Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Remembering Studs Terkel, historian and broadcaster, born 100 years ago. "He never lost his excitement at the thought that there was a world out there just waiting to be heard, and ready to be opened by the simplest of questions"
Sinclair goes to meet Gary Snyder, reluctant beat icon, now 82. Kerouac had him as Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums, the scholar-poet of the mountains. Lives in Thoreau-inspired wilderness encampment in Sierra Nevada foothills
Two centuries on, his books are scarcely read—but his influence is immortal. His stories and characters live on in operas, plays, films and children's books. The popular narrative of Scotland is still largely his invention
"Sendak recognized that life is fraught, but that you’re resilient and that you’ll get through it somehow, and he told you so without becoming in any way moralistic. It was just really reporting on his own life experience"
Deft, admiring review of new volume of essays by Charles Rosen—musician, critic, polymath. He shows his age, but "no other living critic has produced a corpus that so fully exemplifies the virtues and achievements of civilisation"
"Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children"
Hemingway's old paper, the Toronto Star, has launched a terrific new project to republish his columns. In this piece, from 1923, Hemingway describes the first bullfights he saw – an experience he was to revisit in his first novel
Review of Susan Sontag's Journals. "Sontag brings her frequently lofty subjects close to the reader, but not too close, so that she satisfies some yearning in the public to know or to understand without ever satisfying it entirely"
Curtis introduces 40-minute film about how Norman Mailer stood for mayor of New York in 1969. "It captures a phenomenon that has come to dominate (and possibly strangle) western metropolitan society today – the rise of the hipster"
Interview with Nobel-winning author, now 81. Still regrets not writing under her real name, Chloe Wofford. But interested in literary not personal posterity. Latest novel, Home, takes new approach stylistically
Scholarly, admiring essay about Martin Amis's writing. "Masculinity is the Big Theme of all his work: violent, unfettered, full-throttle masculinity, whether in the field of pornography, street violence or nuclear weapons"
F Scott Fitzgerald writes to his friend Hemingway asking for his opinion on Tender is the Night. Hemingway replies. "We are all bitched from the start. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don't cheat with it"
"Not always rational, and by no means always prudent, but penetratingly sane. He knew who he was"
