Alan Bennett has a new story, “The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson,” in the LRB. I need to reread his uncommonly delightful The Uncommon Reader.

Selected letters of James Salter and his good friend Robert Phelps appear in the current issue of Narrative. Also, Pia Z. Ehrhardt reads some of her work.

“This old white motherfucker and his wife rolls up. He’s like, ‘Young man, do you know where the Poe house is?’” The Wire and A.N. Devers on Edgar Allan Poe’s Baltimore house.

The New York Society Library features an exhibition of Shirley Hazzard’s (Transit of Venus) manuscripts, photographs, and more, through January 31.

Narrative’s free app for the iPhone and iPad includes all back issues of the magazine (a couple of which include my writing). I also like to read Electric Lit this way.

“[T]o correct a bad sentence satisfactorily is not always possible; it should never have existed, that is all that can be said.” — Fowler

Just about every time my father-in-law (above) and I talked on the phone, we began by filling each other in on whatever progress we’d made with the books we were writing. I don’t remember exactly when he decided to start working on a study of Macbeth, but I remember his interest developing and his arguments germinating, and I remember clinking glasses with him in many different living rooms as he told Max and me about new developments in his research.

I guess I always believed that Larry and I would finish our projects at about the same time. But in June he died, just a few chapters short of a completed manuscript. At his side were the copy of Memento Mori I’d sent him and Joseph’s most recent essay, which Larry had marked up with question marks and check marks and one “very good.” A teacher to the end.

Like me, Larry was a beginning-obsessed writer. He perfected the start, moved forward incrementally, and backed up again whenever he identified a problem with structure or a hole in his logic. Unlike me, he was remarkably learned and quite conservative. We often disagreed, about literature, about politics, and especially about religion, but I never doubted that he respected me and wanted to hear my opinions. In this regard, and in many others, he differed markedly from my own parents, and I don’t think I realized until his death how much I’d come to think of him as a kind of replacement father. My actual dad and I don’t speak.

When your spouse’s parent dies, grieving is complicated. There is the grief you feel for yourself, for the loss of a person you (if you’re lucky) loved, and there is the grief you feel at seeing the person closest to you dealing with a nearly unfathomable loss. At times the sorrow is literally almost suffocating. These are clichés, but they are also realities, as is the fact that the passing of someone important to you causes you to think about the way you’re spending your own life.

Almost two months after Larry’s death, it’s still very hard to write about him. (Or to think about his book, which Max, Joseph, and I promised him we would finish. We have a lot of reading to do.) And it’s impossible to imagine ever returning to a life in which I treat my writing like a frivolous hobby or prioritize writing about other people’s novels over working on my own.

I’m genuinely sorry for leaving the site dormant without explanation all this time; I honestly haven’t been able to figure out how to say any of this. Things will continue to be relatively quiet here until I’m feeling better and my novel is done. I hope that will be soon, but it won’t be next week or next month, barring some sort of miracle. The good thing about Internet time is that it only seems interminable when it’s happening.

At FSG’s Work In Progress, Jeffrey Eugenides talks with Jonathan Galassi about the genesis of the “more tightly dramatized, less fanciful” novel he’s finishing up.

Emma Garman admires Jean-Christophe Valtat’s 03, calling the novella “Nabokovian in its outrageously solipsistic stylishness.” See also Valtat on the persistence of childhood.

I’m excited to interview Sarah Waters this Thursday night about her creepy haunted house novel, The Little Stranger. We’ll be at B&N Lincoln Triangle, 7:30 p.m.

As you can see, I have the best in-laws. That’s Larry on the left, and Jane on the right, and though they divorced years ago — long before I met them — they’re both still this fun and campy.

Right now I’m reading Old Mortality, a gift from Larry. He figured I would appreciate Sir Walter Scott’s meditation on fanaticism, violence, and repression, and I do, very much, even though it’s subtly weighted toward the Tories.

On Friday night I’ll be introducing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as she opens the last event of Girls Write Now’s Chapters series with a reading from her short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck. I’ve written about my admiration for her work many times; since then, she’s won a MacArthur Fellowship and earned a place on The New Yorker’s 20 under 40 list.

Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, which I once stayed up until 5 a.m. on a work night to finish, centers on a girl about the same age as those Girls Write Now serves. My favorite of her short stories, “Cell One,” appears in the new collection.

At the event we’ll also debut our 2010 anthology, which features an introduction by Nami Mun, whose Chapters reading from Miles from Nowhere earlier this year was astonishingly good. The event will be held at the Center for Fiction, starting at 6 p.m.

I can’t believe I forgot to link to the second installment of my Paris Review Daily Culture Diary.

It’s not any sexier than the first, I’m afraid, but if you’re craving more usage pedantry, solo drinking tips, or line-editing blow-by-blows, you won’t want to let this one pass you by.

