Volume 262 Issue 04 01/26/2015 Spring 2015 Announcements: Literary Biographies, Essays & Criticism: Lives in Letters By Everett Jones Jan 23, 2015
This season’s literary nonfiction looks at what it means to devote your life to the written word.//The state of reading and writing in today’s digitally driven world has been preoccupying authors of late. Melissa Pritchard, for instance…
Pw’s Top 10: Literary Biographies, Essays & Criticism
Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. Mary Norris. Norton, Apr.
The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime. Harold Bloom. Random/Spiegel & Grau, May 12
The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings; J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams. Philip and Carol Zaleski. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2
I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, 1955–1997. Edited by Bill Morgan. City Lights, May 12
The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964. Zachary Leader. Knopf, May 5
Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald. Edited by Suzanne Marrs and Tom Nolan. Arcade, July 7
The Nearest Thing to Life. James Wood. Brandeis Univ., June 2
A Solemn Pleasure. Melissa Pritchard. Bellevue Literary, May 12
Where I’m Reading From: The Changing World of Books. Tim Parks. New York Review Books, May 12
Young Eliot: A Biography. Robert Crawford. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Mar. 31
Literary Biographies, Essays & Criticism Listings
Arcade
(dist. by Perseus)
Bookmarked: Reading My Way from Hollywood to Brooklyn by Wendy Fairey (Mar. 3, hardcover, $25.99, ISBN 978-1-62872-537-7). Fairey’s mother, Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham, was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last love. When Fairey was a child, Fitzgerald would bring her books by classic authors, from Charles Dickens to Virginia Woolf, sparking a lifelong literary journey that she traces in this memoir.
Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald, edited by Suzanne Marrs and Tom Nolan (July 7, hardcover, $35, ISBN 978-1-62872-527-8). In 1970, Ross Macdonald wrote a letter to Eudora Welty, beginning a 13-year correspondence. Macdonald and Welty’s biographers offer a collection of their witty, wry, tender, and, at times, profoundly romantic letters.
Arte Público
The Milli Vanilli Condition: Essays on Culture in the New Millennium by Eduardo Espina, trans. from the Spanish by Travis Sorenson (Mar. 31, paper, $17.95, ISBN 978-1-55885-811-4). Uruguayan-born poet Espina ponders the paradoxes of modern life in a serious-minded but entertaining collection of essays on a wide variety of subjects, including serial killers, nostalgia, and even the Olympics.
Bellevue Literary
(dist. by Consortium)
A Solemn Pleasure by Melissa Pritchard (May 12, paper, $16.95, ISBN 978-1-934137-96-3). Novelist (Palmerino) and short story writer Pritchard shares, in these 15 essays, a passion for writing and storytelling that educates, honors, and inspires. The inaugural title in Bellevue’s the Art of the Essay series.
Black Dog & Leventhal
(dist. by Workman)
Mark Twain’s Notebooks: Journals, Letters, Observations, Wit, Wisdom, and Doodles, edited by Carlo De Vito (May 5, paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-1-57912-997-2). This original and insightful collection combines Twain’s journal writings with his rarely seen sketches and doodles to create a fascinating, and often hilarious, visual testimonial to the father of American literature.
Bloomsbury
Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita by Robert Roper (June 9, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-8027-4363-3). Worldly, refined, cultivated: the Russian-born author of Lolita might seem as European as they come. Nabokov, however, regarded his time in the U.S. as the richest of his life, as shown in this revelatory biography from Roper (Now the Drum of War).
Brandeis Univ.
The Nearest Thing to Life by James Wood (June 2, hardcover, $35, ISBN 978-1-61168-741-5). A master class from the New Yorker’s Wood, often regarded as our finest living critic, on the connections between fiction and life. Along with individual works like Chekhov’s “The Kiss” and Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, Wood discusses his personal experiences as a reader.
City Lights
I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, 1955–1997, edited by Bill Morgan (May 12, hardcover, $26.95, ISBN 978-0-87286-686-7). A collection of the correspondence between the author of Howl and his publisher and fellow poet, and City Lights Books cofounder, provides an evocative portrait of enduring friendship.