TOBI'S DESK

Spooky! The good folks over at The New York Times understand that there is only so much time left to bask in the eerie Halloween vibe, so they’ve put together this helpful list of the latest and best in horror fiction to help you find something suitably scary to read. The post Boo! appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2ePE0oi

From the cover of The Crown Derby Plate . Almost a year ago, old friends gave me a big fat Portugese novel I’d never heard of, which promptly burrowed its way under a stack of old New Yorker s and stayed hidden until a month ago. It was a buried treasure. To get an idea of The Crime of Father Amaro , by Eça de Queirós, imagine a Trollope novel—early 1870s, cathedral town, church politics, Tories v. Whigs—except that everyone’s super Catholic, and sex crazed, and with the added difference that the author can’t ever quite decide whether he’s writing a bawdy comedy or a satirical tragedy, and so ends up writing both. This wavering tone must have been hard to translate, but Margaret Jull Costa’s 2002 translation makes it look easy. The Crime of Father Amaro  is the best novel I’ve read this year. — Lorin Stein Biblioasis is reviving an apparent tradition of reading ghost stories at Christmastime through a quintet of booklet-size publications, each containing a spooky story and...

You are invited to submit your work to a new anthology celebrating LGBT life and community in Nigeria.  On January 13, 2017, the anthology will be available for download right here on Brittle Paper. Here are the details: On January 13 2014 the administration of Goodluck Jonathan passed the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act. Under the law, […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2eY6pJm

To celebrate the spookiest of holidays, we’re publishing a selection of excerpts from David J. Skal’s Something in the Blood , a biography of Bram Stoker ,  published this month by Liveright. Today: a love triangle between Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and Florence Balcombe.  Florence Balcombe, around the time she met Oscar Wilde. On one of his visits or summer vacations in Ireland, Oscar Wilde made an acquaintance of an “exquisitely pretty girl” of seventeen, he wrote to a classmate. Though unnamed in the letter, she has generally been identified as Florence Anne Lemon Balcombe. Wilde described her as having “the most perfectly beautiful face I ever saw and not a sixpence of money.” He escorted her to an afternoon service, presumably at the ancient Christ Church Cathedral in central Dublin, which had only very recently been restored to a fashionable semblance of its medieval glory. It may have been there that he made her a Christmas gift of a small gold cross engra...

“Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once, and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.” — Susan Sontag , quoting “an old riff I’ve always imagined to have been invented by some graduate student of philosophy,” but part of which (i.e., the first half) is often attributed to John Archibald Wheeler (who “admitted to having found it scrawled in a Texas men’s room”), Woody Allen , and Albert Einstein , but which actually appeared before all of these figures were supposed to have said or written it in a novel by Ray Cummings from 1922 called The Girl in the Golden Atom and is spoken by a character named Big Business Man, so I guess one can only really credit Sontag (or, I suppose, the “old riff” to which she refers) with the part about space (which, admittedly, is a totally brilliant and enriching addendum; really makes the phrase, don’t you think?), and if you think this quote attribution is convoluted and confusing well then hold onto your hats, the...

Welcome our newest correspondent, Amy Gentry. This is the first in her series about domestic thrillers. “In the midst of our current post– Gone Girl renaissance in domestic suspense,” she writes, “these films look more prescient than ever.” A still from Cradle . When the director and screenwriter Curtis Hanson passed away last month at the age of seventy-one , obituary writers agreed he’d be remembered longest for his 1997 James Ellroy adaptation, L.A. Confidential . It’s easy to see why L.A. Confidential gets all the love, with its balletic rhythms, its crafted-yet-earnest performances from Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe, and the beatific fatalism of its third-act plot twist reflected in the eyes of a dying Kevin Spacey. But my favorite Curtis Hanson moment comes from a film he made five years earlier, barely mentioned in his obits: The Hand That Rocks the Cradle . In it, a stay-at-home mom played by Annabelle Sciorra barges into the nursery of a house for sale and gasps in ho...

Someone’s finally done it, and it’s our own  Emily St. John Mandel , to boot: over at  FiveThirtyEight , Mandel crunches the numbers on books with the word “girl” in the title, concluding that we may not have reached peak girl yet . (Also 65% of the time, the girl in question is actually a woman.) Nonetheless, if you’re looking to go rogue, check out our guide about how to title every book you ever write .   The post The Gone Girl With The Dragon Tattoo On The Train appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2eXmBdL

This could be you. (Not the scuba diver.) Last week Bob Dylan’s silence on the Nobel felt like a roguish prank; this week, it’s a matter of existential import. As Adam Kirsch writes, Dylan has effectively out-Sartred Sartre, who outright refused the prize more than fifty years ago. By ignoring it, Dylan punctures the thin membrane of authenticity that gives the Swedish Academy its cachet: “ The Nobel Prize is in fact the ultimate example of bad faith: A small group of Swedish critics pretend to be the voice of God, and the public pretends that the Nobel winner is Literature incarnate . All this pretending is the opposite of the true spirit of literature, which lives only in personal encounters between reader and writer. Mr. Dylan may yet accept the prize, but so far, his refusal to accept the authority of the Swedish Academy has been a wonderful demonstration of what real artistic and philosophical freedom looks like.” Meanwhile, Dylan’s primary audience, baby boomers, have inve...

