Writing and Writers

Why Our Monsters Talk to Michael Wolff

September 12, 2021 by Staff Reporter

I couldn’t write about these kind of blurred journalistic lines, of course, without disclosing my largely friendly relationship with Mr. Wolff. I first encountered him in 2009, when he profiled my then-employer, Politico, and wrote in passing that I was a “total dweeb” who was “the only one as interested in what his sources are doing as they themselves are.” I felt both insulted and pretty much seen.

After that, I sought him out for occasional career advice, which he gave generously. In 2014, he invited me to a dinner with executives at Uber, and neglected to ask me to agree that it was off the record. When I published one executive’s explosive suggestion to me that the company dig up dirt on the journalists who had been covering the company, Mr. Wolff, then a columnist for USA Today, blasted me in print as “a gotcha political blogger” who had grown “censorious and moralistic.” (Fair.) A couple of weeks later, he took further revenge by publishing an indiscreet comment I had made to him in private. I was furious. I also figured we were even. And when I was thinking last year about writing a book, I asked him how to do it. He told me, You start with a blank piece of paper, and on the top, you write the amount of money you want.

Mr. Wolff seems to be following his own advice as he cashes in on the success of “Fire and Fury” with his third book in four years. But he offers a scarce commodity in a media market that has moved away from his kind of journalism. A hot political environment has taught many reporters to see their work in moral, even didactic, terms. Magazine writers are out looking for heroes, not villains, and they appear to have little interest in understanding why our bad men do the things they do.

But monsters are fascinating. And Mr. Wolff “doesn’t have that sort of natural recoil to some of the more odious people in the world,” said Janice Min, his former editor at The Hollywood Reporter.

After we parted, he emailed me that he would prefer that his beat not be described as “elderly sex abusers.” It has simply turned out that the class of media moguls he covers “has turned out to, disproportionately, include many sex abusers,” he said.

That generation may, at last, be aging out, meaning Mr. Wolff risks running out of subjects. When I asked who will hold his interest in the years to come, he said he was “scouting the next generation” of powerful media figures.

“Too Famous” includes a few of them — Jared Kushner, Tucker Carlson and Ronan Farrow. And Mr. Carlson, for one, was happy to sit down with Mr. Wolff. “He is one of the last interesting people in American media,” Mr. Carlson texted me. “Anyone who doubts that should have lunch with him.”

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A Lost Brontë Library Surfaces

May 25, 2021 by Staff Reporter

The Honresfield Library took shape not far from the parsonage at the edge of the West Yorkshire moors, where Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their brother, Branwell (born between 1816 and 1820), grew up creating elaborate shared imaginary worlds. It was assembled starting in the 1890s by Alfred and William Law, two self-made mill owners who had grown up less than 20 miles from the Brontë home in Haworth (which is now the Brontë Parsonage Museum).

The Laws’ collection, held in the library at their home, Honresfield House, included what Heaton called “grand country-house books” like a Shakespeare First Folio (long since sold off). But the brothers, less typically, were also keen collectors of manuscripts, acquiring the Brontë cache from a dealer who had bought them directly from Charlotte’s widower. William, the more serious collector, also paid frequent visits to Haworth to buy family relics that had been saved by neighbors and relatives.

After the deaths of the brothers (who never married), the collection passed to a nephew, who granted access to select scholars, and had facsimiles made of some items. But after his death in 1939, the originals fell out of public view.

By the 1940s, the collection had become “well-nigh untraceable,” as one scholar put it at the time. In recent decades, some artifacts from the collection, like Charlotte’s writing desk (now at the Brontë Parsonage Museum), have come up for auction. But the whereabouts of the rest remained unclear.

“When I was first approached about this material, I thought, ‘Hang on — maybe it’s that collection?’” Heaton recalled. “To then go actually see it was quite a thrill.” (The sellers, who wish to remain anonymous, are family descendants of the Laws, he said.)

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Poets in Myanmar Are Killed After the Coup

May 25, 2021 by Staff Reporter

On March 4, his sister received a police summons to the Monywa mortuary. She identified her brother’s body, Ms. Khin Sandar Win said. A bullet hole punctured his left temple. A long slash ran down his torso.

The family wondered whether the gash signaled that his internal organs had been removed, a desecration increasingly found among those killed by the military in Myanmar. But Mr. Chan Thar Swe was cremated before his relatives could find out more.

His mother now spends her days looking at photographs of him, her oldest child, on Facebook. Along with his ashes, it is all she has of him.

“My brother did not support us financially because he was a poet, but he protected us whenever we needed,” Ms. Khin Sandar Win said.

At Mr. Chan Thar Swe’s funeral, another poet, Ko Khet Thi, recited a poem he had written for those killed by the security forces, many with a single bullet to the head and some when they were not even protesting.

They began to burn the poets

When the smoke of burned books could

No longer choke the lungs heavy with dissent.

Weeks after the funeral, Mr. Khet Thi, a onetime engineer, was hauled into detention and later turned up dead, according to his family. His corpse also had an unexplained incision down his torso, the family said.

“I am also afraid that I will get arrested and killed, but I will keep fighting,” said Ko Kyi Zaw Aye, yet another poet from Monywa who was close to both men.

