The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Still making people mad.
Tobias Wolff speaks with Australia’s The Age (where his latest story collection, Our Story Begins, has just been published). He recalls the experience of reading galleys of his first novel, Ugly Rumours, a book he now disowns: “”I thought I had gotten way ahead of myself. I wasn’t smart enough to be Pynchon, but I liked the almost 19th century Dickensian layering of perspectives, the kind of wild sense of humour that Pynchon allows himself and the mingling of realism and urban myth and absurdity. Nothing is a waste of time for a writer, but this was not my medium.”
Penguin Classics is launching its African American Classics series with a collection of works by Charles W. Chesnutt. The Atlantic‘s Web site pointed to some of his work in January.
Scott Romine revisits Walter Hines Page‘s The Southerner. The 1909 novel has just been reissued by the University of South Carolina Press.
Lastly, if it’s true that we’re all not reading anymore, at least the book titles are still good for something: “If you decided to name your horses after classics in American literature, you could have horses named Red Badge Of Courage, Tender IsThe Night, The Last Tycoon, O Pioneers, Pudd’nhead Wilson, Absalom Absalom, A Moveable Feast, Travelswithcharley, Tortilla Flat and many others. I’ve just scratched the surface.”
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