A Story Lately Told by Anjelica Huston (and Other Books by Hustons)

The Committee Room turns its attention to Anjelica Huston's recently published autobiography, A Story Lately Told. The Oscar-winning actress offers up a briskly paced, impressionistic account of her action-packed first twenty-one years. A second volume, tentatively titled Watch Me, covering her acting career and highly publicized, long-term romance with actor Jack Nicholson, is due to be published later this year.

Huston's most notable films include screen versions of the novels The Witches by Roald Dahl, Prizzi's Honor by Richard Condon, and The Grifters by Jim Thompson.

"Unlike many celebrity memoirs, Anjelica Huston's is worth reading," says book reviewer Lewis Jones of The Spectator. "Her story is an interesting one, and is generally well written, sometimes even beautifully so."

Anjelica Huston, the daughter of the legendary film director John Huston, was born in Los Angeles in 1951 while her father, then in his mid-forties and at the top of his game career-wise, was in the Congo making his famous screen version of C.S. Forester's novel The African Queen.

John and Anjelica Huston, 1976
(photo: Rex Features).

Though born in California, Anjelica spent her childhood far from Hollywood on a vast estate called St. Cleran's in the rural west of Ireland. Her father, for whom the term "big personality" might have been coined, played out a country squire fantasy.

Young Anjelica attends a local village school run by nuns (though her family is atheist), roams the green fields of St. Cleran's with the children of the servants (her only playmates) and becomes an excellent horsewoman. As soon as she is old enough she fox hunts, sometimes sidesaddle, with the local gentry. "There was nothing so close to the feeling of flying as being on a good Irish hunter when the hounds picked up a scent," Anjelica writes. Her eccentric brother Tony takes up falconry. Her beautiful young mother, the former ballerina Enrica "Ricki" Soma, the fourth of John Huston's five wives, endlessly arranges renovations to the ramshackle estate and entertains the numerous visitors, many of them writers, who the usually absent John Huston brings home with him.

TCR Story of the Month for March: "Stereograms" by Jen Julian

Author Jen Julian

The Committee Room is especially proud to present "Stereograms" by Jen Julian as TCR Story of the Month for March. In this chilling and powerful story written in the Southern Gothic tradition, a young widow employed at a North Carolina mental institution is haunted by ghosts both literal and figurative.

Jen Julian is from Goldsboro, North Carolina. She received her MFA in Fiction from UNC-Greensboro and is currently an English PhD candidate at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Press 53’s 2010 and 2013 Open Awards Anthologies, Four Way Review, Toasted Cheese, and an up-and-coming issue of The North Carolina Literary Review Online. She is winner of the University of Missouri's 2013 Margery McKinney Award for Fiction and was a finalist for North Carolina State University's 2009 Brenda L. Smart Fiction Prize.

"Stereograms" was published in New Delta Review and won New Delta Review's 2013 Matt Clark Fiction Prize.

Seven American Deaths and Disasters (An Interview with Poet Kenneth Goldsmith)

Seven American Deaths
and Disasters

In Seven American Deaths and Disasters, conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith offers transcriptions of genuine, as-it-happened radio and television news coverage of seminal events in recent American history: the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, the murder of John Lennon, the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the death of "king of pop" Michael Jackson. Additionally, there is a chilling text taken from an FBI file of an emergency call made by a teacher cowering with her students in the Columbine High School library as prowling gunmen approach the library doors.

Goldsmith is a proponent of "uncreative writing" that retextualizes, reframes, and recycles existing material. He has added nothing to the content of Seven American Deaths and Disasters, which was recently published by New York-based powerHouse Books. His contribution is the concept itself plus careful selection and editing.

"What constitutes the act of writing is rapidly changing in the digital age," Goldsmith explained to The Committee Room. "Skills that we used to consider outside of the scope of writing — word processing, databasing, recycling, appropriation, intentional plagiarism, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, but to name a few — are now the ways we routinely construct literature."

