September 30, 2008
The TLS on why Roger Casement is the most biographied (can't be bothered to think of a real word for that) and studied of all of the Irish leaders of 1916. (Hint: It might have something to do with his dirty, dirty diary.)
The clincher in stiffening opinion against [reprieve from sentence of execution] was the discreet but widespread circulation of diaries allegedly discovered among Casement’s possessions, detailing with unashamed relish his obsessive sexual exploits with boys and young men picked up in the streets, at home and abroad. Accompanying cash-ledgers recorded the payments usually (though not always) involved.
The Guardian has an idea about why DC Comics' Minx line failed: The books were boring.
Minx launched with The Plain Janes by Cecil Castellucci about four high school girls who play artistic pranks on their suburban town. Buffy creator Joss Whedon was reportedly a big fan, but I found it earnest and pallid – particularly since the pranks in question are unimaginative, which is enough to sink the whole concept... The Plain Janes, like most of the Minx books that followed, lacks the exuberance and naughtiness that you get in really good young adult reading.
In case you're wondering how to spend Banned Books week (that would be this week, apparently), the Haphazard Gourmet has your diet covered. They're matching recipes with challenged books, including fairy cakes to eat as you enjoy your Eloise ("In a separate bowl, beat each of the Eggs individually, as if you're a peace officer trying to quell the mob of religious zealots rioting in the streets when Salmon Rushdie's The Satanic Verses first came out."), and a trifle (seriously? no kidneys?) with Ulysses.
Then, once you're loaded up with sugar, you can shame yourself with this Guardian quiz about banned books.
You can now watch Eddie Campbell's reading at the Hopleaf from July 2008, along with our interview with the fella.
September 29, 2008
Nina Katchadourian's stories constructed out of book spines. (From TMN.)
Tao Lin is interviewed at NYU Local.
My advice for NYU students who want to go into writing is “I don’t know what advice to give you.”
Next month Telegram will be publishing Jesus del Campo's A History of the World for Rebels and Somnambulists, and thank Christ for that. (Look for Elizabeth Bachner's review in the next issue of Bookslut.) Actually, Telegram is doing some amazing stuff lately, as Metropole, my latest addiction, comes out the same week. I wish Telegram had excerpts from their books online, so you could read a bit of History's absolute (charming) insanity, but all I can find is del Campo's "Immortality has nothing on the Roma–Lazio derby" in the Drawbridge.
Then a spokesman stepped forward to speak on behalf of the demonstrators and read a manifesto in Latin.
"After deep discussions," he said, "we have decided to put aside our differences of creed, which at this moment seem of secondary importance, and have agreed to come here, to the centre of world religion, to express our shared conviction that what we have to go through and suffer is simply not fair. No, Your Holiness. It's not fair that we should be weighed down with uncertainty about our final destiny for all our lives, on top of all the other hardships which keep us in a permanent state of discomfort, as well as being blackmailed to do the right thing left, right and centre under the threat of eternal punishment. We have realized that we are all united by the same anxiety, and because of this we want Your Holiness to communicate our protest to He who has appointed you as His representative on earth."
NPR profiles Achewood genius Chris Onstad, and offers an excerpt from his new graphic novel The Great Outdoor Fight.
Steve Marsh on John Berryman's increasing popularity.
Cause of death aside, there may be another reason Berryman is poised for revival: His haunting Dream Songs, though more than forty years old, are startlingly modern—confessional like a blog, with the abbreviated syntax of the text message, and infused with the kind of protective irony that permeates the Internet. Like an online role-playing game, Berryman’s poems even contain an avatar, “Huffy Henry,” when the poet was feeling intolerably eggheaded, and “Henry House, the steadiest man on the block,” when he was feeling more manly and stable. Berryman’s self-awareness is a prototype of our modern brand of ironic self-defense. Dream Songs anticipate the way we communicate now in a way the verse of his contemporaries—Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell—doesn’t.
The London home of the publisher of a controversial new novel that gives a fictionalised account [Jewel of Medina] of the Prophet Muhammad's relationship with his child bride, Aisha, was firebombed yesterday, hours after police had warned the man that he could be a target for fanatics.
A petrol bomb is believed to have been thrown through the door of Martin Rynja's £2.5m town house in Islington's Lonsdale Square, which also doubles as the headquarters of his publishing company, Gibson Square. Three men have been arrested on terrorism charges.
September 26, 2008
After a year of reading spiritual memoirs, a small rant about the subject was inevitable. In my latest column at the Smart Set, it was Surprised by God that was the last straw...
You would think that the spiritual memoir would be a stand out division — after all, if the writer has seen the face of God, he or she should probably get a good story out of that. For centuries, people have been telling stories about spiritual experiences, listing out their sins, telling tales of redemption and light at the end of a very dark tunnel. These past few years, however, have seen a crazy rush on the subject matter, with everyone who has ever thought about religion feeling the need to write about it. Approximately half the United States population will convert or adapt their religious beliefs at some point in their lifetime, which equals a lot of potential memoirists.
I suppose the thought process behind publishing these books is that since it’s in the air of our culture, those who are seeking will want to hear other people’s stories. But the same rules from other memoirs apply — just because you lived through something, that doesn’t mean you have anything interesting to say about it. Perhaps the bar is set too high by the original spiritual memoirist, St. Augustine. In his book, he had a great hook — "Give me chastity and continence, but not yet" — and managed to invent the concept of original sin. It’s not like a recent convert to, say, Judaism is going to top that.
Minx, a teenage girl-oriented imprint of DC Comics, has been canceled.
If you're traveling constantly, waking up in beds you don't recognize, and slightly worried about the fact that next month you'll be in a country where you don't speak a lick of the language for an extended period, do not pack Metropole as your reading material. The story of a man who accidentally wandered onto the wrong plane, fell asleep and woke up in a country so bizarre he can't seem to communicate a thing. He has no idea where he is, can't find a way back to the airport, and has lost his passport. I started reading it during my trip to New York, where I was beyond miserable half the time, and the anxiety of the book is so catching I had to put it away until I got back home.
That said, when you're safe in your own bed, recognizing the buildings outside your window, Metropole is fantastic. But after reading it, just try not to triple check every plane and train you board for weeks.
Over at Search Magazine, Bookslut's own Barbara J King reviews books on the evolution and spirituality of music.
Fifty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens crafted flutes from animal bone. Later, Ice Age artists painted glorious horse and bison images on cave walls, and, one acoustic expert concludes, placed the images precisely where the cave’s topography would have best amplified the sounds of singing or instrument playing.
The Giller Prize longlist is out, and I subtly detect signs that award juror MP Bob Rae is source of amusement for Canadian readers. I'm always trying to impress Canadians, so: Bob Rae! Judging a book award! What next, a dog on rollerskates?
David Adams Richards for The Lost Highway
David Bergen for The Retreat
Joseph Boyden for Through Black Spruce
Austin Clarke for More
Anthony De Sa for Barnacle Love
Emma Donoghue for The Sealed Letter
Marina Endicott for Good to A Fault
Steven Galloway for The Cellist of Sarajevo
Rawi Hage for Cockroach
Kenneth J Harvey for Blackstrap Hawco
Patrick Lane for Red Dog, Red Dog
Pasha Malla for The Withdrawal Method
Paul Quarrington for The Ravine
Nino Ricci for The Origin of the Species
Mary Swan for The Boys in the Trees
The happy (but hatless) Patrick Ness is smiling over at The Guardian, having won their children's fiction prize for The Knife of Never Letting Go.
