Peter Straus
Ernest Competition
SOME BOOKS ARE worth the wait. When his current publisher was not even a gleam in anyone’s eye, Tobias Wolff’s UK editor, Liz Calder, on the basis of some extraordinary short stories, Hunters in the Snow, commissioned his first novel. Around twenty years later, and having moved from Cape to help found Bloomsbury, she publishes it. Old School is a beautifully written and utterly captivating novel, which is what one would expect from a literary master such as Tobias Wolff.
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I have just spent a wonderful few minutes re-reading the best book review of the year in my opinion. It's by Piers Brendon in September's issue of @Lit_Review. Beautifully captioned as 'Jack the Lad', Brendon takes Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Vol.I apart! It's a laugh a minute. Ouch!
'Perhaps the real modern polymaths are the hidden ones who do not themselves grab the limelight but have the expertise to bring together different fields of knowledge: librarians, teachers, editors of literary journals…'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/masters-of-none
Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.