The Paris Review's Blog, page 775

J. D. Salinger on a Cruise, and Other News

J. D. Salinger worked as an entertainment director on a luxury liner. And other odd jobs of literary greats.
“Few readers know that Edgar had an older brother. Typically going by the name Henry, he was a poet, like his famous sibling, and a hard-drinking sailor.” At Page Turner, an investigation of early Poe.
Vogue UK has launched the Vogue On … Designers book series.
“Rather like a modern foreign correspondent, he had his area of expertise that he was keen to emphasize.” On the “shaggy-dog stories” of Herodotus. 

 

City Lights

 

This interactive Bay Area Literary Map, courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle, is fantastic, and because we are greedy, we want one for every city in the world.

 

Obituary of Edgar Allan Poe

From the Richmond Semi-Weekly Examiner, vol. II, no. 98, October 12, 1849:

EDGAR ALLAN POE died in Baltimore on Sunday last. His was one of the very few original minds that this country has produced. In the history of literature, he will hold a certain position and a high place. By the public of the day he is regarded rather with curiosity than with admiration. Many will be startled, but few will be grieved by the news. He had very few friends, and he was the friend of very few—if any. But his character and adventures were too remarkable, and his literary merits too indubitable, to pass from the stage with the simple announcement already given.

His family was a very respectable one in Baltimore. His grandfather was a Quartermaster General in the Revolution, and the esteemed friend of Lafayette. During the last visit of that personage to this country, he called upon the widow to tender her his acknowledgments for services rendered him by her husband. His great-grandfather married a daughter of the celebrated Admiral McBride. Through him they are related to many of the most illustrious families in England. Edgar Poe’s father was reputably brought up and educated. — Becoming enamored with a beautiful young actress, he made up a runaway match with her, and was disowned by his friends thereafter. He or his wife possessed mimetic genius, and they lived precariously. They came to Richmond in pursuit of their profession. She was somewhat of a favorite on our boards—but more on account of her beauty than her acting. They both died in Richmond—both of consumption, and within a few weeks of each other, and left here without a house or home their gifted but most miserable and unfortunate son. Mr. John Allan, a wealthy and kind hearted merchant of this place, having no children of his own, taking a natural fancy to the handsome, clever child, adopted him as son and heir. He was consequently brought up amidst luxury, and received the advantages of education to their fullest extent. In 1816 he accompanied his adopted parents in a tour through England, Scotland and Ireland. — They returned to this country, leaving him at Dr. Brandsby’s High School, Stoke Newington, near London, where he continued five years. He returned in 1822, and continued about Richmond for two or three years. He was then remarkable for his general cleverness, his feats of activity, his wayward temper, extreme personal beauty, his musical recitations of verse, and power of extemporaneous tale-telling. In 1825 he went to the University of Virginia. The University was then a most dissolute place, and Mr. Edgar A. Poe was remarked as the most dissolute and dissipated youth in the University. He was already a great classical scholar, and he made huge strides in mathematics, botany, and other branches of natural science. But at the same time he drank, gambled, and indulged in other vices until he was expelled from the place. On Mr. Allan’s refusal to pay some of his gambling debts, he broke with him and went off at a tangent to join the Greeks—those being the times of Bozzaris and the Greek Revolution. When he reached St. Petersburg, however, he found both money and enthusiasm exhausted, and he got into a quarrel with the Russian authorities—whether about liberty or lucre is not known. At any rate he found himself nearly adding some knowledge of the knout and Siberia to his already extensive knowledge of men and manners, and was glad enough to accept the intervention of the American consul, Henry Middleton, and his aid to get home. In 1829 he entered the Military Academy of West Point. In the meantime, Mr. Allan had lost his first wife, and married a lady his junior by a very great number of years—he being sixty-five. Mr. Poe is said to have behaved uncivilly to the lady and to have ridiculed the match. The old gentleman wrote him an angry letter, and Mr. Poe answered it with a very bitter one. The breach was never healed. Mr. Allan died a short time afterwards, and left Poe nothing. Read More »

Recapping Dante: Pilot Episode, or Canto I

This fall, we’re recapping the Inferno. Read along!

Really, this is how you want to begin? With a trope? And do you really think that we’ll let you get away with it because you decided to double down, fold it over on itself, and begin not only in medias res but in the middle of your life, too? We see what you’ve done there. Very fancy; but couldn’t you have at least started at the end, like Sunset Boulevard?

“Midway in the journey of our life”—the cascade of allusions, and all in a single line, creating some sort of referential trifecta, or fourfecta, or whatever the highest number of fectas is. Is it meant to alert a reader that this probably isn’t an airport book—to chase away the ill-suited, like the opening sequence of 8½?

So far this character has no name, but for the sake of it, let’s call him Dante I. He finds himself in a dark wood, and that he isn’t quite able to remember how he got there feels a bit like an easy, preemptive fix to a plothole. Nevertheless, he goes on his “firm foot always lower than the other” (watch out for phrases like these; it’s safe to assume that whenever any piece of satellite or even self-explanatory information is given, it is probably a giant X telling the savvy reader to dig in that spot).

Suddenly our character is accosted by a leopard, or lonza (a lion-leopard superbeast), and obviously he’s a bit disoriented and doesn’t want to deal with it, so he walks away. But then, a lion appears, and then a she-wolf, and it’s by now such a strange mix of creatures (do they even have leopards in Italy?) that we are left to assume either Dante blacked out and came to in a zoo, is witnessing an ecological disaster miracle, or that these three beasts have some sort of metaphorical significance as well. There’s a chance the beasts each represent a sin, but that feels like a bit of a stretch, so let’s just say that the leopard is Florence; the lion, France; and the she-wolf, the papacy. (Dante, though a Florentine, was in the middle of a battle between two warring houses, and so even at home there were enemy forces out to get him.)

