Category Archives: Authors

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.’”

Authors, Non-fiction

1386: Chaucer’s Chaotic Year

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The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Now Newly ImprintedJeff Strowe tells us, “If Chaucer were alive today, he’d be on the front page of ‘US Weekly.'” His marriage was strained by personality and circumstance. His employment was tedious. His world was remarkably unclean and violent, which isn’t what many people imagine when thinking back to 1386. Strowe pulls these details from Paul Strohm’s new book, Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury.

The best parts of Strohm’s book deal with the byzantine intricacies and flat-out craziness of life in the 14th Century. Primitive sanitation practices caused awful putrid smells to waft upwards, baking residents of Chaucer’s neighborhood with a daylong, unceasing stench that, despite its’ unceasing presence, undoubtedly caused constant suffering by those caught in the down and upwind paths. Several hundred feet away also laid forth the severed heads of various vagrants, thieves, traitors, and “enemies” of the King.

There’s also some time spent on his literary efforts, though they don’t make up the bulk of the book.

Authors

Wangerin Describes His Life

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Paul Pastor reviews Walter Wangerin’s memoir, Everlasting in the Past.

The contemporary Christian memoir has behind it a richly populated tradition of self-reflection: Augustine’s Confessions, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, Therese of Lisieux’s Story of a Soul, C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Circle of Quiet, and countless other narratives that use personal experience and devotion to point to a larger Christian path.

. ..

[Wangerin’s] prose is miniaturized, fitted like clock parts, each sentence turning the next. Just when you think you are witnessing an over-written sentence, he expertly surprises you. The book is paradoxically both spare and extravagant, and it will not be to everyone’s taste. It’s high craft, but he avoids pretense, and it works, as Dun Cow did. It’s distilled, dense. Delicate. I love it.

(via Prufrock)