Irish writer Paul Lynch wins the Booker Prize for fiction with his dystopian novel ‘Prophet Song’
ByThe Associated Press
November 26, 2023, 5:04 PM
LONDON — Irish writer Paul Lynch wins the Booker Prize for fiction with his dystopian novel ‘Prophet Song.’
Irish writer Paul Lynch wins the Booker Prize for fiction with his dystopian novel ‘Prophet Song’
ByThe Associated Press
November 26, 2023, 5:04 PM
LONDON — Irish writer Paul Lynch wins the Booker Prize for fiction with his dystopian novel ‘Prophet Song.’
The winner of the Booker Prize for fiction will be announced on Sunday
ByThe Associated Press
November 26, 2023, 7:40 AM
From left, Irish author Paul Lynch, British author Chetna Maroo, American author Jonathan Escoffery, Canadian author Sarah Bernstein, Irish author Paul Murray and American author Paul Harding pose with their books during a photocall for the Booker Prize 2023, in London, Thursday, Nov. 23, 2023 ahead of the award ceremony on Nov. 26 in London. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)
The Associated Press
LONDON — The winner of the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction will be announced on Sunday. If bookmakers are right, the victorious writer will be named Paul.
Three of the six books competing for the 50,000 pound ($63,000) award are by authors of that name: American novelist Paul Harding’s historical novel “This Other Eden,” Irish writer Paul Lynch’s dystopian story “Prophet Song” and his compatriot Paul Murray’s tragicomic family saga “The Bee Sting.”
The other finalists are Canadian author Sarah Bernstein’s “Study for Obedience,” U.S. writer Jonathan Escoffery’s “If I Survive You” and British author Chetna Maroo’s “Western Lane.”
The winner will receive their trophy during a dinner ceremony in London. British bookmakers ranked Lynch as the favorite to win, followed by Harding and Murray, according to comparison website Oddspedia.
There have been two previous winners named Paul: Paul Scott in 1977 and Paul Beatty in 2016.
Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize is open to novels originally written in English from any country and published in the U.K. and Ireland. It has a reputation for transforming writers’ careers. Previous winners include Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Hilary Mantel.
A judging panel headed by Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan chose this year’s six finalists from 163 books entered for the prize.
Last year’s winner was Shehan Karunatilaka for “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida,” a satirical “afterlife noir” set during Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war.
Two years ago Emerald Fennell stood on the Oscars stage hoisting her writing trophy for “Promising Young Woman,” a scathing look at rape culture and a balancing act of wit, style, shock value, audacity, great acting and pitch-black humor — plus a timely #MeToo message.
That’s a lot for a debut film, and we didn’t even mention the best director nomination. Not surprisingly, anticipation has been hot for the writer-director’s next effort (as an actor, she’s already graced a little film this year called “Barbie,” in the suitably dark role of pregnant, discontinued Midge).
Now “Saltburn” is here, and the results are enticing but decidedly mixed — perhaps because Fennell seems to be trying to one-up herself by leaning on the shock value, at the eventual expense of other storytelling elements.
Make no mistake, the clever writing is here, as is the style, the sleek technique, and some terrific performances (Rosamund Pike is especially delicious in a supporting role). What’s missing, or muddled, is the message — and perhaps even more, the heart. After two hours of cringing and gasping in both awe and discomfort, we’re left admiring the “how” of what she’s doing but still figuring out the “why.”
One thing that’s not lacking: beauty. Unsurprisingly, Fennell excels at lush production values, especially in presenting the imposing, seductive and somewhat debauched Saltburn — no, not a person, but a country manor! This is England, and a story of class dynamics, so it’s surely fitting that the star be a piece of real estate. (And let’s just say, the phrase “real estate porn” takes on an added dimension here.)
We start, though, at Oxford. Here we meet our main character, Oliver Quick (and if that doesn’t take you straight back to Dickens, nothing will). It’s 2006, and Oliver (Barry Keoghan, ever-watchable and unpredictable) is a freshman on scholarship, feeling out of his league. At his first tutorial, he announces he read all 50 books on the summer reading list. His bemused teacher tells him nobody does that.
Oliver soon learns that life at Oxford isn’t about what you’ve read, but who you know. In the Hogwarts-style dining hall, he can barely find someone to sit with — only a needy mathematics major. He has no earthly connection to the rest of the privileged, entitled (and in some cases, titled) student body, but aches to fit in.
And then aristocratic golden boy Felix appears, like a Greek god. Played by Jacob Elordi, currently appearing as Elvis in “Priscilla,” Felix is gorgeous and effortlessly rakish; he seems to have never encountered hardship. Unless you count a flat tire on his bike, which is how Oliver meets him, lending his own bike so Felix can get to class.
The two become friends. It’s obvious what’s in it for Oliver, but what’s in it for Felix? That’s less clear, but Oliver’s home life has been hard. So, when Oliver tells Felix a tragedy has occurred involving his drug-addicted parents, Felix invites him to spend the summer at his family palace, er, home.
The family includes Felix’s beautiful but unstable sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver), his comically out-of-touch father, Sir James (Richard E. Grant, very funny), and the terrifically droll Pike as Elspeth, Felix’s glamorous, clueless mother. Also spending the summer is cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe, excellent) a Saltburn outsider himself — American-born, a person of color — but compared to Oliver an insider, which is crucial. The great Carey Mulligan, Oscar-nominated for “Promising Young Woman,” has a welcome cameo as an unwelcome guest.
The early Saltburn days are intoxicating. Felix points out the various Rubens portraits, the original Shakespeare folios, that sort of thing. Days are spent lounging languidly on the lawn by the mossy pond. Dinner is black tie, so Oliver needs a loaner jacket and cufflinks. These people even play tennis in tuxes.
Then the really crazy stuff starts happening.
And we mean Fennell-level crazy. In “Promising Young Woman” there was a slow burn to the shocking, graphic ending. Here, the shocks come early. A few involve bodily fluids. Fennell knows how to startle the most jaded of film audiences — guests at the screening I attended either gasped or giggled in embarrassment.
