New J.D. Salinger Books Coming?

Quite possibly!

Vladimir Nabokov - Life and Work

Unpublished Truman Capote Story Now Published

It'll be in the December issue of Vanity Fair.

From a story in the Los Angeles Times...

In the December issue of Vanity Fair, which hits shelves this week, readers can get a taste of a missing chapter from Truman Capote's famously unfinished novel, "Answered Prayers." In Vanity Fair's table of contents, look for the piece by Capote titled "Yachts and Things."

Capote was at work on "Answered Prayers" for almost 20 years. He signed the contract in 1966, which was postponed, renewed and recalculated for larger and larger advances. It is rumored that he was offered $1 million to finally complete his manuscript -- but he couldn't meet the deadline. Parts of the manuscript that had appeared in Esquire magazine were gathered together after his death in 1984 and published, incomplete, as "Answered Prayers."

"Yachts and Things" was known to be a chapter planned for the book; the six-page story that appears in Vanity Fair was found among Capote's archives at the New York Public Library.

JK Rowling on "The Daily Show"

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Sherman Alexie, Interviewed

With a new collection of short stories out, the Daily Beast chats with Sherman Alexie.

From the piece...

By now you are, I assume, used to being called an “Indian superstar.” What keeps you grounded?

Hey, I get called a “superstar,” as well as an “Indian superstar.” I get the adjective-free praise, as well! What keeps me grounded? I didn’t marry a fan. My sons aren’t interested in coming to my performances. My friends aren’t big fans, either. I haven’t made groups of friends based on our mutual writing careers. Most of my friendships center on basketball. So I guess you could say I stay centered in the midst of fame because I avoid people who care about my literary fame. I have ended newish friendships and professional relationships when I’ve discovered that my fame is a part of the attraction. What’s the best antidote for fame? The loving contempt of your friends and family.

Your newer stories are not as long as the earlier stories that first appeared in The New Yorker, like “What You Pawn I Will Redeem.” Some reflect your talent for the one-liner, like “The Human Comedy,” a six-word story you published in Narrative Magazine. Is there a reason you now favor briefer stories?

Though I have a reputation for being a Luddite, I actually love the new digital technology and its artistic possibilities. So I have certainly been writing very short stories because they look great on my iPad screen! It’s a callback to my early days of writing. I began my career on a manual typewriter and found that the physical act of pulling a sheet from the typewriter dictated the end of a poem. So I mostly wrote very short poems as a result. But when I moved to a word processor, my poems grew in length. And then I began to write stories and the beginnings of novels. The shape of the machine influences the shape of my work.

A Chat with Maria Semple

The Guardian Chats with T.C. Boyle

TC Boyle talks about being a 'complete control freak' and why he feels compelled to write.

From the article...

Boyle grew up reading Kafka and Flannery O'Connor, and was taught in the 70s at the Iowa Writers' Workshop by John Irving and the "absolute master" John Cheever, but these days he is just as likely to be reading scientific non-fiction with such ominous titles as The Coming Plague or Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.

"I worry about everything – every sick baby, every vanishing species – all the time," says Boyle. He says that the lack of control he feels in the rest of his life has led to him becoming a "complete control freak" as a writer. "I've been lucky in my career in that nobody has ever said 'no' to me. I don't require much editing. The book you see on the shelves is pretty much the book I hand in. I'm not a member of any organisation or team. I was in a band once, but I was the singer. I'm enslaved to writing to the point where I sacrifice almost everything else." Since 1979, when his first short story collection, Descent of Man, was published, this obsessive work rate has resulted in six further story collections and 14 novels, all of them written with a breakneck energy that comes across on the page.

Boyle says he was "essentially a good kid" but "a hyperactive one" who got up to a fair bit of mischief in his home town of Peekskill, 30 miles outside New York City. In his teens, he took drugs and raced cars around the town with friends: "The normal stuff when there's nothing going on in your life and you need something to prove you're unique and show you're a man." Does he still think there's a touch of that hyperactivity in him now? "Well, look at me," he says. "What do you think?"

Mo Yan Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

Time Magazine profiled the author, here.

From the piece...


For Eric Abrahamsen, a Beijing-based translator of modern Chinese fiction, it is clear that Mo Yan engages in the complex calculus of what is and isn't permissible that faces every Chinese writer. There is nothing wrong with that: not every artist has the stomach for strident dissent and, having been banned in the past, Mo Yan has nothing to prove. But these days, says Abrahamsen, Mo Yan "knows exactly where the lines are and doesn't cross them." Discussion about the drawbacks of the one-child policy, and whether it should be rolled back, is now permissible in China, for example. "I think the reason the book got published now is because it's not controversial anymore," says Abrahamsen.

