When we published a new translation of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé last year, we celebrated with a live reading of the play that was covered by CNN. Joseph Donohue’s translation is now being staged at Villanova University, where it has received raves, one of which you may read online here.
Michael Lackey gave a preview of his forthcoming book, The Haverford Discussions, during a recent talk at Roosevelt University on the subject of race.
Alan G. James, editor of The Master, the Modern Major General, and His Clever Wife: Henry James’s Letters to Field Marshal Lord Wolseley and Lady Wolseley, 1878–1913, sent along the following piece about the genesis and various stages of the project. It is an excellent insider’s look at how a book originates that begins, “Twenty years ago or so I experienced a literary epiphany: I discovered Henry James.”
Any fans of the latest edition of Best New Poets who happen to be in the New York area should mark their calendars for two upcoming events. A number of BNP contributors will be reading from their work at 7:30 on January 7 at Bar 13 in Greenwich Village. On January 9 at 7:00 more BNP contributors will be reading at BookCourt in Brooklyn.
Rotunda, the electronic imprint of the University of Virginia Press, announces the release of its latest digital publication: Edited by Robert Whalen and Christopher Hodgkins, The Digital Temple is a complete edition of George Herbert’s 1633 masterpiece, The Temple.
Beginning in late 1966, John Steinbeck, roughly the age of the century, spent several months in Southeast Asia, covering the war in Vietnam for Newsday. His reports back home, published now in Steinbeck in Vietnam: Dispatches from the War, constitute the Nobel laureate’s final published work. Steinbeck’s reports took the form of letters to Alicia—a tribute to Alicia Guggenheim, the late publisher and editor of Newsday. In them, he applied his naturally superb eye to a scene that eluded comprehension, “a war not like any we have been involved in.” The Huffington Post has posted a typically eloquent, searching letter here. Positive reviews are in from Shelf Awareness, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus.
Steinbeck is most associated with Depression-era works such as The Grapes of Wrath. But, says Steinbeck in Vietnam editor Thomas Barden, “Steinbeck always wanted to be where the action was.” His reports were complicated by the fact that, despite his rather left-leaning past, Steinbeck was no dove. While not as important as Steinbeck’s novels, Barden feels these dispatches “have the spell-casting power of Steinbeck’s great works of fiction. They have his trademark immediacy and passion.”