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ABOUTBlack Lamb was created to offer the discerning reader a stimulating selection of excellent original writing. Published monthly. (more) FREE SAMPLE COPYClick here to receive a free sample issue via U.S. mail. There is absolutely no obligation. SUBSCRIBESupport this independently published journal of fine essays. Annual subscriptions are $15 in the USA, $25 in Canada, $30 in the UK, or $35 elsewhere (all prices in US $). Click here to subscribe online via paypal or send a check to Black Lamb, 1759 View Drive, San Leandro CA 94577. QUESTIONSIf you have questions or comments regarding Black Lamb, please email us. |
Archive for the 'Books and Authors' CategoryThis Week in Literary HistoryAugust 1st, 2010 Hungarian-born novelist Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon, 1940) is born in Budapest in 1905. Arthur Koestler, b. September 5, 1905, d. 1983
Suggested Reading Novel Darkness at Noon, 1940. Autobiography Spanish Testament, 1937. Scum of the Earth, 1941. Dialogue with Death, 1942. Arrow in the Blue, 1952. The Invisible Writing, 1954. Non-fiction The Yogi and the Commissar and other essays, 1945. The Challenge of Our Time, 1949. Promise and Fulfillment: Palestine 1917-1949, 1949. Insight and Outlook, 1949. The Trail of the Dinosaur and other essays, 1955. Reflections on Hanging, 1956. Suicide of a Nation, 1963. The Ghost in the Machine, 1967. The Heel of Achilles, 1974.
Posted by: The Editors Last Week in Literary HistoryAugust 1st, 2010 English biographer Michael Holroyd (Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography, 1967) is born in London in 1935. Michael Holroyd, b. August 27, 1935
Suggested Reading Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography, 1967-68. Augustus John: A Biography, 1974-75. Bernard Shaw, 1988-92. A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families, 2008.
Posted by: The Editors Last Month in Black LambVolume 8, Number 7 — July 2010July 1st, 2010 The Black Lamb Review of Books In this Black Lamb Review of Books, a seventh annual issue devoted entirely to books and reading, editor Terry Ross reflects on his springtime reading, which as included four novels by Frederick Buechner, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, two books by Jim Harrison, a Forties noir classic, and novels by Wallace Stegner, Edith Wharton, and Frederic Raphael. Greg Roberts reports on the autobiography of Isaac Stephenson, an honest politician vilified during his lifetime.
Posted by: The Editors June 2007 in Black LambVolume 5, Number 6 — June 2007June 1st, 2007 The Black Lamb Review of Books In our cover story Terry Ross wonders how people find time to read books and talks about the 14 books on his shelf waiting to be read. In our page 2 feature, Tales from the Crypt, Ed Goldberg reviews two books haunted by dead white American authors. In A Lot of Learning, William Bogert offers an appreciation of memoirs by Dick Francis and Anne Fadiman. Cate Garrison reviews The Bookseller of Kabul in We Believe Her. You Read It Here First: Terry Ross celebrates the reissue of Evelyn Waugh’s travel books, the 5-volume autobiography of Leonard Woolf, and Irene Handl’s wonderful The Sioux, published in 1965.
Posted by: The Editors Honorary Black LambsApril 1st, 2007 BY BLACK LAMB Here, as always in this space, are new entries in what will become, later this year, The Ultimate Literary Calendar. We hope you find the following mini-guides with suggested bibliographies useful introductions to these two important figures from the world of books. John Braine, b. April 13, 1922, d. 1987
Suggested Reading Novels Room at the Top, 1957. The Vodi, 1959. Life at the Top, 1962. The Jealous God, 1964. Waiting for Sheila, 1976. The Two of Us, 1984.
Mortimer is celebrated for his creation of Horace Rumpole, the imperturbable barrister, and his wife Hilda, always referred to as She Who Must Be Obeyed. But he is also the writer of many other novels and plays, many of them superb. Our favorites are the Rapstone Chronicles, a trilogy of novels listed below after Rumpole, the autobiography Clinging to the Wreckage, the remarkable play A Voyage Round My Father, and two enchanting books of interviews with famous people (from Grahame Greene and Georges Simenon to Mick Jagger and Raquel Welch), In Character and Character Parts. Suggested Reading Novels & novellas Charade, 1947. The Rumpole Series (19 books), beginning with Rumpole of the Bailey, 1978, through Rumpole and the Reign of Terror, 2006. Paradise Postponed, 1985. Titmuss Regained, 1990. The Sound of Trumpets, 1998. Plays A Voyage Round My Father, 1971. Edwin and Other Plays, 1984. Non-fiction Clinging to the Wreckage, 1982. The Oxford Book of Villains, 1992. Murderers and Other Friends: Another Part of Life, 1994. The Summer of the Dormouse: A Year of Growing Old. Interviews In Character, 1983. Character Parts, 1986.