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‘Selling the Family Jewels’: A James Joyce Landmark Is Set to Become a Hostel

May 11, 2021 by Staff Reporter

DUBLIN — James Joyce famously left his native Dublin at the age of 22 and then spent the rest of his life writing about the city, sending characters to wander its slums, back streets and faded 18th-century grandeur.

A century before search engines and online street views, the exiled Joyce would bombard Dublin-based friends with postcards and letters, checking every detail of the city’s micro-geography, every shop front and street number. Not long before his death in Zurich in 1941, he was asked whether he would ever go back to Dublin. His reply: “Have I ever left it?”

But if Joyce died in love with Dublin, does Dublin still love Joyce? Last month, despite vigorous opposition from prominent writers, artists, academics and heritage groups, Ireland’s planning authority approved a proposal to convert one of Dublin’s most iconic Joycean landmarks into a tourist hostel, dashing hopes that it could be preserved as a museum and cultural space.

18th-century townhouse at 15 Usher’s Island was the setting for “The Dead,” the final story in Joyce’s collection “Dubliners,” often cited as the greatest short story written in English. It is certainly more accessible to general readers than Joyce’s great trio of modernist novels — “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake.”

the detailed decision on its website. An agent for the two developers, Fergus McCabe and Brian Stynes, said they had no comment beyond what was stated in their planning application.

For many Dubliners, the decision to redevelop the literary landmark is symptomatic of a wider erasure of the city’s street life and townscape by commercial development.

report last month showed that Dublin was the fifth most expensive city to rent a home in Europe. Even Paris is cheaper.

Una Mullally, a columnist who champions Dublin’s lively but embattled cultural fringe in the Irish Times newspaper, said the de facto government policy was “to offer cookie-cutter entertainment and hospitality for tourists and people who live in the suburbs, and high rents for landlords that make it impossible for creative people, or even people with ordinary jobs, to live or create in the city.”

Yet in doing so, she said, it was destroying the city the tourists came to see.

Joyce himself has long been used to promote Irish tourism, at the head of a pantheon of great Irish writers. Every year, encouraged by state and city tourism organizations, a swelling army of Joyce fans travel to Dublin to celebrate Bloomsday, the anniversary of June 16, 1904, when the story of “Ulysses” unfolds. Joyce remarked that if his Dublin were destroyed, it would be possible to recreate it from the details in his novel.

LONDON — A nightmarish tale of a Senegalese soldier fighting for France in World War I, and a workplace novel set on a spaceship, are among the six titles shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize.

The shortlist for the prize, arguably the world’s most significant award for literature translated into English, was announced in an online news conference on Thursday.

Éric Vuillard, a past winner of the Prix Goncourt, France’s premier book award, is perhaps the highest profile author on the shortlist, nominated for “The War of the Poor.”

The book, translated by Mark Polizzotti, tells the story of Thomas Müntzer, a 16th-century itinerant priest who led popular uprisings against feudal lords in what is now Germany. “At its best, ‘The War of the Poor’ feels urgent, breathless,” Boyd Tonkin wrote in a review for The Financial Times.

review for The New York Times.

The International Booker Prize is awarded each year to the best book translated into English and published in Britain or Ireland. It is separate from the better known Booker Prize for fiction originally written in English, but has the same prize money of £50,000, or about $70,000. The author and translator split the prize equally.

The award has helped turn several non-English authors into stars. Past winners included “The Discomfort of Evening,” by the Dutch author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, translated by Michele Hutchison, and “Flights,” by the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft.

Alongside “The War of the Poor” and “At Night All Blood is Black,” the shortlisted titles are:

“The Dangers of Smoking in Bed,” by the Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez, a short story collection about death, sex and the occult, translated by Megan McDowell. “Largely it’s insatiable women, raggedy slum dwellers and dead children — those who are ordinarily powerless — who wield unholy power in this collection, and they seem uninterested in being reasonable,” Chelsea Leu wrote in a review for The New York Times.
“In Memory of Memory,” by Maria Stepanova, and translated from Russian by Sasha Dugdale. In it, Stepanova digs through a dead aunt’s possessions, then uses them to reconstruct her family’s story. It is “a kaleidoscopic, time-shuffling look at one family of Russian Jews throughout a fiercely eventful century,” wrote John Williams in a review for The New York Times.
“When We Cease to Understand the World,” by Benjamín Labatut, a Dutch-born author who lives in Chile and writes in Spanish. Translated by Adrian Nathan West, the book takes the stories of real scientific and mathematical breakthroughs — such as Albert Einstein’s equation for general relativity — and uses them to muse about humanity’s destructive power. It has received mixed reviews in Britain. “Labatut’s brave experiment with form has produced an unstable compound that is a laboratory curio, not an entirely new genre,” Claire Lowdon wrote in The Times of London. But John Banville, in The Guardian, called it “ingenious, intricate and deeply disturbing.”
“The Employees,” by Olga Ravn, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken. It is a science fiction novel where the crew members of a spaceship — both human and artificial — are transformed after they encounter strange objects on a planet called New Discovery. Danish newspapers heaped praise on the book when it was released in 2018. “Olga Ravn has written a difficult and wildly original socially critical sci-fi utopia,” Alexander Vesterlund wrote in Politiken.

Several of the titles are far from straightforward novels, containing elements of memoir and historical nonfiction, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, the chair of the judges, said at the news conference. “This is a fantastically vigorous and vital aspect of the way fiction is being written at the moment — people are really pushing the boundaries,” she said.