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February 03, 2012

Commentary Magazine on why there was such an outpouring of grief and memorializing after Christopher Hitchens's death:

Mayer’s piece and the other tributes demonstrated that mawkish self-flattery is unavoidable among journalists when they compete to advertise their intimacy with the famous. I wish I kept a list of everyone who modestly admitted they “didn’t know Hitch well” but nonetheless recalled an encounter with him in which he recognized, with mystical discernment, their soul-deep connection. (“I had passed the only test that mattered to him,” wrote one editor…)

Yes: More opera writing like this, please. Sameer Rahim has started a column at the Telegraph called "The Opera Novice," following his learning process as he goes from having never seen an opera to becoming a little bit obsessed. (There is a disappointingly small amount of opera writing that isn't intimidating or too smartypants for its own good. It can be intimidating to someone who loves the music but doesn't know the language with which it's discussed.)

February 02, 2012

I don't know if you heard, but DC Comics decided to hire some people to write a Watchmen prequel. Without Alan Moore, of course. The only real question is, what is the worst way in which this is horrible? Is it the blatant money grab? The obvious fuck you to one of the most talented writers they have ever published? Is it the sign that they have simply given up all hope of ever re-establishing their credibility? What measure of scale does it take to figure something like that out?

Austin Grossman is at the Wall Street Journal blog, and he makes a stab at declaring the greatest of the many evils:

The truly frightening thing is that DC has lost faith that there are new stories to tell about superheroes. As Alan Moore put it, “I tend to take this latest development as a kind of eager confirmation that they are still apparently dependent on ideas that I had 25 years ago.” I find it hard to argue otherwise.

Catherine Flynn on the years in Paris wherein Walter Benjamin and James Joyce overlapped.

So for some goddamn reason we're totally doing an event tonight with Shalom Auslander and his book Hope: A Tragedy. It's in New York, at McNally Jackson. So, you know. Ready yourselves.

February 02, 2012

Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, whose beguilingly simple, playful poems spoke to the heart of everyday life, died yesterday aged 88.

Described by the Nobel committee as the "Mozart of poetry" but with "something of the fury of Beethoven" – and by an Italian newspaper as the "Greta Garbo of World Poetry" – Szymborska died in her sleep from lung cancer, said her personal secretary Michal Rusinek.

You can read her Nobel lecture here.

February 01, 2012

A new Kind Reader column is up, regarding those moments when your life changes and suddenly you don't recognize it anymore. (I was tempted to plagiarize the advice my mentor has snappishly given to me before: "It's like you're drowning yourself in a bird bath. Stand up, it's just a bird bath." But that is advice you can only really give to someone you love. Otherwise it sounds like you're not acknowledging their reality.)

At any rate, I prescribe Metropole, a novel of dislocation and spiritual crisis. (As we all remember, William James said that the "essence of the spiritual crisis is this: 'Help! Help!'" A scene that replays in my head frequently is the one where the protagonist, having been dumped in a city where he cannot speak the language, does not know anyone, is terrified all of the time, spots someone reading a newspaper printed in his own native language. It's in the subway station, and he calls out to the man. The man also must be stranded in this strange city, as he immediately calls back in joy and relief. But he's already on the escalator going up, as our protagonist is going down. The crush of the crowd prevents either one of them from turning around. By the time the protagonist gets to the bottom, is able to fight his way to the up escalator and get to the top, the other man has disappeared.

I am pretty sure I cried when I read that the first time.

But at least the book ends happy(ish). At least, with a dose of optimism. Otherwise I would not have survived reading that book the first time.

Oh, and, B&N has asked me to make the next column relationship-y, as it will be printed on Valentine's Day. So send all relationship-y questions to my Kind Reader email. I'll find you a book that's romantic without making you want to vomit.

January 31, 2012

The photography website Emphas.is is starting a new publishing venture, starting with Trading to Extinction, an investigation into the black market for endangered species. It's set up a bit like Kickstarter, which projects funded by special pre-sales -- a $100 donation gets you a copy of the book and an archival print. The New York Times blog Lens has a slideshow of images from Patrick Brown's book.

I don't know about you, but the London Review of Books Kindle subscription has changed my life (a tiny, tiny bit). After realizing that spending $75 on an international subscription to the magazine was a pretty foolish thing to be doing (especially since so much of their fiction coverage is abyssmal), I didn't renew my subscription after a year. But now! It's on my Kindle. For a reasonable price. It is good to have you back, even if I miss my ritual of reading London Review of Books on a Sunday morning, the paper issues spread out on my daybed, eating crackers and drinking tea. It's not the same, but who cares when it's $40 cheaper?

