In Cold Blood

Un bell'articolo di  Patrick Radden Keefe su Capote e the making of In Cold Blood. "But what is interesting, given that Capote omitted any mention of himself from the narrative, is the degree to which we remain fascinated not just by In Cold Blood, but by the process of its creation. Along with these periodic revelations about Capote’s novelistic license, two films in recent years were based not on the book, but on its making.
Some of this persistent interest in the backstory of In Cold Blood may simply be a product of its greatness: even detractors who would like to see it plucked from the True Crime section and reshelved permanently in Fiction still tend to concede that the book was a major literary achievement. But Capote’s infractions also raise enduring questions about the slippery boundary between truth and fiction in narrative journalism, and the relationships that develop between a reporter and his sources. newyorker.

Founding The New York Review

Jason e Barbara Epstein

Continuiamo con la serie di articoli sugli inizi della New York Review of Books, che risalgono a 50 anni fa. Qui è uno dei fondatori, Jason Epstein, l'unico sopravvissuto, a ricordare i fatti: "Of the four friends who met for dinner fifty years ago in Barbara’s and my apartment on West Sixty-Seventh Street during the New York newspaper strike, I am the sole survivor. Though we had no such plan in mind beforehand, it was at that dinner that Elizabeth Hardwick, her husband Robert (Cal) Lowell, Barbara and I saw all at once the opportunity that would become The New York Review of Books. The dinner was impromptu, a last minute plan of Lizzie and Barbara’s, who had met unexpectedly on Columbus Avenue that afternoon; we sat around a makeshift table in our as yet barely furnished apartment, which, with its double-height living room and huge north-facing window, had been designed at the turn of the century for artists. The Lowells also lived on West Sixty-Seventh Street, an easy walk from our own building. ..." nybooks.

Anne Carson

Anne Carson was uncomfortable with the idea of a traditional profile: a journalist following her around for a few days, like a private detective, noting her outfits and mannerisms, shadowing her on errands, making lists of furniture and wall decorations and pets, quizzing her students, standing behind her holding his breath while she tried to write in her journal. Carson is a private person. She prefers to be alone. (When her husband is traveling, Carson will call and tell him, “I miss you, but I’m having a great time.”) Her book jackets have no author photo. Her back-flap biography — “Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living” — is so minimalist that it sounds like a parody of a back-flap biography. ...
In the end, she agreed to exchange some e-mails.  ...
Here, just to give the flavor, are some excerpts from the e-mails of Anne Carson. ...
On teaching: “when i began to be published, people got the idea that i should ‘teach writing,’ which i have no idea how to do and don’t really believe in. so now and then i find myself engaged by a ‘writing program’ (as at nyu, stanford) and have to bend my wits to deflect the official purpose.” dall'intervista via e-mail di Sam Anderson ad Anne Carson. nyt.

Harlem Rent Party Advertisements

Langston Hughes faceva la collezione dei biglietti che pubblicizzavano i rent parties. "Hosts of these gatherings opened up their apartments for a night, charging a fee to guests in return for live music, dancing, and socializing. Food was extra, and the accumulated cash went to help the hosts pay their rent". slate.

I am a thief

In 1902, Mary MacLane, a nineteen-year-old-girl from Butte, Montana, published a book detailing her fantasies, her outrageous philosophical ideas, and intimations of her own genius. The book was a sensation, selling a hundred thousand copies in its first month, and launching her into a short but fiery life of writing and misadventure. A template for the confessional memoirs that have become ubiquitous, I Await the Devil’s Coming, is being published in a new edition by Melville House this week.

I am a thief.
It has been suggested to me that I am a kleptomaniac. But I am sure my mind is perfectly sane. I have no such excuse. I am a plain, downright thief.
This is only one of my many peculations. I steal money, or anything that I want, whenever I can, nearly always. It amuses me—and one must be amused.
I have only two stipulations: that the person to whom it belongs does not need it pressingly, and that there is not the smallest chance of being found out. (And of course I could not think of stealing from my one friend.)
newyorker.

