I've been a Jane Lynch fan ever since I saw 'Best in Show'. So, I'm really excited about Jane's new autobiography Happy Accidents, which will be hitting stores (and library shelves) September 13th!
Check out the video trailers below! The first, was filmed just after Jane finished recording the audio edition and will tell you a bit more about the book and the process of writing it.
And now- a special message recorded just for us in Canada!
Are you excited too?!! I have a five galleys up for grabs for the first five Canadian librarians to e-mail me at rosalyn.steele@harpercollins.com.
Please use 'Happy Accidents' as the subject of your e-mail and please be sure to include the full mailing address of your library.
-Rosalyn
Showing posts with label Memoir. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Memoir. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Thursday, October 22, 2009
NYRB Challenge: A Ménage à trois of letters. . .
My next pick in my ongoing 50 book NYRB Classics Challenge was inspired by a recent conversation with a friend. We were discussing - ironically by electronic means - the demise of personal correspondence, concluding shamefully that it had been several years since either of us had actually written a long letter by hand. E-mail or instant messaging can be a wonderful, instantaneous, cheap mode of communication, but I have to wonder - are we missing out on something possibly more precious and fun, th
at is not only more permanent, but also intellectually challenging, forcing one as it does, to thoughtfully take the time to choose words and subject matter? Is letter writing truly a lost art form and one I'd like to re-engage with?
I wanted to find out so I spent two hours flexing my lazy hand muscles and I wrote my friend a letter. And then I went to my shelves and started reading NYRB Book #6 - Letters: Summer 1926, the correspondence between the poets Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva and Rainer Maria Rilke. The collection is edited by Yevgeny Pasternak, Yelena Pasternak and Konstantin M. Azadovsky and translated from the Russian, German and French by Margaret Wettlin, Walter Arndt and Jamey Gambrell. Susan Sontag provides the preface.
The collection covers four months in which the three poets wrote to and about each other. Rilke was battling leukemia in a sanatorium in Switzerland; he would die later that year. Pasternak was living in Moscow (where he couldn't receive letters with Swiss stamps - Rilke had to reroute them through France or Germany) and carrying on both an artistic and romantic correspondence with Tsvetayeva who was living in poverty in Paris. Reading this collection of very powerful and beautifully written letters, I was struck by several glaring contrasts to our modern styles of communication, no doubt influenced by the historical period and the personal temperaments of the poets. Considering that Rilke had never met either the adult Pasternak or Tsvetayeva, the emotional and familial outpouring of words is impressive from all three of them. Any author today would blush to get the type of adulation that gushes from this fanmail. This is especially true of Tsvetayeva's letters which were my favourite of the group. As noted in the introduction, she treated her letters as art, as if she were creating a new genre - "epistolary lyric poetry." Here she is on the subject of writing them:
Secondly, it was fascinating to note the extreme importance placed on the written word. These letters were not only read and re-read, but multiple copies were made, extracts written down in notebooks and forwarded on in other letters to friends and families. And indeed it is because of this meticulous preservation that this correspondence has been able to be reconstructed, as in some cases the original letter was lost. These letters were treasured and savoured. Pasternak kept a copy of a short letter from Rilke in an envelope marked "Most Precious" which he carried in his jacket pocket for the rest of his life. Would we ever do this with an e-mail, even one printed out? Would it have the same sentimental and emotional impact as a blue-tinged, crinkly piece of paper, the ink faded somewhat, but still showing signs of its writer's distinctive handwriting? Would we ever assign that much importance to any device that needed electrical charging?
And the correspondence even continued posthumously. Both Pasternak and Tsvetayeva wrote letters to Rilke after hearing of his death, as if this was the only medium they felt could best express their grief.
