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The team at TrustEssays.com has created an infographic called “10 Weird Writing Habits of Famous Authors.” The piece features insights into the writing practices of Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, and Flannery O’ Connor.

We’ve embedded the full image below for you to explore further—what do you think? To learn more about some of your favorite writers, follow these links to view infographics on “The Day Jobs That Inspired Famous Authors,” “Writing Tips From Famous Authors,” and “Exploring the Careers of Famous Authors.” (via Lifehack)

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Did you know that Truman Capote had a sharp tongue? The team at AussieWriter.com has created an infographic that shine the spotlight on “Famous Writers’ Insults.”

The image features quotes from The Invisible Man author H. G. Wells, Madame Bovary author Gustave Flaubert, and The Sun Also Rises author Ernest Hemingway. We’ve embedded the full infographic below for you to explore further—what do you think? (via The Digital Reader)

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A Christmas Memory

By Truman Capote

 

If your children have never heard of this picture book gem from Truman Capote of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “In Cold Blood” fame, you and your young readers are both in for a real treat. Originally published in 1956 in “Mademoiselle” magazine, December 1956, it was reprinted in 1966 in book form.

And with the words, “It’s fruitcake weather”, young Buddy, for that is the alias that Mr. Capote uses in his very evocative memory book, he draws a very readable time capsule of Depression Era Alabama and his memories of Christmas past that highlight his relationship with his Aunt Sook. It is an autobiographical look at a snapshot in time of his life until he was ten.

Young Buddy has lived for as long as he can remember with an assortment of older relatives in a big, rambling house, but the only kindred spirit in the place is Sook. She is childlike, though that fact is never emphasized by Buddy nor seen as a negative. In fact, it is the very opposite. Sook and Buddy are two souls who are emotionally simpatico in that they understand what it is to be childlike; to still get excited by the wonders in nature, people and a joyful task they yearn to do together each year – the baking of their traditional Christmas fruitcakes. So small a thing? Maybe. But it is in the counting out of nickels, dimes, quarters and pennies saved for the purchase of ingredients, trundling out to a wood filled with old, gnarled pecan trees to gather a baby carriage full of them and ending with a visit to an American Indian nicknamed Haha, owner of a local cafe where they purchase $2.00 worth of whiskey to spice the cake up, that we are allowed the privilege of seeing two souls sharing a season. It is beautiful.

Some children may have a bit of trouble sitting for the telling of this lengthy Christmas tale that ends with separation, but I think we need to expose our young readers to picture books just like this one. Why? Because they can elongate the attention span that may have a tendency to be shortened by some books that don’t allow a story to patiently come to the child, develop and grow in a space of time that allows reflection and thought regarding characters and plot. Kids are much more perceptive and intuitive than we believe. And this is a book that allows children to savor a real give-and-take between two soul mates of very different generations, separated by age but not by much else.

Plus, Beth Peck’s soft watercolor drawings are so spot on perfect for Capote’s book that I think I’d recognize Buddy and Sook if I saw them walking down my street one day. I should only be so lucky!

There is also an amazing made for TV movie of “The Christmas Memory” that garnered an Emmy Award for actress Geraldine Page as Sook in 1966? She won another for a sequel to Buddy/ Capote’s Christmas picture book adaptation. It too became a made for TV movie and it’s called “The Thanksgiving Visitor.” Did you know there were bullies in school way back in the 1930’s, too?

Sweet and childlike, yet strangely worldly-wise, Sook has a surprising way of teaching Buddy how to treat a bully. Kindness seems to be the key to her approach where Buddy’s is tit for tat. Great lessons here for kids.

Here are links to both movies:

“A Christmas Memory” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0vjTfVyZco

“The Thanksgiving Visitor” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfkYVO9RgdU

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What are your favorite non-fiction books? Designer David McCandless created an infographic called “Non-Fiction Books Everyone Should Read” for his new book, Knowledge is Beautiful.

Some of the titles featured in this image include The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, and A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. We’ve embedded the entire graphic below for you to explore further.  (via The Huffington Post)

(more…)

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A Swiss publisher named Peter Haag unearthed several of Truman Capote’s (pictured, via) lost writings. Haag made this discovery during a research session at the New York Public Library.

Four oshort fiction pieces have been translated into German and featured in a publication called ZEITmagazin. Random House will release the English edition of this new Capote collection, which contains 20 stories and 12 poems, in December 2015. Executive editor David Ebershoff is editing the book

Here’s more from The New York Times: “Capote, who died in 1984, at 59, is believed to have written these works between the time he was 11 and 19, although not all are dated. Mr. Haag, whose house, Kein & Aber, based in Zurich, publishes Capote in German, said he and Anuschka Roshani, Capote’s German-language editor, came across the writings on one of their frequent trips to the New York library’s manuscripts and archives division looking for clues to the fate of Capote’s unfinished novel, Answered Prayers.”

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Vanity Fair will feature an unpublished Truman Capote story called “Yachts and Things” in its next issue.

