Category Archives: Authors

Authors, Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Joy,’ by Abigail Santamaria

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J. R. R. Tolkien never warmed to Joy Davidman, the woman his friend C. S. Lewis fell in love with and married. Looking at it from his point of view, it’s not hard to see why.

For decades, he’d watched “Jack” Lewis live almost a slavish life, working long hours as an instructor at Oxford, then going home to wait hand and foot on a selfish, small-minded old woman, Mrs. Moore, whom he’d promised a friend, her son, he’d take care of in case of his death in World War I.

But now, in the late 1950s, Jack’s indenture was over. The old woman had died. Tolkien had improved the situation by calling in personal favors to get Jack offered the chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, a position that would give him three times the salary, and half the work, of his old job at Oxford. Tolkien was confident that with all this new freedom, the pent-up energy of all those years of servitude would gush forth in a flood of scholarship and creativity. Jack would finally get the recognition he truly deserved.

Instead, like an earthquake, Joy Davidman happened. She brought with her complicated domestic troubles, financial woes, two nice but active young boys, and a hint of scandal. Then, to cap it all, she brought cancer, the disease that had already scarred Jack as a young boy, when he lost his beloved mother. Continue reading ‘Joy,’ by Abigail Santamaria →

Authors

“It Made Less of Narnia For Me”

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Author Neil Gaiman describes how he felt about seeing the allegory in The Chronicles of Narnia.

My upset was, I think, that it made less of Narnia for me, it made it less interesting a thing, less interesting a place. Still, the lessons of Narnia sank deep. Aslan telling the Tash worshippers that the prayers he had given to Tash were actually prayers to Him was something I believed then, and ultimately still believe.

Authors

A Wodehouse Guide to Reading, Etc.

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P.G. Wodehouse recommends a day of reading his own work.

Wodehouse is invoked in this post on antedating. “This sort of decisive antedating should remind us of the almost diametrical wrongness of a popular stereotype of scientists and humanists.”

P.G. Wodehouse’s language is as American as it is British.

Authors

Canin: Uncomfortable Writing

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“To me, point of view is everything,” Ethan Canin tells Julie Buntin for Publishers Weekly. “I read for the sensation of becoming another person; I write for the same sensation. As I write, I try to be the character.”

This process can be uncomfortable. “This book almost killed me,” Canin says. “I published my last book [the bestselling America America] in 2008, so that’s, what, seven or eight years ago, but I wasn’t working the whole time. Writing [A Doubter’s Almanac] was actual agony. I remember going out to a bar with my closest friend in Iowa a couple of years ago and saying, ‘I’m going to have to give the money back. I can’t do it. It’s a huge, huge mess.’ ” This huge mess sits before us on the table, in ARC form, with its blockbuster cover and glowing blurb from Pat Conroy.

Authors, Coffee, Tea, Drinks, Non-fiction

Alton Brown: Memphis Is #1 Town

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The Eater Upsell podcast talked to Alton Brown this month about his books, his road show, his Food Network shows, and his food philosophy. There are many highlights, but one that stands out to me is his big shout-out to Memphis, Tennessee.

Outside of Memphis proper is this doughnut place called Gibson’s, which makes not just the best doughnut in the United States but, as far as I’m concerned, if all the other doughnuts went away and I still had Gibson’s, I’d be okay. They’ve also got the best chicken, and maybe the best hamburger in the United States.

He also gives credit to Starbucks for being the “game changer” in American food culture. Now, many of us are willing to spend $4 on coffee and look forward to fancy third-wave brews.

What’s funny, though, is I think that we’re more sophisticated as eaters than cooks. You know, I know people that can detect the difference between whether we’ve made the bouillabaisse with, you know, Turkish saffron or Iranian saffron, but couldn’t cook the seafood in the bouillabaisse if you held a gun to their head, you know, so — we’ve become far more sophisticated as consumers. Whether we have as cooks or not, I don’t know.

Authors, Religion

Sharing Your Remarkable Story

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You have a story of faith and God’s work in your life. “And if people don’t take us seriously,” says Aaron Armstrong, “that’s still good news worth sharing.” He briefly describes the struggle his wife has experienced and links to a couple versions of her remarkable story.

