Play Acting: Mickey Spillane is to take the role of Mike Hammer in the movie version of The Girl Hunters (both movie and paperback edition will be released in March). Variety wonders if this isn’t a first of sorts. Maybe so, for our times (even if Brendan Behan beats him to it), but we remember gaudier and more expansive days with such actors as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, etc…. Caedmon Records announces a recording of Dylan Thomas reading from The Duchess of Malfi and King Lear, a welcome addition to the five Thomases already available…. Edward Albee’s first Broadway play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (The title derives from a subway scrawl once reported by The New Yorker), on view at the Billy Rose, is a full-scale three hours and better, and Lane Bradbury, Uta Hagen, Arthur Hill and George Grizzard are the entire cast.
Wonders: New Directions promises for November publication Ezra Pound’s and Noel Stock’s Love Poems of Ancient Egypt ($1.50), one or two of which have appeared in NATIONAL REVIEW…. And Harvest Books (Harcourt, Brace and World) have put into paperback D. D. Paige’s The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941 ($2.25). The foxy old Confucian, presently mending from a minor operation in Rapallo, is engaged in bringing The Cantos, now half a century in composition, to an end…. Miss Alice Babette Toklas, whose autobiography was written for her years ago, and whose sole contribution, to date, to the Heroic Age of Cubism has been a cook book of scrumptious recipes, has finally written her own account of the days when Gertrude Stein delivered Picasso the American funnies in her Model T. What Is Remembered will be published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in February at $5.00.
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