Books

The 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to William Butler Yeats “for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.” Informed of the prize late on the night of November 14 by the editor of the Irish Times, the fifty-eight-year-old Yeats and his wife George sat up taking telephone calls and telegrams for a couple of hours. Then, according to Yeats’s sister Lily, the couple went down to the kitchen and cooked some sausages before going to bed. The next day, the Yeatses went out and began spending some of the check Yeats would receive in December.

In 2011, a terminally ill Christopher Hitchens faced death with droll stoicism: “To the dumb question ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: ‘Why not?’” he wrote. As his health declined and the end drew nearer, the skeptical Hitchens stuck to his atheist guns, clear-eyed in his confidence that death was final. Hitchens died in 2011, but his work and reputation live on. No paradox there, of course, but just how large Hitchens looms twelve years after his death would surely have surprised even this immodest author. It’s certainly a surprise to me, a reformed Hitchens fanboy. The face of twenty-first-century atheism is having quite the afterlife.

It is one of those cosmic ironies that the author Martin Amis, who has died at the age of seventy-three of esophageal cancer, might have appreciated that his death was announced the day after Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of his novel The Zone of Interest premiered to a rapturous reception at this year’s Cannes film festival.

Until a few weeks ago, Judy Blume’s reputation as one of the world’s most admired and respected novelists seemed assured. She has sold over 82 million copies of her twenty-five books, has won countless awards and was named one of TIME’s most influential people earlier this year. But those whom the gods wish to destroy are asked for their views on J.K. Rowling — and so when Blume was asked as much in an interview, she replied, “I love her... I am behind her 100 percent as I watch from afar... I haven’t been in touch with her during this tough time. Probably I should.” This went badly, as might be imagined — “Fuck Judy Blume!

Donald Trump is set to publish a letter from then-Prince Charles, without the British monarch's permission. The letter from the now-King will form part of a book coming out Tuesday called Letters to Trump, which features celebrities and other people who have written to the former president during his life. The correspondence is said to range from President Richard Nixon to Alec Baldwin. Perhaps they bonded over lawsuits? Charles purportedly wrote to Trump in 1995 to thank him for offering an honorary membership to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. A nice gesture, but King Charles isn’t a golfer. Maybe it’s something to do with those hands.

Jonathan Eig’s new King: A Life (KAL) is the first comprehensive biography of the black civil rights hero to appear in more than thirty years, and it will succeed my own Bearing the Cross (BTC), published in 1986, as the standard account. One normally does not review a book one’s blurbed — I’ve called it “a great leap forward in our biographical understanding” — nor where one’s actively aided the author’s research and read his manuscript multiple times. But comparisons between KAL and BTC will be legion, so highlighting the three most significant ways in which the two biographies differ will be a service both to the thousands of readers whom Eig’s volume should attract and to students of King’s life more generally.