Patricia Volk, author of Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli and Me, tells Terry Gross about the moles on fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli’s face:

She was born with moles raised black moles all over her face. She never had them removed. She had an older sister who was quite beautiful. She was said to look like the statute of Athena in the Vatican, but Elsa Schaiparelli’s mother always told her she was ugly. And she didn’t feel good about herself until her uncle — who was the foremost astronomer in the world at the time — Giovanni Schaiparelli … took his little niece to the observatory and he asked her to look in the telescope and what she saw was the Big Dipper and he said, “That’s what’s on your face.” And from then on she felt quite attractive. She had a broach made by Cartier that echoed the moles on her face and she wore it under the moles. It became a source of pride for her, that this constellation was on her cheek.

Image of Elsa Schiaparelli, 1932,  by George Hoynignen-Huene via We Had Faces Then

There’s a wonderful little passage that Martin Luther King had written from a jail cell where he talks about the effect of racism on young African-American children and how he can see on the face of a child the clouds of inferiority gathering as they observe some racist taunt or action. And when I think about — in some senses — the safest place to raise our children, there are many different forms of risk that we have in life.

— 

Novelist Mohsin Hamid, who lives in Lahore, Pakistan, talks about how a safe place to raise children can be judged in different ways.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from A Birmingham Jail” to which Hamid refers above. You can read the entire text of the letter here.

Maureen Corrigan on Patricia Volk’s new memoir Shocked:

I cannot tell you, apart from its other virtues, how much fun this memoir is to read. Volk has caught something of Schiaparelli’s surrealist approach to art: her narrative structure is exuberantly loopy and the gorgeous color illustrations and photos scattered throughout the book don’t just supplement the text, but extend it outward, like a Tumblr. The in-joke photo here of Wallis Simpson posing in Schiaparelli’s “lobster dress” is alone worth the price of this book.

Wallis Simpson in Schiaparelli’s lobster dress via Vogue

Maureen Corrigan on the role of Elsa Schiaparelli in writer Patricia Volk’s new memoir Shocked:

Volk’s own memoir zig-zags between the two titanic female figures — her mother and Schiaparelli — who impressed their ideas of beauty and womanhood on her. Schiaparelli was one of those “ugly-beautiful” women who make their mark through the force of personality and imagination. An intimate of Surrealist artists like Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali, Schiaparelli blurred the lines between art and fashion. Inspired by Dali’s loony recreation of the Venus de Milo with drawers, “Schap” as she was called, designed a women’s skirt suit with drawers and hardware for pockets.

Elsa Schiaparelli by Andre Durst, 1936

John Powers on the PBS documentary Philip Roth: Unmasked that premieres next week:

Here’s a writer who specializes in anger, sarcasm, iconoclasm, dirtiness, atheism, comedy and sexual attitudes that smack of misogyny.

While Philip Roth Unmasked doesn’t completely ignore his dark ferocity, it tiptoes around it. We learn little about his personal life, which was messy enough to prompt his ex-wife, actress Claire Bloom, to spend 150 pages of a book excoriating his manipulative narcissism. Nor do we get much insight into what’s obvious from Roth’s work — his ambition, his princely sense of entitlement, his use of fury as fuel, his tendency toward political sanctimony, his way of seeing women as one big perk of fame.

Image courtesy of PBS

So Philip Roth (the man, the legend, the controversial character) turns 80 tomorrow. What are your thoughts on his stature in contemporary American letters, eh?

Critic John Powers will wish Mr. Roth a very happy birthday on the show tomorrow by reviewing the upcoming PBS American Masters, Philip Roth Unmasked. In the meantime…

• “Philip Roth On Writing, Aging And ‘Nemesis’

• Philip Roth Discusses ‘Everyman’

(via Literary Caucus: Salman Rushdie, James Franco, and 28 More Notables Assess Philip Roth’s Career)

Battleborn author Claire Vaye Watkins on growing up an hour west of Las Vegas:

If you looked east at night you’d see a dark mountain range and then the glow of the city of Las Vegas behind it. You could see the lights of the city every single night.

