January 31, 2006
I think demonstrations across the country could be very useful on this famous Tuesday. Just say no. We've had enough of you. Go home to Crawford. We'll help you raise the money for a library, and you won't even ever have to read a book. We're not cruel. We just want to get rid of you and let you be an ex-president with his own library, which you can fill up with friends of yours who can neither read nor write, but they'll be well served and well paid, we hope, by corporate America, which will love you forever.
(Thanks to Carl for the link.)
The Academy Award nominees for best adapted screenplay include four scripts based on books, and one based on a short story.
-Brokeback Mountain, screenplay by Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana, based on the short story by Annie Proulx
-Capote, screenplay by Dan Futterman, based on the book Capote: A Biography by Gerald Clarke
-The Constant Gardener, screenplay by Jeffrey Caine, based on the book by John le Carre
-A History of Violence, screenplay by Josh Olson, based on the book by John Wagner (art by Vince Locke)
-Munich, screenplay by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, based on the book Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team by George Jonas
Otherwise, it looks like that movie Crash got a million nominations, one for original screenplay. As a public service, I reprint the script for Crash in its entirety here:
Man: I had an experience today that reminded me that racism is still very much a problem in this country.
Woman: Yes. Racism is bad.
Man: It's very bad.
Woman: Yes, it is. Very, very bad.
There. I just saved you ten bucks and two hours. Now you can go rent Me and You and Everyone We Know, which didn't get nominated despite the fact that it's twenty million times better than Crash and doesn't have wooden performances by Matt Dillon and Don Cheadle.
There are remembrances of Wendy Wasserstein at the Washington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Seattle Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, The Telegraph and the BBC.
A new 40-second video of Jill Carroll aired Monday on Arab TV station Al Jazeera. The video, broadcast without audio, pictures Ms. Carroll wearing a white headscarf and weeping. Al Jazeera's newscaster says on the video that Carroll is appealing to the US military and the Iraqi Interior Ministry to release all Iraqi women prisoners, and that this "would help in winning her release."
Attention WTTW Channel 11 Chicago Tonight viewers! I am not that orange in real life!
That is all.
Art Spiegelman used to design Garbage Pail Kids? Seriously?
Huh.
JM Coetzee on being translated:
Are my books easy or hard to translate? Sentence by sentence, my prose is generally lucid, in the sense that the syntactic relations among words, and the logical force of constructions, are as clear as I can make them.
On the other hand, I sometimes use words with the full freight of their history behind them, and that freight is not easily carried across to another language. My English does not happen to be embedded in any particular sociolinguistic landscape, which relieves the translator of one vexatious burden; on the other hand, I do tend to be allusive, and not always to signal the presence of allusion.
(Via Bookninja.)
Russia's Public Chamber is considering banning racist and nationalist books.
But Tankred Golenpolsky, the founder of Jewish International Paper, a Moscow publication that has campaigned against anti-Semitic books, said society should protest books, not ban them. He said a ban on certain books could be the start of a creeping process that resulted in the creation of a state censorship committee.
Bernard-Henri Lévy responds to Garrison Keillor's negative review of American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville.
"Was the reviewer Francophobic? Was he looking down at me because I was French?" he said. "Maybe I will respond more fully later. But overall, I thought the review was well-written. And at least now I know that this book has the ability to provoke this sort of Francophobia and American populism - that's great. If somebody says, 'He's a Frenchman - what does he know?' that to me is a symptom of Francophobia."
Every time I think of Garrison Keillor, I think of his doppelganger on that one episode of The Simpsons:
Well, sir, it has been an uneventful week in Badger Falls...where the women are robust, the men are pink-cheeked, and the children are pink-cheeked and robust.
At the Apple Biscuit cafe, where the smiles are free, don't you know, Sven Inqvist studied the menu, and finally he ordered the same thing he has every day.
Stupid essayist! Be more funny!
Kirkus busts a plagiarist. It turns out Harriet Ziefert's not-forthcoming-anymore A Snake Is Totally Tail is "strikingly similar" to a 1983 book by Judi Barrett called — aspiring plagiarists, take note here — The Snake Is Totally Tail. Très subtle!
In 11 of the 12 instances in which an animal is mentioned in both books, the language is duplicated word for word, for instance: “A crab is conspicuously claws,” “a duck is quantities of quack” and “a porcupine is piles of prickles.”
Journalists are probably now looking through publisher Blue Apple's backlist with a fine tooth comb, and raising questions about suspicious-looking titles such as Green Eggs and Lamb, The Hat-Wearing Cat and The Magical Boy Wizard Who...Ah, Fuck It, Here's a Photocopy of the Last Harry Potter Book.
The New Yorker reprints a short play and two articles by the late Wendy Wasserstein.
January 30, 2006
One county, one book, one white-hot cauldron of moral outrage.
On Monday, Friendswood [Texas] Mayor Kim Brizendine issued a proclamation declaring Jan. 31 Galveston County Reads Day for “all citizens, teens to seniors.”
On Friday, he issued a press release that expressed concern about the content of the book.
Brizendine said he regretted endorsing the novel. He also said the Friendswood library board would be reviewing the placement of the book in the library.
The book in question is the novel that shocked North America and Europe with its sheer, unapologetic perversion and immorality: Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. That's right: The one that your great-aunt's book club read a year and a half ago.
Two Friendswood city council members, John LeCour and Chris Peden, are upset that the book contains the word "fuck," and that a character in the novel questions the existence of a god. Peden's logic is particularly...something:
“A lot of liberal do-gooders say we should take the book in its entirety,” he said. “That’s like saying a man is a great deacon at his church, a great Little League coach, a great provider for his family, but he beats his wife. That is not a good man.
“The firestorm is all the liberal pacifists who are trying to make us out to be book burning, goose-stepping Nazis. That’s not the case at all. There are plenty of books without profanity we could promote.”
OK, wait. I'm confused. The dog beats his wife? Or...the autistic kid? He's married? Do they even have Little League baseball in Britain?
It's stories like this that make me think Texas Gov. Rick Perry's asinine "I'm Proud of Texas, How 'Bout You?" campaign (seriously) is not going to go quite as well as he hopes.
Thanks to Leila for the link.
Tim Adams wonders what the appeal of the "misery memoir" is, and has some kind words for Jonathan Franzen:
[Oprah Winfrey] therefore dispatched Franzen with a film crew to his home town to sit and look mournful where his father's ashes were scattered and to invade the family home that he had vowed not to return to. Franzen went along with it for a while, assuming versions of the emotions that the cameraman expected Oprah - and America - might want, emotions that he had spent eight years trying to craft into the subtleties of his fiction. Eventually he withdrew from the charade, throwing away, it seemed, his bestseller in the process. The collected wrath of the media came down on him for being so 'spoilt' and 'ungrateful' and 'elitist'. Oprah denounced him as 'clearly having issues'.
