How to use this Page

If you follow us on Twitter, you might notice that we couldn't help posting bits from Jules Renard's charming and inventive collection of observations of the natural world, Histoires Naturelles or Nature Stories. They were just too delightful not to share. Where writers often seek to make the world strange in order to enable us to experience it afresh, Renard's gift is to domesticate the by-definition inhuman. His patently false imaginings of animals' inner lives paradoxically grant them their own realities—realities that Renard's writings help us to understand that we can never understand. And beyond that, they will make you gasp with the wonder of this gifted and too-little-known writer's wholely fresh way of putting into words everything he observes.

To celebrate the book's official on-sale date, we can finally let you in on some longer excerpts, accompanied by the illustrations that Pierre Bonnard drew for the 1904 edition of the book.

And if, like us, you aren't satisfied with just one book by Jules Renard, then you must run out and buy the selection of his Journals translated by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget and published by Tin House Books.

From "Frogs"

    They’re suddenly relaxing their springs. That’s how they take exercise.
    They’re leaping out of the grass like heavy drops of frying oil.
    They pose, like bronze paperweights, on large water lilies.
    One of them is soaking in air. Through his mouth, you could drop a coin into the money box of his stomach.
    They rise like sighs, out of the mud.
    Motionless, with their large eyes level with the water, they seem like growths on the flat pond.
    Squatting like tailors, they’re yawning, stupefied at the setting sun.
    Then, like street vendors deafening people as they yell, they croak the latest news items of the day.
    They’re giving a party this evening, at home. Can’t you hear them polishing the glasses?
    Sometimes, they snap up an insect.
    Others are only interested in love.

"The Stag"

      I went into the wood at one end of the avenue as he was coming in at the other.
    At first I thought a stranger had just come in, wearing a plant on top of his head.
    Then I could see the little dwarf tree spreading out its leafless branches.
    Finally the stag came plainly into sight, and we both came to a halt.
    “Don’t be afraid, come closer,” I said. “I’m carrying a gun, but it�

Larry Korn, with the help of the folks at Beyond 50 Radio, have put together a book trailer for The One-Straw Revolution. To call this short film a book trailer, though, is perhaps not to give it its full credit. What we have here is more a primer on the work of this pioneer of the alternative food movement. If you're wondering why we published The One-Straw Revolution, or are curious about the fuss around it, have a peek at this. And for those who feel that they already have a handle on the man and his methods, there's quite a bit of fresh information here, including footage that was filmed on Fukuoka's farm in the early 80s.

HDT's desk, from the NYPL digital archive

Damion Searls, editor and mastermind behind our edition of Thoreau's Journal, sat down to talk about Thoreau with Christopher Lydon. The podcast is called Radio Open Source, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Listen to the podcast.

Also: remember to post your favorite excerpt from Thoreau's Journal to be entered in a drawing to win a Thoreau baseball t-shirt from Novel-Ts. More details here.

Every now and then our translators manage to shut down their computers, put the dust-cover on the typewriter, and talk about their work in the wild.

First, Larry Korn—who lived on Masanobu Fukuoka's farm in Japan in the 1970s and returned to the US, where he translated The One Straw Revolution and spread his sensei's teachings—will co-teach a two-week intensive permaculture design course at Restoration Farm in Oregon, beginning June 13.

Next, Robert Chandler, who has been translating the work of Vasily Grossman since the 1980s and who is very much responsible for the author's acclaim as one of the most important Soviet writers, has three events in London this month. The first is taking place tonight at the Free Word Center. And in the upcoming two, he'll be discussing Grossman's recently released novel Everything Flows and talking with Grossman's daughter, Yekaterina Korotkova-Grossman:

June 15, 7.30pm, Pushkin House
June 20, 2pm, British Museum, Stevenson Room

(thanks to Sarah J. Young for rounding up these Grossman-related events, as well as for linking some recent press in praise of Vasily Grossman, on her blog)

Lavinia Greacen is the author of a biography of J.G. Farrell, J.G. Farrell: The Making of a Writer, and the editor of the recent volume J.G. Farrell in His Own Words: Selected Letters and Diaries (to which John Banville provided an introduction). She recently sent out a letter to spread word that Farrell's novel Troubles is one of six books shortlisted for the Lost Booker Prize of 1970.