“For years, whenever she or both of us have told the story of how we came to faith, we’ve seen people stop speaking to us, back away slowly as if we were whacked, or (in one instance) convert to an entirely different religion.”

Authors

What Kept Conan Doyle Going?

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Before he created the most illustrious residents of Baker Street—whom he nearly called J. Sherrinford Holmes and Ormond Sacker—Arthur Conan Doyle had already written a novel that was lost in the mail, and contributed excellent short fiction to various magazines. “The Captain of the Pole-Star” (1883), set in the Arctic, is one of the most haunting Victorian tales of the supernatural. But the young writer could hardly think of quitting his day job as a doctor in Southsea. A Study in Scarlet was turned down by one publisher after another, until it was finally accepted by Ward, Lock, and Co., who offered to buy the British copyright for a derisory twenty-five pounds.

Michael Dirda describes Conan Doyle’s desire to write better work than his Sherlockian mysteries and what kept him writing them. (via Prufrock)

Authors

Kipling Didn’t Look Back

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How Kipling seemed to a brilliant contemporary is shown by the parody “PC X36” in Max Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland (1912). The narrator’s policeman friend Judlip spotted an old man with “a hoary white beard, a red ulster with the hood up, and what looked like a sack over his shoulder” standing on a rooftop.

Ordering him down to the street, the constable grabbed his collar. “The captive snivelled something about peace on earth, good will toward men. ‘Yuss,’ said Judlip.

‘That’s in the Noo Testament, ain’t it? The Noo Testament contains some uncommon nice readin’ for old gents an’ young ladies. But it ain’t included in the librery o’ the Force. We confine ourselves to the Old Testament – O T, ’ot. An’ ’ot you’ll get it. Hup with that sack, an’ quick march!’ ”

Beerbohm is right about the often annoying rendering of dialect and the petty violence, but he puts his finger on a more important feature of Kipling’s world: its rejection of Christianity. Kipling lost all that in the Southsea boarding house.

Christopher Howse describes the hard edges of Rudyard Kipling and some of the reasons he became that way. Like his rejection of the gospel, Kipling cut ties with his past repeatedly.

Authors

Not a spy, but a cool story

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There was big news in the world of C. S. Lewis studies today. Christianity Today released an article by Harry Lee Poe about the discovery of a previously unknown recording of a radio talk by C. S. Lewis. Not a talk for the BBC, but for Iceland, on Her Majesty’s Secret Service, so to speak:

Until now, the general public and the world of scholarship had no idea that C. S. Lewis began his wartime service by undertaking a mission for MI6. Long before James Bond, Lewis rendered service to this clandestine branch of British Intelligence, which was so secret for so long that few people knew of its existence, and few of those knew its actual name. Alternatively known as Military Intelligence, the Secret Service, and MI6, its actual name may be the Secret Intelligence Service. Ian Fleming gave the head of this spy network the code name of M, but in real life he is simply known as the Chief. When Lewis came on board at the beginning of World War II, it was still a fledgling group of amateurs desperately working to save their island home from disaster.

The story is interesting, not only for the revelation of Lewis’ work for British Intelligence, but because it involves one of his all too rare explications of his passion for Norse literature and myth.

I think the title’s a bit misleading, since Jack Lewis was nothing like a spy, but the story’s a big deal nonetheless. Kudos to Harry Lee Poe for his discovery.

Authors, Fiction

The Night the Devil Stole the Moon

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Volzhskiy prospekt, Samara

Nikolai Gogol’s The Night Before Christmas is not the kind of Christmas story today’s readers expect to find on the holiday sale shelf.

The novella is unlike most Christmas stories. It opens with the devil flying above the small village of Dikanka, enjoying one last night of freedom before he must return to hell, when he decides to steal the moon and put it in his pocket in order to thwart the amorous designs of the local blacksmith, Vakula. In addition to being an excellent blacksmith, Vakula is also a talented painter, and his favorite theme is the vanquishing of Satan.

Micah Mattix writes, “perhaps no Russian writer is as foreign as Nikolai Gogol. He was even baffling to his own countrymen. ‘Gogol was a strange creature,’ Vladimir Nabokov famously wrote in his idiosyncratic biography of the writer, ‘but genius is always strange.’”