Read This: Ecotone

I recently added Ecotone, a literary journal from the creative writing department at UNC-Wilmington, to my sidebar. One of the writers on the journal's editing team, Miriam Parker, wrote to let me know about "The Body as Ecotone," a series of short essays being published on the journal's blog. Miriam says they welcome submissions:

"We're interested in exploring the body as an ecotone—as a transitional place separating past and present, fantasy and reality—and invite you to submit artistic expressions of this idea. (We're open to anything: striking text, video, finger paints, sand sculptures...) Has your body served as a transitional zone physically through body art, pregnancy, injury, plastic surgery? Or perhaps through grief, stress, starvation or alchoholic binges? However you view your body as an ecotone, we're interested."

Among those who have already contributed: Laurel Snyder, Ann Ropp, Alison Stine and Jeannine Hall.

Richard Lange's Dead Boys

Sometimes, a book just comes along at the perfect time.

My recent reading has included a great deal of nonfiction. And what little fiction I've been reading has been glitzy, glamy, style stuff about beautiful people. So I was hankering for a good, old-fashioned story collection in the likes of Tobias Wolff or Raymond Carver. Just quiet, solid stories about quiet people in trouble.

And then I stumbled upon Richard Lange's Dead Boys. It's been out since the middle of August and if someone were going to create a book guaranteed to get my cash dollars, this is it. With blurbs by my favorites such as Chris Offutt, Daniel Woodrell, and Scott Wolvern, Dead Boys is often compared with the stories of Carver and Denis Johnson.

For me, that kind of stuff is a sure sell.

And the book hasn't disappointed. There's a noir tinge to some of the pieces, but not too much. These are people generally driven to criminal lifestyles. And they, frequently, are not very good at it. They're not that different then you or me. And let's face it. No matter how many espisodes of Law & Order you might have watched, you probably ain't gonna make a good crook. Just like the characters in this book.

But their foilbles make them human and compelling. And in the end, you end up rooting for them to succeed in some small way.

Stephen Fry Has a Blog Now

Yes, it's true, British actor/author Stephen Fry is blogging, but, so far, not about literature or even acting. Instead, in his first entry, he's talking about technology: "I have gorged myself on electronic gismos, computer accessories, toys, gadgets and what-have-yous of all descriptions," he writes, "but most especially what are now known as SmartPhones. PDAs, Wireless PIMs, call them what you will."

And damned if the guy doesn't know his geek down cold.

This reminds me that I have been meaning for ages to say lovely things about Fry's most recent book, The Ode Less Travelled, which came out in paperback earlier this summer, and I just never seemed to get around to it, which is pretty sucky of me. Because it really is quite a good book, and although I generally consider myself somewhat intellectually well off, I'm the first to admit that my poetic appreciation skills are underdeveloped, and Fry has actually given me a little more confidence that I have enough historical and technical context to better understand what the heck it is I'm reading.

(Thanks to Nat Torkington for clueing me in!)

The Shape of Things That Came

I've been a huge William Gibson fan ever since I stumbled onto Neuromancer in high school, so I'm eagerly anticipating some free time in my schedule, probably around the Labor Day weekend, to read his latest novel, Spook Country, and in the meantime I'm glad to see his continued assimilation into the literary mainstream, like the Sunday NYT interview with Deborah Solomon, who wonders when "American life [became] stranger than science fiction."

"If I had gone into a publisher in New York in 1981," Gibson replies, "and told them I wanted to write a novel that is set in a world where the climate is out of whack and Mideast terrorists have hijacked airplanes and in response the U.S. has invaded the wrong country—it's too much. Contemporary reality is like an overlapping set of dire science-fictional scenarios."

Too much...unless maybe you were Gregory Benford, and you were offering those publishers the manuscript to the 1980 Nebula-winning novel Timescape, set in a 1998 where the world is threatened by catastrophic climate change and New York City was obliterated by nuclear terrorists. (I can't remember if the U.S. retaliated by invading anybody, and if I still own a copy, it's in a basement hundreds of miles from here.) Given my own trajectory through the science fiction canon, I must have read Timescape about a year or so before Neuromancer, and, as you can see, there are aspects of it that remain fresh in my memory, more than twenty years later. You should be able to track down a copy with a little hustle, and my memory tells me it would be an effort well spent.

