Mark Twain on Jane Austen: I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

William Faulkner on Mark Twain: A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.

Ernest Hemignway on William Faulkner: Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You’re thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes — and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he’s had his first one.

Tom Wolfe on Ernest Hemingway: Take Hemingway. People always think that the reason he’s easy to read is that he is concise. He isn’t. I hate conciseness — it’s too difficult. The reason Hemingway is easy to read is that he repeats himself all the time, using ‘and’ for padding.

John Irving on Tom Wolfe: He doesn’t know how to write fiction, he can’t create a character, he can’t create a situation…You see people reading him on airplanes, the same people who are reading John Grisham, for Christ’s sake….I’m using the argument against him that he can’t write, that his sentences are bad, that it makes you wince. It’s like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine….You know, if you were a good skater, could you watch someone just fall down all the time? Could you do that? I can’t do that.

You can read more examples on the original Examiner article.

When the late author, the alter ego of Theodor Seuss Geisel, was penning his beloved Beginner Books for Random House in the 1960s, he’d have his editor in chief, Michael Frith, over to his house, where they’d work until the wee hours. And when they’d get stuck, according to “Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel” by Judith and Neil Morgan, Geisel would open a secret door to a closet filled with hundreds of hats. Then, he and Frith would each pick a different hat, perhaps a fez, or a sombrero, or maybe an authentic Baroque Czech helmet or a plastic toy viking helmet with horns. They’d sit on the floor and stare at each other in these until the right words came to them.

And they were behind a secret false door in his home! What a marvellous thing to know. It’s no wonder he was so able to tap into the joy and mystery that appeals to well to children. His collection of hats was apparently quite extensive, containing hundreds of hats.. And as reported in the article, many of them can now be viewed as part of an exhibition that is traveling across the U.S.A.

Read the full article for more information.

Achebe wrote novels, poetry and essays, and is most famous for his first novel Things Fall Apart, published in 1958. Things Fall Apart has sold more than 10 million copies and is one of the great novels of the 20th century. The title is taken from a WB Yeats poem and the colonial-themed plot concerns the arrival of white men in a rural village. He wrote the book in English but was widely criticised in Africa for doing so.

Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God are sometimes described as The African Trilogy.

Born in 1930, The author won the Commonwealth poetry prize for his collection Christmas in Biafra. He was a finalist for the 1987 Man Booker prize for Anthills of the Savannah, and he won 2007 Man Booker international prize. In 1975, he famously called Joseph Conrad “a bloody racist.”

Things Fall Apart is the most widely read African book of all time and it has been translated into around 50 languages.

Achebe was a professor of Africana studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, until his death. He left Nigeria in 1990 after a car accident left him paralysed from the waist down and moved to the US.

Today, Haig shared a decade of hard learned wisdom in the pages of The Telegraph.  Included in his notes are gems such as “People always want the book you have just written. But if you give it to them you will lose their respect. (People are weird.) ” ,  “Most things that go on with a writer’s career the writer doesn’t know about“, which meshes well with the concept that “Foreign rights = free money.”

His insights are interesting and quite honest, well worth the quick read.  If you like what you read you can also check out his books The Dead Fathers Club, The Radleys, and his newest book The Humans which will be published May 9th.

A Song of Fire and Ice Box Set

Fans of George R.R. Martin love the author for his amazing attention to detail within his vast storylines; what they don’t love, is having to wait several years between books.  This isn’t to say his fans are unappreciative – I assume most understand that quality craftsmanship takes time.  It’s more that they’ve been accustomed to a certain quality in their fantasy writing, and darn it all they want more.

George R.R. Martin has now become the victim of his own success.  I am sure he loves that his fans are clamoring for more of his writing, but it has almost gotten to the point where some fans are annoyed with him doing anything else other than writing his books – such as writing his blog, promoting his books, or cooking breakfast.

So as an act of kindness, or perhaps to get the heat off his back, Martin recently wrote a list of book recommendations for his fans who are in need of further distraction while waiting for the next installment of his A Song of Ice and Fire series.  His main suggestion was for The Accursed Kings series by French author Maurice Druon, which is a seven-volume series that is finally being translated in its entirety into English; Martin has just written the introduction to the first volume: The Iron King.

