Carver had been up all night reviewing Lish’s severe editorial cuts wo stories had been slashed by nearly seventy per cent, many by almost half; many descriptions and digressions were gone; endings had been truncated or rewritten and he was unnerved to the point of desperation
More on Raymond Carver’s relationship with his friend and editor Gordon Lish at The New Yorker
When fellow Portuguese writer, Jose Saramago, won the Nobel prize in 1998, many people called to congratulate him, after they had called Lobo Antunes to tell him that the prize should have gone to him instead.
It is hard to find anything worthwhile in English on the Portugese writer Antonio Lobo Antunes. Luckily the writer Gonzalo Bar made up for this great loss on his own blog; Gonzalo Bar, all rights reserved
What is Casanova’s biographer to do? The retired libertine did the job so well himself in his Histoire de ma vie that no one could possibly improve on his story.
His first sexual encounter was with a pair of sisters whom he enjoyed simultaneously; much later he would enjoy his own daughter in the same bed as her mother.
A review of a new biography on Casanova by Ian Kelly at Telegraph
You’re dealing with nuance and ear and meter, and one syllable off in something I write in a gag ruins the laugh. . . . In actual one-liners, there’s something succinct, you do something that you do in poetry.
Lennard Davis discusses the man behind Woody Allen in The Common Review
The British author Doris Lessing has won the 2007 Nobel prize for literature. Lessing, who is only the 11th woman to win literature’s most prestigious prize in its 106-year history, is best known for her 1962 postmodern feminist masterpiece, The Golden Notebook.
More on Doris Lessing at The Guardian
In 1907, exactly fifty years before Jack Kerouac’s On the Road reached the New York Times bestseller list, Jack London–then one of the most popular authors in America–published a memoir titled simply The Road.
More on Kerouac and London at The Nation
Henry Roth had one of the most anomalous careers in modern letters: a brilliant novel at age twenty-eight, the incomparable Call It Sleep, lost for thirty years but never quite forgotten, then a torrent of words let loose in his seventies and eighties.
Morris Dickinson discusses Henry Roth’s anomalous career in Threepenny Review
I died Thursday morning, a little before eight, on the fourth of March, eighteen fifty-two, in Moscow. Absolute bodily exhaustion as the result of a private hunger strike (by means of which my morbid melancholy had tried to counter the devil) culminated in acute anaemia of the brain – and the treatment I was subjected to, a vigorous purging and blood-letting, which was further complicated by the after effects of malaria and malnutrition.