Mike McGrady, Known for a Literary Hoax, Dies at 78

Associated Press
Mike McGrady in 1969.

By MARGALIT FOX

Mike McGrady, a prizewinning reporter for Newsday who to his chagrin was best known as the mastermind of one of the juiciest literary hoaxes in America — the best-selling collaborative novel “Naked Came the Stranger,” whose publication in 1969 made “Peyton Place” look like a church picnic — died on Sunday in Shelton, Wash. He was 78 and lived in Lilliwaup, Wash.

The cause was pneumonia, said Harvey Aronson, who with Mr. McGrady was a co-editor of the novel, written by 25 Newsday journalists in an era when newsrooms were arguably more relaxed and inarguably more bibulous.

Intended to be a work of no redeeming social value and even less literary value, “Naked Came the Stranger” by all appearances succeeded estimably on both counts.

Originally issued by Lyle Stuart, an independent publisher known for subversive titles, the novel was a no-holds-barred chronicle of a suburban woman’s sexual liaisons, with each chapter recounting a different escapade:

She has sex with a mobster and sex with a rabbi. She has sex with a hippie and sex with at least one accountant. There is a scene involving a tollbooth, another involving ice cubes and still another featuring a Shetland pony.

The book’s cover — a nude woman seen from behind — left little to the imagination, as, in its way, did its prose:

“Ernie found what Cervantes and Milton had only sought. He thought the fillings in his teeth would melt.”

The purported author was Penelope Ashe, who as the jacket copy told it was a “demure Long Island housewife.” In reality, Mr. McGrady had dreamed up the book as ironic commentary on the public’s appetite for Jacqueline Susann and her ilk.

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Mexican author Carlos Fuentes dead at 83

Fuentes’ works gave an insight into Mexican identity

The Mexican author Carlos Fuentes has died, aged 83.

Fuentes was one of the most prolific Latin American writers known equally for his fiction and his essays on politics and culture.

His most famous works were The Death of Artemio Cruz and The Old Gringo.

He was associated with the Latin American Boom – a literary movement made up of mainly young authors whose politically critical works broke with established traditions.

He died in a hospital in Mexico City. Hospital sources did not comment on his cause of death.

Mr Fuentes wrote a wealth of novels, plays and essays and regularly commented on political events in Spanish newspaper El Pais.

Born in Panama in 1928, he did not move to Mexico until he was 16.

The son of a diplomat, Mr Fuentes spent much of his childhood moving around the Western Hemisphere.

He said it was this which allowed him to view Latin America from a distance, giving him a critical edge.

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Maurice Sendak, Author of Splendid Nightmares, Dies at 83

Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times
Maurice Sendak at his Ridgefield, Conn., home with his German Shepherd, Herman, in 2006

  By MARGALIT FOX

Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83 and lived in Ridgefield, Conn.

The cause was complications from a recent stroke, said Michael di Capua, his longtime editor.

Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children. He was known in particular for more than a dozen picture books he wrote and illustrated himself, most famously “Where the Wild Things Are,” which was simultaneously genre-breaking and career-making when it was published by Harper & Row in 1963.

Among the other titles he wrote and illustrated, all from Harper & Row, are “In the Night Kitchen” (1970) and “Outside Over There” (1981), which together with “Where the Wild Things Are” form a trilogy; “The Sign on Rosie’s Door” (1960); “Higglety Pigglety Pop!” (1967); and “The Nutshell Library” (1962), a boxed set of four tiny volumes comprising “Alligators All Around,” “Chicken Soup With Rice,” “One Was Johnny” and “Pierre.”

In September, a new picture book by Mr. Sendak, “Bumble-Ardy” — the first in 30 years for which he produced both text and illustrations — was issued by HarperCollins Publishers. The book, which spent five weeks on the New York Times children’s best-seller list, tells the not-altogether-lighthearted story of an orphaned pig (his parents are eaten) who gives himself a riotous birthday party.

A posthumous picture book, “My Brother’s Book” — a poem written and illustrated by Mr. Sendak and inspired by his love for his late brother, Jack — is scheduled to be published next February.

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Poet Adrienne Rich, 82, has died

Photo: Adrienne Rich. Credit: Robert Giard / Norton

Adrienne Rich, a pioneering feminist poet and essayist who challenged what she considered to be the myths of the American dream, has died. She was 82.

The recipient of such literary awards as the Yale Young Poets prize, the National Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the Dorothea Tanning Award given by the Academy of American Poets, Rich died Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz of complications from long-term rheumatoid arthritis, said a son, Pablo Conrad.

