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The Argentine novelist Antonio Di Benedetto stood in front of a firing squad four times. #inkstains #books #writers

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

Cora Taylor ran a brothel in Jacksonville. Slightly after, she became a war correspondent in the Greco-Turkish War. In between, she met Stephen Crane. #inkstains #writers #books

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

Patrick Leigh Fermor was expelled from a school for difficult children. He walked from Holland to Istanbul in a year, journey that took another 33 to become a book. In between, he lived with a Romanian noblewoman, kidnapped a German general, & spent time in monasteries and silence. #inkstains #books

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

Tolstoy belittled Rilke for his interest in writing lyric poems. #inkstains #poets #rilke

submitted 22 days ago • 0 comments

Italo Svevo wrote two books in his thirties, which are forgotten although Joyce admired them. And then, after nearly a thirty year silence, The Confessions of Zeno, which is not. #inkstains #writers #books

submitted 22 days ago • 1 comment

It took Italo Calvino either twenty-nine years or thirty days to write The Cloven Viscount. #inkstains #books #writers #calvino

submitted 22 days ago • 1 comment

Those who knew Marcel Proust in his youth, even the extended youth of his twenties, expected very little from him. #inkstains #books #writers

submitted 22 days ago • 0 comments

Lawrence Durrell, author of The Alexandria Quartet, made a life changing discovery in a public toilet: a discarded copy of Henry Miller’s The Tropic of Cancer. #inkstains #books #writers

submitted 22 days ago • 0 comments

Elias Canetti’s wife wrote to his brother: “No document that gives access to Canetti’s inmost being must be allowed to survive.” #inkstains #booksky #writers

submitted 22 days ago • 0 comments

I'm looking for writers best known for their fictions, but who started out as poets: Denis Johnson, Bohumil Hrabal, Michael Ondaatje, Roberto Bolano, Thomas Hardy. Can you think of others? #booksky #writers #books

submitted 23 days ago • 3 comments

I need of list of other women who re-named themselves as writers: Anna Akmatova, Marguerite Yourcenar, Flannery O’Conner, George Eliot, Anna Kavan, Jean Rhys, Elena Ferrante. I'm sure there are many, many others. Suggestions? #bookskys #writers #books

submitted 24 days ago • 1 comment

Arriving like a ghost, a whisper, Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo sold just 2,000 copies in its first four years. Marquez would compare Rulfo's literary legacy, perhaps 300 pages in total, to that of Sophocles. #inkstains #booksky

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

At 19, Arthur Rimbaud abandoned poetry, moved to Abyssinia and became a trader. In his absence, the previously scorned poet was discovered and revered by a Parisian audience now ready for his illuminations. But by then, Rimbaud had become someone else. #inkstains #poets #booksy

submitted 25 days ago • 0 comments

The poet Anna Akhmatova insisted she would never have posed nude for Modigliani. He must have painted those portraits from memory. #inkstains #poets #books

submitted 26 days ago • 0 comments

Raymond Carver had 2 children by the age of 20, and his wife was 2 years younger. 9 years passed between his story “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please” appearing in the Best American Short Stories and his first book, with the same title. 14 stories. Tight ones. #inkstains #books

submitted 26 days ago • 0 comments

Gutenberg first sought his fortune by selling polished metal mirrors, which promised to capture the holy light of religious relics. But a flood swamped the town where the relics were to be displayed; no pilgrams came. In debt and needing a money-maker, Gutenberg turned to printing. #inkstains #books

submitted 26 days ago • 0 comments

A third of Li Po’s poems reference the moon, that singular drinking companion. By legend, he died trying to embrace its reflection in a river. #inkstains #books #poetry

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

Among his odd odd-jobs, Edgar Rice Burroughs sold pencil-sharpeners door-to-door. #inkstains #books #writers

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

The Beowolf manuscript was written around 1,000. For almost 700 years, there may only have been 1 copy of it. In all those centuries, it is possible it was never read, not even a single time. Then, it was nearly lost in a fire. #inkstains #books #writers

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

When Sonia Haft Greene embraced the 32-year-old H.P. Lovecraft, it was the first time he’d been kissed since childhood. Eventually she’d burn all his letters but one, which revealed him more at ease with cosmic terror than the basics of seduction or affection. #inkstains #lovecraft #booksky

submitted 28 days ago • 0 comments

H.P. Lovecraft, a strange, isolated man, is believed to have written 100,000 letters, or roughly six a day for each of his 47 years of life. In one, he concluded “We are all meaningless atoms adrift in the void.” #inkstains #lovecraft #booksy

submitted 28 days ago • 0 comments

In 1923, Henry Hamilton traveled to Moscow, where he stayed as a guest of Tolstoy's granddaughter. Honoring the old man’s secrets but betraying his style, the Midwesterner simply recorded: “Mrs. Tolstoy explained many things to me, and I of course was very appreciative.” #inkstains #writers #booksky

