Letter from Ernest Hemingway’s widow could solve Cuban farmhouse mystery

Finca Vigía/ en.wikipedia.org

The Guardian

Alison Flood

Ernest and Mary Hemingway at their Cuban farmhouse, Finca Vigía. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

The mystery of whether Ernest Hemingway’s widow volunteered or was coerced into leaving their Cuban house to the nation has come a step closer to being solved, with the discovery of a letter in which she states that her late husband “would be pleased” that Finca Vigía be “given to the people of Cuba … as a centre for opportunities for wider education and research”.

Hemingway lived on the 19th-century Cuban farm for 21 years, between 1939 and 1961, writing his masterpieces The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls there as well as posthumously published works including A Moveable Feast and Islands in the Stream. He committed suicide in Idaho in 1961. The property became a museum in 1962, but it has been unclear whether this was following the wishes of Mary Hemingway, his fourth wife, or at the insistence of the Cuban government, with differing accounts from different parties.

The newly discovered letter, dated 25 August 1961, sees Mary Hemingway specifically donate the Finca Vigía to the Cuban people. “…Whereas – my husband, Ernest Hemingway, was for twenty-five years a friend of the Pueblo of Cuba … he never took part in the politics of Cuba … he never sold any possessions of his, except his words, having given away cars, guns, books and his Nobel prize medal to the Virgen del Cobre,” she wrote to her husband’s friend Roberto Herrera.

“I believe that he would be pleased that his property … in Cuba be given to the people of Cuba … as a center for opportunities for wider education and research, to be maintained in his memory. With this document, as the only heir of Ernest’s estate, I hereby give to the people of Cuba this property, in the hope that they will learn and profit from, and enjoy it, as much as Ernest and I did.”

The letter from Mary Hemingway to to her husband Ernest’s friend Roberto Herrera. Photograph: Alexander Historial Auctions©

Sold this week via Alexander Historical Auctions, the letter was found among the papers of Herrera. “Ernest Hemingway had committed suicide in Ketchum less than two months earlier. However, at some point shortly thereafter, Mary backtracked and stated that after Hemingway’s suicide, the Cuban government contacted her in Idaho and announced that it intended to expropriate the house, along with all real property in Cuba. These documents show that Mary did indeed intend to donate the home to the Cuban people,” said the auction house in its catalogue. The handwritten note was snapped up on Wednesday for $1,100 (£716), a price well below the estimate of $2,000-$3,000.

Valerie Hemingway – who was Ernest’s secretary before marrying his youngest son, whom she met at the author’s funeral – went to Finca Vigía with Mary shortly after Hemingway’s death to sort through his papers. She said via email that “what is being auctioned is a draft of a memo Mary intended to give to [Fidel] Castro that Roberto Herrera was going to translate. As far as I can remember Mary never actually sent the memo; she gave the draft to Roberto afterwards.”

Her own memoir, Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways, sees Valerie write that Mary “genuinely wanted to see her husband’s memory endure by creating a shrine of the home he loved and dedicating it to the Cuban people, among whom he had lived for more than a third of his life … Mary’s first idea was that the finca would become a learning centre, and to that end she wanted to leave there as complete a record of her husband’s life and most especially of his work as was prudent.”

But Naomi Wood, author of the novel Mrs Hemingway, said that Mary Hemingway’s own memoir suggests the situation was not quite as straightforward. “The question is whether the Hemingway house was ‘donated’ by Mary, or coerced from her, or extracted from her via diplomacy. In all likelihood it was a mixture of all three,” she said.

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Ernest and Mary relax on their fishing boat, Filar. Photograph: Popperfoto/CPL

“In her memoir, How It Was, she uses the words ‘acquisition’ and ‘appropriation’, which suggests the takeover of Hemingway’s property was done with some unwillingness on her part, rather than a donation as the auctioned letter suggests. Though the auctioned letter suggests a donation, her memoir suggests bullying, though Castro does it in the most gentlemanly fashion, even asking her: ‘Why don’t you stay here with us in Cuba?’”

