The 100 Best Novels: A Literary Critic Creates a List in 1898

in History, Literature | November 14th, 2013

Book lists, despite what younger readers born into Buzzfeed’s ruthless listsicle monopoly may think, have always been popular. Some, like David Bowie’s Top 100 Books, give us a sense of the artist’s development. Others, like Joseph Brodsky’s List of 84 Books for Basic Conversation, provide a Nobel prize-winning benchmark for knowledge. Even though the books are within the reach of most readers, systematically digesting such lists often tries one’s patience. Despite the lack of will or interest in working through someone else’s literary education, however, glancing through such personal anthologies provides us with a glimpse into the maker’s life—be it their private tastes, or their social mores.

In late October, The Times Literary Supplement’s Michael Caines unearthed another Top 100 list; this one, however, has the distinction of hailing from 1898. At the turn of the 20^th century, a journalist and author of numerous books on the Brontë sisters named Clement K. Shorter tried his hand at compiling the 100 Best Novels for a journal called The Bookman. The ground rules were simple: the list could feature only one novel per novelist, and living authors were excluded. Today, Shorter’s compendium looks somewhat hit-or-miss. There are some indisputable classics (many of which can be found in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections) and some other texts that have faded into oblivion. Still—one can’t help but experience a certain historical frisson at a 19^th century listsicle. Here it goes:

1. Don Quixote — 1604 — Miguel de Cervantes

2. The Holy War — 1682 — John Bunyan

3. Gil Blas — 1715 — Alain René le Sage

4. Robinson Crusoe — 1719 — Daniel Defoe

5. Gulliver’s Travels — 1726 — Jonathan Swift

6. Roderick Random — 1748 — Tobias Smollett

7. Clarissa — 1749 — Samuel Richardson

8. Tom Jones — 1749 — Henry Fielding

9. Candide — 1756 — Françoise de Voltaire

10. Rasselas — 1759 — Samuel Johnson

11. The Castle of Otranto — 1764 — Horace Walpole

12. The Vicar of Wakefield — 1766 — Oliver Goldsmith

13. The Old English Baron — 1777 — Clara Reeve

14. Evelina — 1778 — Fanny Burney

15. Vathek — 1787 — William Beckford

16. The Mysteries of Udolpho — 1794 — Ann Radcliffe

17. Caleb Williams — 1794 — William Godwin

18. The Wild Irish Girl — 1806 — Lady Morgan

19. Corinne — 1810 — Madame de Stael

20. The Scottish Chiefs — 1810 — Jane Porter

21. The Absentee — 1812 — Maria Edgeworth

22. Pride and Prejudice — 1813 — Jane Austen

23. Headlong Hall — 1816 — Thomas Love Peacock

24. Frankenstein — 1818 — Mary Shelley

25. Marriage — 1818 — Susan Ferrier

26. The Ayrshire Legatees — 1820 — John Galt

27. Valerius — 1821 — John Gibson Lockhart

28. Wilhelm Meister — 1821 — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

29. Kenilworth — 1821 — Sir Walter Scott

30. Bracebridge Hall — 1822 — Washington Irving

31. The Epicurean — 1822 — Thomas Moore

32. The Adventures of Hajji Baba — 1824 — James Morier (“usually reckoned his best”)

33. The Betrothed — 1825 — Alessandro Manzoni

34. Lichtenstein — 1826 — Wilhelm Hauff

35. The Last of the Mohicans — 1826 — Fenimore Cooper

36. The Collegians — 1828 — Gerald Griffin

37. The Autobiography of Mansie Wauch — 1828 — David M. Moir

38. Richelieu — 1829 — G. P. R. James (the “first and best” novel by the “doyen of historical novelists”)

39. Tom Cringle’s Log — 1833 — Michael Scott

40. Mr. Midshipman Easy — 1834 — Frederick Marryat

41. Le Père Goriot — 1835 — Honoré de Balzac

42. Rory O’More — 1836 — Samuel Lover (another first novel, inspired by one of the author’s own ballads)

43. Jack Brag — 1837 — Theodore Hook

44. Fardorougha the Miser — 1839 — William Carleton (“a grim study of avarice and Catholic family life. Critics consider it the author’s finest achievement”)

