Tag: Literature
Paul Theroux’s New Novel: ‘A Dead Hand’
by Jim Benning | 11.18.09 | 1:50 PM ET
Paul Theroux’s new novel isn’t scheduled to be released in the U.S. until February 2010, but it’s already getting mixed reviews in the British press. It’s a mystery of sorts set in Calcutta and featuring a down-on-his-luck travel-writer-protagonist named Jerry Delfont.
Intriguingly, writes Doug Johnstone in The Independent:
Midway through the book, Delfont meets a fictional veteran US travel writer called Paul Theroux, a more successful and famous version of Delfont, whom he despises. The next 20 pages amount to a diatribe by Delfont about the act of travel writing, describing it as an emotionally stunted, puerile and selfish pastime, and brutally denouncing anyone who is stupid and arrogant enough to do it. This remarkable interlude is compelling, like rubbernecking a psychological car crash - but the rest of the novel is distinctly patchy, the bad points eventually outweighing the good.
Apparently the sex writing in the book leaves something to be desired. Once again, Theroux has been nominated for the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction award.
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Yahoo! BuzzFollowing Chekhov to ‘Hell’
by Robert Reid | 11.04.09 | 10:41 AM ET
Photo by Robert Reid On Sakhalin Island, Robert Reid communes with the world's first "Gulag tourist"
Get Your Sordid Kerouac Estate Details Here
by Eva Holland | 10.30.09 | 12:44 PM ET
The Telegraph delves into the ongoing nasty legal battle over the Jack Kerouac estate. It’s not pretty, though it is dramatic—a disowned daughter, a forged will and a couple of deaths by liver failure are all in the mix. The story also notes that Kerouac’s unpublished first novel, which we blogged about earlier this year, will be out in 2010.
The Perfect Traveler
by Pico Iyer | 10.28.09 | 10:14 AM ET
He was cool, steady and prone to breaking rules. Pico Iyer celebrates the life and work of Somerset Maugham.
Travel and the National Book Award
by Eva Holland | 10.16.09 | 3:25 PM ET
The finalists for this year’s National Book Award have been announced, and there are a couple of familiar names on the list. Marcel Theroux—son of Paul, and a sometime travel journalist himself—is nominated in the fiction category for his novel, “Far North,” while Greg Grandin’s Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City landed on the nonfiction shortlist.
Audio Interview With Peter Ferry: ‘Travel Writing’
by Jim Benning | 10.14.09 | 11:14 AM ET
Jim Benning asks the World Hum contributor about writing novels and non-fiction
Dan Brown Tourism Hits D.C.
by Eva Holland | 09.30.09 | 12:06 PM ET
That was quick. Two weeks after the release of his latest, “The Lost Symbol,” and the Dan Brown-themed travel stories about the city where it’s set—Washington, D.C.—are already piling up.
The Swedish Novel has ‘a Passport in its Back Pocket’
by Eva Holland | 09.17.09 | 3:58 PM ET
A group of Swedish writers have published a manifesto for Swedish literature in the 2010s. “We want to write books which are read, thumbed, torn out of the hands of angry taxpayers, borrowed and distributed to the max, quoted, imitated and translated,” they wrote. “The Swedish novel has brown eyes and black hair, it’s bald, green-eyed, blind and hook-nosed. It carries a collection of poetry in its breast pocket, a passport in its back pocket, and wears high heels.” (Via The Book Bench)
Travel Movie Watch: ‘A Moveable Feast’
by Eva Holland | 09.17.09 | 10:29 AM ET
Hemingway’s classic Paris memoir looks to be getting the book-to-big-screen treatment: The author’s granddaughter, actress Mariel Hemingway, has acquired the film and TV rights and is moving ahead with the project. There are no details yet, but plenty of intriguing questions. For instance, how might the movie handle the editing controversies of the book’s two dueling print editions? And who will play Hemingway, not to mention the cast of literary all-stars—Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and more—that surrounded him in Paris?
As always when a favorite book is being adapted, I’m nervous and skeptical. But I’m also very, very curious to see how this one plays out. (Via EW’s News Briefs Blog)
What Would ‘Walden’ be Called if it Were Published Today?
by Eva Holland | 09.16.09 | 1:20 PM ET
According to this fun list of revised book titles: “Camping with Myself: Two Years in American Tuscany.” (Via The Daily Dish)
Roald Dahl’s Childhood Candy Store Found
by Eva Holland | 09.14.09 | 11:29 AM ET
Call it Charlie and the Chinese take-out joint. A literary landmark has been rediscovered at the Great Wall of China restaurant in Llandaff, Wales—where researchers believe Mrs. Pratchett’s Sweet Shop, the store thought to be the inspiration for Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “The Twits,” was originally located. A historic marker will go up this week, and I’m sure the Dahl pilgrims won’t be far behind. (Via The Book Bench)
Margaret Drabble’s Favorite Literary Landscapes
by Eva Holland | 09.10.09 | 10:48 AM ET
The author picks 10 British spots that have inspired her fellow writers, from Tennyson’s Tintagel to Godrevy Lighthouse, of “To the Lighthouse” fame.
