Category: Sherwood Anderson
Links: Generosity
December 10, 2010 December 10, 2010 by Mark Athitakis, posted in Adam Ross, Andrew Ervin, Blake Butler, Ernest Hemingway, Gary Shteyngart, Herman Melville, J.D. Salinger, Jonathan Franzen, Kurt Vonnegut, Kyle Minor, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, William Styron
Gary Shteyngart: "Nobody wants to read a book but everybody wants to write one. Reading requires an act of empathy, really. What you're doing when you're reading a book is saying, I'm going to turn off who I am for a little bit, and I'm going to enter the personality of another human being. Reading is a very generous act, but it's a very helpful act if you really want to understand what another person is like."
On making a film version of Winesburg, Ohio with a contemporary setting and all-black cast.
D.G. Myers deems Kurt Vonnegut unfit for the Library of America, largely because of his "sentimental moralism." I read and enjoyed most of Vonnegut's books in high school but haven't revisited them—maybe sentimental moralism means more when you're a kid. Same probably goes for J.D. Salinger. But it's still hard to for me to dismiss Vonnegut as easily as Myers does, because Vonnegut had such a strong influence on other writers—Rick Moody and Jonathan Safran Foer most prominently. Neither makes my short list of great living American writers, but that's just me—the point is that Vonnegut still insinuates himself into fiction in ways that, say, Salinger, never does now. Which is at least one justification for including Vonnegut among the country's "most significant writing."
Speaking of: In 2006 Vonnegut went on Second Life to do an interview, which was recently unearthed at Mobylives.
Also speaking of: An online repository of academic research on J.D. Salinger.
And, speaking of some more: The Library of America's own blog on how Willa Cather has been dismissed as too readable and/or too reactionary.
"The death of God therefore, in Melville's inspiring picture, leads not to a culture overtaken by meaninglessness but to a culture directed by a rich sense for many new possible and incommensurate meanings."
Levi Asher gathers up some news items as proof of Beat culture's continuing endurance, including a new John Clellon Holmes biography and a film version of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Kyle Minor's suggested reading list for a spring fiction workshop would fill a couple of bookshelves and crush the soul of a young MFA student. But it's an interesting (mostly) anti-canonical longlist of (mostly) contemporary literature. (On a related note, HTMLGiant's Blake Butler recently answered a few questions of mine about the site for the National Book Critics Circle "Conversations With Literary Websites" series.)
Jonathan Franzen aces a quiz on birds.
Ernest Hemingway's life as told through his guns.
Andrew Ervin (whose debut novel, Extraordinary Renditions, I reviewed for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune) talks about working on the book, and why he's careful about what he reads when he's writing.
Binky Urban and Karl Marlantes get big prizes; Mr. Peanut author Adam Ross gets a smaller one, but at least has a good strategy for spending it.
"Sophie's Choice": a useful shorthand for "heartbreaking decision," which is to say it doesn't apply to figuring out what to cook over the holidays. (via)
Links: Move it to the Exits
August 6, 2010 by Mark Athitakis, posted in Alice Walker, Alyson Hagy, Ben Fountain, Darin Strauss, David Foster Wallace, Gary Shteyngart, Henry James, Herman Melville, Jennifer Egan, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oscar Hijuelos, Ron Currie Jr., Sherwood Anderson
Now it can be told: The inspiration for the "Great Rock and Roll Pauses" chapter in Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad (i.e., the PowerPoint chapter) was Semisonic's "Closing Time."
Speaking of: Trying to write a novel and raise a kid simultaneously? Jennifer Egan and Darin Strauss are here to help. (Well, in Manhattan to help. For one evening, on September 14.)
Alyson Hagy considers the appealing strangeness of Sherwood Anderson's "Paper Pills." (Winesburg, Ohio was a series of "grotesques," after all.)
Alice Walker keeps (or at least once kept) a pile of leaves by her writing desk: "She rustles them when she does her writing, because it makes her feel closer to nature as she works."
When Hawthorne met Melville.
Oscar Hijuelos on inserting himself as a character in his most recent novel, Beautiful Maria of My Soul.
Ron Currie Jr. on reading Infinite Jest: "By the time I'd finished, my copy was a mess of grass clippings, sweat drips, and smears of axle grease and 50:1 gas/oil mix."
The quintessential Jamesian sentence.
"I think that Shteyngart is part of a whole sweeping movement of young Jewish writers who are bringing a new multicultural picture to American Jewish fiction."
Ben Fountain remembers the Dallas poet Robert Trammell.
Detailed writing advice from Maxwell Perkins (to be portrayed by Sean Penn on film at some future date) to Ernest Hemingway: "I'm glad you're going to write some stories. All you have to do is to follow your own judgement, or instinct + disregard what is said, + convey the absolute bottom quality of each person, situation + thing. Isn't that simple!!"