Posted by: The Editors Honorary Black LambsMarch 1st, 2006 BY BLACK LAMB As always in this space, we present new entries to the Black Lamb Literary Calendar, which will appear later this year. Here are your handy thumbnail guides, with selected bibliographies, to three preeminent figures of literary history.
Whatever his limitations, Strachey revolutionized the writing of biography in English with his book Eminent Victorians, in which he replaced the standard Victorian two-volume compendium of minuscule facts with shorter accounts. If his portrayals of Cardinal Manning, Dr. Thomas Arnold, Florence Nightingale, and General George Gordon reveal as much about the biographer as about the biographee, this only adds to the fun. Strachey went long steps further in the direction of tabloid journalism (elegant tabloid journalism, though) in his subsequent books; biography was never the same again. Biography Eminent Victorians, 1918. Queen Victoria, 1921. Elizabeth and Essex, 1928. Portraits in Miniature, 1931. Essays & Studies Landmarks in French Literature, 1912. Books and Characters, French and English, 1922. Characters and Commentaries, 1933.
Posted by: The Editors Honorary Black LambsDecember 1st, 2004 BY BLACK LAMB December is a fertile month for artistic birthdays, from which we’ve chosen four Honorary Black Lambs to add to our accumulating Black Lamb Literary Calendar. Here are four short assessments and selected bibliographies, your capsule guides to some of literature’s great figures.
Conrad, born Jozef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski in Poland, has often been praised for his mastery of his second language, but in fact he wrote in a strange un-Engish. After a couple of notable books he published his so-called masterpiece, Lord Jim, in 1900, then needed the help of Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford) on three subsequent novels. We confess to a weakness for The Nigger of the Narcissus, but then we’re soft on sea stories, which is probably why we tolerate Lord Jim so far as we do. Conrad’s is a bizarre and non-influential body of work. Novels The Nigger of the Narcissus, 1897. Lord Jim, 1900. Nostromo, 1904. The Secret Agent, 1907. Short stories & tales Typhoon, 1902. Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories, 1902. The Complete Short Stories of Joseph Conrad, 1933.
Posted by: The Editors Honorary Black LambsSeptember 1st, 2003 BY BLACK LAMB September is not specially striking for its supply of literary birthdays, but it makes up in quality whatever it may lack in quantity. Perhaps most notable of the notables is Señor Alcala de Henares, better known as Miguel de Cervantes, who was born on or about September 29 in 1547. His El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, sometimes called the first novel, was published in two parts in 1605 and 1615. Cervantes died in 1616 on the same day as Shakespeare, who was his younger contemporary.
Posted by: The Editors The All Book Issue... and the incredibly cruel All-Book Issue hoaxJune 1st, 2003 BY TERRY ROSS This month’s edition of Black Lamb — which I call the All-Book Issue — is a departure from the norm, because this magazine was created as a reincarnation of the old-fashioned literary Miscellany. Most months, that’s what it is, with the writers checking in from wherever they are — geographically, professionally, psychically — on whatever subjects or anecdotes they choose. It becomes a potpourri of different (and sometimes differing) voices and lives. But for the June issue, the halfway point in our first year, I proposed that the writers choose a book and write about it in the context of their regular columns. Not book reviews, I said, but rather essays on how influential books had changed their lives. About a month before the copy deadline, I sent a mass email to most of the contributors (a few had already sent in their articles) to remind them of this assignment. That’s when the fun started. Noting the copy deadline of April 1, one of the writers, Bud Gardner (his column's calledCountry Lawyer) copied the others’ email addresses from my message and wrote to them all, suggesting a prank. Country apparently called to country, for Emily Emerson (En Campagne) in west-central France immediately proposed that everyone write about the same book. Too hard, someone else said, we have no book in common. How about the same author, then, piped in Rebecca Owen from Pittsburgh, Pa. And thus came into being, at least conceptually, Black Lamb’s first, and certainly its last, All James Michener Issue.
Posted by: The Editors Wondrous landFinding Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell everywhereJune 1st, 2003 BY CATE GARRISON I was born a million miles away in a little village on the side of a hill… (“When you say ‘hill,’” the Queen interrupted, “I could show you hills, in comparison with which you’d call that a valley.”)
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