The story is about two friends about to take ”an idyllic three-week cruise in the Mediterranean aboard a friend’s chartered yacht.” The issue will hit New York and Los Angeles newsstands on November 1. Readers in other parts of the country can get the issue on November 6 both in print and iPad, Nook and Kindle format. Here’s more from the magazine:

[The] newly discovered work that appears to be an early draft of one of the unpublished chapters of Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers. Contributing editor Sam Kashner noticed the manuscript, entitled “Yachts and Things,” while sorting through Capote’s papers in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library while researching that lost novel in progress and the scandal surrounding it. “Could Truman have been hiding parts of Answered Prayers, right under our noses?” Kashner asks in the introduction to the text, which appears alongside his report.

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I spent more than 20 years in book publishing, mostly as an editor, and one of the most vexing issues my colleagues and I always faced was the jacket — what image (if any) and what type to put on the outside of a book. During my career, I had the privilege of meeting and [...]

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I had time, just now, that quiet time, of reading the magazines that came in last week.  Oh, the stolen deliciousness of it all.  In The New Yorker, I read of Oliver Sacks on his years dedicated, in large part, to experimenting with large doses of amphetamines, morning-glory seeds, LSD, morphine, and all other manner of neuro-shifters.  I thought of all the Sacks I have read these many years, of the seeming innocence of his beguiling childhood memoir, Uncle Tungsten:  Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, of his great empathy for patients and ferns and other earthly beings. His New Yorker essay delves, skips, and buries time before it rushes, headlong, toward its hard stop.  Sacks had discovered a book on migraines and it had become important to him.  He had a revelation about migraines.  He ...

... had a sense of resolution, too, that I was indeed equipped to write a Liveing-like book, that perhaps I could be the Liveing of our time.

The next day, before I returned Liveing's book to the library, I photocopied the whole thing, and then, bit by bit, I started to write my own book.  The joy I got from doing this was real—infinitely more substantial than the vapid mania of amphetamines—and I never took amphetamines again.

Writing books, Sacks suggests, saved him.  The next story I read, an excerpt from D.T. Max's much heralded biography of David Foster Wallace (in Newsweek), suggests how writing would and would not save this genius.  The excerpt, which focuses on Wallace's early correspondence with Jonathan Franzen as well as his infatuation with Mary Karr, suggests that this book is well worth reading as a whole.  I've always been a huge D.T. Max fan, and I'm certain I will learn from these pages.

In between the Sacks and the Wallace, I found two poems of interest.  Joyce Carol Oates has a chilling, compelling poem in The New Yorker called "Edward Hopper's '11 A.M.,' 1926"�worth reading from beginning to end.  Oates was one of several authors who contributed to one of my favorite poetry collections (a gift from my sister) called The Poetry of Solitude:  A Tribute to Edward Hopper (collected and introduced by Gail Levin). Clearly this project, all these years later, continues to inspire.

Finally, within the pages of this week's New Yorker is a poem by C.K. Williams, one of my favorite living poets.  I had the great pleasure and privilege, years ago, of interviewing C.K. in his Princeton home for a magazine story.  Later, I saw him read at the Writer's House at Penn.  He remains vital, interesting, experimental, and honest, and his new poem, "Haste," is a terrifying portrait of time.  From its later phrases:

No one says Not so fast now not Catherine when I hold her not our dog as I putter behind her
yet everything past present future rushes so quickly through me I've frayed like a flag

Unbuckle your spurs life don't you know up ahead where the road ends there's an abyss? ... 

My first corporate interview isn't until 1 this afternoon.  I'm sitting down to read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.  I figure it's time.


(That above, by the way, is my cat Colors, who lived with me for many years.  She's climbing into my bedroom window.  I'm eleven or twelve years old.  And I'm reading on my bed as she pokes her pink nose in.)

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I was escaping on Thursday as I made my way to the bookstore.  The heat, a particular conversation, a pedigreed failure.  In the summer, at bookstores, I tend to stand among those tables dedicated to middle- and high-school reading lists—looking at all that I've missed, scorning my own piecemeal education, regretting my only partially successful autodidactism.  I studied the history and sociology of science at Penn.  I teach memoir.  I review (mostly) adult literary fiction.  I have (most recently) been writing young adult fiction that is perhaps not really young adult fiction.  I started out as a poet.  I am currently researching the heck out of Bruce Springsteen.  My triple-stacked bookshelves reflect my scattershot world.  Despite the fact that I have tried, since I was a teen, to read at least three books a week (and, later in life, The New Yorker, New York Times, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, and the book review sections of The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Philadelphia Inquirer), I have a whole lot of gaps, always, to fill.  I am embarrassed, often, by my own not-knowingness.  I could not pass any test that might be given.

Thursday, ignoring the criminally ignored two dozen as-yet-unread books stacked on my office floor, I bought two more—A Northern Light, which Melissa Sarno recommended, and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.  I have read all of Capote except In Cold Blood.  Don't ask why; it just happened.