Elizabeth Benedict Is Giving It Away Online

Novelist Elizabeth Benedict has an essay in the new issue of Daedalus called "What I Learned About Sex on the Internet," and she's willing to send you a PDF of it if you contact her through her website (although you might also consider ordering the magazine online) . Benedict's guided tour of the search results for "sex" on Google takes alluring detours into the world of Christian porn, Benedict's stint as a columnist for the Japanese edition of Playboy and the sorts of weighty subjects that come up when one's staring at the web at 3:00 A.M. Face it: Sexual experimentation doesn't get much safer than this, and though I'm not making any assumptions about your capacity for fun in other venues, I'm reasonably certain you'll enjoy it.

Hear This: Dr. Keith Albow on "Be Happy, Dammit!"

Periodically, I will drop by the studio where my friend Karen Salmansohn tapes her satellite radio show, Be Happy, Dammit!, to join in on conversations with authors that I've thought she and her listeners would find interesting. Last week, we did a half-hour interview with Dr. Keith Ablow about his new book, Living the Truth. You can download MP3s of the first half and the second half of the interviews from the Lime website, along with several other great interviews that Karen's done with other experts in personal transformation. I have a lot of fun doing these segments, although I'm still working on becoming truly comfortable behind the microphone, and I'm looking forward to doing more of these segments every Friday in July.

Read This: The Dip

This weekend, Reuters filed a review of The Dip, the new book from Seth Godin about the middle ground between beginner's luck and genuine expertise, that moment in every venture where things start getting hard and you need to work to be the best. Now, most of us have grown up hearing that we have to stick those moments out, but Godin tells us, as the review puts it, that "winners quit fast and quit often and only stick when they find the right dip to conquer."

Like much of what Godin writes, this is a powerful little book, and that's why I brought Godin to "Be Happy, Dammit!" last month to talk with Karen Salmansohn about his ideas. (Download the MP3 directly.) I've learned a lot from Godin over the years about achieving greatness, and this is valuable advice on a rarely discussed aspect of that goal. And it's really short, too—less than a hundred pages. So you could polish it off in a single afternoon, if you apply yourself!

Read This: Kid*Lit(erary)

My friend Laurel Snyder has started up a new blog called Kid*Lit(erary), which features "micro-reviews of the very very very very very best children's books in the world."

"You might ask why a 32 year old (young) woman is reading children's books," Snyder writes in an early post. "And I could tell you that it's because I'm a children's author (which I am) but that would only be a partial truth. Because I've been reading (and re-reading) the same books for 25 years, and I've only been a children's author for two of those years... But now I want NEW books, books that will live up to the standards of the books I love." So far, she seems to be putting together an interesting mix, juxtaposing classics like The 13 Clocks with newer stories like Olivia Kidney. If you're frequently shopping for reading material for kids—or, like Laurel, for yourself on the sly—this seems like a pretty good place to get some inspiration.

Read This: Under My Roof

My favorite paragraphs from all the reading I've done this week:

"What are we waiting for? Did you buy a bunch of smoke detectors?" I asked him so he wouldn't know I knew that he bought commercial grade uranium online.

"No, I bought commercial grade uranium online. Perfectly legal." About ten miutes later, he signed for the uranium and put the box in the trunk of his car. Then we drove to the FedEx shipping center a few blocks away. There he answered to "Jerry Wallace," Mom's maiden name, and quickly flashed her old passport that he had put his picture on and then re-laminated to claim another box. That one went on my lap for the drive home. I wasn't too happy about that because it was heavy and radioactive. Since the sample was only twenty percent Uranium-235 I didn't have to be that worried, but, you know, testicles.

Even though I've been a Nick Mamatas fan for a while, it took me a while to get around to reading Under My Roof. Luckily, it's a novella, so it goes by pretty quickly. Basically, all you need to know is that the narrator's dad has decided to secede from the United States, like Peter Griffin did in that one episode of Family Guy, except that Peter didn't have a homemade nuclear device, but other than that it's a more realistic version of the scenario. Slightly. For one thing, the narrator's a psychic pre-teen. Anyway, it all escalates pretty quickly, but in ways that remain true to the story's fundamental conventions, and I just think that if you share my sense of humor, you'll dig it. So there.

