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Delphinium Books Blog

Hemingway’s Nobel Prize

October 11, 2015

Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in 1954.  Unfortunately, he was unable to attend the award ceremony because he was recuperating from injuries sustained as a result of an airplane accident.  This, in and of itself, is Hemingwayesque, and the irony was certainly not lost on the U.S. Ambassador who read the acceptance speech that the prize-winning author prepared.

What follows is the most oft quoted part of the acceptance speech.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: General Tagged With: 1954, acceptance speech, celebrity, demotic, fame, Fitgerald, Hemingway, literature, Nobel Prize, style, writers, writing

In Memoriam: Esther Terner Raab

April 29, 2015

Guest blog by Richard Rashke, author of Escape from Sobibor and Useful Enemies.

Esther-Raab
Esther Terner Raab 1922-2015

IN MEMORIAM Esther Terner Raab By Richard Rashke

I met Esther Raab for the first time in 1981 during an International Liberators Conference sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. Medal-chested soldiers from fourteen countries had gathered in Washington, D.C., my hometown, for the special two-day remembrance. But I didn’t attend the conference to learn how they had liberated Nazi camps across Europe and what horrors they had seen. [Read more…]

Filed Under: General Tagged With: anti-semetic, Esther Raab, Germany, holocaust, Nazis, Poland, Richard, Slovenia, Sobibor, survivor, World War II

Memoir Versus Novel

April 18, 2015

Bottoming Out Memoirs

 

Memoir Versus NovelI am not done weighing in about memoirs. While hiking on a neighbor’s land, it came to me that to create emotional resonance in a reader is a lot harder for a fiction-writer. Why?

[Read more…]

Filed Under: General Tagged With: autobiographical, bottoming out, dysfunctional, fiction, fiction-writing, imagination, James Frey, Memoir, memoirist, Nabokov, novelist, redemption, spiritual crisis, truth

Writers and Rage

April 9, 2015

In my spare time, when I am not reading manuscripts, I am reading a wonderful memoir called H is for Hawk by the English writer Helen Macdonald. The book distinguishes itself from most memoirs of grief because it focuses on an activity — falconry — and relies on this fascinating pastime to give the reader a profound understanding of the author’s loss of her beloved father. [Read more…]

Filed Under: General Tagged With: artists, book editor, Cambridge, falconry, Goshawk, hawks, Helen Macdonald, memoirs, novelists, rage, Will Schwalbe, writers

Is The Girl On the Train the new Gone Girl?

March 30, 2015

Girl-On-The-Train2

I am rooting for the female novelists. If most of the die-hard novel readers are women, then surely women writers should always be occupying the top tier of the fiction best seller lists. They should be able to wrestle the #1 and #2 spots away from the likes of John Grisham and James Patterson. [Read more…]

Filed Under: General Tagged With: best-seller lists, Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl, James Patterson, John Grisham, Paula Hawkins, principles of fiction-writing, suspense fiction, The Girl On the Train

Oliver Sacks, Artistic vision and Enlightenment

March 10, 2015

enlightenment-pic-2I recently posted on Twitter and Facebook an essay by Oliver Sacks that described his end-of-life struggles (invariable for us all), recounted with bittersweet resignation. Sacks expressed his gratitude for being given a life of rewarding work as well as the unusual aptitude to understand the complex, mysterious and often misconstrued workings of the human brain.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: General Tagged With: art, enlightenment, Michael Pollan, NYU, Oliver Sacks, psilocybin, The American Visionary Art Museum

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