This collection contains an excellent and extensive introduction that provides all the biographical and artistic context one needs to successfully navigate through the correspondence and it will make you want to engage with the poetry as well. Rilke's poetry can be found easily and in many editions, for example here. Samples of
Tsvetayeva and Pasternak's poetry, can be found in NYRB's edition of The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems, translated by Paul Schmidt. In particular, this collection contains Tsvetayeva's long poem "The Poem of the End" about a couple ending their affair as they walk across a city. It's haunting, beautiful and stylistically interesting, and when she sent it to Pasternak, it made an enormous impact on him (he mentions it numerous times in his letters, both to her and other correspondents). The collection also includes poems by acclaimed poets Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam and Alexander Blok.
The day after I finished the book, a handwritten letter arrived from my friend (Canada Post is considerably slower now than 1926 postal systems that crossed many borders). I shall treasure it. I think we both enjoyed the exercise enormously and I hope we'll continue to make the time to write.
at is not only more permanent, but also intellectually challenging, forcing one as it does, to thoughtfully take the time to choose words and subject matter? Is letter writing truly a lost art form and one I'd like to re-engage with?I wanted to find out so I spent two hours flexing my lazy hand muscles and I wrote my friend a letter. And then I went to my shelves and started reading NYRB Book #6 - Letters: Summer 1926, the correspondence between the poets Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva and Rainer Maria Rilke. The collection is edited by Yevgeny Pasternak, Yelena Pasternak and Konstantin M. Azadovsky and translated from the Russian, German and French by Margaret Wettlin, Walter Arndt and Jamey Gambrell. Susan Sontag provides the preface.
The collection covers four months in which the three poets wrote to and about each other. Rilke was battling leukemia in a sanatorium in Switzerland; he would die later that year. Pasternak was living in Moscow (where he couldn't receive letters with Swiss stamps - Rilke had to reroute them through France or Germany) and carrying on both an artistic and romantic correspondence with Tsvetayeva who was living in poverty in Paris. Reading this collection of very powerful and beautifully written letters, I was struck by several glaring contrasts to our modern styles of communication, no doubt influenced by the historical period and the personal temperaments of the poets. Considering that Rilke had never met either the adult Pasternak or Tsvetayeva, the emotional and familial outpouring of words is impressive from all three of them. Any author today would blush to get the type of adulation that gushes from this fanmail. This is especially true of Tsvetayeva's letters which were my favourite of the group. As noted in the introduction, she treated her letters as art, as if she were creating a new genre - "epistolary lyric poetry." Here she is on the subject of writing them:
A letter is like an otherworldly communication, less perfect than a dream but subject to the same rules. . . Neither the one nor the other can be produced on command; you neither write a letter nor dream a dream when you want to but when it wants to: the letter- to be written; the dream - to be dreamed.
Secondly, it was fascinating to note the extreme importance placed on the written word. These letters were not only read and re-read, but multiple copies were made, extracts written down in notebooks and forwarded on in other letters to friends and families. And indeed it is because of this meticulous preservation that this correspondence has been able to be reconstructed, as in some cases the original letter was lost. These letters were treasured and savoured. Pasternak kept a copy of a short letter from Rilke in an envelope marked "Most Precious" which he carried in his jacket pocket for the rest of his life. Would we ever do this with an e-mail, even one printed out? Would it have the same sentimental and emotional impact as a blue-tinged, crinkly piece of paper, the ink faded somewhat, but still showing signs of its writer's distinctive handwriting? Would we ever assign that much importance to any device that needed electrical charging?
And the correspondence even continued posthumously. Both Pasternak and Tsvetayeva wrote letters to Rilke after hearing of his death, as if this was the only medium they felt could best express their grief.
This collection contains an excellent and extensive introduction that provides all the biographical and artistic context one needs to successfully navigate through the correspondence and it will make you want to engage with the poetry as well. Rilke's poetry can be found easily and in many editions, for example here. Samples of
Tsvetayeva and Pasternak's poetry, can be found in NYRB's edition of The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems, translated by Paul Schmidt. In particular, this collection contains Tsvetayeva's long poem "The Poem of the End" about a couple ending their affair as they walk across a city. It's haunting, beautiful and stylistically interesting, and when she sent it to Pasternak, it made an enormous impact on him (he mentions it numerous times in his letters, both to her and other correspondents). The collection also includes poems by acclaimed poets Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam and Alexander Blok.The day after I finished the book, a handwritten letter arrived from my friend (Canada Post is considerably slower now than 1926 postal systems that crossed many borders). I shall treasure it. I think we both enjoyed the exercise enormously and I hope we'll continue to make the time to write.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Julie and Julia . . . and Judith!