Mary Hemingway recounts a telephone conversation from the time in How it Was, in which she says to a Cuban official that “I’m not sure if I wish to give you our finca. [They could appropriate it, of course, as they had done to so much US property there.] Perhaps your government would give me permission to go down to remove our personal papers. Would you find out and call me back tomorrow? This same hour? Muy bien.”

She was advised, she writes, “to take the chance of recovering Ernest’s manuscripts, if nothing more. By this time United States citizens were prohibited journeys to Cuba, but the US immigration authorities in Miami gave me the exit and re-entry permits.”

The author’s widow would bring back crates of papers on a shrimp boat travelling from Havana to Tampa. “Mary also recounts her negotiations with Castro to remove a few paintings back to the US: including a Paul Klee and Juan Gris,” said Wood. “She also manages to remove Hemingway’s wax-sealed manuscripts they’d found at the Banco Nacional. Mary’s cargo left on a shrimp boat back to Tampa, which was the last to have any clearance papers from the US. More importantly for scholars than the nature of the deal for the Finca Vigía donation or appropriation was the fact that she managed to get those manuscripts out.”

Dr Susan Beegel, editor emerita of The Hemingway Review, said the discovery of the letter – first covered in Fine Books & Collections – was “new and interesting”.

“It’s nice to see her thoughts on how she intended the people of Cuba to enjoy the museum – still thriving today,” said Beegal. “It’s well-known that Mary deeded the Finca Vigía to the people of Cuba. After the Castro revolution, the house could have been appropriated, as was the case with other US property in Cuba, but instead the Cuban government approached Mary to request the house as a gift, to be used as a monument to Hemingway. She negotiated with them (and the Kennedy administration as well, because US citizens were not allowed to visit Cuba) to be able to return and remove personal belongings, art, and Hemingway’s manuscripts from the house in exchange for the donation.”

El Premio Cervantes 2014 Juan Goytisolo y Cuba

Café Fuerte

El escritor español Juan Goytisolo

Por Pío E. Serrano

A pesar del retraso con que se ha concedido el Premio Cervantes a Juan Goytisolo es una buena noticia para el mundo literario de habla hispana. No solo por la calidad de su escritura sino por su capacidad de molestar y provocar la pereza de ciertos posicionamientos extremos de lo políticamente correcto. Esta actitud en especial lo fue en sus análisis del caso cubano, conocido por él de primera mano. 

Goytisolo visita Cuba por primera vez en 1961, invitado por Carlos Franqui. El entusiasmo que provoca en él, un luchador antifranquista, la joven revolución queda reflejado en su primer texto, una serie de artículos publicados primero en el periódico Revolución y posteriormente recogidos en forma de libro en Pueblo en marcha. Aquí da testimonio de lo que aprecia como un pueblo mayoritariamente exaltado por el derrocamiento de la dictadura de Batista, el estreno de una nueva época y el inicio de reformas que aprecia, sobre todo, en la vida rural. A partir de entonces regresa a Cuba en numerosas ocasiones en lo que H. M. Enzensberger denomina “turismo revolucionario”.

Del entusiasmo al desaliento

En 1967 se registra su última visita a la Isla y el entusiasmo primero se sustituye por un notable desaliento. Confronta entonces el giro autoritario del régimen, la inconformidad de un núcleo importante de escritores, la persecución a los homosexuales… A su entender, la revolución cubana había dejado de ser un modelo a seguir. Una posición, por cierto, en la que queda relegado entre la intelectualidad española, latinoamericana y gran parte europea. Junto a Mario Vargas Llosa y unos pocos más sostendrá pugnazmente su incómoda posición minoritaria.

En 1968 se había negado a asistir al dócil Congreso Cultural de La Habana, que contó con una importante representación española, y en 1969 publica la primera edición de Señas de identidad  que contiene en sus páginas algunas de las razones de su creciente desencanto.

Todavía en 1971, de nuevo junto a Vargas Llosa, y junto a Jorge Semprum, otro de los intelectuales españoles con los que comparte sus posiciones ante el régimen cubano, es uno de los impulsores de las dos cartas abiertas que se dirigen a Fidel Castro en protesta por el “Caso Padilla” que tanto recordaba los procesos de Moscú.