September 25, 2008
Failbetter.com has two excellent new poems by Sherman Alexie, "How to Create an Agnostic" & "Mystery Train."
Flagg Miller, a scholar of Arabic poetry, is bringing out a study of Osama bin Laden's poetry, based on audio recordings from bin Laden's Afghanistan compound. The BBC has an audio clip. Meanwhile, Abu Hamza is apparently able to release poems to YouTube from prison.
Wave Books, which I love, gets a writeup in Publisher's Weekly.
The biennial Dodge Poetry Festival started Thursday in NJ. Attendees have started uploading video, such as this clip of Simon Armitage, to YouTube. The festival itself has recently uploaded highlights from 2006.
At the Boston Review, Robert von Hallberg has an excellent review-essay on American poets and war: The poets have been looking for the nation—for our operative ideals of collectivity. These poets write as citizens of a bloody republic, but not as outsiders. In their poems, not revolution but pending policy decisions are clearly visible or easily imaginable—the incarceration of foreign nationals, for example, or aerial bombardment of Iran. What can be named can be considered, supported or opposed, with awareness of costs. (While you're there, don't miss Colin Dayan on Aimé Césaire or the sampler of poems by Ashley Capps.
Joshua Kryah (see my review of Glean) reads John Clare's "Where he told her love" as part of the Romantic Circles's Poets on Poets series.
Finally, just in time for the weekend: "Sexual terms that aren't technically onomatopoetic but should be."
September 24, 2008
A children's author who may want to invest in a new hat is Jeanne Willis, since her book, The Bog Baby, is cleaning up at various British book awards. I bet Ian McEwan is gnashing his teeth, wishing he'd come up with that title.
Eva Ibbotson talks to The Guardian about being listed for the Astrid Lindgren Stonking Great Piles of Cash* Memorial Award:
"It's not bad, is it," she said. "I think I would probably accept it if they offered it to me - you can't turn it down because it's too meagre. There are 152 other applicants, so one can't be certain of winning ... one won't go out and buy a hat quite yet."
*£410,000.
The granddaughter of Anne of Green Gables' author Lucy Maud Montgomery has revealed that her grandmother killed herself with a drugs overdose at the age of 67. LM Montgomery, who died in 1942, is one of Canada's best-loved authors, and wrote 19 other novels as well as the hugely popular children's classic...
Macdonald Butler was also prompted to break the family's silence by the heightened focus on Montgomery this year, which marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Anne of Green Gables.
Chester Brown's new zombie comic is available online as a PDF.
If you haven't picked up a copy of James Thurber's 13 Clocks, recently reissued by NYRB, you're missing out. Sonja Bell reviews it for the LA Times. Today ArtsJournal linked to this short film with Thurber, "It's My World and Welcome To It."
There have been a few disappointing moments writing my cookbook column for the Smart Set. Pretty much everything that came out of the Oprah book, for example. Or the semifreddo I made last week, which was delicious but for some reason separated into layers. Then there are the transcendent moments where everything works out perfectly. Like the pizza in Wolfgang Puck Makes It Easy. I was determined to finally make a pizza that was not disgusting or basically focaccia because I've done enough of that in my life already:
I have made some horrendous pizzas in my day, starting when I was around 7, and discovered that I could take an English muffin, cover it with ketchup and dried oregano, top it with a slice of American cheese, and stick it in the oven for a few minutes. (Seriously, God bless my father for eating these monstrosities without visibly gagging. He always waited until I left the room, proud as punch, before he raided the refrigerator for some real food.)
Oh my god, I used "p-word as punch" again. Where did this come from? This is even more disturbing than when I realized I kept saying "fixin to" because at least then I was living in Texas. If you need me, I'll be on my fainting couch.
September 23, 2008
Apparently I am the type of person to say "pleased as punch." When people are around. With tape recorders. I'm not sure who I was channeling when I said that, but there you go. Life is a journey of self-discovery, I hear.
It always happens: suddenly publishers release two or three books on some obscure subject at the exact same time. Thomas Barlett talks to writers who thought they had found a singular topic, only to discover they have competition.
The Guardian digests Philip Roth's Indignation.
The prevailing sexual code of the time was dry-humping with no orgasmic discharge but I wanted to experience intercourse before I died. I invited Olivia Hutton, a girl I noticed in the library, to dinner. On the way home I tentatively kissed her. Unprompted, she gave me a blow job.
There is an award for best magazine cover. I'm a little sad there's no category for most egregious use of Photoshop by a woman's fashion magazine. The list of finalists is here, the gallery of nominees is here.
DD Gutenplan uses this review in the Nation of David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague and Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics to write about the "rich history of comics."
Proust can keep his madeleines. For me, nothing brings back that childhood sensation of safety, or the inky smell of clandestine pleasure, quite like Batman No. 166, "Two-Way Deathtrap!" in which the caped crime fighter, confiding the details of a nightmare to Robin, is overheard by a villain who proceeds to turn Batman's fevered dream into deadly reality. Or the next issue, No. 167, with "Zero Hour for Earth"--a "book-length spy-thriller" in which Batman jets off to fight the criminal organization Hydra.
Ayelet Waldman has created Books for Barack, a fundraiser that can score you rare signed first editions from many fine authors.
If you donate $250 or more to Barack Obama's campaign through Ayelet's MyBarackObama website, you will receive a mystery bag of 10 books, all in a canvas tote printed with the BOOKS FOR BARACK logo. The bags will be assembled randomly and tied closed so that no one — not even Ayelet — will know the contents of any specific bag. Your bag could contain a signed first edition copy of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, a signed first edition copy of Stephen King's Hearts of Atlantis or a fine collection of poetry by a writer you've been waiting to discover.
Alex Ross, author of The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century is a genius.
Oh What Fun... Hairy Green Eyeball has scanned pages from the books we used in our first grade class, Miriam Story Hurford's Days of Fun. (Link from Journalista.)
September 22, 2008
Bookslut's Indie Heartthrob Interview Series
A weekly interview series where someone involved in the small press (be it writer, editor, slush slave, etc.) is thrown into the spotlight, grilled over the state of the independents and sundry other items, and quickly made to return from whence they came after having graced us all with their presence.
This week: Michael Kimball
Michael Kimball's first novel was rejected 119 times. Then it came out in the US and UK and became available in six languages. Gives you hope, doesn't it? Now his third novel in, Kimball's Dear Everybody tells the life story of a meteorologist via his unsent letters to his parents, ex-girlfriends, the Easter Bunny, and Michigan among others after his suicide. Check out the book trailer and other projects at Kimball's website. And if you're in the New York area, you'd better see him read at Litquake's NYC Lit Crawl on Saturday, September 27. That is, of course, if you know what's good for you.
