Writing and Writers

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares38 Views

    Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel-Winning Peruvian Novelist, Dies at 89

    by

    Mr. Vargas Llosa, who ran for Peru’s presidency in 1990 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, transformed episodes from his personal life into books that reverberated far beyond the borders of his native country.Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist who combined gritty realism with playful erotica and depictions of the struggle for individual liberty in Latin America, while also writing essays that made him one of the most influential political commentators in the Spanish-speaking world, died on Sunday in Lima. He was 89.His death was announced in a social media statement from his children, Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana Vargas Llosa.Mr. Vargas Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, gained renown as a young writer with slangy, blistering visions of the corruption, moral compromises and cruelty festering in Peru. He joined a cohort of writers like Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia and Julio Cortázar of Argentina, who became famous in the 1960s as members of Latin America’s literary “boom generation.”His distaste for the norms of polite society in Peru gave him abundant inspiration. After he was enrolled at the age of 14 in the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, Mr. Vargas Llosa turned that experience into his first novel, “The Time of the Hero,” a critical account of military life published in 1963.The book was denounced by several generals, including one who claimed it was financed by Ecuador to undermine Peru’s military — all of which helped make it an immediate success.Mr. Vargas Llosa was never fully enamored, however, by his contemporaries’ magical realism. And he was disillusioned with Fidel Castro’s persecution of dissidents in Cuba, breaking from the leftist ideology that held sway for decades over many writers in Latin America.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 63 Shares24 Views

      in Elections

      Mario Vargas Llosa: An Appreciation

      by

      The Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa was the world’s savviest and most accomplished political novelist.Once upon a time, during the last quarter of the 20th century, it was possible to argue that one person was America’s best novelist and best literary critic. I am talking about John Updike, whose long and elegant reviews in The New Yorker set reading agendas.Such was Updike’s influence that readers paid heed when, in the mid-1980s, he developed a sustained literary man-crush on the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who died on Sunday at 89.More than once in his reviews of Vargas Llosa’s novels, Updike took note of the author’s handsomeness and urbanity. He was more impressed by Vargas Llosa’s substantial intelligence, his learning, his versatility and his imagination, which could conjure the comic fussiness of a tiny left-wing splinter group in solemn session, or the nauseated feelings of a young wife who discovers that her husband is gay, or the mixed feelings of a citified idealist engaging in a gun battle in the Andes while beset with altitude sickness.Vargas Llosa “has replaced Gabriel García Márquez” as the South American novelist North American readers must catch up on, Updike wrote in 1986, four years after García Márquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature and 24 years before Vargas Llosa himself would.Even Updike was two decades late to the writer’s work. Vargas Llosa had already published most of his major and enduring novels, including “The Time of the Hero” (1963), “The Green House” (1966), “Conversation in the Cathedral” (1969) and “The War of the End of the World” (1981). These grainy, raunchy, politically minded and mind-expanding books found a worldwide audience but were slower to catch on in the United States.Vargas Llosa had helped start, in the early 1960s, a movement that became known as the Boom, a term applied to a freewheeling and socially conscious new generation of Latin American writers: García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Juan Rulfo, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, José Donoso and Miguel Ángel Asturias, among others.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares42 Views

      in Elections

      How to Be a Happy 85-Year-Old (Like Me)

      by

      In 2000, I published a book called “Rules for Aging,” a sort of how-to guide for navigating the later years of one’s life. I was 60 at the time and thought that I knew a thing or two about being old. Twenty-five years later, I just finished a sequel, which reflects my advice for growing very, very old. (I have been doing a lot of that lately.) It took me 85 years to learn these things, but I believe they’re applicable at any age.1. Nobody’s thinking about you.It was true 25 years ago, and it’s true today. Nobody is thinking about you. Nobody ever will. Not your teacher, not your minister, not your colleagues, not your shrink, not a soul. It can be a bummer of a thought. But it’s also liberating. That time you fell on your butt in public? That dumb comment you made at dinner last week? That brilliant book you wrote? No one is thinking about it. Others are thinking about themselves. Just like you.2. Make young friends.For older folks, there is nothing more energizing than the company of the young. They’re bright, enthusiastic, informative and brimming with life, and they do not know when you’re telling them lies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares35 Views

      in Elections

      Max Kozloff, Art Critic Who Became an Artist Himself, Dies at 91

      by

      He wrote extensively about the New York art scene in the 1960s and ’70s, then shifted to become a prominent street photographer.Max Kozloff, a leading art critic who helped readers of The Nation and Artforum navigate the array of movements that followed Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s and ’70s, and who later became a well-regarded photographer in his own right, died on April 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 91.His wife, Joyce Kozloff, said the cause was Parkinson’s disease.As a writer, Mr. Kozloff established himself early on. He became the art critic for The Nation in 1961, when he was a 28-year-old doctoral student at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. He became an associate editor at Artforum three years later and eventually became the editor.He wrote extensively about painting, especially those New York artists who were pushing beyond the waning dominance of Abstract Expressionism, like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. And he tussled with older critics, especially Clement Greenberg, whose ideas he found too doctrinaire to be useful in a time of proliferating artistic movements.Though Mr. Kozloff was far from ideological, he was interested in the ways ideology and political context shaped artistic production.In perhaps his most famous essay, “American Painting During the Cold War,” published in Artforum in 1973, he argued that Abstract Expressionism, precisely because it claimed to exist outside of politics, served as a handmaiden of postwar American dominance, showing the world that a techno-liberal powerhouse could foster great art.As a student of photography, Mr. Kozloff was especially interested in what he considered street photography — seemingly random, spontaneous images of anonymous people engaged in mundane activities.University of New Mexico PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares48 Views

      in Elections

      I’ve Listened to ‘The Great Gatsby’ 200 Times. Here’s What I Learned.