El desencanto originario de Goytisolo pronto dejó de ser una voz aislada. Se sucedieron entonces posturas críticas, desde Los guerrilleros en el poder de K. S. Karol y Cuba, ¿es socialista? de René Dumont (ambos de 1971), y Persona non grata (1974) de Jorge Edwards hasta El hundimiento del Titanic (1985) de H. M. Enzensbeger, entre tantos otros.

Pero no olvidemos que Juan Goytisolo fue el primero de los intelectuales europeos que dio la voz de alarma. A su lado, desde Hispanoamérica, Mario Vargas Llosa y el grupo Sur, desde Argentina, quizás la inicial desaprobación de la experiencia revolucionaria cubana.

Fidel Castro's friend Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez Dies at 87

NBC News.com

www.periodismosinfronteras.org

Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, known the world over for his world of magical realism in books like "One Hundred Years of Solitude," died in his home in Mexico City at age 87.

Widely considered the most popular Spanish-language writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century, his books blended the everyday with fantasy elements such as a boy born with a pig's tail and a man trailed by a swarm of yellow butterflies.

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" was "the first novel in which Latin Americans recognized themselves, that defined them, celebrated their passion, their intensity, their spirituality and superstition, their grand propensity for failure," biographer Gerald Martin told The Associated Press.

When he accepted the Nobel prize in 1982, Garcia Marquez described Latin America as a "source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune."

British author Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, has died at 94

Danica Kirka/

Doris Lessing, the Nobel prize-winning, free-thinking, world-traveling and often-polarizing author of "The Golden Notebook" and dozens of other novels that reflected her own improbable journey across the former British empire, died Sunday. She was 94. 

Her publisher, HarperCollins, said the author of more than 55 works of fiction, opera, nonfiction and poetry, died peacefully early Sunday. Her family requested privacy, and the exact cause of death was not immediately clear.

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Nobel literature prize goes to Canadian writer Alice Munro

today

PETER MUHLY / AFP - Getty Images

A photo taken on June 25, 2009 in Dublin, Ireland 

shows Canadian author Alice Munro who

 has been awarded the 2013 Nobel Literature Prize.

Alice Munro, a Canadian master of the short story revered as a thorough but forgiving chronicler of the human spirit, won the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday. 

Munro is the first Canadian writer to receive the prestigious $1.2 million award from the Swedish Academy since Saul Bellow, who left for the U.S. as a boy and won in 1976. 

Seen as a contemporary Chekhov for her warmth, insight and compassion, she has captured a wide range of lives and personalities without passing judgment on her characters. Unusually for Nobel winners, Munro's work consists almost entirely of short stories. "Lives of Girls and Women" is her only novel. 

"I knew I was in the running, yes, but I never thought I would win," the 82-year-old said by telephone when contacted by The Canadian Press in Victoria, British Columbia. 

Munro is beloved among her peers, from Lorrie Moore and George Saunders to Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen. She is equally admired by critics. She won a National Book Critics Circle prize for "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," and is a three-time winner of the Governor General's prize, Canada's highest literary honor. 

Atwood — a fellow Canadian who also figured prominently in the Nobel buzz — tweeted, "Hooray! Alice Munro wins 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature." 

Munro's publisher, Penguin Random House, welcomed the award with "jubilation and great pride," and sent "joyous good wishes to our beloved author and to our family of her publishers and editors." Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper congratulated Munro on Twitter "on behalf of all Canadians." 

The award is likely to be the capstone to Munro's career. She told Canada's National Post in June that she was "probably not going to write anymore." 

In announcing the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy called her a "master of the contemporary short story." The academy's permanent secretary, Peter Englund, said he had not managed to get hold of her but left a message on her answering machine. 

"She has taken an art form, the short story, which has tended to come a little bit in the shadow behind the novel, and she has cultivated it almost to perfection," Englund told The Associated Press 

Munro is the 13th female literature laureate in the 112-year history of the Nobel Prizes. 

Her published work often turns on the difference between Munro's youth in Wingham, a conservative Canadian town west of Toronto, and her life after the social revolution of the 1960s. 