Dear Everybody is written in a very unusual way–correspondence. When you first came up with the idea, what were some reactions you've heard from colleagues and friends? Which one stuck out the most, and did it hold true?
When I told people that I was writing a novel about a man writing letters of apology to nearly everybody he knew (and that through doing so, he would tell his life story), most of my friends kind of loved the idea. You could almost see them starting to think about the letters that they would write. But the reaction that stuck out most was a writer friend who when he saw the first couple of chapters said, “You can’t do this.” That’s when I knew that I had something good.
Do you have a favorite letter from the book?
I love a bunch of different letters, but my one favorite is a very short letter:
Dear Mom and Dad,
Here’s the reason that I pulled the stitching out of my feather pillow and then pulled all of the feathers out of it too: I thought that I was going to find a bird.
Do you think the letter format is more successful in keeping the average reader's attention span? Let's face it, not everyone wants to read a 3-page paragraph on the state of Russian farming in 1835 anymore, as much as we hate to admit it…
I try very hard to keep the reader’s attention, to not let the reader look away, and I think the short letters help to do that. I like the fast pace that the letters create—moving quickly from one piece to another—and the way that they make the narrative compelling from a structural standpoint. Last week, a friend sent me a link to something that Brandi Wells posted on her blog: “I got Michael Kimball's Dear Everybody in the mail on Friday and I've read about half of it. I want to quit doing other things that I am doing and just read this book.” That’s what I was trying to do.
How did "Excerpts from the Suicide Letters of Jonathon Bender (b. 1967-d.1999)" differ from Dear Everybody? Were there any fundamental changes that went into the story during the transition to novel?
As the title of the story suggests, “Excerpts” really was just a bunch of the suicide letters, 20 or so. This was from an early stage of the novel when it was almost completely just letters. But then I created a frame for the novel—added the obituary that opens the novel, the introduction from Jonathon’s unreliable brother who doesn’t really like him, the eulogy from his ex-wife, the last will and testament. After that, a bunch of other documents and elements became part of the novel—diary entries from his mother, notes home from his teachers, to-do lists, psychological evaluations, weather reports, a missing person flyer.
Tell me about your new project, "Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard)."
My friend Adam Robinson was one of the curators for a performance art festival, the Transmodern in Baltimore, and he asked me if I wanted to participate. I asked him what he thought a writer could do as performance and we made some jokes about that. But then I suggested that I could write people’s life stories for them and then I remembered this bunch of postcards that I had just gotten in the mail. That's how the project started. The first postcard I wrote was for Bart O’Reilly, a painter, who quit art school in Dublin to work as an ice cream man in Ocean City, which is how he met the woman who became his wife. When I finished the postcard and looked up, a line had formed. For the rest of the night, I interviewed dozens of people, wrote each person’s life story, and then gave them the postcard. I did this for four hours straight without getting up out of the chair that I was sitting in. Since then, I have interviewed over 100 people over the telephone and through email. The one thing that I have learned so far is that everybody is amazing.
You're also working on a documentary entitled I Will Smash You. Can you tell me a little more about this? What is the film about, and how are you involved?
I Will Smash You is a documentary film that I'm making with Luca Dipierro and Black Arrow Studio. We asked people to choose an object that had some personal meaning for them and then to destroy it in any way that they wished—an idea that grew out of the trailer for Dear Everybody. I interviewed each person about their object, the story behind it—though I was off to the side, off-camera the whole time, just a voice asking questions. Then we let each person do whatever he or she needed to do to the object that they brought with them. In the trailer, Adam’s troubled relationship with Christianity leads him [to] sing a favorite hymn and then take a baseball bat to the notes that are in the air around him. Then you see Ella walking down the alley behind my house with a papier-mâché version of her mean teacher's head and then there is a glimpse Betsy working over the windshield of her Ford Taurus, which was cursed. There are 20-some different chapters like that.
What are you reading now? Do you have a specific writer(s) you draw from about when working on your own projects?
I’m reading Deb Olin Unferth’s Vacation, which is great. I’m also reading John Darnielle’s Black Sabbath's Master of Reality, which is a novel and a piece of music criticism at the same time. I’m always looking for great, new, different books to read, but there are writers I do go back to over and over—Faulkner, particularly. I read a few different books nearly every year—DeLillo’s End Zone, Crawford’s Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine, Davis’ The End of the Story.
"The Greatest Hamlet of Our Time"
The New Republic looks at the war over the new Russian textbooks.
"You may ooze bile but you will teach the children by those books that you will be given and in the way that is needed by Russia. And as to the noble nonsense that you carry in your misshapen goateed heads, either it will be ventilated out of them or you yourself will be ventilated out of teaching.... It is impossible to let some Russophobe shit-stinker (govnyuk), or just any amoral type, teach Russian history. It is necessary to clear the filth, and if it does not work, then clear it by force."
David Gessner (read Bookslut's interview with him here) on what having so many writers making their livings as teachers means for the state of literature in this country.
While everyone in the world appears to be publishing I Met David Foster Wallace That One Time in College pieces in every newspaper and magazine, Harpers has made Wallace's work in their magazine available online: Read "The Depressed Person" (PDF)
Joanna Weiss writes about toothless fairy tales. The biggest problem these fairy princesses encounter is having nothing to wear to the ball.
The book went on to spin the tale of a charmed girl named Rapunzel, who spent her days in the tower sewing dresses with a friend. She loved when the witch came to visit and teach songs, including one that made Rapunzel's hair grow longer. But tension arrived: One day, Rapunzel looked out the window and saw a fair in the village nearby. She wanted to go, but the witch was off tending to her garden and couldn't let her out. Fortunately, a prince riding by in his carriage called up to her, "Rapunzel! Why aren't you at the fair?"
It was one of those strange things, meeting a documentarian (Laura Zinger, of Brown Finch Films) who had a film crew ready. We started talking about what we would do if we had the time, if we could ignore the fact for a second that I didn't know what I was doing. Enter in a margarita or two at the Twisted Spoke, and what do you know? All of a sudden we're bringing in Eddie Campbell for our little experiment and we're filming the first episode of Bookslut TV? The Bookslut Interviews? Who knows! I'm putting it up before I think better of the whole situation, or at least start watching it again and yelling "What the hell is going on with my hair?"
Soon we'll have a few other related items... video of a story Eddie told during his reading and a transcript of the unedited interview. But for now, enjoy our first video interview, Episode 1: Eddie Campbell.
September 19, 2008
I know I am the only person in the world who didn't like Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal -- I can't explain it. It felt trite and mean spirited to me, and all the characters seemed unbelievable. Heller has a new book out, called The Believers. I can't decide if I'll give Heller another chance or not, but apparently I already have John Crace's permission to dislike it. Hooray, at least one person in the world won't look at me like I'm a loon when I admit I only kept reading the book out of disgust. Crace digests the book for the Guardian.
"Where's my pot?" Audrey shouted, when Rosa arrived. "And how could you have become an Orthodox Jew?"
"Because I'm as much of a caricature as you are," Rosa replied. "And I'm rebelling against you and Dad in my own way, you bitch."
"Excuse me," Karla whispered. "We can all represent something in our own ways. I'm the fat, compliant, barren one who is married to a dull union lawyer."
