Saturday Reviews

Two more Dickinson-related books are mentioned in recent reviews:

Shaggy Muses: The Dogs Who Inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton and Emily Brontë, by Maureen Adams

Emily Dickinson’s Newfoundland dog Carlo is covered in this book, along with Woolf’s Plinka, Brontë’s mastiff Keeper, and the canine companions of other late-19th century women writers. Says Jackie Crosby’s Star Tribune review,

Psychologist and former English professor Maureen Adams weaves a brilliant narrative using diaries, letters and published works to tell the largely untold story of how dogs comforted, healed and even sparked amorous adventures with five of the world’s most enduring writers.

The Dickinson Papers by Mark Ragg

A hunt for purloined Dickinson letters draws together a poetry lover and a museum curator in contemporary Sydney. (This book is, alas, currently available only to Australian readers.) Says Emily Maguire in a note in The Age:

Packed with poetry, literary anecdotes, musings on the proper placement of books, yarns about Sydney’s underworld and Samuel Beckett’s cricketing style, and a hundred other diversions, it all comes together nicely thanks to smart writing, a super-light comical touch and characters as real and memorable as any I’ve come across in recent fiction

As an aside: I find it frustrating that the English-speaking world is so splintered when it comes to book publishing. Radio National’s Book Show is a significant part of my podcast-listening diet, and numerous times I’ve heard a fascinating interview or glowing review and upon rushing to Powell’s or Amazon to add the book to my wish list, I discover that it’s not available in the States yet and isn’t likely to be any time soon. It’s bad enough that there are so many great books that are never translated into English, as The Literary Saloon reminds us almost daily; that we can’t easily share books across the countries that ostensibly speak the same language, is a cruel anachronism in this age of the borderless Internet.