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New York Times
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Mario Vargas Llosa: An Appreciation
Once upon a time, during the last quarter of the 20th century, it was possible to argue that one person was America's best novelist and best literary critic. I am talking about John Updike, whose long and elegant reviews in The New Yorker set reading agendas. Such was Updike's influence that readers paid heed when, in the mid-1980s, he developed a sustained literary man-crush on the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who died on Sunday at 89. More than once in his reviews of Vargas Llosa's novels, Updike took note of the author's handsomeness and urbanity. He was more impressed by Vargas Llosa's substantial intelligence, his learning, his versatility and his imagination, which could conjure the comic fussiness of a tiny left-wing splinter group in solemn session, or the nauseated feelings of a young wife who discovers that her husband is gay, or the mixed feelings of a citified idealist engaging in a gun battle in the Andes while beset with altitude sickness. Vargas Llosa 'has replaced Gabriel García Márquez' as the South American novelist North American readers must catch up on, Updike wrote in 1986, four years after García Márquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature and 24 years before Vargas Llosa himself would. Even Updike was two decades late to the writer's work. Vargas Llosa had already published most of his major and enduring novels, including 'The Time of the Hero' (1963), 'The Green House' (1966), 'Conversation in the Cathedral' (1969) and 'The War of the End of the World' (1981). These grainy, raunchy, politically minded and mind-expanding books found a worldwide audience but were slower to catch on in the United States. Vargas Llosa had helped start, in the early 1960s, a movement that became known as the Boom, a term applied to a freewheeling and socially conscious new generation of Latin American writers: García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Juan Rulfo, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, José Donoso and Miguel Ángel Asturias, among others. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
01-03-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
In like a lion? The first day of March brings flurries, strong winds and a chilly night
Even though spring starts later this month, Central Indiana's weather will remain chilly, with strong winds and flurries north and east of Indianapolis. Very slight accumulation on grassy areas, bridges and overpasses "can't be ruled out," said Aaron Updike, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. Visibility could be as low as a mile, too, so drivers should take extra care. "Right now we're seeing snow on the I-74 corridor and north, but it's moving south," Updike said. Precipitation should end by the late afternoon or early evening. On Saturday night, temperatures will drop to around 18 degrees in Indianapolis. Winds will settle slightly, but could still gust as high as 18 mph. "It will be pretty calm as we get late into tonight and tomorrow morning," Updike said. Skies will be mostly sunny Sunday and it will feel warmer, but spring's not quite here yet. The high temperature will be in the mid- to high thirties, with winds of about 5 to 8 mph, though winds could occasionally gust higher. Temperatures will warm in the early part of the week, with highs in the 40s and 50s. Rain will begin late on Monday and continue through Tuesday night as a strong low-pressure storm system moves in. Thunderstorms are possible. "It looks like we're going to be near or just above seasonal for the rest of the week," Updike said. 🚨 Indiana Weather Alerts: Warnings, Watches and Advisories. ⚡ Indiana power outage map: How to check your status. 💻 Internet outages: How to track them. 🚫 What you should and shouldn't do when the power is out. 🐶 Your neighbor left their pet outside. Who you should call. AES Indiana customers: 317-261-8111 Duke Energy customers: 1-800-343-3525 If you encounter a downed traffic signal or a limb blocking a roadway, contact the Mayor's Action Center at 317-327-4622 or online at When calling after hours, press "2" to be connected. Check road conditions, including road closures, crashes and live webcams using Indiana's online Trafficwise map at or visit our gridlock guide page for live traffic cams and more. INDOT's CARS Program provides information about road conditions, closures and width and weight restrictions. The website has a color-coded map of Indiana's highways and highlights hazardous road conditions and travel delays. The interactive map also shows road work warnings, closures, roadway restrictions and other information helpful to drivers. Ryan Murphy is the communities reporter for IndyStar. She can be reached at rhmurphy@ This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indianapolis weather outlook: a chilly weekend before a rainy week
New York Times
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The End of the Blurb. Thank God.
