A Visit with Patrick Leigh Fermor: Part 1

Patrick Leigh Fermor, center, with members of the team that abducted General Heinrich Kreipe: George Tyrakis, W. Stanley Moss, Manoli Paterakis, and Antoni Papaleonidas.

By Ben Downing

It has been said of Ulysses that, were Dublin ever obliterated, the city could be substantially rebuilt by consulting its pages. Along these lines, if all Europe were, God forbid, laid waste tomorrow, one might do worse than attempt to recreate it, or at least to preserve some sense of its historical splendor and variety, by immersing oneself in the travel books of Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Patrick who? Although popular both in his native England, where his books are available in Penguin paperback, and in many other countries—he has been translated into any number of languages—Leigh Fermor (who died in 2011) is known to only a devout few in this country, where, scandalously, his work is not distributed. I myself came to him three years ago, when a friend pressed me to seek out A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), the first two volumes of a projected trilogy about his teenage walk across Europe in the early thirties. By chance, that very week I stumbled across a used copy of A Time of Gifts. I began reading straightaway, but after a few pages stopped and rubbed my eyes in disbelief. It couldn’t be this good. The narrative was captivating, the erudition vast, the comedy by turns light and uproarious, and the prose strikingly individual—at once exquisite and offhand, sweeping yet intimate, with a cadence all its own. Perhaps even more startling was the thickness of detail, and the way in which imagination infallibly brought these million specificities to life. In the book’s three hundred or so pages, scarcely a paragraph was less than spirited, cornucopian, and virtuosic.

I am not given to idolizing writers or reading them entire, but this was a special case. Before long I had tracked down, whenever possible in their beautiful John Murray hardback editions.

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When Kurt Cobain met William Burroughs

Kurt Cobain with William Burroughs

By Richard Metzger

Although “The “Priest” They Called Him” might be the most obscure thing in Kurt Cobain’s discography, it’s probably the best selling musical collaboration of William S, Burroughs’s recording career. Basically, in 1992, Cobain contacted his hero, Burroughs about doing something together. Burroughs sent him a tape of a reading he’d done of a short story originally published in his Exterminator collection in 1973 and Cobain added some guitar backing based on “Silent Night” and “To Anacreon in Heaven.”

It was originally released as a limited edition 10-inch EP picture disc on Tim/Kerr Records in 1993, it was subsequently re-released on CD and 10-inch vinyl.

At the time of the collaboration, however, the two had not met. In a carefully prepared “dossier” on the subject found on the web’s premiere Burroughs website, The Reality Studio, their eventual meeting is described thusly, via several sources:

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At Scott and Zelda’s Final Resting Place, Gatsby Lives

Author Francis Scott Fitzgerald in an undated photo.

By Michael Winship

With all the fanfare around the new movie version of The Great Gatsby, directed by Baz Luhrmann with a screenplay by Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, it’s a great time to go back to the book and be reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elegant, graceful writing; so fragile and yes, unique, that it may never really be brought successfully to the screen.A good time, too, to be reminded of how the book’s depiction of conspicuous consumption during the Jazz Age of the 1920s — and the stark contrast between rich and poor — so parallel life in New York today, where, as The New York Times reported last year, “The poverty rate reached its highest point in more than a decade, and the income gap in Manhattan, already wider than almost anywhere else in the country, rivaled disparities in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Daisy Buchanan, the object of Gatsby’s desire, and her husband Tom would feel at home in the 1% world of overindulgence and profligacy. As Fitzgerald famously described them:

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The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History

Vladimir Nabokov

By Emily Temple

Sigh. Authors just don’t insult each other like they used to. Sure, Martin Amis raised some eyebrows when he claimed he would need brain damage to write children’s books, and recent Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan made waves when she disparaged the work that someone had plagiarized, but those kinds of accidental, lukewarm zingers are nothing when compared to the sick burns of yore. It stands to reason, of course, that writers would be able to come up with some of the best insults around, given their natural affinity for a certain turn of phrase and all. And it also makes sense that the people they would choose to unleash their verbal battle-axes upon would be each other, since watching someone doing the same thing you’re doing — only badly — is one of the most frustrating feelings we know. So we forgive our dear authors for their spite. Plus, their insults are just so fun to read. Click through for our countdown of the thirty harshest author-on-author burns in history.