To vote for Troubles, visit the Booker Prize website.

Last week the Irish Embassy in London invited Cork University Press to launch JG Farrell in His Own Words, his Selected Letters and Diaries, which was edited by me. The Ambassador made an excellent speech, and the packed event was a great success.

The timing could not have been better. The following day JG Farrell made the Lost Man Booker Prize shortlist with Troubles, his novel set in Ireland, which was subsequently awarded the Faber Prize. It is the first book of his acclaimed Empire Trilogy.

The "Lost" Man Booker is a one-off prize to honour the books which missed out on the opportunity to win the Booker Prize in 1971. That year, just two years after it began, the Booker Prize ceased to be awarded retrospectively and became-as it is today-a prize for the best novel of the year of publication. As a result a wealth of fiction published for much of 1970 fell through the net. Twenty-one novels were chosen last month for the longlist, and now six are on the shortlist.

J.G. Farrell—known to his friends as Jim—was drowned on August 11, 1979 when he was swept off rocks by a sudden storm while fishing in West Cork. He was in his early forties. "Had he not sadly died so young," remarked Salman Rushdie in 2008, "there is no question that he would today be one of the really major novelists of the English language. The three novels that he did leave are all in their different way extraordinary."

The winner will be decided by public vote, and this closes-quite soon-on 23 April 2010. The result will be announced on 19 May.

If you feel that Irish author JG Farrell deserves to win, then please vote by using the link below. Please circulate this email widely, too, because every single vote for Farrell is valuable!

www.themanbookerprize.com/news/vote

 With best wishes from Ireland,
 Lavinia

*****

More

Sam Jordison writes about The Siege of Krishnapur, the second book of Farre

Just before Halloween, the New York Institute for the Humanities sponsored a panel discussion about Vasily Grossman and Curzio Malaparte, two writers who worked as war correspondents on opposite sides of the Eastern Front during WWII. When it was Chris Hedges turn to speak, it became clear that he believed the most significant divide between the two writers to be not geographical or narrowly political, but primarily moral. The panelists were too polite to duke out the merits of realistic writing versus the fantastic mode or the value of giving voice to war's victims (Grossman) rather than focusing on those in power (Malaparte) right then and there. Too bad, we would have liked to hear panelist and Malaparte translator Walter Murch come to Malaparte's defense.

Last month, the radio program On The Media gave Hedges an opportunity to discuss war writing, Grossman's bravery and what he terms Malaparte's "war pornography" in more depth. It takes a minute, but an audio player should load right on this very page.

By the way, it's worth listening to this entire episode of On The Media, which took "The Future of the Book Industry" as its theme.

The Lyric Theater, Tupelo, Mississippi

If you only know Elaine Dundy through her novels (the ones we publish were written early in her career) then you probably don't know that Dundy was the author of Elvis and Gladys, a well-regarded biography of the singer and his mother ("my friends thought I'd gone not only out of my mind but my realm" she wrote in her biography, Life Itself) and Ferriday, Louisiana. She spent many months in Tupelo, Mississippi in the early 80s researching Elvis's birthplace and made some lifelong friends there, including Roy Turner, a reasearch assistant who became one of her best friends. Since Elaine's death, Roy's been working on setting up a foundation to benefit the arts in Tupelo. The first grant has been awarded to the Lyric Theater, where Elvis watched movies as a child—and which now houses a local theater group.

Royalties from the sale of Elaine Dundy's books will go to the fund. For the full text of the article below, click here.

 The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories
Mavis Gallant
Introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri
to be published fall 2009

Thanks to Granta magazine, which published a converation between these two writers in the summer 2009 issue, for posting these clips.

