The Chicago Blog

Set in the fictitious town of Manawaka, Manitoba, Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel offers a moving portrait of its protagonist, nonagenarian Hagar Shiply, as she struggles to come to terms with the troubles of her past in a dramatic story of a life drawing to a close. Alongside the other novels in her "Manawaka series"—A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, A Bird in the House: Stories, and The Diviners—Laurence's The Stone Angel has been lauded as one of her most poignant narratives and the most famous work by one of Canada's most prominent feminist writers.

The book was also recently made into a feature film by Canadian filmmaker Kari Skogland with its world premiere showing at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. This Friday, July 11 the film will also see its U.S. debut in select theaters, including NYC's Landmark Century theaters, and hopefully will see a wider distribution (to Chicago maybe) in the following weeks. Check out a trailer for the film on the official The Stone Angel movie website, or find out more about the book here.

Archived in Books for the News | Fiction | Literature
Posted by TXM at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chicago magazine has a nice piece in the December issue about the inspiration behind Francis Ford Coppola's new film—his first in ten years—Youth Without Youth. If you've been paying attention, of course, you already know some of the story. The literary inspiration for the film is the book of the same name by Mircea Eliade and the book was placed in Coppola's hands by Wendy Doniger, a professor of religion here at U of C and a longtime friend of Coppola.

The magazine article by Robert Loerzel tells more about the friendship:

Doniger says she and Coppola were members of a "little coven of misfits and existentialists" at Great Neck High School on Long Island in the mid-1950s. "We were anti–Doris Day," Doniger says. They wrote Hemingwayesque stories, listened to jazz in Greenwich Village, and smoked cigarettes. Doniger remembers Coppola as a "gawky" boy with a head full of ideas.

But don't read that "gawky boy" comment as too dismissive. Loerzel writes that "Coppola offers a little more detail: 'She was, in fact, the first girl I ever kissed.'"

We have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Fiction | Film and Media
Posted by DB at 03:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Book publishing is globalized; it has never been easier to obtain any book that has been published anywhere. As well, more and more English-language books are being translated in the non-English speaking world. The reverse is not so true, however. There is a trickle of foreign titles translated into the only language most of us in this country can read compared to the flood flowing in the opposite direction.

So it is noteworthy that last Sunday's Washington Post featured an article reviewing a sampling of some international voices currently hitting the U.S. mystery scene, including our translations of Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Pledge and The Inspector Barlach Mysteries. Richard Lipez writes for the Post:

Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990) was best known as the author of clever, morally inquisitive plays such as The Visit and The Physicists. In the early 1950s he also wrote three short, spellbinding mystery novels, which the University of Chicago Press has reissued in paperback with new translations from the German by Joel Agee: The Pledge and The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge and His Hangman & Suspicion. The latter includes a thoughtful foreword by Sven Birkerts, who praises Dürrenmatt's talent as a captivating entertainer who could also "play through complex moral issues with a speed-chess decisiveness and inexorability." Dürrenmatt was Swiss and sounds it. He is sober, formal, precise and, when it suits him, to the point.… These are slender tales. But they have the weight and texture of classics. Mystery readers should be grateful to the University of Chicago Press for bringing these gems back to life.

We have a website for our Dürrenmatt translations, where you can read more about The Pledge, The Inspector Barlach Mysteries as well as our three-volume set of Dürrenmatt's Selected Writings.

Archived in Fiction | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The December 22 & 29 issue of the TLS is packed with reviews of our new volumes of the writings of Friedrich Dürrennmatt (see below). Each of the reviews—not to mention the books themselves—merits a separate blog post. Michael Butler's review of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Selected Writings completes the TLS's coverage of our publications from this prodigious and engaging writer who is regrettably known only for several of his plays. Butler notes that since Dürrenmatt's death in 1990, his work has suffered a "long silence at least outside of the industrious groves of academe." Butler continues:

The University of Chicago's bold attempt with these meticulously presented volumes to "rediscover" Dürrenmatt for an English speaking readership is therefore welcome. The names of such distinguished scholars as Kenneth J. Northcott and Theodore Ziolkowski are a guarantee of high editorial standards, and each volume is equipped with a succinct and sensible introduction.… English readers have much to be grateful for. Above all, they have been provided with translations of impressive accuracy. Dürrenmatt is not an easy author to get into English, but Joel Agee has succeeded splendidly. He catches with admirable linguistic agility the shifts of tone and the unexpected shafts of humor amid the stygian gloom that constantly challenges Dürrenmatt's readers.

Take a look at the website we've created for Dürrenmatt's Selected Writings where you can peruse a fascinating collection of excerpts and essays, including those "succinct and sensible" introductions and an interview with Dürrenmatt.

Archived in Fiction | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the December 22 & 29 edition of the Times Literary Supplement Ian Brunskill's review of Dürrenmatt's The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion begins:

The more well-ordered a world (or narrative) appears to be, the greater the potential for devastation …. [And] that, to a large extent, is what drew Dürrenmatt in the 1950s to the traditionally disciplined realm of crime fiction, the conventions and formulas of which he proceeded, with some relish, to turn upside down. The resulting short novels have long been among his most popular works. Now wonderfully translated by Joel Agee, they are part of the University of Chicago Press's promotion of the author.