Yesterday, between bouts of Springsteen research, I read A Northern Light, a young adult novel written by Jennifer Donnelly, which was a Printz Honor Book when it was released ten years ago, earned numerous additional citations, and continues to be extremely well read today.  Set in 1906 and featuring Mattie, a sixteen-year-old farm-bound girl who loves words, A Northern Light is, I found, an instructive book—thoroughly researched, strategically structured, seeded with the right kind of issues for young readers of historical fiction (feminism, race relations, the value of education and literature).  I loved, most of all, Donnelly's Weaver, an African American adolescent.  Weaver has much to say, and Donnelly, wisely, gives him room—to be smart, to be angry, to be hopeful, to be Mattie's truest friend. Boy-girl friendships that are honest and meaningful and yet not tinged with erotic desire are so rare in books, and especially rare in young adult literature, and so I was happy to spend some time on this warm weekend making this acquaintance.

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Even today, Truman Capote remains one of most America’s most controversial authors. Following early literary success his flamboyant became well-documented at the many parties and restaurants he frequented. Always claiming to be researching his next book, Capote was a social celebrity and may have had just as many strong opinions about other people as they had about him. In the quiz below, you'll find a series of quotes from

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33-year-old J.D. Salinger tried to run away with a married woman at a Harper’s Magazine party in 1952, one writer explained in a new essay. According to a Paris Review essay by Blair Fuller, Salinger privately proposed to her sister, Jill Fox, asking her to leave everything behind and start a new life New Hampshire.

Fox refused, but confessed after the party: “I was smitten with Jerry [Salinger] that evening, but I wondered what he and I would be saying to one another around Hartford.” Hartford is the halfway point between Cornish and New York City.

Jill’s husband Joe Fox would become a Random House editor, working with authors like Truman Capote and Philip Roth. If given the chance, what author would you run away with?

continued…

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photo by Baking Addict.

Tick tock, tick tock.

Christmas is practically here!

I think I hear the faint jingle of sleigh bells!

Better check my list to make sure I've got everything covered.

Shopping? Done (hooray!), 80% of it online.
Wrapping? Check (like doing the paper, not the ribbons/bows). 
Shipping of gifts? Check (USPS Flat Rate boxes are too dang small)!
Decorating? Yes, with the help of resident bears.
Christmas cards? Mailed (receiving and sending fewer this year).
Baking? Done for now, large percentage already consumed. ☺
Carol singing? Not yet, better practice on the piano.
Stress factor? Abating.

      
         Wreath in Old Town, Alexandria, VA.

Is it just me, or has anyone else ever thought that if it weren't for women, there wouldn't be any Christmas?

I may be wrong, but I'm guessing that in the majority of American households, it's the female who frantically rushes around each year trying to get all these tasks completed. I'm not saying we don't enjoy some of these traditions, just that there's so much pressure to do all of them to the nth degree. Okay, men do like to string up lights outside; there's a certain pride factor intense competition to have the prettiest house in the neighborhood. Must keep up appearances, even though there's chaos inside.

But aside from that, myriad details, large and little, inevitably fall to women. After the big rush to Christmas day, a woman's job still isn't done, because then she must prepare Christmas dinner. This is tackled after a full morning of gift opening, Christmas breakfast, family visiting, hyper-excited kids whooping and hollering, and general head spinning. 

   
     Paper Source entrance, Alexandria, VA.
   
In my dotage *cough*, I've realized that Christmas will come, whether all these things get done or not. It will come to households with fewer gifts under the tree, to people who've lost loved ones during the year, to those who can't be with their families or friends, to soldiers far from home, to the elderly in nursing homes, to the homeless shivering in the cold, to those who are happy and content as well as to those who are sad, displaced, or unemployed. 

It all comes to fore at Christmas -- what you miss, what you regret, what you should have or could have done, memories of childhood holidays, high expectations of picture perfect celebrations, longstanding feuds, family tension, the inevitable retrospective of personal and professional achievements/failures, the all-encompassing pressure "to be happy," and a feverish desire to acknowledge anyone or everyone who has ever made the least bit of difference in your life.

I'm not a Scrooge. I like giving gifts to those I love and care about. I also love to bake and decorate, and to write little notes in Christmas cards. I love meeting friends for Christmas Eve dinner and listening to my favorite carols. Just not all at once. 

       

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• A.B.C. = Airport Bookstore Commentary
• I have visited (and revisited) several bookstores throughout my travels. Mostly in the Denver, Minneapolis and Salt Lake City airports... Anyway, airport bookstores are my favorite type of bookstore in the world (excepting only indie children's bookstores). So I thought I'd share some commentary on each one that I visit.

Bookstore #1: This one's in the Salt Lake City airport. Unfortunately I can't tell you a whole lot about their book selection, browsing comfort, or any of that, because I wasn't able to spend any time in it. It was after I landed in Salt Lake City (earlier this month on the latter part of a trip I took; you know, the one where I met Tony DiTerlizzi in CA?). I was excited to see my cousins and also tired from my long day of traveling, thus I didn't take the time to browse here.

HOWEVER - I simply had to share this bookstore with you, because it boasted a very special feature. Lining the walls above the shelves were some purely brilliant quotes from some of the most famous authors in all of history.


Just beautiful!

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