Today is being celebrated as Paul Auster Day in Brooklyn (scroll down). The rest of us will have to wait until tomorrow for what surely has to be considered our day. And I'm not talking about Mardi Gras, though I do believe the day I'm talking about can only be celebrated on Fat Tuesday. No, tomorrow is National Pancake Day and the good folks at iHop will be giving away free short stacks all day long. So take your Auster novels to your local iHop and laissez les bons temps rouler!
A letter from Truman Capote to a relative of his in the tiny town of Monroeville, Alabama, may help to debunk the long-held myth that Capote did a significant amount of the writing of Harper Lee's classic To Kill a Mockingbird:
The letter from Capote to an aunt, Mary Ida Carter, is dated July 9, 1959, almost a year before "To Kill A Mockingbird" was released by J.B. Lippincott on July 11, 1960.
"Yes, it is true that Nelle Lee is publishing a book," Capote wrote in the final paragraphs. "I did not see Nelle last winter, but the previous year, she showed me as much of the book as she'd written, and I liked it very much. She has real talent."
See also: what a Capote visit meant to his former hometown of Monroeville. I read somewhere else that most people in Monroeville have yet to see the film Capote due to the fact that the town's only theater burned down thirty-five years ago.
Digging way back into the NY Times archive for this one: "Gabriel Garcia Marquez Meets Ernest Hemingway":
At the time, I was a 28-year-old newspaperman with a published novel and a literary prize in Colombia, but I was adrift and without direction in Paris. My great masters were the two North American novelists who seemed to have the least in common. I had read everything they had published until then, but not as complementary reading - rather, just the opposite, as two distinct and almost mutually exclusive forms of conceiving of literature. One of them was William Faulkner, whom I had never laid eyes on and whom I could only imagine as the farmer in shirtsleeves scratching his arm beside two little white dogs in the celebrated portrait of him taken by Cartier-Bresson. The other was the ephemeral man who had just said goodbye to me from across the street, leaving me with the impression that something had happened in my life, and had happened for all time.
{via}
Does anyone miss the good old days when you got to diagram a compound-complex sentence on the chalkboard?
The AP has an interesting story about what they call a literary prospector. This guy, Steve Hines, scours old reference books and magazines looking for overlooked pieces by famous authors in hopes that if the copyright has expired he'll be able to turn around and make a profit by publishing the rediscovered pieces.
According to reports, Johnny Depp will play Heathcliff and Angelina Jolie will portray Catherine in yet another film adaptation of Wuthering Heights.
"Things I will not do when I direct a Shakespeare production, on stage or film":
36. Keanu Reeves will not be allowed near the production. {Ed.: Amen!} {via}
The sweet and oh-so-compassionate conservatives at WorldNetDaily are peddling serious literature these days. Three guesses as to what book they are selling. Hint: According to them, "There is no argument he's the best-selling human author of all time." Give up?
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