Mo Yan is adamant that he never worries about censorship when choosing what to write about. "There are certain restrictions on writing in every country," he says, adding that the inability to attack some topics head on is actually an advantage. Such limitations make a writer "conform to the aesthetics of literature," Mo Yan argues. "One of the biggest problems in literature is the lack of subtlety. A writer should bury his thoughts deep and convey them through the characters in his novel."

Vladimir Nabakov's Lost Short Story on Boxing, Found, and Published

We can thank the Times Literary Supplement for that.

From the intro...


Nabokov was a devotee of sports and games, ranging from boxing, football and tennis, through chess and cryptic crosswords, to the play of thought, language, desire, art, and the divine universe – those more abstract forms of play that he invokes at the beginning of “Breitensträter– Paolino”, sounding, for all the world, like a Presocratic philosopher, only one come to declare not that all is air, water, earth, or fire, but that all is play. Never again would he express so openly and nakedly this vision of life and art as play, which would govern his work for the next fifty years; no wonder that Nabokov, who later said an artist is lost when he seeks to define art, should have let the piece lie hidden in the archives of the emigration. 

As a young man Nabokov had taken boxing lessons from a “wonderful rubbery Frenchman, Monsieur Loustatot”, fondly remembered in his autobiography, Speak, Memory; he boxed competitively as an undergraduate at Cambridge; and in Berlin he and his friend George Hessen staged a number of bouts. In 1924, he published a poem called “The Boxer’s Girlfriend”, and in his first major work, The Tragedy of Mister Morn (see below), the protagonist, Morn, talks about a fist fight with expert attention to specific punches: a hook is a “comma”, a jab a “full stop”. 

Of all the sports Nabokov could have chosen to focus on, he took in boxing the one that concentrates as no other the pain and violence he always saw in play. But “Breitensträter–Paolino” is a very literary and verbal account of boxing – the author’s red ink seeping across a skein of metaphor into the blood on the referee’s vest – and is punctuated according to the varying rhythms and geometries of the sport: its quick flurries, its wary circlings, its duelling antitheses.

Remembering Gore Vidal

Is This Jane Austen, Age 13?

Quite possibly.

Dave Eggers Interviewed

The Rumpus chats with Eggers over his new novel.

From the piece...

The Rumpus: A Hologram for The King is your first imagined-from-scratch book in a while. In a lot of ways it seems like a real departure from the last book we talked about, Zeitoun. So I guess the question would be, Why a novel set in Saudi Arabia?

Dave Eggers: Well, about four years ago I had one of those moments where you think, Huh, that’s an interesting framework for a novel. My brother-in-law had just been to Saudi Arabia with his company, and he told me about these cities that King Abdullah is trying to construct from scratch, these centers of education and manufacturing and other catalysts for a post-oil economy. I was fascinated by the idea of American businesspeople coming to these nascent cities in the desert, trying to get in on the ground floor. That was the start of it at least, and it gelled with some ideas I was having about this aging businessman who’s painted himself into a corner.

Phil Collins Remembers the Alamo with a New Book

Wait. What? Phil Collins?! Yup.

From a story in the New Yorker...

Skip ahead a little more: it’s 2004, and Collins is in San Antonio again, this time on his farewell tour before retiring from music. (An operation to fix some dislocated vertebrae made it hard to play the drums.) Now a seasoned collector, he visits the Alamo for what he thinks is his last time, and stops in at The History Shop, a store about fifty yards from the mission. There he meets the proprietor, Jim Guimarin, who offers to scout for artifacts for him. The two become friends, and Guimarin points out that no one has ever dug beneath the shop itself. By 2007, he and Collins are digging beneath the floorboards. “There were cannon handles and a flattened cannonball, lots of musket balls, personal effects of soldiers,” Collins said. They also found the remains of three fire pits, which may have been the site of the group that cleaned up after the battle, led by General Andrade.

Besides the artifacts from The History Shop, Collins’s collection, which he keeps in the basement of his house in Switzerland, includes Davy Crocket’s musket-ball pouch (complete with five musket balls), a knife belonging to James Bowie (Texan folk hero—no relation to that other British rocker), and a sword belonging to the Mexican leader Antonio López de Santa Anna.

Canteen's Hot Author Series

Canteen is putting cool authors together with cool photographers to see what happens.

From a piece on their site...

Writers have lost their place as cultural heroes. Instead, we celebrate a numbing parade of overpaid and undertalented actors, musicians, and athletes. Ridiculous amounts of money, publication real estate, and TV time are squandered to promote The Bachelors and the Kardashians and whoever will soon rise vapidly to take their place.