Links: That'll Do
June 25, 2010 June 25, 2010 by Mark Athitakis, posted in Aimee Bender, Annie Proulx, Dan Chaon, Henry Roth, James Hynes, John Updike, Jonathan Lethem, Nicholson Baker, Philip Roth, Ray Bradbury, Sherwood Anderson, Shirley Jackson, Susan Straight, Wendell Berry
Dan Chaon: "We both know that the cliché of the Midwest is that we are all corn-fed, really nice people, but you read any police blotter in any small town, and you know that's not true (laughs). My mother was someone who was the first big storyteller in my life, and her fascination was always with morbid or crazy things that happened to people she was related to or people she knew about — you know, somebody having a heart attack and falling into a pig pen and being eaten alive by the pigs."
Various Jonathan Lethem-related film projects are floating around; most recently, David Cronenberg may direct Lethem's 1997 novel, As She Climbed Across the Table.
Considering James Hynes' stellar new novel, Next, as a retort to Reality Hunger.
The best underappreciated Chicago novel.
How motherhood fed Shirley Jackson's fiction.
Do critics need to be tougher? (And does my phrasing the link in the form of a question reflect the urge to be compassionate and nonconfrontational that Jeffrey R. Di Leo derides?)
How John Updike revised. The multimedia glimpse into multiple drafts of the opening of Rabbit at Rest is particularly interesting. (Last year I took a look at how Updike tweaked some of the stories that appeared his final collection, My Father's Tears.)
A letter Nicholson Baker wrote to Updike in 1985, under the "oddly peaceful emotional umbrella" of one of his stories.
Henry Roth biographer Steven Kellman responds in Bookforum (reg req'd) to Joshua Cohen's criticism of An American Type in Harper's.
The Italian "journalist" who invented a host of interviews with Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Gore Vidal, and many others has confessed.
Wendell Berry has pulled his papers from the University of Kentucky to protest the school's affiliation with the coal industry.
Aimee Bender's influences, from Raymond Carver to L. Frank Baum to The Piano.
Blogging Ray Bradbury.
Susan Straight on her surprise at how eagerly her students took to Winesburg, Ohio. (Straight also puts in a good word for Alex Espinoza's fine 2007 novel, Still Water Saints.) (via)
Thanks to "bungling bureaucrats in Washington, DC," Annie Proulx couldn't give a reading in Moscow.
If you're in Germany after Thanksgiving, there's a sizable conference on the work of Richard Powers going on. (via)
"[Philip] Roth assumed the persona of my friend's whiny Jewish mother while masturbating my friend's black umbrella. In a kvetchy falsetto, Roth scolded my friend for being a bad son."
Roundup: Bait and Switch
June 15, 2008 by Mark Athitakis, posted in Cormac McCarthy, Gore Vidal, Herman Melville, Joe Meno, Lionel Shriver, Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson
(If you're arriving here from the Readerville Journal, welcome. If you're not arriving here from the Readerville Journal: The folks at that venerable site have been nice enough to dub this site its Blog of the Week.)
Frank Wilson's Books, Inq. points to a review of Lionel Shriver's The Post-Birthday World, an exemplar of very divisive novels. (Wilson's taken this up before regarding Cormac McCarthy's The Road.) It was one of my favorite novels of last year; my review for Kirkus is floating somewhere on the Barnes & Noble review page.
Coudal Partners, a Chicago-based marketing firm, has put out its latest edition of Field-Tested Books, in which various writers contribute short essays about their experiences reading outside of the usual contexts of libraries, living rooms, and public transit. Bless Joe Meno's essay on Winesburg, Ohio, which I blogged about at Allvoices.
Mark Twain's home in Hartford, Conn., is in deep trouble; a visitors' center wound up costing double what was anticipated and energy costs are way up. I'd suggest putting on a short play and charging customers a ton for it, but maybe that's a little too glib. Seriously: Donate here.
Superman is 70.
Guy Sorman, writing in City Journal, enthuses about the Amazon Kindle. Walking in Central Park one day, he convinced his wife that she needed to read Herman Melville's Billy Budd, right now, and uploaded it to his Kindle: "I typed "Billy Budd" on the keyboard. It took five seconds to complete the wireless download and cost me approximately $6, debited from my Amazon account." Had Sorman talked to me, I could've saved him six bucks, but I will concede that the Kindle is preferable if you're insisting your spouse read something outside at that very moment.
I knew that Gore Vidal was bitter at how he's been treated by the New York Times over the years, but yeesh:
What do you think is your own best novel? I don't answer questions like that. Ever. And you ought not to ask them.
Well, it was a great pleasure talking to you. I doubt that.