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The Morgan Library is hosting an exhibit called “Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars.”
Some of the items on display include early short stories, notebooks, manuscripts, pictures, and letters between the Nobel Prize-winning author and several beloved writers such as Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. A closing date has been set for Jan, 31, 2016.
Here’s more information from The Morgan Library’s website: “This is the first ever major museum exhibition devoted to the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), one of the most celebrated American authors of the 20th century…Focusing on the inter-war years, the exhibition explores the most consistently creative phase of Hemingway’s career and includes inscribed copies of his books, a rarely-seen 1929 oil portrait, photographs, and personal items.”
I've been in love with this guy for a very long time.
He has lived at my parents' stately home for many years.
Last night he came to live with me.
With you looking over my shoulder, F. Scott, I will try and I will try.
From works by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Maya Angelou to Dave Eggers and Amy Bloom, writer/director/producer Judd Apatow buys lots of books.
While his shelves are full of books, he doesn’t always get to reading them all, he revealed in an interview with The New York Times. In the interview, the author of the forthcoming book Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy also disclosed his favorite comedy writers. Here is an excerpt:
I can make the Sunday Times twice as thick if I name all of the people I admire. I loved Jack Handey’s book \"The Stench of Honolulu: A Tropical Adventure.\" I loved Bob Odenkirk’s book \"A Load of Hooey.\" Steve Martin is a great writer and great at everything. Adam Resnick’s book \"Will Not Attend: Lively Stories of Detachment and Isolation.\" I think many of the great TV dramas are also comedies. So, David Simon (\"The Wire\"); David Chase (\"The Sopranos\"); Matthew Weiner (\"Mad Men\"); and David Milch (\"Deadwood\"). Garry Shandling’s work is unparalleled. James Brooks. Robert Smigel. Amy Schumer. Lena Dunham.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s former home in Great Neck, the location that inspired his classic novel “The Great Gatsby,” is for sale. The seller is looking to fetch $3.9 for the Long Island home.
According to the real estate listing, Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda rented the home for two years in the early 1920s. Check it out:
Zelda called it \"our nifty little Babbit-home at Great Neck,\" and it became their base for parties and visits to even more luxurious homes in the vicinity, which eventually became the class-conscious West Egg and East Egg of \"Gatsby.\"
Via The Los Angeles Times.
Lionsgate has picked up the U.S. rights to the Genius biopic. The story for this movie comes from A. Scott Berg’s nonfiction book, Max Perkins: Editor of a Genius.
Deadline.com reports that Michael Grandage, a filmmaker, took the helm as the director. John Logan, the scribe behind Gladiator and Hugo, served as the screenwriter.
Colin Firth, an Academy Award-winning actor, played the role of the legendary publishing icon. Throughout his career, Perkins worked with several famous authors including Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. (via The Hollywood Reporter)
By: Maryann Yin,
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Which authors do you admire most? The team at blinkbox books has created an infographic that examines the careers of several famous authors including J.K. Rowling, Stephenie Meyer, Meg Cabot, Stephen King, and Haruki Murakami. For each author that is listed on this image, their “breakthrough” novel is highlighted.
Both Douglas Adams and J.R.R. Tolkien hit it big with their debut novels, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Hobbit: There and Back Again. F. Scott Fitzgerald became well-known at age 30 for his third book, The Great Gatsby, while Leo Tolstoy achieved great success at age 42 with his sixth title, War & Peace. We’ve embedded the full infographic below for you to explore further—what do you think?
By: Michael McGriff and J. M. Tyree,
on 11/24/2014
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Fade in on the Mission Dolores, the fictional gravesite of Carlotta Valdes in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. One block away, two writers with their first jobs teaching creative writing (okay, it was us!) decide to collaborate on a book of short stories that respond to classic and cult movies. We try — and fail — to [...]
By: Hannah Paget,
on 9/27/2014
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Coverage of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War has made us freshly familiar with many memorable sayings, from Edward Grey’s ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe’, to Wilfred Owen’s ‘My subject is War, and the pity of war/ The Poetry is in the pity’, and Lena Guilbert Horne’s exhortation to ‘Keep the Home-fires burning’.
But as I prepared the new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, I was aware that numerous other ‘quotable quotes’ also shed light on aspects of the conflict. Here are just five.
One vivid evocations of the conflict striking passage comes not from a War Poet but from an American novelist writing in the 1930s. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934), Dick Diver describes the process of trench warfare:
See that little stream—we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs.
This was, of course, on the Western Front, but there were other theatres of war. One such was the Gallipoli Campaign of 1915–16, where many ‘Anzacs’ lost their lives. In 1934, a group of Australians visited Anzac Cove, Gallipoli, and heard an address by Kemal Atatürk—Commander of the Turkish forces during the war, and by then President of Turkey. Speaking of the dead on both sides, he said:
There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.
Atatürk’s words were subsequently inscribed on the memorial at Gallipoli, and on memorials in Canberra and Wellington.
World War I is often is often seen as a watershed, after which nothing could be the same again. (The young Robert Graves’s autobiography published in 1929 was entitled Goodbye to All That.) Two quotations from ODQ look ahead from the end of the war to what might be the consequences. For Jan Christiaan Smuts, President of South Africa, the moment was one of promise. He saw the setting up of the League of Nations in the aftermath of the war as a hope for better things:
Mankind is once more on the move. The very foundations have been shaken and loosened, and things are again fluid. The tents have been struck, and the great caravan of humanity is once more on the march.
However a much less optimistic, and regrettably more prescient comment, had been recorded in 1919 by Marshal Foch on the Treaty of Versailles,
This is not a peace treaty, it is an armistice for twenty years.
