Tamara

In 1949, as Nabokov was working on “Lolita,” he published a short story in The New Yorker called “Tamara.” As in the novel that followed, the narrator is a middle-aged European, and the title character a young girl—fifteen, in this case—who is recalled as a formative object of desire during his adolescence. (Both stories also begin with a pointed focus on the female character’s name.) Like in “Lolita,” time and circumstance block the protagonist’s pursuit of the young girl, and the story evolves into an exploration, in part, of memory, mood, and perspective. The New Yorker

buona lettura di mezz'estate!

Qualche giallo per l'estate

The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley; Death in the Air by Ram Murali; The Burial Plot by Elizabeth Macneal; French Windows by Antoine Laurain; The Man in Black & Other Stories by Elly Griffiths, recensiti da Laura Wilson, The Guardian

e anche:

Deep-sea divers feel the pressure, Stephen King returns with some masterly tales, a mother fears her own son, and a Dorset resort isn’t as restful as it seems, Allison Flood, The Guardian

The End of the English Major

During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before. Nathan Heller, New Yorker

un articolo molto interessante, che collega il declino delle humanities ai costi stellari delle università americane e ai conseguenti debiti che gli studenti devono ripagare alla fine degli studi, ma anche a molti altri fattori, come al fatto che molti studenti hanno idee vaghe su che cosa siano le humanities. Colpa nostra, anche. Comunque da leggere.

sempre sul New Yorker, un bell'articolo sui mondi di Italo Calvino, Mavellous Things, Merve Emre.

ancora su Old Babes in the Wood (Chatto & Windus),  Lisa O'Kelly interevista Margaret Atwood, The Guardian

e anche:  

Growing numbers of women in UK are joining forces with friends to run independent bookshops, Nadia Khomami, The Guardian

e la longlist dell'International Booker Prize, sempre sul Guardian

 

Italy’s Great Historical Novel

Last month, the Modern Library added to its list “The Betrothed” (“I Promessi Sposi”), from 1842, by the Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni, in a new translation—the first in fifty years—by Michael F. Moore.In some respects, this is a curious choice. Most readers outside Italy will not have heard of the title, or even of the author. In Italy, the book is considered a pillar of the national literature, perhaps second only to the Divine Comedy. Joan Acocella, The New Yorker

ottima cosa, questa nuova traduzione e questa riscoperta di Manzoni. E visto che parliamo di classici, vi propongo il primo racconto di Nora Ephron sul New Yorker, "About (Almost Surely) New York", ovviamente. Risale al novembre del 1974.

Something has happened to telephone booths in New York. No one knows when it happened, and no one knows what it is that happened, but something has happened. Telephone booths in New York are different. They have changed. There are people who say it has to do with what they look like, and there are people who say that it has to do with whether they are out of order, and there are people who say that all that is beside the point. What matters, they say, is that something has happened to telephone booths in New York. Nora Ephron, The New Yorker

 

Sarah Braunstein

Sarah Braunstein è l'autrice del racconto della scorsa settimana sul New Yorker, "All You Have to Do". Dall'intervista di Willing Davidson:

In “All You Have to Do,” your story in this week’s issue, Sid Baumwell is a sixteen-year-old in a small town, who, as he puts it, needs “a grievance.” Why is Sid so perplexed by, and worried about, his own mildness?

I think Sid’s desire to leave this town, to grow up, is quite strong—and yet it’s not matched by his day-to-day affect. Isn’t this the scariest thing for a teen-ager, that brand of cognitive dissonance? A desire to run that’s matched only by a desire to be comfortable? He loves his mom. His mom loves him. How does one grow up, and manage the violence implicit in the act of growing, in the face of such steadiness and equilibrium? It may seem to Sid (and, sometimes, to me) that it’s only hysteria—in the form of grievance, or longing, or pain, or trangression—that motivates one, finally, to change. And by change I mean simply to move beyond the town, to become someone new. To grow up. newyorker.

