Category: Authors

Paul Auster (1947-2024)

Published May 1, 2024 by Tom Fasano

Paul Auster (1947-2024)

Paul Auster, a celebrated American author known for his love of typewriters, has died at 77. He gained fame for his “New York Trilogy” and was a notable figure in postmodernist fiction.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947, Auster’s writing career began at the age of eight when he missed out on getting an autograph from his baseball hero, Willie Mays — who was outside the players’ locker room after a game — to not having a pencil. From then on, he always carried a pencil with him, and his writing journey began. After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to Paris, where he began translating French literature and publishing his own work in American journals.

Auster’s big break came in the mid-1980s with the publication of “”City of Glass,” the first novel in his “New York Trilogy.” This trilogy cemented his reputation as a master of postmodernism, as he blended detective fiction with existential questions about identity, space, language, and literature. The trilogy brought him worldwide acclaim and established him as one of the signature New York writers of his generation.

A major theme in Auster’s work was the role of chance and coincidence. This fascination can be traced back to a life-changing event he witnessed at the age of 14 while hiking during a summer camp. He saw a boy standing just inches away get struck by lightning and die instantly. This experience profoundly impacted Auster, and it became a recurring motif in his fiction.

While Auster was born in New Jersey, he became synonymous with Brooklyn, where he settled in 1980. He was seen as a guardian of the borough’s rich literary past and an inspiration to a new generation of novelists who flocked there. His works often used New York as a backdrop, with Brooklyn featuring prominently and his characters grappling with life’s randomness and chance occurrences.

Auster’s body of work includes over 30 books, ranging from novels to memoirs, poetry, and screenplays. His notable works include “Moon Palace,” “The Music of Chance,” “The Book of Illusions,” “Leviathan,” “4 3 2 1,” and, of course, the “New York Trilogy.” His writing imposed a sense of irreality, inviting readers into a world where the lines between reality and fiction blurred.

Paul Auster’s passing is a reminder of the profound impact writers can have on our lives. His words will continue to resonate with readers for generations to come, and his influence on contemporary literature will forever be felt. As he once said, “If there’s a pencil in your pocket, there’s a good chance that one day you’ll feel tempted to start using it.”

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Privilege to Page: An Author’s Introspection

Published August 23, 2023 by Tom Fasano

Privilege to Page: An Author’s Introspection

Well tie me to a cactus and call me Prickly Pete, it seems this Nick McDonell fella has ruffled some feathers with his new book that’s part memoir and part critique of the hoity-toity upper crust.

Now I ain’t one to judge a book by its cover or a bloke by his bank account, but it does raise my eyebrows a smidge that ole Nick lays bare how much moolah he got paid for scribbling his personal reflections, even as he aims to interrogate the entitled elite he was born into like a baby blue blood. Makes me wonder if his conscience is as heavy as his wallet after cashing that fat check.

From what I gather, Nick regales us with tales of his rarefied upbringing among the impressively pedigreed – schmoozing at Harvard, crewing on yachts, and mixing with Ivy Leaguers whose folks have more money than Scrooge McDuck. He winces at the memories like he’s swallowed a lemon peel, making sure we know his eyes are wide open now to the highfalutin hypocrisy of exclusive clubs and such.

But some reviewers grumble that Nick’s personal stories don’t pack much of a revelatory punch or dig deeper into the whys and wherefores of elite entitlement than a kid shoveling sand on a beach. Shoot, I reckon Nick’s just doing what a fellow naturally does when he wakes up one day and realizes the cherry privileged bubble he grew up in maybe wasn’t the whole pie. No sin in feeling conflicted about your gilded youth once them golden blinkers come off.

Yet the cynical side of me (and Lord knows I’ve nurtured that ornery cuss) can’t help noting that Nick is monetizing hisnewfound conscience just as surely as he’s milked his status since his diaper days. He may have left the plush parlors of privilege for the straight and narrow, but cold hard currency didn’t get left behind. The more things change the more they line the same pockets, or so it seems to this plain old tax-paying Joe.