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Goodnight, Sweet Print

By Ted Heller

THE YEAR IS 2001 and I am on the subway. It is the Number 1 train, going uptown, and I am heading to a reading of Slab Rat, my first published novel. (It’s my first ever reading, too, and I’m nervous.) It’s four in the afternoon and the car I’m on is not crowded. I see, directly across from me, a gorgeous, olive-skinned brunette sitting and reading a book.  She’s not tall enough to be a model and not quite emaciated enough, but she is on the flawless side (her nose is a bit long, but who cares?). I swallow and tell myself not to stare and I follow through on it: I do not stare, for that would just be wrong. But then, while nobly avoiding eye contact, I see what book she is reading. It’s Slab Rat! Oh my God! She’s reading my book and, I can tell, she’s enjoying it, too. Perhaps she’s also on her way to the reading?

This opportunity, I quickly realize, is highly unlikely to ever occur again. I may never get another book published, and if I do ever get another book published I may not ever again see someone else reading it, and if I do ever get a book published and see someone else reading it, the person most likely will most likely not be, as this woman is, a dead ringer for Monica Vitti circa The Red Desert. Should I do something? Do I bust some sort of move? “You have to do something,” I hear a strange, anxious voice telling me. It’s my voice . . . and it’s saying: “This is one of the three reasons you became a writer in the first place, fool!” (The other two reasons being: 1) to write books that don’t sell well, and 2) because I can’t do anything else.) So, after the subway comes to a sudden stop between stations, I stand up and approach her and tell her that I am the author of the book that is currently reducing her to hysterics. She looks up at me, looks at the photo on the book jacket, and tears of delight quickly well in her eyes. She begins to melt.

The above scene did not happen. Of course it didn’t.

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War & Peace: Ru Freeman

Ru Freeman

By Claire Kirch

“All fiction is nonfiction,” declares Ru Freeman. A social justice activist and freelance journalist, her creative writing explores many of the same themes as her political commentary: war, peace and reconciliation, education, and women’s issues. Born in the capital city of Colombo, in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1967, the daughter of a civil servant and a teacher, Freeman recalls a tumultuous childhood and young adulthood in a family of intellectuals, set against a backdrop of political conflict and discord.

Her life clearly informs her fiction. Freeman’s second novel, On Sal Mal Lane (Graywolf), weaves together the experiences of a large cast of characters from 10 families of various religious, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds who make their homes on a quiet street in Colombo. Ordinary citizens, the fabric of their lives is ripped apart by the real-life civil war that erupted in 1983 following years of tension between two ethnic groups, the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority. By the time the war ended in 2009, 25 years after the events in On Sal Mal Lane take place, an estimated 100,000 Sri Lankans had perished.

“In Sri Lanka,” Freeman, 45, explains, “you have to live with everybody else. You don’t get to isolate yourself. So, when there are riots, or war, or suicide bombs, it doesn’t just kill one group; it kills a lot of people. They are from everywhere, from all religious backgrounds, from all ethnicities.” It’s a history of violence that Freeman, who now lives with her husband and three daughters in a bucolic village on Philadelphia’s tony Main Line, knows all too well.

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In the Reign of the Gay Magical Elves

By Bret Easton Ellis

The rush to embrace and console every gay man who comes out is infantilizing and condescending—but it’s a script written and promoted by GLAAD and reinforced by a sanctimonious establishment of gay men that rewards those who play by the rules—and punishes those who don’t. Novelist Bret Easton Ellis on why he refuses to take his bitch-slapping lying down.

