A special collection
Don DeLillo’s one-page meditation on running encompasses the 2013 bombing at the Boston Marathon and the Russian and former Soviet place names in the news coverage: “Another geography lesson shaped by terror in the streets.’’ Painter Kayla Mohammadi’s take on the Citgo sign (pictured) is a bright spot. Paul Auster and Douglas Bauer gave opening pages from their unfinished novels. (Left: “Ground Water’’ by Charles Watkins.)
These creations are among 132 signed limited-edition works in “For One Boston’’ (Pressed Wafer). The boxed set is a brush with fame, a remembrance of the bombing, and a celebration of the human spirit. Twenty-six sets were created as a fund-raiser for victims of the Marathon bombings. The price is $10,000 each. So far the only buyer has been Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room.
Poet William Corbett, editor of “For One Boston’’ and director of Pressed Wafer, said Pressed Wafer is a veteran of similar fund-raisers. In the past, the beneficiaries have always been poets in need.
Literary scholar honored
Esteemed literary scholar Christopher Ricks, who has written books about Alfred Tennyson and Bob Dylan, has been honored for his scholarship on T.S. Eliot. The Poetry Foundation on Wednesday announced that “The Poems of T.S. Eliot: Volume 1, Collected & Uncollected Poems’’ and “The Poems of T.S. Eliot, Volume II, Practical Cats & Further Verses’’ (Johns Hopkins University), co-edited by Ricks and Jim McCue, have won its Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine, said in a press release that the books “illuminate every one of Eliot’s poems in ways unimaginable until now.’’
The volumes have been much lauded. Noting that each contains eight pages of notes for every page of poetry, literary critic John Sutherland, writing in The Financial Times, called the two volumes a “monumental work of scholarship.’’ How the Nobel Prize-winning Eliot would have received the books is another matter. As Ricks and McCue write, Eliot wanted nothing to come between his words and his readers. “I want my readers to get their impressions from the words alone and from nothing else,’’ Ricks and McCue quote him as saying.
Ricks is co-director of Boston University’s Editorial Institute, which offers training in textual editing and contextual annotations for editions of important writings.
Telling stories
Storyteller Micaela Malo describes her own brand of stage fright this way: “I love the panic and self-doubt before they call your name and then when the confidence in your own truth bursts through your heart into the microphone.’’ Malo is one of 10 storytellers who triumphed in story slams at Club Passim and Trident Booksellers over the past year and will vie for top honors in the Big Mouth Off on May 15. The evening at the Epi Center, 100 West 2d St., begins with a reception at 6 p.m. The storytelling starts at 7 p.m. Tickets are $30.
Coming out
¦ “Lost and Gone Forever: A Novel of Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad’’ by Alex Grecian (Putnam)
¦ “The Fireman’’ by Joe Hill (Morrow)
¦ “Mercy’’ by Daniel Palmer and Michael Palmer (St. Martin’s)
Pick of the Week
Jane Stiles of Wellesley Books in Wellesley recommends “Flight of Dreams’’ by Ariel Lawhon (Doubleday): “Through characters based on the real-life passengers, this novel explores the fascinating story of the final voyage and explosion of the Hindenberg. In a crackling story full of spies, Nazis, class structure, and romance, the author keeps you in rapt suspense, wondering who will survive.’’
Jan Gardner can be reached at JanLGardner@yahoo.com.
