May 10th, 2025
Home | Log in!

On Top Shelf
MIXED INKMIXED INK
Fresh Pick
THE RUINED DUCHESS
THE RUINED DUCHESS

New Books This Week

Reader Games


The books of May are here—fresh, fierce, and full of feels.

Slideshow image


Since your web browser does not support JavaScript, here is a non-JavaScript version of the image slideshow:

slideshow image
Wedding season includes searching for a missing bride�and a killer . . .


slideshow image
Sometimes the path forward begins with a step back.


slideshow image
One island. Three generations. A summer that changes everything.


slideshow image
A snapshot made them legends. What it didn�t show could tear them apart.


slideshow image
This life coach will give you a lift!


slideshow image
A twisty, "addictive," mystery about jealousy and bad intentions


slideshow image
Trapped by magic, haunted by muses�she must master the cards before they�re lost to darkness.


slideshow image
Masquerades, secrets, and a forbidden romance stitched into every seam.


slideshow image
A vanished manuscript. A murdered expert. A castle full of secrets�and one sharp-witted sleuth.


Since your web browser does not support JavaScript, here is a non-JavaScript version of the image slideshow:

slideshow image
Two warrior angels. First friends, now lovers. Their future? A WILD UNKNOWN.


The Company They Kept
Robert B. Silvers

Writers on Unforgettable Friendships

New York Review Books
September 2006
On Sale: September 5, 2006
316 pages
ISBN: 1590172035
EAN: 9781590172032
Hardcover
Add to Wish List

Literature and Fiction

Many of the illustrious contributors to The New York Review of Books have had deep and abiding relationships–both personal and intellectual–with other poets, writers, artists, composers, and scientists of equal stature. The Company They Kept is a collection of twenty-seven accounts of these varied friendships–most of them undeniably fraught with “idiosyncratic complexities.”

One of the sweetest and funniest is Prudence Crowther’s memoir of her romance, at age thirty, with the seventy-four-year old S. J. Perelman (“As a friend of mine put it, ‘Yeah, too bad you couldn’t have met when you were twenty six and he was seventy–or when he was thirty, and your parents hadn’t met yet.’”). Darryl Pinckney recalls his unsettling stint as Djuna Barnes’s handyman. Susan Sontag’s piece on Paul Goodman is more about how they never hit it off; Seamus Heaney’s remembrance of Tom Flanagan has all the melancholy affection of a bereft and beloved son. Larry McMurtry and Ken Kesey were grad students together–for years afterward, McMurtry recalls, the Merry Pranksters would show up unannounced, and throw his family and neighbors into hilarious chaos. Derek Walcott recalls his parting of the ways with Robert Lowell, and of their bittersweet reconciliation. And Robert Oppenheimer writes that he wants to dispel the clouds of myth surrounding Albert Einstein: “As always, the myth has its charms; but the truth is far more beautiful.”

From Anna Akhmatova’s dreamlike description of wandering through Paris with the impoverished Modigliani to Joseph Brodsky’s account of his first meeting with Isaiah Berlin (from which he returned to report, around the kitchen table, to Stephen Spender and W.H. Auden), these pieces are tantalizing glimpses into the lives of those who have made The New York Review of Books into what Esquire magazine calls "the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language."

Comments

No comments posted.

Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!

© 2003-2025 off-the-edge.net  all rights reserved Privacy Policy