She came of age during the social upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s and was best known as an advocate of women’s rights, which she wrote about in both her poetry and prose. But she also wrote passionate antiwar poetry and took up the causes of the marginalized and underprivileged.

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Lawrence Anthony, Baghdad Zoo Savior, Dies at 61

Lawrence Anthony in South Africa in 2009. He helped set up game reserves to protect animals.

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Lawrence Anthony, who abandoned a career in insurance and real estate to play Noah to the world’s endangered species, most spectacularly in rushing to the smoldering Baghdad Zoo after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, died on March 2 in Johannesburg. He was 61.

The Earth Organization, a conservation group that Mr. Anthony founded in 2003, announced the death. News reports said the cause was a heart attack.

Mr. Anthony persuaded African rebels who were wanted as war criminals to protect the few remaining northern white rhinoceroses prowling their battlegrounds. He adopted a herd of rogue elephants that would otherwise have been shot. He fought to save crocodiles and other species.

To preserve wildlife and their habitats, he showed antagonistic African tribes how they could benefit by cooperating in setting up game reserves to attract tourists. He worked with diplomats and lawyers to introduce a proposal to the United Nations to prohibit using conservation areas or zoos as targets of war.

Craggy, bearded and exuberant, Mr. Anthony was known to play music from the rock bands Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple at full volume in his Land Rover as it bounced across the African countryside. He worked with eminent environmental scientists while readily volunteering that he had barely made it through high school.

Mr. Anthony’s most widely publicized work was after the United States and its allies invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003. Hearing that Baghdad had the biggest zoo in the Middle East, he was in Kuwait within days and packing a car with veterinary supplies before crossing the Iraq border in the wake of the United States soldiers.

He arrived at the zoo while fighting was still going on to find clouds of flies swarming the carcasses of animals. Looters had stolen many others. Of the 650 animals in the zoo before the invasion, just 35 were still alive, mainly large ones like lions, tigers and a brown bear native to Iraq. They were in such sad shape, he said, that he initially wanted to shoot them to end their misery.

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Wislawa Szymborska, ‘Mozart of poetry’, dies aged 88

Wislawa Szymborska in 2010. Photograph: Jacek Turczyk/EPA

Polish president joins tributes to Nobel prize-winner, calling her the country’s ‘guardian spirit’.

By Alison Flood

Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, whose beguilingly simple, playful poems spoke to the heart of everyday life, died yesterday aged 88.

Described by the Nobel committee as the “Mozart of poetry” but with “something of the fury of Beethoven” – and by an Italian newspaper as the “Greta Garbo of World Poetry” – Szymborska died in her sleep from lung cancer, said her personal secretary Michal Rusinek.

Speaking on Wednesday, Poland’s president Bronislaw Komorowski called her the country’s “guardian spirit”. Her poems “were brilliant advice, through which the world became more understandable”, he said; they showed the importance of finding value “​​in the daily bustle”.

Born in the Polish village of Bnin in 1923, Szymborska moved to Krakow eight years later and lived there until her death. She studied Polish philology and sociology at the city’s university, and published her first poem in March 1945, “Szukam slowa” (I am Looking for a Word), in the daily Dziennik Polski. Her first collection, That’s What We Live For (1952), was written under Poland’s communist regime and was an expression of socialist realism; she later renounced the Stalin-era verse of her first two books, going on to mock communism in later collections. Her writing, always accessible, which by her death stretched to around 400 poems, was known and loved across Poland, often learned by heart, with “Cat in an Empty Apartment” recited across the country.

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Hell’s Kitchen resident wrote several other books about the movies

Damien Bona

Damien Bona, co-author of ‘Inside Oscar’ reference book on the Academy Awards, dies at 56

By Helen Kennedy

Damien Bona, who authored several books about Hollywood and was a leading expert on the Academy Awards, died Sunday after suffering cardiac arrest. He was 56.

Bona, who lived in Hell’s Kitchen, was best known as the co-author of “Inside Oscar: The Unofficial History of the Academy Awards,” considered the definitive standard reference about the Oscars.

When the book first appeared in 1986, critic Vincent Canby called it “a giddy social history of our place and time, full of statistics and the kind of utterly trivial details that, taken together, somehow assume significance, like centuries-old graffiti scratched onto the base of the Sphinx.”

After the 1994 death of his co-author, Mason Wiley, Bona continued to update “Inside Oscar” and published a follow-up volume, “Inside Oscar 2.”

