Books Tell You Why. All About Collecting Rare Books

Audrey Golden

World literature scholar and erstwhile lawyer. Lover of international travel, outdoor markets, and rare books.

Iowa City as a UNESCO City of Literature

By Audrey Golden. Jan 19, 2017. 9:00 AM.

Did you know that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has a “Creative Cities Network,” and did you know that only one city in the United States has been honored as a “City of Literature”? In short, the UNESCO Creative Cities Network has seven different fields through which it honors sites and cities across the globe, including for crafts and folk art, design, film, gastronomy, literature, music, and media arts. The only place in the United States that has been recognized for its literary significance is Iowa City, IA, home to the University of Iowa and the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Want to know more about Iowa City’s literary status? Keep reading, and we’ll discuss the reasons that this place was selected as the sole UNESCO City of Literature in the states.

Learning More About New Zealand Literary Journals

By Audrey Golden. Jan 14, 2017. 9:00 AM.

Topics: Poetry, Literature, Nobel Prize Winners

What kinds of literary journals have been most popular in New Zealand in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? This isn’t a question that most American readers have an answer to, given that many New Zealand literary journals simply are not readily available in the United States (or on the internet, for that matter). Yet New Zealand journals like Cave, Edge, and Landfall have been publishing scholarship, fiction, and poetry for decades, featuring works by famous New Zealand authors as well as award-winning poets and writers from other parts of the world. If you’re interested in learning more about these New Zealand journals, allow us to provide you with an introduction!

Best Books on Finland

By Audrey Golden. Jan 10, 2017. 9:00 AM.

Topics: Literature, Literary travel

Of the literature from all the Nordic countries, Finland may be the region that English-language readers tend to know the least about. To be sure, most readers in the U.S. have encountered (or at least have heard about) the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle series and Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Even Icelandic Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness gained popularity here in the 1950s and 1960s, with first editions of his 1934 novel Independent People now highly collectible. And don’t get us started on the global fame of Danish fiction writers such as Hans Christian Andersen and Isak Dinesen. But what about writers and novels from Finland? We have a couple of recommendations to get you started.

Four of the Best Books from Argentina

By Audrey Golden. Jan 6, 2017. 9:00 AM.

Topics: Literature, Literary travel

Are you thinking about traveling to Argentina in the near future? Or perhaps you’re considering a trip to Buenos Aires through literature? Argentina is a socially, culturally, and geographically varied country, with a world-famous wine region, the literary capital city of Buenos Aires, and part of the archipelago known as Tierra del Fuego. In addition to its scenic splendor, the city of Buenos Aires is well-known for the world-famous writers it produced in the twentieth century. From novelists and short-story writers associated with the journal Sur, such as Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges, and Silvina Ocampo to expatriate novelists and poets like Julio Cortázar, Argentina produced some of the most significant writers of the last one-hundred years. Here are a couple titles we highly recommend.

Bessie Head's Experience at the International Writing Program

By Audrey Golden. Dec 30, 2016. 9:00 AM.

Topics: Literature, Literary travel

Since 1967, the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa has brought together writers from more than 140 different countries to be in residence for a semester at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. During the fall residency each year, the University of Iowa hosts events for the writers in residence, who read work from their recent novels, short stories, poetry collections, drama, and books of creative non-fiction. To be eligible for residency in the IWP, writers must have at least one book published, and they must have sufficient English-language skills. In 1977, Bessie Head traveled from Botswana to the United States as one of the IWP’s fiction writers in residence.

Multifaceted Creativity: Jim Dine as Both Artist and Poet

By Audrey Golden. Dec 23, 2016. 9:00 AM.

Topics: Poetry, Book Collecting

Many Americans familiar with Pop Art or Conceptual Art might know of Jim Dine’s role in creating “Happenings” throughout New York City alongside other artists such as Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow. Given that he has been such a prolific painter, experimenting with conceptual forms and new media, Dine often is thought of first and foremost as an artist. Yet, as a Fall 1969 issue of The Paris Review* made clear to readers, Dine is also a poet.

Native American Writers and Artists in N. Scott Momaday’s Family

By Audrey Golden. Dec 15, 2016. 9:00 AM.

Topics: Children's Books, Literature

Many readers of twentieth-century literature are familiar with the works of Native American novelist N. Scott Momaday. A writer of Kiowa and Cherokee ancestry, Momaday was born in Lawton, Oklahoma at the Kiowa-Comanche Indian Hospital to Natachee Scott and Alfred Morris Momaday. In 1963, N. Scott Momaday received a Ph.D. in literature from Stanford University, and shortly thereafter, his novel House Made of Dawn (1968) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Many critics cite House Made of Dawn as the beginning of what scholars and critics have described as the “Native American Renaissance,” referring to the (re)emergence of native American voices and narratives in fiction. In 1969, Momaday published The Way to Rainy Mountain, a text that introduced readers to Kiowa folklore and, in many respects, familiarized readers with his father’s illustrations. Since the late 1960s, Momaday has written numerous works of poetry, memoir, fiction, and scholarship.

Yet what many readers who are well-acquainted with Momaday’s literary output don’t know is that his parents, Natachee Scott Momaday and Al Momaday, were also prominent writers and artists.

45th Anniversary of Pablo Neruda’s Nobel Prize

By Audrey Golden. Dec 8, 2016. 9:00 AM.

Topics: Poetry, Literature, Nobel Prize Winners

Pablo Neruda wasn’t born with the name by which so many readers across the globe have come to know his work. Rather, he was born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto in the small Chilean town of Parral, Chile. This December marks the 45th anniversary of Neruda winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1971, Neruda traveled back to Stockholm—he had visited on previous occasions and had met the founder of Sweden’s first poetry journal, FIB:S lyrikklub, Stig Carlson—to accept the Nobel Prize. Yet his winning this award wasn’t entirely a surprise. To be sure, scholars and fans of his work had been making efforts for years to encourage the Nobel Committee to recognize the poet’s achievements. On this anniversary of Neruda winning the Nobel Prize, we’d like to think a bit more about why Neruda was selected for the award, as well as some of the reasons that the Nobel Committee didn’t honor him earlier in his lifetime.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Recently Published Letters to His Wife

By Audrey Golden. Dec 3, 2016. 9:00 AM.

Topics: Literature, Literary travel

If you’re interested in twentieth-century literature in any way at all, you’ve probably encountered some of the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov. The Russian immigrant novelist was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1899, and he immigrated with his family to Britain after the Russian Revolution. He moved to the United States in 1939, just two years before the U.S. would enter World War II, and he remained here with his wife, Véra, until 1959. Most American readers are familiar with the novelist’s perhaps most famous—or infamous, depending upon the speaker—work, Lolita. Yet we’d like to introduce you to a recently published book of Nabokov’s letters to his wife, simply entitled Letters to Véra (2015). The edited collection contains correspondence from the writer over the course of decades, along with photographs and small drawings that accompanied Nabokov’s letters to Véra.

Visiting Literary Homes in Moscow, Russia

By Audrey Golden. Nov 26, 2016. 9:00 AM.

Topics: Literature, Literary travel

If you’re planning a trip to Moscow, Russia and are interested in visiting authors’ homes, you’re in great luck. We only had a handful of days to spend exploring the many literary haunts and homes of some of Russia’s greatest writers, so we packed in as much as we could. While visitors to Russia often think of St. Petersburg as the place to go to visit the homes of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov, we can’t recommend a trip to Moscow enough. In addition to the magnificence of Red Square and St. Basil’s Cathedral, where else in the world can you pack in visits to the former addresses of six of the world’s greatest writers?