The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome

Godine is very proud to have just published The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome by Roland Chambers, a biography. Ransome is best known for the twelve immortal "Swallows and Amazons" books he wrote on his return from Russia in 1928. Godine is the US publisher for this series. From his prose he appears a genial and gentle Englishman, who, like his protagonists, pursued benign maritime adventures. Nothing could be further from the truth. By the time he wrote his masterpieces, the most interesting episodes of his life were well behind him. For Ransome led a double, and often tortured, life. Before his fame as an author, he was notorious for very different reasons: between 1917 and 1924, he was the Russian correspondent for the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian, and his sympathy for the Bolshevik regime gave him unparalleled access to its leaders, policies, politics, and plots. He was also the lover, and later the husband, of Evgenia Shelepina, Trotsky's private secretary, as well as friends with Karl Radek, the Bolshevik's Chief of Propaganda, and Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the secret police.

The Last Englishman has already received reviews from the Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekly. From Publishers Weekly:

Chambers says that his interest in writing a biography of Ransome was sparked by the British National Archives’s 2003 release of documents revealing the journalist’s involvement with MI6 during the Russian Revolution. “This was surprising and controversial,” he explains. “If Ransome was known at all for his work for the Revolution, it was as an apologist for the Bolsheviks. But these documents proved that he was betraying them all along to the British secret service. That was enough to get me looking into the history of it all. I discovered that his story was much more complicated than I expected because of his involvement with Evgenia Shelepina, Trotsky’s private secretary. He was genuinely in love with her and genuinely sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, but on the other hand considered himself a British patriot doing his best to broker a kind of understanding between the British and the revolutionists at a time when their interests were radically different.”

. . .

Though Ransome’s personas as children’s book author and double-sided political operative may seem at odds, Chambers views the author’s two lives as less inconsistent. “The Swallows and Amazons books are really all about doubleness,” he says. “The young characters are constantly fighting, drafting secret treaties, and making peace. It’s all there, though in a benign world – Ransome had drawn the poison from it all. I think that’s why his books were so successful in England. If you look at Britain as an empire, it has a history of doubleness. There’s the Englishman at home sipping tea in front of the fire, and there’s the high-seas adventuring Englishman in the colonies creating an empire. The two are contradictory in a way, but they do live side by side as part of the culture – and as part of Ransome himself.”

Wanda Coleman - Winner of 2012 Shelley Memorial Award!

Congratulations to Black Sparrow poet Wanda Coleman! She has just been announced as the winner of the 2012 Shelley Memorial Award:

The Poetry Society of America is honored to announce that Wanda Coleman is the 2012 recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award, presented annually to a living American poet selected with reference to his or her genius and need by a jury of poets. This year's judges were Gary Young, appointed by the president of the University of California at Berkeley, and Rigoberto Gonzalez, appointed by the Poetry Society of America.

Recent winners of this award have included Kimiko Hahn, Lyn Hejinian, Angela Jackson, Yusef Komunyakaa, James McMichael, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, Ed Roberson, Eileen Myles, Rigoberto Gonzalez, and Gary Young.

The Poetry Society of America, the nation's oldest poetry organization, was founded in 1910 for the purpose of creating a public forum for the advancement, enjoyment, and understanding of poetry. Through a diverse array of programs, initiatives, contests, and awards, the PSA works to build a larger audience for poetry, to encourage a deeper appreciation of the art, and to place poetry at the crossroads of American life.

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Gudgeon n One of those rather delightful words that sound as though they can, and in fact do, mean practically anything. A gudgeon can be:

—A pivot at the end of a rod, serving as the base for a rocker or a wheel.
—A ring that fits over a hook to keep a gate closed.
—A pin connecting two blocks of stone.
—A pin holding a piston rod and a connecting rod together.
—A metal eye or socket on the stern of a boat, to receive the rudder.
—A gullible person.
—A bait.


Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Gudgeon appears in the First.

Publishers Weekly on the story behind The Forty Days of Musa Dagh

Last week Publishers Weekly ran a story on our recently released book The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel. Godine is proud to bring this important book back into print almost 80 years after its first publication—and in an edition that restores nearly a quarter of Werfel's original text. The story behind our edition is one of personal connection and fortuitous circumstance (as is the case, it seems, for so many books).

