May 22, 2012 On the Shelf Burning Books, Listening to Just Kids, Casting Fleming By Sadie Stein For those with Spotify, all the songs mentioned in Just Kids, in playlist form. (Perfect for a rainy day!) Duncan Jones has signed on to direct a biopic of Ian Fleming, based on Andrew Lycett’s The Man Behind James Bond. Everyone knows the man himself okayed Sean Connery to play 007, but who should fill the enigmatic writer-spy’s shoes? A letter from Edgar Allan Poe to Sarah Josepha Hale, author of the poem “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” has sold at auction for $164,000. In it, Poe refuses an offer to publish in Hale’s magazine, explaining, “To send you a crude or hastily written article would be injurious to me, and an insult to yourself—and I fear that I could, at present, do little more.” William Peter Blatty, better known as the author of The Exorcist, is suing Georgetown University in church court, disputing his alma mater’s right to still call themselves Catholic given some of its secular policies. “Frat boys burning textbooks to celebrate graduation burn down frat house.”
May 21, 2012 Bulletin App Time at The Paris Review By The Paris Review As David Carr reported in today’s New York Times, The Paris Review is partnering with The Atavist to bring you an app worthy of the magazine, with complete issues, rare archival material, our entire interview series … and (natch) the Paris Review Daily. Starting late this summer, you’ll be able to read us on your iPad, iPhone, Kindle, Kobo, Nook, or Sony Reader. Foreign readers, take heart! For four decades we’ve been looking for a cheap and timely way to get the Review to our fans abroad. Soon, whether you’re in Melbourne or Milan, you’ll be able to read our stories, interviews, and poems at the same moment as everyone else. Lovers of print, you take heart, too! Even those of us who hold no brief for gizmos will want to check out this app—for hard-to-find back issues, special anthologies, plus audio and video of your favorite writers. This is stuff we can only bring you digitally—and stuff nobody else can bring you. Stay tuned.
May 21, 2012 On History Special Agents: The Women of SOE By Simon Mawer Christine Granville They ranged from girls barely out of high school to mature mothers, from working-class women to aristocrats, from the plain to the beautiful, from the prim and proper to wild high-lifers. The only women from the Western Allies to bear arms in action during the Second World War, they suffered torture, the misery of the concentration camps, and death at the hands of Nazi butchers. They were a band of sisters such as has not been seen before or since, and the only thing they had in common was language—they all spoke French. Now, sixty-seven years after peace broke out in Europe, all but one or two are dead. They are the women agents of the Special Operations Executive, the special force founded in 1940 on the explicit orders of Winston Churchill to “set Europe ablaze.” Read More
May 21, 2012 Books A Panorama of The House of the Seven Gables By Jason Novak A ten-foot-tall panel illustrating the classic novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Click in and scroll down for the whole story. Read More
May 21, 2012 On the Shelf Cuckolds and Commutes: Happy Monday! By Sadie Stein This writers’ workshop is inspired by the 7-train commute. Feel-good alert! A good samaritan bails out an endangered Vermont bookmobile. One affair, two sides of the story: when both cuckold and cad give their versions, and, by the way, the latter is John le Carré. The Marriage Plot, coming to a multiplex near you. (Okay, maybe not a multiplex.) Jay McInerney: “I was fortunate to get a lot of mileage out of my vices.”
May 18, 2012 Ask The Paris Review Improving Writing, Finding Happiness By Lorin Stein How do I improve my prose? The poet and diplomat Paul Claudel once wrote, “To beware the adjective is the beginning of style.” I ought to have written “the French poet and diplomat” or “the great French poet and diplomat,” because sometimes an adjective is a helpful thing; it is easy to take such advice too much to heart. On the whole, though, Claudel is right: most prose gets better if you take out all the adjectives (and adverbs) that you can. Hello, I have recently started reading your most wonderful publication, and I really like your recommendations based on books people have already read! Thank you for this and keep up the good work! Now, to the question about life, I put forth this question to a friend but he didn’t respond, maybe you can help? I’m happy with my life as it is today, but there is no joy of existence! I’ll try to explain this a little, for all that I have I still feel my life is incomplete! Can you help? P.S. I have varied interests, wonderful family, friends, comforts, and all this keeps me happy, and busy, but that feeling of incompleteness always remains! Thank you for your kind words about the Daily! Unfortunately, your question is beyond our pay grade. So I sent it to my mom. I half expected that she would tell you to meditate and drink fewer martinis, but then (as she says), she doesn’t know you. Her response follows! Your question about achieving true joy triggered an image of little Flora in Dickens’s Dombey and Sons. Never has there been such a joyful and generous creature. Then came Scrooge, after he learned that joy and generosity of spirit are inextricably linked. It seems to me that Dickens is onto something. I don’t know you, so it’s hard to say how you will find joy, but I would imagine that if you reached out beyond your family and friends—maybe to tutor a child who needs it, or read to someone in a nursing home, or even just give a ten-dollar bill to the next homeless guy who asks you for money—you may find that a certain amount of joy has been there all along, and you might begin to get the hang of it. Have a question for the editors of The Paris Review? E-mail us.