Marie Ponsot

Marie Ponsot, a poet known for her bold reimaginings of traditional forms, has been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, one of the most prestigious (and richest) in poetry, which comes with a $100,000 award.
Ms. Ponsot, 91, joins John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin, Lucille Clifton, Adrienne Rich and others on the list of winners of the prize, which was founded in 1986 to honor lifetime achievement. Her work includes the collections “Easy,” “Springing” and “The Bird Catcher” (winner of the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award), as well as translations of more than 30 books from French.
As part of the honor, Poetry magazine will publish 11 of her poems in its May issue. nyt.

J. M. Coetzee e Paul Auster

Tra il 2008 e il 2011, J. M. Coetzee e Paul Auster hanno intrattenuto una fitta corrispondenza che verteva soprattutto sullo sport. Ora è pubblicata in Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011), da Viking.
"December 30, 2008
Dear Paul,
...  It is high summer in this hemisphere, and I spent most of Sunday sitting in front of a television screen (shades of Wall Street!) watching the third day of a five-day game of cricket between the national teams of Australia and South Africa. I was absorbed, I was emotionally involved, I tore myself away only reluctantly. In order to watch the game I put aside the two or three books I am in the middle of reading". newyorker.

Renata Adler

Renata Adler fotografata da Avedon

Renata Adler è una brava scrittrice, da noi poco cosciuta (mi risultla che solo il suo romanzo Speedboat, Fuoribordo, sia stato tradotto in italiano, nel 1983, da Giancarlo Buzzi per Guanda). Tra l'altro è nata a Milano, nel 1938, da genitori tedeschi in fuga dal nazismo. E' poi approdata in America. Ora i suoi romanzi - scritti negli anni '70 - sono riproposti da Nyrb Classics. "What is amazing about Adler’s novels is the way that they integrate cultural analysis with telling details of social nuance. Speedboat, like Pitch Dark, has just been republished by NYRB Classics, after years of being passed along to new readers like samizdat pamphlets. Both novels have more in common with the New Novel than with the thrillers that Adler has said she loves. Both are written in a “discontinuous first-person” (in Muriel Spark’s phrase) that cumulatively conveys what it is like to be a female intellectual in the world of publishing in the nineteen-seventies. These are not works of realism—they have a dreamlike quality— but they contain as much reality as a Balzac novel does. It’s just that their reality is incantatory, sparse, periodically blazing, and not a little self-consciously neurotic". Meghan O'Rourke, newyorker.

I Do and I Don't

I Do and I Don't è il titolo di un libro di Jeanine Basinger sulla storia dei matrimoni al cinema, edito da Knopf. "Romance movies may demand chemistry, but movies about marriage demand something more difficult to create — a sense that a couple are simpatico, that however much they may bicker and snipe, their deep understanding and feeling for each other will ultimately keep them together" ... Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy worked so well as a married couple not just because they were known to be an off-screen pair, but because, as Basinger explains, they “generated a sense of incompatibility, competition, class difference and underlying tension.” Beyond attraction, there was respect: each saw the other as the most interesting person in the room.. nyt.

Sui sogni nei romanzi

Francine Prose parla dei sogni nei romanzi in un bel saggio sul blog della New York Review of Books. "The most sustained and artful literary recreations of the dream state I know occur in Bruno Schulz’s stories, especially in “Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, ” which, in Celina Wienewska’s elegant translation, unfolds in the present tense and in the straightforward tone of someone describing a dream on the psychoanalyst’s couch or at the breakfast table. Consider this summary of the story’s opening sections: Joseph, the narrator, sets out on a long, halting, and peculiar train journey, then arrives in a desolate landscape and finally at the sanitorium, where he has booked a room. He is eyeing the cakes in the restaurant when he is called to see the doctor. It turns out that Joseph has come to see his father. But there is some uncertainty, as there so often is in dreams, about whether his father is living or dead. Joseph’s father is dead, the doctor says, but not to worry, all of the sanitorium patients are also dead, and none of them know it". nybooks. (Nella foto un disegno di Bruno Schulz)