100 Years of America’s Best… Sellers

From: imgsave

“When Matthew Kahn, a creative writing student at California State University at Northridge, learned from one of his professors that the bestselling book of 1926 was The Private Life of Helen of Troy by John Erskine, he was struck. The class wasn’t reading it, but the book they were reading, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, was published the same year. 'I thought that was interesting,' Kahn told me. 'When we think of the books of 1926, we think modernists. We don’t think about the books that most people were actually reading at that time.'

     So Kahn decided to read them, 100 years of No. 1 bestsellers, from 1913 to 2013, and post reviews on his blog, Kahn’s Corner. As of the time of this writing, he’s up to 1966 and Jacqueline Susann’s The Valley of the Dolls — decidedly not a hit with this reader. But Kahn has come across a few surprises and can offer an unusual perspective on what Americans have liked in a book since the First World War. I called him up to get his impressions. […]
     One thing about the massive shift in the 1960s is that it’s partly about a changing perspective on books. They’re more seen as a part of the entertainment industry. In the first half of this list, there are about 10 years where the bestseller was also a Pulitzer Prize winner. There were a few years where the bestseller was written by a Nobel Prize winner. With Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent, in 1960, that was the last time either of those things were true. It’s the last book on the list to win the Pulitzer Prize.”
— Laura Miller, Salon
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storage and retrieval

From: Who Is Your Lawyer?

“On this day in 1956 [November 19], while visiting the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Ernest Hemingway was alerted by the staff that he’d had two trunks stored there since the 1920s, and if he didn’t claim them, they’d be tossed in the trash. Hemingway was surprised when he claimed the luggage and found lost manuscripts and notes, some of which would eventually make up A Moveable Feast, one of the most famous literary memoirs ever.

     Remembering the unlikely rescue of Hemingway’s work gives us a moment to pause and think about all the work by all the greats that didn’t actually make it. Whether tossed into the fire, stolen, or just plain lost in a box somewhere, here are a few storied pieces of writing that we’ll probably never get to read.”
— Jason Diamond, Flavorwire
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“As the literary-minded will no doubt recall, on the cusp of Hemingway’s early fame virtually all of his finished but as yet unpublished work was lost in a bizarre twist of fate. The incident, which occurred in late December, 1922, is noted by Hemingway in A Moveable Feast and receives half a paragraph in Carlos Baker’s biography of Hemingway.
     As Baker reports, Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, before catching a train from Paris to Switzerland to meet her husband, had packed all his manuscripts (except for Up in Michigan and My Old Man) 'in a separate small valise so that he (Hemingway) could get on with his writing during the Christmas season.' However, at the Gare de Lyon someone purloined the bag holding Hemingway’s pages — which contained poems and short stories and the beginning of a novel never again seen.”
— Robert Scott Lawrence, Who Is Your Lawyer?
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“Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is the hallmark of an authoritarian regime…” – [U.S.] Justice Potter Stewart (1966)

From: U.S. Embassy, Nigeria

"A lack of 'literary value' has apparently left Ralph Ellison's landmark 1952 novel, Invisible Man banned from school libraries in Randolph County, N.C., the Asheboro Courier-Tribune reports. […]

     As the school district's policy requires, the complaints [of a Randolph County, N.C. parent of an eleventh grader] lead to votes on the school and district levels. Both held that the book should remain available to students in the library. However, in a 5-2 vote, the school board voted to ban the book, with one board member, Gary Mason, stating, 'I didn’t find any literary value.'
     Mason's blunt assessment however, runs counter to decades of intellectual criticism of the novel, which won the 1953 National Book Award for fiction, beating out Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and John Steinbeck's East of Eden.
     In 1995, writing for the New York Times, Roger Rosenblatt praised the novel as a masterpiece.
     'Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953, was instantly recognized as a masterpiece, a novel that captured the grim realities of racial discrimination as no book had,' Rosenblatt wrote. 'Its reputation grew as Ellison retreated into a mythic literary silence that made his one achievement definitive.'"
— Huffington Post
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"[…] All [Randolph County Board of Education] members were given copies to read before the vote. Board Chair McDonald said 'it was a hard read.'
     Mason said, 'I didn’t find any literary value' and objected to the book’s language. 'I’m for not allowing it to be available,' he added.
     A school district official said ahead of the vote that Invisible Man was just one of many options in school libraries, and that no student was forced to read it. She also stressed that the state Department of Public Instruction approved the book for student consumption.
     Invisible Man was one of three books that Randleman High School juniors-to-be in the 2013-14 school year could choose to read for the summer. Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin and Passing by Nella Larsen were the students’ other choices. Honors students had to choose two of the three books."
— rt.com
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Here's another post about censorship...

