York Times Book Review Research Articles

Whence the 3 Percent?: How Far Have We Come toward Decentering America’s Literary Preference?

This article examines the production and prominence of literature translated into English, asking how far we have come toward decentering America’s literary offerings. Through analyses of the Publishers Weekly Translation Database, we find that global linguistic representation in American publishing remains low and skewed heavily toward the colonial languages of traditional cultural centers, with translations from French, Spanish, and German making up 45 percent of translations published in the United States. Books written in French tend to traverse pathways to translation that reinforce cultural hierarchies, whereas Spanish-language books get translated through different pathways that sometimes circumvent and sometimes include traditional centers. Approximately 60 percent of books translated into English are published by smaller-scale, independent presses and university-affiliated presses. At the pole of large-scale production, where the other 40 percent of translated literature is produced, there is increasing concentration among large conglomerate publishers. The recent entry of Amazon’s publishing arm has also dramatically increased the production of mass-market translated fiction in the United States. But the question remains: how and where does translated literature become known and accessible to the American reading public? To find answers, we surveyed recent initiatives by mainstream media outlets to promote global literature and translations. Using two audit methods, we assess the visibility of translated books in the New York Times Book Review between 2008 and 2021. We found that only 5 percent of New York Times Book Review items include translated books, and that translations from French, German, Spanish, and Italian account for over half of those receiving full critical reviews. We conclude our discussion by suggesting that user-generated online platforms, such as Goodreads.com or Bookriot.com, may be fruitful sites for further investigation of how translated books might gain greater visibility among American readers. This digital literary sphere is ripe ground for further work seeking to understand the possibilities for diffusion and reception of translated literature and how this might advance the decentering of the global literary field.

Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them

What a pleasure to find this book about government information listed in the New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of 2022! Dan Bouk is a history professor at Colgate University who “researches the history of bureaucracies, quantification, and other modern things shrouded in cloaks of boringness” (author’s note). Tedium, he believes, can be a smokescreen for things that somebody deliberately wants to hide, so he’s on a personal mission to cut through the superficial dullness. Bouk is certainly the right person for the job. His enthusiasm for bureaucratic data is irresistible, and his meticulously researched writing is witty, lively, and not at all boring.

America's Media War Against the USSR

America's Media War Against the USSRMichael R. McBreartyMichael R. McBrearty1540 York Avenue 3R, New York, NY 10028, (646) 280 – 9649, [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:April 2023https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2023.87.2.285PDFPDF PLUS ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations AboutREFERENCESBonnell Victoria E., and Freiden Gregory. 1993. “Televorot: The Influence of Television Coverage in Russia's August 1991 Coup.” Slavic Review, 52:4, 810–828. Crossref, Google ScholarBonnell Victoria E., , Cooper Ann, and Freiden Gregory. 2015. Russia At the Barricades, Eyewitness Accounts of the August 1991 Coup. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Crossref, Google ScholarDichter Ernest. 1960. The Strategy of Desire. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company. Google ScholarEdwards Lee. 2001. Mediapolitik: How the Mass Media Have Transformed World Politics. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Google ScholarEllul Jacques. 1973. Propaganda, The Formation of Men's Attitudes. New York: Vintage. Google ScholarFiges Orlando. 1995. “Communism: Two Autopsies.” New York Times Book Review, March 19. Google ScholarGates Robert. 1996. From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War. New York: Simon & Schuster. Google ScholarGerbner George. “Instant History: The Case of the Moscow Coup.” Political Communication, Vol. 10, 1993, 193–203. Crossref, Google ScholarGervasi Sean. 1991-1992. “Western Intervention in the USSR.” Covert Action, No. 39 (Winter) 4–9. Google ScholarHersh Seymour M. 1994. “The Wild East.” The Atlantic Monthly (June). Google ScholarHolt Robert T. 1958. Radio Free Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Google ScholarKind-Kovacs Friederike. 2014. Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain. Budapest: Central European University Press. Crossref, Google ScholarKohler Foy D. 1952. “This Is the Voice of America.” Cathode Press (Summer Issue). Google ScholarKrugman H. E. 1971. “Brain Wave Measures of Media Involvement.” Journal of Advertising Research, Vol. 11, No. 1, ps. 3–9. Google ScholarLisann Maury. 1975. Broadcasting to the Soviet Union: International Politics and Radio. New York: Praeger Publishers. Google ScholarMesyatsev N. 1967. “Ideological Subversion on the Airwaves of Foreign Radio Stations Broadcasting in the Russian Language.” Gostelradio Memo to CPSU Central Committee, April 14. Downloaded from Wilson Center Digital Archive, http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenterorg.document/121515on11-1-2020. Google ScholarMcLuhan Marshall. 1965. Understanding Media, Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. Google ScholarMitrovich Gregory. 2004. Cold War Broadcasting Impact: Report on a Conference organized by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, October 13–16. Google ScholarNites Paul. 1994. NSC-68: Forging the Strategy of Containment. Washington, DC: National Defense University Press. Google ScholarOdom William E. 2000. The Collapse of the Soviet Military. New Haven: Yale University Press. Google ScholarParenti Michael. 1997. Blackshirts and Reds. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Google ScholarParta R. Eugene. 2004. “Measuring the Audience to Western Broadcasting in the USSR.” Paper prepared for the Conference on the Cold War Broadcasting Impact, held at Stanford University, Stanford, California, October 13–15. Google ScholarUS State Department, Office of the Historian. 1969. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume XII, Soviet Union. January 1969-October 1970, “106. Memorandum for the 303 Committee.” Google Scholar Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 87Issue 2Apr 2023 Information© 2023 by S & S Quarterly, Inc.PDF download

Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill

Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill

Constructive Discussion about The Theory of Immortality of the Book of “The Physics of Immortality’’

In July 1993 Frank J. TIPLER wrote a book about the masterpiece theory of the Physics Of immortality. As New York Times Book review says “A thrilling ride to the far edges of modern physics” here he prove both theoretical and Mathematically that God and the resurrection of death exist . But then after the

What Is Genre? How Do We Talk About Fiction?: Assessing Complementary Schemas and Approaches

Describing fiction is notoriously problematic. One aspect of this is the designation “genre” which can mean different things to different communities involved in the book trade, such as publishers/authors, readers, and information professionals. Using sources created by all three (i.e., ProQuest and New York Times Book Review, Library of Congress bibliographic records, GoodReads categories, New York Public Library catalog user-supplied content, and Amazon categories), aboutness and isness metadata are harvested for two novels. Ultimately, we find that although the vocabularies each have different purposes and intended audiences, the compilation of terms from different sources presents a coherent image of a title. Future work in knowledge organization (KO) should consider how best to harness information from multiple sources in providing library users with a more robust perspective on fiction titles.

Moods in Book Reviews: Text Mining Approach

AbstractSpiteri and Pecoskie (2018) proposed a taxonomy of terms to describe emotion and tone in novels. We tested those terms against 5,144 full‐text book reviews from the New York Times Book Review to discover whether the proposed terms were used in published reviews to describe books, and of those terms used, which were most used. The objective of this study is to explore whether emotional contents can be identified by a text mining approach without investing too much time and efforts of information professionals. Findings demonstrate that the terms chosen by Spiteri and Pecoskie are used in professional book reviews, though some may be used in multiple ways, rather than only related to emotional content. Results of this work contribute to a larger scale project of testing machine models of identifying emotional content in books and ultimately being able to create automated media recommendation systems that include emotion as an identifier.

Constitution Illustrated

Fans of comics and cartoons will revel in the creative deployment of characters from the funny pages throughout Constitution Illustrated. Artist R. Sikoryak is a contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review and is the author of several illustrated books. In his latest work, he has concocted an ingenious ploy to enliven the text of the Constitution. Each page features a different section of the Constitution being recited by cartoon characters. Sikoryak has imitated the style and borrowed the characters of dozens of cartoonists. Readers will find favorites both classic and contemporary, from Bud Counihan’s Betty Boop and Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy to Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor. Aficionados will have fun figuring out the artist being imitated on each page, and a helpful index provides a key to the source of each drawing for those who aren’t able to recognize the myriad cartoonists represented.

