September 13, 2019 Eat Your Words Cooking with Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. It has long been a dream of mine to steal or reprise the premise of a column called War Nerd, which ran in the English-language Moscow newspaper the eXile in the nineties. As I recall, the column examined contemporary conflicts and current events with an awareness of the region’s history of war. Since war and war history are among my reading preoccupations, or were before I became a cooking-from-literature columnist and my reading list skewed almost entirely to “books with food in them” or “books that might have food in them,” I imagined myself qualified. The modern Italian classic The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957), has both food and war, but alas it showed up that dream as a delusion—a brief Google search determined that the original War Nerd, Gary Brecher, is still at it for a relaunched online version of the eXile. The Leopard’s setting is Sicily in 1860, the year Garibaldi returned from exile and the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy, began. Prior to that, as many of us remember vaguely from high school history, modern Italy was a cluster of nation-states, often ruled by foreign powers. Sicily, united with Naples as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, was ruled by a French Bourbon king. Lampedusa was a descendent of Sicilian aristocracy, and the book is loosely based on the experiences of his great-grandfather, who appears as the character Don Fabrizio Corbera, prince of Salina. I have long wondered why, exactly, The Leopard is so popular in America—more than one well-meaning literary friend has tried to force it upon me, and until a recent decluttering, I had two copies of it, without having read it once. The book is beautifully written and has a sexy subplot about chaste young lovers feverishly fondling each other in the abandoned rooms of the baroque family castle, but don’t many deserving yet obscure works-in-translation fit those categories? Moreover, the Italy it presents is not the one we think we know. Read More
September 12, 2019 Re-Covered Re-Covered: Margaret Drabble’s 1977 Brexit Novel By Lucy Scholes Margaret Drabble is so well known that seeing her included in this column might confuse some readers. Writing in the New York Times only two years ago, when Drabble’s most recent novel, The Dark Flood Rises, was published, Cynthia Ozick described the then seventy-eight-year-old as “one of Britain’s most dazzling writers,” and the work in question—Drabble’s nineteenth novel—as “humane and masterly.” In her sort-of memoir, The Pattern in the Carpet, Drabble describes writing as a “chronic, incurable illness,” one she caught “by default when I was twenty-one”; her first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, was published three years later when she was only twenty-four. And yet, though she herself is not forgotten, certain of her works have fallen out of print. Perhaps it’s inevitable that in a career as long as hers, some of what she’s written would, despite its brilliance, have slipped through the cracks. The Ice Age—Drabble’s eighth novel, originally published in 1977—is one such example. Having spent much of this summer reading Drabble’s perceptive, elegantly written work, I can say with confidence that this one stands out from the rest. First, it marked the moment when Drabble turned her attention from the small-scale worlds of a protagonist’s individual struggle to what Patrick Parrinder described as her later, “settled, capacious, Condition-of-England chronicles, prolonged ruminations on the way we live now.” Her earliest protagonists were young women, often of the same age and background as Drabble herself—she grew up in Sheffield, was educated at a Quaker school in York, took a double first at Cambridge, tried her hand at acting with the Royal Shakespeare Company, then moved to London and began writing while also looking after her young family (she had three children with her first husband, Clive Swift)—who find the values of their youth challenged when they come up against a more metropolitan world. In The Ice Age, however, there’s a shift in focus from the individual to the collective, and Drabble’s fiction takes on a strong sociological angle. Interviewed for this magazine in the fall of 1978, only a year after The Ice Age was published, she admits that “the whole idea” for it “came from reading newspapers.” Read More
September 12, 2019 First Person Who Was My Mother? By Sallie Tisdale © somemeans / Adobe Stock. I’ve lived in a garage, a dormitory, a screened-in porch, and more than one basement. I’ve owned three houses. After my divorce and the divestiture of common property, I moved into a small second-floor apartment in a large complex of handsome brick buildings originally used as military family housing. Here, we have hardwood floors, tiny kitchens, big trees, lousy wiring. Hardly anyone in the complex draws their curtains. I walk my dog in the evening, and behind the disguise of his slow rooting in the shrubbery, I get brief, cropped shots of other lives. A deer head with an impressive rack mounted on a wall painted navy blue. Two women at a dining table, heads close. A father drilling his kids in calisthenics, barking like a sergeant. A man practicing piano, the faint, rapid scales barely audible through the glass. A young couple, so unformed they seem to be made of putty, pushing a pair of Chihuahuas in a baby stroller down the walk. A dour woman sitting on the steps of the building