Search Results for: valerie

Bookforum Benefit for Katrina Survivors

Brian Sholis of Art Forum writes in to let readers know about a Bookforum benefit for survivors of Hurricane Katrina. This will take place October 10 at Cooper Union’s Great Hall in New York. Details here. The event will feature readings by writers Robert Stone, Donna Tartt, Roy Blount, Valerie Martin, Nancy Lemann, John Barry, and Mike Tidwell, and will be hosted by the New Orleans Times-Picayune‘s Chris Rose.



Johnson Profile

Dennis Loy Johnson, proprietor of Melville House Publishing and editor of Moby, one of my daily must-reads, is profiled, along with co-owner Valerie Merians, in this NY Sun article by Brendan Bernhard. The article focuses primarily on the series of books by French authors Dennis has published (among whom Dominique de Villepin and Bernard-Henry Levy.)

“The whole community of Americans interested in French literature has been feeling as if it’s under assault,” says Mr. Johnson, mournfully but with the air of a man who wants to rectify the situation. “It all kind of stopped after Camus. There are fewer and fewer French books being translated, and unless it’s something written by Michel Houellebecq, you’re probably not going to hear about it.

That might explain why Dennis was deluged by requests from editors on a recent trip to Paris. In the middle of all this, he’s still managed to do some very serious investigative work for his post-NBA column, which you can read here.



Who’s She Calling A Brat?

Are biographies of women associated with great writers starting to overshadow those of the writers themselves? Katie Roiphe seems to think so. In this Slate article, she takes a new biography of Lucia Joyce by Carol Loeb Schloss to task.

These biographies interest themselves not with women who wrote great books, but with women who happened to be there as they were being written, women like Zelda Fitzgerald, Vera Nabokov, Georgie Yeats, Valerie Eliot, and Nora Joyce. The latest engrossing contribution to the genre is Carol Shloss’ Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake. Once the genre served as an original, quirky feminist corrective, but now, as it becomes more prevalent, it panders to a culture more enamored of family dysfunction and prurient gossip than art itself.

Roiphe complains that there is no evidence that Lucia Joyce had any talent, that she was nothing more than a dilettante with a taste for dancing, painting, and writing. I can’t speak to the other bios that Roiphe puts in the same bag as Lucia Joyce, but I did read Stacy Schiff’s Vera: Mrs Vladimir Nabokov, and I just don’t think you can come to understand Vladimir Nabokov without reading that book. Vera didn’t just “happen” to be there. She researched, corrected and typed his manuscripts, did all his submissions, translated his work, fought with his detractors, even made corrections on word choice when he was writing Lolita. I can’t imagine anyone telling Nabokov that he doesn’t have le mot juste. She sometimes wrote his lectures for him at Cornell, and on a few occasions lectured when he was unable to. Roiphe may have a point about Lucia Joyce, but I think she gets carried away and smears everyone else.