In yet a further irony of history, we find: Hitler also had a penchant for the Saxon novelist Karl May’s Wild West adventure stories, which he had reissued in a special field edition for German soldiers at the front and later recommended to his military commanders as manuals of strategy. (Don’t blame the innocent May,… Continue reading Hitler and Einstein and Westerns….
God Bless Paul Harding: For three years, Paul Harding’s unpublished novel, “Tinkers,’’ sat in a drawer. The writer, a former Boston rock drummer who grew up in Wenham, had tried selling it, but nobody was interested. “I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll be a writer who doesn’t publish,’ ’’ Harding, 42, said this week, a day after… Continue reading
The Drowned GiantBritish writer J.G. Ballard has passed away at age 78. Mostly known for his novels Crash and Empire of the Sun, both made into mediocre Hollywood films, he was to my mind a better short story writer. His collection The Terminal Beach includes two of my favorite short stories, The Drowned Giant and… Continue reading
It being National Poetry Month, there are a couple of things you shouldn’t miss: One is that Siris, in addition to being a philosopher for the working day, is an excellent poet. As demonstrated by samples here and here. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. He posts verse often, so if you haven’t… Continue reading
Updike, Science Fiction and “the Modernist position”In the back-page editorial for the latest (March) issue of the New York Review of Science Fiction, David G. Hartwell passes along some grim forecasts for the field in publishing (which I’ll discuss in a separate post). After which he writes: I had hoped to devote this editorial entirely… Continue reading
