About Me
- Xerxes
- New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
- Admire John McPhee, Bill Bryson, David Remnick, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr and James Martin (and most open and curious minds)
31.8.16
New Yorker
Today is the birthday of William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, born William Chon in Chicago (1907). He started working for The New Yorker as a reporter for the "Talk of the Town" section in 1933, and was paid $2 per column inch. He took on some editorial duties after a few years as a writer, and became managing editor in 1939. He convinced the magazine's founder, Harold Ross, to devote an entire issue to John Hersey's in-depth coverage of six survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It was radically different than the magazine's usual fare, but it was a huge success. When Ross's health began to go downhill in the early 1950s, he bequeathed the magazine to Shawn. Some people were skeptical that Shawn could pull it off; after all, he was a Midwestern boy, raised in Chicago and educated in Michigan, and his first real journalism job had been reporting for a small paper in Las Vegas, New Mexico. He didn't like a fast-paced lifestyle, crowds, elevators, or power lunches. He was a small, shy, extremely courteous man whose feet didn't reach the floor under his desk. Ross died of cancer late in 1951, and Shawn succeeded him a couple of months later; he held the position until 1987, when the sale of the magazine forced him into retirement.
Under Ross's leadership, The New Yorker had been a forum for sparkling wit and snarky gossip; its stable of writers included E.B. White, James Thurber, and many members of the Algonquin Round Table. When Shawn took over the helm, the magazine took a more serious turn. It featured more stories of national interest and toned down its New York focus. Tom Wolfe said, in 1965, that Shawn had turned The New Yorker into "the most successful suburban women's magazine in the country." Former New Yorker writer Dorothy Parker complained that most of the writing was "about somebody's childhood in Pakistan," and even Shawn himself sometimes regretted the decline in the amount of humor in the magazine's pages under his watch.
But he had the support of the magazine's owners, and throughout his career, he earned the admiration and affection of the writers he worked with: among them J.D. Salinger, John Updike, Jamaica Kincaid, Elizabeth Bishop, and Philip Roth. He published Truman Capote's In Cold Blood as a series of articles. His magazine began to shape public opinion rather than just remark upon it. It was in the pages of Shawn's magazine that Rachel Carson's Silent Spring first educated Americans about the environment, and James Baldwin published essays on race relations that would eventually become his book The Fire Next Time (1963).
When the magazine was sold and Shawn was forced to retire in 1987, he wrote a last letter to his colleagues, saying, "We have built something quite wonderful together." After his death in 1992, former colleague Gardner Botsford wrote in The New Yorker: "He sharpened our thinking, brought us sternly back from our vacant musings, oiled our transitions, and turned us into professionals of a greater competence than we would ever have achieved on our own." Another New Yorker staffer said, anonymously, "No editor ever ruled a large and complex magazine as absolutely as he ruled this one; yet no editor, perhaps, ever imparted to so many writers and artists as powerful a sense of freedom and possibility."
Shawn himself once said, "Falling short of perfection is a process that just never stops."
Hopper
| Hopper by Ivo Kranzfelder. T
he American artist Edward Hopper (1882-1967):
"Hopper's pictures truly seem to be located in a twilight zone, an interim condition. They reveal a world that is no longer in a state of innocence, but has not yet reached the point of self-destruction. His imagery is marked by a tremendous balance that is not yet equilibrium. It evokes no idyllic pre-industrial state, nor does it celebrate mechanization. Hopper shows us a situation that no other American artist captured in quite this way. ... This ambiguity, even indifference, made Hopper a forerunner of American Pop Art. Not so much a reliance on tradition as his conscious use of American set pieces from the environment made him a quintessentially American Painter. ...
"Hardly a trace of (faith in the blessings of technology) is found in Hopper. Once the diffuse religious feeling present in the earlier works had dissipated, nothing new replaced it. Only emptiness, a vacuum remained. Again, it was not so much Hopper's themes that were typically American, as it was his pictorial inventory, the actual things he depicted. Besides railroads, these included train stations and gas stations. As Pop artists pointed out, Hopper was likely the first painter ever to dignify the latter feature of American landscape by using it as a motif in art. ...
