#Sybille Bedford

[yourdailyqueer]

Sybille Bedford (deceased)

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Lesbian

DOB: 16 March 1911 

DOD: 17 February 2006

Ethnicity: Ashkenazi Jewish

Nationality: German / British

Occupation: Writer, publisher, journalist

[vivianascarincilibellulalab]

Nina di aprile e su Sybille Bedford!

Ancora una bellissima puntata di Nina. Si parla di Sybille Bedford a cura di Anna Toscano con Antonella Cilento e Valeria Palumbo. NINA è il podcast della Società Italiana delle Letterate ideato e organizzato da Anna Toscano e Viviana Scarinci. Ogni mese una puntata nuova che poi potrete scaricare e tenere con voi per ascoltarla e riascoltarla quando volete a partire da Spotify, Audible di…

[callmewinged]

"How describe that slow winter, so leisured in unfolding, so brief in passage, that was a radiant summer? How record the long lull, the safe sequence, the seamless span of equal days...

We were then each working on a book and had reached midstream, that prosperous passage between the struggle of the beginning and the obsession of the end, when the book moves with its own existence and has not yet absorbed one's own, and the daily quarrying is an anchor rather than a burden, a secret discipline at once attaching and detaching, muffling and heightening the rest of living. Within these shafts we strayed at will between two dreams, the life of our books, and the life of the hacienda

Every day we wore linen clothes, every day we bathed. We had never been so free. Letters were lost or late, everything else in abeyance among those birds and fruit and flowers -- anxiety, money, love; the vicissitudes of friends, the miseries of politics, ourselves perhaps." ~ Sybille Bedford, "A Visit to Don Otavio: A Traveller's Tale From Mexico"

[ambxtxo]

donna tartt’s reading list

In an interview, Tartt lists her favorite authors and the names of a few works. I have listed the most popular works from each author and the specific ones she recommended as well.

Homer

The Iliad

The Odyssey

Greek Poets and Tragedians

Argonautica

Antigone

Prometheus Bound

The Oresteia

Medea

Oedipus Rex

The Bacchae

The Frogs

Dante

Inferno

Purgatorio

Paradiso

Shakespeare

“I went back and read Macbeth and Hamlet during the pandemic”

Macbeth

Hamlet

Dickens

“Dickens was a part of my familial landscape, the air I breathed.”

A Tale of Two Cities

Great Expectations

Nabokov

Pale Fire

Lolita

Proust

In Search of Lost Time

Swann’s Way

Dostoevsky

Crime and Punishment

The Brothers Karamazov

Yeats

The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

Borges

Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings

Edith Wharton

The House of Mirth

Ethan Frome

Evelyn Waugh

Brideshead Revisited

Helena

Salinger

Catcher in the Rye

Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway

Orlando

Edward St. Aubyn

The Patrick Melrose Novels

Haruki Murakami

Kafka on the Shore

Norwegian Wood

Olga Tokarczuk

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Don DeLillo

White Noise

Underworld

W.G. Sebald

Austerlitz

The Rings of Saturn

Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking

The White Album

Other Specific Books

Memoirs d’Outre-Tome by Chateaubriand

Jigsaw by Sybille Bedford

All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski

A Balcony in the Forest by Julien Gracq

[nejjcollectsbooks]

First Read of September.

A Compass Error by Sybille Bedford.

An underrated dark academia book that isn’t as celebrated as it should be. It’s a relatively short book, a little over 200 pages. The reviews and the summaries promise a coming-of-age story that deals with a seventeen-year-old girl’s ambitions and a forbidden romantic romp. Set in France during the 1920s, Flavia is studying for the entrance exam to Oxford University, she has dreams of becoming a writer. But the realities and cruelty of life will try to get in between herself and her desires.

This is a sequel to a story of her mother, which apparently is rehashed in the first twenty pages so I feel no need to get the first book.

Anyone read ‘A Compass Error’? Or have any underrated dark academia recs?

[olderthannetfic]

I feel like both you and your readers might enjoy the book "The Trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover" by Sybille Bedford. It's about the obscentiy trial against Penguin Books in the UK for their publication of the uncensored version of Lady Chatterley's Lover (obviously) and it's well-written, short (about 80 pages), and makes a lot of very good points about how people treat not only depictions of explicit things in media but the way they treat people who read those sorts of things.

--

I haven't read it, but I'm immediately reminded of this:

[sarahemilyduff]

Non-Work Reading, 2022

Sybille Bedford, A Compass Error

Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

Isabel Colegate, The Shooting Party

Penelope Fitzgerald, Innocence

Deborah Levy, Real Estate

John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Call for the Dead, Tinker, Taylor, Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley's People, A Legacy of Spies

Elif Batuman, Either/Or

Leonardo Sciascia, The Day of the Owl

Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

Laura Cumming, On Chapel Sands

Yukio Mishima, The Sound of the Waves

Esther Freud, Hideous Kinky

Lily Dunn, Sins of my Father

Monica Baldwin, I Leap Over the Wall

Felicity Cloake, Red Sauce, Brown Sauce

Barbara Trapido, Brother of the More Famous Jack, The Traveling Horn Player

Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

Mark Prins, The Latinist

JL Carr, A Month in the Country

EM Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread

Sarah Perry, After Me Comes the Flood

Cho Nam-ju, Kim Ji-young, Born 1982

Sheila Rowbatham, Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties

Salman Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey

Auberon Waugh, The Foxglove Saga

Emily Ogden, On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays

[melleonis]

finished A Compass Error (1968) by Sybille Bedford & at least for the present moment am obsessed. half a bildungsroman: the Very Serious Young Girl who is planning out her Very Serious Life for the Benefit of Mankind, who experiences her first sexual encounter with an older woman with the satisfaction of being able to mentally tick a box for orientation, getting hammered with maybe the most brutal turn i’ve seen a piece of fiction take since the dinner scene in Mulholland Drive. like watching Mr. Bean in his ridiculous little car getting T-boned by a 1930s Alfa Romeo, and the shriek of metal and the shattering of glass and bone and then, for a moment, silence. obsessed.