Congolese Man Plans New Lawsuit Against Tintin
by Michael Yessis | 09.02.09 | 12:40 PM ET
Cover art from The Adventures of Tintin Vols. 6-10 Two years ago Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo filed suit in Belgium, demanding Tintin in the Congo be removed from the market because of its “racism and xenophobia.” He got no response from the Belgian legal system, so he’s planning to “launch parallel proceedings in France and go ‘all the way to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary,’” according to the Telegraph.
“Tintin in the Congo” has been stirring up controversy in the U.S. recently, too. Last month the book was removed from the shelves of a Brooklyn, New York, library—news that made the mash-up map of book bannings in America that Eva wrote about yesterday.
Tintin, of course, has been celebrated by many people—including Julia Ross here on World Hum—for its “power to unite travelers and melt national divides.” (Via The Slatest)
Book Bannings in America, Mapped
by Eva Holland | 09.01.09 | 1:25 PM ET
Banned Books Week has a mashup of all the book bans (and resulting challenges) in the Lower 48 over the last two years. Anyone expecting a certain, er, geographical censorship concentration might be in for a surprise: Brooklyn and the Bay Area, for instance, are represented right alongside the more stereotypical suspects. (Via The Book Bench)
Lord of the Flies: ‘Absurd and Uninteresting’?
by Eva Holland | 09.01.09 | 11:25 AM ET
Apparently, William Golding’s castaway classic really made the rounds before finally being published, and one unimpressed reader’s note on the manuscript has just surfaced. After calling the book an “absurd and uninteresting fantasy,” she wrote: “A group of children who land in jungle country near New Guinea. Rubbish & dull. Pointless.”
Dull? I’d love to know what her idea of an eventful island getaway is. (Via The Book Bench)
What Makes a Great Airplane Read?
by Eva Holland | 08.31.09 | 4:52 PM ET
I have a confession: Last week, I enjoyed the greatest airplane reading of my life. I’ve never been much of an on-board reader—for a long time, I was one of those passengers who was asleep before take-off, and who needs a good book when you have the gift of in-flight unconsciousness? But lately I haven’t been able to drop off to sleep the way I used to, and I’ve become a restless, impatient flier.
Enter—don’t laugh—the Twilight saga. Over four days, the bestselling teen-vampire-romance novels got me through 17 hours of flying time, two hefty ground delays and one long scheduled layover. They also got me thinking about ideal airplane books. What factors have me reading straight through until landing, oblivious to the hours passing? And why do some titles leave me fidgeting in my seat after the first hour?
20 Years Later: Reading up on the Berlin Wall
by Eva Holland | 08.31.09 | 9:34 AM ET
With the 20th anniversary of the wall’s destruction coming up in November, the time seems right for a look back. Here’s a handy starting point: The Guardian’s books blog has a thoughtful list of 10 must-reads, fiction and non.
Brit Lit and Venice: A Love Affair
by Eva Holland | 08.27.09 | 3:00 PM ET
In the Independent, Peter Popham has a thoughtful essay about the world’s—and, in particular, the British writing community’s—ongoing fascination with Venice. He writes: “Venice is the great seducer, the feminine city incarnate, risen like Venus from the waves and always threatening to sink into them again; demanding to be rescued, to be immortalised yet again by pen or brush, even though already, 250 years ago, one jaded visitor complained it was a city ‘about which so much has been said and written—that it seems to me there is nothing left to say.’”
He wraps up the essay with a list of artistic Brits who’ve gotten caught up in the city’s charms, from Lord Byron to Elton John. I’d add Jan Morris’ “Venice” to the list of worthy titles Popham mentions.
Could Literature Cure the Fear of Flying?
by Eva Holland | 08.19.09 | 12:08 PM ET
In the latest issue of Granta, Javier Marias has a fun and thoughtful essay about his fear of flying and how it has started to abate in recent years. And, he believes, “a little more literature” would help him, and other nervous fliers, feel even more confident:
I would like to ask Iberia, in this the twenty-first century, to abandon their anodyne patriotic gestures and adulatory nods to the Catholic Church—all those planes called Our Lady of the Pillar and Our Lady of Good Remedy, The City of Burgos and The City of Tarragona—and instead choose names that are more cheerful and more literary. I, for one, would feel safer and more reassured, more protected, if I knew I was flying in the The Red Eagle or The Fire Arrow or even Achilles or Emma Bovary or Falstaff or Liberty Valance or Nostromo.
(Via The Morning News)
Ben Gibbard, Jay Farrar Team Up for ‘Kerouac’s Big Sur’
by Michael Yessis | 08.17.09 | 12:09 PM ET
Death Cab for Cutie singer/songwriter Gibbard and all-around alt-country standard-bearer Farrar had never met before collaborating on the soundtrack to a new documentary about Jack Kerouac, “One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur.” Paste spoke with the pair about their work on the album, which will be released October 20.
Gibbard had previously written for Paste about his experience writing the most recent Death Cab album at the same cabin where Kerouac wrote “Big Sur.”
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