Brian Doyle on the poetry of the rejection letter.
Slate looks at casting for audiobooks, and how it occasionally goes wrong. For example, Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader for a Day:
The reader, actor Reg Rogers, is a white guy. Every character but the Indian-American narrator is black. This is always tricky audiobook territory, but here, not only has Rogers unwisely chosen to bring a little "sound of the street" to his characters, he's opted to bring the sound of the street from movies of the 1960s. JT, a twentysomething gang lieutenant, sounds like Sydney Poitier circa In the Heat of the Night. Ex-gang members in their 50s veer toward Fred Sanford at best, Uncle Remus at worst.
Every time an Alan Moore work is adapted to film, someone has to write an article about his surly relationship with Hollywood. This time it's a Watchmen/LA Times pairing. At least he's always entertaining.
"It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The 'Watchmen' film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I, for one, am sick of worms. Can't we get something else? Perhaps some takeout? Even Chinese worms would be a nice change."
The poet and critic Reginald Shepherd died last week at 45. On Shepherd's blog, his partner Robert Philen has posted a memorial, as well as Shepherd's last poem. Shepherd was the author of Some Are Drowning (1993), Angel Interrupted (1996), Wrong (1999), Otherhood (2003), and Fata Morgana (2007), along with a book of essays earlier this year, Orpheus in the Bronx.
The comment thread at Harriet is an excellent tribute to his impact as a poet and critic, but also don't miss Robert Archambeau's retrospective review of Shepherd's books, Lawrence La Riviere White's heartfelt testimonial at The Valve or this unfinished interview he gave Steven Augustine. As usual, Ron Silliman has collected a comprehensive set of links. Shepherd was the first poet who I encountered first online as a blogger, and his flexible, rigorous intellect was welcome in any medium. I still love a post from a year ago today, "Against Identity Poetry, For Possibility": The impulse to explain poetry as a symptom of its author's biography or its social context is pervasive these days, including among authors themselves. But that has always seemed to me a form of self-imprisonment, neglecting or even negating the possibilities poetry offers not just of being someone else, anyone and/or everyone else, but of being no one at all, of existing, however contingently, outside the shackles of identity and definition.
--
A few other links:
Wave Books has launched a new blog, PoetryPolitic: A Blog in 50 Days, that will publish poetic/political news until the election. (And see their book: State of the Union: 50 Political Poems.)
Not poetry, but: I've got three interviews up in various places this month: here at Bookslut with Kate Summerscale, author of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher; at Clarkesworld Magazine with Richard K. Morgan, author of Thirteen; and at PopMatters with Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, editors of Steampunk.
No wonder kids read less today: Their parents can't even be bothered to read to them!
Video of Johnny Depp reading Ginsberg and Kerouac.
Finally, the most appropriate David Foster Wallace tribute of all: NASCAR's.
September 18, 2008
National Endowment For The Arts Funds Construction Of $1.3 Billion Poem
John Warner on the disillusionment process of a publishing upstart:
Now, after two years of, let’s call it, non-success, I understand that the problem is at least as much about publicity and distribution as it is about quality. (At least I hope that’s the problem.) So I’m here to announce that if TOW Books is going to fail at publishing, we are going to fail in our own spectacularly new way.
Book publishers can be sued if they publish a book full of libelous statements because, the reasoning goes, a publisher should know what it prints. The publisher reviews the manuscript, edits and proofreads it, and distributes the finished book to retailers. It is involved in every part of the process.
But the Internet has given rise to a new breed of printing company, a hands-off model that doesn’t get involved with the writing process at all. Online print-on-demand companies specialize in printing books exactly as they appear on submission, without any changes. If print-on-demand services don’t exercise any oversight over their books, are they still liable when those books are found to contain defamatory statements?
Emily Perkins received some criticism for setting her latest novel in London, instead of her home country of New Zealand. The accusation being, I suppose, that she was selling out for the larger London audience. She talks to the New Zealand Listener.
“Look, I’m getting angry about this again now,” she says. “I’m on my feet, walking around the room and pointing my finger! When we keep saying, ‘Who are we? Who are we?’ When we say, ‘We must only write books about New Zealand’, well – this runs perilously close to saying what we should be, and then we get programmatic and moralistic. Which is fucked. Go and live in Soviet Russia!”
NPR has my review of Perkin's Novel About My Wife up.
September 17, 2008
Gawker examines the latest blogs-to-books. Yuck, sorry, need a shower just writing that.
Passive Aggressive Notes
A blogfull of—yep—passive-aggressive notes. Maybe if it's sold on a table at Urban Outfitters alonside those "things to do when you're stoned" and sex position joke books. But does anyone want a book full of funny pictures of notes? You can't e-mail those to your friends! Verdict: DO NOT WANT
If you're getting ready to read Boris Kachka's New York Magazine article on the state of publishing, please remove sharp objects from your apartment first. From ridiculous advances to broken bookstores to the smart people fleeing big publishing... I kept hoping for a talking unicorn to show up and tell everyone the answer.
Sticky Pages
Prolific sex writer Violet Blue rivals Rachel Kramer Bussel for my erotica love and admiration. If you’re not reading Blue’s website, Tiny Nibbles, then, well, what are you doing on the internet?
Lips Like Sugar: Women’s Erotic Fantasies edited by Ms. Blue, is a very delicious slice of imagination. I love that the assumption is that the reader will suspend disbelief because these are fantasies. It’s a great premise for a collection. Anything goes.
Today’s Sticky Pages features a woman who was at work, fantasizing about her husband, only to cancel her lunch appointment and dash down to the construction project he’s supervising. He’s tied her up on the unfinished kitchen island in an unfinished home.
And remember everyone, it’s just a fantasy.
Page 6, “Quick Fix” by Heather Peltier from Lips Like Sugar: Women’s Erotic Fantasies, edited by Violet Blue.
“I’ve been wondering how to reward my men for working so hard,” you growl into my ear and my back stiffens, my pussy flooding with heat as you torment me. I feel one hand grinding the sandpaper very lightly against my ass and thighs, the other hand pressing against my pussy and clit. Two fingers enter me, and I gasp. “A monetary bonus just didn’t seem like it would satisfy them. How kind of you to provide the perfect reward for a hard day’s work.”
The heat rises in my pussy as I push back onto you, your fingers pumping me as your growl intensifies, your breath hot and the smell of your sweat close in my nostrils.
“How about if I just leave you here and let them use you for as long as they like? We wouldn’t get much work done this afternoon, but I’m sure they’d work twice as hard tomorrow.”
I moan softly, writhing in the bonds, pushing back onto you as hard as I can as you finger-fuck me. Your cock still juts out of your open pants, still moist with my spittle, still hard. When you ease your fingers out of my pussy and toss the sandpaper away, I know what’s coming.
September 16, 2008
In New York to talk to the AAP tomorrow, and too tired to hold a thought in my head. We'll chat soon.
September 15, 2008
Bookslut's Indie Heartthrob Interview Series
A weekly interview series where someone involved in the small press (be it writer, editor, slush slave, etc.) is thrown into the spotlight, grilled over the state of the independents and sundry other items, and quickly made to return from whence they came after having graced us all with their presence.
