Read This: Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare

Because of my busy schedule these days, I end up reading a lot of books piecemeal—a few chapters one day, a few more a couple weeks later—and that’s how I’m getting through the latest biography by one of my favorite writers, Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare. I was lucky enough to get to hear Ackroyd speak a few months back, at a Sunday brunch lecture sponsored by the 92nd St. Y, where he discussed the challenges in writing yet another biography about someone who, it seems, has a book published about him every single day…but also about the challenges of biography itself. “In fiction,” Ackroyd observed, “you must always tell the truth, but in biography you’re allowed to make things up.” This was well before the whole James Frey thing, mind you; what Ackroyd was talking about was the way in which the genre relies equally upon imaginative reconstruction and scholarship to give a sense of a life. “What is the point of the historian or the biographer,” he wondered, “if we can’t use imagination as a source for inspiration?”

During the question period, I asked him if he felt any difference between writing the big biographies like Shakespeare and the recent series of “brief lives” he’s developed about subjects like Chaucer and J.M.W. Turner. “It doesn’t make any difference as far as I can tell,” he smiled. “The vision has to be approximately the same.” And it is, I have to confess, a vision I’m usually willing to follow in just about any direction.

4 March 2006 | read this |

Don’t You Forget About Me

Oh, good heavens—I was so busy putting the finishing touches on a story for next Monday’s issue of Publishers Weekly that I completely didn’t realize I’d been so remiss here. I am really going to have to make up for that beginning this weekend.

In the meantime, my good friend Mark Sarvas spotted an interview between Kate Braverman and William Vollmann. Since I had just met Braverman in my role as GalleyCat co-writer, I emailed her to say I’d seen it, and she suggested that I check out the complete version of that talk, which she’s hosting on her own website.

And Tommy Hays, a former Beatrice guest author, turned up with an essay at Moorishgirl, coinciding with this month’s release of The Pleasure Was Mine in paperback…

As for me, I’m at New York Comic-Con much of this weekend, reporting for GalleyCat, but I have some guest authors just about ready to be published, so I’ll start cracking on those Saturday (or Sunday).

24 February 2006 | uncategorized |