New Book by Dale Salwak, Noted Pym Author and Editor

See below, from the excellent Dale Salwak:

New Book Conjures The Literary Dead

Posted at 11:20PM Wednesday 20 Apr 2011
If you could meet one deceased literary figure, who would that be? What would you ask? What would you say, and why? In AFTERWORD: CONJURING THE LITERARY DEAD (May 1st, University of Iowa Press), edited by Dale Salwak, eighteen distinguished authors respond to this challenge by creating imagined conversations with a constellation of British and American authors, from Samuel Johnson to Jane Austen to Samuel Beckett to Edith Wharton.

Each chapter embarks on an intellectual, emotional, and often humorous voyage as the layers of time are peeled away, letting readers experience authors as they really were in their own era or, on occasion, transported to the present. As eccentric as it is eclectic, this collection takes the audience on a dizzying descent into a literary Inferno where biographers, novelists, and critics eat the food of the dead and return to tell the tale. Readers will take great pleasure in seeing what happens when scholars are loosed from the chains of fact and conduct imaginary interviews with deceased authors.

Covering 200 years of literary history, the essays in AFTERWORD draw upon the lifelong, consuming interest of the contributors, each fashioning a vivid, credible portrait of a vulnerable, driven, fully human character. As contributors appeal to what Margaret Atwood calls the deep human desire to "go to the land of the dead, to bring back to the living someone who has gone there," readers are privy to questions that have seldom been asked, to incidents that have been suppressed, to some of the secrets that have puzzled readers for years, and to novel literary truths about the essential nature of each author.

Contributors:

Catherine Aird (on Rudyard Kipling), Brian Aldiss (on Thomas Hardy), Margaret Atwood (on negotiating with the dead), William M. Chace (on Ezra Pound), Nora Crook (on the Shelleys), Paul Delany (on George Gissing), Colin Dexter (on Alfred Edward Housman), Margaret Drabble (on Arnold Bennett), Peter Firchow (on George Orwell), Alan W. Friedman (on Samuel Beckett), Eugene Goodheart (on Jane Austen), John Halperin (on Edith Wharton), Francis King (on Oscar Wilde), Jeffrey Meyers (on Samuel Johnson), Cynthia Ozick (on Henry James), Jay Parini (on Robert Frost), Carl Rollyson (on William Faulkner), Dale Salwak and Laura Nagy (on literary imagination), Alan Sillitoe (on Joseph Conrad), and Ann Thwaite (on Frances Hodgson Burnett, Edmund Gosse, A. A. Milne, and Emily Tennyson).

The Subversion of Romance in the Novels of Barbara Pym

Available from the author at etsag1998@aol.com. Also, in the true spirit of Pymian indexers and proofreaders comes A Bibliography of Doll and Toy Sources, Mixed Media, Electronic, Musical, Artistic, and a new Poetry Chapbook, Sappho, I should Have Listened.

Fragment by Sappho:

Sappho,
When some fool
Explodes rage in your breast,
Sappho,
Stop that yapping tongue!

Barbara Pym Society on Facebook

Pym on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Barbara-Pym-Society/326965535031?sk=wall#!/pages/Barbara-Pym-Society/326965535031?sk=wall#!/photo.php?fbid=10150529901870032&set=pu.326965535031&type=1&theater

Pym Conference on line

See below and enjoy! I will also post some photos.

Photos from the 2011 North American Conference have just been posted on our Facebook page, and the papers are on our web site.

Remember, BPS memberships expire on March 31 every year. To renew for 2011, click here. You can now renew online and pay by credit card if you wish.

We will be having a Summer Garden Fête on Sunday June 26 at 3:00 p.m. at the home of Denise Marois-Wolf in Acton, Massachusetts. Details will be forthcoming soon.

Best wishes,

Tom Sopko
North American Organizer
The Barbara Pym Society

DarkCreation.com

Visit this site for the most wonderful depictions of ghostly and vampyre dolls I've ever seen. Also, visit Uneek designs on Etsy for Jane Eyre, Bertha Rochester, and Bronte sister dolls. These are dolls by various talented artists for the literary minded. Enjoy.