Robert Gammon's Blog

Talking to the Editor Behind Back-to-Back Booker Prizes

Lithub, 24 November 2020

Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain was announced this year’s Booker Prize winner. It’s no small feat for any writer, but what makes this win so spectacular is the fact that Shuggie Bain is a debut novel. (It’s only the fifth debut novel to win in the Booker’s 51-year-old history.) During his brief speech at the virtual award ceremony, Douglas Stuart thanked his editor for being the only one to take a chance on him in New York City.

Peter Blackstock, a senior editor at Grove Atlantic, is no stranger to the Booker Prize. He also acquired last year’s winner, Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. (Not to mention Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer, Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, and a slew of other amazing titles.) What’s his secret? In the midst of his celebrations, Blackstock graciously took the time to answer a few questions for us.

Katie Yee: You recently announced that you became a citizen of the United States. (Congratulations!) How do you think your experiences outside the US, specifically outside of New York City publishing, have shaped your path and the kinds of stories you gravitate towards?

Peter Blackstock: I think about this a lot—it’s imperative for editors to publish books that go far beyond their own experiences, and yet the reason why it’s so important that the industry become more representative of the country is precisely because we know we bring implicit biases, interests, and specialist knowledge to our work as editors.

My mother is Punjabi Malaysian, and I know that I felt particularly drawn to The Sympathizer in part due to my Southeast Asian and mixed-race heritage. All four of my grandparents were born in different countries and I now live in another one, as an immigrant, albeit one with privileges not afforded to many immigrants. I grew up in the UK, and know that for that reason Shuggie Bain did not sound as foreign to me as it did to many American editors, and as a gay man this story of queer childhood resonated very deeply with me emotionally. It’s impossible to separate out salient parts of identity from selfhood, so I don’t know if I would have felt any differently about either of those extraordinary books had I had a different background. But having a diverse editorial and publishing team and faith in editors from backgrounds underrepresented in publishing can help houses make sure they are publishing the most interesting and powerful stories available in the most energetic and thoughtful way possible. That’s an opportunity the industry can’t afford to miss.

All the same, reviewing fiction and most nonfiction will always be subjective, and for that reason I think sharing material with editor colleagues can often help good books find the right home. I have passed submissions to colleagues that they have acquired and published brilliantly. We owe it to writers to give them the best chance of telling their story and we editors should be acutely aware our gatekeeping power.

KY: During the Booker ceremony, Douglas Stuart said you were the only editor in New York to take a chance on him. Clearly, you’re seeing something that doesn’t quite line up with the majority of your peers here. When you pick a manuscript, are there certain things you look for?

PB: I feel very lucky to have been able to acquire Shuggie Bain and to work with Douglas on it. Some of the most successful books Grove has ever published have been won with us as the sole bidder, so Douglas stands in a proud tradition! It’s a very subjective thing to consider a piece of literary fiction, and I have turned down successful and prize-winning books myself, but I felt extremely strongly about this book—deeply moved by the story and hugely impressed by Douglas’s writing. You could tell from the first paragraph that you were in the hands of a truly masterful writer.

When Kirkus called the book a “masterpiece” I felt so glad, since that was the word I had been using to describe it, albeit in a tentative British way! I feel lucky to work at a place like Grove which is very editorially-led, and my colleagues who read alongside me couldn’t have been more supportive of the acquisition. Our editorial director Elisabeth Schmitz was a particularly strong champion, and our publisher Morgan Entrekin was thrilled when we were able to acquire it. Perhaps other editors felt the same but then were talked out of offering by others (or themselves—I have done that several times and regretted it every time). In any case I hope that Shuggie’s success can help blaze a trail for other great works that might be overlooked by US editors.

KY: The list of books you’ve worked on is extremely diverse, in terms of race and country of origin. On a purely narrative and structural level, too, your titles have really run the gamut. Girl, Woman, Other is an experimental novel in verse that explores the experiences of several Black women. Meanwhile, Shuggie Bain is a heartbreaking bildungsroman about coming into your queerness amidst the backdrop of family hardship and addiction in Scotland. How do you approach such different novels when it comes to the editing process? How do you have so many hats?!

PB: I love having a list that reflects the world, and you don’t have to sacrifice on quality to do so, in fact, quite the opposite. I want my list to reflect both the American experience, particularly of people who are marginalized by societal power, and the broader world beyond the States. I can’t imagine not publishing books in translation, or not publishing novels that take chances in their form or style, from Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater to Jean-Baptiste del Amo’s Animalia to Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other.

Regarding editing, each book requires a different editorial approach, sometimes I suggest quite a lot of work, sometimes less, but one constant is that all of my edits are just suggestions for the author or translator to consider. I don’t acquire pieces of fiction that I wouldn’t be proud to publish in their current form, but I do feel that the editor’s role is in part to act as a counterpoint to the author and suggest things (including stupid ideas—I make at least one of those every edit!) that might spark a different direction or help underline a resonant moment of the story. I don’t write myself, so consider each manuscript a little miracle, and worry sometimes about somehow spoiling the magic with an edit. But in my experience the author always knows what is a good edit and what is a bad edit and takes only the good (and forgives the editor for anything stupid!)

KY: Earlier this fall, you were named the publisher of Grove Press UK, Grove Atlantic’s UK-based imprint, under Atlantic Books. (Congratulations again!) What is your vision for the direction of that imprint? Do you consider different things when choosing a book for a UK audience as opposed to a US audience?

PB: I’m really looking forward to this new part of my role, and thankfully with everyone on Zoom these days the Atlantic Ocean doesn’t feel quite so wide! The Grove UK imprint has been going for more than ten years and I mostly intend to help the Atlantic Books Associate Publisher Clare Drysdale and the rest of the Grove UK team continue their amazing work. But I am thrilled to be able to bring some new voices to the list, including a handful of writers we aren’t publishing in the US. The Grove UK list has been a little nonfiction heavy so in due course I’m excited to talk about a few brilliant fiction writers we are going to be bringing to UK readers.

KY: What are you reading right now? Are there any new writers we should keep an eye out for here?

PB: At the moment, I’m taking a break from the modern world by reading Maurice by E.M. Forster, and have The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste and This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga next on my pile.

Russian Roulette: The Life and Times of Graham Greene review

Published in The Guardian, 28 November 2020

When Gabriel García Márquez, in the presence of Fidel Castro, asked Graham Greene if it was true that he’d played Russian roulette with a loaded revolver, Greene assured him he had, several times. Castro, one of several world leaders with whom Greene had audiences over the years (Gorbachev, Ho Chi Minh and Pope Paul VI were others), calculated the odds and said he shouldn’t be alive. Greene thought the same. He’d expected to die young (“I’d rather die of a bullet in the head than a cancer of the prostate”) but survived to the age of 86.

The Russian roulette story has been disputed; Greene may have played it with blanks or empty chambers. But Richard Greene (no relation) takes it as the central premise of his biography: the novelist as risk-taker and adventurer, with a history of self-harm and an addiction to danger. An early trip to Liberia, to investigate modern slavery, set the tone. Greene knew there were risks – being shot at by soldiers, bitten by snakes or infected by lassa or yellow fever – but they only spurred him on. He was accompanied by his cousin Dorothy, who found him frightening: “If you are in a sticky place he will be so interested in noting your reactions that he will probably forget to rescue you.”

Many journeys followed: to Mexico, Cuba, Malaya, Vietnam, Chile, China, Haiti, Belize, Nicaragua, the Congo and so on. He went to write articles, deliver messages, make diplomatic representations and gather material for books, sometimes all at the same time. His focus was invariably on Catholic priests under conditions of oppression, or on “English characters in a setting which is not protective of them”. He was suspected of spying: rightly so, if only as a novelist. During the war he had worked for MI6, with Kim Philby. Though only briefly a member of the Communist party, he understood its appeal and defended Philby’s betrayal of his country: “He was serving a cause and not himself.” For Greene, Catholicism served the same purpose – faith in an ideal. He characterised himself as a Catholic agnostic, but one with sufficient “doubt in my disbelief” to think a life after death more likely than not.

His theologising and preoccupation with sainthood now look as old-fashioned as his fondness for brothels. He had many failings, not least as a parent – one who found the company of small children purgatorial and had little contact with his son and daughter until they grew up. But he was generous with money: friends, relations and ex-lovers were treated to cars, houses, pensions and other extravagant gifts. And, though indifferent to UK party politics, he was a passionate campaigner against global injustice. Whether it was urging authoritarian regimes to release imprisoned dissidents or attacking the US for its military interventions, he enjoyed making a nuisance of himself.

Richard Greene gently disparages his subject’s previous biographers, Norman Sherry and Michael Sheldon: reviewers found their approach “prurient and trivial”, he says, and much new material has since come to light. In place of a life “boiled down to sex, books and depression”, he offers a life of travel, literary activity of all kinds (plays and screenplay, as well as fiction, editing, publishing and journalism) and a bipolar disorder. He traces Greene’s traumas back to his school days, when he was bullied, victimised and put on suicide watch. And he sees bipolarity as the source of Greene’s restlessness – his need for constant stimulation, whether in a new country or with a new woman. Only with his last partner, Yvonne Cloetta, in tax exile in Antibes, did he achieve something like stability. Till then, despite fame and success, he comes across as largely unhappy – dependent on booze and Benzedrine, guilty about his failed marriage to Vivien, fearful that he was washed up as a writer, disappointed not to win the Nobel.

For all his claims to be drawing on new material, Richard Greene can’t help but go over old ground, from the Shirley Temple libel case to the tiff with Anthony Burgess. It was an immensely busy life and the telling of it here, in 78 short chapters and 500 brisk pages, feels rushed. The emphasis on Greene as foreign correspondent and emissary is certainly fresh. But the cost is an excess of information on the internal politics of the countries he visited, not always pertinent to the fiction. To spend more time on the history of Panama in the 1970s, for example, than on the Greene’s long and complicated affair with Catherine Walston may be a corrective to earlier biographies. But it does little to explain the man and throws more attention on a lesser nonfiction book (Getting to Know the General) than The End of the Affair, his masterpiece.

El artista de hoy debe ser más radical que nunca para no dejarse intimidar por la mojigatería de los nuevos inquisidores

Por Javier Cercas - El País, 29 de noviembre 2020

Suele decirse que, si le pegas una patada a una piedra, de debajo salen cinco poetas. De ser así, en Chile como mínimo tres de ellos son buenos, porque allí la poesía es casi una religión. Este año le han concedido el Premio Reina Sofía, el principal galardón del género en español, al que más me gusta, por lo menos al que más me gusta de todos los vivos: Raúl Zurita. Zurita, que podría ganar con justicia cualquier premio, suele decir: “Si no eres capaz de matar a un hombre, no eres un artista; pero, si lo haces, eres un repugnante asesino. En ese borde estás”. La afirmación me recuerda unos versos que Robert Browning escribió en La apología del obispo Blougram y que me atrevo a traducir así: “Nos interesa el borde peligroso de las cosas. / El ladrón honesto, el asesino delicado, / el ateo supersticioso”.

