“Not here, not here the darkness / In this twittering world.” (Eliot) Author of SHIRLEY JACKSON: A RATHER HAUNTED LIFE. Working on Anne Frank bio. #caroin2023
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Articles by Ruth Franklin
How Shirley Jackson Exposed the Darker, Uncanny Side of Everyday Life
1 hour ago When I was 16, I attended a writing workshop with a group of precocious young poets, where we all tried very hard to prove who among us was the most tortured upper-middle-class teenager. One boy refused to tell anyone where he was from, declaring, “I’m from everywhere and nowhere.” Two weeks later, …
The singular tragedy of Anne Frank
"Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes ... Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find their parents have disappeared." Written by Anne Frank about the persecution of Jews by Nazis in Amsterdam, these words went viral during the first Trump administration.
THE MANY LIVES OF ANNE FRANK
An intriguing effort that tries to do too much. The short life and long legacy of the world’s most famous Holocaust victim. Anne Frank got her first diary as a present for her 13th birthday, just weeks before her family went into hiding in 1942. By the time she died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, not yet 16, she had filled multiple notebooks and was revising them for postwar publication before her arrest.
The Singular Tragedy of Anne Frank Original
"Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes ... Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find their parents have disappeared." Written by Anne Frank about the persecution of Jews by Nazis in Amsterdam, these words went viral during the first Trump administration.
Adipose-tissue Treg cells restrain differentiation of stromal adipocyte precursors to promote insulin sensitivity and metabolic homeostasis
Morigny P. Boucher J. Arner P. Langin D. Lipid and glucose metabolism in white adipocytes: pathways, dysfunction and therapeutics. Nat. Rev. Endocrinol. 2021; 17: 276-295 Klein S. Gastaldelli A. Yki-Järvinen H. Scherer P.E. Why does obesity cause diabetes?. Cell Metab. 2022; 34: 11-20 The endocrine function of adipose tissues in health and cardiometabolic disease. Nat. Rev. Endocrinol. 2019; 15: 507-524 Divoux A. Tordjman J. Lacasa D. Veyrie N. Hugol D. Aissat A. Basdevant A. Guerre-Millo M. Poitou C. Zucker J.D. et al.
Is Mary Oliver a good poet?
This comes up every now and then. I remember someone a few years ago saying Mary Oliver was “poetry for people who don’t like poetry.” That’s not true, but even if it is, who cares? Anyway, it came up again when Maggie Zhu tweeted that Mary Oliver is “upmarket Rupi Kaur.”Zhu followed up calling Oliver a “preacher-masquerading-as-poet”. Loyal reader of The Common Reader said this: I started off yesterday feeling positive towards Mary Oliver.
Close Encounters of the Literary Kind
There’s a long strange period at the beginning of working on a project where you think there is a book here or a story or an essay, but you’d be hard put to say what it is. You couldn’t possibly explain it in a few sentences. Yet there’s a pull, there’s something. It’s almost like a divining rod. You’re walking around like, Is there water somewhere? After graduating from college, Rachel Cohen decided to spend a year driving around America.
The betrayal of Anne Frank, etc.
Welcome to my new subscribers! I’m glad you’re here. This email comes out once a month. Otherwise, find me on Twitter, Instagram, or (if you must) Facebook. What I’m writing As I’ve mentioned earlier, I’m currently at work on a book about Anne Frank for Jewish Lives, a series of short biographies published by Yale University Press.
Beyond the Betrayal | Ruth Franklin
Why are we so eager to assign a single person blame for revealing the hiding place of Anne Frank and her family? On the morning of August 4, 1944, everything seemed normal at Prinsengracht 263, a tall, narrow building along a canal in Amsterdam’s Jordaan neighborhood.
Reality and imagination revisited, &c.
Welcome to my new subscribers! I’m glad you’re here. This email comes out once a month. Otherwise, find me on Twitter, Instagram, or (if you must) Facebook. Last week, out of the blue, I got a very nice email from a stranger who said he planned to feature a paragraph from an essay I’d written for The New Yorker on his website, The Humble Essayist.
Coming soon
This is Ghost Stories, a newsletter about What I'm reading and writing these days..
A Year in Reading: Jocelyn Nicole Johnson
I started 2021 by finishing Deesha Philyaw's sterling collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, stories that sit adjacent to Black Southern church experiences and explore desires. I keep reading collections, including Dantiel W. Moniz's Floridian brown-girl Gothic-lite Milk Blood Heat. In my claustrophobic wintery months, I traveled to parts of China with Te-Ping Chin's The Land of Big Numbers, and then to a Europe I hadn't quite seen before with Garth Greenwell's, A Cleanness.
