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ABOUTNow in its 14th year of publication, this magazine was created to offer the discerning reader a stimulating selection of excellent original writing. Black Lamb Review is a literate rather than a literary publication. Regular columns by writers in a variety of geographic locations and vocations are supplemented by features, reviews, articles on books and authors, and a selection of “departments,” including an acerbic advice column and a lamb recipe. SUBMISSIONSBlack Lamb welcomes submissions from new writers. Email us. QUESTIONSIf you have questions or comments regarding Black Lamb, please email us. |
Archive for May, 2002A Week in Literary HistoryMay 31st, 2002 American ur-poet Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass, 1855-92) is born in West Hills, Long Island, in 1819. Walt Whitman, b. May 31, 1819, d. 1892
Sugggested Reading Poetry Leaves of Grass, 1855-1892. Drum-Taps, 1865. Passage to India, 1871. Prose Democratic Vistas, 1871. Memoranda During the War, 1875-1876. Specimen Days and Collect, 1882-1883. Complete Prose Works, 1892.
Posted by: The Editors A Week in Literary HistoryMay 29th, 2002 Prolific English author G.K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesteron (The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911) in born in Kensington, 1874.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, one of the most famous and beloved men in England for the last three decades of his life, called himself a journalist because he published most of his work in newspapers, among them his own creation, G.K.’s Weekly, which he started in 1918. His taste for paradox and symbol combined naturally with his devout Roman Catholicism in all his works, however secular the subject. He was almost absurdly prolific, but his fertile mind and humor gave value to everything he wrote. His novels are charming and ingenious, his infrequent verse excellent, and his biographical studies constantly illuminating. For his voluminous other writings, he is most rewardingly approached through anthologies. Suggested Reading Novels The Napoleon of Notting Hill, 1904. The Man Who Was Thursday, 1908. Manalive, 1912. The Flying Inn, 1914. Father Brown Stories The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911. The Wisdom of Father Brown, 1914. The Incredulity of Father Brown, 1926. The Secret of Father Brown, 1927. The Scandal of Father Brown, 1935. Essays & Studies Heretics, 1905. All Things Considered, 1908. Orthodoxy, 1908. What’s Wrong with the World, 1910. The Superstitions of the Skeptic, 1925. Generally Speaking, 1928. Come to Think of It, 1930. Avowals and Denials, 1934. Critical Biography Robert Browning, 1903. Charles Dickens, 1906. George Bernard Shaw, 1909. William Blake, 1910. Saint Francis of Assisi, 1923. Robert Louis Stevenson, 1927. Chaucer, 1932. St. Thomas Aquinas, 1933.
Posted by: The Editors A Week in Literary HistoryMay 27th, 2002 In 1894, American noir novelist Dashiell Hammett (The Thin Man, 1933) is born in St. Mary’s County, Md.
Hammett denied having ambitions to write “literary” fiction, but in a few of his detective novels his clear, spare style reaches a level that other authors aspired to. His output is not large, because he was unfortunately a world-class alcoholic and hypochondriac, and perhaps because he spent time in Hollywood. He wrote some of the best parts of Lillian Hellman’s plays. Suggested Reading Novels Red Harvest, 1929. The Thin Man, 1934.
Posted by: The Editors A Week in Literary HistoryMay 27th, 2002 American experimental novelist John Barth (Giles Goat-Boy, 1966) is born in Cambridge, Md., 1930. Barth emerged in the late Fifties and early Sixties both as a rare novelist of ideas and as an experimental fictioneer, celebrating what he and others deemed the death of the traditional novel with exuberant forays into new types of fiction. The early works still reveal many attractions, not least among them an abiding sense of humor, and Giles Goat-Boy is the most inventive and amusing novel of academia ever written. In the later books, though, the novelty wears off, although Barth’s energy doesn’t. Suggested Reading Novels The Floating Opera, 1956. The End of the Road, 1958. The Sot-Weed Factor, 1960. Giles Goat-Boy, 1966. Chimera, 1972. Letters, 1979. Novella Chimera, 1972. Short stories Lost in the Funhouse, 1968. On with the Story! 1996.
