Monday's Body of Work

Hello, Monday. Hello, computer and coffee and office. And hello readers. Today we have pages, pages and pages of literature news. Yes, Monday brings the blues. But it also provides the most comprehensive installment of articles and stories concerning the written word. So buck up, buttercup. We’ve got you covered. And Today’s Body of Work has wings. Take flight from the mundane, read instead about Martin Amis and his famous one-liners, about August Kleinzahler — arguably America’s finest living poet — basking in the sweet addiction of poetry, about the ongoing Salinger saga and Turkish literature finally crossing the divide. The Atlantic shows us how to be happy, even if Tent Cities are popping up all over the place, as explained in The Nation, and why not let these wings carry us once more to the land of John Updike, a place that inspires Julian Barnes to reflect, expel demons and rejoice. — Kevin Murphy

– Do you know about this new J.D. Salinger lawsuit? True: The number of people who lose sleep over Salinger’s strange saga may no longer be enormous, but he still has a cult following, and there are also those of us who—without being cultists—think he’s an important figure in American literature whose work (and whose subsequent 45-year-long nonpublishing silence) are both worth paying attention to. — J.D. Salinger in Slate

– “Where does Martin Amis’s narrative voice come from?” asks Neil Powell in Amis and Son. Not, he thinks, from dad, but – all too obviously – Holden Caulfield. “If you really want to know” hangs, like a career motto, over all Amis’s fiction. — Martin Amis in the Guardian

– Hearing of John Updike’s death in January of this year, I had two immediate, ordinary reactions. The first was a protest—”But I thought we had him for another ten years”; the second, a feeling of disappointment that Stockholm had never given him the nod. The latter was a wish for him, and for American literature, the former a wish for me, for us, for Updikeans around the world. — John Updike in the New York Review of Books

– Last fall, I spent about a month in the file room of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, hoping to learn the secrets of the good life. The project is one of the longest-running—and probably the most exhaustive—longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being in history. Begun in 1937 as a study of healthy, well-adjusted Harvard sophomores (all male), it has followed its subjects for more than 70 years. — Happiness in the Atlantic

– As early as 1989, dozens of homeless were pitching tents on the precise site of this year’s Tent City in Sacramento. They called their community, without irony, “Camp Hope.” Since then, other tent cities have sprung up there for a few weeks or months. It’s hardly an idyllic spot–no sanitary facilities, few trees, no shelter from the wind or rain–but it’s out of sight and a short walk to Loaves and Fishes, a nonprofit that provides free meals and other services. — Tales of Tent City in the Nation

– Now 59 and living in contented anonymity in San Francisco, Kleinzahler is one of the nation’s most accomplished poets. He recently won a $150,000 prize from the Lannan Foundation and the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry, the latter of which he shared with UC Riverside Professor Juan Felipe Herrera, the first time that two winners were selected in one category. — August Kleinzahler in the San Francisco Chronicle

Video of August Kleinzahler Reading The Tartar Swept