"We know that Hopper was a great admirer of Ernest Hemingway. In 1927, Scribner's Magazine, for which Hopper worked as an illustrator, published Hemingway's story, The Killers. Hopper wrote a letter to the editors, saying how refreshing it was to find such an honest piece of work in an American magazine, after wading through the endless, sugar-coated mush that was usually published. And, he added, the story made no concessions to mass taste, contained no divagations from reality, and had no spurious resolutions at the end. ...
"His ideal, which he knew to be unachievable, was to make his (paintings) 'with such simple honesty and effacement of the mechanics of art as to give almost the shock of reality itself.'
" 'I was never able to paint what I set out to paint.' "
|
Hopper
Author: Ivo Kranzfelder
Publisher: Taschen
|
100 Books You Should Read Now: An English Professor's List | Psychology Today
100 Books You Should Read Now: An English Professor's List | Psychology Today
"We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees." Mohsin Hamid writes about why stories matter in his novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia "Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create."
Next week will mark my 29th years of teaching literature at UCONN in Storrs, CT. Over the nearly three decades in the classroom, teaching both undergraduates and graduate students, I've developed a long list of novels I consider essential. Friends, especially Facebook friends, often ask for suggestions about what to read next.
Okay, you asked for it.
I decided to take a deep breath and put my reading lists together, limiting my choices by the following factors: 1. I admire this work so much that I've taught it in a course, have notes on it and believe that it's a terrific accomplishment as a work of literature; 2. These works have all (to my knowledge) been written in English and not translated from other languages (otherwise Madame Bovary would be on there, as well as dozens of others); 2. These books are NOT in any particular order except in my own spider-web mind, so if you can see the patterns, I'd loveto know what you think (can you find the Waldo of my imagination in the sets of 5?). The patterns exist but they are subtle and eccentric.
So here's your reading list, folks. Let me know what books you love and let me know, too, what you think I should have included.
How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia Mohsin Hamid
Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray
Great Expectations Charles Dickens
Far From The Madding Crowd Thomas Hardy
Middlemarch George Eliot
Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Alan Sillitoe
Nights at the Circus Angela Carter
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil Fay Weldon
Underworld Don De Lillo
The Death of the Heart Elizabeth Bowen
The Good Soldier Ford Maddox Ford
Go Tell It On A Mountain James Baldwin
Alias Grace Margaret Atwood
Bastard Out of Carolina Dorothy Allison
Frost in May Antonia White
Rebecca Daphne Du Maurier
Cold Comfort Farm Stella Gibbons
Tom Jones Henry Fielding
Pamela Samuel Richardson
Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw
Dubliners James Joyce
The House on Mango Street Sandra Cisneros
A Child’s Christmas in Wales Dylan Thomas
White Teeth Zadie Smith
Orlando Virginia Woolf
The Odd Women George Gissing
The Garden Party and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield
The Collected Stories of Flannery O’Connor
The Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Anita Loos
Babbitt Sinclair Lewis
Three Men and a Boat Jerome K. Jerome
The Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad
The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne
Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe
Fanny Hill John Cleland
BU-tterfield 8 John O’Hara
The House of Mirth Edith Wharton
Beloved Ton Morrison
Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
Frankenstein Mary Shelley
Dracula Bram Stoker
Wolf Hall Hillary Mantel
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents Julia Alvarez
The Country Girls Trilogy Edna O’Brien
The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde
She’s Come Undone Wally Lamb
The Haunting of Hill House Shirley Jackson
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Betty Smith
Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston
Sister Carrie Theodore Dreiser
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
1984 George Orwell
Catch 22 Joseph Heller
The Talented Mr. Ripley Patricia Highsmith
A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court Mark Twain
The Shipping News Annie Proulx
Asylum Patrick McGrath
The Woman Warrior Maxine Hong Kingston
The Female Quixote Charlotte Lennox
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café Fanny Flagg
The Princess Bride William Goldman
The Portrait of a Lady Henry James
The Jungle Upton Sinclair
City Boy Herman Wouk
Red Shift Alan Garner
Gone With The Wind Margaret Mitchell
The Loved One Evelyn Waugh
The House of Sand and Fog Andre Dubus III
My Year of Meats Ruth Ozeki
Election Tom Perrotta
The Three Sisters May Sinclair
McTeague Frank Norris
Peyton Place Grace Metalious
Carrie Stephen King
Porterhouse Blue Tom Sharpe
The Waterfall Margaret Drabble
The Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys
No Country For Old Men Cormac McCarthy
The Godfather Mario Puzo
The Odd Woman Gail Godwin
Olive Kitteridge Elizabeth Strout
Final Payments Mary Gordon
The Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett
Property Valerie Martin
Possession A.S. Byatt
The Quiet American Graham Greene
The Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolfe
Blue Angel Francine Prose
Small World David Lodge
Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
The Shape of Things to Come H.G. Wells
Howard’s End E.M. Forster
Straight Man Richard Russo
The Ice Storm Rick Moody
Sons and Lovers D.H. Lawrence
The Group Mary McCarthy
Books
London's Most Fabulous Literary Bookshops
If you can’t find the book you want in London, the chances are that you won't be able to find it anywhere.
