blogis librorum. A blog about books. Rare books.

“All Shaw's characters are himself: mere puppets stuck up to spout Shaw.”
-Fanny’s First Play (1911), Epilogue

Historical fiction, of which biographical fiction is a subset, can in many ways be considered one of the earliest literary trends.Writing about history, sometimes real and sometimes imagined, connects Homer’s Iliad (c750 BC) to Shakespeare’s history plays to Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977). In the case of the earliest English language novels, it was popular to market even fantastical novels as being the stuff of historical or biographical truth.Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), for instance, were presented to contemporary readers in the style of biography, journalism, and recovered documents.In this way, it is easy to take a blasé attitude toward biographical fiction. To do so, however, would be to tragically overlook the literary contributions of Irving Stone.

It has often been said that the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson are best experienced as a series of profound quotes strung together.While that may be the case, Henry David Thoreau, one of Emerson’s fellow seminal transcendentalists and the author of Walden (1854) and Cape Cod (1865), has an oeuvre that is equally laden with excellent quotations. “The mass of men,” he says in Walden, his classic rumination on solitude, self-reliance, and nature, “lead lives of quiet desperation.”Sometimes the cure for that desperation, Thoreau’s writing seems to suggest, is an expertly deployed quote.

Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein are considered by many to be the defining triumvirate of early science fiction. While the three of them, together, pushed the use of science and technology beyond their earlier status as mere narrative devices to a level on which they could set the parameters for high-minded thought experiments, Heinlein has always been somewhat of an outlier. He was, after all, the only one of the three with no formal scientific training. It is perhaps this fundamental truth about him, that writing was his primary concern and vocation, that enables him to cut to the heart of human truths in ways his contemporaries sometimes couldn’t. Nowhere is this fact better on display than in his magnum opus, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966).

“It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn’t going to be quotable…
it’s better to be quotable than honest.”
–Tom Stoppard, 1973

Many are, no doubt, familiar with Tom Stoppard’s work without being aware of it.The prolific Czech-born British playwright’s talents extend beyond the stage to the screen and the radio.Not only will many who would otherwise avoid absurdist drama have delighted in his 1988 Oscar-winning film Shakespeare in Love, still others will have seen 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade without knowing that Stoppard had a hand it.

For a contemporary novelist, becoming a household name is not easy.A Man Booker Prize (of which Ian McEwan has been a recipient) may not do it. Nor, indeed, may a prominent spot on TIME’s list of the 50 best British authors since 1945.Surely, then, we must attribute Ian McEwan’s name recognition at least partially to luck, and more than a little bit to a well-respected film adaptation of his critically acclaimed novel Atonement (2001).But a reputation like McEwan’s can’t be built on luck alone.Rather, it must be built on a strong foundation of literary acumen, pieced together, in McEwan’s case, from a well-trained ear for language and an uncommon sense of urgency.It is lucky not just for Ian McEwan but for the community of readers that such well wrought fictions reach a wide audience.  Here are five interesting facts about the acclaimed author.

“A classic (is) something everybody wants to have read but nobody wants to read.”
-Mark Twain, 1900

It is, perhaps, a little ironic that a remark Mark Twain made in reference to Paradise Lost (1667), a text that was by then some 200 years old, can be deployed to describe a book that is barely pushing forty. At the same time, it seems fitting that two works that so poetically, and controversially, dramatize events from the religious past should be neighbors in one paragraph. Indeed, one could argue that Salman Rushdie’s famously controversial novel, The Satanic Verses (1988) has more in common with John Milton’s epic poem than most. The fact remains, however, that many if not most are more familiar with Iran’s condemnation of the book as heretical than with the book itself.

In his 1964 novel The Dalkey Archive, Irish satirist Brian O'Nolan (known better by his noms de plume Flann O’Brien and Myles na Gopaleen) envisions a world where whiskey can be aged to perfection in a matter of days and a mad scientist named de Selby poses a serious existential threat to humanity.Almost entirely separate from these imaginings comes a scene in which the late literary behemoth James Joyce is alive and well and working as a bartender near Dalkey.Bewildered by the author’s sudden appearance, O’Nolan’s protagonist, Mick, asks him about Ulysses (1922). Joyce responds, “I don’t want to talk about that exploit.I took the idea to be a sort of practical joke.”

One hears a lot, in certain circles, about experimental literature.From James Joyce to Tom McCarthy, authors have always seen themselves as engaging in experiments, be they with prose, structure, or content.While the notion of books-as-experiments can be appealing, one almost never hears whether these experiments succeed or fail.An exception, however, comes, in this regard as in so many others, from beloved James Bond creator Ian Fleming.

When beloved writer and illustrator of children’s books Maurice Sendak passed away in 2012, it was Stephen Colbert who best summed up the sentiment that accompanied Sendak’s passing. “We are all honored” he said, “to have been briefly invited into his world.”And indeed, Sendak’s most beloved works, like Where the Wild Things Are (1963) and Brundibar (2003), were invitations to worlds wholly separate from this one: worlds that were at once startling and beautiful, inviting and grotesque, smartly crafted and whimsical.It wasn’t just the worlds populated with wild things, however, to which Sendak invited his readers.