(I know this sounds like an advertisement. I was just happy.)

From the handbags at ten paces department: Andrew Miller's sixth novel, Pure, has won the Costa Book of the Year Award after 'bitter dissent' between the judges.

Over at Kirkus, I have a short review of The Green Sofa by Natascha Würzbach. (Another lady! I cannot be stopped!) It's her memoir about her childhood spent between World War I and World War II. Her mother was a modern dancer who entertained German troops on the front line, and her father was an intellectual dissident who was forbidden from working, and who was hiding his Jewish heritage. I know, it sounds grim, but the book is a charmer.

Craig Ferguson tours Shakespeare and Company in Paris.

January 30, 2012

As the conversation about male bias in book criticism continues, I noticed my own peculiar statistics. I've been interviewing writers once a week or so over at Kirkus, and of the last 18 Q&As or features, 17 were women. (I just turned in another piece today: woman author.) Here I am, singlehandedly trying to even out the statistics for Kirkus Reviews. It's not really a political act, just a product of my mostly female reading habits. (That sounds like I'm reading the back of tampon boxes, doesn't it?)

But it seems the bias at NPR is far, far worse, as the Boston Phoenix does a little adding up of their literary coverage.

Does any of this really matter? (As in, aren't there bigger problems in the world?) Part of it goes back to the VIDA statistics, as in, who is being paid to write cultural coverage for these publications? Mostly men. In her review of Henry Miller and the Making of “Tropic of Cancer”, Jeanette Winterson reminds us of the result of any kind of homogeneity of voices in cultural criticism, whether that be gender or class or race or city or anything else for that matter.

George Orwell, writing in 1940 about Henry Miller, has very different preoccupations from Kate Millet writing about Miller in 1970. Orwell doesn’t notice that Miller-women are semi­human sex objects. In fact, his long essay “Inside the Whale” barely mentions women at all. Millet does notice that half the world has been billeted to the whorehouse, and wonders what this tells us about both Henry Miller and the psyche and sexuality of the American male.

On this day in 1933 Ezra Pound met with Benito Mussolini.

Ezra Pound! We were just talking about that asshole. Of course, now in our course Bad People Who Wrote Great Books or whatever I called that damn thing we've moved on to Koestler, but everyone loves a good Ezra Pound anecdote.

Also, if you're totally fucking bored and want to feel bad about the 20th century, you can read all of Pound's pro-fascist, anti-Semitic rants that he broadcast over the radio. They are gloriously all online for free.

In just a few days, I'll be heading up to New York for an event with Shalom Auslander at McNally Jackson on February 2. I'll be interviewing him live on stage about his new novel Hope: A Tragedy, at 7pm. I'm not familiar with this Auslander fellow, but I hear he's up to great things. Will try to at least flip through Hope before Thursday night...

January 27, 2012

Over at the Smart Set, I write about Erin Siegal's Finding Fernanda, a tale of corruption in the international adoption industry, and the "new" revelations about the working conditions at the Chinese factories that build all of our electronics. (New as in, the reports have certainly been around for a while, but only now do people seem to suddenly care.)

It fascinated me that people were still dredging up the Salem girls from the past and diagnosing them. Amateur scholars, writers, producers, conspiracy theorists, descendents of Salem folk, and all the sophomore American History classes across America, including mine, once upon a time, have taken a crack at solving the riddle: What happened 320 years ago, and why?

Great piece about historians (amateur and those who write books) who believe they have solved great historical puzzles. Like why the Salem witch trials happened. Should be mandatory reading for everyone who has definitively diagnosed Mozart's cause of death, all 871 of you.

January 26, 2012

The National Book Critics Circle* Awards shortlists have been released, just a short time after the annoucement of the inaugural Hatchet Job of the Year nominations for the most entertainingly vicious book review. Living legend Geoff Dyer shows up on both ballots. It's coincedences like that which serve to keep life worth living, isn't it?

*Specialist book blogger inside knowledge: It's just like the Magic Circle, only identical.

Sri Lankan writer/bass player Shehan Karunatilaka has won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature with his debut novel Chinaman (which I understand does cricket = Sri Lanka like The Art of Fielding does baseball = America).

