Shelf Life

Martha Gellhorn with Ernest Hemingway at the Stork Club, New York City, 1941, a year after the two were married. (Sherman Billingsley's Stork Club/JFK Presidential Library and Museum)

Poetry and motion
Dan Chiasson, poetry critic for The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review as well as a poet in his own right, has added a new title: poetry co-editor at The Paris Review. On the masthead of the fall issue, he replaces former US poet laureate Charles Simic.

Earlier this year, Chiasson was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, which allowed him to focus on his own poetry. He has published two collections and has a third coming out next year. He has also written a book about the role of autobiography in poetry.

The roots of Chiasson's identity as a critic and poet lie in his education. When he attended Amherst College, a great deal of importance was placed on literary criticism. Later, when he was working on his doctorate in English at Harvard, he decided to try his hand at poetry. He audited Frank Bidart's workshop at Wellesley College. Now Chiasson teaches there, too.

Grapes redux
Bunch of Grapes Bookstore, badly damaged by a fire in July, has a new owner and a new, albeit temporary, home on Martha's Vineyard. Late last month Dawn Braasch, a store employee who coordinates author events, bought it from Jon Nelson, who moved to Texas.

The bookstore on Main Street in Vineyard Haven - two blocks from Braasch's home - is expected to be rebuilt by spring. Braasch promises that a temporary Bunch of Grapes store will open in town before Thanksgiving.

Braasch has a background in business, having launched a catering company and managed a trucking firm. To get up to speed on her new venture, she attended a school for bookstore owners and dived into Paco Underhill's "Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping."

Salute to an icon
The unconventional war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, born in St. Louis in 1908, may have spent more time outside the United States than in it. Before she died, at 89, she had covered D-day, the liberation of Dachau, the Vietnam War, and the US invasion of Panama in a career that spanned six decades. She sought out soldiers and civilians, not generals, and bluntly expressed her opinions.

The fact that she was best known for her marriage to Ernest Hemingway irritated her to no end. (She divorced him.) "Why should I be a footnote to someone else's life?" she once snapped. Yet her marriage to Hemingway is the catalyst for an upcoming appraisal of her legacy. The John F. Kennedy Library, home to Hemingway's papers, is hosting a forum on Gellhorn's groundbreaking career at 2 p.m. next Sunday. Gellhorn biographer Caroline Moorehead will be joined by Geraldine Brooks and Ward Just - both, like Gellhorn, war correspondents turned novelists - for a panel discussion. Reservations are recommended.

Gellhorn's papers are archived at Boston University. Moorehead edited a selection of Gellhorn's letters, but the collection won't be opened to other researchers for another 15 years.

Coming out