Archive for the ‘Longreads’ Category

On Willa Cather,
Alfred A. Knopf, and a case of Rothschild

by Jeff Seroy

Twenty-seven years ago, when I was working on the publication of Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice at Oxford University Press, I started to wonder how I had overlooked a writer whose work, in Sharon O’Brien’s groundbreaking study, sounded so interesting and so different from what I had assumed it to be. I began at the beginning—Cather’s stories in The Troll Garden; her first, stiff attempt at extended fiction, Alexander’s Bridge; her two early and perennially popular novels, My Antonia and O Pioneers!—and I read on. There’s a lot of Cather, so if you love her work, you’re in luck, for there’s a lot to love. And it turns out there’s an extensive underground of discerning Cather lovers: her appeal isn’t limited, as the paperback covers of her books often suggest, to girls in grade school.

Just now there is cause for Cather lovers to rejoice: her current executors have authorized a marvelous volume containing 556 pieces from her correspondence, which has spent decades off limits to all but a select cut of scholars. As a publisher, I was immediately drawn to Cather’s voluble interactions with her two houses, Houghton Mifflin Company and Alfred A. Knopf, at both of which I’ve worked. The distinctive DNAs of these institutions were instantly recognizable in her letters, despite the fact that half a century had elapsed between my employment and the day Cather wrote to Houghton’s Ferris Greenslet that “unless you see it otherwise, I shall refuse to say that I have ‘left’ you . . . but that it is true that Knopf is going to publish this next book.” I had always understood that Cather left Houghton for Knopf because she wanted her books more beautifully designed, more handsomely produced—something Knopf has been notable for since its founding in 1915. (They’ve published this newest volume, The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, and it’s exemplary of their expertise. It would have delighted Cather in that regard, though assuredly not in the more central fact of its existence—it was her express wish that her letters be kept from the public eye.) Yes, she grouses about Houghton’s ugly mustard-colored cases, and scrutinizes headbands more than would most writers, but Cather’s letters reveal that she left Houghton for a more serious reason: she felt undervalued and misunderstood by their publicity department. She was frustrated by Houghton’s tradition-bound, buttoned-up, high-minded Bostonianism—she nailed it—and she worried that Houghton didn’t perceive her growth as a writer and therefore acknowledge her potential to reach a broader readership. (more…)

Authors and Editors in Conversation

Mitzi Angel: I particularly enjoyed your portrait of Dublin in This Is the Way. It’s an inside-out portrait of a city, seen through the eyes of someone who does not feel at home there. How have your own experiences of that city influenced Anthony’s Dublin?

Gavin Corbett: Funnily enough, only last Thursday afternoon I had an experience that strongly reminded me of the sense of Dublin I used to have growing up. It was one of those typically Dublin days, weather-wise – drizzly, misty, the light diffuse. I went down this canyon-like street I’d never been on before, this street with seemingly nothing in it, just high brick walls on either side. And I found myself behind a notorious former Magdalene laundry. Have you heard about these Magdalene laundries? They’ve been in the news recently.

Mitzi Angel: Yes, those Church-run laundries the Irish prime minister apologised about? (more…)

Authors and Editors in Conversation

Jonathan Galassi: Jamaica, this is your first novel in a decade. How has your writing changed in the intervening period and what have you been thinking about in terms of writing?

Jamaica Kincaid: “This is your first novel in a decade.” There are so many strange things in that brief statement. The word “decade” is one of them; the word “novel” is another. Do you know who I am, who I really am? Well, I don’t know that, either.

The first real novel I read was Jane Eyre. I was about ten years of age or so. Before that I read mostly poetry: Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and the Bible, King James version, and the Concise Oxford Dictionary; also Nancy Drew mysteries and everything written by Enid Blyton. Enid Blyton was the first person I pretended to be when I was a child. After that, I wanted to be Charlotte Brontë. It’s possible my writing has gone from Enid to Charlotte. I would be so pleased if someone would say that about it. As for thinking about my writing: I do wish I could go beyond 200 pages, I do wish I would write one of those books with so many pages that no one ever finishes the reading of them, but alas, I seem unable to do this. Of course, there are many reasons not to finish reading a book, apart from the length of it. (more…)

The writers Bret Easton Ellis (author of several books, including Less Than Zero, American Psycho, and Imperial Bedrooms) and Laurent Binet (HHhH) met recently to talk about writing, adapting your work for film, and listening too much to your editors.

Laurent Binet: My first question is about something you said in Lunar Park. Actually, your character, Bret Easton Ellis, said that he is the greatest living American writer under forty. Would you have any comment about it, now, today? Or do you want to add something?

Bret Easton Ellis: Well, it’s a joke! I was making fun of myself. The Bret Easton Ellis character actually says that out loud. But no, I never thought I was one of the better American writers of my generation. I thought there were always better writers. And that’s why I’m always shocked—

Binet: Over forty!