Some excerpts from PW's story:

Godine is hoping to capture review attention for its new edition, which editor Susan Barba, the granddaughter of a survivor of the Armenian genocide, regards as “my book.” The press delayed publication for two years in order to get it right, making it both the longest novel, and the book with the longest gestation period, published by Godine. “We had originally intended simply to reprint Geoffrey Dunlop’s translation,” explained Barba. “But in conversations with James Reidel, we began to understand how incomplete the Dunlop translation truly was. Restoring, expanding, and resetting the text was a formidable authorial, editorial, and design challenge.” To keep The Forty Days from becoming unwieldy, Barba went with thin paper stock. To preserve the novel’s elegiac quality, she chose a historic photograph of old women collecting water from a fountain in Musa Dagh for the cover.

While many regard The Forty Days as Werfel’s masterpiece—the original New York Times placed it in a category with other 20th-century literary masterpieces like The Magic Mountain, Ulysses, and Remembrance of Things Past—Reidel argues that Pale Blue Ink should not be overlooked. “Both [Werfel] books,” he said, “deal with anti-Semitism, and they’re warning books. We live in a time where we need to be alert again, especially Jewish people, about where anti-Semitism can lead. They’re both from the 1930s and they’re both remarkably fresh.”

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh - B&N Review

A big thank you goes to Steven G. Kellman at the Barnes & Noble Review for the great piece on The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel, one of our new releases.

Excerpt from review:

In August 1939, to warm his commanders' cold feet before invading Poland, Adolf Hitler is alleged to have asked: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" Silence gainsays guilt. Today, in 2012, it is illegal in Turkey to speak about those deaths -- more than a million during and after World War I -- as genocide. In France, however, denying that Armenians were singled out for slaughter is a crime. The word genocide was coined, by Raphael Lemkin, only in 1944, but it is now applied not only to the liquidation of Lemkin's fellow European Jews but also to campaigns of extermination in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, and elsewhere. Except in Turkey, it is widely applied, retroactively, to the Armenian bloodbath almost a century ago.

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh was first published in 1933, barely a decade after the Armenian genocide. Franz Werfel (1890–1945) was a German-speaking Jew born in Prague, and he and the readers of his meticulously researched novel realized that the eradication of Armenians in Turkish lands bore an ominous resemblance to what was beginning to happen to the Jews of Europe. Werfel's book was banned in Germany, but it was a huge success elsewhere in the world and did more than the efforts of any diplomat, journalist, or historian to encourage speech about the unspeakable. Histories, memoirs, and fictions have since been published about the Armenian genocide, and, though Edgar Hilsenrath's The Story of the Last Thought (1989) might be the most respected novelistic rendition, none has diminished the power of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. The Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Armenian genocide, it arrives today -- when Syria and Congo are killing fields -- as a timely reminder that savagery thrives in silence.

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Fabiform a Bean-shaped. "And I'd like you to meet Brett and Wanda, and their children Jamie and Cass—round here we call them the fabiform four."



Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Fabiform appears in the Second.

Godine has a new sales manager!

Hi! I'm Morgan Hubbard, the new sales manager at David R. Godine, Publisher. I come to Godine from an academic background, having just finished a master's in Public History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Books have always been my chief interest—at UMass, I worked with the university's colossal collection of cold war science fiction, and marshaled my reading into an interactive online exhibit for the UMass library. You can peruse it here. I've also done my share of stints in marketing and sales at a variety of outfits, most recently J. Crew and the publisher Wiley-Blackwell.

As Godine's new sales manager I'm looking forward to cultivating relationships with our booksellers. I'll be making sales calls in the Mid-Atlantic; if that's your region, I hope we'll get the chance to meet soon. I'm also looking forward to expanding our sales efforts. The lists Godine produces are eclectic, and they deserve the chance to catch buyers' eyes in eclectic places. And anxiety-inducing though it may be for the industry, the internet consitutes a whole new way to get our delightful books onto readers' shelves—or e-readers.

Please feel free to contact me anytime. I can be reached by email at sales@godine.com, or by phone at 617-451-9600 x 25.

-Morgan J. Hubbard

The Lonely Phone Booth - Now a play in NYC!

So we have some very exciting news. . . . Our beloved Godine children's book The Lonely Phone Booth by Peter Ackerman and illustrated by Max Dalton has been turned into a play and will be performed by the Manhattan Children's Theatre! Performances will run from April 7–29th, 2012 on Saturdays and Sundays at 12pm and 2pm. To reserve tickets please call (212) 352-3101.

