“About my letters,” T.S. Eliot snarled at his mother, when she innocently offered, in early 1927, to return the trove she had received over the years. “For heaven’s sake don’t send them to me. If there is one thing more depressing than reading other people’s old letters it is reading one’s own.” He wanted the letters kept from others as well, he told her, and even destroyed if necessary. “I do not want my biography, if it is ever written—and I hope it won’t—to have anything private in it. READ MORE >>
Tarzan turns 100
Tarzan of the ApesBy Edgar Rice Burroughs (Library of America, 432 pp., $20) READ MORE >>
The Alibi of Ambiguity
Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy DilemmaBy Barbara Will (Columbia University Press, 274 pp., $35) IdaBy Gertrude Stein Edited by Logan Esdale (Yale University Press, 348 pp., $20) Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected EditionBy Gertrude Stein Edited by Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina (Yale University Press, 379 pp., $22) READ MORE >>
The Blooming Foreigner
“Something Urgent I Have to Say to You”: The Life and Works of William Carlos WilliamsBy Herbert Leibowitz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 496 pp., $40) READ MORE >>
“Tranströmer!” Of course, I knew immediately what the email message meant. After years of waiting among the also-rans, and amid speculation that this was the year for an Arab poet to win the Nobel Prize in Literature to honor the Arab Spring, or maybe, a late-breaking rumor, that Bob Dylan was the bettors’ choice, a Swede was named to win the Swedish prize. READ MORE >>
A Birthday Card for Richard Wilbur
Richard Wilbur, among our most distinguished living poets and a longtime contributor to this magazine, celebrates his ninetieth birthday on March 1 of this year. As the snows of Wilbur’s western New England were slowly yielding to auguries of spring, I found myself thinking, on this portentous event, of a passage from his poem “The Event,” in which he tries to fix in words the elusive significance of a swirling flight of birds. READ MORE >>
The Embroiderer
Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin Selected and edited by Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare (Viking, 554 pp., $35) READ MORE >>
Stand By Your Whale!
Fights
Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit
Raymond Carver: Collected Stories By Raymond Carver (Library of America, 1019 pp., $40) Raymond Carver: A Writer’s LifeBy Carol Sklenicka (Scribner, 578 pp., $35) READ MORE >>
