The Penguin Press: When Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison Were Roommates
An excellent bit of literary arcanum in the Los Angeles Times. (via The Rumpus)
The times were revolutionary—I refer to the sexual revolution. Marriages were lamentably unstable and un-serious. My wife, tired of life with me in the gloomy house, packed her bags and moved to Brooklyn.
I…
Source: Los Angeles Times
Dressed in an old coat I lumber
Down a street in the East Village, time itself
Whistling up my ass and looking to punish me
For all the undone business I have walked away from,
And I think I might have stayed
In that last tower by the ocean,
The one I built with my hands and furnished
Using funds which came to me at nightfall, in a windfall….
Just ahead of me, under the telephone wires
On this long lane of troubles, I notice a gathering
Of viciously insane criminals I’ll have to pass
Getting to the end of this long block in eternity.
There’s nothing between us. Good
I look so dangerous in this coat.
Elizabeth Hardwick was one of America’s great postwar women of letters, celebrated as a novelist and as an essayist. Until now, however, her slim but remarkable achievement as a writer of short stories has remained largely hidden, with her work tucked away in the pages of the periodicals—such as Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books—in which it originally appeared. This first collection of Hardwick’s short fiction reveals her brilliance as a stylist and as an observer of contemporary life. A young woman returns from New York to her childhood Kentucky home and discovers the world of difference within her. A girl’s boyfriend is not quite good enough, his “silvery eyes, light and cool, revealing nothing except pure possibility, like a coin in hand.” A magazine editor’s life falls strangely to pieces after she loses both her husband and her job. Individual lives and the life of New York, the setting or backdrop for most of these stories, are strikingly and memorably depicted in Hardwick’s beautiful and razor-sharp prose.
The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick
by Elizabeth Hardwick, introduction by Darryl Pinckney
Source: booksactually
nypl:
Speak out on behalf of NYPL! Your support is crucial to help stop a devastating $43 million proposed city funding cut. To have your voice heard, visit nypl.org/speakout and sign a letter to your local elected officials opposing the cut. It only takes a few seconds and could save thousands of free classes and programs, hours at your local branch and other resources and materials.
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Source: nypl
Join The Wodehouse Book Club. It’s happening at WORD in Brooklyn.
Just buy a copy of A Bounty of Blandings and get yourself to 126 Franklin Street on the last Sunday of every month this summer. The first discussion is at 3pm on May 27th.
(Whose House? image, imagined by @bookavore / @jennIRL, provided courtesy of @TobiasCarroll / @3rdplacepress. Nice work, gang.)
Source: wordbrooklyn.com
nypl:
We’re excited to have Jesmyn Ward, National Book Award winner for 2011, with us at LIVE from the NYPL on Tuesday.
Her novel Salvage the Bones explores a family’s struggle to find meaning in the days surrounding Hurricane Katrina. Inspired by the author’s upbringing in a “mostly black, mostly poor, mostly uneducated community on the Mississippi Gulf Coast,” Salvage the Bones is an unflinching look at rural poverty, sacrifice, and the human condition during a time of crisis.
As a special gift to our Tumblr followers, get 40% off tickets with this secret password: FAMILY.
Jesmyn Ward photo by Tony Cook.
Source: nypl
Philip Larkin, Read Out Loud at Cooper Union
The greatest offense is usually simply that of reading the poem as though it were a poem, in a boomingly uniform incantation that obscures nuance and texture. Fortunately, there were few such performances on display on Tuesday night at the Cooper Union’s Great Hall, where the Poetry Society of America had organized a tribute to Philip Larkin, England’s greatest post-Second World War poet, to coincide with the publication of “Complete Poems,” a clear improvement on the earlier editions, which includes each of Larkin’s collections in their original order, along with a section of uncollected and previously unpublished work, and a staggeringly thorough commentary. Like the clientele of a hyper-exclusive café, the evening’s readers—James Fenton, Saskia Hamilton, Mary Karr, Nick Laird, Katha Pollitt, Paul Simon, and Zadie Smith among them—sat in threes around small tables up on stage and took turns approaching the lectern to read a Larkin poem of choice.
- Giles Harvey writes about the Philip Larkin tribute Tuesday night at Cooper Union. Above, listen to Andrew Sullivan’s reading of “The Whitsun Weddings”: http://nyr.kr/Ibzb5y
Source: newyorker.com