where I get my mail, smoking. She refuses to move so I can enter; her profound distaste for the world seems immutable, genetic. Below me, in #2, a couple approaches punk’s middle age: she has ropy dreadlocks, and he has a ropy beard, and both have a lot of ink. Through the windows, I can see the Tibetan prayer flags, the bicycles, the aquarium. Sometimes I hear hammering below, and their bulldog yaps every time I pass the door. In six years as neighbors, we have learned each other’s names and exchange occasional comments about the weather. Once I helped them jump their car battery, but I have never been in their apartment. When our basement storage units are broken into, I wake them up early in the morning with the news. It is a voyeur’s dream come true, the storage units open, spilling out contents: A dishwasher. Bicycles. An artificial Christmas tree. Dog crate. Old skis. An antique mirror. We pad around the mess in our pajamas, in our sudden, brief intimacy, sorting out what is theirs and what is mine. And what is mine to know. Read More
September 11, 2019 Bulletin Six Young Women and Their Book Collections By The Paris Review In 2017, Honey & Wax Booksellers established an annual prize for American women book collectors, aged thirty years and younger. The idea took shape when Heather O’Donnell and Rebecca Romney, the bookstore’s owners, observed that “the women who regularly buy books from us are less likely to call themselves ‘collectors’ than the men, even when those women have spent years passionately collecting books.” By providing a financial incentive to them, and a forum in which to celebrate and share their collections, O’Donnell and Romney hope to encourage a new generation of women. This year, they write, “We were impressed by the many contestants whose initial collecting interests put them in pursuit of unusual material not available for Prime delivery: vintage, underground, out-of-print, annotated, foreign, small press, or self-published finds.” We are pleased to unveil the winner of the 2019 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize, who will receive $1,000, as well as five honorable mentions, who will each receive $250. WINNER Emily Forster: Fan-Made Comics and Dōjinshi Emily Forster, twenty-eight, is a cartoonist in New York City. She has amassed a collection of almost five hundred original fan-made comics, from photocopied zines to hardcover anthologies, primarily the self-published comics known in Japan as dōjinshi. “Most of the modern-day distinctions between official and derivative art—and the assumptions of quality attached to each—were based on concerns of property, not an evaluation of the art itself. There was something incredibly alluring to me about comics art created at a professional standard of quality without the expectation of professional reward,” Forster writes in an essay about the collection. Forster’s essay offers a series of insights about the fan-made books she collects, gradually revealing the narrative conventions, circumstances of production, and readership of the material. Honey & Wax says, “We admired her observations on the power structures ‘fanfic’ subverts, her attraction to ‘the ultra-niche within the niche,’ and her insistence on ‘what is beautiful about the illegitimate, the indulgent, and the disposable.’ ” Read More
September 11, 2019 Arts & Culture Artworks in the Room Where I Write By Diane Williams Diane Williams’s story “Garden Magic” appears in our Fall 2019 issue. We asked her to give us a tour of the objects in her office. The artworks in the room where I write inhabit my fiction everywhere, and those of them that are not explicitly conjured nevertheless recommend themselves to me daily. If I look to the right, while sitting in my chair, I follow the travels of Ebenezer Wright’s jerry-rigged adventurer with whom I readily identify. He is a vintage toy clown, riding a scooter, coasting on a roadway—wholly dependent, it seems, on a wing butterfly screw. His destination is a formidable one and he is so eager—he’s on tiptoe. For if he keeps faith with the gray-shaded, curving pathway that he began the journey on, he’ll soon arrive at the Great Sphinx—situated only inches above him. Read More
September 11, 2019 First Person The Sticky Tar Pit of Time By Maria Tumarkin A cat running. Collotype after Eadweard Muybridge, 1887. Credit: Wellcome Collection, via Wikimedia Commons. This morning—that morning, rather—two men in my train carriage lift their heads—two men in their fifties in silky, understated ties—then there is a little snap, like a red light camera going off, and even before the next stop gets announced they’re leaning into each other laughing, How long has it been? Must be forty years give or take. What’s been happening? They run through their classmates: two cancers (one in chemo, one cannot hack chemo), a property development fraud, one guy (just on the other side of a protracted settlement) with too many ex-wives (stupid bastard, he and them deserve each other). A pause. Please don’t tell me it’s all there is. Fraud, cancer, bad marriages, being caught, extricating yourself, chance encounters on trains; can you remember the last time life felt long or kind, or like it was yours and mine? My phone vibrates, one time only for texts. “Make sure you don’t have scissors, nail files, anything sharp.” It’s Vanda. Thank you, Vanda. Shhh. In front of me is time. Time is not a river. It is two strangers on a train whose briefcases touch as they hold each other. Two men who’ll never ride the same train again. Read More