Recent reads

Shakespeare and Company, by Sylvia Beach. A very entertaining memoir of the famous bookshop in Paris, spiced with anecdotes of the famous and not-so-famous writers who seem to have used it as a kind of home-away-from home for English-speaking expatriates. Ernest Hemingway makes a few appearances, as does F. Scott Fitzgerald, but the most entertaining stories are about James Joyce and the epic struggles that he and the bookstore proprietors went through when they decided to publish his book Ulysses themselves. The book, of course, was legally deemed obscene by certain countries including the United States and England. Meanwhile, Joyce proved to be an impossibly fussy writer, driving the printers and binders mad with his constant revisions and insistence on minute details of the book's physical appearance. Meanwhile, copies bound for subscribers in the U.S. were being confiscated at the border. Fortunately, the Canadians were more reasonable, allowing Ernest Hemingway to come to the rescue by arranging for an acquaintance, who frequently crossed the US-Canadian border by ferryboat, to smuggle them into the country one at a time hidden in his pants.

Thanks to Carlos for sending this to me.