A Blog of Bosh

Thurber’s world and welcome to it
Thurber’s comic hero, who came to be known as Thurber Man, is a squinty, skewed kind of guy; a digression blinking at a wife, a boss, an errand that wants him straight, and on time. He knows human nature, but not what can possibly be done about it. He is contemporary to the more dominant species, Hemingway Man, but from a galaxy far away.
CBC Infoculture

Webs of weeds
The Gormenghast trilogy, together with the dazzling drawings he produced in the 1940s and 1950s, have no parallel in English art or fiction. But he paid a terrible price. This biography tells the story of his inexorable decline into premature senility in competent detail, but adds disappointingly little to previous accounts by Peake�s wife and others. By sticking relentlessly to the superficial facts of a life that operated far below surface reality, Yorke too often downgrades his subject.
Review of Mervyn Peake: My Eyes Mint Gold – a Life by Malcolm Yorke
booksonline

‘Oz’ Expert: If Ever Oh Ever a Wiz There Was
There’s no yellow brick road to find the way, but starting Friday the Los Angeles Central Library is transforming itself into the wonderful land of Oz. Through Feb. 24 the Library’s Getty Gallery will be home to “A Century of Oz,” an exhibition featuring more than 400 items related to L. Frank Baum’s classic stories.
Celebrating the centennial of the publication of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” the exhibition is presenting what apparently is the greatest number of Oz material ever publicly displayed. Among the rare items will be the Wicked Witch’s hourglass and a Munchkin costume from the classic 1939 film, a fine copy of the first Oz book and the first editions of Spanish-language Oz books. All the items come from the Willard Carroll Collection, considered the world’s finest.
latimes.com – Calendar Live – Books & Talks

Observer review: Hans Christian Andersen by Jackie Wullschlager
Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy-tales won him fame and wealth – but he probably died a virgin. Jackie Wullschlager tells the story of the life of the great storyteller.
Books Unlimited

The sorrows of a great Dane
THE LIFE OF Hans Christian Andersen, told with thoroughness and sympathy in this new biography, was as peculiar, fascinating and painful as any of his celebrated fairy tales. This big-boned, gawky, lanky egotist was the ugly duckling, meeting snobbery and ridicule, particularly in his stuffy homeland, for several years before Denmark caught up with its most famous son�s internationalrenown.
Review of Wullschlager’s bio of Andersen.
booksonline

More than just make believe
Review of Jackie Wullschlager, HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN: The Life of a Storyteller.
Wullschlager is right to give Andersen the credit for being the first person to choose the fairy story as a literary form and then invent new ones, thereby paving the way for Lewis Carroll and the British “golden age” of Victorian and Edwardian fantasy literature for children, not to mention many European books of the same sort. The Grimms, working at the same period, collected and wrote up fairy tales, changing them massively in the process, but unlike Andersen they never dared to invent from scratch.
The Sunday Times