Mississippi Fred McDowell is singing to us. It’s a fitting tune: Monday rode in on the wind and slapped us with the backside of its gee-tar. But we’ll push on through. We always do. Good things, like the Blues, and literature, keep us optimistic. Speaking of the Blues, what do you know about suffering? Evelio Rosero’s novel The Armies will make you relish every last minute of your existence — even the unsavory parts. George Orwell, that harbinger of social reform, uses his newly published Diaries to discuss his obsession with rats. Houghton Mifflin is miffed over its diminishing role in the modern-day market place, Terry Castle writes really good essays, and T.S. Eliot explains the proper ways to plagiarize. Elsewhere, Gabriel García Márquez’s early life is chronicled, Edgar Allan Poe can’t — for the life of him — find eternal peace, and Google takes over the world. Orwell was right, people. – Kevin Murphy
– Evelio Rosero’s The Armies begins almost idyllically, in a garden. To the bright laughter of macaws, old Ismael Pasos picks oranges. His wife, the slightly less-old Otilia, feeds the fish in the fountain as their cats peer down from an almond tree. In this Eden, it is desire, not satisfaction, that rules. — Evelio Rosero’s New Novel in The Nation
– The saga of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has taken an interesting turn, one that’s truly of the high-finance-moment, and one that’s perhaps promising for the continuance of the venerable house (well, what’s left in combination of several venerable houses). As reported by the unflagging gumshoes at Publishers Marketplace (can Michael Cader really cover so much waterfront solo?) First of all, an outside-chance restructuring of HMH parent Education Media and Publishing Group (EMPG) mentioned in an earlier MobyLives report appears plausible after all. — Houghton Mifflin and Publishing in Moby Lives
Dear Diary: There Are Rats!
– Diaries brings together the eleven individual journals that George Orwell compiled between 1931 and 1949. The final entry, written in September 1949, describes the daily routines of University College Hospital, where he was to die of advanced tuberculosis early in 1950. All were published in the monumental twenty-volume Complete Works (1998), but now appear consecutively for the first time. There is certainly a twelfth diary, and possibly even a thirteenth, among the items taken from a Barcelona hotel room in June 1937 by Soviet agents and now gathering dust somewhere in the NKVD archive in Moscow. — George Orwell’s Diaries in the Times Online
– From one of America’s most brilliant critics and cultural commentators comes a long-awaited collection of penetrating autobiographical essays and a riveting short memoir, novelistic in style and ambition, about the pathos, comedy, and devastation of early love. Stanford professor and longtime contributor to the London Review of Books, the Atlantic, the New Republic, Slate, and other publications, Terry Castle is widely admired for the wit, panache, intellectual breadth, and emotional honesty of her writings on life, literature, and art. — Terry Castle’s Essays in Booksmith
– There is evidence that Shakespeare was wounded by Greene’s attack, but his heirs blithely followed his example. Milton cribbed from Masenius. Later, Laurence Sterne cribbed from Robert Burton, Samuel Coleridge from Schelling, and TS Eliot from all and sundry (in The Waste Land). JRR Tolkien borrowed heavily from the Norse sagas. Four hundred years later, the Darrieussecq-Laurens row is a stark reminder that plagiarism is one of literature’s seven deadly sins, possibly its deadliest. — Literature and Intellectual Property in the Guardian
An Old Writer That Once Was Young
– In 1965, Gabriel García Márquez was an obscure writer drowning in debt, a law school dropout living hand-to-mouth as a journalist and screenwriter. His early novels had garnered solid reviews but little money. Two years later he was the author of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,’’ a novel that achieved immediate commercial and critical success in the Spanish-speaking world. When “Solitude’’ appeared in English in 1970, critics in the United States invoked the author’s name in the same breath as Faulkner and Günter Grass. — Gabriel García Márquez’s Early Life in the Boston Globe
– An annotated facsimile of the mammoth private journal that the founder of analytic psychology kept between 1914 and 1930, “The Red Book” records Jung’s journey of self-investigation from incipient madness to an expanded view of the unrecognized, culturally inherited psychic forces that impinge on an individual’s experience and identity. The book traces the previously obscure path of Jung’s thought between early and mature writings. — Carl Jung’s The Red Book in the San Francisco Chronicle
– A representative for the family of Edgar Allan Poe said the body of the late U.S. author should not be moved from Baltimore despite claims to the contrary. The Baltimore Sun said Sunday while some individuals have called for Poe’s remains to be relocated to a U.S. city other than Baltimore, a man whose great-grandfather was the late author’s cousin rejected such claims Saturday. — Edgar Allan Poe’s Resting Place in UPI
– Every day, hundreds of millions of people use Google. New Yorker writer Ken Auletta’s Googled documents the company’s rise from a tangle of computers in a garage (at the exact same time, Auletta gleefully notes, Bill Gates told a reporter, “I fear someone in a garage who is doing something completely new”) to the most prominent player on the internet’s stage. — Too Much Google in the Stranger
Video: Mississippi Fred McDowell Is In The River
