Came across this a couple of weeks ago:
A master of self-promotion: letters reveal how Philip Roth ‘hustled’ for prizes: Professor Jacques Berlinerblau, who studied the correspondence while writing a book about Roth, was surprised by how pushy the author was and by his wheeler-dealing with friends and colleagues from the worlds of publishing, ( Read more... )

I mean, it's quite bad enough that P Roth was whingeing on about his wives/other women in his life failing to respect his creative processes and interrupting him with Mere Trivia -
- though looking at his output we do not see that it had any particularly Porlockian impact??? or were there GEMZ of prose and exquisite insight LOST to posterity?
- ( Read more... )

I was also given to think about those Northern European gentlemen of wealth and leisure who were of the disposition who in the C18th and C19th would journey to the shores of the Mediterranean for sun, sites of antiquarian interest, and hott youths prepared to be obliging for reasonable remuneration... when reading this:
'We live here': fears ( Read more... )

Is being the 'voice of a generation' a curse or an honour for novelists?
(I wish I could find that thing I read, or think I read, about JD Salinger furiously writing-and-not-publishing for decades after his great days, For Posterity rather than feeble ol' contemporary acclaim, with an eye to posthumous publication, which apparently his son is doing ( Read more... )

Naomi Wolf faces ‘new questions’ as US publisher postpones latest book.
And I also saw, somewhere in the depths of Twitter, that there is some question-mark over her famous Oxford thesis, that has to have various corrections made before it is available...
(We do wonder how far the academics there were bedazzled. We also think that she would have ( Read more... )

That Dr James Miranda Barry would have wished to be remembered for outstanding achievement in the fields of medicine, surgery, and sanitary and hygienic reform.
That if, by some miracle, Barry were to be transported into the present day, I think the things that would be arousing the famed incandescent fury would be things like anti-vaxxers ('they' ( Read more... )

Three things in today's review section that made me think about narrative and tales and who tells the tale, and what is achieved by narrating -
[D]oes an autocrat lurk within every dreadful writer? (okay, my dearios, I larfed liek drayne at seeing this at head of review by Will Self, heh-heh). I'm not sure it answers the question, or even really ( Read more... )

And while I am all about let's have some Dorothy Parker love, I'm not sure this essay really does her any favours:
The wicked wit and enigma of Dorothy Parker - 50 years on
Enquiring minds wonder, was she in fact the only woman at the famed Algonquin Round Table? Not according to the Wikipedia entry, which suggests that the author of that column is ( Read more... )

Jack Monroe wins Twitter libel case against Katie Hopkins - given the initial confusion of identities thing going on, I was really hoping someone would cite the case in which the Mitfords sued for libel over the wrong daughter having been reported as eloping to Spain ('whenever I see the words Peer's Daughter on a newspaper placard, I know it's one ( Read more... )

Extremely depressing section in the Anna Letitia Barbauld biography about how, when she was in late middle age and a significant cultural figure as a writer, editor, and educationalist, she got massively dissed on behind her back by the young dudebros of the Romantic movement (including several to whom she had shown personal kindness or given ( Read more... )