Lorin Stein, il direttore della Paris Review, parla delle virtù del racconto e soprattutto del suo personale rapporto con il racconto. "Short stories bring you up short. They demand a
wakeful attention; a good one keeps you thinking when it’s over. They
take the subjects of the night and expose them to the bright light of
day. They run counter to our yearnings for immersion, companionship,
distraction … and for all of these reasons, in my mind they’ve come to
stand for a kind of difficulty, emotional difficulty, that we are in
danger of losing when we fetishize the charms of the long novel. Reading
groups dive into White Teeth, Middlemarch, or Freedom,
when they might find discussions deeper and more specific -- and
everyone actually on the same page -- if they read a little magazine, an
anthology, or a collection of stories.
There
is a time for multi-tasking and a time for losing yourself. The short
story offers something else: a chance to pay close attention -- and have
that attention rewarded because, for once, every little plot twist,
every sentence, counts. In my life, I'm happy to report, there is a time
for that kind of attention too". pw.
O novella, come si chiama in inglese. A prenderne le difese è Ian McEwan, la cui prima "novella" è stata criticata in maniera antipatica. Lui addirittura definisce la "novella", "the perfect form of prose fiction". Non so se sono d'accordo. Amo i romanzoni, ma anche i romanzi corti e i racconti. Sono tutte forme possibili e non intercambiabili di narrativa. Dettate da esigenze interne, direi. La "novella" ha comunque una tradizione gloriosa. "It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant
(but a giant who’s a genius on his best days). And this child is the
means by which many first know our greatest writers. Readers come to
Thomas Mann by way of “Death in Venice,” Henry James by “The Turn of the
Screw,” Kafka by “Metamorphosis,” Joseph Conrad by “Heart of Darkness,”
Albert Camus by “L’Etranger.” I could go on: Voltaire, Tolstoy, Joyce,
Solzhenitsyn. And Orwell, Steinbeck, Pynchon. And Melville, Lawrence,
Munro. newyorker.
Norman represented not only the most passionate and ambitious writing of
his generation but the spirit of a kind of American writer who will
possibly not come again. Norman was the very antithesis of minimalism—he
was a maximalist. thedailybeast.
Ho letto con grande piacere l'articolo di Liesl Olson su Poetry magazine, la rivista di poesia fondata a Chicago da Harriet Monroe 100 anni fa e diretta in gran parte da donne. Poetry ha avuto un ruolo importante nel diffondere il modernismo negli Stati Uniti e ha contribuito a fare di Chicago un centro culturale. "Monroe is the most celebrated woman of Poetry magazine—and arguably its most important editor—though many women helped to edit Poetry both in Monroe’s time and throughout the magazine’s 100-year history. They include Monroe’s indispensible first assistant, Alice Corbin Henderson; writer and war correspondent Eunice Tietjens; poets Jessica Nelson North and Marion Strobel; and Margaret Danner, a highly successful African American poet who worked with Karl Shapiro and Henry Rago in the 1950s and 1960s. Like Monroe, these women navigated a larger literary culture dominated by men. poetryfoundation.
Nella foto da sinistra a destra: Harriet Monroe, Alice Corbin Henderson, Eunice Tietjens, Marion Strobel, Margaret Danner.
Leggendo un'interessante intervista allo scrittore Jim Shepard, uscita sulla Paris Review, scopro che l'intervistatore, Tim Small, è il traduttore in italiano di Shepard e intervista lo scrittore "on Skype, from my ex-girlfriend's kitchen in Milan, Italy". Vado a cercare Tim Small e scopro che è il fondatore e il direttore editoriale di The Milan Review, una rivista letteraria che così si definisce sul web "The Milan Review is a semi-annual litmag which is vaguely thematic
and definitely in English. It is distributed pretty much all over the
world but conceived and printed in Italy.
