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Trollope Triumphant, and Other News

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On the Shelf

Portrait_of_Anthony_Trollope

The face of a winner.

  • When Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children was published in 1880, he had cut, presumably on a publisher’s order, some sixty-five thousand words—almost a quarter of the original manuscript. “Although Trollope did not delete any of his eighty chapters, he removed consecutive paragraphs in some places; in others, he cut sentences, phrases and words, even replacing a word with one which was slightly shorter on some occasions.” Now an unabridged version of the novel will finally see print.
  • Fornicators! Addicts! Indigents! Orange-juice drinkers! They’re all part of a day in the life of Marko Petrovich, a library security guard in Portland, Maine. “Once in a while a librarian will have security cover a desk while they run to the bathroom or do something quick. Then they return to find that Petrovich has reset the computer desktop background to a portrait of himself.”
  • In 1906, Van Tassel Sutphen’s novel The Doomsman made peculiar predictions about life in the New York City of 2015. “Sutphen’s book imagines that the world of 2015 has devolved into three tribes: the Painted People, the House People, and the marauding Doomsmen. Keeps, drawbridges, archery, and Sirs and Ladies have grown back as thickly as vines over the ruins of American civilization. At the center of it all is the city of Doom.”
  • Donatello’s sculpture of the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk may be the most significant marble statue of the fifteenth century. “ ‘Speak, damn you, speak!’ Donatello, we are told, repeatedly shouted at the statue while carving it … the story may be apocryphal. Still, it points to the fundamental appeal of Donatello’s sculptures: by some strange magic they seem to capture the phantom of life.”
  • Is your teenage daughter sinking into an abyss of nihilism and despair? Leaving poems in her footwear may help. “People have been in pain before, struggled to find hope, and look what they’ve done with it. They made poetry that landed right in your shoe.”
  • Peter Gizzi, who has three poems in our new Spring issue, is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his collection In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011.