The article was provoked by the recent controversy surrounding the decision by publisher W.W. Norton, in response to unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct, to remove Blake Bailey’s biography of novelist Philip Roth from print, essentially to “pulp” the book.
In the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley described the genesis of her classic story. During an evening with her husband Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and another guest, they got the idea to entertain one another by writing ghost stories. Mary Shelley couldn t come up with anything and went to bed, still thinking, and then became possessed by an image of a man lying on a table and slowly coming to life. Shelley recalled that she bolted awake, thinking, I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.”
This book has been cancelled Blake Bailey’s new book on Philip Roth has been withdrawn by its US publisher after multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against the biographer. Should the work be judged by the standards of the life? One of the most striking elements of the allegations against the celebrated literary biographer Blake Bailey was the speed and fervency of his denial. Over the course of recent weeks, Bailey, 57, whose biography of Philip Roth was published last month, has been accused of multiple acts of grooming and sexual assault. The allegations encompass a 20-year period, from the mid-1990s when Bailey started teaching an eighth-grade English class at Lusher Charter School in New Orleans, until 2015, when Valentina Rice, a publishing executive at Bloomsbury USA, claims that he raped her at the house of the
There’s a word for that. It may just not be the word you learned growing up. John Kelly Say what you will about the people in
Shirley Jackson’s unsettling short story “The Lottery,” but at least they took pride in their town’s unique traditions. Sometimes I fret that our nation’s unique subcultures have been ground down and erased by the homogenizing sandpaper of the mass media. But perhaps I needn’t worry. After my recent column on different synonyms for flip-flops zories, go-aheads, thongs, etc. readers wrote in to share terms they learned growing up. Many were surprised to later discover that not everyone had learned the same words.