Es quizá lo que interesa a cualquier escritor de verdad. La tarea de la literatura consiste en explorar los límites de la experiencia, en mostrar la infinita, laberíntica complejidad de lo humano, en arrancarnos de nuestras confortables seguridades morales y políticas y conducirnos a lugares inciertos, donde por momentos perdemos pie. El Ricardo III de Shakespeare es tal vez el mayor canalla de la literatura universal, pero hay pasajes de esa tragedia salvaje en que uno se sorprende a sí mismo poniéndose de su lado, solidarizándose con esa espantosa alimaña, igual que, en Crimen y castigo, uno se solidariza con el estudiante Raskólnikov pese a saber que ha matado a Aliona Ivánovna, una vieja y repulsiva usurera. Añado un ejemplo que todos recordamos. Penúltima secuencia de la tercera parte de El Padrino. Los Corleone al completo acaban de asistir, en el Teatro Massimo de Palermo, a una representación de Cavalleria Rusticana en la que actúa Anthony, el hijo de Michael; al terminar la ópera de Mascagni, mientras los espectadores bajan las escalinatas del teatro, un sicario dispara sobre Michael, pero es su hija Mary quien recibe el proyectil destinado al capo mafioso; éste, tumbado en un escalón con el cadáver de su vástago en los brazos, lanza entonces el grito más desgarrador de la historia del cine, un grito silencioso que se prolonga durante segundos eternos hasta que por fin se convierte en un alarido inhumano. ¿Cómo no compadecer a ese padre cuya hija acaban de asesinar por su culpa? ¿Cómo no llorar con él, que ha vendido su alma al diablo para proteger a los suyos y acaba de perder pese a ello lo que más quiere? Y, sin embargo, sabemos que Michael es un criminal sin entrañas, un monstruo capaz de asesinar a su propio hermano… Ese es el borde peligroso de Browning, el lugar éticamente equívoco al que nos conduce el gran arte, y con el que, precisamente por ello, nos enriquece, permitiéndonos atisbar, desde nuestra butaca de lector o espectador, zonas de la experiencia a las que lo más probable es que, por fortuna, nunca tengamos acceso y a las que de otro modo ni siquiera osaríamos asomarnos. Es en este sentido en el que cabe decir que el arte que no es moralmente arriesgado no puede ser arte de verdad, gran arte. Visto así —y no sé de qué otra forma podría verse—, el coraje, un coraje casi homicida, es una condición indispensable para el artista; la razón es que debe ser capaz de bajar hasta el fondo de sí mismo, como un espeleólogo existencial, para encontrar aquello que ni si quiera él mismo sabía que habitaba allí —todo el horror y el dolor y la pestilencia y la furia y el miedo—, y para sacarlo luego a la superficie, convertido en belleza y sentido. Dicho de otro modo: en su vida, el artista quizá pueda ser más o menos cobarde, pero en su trabajo no; un artista cobarde es como un torero cobarde: se ha equivocado de oficio. Ese borde es el borde de Zurita.

Nuestro tiempo, tan ferozmente puritano, tan pusilánime, tolera mal estas evidencias, y por eso el artista de hoy tiene tal vez el deber de ser más radical que nunca, de exigirse más que nunca y de combatir más que nunca su propio miedo, entre otras razones para no dejarse intimidar por la mojigatería de los nuevos inquisidores. Ya sólo por eso un poeta como Zurita es ahora mismo indispensable.

Mario Vargas Llosa: ¡Qué gloriosa cosa es escribir novelas!

El País - diciembre 2019: Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara (México)

Muchos años antes de ganar el Nobel de Literatura, Mario Vargas Llosa intentó comprender a la distancia en qué momento se había jodido su país, Perú. Detrás de uno de los arranques más emblemáticos de una de las obras cumbres del boom latinoamericano se encontraba un periodista que escribía por las mañanas antes de ir a trabajar a una agencia de noticias de París. El autor en ciernes vivió tres años en una montaña rusa emocional de “entusiasmo y depresión” que terminaron por forjarlo como una de las voces literarias imprescindibles en español. El resultado de este proceso es Conversación en La Catedral, que cumple medio siglo desde su publicación en 1969.

“¡Qué gloriosa cosa es escribir novelas!”, escribió aquel año Vargas Llosa a Abelardo Oquendo, uno de los amigos que, a lo lejos, lo acompañó en el tortuoso camino de la escritura. El entusiasmo reflejó uno de los momentos buenos. “Uno se siente como Sansón tirando las columnas del templo”, contaba en la misma carta a su amistad, a quien finalmente dedicó la novela junto al también escritor Lucho Loayza. El intercambio epistolar lo recuerda el académico Carlos Aguirre, historiador de la Universidad de Oregón, en un apéndice a la edición conmemorativa de la novela, hoy publicada por Alfaguara.

Vargas Llosa rememoró este sábado en la FIL de Guadalajara aquellos años en los que creó las cuatro horas de plática entre el desencantado periodista Zavalita y el zambo Ambrosio en una cantina donde “el olor a fritura, pies y axilas revolotea, picante y envolvente, sobre las cabezas lacias o hirsutas”. La charla tiene como telón de fondo el Perú del dictador Manuel Odriá, quien gobernó el país sudamericano entre 1948 y 1956.

Vargas Llosa confesó que el primer año de la escritura de la novela fue el más difícil. Sabía la historia que quería contar. Tenía los personajes y episodios que la formarían, pero ¿cómo usarlos con coherencia? El escritor define aquellos momentos como llenos de “oscuridad”. “Me sacó las canas que tengo”, dijo el autor, quien no encontraba la estructura idónea.

Finalmente, como pasó con otros miembros del boom, Vargas Llosa encontró los mejores consejos leyendo a William Faulkner. “Descubrí la riqueza de la técnica literaria leyéndolo. Fue el primer escritor al que leí con lápiz y papel para entender las construcciones de sus novelas y cuentos, cómo descomponía las historias para después volver a recomponerlas”, explicó el Nobel de Literatura de 2010.

Fue así que se le ocurrió situar a sus personajes principales en una charla cantinera que sirvió de tronco a un “árbol de conversaciones” que evoca el encuentro de otros muchos personajes. Ya con esa estructura decidida, lo demás fue pulir una extensa novela que Seix Barral llegó a publicar originalmente en dos tomos.

Una de las claves de Conversación en La Catedral es su lenguaje, definido por su autor como “gris, de plomo”. La historia evitó contar el golpe que llevó a Odriá al poder, y se centró en mostrar los efectos que el Gobierno militar provocó en la sociedad peruana. Fue por esto que Vargas Llosa se alejó de un estilo pirotécnico. “Eludí la brillantez, los adjetivos llamativos están desparecidos”. La novela “era incompatibles con el lucimiento de un lenguaje bello, brillante”.

Antes de llegar a Guadalajara, el Nobel dejó una estela de polémica tras su breve paso por Ciudad de México. El viernes, en el Museo de la Memoria y Tolerancia, Vargas Llosa dedicó algunas palabras al Gobierno de Andrés Manuel López Obrador, que cumple un año este domingo. “Mucho me temo que este Gobierno esté retrocediendo un poco a México, que comenzaba a salir de esa dictadura perfecta y temo muchísimo que el populismo, que parece realmente la ideología del presidente de México, nos conduzca otra vez a la dictadura, perfecta o imperfecta”, dijo retomando la famosa frase que él mismo acuñó sobre el régimen del PRI en septiembre de 1990 en el coloquio El siglo XX: la experiencia de la libertad.

El comentario fue respondido por Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller, la esposa de López Obrador. “Veo mal a ciertos escritores que han ganado el Premio Nobel... Me temo muchísimo que el fanatismo y el dogmatismo, que parece la ideología de algunos, nos conduzca otra vez al panfletario perfecto", escribió en Facebook la historiadora, quien coordina trabajos de Memoria Histórica y Cultura en la Administración de la autodenominada Cuarta Transformación.

Book review: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love and War 1930-1949, by Lyse Doucet

The Guardian - 3 Dec 2019

Women are not welcome on the frontline, wrote famed war correspondent Martha Gellhorn in 1940 as she battled against military rules and male rivals for space alongside the troops.

Actually, to be exact, she was only referring to the frontline before a morning attack, “because the men are going to the bathroom (in agony of spirit) in all the trenches up and down the countryside and supposedly it would embarrass the woman”.

Other than that, “if there is a war anywhere I want to be at it”, the pioneering Gellhorn wrote in a letter to friends, fizzing with her signature passion, to be “places where trouble is”. This is just one of hundreds of missives she wrote or received included in a new collection, Yours, for Probably Always. These “Letters of Love and War” were written, typed or telegrammed across a turbulent period from 1930 to 1949, including the Great Depression, the Spanish civil war and the second world war.

This is history as it was lived, and shared in intimate and emotional detail, among Gellhorn’s lovers, husband, family and friends who were among the most important doers and thinkers of the time. Curated with valuable context by Janet Somerville, a literature teacher in Toronto, it’s her own love letter of sorts to a woman she calls “a wonder”.

Her mantra of 'being there’ is still written in stone for those who follow in the path she did so much to clear
Do we need another book on the celebrated Gellhorn who took her own life in 1998 at the age of 89 after a remarkable career spanning 60 years? There’s no shortage of material about or by this gutsy, glamorous writer who chronicled almost every conflict of the 20th century in her novels and reporting. In 2006, a trove of letters was selected and published by Gellhorn’s official biographer, Caroline Moorehead, who knew her as a close friend of her mother’s.

But this new offering reminds us how we read history through two prisms: a recollection of the past and a reflection on our own time. So much has changed, and so much is much the same, since our last Martha moment, reason enough to savour a new account.

Carrying this big brick of a book, more than 500 pages long, on my travels while on assignment, I kept dipping into it against the backdrop of another conflagration in Syria with yet more death and displacement, the kind of story that would have pulled Gellhorn to the front to be “with the boys”. But now our eyes and ears include impressive women correspondents on the ground in equal, if not greater, numbers than the men. And it’s women from the region as much as from the west.

Nowadays, females at the front are, dare I say it, a normal part of war reporting, even if the old fascination with women and war still hasn’t completely faded and students still write theses on whether gender matters in journalism.

Gellhorn’s candid correspondence reminds us of her own ambivalence on these matters. She writes often, and scornfully, about the lot of women in her time, but she somehow escaped society’s strictures. “I’ve never lived in a proper woman’s world, nor had a proper woman’s life… feeling myself to be floating uncertainly somewhere between the sexes.”

At other times, she’s made painfully aware of her position. In a letter written in June 1944, from the Dorchester hotel in London, to a Colonel Lawrence, she railed against the exclusion of women reporters in the second world war, writing: “I do not feel there is any need to beg, as a favour, for the right to serve as eyes for millions of people in America who are desperately in need of seeing but cannot see for themselves.”

Her mantra of “being there” is still written in stone for those who follow the path she did so much to clear. “The only way I can write with any authority with the hope of influencing even a very few people is to write from firsthand knowledge.”

Gellhorn rose above the restrictions with some equally extraordinary advantages. Her correspondence includes frequent exchanges with Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the US president, hailed in her own right as a pioneering woman of her time. It meant Gellhorn was able to obtain her own letter from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed to “All American Foreign Service Officers” to provide “every assistance” to “an old friend”.

But not all of Gellhorn’s friends were helpful all the time. Gellhorn aficionados don’t forget – or forgive – how in 1944 her then husband, Ernest Hemingway, asked Collier’s magazine to accredit him to cover the war even though Gellhorn’s byline had long been theirs. Revenge was sweet when she snuck on board a hospital barge and reached the Normandy shore on D-day. Hemingway and many others never made it.

Those eagerly anticipating that sequence of salvos will be left disappointed. Somerville tells us how Gellhorn, just months before her death, went through her correspondence and threw much of it into a fire, including almost all of her letters from Hemingway. Only two survive, which her adopted son, Sandy, saved from the flames.

Gellhorn’s own mail to Hemingway, until they divorced, is steeped in love and features a charming collection of pet names for him and his most precious part (nicknamed “Scroobie”). But her outpourings also underline how her first and last love would always be her work. Somerville tells us how Hemingway told Gellhorn’s mother, Edna, whose friendship he cherished, that he should have added to his book dedication to his wife: “If I can find her”.

Despite all this and much more, she still often gets first mention as Hemingway’s third wife, rather than as a writer and journalist in her own right. Being known as “Mrs Hemingway” troubled her in her own time. A letter to her editor is categorical: “My articles are always to be signed Martha Gellhorn, always”, underlining her preoccupation with her working life in his long shadow.

“I swallowed the world and it came out as words,” Gellhorn often remarked. Now we have more of her own words, and those who admired and embraced her, to reflect again on her world and ours.

Lyse Doucet is chief international correspondent for the BBC.

Feria Internacional del Libro (Guadalajara): La literatura de los que sobran

Cuatro escritores de Bolivia, Chile, Colombia y Ecuador conversan en la FIL sobre el estallido de indignación social que se vive en sus países

Guadalajara (México) 7 DIC 2019 - El País

América Latina se ha echado a las calles para protestar contra la desigualdad, el machismo y la impunidad. La ecuatoriana María Fernanda Ampuero, el colombiano Felipe Restrepo Pombo, la chilena Arelis Uribe y el boliviano Wilmer Urrelo son ciudadanos de cuatro de los países en los que la protesta está siendo más radical. Invitados a la FIL de Guadalajara, los cuatro se sentaron a analizar para EL PAÍS la convulsa situación que se vive pese a la especificidad de cada uno de sus países.

Arelis Uribe. Hay puntos comunes en los estallidos en toda Latinoamérica. Otras veces ha pasado: si miramos la historia de las independencias vemos que ocurrieron en periodos parecidos.

Felipe Restrepo Pombo. Claramente se ha dado un efecto dominó, pero no en todos lados está siendo lo mismo.

María Fernanda Ampuero. En Ecuador hubo un intento de desestabilizar al Gobierno con infiltrados entre los manifestantes, pero más allá de eso hay una indignación genuina por la subida de la gasolina que provoca que todo aumente un 10% o 15%. Y la gente dijo a sus políticos: “No me cargues el transporte público, que tú no usas. Estoy harto de no llegar a fin de mes, vivir con deudas, que mis hijos nunca tengan una oportunidad frente a los tuyos”. Lo que pasa en América Latina se resume esa frase chilena: es el baile de los que sobran. Estamos bailando los que sobramos.

A.U. En Chile están torturando, violando, desaparece gente.

Wilmer Urrelo. En Bolivia es más complejo. Hubo un fraude electoral descarado y todo se derrumbó. Ya hay 38 muertos. Creo que no hubo golpe de Estado, hubo una insurrección popular con muchas cabezas. El partido de Evo está fracturado por dentro.

F.R.P. En Colombia el proceso de paz ha marcado estos años de una manera muy violenta. Ha polarizado la opinión pública y ha devuelto a la derecha al poder, con Iván Duque. Además pasó una reforma tributaria, que provocó este descontento ignorando a una clase más popular. Cuando se generó la disidencia de las FARC, empezaron otra vez acciones militares y uno de los bombardeos mató a 18 niños. El Gobierno lo ocultó y esto desencadenó una moción de censura y la renuncia del ministro de Defensa. Fue la gota que derramó el vaso. Hubo un paro nacional y la respuesta del Gobierno fue militarizar las ciudades desde el primer día diciendo que la izquierda agitaba esa manifestación. Hasta puntos delirantes como el expresidente Pastrana, que dijo que todo estaba siendo orquestado por Santos y Timochenko desde la FIL.

A. U. Además de la desigualdad, hay otro elemento común que tiene que ver con un vacío, hay una crisis tan grande que la institucionalidad empieza a disolverse y emerge el miedo a la guerra civil. Es una batalla entre una institucionalidad moribunda y una calle cada vez más enardecida. Y no hay líderes.

M.F.A. Lo que se ha llamado paz en Latinoamérica por 500 años es que pobres, indígenas y clases trabajadoras estén callados. Y solo hablen los hombres.

Pregunta. El feminismo sería otro punto en común.

M.F.A. En Ecuador tenemos una ministra del Interior. Es muy criticada. La llaman fascista. Pero a pesar de todo lo que se destruyó no sacó a los tanques como sí creo, perdón, que hubiera hecho un hombre. No cayó en esa cosa visceral de “los matamos ahorita”. Respiró y se lo pensó.

F.R.P. En Colombia las más poderosas después de Duque son tres mujeres y las tres han sido tremendamente violentas. Sin embargo, quien mejor ha leído la situación es la nueva alcaldesa de Bogotá, Claudia López, que apoyó con inteligencia las reivindicaciones de la calle. Es el nuevo tipo de líderes que se necesita. Por supuesto, mujeres, pero no mujeres con mirada machista.

M.F.A. Una cosa linda de Ecuador es que el movimiento feminista nació del movimiento indígena. De la fuerza de las indígenas. No puede ser coincidencia que en se estén levantando todas las mujeres de Latinoamérica con un solo canto, el de Lastesis.

P. ¿La literatura está reflejando esa América convulsa?

F.R.P. Lleva años retratando el malestar. Esto es algo estructural. Y en la literatura ese telón de fondo siempre está ahí: la desigualdad, la violencia, el machismo.

New books coming in April 2018

From The Guardian:

Non-fiction

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (Allen Lane). The bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics is back with an exploration of the meaning of time.

The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton). The author of novels Hot Milk and Swimming Home also wrote Things I Don’t Want to Know, a “living autobiography” on writing and womanhood. This short memoir is the second instalment.

To Throw Away Unopened by Viv Albertine (Faber Social). In her followup to the much-praised Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys., the former Slits guitarist uncovers truths about her family.

Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty by Jacqueline Rose (Faber). It’s always the mother’s fault … the renowned feminist critic on the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings.

Rosie by Rose Tremain (Chatto). The novelist’s first non-fiction book is a childhood memoir that casts a revealing light on the “vanished” world of 1940s and 1950s England.

Fiction

Agency by William Gibson (Viking). The new novel from the colossus of SF switches between a world in which Hillary Clinton won the US election and London two centuries in the future, after most of the global population has perished.

Circe by Madeline Miller (Bloomsbury). The Song of Achilles won the Orange prize in 2012; Miller’s follow-up stays in the world of Homer’s Odyssey to explore the story of the witch-goddess who turns Odysseus’s men into pigs.

I Still Dream by James Smythe (Borough). A 17-year-old girl builds herself an AI system in her bedroom: as the decades pass, it grows with her. An investigation into artificial and human intelligence, which extends into the past and future.

Never Greener by Ruth Jones (Bantam). A debut novel about second chances from the actor and screenwriter best known for Gavin and Stacey.

The Trick to Time by Kit de Waal (Viking). In the follow-up to My Name Is Leon, a young Irish woman in 70s Birmingham is caught up in whirlwind romance – and tragedy.

Macbeth by Jo Nesbø (Hogarth). The project to novelise Shakespeare continues, with the Norwegian crime writer imagining the antihero of the Scottish play as a drug addict turned cop.

Patient X by David Peace (Faber). The author of GB84 and The Damned Utd is here inspired by the life and stories of the great Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa, best known for Rashomon.

Poetry

Europa by Sean O’Brien (Picador). The multi-prize-winning poet focuses on past and uncertain future entanglements between Britain and continental Europe.

Reviews of new books coming in April 2018, from www.themillions.com:

The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer: Wolitzer is one of those rare novelists who is able to capture the zeitgeist. Her follow up to The Interestings, The Female Persuasion centers around Greer Kadetsky, who is a freshman in college when she meets Faith Frank, an inspiring feminist icon who ignites Greer’s passions. After graduation, Greer lands a job at Frank’s foundation and things get real. Wolitzer is a master weaver of story lines and in this novel she brings four together as the characters search for purpose in life and love. As the starred review in Publisher’s Weekly says, this novel explores, “what it is to both embrace womanhood and suffer because of it.” Amen sister. (Claire)

The Recovering by Leslie Jamison: The bestselling author of The Empathy Exams brings us The Recovering, which explores addiction and recovery in America, in particular the stories we tell ourselves about addiction. Jamison also examines the relationship many well-known writers and artists had with addiction, including Amy Winehouse, Billie Holiday, Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace, and more. The Recovering has received advance praise from Stephen King, Vivian Gornick, and Anne Fadiman. Chris Kraus described the The Recovering as “a courageous and brilliant example of what nonfiction writing can do.” (Zoë)

Circe by Madeline Miller: It took Miller 10 years to write her Orange Prize-winning debut novel, The Song of Achilles. Happily, we only had to wait another five for Circe, even more impressive when one considers that the novel’s story covers millennia. Here Miller again invokes the classical world and a massive cast of gods, nymphs, and mortals, but it’s all seen through the knowing eyes of Circe, the sea-witch who captures Odysseus and turns men into monsters. (Kaulie)

America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo: As we enter year two of the Donald Trump presidency, Castillo’s first novel challenges readers to look beyond the headlines to grasp the human dimension of America’s lure to immigrants in this big-hearted family saga about three generations of Filipina women who struggle to reconcile the lives they left behind in the Philippines with the ones they are making for themselves in the American suburbs. (Michael)

You Think It, I’ll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld: Is Sittenfeld a serious literary novelist who dabbles in chick lit? Is she a writer of frothy beach reads who happens to have an MFA from Iowa? Do such distinctions still have any meaning in today’s fiction market? Readers can decide for themselves when Sittenfeld publishes her first story collection, after five novels that have ranged from her smash debut Prep to American Wife, her critically acclaimed “fictional biography” of former First Lady Laura Bush. (Michael)

Varina by Charles Frazier: Returning to the setting of his NBA winning Cold Mountain, Frazier taps into the American Civil War, specifically the life of Varina Howell Davis, the teenage bride of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. In this personal tragedy set in an epic period of American history, Frazier examines how “being on the wrong side of history carries consequences” regardless of one’s personal degree of involvement in the offense. Something to think about. (Il’ja)

Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion by Michelle Dean: You’ve been reading Dean’s reviews and journalism for some time at The Nation, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, The New Yorker, Slate, Salon The New Republic, et alia. Winner of the 2016 NBCC’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, Dean is debuting her first book with apt timing: Sharp features intertwining depictions of our most important 20th-century female essayists and cultural critics—Susan Sontag, Dorothy Parker, Hannah Arendt, Pauline Kael, Rebecca West, Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion, and others. A hybrid of biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, Sharp has been praised and starred by PWas “stunning and highly accessible introduction to a group of important writers.” (Sonya)

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee: In addition to receiving a starred review—and being named a Top 10 Essay Collection of Spring 2018—by Publishers Weekly, Chee’s essay collection explores a myriad of topics that include identity, the AIDS crisis, Trump, tarot, bookselling, art, activism, and more. Ocean Vuong described the book as “life’s wisdom—its hurts, joys and redemptions—salvaged from a great fire.” (Zoë)

Disoriental by Négar Djavadi (translated by Tina Kover): From the waiting room of a French fertility clinic, a young woman revisits the stories of generations of her Iranian ancestors culminating in her parents, who brought her to France when she was 10. This French hit, published in English by Europa Editions, is called “a rich, irreverent, kaleidoscopic novel of real originality and power” by Alexander Maksik. (Lydia)

Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires: A debut collection of stories exploring black identity and middle-class life in so-called “post-racial” America, with storylines ranging from gun violence and depression to lighter matters like a passive-aggressive fight between the mothers of school kids. George Saunders called these stories “vivid, fast, funny, way-smart, and verbally inventive.” (Lydia)

