Author: utpress

Happy Birthday, Papa Hemingway

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Nobel prize winning novelist Ernest Hemingway was born on this day, July 21st, 1899.

Controversial, brilliant, and always quotable, his words on fiction and truth, taken from a 1954 letter to Bernard Berenson, beautifully captures the tenacity and passion of Hemingway as a writer.

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true.

Hemingway spoke often of the importance of truth in writing. He referred to it again during his Art of Fiction No. 21 interview with The Paris Review:

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

In this way, we encounter Hemingway’s own immortality, as it lives and breathes in the prose he worked so hard to create, and in the vast voices of writers he has influenced, and continues to influence to this day.

(photo source: loc.gov)

Why You Need Small Demons

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If you love books, and the stuff in books, from the music and places to the drinks your favorite fictional characters enjoy, then you’ll be mad for Small Demons.

Not only does Small Demons host an ever-expanding archive of literary references, but they also cross-link and connect those references to other books, creating what they call the “storyverse.”

http://youtu.be/DSlY74J6iH8

Small Demons is an amazing, and sublimely addictive, resource for the book-obsessed. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

 

 

The Slaughterhouse-Five Movie Redux

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Per the Guardian:

Charlie Kaufman is set to write a big-screen adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five, to be directed by Guillermo del Toro. The screenwriter behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich is Del Toro’s preferred writer to work on his film of the 1969 Kurt Vonnegut novel.

I like the pairing. Kaufman is an inventive writer, and the adaptation of Vonnegut book should go better than his past book adaptations. Guillermo del Toro has tremendous vision as a filmmaker, and I trust him with Slaughterhouse-Five.

Of course, this is technically a remake, since Slaughterhouse-Five has already been on the big screen. The 1972 film was described by Vonnegut in his preface to Between Time and Timbuktu as, “a flawless translation of my novel Slaughterhouse-Five to the silver screen.”

As a refresher, here is the trailer:

Vonnegut went on to write in the same preface that, “I drool and cackle every time I watch that film, because it is so harmonious with what I felt when I wrote the book.”

Now it’s Kaufman and del Toro’s turn to bring Vonnegut’s classic anti-war novel, once again, to the big screen. No easy task, even if it’s been done before.

As Hollywood’s imagination seems to be running on fumes these days, film remakes and adaptations of books are becoming the rule rather than the exception.

In the instance of Slaughterhouse-Five, Hollywood is guilty of both.

And so it goes.