But who am I to judge? A man’s gotta make his way and Nick’s found his – scribbling about the good ole boy networks with one hand while cashing their checks with the other. At least the public’s getting a glimpse behind the brocade curtain of the upper upper crust, even if Nick’s personal revelation seems more soft whimper than deafening bang. But there’s value in coming clean about your conflicted past, and in reminding the pedigreed that their privilege casts a mighty long, deep shadow. Here’s to more light finding its way in, and a few more conscience-scrubbings all around. Now where’d I stash my copy of The Great Gatsby?

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Dashiell Hammett — Cameo in “Two Sharp Knives”

Published October 10, 2021 by Tom Fasano

Dashiell Hammett — Cameo in “Two Sharp Knives”

This clip is from the CBS 1949 Studio One production of the Dashiell Hammett short story “Two Sharp Knives.” Hammett’s cameo is that of the character Slim, not listed in the cast of characters. This is the only film footage of Hammett I’ve been able to find. I’m sure there must be more.

I had a short communication from Dashiell Hammett’s granddaughter, and she believes this is the only known recording of her grandfather’s voice.

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Abdulrazak Gurnah Awarded Nobel Prize

Published October 10, 2021 by Tom Fasano

Abdulrazak Gurnah Awarded Nobel Prize

Abdulrazak Gurnah has been awarded The Nobel prize in literature for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”

A native of Zanzibar, Gurnah fled persecution and emigrated to England in the 1960s to study. His books include 10 novels and many short stories. Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee, noted that Gurnah’s novels “recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world.”

The prize hasn’t been awarded to a black African author since 1986, when Wole Soyinka won. He is the first black writer since Toni Morrison in 1993 to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

Gurnah’s fourth novel, Paradise, was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker prize. 2001 saw his sixth novel, By the Sea, longlisted for the prize. Olsson said that Paradise “has obvious reference to Joseph Conrad in its portrayal of the innocent young hero Yusuf’s journey to the heart of darkness.”

“[Gurnah] has consistently and with great compassion penetrated the effects of colonialism in East Africa, and its effects on the lives of uprooted and migrating individuals,” Olsson told reporters in Stockholm. Gurnah said he believed it was a set-up when he was told of his victory in his kitchen.

“I thought it was a prank,” he said. “These things are usually floated for weeks beforehand, or sometimes months beforehand, about who are the runners, so it was not something that was in my mind at all. I was just thinking, I wonder who’ll get it?”

“I am honoured to be awarded this prize and to join the writers who have preceded me on this list. It is overwhelming and I am so proud.”

He has never before received due recognition for his work, according to his longtime editor at Bloomsbury, Alexandra Pringle.

“He is one of the greatest living African writers, and no one has ever taken any notice of him and it’s just killed me. I did a podcast last week and in it I said that he was one of the people that has been just ignored. And now this has happened,” she said.

In explaining Gurnah’s work, Pringle said it’s always dealt with displacement, “but in the most beautiful and haunting ways of what it is that uproots people and blows them across continents.”

“It’s not always asylum seeking, it can be so many reasons, it can be trade, it can be commerce, it can be education, it can be love,” she said. “The first of his novels I took on at Bloomsbury is called By the Sea, and there’s this haunting image of a man at Heathrow airport with a carved incense box, and that’s all he has. He arrives, and he says one word, and that’s ‘asylum.’”

“In Gurnah’s literary universe, everything is shifting – memories, names, identities. This is probably because his project cannot reach completion in any definitive sense,” said Olsson. “An unending exploration driven by intellectual passion is present in all his books, and equally prominent now, in Afterlives, as when he began writing as a 21-year-old refugee.”

In 2017, after criticism regarding financial misconduct and sexual abuse, the Swedish Academy made steps to become more transparent in deciding the Nobel Prize. After the uproar generated by Peter Handke’s win in 2019, the American poet Louise Glück won the prize last year, a decision that wasn’t subject to controversy.