But it isn’t just the millions of volumes available that makes this city such a joy for bibliophiles – it’s also the fact that so many of the shops selling them are worth visiting for their own sake, each one packed with history, charm and mystique.
The Atlantis Bookshop
This esoteric epicentre has been going since 1922, when it was founded by Michael Houghton, a practising pagan, occultist and friend of the paranormally-inclined writers Aleister Crowley and WB Yeats.
Houghton wanted Atlantis to be a meeting point and social hub as well as a place to buy things. With this in mind, he filled the shop with homely occult bric-a-brac, transformed the basement into a meeting place for, among others, the druidic Order of the Hidden Masters, and also established his own printing press. His first publication was the grand master of Wicca Gerard Gardner's High Magic's Aid — published two years before the repeal of the last Witchcraft Act.
These days, The Atlantis Bookshop still produces its own editions, including an illuminated version of Aleister Crowley's Book of the Law.
It's owned and run by Geraldine Beskin, who inherited the shop from her father. Geraldine’s father, in turn, began life at Atlantis as a customer; he had no thoughts of buying it or becoming a bookseller – until, that is, he reached the till with a pile of books, and upon handing them over found Michael Houghton squinting up at him. "You'll own this shop one day," Houghton told him.
And so it was.
The Atlantis Bookshop, 49a Museum Street, WC1A 1LY
The Atlantis Bookshop, 49a Museum Street, WC1A 1LY
Big Green Bookshop
Relative new-kid-on-the-block the Big Green Bookshop is not to be missed, set on an unprepossessing side street in London’s Wood Green
Since its opening in 2008 the Big Green Bookshop has gathered a legion of regulars who call themselves 'Big Greenaholics'.
Owned by Simon Kay and Tim West ("Two blokes," they like to say, "with one bookshop and no idea"), the well-stocked, community-orientated store found itself at second place in the Independent's Best British Bookshop list in 2012.
More recently, Londoners proved just how much they love their books and their independent booksellers when a theft left the store £600 short of cash. An online crowdfunder was set up, and within hours over £5,000 was raised.
Simon and Tim, like the fantastic fellows they are, are using the additional money to set up a reward scheme whereby 10% of book sales will go to nominated schools in the area.
Big Green Bookshop, Unit 1, Brompton Park Road, N22 6BG
Big Green Bookshop, Unit 1, Brompton Park Road, N22 6BG
Foyles
One of London’s best-known and best-loved bookstores, Foyles first opened in 1903 at the home of its founders, William and Charles Foyle.
It quickly moved on to the antiquarian book paradise of Cecil Court before, in 1906, scaling up again, this time to a longer-lasting home on Charing Cross Road, where it earned an entry in the Guinness Book of Records for having the most shelf space of any bookstore in the world (upwards of 30 miles).
It was just as famous for the fact that it was very hard to find anything on those shelves.
In 1945, Foyles was handed down to Christina Foyle, daughter of William.
