Category Archives: Publishers
Edward Weston, Walt Whitman: Grass
November 7, 2012 Whitman, poet of New Jersey and New York. Also poet of grass, the force of demographics, what comes up from the ground. He would have been unsurprised by Hurricane Sandy, or by the rising sea levels … Continue reading
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: “Re Dis Appearing”
October 24, 2012 I’m getting ready for the World Humanities Forum, held next week in Busan, South Korea. So I’ve been thinking about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, born in 1951 in Busan. She immigrated with her family to the … Continue reading
Jack Kerouac, Edwidge Danticat: Joual and Creole
October 10, 2012 The name on his birth certificate is Jean Louis Kirouac – that’s the most common spelling of the name in Quebec, which is where his parents were from. His father, Léon-Alcide, continued to work as a printer … Continue reading
Jack Kerouac: Mexico City Blues
October 3, 2012 “The immense triangular arc from New York to Mexico City to San Francisco”: Jack Kerouac writes in The Dharma Bums. After two publishers turned down On the Road in quick succession, Kerouac went to Mexico in a … Continue reading
Toni Morrison, Slade Morrison: More Children’s Books
September 12, 2012 Toni Morrison also had trouble with publishers. At least she managed to get it in print — The Big Box, the first of several coauthored with her son Slade, first appeared in Ms. Magazine in 1980 and, … Continue reading
Children’s Books, Children’s Songs: Gertrude Stein, Paul Robeson
September 5, 2012 Last year Yale University Press brought out Gertrude Stein’s To Do: A Book for Alphabets and Birthdays, never published in her lifetime. Stein had written it as a follow-up to her first children’s book, The World is … Continue reading
Billie Holiday, Abel Meeropol: Black/Jewish Strange Fruit
July 25, 2012 Billie sang it, but the music and lyrics were Abel’s. He had first written it as a poem, after seeing the photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana on August 7, 1930. … Continue reading
Tender is the Translation
June 20, 2012 Because of my online lectures on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, I’ve been getting inquiries about these authors from Asia, Europe, South America – many viewers of the Open Yale Courses are outside the US. This week I … Continue reading
All Saints Bookstore, Beijing
June 13, 2012 We were in Hong Kong on June 4, the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. A candlelight vigil had been held in Victoria Park for the past 23 years. This year, 180,000 people showed up. There … Continue reading
Space Brownies: Alice B. Toklas, Brion Gysin, William Burroughs
May 16, 2012 Gertrude Stein was dead at that point; she had died in 1947. In 1952 Alice signed a contract with Harper’s to write a cookbook. Then in her 70s, Alice was not as quick with her pen as … Continue reading