The ‘Dramatic Picture’ of Richard Feynman by Freeman Dyson. Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science by Lawrence M. Krauss Norton, 350 pp., $24.95 Feynman by Jim Ottaviani, with art by Leland Myrick and coloring by Hilary Sycamore First Second, 266 pp., $29.99 In the last hundred years, since radio and television created the modern worldwide mass-market entertainment industry, there have been two scientific superstars, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.
The War for Catch-22. Candida (pronounced Can-dih-duh) Donadio, who would become Heller’s new agent, was about 24 years old, Brooklyn-born, from a family of Italian immigrants.
She rarely spoke about what she implied was a grim Sicilian Catholic upbringing. Short and plump, her black hair in a tight bun, she’d fix her brown eyes on people she’d just met and startle them with some bawdy remark, delivered in an unusually deep voice. “She had more synonyms for excrement than anyone you’d ever run across,” says Cork Smith, Thomas Pynchon’s first editor. She liked to say the primary task of a literary agent was to “polish silver.” I am very real. In October of 1973, Bruce Severy — a 26-year-old English teacher at Drake High School, North Dakota — decided to use Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, as a teaching aid in his classroom.
The next month, on November 7th, the head of the school board, Charles McCarthy, demanded that all 32 copies be burned in the school's furnace as a result of its "obscene language. " Other books soon met with the same fate. Edouard Levéâs ‘Suicide’ and Edouard Levéâs Suicide. It would be an interesting experiment to sit someone down in a chair and present them with a copy of Edouard Levé’s Suicide from which front and back covers, promotional blurb, author bio, translator’s afterword and other such paratextual trimmings had all been removed.
Such a reader, blinkered against the novel’s context, might well find it a strange and unnerving and hypnotic read, but it would, in an important sense, be a very different experience to the one that awaits every other person who picks up Levé’s final work. Ten days after he submitted the manuscript of Suicide to his editor at the age of 42, the author killed himself. Fifty-Two Stories » 25. The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains. You ask me if I can forgive myself?
I can forgive myself for many things. For where I left him. Emily Dickinson, Erotic Grief Counselor. Most people know that Emily Dickinson was a great poet, but it takes a deep plunge into her collected poems to realize just how staggeringly great she was.
Usually represented in classrooms by a handful of brilliant but overfamiliar lyrics (“ Because I could not stop for Death ,” “ There’s a certain Slant of light ,” etc.), she in fact wrote hundreds of poems of comparable quality, most of them within the span of just three or four years. During the years 1861–64 she produced, on average, a poem every two days, turning out masterpieces the way some people turn out diary entries. This output is as much a neurological mystery as a literary feat, and I think it deserves an anniversary celebration.
One hundred and fifty years ago, Emily Dickinson caught fire, and no poet—not even Rimbaud a decade later or Rilke in 1922 or Plath in the autumn before suicide—has reached quite the same degree of “ White Heat ” since. George Bernard Shaw and the despots by Stanley Weintraub - TLS. AN UNEXPECTED ALLIANCE. Lee Siegel considers the weird comedy of letters between T.S. Eliot and Groucho Marx ... Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE The second volume of T.S. Eliot’s letters was recently published by Yale University Press, with new materials and previously unpublished missives. Edward Thomas, Robert Frost and the road to war. Edward Thomas and Robert Frost were sitting on an orchard stile near Little Iddens, Frost's cottage in Gloucestershire, in 1914, when word arrived that Britain had declared war on Germany.
The two men wondered idly whether they might be able to hear the guns from their corner of the county. Rise of the Machines: why we keep coming back to H.G. Wells' visions of a dystopian future. On the evening of October 30, 1938, radio listeners in the greater New York area settled in for a broadcast of "Ramon Raquello" and his orchestra.
Suddenly the performance was interrupted by the host, who explained that he had a special bulletin from "Intercontinental Radio News. " Perhaps a few listeners scratched their heads and wondered what Intercontinental Radio News was, but apparently not many. Mysterious explosions of "incandescent gas" had been observed on Mars through various telescopes, IRN reported.
Next a bulletin came in of strange aerial vehicles in various parts of the country and weird, creepy creatures popping out of them. Soon reports started coming in from everywhere of a Martian invasion of the planet. The Riddle Of Mark Twain's Passion For Joan Of Arc. On a December night in 1905, the New York City chapter of the Society of Illustrators managed to do something many thought impossible.