45. Valentine Vox — 1840 — Henry Cockton (yet another first novel)

46. Old St. Paul’s — 1841 — Harrison Ainsworth

47. Ten Thousand a Year — 1841 — Samuel Warren (“immensely successful”)

48. Susan Hopley — 1841 — Catherine Crowe (“the story of a resourceful servant who solves a mysterious crime”)

49. Charles O’Malley — 1841 — Charles Lever

50. The Last of the Barons — 1843 — Bulwer Lytton

51. Consuelo — 1844 — George Sand

52. Amy Herbert — 1844 — Elizabeth Sewell

53. Adventures of Mr. Ledbury — 1844 — Elizabeth Sewell

54. Sybil — 1845 — Lord Beaconsfield (a. k. a. Benjamin Disraeli)

55. The Three Musketeers — 1845 — Alexandre Dumas

56. The Wandering Jew — 1845 — Eugène Sue

57. Emilia Wyndham — 1846 — Anne Marsh

58. The Romance of War — 1846 — James Grant (“the narrative of the 92nd Highlanders’ contribution from the Peninsular campaign to Waterloo”)

59. Vanity Fair — 1847 — W. M. Thackeray

60. Jane Eyre — 1847 — Charlotte Brontë

61. Wuthering Heights — 1847 — Emily Brontë

62. The Vale of Cedars — 1848 — Grace Aguilar

63. David Copperfield — 1849 — Charles Dickens

64. The Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell — 1850 — Anne Manning (“written in a pastiche seventeenth-century style and printed with the old-fashioned typography and page layout for which there was a vogue at the period …”)

65. The Scarlet Letter — 1850 — Nathaniel Hawthorne

66. Frank Fairleigh — 1850 — Francis Smedley (“Smedley specialised in fiction that is hearty and active, with a strong line in boisterous college escapades and adventurous esquestrian exploits”)

67. Uncle Tom’s Cabin — 1851 — H. B. Stowe

68. The Wide Wide World — 1851 — Susan Warner (Elizabeth Wetherell)

69. Nathalie — 1851 — Julia Kavanagh

70. Ruth — 1853 — Elizabeth Gaskell

71. The Lamplighter — 1854 — Maria Susanna Cummins

72. Dr. Antonio — 1855 — Giovanni Ruffini

73. Westward Ho! — 1855 — Charles Kingsley

74. Debit and Credit (Soll und Haben) — 1855 — Gustav Freytag

75. Tom Brown’s School-Days — 1856 — Thomas Hughes

76. Barchester Towers — 1857 — Anthony Trollope

77. John Halifax, Gentleman — 1857 — Dinah Mulock (a. k. a. Dinah Craik; “the best-known Victorian fable of Smilesian self-improvement”)

78. Ekkehard — 1857 — Viktor von Scheffel

79. Elsie Venner — 1859 — O. W. Holmes

80. The Woman in White — 1860 — Wilkie Collins

81. The Cloister and the Hearth — 1861 — Charles Reade

82. Ravenshoe — 1861 — Henry Kingsley (“There is much confusion in the plot to do with changelings and frustrated inheritance” in this successful novel by Charles Kingsley’s younger brother, the “black sheep” of a “highly respectable” family)

83. Fathers and Sons — 1861 — Ivan Turgenieff

84. Silas Marner — 1861 — George Eliot

85. Les Misérables — 1862 — Victor Hugo

86. Salammbô — 1862 — Gustave Flaubert

87. Salem Chapel — 1862 — Margaret Oliphant

88. The Channings — 1862 — Ellen Wood (a. k. a. Mrs Henry Wood)

89. Lost and Saved — 1863 — The Hon. Mrs. Norton

90. The Schönberg-Cotta Family — 1863 — Elizabeth Charles

91. Uncle Silas — 1864 — Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

92. Barbara’s History — 1864 — Amelia B. Edwards (“Confusingly for bibliographers, she was related to Matilda Betham-Edwards and possibly to Annie Edward(e)s …”)