She was responsible for several successful innovations, such as a long-running series of literary luncheons with famous authors (including Arnold Bennett, who showed her a crumpled five pound note, which he had been carrying around for 20 years, to give to the first person he saw reading one of his books).
Christina also created a fair bit of chaos. For a long time she refused to install electronic tills. There was instead a convoluted payment system in the shop that made customers queue three times: first to collect an invoice for a purchase, then to pay the invoice, and then to pick up the books. Why? Because Christina, who was snooty about the 'lower orders', didn’t trust her sales staff to handle cash.
Meanwhile, shelves were organised by publisher, rather than author or topic. The shop acquired such a reputation for confusion, in fact, that Dillons book chain ran an advert of a bus shelter on the Charing Cross Road: 'Foyled again?' it read: 'Try Dillons.'
These days, Foyles has thankfully embraced technology. It's still on Charing Cross Road, albeit in a gorgeous new building at 107, where, as well as stocking enough books to retain its moniker as the 'alternative British Library', there’s also a fifth floor gallery and a large, bright café to relax in.
Foyles, 107 Charing Cross Road, WC2H 0DT (and other branches)
Foyles, 107 Charing Cross Road, WC2H 0DT (and other branches)
Hatchards
Hatchards is the oldest, and arguably also the grandest, bookstore in town.
The shop has been around since 1787, when John Hatchard, a humble bookseller who until then had been plying his trade around the coffee houses of London, was granted a royal warrant by George III.
Based at 173 Piccadilly, the store quickly became a regular haunt of the great and the good, with Disraeli, Lord Wellington and Jane Austen among the following century's regulars.
It was also Oscar Wilde’s favourite bookshop – and, tragically, the place where his wife (Constance Wilde) later ordered her copies of The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
Today, the shop retains the same refined air of centuries past. The Queen has an account there, as does Prince Charles – and customers might be forgiven for thinking they’ve stumbled across some fine old gent's living room, with sweeping staircases, gilt-framed oil paintings, and open fires.
Not everyone has behaved well in this refined setting, however. Noël Coward liked to regale people with a story about how, as a teenager, and short of cash for Christmas presents, he shoplifted a suitcase from Fortnum & Mason. Taking it next door to Hatchards, he then proceeded to fill it up with books.
The whole enterprise was so wonderfully easy that shoplifting from Hatchards became an enjoyable side-line. Until, that is, he was caught. "Really!" Coward apparently chastised the shop assistant. "Look at how badly this store is run. I could have made off with a dozen books and no-one would have noticed."
Hatchards, 187 Piccadilly, W1J 9LE
Hatchards, 187 Piccadilly, W1J 9LE
Heywood Hill
Another one for lords and ladies, the Mayfair bookshop Heywood Hill, which opened in 1936, proudly represents itself as a 'literary landmark in its own right'.
Writer Nancy Mitford worked there in the final years of the second world war – and, according to her sister Deborah, had 'the best fun in the world'.
Nancy also forgot to lock up one night – and when she returned the following morning, found the bookshop full of confused people, 'trying to buy books from each other.'
Other members of the smart set were regulars through the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s: Cyril Connolly, Osbert Sitwell, and Evelyn Waugh, who called it "the centre of all that was left of fashionable and intellectual London."
The shop's very first catalogue included the first English edition of Ulysses. More recently, it appears in John Le Carre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Heywood Hill, 10 Curzon Street, W1J 5HH
Heywood Hill, 10 Curzon Street, W1J 5HH
Housmans
If you prefer your literary landmarks – and your literature – to come with a pinch of rebellion, then head to Housmans in King’s Cross, which, like Hatchards, prides itself on its age – only this time as 'London’s oldest radical bookshop'.
Launched by a group of pacifists in 1945, including Laurence Housman, the younger brother of the poet AE Housman, Housmans has been not just a terrific progressive bookseller – stocking everything from biographies of Trotsky through to esoteric gay literature, with sections such as 'Situationism' – but a dynamic meeting place.
It was at Housmans that CND dreamed up and designed its legendary peace sign. Peace News, likewise, has operated for many years from the upstairs offices.