Here’s one of the mouse-over notes:
After reading Brad Gooch’s biography of Flannery O’Connor last year, I internalized her (and Elizabeth Hardwick’s) prohibition against allowing the same word to appear twice on a page, and my prose strains in places as a result. I wonder: did O’Connor read Muriel Spark? If so, confronted with such hilarious and inarguably brilliant repetitions — see, e.g., the sticks* — how could she have continued to adhere to her rule? Also how did Spark reuse words so imaginatively? She built humor through the sameness but somehow made the descriptions fresh every time. I wish she could revise this scene I’m getting ready to work on now, the one with the dogs in the car.

Somewhat relatedly: as predicted, Caitlin Roper’s issue of The Paris Review was waiting in the mailbox on my return from Florida. I turned first to my friend Victor LaValle’s essay, which is just great, and then to the R. Crumb interview, which you won’t want to miss if you’re a fan, and then, fingers quivering with years of accumulated anticipation, I read the Katherine Dunn excerpt, which made me want to read more.
 

* Mouse-over note from the first installment: “By now there are passages I could almost quote from memory — especially the post-funeral scenes involving the writer with rheumatoid arthritis slouched over ‘two sticks,’ making his way among the funeral flowers as the other elderly characters goggle at him. The novelty of the Scottishism (’sticks’ rather than ‘canes’) tickles me, of course, but it’s the perfect, deadly repetition of the word — all the glimpses of the ‘clever little man doubled over his sticks’ — that makes this section so funny.”

Jonathan Franzen says “there isn’t a more hilarious narcissist in all of literature” than Sam Pollit of The Man Who Loved Children, which my friend Robb Forman Dew has been urging on me.

I’m back in New York, at least for now, but while I catch up you’re better off checking my Twitter feed than waiting on the RSS.

The first part of my Culture Diary — chronicling things I read, watched, and did the week before last — is up at The Paris Review Daily. Featured: Muriel Spark, Kingsley Amis, Sam Lipsyte, Damages, Jenny Diski, Jimmy Buffett, Rebecca West, Panir Sabzee, Jonathan Franzen, alcoholic beverages…

The silence around here may continue for a little while. I’m unexpectedly in Florida with Max and A.; we’re visiting my father-in-law, who’s in poor health. Here he is (pictured), reading aloud the entry on “alright” (“all wrong”) from my copy of Kingsley Amis’ The King’s English. Not long after this usage bonding moment, he presented me with his pristine abridged copy of Fowler’s 1908 book of the same name.

The next issue of The Paris Review, edited by Caitlin Roper and probably waiting in my mailbox back in Brooklyn, features an interview with R. Crumb, an essay by Victor LaValle, and long-awaited new fiction from Geek Love author Katherine Dunn.

Oxford American’s fifth annual Best of the South issue includes my ode to Miami’s Biltmore Hotel, which I grew up thinking was haunted. Here’s an excerpt:
By day, the hotel was a dingy institutional white, its roof stained with age and half its windows blocked up, but when I first saw it lit against the night sky, barred minaret gleaming from within, I half-expected the whole thing to vanish. It looked, to my six-year-old eyes, like an apparition, an enchanted castle with a single turret. My mother walked me to our crumbling slab of a dock for a better view.

We’d moved into a house along the Coral Gables Waterway, a limestone channel dug during the ’20s land boom. The air smelled of muck and salty reeds with subtle notes of motor oil. Young peacock bass — quicksilver in the dim light — leapt out of the water and dropped almost soundlessly back. At the canal’s head, a half-mile away, rose the vacant hotel. In a land of strip malls, the mouldering Jazz Age relic was the most beautiful building I’d ever seen.

You’ll have to track down the rest to read the part about gangsters, ghosts, and thwarted attraction.

Obviously that’s the hotel, above, and here’s another old South Florida postcard showing a view of the canal. My childhood wasn’t all long afternoons of slow-flowing water and grand limestone sea-walls, but despite everything, I’ll always miss that house.

Fingers crossed, my copy of the magazine will be waiting when I get home tonight, and not just because I have a piece in it. I look forward to this issue every year. My personal favorite best-of essay so far is Sean Rowe’s 2008 “Insider’s Guide to Jailhouse Cuisine.” I’m also partial to Karen Russell’s, on a field trip to the Coral Castle.

The 2010 contributors listed on the magazine’s website are great, but they’re only part of the picture. Facebook tells me that something by Josh Weil was also included, and I know from experience that work from other writers I like will have been, too. Once I have the full table of contents in front of me, I’ll do a giveaway.

ThermoPoetics contends that some ideas about nature — and thermodynamics in particular — manifested themselves in literature before being articulated scientifically. (Via.)

This month The Paris Review Daily celebrates one of the magazine’s longtime contributors, Dr. Strangelove scribe Terry Southern.

On June 12, Save NYC Libraries is hosting a We Will Not Be Shushed read-in to support restoration of funding to our local library systems. To get everyone in the spirit, here are some librarians adapting Lady Gaga. (Link swiped from Alison Bechdel.)

If you haven’t sent in your postcard yet, now’s the time.