Looking back, Franzen's story is one of the few occasions in recent years when an advocate of real life, complex and nuanced and difficult, has stood up against 'real life', manufactured and marketed and manipulative. He was, it is clear, fighting a losing battle.
Children from northeast Mississippi suggest plots for the final Harry Potter book. Ninety-seven percent of the entries ended with Harry Potter swooping into the young author's house on a Quidditch broom and taking them the fuck away from northeast Mississippi.
John Thorn considers the linguistic ramifications of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, a team name even more awkward than the New Orleans/Oklahoma City Hornets.
I ran through my whole list of rhetorical devices, from alliteration to zeugma, and could find nothing that quite fit the Moreno Stratagem. Oxymoron came close, but a subterranean level of common sense or humor is discernible in "jumbo shrimp" or "adult male" that is not evident in "Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim."
And then I found it. Anesis: a figure of addition that occurs when a concluding sentence, clause or phrase is added to a statement that purposely diminishes the effect of what has been previously stated. A neat example of the device is the 1925 Rodgers and Hart lyric, "We'll have Manhattan … the Bronx and Staten Island too."
Playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who celebrated women confronting feminism, careers, love and motherhood in such works as "The Heidi Chronicles" and "The Sisters Rosensweig," died Monday. She was 55.
If you speak German, you might want to check out this interview with Salman Rushdie. The Literary Saloon, which must not be authored by a product of the American public school system, translates a few of the passages concerning John Updike's weirdly rambling negative review of Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown:
Ich habe die Kritik gelesen und mich sehr geärgert. John Updike sollte nicht über politische Dinge schreiben; er ist besser, wenn es um Sex in den Suburbs geht.
(I read the review and was very annoyed by it. John Updike shouldn't write about political matters; he's better when the subject is sex in the suburbs.)
Oh, burn, rabbit boy! John, you may respond in the European language of your choice.
Jarret Keene interviews Richard Burgin, "a horror writer with a brain."
The Daily Star talks to Hanif Kureishi (The Buddha of Suburbia, My Beautiful Laundrette).
"Let's shut the door, they're saying, and let's not hear anybody else, and let's not stop being English," Kureishi summarizes indignantly. "The whole debate is about what can be said. Are Muslims allowed to say that they hate gays? Are they allowed to say that they hate the West? Are they allowed to say that you should blow people up in response to what went on in Iraq? What are the limits of what can be said? And that to me, as a writer, is obviously fascinating."
SHOCKING NEWS: Nobody reads poetry anymore! For the love of god, SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING!
You can watch American Vertigo author Bernard-Henri Lévy's recent appearance on the Daily Show online and see that beautiful hair in action.
The Scotsman profiles Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the Velvet and the new The Night Watch (to be released in the States in March).
Nowadays, Waters, who turns 40 this year, is justly celebrated for what she calls "lesbo Victorian romps". They're dark books but not ghost stories, and we discuss the paucity of women working in this genre. "At school, no other girls I knew read them," she says. "I was back home for Christmas, rooting around in my parents' attic, and I found one of my old projects. It was called 'Witchcraft And Torture In The Middle Ages' and I remember being torn between the two topics, so I combined them. There were all these intricate diagrams of horrible shackles and thumbscrews. I did feel different at that age. I knew I wasn't girlie."
(Via Maud Newton.)
This week's Guardian Digested Read is The Treehouse by Naomi Wolf.
Lennie's childhood was fraught with violence and hardship, yet he remains the tenderest soul. "Destroy the box," he chanted. I thought about the prison I had created for myself, the high profile woman of letters. I needed to sublimate my ego, though obviously not to the extent of not writing about myself.
The book list for The Morning News Tournament of Books has been announced.
Doesn't it just make sense that Sherman Alexie knew about the Nasdijj fraud before everyone else? He's just so good. (Read Ten Little Indians and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, yo.)
And how do I feel now that the author of an investigative story in L.A. Weekly believes that Nasdijj is a fraud and actually a white writer named Timothy Barrus? Vindicated? Well, sure. I dream of leaving "I told you so" messages on many voice mails, although unlike James Frey's publisher, who initially supported his lies and moral evasions about his exaggerated memoir, A Million Little Pieces, Nasdijj's publisher dropped him because of personality conflicts even before the L.A. Weekly story came out. Of course, Frey has sold millions of books and will probably sell a few million more. Nasdijj hasn't sold millions of books, and he will probably fade into obscurity.
Edinburgh: City of Literature, take two.
To date, the City of Literature’s only achievements have been securing the Man Booker Prize ceremony for Edinburgh last August and sending out an e-bulletin from its website. . . .
Novelist AL Kennedy added: “It hasn’t done anything for me. If it was going to do anything, I would much rather it focused on new writers and on language skills.”
Robert Chalmers has an extensive profile of Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors, the forthcoming Possible Side Effects).
He has never called his work autobiography, but memoir, a term whose standard definition (an account based on the writer's knowledge of people, places and things) doesn't explicitly demand rigorous adherence to fact. "His life is in his books," is the phrase his publishers use. And - as he mentions following an exchange I initiate for the first, and I hope the last, time in my life: "Just how many undertakers have you actually had sex with?" "One" - real characters from his past have been duplicated, or merged with others.
See? It's not a crime.
Nobel Prize-winning playwright Dario Fo might be elected mayor of Milan.
The man known for his scathing attacks on the rich and powerful has run a controversial and colourful campaign, pledging to rid Milan of the "money-grabbing bastards who have run this city for decades". London's mayor, Ken Livingstone, who visited Milan last week, is one of his supporters.
Bernard-Henri Lévy (American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville) takes knocks from John Allemang at The Globe and Mail and Garrison Keillor at The New York Times. Here's Keillor:
In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There's no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title.
Tobias Wolff (This Boy's Life) has a new short story at The New Yorker.
Some sad news out of my hometown: Molly Ivins is battling cancer for the third time. (Go to Bugmenot.com and enter "statesman.com" if you need a password.)
"Maybe this is false bravado," she said. "In some ways for me, this is like having a manageable disease. It's like diabetes. It doesn't mean it's not going to come get me in the end."
Ivins, never married, said she's divided charitable bequests in her will between the American Civil Liberties Union, which she credits with defending the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights, and her cherished [Texas] Observer.
Ivins is one of Texas' great writers — all her books are worth reading, but definitely check out Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? and Nothin' But Good Times Ahead, both of which should be required reading in all Texas history classes.
