August 3, 2011 Contests Beach Towel Contest: We Have a Winner! By Sadie Stein This was a tough one. We asked you to photoshop an author of your choice onto our beach towel. The entries were truly staggering in their creativity and execution (as you can see for yourselves.) But there can only be one grand-prize beach-towel winner. First, our wonderful runners-up, all of whom win ever-chic Paris Review tees. “Bukowski Relaxing” by b_lazy. Read More
August 3, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Facebook has acquired Push Pop Press, a start-up that converts books into iPad- and iPhone-friendly formats. “Until a few years ago, hardly a day would go by in the summer without the mailman bringing a postcard from a vacationing friend or acquaintance. Nowadays, you’re bound to get an email enclosing a photograph, or, if your grandchildren are the ones doing the traveling, a brief message telling you that their flight has been delayed or that they have arrived.” Vote for the top one hundred science-fiction and fantasy titles. Anyone for retro cocktails? Joanna Lumley is raising funds to convert the home that helped inspire Peter Pan into a children’s literature center. In praise of small-town papers. Remembering Elizabeth Mackintosh—aka Josephine Tey, aka Gordon Daviot. Meet the new Spider-Man: Brooklynite Miles Morales. The New Yorker conquers the iPad. A guide to literary Edinburgh. #undatable—the literary characters you really wouldn’t want to date. Please judge these Virago Modern Classics by their gorgeous covers!
August 3, 2011 Correspondence Document: Woolf’s Letter to a Young Poet By Sarah Funke Butler Copyright © The Estate of Virginia Woolf, 2011. Virginia Woolf, who had no children of her own, famously directed much of her maternal energy to the offspring of Vanessa Bell, her sole full sister and long-standing dust-jacket designer. Vanessa’s oldest son Julian was Woolf’s particular favorite. He was named for Virginia’s brother Julian Thoby Stephen, who died of typhoid at the age of twenty-six on a trip to Greece. Thoby, as he was called, inspired Woolf to write Jacob’s Room, in which she rendered the protagonist chiefly through others’ memories; the pain of his loss was such that, even in fiction, she strained against summoning him by direct account. When the younger Julian decided to pursue poetry, his aunt Virginia offered the blend of succor and static seen in this previously unpublished letter. Composed in Woolf’s signature purple ink, and dated simply “Thursday,” the letter reads in full: “Thursday. My dear Julian. I like the poem very much. It still wants CURRENCY I think. When did you write it? It shall be the cornerstone of my new library at Rodmell. But this is to say—please be here 7:30 sharp tomorrow (Friday) as we want you to drive Rachel & us to a restaurant.” Read More
August 2, 2011 Arts & Culture Adaptation By Sadie Stein On a recent Friday evening I went to see the new documentary Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness at a West Side theater that, on any given day, swings heavily Jewish and seriously elderly and on this occasion surpassed itself on both counts. The audience arrived early, settled slowly, talked loudly, and laughed at Yiddish jokes before they were translated, probably among the last people in the world able to do so. My own few words of the language—picked up in a class I briefly flirted with at the 92nd Street Y—were of little help. That class was held only a few blocks from my grandparents’ apartment, and each week, I’d go there afterward for a late dinner. They were glad to see me regularly—I wasn’t, typically, on the Upper East Side—but the nature of the class made the dinners particularly meaningful. My grandfather would speak to me in Yiddish. I’d known it was his first language, of course, but he never spoke it normally, and it was surprising to see him slip into it as if eighty years hadn’t elapsed. My grandfather, who died earlier this year, was a librettist, which is to say he wrote the dialogue for musicals. He started in radio, worked in early TV, and in the fifties made the move to Broadway. Looking for new material in the early sixties, he rediscovered Sholem-Aleichem’s tales of shtetl life and transformed them into an unlikely musical that became Fiddler on the Roof. (He had come to my sixth-grade class and told us about its inception—the difficulty of finding producers, the skeptics and naysayers, the creative team’s unwavering commitment to the project—during our “Immigration” unit.) Read More
August 1, 2011 Notes from a Biographer The Angel of Forgetfulness By Tracy Daugherty Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 was first published fifty years ago this fall. Heller’s biographer, Tracy Daugherty, marks the occasion with a consideration of the author’s legacy. Joseph Heller in Rome, summer 1966. Courtesy Erica Heller. In the early 1970s, during the period he was writing his second novel, Something Happened, Joseph Heller, approaching his fifties, fretted about his health. He was shocked by how bloated he looked in mirrors. The double chins in his publicity photos bothered him. He began working out regularly at a YMCA in the sixties on Broadway in Manhattan, running four miles a day on a small track there. “The Angel of Death is in the gym today,” said the Y’s patrons every so often. Not infrequently, ambulance crews showed up to cart away, on a stretcher, an elderly man in a T-shirt and shorts who had collapsed while running or doing chin-ups. While exercising, Heller avoided meeting anyone’s eyes. He pursued his laps with grim seriousness. He worried about the slightest ache or twinge—in his lower back, bladder, calves, the tendons of his ankles, or bottoms of his feet. Sometimes, faint vertical pains shot through his chest and up through his collarbone. This was a hell of a way to try to feel better. In this melancholy spirit (stretching, rolling his arms to ease the needling pains), he squirreled away portions of Something Happened in a locker at the Y, in case fire ran through his apartment or his writing studio, or he keeled over one day. In the spring of 1974—a fit fifty-one-year-old—he completed the manuscript to his satisfaction and decided to copy it for his agent. He took his teenage daughter, Erica, with him to the copy shop. “I figured if a car hit me, if I got mugged, or if I dropped dead of a heart attack, the manuscript might still be saved,” he later told Erica. Read More
July 29, 2011 Bulletin The Beach Towel: Now for Sale! By The Paris Review We’ve heeded your wishes and, by popular demand, our super-duper Leanne Shapton–illustrated Paris Review beach towel is now available for purchase, yours for a very reasonable $20. But wait! For only $20 more, you can add a full year of fiction and poetry. That’s right: with the price of a subscription, the towel can be yours, free. The smartest towel of summer and reading material to match? That’s what we call a deal.