Not all ‘war poems’ are immediately recognizable as such. In 1916, the poet and army officer Frederick William Harvey was made a prisoner of war (the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography tells us that he went on to experience seven different prison camps). Returning from a period of solitary confinement, he apparently noticed the drawing of a duck on water made by a fellow-prisoner. This inspired what has become a very well-loved poem.
From troubles of the world
I turn to ducks
Beautiful comical things.
How many people, encountering the poem today, consider that the ‘troubles’ might include a world war?
Headline image credit: A message-carrying pigeon being released from a port-hole in the side of a British tank, near Albert, France. Photo by David McLellan, August 1918. Imperial War Museums. IWM Non-Commercial License via Wikimedia Commons.
The post World War I in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations appeared first on OUPblog.
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Washington Irving, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and now Edgar Allan Poe. Paying homage to famous American authors has sort of become what I do.
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In honor of the 100th anniversary of World War I, we’re sharing an excerpt of Sir Hew Strachan’s The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War. Get a sense of what it was like to live through this historic event and how its global effects still impact the world today.
The Great War haunted the last century; it haunts us still. It continues to inspire imaginative endeavour of the highest order. It invites pilgrimage and commemoration surrounded by palpable sadness. Almost a hundred years after the war, ‘The Last Post’, intoned every evening at the Menin Gate in Ypres, still summons tears. We wish it all had not happened.
We associate the war with the loss of youth, of innocence, of ideals. We are inclined to think that the world was a better and happier place before 1914. If the last century has been one of disjunction and endless surprise rather than of the mounting predictability many expected at the next-to-last fin-de-siècle, the Great War was the greatest surprise of all. The war stands, by most historical accounts, as the portal of entry to a century of doubt and agony, to our dissatisfaction.
Its extremes of emotion, both the initial jubilation and subsequent despair, are seen as a preface to the politics of extremism that took hold in Europe in the aftermath; its mechanized killing is regarded as a necessary prelude to the even greater ferocity of the Second World War and to the Holocaust; its assault on the values of the Enlightenment is seen as a nexus between indeterminacy in the sciences and the aesthetics of irony. Monty Python might never have lived had it not been for the Great War. The war unleashed a floodtide of forces that we have been unable ever since to stem. ‘Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget!’ How in the world, Mr Kipling, are we to forget?
Figure 11.1 from the Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War. Used with permissions from Oxford University Press.
The enthusiasm surrounding the outbreak of war many described as a social and spiritual experience beyond compare. Engagement was the hallmark of the day. ‘We have,’ wrote Rupert Brooke, ‘come into our heritage.’ The literate classes, and by then they were the literate masses—teachers, students, artists, writers, poets, historians, and indeed workers, of the mind as well as the fist—volunteered en masse. School benches and church pews emptied. Those past the age of military service enrolled in the effort on the home front.
Words, literary words, visible on the page, flowed as they had never flowed before, in the trenches, at home, and across the seven seas. The Berlin critic Julius Bab estimated that in August 1914 50,000 German poems were being penned a day. Thomas Mann conjured up a vision of his nation’s poetic soul bursting into flame. Before the wireless, before the television, this was the great literary war. Everyone wrote about it, and for it.
Not surprisingly, the Great War turned immediately into a war of cultures. To Britain and France, Germany represented the assault, by definition barbaric, on history and law. Brutality was Germany’s essence. To Germany, Britain represented a commercial spirit, and France an emphasis on outward form, that were loathsome to a nation of heroes. Treachery was Albion’s name. Hypocrisy was Marianne’s fame.
But the war was also an expression of social values. The intense involvement of the educated classes led to a form of warfare, certainly on the western front, characterized by the determination and ideals of those classes. Trench warfare was not merely a military necessity; it was a social manifestation. It was to be, in a sense, the great moral achievement of the European middle classes. It represented their resolve, commitment, perseverance, responsibility, grit—those features and values the middle classes cherished most.
And here for dear dead brothers we are weeping.
Mourning the withered rose of chivalry,
Yet, their work done, the dead are sleeping, sleeping
Unconscious of the long lean years to be.
Those lines from the Wykehamist, the journal of Winchester College, of July 1917 evoked both the passing of an age and the crisis of a culture.
‘The bourgeoisie is essentially an effort,’ insisted the French bourgeois René Johannet. The Great War was essentially an effort too. The American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald would call the war on the western front ‘a love battle—there was a century of middle-class love spent here. All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high-explosive love.’ Fitzgerald’s ‘lovely safe world’ was one of empire, imperial ideas, and imperial dreams. It was a world of confidence, of religion, and of history. It was a world of connections. History was a synonym for progress.
Sir Hew Strachan is a professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford, Commonwealth War Graves Commissioner, and a Trustee of the Imperial War Museum. He also serves on the British, Scottish, and French national committees advising on the centenary of the First World War. He is the editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War.
We’re giving away ten copies of The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War to mark the 100th anniversary of World War I. Learn more and enter for a chance to win. For even more exclusive content, visit the US ‘World War I: Commemorating the Centennial’ page or UK ‘First World War Centenary’ page to discover specially commissioned contributions from our expert authors, free resources from our world-class products, book lists, and exclusive archival materials that provide depth, perspective, and insight into the Great War.
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The post Memory and the Great War appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Tom Rachman,
on 6/2/2014
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Naming a novel is painstaking, agonizing, delicate. But does the title matter? It certainly feels consequential to the author. After several years' battle with your laptop keyboard, after 100,000 words placed so deliberately, you must distill everything into a phrase brief enough to run down the spine of a book. Should it be descriptive? Perhaps [...]
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Carson Ellis is an award-winning illustrator who has provided art for bestsellers such as "The Mysterious Benedict Society" by Trenton Lee Stewart, The Composer Is Dead by Lemony Snicket, and the "Wildwood Chronicles" by her husband, Colin Meloy.