93. Sweet Anne Page — 1868 — Mortimer Collins

94. Crime and Punishment — 1868 — Feodor Dostoieffsky

95. Fromont Junior — 1874 — Alphonse Daudet

96. Marmorne — 1877 — P. G. Hamerton (“written under the pseudonym Adolphus Segrave”)

97. Black but Comely — 1879 — G. J. Whyte-Melville

98. The Master of Ballantrae — 1889 — R. L. Stevenson

99. Reuben Sachs — 1889 — Amy Levy

100. News from Nowhere — 1891 — William Morris

In addition to the canon, Shorter—unable to heed his own cautious counsel and throwing the door open to the winds of literary passion—included 8 books by living novelists whom he called “writers whose reputations are too well established for their juniors to feel towards them any sentiments other than those of reverence and regard:”

An Egyptian Princess — 1864 — Georg Ebers

Rhoda Fleming — 1865 — George Meredith

Lorna Doone — 1869 — R. D. Blackmore

Anna Karenina — 1875 — Count Leo Tolstoi

The Return of the Native — 1878 — Thomas Hardy

Daisy Miller — 1878 — Henry James

Mark Rutherford — 1881 — W. Hale White

Le Rêve — 1889 — Emile Zola

via The Times Literary Supplement

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Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman

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16-Year-Old Marcel Proust Tells His Grandfather About His Misguided Adventures at the Local Brothel

in Letters, Literature | November 14th, 2013

“One can say anything so long as one does not say ‘I.’ ” Marcel Proust wrote these words to his fellow Frenchman of letters André Gide, and they constitute valuable advice for any novelist as well as a useful key to understanding Proust’s own work. We think of Proust — especially today, the hundredth anniversary of Swann’s Way, which opens his masterwork Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu) — as an important French novelist, an important modern novelist, an important fin-de-siècle novelist, and so on. We also think of Proust as an important gay novelist. And we owe that, in some sense, to Gide, who revealed the closeted Proust’s homosexuality in their published correspondence after Proust’s death. Sexuality has since become a major element of the robust field of Proust criticism, and the letter above surely gives its scholars material — or at least those scholars willing to examine the author’s biography alongside his work.

The author of Remembrance of Things Past once suffered, according to Letters of Note, from an obsession with masturbation. “As a teenager this caused problems for his family, not least his father, a professor of hygiene, who like many of the day believed that such a worrying habit could cause homosexuality if left unchecked.” Given 10 francs by Proust père, Marcel went off to the neighborhood brothel to, in theory, get himself set straight. And the outcome of this “cure”? We defer to the sixteen-year-old Proust himself, who in the letter above tells the whole sordid story to his grandfather:

18 May 1888

Thursday evening.

My dear little grandfather,

I appeal to your kindness for the sum of 13 francs that I wished to ask Mr. Nathan for, but which Mama prefers I request from you. Here is why. I so needed to see if a woman could stop my awful masturbation habit that Papa gave me 10 francs to go to a brothel. But first, in my agitation, I broke a chamber pot: 3 francs; then, still agitated, I was unable to screw. So here I am, back to square one, waiting more and more as hours pass for 10 francs to relieve myself, plus 3 francs for the pot. But I dare not ask Papa for more money so soon and so I hoped you could come to my aid in a circumstance which, as you know, is not merely exceptional but also unique. It cannot happen twice in one lifetime that a person is too flustered to screw.

I kiss you a thousand times and dare to thank you in advance.

I will be home tomorrow morning at 11am. If you are moved by my situation and can answer my prayers, I will hopefully find you with the amount. Regardless, thank you for your decision which I know will come from a place of friendship.

Marcel.