Black Swans by Eve Babitz: Until last year, Babitz was an obscure writer who chronicled hedonistic Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. And then Counterpoint and NYRB Classics began reissuing her memoirs and autofiction, and word of Babitz’s unique voice began to spread. In The New Yorker, Jia Tolentinowrote, “On the page, Babitz is pure pleasure—a perpetual-motion machine of no-stakes elation and champagne fizz.” Novelist Catie Disabato asserts that Babitz “isn’t the famous men she fucked or the photographs she posed in. She is the five books of memoir and fiction she left behind for young women, freshly moved to Los Angeles, to find.” Black Swans is the latest in these recent reissues. Published in 1993, these stories/essays cover everything from the AIDS crisis to learning to tango. And, of course, the Chateau Marmont. (Edan)

Look Alive Out There by Sloane Crosley: Crosley, author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection I Was Told There’d Be Cake, returns with a new collection of essays. Ten years removed from her debut, Crosley takes on issues ranging from the pressures of fertility, to swingers, to confronting her own fame. Look Alive promises to be a worthwhile follow-up to Crosley’s 2011 collection How Did You Get This Number?. (Ismail)

The Only Story by Julian Barnes: Give this to Barnes: the Man Booker laureate’s not afraid of difficult premises. In his 13th novel, a college student named Paul spends a lazy summer at a tennis club, where he meets a middle-aged woman with two daughters around his age. Soon enough, the two are having an affair, and a flash-forward to a much-older Paul makes clear it upended their lives. (Thom)

Blue Self-Portrait by Noémi Lefebvre (translated by Sophie Lewis): In this torrential inner monologue out from Oakland publisher Transit Books, a woman reflects on music, politics and her affair with a musician, a pianist obsessed with the 1910 self-portrait painted by Arnold Schoenberg, a haunting, blue-tinted work in which the composer’s“expression promised nothing positive for the art of the future, conveyed an anxiety for the future, looked far beyond any definition of the work of art or of the future.” (Matt)
How to Be Safe by Tom McCallister: This novel, by the author of The Young Widower’s Handbook, is billed as We Need to Talk About Kevin meets Dept. of Speculation—those are two of my favorite books! Also? Tom McCallister…is a man! Although high school English teacher Anna Crawford is quickly exonerated after being named a suspect in a campus shooting, she nevertheless suffers intense scrutiny in the wake of the tragedy. As the jacket copy says, “Anna decides to wholeheartedly reject the culpability she’s somehow been assigned, and the rampant sexism that comes with it, both in person and online.” Of the book, novelist Amber Sparks writes, “It’s so wonderful—so furious and so funny and urgent and needed in this mad ugly space we’re sharing with each other.” Author Wiley Cash calls McCallister “an exceptionally talented novelist.” (Edan)

Legendary literary feuds, between writers

By Emily Temple in Lit Hub

They don’t make literary feuds the way they used to. Maybe authors are kinder than they used to be—or maybe they just have Twitter. Either way, I love to hear about author feuds of yore, and so I’ve collected (and ranked) some of the best below.

But first, some rules. In order to qualify as a literary feud, both parties must be literary authors in their own right (no editor-author squabbles), and the argument must be two-sided—that is, there should be at least one exchange, two shots fired. No simple unremarked-upon bad review or unacknowledged shit-talking will suffice. For instance, Bret Easton Ellis’s bizarrely vicious attacks on David Foster Wallace in the years after his death don’t rate, because Ellis is just trolling. As far as I can tell, Mark Twain simply bullied Bret Harte, who kept his mouth shut about the whole thing. The Rick Moody/Dale Peck incident—already toeing the line as Peck, while a novelist, is arguably better known as a critic—devolved into a publicity stunt. I wouldn’t count Hans Christian Andersen overstaying his welcome at Charles Dickens’s house a feud, no matter how bad his manners. Same goes for Rimbaud and Verlaine’s gun-toting lovers’ quarrel. And alas, I must also exclude Ayelet Waldman’s 2011 Twitter-salvo to Katie Roiphe: “I am so BORED with Katie Roiphe’s ‘I like the sexist drunk writers’ bullshit. She happily trashes my husband, but guess what bitch? He not only writes rings and rings and rings around you, but the same rings around your drunken literary love objects.” (Oh look, there, I included it. Hey, no wonder Roiphe doesn’t like Twitter.) On the other hand, some writers have had so many good feuds (ahem, Salman Rushdie) that I’ve had to pick and choose from among them (John le Carré over Mo Yan; Updike over Francine Prose).

Ernest Hemingway vs. William Faulkner

This one is admittedly a bit of a stretch, feud-wise, as there was no confrontation to speak of (and one of the comments was given in private), but given the players, I consider it of interest. In a 1947 visit to a University of Mississippi creative writing class, Faulkner was asked to rank himself alongside other contemporary writers. His response, as transcribed at the time (but only published three years later, in The Western Review):
1. Thomas Wolfe: he had much courage and wrote as if he didn’t have long to live
2. William Faulkner
3. Dos Passos
4. Ernest Hemingway: he has no courage, has never crawled out on a limb. He has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used
5. John Steinbeck: at one time I had great hopes for him—now I don’t know.
According to A.E. Hotchner in his Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir, when Hemingway was told about Faulkner’s statement, he responded:
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use. Did you read his last book? It’s all sauce-writing now, but he was good once. Before the sauce, or when he knew how to handle it.

John Keats vs. Lord Byron

To be fair, this is more of a perennial rivalry than a true feud. Bryon was a snob and mega-privileged; Keats was middle-class and jealous of Byron’s success. Neither liked the other’s work, and both were weirdly bitter about it. John Keats, who was quite short, reportedly exclaimed to a friend after reading a good review of Byron’s work: “You see what it is to be six foot tall and a lord!” Lord Byron, after reading a good review of Keats’s, wrote to a friend:
Of the praises of that little dirty blackguard KEATES in the Edinburgh—I shall observe as Johnson did when Sheridan the actor got a pension. “What has he got a pension? then it is time that I should give up mine.”—Nobody could be prouder of the praises of the Edinburgh than I was—or more alive to their censure—as I showed in EB and SR—at present all the men they have ever praised are degraded by that insane article.—Why don’t they review & praise “Solomon’s Guide to Health” it is better sense—and as much poetry as Johnny Keates.

Keats died of tuberculosis at only 25, and some of his friends, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, claimed that his death had been hastened by the stress caused by negative reviews of his work in The Quarterly Review. Byron found that hilarious. He even made fun of him, posthumously, in his famous epic poem Don Juan:
John Keats, who was killed off by one critique,
Just as he really promised something great,
If not intelligible, —without Greek
Contrived to talk about the Gods of late,
Much as they might have been supposed to speak.
Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate: —
‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article.

Jennifer Weiner vs. Jennifer Egan

In the most mutual of Weiner’s myriad literary beefs, she took issue with Jennifer Egan after she won the Pulitzer and told the Washington Post:
My focus is less on the need for women to trumpet their own achievements than to shoot high and achieve a lot. What I want to see is young, ambitious writers. And there are tons of them. Look at The Tiger’s Wife. There was that scandal with the Harvard student who was found to have plagiarized. But she had plagiarized very derivative, banal stuff. This is your big first move? These are your models? I’m not saying you should say you’ve never done anything good, but I don’t go around saying I’ve written the book of the century. My advice for young female writers would be to shoot high and not cower.
Soon after, Weiner complained on Twitter: “Agh. Did Egan really have to pause, mid-victory lap, to call Kinsella, McCafferty “derivative and banal?”” and soon after tweeted: “And there goes my chance to be happy that a lady won the big prize. Thanks, Jenny Egan. You’re a model of graciousness.”
Weiner started a major discussion, but both she and Egan later apologized.

John Updike vs. Salman Rushdie

Much smaller than Rushdie’s disagreement with John le Carré, but still a good mini-feud. In 2006, John Updike reviewed Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown in the New Yorker. His opening line was this: “Why, oh why, did Salman Rushdie, in his new novel, Shalimar the Clown, call one of his major characters Maximilian Ophuls?” He goes on: “Readers of this review will be spared, as the reviewer was not, the maddening exercise of trying to overlay Rushdie’s Ophuls with the historical one. The two have no connection save the name and a peripatetic life.”

“A name is just a name,” Rushdie told the Guardian when asked about the review. “‘Why, oh why. . . ?’ Well, why not? Somewhere in Las Vegas there’s probably a male prostitute called ‘John Updike’. The thing that disappointed me most about Updike is that he did not say in that review that he had just completed a novel about terrorism. He had to sweep me out of the way in order to make room for himself. I don’t subscribe to the very predominantly English admiration of Updike. If you take away Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, and some of the short stories, there’s a lot of . . . slightly . . . garbage. Think of The Coup! The new one is beyond awful. He should stay in his parochial neighbourhood and write about wife-swapping, because it’s what he can do. . . I’m allowed to say it, because he was really rude about me.”

Ernest Hemingway vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald

Literary history’s most famous frenemies met in 1925, and soon became friends—Fitzgerald even sang Hemingway’s praises to the influential editor Maxwell Perkins, helping to jump-start his career. But Hemingway wasn’t particularly grateful, and soon began badmouthing Fitzgerald. In a (fairly negative) review of Scott Donaldson’s book about the pair, Michiko Kakutani writes,
Hemingway, who ”could ill abide being beholden to anyone,” clearly resented Fitzgerald’s help, and in this book, as in many others, he receives the bulk of the blame for the friendship’s demise. He emerges from these pages as an ingrate and bully, a megalomaniac who projected his own insecurities onto those closest to him and who believed he needed to reject friends and lovers before they could reject him. Fitzgerald, in contrast, comes across as a well-meaning but annoying fellow who hero-worshiped the wrong people, and who consistently sabotaged himself by getting drunk and behaving like a fool.
. . .
Hemingway was condescending about Fitzgerald’s work and mocked his former friend as a coward, a lap dog to the rich and a henpecked husband in thrall to a manipulative woman. He likened Fitzgerald to a dying butterfly, a glass-jawed boxer and an unguided missile crashing to earth on a ”very steep trajectory.”

Ten years after Fitzgerald’s death, Hemingway wrote:
I never had any respect for him ever, except for his lovely, golden, wasted talent. If he would have had fewer pompous musings and a little sounder education it would have been better maybe. But anytime you got him all straightened out and taking his work seriously Zelda would get jealous and knock him out of it. Also alcohol, that we use was the Giant Killer, and that I could not have lived without many times; or at least would have cared to live without; was a straight poison to Scott instead of a food.

A.S. Byatt vs. Margaret Drabble

Byatt and Drabble are unique on this list: they are not only enemies, but sisters—and their enmity goes back further than their writing careers. They were highly competitive as children, pitted against one another by their mother, who reportedly favored Drabble. According to the Telegraph, their relationship was further damaged by Drabble’s decision to become a novelist. “Sue always wanted to write,” Drabble said. “I didn’t want to. I just happened to write a novel when I was pregnant and had nothing to do.” And yet her first novel came out before her elder sister’s. But what really sealed it was Byatt’s The Game. “She may not have known what she had done until she had written it,” Drabble told theTelegraph. “Writers are like that. But it’s a mean-spirited book about sibling rivalry and she sent it to me with a note signed ‘With love,’ saying ‘I think I owe you an apology’. . . It’s irresoluble now. It’s sad, but beyond repair, and I don’t think about it much anymore.”

H.G. Wells vs. Henry James

Like others on this list, Wells and James started off as friends and mutual admirers. But they disagreed fundamentally on what literature was for, and in 1915, Wells published Boon, a satirical novel that mocked James’s writing style. When James read it, he wrote to Wells somewhat wounded:
I have more or less mastered your appreciation of H. J., which I have found very curious and interesting after a fashion—though it has naturally not filled me with a fond elation. It is difficult of course for a writer to put himself fully in the place of another writer who finds him extraordinarily futile and void, and who is moved to publish that to the world—and I think the case isn’t easier when he happens to have enjoyed the other writer from far back—
James summarizes the appeal of his own works this way: “They rest upon my measure of fullness—fullness of life and the projection of it, which seems to you such an emptiness of both.”