Read the Best from American Magazines

When I reviewed The Best American Magazine Writing 2006 a few months back, two of my favorite articles were a lengthy David Foster Wallace essay on Los Angeles talk radio host John Ziegler, and John Jeremiah Sullivan's firsthand account of his trip to a Christian rock festival. As it happens, those are the first two pieces that Columbia University Press has chosen to excerpt on the anthology's web page at the Columbia UP site, and if you haven't read them yet, I encourage you to give them a look. If they're taking votes on what to put up next, I nominate the GQ profile of Merle Haggard by Chris Heath!

The Best Nonfiction (I Read) in 2006

Since everybody else is coming out with their year's best lists right about now, I thought I'd put in my two cents. Since I review a lot of nonfiction for Publishers Weekly, and don't get quite as much time to read fiction for fun as I'd like, for the moment I feel a bit more comfortable talking about nonfiction, but I'll try to remember to tell you about my favorite novels from this year later on.

Keeping in mind that I certainly didn't have time to read everything, in my experience the best nonfiction book published this year was Joe Miller's Cross-X, an amazing piece of "embedded journalism" in which Miller observes an inner-city high school debate team as they fight their way into the ranks of the nation's best. There may have been more powerful books about race, more powerful books about class, more powerful books about education published this year...but I'm willing to bet that no book takes on all three subjects with this kind of passion and intensity. I'm glad to see that some of the major book review sections are starting to realize how important this book is, and I hope more will catch on so Joe's reportage can get the audience it deserves. (Yeah, tiny disclosure: I've met Joe since my first rounds of praise for his work.)

And, now, in alphabetical order by title, nine other significant nonfiction books published this year.

Continue reading The Best Nonfiction (I Read) in 2006

When Authors Attack

Sometimes you’ve just gotta wonder why. With so many would-be authors around the world desperate to write and publish even a single book, why would the celebrated author of over a dozen break down and — well, break the law, and go to court, and face humiliating in front of countless young fans? Christopher Heimerdinger, better known by the folksier byline “Chris Heimerdinger,” gained fame in Utah and beyond, beginning in 1989, with a series of novels for teens based on stories from the Book of Mormon. Adventure tales packed with time-travel and morality lessons, the “Tennis Shoes” series includes Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites, Gadiantons and the Silver Sword, Tennis Shoes and the Feathered Serpent, (Parts 1 and 2), The Sacred Quest (formerly Tennis Shoes and the Seven Churches), The Lost Scrolls, The Golden Crown, Warriors of Cumorah, Tower of Thunder, and Kingdoms and Conquerors. As revealed on its Amazon page, Warriors of Cumorah follows this plotline: “When Becky and Josh Plimpton are kidnapped by Todd Finlay, Megan and her two suitors, Ryan and Apollus, attempt to rescue them, but through the mysterious powers of the Rainbow Room, one group ends up in nineteenth-century Jerusalem and the other in central America hundreds of years after the visitation of the Savior to the Nephites.”

Adding to his laurel crown, Heimerdinger has also written other books including Eddie Fantastic, Daniel and Nephi, Ben Franklin and the Chamber of Time, A Light in the Storm, Passage to Zarahemla and A Return to Christmas. A film version of Passage to Zarahemia is now in production. Why oh why, then, did Heimerdinger muck up his role-model status by smashing the deadbolt on his estranged wife’s door, then kicking in the door and entering the place in full view of the couple’s children? This week, the author was “sentenced on a misdemeanor criminal mischief charge stemming from a domestic incident,” according to the Deseret News. “A 3rd District judge spared Christopher Heimerdinger jail time on one class B misdemeanor count of criminal mischief but ordered the author to pay more than $300 in fines and placed him on 12 months of probation. The court also ordered Heimerdinger to take a 16-week domestic-violence and anger-management class. Heimerdinger was originally also charged with one misdemeanor count of domestic violence in the presence of a child but was found not guilty of that charge during a bench trial in August....