Switzerland Today

A short story by Michael Chabon. 
"In the summer of 1974 my parents sent me to live with my grandparents.
My mother’s parents lived in a modest, one-story house in Silver Spring. It was a nondescript little box, half-heartedly Colonial, with a pointed cupola and black shutters that could never be shut. The driveway was stained, the front walk cracked, and the black weathervane atop the cupola listed to one side like the mast of a foundering ship.
I was given the room, at the back of the house ..." Tablet.

Pane

La storia del New Yorker di questa settimana si intitola "Breadman" ed è di J. Robert Lennon. Intervistato da Cressida Leishon: 

Your story "Breadman,” takes place largely in a bread line, as a man waits to buy some bread for his wife. When did the idea for the story come to you? Did you want to satirize a current obsession with artisanal food?

The idea came to me while I was in line waiting to buy some bread for my wife—or, rather, it really came to me while relating the story of the bread line to my friend Adam in a bar some years later. I suppose that I wanted the story to sneakily present itself as a parody of trendy food, before quietly undermining itself and changing into one about the social mores of small communities, including the smallest of all, marriage. newyorker.

Several years later, I noticed a disturbing pattern: many of the things I wrote about in my first three novels later came true in my life. For example, in my first novel, I wrote about a character getting a fatal brain tumor, and soon afterward, one of my best friends got a brain tumor and eventually died. I almost felt as though I had caused this tragedy by simply writing about it. In my second novel, my main character falls in love with a weather scientist who looks like Jon Bon Jovi. They have a strange and tumultuous relationship. Not long afterward, I was at a literary party and in came a man who looked like Jon Bon Jovi. I introduced myself. He was an astrophysicist. We had a passionate but stormy romantic relationship for a year. And in my third novel, the main character suffers from an ailment I’d never experienced nor heard of and thought I’d made up: she finds herself, to a painful degree, wanting nothing; she has lost her desire for all things. Soon after, the same disorder befell me—turns out it’s a symptom of depression, called anhedonia.
None of my novels had been autobiographical, but after writing them, I was starting to feel that while I wasn’t writing from life; life was writing from me. Amanda Filipacchi sul newyorker.

Anche a me è successo.

Primum Non Nocere

Deborah Treisman intervista Antonya Nelson sul suo ultimo - bel - racconto per il New Yorker.
 
Your story in this week’s issue, “Primum Non Nocere,” is about the teen-age daughter of a therapist, who is surprised at home by one of her mother’s former patients. Why throw these two characters—the disgruntled “borderline” and the vulnerable adolescent—together? 

The teen-ager, Jewel, is at her own “borderline”—of burgeoning adulthood—and the fact that she’s ready to transform, willingly or not, makes her ripe for exposure. Her transformation is less dramatic than her brother’s was, which also means that it’s more surprising—to her, and probably to her parents. I like the way that psychological extremity can illuminate more “normal” characters by forcing a comparison. How is adolescence a borderline experience? To be poised between worlds, to be “teetering” and vulnerable to forces beyond one’s control? The two characters seem, to me, complementary. newyorker.

Haruki Murakami's "Sherazade"

Sempre belle - molto - le storie di Haruki Murakami, come l'ultima apparsa sul New Yorker e intitolata "Sherazade". Parla di un uomo - Habara - costretto a stare in casa e di una donna che va a trovarlo, fa l'amore con lui e gli racconta delle storie. Sono le storie della donna che l'uomo attende con particolare piacere. 

Deborah Treisman intervista Murakami: We never learn, in the story, why Habara can’t leave the house. Do you know?
Sorry, but I don’t know the exact circumstances that brought about the situation, either. Of course, I have a few ideas about what might be the cause, but I expect my readers do as well. I’m not trying to make a big secret out of it—in fact, I think if you took their hypotheses and mine and stacked them on top of each other you’d have an important form of author-reader communication. Because what’s important isn’t what caused Habara’s situation but, rather, how we ourselves would act in similar circumstances. newyorker.

