Skidmore prof and Pulitzer-winner has a new piece of fiction in the latest New Yorker.

Click here for the story, History of Disturbance.

As an American, the very notion of “the greatest” always makes me think of Muhammad Ali, but for one Brit the very notion makes her think:

Greatness in a writer can only be awarded posthumously. Let them snuff it first, I say. Then we’ll decide.

Read the Guardian article here.

The poet was born 100 years ago today.

An article from The Independent:

As he wrote of Edward Lear, Auden himself “became a land”, his personal geography packed with must-visit sites. Poster-boy for the 1930s poetic revolution, standard-bearer of the anti-Fascist cultural left, keen-eyed reporter on Midlands foundries or Icelandic glaciers or Chinese wars, martini-sipping New York sophisticate, Christian mystic and seeker, semi-reluctant gay icon and camp gossip, mandarin expatriate in Austria and Italy, apostle of friendship and domesticity: Auden wore many social masks, all authentic, over his 66 productive years. But his mindscape was, over the decades, fissured by tension between the temptations of the public realm and the fulfilments of the private life.

“Poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/ In the valley of its making,” he so quotably asserted in his 1939 elegy for WB Yeats. In truth, Auden had to argue himself out of a youthful conviction that art could indeed act as “a midwife to society”. Most reputable critics concur that he had done so, in New York, by the early 1940s and with works such as New Year Letter – and never looked back. I’m not so sure. Even at his most quietist, the mature Auden sounds a suspiciously declamatory kind of private man.

Here’s an article from the Guardian.

Here’s the Auden Society site with lists of events around the world.

Here Auden read “On the Circuit.”

Download the Paris Review interview (PDF).

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A Japanese publishing house won’t publish a book about Princess Masako.

An Australian journalist refused Wednesday to bow to the Japanese government’s demand that he apologize for “groundless claims” in a book he wrote about Crown Princess Masako.

Instead, Ben Hills, an award-winning investigative reporter, went on the attack, saying the government’s reaction to the book, which was released in Australia in November, has been “bizarre, unprofessional and bewildering.”

“I regard this as an attempt by the Japanese government to suppress and censor my book, and I think it is absolutely outrageous,” he said.

On Monday, diplomats from the Japanese Embassy in Canberra delivered letters to Hills and publisher Random House Australia, protesting the content of “Princess Masako, Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne.”

The government’s letters said the book is defamatory and contains “disrespectful descriptions, distortion of facts and judgmental assertions . . . pertaining to the birth of Her Imperial Highness Princess Aiko and the physical conditions of Her Imperial Highness the Crown Princess Masako.”

The government has demanded an apology and corrections.

Hills said the letters had no details about which parts of his book are wrong or inaccurate.

“They (the letters) really didn’t specify anything in particular they were complaining about,” he said. “They were just a complete, widespread rave. It was most unprofessional.”

Hills said the diplomats told him one of the defamatory points was his claim that the Crown Princess’ daughter, Princess Aiko, was conceived by in vitro fertilization.

This is my first post on Michael’s blog, and I want to thank him for allowing me to contribute. I’m the author of The Masada Scroll and recently was interviewed on this blog (click here). I’m busy at work on the sequel to the novel but have been taking some time to promote the first book — which is something I’m a bit uncomfortable doing. Fortunately my co-author, Robert Vaughan, has a lot of experience in that regard, so I’ll be flying out to Chicago on Wednesday to join him for some book signings.

Robert and I were interviewed recently by Pioneer Press, which is owned by the Chicago Sun-Times and publishes a number of suburban papers in that area. The resulting story in the Evanston Review was published online and and can be read here. The story angle was a combination of how two authors go about collaborating on a novel and how the resulting book, which is similar in concept to The Da Vinci Code, was developed earlier but couldn’t find a publishing home until Dan Brown’s blockbuster created a market.

I’m looking forward to seeing the print version of the review when I’m visiting Robert. It makes the “getting published” process seem more real when you see a story in print. It sure would be great to have a similar story in our local paper, the Times Union (hint hint).

I’ll write again after the book signing and tell you how it goes.

Paul Block, Delmar, NY
paulblock.com

On the Millions books blog, one take on Ray:

Complain all you want. It’s like railing against the pounding surf. She only grows stronger and more powerful. Her ear-shattering tones louder and louder. We KNOW she can’t cook. She shrewdly tells us so. So…what is she selling us? Really? She’s selling us satisfaction, the smug reassurance that mediocrity is quite enough.

The blog entry is here.

A Victorian poetry slam.

Take Shakespeare’s sonnets, add an Internet interface and mix.