Tag: Literature
The New York Times: ‘It’s a List, Silly!’
by Eva Holland | 06.20.11 | 5:21 PM ET
The Times responds to the Guardian’s top non-fiction picks with 33 lists of favorites chosen by newspaper staffers, and a refreshingly unambitious introduction—no best-of claims here:
Dispensing with all pretense to rigor—it’s a list, silly!—we simply asked each member of the staff to pick their five favorites… Two members of the staff saw fit to pick six titles (they’ve been reprimanded), one identified the author of “On Photography” as Susan Sarandon (she has been ridiculed), and one expressed dislike of the term “nonfiction” (that poor soul will be reading the Lives slush pile for a week).
The Times lists, like the Guardian’s, include a handful of travel favorites, from Krakauer to Kapuscinski. Mother Jones has joined the conversation, too. And while we’re at it, Budget Travel recently offered a fiction-heavy take on the 25 Greatest Travel Books of All Time.
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Yahoo! BuzzBook Lovers, You Have Three New Reasons to Spend More Time in Airports
by Michael Yessis | 06.08.11 | 10:55 AM ET
Just tweeted a Wall Street Journal piece about authors promoting their books at airport bookstores. The appearances are known as “fly-bys” and, apparently, nobody does them like second-tier celebrity authors such as Ice-T, Rob Lowe and Joan Collins.
David Roth writes:
Airport book signings won’t supplant traditional book tours anytime soon, but maximizing publicity opportunities, even during an author’s travel layover, makes sense for publishing houses as marketing budgets shrink and traditional bookstores vanish. Hudson News’s transit locations make up 10% or more of total sales for some books that the retailer keeps in heavy stock, said Sara Hinckley, a company vice president.
The story brought to mind a couple literature-goes-to-the-airport pieces I liked in recent months. Taiwan’s Taoyuan International Airport recently opened the first airport library for ebooks. And The World profiled the real-world library that opened last summer at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol.
Here’s the video that accompanied The World’s report:
Paul Theroux, V.S. Naipaul and the End of a Feud
by Jim Benning | 06.07.11 | 4:00 PM ET
Paul Theroux’s long-running feud with Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul has apparently come to an end. The two authors shook hands in the green room at the Hey Festival late last month in Wales. Writer Reza Aslan was there. He not only posted a message on Twitter about it—“Holy Cow! I caught first face to face reconciliation of Paul Theroux & VS Naipaul. Magical moment.”—but he just happened to capture it on video:
What caused the feud? Accounts vary. According to The Telegraph, Naipaul suspected that Theroux had seduced his first wife. A New York Times report, however, emphasized Theroux’s anger over a book he’d signed: “His decades-long friendship with Mr. Naipaul imploded some 15 years ago when he discovered that a copy of one of his novels, lovingly inscribed to Mr. Naipaul, had been put up for sale.”
Whatever the cause, Theroux went on to write a great book exploring their friendship and its demise, Sir Vidia’s Shadow.
Amazingly, Naipaul was back in the headlines days after the handshake, offending countless people, when he told the Royal Geographic Society that he doesn’t think much of women writers: “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.”
The Best Travel Books of 2010
by Frank Bures | 12.09.10 | 12:10 PM ET
Frank Bures surveys the year's most intriguing titles and offers a few gift ideas
Writer’s Block at Norman Mailer’s House
by Eva Holland | 11.18.10 | 1:01 PM ET
The Smart Set has a dispatch from Provincetown, where freelancer Amy Rowland spent a month as a fellow at Norman Mailer’s house-turned-writers’ retreat—and found herself unable to write. Here’s Rowland:
We were encouraged to write in Mailer’s house, but I found I couldn’t. Sitting in the living room, where Mailer kept dinner companions waiting while he finished writing in the attic, was like trying to write in a shrine. There were photos on the wall: Mailer with Vidal, Mailer with Plimpton, Mailer with Castro, Mailer with Vonnegut, Mailer with Jackie Kennedy.
Once, I wandered out to the porch and plopped down in a white rocking chair with faded pink cushions.
“That was Mailer’s chair,” someone said. “That’s where he sat to watch the water.”
I jumped up from the chair and went back to the wall of photos.
A Mark Twain Pilgrimage
by Eva Holland | 11.11.10 | 4:20 PM ET
Fresh off a trip to the grave of Robert Louis Stevenson, World Hum contributor Catherine Watson visits Mark Twain’s grave in Elmira, New York—and explains how Twain had previously flown under her radar:
America’s most American writer lies in a family plot on a gentle hillside, beside his beloved wife, Livy, surrounded by the graves of their children and her relatives—all under simple, matching headstones.
The name on his marker is the one he was born with, Samuel L. Clemens. The pen name we know him by—which he once claimed to detest—gets second-billing below.
For me, these quiet graves were the end of a quest I hadn’t planned on making. I’d always been a Hemingway fan, with runner-up passions for Robert Louis Stevenson and the Bronte sisters.
But this year—the 100th anniversary of his death—I’ve been immersed in Mark Twain. I’ve been reading almost nothing but his abundant travel writing, with side trips into biographies about him, when I needed a break.
