Perusing Some Literary Signposts -

As a teenager, I dropped into the Limelight Cafe on Sheridan Square one weekend afternoon with a friend. We were sitting there, chatting over our beverages, when a rumpled man in a heavy tweed overcoat entered the premises. He was carrying a large bundle of newspapers.

Then, I heard a voice nearby narrate the explanation as if it belonged to an announcer on the radio: "Oh, look, it's Joe Gould! He's a well-known Greenwich Village character."

If Joe Gould had his secrets, so did his biographer, Joseph Mitchell. Theirs was some sort of fateful conjunction. Joshua Prager writes about Gould's mysterious benefactress, whom you may have already encountered elsewhere in the annals of Literature.

This was a transitional era for Greenwich Village. Although there were still some old-fashioned Bohemians living there, including poet EE Cummings, increasingly, the artistic and creative residents were those who found commercial employment in advertising and tv, etc.

Some of the old bars and restaurants continued to prosper, but the demographics of the neighborhood were inexorably changing.

# Sally McGrane takes us on a
literary junket to Davos, Switzerland. 

# Huw Nesbitt stirs up old controversy for a younger generation: the success of two scandalous authors, Celine and Henry Miller.

# How the Internet Uses
Nostalgia by Megan Garber.

# What about those Selfies?
Keep Smiling by Tara Isabella Burton.

# After I'm Gone by Laura Lippman is a new mystery novel based on the real-life disappearance of a Baltimore con man and bookmaker; reviewed here by Adam Woog, who described it as spellbinding.

# JK Rowling's new crime novel
The Silkworm will debut in London on June 19th.

# Fantômas is Louise Doughty's guilty pleasure.

...