Much of this week's class was about narcissism. I mean, we were talking about Ezra Pound. But if you are a dude who wants to distill thousands of years of philosophy, art, and poetry into a book called Guide to Kulchur, you kind of have to think of yourself as the most brilliant man alive. Simply in order to do the work. If Pound was thinking, I am just a small wee little mouse, lord knows he wouldn't have thought himself up to the task.

Not that defaults you into being a bad person. James Joyce also seems to have been a massive narcissist, at least where his work lives. And yet from most accounts he was not a dick. Pound: yes. Yes he was.

Alice Gregory writes about Raymond Roussel, a French poet who was also a massive narcissist, but he never became as important or as read as Pound or Joyce. He did believe, though, that he would “enjoy greater glory than Victor Hugo or Napoleon.” His narcissism tipped, though, a little into the crazy realm, as he believed his pen emanated a blinding white light as he was writing.

p.s. Ezra Pound was famously locked up for 12 years in an institution, and I found the following bit from Alec Marsh's short biography of Pound amusing:

The younger psychiatrists who had contact with Pound once he was hospitalized did not find him insane, which is not to say that they failed to notice his eccentricities, or to report on his strange swings of mood, which to Pound were terrifying and real: 'velocity after stupour tremendous,' Pound wrote to Cornell, and in the same letter: 'enormous work to be done and no driving force and everyone's inexactitude very fatiguing.' What does come across clearly in the transcript of the sanity hearing is that Pound was suffering from what we now call a 'personality disorder,' and not a full-blown mental illness. The doctors agreed that Pound was in a paranoid state, but was not a paranoid schizophrenic. He was 'schizoid' (a contested term that covers a wide spectrum of disorders), somewhat detached from himself and the 'real world.' He held certain 'fixed ideas' bordering on the delusional and a notable 'grandiosity' that goes along with that; his translation of Confucius holds the key to world peace, for example; or, that he 'has no peer in the intellectual field,' which is why he cannot make himself understood. 'He was grandiose and hard to talk to,' said one. All commented on his 'distractability' -- the way he jumped from topic to topic, leaving his interlocutors baffled, 'out on a limb.' The diagnosis was in effect a clinical judgment on who he was, not the discovery of an illness that like any other might pass away in time. Pound was being asked to recover from being himself.

Didn't the New York Times have a piece recently about a woman who was very happy living on her own until she fell and hurt herself and she realized this is how she is going to die unless she gets married really fast? I read it somewhere, but it was awful, so I'm not going to look for the link. Well, it turns out that living alone is pretty good for you. Eric Klinenberg, who also wrote that great book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, has published Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. He's interviewed at the Smithsonian.

We need to make a distinction between living alone and being alone, or being isolated, or feeling lonely. These are all different things. In fact, people who live alone tend to spend more time socializing with friends and neighbors than people who are married. So one thing I learned is that living alone is not an entirely solitary experience. It’s generally a quite social one.

In other words, if you live alone and fall, someone will probably notice you've gone missing. Eventually.

Behaviorists: kind of motherfuckers. I mean whatever, if you actually read their work, Skinner and the rest, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in there. There just also happens to be a lot of: Hey, why not just put your baby in a box! He'll be fine. Shouldn't touch him too much anyway, you're just training him to be needy.

Anyway, there was also Watson, who thought that babies were blank slates, just little soft (screaming) marshmallows or what have you. He did that experiment on Little Albert, making him scared of fuzzy white things like lab rats and bunnies, because Watson was freaking him out with loud sounds. Now, according to a new paper, Little Albert was actually quite neurologically impaired, and as the article puts it, Watson was "terrifying a sick baby for no valid scientific reason." Like I said. Behaviorists: kind of motherfuckers.

If you haven't heard, a German publisher was going to publish Hitler's Mein Kampf again in Germany. It's been, shall we say, unavailable for a while. The debate, from what I've been reading, centered mostly around whether or not this publisher should be allowed to profit from republishing Hitler. Kind of gross.

But then yesterday it was announced that the publisher is going to delay the printing, mostly because he never did have permission from Bavaria, which owns the copyright. But from reading some of the American press, you'd think the debate centers around whether Mein Kampf will, I don't know, start the Holocaust up again? Like it's just been lying dormant? "ARE GERMANS READY FOR A REPUBLISHING OF MEIN KAMPF?" Good lord, I think it will be fine. (But yay, I'm glad the publishing has been halted, at least by this guy, as it was looking like the only motivation for republishing it was money and scandal.)