There's just one Hitch. Illustration of Christopher Hitchens by Sturt Krygsman Source: The Australian LAST year, just before he was diagnosed with advanced oesophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens published the unexpectedly moving memoir Hitch-22.
"I soon enough realised when young," he revealed in that book, "that I did not have the true 'stuff' for [writing] fiction and poetry. Misremembering Christopher Hitchens. Last month, I attended a memorial service for the late Christopher Hitchens, a member of this humble journal’s editorial board, who died last December after a struggle with esophageal cancer.
In addition to being a world famous polemicist and author, he was a friend and mentor. Which is why it pains me to report that the service did neither Christopher nor his career justice. Dickens from first to last. Dinah Birch Claire Tomalin CHARLES DICKENS A Life 527pp. Penguin. £30 (US $36).978 0 670 91767 9 Robert Douglas-Fairhurst BECOMING DICKENS 389pp. Belknap Press. £22.95 (US $29.95).978 0 674 05003 7 Published: 16 November 2011 Photograph: Felipe Dana/AP Photo. On the trail of George Orwell’s outcasts. 5 August 2011Last updated at 20:40 ET By Emma Jane Kirby BBC News, Paris and London Orwell's narration begins in the street he called the Rue du Coq d'Or, in the 5th Arrondissement, where he once lived Some 80 years after George Orwell chronicled the lives of the hard-up and destitute in his book Down and Out in Paris and London, what has changed?
Retracing the writer's footsteps, Emma Jane Kirby finds the hallmarks of poverty identified by Orwell - addiction, exhaustion and, often, a quiet dignity - are as apparent now as they were then. "Quarrels, and the desolate cries of street hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing-orange-peel over the cobbles, and at night loud singing and the sour reek of the refuse carts, made up the atmosphere of the street…. Poverty is what I'm writing about and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum. " Continue reading the main story. 1984 v. Brave New World. In October of 1949, a few months after the release of George Orwell's dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he received a fascinating letter from fellow author Aldous Huxley — a man who, 17 years previous, had seen his own nightmarish vision of society published, in the form of Brave New World.
What begins as a letter of praise soon becomes a brief comparison of the two novels, and an explanation as to why Huxley believes his own, earlier work to be a more realistic prediction. Fantastic. Trivia: In 1917, long before he wrote this letter, Aldous Huxley briefly taught Orwell French at Eton. (Source: Letters of Aldous Huxley; Image: George Orwell (via) & Aldous Huxley (via).) Interview / Salman Rushdie is not afraid. Can’t take Bombay out of the boy - Books. Updated: Thu, Jan 19 2012. 07 34 PM IST When the rector of India’s leading Islamic seminary, the Darul Uloom of Deoband, found that Salman Rushdie was visiting the Jaipur Literature Festival, which began on Friday, he asked the Indian government to cancel Rushdie’s visa.
News Desk: Rushdie Non Grata. TO NAME THE UNNAMEABLE. Salman Rushdie's PEN World Voices Lecture on Censorship. No writer ever really wants to talk about censorship. The Larkin puzzle. Philip Larkin complete by Michael Dirda. Is Philip Larkin a great poet? William Shakespeare, Gangster. The peculiar legacies of Walter Scott. John Sutherland. Popular Writers: A Stephen King interview. I interviewed Stephen King for the UK Sunday Times Magazine. The interview appeared a few weeks ago. Ray Bradbury, Science Fiction Master, Has Died at 91 - National. The legendary science fiction author died in Los Angeles at the age of 91, his family and publisher have confirmed. The science fiction blog got confirmation from Bradbury's grandson and biographer that the author of such classics as Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles (and so many more) had died Wednesday morning. An early icon to many young readers and adults alike, Bradbury's stories introduced millions to science fiction and a general love of reading.
The Book Bench: Is Self-Knowledge Overrated? The great bad writer. Self-indulgent, vulgar, borderline insane—Edgar Allan Poe was the most influential American author of the 19th century. Shell' Game - April 24, 2012. Ernest Hemingway: How the great American novelist became the literary equivalent of the Nike swoosh. Stevenson’s other island. HUMANITIES Magazine: January/February 2012: “Moving and Memorable” Author, social critic, and political activist. The Bell Jar at 40 by Emily Gould. On the poetry of Sylvia Plath. How Oscar Wilde Painted Over “Dorian Gray”