Wells wrote back: To you literature like painting is an end, to me literature like architecture is a means, it has a use. Your view was, I felt, altogether too prominent in the world of criticism and I assailed it in lines of harsh antagonism. And writing that stuff about you was the first escape I had from the obsession of this war. Boon is just a waste-paper basket. Some of it was written before I left my home at Sandgate (1911), and it was while I was turning over some old papers that I came upon it, found it expressive, and went on with it last December. I had rather be called a journalist than an artist, that is the essence of it, and there was no other antagonist possible than yourself. But since it was printed I have regretted a hundred times that I did not express our profound and incurable contrast with a better grace.

James’s reply was his last to Wells:
My dear Wells.
I am bound to tell you that I don’t think your letter makes out any sort of case for the bad manners of Boon, as far as your indulgence in them at the expense of your poor old H. J. is concerned — I say “your” simply because he has been yours, in the most liberal, continual, sacrificial, the most admiring and abounding critical way, ever since he began to know your writings: as to which you have had copious testimony. Your comparison of the book to a waste-basket strikes me as the reverse of felicitous, for what one throws into that receptacle is exactly what one doesn’tcommit to publicity and make the affirmation of one’s estimate of one’s contemporaries by. I should liken it much rather to the preservative portfolio or drawer in which what is withheld from the basket is savingly laid away. Nor do I feel it anywhere evident that my “view of life and literature,” or what you impute to me as such, is carrying everything before it and becoming a public menace—so unaware do I seem, on the contrary, that my products constitute an example in any measurable degree followed or a cause in any degree successfully pleaded: I can’t but think that if this were the case I should find it somewhat attested to in their circulation—which, alas, I have reached a very advanced age in the entirely defeated hope of.
. . .
I absolutely dissent from the claim that there are any differences whatever in the amenability to art of forms of literature aesthetically determined, and hold your distinction between a form that is (like) painting and a form that is (like) architecture for wholly null and void. There is no sense in which architecture is aesthetically “for use” that doesn’t leave any other art whatever exactly as much so; and so far from that of literature being irrelevant to the literary report upon life, and to its being made as interesting as possible, I regard it as relevant in a degree that leaves everything else behind. It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process. If I were Boon I should say that any pretence of such a substitute is helpless and hopeless humbug; but I wouldn’t be Boon for the world, and am only yours faithfully, Henry James

Derek Walcott vs. V.S. Naipaul

“It’s going to be nasty,” Derek Walcott told the audience at the Calabash International Literary Festival in 2008. He then proceeded to read a poem entitled “The Mongoose,” which begins:
I have been bitten. I must avoid infection
Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.
Read his last novels. You’ll see just what I mean:
A lethargy approaching the obscene.
Snap. But what had Naipaul done to deserve such treatment? According to the Guardian:
For years, the writers [had] discreetly sniped at one another in print and in interviews. Naipaul’s inclusion of an essay on Walcott in his 2007 memoir A Writer’s People—and its attendant publication in the Guardian—delivered a backhanded compliment by effusively praising Walcott’s earliest work [he calls Walcott “a man whose talent has been all but strangled by his colonial setting”], and seems to have provoked the poet into making such a public attack.

Ernest Hemingway vs. Wallace Stevens

I’ll just let Papa tell it himself (in a 1936 letter to Sara Murphy): Hangover came about through visit of my lawyer Mr. (Maurice) Speiser whom I cannot see without the aid and abettment of alcohol plus seeing off in southern farewell the Judge (Arthur Powell) of the Wallace Stevens evening (when Hemingway and the poet Wallace Stevens had a fistfight). Remember that Judge and Mr. Stevens? Nice Mr. Stevens. This year he came again sort of pleasant like the cholera and first I knew of it my nice sister Ura (Ursula) was coming into the house crying because she had been at a cocktail party at which Mr. Stevens had made her cry by telling her forcefully what a sap I was, no man, etc. So I said, this was a week ago, ”All right, that’s the third time we’ve had enough of Mr. Stevens.” So headed out into the rainy past twilight and met Mr. Stevens who was just issuing from the door haveing just said, I learned later, ”By God I wish I had that Hemingway here now I’d knock him out with a single punch.” So who should show up but poor old Papa and Mr. Stevens swung that same fabled punch but fortunately missed and I knocked all of him down several times and gave him a good beating. Only trouble was that first three times put him down I still had my glasses on. Then took them off at the insistence of the judge who wanted to see a good clean fight without glasses in it and after I took them off Mr. Stevens hit me flush on the jaw with his Sunday punch bam like that. And this is very funny. Broke his hand in two places. Didn’t harm my jaw at all and so put him down again and then fixed him good so he was in his room for five days with a nurse and Dr. working on him. But you mustn’t tell this to anybody. Not even Ada (MacLeish, wife of the poet Archibald MacLeish). Because he is very worried about his respectable insurance standing and I have promised not to tell anybody and the official story is that Mr. Stevens fell down a stairs. I agreed to that and said it was o.k. with me if he fell down the lighthouse stairs. So please promise not to tell anybody. But Pauline who hates me to fight was delighted. Ura had never seen a fight before and couldn’t sleep for fear Mr. Stevens was going to die. Anyway last night Mr. Stevens comes over to make up and we are made up. But on mature reflection I don’t know anybody needed to be hit worse than Mr. S. Was very pleased last night to see how large Mr. Stevens was and am sure that if I had had a good look at him before it all started would not have felt up to hitting him. But can assure you that there is no one like Mr. Stevens to go down in a spectacular fashion especially into a large puddle of water in the street in front of your old waddel street home where all took place. So I shouldn’t write you this but news being scarce your way and I know you really won’t tell anybody will you really absolutely seriously. Because otherwise I am a bastard to write it. He apologised to Ura very handsomely and has gone up to Pirates Cove to rest his face for another week before going north. I think he is really one of those mirror fighters who swells his muscles and practices lethal punches in the bathroom while he hates his betters. But maybe I am wrong. Anyway I think Gertrude Stein ought to give all these people who pick fights with poor old papa at least their money back. I am getting damned tired of it but not nearly as tired of it as Mr. Stevens got. It was awfully funny to have a man just declaring how he was going to annihilate you and show up just at that moment. Then have him land his awful punch on your jaw and nothing happen except his hand break. You can tell Patrick. It might amuse him. But don’t tell anybody else. Tell Patrick for statistics sake Mr. Stevens is 6 feet 2 weighs 225 lbs. and that when he hits the ground it is highly spectaculous. I told the Judge, the day after, to tell Mr. S. I thought he was a damned fine poet but to tell him he couldn’t fight. The Judge said, ”Oh, but your wrong there. He is a very good fighter. Why, I saw him hit a man once and knock him the length of this room.” And I said, ”Yes, Judge. But you didn’t catch the man’s name, did you?” I think it was a waiter. Nice dear good Mr. Stevens. I hope he doesn’t brood about this and take up archery or machine gunnery. But you promise you won’t tell anybody.

Of course, Hemingway was 20 years younger than Stevens at this time. But more importantly: what a gossip.

Marcel Proust vs. Jean Lorrain

Probably one of the few times that a book review led to an actual, pistols-drawn duel—but not actually because of the book in question. In an 1896 review of Proust’s Pleasures and Days, Lorrain suggested that he was gay, and described him as “one of those pretty little society boys who’ve managed to get themselves pregnant with literature.” After a second snarky essay a few months later, in which Lorrain (writing under a pseudonym) insinuated that Proust was having an affair with Lucien Daudet (the son of M. Alphonse Daudet), Proust challenged Lorrain to a duel. (Both Proust and Lorrain, by the way, were definitely gay.) Both shots went wide—probably on purpose—and everyone’s honor was restored.

William Thackeray vs. Charles Dickens

To be fair, Dickens used a patsy in his feud with Thackeray—but I’ll still count it on principle. The two were close friends and eventually literary rivals, though Dickens reached fame and critical approval first. Things were only as tense as could be expected until the famous “Garrick Club Affair,” which ruined their friendship.
Here’s what happened: In 1858 Charles Dickens separated from his wife, and Thackeray let it slip that Dickens was having an affair with a teenage actress, Ellen Ternan. In response, Dickens let one of his protégés, Edmund Yates, publish a slanderous attack of Thackeray in Dickens’s magazine Household Words.

“Mr. Thackeray is forty-six years old, though from the silvery whiteness of his hair he appears somewhat older,” the piece began.
His face is bloodless, and not particularly expressive, but remarkable for the fracture of the bridge of the nose, the result of an accident in youth. . . No one meeting him could fail to recognise in him a gentleman; his bearing is cold and uninviting, his style of conversation either openly cynical, or affectedly good-natured and benevolent; his bonhomie is forced, his wit biting, his pride easily touched—but his appearance is invariably that of the cool, suave, well-bred gentleman, who, whatever may be rankling within, suffers no surface display of his emotion.

Worse: Our own opinion is, that his success is on the wane; his writings never were understood or appreciated even by the middle classes; the aristocracy have been alienated by his American onslaught on their body, and the educated and refined are not sufficiently numerous to constitute an audience; moreover, there is a want of heart in all he writes, which is not to be balanced by the most brilliant sarcasm, and the most perfect knowledge of the workings of the human heart.

Thackeray wrote to Yates: “As I understand your phrases, you impute insincerity to me when I speak good-naturedly in private; assign dishonorable motives to me for sentiments which I have delivered in public, and charge me with advancing statements which I have never delivered at all. . . I am obliged to take notice of articles which I consider to be not offensive and unfriendly merely, but slanderous and untrue.” But the real problem was that Yates had lifted conversations from the privacy of the Garrick Club, where all three men (Thackeray, Dickens, Yates) were members, and where, as Thackeray puts if “I and other gentlemen have been in the habit of talking without any idea that our conversation would supply paragraphs for professional vendors of ‘Literary Talk.'”

Thackeray put the issue to the Garrick Club, who—despite a letter from Dickens pleading in support of Yates—kicked him out. He continued to write more articles and even a book criticizing Thackeray, and Dickens resigned from the club. “I never exchanged a word except of kindness with this Mr. Yates until the appearance of this article against me,” Thackeray wrote to Charles Kingsley. “What pains me most is that Dickens should have been his adviser: and next that I should have had to lay a heavy hand on a young man who, I take it, has been cruelly punished by the issue of the affair and I believe is hardly aware of the nature of his own offense and doesn’t even understand that a gentleman should resent the monstrous insult which he volunteered.” And to his mother, Thackeray wrote, “I am become a sort of great man in my way—all but at the top of the tree; indeed there if truth be known and having a great fight up there with Dickens.” He was sad at the loss of his friend; but reportedly the two made up after a chance encounter only a few months before Thackeray’s death.