January 25, 2012

Have you read Emma Garman's series at the Awl regarding the men and women who clog up the British tabloids? The footballers, the reality stars, the wives of footballers... Today she gives us a brilliant little lesson on attention span, reminding us that:

a missing white girl with pretty blonde hair; white girl imprisoned for grisly murder; [and] famous married man sexing women who aren’t his wife... enjoy a statistically equal claim on our attention, and on average will attract 1,250 times the coverage of an outbreak of war.

And that reminds me of all the reading I have not been doing this week. Like the scholarly book that has taken me two weeks to get through two chapters. But don't worry, I'm all caught up on episodes of Modern Family.

The trial of a television director on morality charges for airing a controversial animated film is a disturbing turn for the nascent Tunisian democracy, Human Rights Watch said today. On January 23, 2012, a Tunis court announced that Nabil Karoui, director of Nessma TV, will go on trial on April 19 for airing the French animated movie “Persepolis.” [Based on the Marjane Satrapi graphic novel of the same name.]

On October 7, 2011, the privately owned Nessma television station broadcast “Persepolis,” an animated feature film about a girl’s childhood in Iran. The broadcast led to protests in Tunis because it contained a scene depicting God, which some consider to be forbidden by Islam. On October 14, a crowd damaged Karoui’s home in Tunis with Molotov cocktails.

There's a short interview with Banana Yoshimoto, on the occasion of her novel The Lake being nominated for the Man Asian Literary Prize.

The abductions of Japanese citizens by North Korea was big news in this country at the time I was writing The Lake. I believe that this incident has cast a shadow over this novel gently but surely. I wanted to write about the small happiness of people who suffer in silence.

(Ah, can't even type "Banana Yoshimoto" without thinking of the boy who sent me Kitchen and Lizard in the mail when I was 16.)

Hungary is using shitty translations to confuse the EU about what's going on with its constitution.

During the one month that the constitution was open for public debate, the Hungarian government sent an English translation to the European Commission, as EU law requires it to do. But the English translation left out the controversial and inflammatory preamble. The preamble asserts that sovereignty rests in the Hungarian “nation” (that is, ethnic Hungarians and not Hungarian citizens of all ethnicities). It also includes potentially destabilizing references to Hungary’s “historic constitution” that implicitly laid claim to territories now belonging to neighboring states. In addition, the English version of the constitution presented to the EU was riddled with translation mistakes that changed the sense of the text.

January 24, 2012

I have to spend the rest of my day hanging out with and interviewing opera singers, so I guess my life in Philadelphia is not that different from my life in Berlin. Or, spending the day dealing with what Ezra Pound referred to as the "ginks walkin' about and doin' stage actin'" distracting from the real music. To get in the mood, there's an excellent piece by Michael Neve in an old London Review of Books, on Frank Johnson, Clive James, and Michael Frayn, which opens with a discussion of the appeal of opera.

Opera booms when the expense of it is most ruinous, and events seem most ‘operatic’ when they are huge, scary and very much for real. Opera as a cultural form lays bare the fact that there is money to sustain it while at the same time – the same Wagnerian time, one might say – it calls into question the base that sustains it.

You should maybe follow @gingrichfiction on Twitter, seeing as how someone is tweeting excerpts (imagined or real, who could possibly tell the difference?) from Gingrich's speculative fiction. (via)

Neal Pollack was a god when those of us in our generation who write needed a god. He was an organic god, real and smelly and not something you would bring home to meet the folks, so to speak.

Ah, this makes me happy. And think of Austin, Texas, where I first met Neal, watching him perform "I Wipe My Ass with Your Novel" at Club DeVille (followed by an encore of "Fuck and Run"). And I still think The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature is hysterical. Someone had to write spitfire satire of literary pomposity, and he did it very well.

January 23, 2012

The working title for Ayn Rand’s ____________ was Ego, but she switched it when she thought it gave too much of the theme away and was too blunt.

It does not really matter what goes in that blank, does it?

A scholar perusing the archives of the early 20th century Hebrew writer David Vogel's estate stumbled upon a bit of dusty magic: an entire novel, unpublished and previously undiscovered, just sitting there mislabeled. After hiding away for 70 years or so, the novel is being published in Israel. And the reason it was not published in his lifetime? It was perhaps a too autobiographical novel about a man and his married lover. Haaretz has the whole story.

