Pare che lo sia stato, per Philip Roth, che ha consigliato a Julian Tepper, il giovane autore di Balls, che lo serviva in un deli dell'Upper West Side, di smettere di scrivere. “I would quit while you’re ahead. Really. It’s an awful field. Just
torture. Awful. You write and you write, and you have to throw almost
all of it away because it’s not any good. I would say just stop now. You
don’t want to do this to yourself. That’s my advice to you.” Gli ha detto Roth, e ha scatenato una polemica. newyorker.
L'ultimo libro di Maurice Sendak, My Brother's Book (HarperCollins), è uscito postumo lo scorso 5 febbraio. E' dedicato al fratello, Jack, morto nel 1995, scrittore per bambini e collaboratore di Maurice, e a Eugene Glynn, morto nel 2007, psicoanlista e compagno dello scrittore. Bruce Handy, di Vanity Fair, dice: "Is it possible for someone as beloved and as habitually honored as
Maurice Sendak to be, at the same time, under-appreciated? His final
book, the posthumous, just-published My Brother’s Book (available February 5th), makes me think yes. It’s not his best work, but what is? That’s the “curse” of having written and illustrated Where the Wild Things Are when you were 35 and In the Night Kitchen when you were 42 and then living to be 83. But My Brother’s Book
is a perfect coda to a singular career, a lovely and moving
distillation. It’s also, as the title implies, Sendak’s most overtly
personal book. It’s the work of a man facing loss and death who still
had deep reservoirs of craft, imagination, and feeling from which to
draw. It’s the work not of a great children’s author and illustrator but
of a great writer and artist, period". vanityfair.
Random House Children's Books and Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced today the launch of the Hats Off to Dr. Seuss! campaign at the famed 42nd Street branch of the New York Public Library in New York City. Inspired by the 75th anniversary of The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins [il primo libro del Dr. Seuss], the yearlong celebration salutes the
breadth of Dr. Seuss's work, not only the remarkable library of
children's books he created, but also the span of his incredible career
and legacy as a man who wore many hats: as an ad man, a political
cartoonist, filmmaker, and a fine artist, to name a few. To
celebrate this partnership there will be a brand new exhibit featuring
Dr. Seuss's personal hats which have left his legendary, secret "hat
closet" for the first time. The exhibit will be on display in The New
York Public Library's Children's Center at 42nd Street through February 11.
Martedì scorso alla Town Hall di New York si è svolta una grande festa in onore dei cinquant'anni della New York Review of Books. Vi hanno partecipato molti dei più famosi collaboratori, come John Banville, Mary Beard, Michael Chabon, Mark Danner, Joan Didion (nella foto),
Daniel Mendelsohn, Darryl Pinckney, e Robert B. Silvers, il fondatore insieme a Barbara Epstein. nyt.
Questa settimana a New York si sono svolti vari party in onore del cinquantenario della New York Review of Books. Pare che Scorsese sia interessato alla storia della rivista per un prossimo film/documentario.
"On Monday evening, at a small private party commemorating the magazine’s
50th anniversary, held in its Greenwich Village offices, Mr. Scorsese,
accompanied by a film crew of about a half dozen, interviewed various
current and former writers and dropped boom mikes into clusters of
casual cocktail chat. A crew will also be filming an event
at Town Hall on Tuesday night featuring Joan Didion, Michael Chabon,
Daniel Mendelsohn, John Banville and other longtime contributors, as
well as the magazine’s editor and co-founder, Robert Silvers". nyt.
Sul New Yorker di questa settimana c'è un pezzo inedito di Joseph Mitchell, uno dei grandi scrittori dello staff della rivista, morto nel 1996. Mitchell è noto per i suoi profili della gente della città. Vagare per la città era una delle cose che amava di più fare e questo articolo è un'ode alle strade di New York. “I frequently spend an entire day riding on New York City buses, getting
off at junction points and changing from one line to another as the
notion strikes me and gradually criss-crossing whatever part of the city
I happen to be in. I might ride in a dozen or fifteen or twenty
different buses during the day.”
Purtroppo l'articolo non è disponibile ai non abbonati alla rivista. Se ne può leggere comunque uno stralcio cliccando qui.
Un bell'articolo di Tim Parks sulla traduzione e in particolare sulla difficoltà di rendere il suono e il ritmo dell'originale, oltre al senso.
"Another way of approaching the question of what is different about
translation, might be to look at a text where the usual relation between
semantics and acoustic effects is radically altered. Everybody knows
the opening of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”:
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
...
Here is a heroic Italian version by Milli Graffi:
Era cerfuoso e i viviscidi tuoppi,
Ghiarivan foracchiando nel pedano
Stavano tutti mifri i vilosnuoppi,
Mentre squoltian i momi radi invano. nybooks.
Emily Stokes, del Financial Times, intervista Bob Silvers, fondatore ed editor della New York Review of Books, che quest'anno compie 50 anni. "As
an editor working at a literary magazine, I find Silvers’ work ethic
inspiring, if hard to mimic; he is in the office seven days a week,
often until midnight, where he keeps a bed in a cupboard. He edits every
piece in the NYRB himself. Contributors speak of his long polite memos
revealing an encyclopedic knowledge of even the most obscure subjects,
as well as a disregard for normal working hours; many have stories of
receiving clippings and queries from “Bob” in the middle of the night or
as they sit down to Christmas lunch". ft.
Oliver Sacks parla del funzionamento della memoria e dello scrivere memoriali. "In 1993, approaching my sixtieth birthday, I started to experience a
curious phenomenon—the spontaneous, unsolicited rising of early memories
into my mind, memories that had lain dormant for upward of fifty years.
Not merely memories, but frames of mind, thoughts, atmospheres, and
passions associated with them—memories, especially, of my boyhood in
London before World War II. Moved by these, I wrote two short memoirs ... I think a more
general autobiographical impulse was stimulated, rather than sated, by
these brief writings, and late in 1997, I launched on a three-year
project of writing a memoir of my boyhood, which I published in 2001 as Uncle Tungsten. ... I accepted that I must have forgotten or lost a great deal, but assumed
that the memories I did have—especially those that were very vivid,
concrete, and circumstantial—were essentially valid and reliable; and it
was a shock to me when I found that some of them were not". nybooks.
Stephen King parla della violenza in America e del possesso di armi in un breve saggio (25 pagine), Guns, che Amazon definisce "intimate and moving", e che esce in edizione Kindle al costo di 1.32 dollari. I proventi andranno alla Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. amazon.
