The Paris Review

Even if you’ve been reading Janet Malcolm for years, the critical appreciations collected in Forty-one False Starts may surprise you. The title essay is (or pretends to be) a series of scrapped beginnings to her profile of the painter David Salle, a giant of the art world in vulnerable mid-career. If you want to write magazine prose, this alone should make you buy the book. Ranging from Bloomsbury to Edward Weston to J.D. Salinger, the entire book is full of stylistic daring, fine distinctions, and bold judgments set down at the speed of thought. —Lorin Stein

The Emperor’s Tomb was the last novel Joseph Roth wrote. Michael Hofmann, whose versions of Roth are all unsettlingly good—more like inhabitations than translations—calls it a “valedictory repertoire of Rothian tropes and characters”: Viennese cafés, feckless and frivolous young men, the call-up to war, the end of Empire, the never-ending nostalgia for Empire. If you’ve read Roth before, you’ll enjoy the new variations on old themes; if you haven’t read Roth, start with The Radetsky March. You won’t want it to end and when it does, reading The Emperor’s Tomb will bring it all back. —Robyn Creswell Read More »

• “You can’t go around buying Cadillacs on what the small mags pay, but that doesn’t really matter, does it?” A new cache of letters by young J. D. Salinger comes to light. 
  
• Granta editor John Freeman is leaving the magazine to teach. 
• Edward de Grazia, a lawyer and free-speech advocate who defended both Tropic of Cancer and Naked Lunch, has died at eighty-six. 
• The strange mystery of the stolen books of Lambeth Palace. 
• The Library of Congress (sort of) comes to terms with eBooks. 

In seventh grade, we read The Catcher in the Rye. One day, Ms. C. handed out xeroxed maps of New York City and asked us to trace Holden Caulfield’s path through New York. We did. “Do you see the pattern?” she kept asking excitedly. “Do you see what it’s all pointing to?” No one did. “He’s heading home! He’s circling around home!” she finally shouted, exasperated. We were collectively underwhelmed. I suspect Holden Caulfield might have been, too.

Maybe our teacher was onto something, though: in a sense, she was urging us to do the same thing Becky Cooper conceived of in her collaborative art project Mapping Manhattan, now collected in a book. A range of New Yorkers—artists, writers, thinkers, kooks—present maps colored (in some cases literally) by their personal experiences. The results are as wide-ranging and fascinating as one might expect. None, that I can see, are leading to the author’s childhood home—but then, if memory serves, I only got a B+ in that class.

Malcolm Gladwell’s map.

• Paavo Anselm Alexis Hollo, a prolific and accomplished poet, critic, and translator, has died at seventy-eight. 
• J. D. Salinger once wrote a biographer that he had “borne all the exploitation and loss of privacy I can possibly bear in a single lifetime.” Luckily for him, he won’t be around for the upcoming biography by David Shields and Shane Salerno, released by Simon & Schuster in September. 
• Courier font has been perfected. Meet Courier Prime, if you dare.
• Robert Silvers, at lunch with the FT, talks editing, Zadie, and keeping the Pentagon Papers at the NYRB offices. 
• “It became clear that we were building a utopian alternate-universe bestseller list—a syllabus for readers who are curious about the best transgressive, funny, gripping memoir and fiction written by every kind of person other than heterosexual men.” On the founding of Emily Books. 

Rose Burgunder and William Styron.

To John P. Marquand, Jr.

April 17, 1953 Rome, Italy

Dear Jack:

I received your telegram, and I must say that Rose and I feel that there would be nothing more delightful than to play Byron with you for a while, and we were especially intrigued by the line which said a special tour was being arranged, or would be arranged, “in our honor,” which conjured up visions of open, bullet-proof sedans, police escorts, and jonquils being thrown into our faces by a frantic populace. It would indeed be nice. But we have talked this thing over and have decided that in view of the fact that we will probably be getting married within the next few weeks, and that Rose’s brother and wife are expected at any moment, it would put a strain on our nervous resources to come, at least my nervous resources, already depleted by a soggy, constant drunkenness brought on in part by the prospect of marriage, by insomnia, by clots, and by a general spiritual enervation resulting from the realization that already, going on 28, I am a wash-up as a writer and fit only to do the “Recent & Readable” part of the book section in Time. In other words, I will be going through a crisis this spring and although I don’t doubt that Greece is an excellent place to weather such a storm, I hope you can understand my position. I hope also, by the way, that when you finish diddling your Greek lady-in-waiting you will come back to Rome in time to take part in the shoddy ceremony which is due to be enacted in the city hall. That will be some time toward the end of this month, no doubt, or the first week or so in May.

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