Kenneth Goldsmith

Goldsmith's earlier works include Fidget (2000), a chronicle of every movement of his body over a thirteen hour period, Day (2003), a transcription of a New York Times issue from an ordinary day in 2000, and Printing Out the Internet (2013), a crowdsourced project that invited the public to print out pages of the internet and send them to a Mexico City art gallery to be added to an installation. Ultimately, ten tons of paper was collected.

TCR Story of the Month for February: "Arab Spring" by Joseph Giordano

Joseph Giordano

The Committee Room is pleased to offer "Arab Spring" by Joseph Giordano as TCR Story of the Month for February. Using evocative detail and a firm sense of history, "Arab Spring" tells the story of an honest man doing business in a culture where political corruption is a centuries old practice.  

Joseph Giordano is a Texas-based writer whose work has appeared in more than thirty magazines including Bartleby Snopes, The Foliate Oak, and The Summerset Review.

"Arab Spring" was published in Newfound (Fall 2013).

To read "Arab Spring" click here

TCR Story of the Month highlights an outstanding work of short fiction published online within the preceding twelve months.

Update on TCR Story of the Month Author: Jean Ryan's story "Greyhound" included in Ashland Creek Press anthology Among Animals

Among Animals (cover shows red fox
photographed at San Juan Island, Washington).

The Committee Room is pleased to share the news that the short story "Greyhound" by Jean Ryan is included in the anthology Among Animals: The Lives of Animals and Humans in Contemporary Short Fiction, to be published this month by Ashland Creek Press.

Ryan's story "Paradise," published in Blue Lake Review, was TCR Story of the Month for March 2012.

Among Animals is a varied collection of stories by writers from around the world exploring the ways in which animals and humans both understand and challenge one another.

In "Greyhound," a woman brings home a rescued racing dog for her troubled partner in the hope that they might help each other heal.

Publisher's Weekly has called Jean Ryan a writer who "controls devastating psychological material with tight prose, quick scene changes, and a scientist’s observant eye."

The Los Angeles Review says "Ryan’s stories praise the transformative power of compassion, and reveal how the rescued can become the rescuer."

A Recovered American Classic: "The Lost Weekend" by Charles Jackson (An Interview with Charles Jackson Biographer Blake Bailey)

Novels are often overshadowed to the point of near oblivion by successful film versions. Forrest Gump. The Silence of the Lambs. Kramer vs. Kramer. Midnight Cowboy. In the Heat of the Night. True Grit. The Graduate. Would anyone think of this as a list of novels?

Similarly,The Lost Weekend  is remembered today, if it is remembered at all, as an Oscar winning 1945 film directed by Billy Wilder and starring Ray Milland as a struggling and not so young anymore writer on a harrowing, five-day drinking binge in Manhattan.

The even harder hitting novel The Lost Weekend by Charles Jackson, upon which the movie is based, was published seventy years ago this month, in January 1944. The Lost Weekend sold a half million copies in its first few years of publication, was translated into several languages, and made its author famous, at least for awhile.

Jackson and his novel have recently emerged from the shadows. Vintage Books has brought out a trade paperback edition ofThe Lost Weekend. Also, a superb biography of Jackson -- Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson -- by Blake Bailey was published by Alfred A. Knopf.

TCR Story of the Month for January -- "Translating Kun" by Inderjeet Mani

Inderjeet Mani

The Committee Room is pleased to offer "Translating Kun" by Inderjeet Mani as TCR Story of the Month for January.

"Translating Kun" is set in Thailand, which Mani calls a "land of bars and Buddhism" and nights "full of heady tropical scents with the chatter of humans and insects riding on the breeze." Employing a dreamlike mood, the story looks at the very different realities of a pleasure seeking expatriate writer and a hardworking Thai woman with whom he is involved.
 
Inderjeet Mani studied creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, at Bread Loaf, and at Harvard. He has been published in Eclectica, BLIP Magazine (now New World Writing), 3:AM Magazine, Drunken Boat (Finalist for the Pan Literary Award, also one of storySouth’s Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2007), Nimrod (Finalist for Katherine Anne Porter Prize), WIND (2003 Short Fiction Award), Word Riot, Asia Writes, The Deccan Herald, and various other venues. His books include The Imagined Moment, which analyzes time in fiction. Mani is also one of the people behind the Solpix lit-film web portal.