For a list of books banned in the U.S. go here...

Here's a link to what's happening in your area of the U.S.A. during Banned Books Week — September 22 - 28, 2013.

Buy Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and the other books mentioned in these posts here...

Lilliputian, diminutive, teensy-weensy

Illustration by Tom Gauld (via DoobyBrain)

Ernest Hemingway, as a young newspaperman in the 1920s, bet his colleagues $10 that he could write a complete story in juts six words. He won the cash with this: 'For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.'

     As an example of brevity this is unsurpassed, but is it actually a story? Does it fulfill all the rules of drama which I tend to harp on about?
     Admittedly there is no plot, no structure, no protagonist or antagonist, but this is a story because it evokes an emotional response in the reader, and that is the prime aim in creative writing."
— Gurmeet Mattu, Ezine Articles
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From: criggo

"... At nine pages, 'Glenn Gould,' a monologue by Lydia Davis, is longer than most of her work, which are typically between three and four; many are as brief as a paragraph, or a sentence. Most of them are not conventional 'stories'—they usually feature people who are unnamed, are often set in unnamed towns or states, and lack the formal comportment of a story that opens, rises, and closes. There is no gratuitous bulk, no 'realistic' wadding. Davis’s pieces, often narrated by a woman, sometimes apparently by the writer, are closer to soliloquy than to the story; they are essayist poems—small curiosity boxes rather than large canvasses."
— James Wood, The New Yorker
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For another post about Lydia Davis, go here...

The Courage to Hesitate

"Olivia Chow is getting ready to lose Jack Layton for a second time.

     The CBC drama special Jack, the story of their life together and the death of the former NDP leader from cancer in 2011, will air on Sunday, March 10 at 8 p.m.
     Chow hasn’t seen it yet, but she knows the time is coming soon.[…]
     The truth is that it can’t be easy for her to relive those emotionally charged months in 2011 when her husband was diagnosed with prostate cancer, fought it while bringing the NDP to major victory, then succumbed to another cancer in a matter of months, dying at his moment of greatest political triumph.
     'I wanted Jack’s story to inspire more people to get involved and try to make the world a better place,' is how she explains her reason for allowing this film to be made so close to the actual events."
— Richard Ouzounian, The Record
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I find it rather disturbing to that the CBC has taken upon itself to produce the drama special "Jack" about the former leader of the NDP Jack Layton so close to his passing.
     The story, of course, is hard to resist; it holds all the components of great drama: a man struggling with terminal illness as he tackles the most important political contest of his life. But it seems a bit inappropriate and gratuitous: an exploitation of a grieving process that is still ongoing, not only for his close family and friends, but also for the public at large.
     Most endeavours of this kind — the recent Spielberg movie "Lincoln" comes to mind — allow the perspective of history to guide the narrative. If the producers had waited ten years or even longer to approach this subject I'm sure it would have taken on the weight (and value) of a vintage Bordeaux rather than the immediate, fruity, gratification of a Beaujolais nouveau.
     There are so many Canadian stories to dramatize: what about a series based on Alice Monro stories? Has anyone made a decent movie about Ernest Hemingway's time in Toronto?
     A movie about world-famous contralto Portia White? John McCrea (author of "In Flanders Fields")?
     Or Canadian Lieutenant Harry Colebourn, the man responsible (in part) for Winnie the Pooh?