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Hermann Hesse the Watercolorist

Published January 16, 2021 by Tom Fasano

Hermann Hesse the Watercolorist

Hermann Hesse is one of the most widely read German-language writers ever. He is most renowned for his literary works such as Demian, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game, yet he also made a name for himself as a painter. After the First World War, he learned to paint with watercolors. His paintings vividly depict Ticino’s landscape (Switzerland), where he lived from 1919 to 1962.

HIs art is a glimpse into the more intimate and hidden side of this great popular writer. On his psychoanalyst’s advice, a student of Carl Gustav Jung, Hesse at first reluctantly took up watercolors. Eventually, he came to enjoy painting so much that it became his favorite pastime. What attracted and fascinated him was the magic of nature and the expressive power of colors. He painted thousands of watercolors, mostly Ticino landscapes in vivid colors, and illustrated small books of poetry throughout his life.

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A Writer’s Room

Published March 20, 2014 by Tom Fasano

A Writer’s Room

Thomas Fasano is an old-fashioned guy, and stepping into his home office is like stepping back in time, perhaps like visiting an old C.P.A. who still uses ledgers and adding machines. The office is in the back of the home where he has lived with his wife, Sandy, for the past eleven years. Among his most cherished items are a wooden desk (he built it himself from his own design), a wooden file cabinet, an antique typewriter table with an IBM Selectric II typewriter sitting atop it, several wooden bookcases (he built these too), and a huge corkboard on which he outlines his writing by pinning and arranging index cards. Here Fasano writes the old-fashioned way: in longhand with a fountain pen, on legal pads. Later, he types up his drafts on the IBM. The first few drafts of his writing never see a computer.

Years ago I realized I needed something more, that I had something more to give. That’s why I started writing. After all, I teach writing. Shouldn’t I write too?
—Thomas Fasano

We at Coyote Canyon Press will soon be publishing a fairly comprehensive grammar book by Mr. Fasano, English Grammar Review: a Handbook for Writers. “It’s a look at the traditional model of grammar,” says Fasano on a recent Sunday afternoon. “I’m a teacher, and most of the teachers I know who teach grammar teach the traditional model, which isn’t a modern grammar at all, that’s for sure, but it’s what everyone teaches. So I thought I’d write a book that explored this antiquated approach and codified it in some useful way.”

When asked about the book’s intended audience, “Writers,” he says, picking up one of his many fountain pens and turning up the volume on a Beethoven piano sonata. “Just what the subtitle says — “I teach writing. Shouldn’t I write too? — especially student writers. They’re the ones who will benefit most from a handbook like this. I wish I had a book like it when I was a student. It would’ve clarified several aspects of language for me. You must be able to understand the shape of all the pieces in order to fit them together.”

As for future projects, he doesn’t like to talk too much about them for fear of jinxing them. “But you can bet,” he says, “what I’m working on now is a book aimed at students. As you know, I’m a teacher, and I think a lot about my job and how to reach as many students as possible. It’s too easy to get locked into the same old classroom, teaching the some old classes, dealing with the same thing day in and day out. Years ago I realized I needed something more, that I had something more to give. That’s why I started writing. After all, I teach writing. Shouldn’t I write too?”

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Rediscovered novel by Hermann Hesse, In the Old Sun, published by Coyote Canyon Press

Published September 21, 2013 by Tom Fasano

Rediscovered novel by Hermann Hesse, In the Old Sun, published by Coyote Canyon Press

One of Herman Hesse’s earliest novels, In the Old Sun (In der alten Sonne) was completed in 1904. The story is of novella length and comes long before the novels that were to make Hesse famous in the decades after World War II.

In his early years as a writer, Hesse turned memories of his childhood home of Cawl—called “Gerbersau,” after a favorite fishing spot on the Nagold River—into a steady flow of Novellen, which kept his coffers replenished; and the ranks of his reading public kept growing. “In der alten Sonne,” one of these recollective tales, was first published in Hesse’s Nachbarn (1908), a collection of five works of fiction about the natives of his birthplace.