Introduction

On November 6, 2020, late in the sesquicentennial year of Dickens's death, two photographs of Dickens appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. Arresting and similar images of the inimitable one sitting in a chair and revealed in half profile as taken by the Watkins Brothers circa 1860. Beneath them on the top of the Book Review section is the large-type title, “Dickensworld.” Indeed.The long essay that followed is ostensibly a review of a new biography of Dickens, but that is summarily dismissed, and what in fact is presented is a valuable musing on Dickens the man, his works, his afterlife, and especially his reputation, that begins with the following: This year is the 150th anniversary of the death of Charles Dickens — Dickens, who as time goes by emerges ever more conclusively as England's greatest novelist and the literary figure who has come to govern our sense of the Victorian era; to embody it, really. And who also happens, in all likelihood, to be the most popular novelist who ever lived.Readers of this journal will appreciate that ringing endorsement of the writer who we think, read, and write about. The author of that review essay is the venerable Robert Gottlieb, former editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Knopf book publishers and The New Yorker magazine. He is surely as informed on literary matters of the present and past century as anyone who has graced the pages of the New York Times, so his views command respect. As editors we welcome his affirmations, including on the value of aesthetic judgment and, implicitly, the value of what we do as literary scholars.As editors today we often are presented with essays and perspectives that grind critical paths and take hard work before they emerge in print. We regularly cry out for help to identify the new ideas so as to help the author express them to us uninformed though learned readers and editors. We thank all of our outside readers for their continued help and support in bringing new understandings and appreciations to the world of Victorian fiction, even while currently struggling with the many obstacles brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. And we appreciate Robert Gottlieb for bringing us back to the big picture, “Dickensworld,” and reminding a wide audience that Dickens matters a lot in these days when the humanities are being challenged as passé and irrelevant.Over the decades this journal has been open to all critical approaches, moods, and modalities, and has been well served—if we may say so ourselves—by a series of capable and respected editors. Things evolve, Dickens remains. We wish to thank our esteemed coeditor, Caroline Reitz—who has with our good wishes taken over as the executive editor of Clues: A Journal of Detection—for her companionship and dedication to Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction through Volume 51.For this current volume, we once more express our gratitude for important and practical assistance received from the following administrators at CUNY's Graduate Center: Interim Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Julia Wrigley, former Interim President James Muyskens; Ph.D. Program in English Executive Officer Kandice Chuh; and Nancy Silverman, Academic Program Coordinator, Ph.D. Program in English. Anna Metreveli in the Business Office continues to be the ablest of facilitators.In addition, we extend thanks to Professor John O. Jordan, Director of the The Dickens Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Renee A. Fox, Co-Director; and Courtney Mahaney, Assistant Director of The Dickens Project. See also <http//dickens.uscs.edu>.We gratefully acknowledge our indebtedness to Paris Shih, a doctoral student in English at the Graduate Center who was our editorial assistant during the early period when this issue was in formation and to his successor Katharine Williams for their consistently efficient and reliable help.Finally, we thank the following members of the Journals Department at Penn State University Press for their encouragement, guidance, efficiency and support: Julie Lambert, Journals Manager; Astrid Meyer, Journals Managing Editor; and Rachel Lynn Ginder, Production Assistant and collaboratrice extraordinaire.—The Editors

Teaching Heart of Darkness Now

Why should we teach Heart of Darkness today? For decades, the question was not necessary. A longstanding fixture in the canon of greatest works written in the English language, the novella was read by high school and college students alike, and celebrated for its psychological depth and aesthetic complexity. Then came Chinua Achebe—who in 1975 called Conrad a “bloody racist”1 and offered passages to prove it. He spent the last thirty years of his life calling for the book to be struck from curricula—a call recently echoed by Michael Eric Dyson (New York Times Book Review, June 7, 2020). The passages that offended Achebe are all the more offensive in an age of George Floyd, all the more offensive to a generation increasingly sensitized to racial injustice. What else but offence—and pain—could be the response to a line that describes the humanity of Africans as a “remote kinship”...

Race

60 WLT AUTUMN 2021 a POETRY Because all the fathers and mothers of my parents, all the time past, are earth. But also language, words like Spanish, gypsy, black, or immigrant. Words that rise like swords, walls that are constructed with words, the old continents, the new continents, with the fading kingdoms and kings over there, on the same ruins, on the myths and oracles, America rises. Into it pour the children of the children of the grandchildren of civilizations. Children of Rome and Greece, settlers of Egypt, nomads of India, its rivers flow into the womb of the Mississippi, they bring the water in their veins, they water the fertile land, and then they are food for the trees, oxygen in the lungs of other men, water again in combination with hydrogen. America is watered with the blood of civilizations. Past is the word that keeps the balance on their lips, the present is yesterday, the future is yesterday, the fruit after a storm was bitten. I say Spanish, and I do not understand. I say Spain, and my eyes fill with melancholy, but also my heart with flowers is gone, of a mineral taste, as if it were the smoke of a distant fire. Race by Fernando Valverde WORLDLIT.ORG 61 Fernando Valverde (b. 1980, Granada) has been voted the most relevant Spanishlanguage poet born since 1970 by nearly two hundred critics and researchers from more than one hundred international universities. For his collaboration in a work of fusion between poetry and flamenco, he was nominated for a Latin Grammy in 2014. He teaches poetry at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Poet, teacher, and activist Carolyn Forché has witnessed, thought about, and written about some of the most devastating events of twentiethcentury world history. According to Joyce Carol Oates, Forché’s ability to wed the political with the personal places her in the company of such poets as Pablo Neruda, Philip Levine, and Denise Levertov (New York Times Book Review). Her memoir What You Have Heard was named a finalist for a 2019 National Book Award in Nonfiction. Only the color of the land where I grew up is as certain a race. A reddish earth, often bathed in blood. Land that saw Phoenicians die, Romans, Arabs, men of every land and country, and also to my grandfather, and my grandfather’s father, and also the old blesseds who come every morning to the parish of San Juan de Dios, and the men who try to cross the strait and are returned to the shores of my country by the waves of the Mediterranean, and to the people who suffer and always look toward the ground out of shame or weakness, or simply because they want to put an end to the journey. My race belongs to that land, and the word land, and the water that cleans it without paying heed to the blood that drags it away. Translation from the Spanish By Carolyn Forché Editorial note: “Race” is forthcoming in America, published by Copper Canyon. FERNANDO VALVERDE PHOTO BY CHRISTINA ANTON, CAROLYN FORCHÉ PHOTO BY DON J. USNER ...