John Irving vs. J.P. Donleavy

In a 1986 interview with the Paris Review, John Irving described meeting J.P. Donleavy at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
I went to the airport to meet him; I’d written three novels—but not yet The World According to Garp; I wasn’t famous. I didn’t expect Donleavy to have read anything of mine, but I was surprised when he announced that he read no one living; then he asked if we were in Kansas. I told him a little about the Workshop, but he was one of those writers with no knowledge about writing programs and many prejudices about them: to be a student of writing was a waste of time; better to go out and suffer. He was wearing a very expensive three-piece suit, very handsome shoes, and handling a very posh walking stick at the time, and I began to get irritated. In a meeting with Workshop students, he told them that any writer who was lowering himself by teaching writing wasn’t capable of teaching them anything.
. . .
Cheever tried a few times to engage Donleavy in some conversation, and as Cheever was as gifted in conversation as any man I have ever met, I grew more and more furious at Donleavy’s coldness and unresponsiveness and totaldiscourtesy. I was thinking, frankly, that I should throw the lout in a puddle, if there was one handy, when Cheever spoke up. “Do you know, Mr. Donleavy,” Cheever said, “that no majorwriter of fiction was ever a shit to another writer of fiction, except Hemingway—and he was crazy?” That was all. Donleavy had no answer. Perhaps he thought Hemingway was still a living writer and therefore hadn’t read him, either.
. . .
I should add that drinking wasn’t the issue of this unpleasant evening; Cheever was not drinking; Donleavy wasn’t drunk—he was simply righteous and acting the prima donna. I feel a little like I’m tattling on a fellow schoolboy to tell this story, but I felt so awful—not for myself but for Cheever. It was such an outrage; that Donleavy—this large, silly man with his walking stick—was snubbing John Cheever. I suppose it’s silly that I should still be angry, but George Plimpton told me that Donleavy has a subscription to The Paris Review; this presents an apparent contradiction to Donleavy’s claim that he doesn’t read anyone living, but it gives me hope that he might read this. If the story embarrasses him, or makes him angry, I would say we’re even; the evening embarrassed Cheever and me, and made us angry, too.
After reading the interview, Donleavy wrote a hilariously snooty response, which was then published: I was not carrying a cane at the time but remember a request from Mr. Irving to speak with him privately which I did and during which meeting I suggested to him, that if he had the option to leave the cosy world of teaching, it was better to go suffer and pursue a writing career outside of university. This advice he seems to have taken, and I’m told, he was heard to mention it on a radio broadcast some years ago. As for snubbing Mr. John Cheever, I distinctly recall pleasantly meeting this distinguished gentleman in his classroom during one of his teaching sessions. Also, I am informed by the friend sending me this cutting from the Paris Review that one of Mr. Cheever’s students (now a published novelist), was at the time at Iowa and was present at my talk and quotes Mr. Cheever as saying he thought the lecture and reading wonderful and that one’s tailoring was sublime. As someone who was always only dressed to keep warm and comfortable, Mr. Cheever’s reference to my tailoring comes as a surprise but clearly is not the remark of a man who has felt snubbed, and I suspect there is some other reason for Mr. Irving’s remarks.

It is true that I do not have untold sympathy for the American academic fraternity nor did I keep up with the literary scene then, nor do I now. But I note in the paragraph on page 95 preceding the present above matter, that Mr. Irving refers to the interchangeable use of “I” as a first person narrator with third person narrator. At least it is evident that this device, first used in The Ginger Man, has made an impression on Mr. Irving. All this has come to my attention not as a subscriber nor as a recipient of complimentary copies of the Paris Review and which latter I assure Mr. Plimpton I do not receive.

To which Irving responded: “I’m sorry you had to suffer that arcane and mannered flapdoodle from Mr. Donleavy,” before reiterating most of his points.

Truman Capote vs. Gore Vidal

This feud was all about literary jealousy. Early on, Vidal was disgruntled at the appearance of a Life magazine photo spread entitled “Young U.S. Writers: A Refreshing Group of Newcomers on the Literary Scene is Ready to Tackle Almost Anything.” It’s not that Vidal wasn’t included—he was, in a tiny, awkward photo. Capote rated three-quarters of the first page. Socially, they were cordial, but Vidal was offended by Capote’s manner and irritated by his name-dropping. “The instant lie was Truman’s art form, small but, paradoxically, authentic,” he wrote. “One could watch the process. A famous name would be mentioned. The round pale fetus face would suddenly register a sort of tic, as if a switch had been thrown. ‘Eleanor Roosevelt. Oh, I know her intimately!'”
The rivalry was mostly made up of petty things—a comment here, a snub there, a bad review whenever called for. “I first met Truman at Anaïs Nin’s apartment,” Vidal once said. “My first impression—as I wasn’t wearing my glasses—was that it was a colourful ottoman. When I sat down on it, it squealed. It was Truman.” Once, according to Fred Kaplan’s biography, Vidal called up Tennessee Williams and, pretending to be Capote, elicited some “uncomplimentary remarks” about his own writing. Then, when he next saw Williams, he alluded to those remarks, in order to make him believe Capote has betrayed him by repeating the conversation. That’s some brilliant mean girl-ing. He also famously called Capote’s death “a brilliant career move.”

Hilton Als interpreted the feud this way:
[Vidal’s] disdain for Truman Capote—another child of an alcoholic mother—had less to do with Capote’s impulse to embellish the truth than with his skill at imagining characters, no matter how derivative his early short stories were. (Vidal never produced anything in fiction on the order of Capote’s Miriam, Among the Paths to Eden, let alone Breakfast at Tiffany’s or In Cold Blood.) And I think Vidal rather resented Capote being, often, the only other known out homosexual in the room. (Vidal could love Tennessee Williams because the stage was Williams’s thing, not prose.)

I would be remiss if I didn’t add Capote’s much-quoted quip: “I’m always sad about Gore—very sad that he has to breathe every day.” And in an interview after Capote’s death, Vidal shuddered, “Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.”

Sinclair Lewis vs. Theodore Dreiser

A 1931 article in The Montreal Gazette (headline: “Noted Authors in Reported Fracas“) cites the Evening Post to report that “Theodore Dreiser, novelist, slapped the face of Sinclair Lewis, Nobel literary prizewinner, at a dinner last night.”

For context, Lewis had just beat out Dreiser for the Nobel Prize, becoming the first American to receive the honor—though some interpreted the choice as a subtle snub to the entire country by the Swedes. Dreiser was devastated, and though Lewis tried to reach out to him, Dreiser wouldn’t have any of it.
Now they were both at a literary dinner for a Russian novelist. According to Anthony Arthur in his Literary Feuds, Dreiser congratulated Lewis, but Lewis responded with a “sneer,” and then, during the meal, “fondled a bottle by the neck and muttered how he’d like to break it over Dreiser’s head.” Lewis was asked to give an impromptu speech, but refused, standing up and saying “I feel disinclined to say anything in the presence of the man who stole 3,000 words from my wife’s book and before two sage critics who publicly lamented my receiving the Novel Prize.” In 1928, Dreiser had been accused of plagiarizing parts of The New Russia by Sinclair’s wife Dorothy Thompson for his volume Dreiser Looks at Russia.
After the meal, Dreiser confronted Lewis. “I know you’re an ignoramus, but you’re crazy,” Dreiser said. Lewis repeated his claims, and Dreiser slapped him. Or, as he reported it: “I smacked him. And I asked him if he wanted to say it again. He said it again. So I smacked him again. And I said, ‘Do you want to say it again?'” According to Arthur: At this point Lengel entered the room and heard Lewis say, “Theodore, you are a liar and a thief.” Lengel grabbed Lewis, thinking to restrain him from attacking Dreiser, but Lewis was limp and unresisting. Lengel told Dreiser that he’d better leave. Lewis said again, “I still say you are a liar and a thief.” “Do you want me to hit you again?” Dreiser demanded. “If you do, I’ll turn the other cheek.” Dreiser said, “Aw, Lewis, you shit!” Lengel was pushing the bigger man through the door when he turned and shouted, “I’ll meet you any time, anywhere. This thing isn’t settled.” Lewis followed, muttering something. Dreiser said, “Lewis, why don’t you peddle your papers somewhere else?”

The tabloids were all over this, and Dreiser reportedly got a few complimentary telegrams, including one that said: “Thank you for slapping Sinclair Lewis. You did just what many thousands of Americans would like to do.” Well, Lewis still got the Nobel.

Gabriel García Márquez vs. Mario Vargas Llosa

February 12th, 1976: Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez meet in Mexico City at a movie premiere. García Márquez is happy to see his friend—who promptly punches him in the face, leaving him bleeding, and shouts “How dare you come and greet me after what you did to Patricia in Barcelona!” Patricia, of course, was Vargas Llosa’s wife. According to the Independent (via the New Yorker):
Mario strayed. He fell in love with a beautiful Swedish air stewardess whom he met while travelling. He left his wife and moved to Stockholm.

Distraught, his wife Patricia went to see her husband’s best friend, Gabriel. After discussing the matter with his wife, Mercedes, he advised Patricia to divorce Mario. And then he consoled her. No one else quite knows what form this consolation took…. Eventually Mario returned to his wife, who told him of Gabriel’s advice to her, and of his consolation.

Hence the famous black-eyed photograph of García Márquez. “I took the picture two days after the incident, when he came to my house,” said friend and photographer Rodrigo Moya. “It was difficult to take a picture in which he looked this good. I have some pictures in which he looks like he was really beaten up, like beaten up by the Mexican police.” Since then, both writers have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but as legend would have it, they never spoke again.

Paul Theroux vs. V.S. Naipaul

In the 90s, V.S. Naipaul, who reportedly suspected his longtime friend Paul Theroux of seducing his wife, sold off a book that Theroux had personally inscribed to him, getting about $1,500 on the internet. Theroux responded by writing a very damning book about their friendship, Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents, which he later called an “unsparing and accurate portrait of the man, minus the instances of racism and physical abuse that I was forbidden by lawyers to publish. . . In thirty years . . . I mainly saw his sadness, his tantrums, his envy, his meanness, his greed, and his uncontrollable anger. But I never saw Naipaul attack anyone stronger than himself; he talked big and insultingly but when he lashed out it was always against the weak—women who loved him, his wife, and waiters: people who couldn’t hit back, the true mark of the coward.”

But in 2011, after fifteen years of animosity, the two made up—or at least shook hands. According to the Guardian: “Spotting Naipaul in the green room at the Hay festival, Theroux turned to McEwan and asked what he should do. “Life is short,” McEwan replied. “You should say hello.” And with that, handbags were holstered.” As Naipaul’s wife described it: “Paul approached him and said he missed him. It was very gracious and wonderful of him. So that is the end to the literary feud.”

“After so many years, we’ve finally spoken,” said Theroux. “I just had an experience today with a capital E.”

Vladimir Nabokov vs. Edmund Wilson

This is about as literary as a feud can get: fighting over Pushkin. In 1965, Nabokov published a four-volume translation of the Russian writer’s Eugene Onegin—and his friend “Bunny” panned it in The New York Review of Books. Nabokov responded in the same publication, writing

I fully share “the warm affection sometimes chilled by exasperation” that he says he feels for me. In the 1940s, during my first decade in America, he was most kind to me in various matters, not necessarily pertaining to his profession. I have always been grateful to him for the tact he showed in refraining from reviewing any of my novels. We have had many exhilarating talks, have exchanged many frank letters. A patient confidant of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language, I have always done my best to explain to him his mistakes of pronunciation, grammar, and interpretation.
He then proceeds to rebut Wilson’s review, point by point, but stops himself, on the basis of the “strange tone” of the review. “Its mixture of pompous aplomb and peevish ignorance is certainly not conducive to a sensible discussion of Pushkin’s language and mine,” he finishes. Wilson responded again, although with less fervor.

That wasn’t the only problem, of course. Wilson had also hated Lolita, and was competitive with the increasingly more-famous Nabokov, and they also butted heads politically—but it was the Pushkin thing that tipped them over the edge.

Martin Amis vs. Julian Barnes

Martin Amis has made a lot of enemies along the way. But one of the earliest was his longtime friend Julian Barnes, whom he alienated on account of what sounds a lot like greed. Amis wanted a £500,000 advance for his 1995 novel The Information. Jonathan Cape offered £300,000—so Amis fired his agent, Pat Kavanagh, in favor of Andrew Wylie, who got him the money (which he reportedly wanted for dental work). The only problem was that Pat Kavanagh and her husband, Julian Barnes, were close friends of Amis’s—and Barnes was not pleased. According to the Independent: Barnes wrote to Amis to wish him the same success as two other Wylie clients: Salman Rushdie, who was living in fear of his life because of a fatwa, and Bruce Chatwin, who died of AIDS. The letter was signed off with two words, the second of which was “off.”

