Mark Sarvas's Blog, page 40
June 17, 2009
WEDNESDAY MARGINALIA
* The LA Weekly arrives a bit late in the game to the whole James Wood/How Fiction Works tussle but the frank Q&A is worth your while.
It seems very humble, helpful, and earnest in its endeavors. Though that didn’t stop Walter Kirn from painting you as the world’s greatest snob in The Times.
I was bemused by the Walter Kirn attack — that’s diplomatese for “I wanted him dead and bound in the trunk of a Lincoln Town Car.” It was the purest American anti-intellectualism: Fiction, he claimed, is abou
June 16, 2009
IRAN WRITERS ROUND UP
Litlinks are feeling just a bit trivial at the moment (which doesn't mean we won't return to our full trivial selves by tomorrow), so for now we direct you to this round up of Iranian writers offering their first thoughts on the unfolding drama.
HAPPY BLOOMSDAY
Updates are running behind this morning but we'll have some new posts up in a few hours. Until then, Happy Bloomsday to the lot of you. Here's Colum McCann on his family memories of Ulysses.
Soon my grandfather was emerging from the novel. The further I went in, the more complex he got. The man whom I had met only once was becoming flesh and blood through the pages of a fiction. After all, he had walked the very same streets of Dublin, on the same day as Leopold Bloom. I began to see my grandfa
June 12, 2009
REVIEW: IN THE KITCHEN
My review of Monica Ali's new novel, In The Kitchen, has gone live at the Barnes & Noble Review. It begins thus:
What hath Anthony Bourdain wrought? In the wake of all the imitators it spawned, it can be hard to remember just how bracing Kitchen Confidential was when it was published back in 2000. There had always been famous cooks -- Julia Child, Graham Kerr -- but Bourdain somehow managed to simultaneously deglamorize the kitchen and make it sexy and dangerous. From Top Chef to Hell's Kitchen t
June 11, 2009
MICHAEL THOMAS WINS IMPAC
Wow. Love to see stories like this one. Michael Thomas unseats some huge names to take home the IMPAC Dublin Prize.
A debut novelist who says he's never really had a proper job has won the world's richest literary award. American writer Michael Thomas beat authors including Philip Roth, Doris Lessing and Joyce Carol Oates to take the €100,000 (£85,000) Impac Dublin prize with his debut novel, Man Gone Down.
THE LONG READ
Two long pieces have our attention this week. We've only begun both, but they seem promising so we bring them to your attention here. First, there's Daniel Torday on "Fatalism in the stories of Edward P. Jones" ...
It’s a startling move in a straightforward realist narrative, not entirely unlike the moment in Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Frances Macomber,” when after about a dozen pages of mundane description of a rich man hunting, we’re suddenly thrust into the head of the lion that w
I GET AROUND
My essay on the foolishness of writers who carp about the Kindle can now be found at the Huffington Post ...
At a panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, I watched with bewilderment as a novelist I admire declared, without apparent irony, that "The Kindle is evil." It should have been easy to ignore so foolish a statement, but this author was scarcely alone in expressing antipathy for Amazon's popular electronic book. A table in the Green Room, with a slightly forbidding "Reserved for A
June 10, 2009
MONDAY MARGINALIA
This whole baby and blogging thing ... yikes ... not so easy ...
* From the Guardian Archive: Mr. Charles Dickens has died at 58.
Mr Charles Dickens died last night at ten minutes past six o'clock, at Gadshill, near Rochester. He was seized with illness about the same hour on Wednesday afternoon, as he was about to sit down to dinner with his sister-in-law, Miss Hogarth. She observed something unusual in his appearance and became alarmed. She told him that he looked ill, and proposed to telegrap
June 8, 2009
CHAPTER 11 FOR ARCADE
Sad news - and no, we're not referring to the use of "impact" as a verb in the subhead. Arcade, publishers of Andrei Makine in this country, has filed for bankruptcy.
The couple founded Arcade in 1988. Its list of authors includes the renowned Mexican poet Octavio Paz and the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, winner of the Man Booker Prize.
Mr. Seaver, who died in January at the age of 82, began his career at Grove Press, where he championed the work of Samuel Beckett and helped bring books by Henr
MENDELSOHN ON NPR
One of the items caught up in baby whirl but still coming soon is a planned chat with Daniel Mendelsohn on his new translation of the poems of C.P. Cavafy. Until we get our act together, though, you can check out this discussion on NPR of same.