In an interview with AP in 2003, she described the '60s as "wonderful." 

It was "because, having been born in 1931, I was a little old, but not too old, and women like me after a couple of years were wearing miniskirts and prancing around," she said. 

Munro, the daughter of a fox farmer and a teacher, was born Alice Anne Laidlaw. She was a literary person in a nonliterary town, concealing her ambition like a forbidden passion. 

"It was glory I was after ... walking the streets like an exile or a spy," recalls the narrator of Munro's "Lives of Girls and Women," a novel published in 1971. 

She received a scholarship to study at the University of Western Ontario, majoring in journalism, and was still an undergraduate when she sold a story to CBC radio in Canada. 

She dropped out of college to marry a fellow student, James Munro, had three children and became a full-time housewife. By her early 30s, she was so frightened and depressed she could barely write a full sentence. 

Her good fortune was to open a bookstore with her husband, in 1963. Stimulated by everything from the conversation of adults to simply filling out invoices, her narrative talents resurfaced but her marriage collapsed. Her first collection, "Dance of the Happy Shades," came out in 1968 and won the Governor's prize. 

She later married Gerald Fremlin, a geographer. 

Her stories are usually set in Ontario, her home province. Among her best known is "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," the story of a woman who begins losing her memory and agrees with her husband that she should be placed in a nursing home. 

The narrative begins in a relatively tender, traditional mood. But we soon learn that the husband has been unfaithful in the past and didn't always regret it — "What he felt was mainly a gigantic increase in well-being." The wife, meanwhile, has fallen for a man at the nursing home. 

Some have called her "the greatest author in North America and, yes, I tend to agree with that," said the academy's Englund. "We're not saying just that she can say a lot in just 20 pages — more than an average novel writer can — but also that she can cover ground. She can have a single short story that covers decades and it works." 

Last year's Nobel literature award went to Mo Yan of China. 

The 2013 Nobel announcements continue Friday with the Nobel Peace Prize, followed by the economics prize on Monday. The awards will be handed to the winners on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.

La mujer que tiene el culo más bello del mundo/ Juan Abreu

Juan Abreu

Viene La Giganta y vamos a cenar. Es una de esas veladas como sólo pueden ser veladas con la mujer que tiene el culo más bello del mundo. Miren que hay culos. Pero como este, ninguno. Yo es que quiero meterme debajo de la mesa. Pero no estamos en el St. Rèmy y los manteles son elegantes pero ay, muy cortos. Y además nadie me reta y sin reto en estos casos no se puede actuar. Mientras hablamos de su columpio a seis metros de altura y del mini cepo y de que tenemos que ir a Madrid yo en lo único que pienso es en aquel día en Menorca en que echó a caminar hacia el faro y por suerte quedó esta imagen para la posteridad.

Ustedes no se la merecen, ya lo sé, pero es verano.

Come to papa: Ernest Hemingway's papers return from Cuba

latimes.com

Ernest Hemingway at Finca Vigia in Cuba with, from left, an unidentified woman, his wife Mary Hemingway, and guests Juan "Sinsky" Dunabeitia and Gianfranco Ivancich. (Associated Press)

By Jenny Hendrix

Records from the estate in Cuba where Ernest Hemingway wrote many of his most famous books have been digitized and brought to the United States, the Associated Press reports. The materials will be held at Boston's John F. Kennedy Library, which holds a Hemingway collection of over 100,000 pages.

The Boston-based Finca Vigia Foundation -- named after the estate near Havana where Hemingway lived from 1939 to 1960 -- has been working in Cuba to preserve the papers, books, and belongings that have remained at the house since the Nobel Prize-winner died in 1961. 

The foundation was started by Jenny Phillips, the granddaughter of Hemingway's editor Maxwell Perkins. In 2001, she noticed that the Hemingway home had fallen into disrepair and that many of the author's papers were being stored in a damp basement. After long negotiations navigating the complex relationship between Cuba and the U.S., permission was obtained for the U.S. Treasury and State departments to send conservators to Cuba to help save the artifacts. The foundation also seeks to restore and maintain Hemingway's Cuba home and grounds.

