Alvah's Books

From The Washington Post:

The Origins of a Novel
By Colm Toibin

In the summer of 1967 when I was 12, my father died. For a month or more the house in the evening was filled with people, but by September, when I had gone back to school, things were quieter. People called in ones, in twos, to express their sympathy to my mother. They usually came in the evening, stayed for an hour or so, then left. My brother and I wanted this to stop because the television was in the room where they sat talking. I hardly ever went into that room while there were visitors. But one evening I did, and heard an interesting story being told.

A woman was talking to my mother, talking on and on, about Brooklyn where her daughter had been. I began to listen. She’d never been to our house before and was never, as far as I remember, a visitor again. I saw her on the street sometimes; she was a small, stout, dignified-looking woman who always wore a hat. It was almost 40 years later before I took what I had heard, just the bones of a story about her daughter who had gone to Brooklyn and then come home, and began making a novel from it.

To read the rest of the article click on the title.

For a Brooklyn Tale, and Its Author, a Second Chance at a First Impression

By Eric Konigsberg

So woefully forgotten are L. J. Davis’s novels of Brooklyn that not even he has copies on hand in his apartment. Boxes of the unsold books, along with the rest of his collection 5,000 or so volumes by other authors, were relegated to storage two years ago, when Mr. Davis sold the Boerum Hill town house that had been his home since 1965 and moved into a postwar condominium around the corner.

To read the rest of the article go to The New York Times Book section.