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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.

… even though he’s been dead since 2001.

At the Marvel of Manga blog, a discussion came up about Tintin in the Congo and its racist elements. To recap the controversy: The strip was published in 1930-1931, when the Congo was a Belgian territory (Belgium’s colonial behavior in the Congo was particularly brutal). It was republished in 1946 with some of the colonialist [...]

For what it’s worth: David Lassman, director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, submitted copies of Austen’s novels to 18 publishers in the U.K., changing only names and titles. Only one of the editors to receive the submissions appeared to recognize the work as Austen’s, and none expressed interest in publication. One of the [...]

Two hours with Julio! (In Spanish.)

Gerald Nicosia asserts that Viking Penguin and the estate of Jack Kerouac are “deliberately removing my name from books on the Beat generation and Jack Kerouac.” The Kerouac estate was passed to his third wife, but Nicosia had supported a failed claim to the estate by the author’s daughter, who argued that the will in [...]

Although BoingBoing has already copied the entire article (under the heading “Ursula LeGuin rips into Slate Magazine”), this post “on serious literature,” which appears on the Ansible website, is marked “copyright Ursula K. Le Guin, 2007.” So I will quote just an excerpt. It pertains to the issue of whether genre fiction is serious writing, [...]

When Borges (1899-1986) was eighty he visited Mexico for a week of talks, conferences, and tributes. He decided to visit the Maya site of Uxmal, although his hosts warned him that it would be an arduous trip involving taxis, airplanes, jeeps, and who knows what. But he insisted and arrived at the site as the [...]

Fifty years and a few days ago, on June 26, 1957, after a night of heavy drinking, Malcolm Lowry died. Within a decade his books — or at least Under the Volcano — would be widely read, but at the time none of his books was in print.
Ellis, at the Sharp Side, has marked the [...]

In New York Magazine Daniel Asa Rose quotes Annie Dillard as giving up writing:
“I’m tired,” declared the 62-year-old Dillard, who says that she won’t be doing any more touring, public readings, blurb writing, or letter answering. “I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read. I’m glad to [...]

… it is a form of stupidity” (Alexander Waugh).

Juan Ramon Jimenez, that’s who. And the Sisters of the Holy Rosary aren’t too happy about it.
Called Los Libros de Amor, a new book collects 93 of the Nobel Prize winner’s poems, including 25 that were previously unpublished. And among those are erotic poems that scandalously recall Jimenez’s years being cared for by nuns of [...]

That’s the name of a book about the life of Yeats, which will accompany a major exhibition this summer at the National Library of Ireland. It sounds well worth seeing. But what I really like is this e-card, featuring a T. S. Moore cover from 1928.

via book design blog

Although he has a home in nearby Cartagena (one of the great colonial cities of South America), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (”Gabo” entre amigos) is said not to have been back to his home in Aracataca in twenty-five years. That town, his birthplace, was the main model for Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Now [...]

The works of Samuel Beckett have been united for the first time under one imprint.
UPDATE, 9 Sept. 2007: Publishers lock horns over rights to Beckett work
(Image modified from one posted at kassel.de)

Will Self’s writing room. A 360 degree view in 71 photos by Phil Grey