From: Jetset Marketplace

"Christopher Milne {A. A. Milne's son] had named his toy bear after Winnie, a Canadian black bear which he often saw at London Zoo, and 'Pooh,' a swan they had met while on holiday. The bear cub was purchased from a hunter for $20 by Canadian Lieutenant Harry Colebourn in White River, Ontario, Canada, while en route to England during the First World War. He named the bear "Winnie" after his adopted hometown in Winnipeg, Manitoba. "Winnie" was surreptitiously brought to England with her owner, and gained unofficial recognition as The Fort Garry Horse regimental mascot. Colebourn left Winnie at the London Zoo while he and his unit were in France; after the war she was officially donated to the zoo, as she had become a much loved attraction there."
— Wikipedia
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"[...] Little Screens: Short Stories"

This 1939 edition of Cosmopolitan feature a short story
by Ernest Hemingway (From: Azio Media)

"The short story, like the western, is periodically said to be on the brink of a comeback. The most recent example of this boosterism: an article by the New York Times’ new(ish) publishing reporter, Leslie Kaufman, titled 'Good Fit for Today’s Little Screens: Short Stories, in which 'a proliferation of digital options' is said to offer short fiction 'not only new creative opportunities but exposure and revenue as well.' […]

     A short story can be anything from an exquisite specimen of the literary art to a diverting pastime. In its mid-20th-century heyday, when even magazines like Mademoiselle published short fiction by writers like William Faulkner, stories offered readers an hour or two of satisfying narrative entertainment at the end of the day. Television has largely replaced that function, and the literary short story itself became a more rarefied thing, a form in which writers exhibit the perfection of their technique, rather like lyric poetry. With the exception of certain communities of genre writer and readers — most notable in science fiction — these writers aren’t reaching a wider audience because they aren’t especially trying to. The question is: Has (or will) the ongoing revolution in communications changed that? Is there any reason why it should? The Internet has seen a flourishing of online literary journals like the Collagist and Narrative, but the suggestion that these sites are turning short fiction into promising new sources of 'revenue' would probably make their editors laugh.
     Bitterly."
— Laura Miller, Salon
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"HarperCollins Publishers announced today [November 26, 2012] the launch of HarperTeen Impulse, a digital imprint focusing on Young Adult short stories and novellas. The new imprint will publish short-form works from new and established authors, providing original and exciting new teen ebooks across a wide variety of genres.
     HarperTeen Impulse will publish between one and four titles a month, all of which will go on sale the first Tuesday of that month, branded 'Impulse Tuesday.' Impulse titles will benefit from dedicated program marketing, including extensive social media outreach, monthly newsletters, cross-promotion in HarperTeen print books, and strategic sales promotions."
— PRWeb
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Lord of the Rings Retold

From: Rare Book Review

"One of the cult novels of the 1970s turned out to be Lord of the Rings. Written by one of the unlikeliest of best-selling authors, it affected a large number of people, not least of them being those people now in their teens saddled with names like Galadriel.
     How would this book have turned out had it been written by someone else?

Lord of the Rings, by Ian Fleming
Aragorn placed his hand on the cool, ivory hilt of his 6.38 Anduril sword, half-holding it in as casual manner as possible. His eyes swept the room of the Prancing Pony, eyeing up the potential threats. He took out his pipe, made from the warmed heartwood of a mature oak. In the palm of his left hand, he unwrapped his leather tobacco pouch filled, as he preferred, with Gondorian Silk Cut. Aragorn preferred it to the harsher, stronger Numenorian blend...