The Apthorp

The Apthorp è un palazzo nel West Side di Manhattan. Per un periodo ci ha vissuto Nora Ephron, che l'ha meravigliosamente (come suo solito) descritto in un racconto sul New Yorker, "Moving On". Nora Ephron è morta due anni fa e il New Yorker la ricorda, riproponendo questo racconto. new yorker.

Apple Cake

"Apple Cake" è il titolo del racconto di Allegra Goodman uscito sull'ultimo numero del New Yorker. Si svolge intorno al letto di Jeanne morente e ha una delle più belle scene di morte che abbia letto, "She wanted to open her eyes, to rise up from her bed. She wanted music and she wanted apples. She wanted to touch the sandy beach, to feel summer's heat. She wanted all this, but she couldn't have it. She died because she couldn't breathe". 

In un'intervista Goodman fa anche una considerazione molto interessante tra letteratura e cibo, "My mother Madeleine’s rugelach were unbelievable. I could not use them here because they would have upstaged everything and everyone else. Apple cake is food for a short story. Rugelach require a novel". I rugelach sono dei dolci ebraici, delle specie di croissant (v. foto). newyorker.

Harvey's Dream

Una vecchia storia di Stephen King, "Harvey's Dream", adatta all'estate. La ripresenta Josua Rothman, "Like many stories in The New Yorker, “Harvey’s Dream” takes place in Connecticut. That said, Stephen King’s Connecticut is very different from John Cheever’s. As the story begins, Janet Stevens is in her kitchen, making hard-boiled eggs on “a summer morning in late June.” Her husband, Harvey, is also there—a sixty-something guy in a T-shirt and boxers, a little worse for wear. (“He looked like what the goons on ‘The Sopranos’ called a mope,” Janet thinks.) She’s ruminating about how well she sleeps in summertime, when, because of her allergies, she and Harvey sleep in separate beds. Then Harvey pipes up. He had a bad dream last night, he says; in fact, “I screamed myself awake.” He continues..." newyorker.

I nuovi scrittori di racconti

Il racconto, dopo essere stato dominato da Updike, i minimalisti, ecc. sta ora esprimendo toni e forme nuove. "... it’s been a thrill in the last five years or so to watch the revitalization of the genre by writers with more various and daring emotional aims. There was the shock of seeing Lydia Davis’ unprogrammatic shorts collected in a single volume, for instance, and one reason I think George Saunders’ Tenth of December was embraced with such joy, in fact nearly relief, is because it was full of stories in which stuff actually happened (serial killers! lottery victories!), with a kind of tender irony cutting back against any resulting hazard of melodrama". 
Poi Charles Finch passa a parlare - molto bene - di questo scrittore, Stuart Dybek (nella foto), che non conosco neanche di nome e di cui FS&G sta pubblicando una serie di raccolte di racconti. slate.

Fitzgerald senza censure

E' appena uscita in Inghilterra un'edizione dei racconti di F Scott Fitzgerald senza gli interventi censori a cui erano state sottoposte nelle precedenti edizioni. 
"From sexual innuendo to antisemitism, a wealth of censored material that was sliced out of F Scott Fitzgerald's short stories by newspaper editors is being restored in a new edition of the author's work which presents the stories in their unbowdlerised form for the first time in almost 80 years. ...
The new edition of Taps at Reveille, the latest volume of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F Scott Fitzgerald, restores Fitzgerald's original prose in these and other stories, and is published this week by Cambridge University Press. "Major" changes have also been made to the story seen by many to be Fitzgerald's masterpiece in the genre, Babylon Revisited, said CUP. General editor James West, Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, believes the edition is important "because we want to read what Fitzgerald wrote, not what the editors at the Post thought he should have written." Alison Flood, guardian.