The novel was first published in English in 1914 in Volume XIX of The German Classics: Masterpieces of German Literature by the German Publication Society. The twenty illustrated volumes in the series were edited by Kuno Francke. The publishing house, which was created specifically for this series, went bankrupt soon after the German U-boat sinking of the British ocean liner Lusitania in 1915. One outcome of the Great War was that America’s taste for German literature and culture dissipated overnight.

The translation by A[lexis] I[renée] du P[ont] Coleman is fairly modern. However, the text contains one slight error that merits correcting: the reference to one of the main characters, Heller, as a “sailmaker” is inaccurate; in the original German he is referred to as a Seiler, a rope maker. In addition to this correction, antiquated punctuation has been silently modernized.

Coyote Canyon Press is proud to bring back into print this “lost novel” by Hermann Hesse.

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Don DeLillo’s Typewriter

Published December 2, 2012 by Tom Fasano

Don DeLillo’s Typewriter

In late 2000 I wrote a letter to Don DeLillo asking him what kind of typewriter he used. I’d read in the Paris Review interview that he used a manual typewriter. A page from said typewriter (from his novel Libra) was also reproduced in the article, and I found it fascinating because it showed evidence of hard labor — typing and lots of inked-in corrections. Plus, the type style was beautiful and I wanted that typewriter. So I wrote the letter. A few months later I received a letter (unfortunately damaged) in reply from this most reclusive literary genius, who identified his typewriter as an Olympia “SM-something.” The above photo clearly shows an Olympia SM9, manufactured in the early 1970s. A great and reliable machine, one of which I now own. Here’s a link to the manual.

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The Brontës Rebooted

Published September 23, 2012 by Tom Fasano

The Brontës Rebooted

Portrait of Anne Bronte (Thornton, 1820 – Scarborough, 1849), Emily Bronte (Thornton, 1818 – Haworth, 1848) and Charlotte Bronte (Thornton, 1816 – Haworth, 1855), English writers. Oil on canvas by Patrick Branwell Bronte (1817-1848), caa 1834, 90.2 x74.6 cm.

Juliet Barker has published a revised edition of her landmark biography, The Brontës with new material, including letters and juvenilia not available when the original edition was published eighteen years ago.

What sets Barker’s biography about the Brontës apart is that hers is not the typical account of a mad, freakish clan of sequestered geniuses, but rather a depiction of a flawed and human family. Barker redeems the much maligned Patrick Brontë, the girls’ father, who is portrayed as loving and sympathetic. She depicts Charlotte not as a saint and martyr but instead as a controlling and self-absorbed young woman with a dash of wicked humor and a taste for sarcasm.

Concerning Emily, Barker also dispells a long-held belief about her literary output. She never wrote another novel after Wuthering Heights, but Barker insists she would have penned another had she lived long enough — and that, contrary to received opinion, she was not exhausted creatively or crippled by savage reviews.

At more than a thousand pages, Barker has enough canvas on which to flesh out her major theme: the family’s unique intimacy fostered their extraordinary literary output; the family’s closeness and affection helped them through illness and loss; and each family member sustained the others, despite jealousies and temperamental differences.

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Harriet Beecher Stowe

Published April 24, 2012 by Tom Fasano

Harriet Beecher Stowe

She was the daughter of a Congregational preacher, the sister of five preachers, and the husband of another. She was raised in a family that devoted themselves to Christian purpose, “a kind of moral heaven, replete with moral oxygen — fully charged and with intellectual electricity.” Several members of her family were also famous in their own right. Her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, became an evangelist for reform. Her great-niece was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose grandmother, Mary, was one of Harriet’s sisters. Her sister Catherine was an educator who founded the Hartford Female Seminary.

When Harriet was young, the family moved to Cincinnati, where they found themselves at the border of the North and South, East and West, and at the center of an increasing antislavery sentiment. Here she began to write for literary and evangelical periodicals.

When she was twenty-five she married one of her father’s colleagues at a theological seminary in Ohio, Calvin Stowe; and when he was appointed to the faculty at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, she returned to New England. It was during services at the Brunswick Congregational Church that she was inspired to write her most famous book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which she penned at her kitchen table.

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