Posted by: The Editors A Week in Literary HistoryMay 27th, 2002 In 1912, American novelist and short story writer John Cheever (The Enormous Radio and Other Stories, 1953) is born in Quincy, Mass. John Cheever, b. May 27, 1912, d. 1982
Suggested Reading Short stories The Way Some People Live: A Book of Short Stories, 1943. The Enormous Radio and Other Stories, 1953. Stories, 1956. The Housebreaker at Shady Hill and Other Stories, 1958. The World of Apples, 1973. The Stories of John Cheever, 1978. Novels The Wapshot Chronicle, 1957. The Wapshot Scandal, 1964. Bullet Park, 1969. Falconer, 1977. Other The Journals of John Cheever, 1991.
Posted by: The Editors A Week in Literary HistoryMay 25th, 2002 American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (Self-Reliance, 1841) is born in Boston in 1803. Ralph Waldo Emerson, b. May 25, 1803, d. 1882
Suggested Reading Essays Nature, 1836. The American Scholar, 1837.
Posted by: The Editors A Week in Literary HistoryMay 25th, 2002 Poet Theodore Roethke (Open House, 1941) is born in 1908 in Saginaw, Mich.
A gifted, original, and lyric poet, Roethke has often been consigned to the second tier because his mental illness shortened his career (and life) and limited his output. But he is an essential poet, one of the twentieth century’s most moving and most consistently excellent. Suggested Reading Poetry Open House, 1941. The Lost Son, 1948. Praise to the End!, 1951. The Waking: Poems 1933-1953, 1953. Words for the Wind: The Collected Verse, 1958. I Am! Says the Lamb, 1961. Party at the Zoo, 1963. The Far Field, 1964. Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical, 1964. Collected Poems, 1966. Prose On the Poet and His Craft: Selected Prose, 1966. Selected Letters, 1968. Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 1953-1964, 1972.
Posted by: The Editors A Week in Literary HistoryMay 25th, 2002 American short story writer Raymond Carver (Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, 1975) is born in Clatskanie, Ore., in 1938.
Before his death at fifty of lung cancer, Carver had become the most famous and talked about writer of short stories in America. His earliest stories, florid and full of people talking about “feelings,” were distilled by editor Gordon Lish, and the style that Carver eventually developed — laconic, flat, and menacing — was all the rage in the Seventies and Eighties. But a little Carver goes a long way. The admirable simplicity of the writing can’t make up for the emptiness of the characters, a collection of deadbeats, minor criminals, alcoholics, and losers whose lives are not really worth thinking about. The Carver imitators made American writing a pretty sad affair for twenty years, and his baleful influence is with us still. Suggested Reading Short stories Put Yourself in My Shoes, 1974. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, 1976. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, 1981.
Posted by: The Editors A Week in Literary HistoryMay 25th, 2002 American poet Theodore Roethke (Open House, 1941) is born in 1908 in Saginaw, Mich. Theodore Roethke, b. May 25, 1908, d. 1963
Suggested Reading Poetry Open House, 1941. The Lost Son, 1948. Praise to the End!, 1951. The Waking: Poems 1933-1953, 1953. Words for the Wind: The Collected Verse, 1958. I Am! Says the Lamb, 1961. Party at the Zoo, 1963. The Far Field, 1964. Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical, 1964. Collected Poems, 1966. Prose On the Poet and His Craft: Selected Prose, 1966. Selected Letters, 1968. Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 1953-1964, 1972.
Posted by: The Editors A Week in Literary HistoryMay 22nd, 2002 Mystery writer Ed Goldberg (Served Cold, 1994) is born in the Bronx. Ed Goldberg, b. May 22, 1943
Suggested Reading Novels Served Cold, 1994. Dear Air, 1998. As Alan Gold True Crime, 2005. True Faith, 2007.
Posted by: The Editors |
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