Leon Uris is dead. Uris is best-known for his novel Exodus (which was made into a movie directed by Otto Preminger and starring Paul Newman). The portrayal of Arabs in Exodus and The Haj (primitive, “noble savages,” etc.) earned Uris few friends among Arabs, but otherwise the novels were hugely successful.
“To be, or not to be, I there’s the point,
To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all;
No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes
It’s Hamlet’s greatest soliloquy, but not quite as we know it. The first published version of the play commonly regarded as Shakespeare’s best was yesterday revealed as a travesty of the drama that helped shape the modern English language.
The version of Hamlet known as the “bad quarto” is a salutary warning of the dangers of literary piracy. An entrepreneurial player in Richard Burbage’s company at the Rose Theatre, where Hamlet is believed to have been first staged, beat the Bard to the press with a version of the play he remembered from rehearsals and its first performances in 1600. ” Read on.
Eric Schlosser’s new book, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, is reviewed in the Washington Post.
“Perhaps it was magic, some kind of dark magic. But early yesterday morning a throng of young and eager and happy faces queued all the way round the block to London’s Fortnum & Mason, all waiting to read and thrill and let loose their imaginations. Yet it was hard not to feel cynical. Not, for heaven’s sake, at the children, but at the marketing.”
Marketing robs Hogwarts hero of his magic
“When Matthue Roth takes the stage at a poetry slam, the audience knows right away that they’re seeing something new. For some it’s his peyes, or sidelocks; for others its the poetry about phylacteries (“my tefillin nature/leather wrapped around me like I’m/all tied up/in you. I know the secret of S+M, why/white men pay for bondage and loveless sex/night after night after night, finding nothing”). For most, though, it is the surprising juxtaposition of energetic, erotic performance poetry and intense, Orthodox Jewish religious feeling. How does Roth reconcile the two?” Read the full article.
Find out what people like Zadie Smith, Rabih Alameddine, and Ann Packer are working on at the moment.
Link via Maud.