And indeed with these translations of The Inspector Barlach Mysteries the Press has done its best to reinvigorate interest in Dürrenmatt's atypical crime stories. Both of the mysteries in this book make a radical departure from convention as they follow Inspector Barlach through worlds in which the distinction between crime and justice seems to have vanished. In The Judge and His Hangman, Barlach forgoes the arrest of a murderer in order to manipulate him into killing another, more elusive criminal. And in Suspicion, Barlach pursues a former Nazi doctor by checking into his clinic with the hope of forcing him to reveal himself. The result is two thrillers that bring existential philosophy and the detective genre into an unusual convergence.

The Press has also recently released a collection of Dürrenmatt's Selected Writings. See our Dürrenmatt webage to find out more.

Archived in Fiction | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week Alberto Manguel—whose own work as a translator and editor makes him quite a qualified critic—wrote a review for the Spectator of Friedrich Dürrenmatt: Selected Writings. Translated by Joel Agee, the Selected Writings collects in three volumes the best of Dürrenmatt's plays, fictions, and essays—and as Manguel acknowledges—captures the essence of the author's work. Manguel writes:

I'd like to congratulate the University of Chicago Press for allowing us once again to read Friedrich Dürrenmatt in English, thereby restoring to the English-speaking public one of the most important writers of the 20th century … Dürrenmatt's best writing has been included, and almost any of these pieces is an astonishing example of a writer's power to portray and explain experience, and then subvert the whole procedure by opening up his arguments to unanswerable questions. Reading Dürrenmatt's work leaves us with the impression of having witnessed the creation and then the explosion of a small galaxy. The light continues to reach us long after closing his books.

We created a Friedrich Dürrenmatt website where you can peruse a fascinating collection of excerpts and essays, including an interview with Dürrenmatt .

Archived in Fiction | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Norman Maclean was born December 23, 1902. He will forever be associated with the mountains and rivers of Montana, but he was born on the rolling plains of Iowa. His family moved to Missoula, Montana in 1909.

Maclean came to the University of Chicago in 1928 to pursue graduate studies in English. Three years later he was hired as an instructor and eventually became the William Rainey Harper Professor of English. He won the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching three times during his UC career and served as an inspiring mentor to generations of students.

Upon his retirement in 1973, Maclean turned to writing, drawing material from his youth in Montana and his fascination with the Mann Gulch Fire of 1949. In 1976 the University of Chicago Press had the good fortune to publish a collection of his work, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. The book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the title novella was made into a movie in 1992. That same year we published Young Men and Fire which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for best general non-fiction.

Maclean died on August 2, 1990 in Chicago, at the age of 87.

Read the opening pages of A River Runs Through It and an excerpt from Young Men and Fire.

Archived in Commentary | Fiction | Literature
Posted by DB at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Gazette (Montreal) recently published a review of Peter De Vries's novel The Blood of the Lamb: "De Vries was a master of puckish pedantry. His marvelously erudite sentences are often inverted and complex, but they always end up where he wants them.… [The Blood of the Lamb's] humour is a welcome gleam of wry rationality shining through the dark clouds. This is a deeply touching book whose sincerity and universality are likely to ensure its future."

The most poignant of all De Vries's novels, The Blood of the Lamb is also the most autobiographical. It follows the life of Don Wanderhop from his childhood in an immigrant Calvinist family living in Chicago in the 1950s through the loss of a brother, his faith, his wife, and finally his daughter—a tragedy drawn directly from De Vries's own life. Despite its foundation in misfortune, The Blood of the Lamb offers glimpses of the comic sensibility for which De Vries was famous.

Archived in Fiction | Reviews
Posted by at 07:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A passage about the truth-telling power of fiction, from the closing paragraphs of Norman Maclean's novella A River Runs Through It, is being cited in commentary about James Frey and his apparently fictionalized memoir A Million Little Pieces. (For example, this piece by John MacDonald in the Arizona Republic.)

Near the end of the story, Norman's father speaks to him:

"You like to tell true stories, don't you?" he asked, and I answered, "Yes, I like to tell stories that are true."

Then he asked, "After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it?

"Only then will you understand what happened and why."

We have an excerpt from the opening pages of the novella.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Fiction
Posted by DB at 09:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today Zulkey.com features an interview with Stuart Dybek, author of Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. In the interview, Dybek talks about one of the stories from the book, titled "The Long Thoughts":

Have any of the characters in your stories had impact on your real life relationships? Meaning that, if somebody recognizes themselves in one of your stories, how has that impacted his relationship with you?

Despite the fact that I'm writing fiction and have taken the liberties that fiction allows for, people have at different times recognized themselves in some of the characters. Mostly the reaction has been favorable. I had one old friend who appeared in a story called "The Long Thoughts," who would give the book that story appeared in to people as gifts so that they could read about him. There was an instance however when a dear friend who saw himself in one of my stories—a version of a story that he told to me—was offended not by his portrayal but that I would use a story he'd told to me in private. I should add that the story he told to me was fantastical and I changed it further and made still more fantastical. Still, he treated it not as my stealing something but as a broken confidence.

You can read the rest of the interview here.

Archived in Chicago | Fiction
Posted by at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)