January 27, 2006
Displaying the kind of editorial tact they're legendary for, National Review offers this headline for their story on the possible Nasdijj hoax: "Honest Injun?"
Reuters reports on the Upton Sinclair/Sacco and Vanzetti controversy.
Hey, who knew? Bridge to Terabithia is being adapted into a film (again), starring Zooey Deschanel as the teacher. Unfortunately, due to high production costs, the film won't be shot in Terabithia. I hear they're looking at Canada.
Minnesota Public Radio interviews Ron McLarty (The Memory of Running).
Maureen Dowd really Turns Me On sometimes. James Frey has a Bony Little Butt, indeed. Joel Stein is apologetic for the book, a little, because I think Joel Stein would do it if he had the chance. I know a little something about Literary Ambition, and I can see it in Stein's eyes. Did he snort coke off his coworkers' tits at Entertainment Weekly? Oh, I'm not being fair to Joel Stein. If you read this, Joel, I live in L.A. Buy me Lunch.
Poetry is the new Prozac, says The Independent.
One study, published a couple of years ago in the journal Psychological Reports, suggested that writing poetry boosted levels of secretory immunoglobin A. Another, undertaken by a consultant at Bristol Royal Infirmary, concluded that poetry enabled seven per cent of mental health patients to be weaned off their anti-depressants.
The American Library Association announced its Stonewall Book Awards, given to books dealing with LGBT themes and issues. This year's winners: Babyji by Abha Dawesar and The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, the Music, the ’70s in San Francisco by Joshua Gamson.
The latest target of the self-appointed memoir police appears to be Augusten Burroughs.
Whether your ailment is physical or psychological, there will be a memoir to suit. You're no oil painting? Try Ugly, Constance Briscoe's account of how her mother hated her looks and everything else about her (the author, incidentally, looks rather fetching in her jacket photograph). Behavioural difficulties? Joe by Michael Blastland recounts the pain (and occasional pleasures) of living with an autistic son. Eating disorder? The Invisible Girl is Peter Barham's memoir of his dead anorexic daughter. Disability? White on Black by Ruben Gallego details a Russian man with cerebral palsy. Grim home life? Dragonslippers is Rosalind Penfold's diary of a decade in which she endured physical, mental and sexual abuse as a wife. (Or, failing that, there's also A Secret Madness in which Elaine Bass recalls marriage to a man with compulsive obsessive disorder.) Drugs? Out of Time by James Fountain tells how a lemonade and LSD cocktail sent him into a psychiatric unit. That's just January's crop.
Man. The Smoking Gun really has their work cut out for them.
Kids sure do love the podcast. The Guardian Book Club offers their first podcast with a conversation with Hilary Mantel about her book Beyond Black.
Some genius at Step Inside Design magazine decided to use pictures of kittens to illustrate an article about women designers. The response was not positive.
“Congratulations on degrading your well-written, well-researched articles with a cover that portrays these hard-working, intelligent, and creative women as a bunch of adorable, cuddly and nonthreatening housepets,” one reader wrote in a letter to the editor.
My parents have not yet had the decency to die. This makes my work difficult and slow. I am writing a memoir.
It may or may not be true that I started the entire Bookslut Reading Series as an excuse to meet Shalom Auslander, but with his new column at Nextbook, he completely justifies the whole thing. (You should have read Beware of God by now. If not, what the hell is wrong with you?)
I was really surprised how well the reading series went last night. I mean, I'm always surprised when I have to host something and I don't catch something on fire and no one dies. (I'm clumsy.) But it wasn't just the everyone-leaving-with-their-lives thing that surprised me, it was that these three women who wrote very different books managed to play off of one another and the night kind of came full circle.
Following the rule that one should always have a Texan start things off, Christine Wicker didn't exactly read from Not in Kansas Anymore but rather riffed on how she got started writing about religion for the Dallas Morning News and how she noticed a growing number of Christians referring to magic in their daily lives, whether through "blessings" or a belief in angels. She also talked about Zora Neale Hurston and William James, finding out there was a "magical community," and how you can tell if someone is a wizard.
Erica Rand's book Ellis Island Snowglobe was unexpectedly funny, and that came across in her reading of "the part everyone who reviewed the book hates." It's not hard to see why someone would be offended, what with her describing the Statue of Liberty as a gorgeous butch, but no one at the reading stormed out. She too described how the idea of the book came up, with a hot date to Ellis Island where she discovered the woman she was dating had rather Puritanical blood. "I never expected to be sleeping with someone who came over on the Mayflower," Rand admitted.
And then it came back to magic with Kathie Klarreich's reading from Madame Dread, her book about her ten years living as a journalist in Haiti. She was dating a vodou drummer at the time, and she casually admitted to having been "mounted" by spirits at least once. She explained how to break into journalism -- be in the right war zone at the right time -- and her decision to stay in Haiti to cover the turmoil instead of running back to California to be with her dog.
Thanks again to everyone who came. The next reading will be Thursday, February 16 at 7:30. The authors will be:
Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place
Gina Frangello, My Sister's Continent
George Elliott Clarke, George & Rue
Revelations at Alternet's Radical Publishers Roundtable: Barnes & Noble is not necessarily the devil, and independent media is not necessarily any more receptive to indie publishers than, say, the New York Times.
There would also be a strong correlation between the books that are being reviewed in the New York Times Book Review and what's being reviewed in The Nation. It's not just The Nation; I'm just using it as an example. So it's not as if there's a place where you can go where the radical and progressive books are being reviewed. They're just not being reviewed anywhere. Or they're being reviewed on websites and magazines like Clamor or the International Socialist Review.
Hillary Frey, writing about the Oprah v. Frey showdown yesterday, gets it right:
As the audience clapped when Oprah spit out a real zinger ("It's a lie!"; "I think you presented a false person"), it was hard to avoid thinking that Frey was being put on display not to set the record straight, but for a public flogging. More than once Oprah emphasized that this experience has "embarrassed" her. Her revenge: shaming another person in front of a live studio audience. Who knew that Oprah was an "eye for an eye" kind of lady?
Does anyone give a shit that Oprah got "embarrassed"? That's like hearing that Bill Gates stubbed his toe. Oh, you poor fucking baby. Your life must be so hard.
(Thanks to Leela for the link.)
January 26, 2006
Continuum has just announced their list of the 21 forthcoming books in the 33 1/3 series (see below for my fanboy encomium about the line of books). Included are tributes to Belle and Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister, Richard and Linda Thompson's Shoot Out the Lights, Nick Drake's Pink Moon, and The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs — all essential, beautiful albums you should own. Apparently, they passed on my tribute to Weird Al Yankovic's Dare to Be Stupid. They say it's because the manuscript was only 250 words, 237 of which were "very," but I think it's because they're snobs. Snobs, all of them!
