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He is Legend: Remembering sci-fi author Richard Matheson

Tue, 25 Jun 2013 18:56:00 +0000

Richard Matheson was a rare giant of science fiction, though his name was little known outside those circles of souls who lived their lives between dog eared pages of ancient paperbacks scavenged from used book stores. His name didn’t tend to get much air play outside of that small world of science fiction lovers, despite the repeated adaptations of his novels to the screen. It’s a shame that so many who did run across his name, only did so in passing while reading about one movie or another.

But his words were poetry made prose, with that talent for adding just enough of the alien to render the familiar world magnificent and awe-inspiring. His science fiction tiptoed just on the edge of the world we lived in every day, making it crackle with a connection to reality that was beyond the grasp of many of his more famous contemporaries who wrote so much further beyond the ken of the mundane. Stephen King has said that Matheson was the single largest influence on his writing.

Chasing the dragon with Tao Lin

Sat, 22 Jun 2013 17:00:00 +0000

“POT IS A REALITY KICK,” reads a protest sign Allen Ginsberg is holding in a photo from a 1963 rally for the legalization of marijuana in New York City. In another, “POT IS FUN.”

Fifty years ago, it was still possible to believe that drugs could free our minds and transform the world; the chemical evangelist had not yet become a figure of total ridicule. The spirit of Rimbaud, with his systematic derangement of the senses for transforming poets into seers, could be felt among the Beats; the psychologist Timothy Leary, drawing on his Harvard Psilocybin Project experiments of 1960–62, hymned the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics; and in 1964, with all these precedents as inspiration, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters embarked on the psychedelic cross-country bus trip that would be immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Just a few years earlier, Kesey had eviscerated America's conformist culture in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but now he claimed that fiction writing was an old-fashioned and artificial form. The promise of a different world lay in the trip itself:

Acclaimed writer Evan S. Connell dies at 88

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 13:55:00 +0000

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — Evan S. Connell gained some attention via his better known books, but the acclaimed author was well-known and regarded fondly by students of literature, critics, and others as an adventurous writer whose body of work reflected a diversity of interests.

Connell's Depression-era Kansas City in the twin novels "Mrs. Bridge" and "Mr. Bridge" was even made into a movie starring husband and wife movie actors, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

On Thursday, the author of "Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn" — a book about Custer's last stand — was found dead in his apartment in Santa Fe, where he had lived in recent years. He was 88, his niece said.

Connell likely died of old age, said Donna Waller of Hilton Head Island, S.C. His request to family: no funeral.

Connell was a National Book award finalist, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a finalist in 2009 for the International Man Booker Award for lifetime achievement.

Connell was the author of 19 books, including two book-length poems, a biography of Spanish painter Francisco Goya and a historically detailed novel about the Crusades, "Deus Lo Volt!"

Terry Gross says Hilary Mantel’s “weight just about doubled”

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 17:30:00 +0000

Hilary Mantel is the first woman to win two Man Booker Prizes, first in 2009 for "Wolf Hall," and then in 2012 for its sequel, "Bring Up the Bodies." Mantel also suffers from a condition known as "Endometriosis," a debilitating disease in which cells usually found in the womb grow in other parts of the body.

Yesterday, the writer gave an in-depth, uninterrupted description of her life-long struggle with the disease, which became "a crisis" for her. But what NPR's Terry Gross was most fascinated by, it seemed, was Mantel's weight.

She broached the subject awkwardly, at first:

GROSS: So correct me if I'm wrong here. But because of the steroids that you are on to help with your condition...

MANTEL: Yeah.

GROSS: ...and I think because of a thyroid condition as well, your weight just about doubled.

MANTEL: Yeah.

GROSS: And you ended up with a completely different body...

MANTEL: That's right. Yes.

GROSS: ...than the one you used to have. How did that change the sense of who you are?