Q&A with Jhumpa Lahiri and Mavis Gallant

Jhumpa Lahiri and Mavis Gallant Q&A from Granta magazine on Vimeo.

Enough death (although, we still have one more to mark), let's have some good news, shall we?

What do Giuseppe Mazzini, Natsume Soseki and Martin Van Buren have in common? They all have blue plaques affixed to their former residences in Great Britain. And, since last October, G.B. Edwards, who lived most of his life in relative obscurity and died in real obscurity—try finding a photograph of him—has one too. This is apparently the first blue plaque on Guernsey. It's doubtful that Ebenezer Le Page would have been impressed by something like this, but the rest of us can be.

More on The Book of Ebenezer Le Page [link] [link] [link]

Joanna Neborsky, a student in the MFA illustration program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, has produced an illustrated edition of many of Félix Fénéon's concise reports of crimes and misdeads in early 20th-century France (aka Novels in Three Lines) as her thesis project. The work will be part of an MFA student exhibit that's on view until May 16, 2009 at the Visual Arts Gallery.

You can see more of Ms. Neborsky's work at the website of Gigantic Magazine.

In getting together our edition of Tibor Déry's (that's Déry Tibor to you Magyarphiles) novel Niki we came across some poems of his, published in the short-lived Dokumentum, a journal he helped edit. After dropping some not-so-subtle hints to poet and translator George Szirtes (who has written the introduction to Niki) that it would be wonderful to read the poetry in English, he graciously had a go at translating one or two. We should mention that the poems would not have been found had they not been digitized by the New York Public Library.

MY GOLDFISH

born into sunlight
they swam around her silent
one spring night they entered my heart

the well of resurrection!
their golden ferries glittered through my breast
look at them dancing!
years march on monotonous in the garden greenhouse
here and there a face leans towards me
and sheds its tears

feed my goldfish
the wind moans outside
day’s leaden back casts its shadow across us
days pass
who will unearth time’s infinite gifts from my body?

in the dust of the street…
there sprawl the lost nights
gilded wooden statues of beggars march along the boulevard
everywhere darkness
the stars above them: the purple-scaled highway of my fish

George Szirtes webpage and blog


Niki: The Story of a Dog
Tibor Déry

 Just off a trifecta of panels at the Left Forum—including a well-attended Victor Serge read-in—Richard Greeman of the Victor Serge Foundation is on a speaking tour of New York and Connecticut. From his press release:

Beware of Vegetarian Sharks!
Radical Rants and Internationalist Essays (Illustrated)
by Richard Greeman
Just published on line

(tour details below)

Join author Richard Greeman in person at the following events:
Friday, April 24th @ 7:00pm
Bluestocking Books
172 Allen Street, NYC

Monday, April 27th @ 7:00pm
East Hartford Public Library (Lion's Room)
840 Main Street, East Hartford, CT

Wednesday, April 29th @ 6:00pm
Broad Street Books
45 Broad Street, Middletown, CT

Thursday, April 30th @ 7:30pm
The Buttonwood Tree
605 Main Street, Middletown, CT

Scholar and translator Douglas Parmée—who translated two NYRB Classics, The Child by Jules Vallès and Afloat by Guy de Maupassant—died last August. What follows is an expanded version of the obituary that ran in the London Times.

Douglas Parmée was a lecturer in modern languages at Cambridge—and a fellow of Queens’ College for sixty years— who also became known for the number and quality of his translations. These included Effi Briest (Theodor Fontane) and Bel-Ami (Guy de Maupassant) for Penguin Classics; A Sentimental Education (Gustave Flaubert), Nana (Emile Zola) and Les Liaisons dangereuses (Choderlos de Laclos) for the Oxford University Press World’s Classics series; and, for Short Books, a selection from the aphorist and epigrammatist Nicolas Chamfort. He also published two anthologies, Twelve French Poets (Longman 1957), which became for some years an A-level textbook, and its successor Fifteen French Poets (Longman 1974), which did not.

As well as being Director of Studies in French and having various other college jobs in the pluralistic Cambridge way, he spent time at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica and in Barbados and at the University of Western Australia in Perth.