Seriously, though, please read these books.
Lou Reed will be signing copies of Lou Reed's New York at the Gallery at Hermes on February 4. When you're getting your book signed you should ask how he feels about being played by a member of Weezer in the upcoming Factory movie and see if he punches you in the nose. The hospital bills would so be worth the story you'll be able to tell at every party for the rest of your life.
It's low-tech, but I still think it's a better idea than e-books. (Via Bookninja, with sincere condolences about the Canadian election. Dude, I'm from Texas. I feel your pain.)
Novelists and screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, expected to get an Oscar nomination for writing the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, are profiled by the Arizona Daily Star. It'd be nice to see some nominations for Gregg Araki, who adapted Scott Heim's brilliant, brilliant novel Mysterious Skin into a critically acclaimed film (which Araki also directed). Oscar nominations are announced Tuesday.
Joel Stein is the bravest liberal in America right now. Of course, the pro-war chicken-hawk right disagrees.
Everyone in America owes Kathy Glick-Weil a big thank you.
A matter of principle -- and law -- made Newton Free Library's director, Kathy Glick-Weil, insist that FBI agents cool their heels in their pursuit of an alleged terrorist threat.
Glick-Weil said yesterday she had no choice but to prevent the FBI from seizing library computers last week, because they came without a search warrant.
Meet venture capitalist Tom Perkins! Or don't.
For his next big breakthrough, Perkins hopes to rival his ex-wife, best-selling author Danielle Steel, as a romance novelist. His first book, "Sex and the Single Zillionaire," was just published.
From The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, which I pick up when I'm in the mood for something frivolous and light:
A 58-year-old right-handed man complained of being driven to write poetry. For 5 years, he experienced words as "continuously rhyming in his head" and felt the need to write them down and show his writings to others.
(Via Choriamb, who has been posting pictures of haggis this week, thus making me think that vegetarianism might not be such a bad idea after all.)
Jim Hanas interviews Sean Stewart, SF novelist (Perfect Circle) and alternate-reality game pioneer.
Brian Michael Bendis is on today's installment of Nerve's Radical Artist list. Bendis wrote Alias, which had my favorite comics main character ever. Then he ruined her in Pulse and gave her shiny, manageable hair and a cleaner vocabulary. Bastard.
Also on the list: Sayid from Lost. Pay attention Lost writers and let the motherfucker say things on the show other than "Fire!" You're pissing me off with the stingy Sayid moments.
Chabon’s own comic, Michael Chabon Presents The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, published by Dark Horse and on which Vaughan was a collaborator, was recently cancelled—though it will be modified and re-launched later this year.
“The audience may never be there, numerically,” says Chabon. “There may never again be a mass audience for comics as there once was, 50, 60 years ago, when comic books that were successful were routinely selling in the millions."
Oh, honey. It's not that the audience is not there. It's that the Escapist comic was horrifically awful.
The Santa Monica Mirror has a great interview with Gail Godwin (Queen of the Underworld).
Those are the things that I admire, this curiosity to confront something dangerously different, and just curiosity period. And then using yourself up, burning yourself out, to the very last of the candle. . . . I want to burn down. But I want to be a good beeswax candle. You know? The very best.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, James Frey is going to be on Oprah. Whatever. For a televised interview that might actually be entertaining, check out Kinky Friedman, author and Texas gubernatorial candidate, on the Jay Leno show tonight. (Bookslut interviewed the Kinkster last month.)
Daniel Holloway talks to Lauren Weinstein about the forthcoming collection Girl Stories.
For some reason I felt like it wasn’t serious work. It comes a lot easier than some of the other stuff I’m trying to do. Sometimes I felt like making work for “Girl Stories” was like holding your head over the toilet and going, “Blehhhh! There you go! Comics!”
According to Salon's gossip column, people may soon forget about James Frey and move on to Augusten Burroughs. The Smoking Gun has implied they may start investigating the truth behind Running with Scissors next.
Why do they always use the crazy picture of Gabriel García Márquez? The "I'm going to eat your children with a special sauce made out of rabbit skulls" picture? Anyway, turns out he's not writing anymore. Maybe because he's gone crazy.
The San Diego City Beat has a well-deserved love letter to editor David Barker and Continuum Publishing, whose 33 1/3 series of books about legendary record albums is as addictive as crack (and probably cheaper).
Reading someone else deeply examine why they love a song or album that you, too, adore goes beyond nostalgia and reverence. When done well, the 33 1/3 books take a visceral love for a certain piece of music and make it palpable.
All the ones I've read are great, but I personally recommend Joe Pernice's The Smiths' Meat Is Murder, Neutral Milk Hotel's Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, and Colin Meloy's The Replacements' Let It Be. (Cooper is editor and publisher of the awesome magazine Scram, and Pernice and Meloy are both rockers themselves — Pernice with the Pernice Brothers, and Meloy with The Decemberists.)
Also in the City Beat: Michael Chabon discusses the state of the comic book revolution. (It's over, and comic books won.)
And more importantly, says Chabon, even when comics are about superheroes, they aren’t any less artistic. “Even though I think I’ve been guilty of it, to a certain extent, I really want to not appear to be endorsing the view that comics are any less an art form when they’re about Superman than when they’re about two guys eating donuts in Oakland. The medium is the medium, and art is art.”
(Both of these links via Largehearted Boy, who deserves a huge hug for posting that Son Volt show in Hartford the other day.)
Columnists for The Mirror discuss the worst books they read last year. Paul Routledge is my new hero:
And now I'm going to cheat a little bit, too, by choosing The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown as my second-worst book. I haven't read it, and won't buy it or read it because it is so obviously tripe. I don't know who buys these airport blockbusters, but they need to go back to school.
Bowing to a parent's complaint, [Absecon, N.J.] school officials have stricken a book from an elementary school's Black History Month reading list because it contains a racial slur.
January 25, 2006
Italians are still talking about Melissa P., the film based on Melissa Panarello's 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed. Panarello hates the film:
"It's opinionated and full of prejudices that inevitably deteriorate into dime store psychology," she wrote in a letter published by Italian news agencies.
Who'd have thought a movie about a teenage girl having lots of kinky sex would be successful?
On an unrelated note, I think I just figured out a way to get teenage boys interested in literature and foreign film.
Residents of Afghanistan's southern city of Kandahar have accused the US military of seizing a popular young poet from a mosque and holding him without charge.
Gay rights pioneer and author Betty Berzon (Surviving Madness: A Therapist's Own Story) has died at 78.