Fennell is also comfortable with the world she seeks to paint. Even if you didn’t know beforehand, it’s pretty clear from the vividly rendered Oxford scenes that the director attended Oxford herself, and her scenes of student life at that storied institution, seen through outsider Oliver, form the most authentic-feeling part of the film.
But how long will Oliver remain an outsider? Will this uncertain and complicated young man, who arrives at the Saltburn gates too early and too naive to have waited for the footmen to collect him at the station, ever fit in, something he covets above all else? That’s the question the rest of the movie answers, taking increasingly sinister twists and turns.
As if in a garden maze, perhaps? Like any self-respecting, spectacular period mansion, Saltburn has one of those, too, where some key action takes place. More broadly, though, the maze seems to symbolize the effect of this film: pretty, seductive, challenging, forbidding and ultimately confounding.
“Saltburn,” an Amazon/MGM Studios release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association “for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, language throughout, some disturbing violent content, and drug use.” Running time: 127 minutes. Two stars out of four.
LONDON — A book about a fire that ravaged a Canadian city and has been called a portent of climate chaos won Britain’s leading nonfiction book prize on Thursday.
John Vaillant’s “Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World” was awarded the 50,000 pound ($62,000) Baillie Gifford Prize at a ceremony in London.
The chair of the judging panel, Frederick Studemann, said the book tells “a terrifying story,” reading “almost like a thriller” with a “deep science backdrop.”
He called “Fire Weather,” which was also a U.S. National Book Award finalist, “an extraordinary and elegantly rendered account of a terrifying climate disaster that engulfed a community and industry, underscoring our toxic relationship with fossil fuels.”
Vaillant, based in British Columbia, recounts how a huge wildfire engulfed the oil city of Fort McMurray in 2016. The blaze, which burned for months, drove 90,000 people from their homes, destroyed 2,400 buildings and disrupted work at Alberta’s lucrative polluting oil sands.
Vaillant said the lesson he took from the inferno was that “fire is different now, and we’ve made it different” through human-driven climate change.
He said the day the fire broke out in early May, it was 33 Celsius (91.4 Fahrenheit) in Fort McMurray, which is about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) south of the Arctic Circle. Humidity was a bone-dry 11%.
“You have to go to Death Valley in July to get 11% humidity,” Vaillant told The Associated Press. “Now transpose those conditions to the boreal forest, which is already flammable. To a petroleum town, which is basically built from petroleum products -– from the vinyl siding to the tar shingles to the rubber tires to the gas grills. … So those houses burned like a refinery.”
Vaillant said the fire produced radiant heat of 500 Celsius — “hotter than Venus.”
Canada has experienced many devastating fires since 2016. The country endured its worst wildfire season on record this year, with blazes destroying huge swaths of northern forest and blanketing much of Canada and the U.S. in haze.
“That has grave implications for our future,” Vaillant said. “Canadians are forest people, and the forest is starting to mean something different now. Summer is starting to mean something different now. That’s profound, It’s like a sci-fi story -– when summer became an enemy.”
Founded in 1999, the prize recognizes English-language books from any country in current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. It has been credited with bringing an eclectic slate of fact-based books to a wider audience.
Vaillant beat five other finalists including best-selling American author David Grann’s seafaring yarn “The Wager” and physician-writer Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “The Song of the Cell.”
Sponsor Baillie Gifford, an investment firm, has faced protests from environmental groups over its investments in fossil fuel businesses. Last year’s prize winner, Katherine Rundell, gave her prize money for “Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne” to a conservation charity.
The judges said neither the sponsor nor criticism of it influenced their deliberations.
Historian Ruth Scurr, who was on the panel, said she did not feel “compromised” as a judge of the prize.
“I have no qualms at all about being an independent judge on a book prize, and I am personally thrilled that the winner is going to draw attention to this subject,” she said.
NEW YORK — Justin Torres’ novel “Blackouts,” a daring and illustrated narrative that blends history and imagination in its recounting of a censored study of gay sexuality, has won the National Book Award for fiction.
On Wednesday night, the nonfiction prize was awarded to Ned Blackhawk’s “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History” and young people’s literature was won by Dan Santat’s “A First Time for Everything.” Craig Santos Perez’s “from incorporated territory (åmot),” the fifth work in his series about his native Guam, was cited for best poetry, and Stênio Gardel’s “The Words That Remain,” translated from Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato, won for literature in translation.
Torres, whose book imagines a conversation between a dying man and the young friend he educates about a real history called “Sex Variants,” gave a brief acceptance speech before he was joined by more than a dozen nominees who gathered to present a statement about the Israel-Hamas war. Read by fiction nominee Aaliyah Bilal, the statement condemned the “ongoing bombardment of Gaza,” antisemitism, anti-Palestinian sentiments and Islamophobia and called for a humanitarian cease-fire. The authors received a standing ovation after Bilal finished.
One sponsor, Zibby Media, had withdrawn support out of concerns the statement might be antisemitic and anti-Israel.
Oprah Winfrey gave an emotional keynote address during the dinner ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street, and honorary medals were presented to poet Rita Dove and to Paul Yamazaki, a longtime bookseller at San Francisco’s famed City Lights store.
Winners in the five competitive categories each received $10,000.
The night’s unofficial themes were self-expression, voices silenced and raised and the way literature can, as Dove described it, summon the voice of our “unarticulated disturbances.”
The National Books Awards are a tribute to words and the right to read, as embodied this year by event host LeVar Burton and Winfrey. Burton, a longtime champion of reading, marveled that he and Winfrey, both descended from enslaved people, could become “symbols for literacy, literature and the written word.”
Winfrey, seated during dinner between book club choices Jesmyn Ward and Abraham Verghese, became tearful as she spoke of her lifelong passion for words and reverence for authors. She quoted from such favored works as Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” and Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead” and condemned those who ban books, calling censorship an act of isolating people into “soulless echo chambers.”
Books, Winfrey said, should be within reach “of everyone to choose for themselves.”
Hundreds attended the National Books Awards, raising more than $1 million for the National Book Foundation, which oversees the event and provides a wide range of public and educational programs. Booksellers and others judge panels of writers and select awards finalists and winners of the competitive categories, for which publishers submitted a total of more than 1,900 works.