Doubt. Stolen manuscripts. Self-loathing. Censorship. Missed deadlines. Unanswered pitches. Typos in query letters. Spotty Wi-Fi? The horrors of writing range from the existential to the melodramatic. Horror films are exercises in hyperbole. Writers are perfect characters for these tales of dread. Writers often become lost within the worlds of their minds. Their devotions to stories and poems can develop into frenetic obsessions. Writers crave solitude and distance, creating a barrier from the outside world. In a profession where rejection is constant, writers might take out their frustration on friends, partners, and children. Writers are often the subjects of dramatic films, but less often the focus of horror. Perhaps writers don’t want to write their worst fears into reality. Still, there are enough tales of writerly woe and worry for poets, novelists, and essayists to ponder their deepest anxieties on the screen. Here are eight horror films about writers. Images (1972) The f...

Featuring missing titles from Cormac McCarthy , Margaret Atwood , Stephen King , Roberto Bolaño , Vladimir Nabokov et al., The Missing Books is a project by Scott Esposito to assemble “a curated directory of books that do not exist, but should.” If that puts you in the mood for further Borgesian hijinks, consider  Sam Allingham ‘s piece about a summer spent cataloguing books in a university library basement. The post The Missing Books appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2eVWLXm

With only a few days left of my celebration of Nigerian women writers, today the focus in on writer and broadcaster Chikodili Emelumadu. Photo via Sub-Q Magazine On writing and broadcasting, Emelumadu notes in this  interview on Geosi Reads  that while they both 'revolve around telling stories' ... writing deals with the written word as a method of reaching people while broadcasting is audio/video. Still, for Emelumadu, 'writing is not new' - as she discusses during  an interview on Sub-Q : I've been doing it since I could write words. And before I could write, I was telling stories. Before I could tell them, I thought them and dreamt them and felt them and was them.   Emelumandu is  currently working on a novel about a group of girls on a quest .   Although after trying many different formats - plays, poetry, novels and novellas - she notes in her interview on Geosi Reads that she has ' finally "settled" on short stories '. Well, h...

To celebrate the spookiest of holidays, we’re publishing a selection of excerpts from David J. Skal’s Something in the Blood , a biography of Bram Stoker ,  published this month by Liveright. First up: the origins of  Dracula . Christopher Lee as Dracula, 1958. There are many stories about how Bram Stoker came to write Dracula , but only some of them are true. According to his son, Stoker always claimed the inspiration for the book came from a nightmare induced by “a too-generous helping of dressed crab at supper”—a dab of blarney the writer enjoyed dishing out when asked, but no one took seriously (it may sound too much like Ebenezer Scrooge, famously dismissing Marley’s ghost as “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese”). But that hasn’t stopped the midnight snack of dressed crab from being served up as a matter of fact by countless people on countless occasions. While the nightmare aspect may well have some validity—Stoker’s notes at least ...

Henri-Edmond Cross, Landscape with Stars , ca. 1905–1908, watercolor over graphite on white wove paper, 9 5/8" x 12 5/8". Karen Fish’s poem “The Dreams” appeared in our Winter 1989 issue .  Night arrives solid and heavy more than several blocks long—to displace its weight and float like a tanker over us. It is because my husband is from the midwest that he dreams of twisters. Every Spring in his head he is running to beat the wind. Sometimes, a child again he is at the diningroom table over-seeing an arrangement of baseball cards and interrupting that satisfied moment, a sudden darkness, false night. It is as if the moon slid its face in front of the sun and beyond the window—leaves, limbs, garbage can lids fly by—horizontal, gravity seeming to nap. He hears his dead father’s cough from the front room, his father’s slippers hit the floor and rush for the screen door. A garage three-doors-down is lifted, picked up and turned ninety degrees and placed bac...

Wrigley Field is a little over a mile north of where I live, close enough that on summer nights when “The Friendly Confines” hosts a concert (August saw both Billy Joel and Pearl Jam), familiar ballads fill the courtyard of my pre-war walk-up, prompting tenants to abruptly open, or close, their windows. Technically I don’t live same neighborhood as the Cubs—that would be Wrigleyville, the residential enclave surrounding the 102-year old park—but for more years than most Chicagoans care to think, a steadfast devotion to the team has had a way of uniting the various neighborhoods on the North Side in a shared community of suffering. In the seventies, when the team consistently flirted with the worst record in baseball, the Cubs earned the nickname “The Loveable Losers.” The qualifier is a tribute to the loyalty of the fans, but it hardly redeems the category. Say what you will about history, tradition, and heroic team players—and the Cubs have all three in abundance—this is still sport...

The German Girl  (in Spanish, translated by Nick Caistor ), is a novel with a purpose:  To expose the atrocity of the S.S. St. Louis, whose 1939 voyage from Hamburg to Cuba exemplifies the fatal consequences of closed borders and failed humanity, of hope gone horrendously wrong.   Armando Lucas Correa , raised in Cuba before emigrating to the United States, writes with a political agenda as well — to out Cuba not only for denying sanctuary to most of the St. Louis ’s ill-fated passengers, but also for erasing the crime from Cuba’s history books.  Cuba is not the only country with a selective memory.  The United States, too, played a key role in the horrors that transpired, and was very late in coming to a public admission of guilt. Correa is a journalist.  Among other professional activities, he is editor-in-chief of People en Espanõl .  His first book, En Busca de Emma ( In Search of Emma: Two Fathers, One Daughter and the Dream of a Fam...