"Bark" di Lorrie Moore

E' uscito - dopo 15 anni - un nuovo libro di racconti di Lorrie Moore, Bark (Knopf), ma pare sia deludente.
"Most of the stories in “Bark” are set in the tundra of middle age, and deal with divorce, death, disillusion or other sorts of hurt. There are some deeply affecting moments here — mostly involving children — but they remain just that: moments, islands in stories that, for the most part, are heavy-handed and forced. Many of the characters come across as synthetic types, instead of as specific people delineated intimately from within. And all too often, Ms. Moore’s custom blend of jokes, inner road maps and social observation devolve into what read like imitation Lorrie Moore stories". Michiko Kakutani, naturalmente, sul nyt.

La Lolita di Dorothy Parker

Auguro ai miei lettori buon Natale con un articolo interessantissimo - una sorta di giallo - su un racconto di Dorothy Parker intitolato "Lolita", uscito sul New Yorker alla fine dell'agosto del 1955, pochi giorni prima che Lolita di Nabokov uscisse in Francia, dopo esser stato rifiutato da tutti gli editori newyorchesi.
"By 1955, the writing careers of Vladimir Nabokov and Dorothy Parker were headed in opposite directions. Parker’s was in a deep slump. The New Yorker—a magazine she had been instrumental in founding—had not published her fiction in fourteen years. Nabokov, by contrast, was becoming a literary sensation. The New Yorker had published several of his short stories as well as chapters of his autobiography Conclusive Evidence and of his novel Pnin. His next novel, Lolita, would bring him worldwide recognition for its virtuosic prose and the shocking story of a middle-aged man’s relationship with his pubescent stepdaughter and her aggressive mother. It was a manuscript that Nabokov circulated very little because he feared the controversy that would erupt when it was published.

Yet three weeks before Lolita arrived in bookstores in France, where it first came out that September, Parker published a story—in The New Yorker, of all places—titled “Lolita,” and it centered on an older man, a teen bride, and her jealous mother. How could this have come to pass?" Galya Diment su vulture.

Find the Bad Guy

"Find the Bad Guy" è il titolo del racconto, bello, di Jeffrey Eugenides, uscito la scorsa settimana sul New Yorker. Ancor più bella, direi, è l'intervista all'autore da parte del suo editor, Cressida Leyshon. Eugenides parla del suo modo di scrivere e dice, tra l'altro, "Houses are important in fiction. “Howard’s End” is maybe the best example, but there are lots of others. Nabokov drew the floor plan to the Samsas’s apartment in his lecture on “The Metamorphosis,” and I’ve always kept that lesson in mind. If you picture a house or an apartment when you’re writing, you can see your characters more clearly. You know where they are, and you move them through a defined space. The reader can sense when a writer isn’t sure about these logistics. If you’re unsure about the room your characters are situated in, some of that fuzziness will get transmitted into the scene itself. You need to have specificity around you, even if you don’t mention one item of that specificity". newyorker.

The Perils of Precocity

"The Perils of Precocity" è una storia molto carina di Thomas Beller, uscita sul blog del New Yorker. Ha a che fare una lettrice bambina e con la lettura in generale. Ecco l'inizio, "Something strange is going on with my six-year-old daughter’s reading habits. Until a few days ago, she had no reading habits. Now she suddenly has her face stuck in all sorts of books that are not age-appropriate. This is especially striking because Evangeline has always been drawn to the screen". newyorker. 
Ripropongo la foto dell'articolo perché mi sembra anch'essa molto carina.

James Wood on Alice Munro

Molto bella l'analisi di James Wood della storia di Alice Munro "The Bear Came Over the Mountain".

"But two additional elements, both characteristic of Munro’s careful art, make it a great story. First, there is Munro’s astounding lack of sentimentality ... The second very Munro-ish element is the formal freedom of the story, which compacts a lot of life into a short space, and moves backwards and forwards over a great deal of terrain." newyorker.