Contributions by David Leavitt
David Leavitt says: my new novel, The Two Hotel Francforts, which is set in Lisbon in the summer of 1940, will be published in the US in October and in the UK in December. Among the many Latin American writers I admire are Borges, Machado de Assis, and Tomas Eloy Martinez. Among novels set in Latin America but written in English, favorites include Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet, and Victor Serge's Unforgiving Years. I teach in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Florida, where I edit the literary journal Subtropics.
The Reversal Spell
Published on
April
19th
of
2013
by
David Leavitt and Carlos Freytes
in Fiction.
David Leavitt
The day that Paris was declared an Open City, I went to say goodbye to the Baron. He was one of my oldest friends. I’d known him since 1931, the year I’d come to Paris, a boy of nineteen living by his wits in a prostitution hotel on Rue Lepic. The Baron himself still lived, as he had his entire life, in a vast gloomy apartment on Avenue Mozart. Portraits of bustled women and narrow-snouted dogs hung on the walls. The piano wore a silk shawl of the sort that grandmothers draw around their shoulders in winter. For a long time the Baron had been rich, but he had lost most of his capital, including the Baroness, in the crash of ’29.
I could not remember a time when the elevator in the Baron’s building had … Read More »
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