Behind Children’s Books: Backstories & Revelations by Jerry Griswold

Reviewed by: Behind Children’s Books: Backstories & Revelations by Jerry Griswold Joel D. Chaston (bio) Behind Children’s Books: Backstories & Revelations. By Jerry Griswold. Independently Published, 2020. I first became acquainted with Jerry Griswold’s literary scholarship years ago when I read Audacious Kids: Coming of Age in America’s Classic Children’s Books (1992), which had recently been named Outstanding Critical Book of the Year by the Children’s Literature Association. I remember being very impressed with Griswold’s keen insights into children’s literature and culture, and, especially, his personal and witty prose style. Over the years, various critics have praised Griswold, now an Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, for his ability to speak simultaneously to general readers and academics. [End Page 222] I must confess that when I first picked up Griswold’s most recent book, Behind Children’s Books: Back-stories & Revelations, I was expecting a sustained, theoretical study of children’s culture similar to Audacious Kids, The Meanings of “Beauty and the Beast” (2004), and Feeling Like a Kid: Childhood and Children’s Literature (2006), and I was surprised by the differences in its content, purpose, and organization. Behind Children’s Books is a collection of sixty short essays about children’s literature and culture. All but ten of the essays are revisions of work which originally appeared in popular newspapers and magazines, such as The New York Times Book Review and Los Angeles Times, or in online publications. Most importantly, the book is primarily intended for a general audience. As Griswold explains in his brief introduction to the book: Coming from my Other Life as a literary journalist, these contributions are different from my academic publications because they are meant for general readers and they are brief (averaging two or three pages each). With regard to the latter, I have always admired Nietzsche’s aim “to say in ten sentences what others say in a book.” Here will be found dozens of bouillon cubes to inspire thousands of banquets. (2) Through these “bouillon cubes,” Griswold hopes to “pull back the curtain” for his readers, providing revelations and backstories about children’s books. Once I put aside my initial expectations, I took Griswold’s advice sampling various “bouillon cubes,” in the same way I might approach a “taster’s table.” I soon realized that Beyond Children’s Books is impressive in its variety of topics, as well as its personal style, which should appeal to Griswold’s primary audience and, I would hope, academics. The essays in this volume are loosely grouped into ten thematic sections, such as “Author Backstories” (biographical anecdotes about children’s authors), “Meetings” (Griswold’s personal experiences with children’s writers), “Derivations” (adaptations of and unconscious imitations of children’s texts), “Personal Favorites” (personal responses to various children’s books), “Behind Classics” (anecdotes about classic children’s stories), “Travel Tips” (literary destinations), and “ Books and Life” (the affective power of reading). Despite my teaching and writing about children’s literature for years, many of the essays have inspired me to think about children’s texts in new ways. For example, I never expected that an essay about “Talk-Like-a-Pirate Day” would make me to rethink my assumptions about Treasure Island, Peter Pan, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Pirates of the Caribbean. For me, Griswold’s most interesting “bouillon cubes” describe his “adventures” with writers and illustrators such as Maurice Sendak, Bruno Bettelheim, Sid Fleischman, James Marshall, and Nicoletta Ceccoli. I highly recommend both “Mary Poppins, P. L. Travers, and Walt Disney” and “P. L. Travers,” which draw on Griswold’s friendship with Travers, whom he first met as a graduate student when [End Page 223] she was visiting the University of Connecticut. Drawing on recorded interviews with Travers, Griswold discusses their shared interests in “yoga and Zen and mysticism,” the origins of the nanny, Mary Poppins, and Travers’s disdain for Walt Disney’s film adaption of Mary Poppins. In “Bruno Bettelheim,” Griswold describes Bettelheim’s contradictory behavior when he visited San Diego State University to deliver a lecture on fairy tales. At times, the psychologist seemed to thrive on conflict...