This week: Miriam Toews
Miriam Toews, author of A Complicated Kindness just released her newest novel The Flying Troutmans. With a voice bordering on lyricism, Toews created a road novel in which a mismatched family (minus the mother, Min, who is in an asylum) crosses the border from Canada to the United States in search of an absent father. Whether it's a one way trip or a return is yet to be seen by the time Hattie, her nephew, Logan, and her niece, Thebes, take off for South Dakota, and Hattie quickly (if not half-reluctantly) concludes that she is becoming a parent.
Toews spoke to me briefly from Vancouver while on a book tour in support of her novel.
Where did the story for The Flying Troutmans come from?
I had always wanted to write a road story but hadn't really figured out how to. I needed my characters to have a good and urgent reason for being on the road in the first place and that's how the story developed.
Would you call this a "road novel" in the same vein as a "road movie" (e.g.: Paris, TX, TransAmerica, The Straight Story, but certainly not Crossroads)? Do you think your characters develop in a similar fashion on their journey?
Yeah, I think so. I love those movies you mention (don't know Crossroads, though). Stranger than Paradise is a great road movie, too!
One of the most interesting characters I came across was Thebes, Hattie's somewhat awkward 11 year old niece. How did you construct her? She reminds me of the little sisters of so many childhood friends…
My daughter inspired the character of Thebes to a certain degree. She was a similar type of 11 year old. She is 18 now and infinitely more sophisticated.
Hattie has an affinity for Lucinda Williams' heartbreak songs, much to Logan's dismay. Do they hold a special significance in your own life as well?
I love Lucinda Williams. She's a brilliant songwriter and the way she sings, her voice, her delivery, everything, is amazing. Sad, beautiful, raunchy, tender, smart, angry, it's great road music…. Yeah, I've had my heart broken a few times in this life….
Tell me about your work on This American Life. Your piece from the episode "Testosterone" recalls similar themes to your newest novel…
Yeah, that's true. That piece is pretty old but I wrote it when my kids were around the same age as the characters in the book.
How do you feel writing for radio differs from, say, a novel? Do you have a preference?
Well, I think it's pretty much the same except for the length. I haven't done a lot of writing for radio so I'm not too sure.
What are you working on next?
I'm thinking about another novel, taking a few notes, trying to figure some stuff out. It's embryonic at this point, but maybe it'll turn into something eventually.
September 14, 2008
David Foster Wallace, whose darkly ironic novels, essays and short stories garnered him a large following and made him one of the most influential writers of his generation, was found dead in his California home on Friday, after apparently committing suicide, the authorities said.
I remember weeping a lot over Spalding Gray's death, so I guess my primary reaction to this news is, Is Everyone Okay?
September 12, 2008
The Mercantile Library Center for Fiction does a whole array of book prizes (three of them), so you're bound to find one that fits your special needs. This month the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize dinner provides the opportunity for authors to put on some fancy pants outfit and celebrate the rookies. If it weren't for the phenomenon of the first novel, we'd never be blessed with difficult second novels, or prequels, sequels, contract-plugging short story collections, or the foaming at the mouth, post-Book Fair, 'Hot New Author Sparks Bidding War!' PR releases. Praise be.
The 2008 shortlist looks like this:
Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen
The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti
Songs for the Butcher's Daughter by Peter Manseau
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block
The 2007 John Sargent winner went on to do quite nicely, so keep an eye on this one.
Robert Heinlein's form letter sent in response to fan mail. (From Largehearted Boy.)
While Janice Galloway admits that deciding to write your memoirs smells of self-obsession, she tells the Guardian why she wrote This is Not About Me. (Whatever. I'd read anything she decided to write.)
"I've wondered what the notion of family is supposed to mean. I knew something had been wrong with mine - I think most people know that about theirs - but when you have your own children or you have children to look after, you really wonder which of the mistakes you may be passing on ... You can acknowledge that what happened to you could have happened to anyone, but you also need to acknowledge that it happened to you. What's important is that you deal with it so you don't pass it on."
Jeani Ziering, an interior designer in Manhasset, N.Y., says the newfound popularity of libraries is part of a general movement toward traditional design and décor. "When the economy turns bad, people turn to the classics," she says. Libraries are especially appealing during anxious times because they project coziness and comfort, she adds.
Before you start thinking people are turning to the Chicago Public Library copy of Charles Dickens for comfort, you should know that by "libraries," they mean "rooms in houses that maybe have books in them, and those books are mostly likely unread." But who doesn't love rolling ladders?
September 11, 2008
Lulu Eightball cartoonist Emily Flake sits down with some how-to-draw comics guides. (Link from Journalista.)
The UK and US marketing strategy for the French blockbuster The Elegance of the Hedgehog is to hide its French origins.
"I think it's a great book but it's going to struggle a bit in the UK," says Jonathan Ruppin, promotions buyer at independent bookshop Foyles. "The British reading public are unduly wary of foreign fiction. And the plot is not the main aspect of this book - it's more subservient to philosophical and sociological observations, and I find with the UK market now the plot is what people want more than anything else. Something esoteric and tricksy is difficult to sell."
There is nothing like a hideously written science book that makes you grateful for writers who can get complex ideas across the page in entertaining, concise manners. Gayle Greene's Insomniac is a goddamn mess. It's all the more painful for the fact that it's hard to find any information on insomnia, so it's not like I could ditch this one and pick up something else instead. But Greene goes around in circles, rambles on in passages that desperately need to be cut, and has an unpleasant, cranky voice. Every two pages I would want to put it down and read something else, and I had to keep myself occupied by reading it in front of a CSI marathon.
I finally finished the damn thing, and can now diagnose my troubled sleep with ease. And if you're interested in reading it for ideas on how to finally get a good night's sleep, I should tell you: no one knows how to fix insomnia. No one knows really what it is or why some people have it. The rest of the book I outline in my Smart Set column.
In case you don't want to read the Booker short list (and come on, really), the Guardian digests the nominees so you can pretend you did.
September 10, 2008
Books Un-Covered
I just moved into a new apartment and have been obsessively reading decorating magazines. “Decorating with books” seems to be a popular suggestion. Apparently the Pottery Barn catalog came out a couple years ago picturing shelves with the books facing the wrong way -- pages outward, as though the spines were too ugly to look at -- and other magazines, including Country Home, have used the same technique. I assume they have a typed index of all the book titles somewhere, in order to find a particular one. Or maybe the books aren’t meant to be read. I suppose this way, the books don’t have to have nice covers, and you don’t have to own only impressive books to dazzle your guests. You could display your Sweet Valley High collection and nobody would know.
I went to a friend’s apartment recently and he had propped up his dart board with a stack of about a hundred paperbacks. “It kept falling off the nail,” he explained. This is the reason he could not lend me any of his Philip Roth novels.
In the current issue of Domino, the Scouting section lists books with attractive spines, ideal for decorating. They had the Melville House Art of the Novella series, Overlook Press’s collector’s editions of P.G. Wodehouse, and the Persephone Books collection, among others. Personally, I think it looks a bit too much like a bookstore to have whole rows of identical untouched books, but one time in a Barnes & Noble, I walked by an entire shelf filled with Penguin Classics, and I have to admit seeing them all together like that had incredible visual impact.
