Category Archives: Novelists

Sinclair Lewis’s Typewriter Honeymoon

Posted on by
Reply

Picture this: Sinclair Lewis, the hard-hitting word slinger of the American novel and playwriting scene, so intertwined with his portable typewriter that he hauled the damn thing with him on his honeymoon in 1928. It’s like the guy couldn’t leave home without it.

You’d think his fresh spouse, the razor-sharp journalist Dorothy Thompson, would’ve called foul. But no, she just shook her head and laughed. Love’s strange like that, I suppose.

Despite the romantic allure of newlywed bliss, our man Sinclair managed to sneak in a little keyboard time. Yeah, he’d hole up right there on the steps of their caravan, a custom-built beast that stretched seventeen feet from bumper to bumper. They’d packed this metallic cocoon with all the amenities of a cozy bungalow—think snug living room, a fully-stocked kitchen, all the usual stuff. They were, after all, embarking on a summer-long odyssey through the rolling green landscapes of England and Scotland. Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it?

The caravan, it seems, was designed with everything a wanderlust-struck couple could need for a three-month tour. Well, almost everything. In a comedic twist of fate, the architects seemed to have missed one critical detail—no damn typing room! But when you’re Sinclair Lewis, anywhere can be a writing den. And that, folks, is how you churn out magic in the face of life’s charming absurdities.

Now, imagine this: You’re Sinclair Lewis, hunkered down on the steps of your caravan, churning out literary gold on your portable typewriter. And, let’s be honest, maybe these sessions were a welcome breather from the euphoria of newlywed life. A bit of solitude to refocus, reaffirm your commitment to the written word. Sounds like a slice of nirvana, doesn’t it?

Just as things were starting to get comfy, a curveball. A letter from a female fan lands in your mailbox, and boy, she’s got an offer that’s hard to ignore. She’s throwing herself at your feet, promising to play the role of your secretary. And she’s not just talking about typing up manuscripts and fetching coffee. No, she writes, “I’ll do everything for you – and when I say everything, I mean everything.” Now that’s dedication. You can practically hear her batting her eyelashes through the page. (One might speculate that her interpretation of “everything” might extend as far as topping off his whiskey glass.)

Dorothy Thompson’s response to the wannabe stenographer:

My dear Miss:
My husband already has a stenographer who handles his work for him. And, as for “everything,” I take care of that myself — and when I say everything, I mean everything.
Dorothy Thompson (Mrs Sinclair Lewis to you.)

And so it goes.

Is the Horror Novel Entering a New Golden Age?

Posted on by
Reply

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.
[wdi_feed id=”1″]

Gatsby as Silhouette

Posted on by
Reply

Sometimes a silhouette is more significant than an ordinary drawing. A few traces of the pen, a few vibrant adjectives, are often sufficient to bring a character to life.

Take Owl Eyes, a partygoer at Gatsby’s mansion, a quickly drawn and excellent character who wanders into the library with intoxicated admiration. I’ve always seen this man as wise, someone groping through the booze-haze to understand the mirage before him. Readers have been lost in Gatsby’s house ever since, lost in his never-ending revival.

Almost all the bitterness Nick feels about Gatsby has been directed back at Fitzgerald’s novel.

What major work of fiction is so well established in the curriculum and canon yet is constantly and vigorously contested for its literary merit and ethical character? We’re not talking about books like Huckleberry Finn, which got sucked into a rage about racial slurs and censorship and the tireless battle over the N-word. With Gatsby, one must ask: Could Fitzgerald write well, or was he, as Gore Vidal said, just a novice?

Almost all the bitterness Nick feels about Gatsby has been directed back at Fitzgerald’s novel. Just as Nick questions Gatsby, readers question his book: Is this mere shallowness or astonishing depth? Like Daisy, Nick has been criticized for his passive attitude or worse, for taking part in the spectacle.

Even admirers disagree: is the book good, or is it great?
The answer lies not in the assurance of the perfect text but its unknowability. Despite the tight structure and well-crafted three-act framework, it’s full of wild ambivalence, stiff morality, and a love of money, as well as a lack of empathy from many of its players.

Fitzgerald was proud of his achievement, but his work baffled critics and didn’t sell well. “Of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about,” Fitzgerald wrote to the critic Edmund Wilson.

That question remains unresolved. Some reviewers have seen the novel as a slapdash piece of work. John Kenneth Galbraith sneered that Fitzgerald had no real interest in class. “It is the lives of the rich — their enjoyments, agonies and putative insanity — that attract his interest,” he wrote. “Their social and political consequences escape him as he himself escaped such matters in his own life.”