If you're not familiar, the book is the story of one of the last remaining phone booths in New York City, the Phone Booth on the corner of West End Avenue and 100th. Everyone used it — from ballerinas and girl scouts, zookeepers and birthday clowns, to cellists and even secret agents! The Phone Booth was so beloved that people would sometimes wait in line to use it. Kept clean and polished, the Phone Booth was proud and happy . . . until, the day a businessman strode by and shouted into a shiny silver object, "I'll be there in ten minutes!" Soon everyone was talking into these shiny silver things, and the Phone Booth stood alone and empty, unused and dejected.

How the Phone Booth saved the day and united the neighborhood to rally around its revival is the heart of this soulful story. In a world in which objects we love and recognize as part of the integral fabric of our lives are disappearing at a rapid rate, here is a story about the value of the analog, the power of the people's voice, and the care and respect due to those things that have served us well over time. If you're a New Yorker, the real Phone Booth, which is still standing at West End Avenue and 100th Street, is worth a field trip!

A special book signing event will be held on April 15th immediately following the 2pm performance and will feature a conversation with the actors, gifts for the kids, cake, crafts and of course an appearance by author Peter Ackerman and an opportunity to get your copies of the book signed.

Author Peter Ackerman is a New York City native and co-writer on the animated movies Ice Age and Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Mission Statement n Not, as might be expected, an invoice received from a religious establishment, but the latest pretentious term from the world of New Management. It means "objectives," and seems to be largely replacing the previously popular "corporate plan." The comings and goings of the modish terminology of the New Managers, and the array of documentation that the terminology reflects, constitute a potential field of study for a doctoral thesis. A "Duty Statement," for example, is a job description worded in sufficiently elementary terms to enable a dimwitted candidate to apply for the job. "Selection Criteria" are descriptions of job qualifications worded in sufficiently elementary terms to enable a dimwitted selection panel member to select the wrong candidate. And so on.


Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Mission Statement appears in the Second.

Mark Doty - "A Display of Mackerel"

Writer Jeff Gordinier selected Mark Doy's "A Display of Mackerel" audio feature on the Poetry Foundation's website for his "What We're Reading" entry in the New York Times today:

This is what happens when poets stop by the fish counter. In a short podcast, Mark Doty swoons over “these beautiful, luminous bodies of mackerel, all on crushed ice,” and talks about starting to compose a captivating piscine rumination (which he reads here) on the way home from the market.

Godine is proud to publish Mark Doty's latest collection of poetry, Paragon Park.

Writing the Garden - Award winner!

We're very happy to announce that our new title Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation across Two Centuries by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies in New York City, has just won one of the 2012 American Horticultural Society Book Awards.

Notes on the book from the 2012 Book Award Committee:

"Sampling from the last two centuries of Western garden writing, this “delicious historical survey of writing gardeners and garden writers is rich with anecdote, writing excerpts, and illustrations,” says [Rand B.] Lee. [W. Gary] Smith appreciates the “unique voice and engaging perspective” the author provides as she weaves together her analysis with excerpts from each featured writer, both famous and unknown. The resulting scholarly work is “so well done, interesting, and readable that I couldn’t put it down,” says Brandy Kuhl."

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Pilgarlic n A poor, wretched, bald-headed man who presents a sorry spectacle. From pilled (peeled) garlic.


Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Pilgarlic appears in the First.

BSB Poet Juliana Spahr in Cambridge, MA

For those of us in the Boston area, Black Sparrow poet Juliana Spahr will be reading with Cole Swensen in the Edison-Newman Room at the Houghton Library (Harvard Yard, Tel: 617-495-2440) on Harvard University's campus on Wednesday, March 7th at 6pm for the final session of the "Poet's Voice" reading series. Spahr's latest, Well Then There Now (2011), earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly ("Spahr's fifth book of imaginative writing [both poems and prose] should be a blockbuster, a lasting disturbance; a work of crisp wit, bizarre conjunctions and ultimately enduring moral authority; it is also the best, and perhaps the most widely accessible, thing that Spahr has done.").

Well Then There Now also just received a great review from Siobhan Phillips at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Pronouns are tricky things. How far does “I” extend? How particular is “you”? How distant is “them”? And then there’s “we,” which seems to reach from cozy, particular partnerships to vague, wide allegiances — thereby risking a slide between intimate and universal. How and why do I separate my affection for the familiar body lying next to me and my compassion for the unknown citizen living halfway around the world? Does one relationship model the other? Should they be related?

