Monday, March 05, 2007

I have always relied on the kindness of strangers

Yale University Press has released an edition of Tennessee Williams' Notebooks.

Phillip Hensher in the Telegraph (UK) is less than complementary, but, as usual, the NYT Sunday Book Review is more positive. (Also of interest, back in November, the NYT Book Review printed John Waters' introduction from the new edition of Williams' Memoirs.)

1 comment:

Tim said...

The Times Review also gives a lot of room to quotations from the notebooks themselves, and they sound fascinating.

I don't know why people are surprised by the Hemingway-Williams connection. I think some people confuse sexual orientation with both aesthetics and politics, and vice versa. Their aesthetic is almost identical. They're both great at brutality and fragility. And I think everyone wants to put Williams just on the side of Blanche -- but at least to me, the notebooks show that Williams also knew what was both thrilling and terrifying about Stanley.