Yet another defeat for "Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools," the pro-censorship Kansas group. The Blue Valley School Board voted to keep three disputed books on class reading lists. Surviving this latest challenge were Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Robert R. McCammon's Boy's Life and Pat Conroy's The Lords of Discipline. A group of Blue Valley students called Students Speak Out opposed the ban. Have the Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools ever actually won one of these battles? They're like the Washington Generals of censorship.
What do children's fantasy books have in common with college basketball? I am not sure. But I'm pretty sure Bob Knight is Voldemort.
Amarillo accountant Bob Berger told the Panhandle Press Association Monday that he wouldn't be alive today were it not for having read every 'Dummies' book ever published.
Get ready for A Couple of Whiny Bitches v. Frey. If this suit isn't thrown out within fifteen seconds of being filed, I despair for America's legal system.
The latest thump on the controversial best-seller "A Million Little Pieces" is a Seattle federal court lawsuit seeking damages on behalf of consumers for the "lost time" they spent reading the book. . . .
In a lawsuit filed Thursday, Seattle Attorney Mike Myers lists as plaintiffs two Seattle residents, Shera Paglinawan and Stuart Oswald, who each received or purchased the book "before news of the book's falsity was disseminated."
You know, I never thought tort reform was a good idea. Until now.
Nerve.com has unveiled the first ten in their list of fifty "radical artists." Authors on that first ten include Damali Ayo (How to Rent a Negro) and sexy Chris Mooney (The Republican War on Science).
That Nerve list of "radical artists" also includes cartoonist/funniest man alive Chris Onstad (Achewood). Chris Mooney might be sexy, but Roast Beef is hell of awesome.
The Largeheartedboy's latest edition of Book Notes comes from Douglas A. Martin and his book Branwell, a novel about the less famous Bronte.
Alan J. Green, a former Louisiana judge who knew James Frey at the Hazelden rehab clinic, says the author's depiction of life at the treatment center was "pretty accurate."
Hilary Spurling won the Whitbread Book of the Year award for Matisse the Master, beating out the bookies' favorite, Ali Smith's The Accidental. Spurling describes herself as "gob-smacked" by the victory. I assume that "gob-smacked" is a British word meaning "completely surprised," but maybe Spurling just likes making up words. Which would explain why she described Matisse's Deux fillettes, fond jaune et rouge as "a scroptastic work, bursting with a confluvious spirit and an irrepressible sense of resplondance." What does that even mean? Ali got robbed.
Keep an eye out for one of the coolest projects I've heard about this year: Stories Care Forgot: An Anthology of New Orleans Zines, which will be published by Last Gasp. Edited by Ethan Clark, creator of the zine Chihuahua and Pitbull, the book anthologizes selections from zines such as I Hate This Part of Texas, Rocket Queen and Chainbreaker. Author proceeds will be donated to The New Orleans Community Bike Project and The People's Hurricane Relief Fund. There's a book tour planned for the South and West — some of the dates are tentative, but if they make it to your neck of the woods, go. I'm planning to see them at Monkeywrench Books in Austin on March 3, if they're able to make it down here.
January 24, 2006
Alan Wolfe and Franklin Foer will be discussing Bernard-Henri Lévy's American Vertigo this week.
Locus Magazine has two best of 2005 lists, with Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners on both.
I should probably read Money, A Memoir: Women, Emotions, and Cash. I do, after all, cause my accountant great emotional pain when I meet with her. "Can't you actually do something that earns you money?" she asks as she totals up my check stubs because I'm too terrified to see the total to do it myself. I expect a longer lecture from her about my trip to Ireland than I got from my father. But anyway, this interview with author Liz Perle should be a good start.
Well, as I said, it's this very schizophrenic feeling about money, where they feel ashamed to ask for it, where they feel that it's a handout in some way -- because someone else has the pay stub. But the fact of the matter is that frequently the person wouldn't have that pay stub without your hard work. And until you can look at that without guilt or embarrassment, you're not gonna be paid for what you do.
Do you ever read a book just because you hate it? You probably started out reading it thinking it would have redeeming qualities, but then you realized it was so offensively awful that your burning hatred actually sustained you through page after page? Even though you were occasionally tempted to claw out your own eyes, you just couldn't stop reading in fear that you were going to miss the ultimate awful horrible moment?
Yeah, I'm kind of going through that right now.
Comics 212 explains why it has been so difficult to track down copies of Alan Moore's masterpiece, From Hell. (And whichever one of you motherfuckers borrowed my copy and never returned it, well, may rabid hamsters feast on your soul.)
"You know I read Lovecraft to all our sons when they were small. Friends and strangers," - he is laughing - "would say, oh my God, what are you doing, don't read them that stuff, you're doing them immense psychological harm! But, ah, they recall it very fondly."
The Independent profiles American-British author Russell Hoban (Riddley Walker). Hoban is best known for his children's books about a badger named Frances (this was my favorite, but they're all pretty goddamn cute). He also wrote Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas, which Jim Henson adapted into my favorite Christmas special ever. Man, I loved that otter! And the badger, too. Frances, come live with me, you can have as much bread and jam as you would like.
I guess you could say I wasn't a very...tough kid.
The Guardian profiles Whitbread children's fiction award winner Kate Thompson (The New Policeman).
SFist interviews maybe the funniest person in America: Achewood creator Chris Onstad. (Buy his books here. Seriously. Do it.)
The American Library Association announced its children's book awards. Winning the Newbury Medal was Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins, while Norton Juster and Chris Raschka won the Caldecott Prize for The Hello, Goodbye Window. At Chasing Ray, Colleen Mondor offers her own awards, citing Naomi Shihab Nye's Going, Going for "Best Social Commentary" and Cecil Castellucci's Boy Proof as "Best Coming of Age/Finding Yourself Tale."
January 23, 2006
Jonathan Baskin wonders: Has America forgotten Harold Brodkey?
While Pynchon, Gaddis, and DeLillo were busy chronicling the capacious comedy of culture, Brodkey staged, in relentless, repetitive fragments, the tragic theater of self. To the degree he was successful, he advanced the "program" not just of high modernism but of fiction in general. Perhaps more than any writer since Joyce, he held the torchlight of language to the inner workings of human consciousness.
I just bought Kathryn Davis' The Thin Place on Jessa's recommendation, since she was right about Paradise and Lanark and Here Come the Warm Jets. You can read her review of The Thin Place in the Chicago Sun-Times, but you'll just have to ask her in person about the Eno album.
The Oxford University Press blog has a chilling excerpt from Ray Arsenault's Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice.
At the Chronicle of Higher Education, David Glenn explains what happened to the Smithsonian Institution Press, which last year became an imprint of HarperCollins, leaving almost 900 books in publishing limbo.
