The Paris Review

• Herewith: writers as teenagers. Only Allen Ginsberg looks suitably awkward.
• Feisty indie Inkwood Books, of Tampa, lives to fight another day. 
• The secret lives of unfinished books. 
• The uneasy marriage of poetry and e-readers. 
• Applying science to the Shakespearean authorship mystery. 

I know that I am not alone in sometimes craving nothing more than a nice, long browse through the self-help section of the bookstore. But I know that I’m alone in admitting it to The Paris Review! My question is, do you know of any authors writing in the self-help genre who have elevated the form and who you would qualify as literary?
Appreciatively,
Stan Hope

Let your self-help freak flag fly! I’ve already had occasion to recommend Love and Limerence, by the late Dorothy Tennov. It’s a book about what to do if you find yourself in love. This is my favorite self-help book, and I think about it often. An informal poll of The Paris Review office reveals that everyone has been telling us to read The Artist’s Way (“you can skip the spiritual parts”) but that none of us has read it.

I used to frequent Chumley’s and the Cedar Tavern. (I even went to the Algonquin once, thinking that it would be a glamorous throwback, but it turned out to be a tourist trap.) Lately even the White Horse Tavern is overrun with investment bankers. It’s awful. What is the ideal place to spend a few hours drinking—and still feel a hint of New York’s rich literary past—this fall?

It may be a little low on mystique, but if you’re in the Village and want to drink in the company of writers, you can’t go wrong with Cafe Loup. It’s crawling with them—and there’s always plenty of extra martini in the shaker. If you’re hungry, order the fries. In Boerum Hill, writers—those who can still make the rent—tend to congregate at the Brooklyn Inn (a bar that features in Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn). I’ve never been to Scratcher, in the East Village, except when some writer was having a party there—but I’m told it’s hard to tell the difference. If you’re headed uptown, there is always the Carlyle, a perennial tourist trap that happens also to have a wonderful bar, one celebrated in several poems by Frederick Seidel, including “For Holly Anderson.” Read More »

A cultural news roundup.

Boy Reading, by Thomas Pollack Anshutz.

I wasn’t going to say Jane Austen! I find her deeply, deeply depressing. Maybe you feel the same. If you want to read a genteel English novel where the perpetual “friend” gets the upper hand, try The Tortoise and the Hare, by Elizabeth Jenkins. (Jenkins also wrote a biography of Austen, but you can skip that.) You might get a vicarious kick out of Dawn Powell’s 1942 satire of New York media people, A Time to Be Born. Another tale of a friend triumphant. It sounds, though, as if you may be in the market for a seduction manual. I’ve never read one that rang true, sorry to say. Instead it seems to me one should probably read dirty books—starting with something outrageous and perverse, like Bataille’s Story of the Eye—if only because these books, the really dirty ones, give a person courage when she (or he) feels unsexed. They may help you acknowledge your awkward or forbidden feelings toward those guys, even at the risk of rejection. If you’re fed up, as you say, it’s time to act!