July 11, 2012 On the Shelf Potter, Proust, and Papa By Sadie Stein Many happy returns, M. Proust. Many happy returns, Ms. Munro! Beatrix Potter illustrations go on the block. Listen to William Faulkner read his 1954 Nobel acceptance speech. Finding the Great New Jersey Novel. A Hemingway-themed vacation.
July 10, 2012 Bulletin See You There: Paris Review at the Strand, Tomorrow! By Sadie Stein Mark your calendars! Tomorrow, Wednesday, July 11, join The Paris Review and the Strand for the second in a series of literary salons. Enjoy wine (from Sip) and words (read by Amber Tamblyn) with two New York institutions. See you there! Wednesday, July 11, 7 P.M.–8:30 P.M. The Strand Bookstore, third-floor Rare Book Room 828 Broadway at Twelfth Street Admission: Buy a copy of the current Paris Review or a $15 Strand gift card. To reserve your seat, click here.
July 10, 2012 On Sports Time Out By Chris Wallace Late in the third quarter of a blowout loss at North Torrance High School my junior year I woke up in a blurry huddle. Grids of stadium lighting were smeared on the South Bay night sky as if they’d been moved before they dried. My teammates stood around me in their away whites, the sateen jerseys looking smudged and shabby in the dark. I shouldn’t have been surprised if a star suddenly dilated just to wink at me, such was my loopy state of mind—and my self-regard as a high school quarterback. A timeout had been called, apparently. There was no apparent rush to get back to the line of scrimmage, run another play. And our coach was in the huddle with us. Oh, thank god, I thought, Coach is playing. I’d never seen him in uniform before, but didn’t think to question it—we needed all the help we could get. Though, standing next to the star receiver with whom he’d traded outfits, he did look a lot taller than normal. Reassuring counsel was given by someone, maybe me, as we gathered ourselves to go back on. We settled on a simple play: everyone run as far as you can as fast as you can, and I’ll throw the ball to one of you, ready, break. I stepped under center in a kind of euphoria, took the snap, dropped back and threw our coach—or, rather, the receiver onto whom I’d transposed Coach’s face—a forty-two-yard touchdown, and walked off the field, vindicated and giggling. A blink and it was two hours later. Read More
July 10, 2012 On the Shelf Reading Children, Posthumous Novels By Sadie Stein William Faulkner’s first published work, from the 1919 New Republic. Woody Guthrie’s unpublished novel will be published next year, with a little help from Johnny Depp. If you’ve never seen Émile Zola’s legendary “J’Accuse!” editorial, the Los Angeles Review of Books has helpfully shared it. If Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester texted. The Dorothy Parker Facebook page FAQ is the ne plus ultra of dead author Fabecbook page FAQs. Vintage photos of children reading.
July 9, 2012 Contests Win a Bicycle! By Lorin Stein My predecessor George Plimpton was known for cycling around New York before it was either cool or safe (before, some would say, it was sane). And nowadays, we at TPR are still devoted city bikers; our rides can be found chained up and down White Street. So in celebration of the Tour de France—and thanks to the generosity of Hudson Urban Bikes—we, along with Velojoy, are giving away one of Hudson Urban Bikes’ Beater Bicycles Roadster. This classic city bike comes in a men’s and a women’s model, both of which may be seen in the diabolical and rather enigmatic illustration below. Read More
July 9, 2012 At Work Home to Darkness: An Interview with Playwright Tom Murphy By Belinda McKeon Sit in a theater for a Tom Murphy play and I can guarantee you one thing: you will come out of that theater rattled, and throttled, and staggered, in the best of all possible ways. It might take a long moment, afterwards, to catch your breath; use that moment to listen to the torrent of marvelous language that will still be surging through your head. That tussle of starkness and poetry. Murphy doesn’t give us lyricism the way that Irish writers, apparently, are meant to do; he gives us blunt and beautiful rhythm. He doesn’t give us laughter in that way either, though audiences will inevitably seek it out, and connect, in the sting of that laughter falling wrongly, with the defiantly dark intelligence of Murphy’s vision: guffaw at all the drinking scenes, if you will, but these are broken lives, and there’s no joking that away. Tom Murphy is Ireland’s greatest living dramatist. We say things like that in Ireland—Ireland’s greatest this, Ireland’s greatest that—as though it means anything in the greater scheme of things. Who cares what Ireland thinks is great? Tom Murphy doesn’t. But it’s true of him, that accolade, I promise you. Read More