Also at the Chronicle: Jeffrey R. Young looks at the Open Content Alliance, which is backed by Yahoo! and Microsoft, and is scanning only books that are not protected under copyright.
Peter Anderson, whose blog Pete Lit I enjoy, has a new short story, "Ectoplasm," in Storyglossia. The new issue also has stories by Amy Greene, Toshiya A. Kamei, Staci Leigh O'Brien, D. E. Fredd and Linda Ellis.
Jonathan Ames, who has a new collection called I Love You More Than You Know, lists the contents of his fridge for us.
10. Crazy Richard’s Chunky Peanut Butter, ca. 2003.
11. Muir Glen tomato sauce, expiration date: June 2004.
12. Tofu steak, ca. 2004. This was brought over by an ex-girlfriend and then never eaten and then never thrown away for sentimental reasons.
Joe Sacco has another report from Iraq in the Guardian this week. (Warning: massive fuck-off PDF file.)
The Beast's "50 Most Loathsome People in America" list includes authors Michelle Malkin, Charles Krauthammer and Thomas Friedman. (Coming in at No. 13: God.)
(Via Backwards City.)
The Boston Globe profiles the absolutely essential We All Die Alone by Mark Newgarden.
At an American Library Association meeting in San Antonio yesterday, author Andrei Codrescu (New Orleans, Mon Amour) slammed the ALA council for not condemning the imprisonment of librarians in Cuba. Codrescu grew up in Communist Romania.
Later, in the Q&A, Codrescu was asked if "people paid to overthow the Cuban government" deserve the support he professed. He didn't engage the question but said wryly, "I think people should overthrow all governments." Gorman, referencing the "Radical, Militant Librarian" FBI email that ALA has turned into a slogan, quipped that he could see the headline: "Anarchist Addresses Pinko Commie Librarians."
Avi Steinberg writes about teaching poetry in prison.
Osama bin Laden's other book recommendations.
A book by an obscure American historian has shot into US best-seller lists after the elusive leader of al-Qa'ida endorsed it in an audio message aired last week.
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower by William Blum had languished below 200,000 on Amazon's top-seller list but stormed to 21 yesterday, with the online retailer struggling to meet demand.
The book is published by Common Courage Press.
British bookies pick Ali Smith's The Accidental as the favorite to win the Whitbread Book of the Year.
Bernard-Henri Lévy, who really does have the best hair of all the rock star intellectuals currently around, is interviewed in Salon. His new book is American Vertigo, but we can also recommend War, Evil, and the End of History, reviewed by John Detrixhe here.
Debbie Taylor heaps some very gentle scorn on "lit lite."
Lit lite is the kind of book beloved of the reading group: sufficiently approachable and gripping to engage everyone, yet still offering something - some stylistic quirk, some moral dilemma, some social issue - for members to discuss when they meet.
Taylor cites Life of Pi, Small Island and On Beauty as examples of "lit lite," and Christine Brooke-Rose's Thru as a "slow read," as in "slow food," which is apparently a good thing. I guess another way of putting this would be, Martel and Levy and Smith are like popular food items that many people enjoy, but if you are someone who likes it when people say "Enjoying that orange? Let me tell you a two hour-long story about the grove it came from, which will somehow end up with me lecturing you against eating farm-raised shrimp," you will probably enjoy the Brooke-Rose book more.
The Turkish government has declined to approve charges against the country's most prominent author, leaving the decision to a local court that could drop the case, a government official said Sunday.
January 20, 2006
Anyone want to be an “expert literary witness”?
Next month, Ig Publishing will release Proud to Be Liberal, with contributors like Steve Almond, Laila Lalami, Maud Newton, Matthew Yglesias and Tom Tomorrow. (Via Pete Lit.)
And speaking of Colleen Mondor: Publishers want to publish her book, a novel about flying small planes in Alaska — but only if she lies and claims it's a memoir.
But when I wrote this book I didn't intend for it to be considered truth, I wasn't looking for truth. I just wanted to tell an honest story and sometimes that contains a true moment, but a true story - no. I can't swear to that and I can't write that.
How did the James Frey debacle happen? That's fucking how. In the meantime, I hope some publisher gets as lucky as Bookslut did, and signs Colleen on. (And look, publishers, I'd hurry if I were you. Colleen's an extremely rare talent; she won't be unsigned for long.)
The great lit mag Barrelhouse is having a pop culture essay contest.
At the Powell's blog, Alexis urges Oprah to start picking children's books for her club.
If only children's literature had an advocate as commanding and steadfast as Oprah. Imagine what it would be like if all of the millions of readers Oprah inspired were children? Children everywhere with their noses in books…wouldn't it be beautiful? And these children would grow up enamored of books, in love with reading. . . .
There are passionate booksellers, librarians, teachers, and, of course, parents, all over the country who have an effect, every day, on the reading habits of individual children. What we need now is a loud, insistent voice that can reach from coast to coast and across classes, to demand that children learn to read, to really read. Are you listening, Oprah?
Alexis suggests the work of John Bellairs, which is awesome — I didn't know anybody else remembered that guy. Or how about Michael Chabon's Summerland, one of the most intelligent YA novels of recent times? Or Walter Dean Myers' recent Autobiography of My Dead Brother, which our own Colleen Mondor loved?
David Foster Wallace on recording the audio version of his new book:
"Most poetry is written to ride on the breath, and getting to hear the poet read it is kind of a revelation and makes the poetry more alive. But with certain literary narrative writers like me, we want the writing to sound like a brain voice, like the sound of the voice inside of the head, and the brain voice is faster, is absent any breath, and it holds together grammatically rather than sonically."
If you're writing a sequel to a beloved children's book, the first thing you want to do is make sure the title can't be interpreted in any sexual, obscene way.
The title of the sequel to Peter Pan - JM Barrie's children's literary classic - has been revealed.
The new book, called Peter Pan in Scarlet, will reveal what happened to the boy who never grew up.
And the second thing you want to do...ah, fuck it.
John Freeman interviews EL Doctorow.
Here is a non-book-related public service announcement for all you Austin readers. If you are looking for something to do tonight, you should stop by Beerland at about midnight for the Just Guns CD release party. Their new album, Secrets/Spotlights, is out and you can buy it at Waterloo or End of an Ear, and hear some of it on their MySpace page. They are my favorite local band, and they are also very nice guys who will probably give you a big smile and thank you for coming to their show. The Austin American-Statesman, in their first accurate statement of the decade, calls them "a zippy mixture of country punk and Raspberries-style power pop." Go see them! There will be beer.