Are you sitting down? In what the trade publication Publisher's Weekly reported as a 'stunning" or 'tour-de-force' development, the publisher of Simon & Schuster's flagship imprint has announced that it will no longer require authors to provide promotional blurbs for their books. If you're still standing and breathing normally, chances are you're not an author. Be grateful! All these years, you have been spared the indignity of going on bended knee, begging people — generally more eminent than yourself — to sprinkle holy water on your manuscript. If you are an author — a blurbee, as it were — you're probably uttering hosannas of thanks to S&S publisher Sean Manning for this benison. And if you're a blurber, that is, on the receiving end of requests for unction, your hosannas may even be more fervent. Asking for praise is an undignified business. It is inherently awkward, especially if the person you're asking is an acquaintance, friend, or worse yet, someone who sells more books than you do. (In my case, roughly 98 percent of the author-sphere.) I know this from experience. After six books and almost two decades of mendicancy, my knees had to be surgically unbent. They weren't the only damaged part of me. My self-esteem was so low, my self-loathing so high that I avoided mirrors. Dear Mr. Updike, I know you must hate getting letters like this, but I was wondering if you'd drop whatever you're doing and spend the next two days reading my new book. Eminent authors do, indeed, 'hate getting letters like this.' To make Mr. Updike's happiness complete, many such requests end with a sheepish PS: Sorry to ask, but would it be possible to let me have your praise by next Thursday? My publisher — who, by the way, is your No. 2 fan, next to me — says that's the latest he can hold the presses. After six books, I told my editor (who is now publisher, president and C.E.O. of S&S): 'No more blurbs for this camper.' He wasn't thrilled, but good man that he is, he acceded. We have gone on to do 14 more books together, all of them blurbless, leaving Mr. Updike and the other gods of Olympus in unmolested peace. On the higher slopes of Mount Olympus, blurbs are a way by which the gods speak to each other in code, with the whole world watching. One of the delights of the late, great Spy magazine was its feature, 'Logrolling in Our Time,' which mortified many reciprocal blurbers and blurbees. To pick just one … oh dear … 'Cheever continues to do what the best fiction has always done: give us back our humanity, enhanced.' (John Updike on John Cheever's 'Falconer.') 'Superb — the most important American novel I've read in years.' (Cheever on Updike's 'Rabbit Is Rich.") In 2000, Christopher Hitchens brought out a book garlanded with praise from Christopher's beau idéal, Gore Vidal. Its tone of hauteur perfectly matched Mr. Vidal's residence in Ravello, Italy, an aerie perched on a cliff high above the Tyrrhenian Sea: 'I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or Delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.' Their mutual admiration society came to grief following 9/11, which Vidal viewed as just deserts, and Christopher viewed rather differently. By this point, Vidal had become verbally incontinent, referring to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber as a 'noble boy.' Christopher denounced Vidal's 'crackpot strain' in the pages of Vanity Fair. This lèse-majesté resulted in defenestration from Ravello. He surrendered his Delfino coronet with typical panache. The back cover of his 2010 memoir, 'Hitch-22,' carries what might be the first instance of de-blurbing: 'I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or Delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.' This text ran with a giant 'X' across it. My father, William F. Buckley, Jr., was capable of similar sleight-of-hand in blurbmanship. He and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. were lifelong ideological opponents who frequently found themselves clashing on numerous public platforms. At one debate in the early Sixties, Schlesinger said in his opening remarks, 'Mr. Buckley has a facility for rhetoric which I envy, as well as a wit which I seek clumsily and vainly to emulate.' Rather nice, but a low-hanging fruit. Dear old Dad couldn't resist. As he recounted in his book 'Cruising Speed': 'A year or so later, I scooped them [Schlesinger's kind words] up, and stuck them, unadorned, on the jacket of my new book, and waited for all hell to break loose; which it did, telephone calls, telegrams, threats of a lawsuit. I saw Arthur at a party the next year and told him that the deadline for the blurb for my next book was April 15, but that if he didn't have time to compose a fresh one, I'd use the old one, which was after all hard to improve upon.' Both these giants have left the building. If they were still with us, W.F.B. would doubtless be sending Mr. Schlesinger a link to the Publishers Weekly story, with a note saying that the exemption doesn't apply in their case, and that the deadline for a new blurb is next Thursday.