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At Powell's, our book buyers select all the new books in our vast inventory. If we need a book recommendation, we turn to our team of resident experts. Need a gift idea for a fan of vampire novels? Looking for a guide that will best demonstrate how to knit argyle socks? Need a book for [...]
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By: Will Schwalbe,
on 10/2/2012
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I'm a big believer that books, like people, can have partners: there are pairs of books that complement each other and belong together. With some books, as soon as you mention one, someone is bound to mention the other. Obviously, this applies to sequels and prequels. If you say you like Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, [...]
"Where do you get your ideas?" is still the question I get asked most as an author. The second-most-asked question is "How do you write a book?" The answer to both questions is simple: I don't know. But I can tell you how I do it. Writing, like any art form, is whatever you can [...]
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Man, what self-indulgent rubbish.
“I am so rich…I am so observant…My friends are so rich…My friends have great parties…Gatsby is so rich…Gatsby is so neat…”
So it’s a great story about the Jazz era. It wasn’t that great an era.
If I wanted to read about lame, rich, full of themself people going to parties, I’d pick up People magazine.
A bore.
 |
| "Daniel in the Lion's Den" - Peter Paul Rubens |
Simple question, not so simple answer. Which book do you most wish you had written?
Are you going with the mega fortune? Literary greatness? Maybe a little of both?
I'm going with THE GREAT GATSBY.
What about you?
This week! The books!
Another relatively quiet week in books this week, so just a few quality links for you. Also, on Monday and Tuesday I shall be away from the blog and will be posting blog posts of yore, which will possibly incorporate my new kick of including art from yore.
First up, the big news in the social media world is that Google launched Google+, its direct challenge to Facebook (disclosure: link is to CNET, I work at CNET). My first impression: Awesome! I'm a big fan, and you can find me on Google+ here. I also participated in CNET's hands-on look at Google+ using Google+. Add me to your Circles!
Though I'm also still kind of trying to figure out how to calibrate my Google+ presence. The people following me thus far are mostly techies, so I will probably be sharing mainly social media and tech-of-book posts until I can better target my posts. But so far I'm extremely impressed with the interface and am enjoying re-building my social network from scratch.
Speaking of social media news, the Wall Street Journal has a great article on the social media prowess of author John Green, whose unpublished novel is already #1 on Amazon & B&N. (via SideKick)
Major congratulations are in order to my former client Natalie Whipple, who just announced her new book deal with HarperCollins for her debut novel TRANSPARENT!! If you've been following Natalie's blog you know that this has been a long time coming, and having worked with Natalie for several years I can tell you the book deal couldn't have happened to a more deserving writer! So excited for her.
In other awesome former client news, Jennifer Hubbard has a really cool look at some first lines from great novels. (Jennifer also has a really cool cover for her forthcoming novel TRY NOT TO BREATHE).
Roger Ebert took to his blog to lambast an "intermediate level" version of THE GREAT GATSBY (via Rick Daley), whereas Jessa Crispin took a more measured approach and noted that comic version of great novels aren't so bad. I don't know, I'm in Camp Ebert. Turning this...
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning----
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
into this...
Everybody has a dream. And, like Gatsby, we must all follow our dream wherever it takes us.
Some unpleasant people became part of Gatsby's dream. But he cannot be blamed for that. Gatsby was a success, in the end, wasn't he?
...is, as Ebert says, an obscenity.
And riffing off my post about why you're getting rejections, agent Rachelle Gardner adds one more reason:
34 Comments on This Week in Books 7/8/11, last added: 7/11/2011
Very very very sad news this week as, after several years of speculation, Borders has finally succumbed and filed for bankruptcy. It was Chapter 11 bankruptcy (re-org) and not Chapter 7 (Eric from Pimp My Novel had a roundup of the potential difference there), but even still 200 stores will close, and my heart goes out to all those affected. Eric from PMN has an indispensable take on what this means for authors. In the short term, at least, it seems as if this is going to put further pressure on publishers and on the midlist.
Meanwhile, there was an interesting CNET article (disclosure: I work at CNET) asking a very important question and poll: what would you pay for an e-book? The agency model publishers are seeking to hold the line between $10.99 - $14.99 for new release e-books, and it will be interesting to see if consumers will go along with that. Is the perception of value going to be there for an e-book?
And along those lines, I thought Mike Shatzkin had a really interesting take on consumer complaints about DRM, which is that they're not totally valid. His point, in a nutshell: Yes, you can't re-sell your e-books and it's more of a license than true ownership. But when you sell a paperbook you lose ownership of your book, whereas when you send someone a copy of your e-book you still possess it. So why are people insisting on treating them identically? Doesn't the digital model necessitate a new way of thinking about and selling content?
And prospective author J.J. Madden has a great roundup of the recent Digital Book World, and video of some of the people creating the future of publishing.
Now, I did not represent picture books when I was an agent and thus will tell you quite honestly that I know extremely little about them, but someone who does know a thing or two about them is my former colleague Tracy Marchini, who has a really good post on what makes picture books successful.
In contest news, lots percolating around the blogosphere! Blog friends Hannah Moskowitz/Suzanne Young and Kiersten White are hosting contests, and the Texas Observer reached out to let me know about a short story contest guest judged by none other than Larry McMurtry. So be sure and check that out.
Lots and lots of people have reached out to me about this post by Ta-Nehisi Coates about a new documentary on Bad Writing. Which makes me wonder if they're trying to tell me something. Haha. No, and I don't need a breath mint, thank you very much!
In seriously important news, the ship that inspired MOBY-DICK was discovered at the bottom of Davy Jones' Locker!!! No word on Ahab's ivory leg.
OMG THIS "GREAT GATSBY" NINTENDO GAME. A. Maze. Zing.
I've known some people who always seem to be content with life, who tend to think things are perfectly fine as they are.
I don't know any writers this way.
