Mark Sarvas's Blog, page 21
March 9, 2010
FATHERS AND SONS
The poet and translator George Szirtes - whose wonderful blog is one of a handful I still bother to read daily - has begun to post selections from his father's memoirs. "Do I edit?" he asks ...
Of course I edit. It's the least I can do for him. The language is simple and though these conversations were recorded in fairly artless fashion shortly after the death of my mother, he normally wanted to tell a good story; to discover an ever-better, ever-improving anecdote. If he could have turned...
March 8, 2010
MONDAY MARGINALIA
* First and foremost - go and see Laila Lalami this evening at Book Soup, where she'll read from the paperback release of Secret Son. (She's interviewed here at African Writing Online.)
* Second and ... secondmost? ... congratulations to Lorin Stein, new editor of The Paris Review. (Stein is doubly represented in my sidebar as translator of The Mystery Guest and editor of Home Land.)
* The National looks at recent non-fiction efforts from Eggers, Chabon and Foer.
* A report of Margaret...
March 6, 2010
EDGE PEOPLE
I continue to feel tremendous sorrow at the heartbreaking deterioration of Tony Judt's health. (He wrote about his ALS in the NYRB at the beginning of the year.) I've been an admirer for a long time, particularly of his magisterial Postwar, which I've recommended to all who will listen.
Judt continues to post his moving series of brief memoirs, and I find them moving without exception. We are of different generations and upbringings but, as the son of assimilated Jewish immigrants who kept ...
March 4, 2010
TEV GIVEAWAY: THE NORTHERN CLEMENCY
Last year, I added my own praise to Philip Hensher's lavishly well received novel, The Northern Clemency. Here's what I had to say in the Barnes and Noble Review:What is especially interesting about The Northern Clemency is that, despite the political change that transforms their lives, the characters themselves rarely engage directly with politics. Only the Glovers' son Tim, who embraces Marxism (and is one of Hensher's few tedious creations, endlessly deploying the epithet "Fascist!"...
March 2, 2010
DEPT. OF YIKES
Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel is making waves with her recent comment that girls are ready to be mothers at the age of 14.
The author was unable to have kids but said she could have coped with them at 14. She said: "Having sex and babies is what young women are about.
No doubt Mantel was an extraordinary 14 year old but this forty-something parent has his doubts ...
SAM LIPSYTE ANSWERS
Do you feel that literary fiction is afraid to make people laugh these days?
I think there's a worry that if it's funny then perhaps there's something slight about it. That it's not as important as a deeply researched, earnest, historical novel, or a kind of humorless tale of contemporary life. I think there...
February 25, 2010
JOHN BANVILLE AT THE MILLIONS
A fresh collection of literary news is planned for...
February 22, 2010
IS THERE ANYONE OUT THERE ...
... who really believes Martin Amis doesn't totally get off on this nonsense?
Rarely one to turn the other cheek, the novelist Martin Amis – who was the subject of an open letter from Anna Ford in Saturday's Guardian accusing him of narcissism, neglect of his godfatherly duties and smoking over her late husband's deathbed – has counter attacked, calling the former newsreader's outburst "ungenerous and self-defeating".
One can only hope his publicity stff is cutting checks left, right and...