Black Identity Politics and Psychiatry

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article On Mental Health, People, and PlacesFull AccessBlack Identity Politics and PsychiatryEzra E. H. Griffith, M.D.Ezra E. H. GriffithSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:30 Jul 2020https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2020.8a19The sequestration caused by the present pandemic has produced for me at least one beneficent outcome: The time to reread and ponder articles published some time ago. I returned recently to a piece by Harvard Professor Orlando Patterson titled “Being and Blackness” and published in The New York Times Book Review (January 8, 2006). In it, Patterson comments on two books. However, my interest here centers only on Tommie Shelby’s We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Harvard University Press, 2007).Patterson makes clear from the start that Shelby dismisses “the notion of an inherent or essential black identity, the idea that one shares some deep-seated common bond or kinship with all black people by virtue of being black.”Shelby disposes, too, of the idea that “being black means one is, or ought to be, culturally black.” In contrast, Patterson states that Shelby promotes a form of pragmatic nationalism that advocates Black* solidarity, despite the racial composition of the political organization in which Blacks and whites may be operating. Patterson claims that Shelby’s Black solidarity is characterized by “special concern, loyalty, and trust” that is distinct from notions of a color-blind liberal reform effort. This Black solidarity is related to Blacks’ history of slavery and race-based discrimination.I had to be attentive in reading this analysis, as Patterson notes that Black solidarity in this form may not be the solution in every context. For example, Blacks must understand that the socioeconomic challenge they will confront in the United States may not always be linked to their blackness. Still, Shelby seems to grant that Blacks legitimately have “shared political interests” related to their “racial subordination and their collective resolve to triumph over it.”I confess there is a certain laziness in making excursions into philosophical territory through the eyes of another scholar. However, in this case I felt the trip worthwhile, as it provided a different view of the current context surrounding the struggle over Blacks’ rights and privileges in modern America. Tommie Shelby’s work also clarified for me the new eruptions of Black-white discord within APA. Yes, Black members of APA are palpably upset about their perceived treatment within the Association, and the present national climate reinforces their irritation.There is little point in fanning the flames of discord here in a brief commentary. Still, I have talked with APA members on different sides of the debate and have reached the conclusion that the organization’s leadership has more work to do in structuring the discourse. Some of this further effort will require clearer avoidance of rigid boundaries and arguments that emphasize power and legalistic positions. I acknowledge the important step taken by our president, Dr. Jeffrey Geller, in establishing the Task Force to Address Structural Racism Throughout Psychiatry. I have hopes for its advancement of conversations among our diverse constituencies and emphasis on mutual and attentive listening.This is 2020, not 1969. Blacks want seats at the influential tables of APA, and whites must understand that Blacks are tired of repeated begging. Such behavior is below the new standard of dignity for minority group members. Blacks must in turn appreciate that they are not the only nondominant group in the organization or the broader society. Thus, making what Shelby calls “chauvinistic claims” about Black people’s heritage and privileges is often problematic when pursuing political action.There is also no denying APA’s economic and political reach in the marketplace. These bilateral acknowledgements affirm that Blacks and whites are inextricably intertwined in this organization. There is no going back on this point, and all APA constituencies must recognize this reality. I am confident that Jeffrey Geller wants to build community in the organization. I expect he appreciates that every action toward this end must result in mutual preservation of the other’s dignity. However, in closing, I return to Orlando Patterson’s reference to being and Blackness. The entire constellation of APA’s leadership will benefit from conversations, guided by colleagues with experience in the trauma of racism, about those of us who are dark. ■*Editor’s note: Psychiatric News follows the Associated Press Stylebook, which calls for the capitalization of “Black” and “Blacks.”“Being and Blackness” can be accessed here.Ezra E. H. Griffith, M.D., is professor emeritus of psychiatry and African American Studies at Yale University. ISSUES NewArchived

Gender Dynamics and Critical Reception: A Study of Early 20th-century Book Reviews from The New York Times

This paper focuses on book reviews at the turn-of-the century United States in order to underline fundamental compatibilities between large-scale, computational methods and book historical approaches. It analyzes a dataset of approximately 2,800 book reviews published in The New York Times between January 1, 1905 and December 31, 1925. Several machine learning scenarios are employed to investigate how the underlying reviews constructed gendered norms for reading and readership. Logistic regression models are trained and tested to evaluate how effectively lemma frequencies predict the perceived or presumed gender of an author under review. The paper discusses four different feature selection scenarios, as follows: (1) No terms removed, (2) Stop words removed, (3) Stop words, gender nouns, and titles removed, and (4) Stop words, gender nouns, titles, and common forenames removed. For each scenario, the top lemma coefficients are discussed and interpreted. Tracing the norms (gendered and gendering) of The New York Times Book Review in the early twentieth century demonstrates that even the summary-driven book reviews played an important role in mediating hierarchies of taste and distinction. Further, the paper seeks to demonstrate that cultural analytics methods can be used to investigate a range of research questions related to authorship, publishing, circulation, and reception.

Speculations on Eudora Welty's Reading of Seven Gothic Tales and Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen

