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Writer Clancy Sigal was clearly bothered by those obituaries of Elaine Dundy that focused too much on her sex life. Not only that, he stepped up and wrote a polite rebuke to The Guardian about it:

"Elaine was a rich kid. . . . She loved metropolitan high society and celebrity talent. So imagine what it took for her to go down to Tupelo, Mississippi, to spend five months researching what the Boston Globe called 'the best Elvis book yet.' Her personal charm and magnetism, and breezy openheartedness, melted the suspicion of these deep south, rural folks who opened their doors and hearts to her.

"Tupelo led her to the little known hamlet of Ferriday, Louisiana, birthplace of Jerry Lee Lewis. Elaine's book about Ferriday is stunningly good, unpatronising and deeply human."

properly taking the focus away from her salacious personal life and onto her work, particularly her later non-fiction stuff: Elvis and Gladys and Ferriday, Louisiana. Tupelo became a kind of second home to Elaine, and the friends she made there a second family. We'll have more soon about the foundation for the arts there that is being set up there in her honor.

Congratulations to McNally Jackson Bookstore, née McNally Robinson, on its name change. Our very own Matt Weiland (take that Paris Review!) will be there discussing his new book and Names on the Land.

Today is also Vladimir Sorokin's birthday. If he were here in NY, no doubt he'd be happy to know that The Queue is printing this very moment—and that it's formatted with all the idiosyncrasies of the 2007 Russian edition of the book.

The 7th of August marks the day between the bombing of Hiroshima and the bombing of Nagasaki. If you miss those mourning days, you can always fast to remember the destruction of the temples in Jerusalem on Tisha b'Av (on August 9th).

Both Mr. Roth’s book and Ackerley’s are sexual “confessions.” In both, sexual honesty is a first premise: presumably, if we are honest about our sexual selves, we cannot be false to any man or woman, and we are on the way to saying something useful about the general life of feeling, perhaps even about the general life of humankind. It turns out, however, that strangely different enterprises can proceed from the same premise. Portnoy, full of complaint because of his sexual fate, is bent on tracking down the source of his grievances. He needs a culprit and he finds it, or them. The “myself” of My Father and Myself has no complaint against anyone or anything. He is innocent of all impulse to place blame for his sexual situation–unlike Portnoy, who thinks his parents took the id out of Yid, it never occurs to Ackerley to accuse his parents of putting the oy in Goy.

This from Diana Trilling's joint review of Portnoy's Complaint and My Father and Myself published in Harper's in 1969. Now that Lionel Trilling is getting rehabilitated, maybe it's time to take another look at Diana. Her essay is clear, intelligent and entertaining, plus, she prefers the book we publish, or at least deems it the "more masculine–if that word still has meaning–of the two books" under review. She also has a surprisingly ho-hum take on homosexuality:

There are men who want women, and men who want men: the variation between the two is no more remarkable than the variations among the many ways in which a person exercises this primary sexual choice.

Read the full article.

Both Mr. Roth???s book and Ackerley???s are sexual ???confessions.??? In both, sexual honesty is a first premise: presumably, if we are honest about our sexual selves, we cannot be false to any man or woman, and we are on the way to saying something useful about the general life of feeling, perhaps even about the general life of humankind. It turns out, however, that strangely different enterprises can proceed from the same premise. Portnoy, full of complaint because of his sexual fate, is bent on tracking down the source of his grievances. He needs a culprit and he finds it, or them. The ???myself??? of My Father and Myself has no complaint against anyone or anything. He is innocent of all impulse to place blame for his sexual situation???unlike Portnoy, who thinks his parents took the id out of Yid, it never occurs to Ackerley to accuse his parents of putting the oy in Goy.

This from Diana Trilling's joint review of Portnoy's Complaint and My Father and Myself published in Harper's in 1969. Now that Lionel Trilling is getting rehabilitated, maybe it's time to take another look at Diana. Her essay is clear, intelligent, and entertaining, plus, she prefers the book we publish, or at least deems it the "more masculine???if that word still has meaning???of the two books" under review. She also has a surprisingly ho-hum take on homosexuality:

There are men who want women, and men who want men: the variation between the two is no more remarkable than the variations among the many ways in which a person exercises this primary sexual choice.

Read the full article.

The site Well-Mannered Frivolity points us to Unesco's magnificently named Index Translationum, which attempts to catalog all books in translation everywhere (or at least among its hundred-odd member states), a Borghesian task.

Our own Georges Simenon comes in at #16 on the list of most translated writers, with 1,959 translated books to his name. He's right after Isaac Asimov and just before Pope John Paul II. The index is worth looking at, and the Translationum database could proove be a very useful resource, indeed.

As Ms. Well-Mannered Frivolity comments, "Authors who write prolifically have a distinct advantage here," which explains why Barbara Cartland outranks the New Testament.

The photograph above shows M. Simenon (for once without his pipe) adding another volume to his "all-Simenon" bookshelf.

We learned today that Oakley Hall, author of Warlock, has died. Warlock was among Oakley Hall's most famous books, it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, became a film starring Henry Fonda and Anthony Quinn, and struck the fancy of a young Thomas Pynchon. Warlock''s dark vision of the wild west and its allusions to the paranoia and strife surrounding the McCarthy hearings led us to describe it as a postmodern Western—though Oakley didn't warm to the designation.

Like Elaine Dundy, Oakley Hall was active and vibrant up until the end. Last September he appeared on a double bill with his namesake, the band Oakley Hall, and only last month he wrote in to ask for some copies of his book and to request a copy of Rex Warner's Men and Gods. We hear that he was working on another book when he died.

There's no point in giving all the details of Hall's life here, when he does it himself at his own website, housed by the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, which Oakley Hall founded nearly forty years ago.