Many thanks to Letters of Note for uncovering this illuminating and — intentionally? unintentionally? — comedic piece of correspondence from literary history, and to Fabien Bonnet and Larst Onovich, to whom Letters of Note, in turn, gives credit.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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Joseph Brodsky’s List of 83 Books You Should Read to Have an Intelligent Conversation

in Literature | November 12th, 2013

Image via Wikimedia Commons

In 1955, a mere two months into eighth grade, a 15-year-old teenager dropped out of a Leningrad school. He had already repeated seventh grade; the thought of another boring year was unbearable. He wandered into work at a factory, but only lasted six months. For the next seven years, he drifted in and out of menial jobs at a lighthouse, a crystallography lab, and a morgue. For a time, he worked as a manual laborer on geological expeditions and as a stoker at a public bathhouse. Still, it wasn’t a wholly inauspicious start—by the end of his life, he had taught at Yale, Columbia, Cambridge, Michigan, and Mount Holyoke. He had also been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

Despite spurning his own formal education, Russian poet and Soviet dissident Joseph Brodsky immediately rose to the highest academic echelon when he arrived in America in 1972. By all accounts, the autodidact held his classes to a high standard, frequently dismissing any student arguments about literary greatness unless they centered on Milosz, Lowell, or Auden.

Monica Partridge, a former student in his class, told Open Culture, “I took a poetry class with [Joseph Brodsky] at Mount Holyoke College my freshman year… It was all 19th [century] Russian poetry, and he would give us four pages of poems to memorize overnight. We would have to come in the next [morning] and transcribe the poems we had memorized. Very Russian.”

No less impressive was the list of books that Brodsky distributed to Partridge’s class.

1.   Bhagavad Gita
2.   Mahabharata
3. Gilgamesh
4. The Old Testament
5. Homer: Iliad, Odyssey
6.   Herodotus: Histories
7. Sophocles: Plays
8.   Aeschylus: Plays
9.   Euripides: Plays (Hippolytus, The Bachantes, Electra, The Phoenician Women)
10. Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War
11. Plato: Dialogues
12. Aristotle: Poetics, Physics, Ethics, De Anima
13. Alexandrian Poetry: The Greek Anthology
14. Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
15. Plutarch: Lives [presumably Parallel Lives]
16. Virgil: Aeneid, Bucolics, Georgics
17. Tacitus: Annals
18. Ovid: Metamorphoses, Heroides, Amores
19. The New Testament
20. Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars
21. Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
22. Catullus: Poems
23. Horace: Poems
24. Epictetus: Discourses
25. Aristophanes: Plays
26. Claudius Aelianus: Historical Miscellany, On the Nature of Animals
27. Apollonius Rhodius: Argonautica
28. Michael Psellus: Fourteen Byzantine Rulers
29. Edward Gibbon: The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire
30. Plotinus: The Enneads
31. Eusebius: Ecclesiastical History
32. Boethius: Consolations of Philosophy
33. Pliny the Younger: Letters
34. Byzantine verse romances
35. Heraclitus: Fragments
36. St. Augustine: Confessions
37. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica
38. St. Francis of Assisi: The Little Flowers
39. Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince
40. Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy (Tr. By John Ciardi)
41. Franco Sacchetti: Novelle
42. Icelandic sagas
43. William Shakespeare (Anthony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry V)
44. François Rabelais
45. Francis Bacon
46. Martin Luther: Selected Works
47. John Calvin:  Institutio Christianae religionis
48. Michel de Montaigne: Essays
49. Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
50. René Descartes: Discourses
51. Song of Roland
52. Beowulf
53. Benvenuto Cellini
54. Henry Adams: Education of Henry Adams
55. Thomas Hobbes: The Leviathan
56. Blaise Pascal: Pensées
57. John Milton: Paradise Lost
58. John Donne
59. Andrew Marvell
60. George Herbert
61. Richard Crashaw
62. Baruch Spinoza: Treatises
63. Stendhal: Charterhouse of Parma, Red and Black, The Life of Henry Brulard
64. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
65. Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy
66. Choderlos de Laclos: Les Liaisons Dangereuses
67. Baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters
68. John Locke: Second Treatise on Government
69. Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations
70. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics
71. David Hume: Everything
72. The Federalist Papers
73. Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason
74. Søren Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling, Either/Or, Philosophical Fragments
75. Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes From the Underground, The Possessed
76. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
77. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust, Italian Journey
78. Astolphe-Louis-Léonor, Marquis de Custine: Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia
79. Eric Auerbach: Mimesis
80. William H. Prescott: Conquest of Mexico
81. Octavio Paz: Labyrinths of Solitude
82. Sir Karl Popper: The Logic of Scientific Discovery, The Open Society and Its Enemies
83. Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power