It includes only short stories and hand-made artworks, such as
paintings, drawings, collages and the like. No photographs—not for now,
at least. Every issue is radically different from the others in size,
form, concept, shape, color and taste.
It is almost certainly the best Italian-American literary journal in the world". themilanreview.
Tawada writes about … well … it’s not easy to give a “whatness” to her
writing. But language and perception are always central, problematic and
vivid. Consider Tawada’s short story, “Where Europe Begins” (the title
story of one of her collections). In it, the narrator, a foreigner
living in Germany, starts off the story with an earache, which a doctor
later diagnoses as a pregnancy; at a flea market, she picks up a book,
which the vendor says is not a book but a mirror, and then when she
brings the object home, it turns out to be a box containing four
cassette tapes—a book on tape. She plays it. She “tries to listen to the
voice without losing my distance from it. But I couldn’t. Either I
heard nothing at all, or I was plunged into the novel.“
Non so se mi piacerebbe leggere questa Yoko Tawada - scrittrice giapponese che vive a Berlino e scrive sia in giapponese che in tedesco e da noi non è ancora tradotta. Ma mi piace molto la recensione dei suoi racconti che fa Rivka Galchen. newyorker.
Post dedicato ai docenti di scuole americane, che devono essere challenging (che significa poi in pratica?) e sviluppare il critical thinking (che è?). Ecco come quest'ultimo concetto viene definito da Paul Gary Wyckoff, professore di scienze politiche all'Hamiltono College, NY.
1. The ability to think empirically, not theoretically.
2. The ability to think in terms of multiple, rather than single, causes.
3. The ability to think in terms of the sizes of things, rather than only in terms of their direction.
4. The ability to think like foxes, not hedgehogs. 5. The ability to understand one's own biases. insidehighered.
... the most allegedly “difficult” novelist of our generation [David Foster Wallace] spending
time with a crap paperback thriller. You could say that Wallace, here,
was just doing the same kind of thing he did when he spent hours
watching television, a medium he once likened, in its pure embodiment of
desire, to “sugar in human food.” But he seemed to think there was
something else there. In his syllabi, which are all over the web, it
turns out he assigned these books to his students. He assigned Joan
Collins and Mary Higgins Clark and Thomas Harris. And he cautioned students:
“Don’t let any potential lightweightish-looking qualities of the texts
delude you into thinking this is a blow-off type class. These ‘popular’
texts will end up being harder than more conventionally ‘literary’ works
to unpack and read critically.”Even if we are not talking
“literary merit,” whatever that is, the soothing effect of getting lost
might in itself have critical value. Some people, when they’re lost,
read the Bible; others go for a walk; still others houseclean. Me, like
Wallace and his mother, I read an allegedly “bad” book, often one I’ve
read before. Michelle Dean, therumpus.
Oyster è un'app per leggere libri sul proprio telefono. E' un spotify for books. "Members receive unlimited access to an ever-growing collection of books for a single monthly price", dicono i fondatori - Eric Stromberg, Andrew Brown, e Willem Van Lanckersul loro blog.
When
we started working this summer, we were inspired by the belief that the
transformation from the print book to digital is still in its earliest
phase. We knew it was important to find partners who feel the same way
and believe in our vision as much as we do".
Non è un esperimento nuovo, ma è pur sempre divertente. Il Guardian ha sfidato alcuni scrittori a scrivere un racconto in 140 caratteri. Eccone alcuni:
David Lodge:
"Your money or your life!" "I'm sorry, my dear, but you know it would
kill me to lose my money," said the partially deaf miser to his wife.
Hari Kunzru:
I'm here w/ disk. Where ru? Mall too crowded to see. I don't feel safe.
What do you mean you didn't send any text? Those aren't your guys? theguardian.
The Millions (TM) intervista Daniel Mendelsohn (DM) sulle recensioni.