[errantepagina69]

Marie-Dominique Lelièvre (Chanel Nº 5. Biografia non autorizzata)

Hans Günther non spezzava solo i cuori, ma anche le vite, avendo il potere di condurre una donna in prigione o in un campo di concentramento, come capitò a sua moglie, Maximiliana Henrietta von Schoenebeck, detta Jako. Aristocratica tedesca, sorellastra della scrittrice Sybille Bedford, suo padre aveva sposato un'ereditiera ebrea appartenente a una facoltosa famiglia berlinese. Nelle sue memorie, Sybille Bedford descrive Dincklage come un cognato malvagio di cui non dice mai il nome, indicandolo semplicemente con la lettera D maiuscola seguita da un punto o da un commento sarcastico come «<suo marito e dio del sole»> oppure «quel bravo partner di doppio a tennis»>. <Di una bellezza abbagliante, affascinante, biondissimo, immaginate un principe di Galles alto come un uomo [si riferiva a colui che divenne duca di Windsor e che non superava il metro e settanta], di buona famiglia, con pochi soldi ma dotato di un titolo, padre tedesco, madre inglese, un playboy, un seduttore, che non aveva mai lavorato, viveva alle spalle di donne sposate e, di tanto in tanto, persino di un uomo ricco»>, racconta la Bedford. Come Coco, anche lui era bisessuale. Sybille Bedford non si faceva nessuna illusione su di lui, di cui conosceva il lato malefico, «Nel 1919 [...], pare che abbia preso parte a un atto di brutalità politica, tragico e criminale. Oltre che di vigliaccheria. » Sybille Bedford allude all' orribile assassinio di Rosa Luxemburg, l'icona del marxismo tedesco.

Prima uscita 29 aprile 2021 Editore Baldini + Castoldi Pagine 240

[zebydeb]

Avid Reader is the memoir of Robert Gottlieb, who was a New York publishing bigwig in the second half of the twentieth century. Obviously he read huge numbers of new books as they were coming out. And then as now, so much stuff was published that a lot of good books were quickly forgotten after their moment in the sun.

I’ve been keeping a list of novels that Gottlieb enthuses about but I had never heard of (or the author is famous for one book and he’s raving about a different one). He has really wide-ranging tastes, so this list has a little bit of everything. Sometimes he doesn’t even mention the genre, just how good the book was.

It will probably take me years to get round to all these, if ever.

If anyone’s looking for a reading project, may I present to you: The Avid Reader incomplete list of neglected novels

Niccolo Tucci, Before My Time (autobiographical novel by a writer who left fascist Italy - praised by Dorothy Parker)

Sybille Bedford, A Legacy (about German aristocrats - Nancy Mitford loved this one)

Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything (young women juggling career and life in 50s New York, sounds a bit like a pre-women’s-lib Sex and the City)

Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Spinster (autobiographical novel by a New Zealand teacher trying to make school better for her Maori pupils)

Mordecai Richler, Barney’s Version

Bruce Jay Friedman, Stern

Jetta Carleton, The Moonflower Vine (an American farming family with a secret)

Robert Crichton, The Secret of Santa Vittoria (villagers try to outwit Nazis in WWII)

Chaim Potok, The Chosen (two Jewish boys growing up in Brooklyn)

Charles Portis, True Grit (source novel for the Western film)

John Cheever, Bullet Park (“dark and obscure”)

Lisa Alther, Kinflicks

Ross Macdonald (crime writer, no specific title was mentioned)

William Wharton, Birdy

Dorothy Dunnett, British writer of historical fiction, The Game of Kings (start of a series) or King Hereafter (standalone)

Joseph Heller, Something Happened

L G Buchheim, The Boat (translated from German, source novel for the film Das Boot)

Tom Tryon, The Other (psychological horror)

Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise

Evan Connell, Mr Bridge

[cowperviolet]

Reading female literary biographies from the early-to-mid 20th century autumn. Sybille Bedford, Vera Brittain, and Elizabeth von Arnim, here I come

[semperintrepida]

...for the rest of her life she moved between England, France and Italy with a motley series of women lovers. “I wish I’d written more books and spent less time being in love,” she admitted late in her life, and her fans can only agree.

—New York Times book review of “Sybille Bedford: A Life”

[nejjcollectsbooks]

🍁September TBR 🍂 ٢٨/٢/١٤٤٦ 🍁

I think this month’s reads keep in theme with the beginning of autumn? As usual I’ve chosen books from across all genres.

🌕The Secret History by Donna Tartt. 🌖The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell. 🌗A Compass Error by Sybille Bedford. 🌘Histories of Nations edited by Peter Furtado. 🌑I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. 🌒The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. 🌓On Fiction by Sebastian Faulks. 🌔Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch. 🌕Sunset Song by Lewis Gibson. 🌖The Oxford Book of Ireland edited by Patricia Craig.

Anyone else a lover of all book genres?

[robertsmithsonlibraryandbookclub]

Untitled Project: Robert Smithson Library & Book Club [Bedford, Sybille. A Legacy: A Novel, 1960] Oil paint on carved wood, 2019

[callmewinged]

And what were my aims in view? Divided certainly. To go on floating as often as I was allowed to in a delirious present.

Sybille Bedford