“Shortly after the class began, he passed out a handwritten list of books that he said every person should have read in order to have a basic conversation,” Partridge writes on the Brodsky Reading Group blog. “At the time I was thinking, ‘Conversation about what?’ I knew I’d never be able to have a conversation with him, because I never thought I’d ever get through the list. Now that I’ve had a little living, I understand what he was talking about. Intelligent conversation is good. In fact, maybe we all need a little more.”

In addition to the poet’s 1988 University of Michigan commencement address that we posted last week, we bring you Joseph Brodsky’s requisite reading list, annotated with the poet’s handwritten notes.

Note: You can click each image to read them in a larger format.

Get reading, friends.

Via Brodsky Reading Group, and with the deepest gratitude to Monica Partridge, who provided photographs of the original. Props go to Stanford for the typed out list of books.

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Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science write. Follow him at @iliablinderman.

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George Orwell’s Five Greatest Essays (as Selected by Pulitzer-Prize Winning Columnist Michael Hiltzik)

in English Language, Literature, Politics | November 12th, 2013

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Every time I’ve taught George Orwell’s famous 1946 essay on misleading, smudgy writing, “Politics and the English Language,” to a group of undergraduates, we’ve delighted in pointing out the number of times Orwell violates his own rules—indulges some form of vague, “pretentious” diction, slips into unnecessary passive voice, etc. It’s a petty exercise, and Orwell himself provides an escape clause for his list of rules for writing clear English: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” But it has made us all feel slightly better for having our writing crutches pushed out from under us.

Orwell’s essay, writes the L.A. Times’ Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist Michael Hiltzik, “stands as the finest deconstruction of slovenly writing since Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” Where Twain’s essay takes on a pretentious academic establishment that unthinkingly elevates bad writing, “Orwell makes the connection between degraded language and political deceit (at both ends of the political spectrum).” With this concise description, Hiltzik begins his list of Orwell’s five greatest essays, each one a bulwark against some form of empty political language, and the often brutal effects of its “pure wind.”

One specific example of the latter comes next on Hiltzak’s list (actually a series he has published over the month) in Orwell’s 1949 essay on Gandhi. The piece clearly names the abuses of the imperial British occupiers of India, even as it struggles against the canonization of Gandhi the man, concluding equivocally that “his character was extraordinarily a mixed one, but there was almost nothing in it that you can put your finger on and call bad.” Orwell is less ambivalent in Hiltzak’s third choice, the spiky 1946 defense of English comic writer P.G. Wodehouse, whose behavior after his capture during the Second World War understandably baffled and incensed the British public. The last two essays on the list, “You and the Atomic Bomb” from 1945 and the early “A Hanging,” published in 1931, round out Orwell’s pre- and post-war writing as a polemicist and clear-sighted political writer of conviction. Find all five essays free online at the links below. And find some of Orwell’s greatest works in our collection of Free eBooks.

1. “Politics and the English Language”

2. “Reflections on Gandhi”

3. “In Defense of P.G. Wodehouse”

4. “You and the Atomic Bomb”

5. “A Hanging”

The Only Known Footage of George Orwell (Circa 1921)

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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“Wear Sunscreen”: The Story Behind the Commencement Speech That Kurt Vonnegut Never Gave

in Graduation Speech, Literature, MIT | November 11th, 2013

On June 1, 1997, Mary Schmich, Chicago Tribune columnist and Brenda Starr cartoonist, wrote a column entitled “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young.” In her introduction to the column she described it as the commencement speech she would give to the class of ’97 if she were asked to give one.

The first line of the speech: “Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ’97: Wear sunscreen.”

If you grew up in the 90s, these words may sound familiar, and you would be absolutely right. Australian film director Baz Luhrmann used the essay in its entirety on his 1998 album Something for Everybody, turning it into his hit single “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen).” With spoken-word lyrics over a mellow backing track by Zambian dance music performer Rozalla, the song was an unexpected worldwide hit, reaching number 45 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States and number one in the United Kingdom.

