1.1 Congratulations to our cover designer, Niall McCormack, Silver Medalist at Society of Illustrators, Illustrators 56.
1.2 Listen to Niall talking about vintage Irish book and pamphlet design on RTE’s The Book Show (at the 12.45 mark).
Maya Jaggi‘s letter from Croatia.
‘We’re all more or less writers of a disappeared world,’ says Miljenko Jergović, a Croatian who feels an affinity with Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig and Robert Musil, who all wrote after the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Born in Sarajevo, Jergović endured 18 months of siege before fleeing to Zagreb. The tender, ironic war stories of Sarajevo Marlboro (1994) and Mama Leone (1999) are published in English translation by Archipelago Books. Rod (‘Kin’), his latest novel and a bestseller last autumn, is a thousand-page autobiographical saga charting successive wars through his own ancestors. ‘It’s about burying everything of mine that is dead. My close ones are dead. My city no longer exists. Every place for me is a non-place.’
“He doesn’t know who Mirtha Dermisache was, but her name rings a bell: possibly a beautiful woman, and almost certainly elegant.” – Roberto Bolaño, Last Evenings on Earth.
Houellebecq on The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq.
A.N. Wilson on the new biography, Whistler: A Life for Art’s Sake
Bohemianism is inherently snobbish, because its practitioners believe they are more interesting than the conventional majority. Whistler made it his creed, to scandalise the middlebrow and middle-minded. His famous “aesthetic” lecture, “The Ten O’Clock”, claimed that art itself was a science. The lecture had a huge influenced [sic] on Marcel Proust, whose friend Robert de Montesquiou (model of the Baron de Charlus in In Search of Lost Time) was one of Whistler’s best subjects – Sutherland detects Whistler in Proust’s fictitious painter, Elstir.