Lev Raphael's Blog, page 48

Valentine's Day, Secret Love, and Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton is not a writer you tend to think of on Valentine's day. Her marriage was unhappy and the affair she had in her forties was with a faithless cad (it was a secret until the 1970s).



No wonder that love in her novels is so often curdled, thwarted, or hopeless. Think of Ethan Frome, The Reef, The Custom of the Country, The Mother's Recompense, The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence.



But there's so much to love and admire in her work: the wit, the dissection of social fossilization,...

Why Did Scandal Dumb Down Olivia Pope?

SPOILER ALERT: Don't read this post if you haven't watched last night's episode of Scandal.



We've seen lots of people get kidnapped over the years on Scandal, and the wheel of fortune has finally turned badly for Olivia.



But let's be clear about what happened. She was terrified, drugged, and hit. But she wasn't beaten, starved, tortured, sexually abused or raped. She wasn't subjected to solitary confinement for an extended period, which is also internationally agreed to be a form of torture. T...

Mark Twain's Ghost Won't Rest

Mark Twain gave us some great books like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (and some forgettable ones like The American Claimant). He'll always be taught as an American classic, and he'll always be popular during Banned Books Week as well, thanks to Huckleberry Finn, which was controversial even in his lifetime.



But he lives on in ways he couldn't have imagined.



Currently, he haunts the Internet. He's constantly being quoted as saying encouraging, inspiring remarks your mother or your best friend mi...

Mark Twain's Latest Inspirational Quote

Mark Twain gave us some great books like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (and some forgettable ones like The American Claimant). He'll always be taught as an American classic, and he'll always be popular during Banned Books Week as well, thanks to Huckleberry Finn, which was controversial even in his lifetime.



But he lives on in ways he couldn't have imagined.



Currently, he haunts the Internet. He's constantly being quoted as saying encouraging, inspiring remarks your mother or your best friend mi...

When You're an Author, What's Your Time Worth as a Speaker?

Years ago, a much more experienced writer gave me one of the best writing tips I ever got in my career. But it's not what you might expect: she helped me start thinking about what my time was worth when I was invited to speak somewhere.



It's not just the day of the event, she said, if it's only a day. You have to add getting ready the day before, and then at least one day of re-entry into your regular schedule, sometimes more, depending on how complicated your visit was. And then the time you...

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Downton Abbey, Edith Wharton, and the Jews

Overwhelmed by the cascading changes at Downton Abbey, Maggie Smith's snarky Dowager Countess complained way back in Season One, "Sometimes I feel as if I were living in an H.G. Wells novel." Wells, of course, wrote The War of the Worlds and other science fiction and fantasy novels.



Watching Downton Abbey, I've often found find myself feeling that I'm living in an Edith Wharton novel. More than one, in fact. Wharton's novel The Buccaneers, which was unfinished at her death, was all about young...

Auschwitz Comes Home

I grew up the son of Holocaust survivors, and Germany always seemed to me the apotheosis of evil. I feared and loathed it as a child, adolescent and young adult. But I was forced to face that fear when several books of mine were translated into German and I went on the first of several German book tours, came to terms with today's Germany and even made German friends.



The transformation prompted me to write My Germany , a combination of mystery, travelogue, and memoir. Weaving together my story...

Did Hemingway Really Say "Write Your Pants Off!"?

You'll often read or hear the advice that writing is basically getting to it, sitting down and doing it, or more elegantly that "The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair."



Someone on Twitter asked me if I thought Hemingway had said a version of it: "apply seat of pants to chair." Well, that sounds as if it could be Hemingway. It's terse and matter-of-fact enough. But I wondered.









As usual, the Internet isn't much help. And even though it shows up,...

Giving Edith Wharton's Jew a Makeover

Edith Wharton didn't think F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was a perfect book, and she told him so. But his anti-Semitic portrait of Meyer Wolfsheim, now that was perfect, even "masterly."



What did Wharton know from Jews? Well, over a decade before, she'd created her own "perfect" Jew Simon Rosedale in her bestseller The House of Mirth. Rosedale is pure stereotype: rich, unctuous, vulgar, shifty-eyed, and beneath contempt--even though people hope he'll give them stock market tips so the...