Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison；“The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison”

 Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
New to the Second Edition are excerpts from V. F. Odoevksy’s "Russian Nights" and I. S. Turgenev’s "Hamlet of Shchigrovsk District." In "Responses", Michael Katz links this seminal novel to the theme of the underground man in six famous works, two of them new to the Second Edition: an excerpt from M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The Swallows, Woody Allen’s Notes from the Overfed, Robert Walser’s The Child, an excerpt from Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, an excerpt from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, and an excerpt from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Erostratus.

“The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison” is an encyclopedic collection of 60 years of correspondence from the author of “Invisible Man,” running to more than 1,000 pages. Saidiya Hartman reviews it on the cover of this week’s Book Review, and talks about it on this week’s podcast. Among other subjects, she discusses why Ellison never published the second novel he was working on during his lifetime.

“He wasn’t blocked at all, and in fact, even with the unfinished novel, he wrote thousands of pages,” Hartman says. “Ellison is a writer-intellectual, and not every novelist is a writer-intellectual, and I think he was involved in a reflection about history, about American culture, he was thinking about issues of the philosophy of form. And I think holding all that together in the context of this large allegorical canvas about American life — and the predicament of race in that American life — was unwieldy, and clearly it was a task that could not be finished or completed for him. But no, it wasn’t about the inability to write, it was about bringing something to completion.”

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Olaf Olafsson visits the podcast this week to discuss his new novel, “The Sacrament,” about how a nun’s investigation of abuse allegations rekindles troubling memories from her own past.

Olafsson had a long, successful career in business, as an executive at Sony and AT&T, among other companies, but he was always writing and publishing books at the same time. He describes growing up watching his father, who was a writer, as one key to his creative career. “I was under no illusions that this was a bohemian exercise, being a writer. I knew it was hard work from the beginning,” Olafsson says. “It’s a necessity for me. I need writing more than I need business, let’s put it that way.”

Also on this week’s episode, Concepción de León, Elisabeth Egan and Tina Jordan talk about what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.