Tag: censorship

Review | The Last Days of Ellis Island, Gaëlle Josse & Ellis Island: A People’s History, Malgorzata Szejnert

The Last Days of Ellis Island by Gaëlle Josse @WorldEdBooks and Ellis Island: A People’s History by Malgorzata Szejnert @ScribeUKbooks offer an excellent complementary read, giving a different take on getting through the gateway to the Promised Land that was the United States a century ago.

Ellis Island in New York harbour remains the ultimate symbol of American immigration. It was the continent’s busiest inspection station for sixty years until it closed in 1954. Millions of immigrants went through an extensive and elaborate legal and medical vetting process when they disembarked: Jews escaping from political and economic oppression in czarist Russia and Europe; Italians escaping rural poverty; Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Serbs, Slovaks and Greeks . . . along with arrivants from Syria, Turkey and Armenia. Approximately forty per cent of U.S. citizens today can trace at least one of their ancestors back to Ellis Island. Continue reading Review | The Last Days of Ellis Island, Gaëlle Josse & Ellis Island: A People’s History, Malgorzata Szejnert

BookBlast® Archive | Gael Elton Mayo, Letter from Madrid | Moroccan Courier Dec. 1953

Arriving in Madrid by Car the other night there seemed to be no transition; the earth, a road cut into its open face, and then a notice: Madrid. After that some lights and suddenly we were in the capital of Spain, only a few minutes from the open land to the civilized Castellana with its trees and gardens. In this city that is both provincial and international, new and old, no middle way seems necessary: it is a place of extremes, geometrical lines, radical emotions. Why bother with such inessentials as bourgeois villas and suburbs — this is simpler, strong as coarse Logrono wine and more aesthetic.

moroccan courier dec 1953 logo bookblast diary

Since the American agreement there is a new atmosphere of potentiality; the American tourist on his way through now stays longer, there are not only just embassy people or the press. (We noticed also yesterday in the Palace bar some rather familiar sharks and a few 5 per cent operators, last seen in Egypt and Tokyo, perching on high stools waiting and watching . . . the sort that show up when something is going to happen.) Suddenly Madrid contains suspense, against its old and well-known atmosphere of no-hurry. The people waiting around in bars are only the ripples on the edge of the pool, the real pawns are for instance American generals in civilian clothes, business men . . . the atmosphere of construction is especially appealing to the American pioneer spirit, for here there is ( in some ways) everything to be done. Continue reading BookBlast® Archive | Gael Elton Mayo, Letter from Madrid | Moroccan Courier Dec. 1953

Review | Zola vs. The Victorians, Eileen Horne | MacLehose Press

As subdivisions or departments of bigger publishers, imprints break up monolithic companies, give space to individual editors to stamp their list with a defining character and originality, and reassure authors that they are not disappearing into the corporate ether. The MacLehose Press is an independently-minded imprint of Quercus Books, founded by Christopher MacLehose and publishing the very best, often prize-winning, literature from around the world; mainly in translation but with a few outstanding exceptions as English language originals.

“Morality is not offended by human truth. It needs to know the real world and to make vice itself a source of wisdom. A novel by Sir Walter Scott may well push a highly strung young girl into the arms of a lover; a sincere study of the passions will no doubt horrify a young girl, but at the same time it will teach her about life and give her moral strength.” So wrote Emile Zola in La Tribune on 9 August, 1868.

Zola the Publisher

When Zola was a young employee at the Parisian publisher Hachette, he came across La Cause du Beau Guillaume (1862) by the novelist and art critic Louis Edmond Duranty, an advocate of the Realist, subsequently renamed Naturalist, cause. In the preface to the 1900 edition, Jean Vaudal  writes: “In the gallery of ancestors which Zola gave to Naturalism, he placed the bust of Duranty on the second shelf, just beneath those of Balzac, Stendhal and Flaubert. If but one of them were to be granted the Naturalist label, it would be the author of La Cause du Beau Guillaume.”

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt formulated the doctrine of Naturalism, in 1864: “The novel of today is composed from documents, received by word of mouth or taken direct from nature, just as history is composed from written documents. Historians write narratives of the past, novelists narratives of the present.” Continue reading Review | Zola vs. The Victorians, Eileen Horne | MacLehose Press

Review | Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov | Landmark BookBlasts®

“Lolita was rejected by four American publishers in 1954; published in Paris by The Olympia Press, September 1955; banned by the French government, December 1956; found “not objectionable” by U. S. Customs, February 1957; back on the market in France after Olympia won their case against the government, January 1958; published in the U. S., August 1958; re-banned in France after the government’s successful appeal against the initial judgment, December 1956; published in French in Paris, April 1959; back on the market in France in English when the government cancelled their own ban after having been sued again by Olympia, September 1959.

“THIS EDITION IS THE ORIGINAL, COMPLETE AND UNEXPURGATED PARIS EDITION. IT IS THE ONLY ONE ALLOWED TO BE SOLD IN COUNTRIES OTHER THAN THE U.S.A., U.K. AND COMMONWEALTH.”

So reads the back cover blurb of the April 1959 Olympia Press paperback (3rd printing) edition of Lolita. The novel may have a repugnant, discomfiting aura, but oh! how very beautifully Nabokov writes of warped lust and longing, motel sex and middle-America, as he addresses what could be termed a certain Jungian “shadow” side of male human nature. Lolita is an acknowledged classic, and rightly so. Continue reading Review | Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov | Landmark BookBlasts®

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