The new cover art is in honor of the animated movie My Dog Tulip, which features the voice of Christopher Plummer as J.R. Ackerley, along with Isabella Rossellini, Lynn Redgrave, and Brian Murray in smaller roles. Veteran animators Paul and Sandra Fierlinger animate and direct.
Don't worry, the portrait of Ackerley, with his "Alsatian bitch" Queenie (Tulip's real name) gazing up at him with hearts in her eyes isn't gone, it's just moved to the frontispiece.
The illustrator Eric Hanson has a madcap style, reminiscent of the work of Ben Shahn, so we were very pleased when the opportunity to have him bring to life the anarchic Edie Cares, heroine of Terrible, Horrible Edie (clearly she had no part in the naming of the book). Eric recently sent us some of the early ideas for Edie, and we thought we'd share them with you.
By the way, Eric Hanson doesn't just have a blog and illustrate books (though he's just done the cover of John Waters's memoir, making Mr. Waters and Edie siblings of sorts), he's also written a book. It's called A Book of Ages, and will help you realize that you haven't done much with your life, no matter how old you are.
Yesterday Brian Moore's Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne went on sale, along with Alexandros Papdiamantis's Murderess. We couldn't help note both books concern the plight of powerless women living in patriarchal societies—and that they were both written by men. Judge for yourself whether these male writers have done justice to their subjects.
In this excerpt from The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Miss Hearne runs into a tenant from her boarding house as they leave Mass.
She watched him as he walked on, saw his face smile, saw it turn cold and serious. What could he be thinking of? He seemed to be trying to remember something, perhaps an engagement, perhaps an excuse to leave her. For eventually, they all made some excuse. But when they reached the end of the street, he turned and took off his broad-brimmed hat.
“I guess you’ve got a lot of things to do,” he said. “You going back to the house?”
“O, yes. But I go to see my friends, the O’Neills, every Sunday afternoon. He’s a professor at the university, you know. A very clever man. I used to know him when we were children. And now he’s married with a lovely family of his own.”
Why did I say that, she thought, why? But it was her old fault, the old boasts, the shields against pity, against being forced to say that nobody wanted to see you that particular day. The old mistake. Now he would go away.
“That so?” His face showed disappointment.
She tried to undo it: to let him know that life was not all gay friends.
“It’s so nice to have someone to visit occasionally when one lives alone.”
It was a forward thing to say, but she had to come out with it some time: besides, it was the truth, although nobody liked to admit being lonely. How many times before had she turned men away by her habit of boasting, of pretending that she had a good time all the time and needed no one. Looking at him, tall, no longer young, with his rough-red face and his built-up shoe, she knew that he would be easily turned away, that he had not stayed so long alone without something of herself in him. And maybe, although it was a thing you could hardly bear to think about, like death or your last judgment, maybe he would be the last one ever and he would walk away now and it would only be a question of waiting for it all to end and hoping for better things in the next world. But that was silly, it was never too late. And so she waited, pretending not to see him lift his hand to say good bye, waited for something, for some little chance to keep him.
And in this excerpt from The Murderess, we are introduced to the novel's title character.
Old Hadoula, sometimes known as Jannis Frankissa, lay beside the hearth, with her eyes closed and her head resting on the step of the fireplace, the cinder-step as it is known. She had not dozed off, she was giving up her sleep at the cradle of her sick granddaughter. As for the new mother, who had given birth to the sick child, she had been sound asleep for a little while now in her unhappy nest on the floor.
The little hanging lamp guttered under the canopy of the fireplace. It threw shadows instead of light on the few miserable sticks of furniture, which looked cleaner and grander at night than in the daytime. The three half-burnt logs and the big upright balk of timber in the hearth made a lot of ash, a few glowing cinders and a flame that crackled quietly and reminded the old woman through her drowsiness of her absent younger daughter Krinio. If Krinio had been in the house now she would have been whispering in a low chant, "If he's a friend good luck to him, and if he isn't, damn him."
Hadoula, or Frankissa, or Frankojannou, was a woman of scarcely sixty, well built and solid, with a masculine air and two little touches of moustache on her lips. In her private thoughts, when she summed up her entire life, she saw that she had never done anything except serve others. When she was a little girl, she had served her parents. When she was mated, she became a slave to her husband, and at the same time, because of her strength and his weakness, she was his nurse. When she had children she became a slave to her children, and when they had children of their own, she was slave to her grandchildren.