Not that writers have it so bad. Sure, there are stereotypes of the depressive and possibly alcoholic writer, the Edgar Alan Poes, the Charles Bukowskis, the Sylvia Plaths: the tortured artists and souls, a category that seems to loom larger in legend than in practice. Most writers I know aren't that bad off by any means, and in fact you could probably take most of them home to your mom.
But there has to be a pretty intense fire burning inside you to devote the amount of time to write a book that it takes to write one. Spending hundreds of hours engaged in a multi-month mental marathon is not usually an act for the perfectly content at heart.
And that's before you consider the odds.
Writing itself is a form of striving: of striving to be heard, striving for something more than the ordinary life, and, if the writer is honest, there's probably an element of material striving as well, whether for money or recognition or both.
Writing is an act of getting down on your hands and knees and pushing on the ground and hoping the world spins on a slightly different axis. It's the art of not taking life for granted and trying to make something, anything change.
That's partly why we love it, right?
And I don't know if any writer quite wrote and lived the art of writing and striving as F. Scott Fitzgerald did.
Fitzgerald
lived the life of a striver. When Zelda Sayre refused to marry him because she was concerned
he couldn't provide for her, he got back to work writing and the result was THIS SIDE OF PARADISE, a sensation published when he was just 23 years old. He was always trying to be something more.
Of course, Fitzgerald created perhaps the ultimate striver of them all, Jay Gatsby, someone whose entire life was built on fiction, from his name (nee James Gatz), to his always shifting and unknowable biography (he professed to be from the Midwestern city of San Francisco), to the narrative he constructed around his affair with Daisy Buchanan. His life rested on layer upon layer of fiction.
And like Gatsby, writing itself is built around striving and dreams and a world conjured from thin air in the hope that it's enough. It's that feeling that Gatsby had of being just a few sequences of events away from having those dreams coming true, as close as the green light on the dock, so close you can "hardly fail to grasp them."
But when those dreams recede before us, as Fitzgerald wrote in the greatest page of them all, "that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
And then we get back to work.
THE GREAT GATSBY is published by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS, which is the parent company of CNET, where I am employed. The opinions herein expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of CBS.
With apologies to Dante Alighieri...
We have all probably started ill-fated novels that, shall we say, did not go where we wanted them to go. For one reason or another, either our will or our preparation or the idea failed us, and sure enough, they ended up in novel hell.
Based on the
Nine Circles of Hell in Dante's Divine Comedy, here are the nine circles of writing hell.
Save your novel from these sins, my fellow writers! Repent before it is too late!
First Circle - LimboHello shiny idea for a novel! Should I write you? Should I not write you? Maybe I'll write a few pages and see how you go. Should I... oohhh Farmville.
Second Circle - LustNovel, you are so brilliant, you shine like a beautiful bright beacon, nay, like filigree sparkling in the darkest of unlit nights. Everything you do is wonderful, to change but one of your words would be a sin unto mankind. Whatever you want novel, whether it's second person stream of consciousness or an illogical plot twist or overwrought prose that makes people blush, you can have it, please take it, it's yours. I LOVE YOU, NOVEL.
Third Circle - GluttonyNo time to eat. No time to work. No time for breaks. No time to attend to essential hygiene. Twenty-six-hours straight. MUST. WRITE. NOVEL. I. WILL. NOT. BURN. OUT.
Okay, I'm starting to get burned out...
Fourth Circle - GreedDude, Stephenie Meyer wrote that vampire book in like six weeks or something and now she's a gagillionaire. How hard can it be?!
Fifth Circle - AngerI hate agents, I hate query letters, I hate rejection letters, I hate editors, I hate published authors, I hate unpublished authors, I hate periods, I hate exclamation points, I hate semi-colons, I hate paper, I hate words, I hate the space between words, and most of all, I HATE THIS FREAKING NOVEL!!!
Sixth Circle - HeresyYou know what novel I don't like? THE GREAT GATSBY. I mean, what's the big deal?! Green lights and drunks and parties and blah blah blah? What a bunch of trash. I threw that book across the room. That Scott person needs to get a clue, I can't believe anyone published him. And DON'T GET ME STARTED on how much editing he needed.
Seventh Circle - ViolenceOh, you think you're reeeeallll clever, don't you, Manuscript. You think you're smart and witty and amazing and your characters are funny and you're going to make people cry. Well, how about I introduce you to my friend MR. SHREDDER!!! Mwa ha ha ha ha ha.....
Eighth Circle - FraudOprah won't REALLY care if I make up this memoir...
Ninth Circle - TreacheryThis novel
doesn't need revisions. I don't need to
write a good query letter. Who needs to
take the time to research agents? This novel is gold, baby, gold!!<
By Keith Gandal
Want a quick, but apparently reliable measure of how elitist you are? Go see the 7-hour production of Gatz, in which all 47,000 words of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby are, in the course of the play, enunciated on stage. (If you dare and can afford to.) If you love every minute of it and find time flying by, you’re probably, well, an arts snob; if you find your reaction mixed, your mind drifting in and out, and your body just plain giving out, well, you’re likely more of a populist.
Consider the following small, statistically meaningless, but provocative sample of reviews you instantly encounter on the web: the New York Times, Bloomberg, and Theatremania all give the play rave reviews, while the New York Post and the New York Daily News both give it 2½ stars (out of 4 and 5 respectively). Ben Brantley of the New York Times describes the play as “work of singular imagination and intelligence.” Jeremy Gerard of Bloomberg calls it “remarkable,” “as powerful a piece of stagecraft as you may ever see.” David Finkle of Theatremania finds the play “mesmerizing” and declares, “the lengthy production goes by in what seems like a blink of an eye.” Meanwhile, Elisabeth Vincentelli of the New York Post gives it a mixed review, asserting that the director “has come up with an inspired concept” and that Gatz is “great, but [it] also grates.” “There are the deadly boring stretches. Very long ones.” She concludes: “It’s as maddeningly tedious as it is brilliant. By the end, my mind was as numb as my butt.” And Joe Dziemianowicz of the New York Daily News recommends the play, but also calls it a “fanny-numbing readathon.”