The National Book Awards also are a literary celebration that often overlaps with current events, whether the election of former President Donald Trump, a prime topic at the 2016 ceremony, or the badges of support some wore last year for striking workers at HarperCollins Publishers.
Wednesday’s original host, Drew Barrymore, was dropped in September by the book foundation after she renewed the taping of her talk show while Hollywood writers were still on strike. Zibby Media and Book of the Month both declined to attend the ceremony, although only Zibby withheld its financial backing, according to the book foundation. The decision came before Zibby Media could be removed from the program guide, which listed the company as a “bronze” donor, between $25,000 and $49,000.
A full-page ad from Zibby appeared in the guide, opposite a full-page ad from Simon & Schuster for Bilal’s story collection “Temple Folk.”
Many of the winners spoke of using books to demonstrate and champion their own communities, whether the Native Americans in Blackhawk’s work of history or the Pacific Islanders of Perez’s poetry.
The fiction nominees were themselves a kind of collective statement, dramatizing those overlooked or oppressed, whether the brutalized prisoners of Nana Kwame’s Adjei-Brenyah’s “Chain Gang All-Stars: A Novel,” the Nation of Islam members in “Temple Folk” or the Maine island devastated by racist theories in Paul Harding’s “This Other Eden.”
Nominee Hanna Pylväinen, whose work “The End of Drum-Time: A Novel” focuses in part on the Indigenous Sami of 19th century Scandinavia, says one of the purposes of fiction is showing that “no matter what the community” we could “be any one of those people and that we can see how those people got to be where they were in their lives.”
Winfrey, in her speech, said books were a path to helping us relate to people we otherwise “have nothing in common with.” She then quoted the late Toni Morrison: “The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
Benjamin Taylor has a thing for Willa Cather. This year, the 150th anniversary of her birth, he has written a passionate love letter to her in the form of a brief but illuminating biography. “Chasing Bright Medusas” clocks in at just over 150 pages but it offers a fine introduction to one of the leading novelists of the American frontier.
Taylor, a prize-winning author who also penned short books about Philip Roth and Marcel Proust, argues that Cather’s move at age 9 from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to Red Cloud, Nebraska, where for the first time she encountered Jews, Norwegians, Mexicans and immigrants of all kinds, was a foundational event that “made her a cosmopolitan while she was still a provincial.”
He also demonstrates how, as she matured as a writer, she differed sharply from her younger contemporaries in the literary world, including Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Dos Passos, in her “unironic” idealism about America’s possibility.
His other major themes include her complicated relationship to both gender and religion. About the former, he agrees with other critics who have simply taken her strong preference for women as a given. But he adds another layer of complexity by asserting that she preferred “to talk about love at its most exalted, above the reach of mere carnality… sexual nature is what she intends to rise above.”
As for religion, he explains how it was closely bound up with her profound reverence for nature, especially the “harsh beauty of the Southwest,” which “seemed to her the landscape of an inner life.” It was also part and parcel of her desire for literary immortality. “There is no God but one God and Art is his revealer,” Cather wrote to a friend when she was still in her early 20s. “That’s my creed and I’ll follow it to the end.”
Portraying her as a relatively late bloomer — she had a lengthy stint in journalism before she began writing fiction — Taylor repeatedly marvels at both her physical courage and stamina and her iron discipline as a writer. He cites with admiration what she once wrote to a friend: “If only I could nail up the front door and live in a mess, I could simply become a fountain pen and have done with it — a conduit for ink to run through.”
By marshaling judicious quotes from her letters as well as her short stories and novels, including such classics as “My Antonia” and “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” Taylor makes a case for Cather’s enduring place in the American literary canon.
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AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews
Author Sarah Bernstein has won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for her novel “Study for Obedience.”
ByThe Associated Press
November 13, 2023, 11:08 PM
A protestor holding a sign saying “SCOTIABANK FUNDS GENOCIDE” is escorted off the stage during the Scotiabank Giller Prize in Toronto, on Monday, Nov. 13, 2023. (AP Photo/Rob Gillies)
The Associated Press
TORONTO — Author Sarah Bernstein won the Scotiabank Giller Prize on Monday for her novel “Study for Obedience.”
The Montreal-born, Scotland-based author accepted the $100,000 award remotely from Scotland, where she had a baby just 10 days ago.
Her novel is about a young woman moving to the remote north where after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occur.
The 100,000 Canadian dollar ($72,000 U.S.) Giller prize honors the best in Canadian fiction. Past winners have included Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler and Alice Munro.
Just as Bernstein’s name was called at the gala, a protester interrupted the live telecast with anti-Israel war slogans, forcing organizers to repeat the announcement.
The celebrations were also interrupted early in the broadcast when several anti-Israel protesters jumped onstage.
The Giller was created in 1994 by late businessman Jack Rabinovitch in memory of his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller.
NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Britney Spears’ memoir “The Woman in Me” has sold 1.1 million copies in the U.S. alone through its first week.
“I poured my heart and soul into my memoir, and I am grateful to my fans and readers around the world for their unwavering support,” Spears said in a statement released Wednesday by Gallery Books, a division of Simon & Schuster.
The sales figures include pre-orders, print sales, e-books and audiobooks. “The Woman in Me,” released Oct. 24, has been praised by critics as a compelling account of her rise to global fame and her ongoing struggles, including the conservatorship that for years granted her father control of much of her life and her revelation that she had an abortion while dating Justin Timberlake more than 20 years ago.
On the day of publication, Spears posted on Instagram that her book had become “the highest selling celebrity memoir in history.” It is not, so far, even the highest selling memoir of 2023.
“The Woman in Me,” for which she did little publicity beyond Instagram, was the top seller of last week. But Prince Harry’s memoir “Spare,” which came out in January, sold 1.6 million U.S. copies in its first week.
Spears’ memoir helped give a strong boost to streams and sales across her music catalog, according to Luminate, a music and entertainment analytics company. In one day last week, from Monday to Tuesday, Spears’ catalog jumped 18.2% in on-demand streams, and 36.8% in album sales. The numbers continued to climb over the following days. According to Luminate, her U.S. streams increased 24% over the previous week — from 16 million to 19.8 million; her album sales were up 61.4% and digital sales 49%.