Happy 10th anniversary (and 200th book), Melville House. Can't imagine the literary world without you.

First things first: Murder is wrong, OK? But let's say, hypothetically, that you're considering committing one anyway: how would you do it? Practically everyone wants to murder someone. That jerk that got the job you want. That guy who gets all his books reviewed while your books don’t even get published. That handsome, horrible dude everyone loves when only you know he is a complete fraud who must be exposed. Jonathan Franzen. Maybe you want to murder novelist Jonathan Franzen. Let’s say you do. You want to stand over Jonathan Franzen's wrecked body as it bubbles over with his own blood. You’re laughing and he’s just kind of lying there, gurgling. You beat him to death with an iPad and now there won’t be any more sprawling family angst novels from Mr. Handsome Fake Genius Man. Maybe that is who you want to murder. Maybe you would really enjoy wringing his skinny Brooklyn neck. His skinny, pretentious, overrated, Brooks Brothers neck. Hypothetically. Here are some things to think about while you're totally planning the fake murder you have no intention of actually doing and by reading this sentence you hereby absolve the writer of any complicity in the crimes you will in no way go out and commit here comes the period and Jim is absolved.

Oh, Jim Behrle.

January 22, 2012

The 2012 shortlist for the International Arabic Fiction Prize has been released. It's the fifth year for the award, which is worth $50,000 and an English translation and publication to the winning author.

The nominated books are:

The Unemployed by Nasser Iraq
Toy of Fire by Bashir Mufti
The Vagrant by Jabbour Douaihy
The Druze of Belgrade by Rabee Jaber
The Women of al-Basatin by Habib Selmi
Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge by Ezzedine Choukri Fishere

January 20, 2012

In preparation for Edith Wharton's 150th birthday on Tuesday (read our Star-Crossed column about her and Julian Barnes in this month's issue), the New York Times writes about a fad she wrote about, American heiresses going to Europe to marry titled men. Of course, they tie it into Downton Abbey because everything now has to be tied into Downton Abbey. (If you need a break from all that, you can read Simon Schama's entertaining screed about the show and its "cultural necrophilia.")

Congress may take books, musical compositions and other works out of the public domain, where they can be freely used and adapted, and grant them copyright status again, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

In a 6-2 ruling, the court said that, just because material enters the public domain, it is not “territory that works may never exit.”

Like all copyright shenanigans, this will probably be traced back to Disney somehow.

Deborah Blum, author of the nonfiction book The Poisoner's Handbook, explains how her love of Agatha Christie novels had her obsessing over the idea of poison murders since she was a kid.

Drew Nellins, who interviewed Shalom Auslander for Bookslut way back when, accuses Riverhead of "Intellectual Bullying" when it comes to Shalom's new book, Hope: A Tragedy. The book has been a little omni-present, with two glowing New York Times reviews (one perfect review by Steve Stern -- author of The Frozen Rabbi -- one uh kind of weird Janet Maslin review). He's writing funny things for the New York Times Magazine and the Paris Review, he's got those book trailers. Every book critic in the land is lining up to compare Shalom Auslander to Philip Roth. (God -- I really do not get this comparison, but whatever. Is this like when every female singer songwriter gets compared either to Joni Mitchell or Kate Bush, just because it's vaginas all around? Does every funny Jew get compared to Philip Roth?) All of it would be annoying if I didn't think the book was legitimately brilliant.

But the reason for Nellins's complaint is not simply the overexposure, it's the alarming press packet that accompanies the book. (My review copy must have been shipped out before the publicity team developed OCD, because all I got was a one page "hey, this is a book, you can read it" thing.) God knows most of the things publishing publicity departments do bewilder me, like continuing to send me multiple copies of the same book after I've published a review. Or the time an ex of mine published a book and the publisher overnighted a glossy photo of his head along with his book, and when I opened the box the photo fell out, sort of menacingly falling towards me, and I screamed like a rat had just jumped at my face. But on this case, I guess I am just glad they are trying.

I am wondering if Nellins is suggesting that the reason the book is getting such good reviews is because of the Power of the Publicity Folder Thingy. Either way, this seems like less of a problem than when people were going around saying Joshua Ferris is the new Samuel Beckett, because yuck.

January 19, 2012

People are reading Aron Ralston's Between a Rock and a Hard Place -- you know, his memoir about being pinned by a rock until he had to cut off his own arm to save his own life -- or watching the movie adaptation 127 Hours and thinking, huh, I totally want to go hiking in that ridiculously dangerous place. Let's get going!