In other words, this small sample of reviews breaks down across class lines. Higher-brow papers or websites are raving, and the lower-brow papers have mixed feelings, including uncomfortable feelings in their behinds.
But is this breakdown really surprising? A 7-hour production at a cost of $140 seems to demand of its audience members that they have a lot of time and money to spare. This is at the Public by the way, which was presumably once more public than it is now. In fact, one thing the play Gatz does quite effectively is to restore Fitzgerald’s now very accessible novel to the inaccessibility, along class lines, that it would have had back in the 1920s.
I want to make clear that I haven’t seen the play and, thus, that my perceptions of its length, its cost, and its reviews are not colored by my having sat through it. I’m actually quite curious to see it – I’m teaching the novel this term at City College, and I’ve written a recent book that devotes the longest chapter to Fitzgerald’s novel. Well-meaning colleagues and friends have even suggested I take my class to see the play, given that some reviewers are calling it a major theatrical event, but with regular tickets starting at $140, who c
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I've already written it. Still editing, but the dream eating at me since I was 10 is down on paper :-)
Starting on the sequel now. A very soul-satisfying experience so far.
The Rubens picture looks like an illustration for Query Letter Hell or something.
Except the lions don't look hungry enough.
Catcher in the rye - without competition
Absolutely anything by Melina Marchetta, but if I have to pick on, I'll go with my favorite - Jellicoe Road!
The Catcher In The Rye. Love everything about it.
Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises"
Not surprised to see a couple of Neil Gaiman books on this list. For me it would definitely be "Neverwhere. "
There are more refined answers, I'm sure, but for me it's hands down Harry Potter. If for the crossover (kid-adult) alone. Truly a modern marvel.
I would say The Grapes of Wrath, but if I wrote that, I would have to just lay down my pen and retire.
I'll go with Joshua: Ender's Game. (Maybe we can be co-authors?)
What, no one is going to say The Bible? At least the red parts? XD
I'm only teasing Father! Don't smite me! XD
The BFG :)
"Goosebumps: The Curse of Camp Cold Lake"
Perfection at its finest.
Mudbound by Hillary Jordan.
Timely question--I've just started blogging and my first post answers why I would pick her book.
Second choice would be anything by Zadie Smith. She is crazy brilliant.
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
As a father of three boys, The Road, by McCarthy. Only one book made me cry in my life - this is it.
Today, I'd choose The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. On another day, I might choose something by John Irving or Kurt Vonnegut.
The Alchemist or The Reader
Harold and the Purple Crayon
There are books I love but none I wish I wrote. They motivate and inspire me to produce something equally great and maybe even better.
2001: A Space Odyssey. Wish it was written by me, instead Sir Arthur Clarke beat me to it.
The Encyclopedia Brown detective books by Donald J. Sobol. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant books. In fact, the first class stories I'd written were bascially Encyclopedia Brown fanfics.
Bill
I feel this way every time I read a book by Murakami, especially "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" and "Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World".
It's a toss-up, actually. "Bag of Bones" by Stephen King or "The Sorceror's Stone" by JK Rowling. Although I'm deeply envious of Rowling, not for the money (okay, for the money, too), but for having written such a deeply rich and satisfying series of 7 books.
When I read a Louise Erdrich book, I get so jealous, I want to tear it up and stomp on it, except it's too good and I have to keep reading. - Jean
Some great titles. I'd have to go with "Pride & Prejudice".
A fascinating question...I'd probably have to say _The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe_ because it is timeless, classic, and helped paved the way for all modern fairy stories and children's fantasy. But really...I've never wished I wrote someone else's book--I just find them inspiring
THE ROAD, for the style and the profound emotional impact delivered through the story.
WORD VERIFICATION: ceregism. A cerebral climax, i.e. a purely intellectual orgasm. Sorry, I just call 'em as I see 'em.
Every time I read "His Dark Materials" by Philip Pullman I get jealous. I wish I'd thought of the daemons.
It's a toss-up: either the original DUNE series by Frank Herbert, or the FOUNDATION epic by I. Asimov. The scope of those two amazes me. (in the genre category)
As for literary - anything by Hemingway, preferably during the Paris or Key West years.
This is the stuff we dream about, that perhaps our writing might resonate like the books we all remember. Can't wait to see all the comments - our favorite books sometimes indicates our preferences in writing too.
"Come Away my Beloved" a devotional by Frances Roberts. Whenever I open it it gives me what I need. It helped me through a bout of depression and it is a book I give and recommend to others.
Writing a book that impacts lives for the good, even after death, it doesn't get much better than that.
Either "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn or Tamora Pierce's new series (the first book of which was "Terrier")... although, actually, if I'd written those books then I would miss on the delight of reading them.
"ROOM" by Emma Donoghue
...the voice of Jack is just so amazing... it was like reading my nephew's thoughts it was so realistic/perfect.
Wuthering Heights. That was the book that got me obsessed with writing as a teenager. I wanted to create my own Heathcliff.
Hunger Games
Twilight or Harry Potter. I don't like the Twilight novels but she sure does have a lot of $$$$
Also Gatsby. Definitely the best-written book I have read.
The Great Gatsby for me, too.
-Salom
Oh, forgot to mention: I also wish I had thought of The Boys from Brazil.
-Salom
Trickster's Queen because the characters are so believable and the complexity of the social and racial clash between the natives and whites is honest and doesn't have a clear cut resolution.
Every time I read it I find something new. That is the best kind of book.
