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Summary:
In The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, master anthologist John Gross brings together a delectable smorgasbord of literary tales, offering striking new insight into some of the most important writers in history. Many of the anecdotes here are funny, others are touching, outrageous, sinister, inspiring, or downright weird. They show writers from Chaucer to Bob Dylan acting both unpredictably and deeply in character. The range is wide--this is a book which finds room for Milton and Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, Kurt Vonnegut and P. G. Wodehouse, Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie, James Baldwin and Tom Wolfe. It is also a book in which you can find out which great historian's face was once mistaken for a baby's bottom, which film star experienced a haunting encounter with Virginia Woolf not long before her death, and what Agatha Christie really thought of her popular character Hercule Poirot. It is in short an unrivalled collection of literary gossip offering intimate glimpses into the lives of authors ranging from Shakespeare to Philip Roth--a book not just for lovers of literature, but for anyone with a taste for the curiosities of human nature.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
For being writers ...
Customer Rating:
I paid roughly half price for this book and thought it a complete waste of money ... and if time is money, I also have to admit I spent too much time trying to glean something interesting in it. However, at $6 I'm admittedly more apt to rationalize 'why not' and forgo my next cup o' (high end) crappuccino. ... O.K. there were a few 'good' retorts (whatever), but (trust me) you get infinitely more from The Author's writings. ... I'm beginning to think any book blessed with Oxford or Cambridge in the title is going to be a self-fullfilling prophesy of Disappointment. Personally, I'm convinced if you want a piece of a writer, read their writing.
The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes
Customer Rating:
This book is more a reference book then something readable but it does have its moments. If you have a few minutes to kill and are looking for something a little light and amusing this book may fit the bill.
We're in the room as literary history is made
Customer Rating:
Civilians like to imagine that writers talk about writing when they get together. I'm sure, in all of literary history, that has happened several times. But it is not a favorite subject. Sex is. As is Food. Travel. Money. The perfidy of rivals. And did I say money?
Those are ordinary topics. But that doesn't mean we have nothing to gain from hearing what writers have to say about them. These are writers, remember? They're at the most clever when they're envious, scornful or otherwise out of sorts.
John Gross, editor of this anthology, is a particularly witty example of the breed. I stood by him at a party once, and, though I am said to be not entirely dull, I remained mute for a good twenty minutes. Gross spoke in epigrams. He could go lofty or vulgar. He was wise and wicked, and, most of all, funny. No surprise that he has edited a book with those same qualities.
Anecdotes are compressed stories, the more compressed the better. Like this one, about the dictionary-maker and moralist Samuel Johnson: "A young fellow, lamenting one day that he had lost all his Greek --- Johnson retorted, 'I believe it happened at the same time that I lost my large estate in Yorkshire.'"
I was amused to read about William Blake and his wife, sitting in their summer house, naked: "Come in," cried Blake. "It's only Adam and Eve, you know!"
And here's a trivia question. What lines did William Wordsworth write before forking manure into his garden? The opening stanza of the Immortality Ode:
There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Appareled in celestial light The glory and the freshness of a dream...
Do you know Jane Austen's last words? "I want nothing but death."
Here we look over the shoulder of John Keats as he coughs up the first drop of blood --- and knows exactly what it means. We hear Ralph Waldo Emerson dismiss Edgar Allen Poe as "the jingle man." We watch Anthony Trollope chow down and explain that he doesn't have a good appetite, he's just "very greedy."
Oscar Wilde pays a visit to Walt Whitman. Wilkie Collins confesses a drug habit. Emily Dickinson exhausts a visitor. Lewis Carroll plays dumb. At a party given by a Duchess, Henry James describes himself as a hermit. Arthur Conan Doyle demonstrates how to make a holy man jealous. George Bernard Shaw reveals the source of his skepticism. A drama critic falls asleep --- and on his face. Another poet pours a beer over Robert Frost's head. Sinclair Lewis brags about his new book.
As we reach the Twentieth Century, the anecdotes turn more political. Ludwig Wittgenstein gives his money away to his rich relatives, on the theory that they can't be further corrupted by it. Vladimir Nabokov has a violent reaction to anti-Semitism. A Communist sympathizer tells George Orwell: "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs," causing Orwell to reply, "Where's the omelette?" Samuel Beckett gives his jacket to a tramp --- without emptying the pockets. W.H. Auden contemplates the death penalty for Brecht.
There are more Brits than Americans, which seems just. It also makes the book a better gift for English majors than for civilian readers. On the other hand, the last anecdote in the book is about J.K. Rowling --- scholarly this ain't.
The idea reader of this book: the lover of books with snooty friends. Read this, pen in hand, and you'll have more than enough ammo to dazzle your listeners at high-minded parties. Any writer quoted in these pages would understand that motive.
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