Earlier this week I had one of those unsettling moments where you realize there’s practically four months left to the year. Swooosh! The above quote is by American author and “master stylist” Eleanor Clark, who, I’ve just discovered, attended Vassar in the 1930s where she met (befriended?) only one of my top five writers of all time—Mary McCarthy. Eleanor was a National Book Award finalist and winner (for Rome and a Villa and The Oysters of Locmariaquer respectively), but the book of hers I’m most interested to read is Tamrart: 13 Days in the Sahara, presumably a travel memoir, that I can already tell is going to be annoyingly hard to find. I wonder if it’ll be anything like the sublime Desert Divers.
Speaking of annoyingly hard-to-find books, in case you missed it, last week a burglar was apprehended in Rome after he became engrossed in a book about Greek mythology on the bedside table of the home he’d entered. Giovanni Nucci, author of aforementioned book (which explains the Iliad from the perspective of the gods), was tickled enough to quip about Hermes being his own favourite among the Greek gods, “He is also the god of literature. It is clear: everything fits.”
When a band announces a tour:
This cover of a Japanese translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude:
Antizionist Abecedarian by Sam Sax
