Suzanne Frischkorn's Blog, page 24

Sofia Tolstoy (Post # 1400)

Tolstoy was 34 when he married 18-year-old Sofia Behrs in 1862. A famous writer by then, and master of his family's 4,000-acre estate at Yasnaya Polyana near Moscow and the 3,000 peasants living on it, he had sown his wild oats and was ready to settle down. It was in this year that Sofia started writing her diaries, republished in my new translation, "The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy," to mark the

The Top Ten Ludicrous Reasons To Ban A Book

So in the spirit of Banned Books Week's push to make people aware of the often insane reasons people try (and succeed) to ban books I offer you this sample list from theAmerican Library Association's website of books that have been banned and the stated reasons (from various schools and libraries) for banning them....

Anti- Featured Poet #51

Kimberly Grey*

Poetic Justice

Imagine Stephen Dedalus in a fiction workshop surrounded by 20-something neophytes. Better yet, picture Huck Finn, having lit out for the territory, handing sections of his new memoir to Tom and Aunt Sally. Though this may seem amusing, today thousands of hopeful authors distribute their self-portraits to other hopeful authors who sit around seminar tables in one of the hundreds of writing

Sylvia Plath Verse Play, "Three Women"

ROBERT SHAW, the British producer and director, has rather unusual taste in vacation reading. While most of us fill our overnight bags with Stieg Larsson novels, fashionable memoirs or local guide books, Mr. Shaw found himself some years ago lazing about in his Dubrovnik hotel reading the poetry of Sylvia Plath. A Web site he'd chanced on mentioned that Plath had written a radio play in verse, "

Modesty?

Here is a short essay by Justin Taylor that is about being confused by "a general trend in contemporary indy- and small-press lit-land that insists on modesty to the point of self-abasement, encourages people to get awestruck at the drop of a hat, and rewards the expression of self-doubt rather than self-confidence." _____I've had some bits of happy news recently -- Cornshake will be teaching my

Harvestest

Get ready for a night show. It's tough to come to grips with the end of summer. Luckily, autumn will enter with a bang this year.Not only will Northern America witness the beginning of autumn at 11:09 Eastern tonight, there will be a full moon in the sky. Put those two occurrences together and you'll get the rare "super harvest moon.""The two sources of light will mix together to create a kind of

Words

Max's Kansas City

11. Max's was for the artists of the 60s and 70s what Cedar Tavern was to testosterone-driven Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline; to "cooked" poets John Ashbery, as opposed to the "raw" of Allen Ginsberg's coterie; and to the feuding critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. As Watson puts it, the evolution of New York artist hangouts of the

The writing process is not for the faint of heart

"Unfortunately nobody's waiting for you," he says. "No one's expecting you to be here — you in particular. It takes a certain kind of bull-headed, determined person who probably has other ways of being conventionally successful to stay the course quietly without external recognition."Talk to any publisher or literary agent, however, and you'll hear they're inundated with manuscripts. Evidently