Vanishing Act. Paul Collins
tells the story of Barbara Newhall Follett. The daughter of authors Wilson Follett and Helen Follett, Barbara began writing at the age of 4. As she grew older, she developed a private language of her own, evolved from her view of the world of nature. Her first book,
The House Without Windows, was
published when she was twelve. In December 1939 Barbara walked out of her apartment and was never seen again. "Some prodigies flourish, some disappear. But Barbara did leave one last comment to the world about writing—a brief piece in a 1933 issue of Horn Book that earnestly recommends that parents give their own children typewriters. 'Perhaps there would simply be a terrific wholesale destruction of typewriters,' she admits. 'An effort would have to be made to impress upon children that a typewriter is magic.'" The entirety of her known writings now resides in six boxes at the
Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
(via longreads)
posted by ocherdraco
on Dec 21, 2010 -
33 comments
In its latest issue, the
American Book Review has taken stock of literature and come up with its
Top 40 Bad Books [pdf]. Faced with the unusual Top 40 list (which is not strictly a list and includes, among other things,
The Great Gatsby) Alison Flood at the
Guardian responds by asking, "
What makes a bad book bad?" while at the
L.A. Times,
Carolyn Kellogg puts forth that the list's only constant is "that the best books that appear on their worst-book list are subject to the most unreasonable critiques."
[more inside]
posted by ocherdraco
on Mar 16, 2010 -
100 comments
The Mistake on Page 1,032: On Translating Infinite Jest into German. "'The limits of my language are the limits of my world,' Ulrich Blumenbach quotes Wittgenstein as saying in a
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article to describe the challenges and inducements of the six years he spent translating David Foster Wallace’s
Infinite Jest (
Unendlicher Spass) into German — something he did without input from the author, who refused to speak to him."
[more inside]
posted by ocherdraco
on Mar 4, 2010 -
35 comments
"To really write for children, you have to think like a child. And to read a children’s book, you probably have to let go of grown-up reasoning. These thoughts occurred to me as I read two newly-translated books about Tintin and his creator, Georges Remi, better known to the world as Hergé. (The pen name is composed of Remi’s initials backwards, pronounced as in French.) There is much to be learned from these studies and others by “Tintinologists”—about Hergé, about the “world” of Tintin, even about twentieth-century politics. But as I read Pierre Assouline’s well-written biography of Hergé and Jean-Marie Apostolidès’s erudite study of the Tintin books, a version of the question we Jews love to ask kept coming to mind:
Are they good for Tintin?" A review of
The Metamorphoses of Tintin or Tintin for Adults by Jean-Marie Apostolides and
Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin by Pierre Assouline at
The New Republic.
posted by ocherdraco
on Feb 4, 2010 -
17 comments
Ursula Nordstrom—the "
Maxwell Perkins of the Tot Department"—was, from 1940 to 1973, head of the Department of Books for Boys and Girls at the New York publisher Harper & Row, and until 1979 had her own imprint there, Ursula Nordstrom Books. A
legendary editor known to her authors as UN, she published the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Margaret Wise Brown, Shel Silverstein, Maurice Sendak (whom she is credited with discovering) and,
to not a little controversy, E. B. White (
previously). One of "the last generation of devoted letter writers," she wrote
nearly 100,000 during her five decade career at Harper, of which 300 of the most amusing, acerbic, and illuminating are collected in
Dear Genius by Leonard S. Marcus, the first hundred pages of which
can be read at the Harper website.
[more inside]
posted by ocherdraco
on Jan 6, 2010 -
8 comments
From October 1972 to October 1973 a controversy over
Roald Dahl's
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory simmered in the pages of
The Horn Book. It began with an article, "McLuhan, Youth, and Literature", by
Eleanor Cameron, author of the
Mushroom Planet series for children and of
The Green and Burning Tree: On the Writing and Enjoyment of Children's Books. Spread out over the
October,
December, and
February issues, it tied the ideas of
Marshall McLuhan (
The Medium is the Massage) to the confection of
Charlie, calling it "one of the most tasteless books ever written for children":
"The more I think about Charlie and the character of Willy Wonka and his factory, the more I am reminded of McLuhan’s coolness, the basic nature of his observations, and the kinds of things that excite him. Certainly there are several interesting parallels between the point of view of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and McLuhan’s 'theatrical view of experience as a production or stunt,' as well as his enthusiastic conviction that every ill of mankind can easily be solved by subservience to the senses."
What followed was a knock-down, drag-out, letter-writing brouhaha, refereed by
Horn Book editor
Paul Heins, with librarians, parents, teachers,
Ursula K. Le Guin, and
Roald Dahl himself joining in, and it was one of the main causes of the book's
revision that year.
[more inside]
posted by ocherdraco
on Oct 15, 2009 -
68 comments
The Millions, online since 2003, is a book blog of exceptional breadth and depth, and "an independent literature and culture publication that pays its writers." Until recently, that breadth and depth was hard to fathom, as the site had outgrown its infrastructure. Now, however, its excellent
features are easy to find, as are series like
The Future of the Book,
Ask a Book Question, and
The Millions Interview. Superb reviews can be found
as they happen or in the
Book Review Index, and, a vestige of when The Millions was a one man operation, you can find out what C. Max Magee, founder of The Millions, is reading on the
Book Lists page.
[more inside]
posted by ocherdraco
on Aug 20, 2009 -
12 comments