Yes, Juliana Spahr suggests, in her strange, often beautiful, frequently pronoun-deranging poetry. But the task isn’t easy. Well Then There Now, Spahr’s latest book, is a welcome reminder of this necessary effort. Her poems seem particularly vital at the moment not just for the pleasure inherent in their forms of language, but also for the challenge posed by their focus on community. Spahr tests and rejects any separation between intimate passion and general policy. In her poems, love does not resist the world beyond; love lets it in. Politics demands feeling rather than denuding it. The basic dilemma is evident in “Switching,” an earlier, characteristic work, where she worries about the movement between table and bed, or “public” discourse and “private” feeling; how can we find a way, she asks, to think “all together”? This poem ends by imagining a life of “listening and / changing…separation and / joining on the flat planes of this, / our world of daily occurrence”. Her means and mode come at the moment of suspense after each of those “ands,” poised at the edge of a break, as they confront separation by pushing toward union. This push is the drama, for Spahr, of what would otherwise be mere “daily occurrence.”

To read the rest of the review please click here and for event information visit http://hcl.harvard.edu/poetryroom/

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Xenoglossia n. The supposed ability to communicate with others in a language which you do not know. (A term from the world of so-called "psychic research.") The impracticability of this concept is soon exposed if you attempt to talk with your teenager using some of the terms that you have heard him use in conversation with his friends. This will, however, at least afford him considerable entertainment, and you will be pressed, with much sniggering, to "say that again" — something that he will never otherwise say to you.



Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Xenoglossia appears in the Third.

Dorade in the Wall Street Journal

A big thank you goes to Angus Phillips for his terrific review in the Wall Street Journal of Godine's Dorade: The History of an Ocean Racing Yacht by Douglas D. Adkins (foreword by Llewellyn Howland III) this past weekend:

Boats, like people, have yarns to spin, some better than others. Dorade, the low-slung wooden yawl that revolutionized ocean racing nearly a century ago and launched the career of America's greatest modern yacht designer, has a rich tale to tell. Indeed, it's still unfolding.

At 82, the graceful dowager still slices through whitecaps on the West Coast, where she is in the hands of her 15th owner—or caretaker, as he might more aptly be described. "She was, and is, unique," writes Douglas D. Adkins in Dorade: The History of an Ocean Racing Yacht. "On one hand, lovely and dainty, and on the other purposeful and determined. She is still an icon of a certain beauty in yacht design.''

The story of Dorade, named for the colorful ocean fish that the Spanish call dorado and that we call mahi-mahi, is as much a celebration of her designer as it is of her. That would be Olin Stephens, whose name stands below only the "Wizard of Bristol," Nathanael G. Herreshoff, atop the Who's Who of American yacht designers.

. . .

[Douglas D. Adkins's] book is a good one, thoroughly researched, well written, with excellent historical photos and artwork. . . . Olin Stephens went on to design better boats, he would have been the first to concede. But dainty, determined Dorade is the one for which he is remembered best. Eighty-odd years on, she's still rolling, free wide and handsome, and still turning heads.

On Translation - David Bellos at Princeton

David Bellos, the author of Georges Perec: A Life in Words, a biography, and translator of several of Perec’s works (available from Godine: "53 Days"; Life A User's Manual; Things: A Story of the Sixties & A Man Asleep; Thoughts of Sorts; Three by Perec; and W, or the Memory of Childhood) has become the go-to man for thoughts, opinions and strategies when translating a work. A professor at Princeton University, Bellos teaches in the French, Italian, and comparative literature departments. After joining the staff in 1997, he created an undergraduate certificate Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication in 2007. His wide range of skills and contribution to the university are why on February 10th, he was the feature story on Princeton’s website in an article by Paul Karr.

From "News at Princeton":

"David has sparked a good deal of student and faculty interest in the field," said Sandra Bermann, the Cotsen Professor of the Humanities and a professor of comparative literature at Princeton. "Translation is not only for literature majors; it's gaining importance in the social sciences, the sciences and engineering, as well as in the humanities. Even students at Princeton who have no particular literary interests take courses in the certificate program, and David has done a superb job getting that program off the ground."

Bellos is known to integrate various different examples of translation in the classroom, most recently showing the British film “Slumdog Millionaire” in his senior seminar. In order to demonstrate the importance of translation and language in a film’s overall feel, Bellos instructed six students to watch different versions of “Slumdog”, including the U.S. release in English, the French version, and the Spanish version. The students all reported different impressions of the film, based upon the different languages it was presented in. These findings only reinforce the research Bellos has done over the years, and why he asserts, “a translation is different from the original. It can never be the same thing. But it's not worse.”