      by

      “The Great Gatsby” turned 100 this week. Probably, like me, you first read it in high school. My true engagement with the novel, though, began five years ago, when I was in my 50s and a writer and college teacher, and I started listening to a portion of the “Gatsby” audiobook every night.I started on March 17, 2020, which was the day the province of Ontario, where I live, declared a state of emergency because of Covid. My wife and I had listened to Jake Gyllenhaal’s rendition of “Gatsby” during a 2015 road trip, liked it and thought it would be a diverting bedtime story to get us through the lockdown, which we expected to last about three or four weeks. We set a sleep timer, pressed “play” and listened for 45 minutes, and the lockdown wound up lasting nearly two years.“Gatsby” for me has grown from a novel bedtime story to a nightly ritual to a kind of compulsion. It’s hard for us to imagine going to bed now without the compelling timbre of Mr. Gyllenhaal in our ears. In 2023 alone, I listened to “Gatsby,” which runs in its entirety for 289 minutes, just over 48 times. I broke that record in 2024 when I stopped setting the sleep timer and began listening to the entire book overnight, letting it unspool into my ears while I slept. “Gatsby” has now laid down roots in my brain — even into my dreams. In a way, that’s not just true of me but of the entire culture.The literary critic Maureen Corrigan once wrote that “Gatsby” contains some of “the most beautiful sentences ever written about America,” and it persists as a book that is nearly “perfect despite the fact that it goes against every expectation of what a Great American Novel should be.”Not only has it inspired at least five movies, an opera and a Broadway musical, “Gatsby” also has a habit of popping up in the strangest places: When the comedian Andy Kaufman wanted to subvert his stand-up by reading from a novel onstage, including on an episode of “Saturday Night Live,” he chose to read from “The Great Gatsby.” His prank inspired the New York-based experimental theater company Elevator Repair Service to create “Gatz” in 2004, a six-and-a-half-hour performance that involves actors reciting the entire book, word for word. And, yes, I’ve seen “Gatz.” Twice.There is a certain look I get when I tell people about my “Gatsby” ritual — call it “curious concern.” If I explain that during Covid I started listening to “Gatsby” as a comfort before bed — and have been listening to it almost every night since — I can hear how strange these words sound even as they trip out of my mouth. Who chooses as a ritual bedtime story a bittersweet novel that ends with a murder-suicide (preceded by a fatal car crash) in which no one finds love and the only character who ends up close to happy is a violent racist and a serial cheat? Maybe “Pride and Prejudice” would be a more acceptable obsession. It’s also a masterpiece and it has a happy ending. But only “Gatsby” can hold my attention. By now, I’m steeped in it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares75 Views

      in Elections

      Bob McManus, Blunt Editorial Voice of New York Post, Dies at 81

      by

      As the editor of the tabloid’s editorial page and as a columnist, he skewered those he considered phonies and symbols of failed progressivism.Bob McManus, the trenchant editorial page editor of The New York Post and a columnist for other conservative publications who prided himself on his unambiguous common-sense commentary about public policy and other topics, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 81.The cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of bile duct cancer, said his wife, Mary McManus.An influential and respected editorialist, Mr. McManus pulled no punches but still managed to be widely liked.He could unleash a fusillade of zingers against public officials and other prominent targets he branded phonies or hypocrites. But he could also leaven his caustic criticism with wit.“His prose style might best be described as a punchy amalgam of Damon Runyon, Raymond Chandler, and — a particular McManus favorite — Red Smith,” Edmund J. McMahon, a friend who is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, and the founder of the Empire Center for Public Policy in Albany, N.Y., said in an interview.After a police officer was assaulted in Times Square last year by a group that included some migrants, Mr. McManus contrasted “a time when slugging a cop would get you bumps on your head” with what he described as the current anarchic system of justice.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares102 Views

