Page 7 - Malcolm Lowry News Today

The acclaimed novelist on the fun of plotting a counterfactual history of the 16th century, reading in lockdown, and his despair at his country’s vaccine rollout

The Books That Made Me: 8 Writers on Their Literary Inspirations In decades past, the Book Review occasionally asked young authors about their biggest influences. For our 125th anniversary, we put the question to a new generation. Video April 15, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET In 1984, The New York Times Book Review presented a group of writers under 40 with a simple challenge: Name the writer or writers who have most influenced your work and explain how. While many of these authors were just beginning the...

By John Maher | Feb 23, 2021 “If you would be a poet," Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a man who would know, wrote in 2007, "create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if it means sounding apocalyptic....” For nearly the better part of seven decades, Ferlinghetti not only wrote such poems but sold them, from San Franciscos City Lights Booksellers, which he founded with Peter D. Martin in 1953, and published them, at City Lights Publishers, which he st...

The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail. Peter wrote for Creem, a gig hed scored not only with his writing chops but also through his friendship with the reigning bard of rock and roll journalism, Lester Bangs. To the air between us he offered up a pretty guitar with reverence, as if it were a holy artifact. A guitar with a rosewood neck, like Tom Verlaines, he said proudly. Verlaine was the lead singer and guitarist in the band Television. I hadnt yet heard their music, which set Peter ...

As the awards season approaches, a poet and editor offers some suggestions to the Sahitya Akademi The awards, publishing, journal and events strategies of the Akademi have continued unchanged for years, says Medha Singh. Sahitya Akademi Award The Sahitya Akademi awards are considered among the most prestigious literary accolades in the country, with good reason. But the awards, and many of the Akademi’s other activites, have continued in unchanged form for a long time. Perhaps some c...

Mudflat Dreaming: Waterfront Battles and the Squatters Who Fought Them in 1970s Vancouver Jean Walton New Star Books (2018) Finn Slough sits at the intersection of Number 4 and Dyke roads, on the outskirts of Richmond, B.C. The historic fishing village is like something out of a dream, or a different time entirely. Two rows of wooden shacks and houses — some ramshackle, others bright and well-cared for — perch on stilts along a narrow inlet off the mighty Fraser River. Announcements, Events...

Photograph by Fay Godwin The son of an English businessman, J. G. Ballard was born and raised in Shanghai. For the past twenty-odd years, he has lived more or less anonymously in Shepperton, a dingy, nondescript suburb of London lying under the approach to Heathrow Airport. Ballard’s writing is so often situated within the erotic, technical, postholocaust landscape, and so often concerned with the further reaches of postmodern consciousness, that it is inevitably rather droll to come upon the...

Ok, just got the news of a new lockup on 16 th December. It had been expected but I was hoping it would be on Friday so I could still have lunch with my friend Pamela at the French House in Soho on Thursday. No such luck. Was planning on oysters. It was going to be my Xmas treat, but I had to kiss that one goodbye. One of the main reasons the lockdown is upsetting is because many pubs and restaurants are going to go under. Will the historic French House survive? Doubtful.  So many jobs lost. �...

Whole-hog barbecue in the entire state. a 175-pound pig will feed many mouths. about 250 people eat here a day. now this is a not-for-profit establishment? >> john currence: yeah. >> anthony: is that right? >> john currence: yeah, it sure is. >> anthony: what kinda socialist, communist -- are you up to, currence? whats going on here? this is the state of mississippi. >> john currence: well, im just a feel-good kind of guy. >> anthony: me too. ive been here only a week. my sentences, theyre start...

>> anthony: in 1936, the town of cuernavaca, 50 miles from mexico city, was visited by malcolm lowry. a tormented, self-loathing, brilliant and hopelessly alcoholic author. his life work, "under the volcano," was set here. it is widely believed to be one of the great novels of the 20th century. lowry saw symbolism and evil everywhere here. in the deep barrancas, the looming volcano that towered overhead. writer, poet javier sicilia, one of cuernavacas most celebrated residents, has reason to see