Amis told the Observer that he was in a bad place at the time—he was in the midst of a divorce and his father had just died—and was “shocked” by the letter. “It was naive of me not to anticipate it,” he said. Apparently, they patched things up, but it took a decade to do it.

John le Carré vs. Salman Rushdie

This one’s a corker. It started in 1997, when John le Carré complained in the letters section of the Guardian that he had been unfairly attacked by American readers for anti-Semitisim.

Salman Rushdie responded: “It would be easier to sympathize with him had he not been so ready to join in an earlier campaign of vilification against a fellow writer. In 1989, during the worst days of the Islamic attack on The Satanic Verses, le Carré wrote an article (also, if memory serves, in the Guardian) in which he eagerly, and rather pompously, joined forces with my assailants.”

Le Carré came back: “Rushdie’s way with the truth is as self-serving as ever. . . My position was that there is no law in life or nature that says that great religions may be insulted with impunity. . . My purpose was not to justify the persecution of Rushdie, which, like any decent person, I deplore, but to sound a less arrogant, less colonialist and less self-righteous note than we were hearing from the safety of his admirers’ camp.”

Rushdie: “I’m grateful to John le Carré for refreshing all our memories about exactly how pompous an ass he can be.”

Le Carré: “Whether from Rushdie’s throne or Hitchens’ gutter, the message is the same: ‘Our cause is absolute, it brooks no dissent or qualification; whoever questions it is by definition an ignorant, pompous, semi-literate person.’ . . . Rushdie sneers at my language and trashes a thoughtful and well-received speech I made to the Anglo-Israel Association. . . Hitchens portrays me as a buffoon who pours his own urine on his head. Two rabid Ayatolahs could not have done a better job. But will the friendship last? I am amazed that Hitchens has put up with Rusdhie’s self-canonisation for so long.
Rushdie: “If he wants to win an argument, John le Carré could begin by learning to read. . . It’s true I did call him a pompous ass, which I thought pretty mild in the circumstances. ‘Ignorant’ and ‘semi-literate’ are dunces’ caps he has skillfully fitted on his own head. I wouldn’t dream of removing them. . . John le Carré appears to believe I would prefer him not to go on abusing me. Let me assure him that I am of precisely the contrary opinion. Every time he opens his mouth, he digs himself into a deeper hole. Keep digging, John, keep digging. Me, I’m going back to work.”

In 2011, the two patched things up. Rushdie extended the olive branch first (at least publicly)—speaking at a literature festival, he said “I wish we hadn’t done it,” and complimented le Carré’s literary chops. “I think of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as one of the great novels of postwar Britain,” he said. Le Carré responded in The Times: I too regret the dispute. I admire Salman for his work and his courage, and I respect his stand. Does that answer the larger debate which continues to this day? Should we be free to burn Korans, mock the passionately held religions of others? Maybe we should—but should we also be surprised when the believers we have offended respond in fury? I couldn’t answer that question at the time and, with all good will, I still can’t. But I am a little proud, in retrospect, that I spoke against the easy trend, reckoning with the wrath of outraged Western intellectuals, and suffering it in all its righteous glory. And if I met Salman tomorrow? I would warmly shake the hand of a brilliant fellow writer.

At least one person wasn’t too happy about that. “The le Carré-Rushdie quarrel was (and is) between those who think that religion should be protected from ‘offensive’ critiques, and those who do not,” Christopher Hitchens said. “This is the original confrontation over free speech, which goes back to the trial of Socrates. I therefore did my best to make sure that no compromise or kiss-and-make-up was thinkable. One’s job on such occasions, when seeing the embers begin to cool, is to blow on them as hard as possible.”

Norman Mailer vs. Gore Vidal

One of the true legends: the time Norman Mailer head-butted Gore Vidal backstage before appearing with him on the December 15th, 1971 episode of the Dick Cavett show (alongside journalist Jane Flanner). There’s no footage of the head-butt, but happily there is footage of the ensuing squabble, which you can watch below. As Dick Cavett himself described it: Mailer’s entrance was the tip-off. He came on from stage left doing that pugilist walk: his hands were fists and carried high, and he had the tousled look of having visited a favorite bar or two en route. His suit was disheveled, his bow to Miss Flanner courtly, and his refusal to shake Vidal’s extended hand caused a murmuring in the audience.

After that, the battle begins—Mailer is incensed over an essay Vidal has written criticizing him in The New York Review of Books (actually a review of Eva Figes’ Patriarchal Attitudes, but he did compare Mailer to Charles Manson, in passing), and proceeds to take pot shots at everyone’s intelligence, not to mention try to physically intimidate the other guests. Flanner sums it up when she complains about the bickering: “Not only do you insult each other, not only in public, but as if you were in private. That’s the odd way . . . It’s very odd that you act so—you act as if you were the only people here.” Mailer: “Aren’t we?” Flanner: “They’re here, he’s here, I’m here. And I’m becoming very, very bored.” The audience laughs and claps, and Flanner bows Mailer a kiss. It’s a great line, but there’s nothing boring about what’s going on.

No blows were exchanged on television, but six years later, the two met again at a party, and Mailer hit Vidal in the face, knocking him down. “Once again, words fail Norman Mailer,” said Vidal, before getting back to his feet.

New books coming in March 2018

From The Guardian

Non-fiction:

Living With the Gods by Neil MacGregor (Allen Lane). The book of the British Museum exhibition and BBC Radio 4 series from the author of A History of the World in 100 Objects.

Debussy: A Painter in Sound by Stephen Walsh (Faber). The acclaimed classical music writer on the French impressionist composer.
Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading by Lucy Mangan (Square Peg). The journalist takes a trip back to Narnia and Wonderland, and gets reacquainted with some of the favourite characters of our collective childhoods.

Free Woman by Lara Feigel (Bloomsbury). The prolific scholar and reviewer on the life and works of Doris Lessing.

Fiction:

Dead Men’s Trousers by Irvine Welsh (Cape). The Trainspotting crew return; Renton is now an international jetsetter and Begbie a famous artist. But with Sick Boy and Spud trying their luck in the world of organ-harvesting, who’s wearing dead men’s trousers?

Bizarre Romance by Audrey Niffenegger and Eddie Campbell (Cape). Riffs on life and love in prose and comic strip form, from the author of The Time Traveler’s Wife and her graphic artist husband.

The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey (Cape). A Somerset man is drowned and the village priest must investigate … a medieval mystery from one of the UK’s most exquisite stylists.

Upstate by James Wood (Cape). Why do some find life so much harder than others? The leading literary critic delves into depression and the meaning of existence in a novel about family relationships.

Almost Love by Louise O’Neill (Riverrun). First adult novel from the author of the scorching YA book about rape culture Asking for It charts the abusive relationship between a young woman and an older man.

Poetry:

Anecdotal Evidence by Wendy Cope (Faber). In Cope’s first new collection since 2011, she engages with figures from Shakespeare to Eric Morecambe.

Children’s:

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi (Macmillan). Epic fantasy YA debut of magic and war, inspired by the history and myth of west Africa.

Reviews of new books coming in March 2018, from www.themillions.com:

The Census by Jesse Ball: Novelist Ball’s nimble writing embodies the lightness and quickness that Calvino prized (quite literally, too: he pens his novels in a mad dash of days to weeks). And he is prolific, too. Since his previous novel, How to Start a Fire and Why, he has has written about the practice of lucid dreaming and his unique form of pedagogy, as well as a delightfully morbid compendium of Henry King’s deaths, with Brian Evenson. Ball’s seventh novel, The Census, tells the story of a dying doctor and his concern regarding who will care for his son with Down Syndrome, as they set off together on a cross-country journey. (Anne)

Men and Apparitions by Lynne Tillman: News of a new Tillman novel is worthy of raising a glass. Men and Apparitions is the follow-up novel to Tillman’s brilliant, ambitious American Genius: A Comedy. Men and Apparitions looks closely at our obsession with the image through the perspective of cultural anthropologist Ezekiel “Zeke” Hooper Stark. Norman Rush says, “this book is compelling and bracing and you read many sentences twice to get all the juice there is in them.” Sarah Manguso has said she is “grateful” for Tillman’s “authentically weird and often indescribable books.” I second that. (Anne)

Whiskey & Ribbons by Leesa Cross-Smith: Police officer Eamon Michael Royce is killed in the line of duty. His pregnant wife, Evi, narrates Eamon’s passing with elegiac words: “I think of him making the drive, the gentle peachy July morning light illuminating his last moments, his last heartbeat, his last breath.” Months later and wracked with grief, Evi falls for her brother-in-law Dalton: “Backyard-wandering, full-moon pregnant in my turquoise maternity dress and tobacco-colored cowboy boots. I’d lose my way. Dalton would find me. He was always finding me.” The sentences in Cross-Smith’s moving debut are lifted by a sense of awe and mystery—a style attuned to the graces of this world. Whiskey & Ribbons turns backward and forward in time: we hear Eamon’s anxieties about fatherhood, and Dalton’s continuous search for meaning in his life. “I am always hot, like I’m on fire,” Evi dreams later in the novel, still reliving her husband’s death, “burning and gasping for air.” In Cross-Smith’s novel, the past is never forgotten. (Nick R.)

The Emissary by Yoko Tawada (translated by Margaret Mitsutani): In a New Yorker essay on Tawada, author of Memoirs of a Polar Bear, Riva Galchen wrote that “often in [her] work, one has the feeling of having wandered into a mythology that is not one’s own.” Tawada’s latest disorienting mythology is set in a Japan ravaged by a catastrophe. If children are the future, what does it presage that, post-disaster, they are emerging from the womb as frail, aged creatures blessed with an uncanny wisdom? (Read her Year in Reading here.) (Matt)

The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst: Hollinghurst’s sixth novel has already received glowing reviews in the U.K. As the title suggests, the plot hinges on a love affair, and follows two generations of the Sparsholt family, opening in 1940 at Oxford, just before WWII. The Guardian called it “an unashamedly readable novel…indeed it feels occasionally like Hollinghurst is trying to house all the successful elements of his previous books under the roof of one novel.” To those of us who adore his books, this sounds heavenly. (Hannah)

The Chandelier by Clarice Lispector (translated by Magdalena Edwards and Benjamin Moser): Since Katrina Dodson published a translation of Lispector’s complete stories in 2015, the Brazilian master’s popularity has enjoyed a resurgence. Magdalena Edwards and Benjamin Moser’s new translation of Lispector’s second novel promises to extend interest in the deceased writer’s work. It tells the story of Virginia, a sculptor who crafts intricate pieces in marked isolation. This translation marks the first time The Chandelier has ever appeared in English (Ismail).