Ellis: No, my age! Well, I wrote Lunar Park when I was under forty, so . . . No, I always though there were better writers than me. There were better writers than me when I was in college. We talked about this: my friend Eric, the famous Eric, who actually never got published. He was the best writer of us all. But he got derailed by drugs and things. He should have been the one who had the book published. And I’ve never rated myself against my contemporaries, I’ve never felt I’m part of a literary tradition or a literary scene, and I don’t really pay that much attention to the rankings of who is considered the best writer. But I do read a lot of writers, and I do kind of keep up with people my age. Though less so than I did when I was younger.

Binet: So which writer is impressing you the most today? (more…)

The writers John Jeremiah Sullivan (Pulphead) and Geoff Dyer (Zona) recently met up in New York to discuss writing, Raising Arizona, and self-indulgence. The following is an edited transcript of their talk at 192 Books.

John Jeremiah Sullivan: I’d like to begin by saying what an honor it is to talk with Geoff Dyer, a writer who has inspired me all my career. In fact there has been more than one occasion when an editor has expressed incomprehension at an idea I wanted to do, and I raised my fist and said, “It’s like you’ve never heard of Geoff Dyer!”

Geoff Dyer: Well, I mean obviously it’s just awful at these events—it’s just two people slapping each other on the back. In John’s book—it’s not been published in Britain yet—and when it came to the round-up of the books of the year, inevitably everyone chose Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens as their book of the year, but I was so ahead of the curve. I chose this book of essays by this American guy, sort of, seven-eight months before it was even published in England. There is a problem being ahead of the curve—it can seem like you’re ‘round the bend. There’s this huge wave of expectation, and when you come to England, you’ll discover that nothing that happens can quite live up to that sense of expectation in the land of disappointment. So enjoy it now!

Sullivan: Thank you for warning me. Well, I’d like to just talk a little bit about your new book, which I’ve been devouring in recent days. (more…)

Here are a few recent additions from our Longreads page, our repository for articles, interviews, and stories longer than 2,000 words. (Also keep an eye out for our Twitter posts marked with the #longreads tag.) From the past thirty days:

• “What Isn’t for Sale?” by Michael J. Sandel, in The Atlantic
• “Diving Into the Shallows” by Jesse Miller, in Full Stop
• “A Common Faith” by Marilynne Robinson, in Guernica

David Bezmozgis was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1973. His first book, Natasha and Other Stories, won a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was a 2004 New York Times Notable Book. His second book, The Free World, was published by FSG in March 2011. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. In 2010, he was named one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40.” You can follow him on Twitter @dbezmozgis.

What happens when the writer you admire most becomes your friend?

In an essay he published in The New York Times in 1981, the writer Leonard Michaels cited the works of three writers who influenced him—Saul Bellow, Wallace Stevens, and Chekhov. He then wrote: “Finally, the writer who influences me more than any other: Isaac Babel. I never talk about his work.” Implicit was the idea that, if you were a writer, you were a fool or a heretic to say anything about your deepest and most fundamental influence. (more…)

Leonard Michaels (1933–2003) was the author of Going Places, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, and The Men’s Club, among other books. FSG recently published his Collected Stories and The Essays of Leonard Michaels, and reissued his novel Sylvia. David Bezmozgis on Michaels and “Writing About Myself.”

Nothing should be easier than talking about ways in which I write about myself, but I find it isn’t at all easy. Indeed, in writing about myself I encounter a problem that engages me even as I write this sentence. (more…)

Here are a few recent additions from our Longreads page, our repository for articles, interviews, and stories longer than 2,000 words. (Also keep an eye out for our Twitter posts marked with the #longreads tag.) From the past thirty days: (more…)

Here are a few recent additions from our Longreads page, our repository for articles, interviews, and stories longer than 2,000 words. (Also keep an eye out for our Twitter posts marked with the #longreads tag.) From the past thirty days:

• “Late Bloomers” by Alina Simone, in BOMB
• “In Gold We Trust” by Wells Tower, in GQ
• “Creative Writing” by Etgar Keret, in The New Yorker

Here are a few recent additions from our Longreads page, our repository for articles, interviews, and stories longer than 2,000 words. (Also keep an eye out for our Twitter posts marked with the #longreads tag.) From the past thirty days:

• “Reality Effects: John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Essays” by James Wood, in The New Yorker
• “The Fracturing of Pennsylvania” by Eliza Griswold, in The New York Times Magazine
• “How to Dispel Your Illusions” by Freeman Dyson, in The New York Review of Books

Here are a few recent additions from our Longreads page, our repository for articles, interviews, and stories longer than 2,000 words. (Also keep an eye out for our Twitter posts marked with the #longreads tag.) From the past thirty days:

• “Nights of a Baffled Humanist” by Marilynne Robinson, in The Nation
• “The King of Human Error” by Michael Lewis, in Vanity Fair
• “Peyton’s Place” by John Jeremiah Sullivan, in GQ

The following essay is excerpted from the epilogue of André Aciman’s new collection Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere.  He is the author of Eight White Nights, Call Me by Your Name, Out of Egypt, and False Papers, and is the editor of The Proust Project (all published by FSG). He teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He lives with his wife and family in Manhattan.