Writers don’t traditionally get such crass and ubiquitous promotion. But why can’t they at least try to compete with pop-culture stars on the same terms? Let’s promote novelists as sexy and fabulous! Insist that the PEN Award require a turn on the catwalk! Hold the National Book Awards on a sliver of sand populated by buxom models in horn-rimmed shades; let the champagne pop for the cameras, as Oxford tweed gets wet on Temptation Island!

An Unpublished Vonnegut Novella Going to Press?

Yes.

From a story in the New York Times...

A previously unpublished novella by Kurt Vonnegut will be released on Friday by RosettaBooks, close to 60 years after it was written, the publisher said on Thursday. The 22,000-word novella, “Basic Training,” was rejected by the Saturday Evening Post in the late 1940’s, long before Mr. Vonnegut had become famous through works such as “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Cat’s Cradle.”

Harry Potter Author's Next Book Will Be for Adults

More from the Los Angeles Times, here.

Seriously, What was J.D. Salinger Working On?

The reclusive author died two years ago. We've learned lots about his life since, but one big question remains.

From a story on Slate...

What was Salinger writing all of those years, and is it any good?

If the fistful of Salinger letters that have emerged since 2010 impart any significant news, it is the constant confirmation by Salinger himself that he was indeed still writing during the decades of his seclusion and amassing a considerable body of work. Pages that dissatisfied the author, he burned rather than risk them being retrieved from the trash. A fire that destroyed much of his home in 1992 providentially spared his writing studio where he stored his manuscripts, convincing Salinger to purchase a small fireproof vault in which to safeguard the trove. Neighbors recall him, even at age 90, intently filling in a small notebook he apparently carried everywhere.

These and numerous other references are tantalizing clues to what may potentially prove to be the greatest group of posthumous publications since Kafka – and the hope of Salinger enthusiasts worldwide. But where is Salinger’s Max Brod?

Cormac McCarthy, Screenwriter?

Indeed. The novelist has turned in a 'spec' feature-film script that deals with a lawyer who becomes embroiled in drug trade in the Southwest.

From a story in the Guardian...

Deadline reports that the screenplay, called The Counselor, is set in the modern-day south-west of the US and recalls the hard-boiled world of No Country For Old Men. It depicts a respected lawyer who bites off more than he can chew after foolishly getting involved in the drug business. Such a storyline recalls Sean Penn's Golden Globe-nominated turn in the 1993 Brian De Palma gangster film Carlito's Way.

"The spec falls smack in the middle of what everyone responds to with Cormac's novels," Wechsler told Deadline. Steve Schwartz added: "Since McCarthy himself wrote the script, we get his own muscular prose directly, with its sexual obsessions. It's a masculine world into which, unusually, two women intrude to play leading roles. McCarthy's wit and humour in the dialogue make the nightmare even scarier. This may be one of McCarthy's most disturbing and powerful works."

Kerouac's Lost Book Found

Jack Kerouac's first ever novel, which was thought to be lost, has been published 40 years after his death.

From a piece on BBC...

It features correspondence with his best friend Sebastian Sampas and recalls his "life and experiences" at sea, says the book's editor Dawn Ward.

"This book is really quite important as it shows how Jack developed his writing process," she says.

"The letters that support this period, show that he and Sebastian were reading very important writers and playwrights of the time. They were paying attention to changes in literature styles and autobiographical works."

Ms Ward says the work is especially poignant as he "opens up and shows a side to him that we don't normally see in his books."

The manuscript, which was was discovered in the writer's archive by his brother-in-law, came as a surprise to Kerouac experts, Ms Ward says.

"It was referred to briefly in letters, but nothing that led anyone to believe that there was this really large volume."

Jane Austen - Victim of Arsenic Poisoning?

That's what a crime writer thinks.

From a piece in the Guardian...

Having researched modern forensic techniques and poisons for her crime novels, Ashford immediately realised the symptoms could be ascribed to arsenic poisoning, which can cause "raindrop" pigmentation, where patches of skin go brown or black, and other areas go white.

Shortly afterwards she met the former president of the Jane Austen Society of North America, who told her that the lock of Austen's hair on display at a nearby museum had been tested for arsenic by the now deceased American couple who bought it an auction in 1948, coming up positive.

Ashford says that chronic arsenic poisoning gives all the symptoms Austen wrote about in her letters, unlike other possibilities which have been put forward for her death, from Addison's disease, to the cancer Hodgkin's disease and the auto-immune disease lupus. Arsenic was also widely available at the time, handed out in the form of Fowler's Solution as a treatment for everything from rheumatism – something Austen complained of in her letters – to syphilis.