The style of his work can be judged from a review of Liaisons, which praised a racy, colloquial and accurate translation, a concise, well-honed, elegant introduction and helpful and informative notes. It was this raciness, allied to his remarkable facility with languages and a relish for the unconventional – perhaps a distaste for the conventional as well – that led him into some of the byways of Francophone literature, including the crique-craque tradition of Haitian folk fables, which he would assert were superior to those of La Fontaine, especially to anyone who expressed the opposite view. He went to Papa Doc’s Haiti from Jamaica and became the English expert on Haitian literature, giving talks on the Third Programme. This feeling for négritude, though not assumed, gave him further pleasure by the irritation it caused to some. Symbolism and Surrealism were also among his interests, but his true forte was a deep knowledge of and admiration for French novelists of the nineteenth century.

He was born in West Dean in Sussex in 1914 – despite the name, there is no French blood in the family for at least the preceding three hundred years – and was at Simon Langton Boys’ School in Canterbury before his father, an Inspector of Schools, moved to Cambridge and his son entered the Perse School. There he thrived, leaving in 1933 to go up to Trinity College, Cambridge as a teacher training college student, a now non-existent category, spurning an exhibition offered by Downing College. At Trinity he took a first in both parts of the Modern and Medieval Languages Tripos – a starred first in Part II - becoming an exhibitioner in 1934 and a senior scholar in 1935. He left in 1936 to do post-graduate work at the University of Bonn and a doctorate at the Sorbonne. During this time he received various scholarships and studentships from Trinity, including the Dunning in 1938 and the Rouse Ball in 1940.

Although his doctoral thesis—on the symbolist Henri de Régnier—had been completed and indeed published, as was then the rule, he never took the degree, either because the war intervened or, as was sometimes said, in a fit of pique on his part at some Sorbonne functionary's trying to charge a fee which he felt he had already paid. He certainly owned the academic hood.

Back in England, he became Secretary of the Students’ Department in the London office of the British Council from 1939 to 1941. It was in this capacity that he found himself at a lunch for another symbolist poet, Paul Valéry, whose description of the inadequate wine he was offered – “Mais, c’est curieux” – he treasured.

In 1941 he was claimed by RAF Intelligence and then, very naturally, the Government Code & Cypher School at Bletchley Park, where he worked in Hut 3 as part of the team, eventually nearly 600 strong, that translated, analysed and interpreted the decrypts from Hut 6. It was while there that he met and married in 1944 Gwen Hepworth (“Wendy”—he had a habit of using his own versions of names and places), on secondment to Hut 6 from the Foreign Office; his best man was the irascible Glaswegian John Cairncross, later exposed as a spy for the Soviet Union and dubbed the Fifth Man by the press.

After VE Day he was sent to Berlin; he was horrified not only by the condition of the defeated Germans, but by some of their conquerors’ behaviour to them, in particular that of a brother officer who, having agreed the price of a pleasure-boat with its owner’s widow in cigarettes, paid her in Woodbines.

Once again back in England, in 1946 he joined the French department at Cambridge, not long thereafter becoming a fellow of Queens’ College, where he remained until he retired. After the enormous success, noted above, of his anthology Twelve French Poets, he turned to translation. Some indication of his output’s range and extent can be had from observing that, as well as the classics already mentioned, it included Sons of Kings (Les Pléiades) by Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, the thriller Dossier 51 by Gilles Perrault, eight of the articles in Italian Fascisms from Pareto to Gentile (from the Italian), Rosa Luxemberg, a reappraisal, by Lelio Basso, also from the Italian, The Second World War by Henri Michel (co-awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize) and An Exemplary Life (Das Vorbild) by Siegfried Lenz, which won an award from the PEN Club of New York.

He enjoyed giving lectures, despite modestly having described that activity as casting false pearls before real swine; his became very popular: perhaps the undergraduates who liked his irreverence and wit were hoping for a repeat of the legendary if not mythical occasion he lectured on Surrealism dressed only in cap, gown and black tights. He was also Steward of his college and on the wine committee, duties from which he derived much pleasure.

