Sean Horlor’s debut book of poetry, Made Beautiful by Use (Signature Editions), contains lines that must be read out loud. The line “cologne in glass bottles,” for example, is so simple; but say it, “cologne in glass bottles,” roll it around on your tongue, “cologne in glass bottles,” and it becomes a mantra.
While considering the list of writers interviewed for each volume of The Paris Review Interviews (Picador) I couldn’t help thinking: “What an amazing literary gathering that would have been!” For the launch of volume i we can imagine a New York penthouse where a jazz trio plays Gershwin out on the terrace; inside, Dorothy Parker and Truman Capote make catty remarks about Ernest Hemingway, while Billy Wilder and James M. Cain knock back highballs and reminisce about their days writing dialogue for Double Indemnity back in 1944.
In Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey (Douglas & McIntyre), Alberto Manguel gives us a biography of the two books that he feels have, “more than any others . . . fed the imagination of the Western world for over two and a half millennia.” Manguel recounts various theories on the origins of these epic poems, including Samuel Butler’s suggestion that Homer was “a young unmarried woman, and a native of Sicily.”
By Robert B. Strassler, ed.; Andrea L. Purvis, trans.
Reviewed by Michael Hayward
Those who have read Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (Vintage), and those who have seen the film version, will remember that the sole possession of the eponymous patient, Count László de Almásy, was a battered copy of Herodotus’s Histories, an 1890 edition that he had turned into a kind of commonplace book with the inclusion of “other fragments—maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books.”
As an avid long-distance cyclist who also loves to be pulled into a good adventure story, I could not resist Cioma Schönhaus’s book The Forger (Granta), a memoir that describes how Schönhaus lived in hiding in wartime Berlin while working clandestinely as a forger of identity cards.
“This mental mucus is driving me mad. The Japanese blow their noses on paper too.” Thus begins The Diary of Andrés Fava (Archipelago), Julio Cortázar’s novella first published in 1995 and now translated into English by Anne McLean.
A good essayist is at all times quizzical, and in Phantom Limb (Thistledown) Theresa Kishkan is better than good as she explores the complexity and magic of the natural world, extracting what is essential from the sacred as well as from the mundane.
In The Architects Are Here (Viking), Michael Winter revisits his fictional alter ego Gabriel English, who has previously appeared as a central figure in two short story collections and in This All Happened, Winter’s first novel (published in 2000).
