Category: Authors

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?

Is the Horror Novel Entering a New Golden Age?

Stephen Graham Jones, a Blackfeet Native American, has written a terrifying story about a spirit that seeks revenge. The Only Good Indians won both the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson awards for best horror novel at last year’s Horror Fiction Awards.

Earlier this year, British-American author Catriona Ward released her third literary horror novel, The Last House on Needless Street. Ward previously published two novels, Little Eve and Rawblood.

“Horror is in a very exciting place,” says Neil Mcrobit, who hosts the Talking Scared Podcast and interviews some of horror fiction’s biggest names. Frequently mentioned along with Rebecca Netley’s novel The Whistling is The Haunting Season, which collects the stories of authors such as Andrew Michael Hurley, Imagin Hermes Gower, and Bridgett Collins.

Paul Trembley, the author of one of the scariest novels out there, A Head Full of Ghosts, says, “With so many new voices being published, there’s never been a more exciting time for horror readers.” Tembley suggests two debut novels, Violet Kupersmith’s Build Your House Around My Body, about two young Vietnamese women going missing decades apart; and Gus Moreno’s This Thing Between Us, a genuinely creepy novel about grief and a widower fighting the evil that inhabits the smart speaker in his house. Jones also recommends Haley Piper’s Queen of Teeth, which revolves around a woman discovering teeth between her thighs, and Shane Hawke’s Anoka, a collection of Indigenous horror stories.

Author Jonathan Sims, who wrote Thirteen Stories, and hosts horror podcast The Magnus Archives, has an interesting view of how the horror market is currently changing. He says that many of the best horror writers are not on shelves, but online. He points to podcasts such as Pseudopod and Nightlight as examples of where readers can find some of the most exciting voices in horror.

Adam Nevill, whose The Ritual ended up on the big screen, recently self-published his latest novel, Cunning Folk, which follows a man who suspects that his hostile neighbors are in control of evil forces.
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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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

A Writer’s Room

Thomas Fasano is an old-fashioned guy, 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.

Fasano’s Home Office

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.”

“I teach writing. Shouldn’t I write too?”

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?”

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.

Don DeLillo’s Typewriter

Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo’s letter to me in 2001, damaged in the mail

Don DeLilloDon DeLillo’s letter to me in 2001, damaged in the mail

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.

The Brontës Rebooted

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.

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.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

[caption id="attachment_1278" align="alignleft" width="100" caption=" "][/caption]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.

Portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe by Francis Holl after George Richmond c.1855. Stipple engraving

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.

Continue reading “Harriet Beecher Stowe”

RIP: Harry Crews

[caption id="attachment_1175" align="alignleft" width="100" caption=" "][/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.”

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.”

The AP report describes Crews as follows: “A wild man and drunken sage in the tradition of Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson, he wrote bloodied, freakish stories drawn directly from his own experiences, including boxing and karate. Crews sported a tattoo with a line from an E.E. Cummings poem, ‘How do you like your blue-eyed boy Mister Death,’ on his right bicep under the tattoo of a skull.” According to a brief earlier write-up in a New York Times obituary: “Though his books captivated many reviewers (they bewildered others and repelled still others), they attracted a cadre of readers so fiercely devoted that the phrase “cult following” seems inadequate to describe their level of ardor.”

Crews was the son of sharecroppers in Bacon County, Georgia. Growing up was rough, and when his father died when Crews was two, the boy was marked for life. As the AP report details,

His childhood alone tested the imagination. His mother married his father’s brother, a violent drunk. Crews suffered from infantile paralysis and once fell into a vat of boiling water, confining him to his bed for months. Still, he managed to become the first member of his family to graduate from high school, after which he joined the Marine Corps. In the book “Getting Naked with Harry Crews,” he explained to interviewer Hank Nuwer that his military service was crucial.

“If I hadn’t gone in the Marine Corps, I wouldn’t be a professor in the university. I’d be in the state prison because I was a bad actor and a bad boy.”

After a stint in the Marines, Crews began writing, and eventually his publications earned him a spot on the faculty of the University of Florida, where he taught from 1968 through 1997. As recalled by his students, he was mesmerizing on the topic of writing.

He told one interviewer what he told his students; “If you’re gonna write, for God in heaven’s sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you’ve been told.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter”

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 … Continue reading “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter””

This Coyote Canyon Press anthology contains Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter”

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 the deadliness of Beatrice, and inevitably of Giovanni himself, accumulate with a horrid insistence.

Beatrice’s father is Professor Rappaccini of Padua, who raised her from childhood among deadly plants and flowers of his own creation in order to endow her with “marvellous gifts against which no power or strength could avail an enemy.” Giovanni, a young student, unaware of the secrets of the garden, is deeply attracted to her extraordinary beauty and her intimate tending to the beautiful plants. Gradually he becomes aware of the deadliness of the garden, and despite the warnings of Rappaccini’s rival, Baglioni, Giovanni continues to pursue her until he eventually takes on her deadly power. When he finally realizes the extent of his contamination, he urges her to drink with him the antidote prepared by Baglioni. She drinks it first, and “as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was death.” The story ends with Baglioni’s horrified yet triumphant cry: “ ‘Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is this the upshot of your experiment?’ ”

Trailer for the German musical “Rappaccini’s Daughter”