For his other suggestions I’ll skip over the classic fantasy mentions, as we discuss the likes of Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and Jack Vance fairly frequently.  For contemporary fantasy Martin suggests Daniel Abraham (The Long Price Quartet & The Dagger and the Coin), Scott Lynch’s Locke Lamora series, Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold and The Heroes, as well as Patrick Rothfuss novels.  Martin also throws in a few historical fiction plugs for Thomas B. Costain (The Black Rose and The Silver Chalice), as well as authors Howard Pyle, Frank Yerby, Rosemary Hawley Jarman and of course George McDonald Fraser whose character: “that cad and bounder Harry Flashman, swashed and buckled in every major and minor war of the Victorian era.”  

I don’t get around to Martin’s blog  very often, but it’s always a fun read when I do.  He’s very outspoken and a bit of a curmudgeon, but in a fun way, so I do recommend bookmarking the link. 

For additional Martin reading, you can check out a short interview with George R.R. Martin AbeBooks conducted a few years back.

The book was sold by Kim Herzinger of Left Bank Books from New York and Kim was kind enough to explain further why book collectors are fascinated with this enigmatic poet.

Kim writes:

“Kenneth Patchen’s poetry and fiction – and especially his ‘painted poems’ – are now bought and collected for many reasons.

“Like William Carlos Williams, Henry Miller, Kenneth Rexroth, and New Directions’ James Laughlin – all of whom were early champions of his work – Patchen was a kind of ‘godfather’ to the Beat writers of the 1950s and 60s. He was a visionary writer and artist, whose experiments in the ways that poetry could be presented – merged with painting and drawing, like William Blake, or merged with jazz, like Rexroth, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti – opened up new possibilities for the poets of that period. His work offered the Beats yet another way of making poetry central to the sense of unbinding energies that they were so intent upon making available to a culture they felt had become stifling, stale, and predictable in the post-war years.

“His ‘painted poems,’ of which The Moment is one of the finest and scarcest of all of his efforts (all of which were published in extremely small editions), are particularly desirable – for those interested in poetry, of course, but also for those who recognize in his gorgeous, vivid, and compelling drawings and paintings an artist whose work bears comparison with Klee, Dubuffet, American Folk Artists, and graffitists.

“The copy of Patchen’s The Moment recently sold by Left Bank Books, came out in 1955 in a printing of only 42 copies, and gathers together two of Patchen’s 1955 most important books of illustrated poems, Glory Never Guesses and A Surprise for the Bagpipe Player. It contains 36 serigraph broadsides plus two additional serigraphs on the title page and verso (a poem to his wife, Miriam) all of which are printed in various brilliant and delightful colors on rice paper. It had originally been owned by well-known poet-critic Stanley Burnshaw.

“Interest in Patchen will only continue to increase, as interest in the Beats and what they now have come to represent in the development of American life and culture, continues unabated, and also because his art work is recognizable in tendencies evident in the styles and forms of contemporary art.”

Later next month the new poems will be published, along with 1,300 other Kipling poems, in Cambridge Edition of The Poems of Rudyard Kipling; and according to the recent Guardian article, this may not be the last round of Kipling Discoveries. The poems span over a number of years and date back to before the First World War covering a wide array of topics including travel, effects of the media, and The Great War itself.

“Kipling has long been neglected by scholars probably for political reasons,” said Pinney, emeritus professor of English at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Despite winning the Nobel prize, Kipling’s reputation has suffered over his association with British imperialism – he was described as a “jingo imperialist” by George Orwell, who also called him “the prophet of British Imperialism”.

“His texts have never properly been studied but things are starting to change,” said Pinney. “There is a treasure trove of uncollected, unpublished and unidentified work out there. I discovered another unrecorded item only recently and that sort of thing will keep happening. It is a tremendously exciting time for scholars and for fans of Kipling.”

You can find more about Rudyard Kipling here, including his stories and biographies about the author.

Louis Wain was a British artist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, best known for his whimsical and chaotic drawings of cats. If you’ve come across any of Wain’s art, you know it’s memorable. The cats and kittens are depicted with large, wide eyes, often with crazy, spiky fur, and with psychedelic patterns and backgrounds. The cats are anthropomorphized, wearing clothes, having conversations, playing musical instruments and more. If you are a fan of cats, or unusual children’s art, they are utterly charming.

Wain’s story is rather a sad one, unfortunately, in many regards. He was born into a family with a lot of mental illness, and was the only one of six children in the family ever to marry. His longtime devotion to cats began when he was married in his early twenties. His wife Emily fell ill with breast cancer, and Wain found that their kitten, Peter, lifted his sick wife’s spirits immeasurably. He began to dress the kitten up and teach him to do little tricks to make his wife happy. He also began to sketch Peter, and it was on a promise to Emily that he persevered and published his first drawings.