The thing is, Luhrmann and his team did not realize that Schmich was the actual author of the speech until they sought out permission to use the lyrics. They believed it was written by author Kurt Vonnegut.

For Schmich, the “Sunscreen Controversy” was “just one of those stories that reminds you of the lawlessness of cyberspace.” While no one knows the originator of the urban legend, the story goes that Vonnegut’s wife, the photographer Jill Krementz, had received an e‑mail in early August 1997 that purported to reprint a commencement speech Vonnegut had given at MIT that year. (The actual commencement speaker was the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan.) “She was so pleased,” Mr. Vonnegut later told the New York Times. “She sent it on to a whole of people, including my kids – how clever I am.”

The purported speech became a viral sensation, bouncing around the world through e‑mail. This is how Luhrmann discovered the text. He, along with Anton Monsted and Josh Abrahams, decided to use it for a remix he was working on but was doubtful he could get Vonnegut’s permission. While searching for the writer’s contact information, Luhrmann discovered that Schmich was the actual author. He reached out to her and, with her permission, recorded the song the next day.

What happened between June 1 and early August, no one knows. For Vonnegut, the controversy cemented his belief that the Internet was not worth trusting. “I don’t know what the point is except how gullible people are on the Internet.” For Schmich, she acknowledged that her column would probably not had spread the way it did without the names of Vonnegut and MIT attached to it.

In the end, Schmich and Vonnegut did connect after she reached out to him to inform him of the confusion. According to Vonnegut, “What I said to Mary Schmich on the telephone was that what she wrote was funny and wise and charming, so I would have been proud had the words been mine.” Not a bad ending for a column that was written, according to Schmich, “while high on coffee and M&Ms.”

22-Year-Old P.O.W. Kurt Vonnegut Writes Home from World War II: “I’ll Be Damned If It Was Worth It”

Kurt Vonnegut Reads from Slaughterhouse-Five

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George Saunders’ Lectures on the Russian Greats Brought to Life in Student Sketches

in Art, Literature, Writing | November 11th, 2013

Click for larger image

We’ve seen plenty of post-modern decay in writers before George Saunders—in Don DeLillo, J.G. Ballard—but never has it been filled with such puckish warmth, such whimsical detail, and such empathy, to use a word Saunders prizes. As a writer, Saunders draws readers in close to a very human world, albeit a fragmented, burned out, and frayed one, and it seems that he does so as a teacher as well. Since 1997, Saunders has taught creative writing at Syracuse University, where he received his M.A. in 1988, and where he remains, despite being awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2006 and publishing steadily throughout the last decade and a half. To sit in a class with Saunders, according to his onetime student Rebecca Fishow, is to visit with a daring practitioner of the short form, one whose “words seem a lot like the transfer of secrets through a chain-link of writers.”

While attending one of Saunders’ semester-length writing seminars, writer and artist Fishow compiled the notes and sketches you see here (and several more at The Believer’s Logger site). In each sketch, Saunders teaches from one of his favorite classic Russian short story writers. At the top, see him expound on Turgenev’s method, proffering epiphanies, keen observations on craft, and writerly advice in word bubbles—“You are allowed to manipulate,” “Tecnician vs. Artist” [sic], “Instantaneous micro-re-evaluation (@end of story)”—while surrounded by a fringy aura. Above, Fishow reconstructs Saunders’ take on Chekhov’s “Lady with the Pet Dog” around a portrait of a pensive Saunders (looking a bit like Chekhov).

Fishow’s reconstructions are obviously very partial, and it’s not clear if she took them down on the spot or scribbled from memory (the misspellings make me think the former). In the sketch above, Saunders’ explicates Gogol, with phrases like “VERBAL JOY!” and an Einstein quote: “No worthy problem is ever solved on the plane of its original conception.” The latter is an interesting moment of Saunders’ scientific background slipping into his pedagogy. Before he was a MacAurthur winner and an enthusiastic teacher, Saunders worked as an environmental engineer. Of his science background, he has said:

…any claim I might make to originality in my fiction is really just the result of this odd background: basically, just me working inefficiently, with flawed tools, in a mode I don’t have sufficient background to really understand. Like if you put a welder to designing dresses.

As a teacher, at least in Fishow’s notes, Saunders celebrates “working inefficiently.” As she puts it: “His wisdom confirms that flaw and uncertainty and variety and empathy (especially empathy) are positive aspects of the writing process.” Fishow’s portraits go a long way toward conveying those qualities in Saunders as a presence in the classroom.

Find more sketches at The Believer’s Logger site.

Also Read 10 Free Stories by George Saunders Online.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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James Joyce’s Dublin Captured in Vintage Photos from 1897 to 1904

in History, Literature, Photography | November 9th, 2013

The Google Cultural Institute has drawn our attention before, with its virtual exhibitions on the rise of the Eiffel Tower, the fall of the Iron Curtain, and many other notable chapters of human history. Today, take a look at a Google Cultural Institute gallery that has a foot in literature as well as in history, Dubliners: the Photographs of J.J. Clarke from the National Library of Ireland. Subtitled “a glimpse of James Joyce’s Dublin,” the online show presents pictures taken by this fellow Clarke at the turn of the 20th century, when he came to the Irish capital to study medicine. His “photojournalistic approach to his subjects allowed him to capture vivid scenes from the daily lives of Dublin’s men, women and children.”

This made Clarke a contemporary of Joyce, and so his “images also show us how the city looked” to the writer “whose best known works — the short story collection Dubliners, and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses — are all set around that time, when Joyce too was a young student fascinated by the world around him.”

Both the photographer and the novelist, in their separate forms, set about capturing the city, the era, and the culture around them, and the pictures of Clarke’s featured at the Google Cultural Institute could easily illustrate any of Joyce’s books.

I’ve long enjoyed repeating the observation that, had the real Dublin crumbled, we could rebuild it from the details given in Ulysses — or at least we could rebuild the Dublin of 1904. But I now accept that having on hand Clarke’s photographs, about which you can learn much more at the National Library of Ireland’s site, they would greatly speed the reconstruction process as well. All of the Joycean texts mentioned above can be found in our collection of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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Gay Talese Outlines His Famous 1966 Profile “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” on a Shirt Board

in Literature, Media, Writing | November 8th, 2013

Click image once to enlarge, and yet again to enlarge further.

The assignment was impossible: a subject that refused to be interviewed, research that took over three months, and expenses that reached nearly $5,000 (in mid 1960s money). The result: one of the greatest celebrity profiles ever written.

Recently hired by Esquire after spending the first ten years of his career at The New York Times, Gay Talese’s first assignment from editor Harold Hayes was to write a profile of the already iconic Frank Sinatra.

According to Esquire:

The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra — his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on — and observing the man himself wherever he could.

In an interview last month with Nieman Storyboard, Talese explained that he didn’t want to write the story in the first place. “Life magazine just did a piece on Sinatra,” he recalls. “What can you say about Sinatra that hasn’t already been said?” However, for a writer who has written many brilliant pieces, the resulting profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” is his most indelible.

Above is Talese’s outline for the profile. Instead of notebooks, Talese used shirt boards to write down his observations. As he told The Paris Review in 2009, “I cut the shirt board into four parts and I cut the corners into round edges, so that they [could] fit in my pocket. I also use full shirt boards when I’m writing my outlines.”

What is also vital to Talese’s process is his personal observation. If you read Talese’s outline (click on the image above to enlarge), you will uncover more of what Talese thought and felt during that day than facts about Sinatra. “What I’m doing as a researching writer is always mixed up with what I’m feeling while doing it,” Talese notes, “and I keep a record of this. I’m always part of the assignment.”

This style goes to the heart of what became known as New Journalism, which, among other things, established the right for a writer to use his or her imagination to make a scene come alive. While the style was adopted by Talese, along with Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and others, it was first born out of necessity to complete the Sinatra profile. “The creativity in journalism is in what you do with what you have,” Talese says.

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Gay Talese Outlines His Famous 1966 Profile “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” on a Shirt Board

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