Nabakov

James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket

The Ordinary Madness of Charles Bukowski

Nadine Gordimer: Icon

Fantagraphics Profiled

Seattle Weekly does the honors.

From the piece...

That move turned out to be extraordinary well-timed, says Larry Reid, the longtime Seattle art-world curator and promoter who now runs the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery in Georgetown. “I was a voracious consumer when Fantagraphics moved here,” he recalls. “Peter [Bagge] had a party for them at his house, and I immediately pestered Gary and Kim to have a comics show at the Center on Contemporary Art.” 

Two years later that show became Misfit Lit, Fantagraphics published the catalog, and Reid took it on tour around the country—all of which helped cement the grunge/comics/Seattle alliance in the national consciousness. “Music, graphics, and comics all came together” in the early ’90s, says Reid. From that convergence, Fantagraphics “became a part of our cultural heritage.”

Michael Chabon - Profiled

San Francisco Magazine talks to the author.

From the piece...

Chabon’s writing life is deeply tied to California. He received his MFA from UC Irvine and lived for a spell in Los Angeles, but his California journey began and has continued in the Bay Area. His mother, the “original settler,” moved to Oakland when he was still in college in Pittsburgh. On his first visit out here—at age 20—his mother zipped him from the airport to a Mexican restaurant in Fruitvale. He felt instantly at home. “Pittsburgh didn’t even have Taco Bell,” he says. He loved the light, the people, the diversity. “Monocultures—Sweden, China—make me nervous,” he says. “But I guess because I’ve always felt like an outsider, I feel really at home around other outsiders.”

This instant feeling of home, however, applies only to the East Bay. “I remember going up the Montgomery Street escalator into San Francisco that first trip. I was so excited. City Lights. Dashiell Hammett. But I just got this feeling of insignificance—you’re not welcome here. We don’t need you.”

He struggled against this feeling for the entire trip, and years later he did briefly live in San Francisco just before he and Waldman married. But he never warmed to the city. Or maybe it never warmed to him.

The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

The Times Literary Supplement takes a look.

From the piece...

Without the hippies, Brautigan struggled to accomplish “the dewhimsicalizing of his literary reputation”. An attempt to write five genre novels in five years didn’t help, generating only his laziest books, which even Hjortsberg quickly passes over. “Students, always his fan base before, no longer seemed to know who he was.” He experienced a steep drop in income, exacerbated by his relentless drinking and frequent stays in Tokyo, “the erotic capital of planet Earth”. He reacted to all criticism defensively or with self-aggrandizing claims: “There are those who say ‘Richard Brautigan sits down in an hour and a half and writes his annual bestseller’ . . . [but] I work very, very hard to make things appear very, very simple”. Guns assumed a central, almost fetishistic significance, alienating everyone except perhaps the director Sam Peckinpah, with whom Brautigan shot at alley cats from a hotel window. A less enthused filmmaker was Wim Wenders, who once had to “literally escape” Brautigan, who was “aiming at him, drunk and confused”. He became every host’s nightmare: “One, he brought uninvited guests. Two, he was already drunk. Three, he had a .357 Magnum with him”. 

Faced with the financial fallout from a dwindling audience, and socially isolated by alcoholism, Brautigan abandoned Montana and withdrew to an “ultragloomy” house in Bolinas. There he seems to have perfected his loneliness: “Richard was ready to die”.

How To Tell a True War Story

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson

Profile of a Writer: Jorge Luis Borges

Patricia Cornwell Makes a Killing

The Bartender Poet

One Morning at Home with John Irving

Great Lives - Gertrude Stein

BBC Radio discusses the life and times of Gertrude Stein and wants you to listen in, here.

Steve Soboroff - Typewriter Collector

Steve Soboroff, an L.A. civic leader, has acquired typewriters once owned by the famous and infamous. In an era of iPads and text-spouting phones, the ancient, clunky machines have become unlikely objects of desire.

From a story in the Los Angeles Times...

The object of his fascination? Typewriters.