Dante takes off. As he flees, he comes across a figure, and Dante speaks to it. Have mercy, he says, but the English subtitles obscure the fact that Dante is in fact saying this as Miserere, in Latin, and this is when things start to get out of hand. Read More »

Stevie Nicks Writes GoT Fan Poetry, and Other News

“I would love to write some music for Game of Thrones … I’ve written a bunch of poetry about it—one for each other characters. On Jon Snow … On Arya … On Cersei and Jaime.” Stevie Nicks in Westeros. 
“I never really expected that this would go on this long and become such a focus, but I’m happy it has.” Walter Skold, the founder of the Dead Poets Society of America, has visited the graves of three hundred, well, dead poets.
Happy birthday, Book Riot.
“In my mid-adolescence, my friend Terry Martin and I became obsessed with William F. Buckley. This makes more sense when you realize that we were living in Bible Belt farming country miles from civilization. Buckley seemed impossibly exotic. We used to go into Toronto and prowl the used-book stores on Queen Street looking for rare first editions of The Unmaking of a Mayor and God and Man at Yale. To this day I know all the great Buckley lines.” Malcolm Gladwell, by the book. 

 

Taiye Selasi, Rome, Italy

A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows.

This summer I wrote my first ever article in Italian, considering why the Eternal City lures so many expat authors. In my limited Italian, I proposed three reasons—the beauty, the warmth, the un-ambitiousness—all of which come to mind when gazing at this view. When the sun begins to slip behind the gilded greens of the Janiculum, I’ll stare at the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, breathless every time. The sheer beauty of this ancient city—the scale of its churches, the density of its trees, the pastels of its facades, the voluptuousness of its clouds—is on full display from here.

My watch is the clock atop the Basilica of Our Lady in Trastevere, adding its chimes to the cheerful din of chatter, car horns, laughter. There’s never a dull moment in the Piazza of Santa Maria in Trastevere; one can sense as much as hear the joy of social gathering. But it is Rome’s imperfection that I find so beguiling, an invitation to play: seagulls squawking, nonne bickering, paint chipping from the walls. —Taiye Selasi

 

Robyn Creswell Wins Shattuck Award

We are delighted to report that our poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, has won the 2013 Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism. In addition to his work here at the Review, Robyn teaches comparative literature at Brown University. His critical work focuses on modernism and modernity in Arabic poetry. The other recipient is the accomplished critic Abigail Deutsch, whose work has graced these pages. Hearty congratulations to both!

&nbsp

What We’re Loving: Mysteries, Horror, Geography

The late Joachim Fest was famous as an historian of the Nazi era. Among other books, he wrote the first German-language biography of Hilter and a biography of Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer. Fest’s own account of the Nazi years, Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood, will be published in English next February by Other Press, and it tells a very different story: that of a strictly conservative, highly cultured family united in their opposition to the Nazi regime, then shattered by the war. The hero of Not I is Fest’s father, an educator who lost his job and brought the family under suspicion when he refused to join the Party, but Fest’s portraits of his brothers, his mother, and his cousins—and of himself as a teenage soldier and POW—are equally vivid and full of pathos. —Lorin Stein

In his Art of Fiction interview, Russell Banks said, “With a novel it’s like entering a huge mansion—it doesn’t matter where you come in, as long as you get in.” I thought a lot about that statement as I read Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child, a mystery of a book presented as a novel, but one you could just as easily call a story collection. What begins as a standard detective novel—a man is shot from a vintage car—soon transforms into a puzzle of fractured characters and narrative: a couple not good with words writes intimately to each other in a notebook, a man disappears for a month only to reappear with a manuscript on wolves. How should a novel function as a form? How much work should be expected of the reader to put all the pieces together? (I suggest multiple readings.) In the story “Rothko Eggs,” a young woman describes Jackson Pollock’s paintings as “like the idea of having an idea, instead of having an idea.” She could just as easily be describing this book. —Justin Alvarez Read More »

Frost Papers Recovered, and Other News

New York’s Center for Jewish History is opening the David Berg Rare Book Room, which will feature, amongst others, Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, and Emma Lazarus.
A Vermont man has pleaded guilty to stealing (and selling) a number of Robert Frost’s personal papers, which he ran across when a desk containing the papers was donated to the nonprofit where he works. The fine is a whopping one hundred dollars.
The French government approved a law yesterday that will prevent Amazon from shipping discounted books for free. The measure is designed to protect embattled independent bookstores.
How to draw a hare.

 

Ghostwriting Tom Clancy

“I had to be more disciplined than ever about my work schedule; after the first book was turned in, I would have approximately ten months to plot, research, and write each novel. The deadline left no wiggle room—my publisher had pre-sold the books to retailers as holiday releases. Nor was there room for error when it came to the factual details of technology, ballistics, and geography. When I wrote Bio-Strike, for instance, I consulted with polymer engineers and geneticists to design a newfangled biological weapon that that would be scientifically feasible. And then there was the more routine stuff of which action thrillers are made. How does a human body react when hit with a bullet of a particular caliber, at a given distance, striking at a particular angle? I had to find out—call a cop, a forensic pathologist, or a trauma room doctor. Winging it wasn’t an option.”

Read more from Jerome Preisler, who cowrote eight novels with Tom Clancy, here.