Category Archives: Personae
An Evening with William Gaddis
Readers and fans of William Gaddis, a writer notoriously protective of his privacy during his lifetime, have been waiting years to read his correspondence. A number of pieces were collected in Conjunctions this past fall, and finally next month Dalkey Archive Press will publish The Letters of William Gaddis, edited by Steven Moore with an [...]
On Deborah Eisenberg at Bloom
With all due apologies for the end-of-semester posting paucity—one more week and we should be back on a somewhat more regular schedule—I have a new piece up at Bloom. Being the site’s Senior Writer holds all sorts of fine perks: a corner office, expense-account lunches, glamour, prestige… well, OK. Maybe not. But I can bring [...]
It Ain’t Oeuvre ’Til It’s Oeuvre: Elmore Leonard Wins National Book Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award
Last month I commended the PEN American Center for awarding its Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction to E.L. Doctorow. Often it seems like that kind of recognition celebrates an author’s longevity, but not necessarily a consistent body of work. It’s not that writers don’t deserve props for sticking it out and keeping [...]
Alison Bechdel: My BFF in the NYT
Everybody has a secret creative BFF, right? Someone whose writing or art you adore, who loves the same things you love, whose aesthetic influences are just the same as yours. Which is not exactly the same as being a fan. And writing a fan letter—almost always a good thing to do when someone inspires or [...]
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s First Draft
2012 is shaping up to be a big year for all of my childhood obsessions. The Lost Colony may have been found! We may know what happened to Amelia Earhart! And now it appears that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s original autobiography, “Pioneer Girl,” may at long last be published. (If C. Thomas Howell makes a big [...]
Robert Frost Revisited
I am not much of a poetry person, to my chagrin–I’ve made stabs at Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red and Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, but somehow I end up feeling impatient and grumpy rather than transported and enlightened. (Do not get me started on Sylvia Plath.) I do make a couple of exceptions, [...]
Jane Austen: Another Lost Portrait?
You may remember that back in December, a researcher, Paula Byrne, uncovered a new picture of Jane Austen that she believed had been drawn from life. (Here’s a close-up of the picture.) Her logic frankly seemed a little iffy to me, but it interested the BBC enough to focus a whole documentary on it. Six [...]
RIP, Ray Bradbury
Oh, man. Ray Bradbury has died. I haven’t read any of his work in a long time, but when I was in middle school and high school, I devoured The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and dozens of his standalone short stories. My favorite of his stories is “Sound of Thunder,” a downright [...]
Mary Wesley, a Post-40 Bloomer at The Millions
If you’re in the mood for a little arsenic without the old lace, a little posh smut, some Jane Austen with sex… or if you just want to learn a bit more about Mary Wesley, a wild woman of letters who was first published at age 70 and went on to write ten bestselling books [...]
In Which the Booker Prize Judging Panel Promises Not to Tick Me Off This Year
The Booker Prize has long been my favorite literary award, but over the last few years it has been letting me down. There was the year when the dreadful thriller Child 44 made the longlist and the actual prize was bestowed on The White Tiger; there was the year The Finkler Question won; and then [...]
