Original Forbes article that inspired Let Us Now Praise Famous Men published by Melville House: “With the book, we have a much better map of him writing ‘Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men,’ “ said John Summers, who edited “Cotton Tenants” and
printed an excerpt from the article in a literary journal he edits, The
Baffler. I grew up on Famous Men, it was actually one of my childhood picturebooks. I'm totally going to buy this.
The riddle of the labyrinth: Ms. Fox is attentive to touching traces of idiosyncratic humanity, past
and ancient: The church pamphlets and library slips Kober cut up to
serve as index cards during the paper shortages of World War II; the
“scribal doodles” — a bull, a man, a maze — found on the tablets; the
mark a Cretan scribe made when erasing a character on wet clay with his
thumb all those centuries ago. “To look at the tablets even now is to be
in the presence of other people — living, thinking, literate people,”
she writes. I think I'm going to read this next, I already love Alice.
William Denby dead at 90: He once told The Bloomsbury Review that he recognized his uncertain
standing among some critics. “I believed, as I still do, that a black
writer has the same kind of mind that writers have had all through
time,” he said. “He can imagine any world he wants to imagine.”
TLS review of the Annotated Frankenstein. ....Wolfson and
Levao show that the first edition of Frankenstein of 1818 was
packaged as a philosophic novel. Published anonymously, and dedicated to
William Godwin, it features more references to the Prometheus legend and Paradise
Lost than to such Gothic tropes as perverse sexuality and spectral
hauntings. The monster may be stitched together from human and animal parts,
yet he is more memorable for being an autodidact who pleads for affection:
“his humanity is the most surprising, most disturbing, and ultimately most
moving aspect of his character”. I NEED this book....yes! Yes I do.
descensus Averno facilis est