According to his Web site, (www.cheimerdinger.com), the author is described as "deeply committed to celebrating the truths and values of the gospel of Jesus Christ in his creative works,” the article continues. The Web site is, ahem, under reconstruction at the moment.

Read This: Ron Hogan's SF Debut—Free!

Subterranean Press has just created a free PDF download of John Scalzi's special cliché-driven issue of Subterranean, the science fiction magazine that includes my short story "In Search of...Eileen Siriosa," an untold tale from my research for The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane!. As Scalzi says:

"Just about every writer out there has a story they would dearly love to do but could never justify actually writing, because its very beating heart is a cliché so old and worn out that there would be no chance of actually selling it—clichés so advanced in years that even Hugo Gernsback would send back the story with a handwritten note: 'Look, kid. It's been done.' And now, finally, an excuse to bang that story out! It's like Christmas!"

Murder Attempt on a Novelist, and Halloween Kills

If this isn’t the cake-taking week of book news from surprising corners of the world, then it’s going to take a whole lot of Antarctican biographers and Tongan encyclopedists to unseat it. A few days ago, we had the Vast Concrete Book in Turkmenistan at Dibs! And today, to our horror, Reuters reports a shocking crime against a literary colossus in the tiny Adriatic republic of Montenegro. “One of Montenegro's leading novelists said on Wednesday he was beaten and his driver shot dead late on Tuesday in the capital, Podgorica. Jevrem Brkovic, 73 ... said he was attacked outside his apartment building by masked assailants armed with guns and metal clubs. His driver and bodyguard, 53-year-old Srdjan Vojicic, was shot dead. Brkovic himself was treated in hospital for head injuries.” Well, that is just f&*%ed. What work of fiction could possibly have aroused such a lethal frenzy? Brkovic “said the attack was linked to his latest book, A Duklja Lover, a novel set in an underworld where crime and politics come together. ‘It was the act of killers and mafia bosses who recognised themselves in my latest novel,’ Brkovic said. No stranger to controversy, the outspoken writer fled to Croatia in the early 1990s after he fell out with Serb nationalists over the 1991-95 war in Croatia. He returned to Montenegro in 1999... The new country is still dealing with the image of lawlessness it acquired in the 1990s, when smugglers using its rugged coast made fortunes from breaking sanctions imposed on the rump Yugoslavia for its role in the Bosnia war.” Now, as you will notice if you click the link, that is actually what the article says. “Imposed on the rump Yugoslavia.” Anyway it’s a perilous region for individuals who deal in words. Two years ago, the editor of a main Montenegrin newspaper “was shot dead and his death was seen as resulting from his public campaign against officials he accused of having mafia links. His killers have not been found.” You bet they haven’t.

Meanwhile, a Canadian doctor claims that Halloween causes cancer. “Fear will provoke acidity in the body. Anything that provokes negativity in the body will have a chemical reaction and cause the body to become acidic,” insists Dr. Laurence Magne of British Columbia, author of Cancer-Free for Life. (She also promises to help you “Discover The Simple, Yet Effective Ways To Rid Your Body Of Cancer And All Terminal Illnesses.” All of them? Ebola? Because I’ve got this little puncture wound and it’s — urggghh, the blood, my nostrils, it’s ... just kidding. About something horrible.) In a timely press release, Dr. Magne adds: “Halloween is the celebration of fear. People like to be afraid. People wear scary make-believe ghosts and witches costumes. Children are dressed in ugly scary costumes and sent from door to door.... Next, children will want to eat ALL the candy at once, ruin their appetite, and think of the damage they're doing to their body with the colorants they’re ingesting. At the unconscious level, Halloween triggers memories of childhood Halloween, times when we were scared. These fears are brought to the surface during Halloween.” So don’t be scared. Because that could kill you. Being scared, that is. Of death. Which could kill you. Dead. Don’t be scared.