      in Elections

      Liz Moore on ‘Long Bright River’ and the Slow Burn of Success

      by

      Suddenly Liz Moore blazed, comet-like, onto small screens and best-seller lists. But her writing career has been a slow burn.No matter how you slice it, Liz Moore has arrived.This month, an adaptation of her blockbuster novel “Long Bright River” started streaming on Peacock. And her next book, “The God of the Woods,” now on the best-seller list for 36 weeks (and counting), will soon hit the million mark in sales — a distinction normally reserved for celebrities and novelists recognizable by last name alone.Moore isn’t one of those authors. But, over the past two decades, she’s proved to be “a writer who can do anything,” as her editor Sarah McGrath put it.Moore taps into an elusive sweet spot between literary and commercial fiction, populating vividly drawn settings with characters who seem to live, breathe and make terrible mistakes along with the rest of us. Her novels can be enjoyed by, say, a teenage girl and her 50-something father, defying genre and categorization to such an extent that, from one to the next, a reader might not register that they’re written by the same person.“I get messages saying, I loved your new book. Do you have any others?” Moore, 41, said during an interview at a cafe in Philadelphia. “Or they’ll call ‘The God of the Woods’ my second book because ‘Long Bright River’ was my first that broke out.”In fact, “The God of the Woods,” a mystery about siblings who disappear 14 years apart, is Moore’s fifth book. She wrote her first, “The Words of Every Song,” while she was a student at Barnard College. Shortly after she graduated in 2005, she signed on with an agent who’d come to campus for a panel on the publishing industry.“I reached out and said, ‘I have this manuscript of interconnected stories about the music industry. Would you be interested in looking at it?’ She said yes,” Moore recalled. “Only in retrospect do I realize what a lucky break that was.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares95 Views

      in Elections

      Thomas Hoobler, Half of a Prolific Writing Couple, Dies at 82

      by

      He and his wife, Dorothy Hoobler, wrote 103 books, most recently one about presidential love letters, “Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making?”Thomas Hoobler, who with his wife, Dorothy Hoobler, wrote 103 books across a vast range of subjects, including young-adult biographies of Margaret Mead, mystery novels set in 18th-century Japan and, most recently, a book about presidential love letters with the attention-grabbing title “Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making?,” died on Feb. 22 in Manhattan. He was 82.His wife and their daughter, Ellen Hoobler-Banavadikar, said the cause of his death, at a hospital, was a stroke. His death was not widely reported at the time.The Hooblers were journeyman writers, contributing to series that will be familiar to any pre-teenager or parent of a pre-teenager, including Penguin’s wildly successful history books known by fans as “Big Heads” for their cartoonish covers, which bore titles like “Where Are the Great Pyramids?” (2015) and “What Was the San Francisco Earthquake?” (2016).The couple also wrote their own series. They were proudest of the 10 “American Family Albums” they wrote for Oxford University Press, starting with “The Chinese American Family Album” in 1994. The series, which drew on diaries, photographs and newspaper clippings to tell the story of the American immigrant experience, won a slew of honors, according to the Hooblers’ website, including three awards from the Parents’ Choice Foundation, a nonprofit guide to children’s media and toys.The Hooblers wrote 10 “American Family Albums” for Oxford University Press, starting with “The Chinese American Family Album” in 1994.Oxford University PressSuch recognition was typical of the Hooblers’ output for young readers, which drew on extensive research but presented history and personalities in compelling, age-appropriate language.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares97 Views

      in Elections

      Robert E. Ginna Jr., Whose Article Bolstered U.F.O. Claims, Dies at 99

      by

      A founding editor of People, he also served as editor in chief of Little, Brown and produced films. But his public image was defined by a 1952 story for Life.Robert E. Ginna Jr., a founding editor of People magazine, a book editor and a film producer whose 1952 Life magazine article provoked a frenzy by validating the idea that flying saucers might exist and could have visited Earth from outer space, died on March 4 at his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y.His death was confirmed by his son, Peter St. John Ginna. He was 99.Mr. Ginna (pronounced gun-NAY) enjoyed a wide-ranging, eight-decade career. As the editor in chief of Little, Brown, he persuaded the acclaimed novelist James Salter to shift from screenplays to books and discovered Dr. Robin Cook as an author of thrillers. He also produced movies and was part of the team that started People as a highbrow showcase for profiles of cultural figures like Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, but quit when the magazine descended into what he viewed as celebrity fluff.To the general public, though, he was perhaps best known for an article he wrote with H.B. Darrach Jr. for the April 7, 1952, issue of Life magazine. The cover featured an alluring photograph of Marilyn Monroe under the headline “There Is a Case for Interplanetary Saucers.”The April 7, 1952, issue of Life magazine featured a seductive photo of Marilyn Monroe juxtaposed with the now-infamous headline “There Is a Case for Interplanetary Saucers.”Philippe Halsman/Life Magazine, via Magnum PhotosTo Mr. Ginna’s eternal dismay, the article made him a target for U.F.O. buffs and kooks. Headlined “Have We Visitors From Space?,” it examined 10 reports of unidentified flying object sightings, followed by an unequivocal assessment from the German rocket expert Walther Riedel: “I am completely convinced that they have an out-of-world basis.”While reports of U.F.O.s in the late 1940s were often trivialized, Phillip J. Hutchison and Herbert J. Strentz wrote in American Journalism in 2019: “By the early 1950s, however, more substantial human-interest features embraced the idea that U.F.O. reports might correspond to extraterrestrial Earth visitors. A widely cited April 7, 1952, Life magazine feature titled ‘Have We Visitors From Space?’ represents one of the most influential examples of the latter trend.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More