The audio edition of “The Woman in Me,” read by Oscar-nominated actor Michelle Williams, appears a key factor in the book’s initial popularity. Williams’ reading of “The Woman in Me” has been highly acclaimed, and according to Gallery, is the fastest selling audio release in the company’s history. The publisher did not immediately announce a specific audio sales figure.
According to Circana, which tracks around 85% of the print market, “The Woman in Me” sold just under 418,000 copies, far below first week Circana numbers for former President Barack Obama’s “A Promised Land” and former first lady Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” among other memoirs.
No nonfiction release approaches the scale of J.K. Rowling’s final Harry Potter book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” which came out in 2007 and sold more than 8 millions copies in its first 24 hours.
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AP Music Writer Maria Sherman contributed to this report.
LOS ANGELES — Willie starts with the words.
It’s one of the surprising revelations in Willie Nelson ‘s new book, “Energy Follows Thought: The Stories Behind My Songs,” an examination of the 90-year-old country legend and soon-to-be Rock & Roll Hall of Famer ‘s seven decades of songwriting.
While his guitar is practically an extension of his body at this point, he has always started the writing process by thinking up words rather than strumming chords. To him, it’s doing the hard part first.
“The melodies are easier to write than the words,” Nelson told The Associated Press in an interview ahead of Tuesday’s release of his book.
He does not, however, write those words down, not even on a napkin.
“I have a theory,” he said, “that if you can’t remember ’em, it probably wasn’t that good.”
Nelson actually started out as a poet of sorts. At age 6 in Depression-era Texas, he composed a verse in response to the looks he got when he picked his nose and got a nosebleed while standing in front of his church congregation.
“My poem was, ‘What are you looking at me for? I ain’t got nothin to say, if you don’t like the looks of me, look some other way,’” he recalled 84 years later. “That was the beginning.”
He started writing songs soon after.
When he became a superstar in middle age in the mid-1970s, Nelson would be best known for his dynamic live performances and his guitar and vocal stylings.
But as a young man in the 1950s and early ’60s, he was best known as one of the struggling songsmiths who spent their days and nights at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge in Nashville.
In 1961, three of his songs became hits for other artists: Billy Walker’s “Funny How Time Slips Away,” Faron Young’s “Hello Walls” and, most importantly, Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” a song that would become a signature for her and both a financial boon and an ego boost for him.
“Because Patsy liked it, I was poor no longer,” he writes in the book. “This particular ‘Crazy’ convinced me, at a time when I wasn’t a hundred percent sure of my writing talent, that I’d be crazy to stop writing.”
He would go on to make other writers’ songs his own in the same way. He didn’t write most of the biggest hits associated with him, which came in the 1970s and 80s: “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” “Always on My Mind.”
He almost seemed to retire from songwriting when fame finally came to him in the Outlaw Country era, enjoying the chance to record his favorite old standards or the compositions of hot young writers.
But he never stopped composing entirely. Director Sydney Pollack prodded him to write a new song for the 1980 Nelson-starring film “Honeysuckle Rose,” on which Pollack was an executive producer.
Nelson responded by writing — words first — “On The Road Again.”
Pollack was less than thrilled with the lyrics in isolation: “The life I love is makin’ music with my friends, and I can’t wait to get on the road again.”
But was pleased when he heard the chugging music that suggested a train, or a tour bus.
And Nelson would appreciate the nudge.
“Without knowing or trying, in a few little lines, I’d written the story of my life,” he says in the book.
But the songs did get fewer and farther between. More than performing, songwriting can be a young man’s game.
“I don’t write as much as I used to,” he told the AP. “The ideas don’t come that quick. I still write now and then.”
He did recently write the song that gives the name to his book, “Energy Follows Thought,” for his 2022 album, “A Beautiful Time.”
In it, Nelson and co-authors David Ritz and Mickey Raphael give brief backstories to 160 different songs he’s written through the years.
It wasn’t prompted by any great sense of reflection.
“Some of my business guys thought it would be a good thing to do,” Nelson said.
The year of his 90th birthday has been overloaded with events. He was feted by a fellow stars, including Neil Young and Snoop Dogg, in a two-night celebration at the Hollywood Bowl in the summer.
And on Friday, the same week the book is released, he’ll be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Last year, fellow country legend Dolly Parton got a spot in the hall, and had mixed feelings about whether she belonged, even turning down the honor at first.
But Nelson, whose whole body of work has been built on ignoring the lines between genres, has no such problem.
“You can get rock ‘n’ roll in country, rock and roll in any kind of music,” he said.
NEW YORK — Robert Brustein, a giant in the theatrical world as critic, playwright, crusader for artistic integrity and founder of two of the leading regional theaters in the country, has died. He was 96.
Brustein died on Sunday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, according to an emailed statement from Gideon Lester, the artistic director and chief executive of the Fisher Center at Bard University and a decades’ long family friend. Lester said he heard the news from Brustein’s his wife, Doreen Beinart.
Known as a passionate and provocative theater advocate who pushed for boundary-breaking works and for classics to be adventurously modernized, Brustein founded both the Yale Repertory Theatre and the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard.
Some of the works he championed upset critics and playgoers unused to nontraditional productions, but he was unapologetic. “I know I’m out of step,” he told The New York Times in 2001. “I’m so out of step I’m almost in step.”
Even in his 80s, Brustein continued offering his opinions on everything from art to politics, lashing out at the Tea Party and describing the pain of breaking ribs on his own blog. He was a distinguished scholar in residence at Suffolk University, a professor of English emeritus at Harvard University and longtime critic at The New Republic.
Born in New York City, Brustein earned a bachelor’s from Amherst and a master’s and Ph.D. from Columbia. A Fulbright scholar, he taught at Cornell, Vassar and Columbia, where he taught drama. He was dean of the Yale School of Drama from 1966-1979 and during that time founded the Yale Repertory Theatre.
Yale Rep, a champion of new work, has produced several Pulitzer Prize winners and nominated finalists. Many of its productions have advanced to Broadway and together have garnered 10 Tony Awards and more than 40 nominations.
