Showing posts with label American writers. Show all posts

Monday, November 24, 2025

How did Flannery O’Connor’s writing reflect her disability?

Flannery O’Connor in the driveway at Andalusia, 1962. Photo: AP Photo/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Joe McTyre

How did Flannery O’Connor’s writing reflect her disability?

March 26, 2021 | Liz Fields

The writer Flannery O’Connor was known for her dark, funny and sassy stories about misfits, outsiders and the types of offbeat characters she encountered while living in the American South. O’Connor herself could be considered a sort of outsider. Plagued by symptoms of lupus in the latter part of her life and mostly bound to the farm where she lived with her mother and many peacocks, she often wrote about themes of isolation and created characters driven by desires to connect with each other, society at large, or with God. Her stories, which have inspired many writers and readers over the years, were also imbued with a kind of dark humor and exploration of faith and mortality that was often attributed to her illness.

Patti Smith / ‘I’ve never seen a world so driven by power and money’

Patti Smith: ‘I’ve never seen a world so driven by power and money’

This year, the singer-songwriter celebrates the 50th anniversary of ‘Horses’, the album that made her famous, and releases her memoir ‘Bread of Angels.’ Her voice, steadfast in its commitment to the world’s just causes, continues to resonate through her writing and performances

Patti Smith / The poet who became a rock legend

Patti Smith

Patti Smith, the poet who became a rock legend

Celebrating 50 years of her first album ‘Horses,’ with which she revolutionized music and literature while remaining true to herself

Lynn Goldsmith, the photographer who shot Patti Smith like no one else: ‘She was a breath of fresh air’

New compilation ‘Before Easter After’ features portraits, many of them previously unpublished, taken of the singer in the 1970s

The keys to Patti Smith and Bob Dylan’s famous friendship: Art, admiration, respect and a great love of music

The pair maintain a powerful bond that speaks to a way of understanding both songs and life from a bygone era

FERNANDO NAVARRO

JUN 23, 2022 - 11:39 COT

Patti Smith and Bob Dylan have known each other since 1975 and it could be said that their friendship has transcended ordinary life and entered the realms of greatness. Greatness in its original sense and not as a cliché is always complex and, as we know, the complex is often reduced, ridiculed and even vilified in a world driven by capital, post-truth and social media noise. The complex is always the enemy of ignorance.

Edmund White / A Brilliant Neglected Novel About the Search for a Lost Older Lover

A Brilliant Neglected Novel About the Search for a Lost Older Lover

“Nocturnes for the King of Naples,” by Edmund White, stands outside current fashions, with its refined pleasures and its nuanced accounts of gay lives.

By Garth Greenwell

May 28, 2024

Edmund White’s “Nocturnes for the King of Naples” opens with the most remarkable account of cruising I know. By cruising I mean a specifically gay male practice of organized promiscuity, a form of sexual sociality at once universal—existing, in remarkably similar forms, in rural American truck stops and among Roman ruins—and, as White chronicles it, specific to a particular time and place, the Chelsea piers in nineteen-seventies New York, part of the extravagant, unprecedented gay world that flourished between the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the onset of the aids crisis. In the nighttime scene that opens the book, men brush past each other in the dark, alert in their animal bodies, their senses sharpened by hunger; they send up cigarette flares, displaying themselves against the night sky; they pair off or remain solitary, unchosen—like the narrator, who lingers until sunrise, when finally he finds a man to go home with.

Where to start with: Edmund White

Edmund White in Paris in 1986.
Photo by Ulf Andersen

Where to start with: Edmund White

After the news of White’s death, here is a guide to a foundational writer of gay lives and elder statesman of American queer literary fiction

Neil Bartlett

Wednesday 4 June 2025

Edmund White, who has died aged 85, was born in Cincinatti, to conservative, homophobic parents. Although he soon rejected almost all his family’s cultural values, he retained their work ethic: White published 36 books in his lifetime, and was working on a tale of queer life in Versailles when he died.

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

The Veldt

by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury / La pradera

    ‘George, I wish you’d look at the nursery.’
    ‘What’s wrong with it?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Well, then.’
    ‘I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at it.’
    ‘What would a psychologist want with a nursery?’
    ‘You know very well what he’d want.’ His wife paused in the middle of the kitchen and watched the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four.
    ‘It’s just that the nursery is different now than it was.’
    ‘All right, let’s have a look.’

Kaleidoscope by Ray Bradbury

Kaleidoscope

by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury / Calidoscopio

The first concussion cut the rocket up the side with a giant can opener. The men were thrown into space like a dozen wriggling silverfish. They were scattered into a dark sea; and the ship, in a million pieces, went on, a meteor swarm seeking a lost sun.

