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Here’s a simple quiz. Indentify these writers based on these brief, slightly edited excerpts from their Wikipedia entries. I have provided the author’s images above, in a random order. These writers are all men so that I don’t have to play around with the pronouns; I’ll do a female version later.
1
He developed had a […]

Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini’s The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities–From Italy’s Tomb Raiders to the World’s Greatest Museums is a real eye-opener. I had always imagined that the movement to repatriate art was largely based on the rape of colonial nations by the colonizers — that countries like Italy or Greece […]

Jonathan Williams, poet, essayist, and publisher of Jargon Society, died Sunday in Asheville following a long illness. We published a collection of his short prose, called The Magpie’s Bagpipe, at North Point Press.
Williams attended Black Mountain College and began Jargon Society in the early 1950s. The press published such writers as Charles Olson, Kenneth Patchen, […]

The first rule of good writing is that there are no rules. If Elmore Leonard had written Ulysses, or Metamorphosis, or Remembrance of Things Past, or Death on the Installment Plan, or other of the modernist classics I don’t know if college freshmen would be studying them today.
They’d probably be pretty good reading though. Leonard […]

The Literary Review has announced its nominees for the 2007 Bad Sex Award. The award supposed draws attention to “the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description … and to discourage it” in modern literary novels. In fact it’s just an excuse to talk about sex and make fun of writers […]

Conde Nast commissioned a distinguished group of writers to nominate their favorite travel books. Participating authors included André Aciman, Monica Ali, Julia Alvarez, Tom Bissell, Geraldine Brooks, Vikram Chandra, Jim Crace, Jared Diamond, Linh Dinh, Anthony Doerr, Jennifer Egan, Stephen Elliott, Nuruddin Farah, Nell Freudenberger, Peter Godwin, Peter Hessler, Uzodinma Iweala, Sebastian Junger, Robert D. […]

For the past couple of years amazon.com has been including a feature it calls “text stats” on many of its book pages. Among the statistics presented are “readability calculations” that estimate “how easy it is to read and understand the text of a book.” But there is also more raw data, including stats on the […]

It’s a shame he will not be around to read his obituaries, as his favorite subject was himself.
It was never a subject that particularly interested me.
Conceivably Related PostsOn TasteIn a previous post I mentioned that Norman Mailer was not a writer particularly to my taste. Just af…Bad SexThe Literary Review has announced its nominees for […]

Salon’s guide to Doris Lessing, by Laura Morgan Green.
Conceivably Related PostsFriday RoundupIf Folly link with Elegance no man knows which is which ….
– William Butler Yeats

Problems …A Short Guide to IraqIn 1943 the U.S. War Department produced a book offering guidelines for our soldiers fighting in Ira…How to Read a BookMyBlogLog, yes or no?What […]

Ms. Oates, rambling a bit, reveals that during “the first six weeks” of a writing project she is quite miserable. This is somewhat surprising to me, because I find beginnings exhilarating but bog down in the middles. Maybe she is working out the difficulties earlier on, and that accounts for how prolific she manages to […]

The Guardian has an ongoing feature displaying writers’ workrooms. The common features tend to be clutter, piles of books, and undistinguished furniture. Shown is the room of AS Byatt, who says:
The objects in the room are in a way a metaphor of my mind. They are brightly coloured, or transparent, and are about intricate […]

The Guardian asked 50 writers to nominate neglected books that deserve a second chance with the public. “The majority of books fall stillborn from the press, never living up to their authors’ hopes for recognition or dreams of a large, admiring audience,” Robert McCrum, who introduces the list, writes. “So those bestseller lists […]

Edward Sedensticker, who died at 86 on Sunday in Tokyo, was one of the greatest translators of Japanese literature. He had been in a coma for months following a head injury. Among his books were The Tale of Genji, Snow Country and Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata, who won the 1968 Nobel Prize for […]

The entire series of Ross Macdonald Lew Archer novels is returning to print from Vintage Books. The early Archer novels are derivative of Chandler — some would say the entire series is — but as Macdonald’s career progressed he became more interested in the buried roots of violence than its turbulent theatricality. Archer would often […]

A story often repeated is that Joyce’s sometime amanuensis, Samuel Beckett, inserted the words “come in” into Finnegans Wake, unaware that Joyce was answering a knock at the door. This story originates, I think, with Richard Ellman’s biography, James Joyce; at any rate it appears there. I think that Beckett himself may have promoted the […]

Click the image above for an extensive collection of covers of Kerouac’s On the Road. How interesting to see all the different takes on the book! The Italians generally do a pretty good job.
RELATED: Why Kerouac Matters
Above all, On the Road matters for its music: its plaintive, restless hum. In it, Kerouac perfected a melancholy […]

Susan Sontag has positive associations for me for a personal and I suppose fairly trivial reason — she sent a generous letter to me when I was director of Mercury House saying she admired our publishing program. You might be surprised how rare that kind of gesture is.
Eliot Weinberger appears to put personal considerations behind […]

I’m trying out a new plug-in called Stray Quotes. You can see it in the left sidebar under the categories drop-down, under the head “Duly Quoted.” The plug-in can function as a widget. It displays a random quote from a user-created list (refreshing the page will likely produce a new quote). Basic html will […]

Turns out Faulkner wrote a sorority pledge for a friend of his stepdaughter. Unfortunately, the full six paragraphs don’t seem to be available online. But we do get passages, like this one:
I am the university of friendship, the college of sisterly love, the school for the better making of women. I am the sorority.
Conceivably Related […]

… even though he’s been dead since 2001.
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