Did Mary Shelley Write Frankenstein?

The latest sensation to galvanise the torpid lit-hist-crit establishment is the "discovery" by market research analyst John Lauritsen that Mary Shelley did not write Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus (to give the novel its full title). John Lauritsen, it should be remembered, is the gay rights activist who has been fighting a lonely battle against the commonly accepted notion that HIV is what causes Aids. Germaine Greer disagrees. Read the full article here

Huckleberry Who?

Having once read a book isn't the same as having recently read it. Lionel Trilling once famously told Edward Said that he thought the Columbia University humanities core, one of the early great-books curricula, "has the virtue of giving Columbia students a common basis in reading, and if they later forgot the books (as many always do) at least they would have forgotten the same ones." Read the full article here.

Think you know how to read, do you?

In Today's Salon, Tom Lutz writes "I am surprised that I am not a novelist. I am an inveterate liar, so I have at least one of the necessary skills. I love the novel as a form in as deep and devoted a way as any man loved any art, and writing novels is the only thing in the way of a life's work that I've ever really wanted to undertake. Still, I remain novel-less.
I have Jack Kerouac and Hunter Thompson to blame for my early misdirected energies. They encouraged me to believe that the essence of writing was the wild life that preceded it, to believe that I was doing the better part, and the most important part, of novel-writing by imitating them not on the page, but in the bars and on the highways. I realize now this was an error in judgment." Read the whole article here.

Russian Literature in the Age of Putin

Victor Erofeyev — chic in basic black, sipping a cappuccino, pack of Parliaments at the ready — stretches out in the 38th-floor bar of Taipei's Far Eastern Plaza Hotel against a backdrop of triumph over Communism. Through the huge window behind him, the world's tallest building, "101," towers over the crowded capital of the country that's not quite a country, an enormous middle finger thrust at that other China to the west. The building's cocky ambience seems to put Erofeyev, 59, the former enfant terrible of Russian postmodern literature — a rebel who flung a similar finger at official Russian literature by helping publish the unapproved literary almanac 'Metropo'l in 1979 — in the mood for contemplating another kind of "post-Communist" society.Read the full article here.