Eve Babitz and Joan Didion may be dead. But their feud isn’t

Eve Babitz was a Hollywood it girl of the 60s and 70s, and the author of several witty, freewheeling chronicles of her LA life. Photograph: The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens

A new book on the Los Angeles authors leaves no petty stone unturned as it explores their fraught friendship

By Lois Beckett in Los Angeles

Joan Didion, the original girlboss of American letters, keeps inspiring new takedowns. Critiquing Didion’s racism, the writer Myriam Gurba compared her to an onion: “She’s very white, very crisp, and she makes people cry.” An anonymous woman in a Los Angeles bar called Didion “that lady from Sacramento”. (Didion might have fooled the New York Times, but Angelenos know she wasn’t from Los Angeles.)

The Bathtub Kabbalah of J.D. Salinger

JD Salinger

The Bathtub Kabbalah of J.D. Salinger

Two new biographical sketches depict the great recluse as agent of growth, emblem of permanent adolescence, and cipher

ADAM KIRSCH

MAY 29, 2014

Kabbalah teaches that God created the universe by deliberately shrinking himself, withdrawing into himself in order to leave a space that Creation could fill. This idea, known as tzimtzum, has a weird pertinence to the life and work of J.D. Salinger—but then again, since Salinger himself was a kind of mystic, perhaps it’s not so weird. Nobody seems to know whether Salinger spent any of his years of retreat up in Cornish, N.H., reading Isaac Luria, the 16th-century Jewish sage who invented the idea of tzimtzum. His tastes seem to have run more toward Zen and Hindu mysticism, or even the Russian Orthodox Jesus Prayer, which famously obsesses Franny Glass: “If you keep saying the prayer over and over again—you only have to just do it with your lips at first—then eventually what happens, the prayer becomes self-active. Something happens after a while.”

Rye Day

J.D. Salinger’s most famous book has its birthday

ADAM CHANDLER

Today marks the anniversary of the publication of J.D. Salinger’s iconic book “The Catcher in the Rye.” The legacy of the book has been a cultural touchstone since it was first published. But as Louis Menand pointed out in an essay written around the time of the book’s 50th birthday in 2001, “The Catcher in the Rye” has come to mean more than that:

“The Catcher in the Rye” is a sympathetic portrait of a boy who refuses to be socialized which has become (among certain readers, anyway, for it is still occasionally banned in conservative school districts) a standard instrument of socialization. I was introduced to the book by my parents, people who, if they had ever imagined that I might, after finishing the thing, run away from school, smoke like a chimney, lie about my age in bars, solicit a prostitute, or use the word “goddam” in every third sentence, would (in the words of the story) have had about two hemorrhages apiece. Somehow, they knew this wouldn’t be the effect.

Supposedly, kids respond to “The Catcher in the Rye” because they recognize themselves in the character of Holden Caulfield. Salinger is imagined to have given voice to what every adolescent, or, at least, every sensitive, intelligent, middle-class adolescent, thinks but is too inhibited to say, which is that success is a sham, and that successful people are mostly phonies. Reading Holden’s story is supposed to be the literary equivalent of looking in a mirror for the first time. This seems to underestimate the originality of the book. Fourteen-year-olds, even sensitive, intelligent, middle-class fourteen-year-olds, generally do not think that success is a sham, and if they sometimes feel unhappy, or angry, or out of it, it’s not because they think most other people are phonies. The whole emotional burden of adolescence is that you don’t know why you feel unhappy, or angry, or out of it. The appeal of “The Catcher in the Rye,” what makes it addictive, is that it provides you with a reason. It gives a content to chemistry.

Despite his influence, many have seemingly been ambivalent to claim Jerome David Salinger, who was raised Jewish and bar-mitzvahed, or to list him among the Jewish greats like Roth, Bellow, Malamud, Ozick, and countless others.

While the (tale-tell) Jewish themes of isolation and ostracism were thick in his work, the identifiable Jewish experiences in Salinger’s characters were camouflaged. His biography may lend some insight. Consider that his grandfather was a rabbi and his father imported ham and kosher cheese for a living. Consider that his mother (Marie), though she was Irish-Catholic, pretended to be Jewish (Miriam) until after Salinger had his bar-mitzvah. Salinger was a mediocre student, but he excelled in the army, taking part in D-Day at Utah Beach and the Battle of the Bulge as well as liberating a concentration camp and earning the rank of Staff Sergeant. He even managed to befriend Ernest Hemingway while in Europe.

There’s plenty more to ponder about Salinger on Rye Day. It might be more fitting to do it alone.

Holden at 50 [TNY]

TABLET

Monday, November 24, 2025