letters
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Dear McSweeney’s: Two Letters from Stephen Elliott
I’ve been traveling for two weeks and people prone to the kind of thoughts I’m prone to should never be alone out in the world.
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Letter From Woolf Costs A Pretty Penny
For the Guardian, Alison Flood reports that a letter from Virginia Woolf to her friend Philip Morrel will go to auction with a guide price of £1,000-£1,500. The letter tells of Woolf’s experience during the Battle of Britain and urges her friend…
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Sylvia Plath’s First Tragedy
I don’t know whether it is a hereditary characteristic, but our little family is altogether too prone to lie awake at nights hating ourselves for stupidities—technical or verbal or whatever—and to let careless, cruel remarks fester until they blossom in…
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Kafka’s Father
Franz Kafka’s letters reveal how the author’s father impacted his writing and his life, and a relationship fraught with fear. Kafka worried about his father’s “intellectual domination” creating an environment of “emotional tyranny.” Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova finds…
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Austen Family Letters
The LA Times reports that unpublished letters and poems from Jane Austen’s family have been acquired by the Huntington Library. While none of the letters are from Jane Austen herself, the correspondence will still “provide valuable insight into Jane Austen…
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The Rumpus Interview with Julie Schumacher
Julie Schumacher discusses going extinct, iPads and iPhones, epistolary novels, and why the number of MFA programs in the U.S. is a non-issue.
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Little Jack’s Love Letters
I shall worship her with quiet dignity. I shall draw her attention to me by exploits, success, and possibly a small measure of fame,” wrote a young, romantically inclined Jack Kerouac to a friend in one of a cache of…
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Simply and Swiftly
In 1906, aged 21, D.H. Lawrence wrote to his future fiancée Louise Burrows with writing advice after reading an essay on art she’d sent to him. Among many other remarkable lines, the British author told Burrows that “[l]ike most girl…
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Letters From Ernest
For the New York Review of Books, Edward Mendelson writes about the second volume of Ernest Hemingway’s letters (1923-25), published by Cambridge University Press: What makes the book revelatory is not its biographical detail but the spacious view it gives…
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Dear Alice
Alice Munro’s birthday was last week (happy belated, Alice!). She’s also Elliott Holt‘s favorite writer, and over at Literary Mothers, Elliott wrote a beautiful letter to her: Your stories provide deeply private pleasures. You are our writer, part of our family.…
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Dear Son or Daughter
Here is the problem in writing letters to your kids—perhaps especially as a writer, who has arguably spent her entire professional life writing letters to everyone who isn’t her kids: How do you suddenly start writing in a grand literary…
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Friends Indeed
It turns out that French poet Charles Baudelaire wasn’t very fond of his compatriot Victor Hugo. Despite having the novelist’s support when prosecuted after publishing Les Fleurs du Mal, the poet may have secretly despised (or perhaps just envied) Hugo—in a…