“I saw that movie about the guy that got his arm cut off, and I started reading about slot canyons,” Richards says. “That movie ­really got me excited.”

My only thought when I read that book, and I did read part of it, because I love that survival nonsense, was to think, well, at least I know this will never happen to me. Because I am lazy and fearful. Maybe I am approaching life all wrong...

The despots challenged in the Arab Spring channelled their stolen wealth through the City. Oligarchs from around the world flocked to Britain because it offered them the rule of law, protection from assassins, luxury shops, art galleries, Georgian town houses, country estates and public schools that could train their sons in the gentlemanly style.

If journalists tried to do what they should do and investigate them, Britain also gave the oligarchs a further privilege: the power to enforce a censorship that the naive supposed had vanished with the repressions of the old establishment. Among the many attractions London offered the oligarchs was a legal profession that served them as attentively as the shop assistants in Harrods food hall.

It is silly that I get excited over a new book on libel tourism, isn't it? Well, it's here, it's called You Can't Read This Book, and the Guardian has an extract.

Watch closely, because here’s where we pivot from personal anecdote to microtrend thinkpiece lede.

Daniel Nester engages in some literary tourism, in a thinkpiece kind of way.

Oh, I'm sorry, you wanted some bookish news or commentary? Because all I've got for you right now is how to give yourself a Lisa Frank inspired manicure. Just try to pretend that doesn't thrill you twenty times more than any information on "Ezra Pound was a fascist, isn't that tragic" or whatever it is we usually talk about here.

January 18, 2012

Over at this week's Kind Reader, I answer a question about a woman's inability to make friends with other women. My solution: Margaret Lawrence's School of Femininity. It's out of print (boo) but available used for around a nickle. It's a nickle well spent to get Lawrence's essays about women writers. She uses the word "harlot" a lot.

I know we are all collectively tired of poets being asked if poetry still matters, but here's another one, pretty much saying the same thing that every other poet has said. This time it's Jonathan Galassi, so at least he says it elegantly. (As opposed to those inelegant, half-articulate poets?) (Maybe I should do this self-questioning off-site, no?)

But what remains, above all, are her many books. At a time when East and West, bristling with weapons, faced off in rigid ideological confrontation, she wrote books that crossed and overcame this divide, books that have lasted: the great, allegorical novels, the personal account of illness and pain.

Günter Grass's eulogy for Christa Wolf has been translated into English.

After all the hoo-ha over sponsorship, this year's T.S. Eliot prize has been won by Scottish poet John Burnside for his collection Black Cat Bone. Here's a vid of the shortlisted poets doing a bit of reading.

January 17, 2012

Czech Radio has a wonderful (English language) piece on Edwin Muir, the Scottish poet who first translated Kafka into English and his memories of Prague. It touches on his friendship with Karel Čapek (whose amazing War with the Newts is finally coming back into print), meeting up with Graham Greene after World War II, and teaching English literature at the university as the communists started to clamp down.

Tessa Hadley rereads and reconsiders the only Elizabeth Bowen novel I failed to get through, Eva Trout. I am happy to learn that everyone thinks this book is a weird little monster.

I do like it when real people who up in the fiction I'm reading. Particularly if they have a tendency to tear off their clothing, have mysterious conversations with God and are later turned into saints by the Church. In Melissa Pritchard's The Odditorium, I learned about Saint Dymphna, whose pagan king father wanted to marry her and when she said no he cut off her head. Later her tomb was associated with healings of mental illness, and so she became the patron saint of schizophrenics, incest survivors, and the possessed. Oh, and princesses. (I am considering making a pilgrimage.)

Saint Dymphna shows up in Melissa Pritchard's stories, as does Annie Oakley, Ripley, and assorted other freaks and holy fools. The collection has an immense amount of charm. I talked to Pritchard as part of our Q&A series at Kirkus, about mixing the real and the fantastical, the limitations of history, and why she longs to write about Madame Blavatsky.

She influenced metaphysicians, scientists, artists and writers, including Yeats, Tennyson, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Jack London, L. Frank Baum and others. But after plowing through Sylvia Cranston's massive biography, my ambition was defeated—Blavatsky's life was sprawling, extraordinary, almost beyond credibility—I felt like a kitchen ant aspiring to attain Mt. Everest.