Other suggestions: group your books by size, genre, or alphabetically. I arranged mine by color. It took a long time. I couldn’t decide whether my new copy of Evening Is the Whole Day should go with the blue-greens or the oranges.
ABC Far North asks Eddie Campbell and Dan Best (The Amazing, Remarkable Monsieur Leotard) to "explain" comic books. "Explain the genre for me, explain what the appeal is for reading a comic when you're an adult." Lordy. (From Journalista.)
There's always a little anxiety when inviting brand new people over for dinner. You can pull out flawless meal after flawless meal for the friends who will love you no matter what, but then someone new shows up and everything goes awry. Last week, my oven when screwy, or seemed to, when two new people came over. I explain in my review of The Book of New Israeli Food, my favorite cookbook of the year.
The problem came when I put the pashtida in the oven. It was set for 400 degrees, it was burning at 400 degrees, and yet after the 25 minutes baking time it was still raw. Not runny or not quite done, but raw. I checked on it 10 minutes later, and it was still raw. At first I fumed over the cookbook’s baking time error as my hungry friends helped themselves to more salad and began to eye the apple cake. But as an hour passed with no change in the doneness, I began to hypothesize other reasons. Perhaps the chickens had been raised by Satan worshippers, and therefore the eggs were cursed. Or maybe a ghost was manifesting itself in the center of my oven, absorbing the energy and leaving a cold spot.
They reprint the recipe for the Pashtida, which I cannot recommend enough. Even the ghost liked it enough to hover around it in my oven for a few hours.
September 09, 2008
"I have sat on judging panels before and what happens is that the funny books get squeezed out, because somehow or other they don't tackle big issues in the proper way," he explained. "They'll get through to the last four or five books, and then historical fiction, or something about death or slavery or new technology will win out."
Poet Michael Rosen explains how award shortlists get to be so grim/launches Roald Dahl Funny Prize.
Bring on the dancers and cocaine! For dawn breaks on the Man Booker shortlist.
Tonight, fans of world literature symbolically lock Salman Rushdie back in a closet and inwardly dread the prospect of working through 5,000 pages of something called 'The Northern Clemency'.
Bookmakers consider the odds for this rum lot:
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
Jan Freeman on the "unkillable" Strunk & White. (Link from TMN.)
What are the kids reading these days?
Violence, knife crime, murderous gangs and a vengeful killing are this year's themes of choice for the best books for teenagers.
That Bookheads Teenage Prize shortlist in full:
Creature of the Knight by Kate Thompson
The Knife that Killed Me by Anthony McGowan
The Red Necklace by Sally Gardner
Snakehead by Anthony Horowitz
Apache by Tanya Landman
The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
Sticky Pages
And now to round out our oral sex erotica review, I read Tasting Him: Oral Sex Stories edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel.
Bussel writes in the intro, “Sometimes, our culture sends the message that those who enjoy going down are somehow only doing the bidding of someone else who’s getting all the pleasure…We know the power of a blow job goes both ways.” Very true.
The stories in this collection are not just women on their knees, but rather all combinations come into play. There’s the requisite power play stories and some gay scenarios and one peculiar story titled “Prego.” What happens is the husband is in the kitchen making dinner for guests. The wife walks in and finds him with his penis in a jar of Prego pasta sauce.
Page 99:
Okay, so I get the food part of the story, here’s where I get hung up: these people live in San Francisco. Presumably pretty close to North Beach. Why in the world are they using Prego pasta sauce for a dinner party?He pushed forward, grabbing the back of my hair at the same time, and suddenly, I found myself sucking Prego from his rock-hard shaft. I should say that I am a pasta junkie. I don’t care if pasta is the cheapest thing for a restaurant to make, don’t give a damn if nineteen dollars for a plate of macaroni is obscene. Every time we go out, that’s what I order. I like red sauce best, what Italians mean when they say gravy.
And I should also say that I love sucking cock. I have gotten on my knees for Jackson in far stranger places than our kitchen. I’ve sucked him on the ferry from Larkspur to San Francisco, with salt spray behind me and San Quentin to my left. I’ve drained him on an airplane, the red-eye from LAX to LaGuardia, while our fellow passengers snoozed zombielike beneath those thin gray throwaway blankets, and I worked hard to keep my slurping sounds to a minimum. And I’ve sucked him on our fire escape, overlooking Chestnut Street, as early morning commuters slogged toward yet another workday.
But I had never mixed these two pleasures before – sauce and sucking, fellatio and food. Not until now. Not until Jackson had finished slamming that bottle of sauce to death, and was ready for me to clean up every wayward drop.
Boris Kachka talks to Michael Greenberg about his memoir Hurry Down Sunshine, a book I loved, loved, loved. It tells the story of his daughter's psychotic break at the age of 15.
There’s a certain lyricism to psychosis, a tremendous word facility, a speeding up of the mind that eventually becomes fragmented and incoherent but still has flashes of brilliance. There are breakthrough artists who were psychotic. But the idea of a romantic madness that denotes a person of higher sensibility and greater creativity, I don’t buy that. Sally’s a very gifted wordsmith, but she can’t write anything because she can’t stay in it.
I am trying to think the universe is making a statement on this Bookforum page. Go to this review of Andrew Meier's The Lost Spy:
Liberals tend to view the Patriot Act, which expanded the boundaries of permissible police and domestic intelligence activities, with a degree of hysteria. If they think the Bush era ushered in a police state, they would do well to read Andrew Meier’s The Lost Spy, which, in the course of unearthing one of the unlikelier sagas in the annals of US-Soviet espionage, is a masterful rendering of the government’s repression of left-wing political ferment during World War I.
Good argument, sir! We should stop complaining about our loss of rights because it's not as bad as it was a century ago! Anyway, directly to the right of this sentence is a bug-eyed gentleman yelling "KRAZY!" The universe has spoken.
By the way, I'm glad The Lost Spy is getting wide attention, but it makes me want to take Black Earth back down off the shelf, where it resides next to Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Good book, that.
Elizabeth Bachner's review of Anonymity by John Mullan in the new issue of Bookslut reminded me that "Silly Novels by Silly Lady Novelists" existed. Change a few words around (take out the bit about the ideal heroine being pious and more religious than the clergy) and you've got yourself an essay about today's "women's literature."
The fair writers have evidently never talked to a tradesman except from a carriage window; they have no notion of the working-classes except as "dependents;" they think five hundred a-year a miserable pittance; Belgravia and "baronial halls" are their primary truths; and they have no idea of feeling interest in any man who is not at least a great landed proprietor, if not a prime minister. It is clear that they write in elegant boudoirs, with violet-coloured ink and a ruby pen; that they must be entirely indifferent to publishers' accounts, and inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains.
Robert Giroux, an editor and publisher who introduced and nurtured some of the major authors of the 20th century and ultimately added his name to one of the nation’s most distinguished publishing houses, died on Friday in Tinton Falls, N.J. He was 94.
