Letters

The Highsmith of Diaries and Notebooks is not someone with a problem that needs to be fixed. It is someone who, gloriously, messily, looked around a nasty world filled with awful people, and saw nothing too fix, and felt no desire to change it.

Fairweather’s letters are unsettling enough not to make them good bedtime reading. Just like his two reckless sea trips in make-do craft – one in 1944 on an old boat, from Sandgate, on the outskirts of Brisbane, landing on Bribe Island off the coast by chance, and the second in 1952 on a self-made raft from far-north Queensland aiming for Dili – his letters are a rough ride on rolling waves.

As he neared the end of his life, Samuel Beckett, one of the keenest chroniclers of unfathomable distances, wrote a…

What this collection most clearly documents is Calvino’s tireless activism in the service of ‘the renewal of the Italian cultural climate’. In the letter he wrote to the influential Marxist literary magazine Il Contemporaneo in 1956, for example, he acerbically critiques the way it fails to keep up with contemporary Italian literature…

The publication of The Letters of William Gaddis is significant because it presents the first direct and unveiled access to this ‘reclusive’ author. For those of us who know and love Gaddis’s work, however, there is something discomfiting about such personal revelations.