April 10, 2012 On the Shelf Scandals, Contests, and Noms de Guerre By Sadie Stein RIP Christine Brooke-Rose, an experimental novelist who has died at eighty-nine. Quoth the New York Times, she had “the ardor of a philologist, the fingers of a prestidigitator and the appetite of a lexivore, resulting in novels that exhilarated many critics and enervated others.” The ALA’s list of 2011’s most-challenged books includes To Kill a Mockingbird, The Hunger Games, and My Mom’s Having a Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler. Amazing movie-title stills. England’s poet laureate takes on the Pendle Witches. “This was a grisly affair, even by the debased standards of the day, with two of the women hanged at Lancaster castle aged over eighty and blind, another probably driven mad by a disfigured face with one eye lower than the other, and all ten convicted largely on the evidence of a nine-year-old child.” You surely know O. Henry’s real name, and the pen names of the Brontes … but there are some real surprises on this list of authorial noms de guerre! At the New York Public Library, Thoreau goes digital. Ninety-six-year-old Herman Wouk’s latest novel, The Lawgiver, chronicles the making of a movie about Moses via “letters, memos, emails, journals, news articles, recorded talk, tweets, Skype transcripts, and text messages.” A literary tattoo showdown. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. contest rewards the winner, appropriately, with classic pulp.
April 9, 2012 Books Secret Gardens By Vanessa Blakeslee It is nearly impossible to imagine the best-selling authors of today living in Downton Abbey grandiosity. Stephen King as the Earl of Grantham? J. K. Rowling as the Lady of the manor? Yet for Frances Hodgson Burnett, the wild popularity of her prolific literary output made such a home her reality for nearly a decade—where an overgrown, neglected garden inspired the Victorian author’s most enduring work, The Secret Garden. That she is now solely regarded as a children’s book author would have stupefied her, for she produced fifty-two novels and thirteen plays, the majority written for adults. When Burnett moved into Great Maytham Hall in Kent, she was a far more popular success than her cohort Henry James, who lived down the road; with her plays bringing in more than a thousand dollars a week, she was her era’s equivalent of Rowling. Read More
April 9, 2012 On the Shelf Smokable Songbooks, Controversial Vodka By Sadie Stein Lindsay Gibbs’s Titanic: The Tennis Story recounts how tennis players and Titanic passengers Dick Williams and Karl Behr met on a rescue ship and went on to become Davis Cup partners—as historical fiction. Unfortunately, the subjects’ descendants aren’t thrilled about the novel, particularly by the fact that the launch party will be sponsored by Iceberg Vodka. The words in poor taste were bandied. Snoop Dogg has released a smokable book. That is all. “The first time I went to [the British National Science Fiction Convention], all I could see was a sea of white, male faces … I found it very disheartening, and I knew I could either go away and never go to another con or try to do something about it.” After writing a poem critical of Israel, Günter Grass has been banned by that country’s Interior Minister. In honor of the Mets’ fiftieth, you can get e-versions of Jimmy Breslin’s Queens-centric classics. In honor of the Mets’ sweep, you can read The Paris Review interview with die-hard Mets fan P. G. Wodehouse. Cartoonist Christoph Niemann draws the books on his nightstand.
April 9, 2012 On Music Music of the Heart? By Sadie Stein When Mad Men featured a kittenish cover of Gillian Hills’s “Zou Bisou Bisou,” it promptly started making waves on iTunes. One hopes their ending with the perennially macabre 1962 Crystals single “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)” won’t have the same effect, despite the song’s enduring place in both the camp and gender-studies canons. It’s jarring to discover that Natural Woman Carole King was behind the lyrics (apparently inspired by Little Eva’s disclosures about her boyfriend’s domestic violence) and even more so when you think that Phil Spector masterminded the arrangement. Public outcry ultimately forced Spector to pull the record. Grizzly Bear is only one of the recent bands to cover the song (it was a Hole staple, too), and it makes us wonder if some things, even today, can’t be safely padded with irony.
April 6, 2012 Ask The Paris Review Drinking with Carp By Sadie Stein My dear Editors, This weekend is slated for sun. I would like to celebrate out on my fire escape, with a cocktail and a mean read. For the optimistic lush, what combination is best? Sincerely, Sauced I mean, if you want drinking without considering consequences—which is to say, not The Lost Weekend or Under the Volcano—I guess you can’t top the beats: Big Sur, On the Road, any Bukowski. If you want your whiskey straight up, try The Long Goodbye. How can you go wrong with a novel that begins, “The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox, he was drunk.” That said, the only story I can think of that deals specifically with a warm-weather drink is Roald Dahl’s Pimm’s-featuring “Georgy Porgy,” which no one could call soothing. How is one to live in a post-Revel world? Why, with the stacks of past Paris Review and New York Review of Books issues the event celebrated, of course! (A few vitamin C tablets and gallons of water never hurt, either.) What should I give my seven-year-old daughter to read for Passover? The Carp in the Bathtub. But NB: she will never eat gefilte fish again. Have a question for the editors of The Paris Review? E-mail us.
April 6, 2012 Bulletin Vote for TPR in the Final! By Sadie Stein Thanks to our fan loyalty, we have made it to the finals in the Battle of the LitMags. But can we take down worthy rival Georgia Review? It’s a clash of the Titans! But our money’s on our readers. Vote now!