The Economist (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
The enduring appeal of Jane Austen A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen. Edited by Susannah Carson. Random House; 320 pages; $25. Buy from Amazon.com “SOME literary works are mortal; Jane Austen’s are immortal,” writes Harold Bloom in his foreword to this delightful volume. In it, 33 writers—from Virginia Woolf to Jay McInerney, from...
Beattie's Book Blog (Free subscription) | 11/18/2009
Andrew Motion to Chair The Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2010 Sir Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate, (pic left by Johnny Ring), is today (Wednesday 18th November) announced as Chair of the judges for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction – the most significant literary prize in the English language. Andrew Motion comments, ‘ It’s an honour to be asked to chair the Man Booker Prize,...
BrontëBlog (Free subscription) | 11/17/2009
A press release from the Brontë Parsonage Museum : SARAH WATERS IN HAWORTH Novelist Sarah Waters will be making a visit to Haworth this month, to speak about her work as part of the Brontë Parsonage Museum’s contemporary arts programme. The talk takes place on Saturday 28 November at 6pm at the West Lane Baptist Centre, Haworth , and is part of a special day of creative writing events...
Biblical Recorder (Free subscription) | 11/17/2009
When I was a child I lived in a small logging town in Southern Oregon. Bly had one paved road and the short walk down my dirt street ended in the woods. I remember a deer entering a clearing while I was sitting on a log next to my dad as he read. On occasion wild horses would stampede through town. When I was 5 we moved to Southern California, but I never forgot the wonder and wildness of the first...
Authors On Line Workshop (Free subscription) | 11/16/2009
Writers Centre Norwich Saturday 5th December 2009 │10:00am – 16:00pm│£50 / £40 “The writing is exemplary: you feel the hand of a natural at work....” Praise for James Scudamore’s Heliopolis – The Guardian, 2009 Keen to avoid the Christmas madness and get some writing done? A creative writing workshop from Booker longlisted author James Scudamore,...
The Telegraph India (Free subscription) | 11/14/2009
It was probably Somerset Maugham who pointed out that there are only about half-a-dozen stories in the history of literature, and writers keep recycling them in different forms. In a world of finite resources, the imagination tends to run dry, so there can only be that many original ideas. It is understandable that art, like literature, must also draw its sustenance from an established repertory of...
The Big Picture (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
Richard W. Fisher The Current State of the Economy and a Look to the Future (With Reference to William ‘Sidestroke’ Miles, W. Somerset Maugham, Don Ameche and Kenneth Arrow) Remarks before the [...]
Hayden's Ferry Review Blog (Free subscription) | 11/10/2009
I'm not one for titles. I appreciate witty ones but I usually find them to be functionally descriptive or useful as mere labels to distinguish one story from another. This probably apocryphal anecdote about Somerset Maugham's advice to a young writer about how to title his recently finished novel comes to mind:"Does it have drums in it?""No, sir.""Does it have bugles in it?""No,...
NY's Funniest Rabbi (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
"When I’m asked by fellow air passengers what I do for a living and reply, “I write poems,” the reaction is often a startled smile, as though they’re thinking Homer! Dante! Milton! (At least that’s what I’m thinking they’re thinking.) And then comes the lean-in, the furrowed brow, the voice thick with compassion as my new friend says, “But there...
The Fill in the Gaps 100 Project (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Gah, I've just realised how long it's been since I last checked in here, and how slack I've been about both reading from my list and writing about what I've read. Crossing off my reads from the last couple of months just now, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I'd read a couple from my list by accident -- and then unpleasantly surprised to find that I couldn't remember anything about some of the...
西儒 ─ The Western Confucian (Free subscription) | 10/31/2009
"It is much better to read books of travel than to travel oneself," truly said the greatest of travel writers, quoted by Pico Ayer in his appreciation — The Perfect Traveler . His Collected Short Stories, Vol. 4 were essential reading for me thiteen years ago, living in what was once British Malaya , the setting for many of the tales. Subscribe in a reader
Gadling (Free subscription) | 10/29/2009
Halloween is right around the corner-- hope everyone has a great costume picked out already. If not, get crackin'! And check out our own Heather Poole's guide to creating a flight attendant Halloween costume . (Fellas, this is your chance to dress in drag unaccompanied by the judging eye of others.) Now it's time for our daily look at what's going on in the travel world today... The 13 sins of hostel...
World Hum (Free subscription) | 10/28/2009
He was cool, steady and prone to breaking rules. Pico Iyer celebrates the life and work of Somerset Maugham.
The New York Observer (Free subscription) | 10/26/2009
Monday: The Painted Veil File this under movies not enough people went to see: 2006’s The Painted Veil is a haunting drama, based on the (excellent) W. Somerset Maugham novel. The film stars Edward Norton and Naomi Watts as a British couple in the midst of marital strife, who go to a small Chinese village during a cholera outbreak. We’re pretty sure it’s one of the more ingenious...
Maud Newton (Free subscription) | 10/22/2009
In Oscar Wilde’s long shadow, Somerset Maugham played it straight. Jessa Crispin reviews a new biography of the writer.
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