“The goal is to try and have people in the audience take away something that lasts and will haunt them, be it either a subject for debate or of their dreams,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1997. “They’ll have an unresolved experience.”
After a painful, highly publicized dismissal from Yale, Brustein in 1979 switched to Harvard, where he taught English and founded the American Repertory Theatre in 1980. Then in 1987, he founded the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training, a two-year graduate program. He retired as artistic director from A.R.T. in 2002 but continued serving as its founding director.
A.R.T. has grown into one of the country’s most celebrated theaters and the winner of numerous awards, including the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 2003, it was named one of the top three regional theaters in the country by Time magazine.
Over the course of his long career as director, playwright, and teacher, Brustein aided the artistic development of such theater artists as Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken, Cherry Jones, Sigourney Weaver, James Naughton, James Lapine, Tony Shalhoub, Linda Lavin, Adam Rapp, William Ivey Long, Steve Zahn, Wendy Wasserstein, David Mamet and Peter Sellars.
At both Yale Rep and A.R.T., Brustein told The Boston Globe in 2012, he embraced popular theater with a nationalistic streak: “We were trying to liberate American theater from its British overseers. We were trying to find an American style for the classics,” he said.
“I was looking for the energies of popular theater applied to traditional work. I was also looking for new American plays. This was a very important function of ours, to encourage and develop new American playwrights.”
Brustein’s own full-length plays include “Demons,” “The Face Life” and “Spring Forward, Fall Back” and “Nobody Dies on Friday,” based on the real-life relationship between Lee Strasberg and his student Marilyn Monroe.
His work has been produced at the Vineyard Playhouse on Martha’s Vineyard, at Theater J in Washington, D.C., and the Abington Theatre in New York. “Playwriting is not so much a craft as an obsession,” he once observed.
His trilogy on the life and work of William Shakespeare includes “The English Channel,” which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; “Mortal Terror”; and “The Last Will,” a witty play which takes place inside a tavern on the eve of Shakespeare’s theater career and presents the young poet as an intellectual kleptomaniac. Brustein published his first book on Shakespeare, “The Tainted Muse: Prejudice and Presumption in Shakespeare and His Time,” in 2009.
Brustein was a staunch believer that theater should be first and foremost an art form, not just a political platform. He once criticized the African-American playwright August Wilson for declaring that Black people should not participate in colorblind casting but should form their own separatist companies. The pair then aired their differences in 1997 in a high-profile confrontation at New York’s Town Hall.
Brustein, a tall man with a deep voice, also wrote “Shlemiel the First,” based on the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer and set to traditional klezmer music. The light, absurd comedy, which gently mocks the lavishness of other musicals, premiered in 1994 at the American Repertory Theatre and was close to making it to Broadway. It was revived in 2011 by Theatre for a New Audience.
“I think the greatest theater is that which combines the low and the high,” he told the Globe. “One thing I can’t stand is the middle.”
His short plays include “Poker Face,” “Chekhov on Ice” and “Airport Hell.” His other books include “Revolution as Theatre,” “Letters to a Young Actor” and multiple volumes of his essays and criticism.
He won multiple honors, including the George Polk Award for Journalism and an award for distinguished service to the arts from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was also inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame. In 2010, he was awarded the Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama at the White House and hailed as “a leading force in the development of theater and theater artists in the United States.”
He is survived by his wife, who ran the human rights film program at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government; and a son, Daniel. His first wife, the actress Norma Brustein, died just after he was let go from Yale.
Brustein was asked in 2012 what he thought of the current state of American theater and said tickets were too expensive and the work often failed to find a deep resonance.
“I love entertainment, but entertainment has got to be a serious effort to investigate the American soul through its theater. Novelists understand this, poets understand this, and for a while the playwrights really understood it,” he told the Globe. “We don’t have that anymore. And if we do, it’s not making it on the stage.
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Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits
NEW YORK — On the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio, rare originals are being displayed and publishers are offering collectors editions of Shakespeare’s plays, including one that sells for $1,500.
Scholars believe that between 200-300 copies still survive from the late 1623 release of “Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.” Presided over by two friends and former colleagues of Shakespeare, who had died in 1616, the Folio ensured that lasting texts existed for “Macbeth,” “Twelfth Night” and other cornerstones of Western literature. In Shakespeare’s lifetime, many of his works were unpublished or available only in cheap paperback editions.
“Without the First Folio we would have lost a world of words,” Gregory Doran, artistic director emeritus of the Royal Shakespeare Company, writes in the introduction to “The Complete Plays” of Shakespeare, a new publication.
First folios have been on exhibit everywhere from the British Museum to the New York Public Library and at least two major book projects will mark the anniversary.
The British Library is collaborating with Rizzoli Books in New York on “Shakespeare’s First Folio: 400th Anniversary Facsimile Edition,” contained within a slipcase cover. With a list price of $135, the book is 928 pages and includes an introductory booklet co-written by Adrian Edwards, head curator of the British Library’s Printed Heritage Collections.
The most ambitious, and exclusive project, is “The Complete Plays,” a limited edition from the Folio Society, an employee-owned company in London that puts out customized volumes ranging from “Beowulf” to George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series. The Society has printed just 1,000 copies of the 3-volume box set, with a list price of $1,500. Besides Doran’s introduction, the Folio Society release includes a foreword by Dame Judi Dench. Each set is hand-numbered by illustrator Neil Packer.
More than three-quarters of “The Complete Plays” have already sold, according to the publisher.
“In an era when everything seems disposable, I feel like there’s a good market for fine editions of classic books,” says Folio Society publishing director Tom Walker.
The First Folio was daring, even audacious for its time, when such publications were “reserved for learned treatises, hefty genealogical texts, books of religious or historiographical importance, or even works by monarchs,” according to Shakespeare scholar Chris Laoutaris. Before Shakespeare the only playwright known to have been so honored was his contemporary Ben Jonson, who honored himself by overseeing “The Workes of Benjamin Jonson” in 1616. While the British Museum edition is relatively affordable, the Folio Society’s production is closer to the intended market for the original release.