It has felt like living with the man, and his writing is so prolific and varied—and his life so preposterously colorful—that I now wonder how I could have cared about anyone else.
Sons of ‘The Beach’
by Rolf Potts, Kristin Van Tassel | 11.11.10 | 11:22 AM ET
What do "The Beach," "Are You Experienced?" and other travel novels say about us? Rolf Potts and Kristin Van Tassel explore backpacker fiction.
Backpacker Novels: A Conversation
by Rolf Potts, Kristin Van Tassel | 11.11.10 | 11:17 AM ET
Rolf Potts and Kristin Van Tassel discuss travel fiction and their essay, Sons of "The Beach"
Flavorwire Celebrates Fictional Traveling Sidekicks
by Eva Holland | 11.01.10 | 12:01 PM ET
A couple years back we put together a list of our favorite fictional travelers. Don Quixote and Jack Kerouac’s Sal Paradise both made the list—and now, we’re thrilled to see, both of their traveling comrades, Sancho Panza and Dean Moriarty, have cracked Flavorwire’s list of the greatest sidekicks in literature. Long live the literary travel buddy. (Via The Book Bench)
Gary Shteyngart in Russia: ‘Not a Tourist, Not a Native’
by Eva Holland | 10.28.10 | 10:59 AM ET
The author is in his native Russia for a book tour, and the New York Times’ Clifford J. Levy takes a look at his reception there:
While Mr. Shteyngart is a rising literary star in New York, he is a nobody in Russia, selling fewer translations of his books here than in Belgium. It may be that Russians don’t quite get his three-ring circus narratives, or are not amused by his caricatures of post-Soviet life. But Russia has a splendid tradition of satire, and current writers like Viktor Shenderovich, whose wit has been compared to Jon Stewart’s, have followings. (As well as the disapproval of the Kremlin.)
Maybe, then, it is something deeper: Russia does not like to celebrate the achievements of its wayward sons, often eyeing them with suspicion and even envy. Mr. Shteyngart said that some of the reviews of his work by Russian critics could be summarized as “Balding traitor betrays homeland.”
World Hum contributor Rob Verger talked with Shteyngart about his dual roles as novelist and travel writer last year. (Via The Book Bench)
A Tintin Tour of Jordan
by Eva Holland | 10.21.10 | 12:23 PM ET
The Guardian’s Georgia Brown made an unconventional trip to Petra—guided by a “Tintinologist” and a copy of The Red Sea Sharks. We’ve talked before about Tintin’s appeal to travelers, and in her dispatch Brown’s guide notes another aspect of that appeal:
Thousands of tourists visit Petra every week, but this summer I was part of the first small group of adventurers to arrive at the rose-red city in the footsteps of Tintin, led by one of the world’s leading Tintinologists, Michael Farr.
For Michael—who, dressed in beige linen suit and explorer’s hat, looks to have stepped from that golden era of travel—this is clearly part of the delight. A natural raconteur, he explains that Tintin creator Hergé’s drawings were astonishingly accurate, from his rendering of landscapes such as the Middle Eastern desert and local costumes, down to the accuracy of Egyptian hieroglyphs painted on a tomb or the Chinese lettering on a street banner. When fans of the comics see images of the real thing they perhaps cannot help but be reminded of the books in which they first saw them.
(Via The Book Bench)
A Short History of Touring Dead Writers’ Houses
by Eva Holland | 10.18.10 | 4:44 PM ET
In the New York Times, Anne Trubek dissects the phenomenon, which has a longer history than you might expect—apparently, visitors were already making their way to Petrarch’s birthplace in the 1300s. But most writer’s-house visitors aren’t there for the sake of literature. Here’s Trubek on the motivations behind many visits:
According to curator and tour-guide estimates, only about half of the 2,000 people who visit the Walt Whitman House in Camden, N.J., each year come because they are interested in Whitman (as opposed to a nice historical stopover after touring the battleship down the road). Just 10 percent of the 9,000 annual visitors to the Thomas Wolfe Memorial in Asheville, N.C., come specifically for the author. Most people who visit the Mount, Edith Wharton’s lavish estate in tourist-friendly Lenox, Mass., are killing time before a concert at Tanglewood (and tend not to continue to Arrowhead, Herman Melville’s modest homestead in the nearby depressed industrial city of Pittsfield). Half of the 182,000 annual visitors to Hemingway’s house in Key West say they come for the cats.
(Via The Book Bench)
Reading Charles Dickens in Nigeria
by Eva Holland | 10.13.10 | 9:25 AM ET
George Packer argues in Lapham’s Quarterly that the great novels of the late Victorian years resonate more powerfully in today’s Rangoon, or Lagos, or Mombasa, than in the Western countries that spawned them. Here’s Packer:
The concerns of that literature—the individual caught in an encompassing social web, the sensitive young mind trapped inside an indifferent world, the beguiling journey from countryside to metropolis, the dismal inventiveness with which people survive, the permanent gap between imagination and opportunity, the big families whose problems are lived out in the street, the tragic pregnancies, the ubiquity of corruption, the earnest efforts at self-education, the preciousness of books, the squalid factories and debtor’s prisons, the valuable garbage, the complex rules of patronage and extortion, the sudden turns of fortune, the sidewalk con men and legless beggars, the slum as theater of the grotesque: long after these things dropped out of Western literature, they became the stuff of ordinary life elsewhere, in places where modernity is arriving but hasn’t begun to solve the problems of people thrown together in the urban cauldron.
