July 24, 2012 Arts & Culture Advice to a Young Illustrator By Sadie Stein 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!
July 24, 2012 On Music Tapes on Books: Mrs. Dalloway By Christine Muhlke and Leanne Shapton A literary soundtrack inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
July 24, 2012 Bulletin Dogs, Scientologists, and Ipanema By Sadie Stein Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto, Ipanema “The Girl from Ipanema” is fifty! (Not the real one—she’s sixty-seven—but the bossa nova classic.) It is the second-most-covered song, after “Yesterday.” A graduate student at King’s College London has discovered a previously unknown 1909 short story by Katherine Mansfield in the university library. Read an excerpt from “A Little Episode” here. What these writers think about when they think about running. What Maira Kalman thinks about herself. The most beloved dogs in literature? We think Nana Darling was robbed. Portrait of the artist as a young Scientologist: a 1969 BBC interview with a teenage Neil Gaiman, then a believer. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
July 23, 2012 First Person Letter from India: The Best Restaurant in the World By Amie Barrodale My friend edits a travel magazine. She lets me review hotels. This means that I can stay at nice hotels free in return for a short review. (The magazine doesn’t pay either; it’s done “on trade.”) I can write four or five hotel reviews a year. Whenever I suggest more, my friend (who is a close friend of more than ten years) goes silent. I recently arranged to stay at the Hotel in Delhi for two nights on trade. Rooms there start at six hundred dollars, and (uncharacteristically) they included everything—food, minibar, spa, airport pick-up and drop-off—in the trade. I mean it was all, to use their very polite and reassuring word, complimentary. Alcohol would have cost, they did say, but I am not a person who drinks anymore. I recently lost my privileges. The thing about a free hotel stay is that you pay in time, in tours, and in the unspoken requirement that you ask questions, feign amazement, and jot notes about wall hangings, historic meetings, and persons who have sat in so-and-so chair. (“How do you spell that name? So wonderful. So he really sat here? May I sit?”) Read More
July 23, 2012 On the Shelf Create Your Own Genie; Listen to Beckett By Sadie Stein The Cygnus Ensemble is presenting three original musical pieces to accompany Samuel Beckett plays. “Omitting letters can confuse. How is the poor reader expected to differentiate between b******* and b*******?” Jonathan Swift and the question of truth. “E-books appear to be doing for religious books what they did for erotica.” Happy (belated) birthday to scholar, teacher, and Norton Anthology founder M. H. Abrams. Create your own genie to win a bookstore gift certificate. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
July 20, 2012 Ask The Paris Review Dear Paris Review, Where Do I Publish? By Lorin Stein Dear Editors: Have made writing full time. Have novel and short essays. Attended NYU’s Summer Writer program last year. Would you have a good list of places for submissions beyond The Paris Review, The New Yorker and The New York Times? Thank you for reaching out via Twitter and offering some of us (hopefully lovable) newbies some guidance. Dear Newbie, We get asked this a lot. It’s a reasonable question, but it always makes our hearts sink. Here’s the thing: no matter how many classes you take, no matter how much time you spend at the keyboard, you cannot write seriously unless you read. And that means, partly, reading your contemporaries. Their problems are your problems; you can’t write—that is, you can’t write for serious readers—until you know what the problems are. Read More