“Only those with deep pockets, and the space to read them, could afford such luxurious products,” says Laoutaris, an associate professor at the Shakespeare Institute in the playwright’s native Stratford-On-Avon and author of “Shakespeare’s Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the Fist Folio,” which came out this year. “When it was released, the First Folio cost more to produce than any other collection of plays in history up until that point.”
The Folio proved successful enough that an updated edition, the Second Folio, was published in 1632, a Third Folio in 1663 and a fourth in 1685. By the 19th century, the original Folio was becoming a valued piece of history, in part through the efforts of collectors Henry and Emily Folger, and a symbol of might for the British Empire. Sir George Grey, who had served as a colonial governor, established libraries worldwide that included copies of the First Folio.
“For Grey, the First Folio represented the pinnacle of culture, but specifically English culture,” Laoutaris says. “He sought nothing less than the obliteration of the language and culture of the native populations in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, nurturing a desire to replace these with the English language and its literary products.”
The United States is home to more than half of all existing copies of the First Folio, followed by the United Kingdom and Japan, with handfuls of editions also existing in Germany, France, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand among other countries. For antiquarians, the First Folio is the greatest of prizes: One sold for $9.9 million in 2020. For scholars and countless admirers, the Folio is secondary to the plays themselves.
“Shakespeare’s stature, for the past 400 years, is a reflection of his plays’ staying power on the stage far more than their survival in a collected works,” says James Shapiro, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and author of several books on Shakespeare.
“You can buy a Ben Jonson folio for a few thousand dollars; a Shakespeare folio will cost you millions. The reason for this simple: the remarkable afterlife of his comedies, histories, and tragedies in theaters throughout the world.”
A Milwaukee comic book shop is looking to sell a rare copy of the first appearance of Spider-Man
ByThe Associated Press
October 23, 2023, 9:30 AM
MILWAUKEE — A Milwaukee comic book shop is looking to sell a rare copy of the first appearance of Spider-Man.
Collector’s Edge has acquired a copy of Amazing Fantasy No. 15, the Journal Sentinel reported. The comic book, written by Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee and published in 1962, tells the story of how Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider, gained amazing powers and learns that with great power comes great responsibility.
The shop’s owner, Steve Dobrzynski, first posted photos of the book on social media last Tuesday. He told the Journal Sentinel a couple found the book among a dead relative’s possessions and brought it to him for help selling it. He did not name the couple.
A near-perfect copy of Amazing Fantasy No. 15 sold for $3.6 million at auction in Texas in 2021. The Collector’s Edge copy is worn and the edges have small tears.
Dobrzynski sent it to the Certified Guaranty Company, a Florida-based comics and collectibles grading service. The service rated the book at 3.0 on a scale of 0.5 to 10, with 0.5 being very bad condition and 10 being perfect condition. Dobrzynski said the book could fetch as much as $35,000.
“It depends, if you put it up at auction, who’s bidding on it,” he said. “If nobody’s bidding on it, it’s obviously going to sell for a bit less.”
Dobrzynski contacted some regular customers to give them a shot at buying the book before making it public, but he hasn’t gotten a yes or no from any of them yet.
“They’re thinking about it, but I can only wait so long for people to think about it,” Dobrzynski said. “If I’m selling it for someone else, my due diligence is to try to get the best possible price I can.”
A Milwaukee comic book shop is looking to sell a rare copy of the first appearance of Spider-Man
ByThe Associated Press
October 23, 2023, 9:30 AM
MILWAUKEE — A Milwaukee comic book shop is looking to sell a rare copy of the first appearance of Spider-Man.
Collector’s Edge has acquired a copy of Amazing Fantasy No. 15, the Journal Sentinel reported. The comic book, written by Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee and published in 1962, tells the story of how Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider, gained amazing powers and learns that with great power comes great responsibility.
The shop’s owner, Steve Dobrzynski, first posted photos of the book on social media last Tuesday. He told the Journal Sentinel a couple found the book among a dead relative’s possessions and brought it to him for help selling it. He did not name the couple.
A near-perfect copy of Amazing Fantasy No. 15 sold for $3.6 million at auction in Texas in 2021. The Collector’s Edge copy is worn and the edges have small tears.
Dobrzynski sent it to the Certified Guaranty Company, a Florida-based comics and collectibles grading service. The service rated the book at 3.0 on a scale of 0.5 to 10, with 0.5 being very bad condition and 10 being perfect condition. Dobrzynski said the book could fetch as much as $35,000.
“It depends, if you put it up at auction, who’s bidding on it,” he said. “If nobody’s bidding on it, it’s obviously going to sell for a bit less.”
Dobrzynski contacted some regular customers to give them a shot at buying the book before making it public, but he hasn’t gotten a yes or no from any of them yet.
“They’re thinking about it, but I can only wait so long for people to think about it,” Dobrzynski said. “If I’m selling it for someone else, my due diligence is to try to get the best possible price I can.”
Author Salman Rushdie called for the unconditional defense of freedom of expression as he received a prestigious German prize
ByThe Associated Press
October 22, 2023, 8:23 AM
Author Salman Rushdie acknowledges applause as he receives the Peace Prize of the German book trade (Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels) during a ceremony at the Church of St. Paul in Frankfurt, Germany, Sunday, Oct. 22, 2023. Rushdie called for the unconditional defense of freedom of expression as he received a prestigious German prize that recognizes his literary work and his resolve in the face of constant danger. (Kai Pfaffenbach/Pool Photo via AP)
The Associated Press
BERLIN — Author Salman Rushdie called Sunday for the unconditional defense of freedom of expression as he received a prestigious German prize that recognizes his literary work and his resolve in the face of constant danger.
The British-American author decried the current age as a time when freedom of expression is under attack by all sides, including from authoritarian and populist voices, according to the German news agency dpa.
He made his remarks during a ceremony in St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt, where he was honored with the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for continuing to write despite enduring decades of threats and violence.
In August 2022, Rushdie was stabbed repeatedly while on stage at a literary festival in New York state.
Rushdie has a memoir coming out about the attack that left him blind in his right eye and with a damaged left hand. “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” will be released on April 16. He called it a way “to answer violence with art.”