Aw, you know, anything earth-shatteringly inspiring and classic by one of the great literary geniuses. Nothing spectacular. ;) I don't necessarily want to have WRITTEN their books, but I wish I could inspire people the same way they did with MY writing! :D Someday!
*To Kill A Mockingbird
*Peace Like a River (Enger)
*Boys Life (McCammon)
Cloud Atlas. Six for the price of one.
All the books I imagined I was going to write before I wrote them. The reach of imagination always exceeds the grasp of technique.
Where The Wild Things Are
Not seeing many picture books in this list!
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close-- that book changed the way I look at the creative process. It's amazing.
Matilda by Roald Dahl (any of his books, really) or The Giving Tree(Shel Silverstein). Those books changed me as a kid!
Any of the works of Alexandre Dumas
I'm going to have to go with Harry Potter, but not really for the money. (though I'm sure it is nice) I'd go with Harry Potter because of the way the books make me feel. I love The Great Gatsby and I've loved many other books, but few of them make me FEEL the way Harry Potter does. I'd love to have created that. I hope what I do create makes someone else feel the same way Harry Potter has made me feel.
THe Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Nearly every topic I get into a discussion about has the potential to make me think of that book series. It just covers so many bloody themes it's a little absurd.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The forgotten, the rejected, the human. I love books about the human condition and I think this one is the most beautiful one I have ever read.
The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum. It's why I wrote the book I did.
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, for a modern work. But for something older and more serious I wish I could express myself the way Souseki does in Kokoro.
A Million Little Pieces. I am a glutton for punishment.
No, seriously. She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb or Sue Miller While I was Gone. But, ask again in five minutes and the answer could be different.
LOTR.
"The Hunger Games" - Instant answer.
Incredible story and message, riveting writing, and an instant YA classic that is going to the silver screen. What's not to (be jealous of) love?
A certain dark Cormac McCarthy book inspired me to write my first published novel, but I love The Road without envy.
I wish I could write a current-day version of McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
Jim Butcher's Codex Alera. One of those instant-connection books, you know? :)
I'm going with the The Great Gatsby, too...
Stainless Steel Rat, Hornblower or the Harry Potter series.
It's a close race between A Wrinkle In Time and Bridge of Birds.
I'm going for big money on this one. Twilight! The author wrote the book in three months and then made 750k in a three book deal.
Three months of hard work and she never had to think about a day job again, she had all the time in the world to wright the other to after that... yea I would wright Twilight.
The first book that popped into my head was "Northern Lights" by Philip Pullman, the second was "Wise Children" by Angela Carter. I echo Joshua and say, how's that for spectrum?
I can read either of these books over and over again and find new things I am in awe of.
Interestingly, my favorite book isn't a book I wish I'd written...
"Lord of the Rings." I'd love to have that much impact, that a book I wrote changed a genre forever.
Southern Vampire Series (aka Sookie Stackhouse-True Blood series).
Not just because of the popularity but the dark southern wit and clearly defined world Harris created. Awesome.
Hands down, A Confederacy of Dunces. Although I wouldn't make the same career choices he made afterward.
Fun question!
As usual, I have multiple answers:
The Harry Potter books. Not the money at all - I wish I could create an incredible world like that, I wish I could plot like that, I wish I could write like that!
Runner up: The Little Prince by Saint-Exupéry. Lovely and wise.
Another runner up: Winnie the Pooh. Delightful and perfect.
Another Runner up: No specific book, but I wish I could write like Terry Pratchett
Non-Fiction: Hard to pick since most of the truly great non-fiction books we've integrated and moved beyond, but I'd love to have the abilities of Darwin, Freud, etc. to conceptualize a new and more accurate way of thinking about things. To add clarity to the human worldview.
The Harry Potter series, for the same reasons Mira said. To be able to create such an intricate, complex, sustainable world with such a huge diversity of characters, settings and challenges, wow.
I can't seem to post as me today, having trouble again, but it's Leila.
Like the Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell comment- great novel.
Also would have enjoyed writing Harry Potter.
But I'm gonna go long on this one say, "The Brothers Karamazov," by Dostoevsky.
And to this day I am stunned by the devotees of Ender's Game. I thought it was awful, awful writing. But to each their own.
I'll share the list of Top 100 novels I keep bookmarked for my ongoing self-improvement program :).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/oct/12/features.fiction
Gatsby makes it, also Catcher in the Rye. And Catch 22, another book I would love to have authored.
It's biased toward British writers and obviously made up of lots of classics and works that make it onto assigned reading lists. How many of us would really like to have authored Pilgrim's Progress, raise your hand?! Or The Scarlet Letter, for that matter.
I'm very curious to read Outlander now, given all the call-outs here. Once was enough for The Road, however.
There are so many; however, I must go with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
BTW, this is a wonderful 'to read' list.
Les Miserables or To Kill A Mockingbird. So many to choose from!
Pride & Prejudice. Literary greatness, no lifetime fame or money but lots of posthumous glory. OK, I wouldn't mind some lifetime fame and money, but I'd rather see my work become immortal.
OK, I'm cheating. Because the book I really wish I had written isn't a book, it's a movie: Mean Girls
It's fetch. It's fierce. It's awesome. Regina George is a life ruiner. She ruins lives. What's not to love?
Don't even have to think about it. Always: To Kill A Mockingbird. (second: Lord of the Flies)
Ann Best, Memoir Author
Catch-22.
Er, then again, maybe I would have had to be a World War II veteran to have penned that.
'Legacy' by Susan Kay, then.
Harry Potter. Not because of the fame and fortune but because I adore that world and I would love to have her imagination. I would also like Tamora Pierce's name creating ability and imagination.
I wish I could write like Fitzgerald, and I'm sure I could contribute many more classics to the list, but really, it's SPIN by Robert Charles Wilson. Coincidentally, I first heard about this book on your blog. I think this book is incredible: the scope is sweeping and epic, the prose is beautiful, and the characters are deep. It's Wilson's masterpiece.