He was divorced from his first wife in the early Seventies, soon marrying Meg—Margaret Clarke, then a research student - with whom he went to live in Adelaide, South Australia, after his retirement in 1981, when he was made a life fellow of Queens’. The location, with a very good library and no more than an hour or two’s drive from three significant wine-producing areas, was carefully chosen.

In retirement, with no academic distractions, he worked on his translations harder than ever; with no need for income from them, his tastes for the recondite or undervalued as well as for the classics could be expressed. The new selection from Chamfort gave him particular pleasure, with its uncynical and humorous appreciation of human nature comparable, he felt, with Montaigne; he also gained great satisfaction from The Child by Jules Vallès, an autobiographical novel dedicated to everyone who was bored at school.

Outside his pursuit of literature as a professional he had an abiding interest in all the arts, being a keen concert-, gallery- and filmgoer. In earlier days he had been fond of the company of convivial wits, having been well-acquainted with, among others, the belligerent critic and boozer John Davenport; Kingsley Amis’s horror when told he would have to teach Conrad amused him particularly. His interest in wine has been mentioned; he had a good palate and was both knowledgeable and experienced. He was widely travelled, both in Europe and outside; in the Fifties and Sixties, the Long Vacation usually saw him leaving Grantchester Meadows to cross the Channel en famille, first in a Vauxhall Velox, then with a Berkeley Cavalier caravan behind his short wheelbase Land Rover or, later, his Austin Westminster. He was not a good driver—and a worse back-seat driver: his adjurations to “keep the revs up” have passed into the family language. He had also been a reckonable tennis and squash player; at school, though not having an especially large or powerful physique, he had set a shot-putting record which stood for many years.

The geographical position of Australia in the Far East led to the development of an interest in the Dao that reflected his own quietist and patient approach to life. As, though tended devotedly by Meg, his health began slowly to decline, this attitude allowed the departure of successive physical faculties to be met not with resignation but with resolution to make the best of what remained.

He is survived by two sons and a daughter of his first marriage and by his second wife and their son.

Douglas Parmée, translator and academic, was born on June 6, 1914. He died in his sleep on August 11, 2008, aged 94.

© Nicholas Parmée 2008

This convergence of two NYRB Classics writers (James Schuyler and Joseph Joubert) seems appropriate today. The recording can be found at the PennSound Archives—which also includes several other poems from the same recording session.

" ...All that is
clear on this shadowless day under
a sky like a shadow is that the first
thought was gray..."

James Schuyler reads "Unlike Joubert"
Recorded at the Chelsea Hotel, New York City, on November 9, 1986.

Various news organizations are reporting that Tayeb Salih, whose Season of Migration to the North we are publishing this March, and in whose honor we have organized a panel at this year's PEN World Voices Festival, has died. He leaves behind a wife and three daughters.

The International Herald Tribune quotes Gamal el-Ghitani as saying, "Saleh is one of world's top novelists. On personal level, he was a modest, wise and brave man who carried the essence of Sudan's culture outside its borders."

The International Herald Tribune
Reuters
BBC

A letter from the editor of NYRB Classics
The Rider on the White Horse is currently available from www.nyrb.com at 30% off the cover price.

Everything's up in the air at the start of Theodor Storm's novella The Rider on the White Horse, written in 1888 when Storm, who was not only a celebrated author but also a distinguished jurist, was on his deathbed. The story begins—begins almost reluctantly—with a strange confusion of voices. First we hear what we take to be the author—only he disclaims authorship. He tells us that we are about to read a story that he read maybe a half century ago in a magazine, a magazine that in the years since he has never been able to track down, a story, he somewhat puzzlingly adds, of which "nothing external" has ever reminded him. The story follows: its narrator, traveling along the coast of the North Sea, is caught in a terrible storm; battered by wind and waves, he repeatedly glimpses a spectral horseman galloping furiously and soundlessly past him. Taking shelter at an inn, the traveler mentions the apparition, and now the local schoolmaster steps in. It is he who tells what you might call the story proper—a ghost story, yes, but also, as these overlapping voices might suggest, a story that has a ghostly life of its own.