Was I the only gay man of a certain demo who experienced a flicker of annoyance in the way the media treated Jason Collins as some kind of baby panda who needed to be honored and praised and consoled and—yes—infantilized by his coming out on the cover of Sports Illustrated? Within the tyrannical homophobia of the sports world, that any man would come out as gay (let alone a black man) is not only an LGBT triumph but also a triumph for pranksters everywhere who thrilled to the idea that what should be considered just another neutral fact that is nobody’s business was instead a shock heard around the world, one that added another jolt of transparency to an increasingly transparent planet. It was an undeniable moment and also extremely cool. Jason Collins is the future. But the subsequent fawning over Collins simply stating he is gay still seemed to me, as another gay man, like a new kind of victimization. (George Stephanopoulos interviewed him so tenderly, it was as if he was talking to a six-year-old boy.) In another five years hopefully this won’t matter, but for now we’re trapped in the times we live in. The reign of The Gay Man as Magical Elf, who whenever he comes out appears before us as some kind of saintly E.T. whose sole purpose is to be put in the position of reminding us only about Tolerance and Our Own Prejudices and To Feel Good About Ourselves and to be a symbol instead of just being a gay dude, is—lamentably—still in media play.

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‘Salinger’ the Documentary, Craftily Promoted With a ‘Psst’

By MICHAEL CIEPLY

J. D. Salinger was good at keeping secrets.

Harvey Weinstein, well, not so much.

But now the film producer may have to adopt the air of mystery for which Salinger was so famous. His company is preparing to offer a peek at a documentary about Salinger that is one of the unlikeliest projects ever to join its menagerie of potential Oscar contenders and box-office bait.

The film, “Salinger,” has been nine years in the making and is scheduled for release on Sept. 6. It is written, produced and directed by Shane Salerno, who is mostly known as a writer of action features like “Savages,” “Alien vs. Predator: Requiem” and “Armageddon.”

Selling the film may test even Mr. Weinstein’s Barnum-like skills. Moviegoers will be kept intentionally in the dark about what new information Mr. Salerno might have about the reclusive writer’s life — Mr. Salinger’s son, Matthew, challenges the notion that anyone close to his father in recent decades cooperated — and the Weinstein Company will have to strike a delicate balance in its marketing. It will have to raise the curtains a little, but not too much, as it seeks to build anticipation for the release.

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Charlaine Harris threatened by fans over final Sookie Stackhouse novel

Author of longrunning vampire saga – inspiration for TV’s True Blood – becomes target of online vitriol for her choice of ending.

By Alison Flood

Death threats, suicide threats and more prosaic threats to cancel book orders have followed the publication of Charlaine Harris’s final novel about the telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse this week, after the American novelist gave her bestselling series a romantic conclusion that not everyone was happy with.

Running for 13 years, the series – on which the television show True Blood is based – is set in a world where vampires and other supernatural creatures live alongside humans. The 13th and final novel, Dead Ever After, concludes Sookie’s romantic adventures and sees her making a choice between three potential suitors: the vampires Bill and Eric, and the shapeshifter Sam.

An early copy was leaked online by a fan in Germany last week, prompting an outpouring of bile on Amazon, Goodreads and Harris’s Facebook page, with thousands of comments posted by fans furious about the choice Sookie made.

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Don’t make fun of renowned Dan Brown

 

The snobs and critics will have a field day with the US author’s latest work – but I’m not joining in.

By Michael Deacon

Renowned author Dan Brown woke up in his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house – and immediately he felt angry. Most people would have thought that the 48-year-old man had no reason to be angry. After all, the famous writer had a new book coming out. But that was the problem. A new book meant an inevitable attack on the rich novelist by the wealthy wordsmith’s fiercest foes. The critics.

Renowned author Dan Brown hated the critics. Ever since he had become one of the world’s top renowned authors they had made fun of him. They had mocked bestselling book The Da Vinci Code, successful novel Digital Fortress, popular tome Deception Point, money-spinning volume Angels & Demons and chart-topping work of narrative fiction The Lost Symbol.

The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors. For some reason they found something funny in sentences such as “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” They even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description, thought the 5ft 9in man. He particularly hated it when they said his imagery was nonsensical. It made his insect eyes flash like a rocket.

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