I'd love to have written Pride and Prejudice.
But I'd also gladly settle for one of the Brontë's novels.
Or something more modern perhaps like Breakfast at Tiffany's by Capote or A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin.
Without a doubt, Harry Potter. We all talk about the billion dollar empire that JK Rowling singlehandedly created, and yet all of that doesn’t speak to the real magic that is J.K. Rowling. With one boy wizard, Rowling transformed reading for children around the world. Reading became fun again. And not only were children reading, adults were reading too. Harry Potter became an experience the whole family could share together. So forget about the Potter movies, the theme park, and the gluttony of merchandizing. The true magic is that Rowling found the formula to make reading awesome again.
No other writer in modern times has been as transformative as JK Rowling, and for that, I salute her.
I'm torn. It would either be - And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. It is one of my all time favorite books and she did such a brilliant job of building the suspense throughout the novel and the ending was sheer genius. Or Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - simply because it is the beginning of something so incredible. A magical world, a fantastic and such well written characters.
"OP CENTER" by Tom Clancy and OLD MAN & THE SEA" by Ernest Hemingway. Two of the most interesting books I wished have written IF ONLY because the two famous authors seemed to be just like me when it comes to story-telling. LOL just kidding.
Aw, man! Nathan took mine.
Madame Bovary or Gone with the Wind. Ooh! Or The Help.
Tough one. Probably Pizzolatto's Galveston, or McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, or maybe Great Expectations.
The Life of Pi by Yann Martel - brilliant writing.
"Ten Little Indians". It is just a great mystery.
"Carrie" by Stephen King. It's the one his wife Tabitha fished out of the garbage.
Rebecca West's "The Return of the Soldier". Small and controlled and perfect.
Gert Hofmann's "The Parable of the Blind." What an amazing way of giving voice to the voiceless by making great painting come alive.
(Speaking of which, I also wish I'd painted the Rubens "Daniel in the Lions' Den" that heads this thread!)
Of recent books in my own genre, YA, I really admire Sonya Hartnett's "Thursday's Child." I wish I could write like that.
Right now in my career, 'Olivia', the picture book by Ian Falconer. It oozes sophistication and draughtsmanship, is great to read aloud to the kids, works on different levels and is downright HILARIOUS not to mention beautiful to look at. I'm writing a comic strip - http://chalkandcheesecomics.blogspot.com/ - check it out!
I would have written Beach Music by Pat Conroy. Sometimes I read just a sentence by Mr. Conroy and I realize I will never be able to write anything quite so beautiful or haunting.
On the other hand, the books I write don't drive me into such a deep depression that I can't write another for 5 years, so maybe he wishes he could write something a little lighter.
I read Pat Conroy when I want to be depressed about my own writing skills, but in a good way. If that makes any sense:)
Uh, my bar isn't that high, actually. Anything by Isabel Allende, especially the first one, The House of The Spirits. I'm a storyteller, no great literary aspirations for me except as far as crafting a unique tale that speaks to people and makes them FEEL (good, bad, happy, sad, whatever).
Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea
The Speed of Light by Elizabeth Rosner.
Are You There God, It's Me Margaret. Judy Blume. Any of those books. She gives lessons without preaching and I clung to every lesson she could teach me since I was lacking so from home.
Perhaps "Nine Stories."
Different topic: I've always loved this painting and have a postcard copy on my fridge. The emotion is so powerful.
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
Of Mice and Men
Harry Potter, without a doubt.
Amsterdam. The World According to Garp. A Visit from the Goon Squad. Oh, I could go on all day!
Either "Look Homeward, Angel" or "Crime and Punishment."
Anything by Cormac McCarthy.
Or LOTR.
Hi Nathan, I have been following your blog for a while and love it. Time to stop being a lurker and post something! I could think of many, but am going with The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. It is beautifully written, has four strong, unique voices, and carries a powerful message.
Time & Again by Jack Finney.
I love it because it uses imagination instead of devices to go back in timeand it's a mystery and a love story,too!
Henry Miller's TROPIC OF CANCER. To say (this won't be word for word as I'm going from memory), "I am no longer an artist, I don't think about it. I just am. This is not a novel. This is libel, slander, a kick in the pants to God." Yep. And then in his later years to support a young writer in Erica Jong and then to coorespond with her via snailmail. Priceless.
Like Joshua and Alan:
Ender's Game (Card)
(It's okay, Domino. To each his own.:D)
or Swan Song (McCammon)
Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus. A perfect novel.
Anything by David Sedaris for LOFL.
For kids: Holly Black's Tithe.
I'm amazed at all the comments.
I have truly never even considered this until right now.
I've never wished I'd written anything other than my own books. I've never wanted to be anyone else either. Interesting.
The Hunger Games Trilogy because a book hasn't made me cry like that since I read Bridge to Terebithia in sixth grade. Also Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn Trilogy because the worldbuilding is so inventive and amazing.
Westerfeld's LEVIATHAN.
For me, it's not so much about how the book was received as what the book's about. LEVIATHAN is precisely the kind of book I would've written, if only I'd thought of it first. Now I have to figure out how to clone without looking like I'm cloning it ;-)
Anon 6:09
That's cool that you feel confident with your own self-expression.
But from my perspective regarding this topic - we admire other people and their accomplishments, and we learn from them what is possible. We can then use those possiblities as a guide for ourselves, so we aspire to simliar accomplishments. For me, that's what this post is really about - our dreams and aspirations, as well as applauding other people's great works.
The book I most wish I'd written would be the one I have yet to write. I'm going for both mega fortune and literary greatness.
I just need to find That Book in me. :)
I'll go with a short story and say A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor.
Underneath the violence, I can feel the gospel everytime I read it.