‘The Lucky Ones’
Estate of Rivka Benyamini Hannan Teitel (center) with his uncle Icok, sister Regina, and father Zindel, in front of the Teitel brewery, Ostrów Mazowiecka, Poland, circa 1938 My maternal grandparents were people who had suffered. Even in my earliest memories, their faces are deeply lined, their hair sparse. My grandfather, a tall man, was perpetually stooped, his chest sunken; my grandmother’s knuckles were swollen with arthritis. Each wore a full set of dentures.
Read By: Ruth Franklin
Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) is deservedly famous for suspenseful fiction like “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House. During her lifetime, though, she was equally well known for the humorous stories she wrote about her absent-minded-professor husband and their four children, published in popular women’s magazines of the era and collected in two best-selling memoirs, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons.
Read By: Diana Khoi Nguyen
Diana Khoi Nguyen on her selection: In a time of global isolation unprecedented for multiple generations, I have retreated into the community of words of others, that is, a return to the nook of books, day in, day out, and it is very much a comfort--a return to the routine days of my sequestered childhood. Today found me missing poets, writers, and humans with whom I would have had some kind of social and physical contact in this now long-gone former world of conferences, events, and travel.
Fiction and Life
In response to: A Sickness in the Air from the February 11, 2021 issue To the Editors: I’m delighted the Review chose to write about my most recent book [“A Sickness in the Air,” NYR, February 11], but troubled by the methods your critic deployed. The review relies heavily on material that’s not the book under discussion, notably a profile of me, in New York magazine. I’m confident your defense will be to note that the critic, Ruth Franklin, is a biographer, and this is how she works.
A Sickness in the Air
Rumaan Alam; illustration by Johnalynn Holland “Are you actually a woman?” the magazine editor Chloe Schama asked Rumaan Alam a few years ago during an interview for Vogue. Her joke reflected her incredulity at his first two novels, which concern themselves exclusively with the circumstances of women’s lives.
A Year in Reading: Ruth Franklin
Until March, my reading this year hummed along as usual: books for the seminar on biography I taught, background reading for assignments, the occasional book club novel. Then, of course, everything fell apart, in my mind as well as in the world. As soon as lockdown began, I found myself unable to read for any sustained period of time—a problem not as terrible as many others the pandemic brought, but difficult nonetheless.
The Silence, by Don DeLillo [Scribner]
How many times, how many ways, could we tell the force and effect of the cultural-political winds throughout the years not by simply reading the news or the trends on social media, but by observing, and feeling, what is going on with PopMatters' contributors? Let's just say 20 years' worth of ways.
Ruth Franklin: A decade of Shirley Jackson
News October 26, 2020 Ruth Franklin: A decade of Shirley Jackson This month Library of America publishes Shirley Jackson: Four Novels of the 1940s & 50s, a companion to the first collection of Jackson’s writings released in 2010. In the following guest post, the new volume’s editor, Ruth Franklin, reflects on the shifts in Jackson’s literary reputation, as well as her heightened visibility in popular culture, in the decade since then.
SHIRLEY Brings the Legendary Writer to Life... with a Twist
It’s always a challenge to bring a real person to cinematic life. But it’s an especially tricky thing to nail down when said real person is projected through a layer of fiction about the nature of fiction itself. But that’s the brilliance of Shirley, the new film from director Josephine Decker and screenwriter Sarah Gubbins about the life of American horror author Shirley Jackson. The film is based on a novel of the same name by Susan Scarf Merrell, which serves as a loose basis for the plot.
Episode 446: Ten Minutes with Ellen Datlow
Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.
The Coode Street Podcast - Episode 446: Ten Minutes with Ellen Datlow
Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.
Book Marks reviews of If It Bleeds by Stephen King
Publisher Scribner Book Company Date April 21, 2020 Fiction Sci-Fi and Fantasy Story Collections From legendary storyteller, and master of short fiction Stephen King comes a collection of four new novellas, each pulling you into intriguing and frightening places. Rave Bill Sheehan, The Washington Post ... contains four new, exceptionally compelling novellas that reaffirm [King's] mastery of the form ...
Emily St. John Mandel’s Catastrophe-Haunted Fiction
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel Knopf Illustration: Paul Spella; Sal Alas / Westend61 / Getty Writing in The New York Times in June 2003, less than two years after the events of September 11 shattered the complacency with which many Americans conducted their lives, the British critic Michael Pye lamented an unlikely casualty of the new era: the ability to occupy ourselves with a superficial novel while sitting in an airport lounge or drifting at 30,000 feet.