Because of travel restrictions to Cuba, this will be the first time most U.S. citizens will have the opportunity to see and examine these Hemingway papers. Among the 2,000 records that have been digitized are passports showing Hemingway's travel itineraries, letters, shopping lists, bar bills (undoubtedly large), notes from Hemingway to his wife, Mary, and handwritten notebooks full of weather observations, including hurricane sightings.

"This is the flotsam and jetsam of a writer's life," Phillips said. "All these bits and pieces get assembled in a big puzzle." 

Sandra Spanier, a Hemingway scholar at Penn State who reviewed the documents, said that they would undoubtedly help future biographers. "While there is no one single bombshell document," she said, "these new details add texture and nuance to our understanding of the man."

Included in the records is a letter written by the critic Malcolm Cowley, praising Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea": " 'The Old Man and the Sea' is pretty marvelous,' " Cowley writes, "the sea is, too, and so is the fish."

A telegram from poet and writer Archibald MacLeish contains more praise, this time for Hemingway's novel, "For Whom the Bell Tolls": "The word great had stopped meaning anything in this language until your book. You have given it all its meaning back. I'm proud to have shared any part of your sky."

There is also a carbon copy of a confidential note Hemingway wrote to actress Ingrid Bergman, telling her he wanted her to have the female lead in the 1943 film version of "For Whom the Bell Tolls," opposite Gary Cooper: "There is no one I would rather see do it and I have consistently refused all suggestions that I endorse other people for the role," he wrote. Bergman did win the role of Maria.

The documents also reveal more about Hemingway's role in World War II: While in Cuba in 1942 and '43 he was authorized by the U.S. Embassy to patrol the island's north coast in his fishing boat, searching for German submarines.

Restoration is ongoing at the Finca Vigia estate. Among other projects, a climate-controlled building is being constructed at the site to house Hemingway's books and the original records. 

Although tensions still exists between the US and Cuba, Phillips sees the Hemingway project as a unique feat of cooperation forged through literature. "Because of the political situation between the two countries, the Cubans held on very fast to what they had there," Phillips said. "I think this is an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind collaboration."

El contrahéroe

ivandelanuez

Iván de la Nuez

En 1989, con el desplome del comunismo, Eduard Limónov siente que su singularidad también se viene abajo. Para los países del Este había llegado la hora del capitalismo, el Mercado o la democracia. Para él, comenzaba el tiempo de lo que siempre había considerado la más terrible de todas las plagas: la normalidad. Ya no sería un escritor disidente y maldito -y ruso- en Nueva York o París. Ahora sería uno más. Estatus insoportable para alguien que había sostenido una anomalía compulsiva y sin merma desde su adolescencia en la Ucrania soviética hasta su regreso a la Rusia post-soviética.

Limónov es el protagonista del libro homónimo que acaba de publicar Emmanuel Carrère (Anagrama). Una biografía “novelada” del escritor, disidente, anti-disidente, activista, delincuente, guerrillero y presidiario cuya vida cruza Nueva York y París, Moscú y los Balcanes, los salones literarios y la cárcel. Un multiopositor fiel a la inconformidad de su juventud underground, pero que al mismo tiempo evidencia la paradoja de que el derrumbe del comunismo también se llevó por delante esa contracultura que lo erosionaba.  

Como no podía ser de otra manera en un hombre hecho a sí mismo a martillazos, Limónov es un nombre escogido por este escritor nacido en Járkov, Ucrania de Stalin, en 1943, y que todavía sigue en pie de guerra en la Rusia de Putin. Desde una infancia y adolescencia en la que ya demuestra sus dotes como poeta y malhechor, Limónov se hace adicto a los extremos, fluctúa entre unas cuantas y contradictorias militancias, tiene vidas varias marcadas por la Segunda Guerra Mundial, el estalinismo, la guerra fría, el exilio, la caída del Muro de Berlín, la guerra de los Balcanes, la terapia de choque del poscomunismo, la cárcel y la oposición más reciente a la Rusia de los oligarcas. Bajo todas estas circunstancias se propuso actuar en primera línea, en ninguna se admitió como víctima.