The German prize, which is endowed with 25,000 euros ($26,500), has been awarded since 1950. The German jury said earlier this year that it would honor Rushdie “for his resolve, his positive attitude to life and for the fact that he enriches the world with his pleasure in narrating.”
Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had condemned passages referring to the Prophet Muhammad in Rushdie’s 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses” as blasphemous. Khomeini issued a decree the following year calling for Rushdie’s death, forcing the author into hiding, although he had been traveling freely for years before last summer’s stabbing.
OVIEDO, Spain — For Japanese author Haruki Murakami, the bloody conflict in the Gaza Strip is a horrendous example of how our world is divided by walls, both physical and metaphorical.
But while admitting he can only pray for peace now, he also feels confident that fiction, rather than offering an escape, can help us understand, and survive, increasingly perilous times.
“I have Jewish friends in Israel. And I’m also aware that the Palestinian situation that I saw when I visited Israel is miserable,” Murakami told The Associated Press in an interview. “So all I can say is to pray so that peace will prevail as soon as possible. I cannot say which (side) is right or wrong.”
The clash between Israel and the Hamas militant group has resonated with the title of Murakami’s newest novel “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” which was published in Japanese this year and has yet to be translated into English.
“In my novels, walls are real walls. But of course they are also metaphoric walls at the same time,” the 74-year-old writer said. “For me, walls are very meaningful things. I’m a bit claustrophobic. If I’m locked up in a cramped space I may have a mild panic. So I often think about walls.”
“When I visited Berlin, the wall was still there. “When I visited Israel and saw that 6-meter-high (19.7-foot-high) wall, I was kind of terrified,” he added.
Murakami spoke to the AP this week before he received Spain’s Princess of Asturias prize for literature in the northern Spanish city of Oviedo. Friday’s gala will be presided over by Princess Leonor de Borbón, the heir to Spain’s King Felipe VI. The 50,000-euro award ($52,900) is one of eight prizes covering the arts, communication, science and other areas that are handed out annually by the Princess of Asturias foundation.
The award’s jury highlighted Murakami’s “ability to reconcile Japanese tradition and the legacy of Western culture in an ambitious and innovative narrative.”
In his memoir on being a writer, “Novelist As a Vocation,” Murakami lays out his theory of “novelistic intelligence,” whereby writers, and readers, learn through fiction to avoid rash judgements and to accept — just like many of the protagonists in his novels and stories — that conclusive answers to real-life questions of love and loss are rarely found.
Reflecting on wisdom that is fostered by fiction, Murakami said that while journalism and breaking analysis of world events are necessary, “we also need metaphorical and slow information” to make sense of our reality, which is being quickly transformed by new technologies, while still riveted by apparently timeless religious and national conflicts.
“For instance, there is fake news. I think it is right to challenge that with fiction. I think that would be the power of novels,” he said. “Fake news has a slim chance of winning its fight against the truth. People who have acquired true stories can certainly see through lies.”
Murakami’s distinctive writing style, which combines an intimate narrative voice with surreal happenings navigated by vulnerable yet resilient protagonists, has won over millions of readers in Japan and around the globe. His novels, short-story collections and essays have sold millions of copies and been translated into over 40 languages.
Murakami’s 1987 novel “Norwegian Wood,” which took a more realistic approach to a story of reminiscing on young love, turned him into a star in Japan. His other novels that have triumphed globally include the enigmatic “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” “Kafka on the Shore,” “After Dark” and “1Q84.”
His most recent short-story collection, “First Person Singular,” brings together tales about a talking monkey who steals names, a non-existent album by jazz musician Charlie Parker, and a yarn that features humorous yet moving poems on baseball, among others in another display of his wildly creative imagination.
Murakami has been considered for years one of the writers who could win the Nobel Prize for Literature. But it has yet to fall his way, often going to writers with smaller readerships, like this year’s winner, Norwegian Jon Fosse.
When asked if he minded being passed over, Murakami said he takes a stoic approach, only worrying about what is in his control: his own writing.
“Basically, I have a policy of not paying very much attention to prizes. It’s because (prizes) are decided based on someone else’s judgment. I’m interested in things in which I can make my own decisions,” he said. “So of course I’m honored to receive this (Princesa de Asturias) award, but it’s only a result. After all, the most wonderful thing is to be able to tell your own story.”
Murakami, who is an avid long-distance runner and has written about his need to be physically fit to endure long days tied to a desk, said he was still going strong despite his advanced age.
Currently, he is taking a break between books to recharge his creative batteries before delving into a new project.
“I’m already 74 years old, and I don’t know how many novels I can still write. So whatever I write, I will write it with great care,” he said.
And what if a digital “author” — a computer using artificial intelligence — were to challenge our monopoly on creative writing?
For Murakami, that won’t happen. His prodigious mind, he believes, still has the upper hand over any such copy since his convoluted stories only suggest meanings through the clouds of the unknown that surround his characters.
“When I’m writing a novel, my head is filled with bugs, but I still write novels using the brain,” he said. “If a computer was filled with as many bugs as I have, I think (it) would break down.”
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AP writer Mari Yamaguchi contributed to this report from Tokyo.
Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare has been awarded the Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor title by French President Emmanuel Macron
ByLLAZAR SEMINI Associated Press
October 16, 2023, 4:01 PM
FILE – Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare arrives at the Elysee Palace to receive the France’s Legion d’Honneur medal by French President Francois Hollande, in Paris, on May 30, 2016. Kadare was awarded the Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor title by French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday Oct. 16, 2023. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)
The Associated Press
TIRANA, Albania — Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare was awarded the Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor title by French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday.
Macron arrived in Tirana after a summit of European Union leaders with Western Balkan countries earlier in the day. He didn’t attend the talks because of the attack in which a teacher was fatally stabbed and three other people were wounded at a school in northern France.
In a long speech describing Kadare’s different novels throughout his writing career and how he had resisted Albania’s communist government, Macron awarded the title “for his works, his courage to rise up against a dictatorial system … and a defender of freedom, a great writer of humanity.”
Kadare, 87, has long been mentioned as a possible contender for the Nobel Literature Prize. He has been well-known internationally since his “The General of the Dead Army” novel was published in 1963 when Albania was governed by the communist government of late dictator Enver Hoxha.
