The Jorge Luis Borges Collection at the University of Virginia attracts scholars from across the globe who are interested in examining one—or many—of the more than 2000 titles in its holdings. In fact, UVA's Borges collection is the most comprehensive in the world. We were lucky enough to conduct an interview with Jared Loewenstein, who began developing the collection in 1977.
Most writers only dream of making the same lasting indent in American cultural consciousness that Joseph Heller did. Even famed novelist John Updike, who didn’t consider Heller to be a ‘top of the chart’ writer, deemed the author’s 1961 satirical behemoth Catch-22 to be “important.” ‘Importance,’ however, isn’t even the half of it. Heller’s inimitable brand of black humor, his keen eye for the absurdity of bureaucracy, and his deep antiwar sentiments combined to form a perfect storm of satirical perfection. Not only did he earn a place in the canon that stretches from Mark Twain to Kurt Vonnegut, but he must also be heralded as a guardian of the deepest absurdity and cynicism that belie the American experience. Here are five facts about him.
During periods of tyranny, writers of fiction become subject to intense censorship and scrutiny. Remarkably, novelists and poets from the early decades of the Soviet Union produced some of the most imaginative and redemptive works in the history of the twentieth century. From the poems of Vladimir Mayakovsky to the realist prose of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Soviet resistance literature occupies an important place in the contemporary imagination when it comes to linking fiction with politics.
For many years it was believed that Immanuel Kant never made it more than ten miles outside of Konigsberg. Even though this is demonstrably false (he spent some years working as a tutor in Russia) public perception of the father of modern philosophy has not changed. Thousands of freshman philosophy students each year will happily speculate about Kant’s fussiness, his cloistered lifestyle, and what many diagnose as a desperate need to get out of the house more. The grumblings of would-be thinkers notwithstanding, it’s hard to gripe too much about the man who redefined philosophy in the 18th Century, forever altering the trajectory of human thought. It can, however, still be hard to envision the great thinker coming into contact with anything downright bizarre.
Charlotte Brontë was the third oldest sister in a remarkably learned family. Brontë is best known and loved for her masterpiece, Jane Eyre. After all, who isn’t captivated by Jane’s spirit and resilience and her love saga with Mr. Rochester? Though Jane Eyre was the first of Charlotte Brontë’s novels to be published, it actually was not the first one she wrote. That title goes to The Professor. Although it has earned less popular esteem, here are three reason to pick up and read The Professor.
In November 2014, the University of Texas paid $2.2 million for the archives of Gabriel García Márquez. It is hard to put a price on the private works of a colossal author, but if one is assigned, that price is necessarily significant. So, it seems the scramble for his papers and manuscripts is just one of the ways the world is dealing with García Márquez's illustrious legacy.
In his lifetime, Henry James mastered the art of of meeting his contemporaries. As a voracious reader, critic, and globe-trotter, James sought out and engaged the finest literary figures of his time in both his American homeland and in Europe. James enjoyed the company and works of some authors more than others, but no matter whom he was interacting with, the judgmental and perceptive writer almost always left a detailed record of his impressions.
No one denies that the Nobel Prize in Literature has a political bent. It is, for instance, widely believed that playwright Harold Pinter’s 2005 victory was meant to commemorate the slow decline of the Thatcher-Major era in Great Britain. While the Nobel committee’s insistence that writers be honored for their ‘idealism’ has yielded snubs for James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and Henry James, it has leveraged that same commitment into recognition for such overtly political poets as William Butler Yeats and Czeslaw Milosz. It would be easy, in light of all this, to color Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney as a predominantly political poet. He was, after all, a prominent voice for peace (among other things) during the Troubles in Ireland. To pigeonhole Heaney thusly, however, would be to do a huge disservice to one of the last century’s most accomplished poets.
The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed waves of immigration from across the globe, including many Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe. After World War II ended, first-generation Jewish American novelists like Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Chaim Potok rose to prominence, with Bellow even winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the decades that followed, graphic novelists like Art Spiegelman depicted Holocaust narratives in print, while second-generation authors such as Philip Roth and Jonathan Safran Foer became enormously popular. Are you trying to build your collection of Jewish fiction? We have some ideas for you.
Across the country, legendary authors’ homes have been preserved as museums. From the small-town Asheville, North Carolina home of Thomas Wolfe to the famous Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, it seems as though many cities have their own literary claim to fame. One little New England town, however, appears to be wealthier in literary history than others. Concord, Massachusetts once was home to Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Indeed, many of these authors’ most notable works of fiction are set in this sleepy town just outside of Boston.
