“‘American Eve’ by Paula Uruburu”
BY THE time she was 16, Evelyn Nesbit was the face of her age, a stunning beauty with a “heart-stopping scarlet stare,” a famous artist’s and photographer’s model whose image, in the earliest years of the 20th century, was used to sell everything from soap to chocolate, sewing machines to powdered toothpaste.
“Liars and cheats”
In 1988, Princeton University accepted an orphan with an eye-catching résumé. Seventeen-year-old Alexi Santana hadn’t been to school but had picked up his education while working in Utah as a cattle herder, a construction worker and a racehorse exerciser. He had read Plato while sleeping under the stars.
“The magical and the elemental, from Halldór Laxness”
“Summer up here in the north is beautiful,” my Finnish father-in-law once said. “Last year it was on a Thursday.” The great Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness develops this idea in his masterwork, “Independent People”: “They stood in bogs and pools, in water and in mud, the close-packed clouds about them interminable, the wet grass whistling drearily under the scythe.
“Unexpected affinities”
Careers have arcs. Writers develop and change, as evidenced by “I Explain a Few Things: Selected Poems” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 360 pp., $16), a new bilingual anthology of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” (Vintage: 384 pp., $14.95), a collection of 24 stories spanning more than two decades by Haruki Murakami.
“His own brand”
Almost 50 years ago, in 1959, Philip Roth published “Goodbye, Columbus,” a coming-of-age love story that was short, sharp, tender and pitch-perfect, and won the National Book Award. Few writers have launched a career so auspiciously. Roth, of course, went on to win pretty much every other literary prize going, achieving almost uncontrollable celebrity with his 1969 novel “Portnoy’s Complaint.”
“This town is rated noir”
NOIR is the indigenous Los Angeles form: It was created here, it grew up here and from here it spread, not only as a genre but as a way of looking at life, character and fate. As a framing lens, it’s now so powerful that it seems not only to be a strategy for telling a story but a way to understand — automatically, unconsciously — how a story works.
“Don’t drive, won’t drive”
I’m an English guy who’s been in L.A. for 16 years. I work here. My children were born here. And still I don’t drive. Some people find this puzzling.“But why?” they ask. “Why don’t you drive?”“I’m really not sure,” I say. “I’ve spent thousands of dollars in psychotherapy trying to work that one out.”