Damion Searls, editor and mastermind behind our edition of Thoreau's Journal, sat down to talk about Thoreau with Christopher Lydon. The podcast is called Radio Open Source, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
Also: remember to post your favorite excerpt from Thoreau's Journal to be entered in a drawing to win a Thoreau baseball t-shirt from Novel-Ts. More details here.
Yuri Olesha's Envy, the funniest novel you'll ever read about the quest for the perfect means of mass producing sausage, has as its dramatic center a soccer match between the USSR and Germany. In the passage below, Volodya is the shlub of a narrator's rival, and Goetske is the flamboyant star of the opposing team. The playing styles of the two men are contrasted, each, perhaps, reflecting the spirit of his home country.
Volodya would catch the ball in midflight, when it seemed mathematically impossible. The entire audience, the entire living slope of the stands seemed to get steeper; each spectator was halfway to his feet, impelled by a terrible, impatient desire to see, at last, the most interesting thing—the scoring of a goal. The referees were sticking whistles into their lips as they walked, ready to whistle for a goal...Volodya wasn’t catching the ball, he was ripping it from its line of flight, like someone who has violated the laws of physics and was hit by the stunning action of thwarted forces. He would fly up with the ball, spinning around, literally screwing himself up on it. He would grab the ball with his entire body—knees, belly, and chin—throwing his weight at the speed of the ball, the way someone throws a rag down to put out a flame. The usurped speed of the ball would throw Volodya two meters to the side, and he would fall like a firecracker. The opposing forwards would run at him, but ultimately the ball would end up high above the fray.
Volodya stayed inside the goal. He couldn’t just stand there, though. He walked the line of the goal from post to post, trying to tamp down the surge of energy from his battle with the ball. Everything was roaring inside him. He swung his arms, shook himself, kicked up a clump of earth with his toe. Elegant before the start of the game, he now consisted of rags, a black body, and the leather of his huge, fingerless gloves. The breaks didn’t last long. Once again the Germans’ attack would roll toward Moscow’s goal. Volodya passionately desired victory for his team and worried about each of his players. He thought that only he knew how you should play against Goetske, what his weak points were, how to defend against his attacks. He was also interested in what opinion the famous German was forming about the Soviet game. When he himself clapped and shouted “hurray” to each of his backs, he felt like shouting to Goetske then: “Look how we’re playing! Do you think we’re playing well?”
As a soccer player, Volodya was Goetske’s exact opposite. Volodya was a professional athlete; the other was a professional player. What was important to Volodya was the overall progress of the game, the overall victory, the outcome; Goetske was anxious merely to demonstrate his art. He was an old hand who was not there to support the team’s honor; he treasured only his own success; he was not a permanent member of any sports organization because he had compromised himself by moving from club to club for money. He was barred from participating in play-off matches. He was invited only for friendly games, exhibition games, and trips to other countries. He combined art and luck. His presence made a team dangerous. He despised the other players—both his side and his opponents. He knew he could kick a goal against any team. The rest didn’t matter to him. He was a hack.
We're giving away a handsome baseball t-shirt, courtesy of Novel-T, and all you have to do is post your favorite excerpt from Henry David Thoreau's Journal here before July 12th (HDT's birthday).
Please cite the date of the entry. The passage need not appear in the NYRB Classics edition of The Journal, but it must be from that work. A winner will be chosen at random. Sorry international readers, this contest is only open to people with US or Canadian mailing addresses.
And please take a moment to browse around the Novel-T shop, they've recently released a second roster of literary tops and they donate $1 of every purchase to 826 NYC, 826NYC, "a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills."
Louise Bourgeois, detail of Untitled (Legs and Bones), 1993; courtesy Gallerie Karsten Greve, Cologne; photograph by Beth Phillips
Louise Bourgeois: 1911–2010
"We sit in Louise's web, a wonderfully tatty parlor, watching the paint peel, waiting nervously. There is a round coffee table with a dozen bottles of liquor on it. Esrafily pours and says: 'Louder! Like we're having a party. If she thinks she's missing a party, she'll come down.'' Cloud taunts us: ''Man, she's gonna lay waste. I call this place the smack-down shack, 'cause it ends in tears, man.'
"Then she appears, and it's hard to imagine this small, opalescent woman in a pink tunic, black slip over black leggings and tiny black Nikes smacking anybody down."
From "Always on Sunday," a profile of the artist and her circle that appeared in The New York Times in 2002
"My Life in Pictures": Bourgeois comments on photographs of herself from age 2 to 85, also in the Times.
And for Barbara Comyns admirers, we hear that her novel Our Spoons Came from Woolworths will soon be republished in America (it's available in the UK from Virago). More details to come.
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