submitted 28 days ago • 0 comments

Before proposing, Bruno Schulz warned Debora Vogel: “Reality takes on certain shapes merely for the sake of appearance, as a joke or form of play. One person is a human, another is a cockroach, but…the migration of forms is the essence of life.” She declined his offer. #inkstains #books #writers

submitted 28 days ago • 0 comments

Kafka the obscure? A year after The Metamorphosis was published, Robert Musil, a Viennese celebrity for his Young Torless, took a leave from military duty to visit him in Prague. Kafka remembered him as “ill, yet in fairly good shape.” Both left their major works unfinished. #inkstains #kafka #books

submitted 28 days ago • 0 comments

Anna Gorenko adopted the pseudonym Anna Akhmatova at the age of 11 to avoid bringing shame upon her family as a decadent poetess. Still, her father abandoned them all when she was just 16. #inkstains #poets #writers

submitted 29 days ago • 0 comments

To keep his work accessible to his wide readership, Georges Simenon limited his writing vocabulary to about 2,000 words. In Ulysses, Joyce uses over 30,000. #inkstains #booksky #writers

submitted 29 days ago • 1 comment

When Roberto Bolaño’s child was born, he turned to fiction to provide for his family. Logic that would only make sense to a poet. #inkstains #bolano #booksky

submitted 29 days ago • 0 comments

The first book Paul Bowles bought, at 11, was Waley’s A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems. He left for Paris at 19, and spent nearly 70 years abroad: Paris, Berlin, Tangiers, Ceylon. After death, however, his ashes were buried in beside the graves of his parents and grandparents. #inkstains #books

submitted 30 days ago • 0 comments

Among Jane Bowles’s phobias: dogs, sharks, mountains, jungles, elevators, and being burned alive. She was, however, fearless about decamping for Morocco in the 1940s, desiring both women and men, and drinking. She suffered her first stroke at 40 and died at just 56. #inkstains #booksky #writers

submitted 30 days ago • 1 comment

Tolstoy once challenged Turgenev to a duel over the westernization of Russian. To ensure more than symbolic battle, he insisted on shotguns. Apologies, postponements, and the reissuing of challenges continued for 17 years, but no duel was fought. #inkstains #booksky #writers

submitted 30 days ago • 0 comments

Anna Kavan’s titles tell a story in themselves: Let Me Alone, A Stranger Still, Change the Name, Who Are You?, I Am Lazarus, and Ice. #inkstains #booksky #writers

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

Dismissing praise for Death in Venice, Thomas Mann wrote, “After all, relatively speaking, I was still a beginner. A beginner of genius but still a beginner.” #inkstains #booksky #writers

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

Some in the 1950s were shocked that Christopher Isherwood would live openly with his partner, Don Bachardy. Others were more alarmed by their 30 year age difference. #inkstains #books #booksky

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

Marguerite Yourcenar worked on The Abyss for 44 years, and it was published another 11 years later, which is like your new manuscript appearing in 2180. Jean Rhys published five books in 12 years and then nothing for the next 27 before The Wild Sargasso Sea in 1966. #inkstains #books #writers

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

Arthur Conan Doyle, progenitor of Sherlock Holmes, once said that the secret of his success was he never forced a story. As he lay dying, surrounded by family, he looked at them one by one. And said nothing. #inkstains #writers #books

submitted 32 days ago • 1 comment

After moving to Paris from Guinea, Camara Laye worked in an assembly plant and then for public transport. He also read, Kafka above all others. When The Radiance of the King was published, some insisted a European must have written it. A wealthy Belgian war criminal was proposed. #inkstains #books

submitted 32 days ago • 0 comments

Trained as a lawyer, Kafka worked for an insurance company assessing injuries to industrial workers. He was rapidly promoted and his duties expanded to investigating claims, writing reports, and managing appeals. His work days typically ended at 2 p.m. #inkstains #kafka #dayjobs #books

submitted 32 days ago • 0 comments

Stanislaw Lem, one of the great science fiction writers of the 20th century, an author who explored the possibilities of artificial intelligence in the 1960s, never learned to use a computer. He wrote all of works on a Remington Underwood typewriter. #inkstains #writers #books

submitted 32 days ago • 0 comments

According to his wife, Guiseppe di Lampedusa, author of The Leopard, always kept a volume of Shakespeare with him on his wanderings, so “he could console himself with it if he should see something disagreeable.” An enviable life. #inkstains #books #writers

submitted 33 days ago • 0 comments

Patricia Highsmith, creator of Tom Ripley, one of America's favorite serial killers, was born on Poe’s birthday. Her mother had previously drunk turpentine in an attempt to abort her. Throughout her life, Highsmith claimed to adore the smell of it. #inkstains #writers #books #avoidinginauguration

submitted 33 days ago • 0 comments