En Moscú se enrola en la contracultura. En Nueva York zigzaguea entre la extrema pobreza y sus encuentros homosexuales con negros, entre su labor como mayordomo de un millonario o la pérdida de Elena, su gran amor de esos tiempos. Todo ello mezclado con un afán de trascendencia y una autoimpuesta obligación de no morir en el olvido. De este cóctel Molotov dan cuenta sus libros de entonces: Nosotros somos el héroe nacional, Historia de un servidor o El poeta ruso prefiere los negros grandes.

Como Limónov siempre escribe sobre él, hay que considerarlo co-autor de la biografía de Carrère, sin que ello reste un ápice de excelencia a un libro que combina momentos de simbiosis entre el autor y el biografiado con otros marcados por muchos grados de separación. La distancia obvia entre un novelista francés de clase media alta, que vive en “un país tranquilo y decadente” y un personaje extremo, en muchos casos deplorable.

Ignorado en Estados Unidos, donde triunfaban -para acentuar sus reacciones viscerales- estrellas rusas o exsoviéticas de la talla de Nabokov, Brodsky, Nureyev o Baryshnikov, Limónov finalmente consigue éxito en Francia y, sin pensarlo dos veces, se instala en París. Allí se convierte en un personaje notorio, a la vez que toma forma su decisión de mezclar comunismo, fascismo y nacionalismo (nada de esto con moderación) o se fragua su implicación con Arkan y sus tigres en el conflicto de los Balcanes, donde llega a combatir del lado serbio. Todavía le queda tiempo para sufrir por el suicidio de sus mujeres, renovarlas siempre por muchachas más jóvenes o regresar a Rusia para involucrarse en la oposición a Putin desde el Partido Nacional Bolchevique, al que llega a aliar con los liberales de Kaspárov.

Cuesta reseñar este libro sin limitarse a contarlo. Cuesta abandonarse a las interpretaciones, aunque el personaje se baste a sí mismo para remitirnos a pensar el orden del mundo, el poscomunismo, la democracia o la idea de la literatura como un deporte de riesgo.  

Limónov comparte panteón con Jean Genet o Reinaldo Arenas. Pero si estos convierten el exceso en excepcionalidad, él convierte la excepcionalidad en exceso. Como Genet o Arenas, Limónov arma su expedición particular a las orillas. Pero allí donde ellos exploran la libertad, él añade una afición totalitaria que le lanza continuamente al extremismo político.

Limónov no es un héroe, pero tampoco un antihéroe. Más bien, califica como un contrahéroe para el que no existe la palabra “rival”. En su vida sólo hay aliados (pocos y menguantes) o enemigos (muchos y crecientes). Es el anti-Brodsky porque Brodsky ocupa su lugar en la literatura. Es el anti-Putin porque Putin ocupa su lugar en la política. Un contrahéroe analógico, por otra parte, con el encanto táctil y algo vintage del mundo de las armas, la máquina de escribir, el bodybuilding casero…

Que Limónov tiene una vida libresca, no cabe duda. Pero el arte literario reside en alcanzar un libro a la altura de esa vida extrema. La novela de Emmanel Carrère, lo consigue.   

(*) Publicado en Eldiario.es, 19 de febrero, 2013.

Salman Rushdie talks about his new book "Joseph Anton"

GlobalToronto

'ARTE Y OFICIO'/ Heberto Padilla

A los censores

Se pasaron la vida diseñando un patíbulo
que recobrase —después de cada ejecución­—
su inocencia perdida.
Y apareció el patíbulo,
diestro como un obrero de avanzada.
¡Un millón de cabezas cada noche!>
Y al otro día más inocente
que un conductor en la estación de trenes,>
verdugo y con tareas de poeta.

Distinguished Canadians: Hugh MacLennan and "Two Solitudes"

"Verde oliva": La novela de la gallega del Mov. 26 de Julio

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Science fiction master Ray Bradbury dies

WP/

LOS ANGELES — Ray Bradbury, the science fiction-fantasy master who transformed his childhood dreams and Cold War fears into telepathic Martians, lovesick sea monsters, and, in uncanny detail, the high-tech, book-burning future of “Fahrenheit 451,” has died. He was 91.