Witty and acerbic, he was the media’s go-to expert on the Academy Awards and their significance, especially during the annual run-up to the ceremony itself.

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British illustrator Ronald Searle dies at 91

By Emily Langer

Ronald Searle, the British illustrator who dreamed up the raucous schoolgirls of St. Trinian’s and inspired a generation of cartoonists with his delicate pen stroke and irony, died Dec. 30 at a hospital in Draguignan, France. He was 91.His literary agent, Rachel Calder, confirmed his death but said the cause had not been determined.

Mr. Searle was widely regarded as one of the 20th century’s finest graphic artists — a draftsman whose spidery pen-and-ink drawings revealed the hilarity and the ugliness of human experience.

He was best known in England as the cartoonist who created St. Trinian’s school, whose mischievous-to-criminal young ladies won the everlasting affection of the prim and proper British audience. In the United States, he drew dozens of covers for the New Yorker magazine. More than one of them featured self-satisfied cats.

Those popular works belied the bleak, and in many ways defining, undercurrent of Mr. Searle’s life. During World War II, he nearly died in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. Between forced labor and bouts of disease, he sketched his fellow inmates and their captors. There, he developed a deceptively simple style that would characterize his work for the rest of his career.

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Christopher Logue

Christopher Logue

Christopher Logue, poet, died on December 2nd, aged 85

PACIFISM was Christopher Logue’s creed. He marched to Aldermaston against Britain’s bomb in 1958, armed only with sandwiches. Three years later he served time in prison for inciting anti-nuclear demonstrations. By then, Homer’s “Iliad” had started to lodge in his head.

                                                    …a gleam

(As when Bikini flashlit the Pacific)

Staggered the Ilian sky, and by its white

Each army saw the other’s china face, and cried:

“Oh please! “

 

 

As a prisoner he was sent to demolish a munitions factory. The irony of that pleased him. All war was criminal behaviour in his eyes. Fighting was something he couldn’t do. He had joined the army briefly at 17, diminutive and shying from physical contact, mostly to avoid work. But when they did a bayonet charge in training, aiming their steel points at bags of straw, hideously roaring, his trousers fell down.

Screaming, kicking, slicing, hacking, ripping

Thumping their chests:

‘I am full of the god!’

Blubbering with terror as they beg for their lives:

‘Laid his trunk open from shoulder to hip—

Like a beauty-queen’s sash.’

Violence, no. Impatience, yes. Jamming the scissors into a vacuum pack of salmon. Crashing his palms on the typewriter keys when he couldn’t change the ribbon. Panting to bring in the Marxist paradise at once in drab postwar Britain, though he hadn’t even got through the “Communist Manifesto”. Reading his poems aloud in the 1960s (a chorus of “Antigone” for the bicycle-makers of Nottingham) in the hope he could immediately culturise the workers. Fuming at his own timidity, political, intellectual, social, sexual. Especially sexual. That lonely twice-daily wank over Men Only.

                                             …in oyster silk,

Running her tongue around her strawberry lips

While repositioning a spaghetti shoulder-strap,

The Queen of Love, Our Lady Aphrodite…

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George Whitman, Paris Bookseller and Cultural Beacon, Is Dead at 98

George Whitman at Shakespeare & Company about 1980.

By MARLISE SIMONS

PARIS — George Whitman, the American-born owner of Shakespeare & Company, a fabled English-language bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris and a magnet for writers, poets and tourists for close to 60 years, died on Wednesday in his apartment above the store. He was 98.

He had not recovered from a stroke he suffered two months ago, his daughter, Sylvia, said in announcing his death.

More than a distributor of books, Mr. Whitman saw himself as patron of a literary haven, above all in the lean years after World War II, and the heir to Sylvia Beach, the founder of the original Shakespeare & Company, the celebrated haunt of Hemingway and James Joyce.

As Mr. Whitman put it, “I wanted a bookstore because the book business is the business of life.”

Overlooking the Seine and facing the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the store, looking somewhat beat-up behind a Dickensian facade and spread over three floors, has been an offbeat mix of open house and literary commune. For decades Mr. Whitman provided food and makeshift beds to young aspiring novelists or writing nomads, often letting them spend a night, a week, or even months living among the crowded shelves and alcoves.

He welcomed visitors with large-print messages on the walls. “Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise,” was one, quoting Yeats. Next to a wishing well at the center of the store, a sign said: “Give what you can, take what you need. George.” By his own estimate, he lodged some 40,000 people.

Mr. Whitman’s store, founded in 1951, has also been a favorite stopover for established authors and poets to read from their work and sign their books.

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