TM: There is a formula for criticism in the piece
which says that knowledge + taste = meaningful judgment, with an
emphasis on meaningful. What makes a critique meaningful? As you point
out, a lot of people have opinions who are not really critics and there
are lots of people who are experts on subjects who don’t write good
criticism. If everyone is not really a critic, where is the magic?
DM: It’s a very interesting question. It is magic,
it’s a kind of alchemy. We all have opinions, and many people have
intelligent opinions. But that’s not the same. Nor is it the case that
great experts are good critics. I come out of an academic background so
I’m very familiar with that end of the spectrum of knowledge. I spent a
lot of my journalistic career as a professional explainer of the
Classics—when I first started writing whenever there was some Greek
toga-and-sandals movie they would always call me in—so I developed the
sense of what it means to mediate between expertise and accessibility.
You use the word magic, which I very well might make part of my stock
Homeric epithet about criticism. It’s intangible, what goes on. I know a
good critic when I read one.
It’s a hard thing to nail down, but that’s why I described it as a
kind of recipe. Look, it’s exactly like a recipe. Three people can make
grandma’s noodle kugel but only Grandma’s noodle kugel tastes like
Grandma’s noodle kugel. themillions.
This author [Mo Yan], born in 1955 into a peasant family in northern China, sets a
groaning table of brutal incident, magic realism, woman-worship, nature
description, and far-flung metaphor. The Chinese novel, perhaps, had no
Victorian heyday to teach it decorum; certainly both Su Tong and Mo Yan
are cheerfully free with the physical details that accompany sex,
birth, illness, and violent death.
New Yorker, 9 maggio 2005.
Marilynne Robinson, Casa (Einaudi), traduzione di Eva Kampmann. Un romanzo molto bello, e duro che mette in scena il brutale scontro tra la debolezza umana e la spietatezza della bontà puntando l'attenzione - quasi maniacalmente - sul contorno delle azioni quotidiani in cui ha luogo. L'azione si svolge a Gilead, Iowa, negli anni Cinquanta e i personaggi sono più o meno gli stessi del romanzo precedente che prendeva il nome dalla cittadina. Cambiano le prospettive e i toni.
Un lungo articolo di Howard Jacobson (di cui è appena uscito il nuovo romanzo, Zoo Time, Bloomsbury), sui bad boy's books, ovviamente a favore, e spiritoso. Inizia così, "I was once told by a publisher that a novel I'd submitted "lacked
redemption". I could not contain my excitement. At last, I said to my
agent, I'd written, and been recognised for writing, a bad boys' book.
She looked at the carpet for what seemed like hours. "I think what
they're trying to say," she replied, when the silence could go on no
longer, "is that they don't like it." guardian.
Today the Oxford English Dictionary announces the launch of OED Appeals, a dedicated community space on the OED website where OED editors
solicit help in unearthing new information about the history and usage
of English. The website will enable the public to post evidence in
direct response to editors, fostering a collective effort to record the
English language and find the true roots of our vocabulary. oup.
When Marina Keegan died, tragically, at the age of twenty-two, in a
car accident in May, she had just graduated from Yale University and was
about to start a job on the editorial staff of The New Yorker. ... She was also at the beginning of a promising career as a writer—of
plays, of journalism, and of fiction. ... Her story “Cold Pastoral,” in which a college student is forced to
reassess her relationship and herself when she reads her boyfriend’s
diary after his death, has a skillfully controlled comedy to it ... At the same time, it shows an acute, almost clinical understanding of
the mixture of arrogance and vulnerability, of pretense and emotion,
with which its twenty-something characters pursue and evade real
attachment.
Per leggere questo bel racconto cliccare qui.
Under the townhouse where the legendary writer Gay Talese and his
wife, Nan, have lived for over half a century is what Talese calls his
“subterranean think tank.” Every day, Talese leaves his home, locks his
door, walks down an elegantly curved outdoor staircase through a
separate entrance, and enters this lush underground office.
There are no windows, and no phones. It is, he says, “one place where I think a writer can work without any distractions.”