There's the 1932 Royal Model P that Ernest Hemingway used to write letters during his time in Cuba. There's a tiny Imperial Good Companion Model T on which John Lennon banged out song lyrics years before the Beatles invaded America.

There's the 1936 Corona Junior on which budding playwright Tennessee Williams composed his antiwar farce "Me, Vashya" for a student competition at Washington University in St. Louis. (He lost!)

"I love people who are the best at what they do," Soboroff said. "The idea that geniuses sat there and accomplished what they accomplished on these typewriters … it gives me chills."

Tennessee Williams: Wounded Genius

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Haruki Murakami: In Search of the Elusive Writer

The Handmaid's Tale

It has been banned in schools, made into a film and an opera, and the title has become a shorthand for repressive regimes against women. Margaret Atwood discusses her most famous work in the Guardian.

From the piece...

The Handmaid's Tale has not been out of print since it was first published, back in 1985. It has sold millions of copies worldwide and has appeared in a bewildering number of translations and editions. It has become a sort of tag for those writing about shifts towards policies aimed at controlling women, and especially women's bodies and reproductive functions: "Like something out of The Handmaid's Tale" and "Here comes The Handmaid's Tale" have become familiar phrases. It has been expelled from high schools, and has inspired odd website blogs discussing its descriptions of the repression of women as if they were recipes. People – not only women – have sent me photographs of their bodies with phrases from The Handmaid's Tale tattooed on them, "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum" and "Are there any questions?" being the most frequent. The book has had several dramatic incarnations, a film (with screenplay by Harold Pinter and direction by Volker Schlöndorff) and an opera (by Poul Ruders) among them. Revellers dress up as Handmaids on Hallowe'en and also for protest marches – these two uses of its costumes mirroring its doubleness. Is it entertainment or dire political prophecy? Can it be both? I did not anticipate any of this when I was writing the book.

I began this book almost 30 years ago, in the spring of 1984, while living in West Berlin – still encircled, at that time, by the Berlin Wall. The book was not called The Handmaid's Tale at first – it was called Offred – but I note in my journal that its name changed on 3 January 1985, when almost 150 pages had been written.

The Autumn of Joan Didion

The Atlantic has a long profile of the author, here.

From the piece...

Women who encountered Joan Didion when they were young received from her a way of being female and being writers that no one else could give them. She was our Hunter Thompson, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He gave the boys twisted pig-fuckers and quarts of tequila; she gave us quiet days in Malibu and flowers in our hair. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” Thompson wrote. “All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better,” Didion wrote. To not understand the way that those two statements would reverberate in the minds of, respectively, young men and young women is to not know very much at all about those types of creatures. Thompson’s work was illustrated by Ralph Steadman’s grotesque ink blots, and early Didion by the ravishing photographs of the mysterious girl-woman: sitting barelegged on a stone balustrade; posing behind the wheel of her yellow Corvette; wearing an elegant silk gown and staring off into space, all alone in a chic living room.

Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has. Didion is, depending on the reader’s point of view, either an extraordinarily introspective or an extraordinarily narcissistic writer. As such, she is very much like her readers themselves. “I’ve been reading you since I was an adolescent,” a distinctly non-adolescent female voice said on a call-in show a decade ago, and Didion nodded, comprehending. All of us who love her the most have, in ways literal and otherwise, been reading her since adolescence.

Didion was also recently interviewed in the Believer, here.

Oh, Hello. The Rise of Children's Author Mo Willems

The great Mo Willems is discussed in the Washington Post.

From the piece...

Mo Willems is doo-doo funny for kids, but he’s witheringly funny, almost sad-funny, for their parents. His books are the barometers of taste for the toddler set. His works, say the people who deeply believe in him, mean something — something both very basic and very complex that has been distilled into cartoons and monosyllabic words.

“He really,” says Edith Ching, a children’s literature instructor and friend of Willems, “he really understands the human condition.”

“The thing about writing for kids is that there are no cultural modifiers. You can’t say that something ‘is so Walter Mondale.’ ” You can’t reference the Kardashians. The Kardashians are meaningless to kids. “So all you have to work with is love, anger, jealousy — it’s a very small palette, but the existential crises are ultimately the same.”