A royal personage was making a tour through his provinces and noticed a man in the crowd who bore a striking resemblance to his own exalted person. He beckoned to him and asked: “Was your mother at one time in service in the Palace?” “No, your Highness,” was the reply, “but my father was.”

Mary Beard discusses two books on laughter and jokes in the NYRB
Cartoon by SCHOT

The New Yorker asked several authors to read a short story. In this episode Richard Ford reads John Cheever’s Reunion

You can also subscribe to the monthly fiction podcast to hear a story from the New Yorker archives chosen by a current fiction writer.

What is Casanova’s biographer to do? The retired libertine did the job so well himself in his Histoire de ma vie that no one could possibly improve on his story….. His first sexual encounter was with a pair of sisters whom he enjoyed simultaneously; much later he would enjoy his own daughter in the same bed as her mother.

A review of a new biography on Casanova by Ian Kelly at Telegraph

Podhoretz detected a “suppressed cry” of “brutality” in the Beats , which he summarized as “kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently, kill the people who can sit still for five minutes at a time, kill those incomprehensible characters who are capable of getting seriously involved with a woman, a job, a cause.”

More on the generation of 58 at New York Times

To Greeks of the generation that fought the Persian Wars, memorizing vast swaths of the Homeric poems and being able to comment on them with facility constituted a liberal education in itself.

More on Alberto Manguel’s new book at The Washington Post

When fellow Portuguese writer, José Saramago, won the Nobel prize in 1998, many people called to congratulate him, after they had called Lobo Antunes to tell him that the prize should have gone to him instead.

It is hard to find anything worthwhile in English on the Portugese writer António Lobo Antunes. Luckily the writer Gonzalo Bar made up for this great loss on his own blog; Gonzalo Bar, all rights reserved

Carver had been up all night reviewing Lish’s severe editorial cuts––two stories had been slashed by nearly seventy per cent, many by almost half; many descriptions and digressions were gone; endings had been truncated or rewritten––and he was unnerved to the point of desperation

More on Raymond Carver’s relationship with his friend and editor Gordon Lish at The New Yorker

Wilson was famously indefatigable, vacuuming up new authors and even languages at a rate apparently unimpaired by his sexual and alcoholic indulgences. Mary McCarthy related wonderingly to one of his biographers that “after drinking in his study late into the night, he emerged ‘in his snowy-white BVDs in the morning,’ freshly bathed and ready to go back to work.”

Full article on Edmun Wilson’s life at The Nation