I'm seeing a lot of my favorites in these responses, but I share BrianW's awe of Pat Conroy and, yes, Beach Music.
But then there's Mockingbird: Who wouldn't want to be the creator of Atticus Finch!
The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold, or the Harry Potter series.
Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" or Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time"
Anthony J. Langford's 'RIP Rest in Prime'. Oh hang on, I wrote it already.
;)
So many books! I don't know. Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines is a brilliant idea, one I wish I'd had. But there are so many other books. I finish them and just sit there for a while, thinking, "I wish I'd written that. That's such a good idea!"
Given that the subtitle of my current WIP is "A Mr. Darcy Novel," I think my answer is obvious.
However, I agree with Rebecca regarding Tolkien--to know my book reshaped an entire genre would be pretty heady.
Jennifer Cary Diers had a good point as well. If I wrote my favorite book, I wouldn't have the enjoyment of reading and rereading it.
The Giver by Lois Lowry and The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Rebecca, Dracula or any of the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Because I'm the sort of borderline sociopath who love to get into the mind of criminals, I'll have to say Thomas Harris' SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. I wish I'd created a villain that deliciously evil, intelligent, charming and likeable! :)
Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible
Outlander
and my WIP.
I would have to go with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness or Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.
I'm stuck because if I'd written any of the books I adore, I probably wouldn't adore them as much. So I'll just go with something that made a lot of money. Maybe the Bible.
Books that have made the most impact on me would include Mrs. Dalloway, Sharp Teeth, LOTR, Three Bags Full, Mudbound, Coraline. I could go on and on. If I had to pick just one I think my head would explode. For today, I'd probably say Mrs. Dalloway. The language in it is like watching a fast moving train while listening to the most beautiful orchestral music.
I must be one of the few people who escaped both high school and college without reading The Great Gatsby.
I've decided I'm going to take the plunge and read it. Thanks Nathan. (And thanks to John Green too, who also recommended it recently.)
Yes, Nathan, a very tough question to answer.
For me, there are three. Any of these would be great to have written:
Richard Bachman's THE LONG WALK,
Dennis Lehane's MYSTIC RIVER, or
Margaret Atwood's THE HANDMAID'S TALE.
Heck, it was hard to whittle my list down to those three! JAWS was in there, along with THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN. :(
This may sound like a cop-out, but I'm glad I've written (am writing) my own book. All the books I love so much are wonderful because they are the way they are. I've I'd written them they'd be different.
Not necessarily bad, just different.
Okay, it's not a book I wish I'd written. It's a series. Rachel Vincent's young adult Soul Screamers series. I am so in love with that series. ^_^
"For me, that's what this post is really about - our dreams and aspirations, as well as applauding other people's great works."
I "get" it. I just never did it.
Anon 6:09
Three books:
Catcher In The Rye
The Great Gatsby (Old Sport)
The ShacK
That IS a toughie, I don't think I've ever really said to myself, 'I wish I'd written that.'
But off the top, I'd say, The old Man and The Sea. I get something new from that book every time I read it. So much about human nature, having, losing, winning and having it taken away again to discover it not the destination but the journey, so much is said in such a small space. It's an epic saga in a hundred or so pages. It's what a book should be and does what a book should do, for me anyway.
2nd choice, Probably The Outsiders. The first book I ever identified with in a way that made me want to write.
"To Kill a Mockingbird" or "Huckleberry Finn". Great talent.
Mists of Avalon by Marian Zimmer Bradley for contemporary lit. The Scarlet Letter from the established literary canon.
The Handmaid's Tale
Loved, loved Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna. The breadth and history and fitting all the pieces together. It has inspired me to research my own historical novel.
Also wish I had written The Secret Life of Bee's. In fact, I am a little disappointed in myself that I didn't!
Either 'Johnathan Livingstone Seagull' or 'A Christmas Carol'...but on further personal questioning, it would have to beeeeeee............... 'A Christmas Carol'; finest story ever written.
"To Kill a Mockingbird" or Gentleman's Agreement"
I should have asked you this before - but why the Great Gatsby? Based on your enthusiasm, I bought and read this, this year - up to page 55, "There's another man in the car," and maybe I have to hang my head in shame, but I am lost and not hooked in the least. I can't get to grips with the characters and the plot so far isn't grabbing me. I've read lots of historical lit, so it's not the time period, I think it's the pace - or that I can only read it in short snatches. What am I missing? Maybe I should restart it when I can do more than a couple of pages at a time.
Wish I had written? Conversations in Sicily by E. Vittorini.
Lord of the Rings, Wild Magic, Trickster's Choice, The Blue Sword, or The BFG.
But, if I had to choose a favorite, I'd say...Wild Magic. It's just my sort of book! I WOULD have written it, if Tamora Pierce hadn't gotten there first!
Great question! Have a great day.
Gatsby's definitely in there. On different days, Huck Finn, Lolita, Crime and Punishment, All the Pretty Horses, Plainsong, Gilead, Oryx and Crake, Breakfast of Champions.
Cheating, I know, to list different days, but those are some good days (and good books)...
gotta go with the one that started it all for me: "The Catcher in the Rye." I find magic in those pages.
Lord of the Rings. I would die to be able to write like Tolkien.
The Forbidden Game trilogy. Originally by L.J. Smith. Did it earn her oodles of money? No. Did it gain her international acclaim? No. But I think it's a damn fine bit of writing, and highly enjoyable. If I'd written it, I would have advertised the heck out of it - which is exactly what I do for her now as a bookseller. I've lost count of how many books I've handsold.
If I chose anything else, I think I'd go with Harry Potter. Riches and it's a hell of a lot of fun. xD
I listed three books earlier but now that I think about it, there is one book that would probably supercede all of them.
The Giving Tree.
Last three books Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. It would've been my dream to be able to finish that series. Brandon Sanderson's doing a great job, though.