Gaddis goes on:
current & recent activity Suggestions for this page are welcome: please send to postoffice at inwriting.org |
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| From NEW YORK— Muriel Oxenberg Murphy , the co-founder of the American painting and sculpture department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, died two weeks ago of cancer, Artnet reports. Murphy, 82, joined the Met in 1949 and helped establish the department under the guidance of Robert Hale. In the 1970s, she became known for her New York salon, which brought together many important literary and art world figures. She edited the collected writings of the novelist William Gaddis, who was her companion for more than 20 years starting in the '70s, and a collected volume of her writing, Excerpts: from the Unpublished Files of Muriel Oxenberg Murphy , was published in July. -- Victoria Harding |
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The Argentinian-born novelist Rodrigo Fresán has been selected to introduce the Spanish-language edition of Agape Agape, translated by Miguel Martinez-Lage, who has also translated J.M. Coetzee, and to be published by Sexto Piso. Fresán's most recent novel to be translated into English is Kensington Gardens. | |
| Good news for all who gave up! Gregory Cowles reports in the NY Times Book Review's Paper Cuts blog that he has at last read Carpenter's Gothic, and finds that "Gaddis is not in fact all that difficult." The blog was written just before he was named editor at the Times Book Review, so there may be a causal effect there, and one can only hope he reads the other four novels; his life may change again thereafter... | ||
The publisher of many "illustrious writers," including Gaddis, Robert Giroux is dead at age 94: the NY Times obituary is here, with a link to their page on Gaddis, which in turn has links to extensive materials from their archives, including contemporary reviews of Gaddis's books and other articles, and to Gaddis material on other sites. . |
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| 79 Horatio Street, the building where Gaddis lived in his Village days, on the street where Wyatt Gwyon had his studio, has been sold: read more about the sale, and the building's rather colorful history, here. --Peter Dempsey View Larger Map |
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Ninth Letter, a beautifully produced literary and arts magazine published semi-annually by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has published the Gaddis story, "In Dreams I Kiss Your Hand, Madam" in its Fall-Winter 2007 issue, and it has been reprinted in Harper's Magazine in its Readings section in August 2008. It's available on line here |
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| A collection of essays on Gaddis's work, Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System, edited by Joseph Tabbi and Rone Shavers, has been described (at www.findarticles.com) as "a collection of papers and other materials takes up the gap in scholarship on Gaddis's approach to aesthetics, systems, media and capital and includes two biographical pieces as well. They include an interview with Gaddis from about 1980, Gaddis's intellectual relationship with Kierkegaard, his approach to the encyclopedic novel, and to dialogue, his aesthetics of cybernetics (to the first and second order), his place n the autopoiesis of American literature, cognitive gothic relevance theory and its iteration and style, Gaddis's transition to postmodernism, his cognitive map, the debates around him, and the remarkable commentary on the media in such works as Agape Agape. This makes Gaddis more famous, but just as delightfully difficult." Full information, including a list of essays, here. |  |
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Torschlusspanik, the German broadcast version of Agape Agape, translated by Marcus Ingendaay, directed by Klaus Buhlert, and performed by Ignaz Kirchner, originally broadcast in 1999, was re-broadcasted on 19th November 2005 on Deutschlandfunk. During the summer of 1997, when he visited the German-American
Festival for Literature, "Crossings," in Cologne, Gaddis was persuaded
by Elisabeth Pankin to write a play for DeutschlandRadio, where she
was director of radio plays. Gaddis was surprised because, as he rmarked,
"radio
is something you listen to in cars." Pankin was expecting
a collage for many voices, something coming close to
party scenes in The
Recognitions , but got instead a monologue. Her disappointment
passed during production, and in the end all involved
knew that they had taken part
in something great and important. |
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| 50th
anniversary of The Recognitions |
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Penguin reissues The
Recognitions and J R with surprising cover art. |
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