Imp of the Perverse
Witold Gombrowicz’s war against cliché. By Ruth Franklin July 23, 2012 Gombrowicz used the nonsensical and the absurd as weapons against convention. Illustration by Victor Melamed In the summer of 1939, the writer Witold Gombrowicz set sail from Poland, on the ocean liner Chrobry, on what he thought would be a brief mission as a cultural ambassador to the Polish community in Argentina.
Ladies of the Moon
Ladies of the Moon Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth Catapult, 243 pp., $16.95 (paper) Christian Sinibaldi/Guardian/eyevine/ReduxJokha Alharthi, London, May 2019 In an engrossing book published last spring called Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, the Australian writer Jane Alison makes a trenchant observation about the “dramatic arc” long considered the foundation for plot.
A Life in Good Taste
The fashions and follies of Elsie de Wolfe. By Ruth Franklin September 19, 2004 In 1921, at the pinnacle of her decorating career, Elsie de Wolfe sued one of her clients for neglecting to pay her for seventeen thousand dollars’ worth of furniture. De Wolfe had never before set foot in a courtroom, but cross-examination presented no terrors for a woman who, at the age of fifty-six, was plucky enough to perform headstands in public.
Burning Down The Haus
We have updated our Privacy Policy Please take a moment to review it. By continuing to use this site, you agree to the terms of our updated Privacy Policy. Wildly entertaining . . . A thrilling tale . . . A joy in the way it brings back punk's fury and high stakes Original and inspiring . . .
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
A genius of literary suspense, known to millions as the author of the “The Lottery”, Shirley Jackson (1916–1965) plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America better than anyone. Based on a wealth of previously undiscovered correspondence and dozens of interviews, Shirley Jackson reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the author, firmly placing Jackson within the American Gothic tradition.
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography Winner of the Edgar Award in Critical/Biographical Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Nonfiction A New York Times Notable Book of 2016 A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Pick of 2016 An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of 2016 A Time Magazine Top Nonfiction of 2016 A Seattle Times Best Book of 2016 A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2016 An NPR 2016's Great Read A Boston Globe Best Book of 2016 A Nylon Best Book...
Last Day for SNAP! Photography Applications, "The Evolution of Emancipation" Juneteenth Gala, Kehinde Wiley Goes Hollywood, African American Art Set Records at Swann Galleries
Visit the Hartford Public Library for Neighborhood Studios SNAP! Photography's public exhibition located on the 3rd floor. Apprentices explore themes of self-identity, mass media, gang violence, social and political issues. Exhibition runs now through Winter 2018.
Review of Bruno Schulz’s ‘Collected Stories’: Return to the Street of Crocodiles
By March 15, 2018 4:13 pm ET In the early 1930s, Bruno Schulz was a high-school teacher of art and handicrafts in Drohobycz, a modest town in what was then eastern Poland. To get his students’ attention, he sometimes told fables in which a pencil, a water jug or a stove turned into an animate object.
Jennifer Egan’s Surprising Swerve Into Historical Fiction
“The sea, the sea!” It’s the jubilant, elemental cry of a child released from a hot car on a summer day, but also a phrase with deep historical and literary roots. The shout of mercenary Greek soldiers—“Thalatta! Thalatta!”—in 401 b.c., when they finally glimpsed the Black Sea, and thus their salvation, on their way back from fighting in Persia, in Xenophon’s telling.
Was Jane Austen a ‘secret radical’?
Jane Austen’s face — demure, bonneted, with a few stray curls over her forehead — peers out pensively from the new British 10-pound note, debuting this fall to mark the bicentenary of her death. The bill superimposes her image over a stately mansion surrounded by vast gardens, with a horse and carriage in the foreground.
Book Reviews: December 2016
History doesn’t always celebrate the literary figures who weren’t award winners or bestsellers. But a lack of renown doesn’t mean that those writers weren’t experts of their craft.
Greenlight Holiday Picks Roundup #7: Nonfiction
How lucky we are to have John Berger still waxing aesthetic. As he crests 90, he's in fine form and though reflective, no less provocative. Landscapes, the companion book to the excellent Portraits, is barely about landscapes, but then his writing always shirks convention and definition. More shrewd, insurgent, voluminous essays about art, politics, creation, philosophy, beauty, observation.