September 08, 2008
Bookslut's Indie Heartthrob Interview Series
A weekly interview series where someone involved in the small press (be it writer, editor, slush slave, etc.) is thrown into the spotlight, grilled over the state of the independents and sundry other items, and quickly made to return from whence they came after having graced us all with their presence.
The Heartthrobs series and I are back from our brief vacation. Where did we go? Nowhere. We stayed in New York. Luckily it felt like November for most of August (we're all going to die), and I got to spend my time reading comics (I was on vacation, after all).
Anyway, on with our heartthrob!
This Week: Lauren Weinstein
The first installment of Lauren Weinstein's The Goddess of War was released by Picturebox earlier this year. Volume I introduces Valerie, the Valkyrie-turned-goddess overseeing man's follies from her planet on the other side of the sun. After 175 years without a break, Valerie decides to take a day off, which causes all sorts of havoc back on Earth.
I spoke to Lauren over the weekend while she was out of town. After getting all giddy over dollar flea market Bundt pans, we got around to her new book and life with Picturebox.
Where did The Goddess of War originate?
The Goddess of War started with a song, that my band mate Patrick Hambrecht wrote about five years ago. It went,
"Another river of blood, another dreary field with the bodies of the slain, another endless battle going on, another last battle, but it always stays the same, another spring maiden of the corn, maybe they'll burn another in the fall, every dead hero is the same, you've seen one martyr and you've really seen them all. Here I am your goddess of war, how many times have I seen you cry.... why in such a hurry to lay down and die, but that's alright, that's what I'm here for, to carry away, your broken, bleeding, your goddess of war…"
Anyways, I liked that song, and it got me thinking, if there was a goddess of war, and if she did oversee the world's wars, what would she be like? A fickle bitch? A heroine? A muse? And what if she got fed up with being the Goddess of War?And why would she get fed up after thousands of years of being in charge? So I began to read mythology and think about all this stuff, and her character developed.
At the same time I started taking etching classes at Parsons, and I really enjoyed scratching into metal plates and slowly bringing up the images of her life. Working on the etchings helped to develop her cosmology. For example, the second etching in the book shows The Goddess's study, where we can see pictures of Vietnam, Samurai armor, and different despots' heads in jars. This got me thinking about who she was, what she did, etc.
There is quite a bit of historical reference in this work. What kind of research went into this?
I did tons of research. Way more than anything I've ever done before. I loved it, and am still collecting information for the next three issues. The first research started as random googlings, like who would the Goddess of War's boyfriend be? Maybe a Native American chief. What Native Americans were known for their bravery in battle—the Apaches! Through that I stumbled on Cochise, who is her BF in the book. I started reading about him and was amazed by the story of his life, a warrior who held strong his entire life against encroaching U.S. occupation. The Bascom affair, which I put in the book, is a really amazing story in itself—it's just as crazy a story as any fiction. I keep finding out new things that are applicable to my story. Did you know that the Babylonian goddess of war and love, Ishtar, has basically the same personality and story as Valerie [the protagonist]? Ishtar is part of a cult of prostitution and in The Epic of Gilgamesh, she asks Gilgamesh to be her lover, but he refuses because he's afraid of what she'll do to him. She exacts revenge. I love it! I thought I was being all original, but the world's first book of fiction has it all in there. Shit!
Where do you plan to go with the story?
The second issue, I believe, will begin with the Goddess's slowly unraveling psychologically, while our present day military and terrorist situation gets out of hand. There will be more romance too. And more war valor and folly throughout history, building and building towards our present predicament. So I've got a basic arc, but I'm going to keep the details secret, partially because I'm not quite sure where it's going, partially because I need to do way more research, and partially because I wouldn't want to give away too much of THE GREATEST EPIC OF LOVE AND WAR IN OUR MODERN SOCIETY.
How did the creation process for Goddess of War differ from Girl Stories?
The creative process for Girl Stories is very different, because I wasn't writing a long intricate work of fiction. Girl Stories is a series of vignettes, many of which were originally on gurl.com. Mostly they were based on my life, and so the process was like a fairly quick expulsion from my body. I'd think of stories or scenes from my own life that seems to resonate somehow, craft them a bit, and voila!
At some point however, in the process of making comics for teenagers about my teenage life (sort of) I got frustrated, thinking, "this is a comic, man! It can be about anything! Why am I bound to do the same memoir shit that every 'serious' cartoonist with 'literary aspirations' feels like they have to do?" Of course, now I'm working on another loose memoir type of thing.
What is working with Picturebox like? How did you get involved?
I've known Dan Nadel (the man behind Picturebox) since college, and I bullied him into publishing my bloated mega-epic. He, my husband Tim and I go waaaaaay back to '94 at Washington University together.
I really like working with Picturebox, mostly because it's small and run by Dan and his cute minion of interns of all sexes, and you know that they're (he's) trying to get the word out about the book. When you work with a mainstream press, there's a lot of bureaucracy and not as much creative freedom. But there are advances, and it's nice to get paid for something you spend a year or two of your life working on. (Ouch! That is the bitter voice of the cartoonist elders I know coming through. I swore that would never be me.)
I think if I could handle it financially, I'd do everything with Dan, because he's a great all around book guy and comics nerd.
What are you working on now?
I'm doing a piece for Nature (the PBS show publishes a comic every year) about the precarious state of frogs on our planet. My husband Tim Hodler wrote it. It's the first time I've ever collaborated with anyone. This story is scary because there is no silver lining, unlike most nature shows about endangered critters. Frogs are just dying all over the world because of our polluted water and a mysterious fungus, and all people can do to help them is store them in tupperware containers.
I'm also doing a sequel to Girl Stories which is going to be the greatest teen graphic novel ever. It's one long story about "Lauren" hanging out with her nerdy friend Will. It will be riveting!
NPR has my review of Andrew Meier's The Lost Spy up today, along with an excerpt of the book.
House of Leaves meets House of Pancakes. (Thanks, Ben.)
Every day a new city, a new IHOP. And yet every night the dreams get worse. I ply the highways, a nervous eye on the rear-view mirror, the back seat piled with stolen menus. Their doors are open 24 hours, but forever closed to my soul. This is what my life has become. This is my hell.
September 05, 2008
The Telegraph has an excerpt about his school days from Roald Dahl's memoir, More About Boy.
The other thing that happened when Mr Pople's bell rang out on Saturday mornings was that the rest of the boys, all those of 10 and over (about 100 all told) would go immediately to the main Assembly Hall and sit down. A junior master called SK Jopp would then poke his head around the door and shout at us with such ferocity that specks of spit would fly from his mouth like bullets and splash against the window panes across the room.
"All right!" he shouted. "No talking! No moving! Eyes front and hands on desks!" Then out he would pop again.
We sat still and waited. We were waiting for the lovely time we knew would be coming soon. Outside in the driveway we heard the motor-cars being started up. All were ancient. All had to be cranked by hand. (The year, don't forget, was around 1927/28.) This was a Saturday morning ritual. There were five cars in all, and into them would pile the entire staff of 14 masters, including not only the Headmaster himself but also the purple-faced Mr Pople. Then off they would roar in a cloud of blue smoke and come to rest outside a pub called, if I remember rightly, The Bewhiskered Earl.