At first, however, there is nothing uncanny about the story the schoolmaster tells, about a young man making his way in the world sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century. Hauke Heien is a boy from a modest farming background who, with a talent for numbers and a fascination with the ways of water, apprentices himself to the local dikemaster and soon makes himself indispensable. When the dikemaster dies, his mantle falls upon Hauke, who also marries, very happily, his daughter. It is a success story.

Hauke's story is set, as I mentioned, on the edge of the North Sea, in Frisia, where the proper construction and maintenance of dikes is crucial not only to the safety but also to the well-being of the community: as the network of dikes expands, so does the availability of land for grazing or cultivation. To open new fields, Hauke orders the construction of a new dike, built on new principles. Content with things as they are, the villagers grumble about the project. The dikemaster, however, is not lightly disobeyed, and they undertake it. They are—and this is where the story begins to grow unsettling—truly horrified when, after two years, the work approaches conclusion, and the dikemaster intervenes to prevent a step without which it will all have been in vain. "Something living has got to go into it," one man tells Hauke, "Even our grandfathers knew that much...."

Hauke ordains that no sacrifice will take place. The dike is built and holds. The new land is cleared. Reason trumps superstition. Progress is made. So it appears, and yet Hauke remains a lonely figure, with only wife and child for company, distrusted by the larger community. He has done his job, neglecting nothing, except perhaps something about the human. He rides on his white horse along his dike and feels himself to be "at the center of all the Frisians alive and dead....[towering] above them all."

There is an extraordinary moment in The Rider on the White Horse when Hauke's wife is sick, and Hauke, unusually, prays:

O God, don't take her away from me! I can't do without her and You know it!... I know You can't always do just what You want to do—not even You.... Speak to me! Just a breath!

Silence. A silence that is at the heart of Storm's story, where the natural world is prowled by supernatural apparitions, while the supernatural itself, the divine—even the poignantly limited God, able only to help a bit, that Hauke addresses—never appears. A world in which you cannot trust your eyes or anything, much less—Hauke will discover—know yourself.

I'm not going to reveal the end—you'll want to find it out yourself, I hope—and ruin the suspense, which mounts powerfully as the story proceeds. I will say that by the end we have been returned, in richer and stranger ways than we might have ever imagined, to the beginning: we are up in the air again. I began by noting the author's odd disclaimer about "nothing external" having ever reminded him of the story he happened upon long ago and now intends to tell again, and one thing that becomes clear in the course of that telling is that the landscape of the story is an interior landscape—the landscape of conscience, say, where the real and the unreal exist under continual threat of confusion, kept apart by only the most fragile and provisional barriers—though Storm's mud slicks, icy marshes, fog banks, crashing waves, and vulnerable dikes, not to mention Hauke and the villagers, never strike us as anything but unforgettably real.

And as to what I also mentioned to begin with, the strangely layered voices by which the story is relayed, by the end it is clear, I think, that the story we have heard is essentially choral: the story of any community and the sacrifices by which it ensures its survival; the story of the isolated souls that constitute all communities and of their deaths. Storm, as I said, was unsure he would live to complete it, and in the background of the story you can hear something like the dead saying to the living (as the living suppose), You are who we were and will be who we are. One of the mysterious effects of this extraordinary work is that at some point the modern reader realizes with a shock that he too is included—included already—in this ghostly chorus. It is ghost story in which, you could say, the reader is brought up short by his own apparition. The reader is the ghost.

The Rider on the White Horse is the title story and masterpiece in a selection of Storm's novellas and stories translated by the very fine American poet James Wright for the Signet Classics series, when it was edited by E.L. Doctorow. If I see a book from that series that I haven't read, I always pick it up, and in this case I was especially interested because of Wright's involvement. I'd always meant to read Storm, though more as a matter of duty, I suppose, than anticipated delight. It's not often that one starts a long story, finds oneself pulled irresistibly along through it, and finishes it both astonished and convinced that it is, in the strongest sense of the word, great—a work that will deepen with rereading, that matters. That was my experience with The Rider on the White Horse.