The Parking Lot Attendant by Nafkote Tamirat: It’s very easy to love this novel but difficult to describe it. A disarming narrator begins her account from a community with strange rules and obscure ideology located on an unnamed island. While she and her father uneasily bide their time in this not-quite-utopia, she reflects on her upbringing in Boston, and a friendship–with the self-styled leader of the city’s community of Ethiopian immigrants–that begins to feel sinister. As the story unfolds, what initially looked like a growing-up story in a semi-comic key becomes a troubling allegory of self-determination and sacrifice. (Lydia)

Let’s No One Get Hurt by Jon Pineda: A fifteen-year-old girl named Pearl lives in squalor in a southern swamp with her father and two other men, scavenging for food and getting by any way they can. She meets a rich neighbor boy and starts a relationship, eventually learning that his family holds Pearl’s fate in their hands. Publisher’s Weekly called it “an evocative novel about the cruelty of children and the costs of poverty in the contemporary South.” (Lydia)

The Merry Spinster by Mallory Ortberg: Fairy tales get a feminist spin in this short story collection inspired by Ortberg’s most popular Toast column, “Children’s Stories Made Horrific.” This is not your childhood Cinderella, but one with psychological horror and Ortberg’s signature snark. Carmen Maria Machado calls it a cross between, “Terry Pratchett’s satirical jocularity and Angela Carter’s sinister, shrewd storytelling, and the result is gorgeous, unsettling, splenic, cruel, and wickedly smart.” Can’t wait to ruin our favorite fables! (Tess)

The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea: Urrea is one of the best public speakers I’ve ever seen with my 35-year-old eyes, so it’s incredible that it’s not even the thing he’s best at. He’s the recipient of an American Book Award and a Pulitzer nominee for The Devil’s Highway. His new novel is about the daily life of a multi-generational Mexican-American family in California. Or as he puts it, “an American family—one that happens to speak Spanish and admire the Virgin of Guadalupe.” (Janet)

Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala: Nearly 15 years after his critically-acclaimed debut novel, Beasts of No Nation, was published, Iweala is back with a story as deeply troubling. Teenagers Niru and Meredith are best friends who come from very different backgrounds. When Niru’s secret is accidentally revealed (he’s queer), there is unimaginable and unspeakable consequences for both teens. Publishers Weekly’s starred review says the “staggering sophomore novel” is “notable both for the raw force of Iweala’s prose and the moving, powerful story.” (Carolyn)

American Histories: Stories by John Edgar Wideman: Wideman’s new book is a nearly fantastical stretching and blurring of conventional literary forms—including history, fiction, philosophy, biography, and deeply felt personal vignettes. We get reimagined conversations between the abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the doomed white crusader for racial equality John Brown. We get to crawl inside the mind of a man sitting on the Williamsburg Bridge, ready to jump. We get Wideman pondering deaths in his own family. We meet Jean Michel Basquiat and Nat Turner. What we get, in the end, is a book unlike any other, the work of an American master working at peak form late in a long and magnificent career. (Bill)

Happiness by Aminatta Forna: A novel about what happens when an expert on the habits of foxes and an expert on the trauma of refugees meet in London, one that Paul Yoon raved about it in his Year in Reading: “It is a novel that carries a tremendous sense of the world, where I looked up upon finishing and sensed a shift in what I thought I knew, what I wanted to know. What a gift.” In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly says “Forna’s latest explores instinct, resilience, and the complexity of human coexistence, reaffirming her reputation for exceptional ability and perspective.” (Lydia)

The Neighborhood by Mario Vargas Llosa (translated by Edith Grossman): The Nobel Prize winner’s latest arrives in translation from the extraordinary Edith Grossman. The Neighborhood is symphonic, a “thriller,” if you can call it that, about a detective whose wife gets roped into a debilitating situation. It is set in Llosa’s 1990s Peru, and you see this place with its paradox of grayness and color, juxtaposed with spots of blood. Two women married to very affluent men are having a lesbian affair, and one of their husbands, Enrique, is being blackmailed. When he fails to meet a photo magazine editor’s demands, he is slandered with photos of an erotic encounter on the front pages of the magazine. These two threads will converge at a point of explosion as is wont with Llosa’s novels. While this may not be his best work, it will keep readers reading all the way. (Chigozie)

My Dead Parents by Anya Yurchyshyn: Sometimes truth is more fascinating than fiction. Such is the case with Yurchyshyn’s My Dead Parents, which started as an anonymous Tumblr blog where the author posted photos and slivers of her parents’ correspondences in an attempt to piece together the mystery of their lives. Yurchyshyn’s father was a banker who died in Ukraine in a car “accident” that was possibly a hit when she was 16, and years later, though not many, her mother succumbed to alcoholism. Her parents made an enviously handsome couple, but they lived out Leo Tolstoy’s adage of each family being unhappy in its own way. Yurchyshyn’s tale is one of curiosity and discovery; it’s also an inquiry into grief and numbness. Her Buzzfeed essay, “How I Met My Dead Parents,” provides an apt introduction. (Anne)

The Last Watchman of Old Cairo by Michael David Lukas: Year in Reading alum and author of The Oracle of Stamboul explores the history of Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue (site of the famous Cairo Geniza document trove discovered in the nineteenth century) through the story of its generations of Muslim watchmen as gleaned by their modern-day, Berkeley-dwelling scion. Rabih Alameddine calls it “a beautiful, richly textured novel, ambitious and delicately crafted…a joy.” (Lydia)

Bury What We Cannot Take by Kirstin Chen: This is an atmospheric novel of betrayal and ardent allegiance to ideology and political choices. When young Ah Liam decides it’s virtuous to report the resistance of his grandmother to Maoist rule to the authorities, he unravels his family with his own hands. His decision leads to the family having to flee the country and for them to have to make a decision: leave a fraction of the family behind or face greater harm. With its striking title about the sacrifice (the “burying”) of those who are left behind, the novel succeeds in drawing a very striking portrait of this turbulent period of Chinese history. (Chigozie)

Memento Park by Mark Sarvas: Many of us who have been with The Millions for some years surely remember Sarvas’s pioneer lit blog, The Elegant Variation—and look forward to his second novel, Memento Park, 10 years after his critically acclaimed Harry, Revised. Memento Park is about art, history, Jewishness, fathers and sons: Joseph O’Neill writes pithily, “A thrilling, ceaselessly intelligent investigation into the crime known as history.” So far, Kirkus praises Sarvas for “skillful prose and well-drawn characters.” (Sonya)

Wrestling with the Devil by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Famously, Kenyan author Ngugi wrote his Gikuyu novel Devil on the Cross while serving out a prison sentence. (And he did it on toilet paper, no less.) Now, the writer whom Chimamanda Adichie calls “one of the greatest of our time” is releasing a memoir of his prison stay, begun a half-hour before he was finally released. Taking the form of an extended flashback, the memoir begins at the moment of the author’s arrest and ends, a year later, when he left prison with a novel draft. (Thom)

Stray City by Chelsey Johnson: Twenty-something artist Andrea ran away from the Midwest to Portland to escape the expectation to be a mother and create a life for herself as a queer artist. Then, confused and hurt by a break-up, she hooked up with a man—and ended up having his child. Chelsey Johnson’s debut novel, which comes after a successful run of short stories like the Ploughshares Solo “Escape and Reverse,” is a humorous and heartfelt exploration of sexual identity and unconventional families. (Ismail)

Ernest Hemingway, reviewed in The New Yorker in 1927

By Dorothy Parker, in The New Yorker

Ernest Hemingway wrote a novel called “The Sun Also Rises.” Promptly upon its publication, Ernest Hemingway was discovered, the Stars and Stripes were reverentially raised over him, eight hundred and forty-seven book reviewers formed themselves into the word “welcome,” and the band played “Hail to the Chief” in three concurrent keys. All of which, I should think, might have made Ernest Hemingway pretty reasonably sick.

For, a year or so before “The Sun Also Rises,” he had published “In Our Time,” a collection of short pieces. The book caused about as much stir in literary circles as an incompleted dogfight on upper Riverside Drive. True, there were a few that went about quick and stirred with admiration for this clean, exciting prose, but most of the reviewers dismissed the volume with a tolerant smile and the word “stark.” It was Mr. Mencken who slapped it down with “sketches in the bold, bad manner of the Café du Dome,” and the smaller boys, in their manner, took similar pokes at it. Well, you see, Ernest Hemingway was a young American living on the left bank of the Seine in Paris, France; he had been seen at the Dome and the Rotonde and the Select and the Closerie des Lilas. He knew Pound, Joyce and Gertrude Stein. There is something a little—well, a little you-know—in all of those things. You wouldn’t catch Bruce Barton or Mary Roberts Rinehart doing them. No, sir.

And besides, “In Our Time” was a book of short stories. That’s no way to start off. People don’t like that; they feel cheated. Any bookseller will be glad to tell you, in his interesting argot, that “short stories don’t go.” People take up a book of short stories and say, “Oh, what’s this? Just a lot of those short things?” and put it right down again. Only yesterday afternoon, at four o’clock sharp, I saw and heard a woman do that to Ernest Hemingway’s new book, “Men Without Women.” She had been one of those most excited about his novel.

Literature, it appears, is here measured by a yard-stick. As soon as “The Sun Also Rises” came out, Ernest Hemingway was the white-haired boy. He was praised, adored, analyzed, best-sold, argued about, and banned in Boston; all the trimmings were accorded him. People got into feuds about whether or not his story was worth the telling. (You see this silver scar left by a bullet, right up here under my hair? I got that the night I said that any well-told story was worth the telling. An eighth of an inch nearer the temple, and I wouldn’t be sitting here doing this sort of tripe.) They affirmed, and passionately, that the dissolute expatriates in this novel of “a lost generation” were not worth bothering about; and then they devoted most of their time to discussing them. There was a time, and it went on for weeks, when you could go nowhere without hearing of “The Sun Also Rises.” Some thought it without excuse; and some, they of the cool, tall foreheads, called it the greatest American novel, tossing “Huckleberry Finn” and “The Scarlet Letter” lightly out the window. They hated it or they revered it. I may say, with due respect to Mr. Hemingway, that I was never so sick of a book in my life.

Now “The Sun Also Rises” was as “starkly” written as Mr. Hemingway’s short stories; it dealt with subjects as “unpleasant.” Why it should have been taken to the slightly damp bosom of the public while the (as it seems to me) superb “In Our Time” should have been disregarded will always be a puzzle to me. As I see it—I knew this conversation would get back to me sooner or later, preferably sooner—Mr. Hemingway’s style, this prose stripped to its firm young bones, is far more effective, far more moving, in the short story than in the novel. He is, to me, the greatest living writer of short stories; he is, also to me, not the greatest living novelist.

After all the high screaming about “The Sun Also Rises,” I feared for Mr. Hemingway’s next book. You know how it is—as soon as they all start acclaiming a writer, that writer is just about to slip downward. The littler critics circle like literary buzzards above only the sick lions.

So it is a warm gratification to find the new Hemingway book, “Men Without Women,” a truly magnificent work. It is composed of thirteen short stories, most of which have been published before. They are sad and terrible stories; the author’s enormous appetite for life seems to have been somehow appeased. You find here little of that peaceful ecstasy that marked the camping trip in “The Sun Also Rises” and the lone fisherman’s days in “Big Two-Hearted River,” in “In Our Time.” The stories include “The Killers,” which seems to me one of the four great American short stories. (All you have to do is drop the nearest hat, and I’ll tell you what I think the others are. They are Wilbur Daniel Steele’s “Blue Murder,” Sherwood Anderson’s “I’m a Fool,” and Ring Lardner’s “Some Like Them Cold,” that story which seems to me as shrewd a picture of every woman at some time as is Chekhov’s “The Darling.” Now what do you like best?) The book also includes “Fifty Grand,” “In Another Country,” and the delicate and tragic “Hills Like White Elephants.” I do not know where a greater collection of stories can be found.

Ford Madox Ford has said of this author, “Hemingway writes like an angel.” I take issue (there is nothing better for that morning headache than taking a little issue). Hemingway writes like a human being. I think it is impossible for him to write of any event at which he has not been present; his is, then, a reportorial talent, just as Sinclair Lewis’s is. But, or so I think, Lewis remains a reporter and Hemingway stands a genius because Hemingway has an unerring sense of selection. He discards details with a magnificent lavishness; he keeps his words to their short path. His is, as any reader knows, a dangerous influence. The simple thing he does looks so easy to do. But look at the boys who try to do it.