(Via The Book Bench)
A Pilgrimage to Vailima
by Catherine Watson | 10.06.10 | 11:28 AM ET
By Catherine Watson An hour into her quest to visit Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa, Catherine Watson ran out of water and lost the trail. What would persistence bring?
Six Spots to Relive ‘Travels With Charley’
by Robert Reid | 09.23.10 | 10:43 AM ET
Robert Reid Fifty years ago John Steinbeck began the road trip that begat a travel classic. Robert Reid unearths the spots where you can still make like the author -- minus the poodle.
Travel Movie Watch: ‘Gulliver’s Travels’
by Eva Holland | 09.09.10 | 3:13 PM ET
We blogged about the adaptation when it was first announced a couple years back, and now the release date is in sight—“Gulliver’s Travels” is due out December 22nd. Here’s the trailer:
(Via Gawker)
Meet the Traveler Who Saved Graham Greene’s Life
by Eva Holland | 09.07.10 | 2:17 PM ET
In the Telegraph, Tim Butcher tells the little-known story of Barbara Greene, a cousin of the well-traveled author—and, apparently, his savior on a 1935 trip through Sierra Leone and Liberia. Here’s Butcher:
At the off, the adventure was the property of Graham Greene. He made all the arrangements and took all the decisions, hiring a team of 24 bearers, three servants and a cook. A child of the late Edwardian era, Barbara Greene was happy to go along with this.
But after crossing into Liberia and beginning the trek, a reversal took place. Graham fell ill, dangerously ill, while Barbara got stronger and stronger. They had various adventures and almost lost each other in the thick forest, but the key moment came about three weeks into the walk when his illness worsened dramatically and he lost consciousness.
“Graham would die,’’ she later wrote. “I never doubted it for a minute. He looked like a dead man already ... I was incapable of feeling anything. I worked out quietly how I would have my cousin buried, how I would go down to the coast, to whom I would send telegrams.’‘
Calmly Barbara Greene took over responsibility for the trip, settling on the route, arranging food and motivating the bearers. Having completed the same trek last year for my book, staying in the same villages and enduring the same climate, I am in awe of her achievement. And I am in no doubt that she saved her cousin’s life.
(Via The Book Bench)
Literature’s Best Train Trips
by Michael Yessis | 09.07.10 | 12:54 PM ET
The Guardian lists 10 of them, including ones in JK Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” Graham Greene’s “Stamboul Train” and Thomas Hardy’s “Midnight on the Great Western.” Of the latter, John Mullan writes:
Hardy’s poem is a vignette of Victorian public transport, preserved forever. By “the roof-lamp’s oily flame” a boy is seen half asleep in his third-class seat, his ticket stuck in his hat band, “Bewrapt past knowing to what he was going, / Or whence he came”.
(Via @nicholebernier)
New York Times Debuts ‘Imprint’: Writers on Places that Inspired a Book
by Michael Yessis | 08.16.10 | 11:30 AM ET
Hooray! Vendela Vida kicks things off with a piece on two towns in Turkey that inspired her latest book, “The Lovers.”
Still, I was slightly disappointed to find it not exactly as I remembered. It seemed louder, and more popular, but its blemishes less romantic and more ragged. I suppose this is what happens in travel, and why we enjoy it. We know when we are traveling that we’re experiencing a particular moment in time. We know that every vacation is ephemeral and can’t be relived.
I began to think about what kind of character would return to a town and be disappointed to find it was not as it once was. And that gave rise to Yvonne, the protagonist in “The Lovers,” my most recent novel. Yvonne is a 53-year-old widow who returns, 28 years later, to the place where she and her husband had honeymooned. Because of the twin towns, I made her the mother of grown twins—one the golden child, the other troubled. The story grew from there.
This promising new feature wins back some of the love I lost after the New York Times killed its regular travel essay.
‘Crime and Punishment’ on the Moscow Subway
by Eva Holland | 08.10.10 | 3:17 PM ET
NPR explores the controversy surrounding one of Moscow’s famously decorated subway stations—Dostoevskaya, the station that honors Fyodor Dostoevsky. Apparently, some Russian psychologists are concerned that the darkness of the station’s artwork may inspire violence or suicide. David Greene sets the scene:
The walls are gray and bare, except for murals capturing scenes from Dostoevsky’s famous novels: Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, and of course, Crime and Punishment, the book where Dostoevsky digs into the mind of his lead character, Raskolnikov, exploring a young man’s path to murder…
The fictional character—poor, desperate for money to help his family and mentally tortured—ends up killing two women. And it’s all depicted in a mural right on the subway platform in which Raskolnikov holds an ax over a woman’s head, while a corpse lies on the ground.
The tale itself is stirring, and the underground tunnel and echo of subway trains make it even creepier.