You have until Monday to enter Largehearted Boy's Robert Pollard fan fiction contest.
Catholic group Opus Dei has called for the film version of The Da Vinci Code novel to be given an adult rating.
The organisation says children should be protected from what it calls "insidious" lies about Catholicism.
Boyd Tonkin presents the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist. Among the finalists: Imre Kértesz (Fatelessness), Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore), and Dubravka Ugresic (The Ministry of Pain).
I’ve always been frustrated with the fact that people don’t realize how sexy — not necessarily in a sex-filled way, but sexy in a dirty, malicious, craven way — politics is. How come it is that when we see corruption and deceit on Desperate Housewives, that’s entertainment, but we refuse to see the absurdity and the entertainment value when it happens in politics?
Ana Marie Cox is interviewed at the Boston Phoenix about Dog Days.
The Village Voice interviews Center for Cartoon Studies co-founder and The Golem's Mighty Swing author James Sturm.
Intelligent magnetic poetry sets!
Katherine Houstoun interviews Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Prep, which found its way to like 700 best-of-the-year lists, and the forthcoming The Man of My Dreams.
I know that lots of people disagree with me, but I think that one idea of 'chick lit' is that it reinforces certain stereotypes or ideas about the world. It's sort of predictable rather than being more complex. . . . I tell people that I don't think my book is 'chick lit,' but that's an assessment for other people to make.
If you're thinking of reading Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man, don't. Read Susan Faludi's Stiffed instead. Twice the insight, none of the gimmick. (It should be on everyone's shelves already anyway.)
The Guardian profiles TS Eliot Poetry Award winner Carol Ann Duffy (Rapture). It's weird that people seem to be making a big deal about her sexual orientation. (She is a lesbian.)
"I have never felt that her sexuality is an issue in her work," said Peter Jay, Duffy's former publisher. "She has largely managed to transcend the issue by virtue of writing good poems as opposed to gender studies."
Nerve talks to James McManus, author of Positively Fifth Street and the new Physical.
As a writing teacher, I'm always getting questions from students like, "Can I write about this if it's going to embarrass my stepbrother or my mother or whoever?" And I say, yeah, you have to go there. You're sort of signing up for that embarrassment when you write.
"There is an incredible opportunity to mix the fun and the serious, the shallow and the profound and politics and entertainment," she said. "The common thread is that they have to do with women, whether they're on television or at a podium or I'm exploring the culture of hyper mommyhood and expensive strollers. It's not all feminism politics all the time. It's about how women get along with men and how they get along in the world."
Oh, Rebecca Traister. Is that what you're doing on VH-1 commentator shows? Bringing feminism to the masses by commenting on Brad Pitt's hair color? Keep fighting the good fight.
A British security guard has been sentenced to prison for stealing copies of the new Harry Potter book, trying to blackmail the book's publisher, and firing a starting pistol at a newspaper reporter. The perfect crime! Except for trying to extort Bloomsbury and shooting at the journalist and getting caught. But otherwise: The perfect crime!
January 19, 2006
Newcity Chicago talks to Andy Greenwald, whose new novel Miss Misery I am very much looking forward to reading. He's on a book tour — go here for dates — and will be in my hometown of Austin on Jan. 30, at BookPeople. Go see him, Austinites! The book looks great. (Via Largehearted Boy.)
The Stranger profiles Colin Meloy, author and lead singer of The Decemberists.
When pressed politely, he names Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Thomas Hardy among his favorite classical authors; Julian Barnes ("His latest novel, Arthur & George, is just amazing"), Nick Hornby ("I like him better as an essayist than a novelist"), and George MacDonald Fraser rate high on his list of contemporary writers.
Colin studied creative writing at the University of Montana, and his sister Maile's new novel, A Family Daughter, comes out next month. (Via Syntax of Things.)
The British writer Christopher Hitchens, one of the most reliable allies of the US administration's conduct of the war on terror, has joined a lawsuit seeking a ban on a domestic spy programme authorised by President George Bush.
Mike O'Brien thought he had it all. A semi-retired Internet millionaire, Mike had a beautiful wife and a relaxing life - until he discovered that his wife was part of possibly the greatest, and oldest, conspiracy in history. Dan Merchant and B. Scott Taylor's satiric, sharp novel tells the story of how stay-at-home wives communicate and collaborate to control the lives of married men. This hilarious romp details the wives' "Point System" (Leaves the toilet seat up: -100 points; Lets his mother-in-law visit for a month: +500 points), includes a quiz to determine if your wife is part of the conspiracy (Does your wife spend more than five hours a week at Starbucks?), and answers burning questions like, if men are the superior sex, why do they lose every argument with their stay-at-home wives?
Yes, seriously. It's a real book.
OH HOLY SHIT, A HUGE TALKING AARDVARK IS COMING TO PITTSBURGH, RUN NOW, SAVE YOURSELVES
Maud Newton misses Mark Twain. Me too.
Yeah, nobody reads. Unless you're a loser.
Paul Thomas Anderson is directing an adaptation of Upton Sinclair's Oil! starring Daniel Day Lewis. It's like the stars are aligning for me today. I should go try to play the lottery.
I bet Oprah misses Franzen.
The publisher and the translator of a new English-language edition of "Night," Elie Wiesel's harrowing account of life in the Nazi death camps, said yesterday that the new edition corrects several small factual errors in the previous translation, including a reference to the author's age when he entered the camps.
Some of Oprah's past picks are being questioned, too: It turns out that the heart is not a lonely hunter, she hasn't come undone, we weren't the Mulvaneys, and Wally Lamb does not know this much is true.
Frey: That night I injected heroin, crack, and horse tranquilizers into my eyeball.
Bystander: Want a Yoo-Hoo?
Oh my god, Drawn & Quarterly is restoring my childhood to me. They will be reprinting the Moomins! Five volumes of it! Hurry hurry hurry, Drawn & Quarterly! Moomins!
When I was in Dublin, I was allowed to hold a signed copy of Finnegans Wake on sale for 16,000 Euro. But only for a second, as I tend to break things. I felt all tingly at the time, but it seems I was holding one of Joyce's lesser books, at least in terms of money. A 1922 first edition of Ulysses will now cost you £100,000. That I doubt they would let me hold.
January 18, 2006
James Frey's DWI did not land him in Auschwitz.
Fourteen years after her death, Angela Carter is making a comeback, reports The Independent.
On Friday, this most theatrical of writers hits the stage of the Lyric, Hammersmith, with an adaptation of Nights at the Circus. In July, Vintage will reissue six of her works with new introductions and in June the South Bank Centre will hold a day of talks on her legacy. 2006 will, it seems, be the year to get Carter. All very nice, but why now?
