James Purdon
Pen Pals
Here and Now: Letters, 2008–2011
By Paul Auster & J M Coetzee
Faber & Faber/Harvill Secker 248pp £20 order from our bookshop
There’s always something slightly uncomfortable about reading other people’s mail, though we’re happy to relax the taboo if the correspondents are famous enough, even more if they’re safely posthumous. It isn’t often that we’re invited to read letters between living writers, which makes Here and Now something of a novelty: a near-current record of correspondence between two major contemporary authors over a three-year period.
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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.