New bio fleshes out ‘The Lottery’ author’s demons
‘Lottery’ author dealt with her demons by writing My initiation into the dark and macabre world of Shirley Jackson came in the mid-’70s, in the form of a weathered copy of “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” a slim paperback that featured a cover image of a raven-haired girl looking through a knothole in a plank fence.
'Shirley Jackson': A great American original and her demons
It has long been a puzzle to some - and will come as a surprise to others - that the Shirley Jackson who wrote the deeply disturbing short story "The Lottery" and chilling novels including The Haunting of Hill House was the same author who wrote breezy, laugh-out-loud-funny works such as Life Among the Savages, about raising her four children. But as Ruth Franklin tells us in this new biography of Jackson, these two seemingly opposite authorial personas are, in fact, profoundly interconnected.
Ruth Franklin - Events - Harvard Book Store
Harvard Book Store and Mass Humanities welcomes book critic and New Yorker contributor RUTH FRANKLIN for a discussion of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, a "historically engaging and pressingly relevant" biography of a towering figure in American literature. Still known to millions primarily as the author of the "The Lottery," Shirley Jackson (1916–1965) has been curiously absent from the mainstream American literary canon.
More Big Literary Biographies of Women, Please
Whither the big, splashy literary biography? Let’s check the National Book Awards, which has tossed the category around—since 1984 it has lumped biography in with nonfiction, and no literary biography has won the prize.
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
“You once wrote me a letter . . . telling me that I would never be lonely again. I think that was the first, the most dreadful lie you ever told me.” This wrenching lines appear twice in Ruth Franklin’s magisterial biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life and are, by some measures, the beating heart of the book. They are taken from an undated letter Jackson wrote to her husband, literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman.
11 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Shirley Jackson
Ruth Franklin's Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life is a major new biography of the American author, taking readers inside the personal life of the enigmatic Jackson. Franklin picks some of her favorite Jackson details. If you went to high school in the United States in the 1950s or later, you probably read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” one of the most anthologized short stories in American fiction.
Shirley Jackson’s Tarot cards. She favored the...
Shirley Jackson's Tarot cards. She favored the Tarot of Marseilles, pictured here. For more: http://tinyletter.com/ruthfranklin/letters/tarot-cards
Hello! I adore your books- American Gods,...
misseversmann asked: Hello! I adore your books- American Gods, Neverwhere, Ocean at the End of the Lane, and (especially) Stardust are my favourites! However, I'm only reading female authors until autumn.
The real-life Hill House? etc.
Updates from the Shirley Jackson files, #11 Dear readers, Thanks to those of you who wrote in response to my query, I now have many questions about Shirley Jackson to answer in future newsletters. But now it’s hot, and I feel languid and out of sorts, and perhaps you do too. So I want to tell you a story about something that happened while I was working on this book. Last summer, while the kids were at camp, my husband and I spent a few weeks in Bennington, Vermont.
Shirley Jacksonâs (china) cat, at the North...
Shirley Jackson's (china) cat, at the North Bennington library. Read more in my newsletter: http://tinyletter.com/ruthfranklin/letters/shirley-jackson-day-larks-and-katydids-etc
SHIRLEY JACKSON by Ruth Franklin | Kirkus Reviews
An engaging, sympathetic portrait of the writer who found the witchery in huswifery. Critic Franklin (A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, 2010) ably captures both the life and art of Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) in this sharp biography. Franklin presents her as the classic square peg: a woman who didn’t easily fit in to midcentury America and a writer who can’t be neatly categorized.
Wisława Szymborska (1923-2012)
AÑADIR A FAVORITOS Please login to bookmark Nombre de usuario o dirección de correo Contraseña Recuérdame La Polonia de posguerra era una nación extraordinariamente desdichada, pero en un aspecto (y quizá ese fue el único) se contaba entre las más afortunadas del mundo. Este país sin pretensiones, que no es admirado por sus paisajes, por su gastronomía o por su arquitectura, produjo a tres de los mejores poetas europeos de la última mitad del siglo.
The True Lies of Totalitarian North Korea
The plot of the book is, at first glance, fantastic—a kind of grotesque picaresque. Much of it is narrated by Pak Jun Doh, who, when we first meet him, has just been conscripted into a naval unit that travels to remote Japanese islands and kidnaps people off the beaches to serve as Japanese teachers in North Korea. Soon he will become a spy, intercepting English-language broadcasts from a fishing boat and—in a set piece that verges on hilarious—travelling to Texas on an obscure diplomatic mission.
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