"How, how did you do this? Are you a magician?"
"I'm a bookseller, sir."
Thanks to Wes for the link.
Read this: Paula Fox's "The Tender Night," a story about a friendship.
As the historian Geoffrey Hughes has noted, "The days when the dandelion could be called the pissabed, a heron could be called a shitecrow and the windhover could be called the windfucker have passed away with the exuberant phallic advertisement of the codpiece."
September 04, 2008
Putin has been good for Russian literature, so says writers.
Books Un-Covered
There are too many books with dramatic clouds on the covers -- The Gathering, So Brave, Young, and Handsome, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, The Lace Reader...
They all have small silhouette people standing on a cliff or near water or in a sparse field, letters stamped across the sky, and decent sales. I suppose clouds lend an automatic poignancy to a cover, calling up the heavens and whatnot, but I wish they’d do something to distinguish one from the other.
Here’s a cloud depiction that’s a bit less drab, but, framed by the same border I used to have on my kindergarten talent show participation certificates, and with that unnecessary pale flesh-colored rectangle at the bottom. Drama-wise, it’s not dissimilar from the A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius cover, but that, at least, was enjoyably tongue-in-cheek.
I just realized the On Chesil Beach cover is exactly the same, except calmer, blue, and flipped. Falling Man is a relieving exception, featuring the same clouds but from a new angle.
And then there’s The Bible, and that McCain campaign poster.
Aboriginal leaders in Australia have called for a book teaching girls how to play the didgeridoo to be scrapped.
The Australian version of the Daring Book for Girls is due to be published next month.
Sherman Alexie showed up at Savage Love to help Dan answer a question about Native American porn.
"If the letter writer is an attractive blond female," says Alexie, "she can head to the next powwow in the region where she lives, pick out a handsome fancy-dancer, and hit on him. She'll either get laid in the back of a casino-money-financed SUV, or she'll get assaulted by a roving band of Indian women looking to protect our most precious and dwindling resource: Native American men."
September 03, 2008
I was prepared to duck my head a little when writing about the 2008 Kansas Notable Books list. Usually when I come across a book about Kansas, it's about prairie grass or the Civil War or rural poverty. But not this year -- Albert Goldbarth, Sara Paretsky, and Sea Monsters. We're a little greedy when it comes to claiming Kansans, but if you lived here once, we'll take credit, thanks. (Link from Largehearted Boy.)
Chronicle of Higher Education profiles Bernard-Henri Lévy and his new book Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against The New Barbarism.
Thus he decided to speak in Left in Dark Times, with its many incisive observations on what it should mean to be "Left" in the 21st century. For Lévy "nothing good can come for the Left" without breaking with much of its history, especially softness on totalitarianism. He takes the widespread abandonment of revolutionary aspirations by most leftists — in the American context, he's talking about "liberals" or "progressives" — as one happy example of that. As he painstakingly explains, remaining on the Left involves a combination of impulses.
Top Shelf Comix is having a $3 sale on its graphic novels.
I find it a strange decision for an opening radio segment, an interview about an interview. Philip Gourevitch talks to the RN Book Show about an interview with Umberto Eco that appears in the new issue of the Paris Review. That said, having heard Umberto Eco speak before, I think he should have a weekly podcast where he can tell his odd stories, sing songs, etc. I would pay for it even.
But the reason I bring this up is because after the Gourevitch segment is an interview with Emily Perkins about her fantastic novel Novel About My Wife. It's really hard to describe this book, about a man retelling the events that led up to his wife's death, without it sounding all depressing and mysterious. It is that, but it's also very darkly funny.
Rolf Potts writes about Kansan Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, the "Henry Ford of Literature," over at the Believer.
It was an odd ending for a man who, in just over thirty years, had become one of the most prolific publishers in U.S. history, putting an estimated 300 million copies of inexpensive “Little Blue Books” into the hands of working-class and middle-class Americans. Selling for as little as five cents and small enough to fit in a trouser pocket, these books were meant to bring culture and self-education to working people, and covered topics ranging from classic literature to home-finance to sexually pleasuring one’s spouse. Distributed discreetly by mail order, Little Blue Books disseminated birth-control information not available in small-town libraries, advocated racial justice at a time when the Ku Klux Klan influenced politics, and introduced Euripides, Shakespeare, and Emerson to people without the means for higher education.
September 02, 2008
Just go ahead and put all of these on your wishlist: Philip Pullman's 40 Favorite Books.
This week's Guardian Digested Read: Silks by Dick & Felix Francis.
"Hello," said Eleanor the vet.
"You must be my future girlfriend."
"Yes. But let's take things slow for a few chapters. Why don't you keep your regulars happy by getting in some riding action first? You could be brought down by another horse when you were winning and be an injured hero. Then we could shag."
You can now download a free copy of an English translation of Max Blecher's Adventures in Immediate Unreality online.
Ruth Rendell tells the Telegraph how her latest was inspired by the phrase "adventure sex."
'No, I don't think there is anything that would shock me,' Rendell says when I mention this. 'Regarding sexuality, at least. As long as consenting adults are involved, I would never censure. Not on moral grounds. There was a case a few years ago involving men doing violent sado-masochism to each other, nailing their scrotums to planks, and so on. You can't understand it, but you don't have to understand it. All that matters is that they like it.'
Deep Glamour has a sneak peek of the book Forgotten Fashion: An Illustrated Faux History Of Outrageous Trends And Their Untimely Demise.
Please excuse my prolonged absence, readers. I've been wallowing in the laziness of August, choosing to bake myself on my Brooklyn rooftop sans reading material just because I can. It seems appropriate, then, that I would reacquaint myself with my writerly duties by reading the 10th issue of The Drawbridge, which is based around the theme of opulence. For me, the more academic, theory-based articles fell flat simply it's more difficult to hear the tune of luxury when the language is dryer and more official; perhaps if the theme were risk or failure (Issues 7 and 8, respectively) I would have more tolerance for the authoritative.
That aside, the pieces that handed me soft, luscious details on a silver platter were thoroughly enjoyable. I relished in DBC Pierre's Mexican breakfasts, John Berger's myth of almond creation, Tracy Quan's salacious description of mink (and pubic hair), and Louisa Young's wistful and forgiving tale of the lecherous old man. In this day of obsessive conservation, it's good to know that there are some kindred spirits out there who see the value in "footmen on the stairs with candelabra. Also, if anyone knows how to score an invite to the Millionaire Fair in Moscow, shoot me an email. I'll don my fox fur and emerald earrings.
September 01, 2008
The Guardian is all over its own First Book Award, with interviews, book excerpts, reviews, and an awesome picture of a chimp. If only a tiny bit of that enthusiasm (whether we're talking website layout or this smile) could be passed on to judge Claire Armistead. In the inevitable blog entry she displays this season's colour for book award jury members: tepid.
As Waterstone's reading groups across the country start out on the shortlisting process, perhaps the best assurance I can give them is that, whatever quarrels they have with individual titles, if these 10 were the only books they read all year, they would get a pretty good idea of the energy, intelligence and wit of the best new writing today.
Claire, love, I'm concerned. Have you had your iron levels checked recently?