Wain was a highly productive artist for the following three decades or so, providing work for countless children’s books, as well as advertisements and features in magazines. His love of cats defined his entire oeuvre (though he did branch into dogs, from time to time), and he became chairman of The National Cat Club in 1898, and even had his own Louis Wain’s Annual from 1901-1915.

But Wain’s success did little to secure his financial future – he had a mother and five sisters to support, and was a poor businessman, often selling his work outright with no thought to copyright or royalties, and was taken advantage of frequently.

Around 1907, Wain’s own mental health began to decline rapidly, and the previously affable, good-natured artist became paranoid, suspicious and delusional as schizophrenia began to take hold. He was committed in 1924, to the pauper ward of a mental hospital. When news of his circumstance reached the public, there was outcry from many, including H.G. Wells, who championed Wain’s cause. Wain was, as a result, moved to a much more pleasant hospital with abundant green space (and even cats), and he spent the remaining years of his life there in relative peace.

Some students of Wain’s art have claimed that the deterioration and change in Wain’s mental state can be clearly demonstrated through a study of his drawings and paintings, while others argue that is problematic. The latter claim that Wain’s frenetic, chaotic, psychedelic-patterned cats were experimentation with for, color and style, and that Wain also continued to create more conventional (albeit playing sports and talking) cats well into his later career. It is tough to know whether to lend any credence to the theories, as few if any of Wain’s works were dated, anyway.

Regardless, for a cat lover, an art lover, or a collector of vintage children’s books, Louis Wain is not to be missed.

And if you can’t get enough weird children’s books about cats, be sure to check out Mee-a-ow! Or, Good Advice to Cats and Kittens by R.M. Ballantyne.

Enjoy this selection of Wain’s cats, depicting great variation in his artistic style over the years.

If I ever made it as an author, I’d wear a beret (to show I am cosmopolitan) and be carrying a mop (to illustrate my kinship with the working classes.)

I was reminded of all of that upon finding this great infographic. I’ve seen many of these techniques in action on dustjackets over the years.

As of now in 2013, Doris Lessing is 93. She was born in 1919 and her second novel, published in 1956, was titled Retreat to Innocence. All of this, coupled with her round, sweetly wrinkled face and penchant for wearing her white hair parted at the middle and pulled back into a bun, might give one preconceived notions about her temperament, character and preferred subject matter. But if you’ve read Doris Lessing’s work, you’ll know she is no kindly, simple old lady doling out pearls of grandmotherly wisdom. Her writing is shrewd, difficult, complex, and nuanced, and has even been called inaccessible. It is as challenging to read as it is enjoyable. She has earned countless literary awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007.

The Zimbabwe-born author is also not one to shy away from controversy, whether in reference to her politics – she was prohibited from entry to South Africa and Rhodesia for vocally protesting apartheid and nuclear armament – or her outspoken comments to those who would pigeonhole her as a femnist writer. Labelled a feminist by critics and readers time and time again, Lessing has repeatedly lashed out in response to the term, expressing extreme distaste for her perspective of trends toward the belittlement of men and male writers, under the guise of empowerment of their female counterparts. She has repeatedly stated that she finds the term and its followers grotesquely oversimplified, and wishes to distance herself from it.

That said, much or her writing inarguably empowers women, and she writes bravely about issues of gender and sex without batting an eyelash. Perhaps the most notable example is her 2003 novella The Grandmothers. In it, Lessing tells the story of two middle-aged women, best friends since childhood, inseparable for decades. The two grow up together, intentionally marry two men who are friends, and move in next door to one another. Eventually, when the two husbands are out of the picture, each woman begins an affair – with her best friend’s teenage son.

It sounds like the stuff of a juicy and perhaps distasteful romance novel. That alone might make one uncomfortable, but when squirm-worthy subject matter is put in the hands of a skilled writer like Lessing, it becomes more interesting, less black and white, and harder to ignore. The story is surprisingly Ask anyone who has read Lolita – a talented wordsmith can be expert at challenging our absolutes and making a reader question his or her own certainties and opinions.

It is likely that complexity and challenge that attracted French filmmaker Anne Fontaine to option the project, and it will be her first English-language film as director. The film adaptation is set and filmed in Australia, and is called Two Mothers. It premiered at Sundance in January, and so far is scheduled for various very limited release worldwide throughout 2013.

Here is a taste: