Writing Fever: a Credo
These web pages aim, principally, to present or call attention to various book-length projects by Susan Ashe and Norman Thomas di Giovanni.
Our work is fiction and non-fiction, with one or two ventures in translation thrown in. Each of our projects has a single element in common. Not a word we write has been commissioned, not a word dreamed up with an eye to a market or a trend or to fashion. We write because of what we want to say and we write the way we want to say it, guided only by writing fever and convinced that books are, or should be, a cottage industry. We write to please ourselves and one or two friends but at the same time we aim into the great dark for the good readers we know exist somewhere, everywhere, unserved by the commerce and consumerism that have hijacked book publishing and book distribution.
Today, a factory system dominates the making and selling of books. Publishers, editors, and agents are city men who deal in futures and gamble in predictions. They even have the chutzpah to tell writers what they should write about. They read manuscripts not with a keen eye for freshness but with a stale eye looking to repeat last season’s hits. Adding to the insult, these money men then toy with us by hyping mediocrity.
Latest Blog Entries
THURSDAY, 19 JANUARY 2012 12:30
Naipaul’s Twenty
Sometime in the southern autumn of 1972, V.S. Naipaul paid his first visit to Argentina, where I was at work translating Borges. Bob Silvers of The New York Review of Book had cabled ahead asking me to help Vidia in any way I could. In due course, on the twelfth of April, I received a cable from Naipaul announcing his arrival three days later and giving me the name of the hotel where he would be staying ... [FULL ENTRY]
CATEGORIES: .V.S. NAIPAUL
THURSDAY, 29 DECEMBER 2011 16:28
Panda
A short story by Susan Ashe. A team of scientists, baffled by the behaviour of a pair of starving pandas, refuse to believe that they can turn into marauding demons.
She sat back on her haunches and seemed to be scratching herself. The scientists, who had her under surveillance, were worried about her, for, though she was in cub, she was thin and disinclined to eat. Now, spurning a small clump of fresh bamboo, she sniffed the air ... [FULL ENTRY]
CATEGORIES: SUSAN ASHE | SHORT STORY
MONDAY, 12 DECEMBER 2011 19:53
Cinnamon and Spice
I made the acquaintance of the English novelist Charles Lambert via the internet back in the autumn of 2008. He had written generously on his website about my work, but when I saw his photograph and learned that he lived in central Italy and that he had once taught for a year at the University of L’Aquila (my ancestors’ native heath) I could not believe he was an Englishman ... [FULL ENTRY]
CATEGORIES: CHARLES LAMBERT | SHORT STORIES
SATURDAY, 26 NOVEMBER 2011 08:51
M.L. Rosenthal
Mack Rosenthal died in 1996. When at the time I read his obituary in The Independent I was moved to write the following tribute. I sent it to the paper but never learned whether it got published. If it did, all well and good. If not, it is never too late to heap praise on the deserving.
Some forty years ago, when I was feeling my way into translation, Mack Rosenthal was poetry editor of the leftish New York weekly The Nation ... [FULL ENTRY]
CATEGORIES: EDITING | TRANSLATION | M.L. ROSENTHAL
MONDAY, 14 NOVEMBER 2011 11:01
Timing It
A short story by Susan Ashe. Widowhood, impending old age, quiet preparations for a self-administered, dignified death. Bleak but timely.
My neighbour’s coming to supper this evening. Since we’re both alone now, Jim and I have taken to inviting each other round once a week ... [FULL ENTRY]
CATEGORIES: SUSAN ASHE | SHORT STORIES