 Lord of the Rings, by Ernest Hemingway
Frodo Baggins looked at the ring. The ring was round. It was a good ring. The hole at the heart of the ring was also round. The hole was clean and pure. The hole at the heart of the ring had an emptiness in it that made Frodo Baggins remember the big skies of the Shire when his father had taken him out and taught him to tear the heads off the small, furred things that walked there, even though he hated blood in those days and the stink of the blood was always part of the emptiness for him then and ever after.
     Frodo Baggins could put the ring on his finger now. The stink of the blood and the hole and the emptiness could never leave him now. Frodo Baggins looked at the ash-heap slopes of Mordor and remembered the Cuban orc who had kept the ash on his cigar all the way to the end. The orc just drew on the cigar and smoked the cigar calmly and kept the ash in a long gray finger, a hard finger, right to the moment that the Rangers beat hit to death with clubs. He was mucho orco, the Cuban.
     Frodo Baggins looked at the ring and the hole and smelled the sulfur smell that came from the vent in the mountain. There were scorched black bushes round the vent. The vent was like the cleft of the old whore at the Prancing Pony on the night that the Black Riders came. Frodo Baggins reached in his pouch and took out the flask of good grappa there and filled his mouth and swallowed the grappa. She was mucha puta, the old whore.
     Frodo Baggins could spit again so he spat hard, once. He took the ring and threw it into the vent.
     The earth moved."

— Alison Brooks, Changing The Times
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Writers digest...

"To Mark Twain, San Francisco was coffee with fresh cream at the Ocean House, a hotel and restaurant overlooking the Pacific. He also had a decided fondness for steamed mussels and champagne. But most of all, San Francisco was oysters—oysters by the bushel at the Occidental Hotel, where the day might begin with salmon and fried oysters and reach its culinary climax at 9 p.m., when, Twain wrote in 1864, he felt compelled 'to move upon the supper works and destroy oysters done up in all kinds of seductive styles' until midnight, lest he offend the landlord. Every indication is that his relationship with the landlord was excellent."
— Andrew Beahrs, Smithsonian
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"Eudora Welty’s fiction includes some of the richest food imagery in Southern literature, as well as some of the richest female characters. Not coincidently, the two are often served together. By constantly placing her female characters in the kitchen and associating them with cooking or baking, Welty’s fiction suggests that women 'belong' in the kitchen. But this is not misogyny, as anyone who really takes the time to think about Welty’s fiction will realize: rather, Welty seems to be suggesting that women—like food—are not only nurturing and central aspects of life, but often the pillars of the family, that which sustains a family unit and community. A woman’s place in the kitchen, along with her 'kitchen rights' so to speak, represents the feminine powers of healing, nourishment, and strength."
— Gabrielle Stanton, OKRA
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"The beer was very cold and wonderful to drink. The pommes à l'huile were firm and marinated and the olive oil delicious. I ground black pepper over the potatoes and moistened the bread in the olive oil. After the first heavy draft of been I drank and ate very slowly. When the pommes à l'huile were gone I ordered another serving and a cervelas. This was a sausage like a heavy, wide frankfurter split in two and covered with a special mustard sauce."
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (pg.73, via Apples and Ice Cream)
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Buy all these scrumptious books here...

"Use short sentences."

"This month, The Toronto Star released The Hemingway Papers consisting of more than seventy original Hemingway articles presented in news-print form exactly as they appeared in the newspaper over ninety years ago. Complete with vintage adverts and comics, I dare any man or woman to unearth a relic of journalism so fine as this.
     It was not until prying open the over-sized daily (adorned with a blow up of Hemingway’s 1923 passport photo) that I came to discover a certain pattern, a cipher if you will, in the technical arch of the man’s Pulitzer Prize winning writing style.
     Ernest Hemingway was a negative guy. He was a fine writer, sure, but not exactly the portrait of a buoyant disposition. He entered the feral arena of news writing by way of The Kansas City Star during his late teens. The daily had a specific ‘style guide’ to which their writers must adhere: 'Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.'"
— Jeff Campagna, Sabotage Times
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You can buy this collection here...

