Category: literary life


Stillness In The Water, Huh?

The book responsible for my never swimming past 25 yards from the shore is now thirty.

Compared to Steven Spielberg’s resulting film, the book had a darker underlying theme. Matt Hooper, the marine biologist brought in to fight the shark, has an affair with Brody’s wife Ellen.
Mayor Vaughan’s insistence on keeping the beaches open, meanwhile, may have something to do with the fact he owes money to the mafia.
Spielberg has admitted that when he first read the book he found most of the characters unlikeable, and wanted the shark to win.



More On Munif

Tariq Ali has written an obit. Yes, there is yet another spelling of Munif’s first name.



Plan B

Recently unsealed documents explain how Winston Churchill ended up winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, beating the likes of Robert Frost, Graham Greene, and Ernest Hemingway.




Mailer at 81

The Scotsman has a profile of Norman Mailer on the writer’s eighty-first birthday.

Two factors have denied [Mailer] the accolades he deserves. First, he has produced no incontrovertibly great book. The Naked and the Dead is a young man’s work, visceral, naive, derivative, shapelessly insightful. For all his obsession with the novel as a form – he calls it “great Bitch Goddess” – Mailer has only produced one novel that flirts with greatness and again the “intertextuality” is a giveaway.

Read the article in full here.