Both Irving Thalbergs

Hollywood wunderkind Irving Thalberg, Sr.,who married Montreal-born Norma Shearer and whose son, Irving Thalberg, Jr. (scroll down at the last link for his bio and pic), was a philosopher

Giuseppe di Lampedusa's letters have been published

Saul Bellow's wife interviewed about his letters

Daniel Patrick Moynihan's letters

Hannah Arendt's correspondence with Leni Yahil

Emily Darrell on Salinger in Vienna (and here's Mark Twain's writing about his time in Vienna, but it's behind a pay-wall)

Roger Boylan on Twain's autobiography

About Haruki Murakami's IQ84, English translations of (the 1st 2 vol's of) which will appear in 2011

Tibor Fischer on Hans Fallada's Wolf Among Wolves

Ina Hartwig surveys 'punch-packing' contemporary German lit

Paul Holdengräber interviews Cees Nooteboom

A review of Patrick Wilcken's book about Lévi-Strauss

Stephan Wackwitz wants to save Walter Benjamin from his fans

A review of Peter Martin's book about Samuel Johnson

The Paris Review's interviews going back to the 50's

Mr. Waggish on László Krasznahorkai's mythology, and on Leo Perutz

Vivian Gornick on Tolstoy

Richard Tempest on Solzhenitsyn and modernism

Ben Yagoda on the characters in the 1959 obscenity trial for Lady Chatterley's Lover

Kristin Hersh interviewed

Saul Bellow on how the political has encroached on the personal

Who would have guessed that Saul Bellow anticipated a feminist theme? Admittedly, he does put a different spin on the idea.

"The personal is political." -- Carol Hanisch (1969)

“Public life drives out private life. The more political our society becomes (in the broadest sense of ‘political’ — the obsessions, the compulsions of collectivity) the more individuality seems lost. … [N]ational purpose is now involved with the manufacture of commodities in no way essential to human life, but vital to the political survival of the country. … The whole matter … has to do with invasion of the private sphere (including the sexual) by techniques of exploitation and domination.” — Saul Bellow, Herzog, p. 178 (1964)

Grass, Bernhard & Sebald

Kurt Eisner (NY TImes pdf)

Günther Grass interviewed in the Guardian. I didn't realize how much in the Tin Drum was drawn from Grass's life. He really did have a Nazi father and a Slavic uncle who was killed by the Germans at the outset of the war.

Michael Hofmann reviews Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters (trans. Ewald Osers and re-issued in Penguin's Central European Classics series) in the LRB. Here's a podcast in which Hofmann keeps a low voice during a panel discussion of Stefan Zweig.

Jessica A. Sequeira discusses Bernhard's Correction

Stephen Sparks reviews Bernhard's Prose

Shifting Sands identifies a difference between Bernhard and Sebald -- Sebald explores the melancholy mind via its projection onto, or interpretation of, its surroundings (landscapes, cities, etc.) while Bernhard's focus is on the different shapes that melancholy takes (esp. bitterness) in interior monologue

It's old news now, but Conversational Reading noted a while back that three newly translated books by Sebald will be published in the next couple of years.They'll be tranlsated by Jo Catling. Catling will also contribute to this upcoming collection of papers about Sebald. Other contributors include Michael Hulse and Anthea Bell.

Brian Oard wrote a nice series of posts last August about Sebald's Vertigo, Emigrants, Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz (inc. a second, short post on the latter).

Here's a podcast of Will Self's 'Sebald Lecture' from last January.