Katharine Beutner's Blog, page 13

Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him to…

Via Elizabeth Chadwick on Twitter, I found this lovely set of photos of an experiment in Greek hairstyles done by students at Fairfield University. A small group of women with hair of the appropriate length and thickness were given braids like those on the Erechtheion marble caryatids who support the South Porch of the Acropolis. The shot-by-shot demonstration of the braiding is pretty remarkable.

Alcestis lived earlier than the era of the Acropolis, but I always imagined her wearing fairly...

Alcestis at Ilium

I just heard from Soho that they've sold the Turkish rights for Alcestis to Epsilon Publishing! This is my first foreign rights sale and I'm thrilled. My editor Katie Herman tells me that Epsilon publishes Ha Jin, Barbara Kingsolver, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Charles Frazier, among others.

I have to get back to dissertation-writing now — though it's difficult to do when fun news of this sort keeps arriving in my inbox — but before I go, have one more interesting link to liven up your Friday...

Jack Gilbert

These two posts about Jack Gilbert are worth reading.

I took a poetry workshop with Jack during his year as writer in residence at Smith (1999-2000). It was my first year there, and I was still writing poetry (I don't any more). I remember Jack as a quiet, slightly mischievous presence, already a bit frail but still sharp. He would casually mention poets he'd known, in a sort of "one time I was at a party and Allen Ginsberg said X to me" way — not name-dropping, just friends he'd had, people w...

Moving, minus books

As I mentioned last week, we're in the process of moving — much of our stuff is over at the new place, but my books are not, yet. I feel very odd without them. Now that it's been a while since we moved out of our little north campus cottage, I sometimes have fantasies of abandoning the stuff we've acquired and living in a tiny house. Then I realize that we'd need to have a second tiny house just for our books. And possibly also for the purpose of banishing the cats on occasion. This move...

Epigraphs & quilting truckers

This article on epigraphs amused me. Alcestis has always had an epigraph:

I have always known

That at last I would

Take this road, but yesterday

I did not know that it would be today.

–Narihira, translated by Kenneth Rexroth (copyright New Directions, who kindly gave me permission to print it in the book)

I'd expected to be told to ditch the epigraph when the book was being laid out and was so happy that it made it through to publication. That epigraph really is an integral part of the book...

Recs for teaching short fiction?

I'm taking a tiny break from my dissertation to prepare a syllabus for my fiction workshop in the fall. Because I am lucky as hell, I get to teach an intermediate fiction workshop! Two, in fact — I'll be teaching in the spring and fall. I've been a teaching assistant for an intro fiction workshop before, but am really looking forward to having my own class. I'm planning to use the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and supplement it with a few other stories. (I can't leave out "The Fall River ...

Buy 'Alcestis,' get a free book!

My fabulous agent Diana Fox is running two giveaways, including an Alcestis-related giveaway! If you purchase Alcestis between now and April 15 and email her a copy of your receipt, she'll send you your choice of one book  (possibly signed!) by any Fox Literary author, or a $20 Amazon gift certificate. See the link above for more details — she's also giving away copies of Seanan McGuire's Rosemary and Rue and A Local Habitation.

Have I mentioned lately that I heart my agent?

Cara Black reading in Ashland, tonight!

Also, forgot to mention — before P&P tonight, I'm going to hear fellow Soho Press author Cara Black read at the Bookwagon in Ashland! Her new Aimée Leduc mystery Murder in the Palais Royal is just out. I'll be running from the reading to the play but am hoping to be able to stick around for her whole event — I'm sure it'll be great.

Interview, post-apocalyptic Austen, and why it's not Kit Marlowe

Margaret Donsbach from HistoricalNovels.Info interviewed me about Alcestis, which she calls "full of poetic passages." (There's a short review of the book at HistoricalNovels.Info, too, and Margaret will soon be reviewing it for the Heritage Key site.)

Tonight I'm going to see an adaptation of Pride & Prejudice at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, one of the best things about visiting Ashland. I'm hoping that it'll be better than the adaptation I saw at UT this fall, which I have to admit was p...

More lazy spring-break link posting

Con or Bust raised over $5000 to help fans of color attend Wiscon! And the copy of Alcestis I donated has already arrived with its new owner.

Sarah Johnson wrote an insightful post about "reviewerese" and the notion of authenticity in historical fiction. A sample:

When you see a novel described as impeccably researched, meticulously researched, or historically accurate (and you'll find this in publicity material, too), what the reviewer may really mean is: "the author includes a lot of...