Have we mentioned that we think you should Buy Books for the Holidays? The proprietors of said site are taking bookstore nominations, so we nominate Three Lives and Company, where we intend to spend some time and money this month.

We're pleased to be in such esteemed company here and here.

From Ready Steady Blog (via the Literary Saloon) comes word that Juan Goytisolo (who wrote the introduction to The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes) has won Spain's National Prize for Literature.

Endorsement most gratefully accepted.

The Hound Blog has a roundup of Cosa Nostra books, including a short discussion of The Moro Affair and a recommendation of other books by Leonardo Sciascia. Says the Hound, "Sciascia has also written many excellent novels concerning Sicilian crime . . . I'd say The Day Of The Owl, The Wine Dark Sea and Equal Danger are mandatory reading for fans of genre fiction. Or just plain old great books."

Unexpected book recommendations: As a child, Michael Crichton adored James Thurber's 13 Clocks;  Barack Obama recently told the Argentine president that he was fond of Borges???take that, Karl Rove!???and Julio Cortazar.

The current issue of the International Literary Quarterly includes an essay by Amit Chaudhuri on money, by which he means "not markets, capital, financial gain or material success, but, specifically, the individual bank note and small change."

Gary Indiana (who wrote the introduction to our soon-to-be-published edition of Henry de Montherlant's Chaos and Night) is profiled in "The Elements of Bile."

Let's petition the USPS to issue a Snowy Day postage stamp in honor of the 50th anniversary of Ezra Jack Keats's classic. 

You totally called it: Judge this Book by Its Cover.

Something about Thanksgiving makes us appreciate homegrown humor that we might not otherwise have the stomach for, so here are Thanksgiving treats from Charles Schultz and Garrison Keillor.

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin (which houses the Mailer Archives) has just posted a page with some mementos from Norman Mailer's time at the 1968 political conventions.

 
Images © The Estate of Norman Mailer

The last image, of a handwritten page, is described on the Ransom site as notes taken during the convention, though it is written in the distinctive, third-person voice of Miami and the Siege of Chicago. At any rate, Mailer holds forth about Ronald Reagan as an actor. Here's what ended up in the final book

Anyone who has read Jean Renoir's memoir of Auguste Renoir, Renoir, My Father will recognize the old bearded man seen here, his hands twisted from arthritis. Also in the film are the painter Vollard and "La Boulangère," also familiar from the book. [via]

The film was discovered in Harvard University's archives in 2001.

"As Robert B. Johnson puts it in Henry de Montherlant (1968), 'Montherlant is French literature's twentieth century maverick,' and mavericks do not, on the whole, endear themselves to political bigots."

—John Fletcher, "Henry de Montherlant," French Novelists, 1930-1960

Chaos and Night by Henry de Montherlant (with an introduction by Gary Indiana) is forthcoming from NYRB in March 2009.

"[Thurber's] anger increased when The New Yorker ultimately refused to publish The Wonderful O because Thurber wouldn't approve the magazine's condensation of the story and he couldn't cut it enough himself to suit the editors. In a letter...Thurber mocked the note often placed at the end of New Yorker book reviews, ' The Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, was first printed in this magazine in a shorter version under the title The Aorta of Darknes.' "

—from Remember Laughter: A Life of James Thurber, by Neil A. Grauer

"[Thurber's] anger increased when The New Yorker ultimately refused to publish The Wonderful O because Thurber wouldn't approve the magazine's condensation of the story and he couldn't cut it enough himself to suit the editors. In a letter...Thurber mocked the note often placed at the end of New Yorker book reviews, ' The Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, was first printed in this magazine in a shorter version under the title The Aorta of Darknes.' "

???from Remember Laughter: A Life of James Thurber, by Neil A. Grauer