The Revolution Will Be Transcribed
Revolution is in the air. Radio Prague casts a backward glance at the Velvet Revolution — a period of significant change for the written word. Vasily Grossman understands what it means to revolt. After all, his mother country is responsible for one of history’s cataclysmic political coups. A review of a heady novel about Pop culture in The Second Pass, the art of criticism is reexamined in Bookslut, and Amos Oz turns the novella on its head. Other revolutionary topics include: The advent of noir and smoking pot, memoirs dethroning fiction as the genre of choice, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s papers enter the digital age. Readers of the world, unite! — Kevin Murphy
– The Velvet Revolution was in many respects about authors and words. Of course there was the playwright dissident himself, Václav Havel, who came out of the shadows where he was put by the censors and persecution to lead the revolution that overthrew Communism. — Velvet Revolution in Radio Prague
– At first glance — “When a bird landed on her foot the pop star was surprised” — you might think Love in Infant Monkeys is little more than a light collection of odd exercises about celebrities and pheasants, celebrities and dogs, and elephants, and monkeys and so on. But keep reading and you’ll find in these immensely entertaining, and often poignant, stories, the subtleties and complexities of a long novel. — Lydia Millet in The Second Pass
Among Smoke, Among Ruins
– Everything Flows is Vasily Grossman’s final testament, written after the Soviet authorities suppressed his masterpiece, Life and Fate. The main story is simple: released after thirty years in the Soviet camps, Ivan Grigoryevich must struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar world. But in a novel that seeks to take in the whole tragedy of Soviet history, Ivan’s story is only one among many. — Vasily Grossman in The New York Review of Books
– I’ve got two good new books of literary criticism, one thin and one fat: Poisoned Pens: Literary Invective from Amis to Zola and The Story About the Story: Great Writers on Great Literature. They’ve gotten me thinking about how when we read fiction, we also can’t help “reading” the author at the same time. — Criticism in Bookslut
– The short novel is a form in which writers typically exercise great control over their material, accepting the abbreviated length as a kind of challenge, working within that limitation to craft a tight, jewel-like story in which all the elements of the piece—plot, tone, imagery—work together to create a unified artistic effect similar to that of a short story. (Think Heart of Darkness, Death in Venice, The Metamorphosis, or The Old Man and the Sea.) This is decidedly not the case with Rhyming Life & Death, Amos Oz’s latest work of fiction to be published in the U.S. in translation. — Amos Oz in Three Percent
Smoking
– In 1944, a noir suspense novel, a paperback original, was issued by a small paperback publisher out of New York. Madman on a Drum would be the first full-length book written by one N.R. De Mexico. In 1951, De Mexico wrote a book that would put his name into the Congressional Record, front and center in a debate about the negative effect of paperback literature on American culture. That book, Marijuana Girl, would become Exhibit A in Rep. Ezekiel C. Gathings’ Congressional Sub-Committee’s mini-crusade against drug use in popular literature. — Marijuana Girl in Book Patrol
– Has the memoir become the “central form” of our culture, as Ben Yagoda insists in his breezy new consideration of the form, “Memoir: A History”? Do I detect hackles rising from coast to coast at the mere suggestion? Today, autobiography is both very popular and widely reviled, for reasons that aren’t always clear. — Memoirs in Salon
– Old paper versions of the books have been digitised so that they can be read, and even turned page by page, on the screen. A 1883 edition of Treasure Island, published by Cassell & Company, is available to read, complete with a poem by Stevenson in the opening few pages recommending it ‘To the Hesitating Purchaser’. Besides the Scotsman’s best-known works, the archive, www.robert-louis-stevenson.org, also includes extracts of little-known poetry, letters, rarely seen family photographs and his observations on friends, family and favourite authors. — Robert Louis Stevenson in the Telegraph
Video: Treasure Island
