Elizabeth Hand’s “A Haunting on the Hill” (Mulholland) is, the book jacket notes, “the first novel authorized to return to the world of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.” Authorized—by whom? Not by Jackson, who died in 1965, but by her heirs. “A Haunting on the Hill” is, therefore, a ghost story conjured by representatives of a deceased author’s estate. It all sounds a little uncanny.
Isn’t that the case, though, whenever we try to resurrect dead writers?
Jonathan Lethem had come back to Brooklyn, and I wanted to know why.
One afternoon a few months ago, he took me to Dean Street, the block in Boerum Hill where he grew up in the ’70s. The area is the setting of his 2003 book (and one of my favorite novels), The Fortress of Solitude, and of his new one, Brooklyn Crime Novel.
I was raised in Brooklyn too, some 15 years after Lethem, and he
Is there anything worse than a novel? Is there anyone more vain, more laughable, more exploitative yet morally self-serious than the novelist? Or, as the protagonist of Zadie Smith’s sixth novel puts it: “ ‘Oh what does it matter what that man thinks of anything? He’s a novelist!’ Without meaning to, she had spoken in the same tone with which one might say He’s a child.”
The American novelist Susan Taubes drowned herself off the coast of East Hampton in 1969 at the age of 41. She had suffered from severe depression for a long time, but many friends thought the proximate cause of her death was a savage New York Times review of Divorcing, the only one of her novels to be published in her lifetime. The review had come out just a few days earlier. The critic, Hugh Kenner, had dismissed the
In the early days of the pandemic, it became harder for us to see one another. The human face, the ultimate marker of individuality, what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called “the first disclosure,” was suddenly sheathed in fabric. Strangers encountered on the street were even stranger—and the masks that covered their visage became a screen on which to project anxious thoughts.
In August Blue, the South African–born, North London–based novelist Deborah Levy’s latest, a concert pianist named Elsa Anderson
In Sally Rooney’s “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” Marxism is demonstrated with a plastic-wrapped sandwich in a corner shop. In Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Mandarins,” it is used by argumentative newspaper editors at a Christmas party. But in Brigitte Reimann’s 1963 novel “Siblings” (Transit Books), newly translated into English by Lucy Jones after the uncensored manuscript was found by chance last spring, it is done in the coffee room of a coal-briquette factory. In 1959, the ruling Socialist Unity Party
At the beginning of Maylis de Kerangal’s novel “Painting Time,” which was published in French in 2018 and in English in 2021, the central character, Paula Karst, is having drinks with two former classmates from the Institut de Peinture, in Brussels. All working trompe-l’oeil painters, the trio are both jazzed and trepidatious about the reunion; the intensity of their training, almost ten years before, bonded them as friends and cemented them as competitors. (And, O.K., possibly as lovers.) Possessed by
To many, the cover is recognizable even at a distance: The lower half of a youthful, feminine face is darkened on one side by a purple shadow. The other cheek and jawline are lit up in neon pink. We don’t see the woman’s eyes, but her lips are pursed and painted red. They’re seductive—the focal point—but still more subtly set than any performative facial expression we
Romance fans can reside in the former home of novelist Dame Barbara Cartland as it goes on sale for £1million.
The stunning Grade ll listed property called River Cottage in Great Barford, Bedfordshire, features four bedrooms, two reception rooms, two bathrooms, a private mooring and an annexe.
Boasting a front door painted in Dame Cartland’s favourite colour pink, the thatched cottage is also to be awarded a classic heritage ‘blue plaque’ by the British Plaque Society to acknowledge that the
Victoria Hislop’s bestsellers, including The Sunrise, The Island and One August Night, have given readers incredible insight into Greece, and even led to the author being granted honorary Greek citizenship. Here, Victoria reveals her favourite haunts in Athens and the best places for a day trip out of the city.
Each year I spend a few months in Athens. I have an apartment in Kato Patissia, an area that makes my friends furrow their brows – think East London before
