Ransom Center Magazine

literature

Notebooks illuminate creative process behind Billy Collins’s poem “The Names”

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This story originally appeared January 21, 2014.

Among the papers in the recently acquired Billy Collins archive are materials related to his poem “The Names,” which was written to commemorate the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Interspersed throughout the poem are the names of 26 victims of the attacks, one name for each letter of the alphabet, from “Ackerman” through “Ziminsky.” [Read more…] about Notebooks illuminate creative process behind Billy Collins’s poem “The Names”

Gulosa por livros

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Tradução de Guilherme Mazzafera S. Vilhena

Em dezembro de 1948, o New York Times publicou um artigo sobre a tradutora Harriet de Onís intitulado “Sra. De Onís põe o saber latino-americano em livro, mas o sabor latino invade sua cozinha” [“Mrs. De Onís puts Latins’ Lore in Book, but Their Cuisine Goes Into Her Kitchen”]. [Read more…] about Gulosa por livros

Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient wins the Golden Man Booker Prize

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Congratulations to Michael Ondaatje, whose 1992 novel The English Patient was awarded the Golden Man Booker Prize on Sunday, July 8. Ondaatje’s archive was recently acquired by the Harry Ransom Center and contains extensive materials relating to the award-winning novel. [Read more…] about Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient wins the Golden Man Booker Prize

Fellows Find: Searching for Kazuo Ishiguro’s unreliable narrators

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by Enora Lessinger

I visited the Kazuo Ishiguro archive at the Harry Ransom Center in June 2017, a few months before Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. This British writer of Japanese descent is famous for the suggestive quality of his writing, and in particular for his self-deceived, unreliable narrators. [Read more…] about Fellows Find: Searching for Kazuo Ishiguro’s unreliable narrators

Cold War culture

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Erik Mortenson discusses his book Ambiguous Borderlands and the pervasiveness of shadow imagery in Cold War materials.

Ambiguous Borderlands: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016) investigates the role shadows play in Cold War literary and popular texts. Informed by research at the Ransom Center, it examines Beat literature, postwar photography, film noir, Twilight Zone episodes, and more to explain why shadow imagery had such a hold on American imaginations in the mid-twentieth century. [Read more…] about Cold War culture