These days, you can pop in and find yourself at readings from the likes of Naomi Klein and Billy Bragg – and, for less politically engaged book-buyers, there’s a brilliant range of poetry and literature too, as well as a children's section stocking some appropriately dissenting titles (A is for Anarchist being a particular favourite).
Housmans, 5 Caledonian Road, N1
Housmans, 5 Caledonian Road, N1
Jarndyce
If you fancy stepping back into Victorian London, then Jarndyce Booksellers is the place to head.
A stone’s throw away from the offices of Faber & Faber, Jarndyce is also, appropriately given its focus on 18th and 19th century literature, very close to Charles Dickens' House at 48 Doughty Street, where he wrote Oliver Twist.
The bookseller specialises in first edition Dickens books and other authors of Dickens’s era, together with what is delightfully known as 'Dickensiana'.
It also has a proper Dickens name: Jarndyce v Jarndyce is the interminable court case which takes up most of Bleak House.
The proprietors have taken great care to model themselves on a 19th-century bookseller. This is a shop with dark green panelling, a working fireplace, and wooden floors. Sombre busts of dead old men, artfully framed paintings, oak desks and soft lighting complete the effect – to the point where you can imagine rounding a corner and bumping into The Inimitable himself.
Jarndyce, 46 Great Russell Street, WC1B 3PA
Jarndyce, 46 Great Russell Street, WC1B 3PA
John Sandoe Books
Chelsea's John Sandoe Books, which has been going since 1957, is the place to head if – as well as reading – you're also partial to a bit of celebrity-spotting.
The website alone sports quotes from literary heavyweights such as Tom Stoppard ("the best browse in London"), and any single day will find the shop full of not only writers (Philip Hensher, Alain de Botton) but also Manolo Blahnik ("the best bookshop in the world") and Terence Conran ("a bookworm's dream"), alongside coteries of thespians, musicians and film stars.
John Sandoe himself passed away in 2007, and the store is now run by Johnny de Falbe – but when Sandoe first set it up, back in the 1950s, it was with Felicite Gywnn, sister of the food writer Elizabeth David.
The initial bookshop involved 'three planks of wood laid on bricks, upon which were laid out all the books one could ever hope to find in one place'. As well as quickly expanding, the place soon earned a unique reputation thanks to the tempestuous Felicite, who refused to suffer fools gladly and was known, on occasion, to throw books at customers she didn’t like.
These days, the shop assistants are far more welcoming. The shop now takes up three houses, and every Christmas it gives away its own printed book – usually a short story, written by authors such as Muriel Spark and Edna O’Brien – to its customers.
John Sandoe, 10 Blacklands Terrace, SW3 2SR
John Sandoe, 10 Blacklands Terrace, SW3 2SR
Persephone Books
In centuries past, it was usual for London publishers to double up as booksellers. John Murray, for instance, not only published Lord Byron, he was the poet's bookseller too (his shop in the City famously sold out of Childe Harold in five days).
Today, the double occupation of bookseller-publisher has all but disappeared – but a few publishers do also have bookshops, one of the most notable being Persephone Books.
Based deep in Bloomsbury, on Lamb's Conduit Street, Persephone Books stocks mainly Persephone titles, and both the publishing house and the bookshop were founded by Nicola Beauman, who used a small inheritance to bring back neglected, out-of-print early 20th-century female authors.
Beauman did this with style: the books all cohere to a series design, with soft, dove grey covers and endpapers sourced from vintage material. The stripped back elegance of the books is matched by the shop itself.
At Persephone Books, you'll find bare wooden floors, artfully ramshackle tables and bookcases, vintage prints on the walls, classical music in the background – and superb literature front and centre.
Persephone Books, 59 Lamb’s Conduit Street, WC1N 3NB
Persephone Books, 59 Lamb’s Conduit Street, WC1N 3NB
By Eloise Millar and Sam Jordison.
Literary London by Eloise Millar and Sam Jordison is out now, priced £12.99 (Michael O’Mara Books)
Last Updated 27 August 2016
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