Care to guess the name of “the most dangerous book that never existed”? It’s neither the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred nor The King in Yellow—see the works of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert W. Chambers for the eldritch details about these accursed volumes. How about the 1917 edition of the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, the unsettling, otherworldly reference book of Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”? Nope.
Back in 1980, I persuaded the Washington Post Book World, where I was then working as an assistant editor, to launch a monthly column devoted to science fiction and fantasy. For once my timing was just right. During the 1980s, Gene Wolfe produced the four original novels of The Book of the New Sun. John Crowley brought out Little, Big and the first volume of the Ægypt series. Writers with roots in science fiction—J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Ursula K. Le Guin—broke into mainstream consciousness, while mainstream literary figures such as Margaret Atwood and Russell Hoban produced dystopian visions of
Born in Chicago in 1888 (the same year as T. S. Eliot), Raymond Chandler, an only child, was brought up by his divorced Irish mother, to whom, according to biographer Tom Williams, he was devoted to an “unhealthy” degree and with whom he lived into his thirties. As a boy, he moved from the American Midwest back to Ireland, before attending Dulwich College in London, where he wore a school uniform and studied the classics. After leaving Dulwich, he spent a year in Paris and Germany, perfecting his French and learning German well enough to pass as a native. Once
Ambitious writers are often said to challenge their readers. That’s certainly true in the case of Umberto Eco and his latest novel, “The Prague Cemetery,” but not, perhaps, in quite the expected way.
Bruce Chatwin (1940–1989) may have been the last important writer in English to model his prose after Hemingway’s. When he wrote, he chiseled away everything except what he wanted the reader to see. Employing lean, declarative sentences and short paragraphs, Chatwin’s prose relied almost wholly on exact word choice and careful sentence rhythms. There’s no clutter, no mush, no padding, nothing overemphatic. Even the Shakers could learn from Chatwin’s simplicity and clarity. Take, for instance, this brief Buenos Aires vignette from an early chapter of his travel classic In Patagonia: “By day the city quivered in a silvery film of
Miguel Syjuco’s wildly entertaining “Ilustrado” was the recipient of the 2008 Man Asia Literary Prize. Such awards, as readers know, all too often go to earnest, high-minded, politically correct and rather dull books. In this case, I picture the judges, weary from perusing massive laser-printed works of heart-sinking merit, suddenly rejoicing at the discovery of a manuscript as engaging as this one, absolutely assured in its tone, literary sophistication and satirical humo
“The essential American soul,” wrote D.H. Lawrence in a celebrated description, “is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” Of course, he was talking about Natty Bumppo and similar rough-and-tumble frontier spirits. By contrast, the amoral Tom Ripley—novelist Patricia Highsmith’s most famous character—is easygoing, devoted to his wife and friends, epicurean, and a killer only by necessity. By my count, necessity leads this polite aesthete to bludgeon or strangle eight people and watch with satisfaction while two others drown. He also sets in motion the successful suicides of three friends he actually, in his way, cares about. Yet aside from an
Roger Angell is now ninety-five and pretty much the last staffer at the New Yorker to have been part of its golden age. He literally grew up with the magazine, his mother, Katharine White, being its first fiction editor and his stepfather, E. B. White, one of its defining writers. As a result, when Angell recalls his childhood and youth, he remembers New Yorker galleys piled around the house, the sound of typing from White’s study, and parties where you might chat with James Thurber.