. . .

I have had similar experiences when taking a Hindi/Urdu class at Boston University. Growing up watching Bollywood films and speaking Hindi to my family, I took the class to learn the beautiful script. However, there was a speaking component for the non-native speakers in the class, and in order to aid their conversation skills, my professor often screened Bollywood films. Occasionally, a non-native speaker would ask my professor the direct translation of a colloquial phrase, and we would look at each other and shrug. Try as you might, some things just can’t be translated and retain the intended meaning. And yet, as Bellos says, “A text and its translation are two different objects, and they always will be. So we must grant the translator authority in a language we do not know.” With his new book Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything, Bellos will keep inspiring his students to try to understand the world in more than one tongue.

David Bellos, winner of the Man Booker International Prize for translation (2005) and the Prix Goncourt de la Biographie (1994), grew up in Southend-on-Sea, England. He is a professor of French, Italian and comparative literature at Princeton University.

"The Wonderful and Terrible Habit of Buying Too Many Books"

Gabe Habash over at Publishers Weekly's PWxyz blog has a great personal piece on ""The Wonderful and Terrible Habit of Buying Too Many Books" which references Walter Benjamin's essay "Unpacking My Library":

“…ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.”

Gabe's problem: a library of far too many books that he hasn't even read. Of course this is one of the best "problems" to have and I'm sure many of us can relate. Gabe ends the piece on a cheerful note:

"A library of mostly unread books is far more inspiring than a library of books already read. There’s nothing more exciting than finishing a book, and walking over to your shelves to figure out what you’re going to read next.

So, the solution here is to just slow down on the buying, not cut it out entirely, which means things like limiting myself to one book per bookstore visit. As I start to chip away at the huge list of Books I Want To Read, I’m sure that list will deepen and broaden in ways I can’t predict, so eventually the library may be more balanced and not so skewed toward books I haven’t read, but it will never be fixed row of read books. Libraries aren’t meant to be intractable, they’re meant to change, and they change by buying books. As long as I don’t trip over those piles of books on my floor and break my leg, it seems to me that having too many books on your hands is a pretty wonderful problem to have."

"Reconsidering Perec’s Library"

Late last week Vice writer Blake Butler paid homage to Godine author Georges Perec’s intriguing look at library organization in the essay, “Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books.” While according to Butler, some “less active readers” feel that an arrangement with no specific order suffices for their libraries, a more passionate breed indulges in assorted, distinctive, and often spontaneous setups. Perec’s suggestions for creating libraries that delight their owners are neither narrow nor rigid. Rather, he leaves the decision up to the readers, instead asking them to reevaluate how they perceive their favorite books.

From Vice:

"In 1978, Georges Perec published a now-famous essay titled, 'Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books,' in which he outlines various analytical methods one might use to organize a home library. He suggests the following possibilities for classification: alphabetically, by continent or country, by color, by date of acquisition, by date of publication, by format, by genre, by major periods of literary history, by language, by priority for future reading, by binding, by series. 'None of these classifications is satisfactory by itself,' Perec notes, 'every library is ordered starting from a combination of these modes of classification, whose relative weighting, resistance to change, obsolescence, and persistence give every library a unique personality.'"

An avid reader since elementary school, I have often altered my bedroom “library”, (the cramped area between my headboard and the wall), and now reconfigure my dorm room “library”, (the cramped area between my futon and the dresser). No matter how minimal the space, I’ve enjoyed arranging my books to my liking, from a kindergarten obsession with flashy covers (Marcus Pfister’s The Rainbow Fish often taking center stage), to a middle school self consciousness with stealthily obscured romantic titles. However, I’ve been fairly vanilla with my bookshelves. Butler’s take on Perec’s essay is an interesting one in that once we begin to examine unique library arrangements, we realize that the possibilities are endless. One of his most far-fetched musings is of organizing books based on, “the number of times a copy of the book has been carried into a McDonald’s.” Although most of us would not attempt this, the choices are fascinating even when they aren’t pragmatic. By imploring his readers to rearrange their bookshelves, Perec summoned not only the organization in his readers, but also the creativity.

Georges Perec is the author of Life: A User’s Manual, hailed as “one of the great novels of the century” by (among others) the Times Literary Supplement and the Boston Globe. His other books include W, or The Memory of Childhood; Things: A Store of the Sixties and A Man Asleep; Thoughts of Sorts; A Void; and Three by Perec, all available in paperback from Godine. Georges Perec died of cancer in 1989.