image via math3780/Flickr

Writer Claire Vaye Watkins — author of the short story collection Battleborn — on growing up near Las Vegas, which is where her mother also grew up:

It never felt like, ‘This is my parents’ city,’ It was like, ‘This is my city.’ Partially — probably — because my parents were always talking about how different it was, you know, than when they were around. They would talk about how the Strip looked nothing like when they had worked [there]. My grandma was a change girl at Caesars Palace basically her whole life and her Las Vegas looked nothing like my mother’s Las Vegas and mine, it was very much my own. … [Y]ou [are] absolutely untethered by any convention of legacy — I guess — or history. You have no obligation to anyone in that kind of context — or so it seems when you’re seventeen.

image via Travel Nevada/Flickr

Claire Vaye Watkins tells Dave Davies about writing the stories in Battleborn in the wake of her mother’s death and after leaving the West for the first time:

I always say I exist in a constant state of homesickness and that’s really the context in which I wrote this book, too. You know, I wrote it five months after my mom committed suicide and about three months after leaving the West for the first time to go study [at graduate school] in Ohio and there was this landscape of grief and homesickness. I’d never written a word about Nevada until then and I think suddenly being removed from my home and missing, you know, the mountains and the stars and the dry air and the rocks and the spiny plants, just this tremendous, overwhelming homesickness which surely had to do with my mom’s dying, I guess I kind of felt the need to conjure up Nevada and bring it back to me that way.

image by lacomj/Flickr

Novelist Mohsin Hamid, who lives in Lahore, Pakistan, talks to Terry Gross about living in cities with a reputation for violence:

In a way, I think if you live in a city or a place where violence is common, then it perhaps doesn’t matter so much if the violence is the likelihood [of] somebody [who’s] going to mug you or attack you in your house or they’re going to blow you up in your barber shop. Violent cities, people who live in violent cities, find a way — as New Yorkers did 30 or 40 years ago — they find a way to just carry on. But you’re stressed out. You’re worried, you know. There’s times when they, for example, will turn off all the cell phone service in Lahore and you can’t make a phone call because they’re scared [that] on a particular religious holiday somebody will use a cell phone to detonate a bomb or coordinate a terrorist attack. You know, that’s freaky when those things happen. In fact, once recently we had a hospital emergency where my father was unwell and we had to take him to hospital but we had no mobile phones. We couldn’t call his doctor, you know. These things happen in daily life and, yeah, it’s upsetting and unsettling.”

Image via Dirty Old 1970s New York City

Critic Maureen Corrigan on one of her favorite books of 2012:

The ragged-but-resilient young narrator of Girlchild, a striking debut novel by Tupelo Hassman, can tell readers a thing or two about what it’s like to grow up without safety nets.

Image by Mr. Andrew Murray via Flickr Commons

From PSFK:

This vending machine is great for book lovers who can’t decide on their next read. Built by Craig Small for antiquarian bookshop The Monkey’s Paw in Toronto, the Biblio-Mat gives you a random old book when you insert $2. Sporting the claim of 112 million titles and no two alike, the Biblio-Mat offers customers a literary surprise that can vary widely in size and subject matter.

The sound of an old telephone bell and a clunk signal that the mystery book has been dispensed. The machine was created as a fun alternative to a bargain bin where customers can dig through discounted books. You can check it out in the video above.

Holiday Reading?

Internet, what are you reading this holiday..Wednesday?

I’m reading The Family Fang, a novel by Kevin Wilson.

Maureen Corrigan: “I have weeks, as a book reviewer, where I feel like Claire. Those are the weeks when it seems like every new book is a riff on Jane Austen, or a young adult vampire/warrior/shape-shifter fantasy, or yet another homage to dead dogs. And then a literary miracle like Beautiful Ruins appears, and once again I’m a believer.”

“Summer is a season when people get hyper-social — with barbecues and neighborhood fairs, graduations and pool parties. In short, it’s an especially trying time for those of us who’d rather stay indoors and read a book. My early summer reading list, therefore, takes the form of a loner’s survival guide.” — from Maureen Corrigan’s summer reading guide for loners

“Undercover Readers” by Les Bryant 2009 (by lesbryant2)