5 September 2008
Joshua Henkin Goes All Out on the Book Blogs
Categories: uncategorized |
Last year, when his debut novel, Matrimony, came out, Joshua Henkin contributed two guest essays to Beatrice, writing about staying with your characters over time and condensing a twenty-year story to 300 pages. Now that Matrimony is out in paperback, Henkin’s winding his way through the blogosphere again, with (among other efforts) a marathon session at The Elegant Variation (24 posts in one day!) and longer meditations on book groups and online book culture at Booksquare. Well worth a look.
4 September 2008
James Agee, “Two Songs on the Economy of Abundance”
Categories: poetry |
Temperance Note: and Weather Prophecy
Watch well The Poor in this late hour
Before the wretched wonder stop:
Who march along a thundershower
And never touch a drop.Red Sea
How long this way: that everywhere
We make our march the water stands
Apart and all our wine is air
And all our ease the emptied sands?
From James Agee: Selected Poems, the latest volume in the Library of America’s American Poets Project, which reminds us that for all the other types of writing Agee practiced—from fiction to journalism to film criticism—he considered himself a poet first.
Other Agee poems online include “Permit Me Voyage” and Sunday: Outskirts of Knoxville, Tennessee.”
3 September 2008
Three International Literary Sensations in One Hour-long Interview
Categories: at the merc |
clockwise from top left: Peixoto, Grimbert, and Agualusa
In addition to the official season premiere of “Beatrice @ the Merc” later this month, I’ve been invited to host another literary event at the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction. On Sept. 16, I’ll be leading a discussion with three internationally acclaimed authors—José Eduardo Agualusa (The Book of Chameleons), José Peixeto (The Implacable Order of Things), and Philippe Grimbert (Memory)—about the ways that history and memory come into play in their fiction. I’m digging into the reading now—and looking forward to planning out some interesting questions for our hour-long conversation.
So that’s the Mercantile Library (17 East 47th St.), at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, September 16. I hope to see you there!
(UPDATE: This event is now co-sponsored by Words without Borders, an online magazine for literature in translation that undertakes to promote international communication through publication of the world’s best writing. Its monthly publications include fiction, nonfiction, poetry and contextual essays, all available for free online.)
