The Paris Review

In 1961, a thirty-three-year-old Maurice Sendak wrote his editor, Harper & Row’s Ursula Nordstrom, about his self-doubts as a writer. Letters of Note presents her response. It is full of great advice, but we especially love this:

The great Russians and Melville and Balzac etc. wrote in another time, in leisure, to be read in leisure. I know what you mean about those long detailed rich novels—my god the authors knew all about war, and agriculture, and politics. But that is one type of writing, for a more leisurely time than ours. You have your own note to sound, and you are sounding it with greater power and beauty all the time. Yes, Moby Dick is great, but honestly don't you see great gobs of it that could come out? Does that offend you, coming from a presumptuous editor? I remember lines of the most piercing beauty (after he made a friend there was something beautiful about “no more would my splintered hand and shattered heart be turned against the wolfish world.”) But there are many passages which could have been cut.

Presciently, she added:

33 is still young for an artist with your potentialities. I mean, you may not do your deepest, fullest, richest work until you are in your forties. You are growing and getting better all the time.

No kidding: Sendak would write Where the Wild Things Are two years later, and the rest is children’s book history!

Salman Rushdie and Jonathan Lethem are among the seven hundred writers and cultural marchers who signed a letter protesting the planned revamp of the New York Public Library.

Dickens isn’t the only one turning two hundred! Wishing a happy bicentenary to Robert Browning.

Madame Bovary, the pie chart.

The James Joyce papers go digital.

Maurice Sendak’s books thrilled children and terrified adults.

And speaking of Sendak, more memories and tributes.

Rock 27 is publishing eighty-three.

Book sales around the world in real time.

America’s Next Top Writer?

The Columbia custodian turned Columbia honors grad!

Maurice Sendak’s life in pictures.

Sendak speaking on his eightieth birthday.

It is with great sadness that we note the death, at eighty-three, of legendary writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak. In books like Where the Wild Things Are, Outside Over There, The Nutshell Library, The Sign on Rosie’s Door and many more, Sendak defined childhood for many of us.

Last September, we ran this interview with Mr. Sendak; his inimitable wit, wisdom, and legendary cantankerousness came through loud and clear.

We’re out this week, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2011 while we’re away. We hope you enjoy—and have a happy New Year!

Maurice Sendak is set to publish his first full-production book since Outside Over There (1981). For the past thirty years, Sendak has been collaborating with other writers, illustrating old texts, designing sets and costumes for opera and ballet productions, creating advertisements and book and magazine covers, and making the occasional HBO cameo as an old-world rabbi. But with Bumble-Ardy, Sendak is reemerging in the form that he has, since 1963’s Where the Wild Things Are, come to define: children’s stories.

Bumble-Ardy is a pig, raised by an aunt, who is built like a house and who lives in a house that looks like a ruin. This aunt is doing her best with poor Bumble, a child who was orphaned when his parents “gorged and gained weight. / And got ate.” That tragic turn of events may have been for the best, as Bumble’s lousy parents never once got around to throwing the boy a birthday party (his birthday is June 10, the same as Sendak’s). So, on his ninth birthday, Bumble secretly invites over terrifying hordes of local swine, who arrive in disguise for a bacchanalia of “birthday cake and brine.” The party ends in hoggish chaos, in tears and threats of slaughter—and, finally, with a measure of forgiveness.

Why the decision to go with a pig? Why not a hedgehog?

I’ve always loved pigs: the shape of them, the look of them, and the fact that they are so intelligent. I think I like them more than I like little human boys. The prospect of drawing pigs was something I could look forward to, and I needed something to look forward to. This project was done under very difficult circumstances. Somebody very important to me was dying painfully, horribly, slowly, and it leaves you questioning everything. Read More »

I absolutely love ghost stories. What luck that Collected Ghost Stories by M. R. James showed up in the office! I snatched it up greedily and I’ve been reading one every night. —Sadie Stein

It’s a truism that art and politics rarely come together without shortchanging at least one, but every once in a while there’s a sublime exception to the rule. Neutral Milk Hotel frontman Jeff Mangum’s performance at Occupy Wall Street was one. “Sing if you know the words.” I did. —Peter Conroy

Mice couriers, man-tree love, sushi-chef assassins, hydro-powered-car chases, propagandist skywriting, a sinister banjo contest, Internet 5.0, and a mystery drug made from dead trees. Matthew Thurber’s weird and wonderful 1-800-Mice is the Gravity’s Rainbow–Sherlock Holmes–Professor Sutwell–Inspector Clouseau–Silent Spring of comics. If you don’t believe me, behold the rap. —Nicole Rudick

If you have never seen nor heard of the British television series Black Books, I highly recommend checking it out. It ran from 2000–2004 and depicts a mostly inebriated foul-tempered Irishman, Bernard Black, who runs a small bookshop in London with his goofy assistant Manny and their loopy friend Fran. —Lauren Goldenberg

This is one of the more complex and beautiful tributes to Steve Jobs I have read. —Artie Niederhoffer

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? I’m intrigued by this investigation on the origins of the Bitcoin. —Natalie Jacoby

I have a certain fascination with The Financial Times’s advice column, which I read with anthropological zeal. Agony Uncle Sir David Tang, “founder of ICorrect, globetrotter and the man about too many towns to mention,” pulls no punches on subjects of etiquette. Take last weekend’s question, from a reader who writes that, “I find that the classiest thing to do with shades is to push them up over your forehead. But it does get complicated if you’re using hair product.” Tang’s response is swift and unsparing: “To push your sunglasses over your forehead is pretentiously après ski and distinctly Eurotrash. It is also effeminate for men to do so. Only Sophia Loren could get away with it. So I don’t know what you are talking about when you call the habit ‘the classiest,’ which you seem not to be. And forget about hair product. There is a greater danger for those wearing a toupee or wig, as sunglasses could push it back to expose a large shiny forehead, reminiscent of that shudderingly shocking Telly Savalas.” —S. S.

Reading Frank Bill’s Crimes in Southern Indiana is not entirely unlike being hit by an 18-wheeler.  Two sentences in, there’s already a drug deal gone bad and a gun pointed at a dealer’s unibrow. Crimes never lets up (though bodies start piling up), but the real strength of the book is how Bill insists on giving three dimensions to life at the desperate ass-end of the American Dream—without once veering into romanticization or voyeurism. You sure as hell wouldn’t want to live anywhere near the towns in these stories, but you can’t help admiring the guy who’s been there and come back to tell the tale. —P. C.

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