Aye, Depressing, The Foundation trilogy are my all time favourite books.
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Aye, Depressing, The Foundation trilogy are my all time favourite books.
On this day in 1950, J. D. Salinger's "For Esme -- With Love and Squalor" was published in The New Yorker. Though still fifteen months away from The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger had many stories published in the high-circulation magazines at this point; "Esme" would help push him into the spotlight, and accelerate his flight from it.
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On this day in 1553 the French monk, physician, humanist scholar and writer, Francois Rabelais died. His influential and much-imitated satiric masterpiece, Gargantua and Pantagruel (five books, 1532-52) is in the mock-quest tradition, with the emphasis decidedly on the 'mock'-- the prize sought being at times the ideal toilet paper, at times the wisdom of the Holy Bottle.
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On this day in 1966 the English novelist Evelyn Waugh died at the age of sixty-three. Even those commentators who regarded Waugh's views and behavior as those of a crackpot thought him the best stylist of his day -- a writer, said Gore Vidal, of "prose so chaste that at times one longs for a violation of syntax to suggest that its creator is fallible, or at least part American."
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On this day in 1931, Dorothy Parker stepped down as drama critic for The New Yorker, so ending the "Reign of Terror" she endured while reviewing plays, and that others endured while being reviewed by her. Altogether Parker reviewed plays for only a half-dozen years in a 50-year career, but her Broadway days brought her first fame and occasioned some of her most memorable lines.
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On this day in 1939 Seamus Heaney was born. His first collection of poems earned four major awards and provoked Christopher Ricks to declare that those "who remain unstirred by Seamus Heaney's poems will simply be announcing that they are unable to give up the habit of disillusionment with recent poetry." There have been almost three dozen books since, and the list of awards includes the 1995 Nobel.
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Dame Muriel Spark died today in Tuscany, Italy, at the age of 88. She was the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
April 17
On this day in 1981 the University of Pennsylvania Press issued their edition of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, in which some 40,000 words are restored to the text and various changes to the original manuscript are reversed. Far from settling the issue, the Pennsylvania edition provided yet another chapter to one of the most famous and controversial stories in American book publishing.
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April 18
On this day (or possibly the next) in 1394, Geoffrey Chaucer's twenty-nine pilgrims met at the Tabard Inn in Southwark to prepare for their departure to Canterbury. Chaucer's intention was to have his pilgrims arrive on Easter morning, after a fifty-five-mile hike through a pleasant English springtime; the pilgrims never made it, though the poetry endures.
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April 19
On this date in 1928, the final volume of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was published. The original estimate was that the complete four-volume set would take ten years; when it took five years to get to "ant," the editors knew they had underestimated spectacularly. They did not know that they were being significantly helped by a contributor from the insane asylum.
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April 20
On this day in 1912 Bram Stoker died. Though the author of some twenty books, Stoker is known almost exclusively for Dracula, published in 1897. The novel brought little fame or fortune in Stoker's lifetime, and raised few eyebrows; modern critics find a "veritable sexual lexicon of Victorian taboos," or "a kind of incestuous, necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic all-in-all wrestling match."
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April 23
Today marks the birth of William Shakespeare (at least that's when most people agree he was born--any anti-Stratfordians can ignore this post if they so desire). I've just had an all night cocktail party in the bard's honor, complete with a cake decorated to look like the first folio and lots of lovely martinis. So read a sonnet today--or maybe even get ambitious and read a play--and wish Shakespeare a happy four hundred forty-second birthday!
On this day in 1891 Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray was published. The novel caused an uproar for "its effeminate frivolity, its studied insincerity, its theatrical cynicism, its tawdry mysticism, its flippant philosophizing, its contaminating trail of garish vulgarity, "but it sold well, making Wilde the focus of even more debate and finger-pointing.
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April 25th
On this day in 1898 William S. Porter -- the drug store clerk, cowboy, fugitive, bank teller, cartoonist and future "O. Henry" -- began a five-year prison sentence for embezzlement. Porter had published several stories prior to his prison term, but the fourteen written behind bars represented a new style and quality, and began his rise to fame.
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On this day in 1893 Anita Loos was born. Loos started writing scenarios for D. W. Griffith while in her teens, and eventually worked on over sixty films, but her most enduring creation is the 1925 novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement as "a masterpiece of comic literature."
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Whaddyaknow. I started reading this two days ago. Nice timing. :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Scheherazade
On this day in 1926 Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama. After the immediate and overwhelming success of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Lee is known to have published only three short magazine articles, all in the early 60s; nor has she broken the silence and anonymity into which she quickly retreated. Legions of readers, fans and homework-driven students continue to make the real or internet trip to Monroeville to see the old courthouse (now a museum), or to see the house where Lee grew up (gone, now a burger stand), or to espy the author, who still spends her summers there. From such research we learn that she apparently likes to shop at the Piggly Wiggly, and have coffee at Hardee's.
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On this day in 1948 Norman Mailer's first novel, The Naked and the Dead was published. A front-page editorial in the London Sunday Times lobbied to have the book withdrawn for its "incredibly foul and beastly," language, but most reviewers ranked it among the best war novels, and conferred upon Mailer a celebrity status that he claimed to regret.