New Yorker review by James Wood: Rediscovering Elizabeth Harrower →

A fascinating article from the current issue of the New Yorker by James Wood about 86-year-old Australian novelist Elizabeth Harrower and her “new” novel, In Certain Circles (out now here in the US from Text / Consortium). It was originally set to be published back in 1971, but she withdrew it months before it was to come out.

“Harrower deposited the manuscript of “In Certain Circles” in the National Library of Australia and essentially terminated her literary career. She has said that she thinks of her fiction as something abandoned long ago, buried in a cellar. She can’t now be bothered with writing. “I don’t know anybody who knows I’m a writer,” she said in 2012.
...
Her work might still be out of print if Michael Heyward and Penny Hueston, a married couple who run the Australian publishing house Text, hadn’t decided to start republishing it in 2012. They began with Harrower’s greatest novel, “The Watch Tower” (1966), the bitter story of two sisters, Laura and Clare, who lose their parents and fall under the sway of Felix Shaw, an abusive and controlling drunk. Over the next two years, Text published the rest of Harrower’s earlier work: “Down in the City” (1957), her first novel, and “The Long Prospect” (1958), her second, both of which she wrote in London; and “The Catherine Wheel” (1960), her third book. “In Certain Circles,” the withdrawn novel, was clearly the publisher’s most precious quarry. Heyward cajoled Harrower into letting him read the manuscript. She had not read any of her own work in forty years, and suspected that she might have to die before it was read again. Heyward thought the novel “extraordinary,” and Harrower agreed to its publication, perhaps figuring that death was a steep penalty for a comprehensive backlist.”
— James Wood, The New Yorker

In Certain Circles | Elizabeth Harrower | Consortium | Text Publishing | 9781922182296 | $24.95 | Sept 2014

 

NOTED: Amazon Must Be Stopped →

The lead article from the New Republic today, by Franklin Foer, is getting a lot of traction online today, and no wonder:

“Growing profit margins depend, therefore, on continually getting a better deal from suppliers. At Walmart, this tactic is enshrined in policy. The company has insisted that suppliers of basic consumer goods annually reduce their prices by about 5 percent, according to Charles Fishman’s book, The Walmart Effect.

It’s hard to overstate how badly these price demands injure the possibility for robust competition. But when Amazon engages in the same behavior, it acquires a darker tint. Where Walmart is essentially a large-scale, cut-rate version of the old department store and grocer, Amazon doesn’t confine its ambitions to any existing template. Without the constraints of brick and mortar, it considers nothing too remote from its core business, so it has grown to sell server space to the CIA, produce original televisions shows about bumbling congressmen, and engineer its own line of mobile phones.

And as it amasses economic power, it also acquires greater influence in the cultural and intellectual life of the nation.”
— Franklin Foer, "Amazon Must Be Stopped, The New Republic


Congratulations to Alan Taylor and W.W. Norton on winning the Pulitzer Prize for History!

Another year, another immensely well-reviewed book of history from W.W. Norton winning a major award.  Following in the footsteps of Eric Foner's The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2011) and The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2009), Alan Taylor has won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1932.

This is Alan Taylor's second Pulitzer Prize for History – he previously won in 1996 for William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic.

Congratulations to Alan Taylor and W.W. Norton!

The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832
Alan Taylor
9780393073713 | $35.00 | Sept 2013
W. W. Norton

Norton: twitter