Spie e dintorni

According to popular lore, a woman spy known only as Agent 355 helped George Washington win the American Revolution, serving as a key member of the Manhattan-Long Island intelligence network later dubbed the Culper Spy Ring. Bill Bleyer Smithsonian Magazine

sempre sul Smithsonian Magazine, un altro articolo interessante su una normalissima coppia del New Mexico che rubò un De Kooning per metterselo in soggiorno.

She was a retired speech pathologist, and he was a retired music teacher. For all intents and purposes, Rita and Jerry Alter were a totally normal couple living in the New Mexico suburbs—except for one thing. They had a stolen Willem de Kooning painting worth $160 million hanging behind their bedroom door.

The couple’s purported double lives as high-stakes art thieves has made headlines ever since their prized painting was identified as a missing de Kooning in 2017. Jane Recker, Smithsonian Magazine

infine, per chi ama John Le Carré, come me, è in arrivo il suo epistolario: 

A collection of letters by the late novelist John le Carré is to be published later this year. A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré 1945-2020 spans almost eight decades, from the author’s childhood in wartime Britain to just days before his death in 2020. It contains letters to le Carré’s family and friends as well as to high-profile fans such as Hugh Laurie, Ralph Fiennes, Stephen Fry, Alec Guinness and Tom Stoppard. Lucy Knight, The Guardian

 

Elizabeth Strout e Elena Ferrante

 

Dear Elena Ferrante,
Thank you for all of your work. I am a huge fan, and I have read all your books, and by reading them I was able to take new risks with my own work. So thank you for that as well. 

Dear Elizabeth,
Thank you for your kind words about In the Margins. I really loved your novels Amy and Isabelle, The Burgess Boys, and naturally the amazing Olive Kitteridge.
But, I must tell you, I value your opinion of In the Margins especially because of your novel My Name Is Lucy Barton, or, to be precise, because of the fleeting but memorable relationship between Lucy and the writer Sarah Payne. The Guardian

interessante scambio epistolare tra due grandi scrittrici, Elena Ferrante ed Elizabeth Strout. 

Inoltre: Yiyun Li, scrittrice dall'inconsueto cv (è immunologa as well), discute del neologismo, da lei creato, "beforemath", parlando dello scrittore Jon McGregor.

Yiyun Li: I love reading dictionaries, getting to know words beyond their everyday usage: etymologies, definitions that have gone obsolete, meanings that have been added over the years.

Last year, as I was rereading McGregor’s entire body of work, I looked up aftermath and was surprised to find that it’s derived from aftermowth, which refers to the second crop of grass that grows after the first has been mown or harvested. Instantly my interest was piqued, as we don’t tend to talk about beforemath—we don’t even have it as a word. As I thought through how McGregor approaches dramatic and tragic events in fiction, it became clear to me that some of his books focus on the beforemath, and others approach aftermath at a slanted angle. The New York Review

Letters to Véra

Letters to Véra è una raccolta di lettere di Vladimir Nabokov alla moglie da poco sposata e ricoverata in una casa di cura nella Foresta Nera per un esaurimento nervoso. Sono tradotte dal russo da Olga Voronina e Brian Boyd e sono uscite presso Penguin Classics. Contengono delle bellissime descrizioni del paesaggio, del tempo, di animali. “The weather this morning was soso: dullish, but warm, a boiled milk sky, with skin – but if you pushed it aside with a teaspoon, the sun was really nice, so I wore my white trousers”. Eric Naiman, tls.

The Letters of J.F. Powers

J.F. Powers è un bravo scrittore americano di racconti da noi praticamente sconosciuto. Il suo interesse narrativo era soprattutto rivolto al mondo dei cattolici americani del dopoguerra, che descriveva con eleganza e una satira bonaria. E' stato collaboratore del New Yorker. Ora è uscita una raccolta di sue lettere, Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a cura di una dei suoi cinque figli, Katherine A. Powers. Adam Gopnik ne parla sul New Yorker, "... the book provides a wonderful picture of a now lost type: the radical-liberal Catholic of the forties and fifties, whose allegiance to the rules of the Church (all those children!) was part and parcel of his allegiance to what would now seem an extravagant, not to say extremist, egalitarian politics. Katherine Powers rightly calls this' the nearly forgotten American Catholic countercultural religious and social ferment of the mid-twentieth century'." newyorker.

Le lettere di Willa Cather

This month, two Willa Cather experts, Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout, are publishing the seven-hundred-page “Selected Letters of Willa Cather.” For Cather scholars, or even just fans, this is a big event, because access to Cather’s correspondence has not been easy. She burned quite a few of her letters, and in her will she forbade publication of any that remained. newyorker.

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather è uscito il 16 aprile presso Knopf. Ha 752 pagine e costa 23, 75 dollari

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.

A Love Letter

Livy Darling, I am grateful — gratefuler than ever before — that you were born, & that your love is mine & our two lives woven & welded together! SLC. SLC sta per Samuel Langhorne Clemens che era Mark Twain che scrive questa bella lettera d'amore nel 1888 alla moglie, Olivia Langdon Clemens, sposata nel 1870.

Eudora Welty al New Yorker

Gentlemen,
I suppose you'd be more interested in even a slight-o'-hand trick than you'd be in an application for a position with your magazine, but as usual you can't have the thing you want most.

I have seen an untoward amount of picture galleries and 15¢ movies lately, and could review them with my old prosperous detachment, I think; in fact, I recently coined a general word for Matisse's pictures after seeing his latest at the Marie Harriman: concubineapple. That shows you how my mind works - quick, and away from the point….

How I would like to work for you! A little paragraph each morning - a little paragraph each night, if you can’t hire me from daylight to dark, although I would work like a slave. I can also draw like Mr. Thurber, in case he goes off the deep end.

Questa è una delle lettere che Eudora Welty scrisse al New Yorker. E' il 1933, Eudora Welty aveva 23 anni, si era laureata da poco, era a New York da sei settimane e aveva disperatamente bisogno di un lavoro. Nonostante l'intellegenza e l'umorismo della lettera, il New Yorker non l'assunse. La lettera è contenuta in un bel volume di prossima uscita, What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), a cura di Suzanne Marrs. newyorker.