For decades Dawn Powell was always just on the verge of ceasing to be a cult and becoming a major religion. But despite the work of such dedicated cultists as Edmund Wilson and Matthew Josephson, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, Dawn Powell never became the popular writer that she ought to have been. In those days, with a bit of luck, a good writer eventually attracted voluntary readers and became popular. Today, of course, "popular" means bad writing that is widely read while good writing is that which is taught to involuntary readers. Powell failed on both counts. She needs no interpretation and in her lifetime she should have been as widely read as, say, Hemingway or the early Fitzgerald or the mid O'Hara or even the late, far too late, Katherine Anne Porter. But Powell was that unthinkable monster, a witty woman who felt no obligation to make a single, much less a final, down payment on Love or The Family; she saw life with a bright Petronian neutrality, and every host at life's feast was a potential Trimalchio to be sent up. - Gore Vidal
posted by Trurl on Nov 12, 2011 - 38 comments

[Harold] Brodkey produced fiction that was epic too, but chiefly in its elaboration of human intimacy. To read his prose is to be incarcerated in the situations of his characters; indeed, it is to be very nearly overwhelmed by them. ... Brodkey moved forward with new forms for rendering human consciousness. His protagonist was, almost always, "a mind shaped like a person." The action consisted of that mind discovering its thoughts. [more inside]
posted by Trurl on Aug 23, 2011 - 11 comments

The art of Jason Courtney takes a personal tour on some of the moments of Margaret Atwood's dystopia Oryx & Crake - a visit to the pigoons or Snowman's morning view, pausing to reflect on the enigmatic beauty of Oryx. [more inside]
posted by panboi on Mar 30, 2009 - 42 comments

Germano Facetti - who died recently - was art director at Penguin Books during the 1960s. He was responsible for some of the most striking book cover designs of the period. More here.
posted by greycap on Apr 19, 2006 - 37 comments

Neil Gaiman 1997 essay on the myth of artistic inspiration
posted by Pretty_Generic on Jul 19, 2005 - 26 comments

Nick Bantock's gorgeous Griffin and Sabine series is based on mail art, a medium with a long history. Developed in the mid-20th century by Ray Johnson and his contemporaries, today the community thrives, with the internet allowing dissemination beyond the reach of point-to-point mail.
posted by dmd on Dec 13, 2004 - 12 comments

Implementation Sex and terror all over the world: The eighth and final installment of a novel, printed out on stickers and placed in public by readers, is now available, along with more than 1000 photos of pieces of the novel in place. It's a distributed narrative in the vein of Shelly Jackson's Skin, a word of which is tattooed on 2000 people. One of the co-authors also co-wrote 2002: A Palindrome Story.
posted by ubueditor on Nov 4, 2004 - 4 comments

"Hubert Selby died often. But he always came back, smiling that beautiful smile of his, and those blue eyes of his... This time he will not be back. My saints have always come from hell, and now, with his passing, there are no more saints". Selby is the author of Last Exit to Brooklyn, (tried for obscenity in England and supported by, among many others, Samuel Beckett and Anthony Burgess), Requiem For a Dream, Song of the Silent Snow. He is being eulogized in the USA and UK, but also, massively (I've just watched a fantastic TV special) in France, where he is much more popular than in his native land (Selby's death was the cover story -- plus pages 2, 3 and 4 -- in the daily Libération today -- .pdf file): Dernière sortie vers la rédemption, L'extase de la dévastation. What makes all this kind of ironic -- in a very Selbyesque way -- is that Selby himself used to say, "I started to die 36 hours before I was born..." (more inside)
posted by matteo on Apr 28, 2004 - 16 comments

Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls.
posted by hama7 on Dec 6, 2003 - 7 comments