These stories amount to wish fulfillment for people who want to believe stereotypes about German austerity, which may be a measure of the Grimms’ success. Their aim in collecting such folklore—alongside the fairy tales, the Grimms published legends, songs, myths—was to create a cohesive national identity for German speakers. It’s why the brothers, especially Jacob, also wrote books on German philology and began what was intended to be the most comprehensive dictionary of the German language, the Deutsches Wörterbuch. (Toiling into their final years, they got as far as frucht, fruit.)
Inspiration was all around him – biographers and critics have identified everyone and everything from his mother-in-law to Castle Park in Michigan as reincarnated in "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." Dorothy was named after a real child, the deceased baby niece of Baum and his wife Maud Gage. But it took an entire century for the inspiration of the Wizard himself to be identified – Washington Harrison Donaldson, balloonist and colleague of famed circus master P.T. Barnum.
Lady Chatterley's Lover went on sale immediately afterwards, as Penguin had prepared to distribute it in the event of acquittal. They had to work with a new printing firm as their usual one refused to touch it. But the trial had the effect of promoting the book, which sold out of all 200,000 copies on its first day of publication. It went on to sell three million copies in three months.
The High Line, in other words, shows how reuse can unlock possibilities in both good and bad ways. On the one hand, it lets us experience the city in a whole new way and converts what had been a garbage-filled, abandoned track into an active public space. On the other hand, it has been the most efficient and effective tool of gentrification possible. These two outcomes, which are completely intertwined, are intrinsic to all the kinds of imaginative reuse that I have been describing, but their effects are particularly amplified in the case of reused transportation infrastructure.
Alan Bennett, now 90, hasn’t published anything original in book form for five years. In the meantime – the Covid years and the Johnson years and the Truss month – readers have had to be content with the peerless annual diaries he writes for the London Review of Books, yearly proof that his special ear for English comedy and sudden pathos is undimmed. This novella is in part his reflection on those years, set inevitably in a care home, the unlikely frontline of national crisis during the pandemic.
Double Happiness follows Siemienowicz’s memoir, Fallen, which explored the turbulent waters of an open marriage and the complexity of marrying too young. In this latest narrative, we follow the exuberant Anna. She’s married to thoughtful scholar Brendan, with whom she has a son, Luka. She’s been ‘good’ recently and, by good, we mean she’s avoided having another affair. Life is peaceful, if not a little monotonous, until she meets Jeremy – an easy-going, charismatic filmmaker – at a writers’ festival in Melbourne. The pair bond over sharks and Australian cinema.