I was born in Alexandria, Egypt. But I am not Egyptian. I was born into a Turkish family but I am not Turkish. I was sent to British schools in Egypt but I am not British. My family became Italian citizens and I learned to speak Italian but my mother tongue is French. For years as a child I was under the misguided notion that I was a French boy who, like everyone else I knew in Egypt, would soon be moving back to France. “Back” to France was already a paradox, since virtually no one in my immediate family was French or had ever even set foot in France. But France—and Paris—was my soul home, my imaginary home, and will remain so all my life, even if, after three days in France, I cannot wait to get out. Not a single ounce of me is French.

(more…)

Frank Bill usually traffics in fiction that hits with the revelatory power of fact—the stories of his debut book, Crimes in Southern Indiana, have the power of bristling frontline reports on the havoc methamphetamines have wreaked on the American heartland. But here Frank steps out from behind his fiction to tell us about a time in southern Indiana when meth was but an exotic treat that came in the mail to only the most enterprising drug dealers. The intervening years would bring all variety of twisted darkness to Corydon, Indiana, but as Frank makes clear here, even in that more innocent time, those looking for trouble—and even those running away from it—had a pretty good chance of finding it.

-Sean McDonald, Vice President and Executive Editor, Paperback Director

Banger’s family got meth in the mail about once a month. It came from the West Coast in a large manila envelope, moist dandruff flakes lumped to the size of an unfolded diaper.

This was before the Sudafed, distilled water, liquid heat, batteries, Coleman fuel, and farmer’s-ammonia craze ignited small-town America, created broken pickets of teeth, catabolized tissue, and scalded the heartland into skin and bone.

This was sometime around 1990, when I chewed on adrenaline and spit madness. (more…)

Here are a few recent additions from our Longreads page, our repository for articles, interviews, and stories longer than 2,000 words. (Also keep an eye out for our Twitter posts marked with the #longreads tag.) From the past thirty days:

• “The Angry Genius of Les Murray“ by J.M. Coetzee, in The New York Review of Books
• “The Book Collection That Devoured My Life” by Luc Sante, in The Wall Street Journal
• “Boats Against the Current” an interview with Simon Reynolds, in The Second Pass

Every month we’ll roundup highlights from our Longreads page, where we’ll be posting articles, interviews, and stories longer than 2,000 words. (Also keep an eye out for our Twitter posts marked with the #longreads tag.) From the past thirty days:

• “Anniversaries, Anesthesia, and Elizabeth Bishop“ by Magdalena Edwards, in The Millions
• “Deceptive Picture” Alex Ross looks at Oscar Wilde’s complicated relationship between life and art, in The New Yorker
• “Paper Trail: Simon Reynolds“ An interview with the author of Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, in Pitchfork

Misha Glouberman is the co-author of The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City. He is a is a performer, facilitator, and artist who lives in Toronto.

As told to Sheila Heti.

I taught a class on happiness to my friends, and one thing that came up was that the topic was seen as sort of trivial. I found that really weird. It was seen as some sort of sickness of Western consumerist individualism. Happiness seems to me the most untrivial thing to talk about or think about. I think it’s really worthy of investigation. Pretty much everything that people do, in one way or another, is done in the interest of trying to be happy. So it doesn’t seem like a bad idea to spend a bit of one’s time thinking about it. (more…)

Every month we’ll roundup highlights from our Longreads page, where we’ll be posting articles, interviews, and stories longer than 2,000 words. (Also keep an eye out for our Twitter posts marked with the #longreads tag.) From the past thirty days:

• “The Millions Interview: David Bezmozgis” The author of The Free World and Natasha chats with Paul Morton in an extended interview
• “Recalculating” a new short story by Deborah Eisenberg, in The New York Review of Books
• “Harvard and Class” by Misha Glouberman, co-author (with Sheila Heti) of the forthcoming book The Chairs Are Where the People Go, in the Paris Review Daily
• “The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934” a short story by David Means, in The New Yorker

Last month we debuted our Longreads page, where we’ll be posting articles, interviews, and stories longer than 2,000 words. (Also keep an eye out for our Twitter posts marked with the #longreads tag.) A few recent highlights:

• “Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts,” by Jonathan Franzen, in The New York Times, adapted from his Kenyon College commencement address
• “Daughter of California” by Edie Meidav, author of the forthcoming novel Lola, California, in The Millions
• “You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!” by John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of the forthcoming essay collection Pulphead, in The New York Times Magazine
• “‘A Frightening Time in America’: An Interview with David Foster Wallace” by Ostap Karmodi in the New York Review of Books blog