FICTION
L.J. Davis, A Meaningful Life, with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem (New York Review Books). Bellissima recensione di Paula Fox - comincia come un racconto della sua vita, delle sue case di Manhattan e Brooklyn, poi passa a parlare del romanzo di Davis - della ristampa di questo classico del 1971. nyrb.

e diverse altre riedizioni dagli anni Settanta, Lore Segal, Rudy Wurlitzer, Luc Sante. vv.

Stephen King su Raymond Carver: la biografia di Carol Sklenicka, Raymond Carver. A Writer’s Life (Scribner), e la riedizione dei suoi racconti, Raymond Carve Collected Stories, a cura di William L. Stull e Maureen P. Carroll (The Library of America), nytbr.

NONFICTION
La settimana è stata dominata da due memoir: Andre Agassi, Open. An Autobiography (Knopf), nytbr, e Sarah Palin, Going Rogue. An American Life (HarperCollins), nyt.

Hitchens su Koestler, di cui è uscita una bella biografia dal titolo inesatto: Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (Random House). "To be born Hungarian and Jewish and German-speaking is to start at a slightly odd angle to the world." atlantic.

POESIA
Eelworks Una nuova poesia di Seamus Heaney
To win the hand of the princess/ what tasks the youngest son/ had to perform.
For me, the first to come a-courting/ in the fish factor’s house,/ it was to eat with them/
an eel supper... tls.

PAROLE
Inappropriate and unacceptable began their modern careers in the 1980s as part of the jargon of political correctness. They have more or less replaced a number of older, more exact terms: coarse, tactless, vulgar, lewd. They encompass most of what would formerly have been called “improper” or “indecent.” prospect.