Before Albania installed political pluralism after a students’ protest in December 1990, Kadare flew to France asking for political asylum. He lived in Paris and recently returned to Tirana.
France has made him a foreign associate of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and also Commander of the Legion of Honor.
Kadare has been awarded a number of international prizes for his works, which include more than 80 novels, plays, screenplays, poetry, essays or story collections translated into different languages.
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Follow Llazar Semini at https://twitter.com/lsemini
NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Nobel laureate Louise Glück, a poet of unblinking candor and perception who wove classical allusions, philosophical reveries, bittersweet memories and humorous asides into indelible portraits of a fallen and heartrending world, has died at 80.
Glück’s death was confirmed Friday by Jonathan Galassi, her editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Over more than 60 years of published work, Glück forged a narrative of trauma, disillusion, stasis and longing, spelled by moments — but only moments — of ecstasy and contentment. In awarding her the literature prize in 2020, the first time an American poet had been honored since T.S. Eliot in 1948, Nobel judges praised “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
Glück’s poems were often brief, a page or less in length, exemplars of her attachment to “the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence.” Influenced by Shakespeare, Greek mythology and Eliot among others, she questioned and at times dismissed outright the bonds of love and sex, what she called the “premise of union” in her most famous poem, “Mock Orange.” In some ways, life for Glück was like a troubled romance — fated for unhappiness, but meaningful because pain was our natural condition — and preferable to what she assumed would follow.
“The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last,” she once wrote.
In her poem “Summer,” the narrator addresses her husband and remembers “the days of our first happiness,” when everything seemed to have “ripened.”
Then the circles closed. Slowly the nights grew cool;
the pendant leaves of the willow
yellowed and fell. And in each of us began
a deep isolation, though we never spoke of this,
of the absence of regret.
We were artists again, my husband.
We could resume the journey.
Glück published more than a dozen books of poetry, along with essays and a brief prose fable, “Marigold and Rose.” She drew upon everything from Penelope’s weaving in “The Odyssey” to an unlikely muse, the Meadowlands sports complex, which inspired her to ask: “How could the Giants name/that place the Meadowlands? It has/about as much in common with a pasture/as would the inside of an oven.”
In 1993, she won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Wild Iris,” an exchange in part between a beleaguered gardener and a callous deity. “What is my heart to you/that you must break it over and over,” the gardener wonders. The god answers: “My poor inspired creation … You are/too little like me in the end/to please me.”
Her other books included the collections “The Seven Ages,“ ”The Triumph of Achilles,” “Vita Nova” and a highly acclaimed anthology, “Poems 1962-2012.” Besides winning the Pulitzer, she received the Bollingen Prize in 2001 for lifetime achievement and the National Book Award in 2014 for “Faithful and Virtuous Night.” She was the U.S. poet laureate in 2003-2004 and was awarded a National Humanities Medal in 2015 for her “decades of powerful lyric poetry that defies all attempts to label it definitively.”
Glück was married and divorced twice and had a son, Noah, with her second husband, John Darnow. She taught at several schools, including Stanford University and Yale University, and regarded her experiences in the classroom not as a distraction from her poetry, but as a “prescription for lassitude.” Students would remember her as demanding and inspiring, not above making someone cry, but also valued for guiding young people in search of their own voices.
“You would hand in something and Louise would find the one line that worked,” the poet Claudia Rankine, who studied under Glück at Williams College, told The Associated Press in 2020. “There was no place for the niceties of mediocrity, no false praise. When Louise speaks you believe her because she doesn’t hide inside of civility.”
A native of New York City who grew up on Long Island, New York, she was a descendant of Eastern European Jews and heir to an everyday creation not associated with poetry: Her father helped invent the X-Acto knife. Her mother, Glück would write, was the family’s “maid-of-all-work moral leader,” the one whose assessment of her stories and poems she looked to above all others. Glück was also the middle of three sisters, one of whom died before was she born, a tragedy she seemed to refer to in her poem “Parados.”
Long ago, I was wounded.
I learned
to exist, in reaction,
out of touch
with the world: I’ll tell you
what I meant to be –
a device that listened.
Not inert: still.
A piece of wood. A stone.
Describing herself as born to “bear witness,” Glück felt at home with the written word and regarded the English language as her gift, even her “inheritance.” But as a teenager, she was so intensely ambitious and self-critical that she waged war with her own body. She suffered from anorexia, dropped to 75 pounds (34 kilograms) and was terrorized by her mortality. Her life, creative and otherwise, was saved after she chose to see a psychoanalyst.
“Analysis taught me to think. Taught me to use my tendency to object to articulated ideas about my own ideas, taught me to use doubt, to examine my own own speech for its evasions and excisions,” she recalled during a 1989 lecture at the Guggenheim Museum. “The longer I withheld conclusion, the more I saw. I was learning, I believe, how to write, as well.”
Glück was too frail to become a full-time college student and instead sat in on classes at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, finding mentors in the poets-teachers Leonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz. By her mid-20s, she was publishing poems in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and other magazines.
Glück’s debut book, “Firstborn,” was published in 1968, and preceded a long stretch of writer’s block that ended while she was teaching at Goddard College in the early 1970s. She had once believed that poets should avoid academia, but found the engagement with Goddard students so enriching she began writing poetry again, work she regarded as well beyond the “rigid performances” of “Firstborn.” Out of her silence she discovered a new and more dynamic voice.
Her second book, “The House on Marshland,” came out in 1975 and is considered her critical breakthrough. But she continued to suffer years of what she called “brutal punitive blankness,” when she tried everything from gardening to listening to Sam Cooke records to break out. Subsequent books such as “The Wild Iris” and “Ararat” became testaments to personal and creative reinvention, as if her older books had been written by someone else.
“I’ve always had this sort of magical-thinking way of detesting my previous books as a way of pushing myself forward,” she told the Washington Square Review in 2015. “And I realized that I had this feeling of sneaking-up pride in accomplishment. Sometimes I would just stack my books together and think, ‘Wow, you haven’t wasted all your time.’ But then I was very afraid because it was a completely new sensation, that pride, and I thought, ‘Oh, this means really bad things.’”