MONDAY MARGINALIA - ALL YOU CAN EAT EDITION
* We are thoroughly enjoying Padgett Powell's fascinating novel, The Interrogative Mood - watch for an upcoming giveaway - and it's nice to see him get an appropriate level of love from the Sunday Times Magazine. CBS also beats us......
MORNING WOOD
James Wood reviews the recent Lydia David collection at the New Yorker - sadly, only available in abstract online but worth reading in its entirety. At nine pages, “Glenn Gould,” a monologue by Lydia Davis, is longer than most of......
WHEW
Thank God. A happy ending. Now that it's over, I can ask - am I the only who immediately thought of the stomach churning opening of Enduring Love? (True story. I found a copy of the McEwan novel in a......
WORKING ...
Have had some Typepad challenges today but am working up a deluxe edition of Marginalia with all sorts of back news that should keep you busy through the weekend....
EVENT: HAMMER MUSEUM
If you're a subscriber to the maliing list of the excellent Hammer Museum reading series, you will have gotten the announcement today of my appearance there next Tuesday. For those who don't subscribe, the details are here. It's a great......
WHAT GAVE YOU THAT IDEA?
From an actual publicist email I received today: "I am looking for reviewers for a nonfiction historical novel and I thought you might be interested." I am not, as regular readers know, a publicist basher; quite the contrary, in fact.......
UNPACKING MY LIBRARY
A little more than a year ago, my wife and I were forced to decamp our digs in Pacific Palisades when our idiot landlady decided that she wanted to list our unit for sale smack in the middle of housing......
NOBEL REACTIONS
We were indisposed yesterday and unable to comment on the Herta Müller Nobel Prize in real time, and by the time we got back online, the Literary Saloon had, as expected, covered it more thoroughly and knowledgeably than we could......
GUEST INTERVIEW: LESLIE SCHWARTZ
INTERVIEW BY DANIEL A. OLIVAS Leslie Schwartz's first novel, Jumping the Green (Simon & Schuster 1999), won the James Jones Literary Society Award for Best First Novel. Her second novel, Angels Crest (Doubleday 2004), was a Los Angeles Times bestseller,.....
WOLF HALL WINS BOOKER
Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, the odds-on favorite to win the Booker, did so last night. We imagine Maud Newton is rejoicing. Wolf Hall is set in the 1520s and tells the story of Thomas Cromwell's rise to prominence in the......
GUEST ESSAY: THE EXUBERANT SELF
Tin House Books has just published The Story About the Story, which collects lively discussions of great literature by some of the most prominent authors of all time. With over thirty essays written by authors as diverse as Oscar Wilde......
MORNING WOOD
James Wood on Richard Powers's Generosity. (Cheers, Niall.) “Generosity” is subtitled not “A Novel,” but “An Enhancement,” perhaps Powers’s way of demoting the book a rank or two, as with Graham Greene’s “Entertainments.” It is also, w...
TEV GIVEAWAY (MONDAY EDITION): LOVE AND SUMMER
I recently received an awfully kind email from one of my readers, John Dunbar, who advised me that he wanted to make a contribution to a TEV giveaway. A devoted William Trevor fan, he'd recently received a gift copy of......
TO MY IFOA CORRESPONDENT
I regret I can't seem to locate your recent email to me and am thus unable to reply. Perhaps you'd drop me a quick line if you see this ... (My new lot as a parent. Sigh.)...
BRISTLING WITH DILIGENCE
James Wood on A.S. Byatt in the London Review of Books. It is hard enough, though not for the Booker judges, to like the historical novel nowadays, but harder still when that novel’s conception of characterisation seems itself antiquarian, as......
EVENT: CHRIS CARMICHAEL IN L.A.
No, it's not literary, but Chris Carmichael will visit three locations in Southern California this week. Carmichael's appearance is part of a 20-city author tour and ride-along series in support of his new book The Time-Crunched Cyclist. September 30, 7:3...
BLURBS FROM BLOGS?
Brian Sholis is a freelance writer on the visual arts, and a former editor at Artforum. We've corresponded a number of times, and I enjoy his writing a great deal - he is thoughtful and insightful. So I was particularly......
ST FRANCIS PRIZE
We meant to draw your attention to Aleksander Hemon's recent win of the St. Francis College Literary Prize which, refreshingly, is awarded for a fourth novel. “I was going to quit after this book, but now it turns out I’m......
REASONS TO LOVE FRANCE # 374
Le Figaro reports that nearly a third of the French population dreams of becoming writers. Apparently, there are already more than million manuscripts out there. (Merci, EG) We've learned, by the way, that Harry, Revised will be released in France......