Recovered and Uncovered

From: RareList Rare Books

"From the famous theft of Ernest Hemingway’s novels to the loss of William Faulkner’s novel four times, manuscripts have had a way of getting lost. It is no less than a eureka moment when they’re found many years later.
     This year has been quite eventful in terms of discovering lost literary treasures. Here’s a look at the famous manuscripts which were found in 2011."
— Hindustan Times
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"An unpublished and previously unknown Enid Blyton novel is believed to have turned up in an archive of the late children's author's work.
Mr Tumpy's Caravan is a 180-page fantasy story about a magical caravan.
It was in a collection of manuscripts that was auctioned by the family of Blyton's eldest daughter in September.
     'I think it's unique,' said Tony Summerfield, head of the Enid Blyton Society. 'I don't know of any full-length unpublished Blyton work.'
     The collection was bought by the Seven Stories children's book centre in Newcastle.
Blyton, who died in 1968, remains a children's favourite and a publishing phenomenon thanks to such characters as the Famous Five, the Secret Seven and Noddy.
An estimated 500 million copies of her books have been sold around the world, with updated and reprinted versions of her most popular stories still selling eight million copies a year."
— Ian Youngs, BBC
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"It's quite surreal," says Hannah Green, archivist at the Seven Stories centre for children's books in Newcastle and one of the few to have read the story in recent years. "It's about a caravan on legs which gets up and walks around," she continues.
     In the caravan with Mr Tumpy are his two friends, Muffin and Puffin, and a dog called Bun-Dorg.
"They live in this caravan and go off on adventures," she explains. "They don't really control it - it decides where it's going to go and when it's going to stay somewhere."
— Hannah Green, in an interview with Ian Youngs (BBC)
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"In 2008, Enid Blyton was voted the UK's best loved writer, beating JK Rowling, Austen and even Shakespeare. Yet, although characters like Noddy and the Famous Five still have devoted fans, Blyton has become a controversial figure, dogged by criticisms of her writing style and accusations of sexism and racism."
— BBC Archive
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Get all the books mentioned in these articles here...

Grudging Witnesses

"Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman served as nurses and eyewitness reporters in the hideous Union hospitals in Washington, D. C. Alcott contracted typhoid in the septic wards and wrote Little Women, about the daughters of a father wounded in the war, while treating herself with mercury. Whitman ministered to the needs of wounded soldiers while also keeping a careful visual record of everything he saw, 'this other freight of helpless worn and wounded youth,' as he wrote to Emerson. 'Doctors sawed arms & legs off from morning till night,' he reported in his journal. He was dismayed to see 'a heap of feet, arms, legs, etc., under a tree in front of a hospital.' As he moved from bed to bed in the overcrowded wards, he was shocked by the youth of the victims. 'Charles Miller, bed 19, company D, 53rd Pennsylvania, is only sixteen years of age, very bright, courageous boy, left leg amputated below the knee.'
     The remarkable medical photographs of the Civil War surgeon-photographer Reed Bontecou—now published in their entirety for the first time [Shooting Soldiers: Civil War Medical Photography By R.b. Bontecou by Stanley B. Burns] and recently shown at The Robert Anderson gallery in New York—bring us closer still. Bontecou, from Troy, New York, was a classifier of seashells and an ornithologist who had traveled in the Amazon before the war collecting specimens. A pioneer in surgical procedures known for the dexterity and speed of his operations, he was also a photographer of genius. His iconic image, 'A Morning’s Work,' shows a pile of amputated legs he himself had sawed off earlier that day."
— Christopher Benfey, The New York Review of Books
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"A remarkable number of well known authors were ambulance drivers during World War I. Among them were Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, and Somerset Maugham. Robert Service, the writer of Yukon poetry including The Shooting of Dan McGrew, and Charles Nordhoff, co-author of Mutiny On the Bounty, drove ambulances in the Great War. [...]
     If the list were expanded to include those working in medically related fields during the war, such names as Gertrude Stein, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and E.M. Forster could be added."
— firstworldwar.com
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