A Poet's Notebook
A collection of author posts
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…
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…
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.
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.”
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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[/caption]Novelist Harry Crews has died from complications from neuropathy. Crews, who died at his home in Gainesville, Florida, was 76. “He had been very ill,” his ex-wife, Sally Crews, tells the Associated Press in this report. “In a way it was kind of a blessing. He was in a lot of pain.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is a rich and darkly morbid story that showcases Hawthorne’s art at its most sensuous and florid. It is the story of a beautiful young woman in a poisonous garden, and its gorgeous and lethal beauty are wonderfully done. The story is a sinister one in that the growing signs of…
For “The Dead” James Joyce drew upon an incident in Galway in 1903. There a young man named Michael (“Sonny”) Bodkin was courting Nora Barnacle (Joyce’s eventual wife), but he had tuberculosis and was soon bedridden. When Nora resolved to leave Galway for Dublin, the boy stole out of his sickbed and in the rain…