He died Tuesday night, his daughter said Wednesday. Alexandra Bradbury did not have additional details.

Although slowed in recent years by a stroke that meant he had to use a wheelchair, Bradbury remained active into his 90s, turning out new novels, plays, screenplays and a volume of poetry. He wrote every day in the basement office of his home in the Cheviot Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles and appeared from time to time at bookstores, public library fundraisers and other literary events around Los Angeles.

His writings ranged from horror and mystery to humor and sympathetic stories about the Irish, blacks and Mexican-Americans. Bradbury also scripted John Huston’s 1956 film version of “Moby Dick” and wrote for “The Twilight Zone” and other television programs, including “The Ray Bradbury Theater,” for which he adapted dozens of his works.

“What I have always been is a hybrid author,” Bradbury said in 2009. “I am completely in love with movies, and I am completely in love with theater, and I am completely in love with libraries.”

Bradbury broke through in 1950 with “The Martian Chronicles,” a series of intertwined stories that satirized capitalism, racism and superpower tensions as it portrayed Earth colonizers destroying an idyllic Martian civilization.  

More  >>

J.K. Rowling reveals title of her first adult novel

Harry Potter may not be returning to the printed page, but his creator J.K. Rowling is — some five years after she penned her seventh and final “Harry Potter” book, the English author is set to return to bookshelves Sept. 27 with her first adult fiction novel.

Rowling's new publisher Little, Brown & Co. announced the upcoming release of "The Casual Vacancy," which it describes as a "darkly comic" novel centering on the fictional English town of Pagford, where darkness lies beneath a peaceful facade.  More >>

Herta Müller, preocupada por las revoluciones inacabadas de Cuba y Venezuela

Guadalajara (México), 28 nov (EFE).- La escritora alemana Herta Müller ha declarado hoy a Efe que le preocupa la falta de libertades que hay en Cuba y Venezuela, dos países latinoamericanos que son exponentes de que "en todos lados donde no termina la ...Mas >>

Herta Müller dice no entender lealtad de García Márquez a Fidel Castro

La escritora rumano-alemana Herta Müller, premio Nobel de literatura 2009, dijo que no entiende los "deseos comunistas" de escritores latinoamericanos como el colombiano Gabriel García Márquez, quien apoya a Fidel Castro en Cuba, según una entrevista publicada el domingo en México por la revista Proceso.

"García Márquez es otro caso que yo no comprendo. Como hombre político no lo comprendo. Esa lealtad a Fidel Castro, pase lo que pase en Cuba. Es una lástima", dijo la escritora antes de viajar a México a participar en la Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara, dedicada este año a Alemania.

Mas >

Sexy Russian Spy Anne Chapman Accused Of Plagiarism In Article On Russian Poet

Image: celebrity blog

Business Insider
Anna Chapman, the Russian spy expelled from the United States who has since become some kind of right wing ideologue back in her home state, has been accused of plagiarism in an article on Russian poet Alexander Pushkin.

Chapman wrote an article on Pushkin (the romantic-era Russian poet considered as important as Shakespeare in Russia, yet apparently 'untranslatable') for a column published Monday in paper Komsomolskaya Pravda — here's its Google translated headline: "If Pushkin had to write his mature works, then perhaps there would be no revolution and the murder of the king!".

Unfortunately, it appears that Chapman is in fact no Pushkin scholar.

Worse still, she didn't even plagiarize from a Pushkin scholar, instead choosing to lift entire passages from United Russia spin doctor Oleg Matveichev, a man who thinks that Pushkin was killed in a "European plot" and that United Russia's opposition should be gathered in a city square and run over with tanks.

The Moscow Times reports that Pushkin's death is often invoked for political reasons. "The history of such uses of Pushkin is a trashy novel in its own right," Princeton University professor Caryl Emerson told the paper.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/anna-chapman-plagiarism-pushkin-2011-11?nr_email_referer=1&utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Business%20Insider%20Select&utm_campaign=BI%20Select%20Recurring%202011-11-02#ixzz1caDZROvD

Escritora cubana plagia un libro editado en EE.UU....