Per vedere Gay Talese che ci fa fare un giretto nel suo bunker cliccare qui.
Calvin Trillin ha recentemente vinto il Thurber Prize for American Humor. Ecco quel che dice in un'intervista:
Who are your favorite contemporary humorists?
I enjoy Sandy (Ian) Frazier from the New Yorker. He's already won a
Thurber or two I believe. Garrison Keillor is funny, Dave Barry always
makes me laugh. My daughters and I have a special appreciation for David
Sedaris. ...
Is immaturity essential for writers of humor?
If you're asking if all humor writers are childish, it reminds me of
something they say Woody Allen said. And I don't know that he said it,
but something about humor writers always have to eat at the children's
table. In our family people fight to eat at the children's table. There
are food fights at the children's table. We recently had to tell my
35-year-old daughter that she couldn't sit at the children's table
anymore. We had to make room for children. clevelandcom.
Su n+1 magazine c'è un bel ritratto di Shulamith Firestone, l'autrice di The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970), trovata morta la scorsa estate, il 28 agosto, nel suo appartamento a Manhattan, a 67 anni. "Although in later years a private and often isolated person, the writer,
artist, and feminist thinker Shulamith Firestone was at one time a
formidable public force. A founder of the first radical feminist
organizations in New York and co-editor of the first theoretical
journals of the Women’s Liberation Movement, she was one of the most
memorable characters of the second wave. Brilliant, passionate,
aggressive, and uncompromising in her beliefs, possessing an
intellectual confidence that lives on in her work, Firestone embodied
much of the radical energy of her era. She “dared to be bad”—as she
declared women ought to in an editorial for Notes from the Second Year—which meant not just disobedient, but willing to fail". Dayna Tortorici, nplusonemag.
Jackson Lander cerca l'origine evolutiva di questa comune espressione "tastes like chicken". "The range of species I’ve heard compared to chicken, flavor-wise, is
very broad across the evolutionary spectrum: various birds, of course,
but also snakes, lizards, small mammals, certain fish. Which made me
wonder: Can we trace the taste of chicken back down the evolutionary
tree to a common ancestor? What was the first creature in evolutionary
history that tasted like chicken? And for how long in the Earth’s
history has life been tasting like chicken? Something had to come first,
and I don’t think it was either the chicken or the egg". slate.
Are literary names always meaningful, or are some characters named quite
casually? Does each genre have a list of first names available only for
that sort of writing? Corydon, a stock-name for a shepherd, is obviously pastoral, whilst Hodge
is clearly georgic. (Thomas Hardy wrote of the farm labourer
‘personified by the pitiable picture known as Hodge’.) Is it necessary
for fictional characters to be named at all? After all, in romances a
name can be withheld for much or all of the story. When it does emerge
it may not be a full name. (Full names, complete with surname, have a
history of their own and deserve a dedicated blog post in their own
right.) Alastair Fowler su oupblog.
The Scientists: A Family Romance è il titolo del nuovo romanzo di Marco Roth (fondatore del magazine n+1), edito da Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Adam Kirsch lo definisce "magnificamente intelligente e commovente". "Roth’s childhood, he reveals, was the source of a
double trauma, one dramatic, one so subtle that it takes him much of
the book to fully understand it. The obvious trauma came when he was 14
years old and learned that his father had AIDS. Eugene Roth had been
infected, his son was told, in a laboratory accident: A medical
researcher working on sickle-cell anemia, he accidentally pricked
himself with a used needle. Four years later, Roth’s father died, too
early to be helped by the later-generation drugs that have made AIDS
into a manageable condition. In the interim, Roth writes, his life was
dominated by the need for secrecy: He had been instructed never to
mention to anyone that his father had this stigmatizing disease. ... This is the second trauma that Roth endured as a
child: the sense that he was growing up in a home that was secretive
and hypocritical". tabletmag.