Speculations on Eudora Welty's Reading of Seven Gothic Tales and Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen Pearl Amelia McHaney Eudora Welty reviewed Isak Dinesen's 1957 Last Tales and two scholarly studies of the Danish writer's oeuvre for the New York Times Book Review. She read, and passed on to William Maxwell, Dinesen's essay "On Mottoes of My Life," and she also contributed to a memorial tribute for Dinesen (the pen name of Karen Blixen) in 1965. These commentaries are part of Welty's oeuvre and have been reprinted and made available to readers and scholars. Until 2019, the first known book review that Welty had published was of Marguerite Steedman's But You'll Be Back for the Saturday Review of Literature in 1942. Recently, however, I learned that in 1938 Welty had reviewed Dinesen's memoir Out of Africa in her hometown paper, the Jackson Clarion Ledger.1 In her review, Welty also acknowledges having read Seven Gothic Tales, Dinesen's first book. By 1938, when she first reviewed Dinesen's work, Welty had traveled throughout Mississippi for her five months as a junior publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration and had had one photography exhibit in the Jackson Municipal Art Gallery and two photography exhibits in New York City. She had published eleven short stories in truly "little" magazines and had written and burned the first version of "Petrified Man." Edward O'Brien had reprinted "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies" in his edition of The Best Short Stories of 1938. Welty was eighteen months away from receiving Diarmuid Russell's invitation to be her primary reader and agent. She was years away from writing a novel, and nearly a half-century would pass before she would write her own memoir. To write a book review is to read closely and then to think, almost from afar, of which details and which impressions to gather and share. To review Out of Africa, the second book by Dinesen, Welty begins by commenting that "'Seven Gothic Tales' appeared several years ago under the name Isak Dinesen. It was a widely read book of ornate, metaphysical stories designed carefully and with a sharp obviously feminine humor, to delight and tantalize the reader who likes curious and unreal things" (1). This brief summary of Dinesen's first book illustrates, most importantly, that Welty had read Seven Gothic Tales prior to writing her Out of Africa review, and, in addressing the "reader who likes curious and unreal things," she begins [End Page 125] the habit of reviewing from a reader's perspective—a point of view she maintains in nearly all of her book reviews. The library of books in Welty's home includes the 1934 Random House Modern Library edition of Seven Gothic Tales that reprints the Smith and Haas publication with Dorothy Canfield's introduction. This first collection of Dinesen's tales was an April Book-of-the-Month Club selection and was on the New York Times Best Seller list for April, May, June, and July of 1934. The book is a complex exploration of the Gothic: sudden dark, stormy, windy weather causing drastic consequences; ancient worlds bearing down on the present through elaborate allusions; corporeal ghosts and shadowy people; unexpected, fantastic events; death; strange visages and bodies; and riddles posed to the characters and readers. Dinesen asks, "'What is it,' she said very slowly, in the manner of a sibylla, 'which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused?'" (Seven 115).2 Peter Monro Jack reviewed Seven Gothic Tales in the New York Times Book Review under the headline "A Strange Book for Our Time." Jack found the tales "curious" with an "almost Proustian sensibility that illuminates, by refining, the romantic mood." Citing that Dinesen's "pattern is as flexible as Scheherazade's," Jack asserts that Dinesen's "inventiveness is apparently inexhaustible," and he concludes, "This is a work of the imagination, very subtle and graceful; a rare and curious book, it will be white magic to many and mere mummery to others … though both are in the book, there is more magic than mummery" (6). This evaluation, I believe, would...

Books Received

Books Received Mark I. West How to Raise a Reader. By Pamela Paul and Maria Russo. Workman, 2019. Intended primarily for parents, this guide provides helpful advice on how to encourage children to take an active interest in books and reading. The authors, both of whom are editors associated with The New York Times Book Review, draw on their own experiences as parents when dispensing advice and suggestions. The book also includes an up-to-date list of recommended titles that appeal to contemporary children. A Marvelous Life: The Amazing Story of Stan Lee. By Danny Fingeroth. St. Martin's Press, 2019. A former writer and editor at Marvel Comics, Danny Fingeroth draws on his experience in this "definitive biography" of his former boss. This thoroughly researched book traces Stan Lee's life and career of, focusing on his role as Marvel's creative leader. Movies to See before You Graduate from High School. By Michael Howarth. Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. In this in-depth reference work, Michael Howarth covers sixty noteworthy coming-of-age films spanning five decades and multiple genres. For each of these films, Howarth provides a substantial entry in which he discusses plot, themes, and pertinent details such as classic lines from the film. The book also includes numerous stills from many of these films. Peter and Pan: From Ancient Greece to Neverland. Edited by Rachel Caine Kreinin. The Israel Museum, 2019. The Israel Museum initially published this lavishly illustrated volume as a catalog accompanying a major art exhibition that ran in June–December 2019, focusing on depictions of Pan from his origins as a god from Greek mythology to his metamorphosis as Peter Pan in J. M. Barrie's works. This volume, however, can also be appreciated as a stand-alone book. [End Page 176] Copyright © 2020 Children's Literature Association

The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison ed. by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner

Reviewed by: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison ed. by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner Ross Posnock John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner, eds. The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison. New York: Random House, 2019. 1,072 pp. $50.00. “Editions of letters and diaries say that a writer has arrived, or is still with us, much more than biographies do,” Darryl Pinckney remarked in his review of Trading Twelves (2000), the Ellison/Albert Murray letters. The warmly celebratory response in major media to The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison upon its publication in the fall of 2019 ratifies Pinckney’s point. Expertly introduced decade by decade by the incomparable John Callahan, The Letters arrive as a great gift to American literature, an intellectual feast of over a thousand pages, a volume that easily takes its place among the most important collections by any American author. The letters above all allow us to bear intimate witness to the birth of Ellison’s ideas (highlights include the 1941 and 1945 letters to Richard Wright, the 1945 letter to Kenneth Burke, and the 1970 letter to Stanley Edgar Hyman) expressed with remarkable force and pungency. Yet intellectual ferment is only one strand in this tapestry; another reveals the private Ellison. His early letters to his mother Ida are often preoccupied with requests for money—he hangs with a fast crowd at Tuskegee—but eventually come to express anguished empathy for her isolation (deserted by her second husband and “toiling from morning to night”), some reassurance that he is special even if unemployed (“every one thinks I’m a little odd and a bit gifted”) and outrage at a world so indifferent to poor people (“I find myself wishing that the whole thing would explode”). These feelings culminate in an August 30, 1937 letter to Ida, the last one she reads before dying unexpectedly two months later. His romantic pain is vivid in two 1941 letters to Sanora Babb, herself a fledgling (white) novelist with whom Ellison was in love; in letters in the 1950s, he confesses to his wife Fanny his guilt and confusion in the wake of an extramarital affair while at the American Academy in Rome. A third strand are the exchanges with his literary circle—Murray, of course, but also during the 1950s, Saul Bellow, and more enduring if less intense friendships with Robert Penn Warren and Richard Wilbur. A fourth thread are the long, nostalgic letters to family and friends recalling the world of his fatherless childhood in Oklahoma City. “I have been returning on the average at least once over the last seven years,” he writes in 1971. “And when I get there, I’m like a ghost—or a Rip Van Winkle” who awakes to discover his world has changed. Each of these strands—I have summarized only the major ones—has its own particular cadence and voice, which makes The Selected Letters a virtuoso display of American prose. The Fall 2019 reviews and events (including a reading of letters at the Schomburg Library) reaffirmed Ellison’s cultural stature. And two of the major reviews (in The New Yorker by Kevin Young and on the front page of the New York Times Book Review by Saidiya Hartman) suggest that a younger generation of critics still find Ellison of considerable value even when some of their political and cultural views are at odds with his (I am thinking of Hartman’s feminism and Afropessimism). Hartman (December 19, 2019) subtly balances judgments: “ ‘Complexity,’ ” she begins, “was the term that Ralph Ellison deployed most often to describe black life and culture. And it is the term best suited to convey the character of this brilliant, often [End Page 241] disapproving and unsparing man.” Although “complexity” has long been a piety of literary humanism associated both with Ellison and with his fellow New York intellectual (and occasional antagonist) Lionel Trilling—suggesting their reverence for literature in the face of political and sociological reductionism—Hartman means something else by the word. This is clear from what soon follows upon “unsparing”: that Ellison’s “cult of the masculine hero” sought to restore “to the native son truth and...

Scenes: Two Dollar Radio: an interview with Eliza Wood-Obenauf

ScenesTwo Dollar Radio: an interview with Eliza Wood-Obenauf Eliza Wood-Obenauf Could you briefly describe your press's history? Two Dollar Radio is a family-run outfit founded in 2005 with the mission to reaffirm the cultural and artistic spirit of the publishing industry. We aim to do this by presenting bold works of literary merit, each book, individually and collectively, providing a sonic progression that we believe to be too loud to ignore. Eric Obenauf and Eliza Wood-Obenauf, a young idealistic couple with a love for books, co-founded and run the press. In 2005, we had just finished undergrad in New York City, where Eric had studied screenwriting and Eliza art education, and moved to San Diego, working service industry jobs and reading a lot. During this time, we were beginning to feel disillusioned with contemporary publishing—it was becoming harder to find the books that we were most attracted to, which was mostly bold and quirky literary fiction. We were reading almost exclusively work from the publisher colophons he had come to trust—Akashic, Soft Skull, Dalkey Archive—and found ourselves going to bookstores, searching spines for their logos rather than authors we were familiar with. During a camping trip up the coast to Big Sur, we happened to stop at the Henry Miller Memorial Library, where we found a copy of Andre Schiffrin's The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (2000). We were both overwhelmed by the book, in which Schiffrin charts the ideological shift in publishing from the post-World War II era to the late 1980s, when corporations acquired many of the independent presses and folded them under their umbrella. Then one day while Eric was bartending, an inebriated and overly talkative customer, who must have noticed Eric trying to ignore him, said: "Don't mind me, I make more noise than a $2 radio!" It was the confluence of these events—immersing ourselves in the work of some exceptional indie publishers, reading Schiffrin's book, and clicking with the name "Two Dollar Radio"—that served as the foundation and initial impetus to want to start our own press. After having lived in both Southern California and New York City, we made the decision to settle in the Midwest, in Columbus, Ohio, where we could afford to make a living working day/night jobs, raise our children, and focus on growing our publishing company. How would you characterize the work you publish? Our tagline is: "Books too loud to ignore." In the work we produce, we value ambition above all, and believe that none of our books crimp to convention when it comes to storytelling or voice. Ideally, that contributes to a liberating reading experience. Our primary interest lies with what we would characterize as bold work: subversive, adventurous, original, and highly creative. Over the past fifteen years we have published a wide range of genres from novels and essay collections to short story collections and memoirs, from Acid Westerns and Sci-Fi to Graphic Novels and Dystopia. No matter the genre, we have become known for curating boundary-pushing writers and for our fiercely punk DIY aesthetic. Who is your audience, and in what ways are you trying to reach them? We operate on the Field of Dreams approach: "If you build it, they will come." Two Dollar Radio has found success without pandering to trends. Since 2005, we've published five to six books each year, some of which have been turned into films, honored by the National Book Foundation, finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, picked as "Editors' Choice" selections by The New York Times Book Review, and made year-end best-of lists at O, The Oprah Magazine, NPR, The Washington Post, Slate, Salon, The Believer, Chicago Tribune, Rolling Stone, San Francisco Chronicle, and others. Rather than using our resources on pay-to-play marketing, we focus on publishing books that blow our hair back and we nurture relationships with booksellers and readers who appreciate the work. The most gratifying experience for us is seeing dedicated indie booksellers hand-selling our books, or readers...