La loca del blog: Escritora cubana plagia un libro editado en EE.UU....: CUBANET Carta abierta al Centro Cultural Pablo de la Torriente Brau Nueva York, 8 de octubre de 2011 Ediciones La Memoria Centro Cutural...

50th aniversary of Hemingway dead: Hounded by the Feds

By A. E. HOTCHNER*

New York Times

*A. E. Hotchner is the author of “Papa Hemingway” and “Hemingway and His World.” 

EARLY one morning, 50 years ago today, while his wife, Mary, slept upstairs, Ernest Hemingway went into the vestibule of his Ketchum, Idaho, house, selected his favorite shotgun from the rack, inserted shells into its chambers and ended his life.

[Henrik Drescher]

There were many differing explanations at the time: that he had terminal cancer or money problems, that it was an accident, that he’d quarreled with Mary. None were true. As his friends knew, he’d been suffering from depression and paranoia for the last year of his life.

Ernest and I were friends for 14 years. I dramatized many of his stories and novels for television specials and film, and we shared adventures in France, Italy, Cuba and Spain, where, as a pretend matador with Ernest as my manager, I participated in a Ciudad Real bullfight. Ernest’s zest for life was infectious.

In 1959 Ernest had a contract with Life magazine to write about Spain’s reigning matadors, the brothers-in-law Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín. He cabled me, urging me to join him for the tour. It was a glorious summer, and we celebrated Ernest’s 60th birthday with a party that lasted two days.

But I remember it now as the last of the good times.

In May 1960, Ernest phoned me from Cuba. He was uncharacteristically perturbed that the unfinished Life article had reached 92,453 words. The contract was for 40,000; he was having nightmares.

A month later he called again. He had cut only 530 words, he was exhausted and would it be an imposition to ask me to come to Cuba to help him?

I did, and over the next nine days I submitted list upon list of suggested cuts. At first he rejected them: “What I’ve written is Proustian in its cumulative effect, and if we eliminate detail we destroy that effect.” But eventually he grudgingly consented to cutting 54,916 words. He was resigned, surrendering, and said he would leave it to Life to cut the rest.

I got on the plane back to New York knowing my friend was “bone-tired and very beat-up,” but thinking he simply needed rest and would soon be his old dominating self again.

In November I went out West for our annual pheasant shoot and realized how wrong I was. When Ernest and our friend Duke MacMullen met my train at Shoshone, Idaho, for the drive to Ketchum, we did not stop at the bar opposite the station as we usually did because Ernest was anxious to get on the road. I asked why the hurry.

“The feds.”

“What?”

“They tailed us all the way. Ask Duke.”

“Well ... there was a car back of us out of Hailey.”

“Why are F.B.I. agents pursuing you?” I asked.

“It’s the worst hell. The goddamnedest hell. They’ve bugged everything. That’s why we’re using Duke’s car. Mine’s bugged. Everything’s bugged. Can’t use the phone. Mail intercepted.”

We rode for miles in silence. As we turned into Ketchum, Ernest said quietly: “Duke, pull over. Cut your lights.” He peered across the street at a bank. Two men were working inside. “What is it?” I asked.

“Auditors. The F.B.I.’s got them going over my account.”

“But how do you know?”

“Why would two auditors be working in the middle of the night? Of course it’s my account.”

All his friends were worried: he had changed; he was depressed; he wouldn’t hunt; he looked bad.

Ernest, Mary and I went to dinner the night before I left. Halfway through the meal Ernest said we had to leave immediately. Mary asked what was wrong.

“Those two F.B.I. agents at the bar, that’s what’s wrong.”

The next day Mary had a private talk with me. She was terribly distraught. Ernest spent hours every day with the manuscript of his Paris sketches — published as “A Moveable Feast” after his death — trying to write but unable to do more than turn its pages. He often spoke of destroying himself and would sometimes stand at the gun rack, holding one of the guns, staring out the window.

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Tributes for Jorge Semprun

Jorge Semprún, the renowned Spanish writer, politician and political activist has died at his home in Paris at the age of 87.