Poet Donald Hall on Fresh Air

Godine is proud to publish titles by 83-year-old former poet laureate Donald Hall, including String Too Short to Be Saved and the children's books Lucy's Summer, Lucy's Christmas, and The Man Who Lived Alone. NPR's Fresh Air just interviewed Hall ("A Poet's View 'Out the Window'"). Here are highlights:

On the most unanticipated part of growing older

"I don't mean to sound superior, but when I was a young man, like 60, I looked at 83-year-olds as if they came from another galaxy. And now I find myself being seen that way. . . . In general, sometimes I don't exist. People don't see me. I know I would have been like that [when I was younger], but it is weird to be in that position."

On fulfillment

"As long as I can do my work and continue to enjoy myself working on words, as in this essay ["Out the Window"], I feel fulfilled. My body causes me trouble when I cross the room, but when I am sitting down writing, I am in my heaven — my old heaven. I began writing when I was 12, I don't think very well. But I've been doing it my whole life. It's been the center of my life, with loves and children, but writing is something I have that not everyone has that I adore."

On living in his grandparents' house

"It's an enormous comfort, which is only interrupted by sad thoughts. I don't mean I'm cheerful every minute about what happens to the house after I die. I live with more bookcases and with crazy pictures on the walls in the same rooms where I spent this delectable childhood, and it is wonderful. I really always wanted to live here. I didn't think I could ever afford to live here. I came to visit my grandmother as she got to be very old, but it seemed out of reach with what I do for a living. Then I married [the late poet] Jane Kenyon and we came here to visit; and she was born and grew up in Michigan, and fell in love with the house, the landscape, what she could see of the social mores of the country. She wanted to live here."

On getting comfort from the idea of his books outliving him

"I can't say it does. I have hope, but I do not have anything like conviction or knowledge that they will. I have been alive too long among too many writers . . . who have died, and they are not thinking of afterwards. Having some success in your life doesn't mean that your work will endure. In an almanac, look at the list of winners of the Pulitzer Prize over the last 60-70 years and see how many names you remember. It's chilling. I can hope, I can daydream, but certainly think that the chances of me being read 50 years from now or 100 years from now are probably not good. That cannot be your only end. You can not write to be immortal because you will never know. It's impossible. Just write as well as you can and don't speculate about whether you will be Chaucer or Shakespeare."

John Banville in Rain Taxi

Rain Taxi Review of Books, based in Minneapolis, features a great article on Irish writer John Banville in their current online edition. Featured is an overview of the best of Banville's work, including The Newton Letter (Godine, 1987). An excerpt from the article:

Style is not merely a superficial concern in Banville, it is how he conjures the secrets he is after. He approvingly quotes Henry James: “In literature, we move through a blessed world, in which we know nothing except through style, and in which everything is redeemed by style.” As a novelist slightly irritated with the form and limitations of the novel, Banville has defiantly expressed disregard for most aspects associated with it, professing “little or no interest in characters, plot, motivation, manners, politics, morality or social issue . . .” In their stead, it seems that his abiding interest is nicely suggested in the opening lines of Czeslaw Milosz’s magisterial “Ars Poetica”: “I have always aspired to a more spacious form / that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose.” This “spacious form” is one that Banville inhabits quite well in his oeuvre, which is rich, allusive, playful, and existential at the same time.

. . .

Throughout it all, there is no escaping the sheer pleasure of Banville’s singing prose—his wondrous-strange manner, which boasts a profusion of gifts and an uncommon sensitivity to the ineffable. We’re confronted with the work of a muralist and also a miniaturist, someone equally at ease tackling the large themes—time, memory ("The past beats inside me like a second heart,” he writes in The Sea), authenticity, alternative existences—as he is capable of devoting loving attention to the details that make up our world. We emerge from his novels, senses tingling brightly, somehow more aware of our possibilities. And Banville honors “the ordinary, that strangest and most elusive of enigmas” through his allegiance to indeterminacy, often content to leave mysteries unresolved, thrumming.

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. His many novels include Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, The Newton Letter (Godine, 1987), Mefisto (Godine, 1986), Athena, The Book of Evidence (which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize), and The Untouchable. His novel The Sea was awarded the 2005 Man Booker Prize. Formerly the literary editor of the Irish Times, John Banville lives with his family in Dublin.