Friday's Literary Grab Bag

Vidal Consults The Dome

Gore Vidal is an irascible pug. He’s not a shabby writer, either. Throughout his long life he has hobnobbed with America’s best and brightest, as well as quite a few highfalutin international personalities. He is an opinionated man, happy to direct a quip toward writers, politics and movie stars. His signature volubility is on display in a recent interview with The Atlantic. Also today we have the world’s largest book, which documents the culture and history of Bhutan. The online portal Fictionaut, celebrated for its support of the short story, is praised in Media Bistro. Publishers Weekly announces the best books of 2009, Safran Foer talks about writing and complains about people who eat animals, Hemingway’s Cuban papers are coming to the JFK Museum, and Marianne Moore, along with a host of other highly regarded 20th century poets, go ’round the table on Silliman’s Blog. Read on, it’s candy for the mind. — Kevin Murphy

– Our conversation ranged widely, covering everything from Ted Kennedy, to the Polanski scandal, to the sexual exploits of Bill Clinton, and the relative merits of Obama vs. Hillary. Throughout, Vidal’s devastating trademark wit was much in evidence, as was an impressive ability to perform dead-on imitations of JFK and Eleanor Roosevelt. — Gore Vidal in The Atlantic

– Today we interviewed Jürgen Fauth, a German ex-pat who hopes to save the literary short story through his site, Fictionaut. What’s it boil down to? The Atlantic, when it had a vibrant short story section, sans everything but the short stories. — Fictionaut in Media Bistro

Bhutan Is Bigger Than Life

– Measuring more than 5 x 7 feet and weighing in at 133 pounds, Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom has been certified by Guinness World Records as the largest published book in the world. At this size, it may qualify for its own zip code. — Big Books in Book Patrol

– Publishers Weekly today names its top 10 books of 2009: Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science; Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply; Victor LaValle’s Big Machine; Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life; Neil Sheehan’s A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon; Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders; Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; David Grann’s The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon; Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft; and David Small’s Stitches: A Memoir. — Publishing in USA Today

– With his own diet, Foer practices what he calls “modified veganism.” That means, “I wouldn’t eat eggs or dairy at a place that I didn’t know where they came from. I would from the farmers market. I’m more [a vegan] than not, not as a rule, though,” he said. — Jonathan Safron Foer in the Daily Texan

Papa + Bottle + Cat = Cuba

– Despite the strained relations between the countries, the curators of the Kennedy library and the Castro regime have over the years found common ground, enough that the library announced this week that Cuba has shared copies of 3,000 letters and documents from the Hemingway archives at the country’s Ministry of Culture. — Hemingway in the Boston Globe

– I don’t think that Moore was the center of modernism any more than I do Olson or Oppen or Zukofsky or Stein. Each has a particular, and vital, role to play in the history of this period – which largely was over by the time I was born at the end of World War 2 (and well before Friedlander was born) – but which cannot responsibly be characterized as central. I do think that you could argue that Pound and/or Eliot was in fact central, particularly in the period between the start of the first & end of the second World Wars. Stevens, Williams, Crane, Frost all fall well outside that central (centering) dynamic – and the work of each is more interesting because of this, I think. Ditto Stein, ditto H.D., ditto Langston Hughes, ditto Marianne Moore. — Marianne Moore in Silliman’s Blog

Video: The Poetry of Marianne Moore

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