True, Fitzgerald was bitter and envious of the rich. “I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich and it has colored my entire life and works,” he wrote to his agent, this coming from the same man who fell in love with Zelda because she looked expensive.

As we are borne back through this single text, we see that admiration might be one path to literary immortality. Still, we should be wary of endless interpretation and enjoy the traces of Fitzgerald’s knife-sharpened pencil.

Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos

Posted on by
Reply

Hailed as a masterpiece on its original publication in 1921, Three Soldiers is a gripping exploration of fear and ambition, conformity and rebellion, desertion and violence.

Part of the generation that produced Ernest Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos wrote one of the most grimly honest portraits of World War I. Three Soldiers portrays the lives of a trio of army privates: Fuselli, an Italian American store clerk from San Francisco; Chrisfield, a farm boy from Indiana; and Andrews, a musically gifted Harvard graduate from New York. Hailed as a masterpiece on its original publication in 1921, the novel is a gripping exploration of fear and ambition, conformity and rebellion, desertion and violence, and the brutal and dehumanizing effects of a regimented war machine on ordinary soldiers.

In Three Soldiers, he introduces readers to a Harvard aesthete who joins the army out of idealism and his two buddies. Their illusions crumble under the tyranny, red tape, and boredom of the military one by one. The soldiers’ reactions range from bitterness to rage, and—for one—murder, in this vivid portrayal of the human spirit caught in the grip of war.

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

Posted on by

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.

GERTRUDE publishes as part of Hermann Hesse Project

Image

Coyote Canyon Press just published the first of two novels by Hermann Hesse, an endeavor we’re calling our Hermann Hesse Project. Just published is Gertrude. The text for this edition is taken from Adele Lewisohn’s translation of 1915, Gertrude and I, published in New York by The International Monthly.

Front cover of Gertrude

Gertrude was the first novel by Hermann Hesse published in English and not part of an anthology. The novel deals with the destructive nature of love, its central theme the narrator’s enduring and hopeless passion for Gertrude, whom he meets through their mutual love of music. “Music was important to Hesse,” says Thomas Fasano, who wrote the Introduction to the book. “As a child he loved to listen to the church organ, learned to play the violin, and developed a passion for Chopin. His interest in music and painting and his lifelong association with musicians and painters greatly informed his writing.”

Fasano writes in the Introduction:

Hesse’s pre-World-War-I heroes are esthetes who live only in their own world of dreams, who shrink before bold action. Temperamental artists, they are paralyzed by their chronic indecision and consumed by loneliness—timid souls to whom the art of life and the art of love are forever unobtainable. They ask little of life and expect much. Such is the nature of the child of nature, Peter Camenzind, and the timorous composer, Kuhn. Such too was Hermann Hesse.

The second book in the Hermann Hesse Project will be a rediscovery of sorts: In The Old Sun, a novel published in English over one hundred years ago and essentially lost since then — until now. We’re planning a beautiful edition of the novel both in hardback and Kindle. In The Old Sun was actually Hesse’s first book published in English in the United States. It was part of an anthology called German Classics and has never been published as an individual book until now.

 

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter”

Posted on by
Reply

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”

John Dos Passos — Three Soldiers

Posted on by
Reply

The defining moment in the life of John Dos Passos came between August 16 and 20, 1917, when he experienced combat firsthand as an ambulance driver in France at the Battle of Verdun. Three days later he wrote to his friend Rumsey Marvin:

The war is utter damn nonsense—a vast cancer fed by lies and self seeking malignity on the part of those who don’t do the fighting.

Of all the things in this world a government is the thing least worth fighting for.

None of the poor devils whose mangled dirty bodies I take to the hospital in my ambulance really give a damn about any of the aims of this ridiculous affair.

Before his wartime experiences, Dos Passos had only intellectualized his feelings of rebellion nurtured at Harvard, and later embellished during his bohemian days in Greenwich Village with its political radicals such as John Reed. These were heady days for someone who wanted to work in the arts. Dos Passos saw the Armory Show, which introduced Americans to the work of Picasso and Matisse; he attended performances of the Ballets Russes; and he was deeply affected by the literary radicalism of the poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.

He had become a pacifistic, but knew that for a young man hoping to be a writer, he must experience the war firsthand. He volunteered for an ambulance unit and shipped to France on June 20, 1917. Near the end of July he joined a section of drivers headed toward the front. What he saw there was, he wrote in one of his journal entries, “horror . . . so piled up on horror that there can be no more. How damned ridiculous it all is! . . . All the cant and hypocrisy . . . all the vestiges of the old truth now putrid and false infect the air, choke you worse than German gas — the ministers from their damn smug pulpits, the business men — the heroics about war — my country right or wrong — Oh infinities of them!”