The film is fabulous!If you haven't yet gone to see Julie and Julia, you are in for a wonderful treat. But be prepared. You will come out of the theatre with an irresistible urge to buy a baguette and lots and lots of butter (which is perfectly fine - both Julia and her husband Paul lived into their nineties) and go home and saute some mushrooms (being very careful not to crowd them). I'm thrilled that Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking has hit the bestseller list again but you will also definitely want to get your hands on a copy of her memoir My Life in France.
I tore up my apartment last weekend desperately searching for my unread copy only to realize I'd left it at the office. But my shelves did yield up The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food by Judith Jones, who was Julia's long-time editor and is also portrayed in the film. And this memoir more than satisified my
need to wallow just a bit longer in Paris and submerse myself in the seductive and sensual world of food.
need to wallow just a bit longer in Paris and submerse myself in the seductive and sensual world of food. Just like Julia, Judith also lived for a number of years in Paris following the end of the Second World War and fell in love with the city, French food and her future husband. We then follow her career back in the U.S. where she became an editor at Knopf and - as illustrated in the movie - championed what became Mastering the Art of French Cooking after the massive manuscript had been turned down by several publishers. The movie ends with the book being published but Judith continues the story, following Julia as she promotes the book on the road and detailing the huge impact the success of the cookbook had on Julia and Paul's life. There's a fascinating section about creating and writing the bread chapter in the second volume of Mastering, all in the pursuit of coming up with a recipe for the perfect French baguette (it ends up being eleven pages long and I'm not going to give away the secret here). Judith also worked with many other incredible chefs and cookbook writers such as Claudia Roden, Edna Lewis, Marion Cunningham and Madhur Jaffrey, just to name a few. Her memoir is not only filled with great stories but certainly demonstrates how incredibly labour intensive it is to edit a cookbook. Luckily Judith is passionate and fearless when it comes to food. For me a beavertail is a delicious deepfried pastry sprinkled with sugar and lemon that is sold along the frozen banks of Ottawa's Rideau Canal; for Judith, it's something a little more
literal. Julia couldn't have been in better editorial hands.
literal. Julia couldn't have been in better editorial hands. The last section of The Tenth Muse is filled with some of Judith's favourite recipes - many of them French (including a shorter one for a baguette, but still based on Julia's recipe). Some look quite complicated but there are many that even I will attempt, such as "Freeform Apple Tarts" and "Sorrel and Leek Pancakes". I also love the section that offers nine ways to use up roast lamb leftovers (my favourite meat). She will also have a new book out this September that already has me salivating - The Pleasures of Cooking for One.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
This movie looks delicious. . .
I don't think I've ever laughed so hard at a movie trailer before. Can't wait for this to come out. Julie and Julia is based on two memoirs - Julia Child's My Life in France and Julie Powell's Julie and Julia, her account of trying to cook every one of Child's recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in one year. See the trailer here. It stars Amy Adams and Meryl Streep who is hysterically funny.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Julie & Julia Coming to the Big Screen!
One of the funniest memoirs that I've read in recent years is Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by Julie Powell. The book chronicles the year temp secretary Julie spent trying to cook every recipe in Julia Child's cookbook 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking', and how her blog documenting the experience became a hit with foodies worldwide. If you love food memoirs, do get your hands on a copy! Powell's writing is hilarious and the food descriptions are mouth watering. I'm still boggled by the amount of butter Powell went through in her year long experiment.
Variety magazine reported on October 31st that Columbia Pictures is bringing this story to film! It sounds like a fantastic project so far- Nora Ephron is writing the screenplay and directing, Amy Adams (Junebug) is going to be playing the author, and Meryl Streep is set to play Julia Child. Now I just have to be patient as it likely won't hit theatres until 2009...
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