Monica Ali (Brick Lane) has a new short story at The New Yorker.
Annalee Newitz: Why worry about JT Leroy when there are frauds like Woo-suk Hwang in the world?
You'd think JT had somehow faked his literary talent instead of simply masking his true identity. I mean, what difference does it make if JT is a girl or a boy? Why should we care whether he's the victim of abuse or merely a person whose writing about being abused is good enough that we could easily believe it was inspired by true experiences? It's not like he managed to convince one of the world's most respected science journals to print a pack of lies based on faked research. JT writes fiction. He doesn't need to do real-life research to back up his stories. Therefore it's no betrayal when it turns out he didn't.
(Via Largehearted Boy.)
Will Oprah's selection of Elie Wiesel's Night start yet another controversy?
Again, there's no denying the truth of Wiesel's experience. But he has his own problems with credibility, which Winfrey might wish to note. Not with the facts of his own life but with broader issues of historical truth and historical memory, which touch upon matters far more substantial than the number of hours James Frey spent behind bars.
For example, Wiesel does not believe that Gypsies and gays should be remembered alongside Jewish victims of the Holocaust, although hundreds of thousands of them perished. He has frowned upon the use of the term "genocide" in reference to the Armenian holocaust.
(Thanks to Carl for the link.)
The invaluable poetry blog Choriamb posts links to a profile of National Book Critics Circle award finalist Richard Siken, and a fascinating interview with the young poet. Bookslut reviewed Siken's book, Crush, last year.
The complete list of finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards:
Fiction
Europe Central by William T. Vollmann
The March by EL Doctorow
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Small Island by Andrea Levy
General Nonfiction
Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich
The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk
Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild by Ellen Meloy
Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees by Caroline Moorehead
Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War by Anthony Shadid
Memoir
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk
Them by Francine du Plessix Gray
Fat Girl by Judith Moore
Two Lives by Vikram Seth
Biography
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Mark Twain: A Life by Ron Powers
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
Lee Miller: A Life by Carolyn Burke
Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson by Jonathan Coe
Criticism
Still Looking: Essays on American Art by John Updike
Unnatural Wonders by Arthur C. Danto
Gather at the River: Notes From the Post-Millennial South by Hal Crowther
The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin by William Logan
What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles by Eliot Weinberger
Poetry
The Incentive of the Maggot by Ron Slate
Crush by Richard Siken
The Shout by Simon Armitage
Bent to Earth by Manuel Blas de Luna
Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert
It's great to see some recognition for Richard Siken, who's a great young poet, and for Eliot Weinberger's book from the great New Directions press. As for memoirs: Joan Didion has a new book? Why didn't anyone tell me?
(Kidding.)
Hostage American reporter Jill Carroll appeared in a silent 20-second video aired Tuesday by Al-Jazeera television, which said her abductors gave the United States 72 hours to free female prisoners in Iraq or she would be killed.
Don't you just love it when an author gets a great website? The new website for Julian Barnes's Arthur and George has games, a chance to win signed copies of his book, an excerpt, a photo gallery of both Arthur and George, and more.
Flak Magazine asks: In the wake of the James Frey controversy, who came out on top?
Winner: Judge Alito
Even the most liberal of Capitol Hill insiders were perplexed as to why he appeared to be doing so well after several days of providing boring, evasive answers to Senate Judiciary Committee questioning. Here's why: This news about Frey makes Sammy Boy seem credible. No matter what your political allegiances, Alito doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would make up a story about some stripper doing a line of coke off his dick.
Man. If his wife freaked out about the Concerned Whites of Princeton thing, I can only imagine how she'd react to that line of questioning.
January 17, 2006
It looks like it's going to be a pretty good year for new literature, but the book I'm most looking forward to is Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? Published by the great Chin Music Press, profiled last year in Bookslut, the book will be in stores next month — though Chin Music is taking pre-orders (with free shipping! Yeah!) right now. Profits from the book will go to Rebuilding Together, a great charity helping to preserve low-income neighborhoods in Orleans Parish. It's hard to think of a cause more worthy, and more sorely needed, than this one.
Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? features contributions from David Rutledge, Dar Wolnik, Jason Berry, and, most exciting for me, the great Colleen Mondor, author, blogger and invaluable Bookslut contributor. Chin Music has also launched a blog, Voices of New Orleans, and it's a good one. Go support them — they're a great indie press doing great things for the people of New Orleans, remembering the victims that President Bush has tried his best to forget.
And since we're on the subject, do yourself a favor and check out New Orleans, Mon Amour, a great collection of essays from Andrei Codrescu, released this month from the great Algonquin Books. It is impossible not to like Codrescu. Literally. Scientists have tested this, and the results are unequivocal. It's also worth noting that the Neighborhood Story Project books are available from Soft Skull, yet another great indie publisher. Bookslut interviewed Abram Shalom Himelstein, coordinator of the project, in 2004.
The Morning News needs your help determining nominees for The 2006 Tournament of Books. Nominate something good, people.
Egypt's Nobel prize-winning writer Naguib Mahfouz is seeking the endorsement of Sunni Islam's highest authority before re-releasing a novel that was condemned as blasphemous when first serialized nearly half a century ago, friends said.
Since finishing up Kathryn Davis's The Thin Place, I have left half finished books all over my apartment. Everything I started to read paled in comparison, and I started to get itchy, thinking I would never again find a book worth reading. (I go through this every time I read Elizabeth Bowen, too.) Then I picked up Gina Frangello's My Sister's Continent. Holy shit, people. I should have picked it up immediately after reading The Thin Place, because it's like that book's sister. But while Davis's book is all cut glass and beautiful, Frangello's is dark and sticky. Yesterday I realized I was trying to hold my breath through one of the sex scenes (although technically there was no sex in the scene, just an unfortunate use of freshly boiled tea). I just knew when I came across the Kathy Acker fragment "If you can't be it, fuck it," this book would be mine forever.
There is an interview with Frangello at Chiasmus Press, the publisher of My Sister's Continent. And Frangello will be reading (with Kathryn Davis! It's my dream come true!) at the February 16th Bookslut Reading Series. I'm hoping to convince her to read something deliciously dirty as the idea of a woman in her ninth month of pregnancy reading this stuff out loud just thrills me.
The idea of a DVD magazine full of odd little films still sounds great. But maybe it's the kind of idea that should be executed by somebody other than the editors of self-consciously weird literary magazines.
The Washington Post reviews the new McSweeney's/Believer venture, Wholpin.
I really haven't had enough caffeine to process this interview with Women Who Make the World Worse writer Kate O'Beirne, but I will say this: both of the women in this conversation are wrong. The truth is