Announcements

Announcements

Review of Photographs, 2019

Review of Photographs, 2019 Pearl A. McHaney Welty, Eudora. Photographs. Updated and expanded, UP of Mississippi, 2019, [i]-xlii, [1- 186] $50.1. Eudora Welty's Photographs, updated and expanded with digital scans of the negatives and archival prints and a new, additional foreword by Natasha Trethewey, arrives on the thirtieth anniversary of the 1989 volume of the same title.2 Eighty years old at the time of original publication, Welty contributed to the selection and captioning of the photographs. During the preceding two decades, Welty had been nationally celebrated with a Book-of-the-Month Club novel (Losing Battles), a Pulitzer Prize (The Optimist's Daughter), a best-selling autobiography (One Writer's Beginnings), awards from Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Regan, more than thirty honorary doctorates, and several lifetime achievement awards. She was highly regarded, a recognizable powerhouse, but Welty's One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression: A Snapshot Album (Random House 1971) had been largely eclipsed by her prose.3 The coffee-table-worthy volume of 100 photographs, with its foreword by Reynolds Price, well-known author and Welty's friend, and an extended interview by Hunter Cole, marketing director for the University Press of Mississippi and Welty's friend, and Seetha Srinivasan, director of the press, was reviewed and recommended in more than twenty publications within six months of its launch. The interview and four photographs were reprinted in the New York Times Book Review beginning on page one and concluding on pages thirty to thirty- three (22 October 1989). Photographs, 20194 greets readers with different front- and back-dustjacket photographs than for the first edition. On the cover, "Jackson / 1930s"—a woman dressed in coat, hat, and gloves (who is given an interior life by Trethewey in her foreword essay "That's Just the Way It Was")—is enlarged from the 3 x 4-inch Recomar shot to show perhaps two-thirds of the portrait that can be seen in full in plate 8. The woman looks back at the photographer, and consequently the viewers of Photographs, as did the woman on the swing seen on the 1989 volume (plate 15 here). On the back cover is "Front yard / Yazoo County / 1930s" (plate 63), one of Welty's earliest photographs [End Page 11] taken with her Kodak camera (2 ½ x 4 ¼ inch photos), replacing a slightly cropped portrait "Delegate / Jackson / 1938" and a statement by Welty drawn from the interview. Now, excerpts from Trethewey's foreword and a collage of quotations from the New York Times' 1989 review including a quotation from Reynolds Price speak out below "Front yard." In addition to the new foreword, two other pieces of prose situate this new edition of Photographs. First, at the top of the inside front flap of the dust-jacket, is a comment by native Mississippi photographer Maude Schuyler Clay (Delta Land Photography, 1999, and Mississippi History, 2015, which was begun in 1975 with Clay's first Rolleiflex camera). Much as many fiction writers claim that reading Welty gave them the permission to tell their own stories, Clay cites Welty acknowledging that she was "well-positioned" to take her photographs because she "was a part of [the scene], born into it, taken for granted"5 and that Welty gave Clay "a framework for [her] own work." From 1971, first seeing Welty's visual work, to 1999, showing Welty her Delta Land photographs, to 2019, seeing Photographs in this new edition, Clay is particularly suited to introduce the new volume. In addition, Welty's May 1999 acknowledgements are here matched by those of Welty's niece Mary Alice Welty White, October 2018, thanking the University Press of Mississippi, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) and the Eudora Welty Collection responsible for the 1989 and 2019 Photographs. White gives special appreciation to Forrest Galey, Special Projects Officer in the Archives and Record Services Division of MDAH for her "meticulous care of each of the images," Suzanne Marrs (White's friend as well as Welty's), and her grandfather, Welty's father, "for introducing" Welty to the camera ([vii]). The 2019 updated and expanded edition is the fine result of the collaborative efforts of...