Royal Pork on Sticks and a Way to Never Forget

Thailand’s Princes Maha Chakri Sirindhorn is now the author of a cookbook. Stir-fried Young Chilis, Baked Spinach Balls, Superfish in the Ocean of Milk, Prawns in the Emerald Pond, Poultice for a Baby's Head, Pumpkin Soup, Pumpkin Pie, Beehive Pancake, Pork on Sticks and Chicken Pressed on the Pan — the project began as a present for her two best-loved teachers, who are turning 84 and 72 this year — lucky years, according to Thai tradition. The Bangkok Post reports: “Knowing that the pair would be delighted to have a keepsake she'd created herself, especially if it were the product of an activity she particularly enjoys, the Princess settled on a handwritten cookery book, to which she gave the title Krua Sra Pathum. The English-language version, which she translated herself, is called Sra Pathum's Cuisine. In preparation for the book, the Princess used the rare Sundays when she was free of other commitments to play chef, testing and making adjustments to recipes in her personal kitchen at Sra Pathum Palace, her current residence... The Princess decided to expand the cookbook into a diary for 2007 to honour the memory of her late grandmother, the Princess Mother, who was herself an avid cook, and also to raise funds for the construction of a museum in memory of her great-grandmother, Queen Savang Vadhana, the first occupant of Sra Pathum Palace.” The book includes a recipe for Boston baked beans, much loved by “HM the King when he was a boy,” reports the Post. “Readers shouldn't be intimidated by some of those fancy names; they merely reflect the royal sense of humour. That ‘superfish,’ for example, is simply a filleted snakehead fish marinated in milk then baked with breadcrumbs and cheese, while the ‘emerald pond’ is a bed of aquatic algae arranged on a flat stone.” A bed of algae! Well, why didn’t you say so? As for “Poultice for a Baby’s Head,” Her Highness advises doing the following with mashed spinach, condensed milk, butter, salt and pepper: “Mix these ingredients together, spread on toast and top it with grated cheese. It is a trick to make kids eat vegetables and get protein, carbohydrate, minerals and food fibre.” The Post adds: “In addition to close-ups of ingredients and the final product, each section comes with a series of photos of the Princess demonstrating the various steps... She then adds, good-humouredly: ‘If you cook them and they are not delicious, it is your own fault; you must have cooked them incorrectly.’”

Sometimes a book rises up out of the realm of bookdom and becomes something else entirely. Joel Meyerowitz’s brand-new Aftermath, a collection of panoramic photos taken at Ground Zero in the first days, weeks and months following 9/11, is an anthem, an archive. It’s history. The ruins he photographed are gone, but as long as these pictures survive, we’ll have a record of what happened, where, and to whom. And that matters, because even though the workers who spent months in the pit that used to be the towers posted a big banner there that said WE WILL NEVER FORGET, it’s sadly all too possible that all too many people will forget, or even already have.

A veteran photographer who has been honing his craft for more than forty years, native New Yorker Meyerowitz was in Cape Cod when the planes hit the towers. Rushing back, he learned that photographs were prohibited and all media was banned from the ruins because Ground Zero was officially a crime scene. Remembering his Vaudeville-actor father’s long-ago advice about how a well-placed shtick can move mountains, Meyerowitz convinced Rudy Giuliani, NYPD brass, and museum administrators that that “I was going to get in there and make an archive of everything that happened ... making visible for the rest of the country the consequences.” He obtained official permission, and with a large-format camera he alone was permitted onto the scene. He captured scenes that simply stun. Workers, firefighters, chaplains, cops, grieving relatives, twisted steel, steaming concrete, volunteers serving hot coffee and transforming a church into a cozy lounge and raking the rubble for bones, keys — one such man calls his kind “gardeners in the garden of the dead.” The text is sometimes as gripping as the pictures; at one point Meyerowitz recounts a member of the Arson and Explosion squad — a macho bunch if ever you saw one — describing how while digging through the smoke they were suddenly surrounded by monarch butterflies: “swarms of them flitting around us, tapping on our helmets in the smoke. One of the guys stood up and said, ‘Souls.’”

Meyerowitz will be discussing the book on Thursday, October 19 at Hennessey & Ingalls Bookstore in Santa Monica, CA. He’ll be at NYC’s Javitz Center on November 2 and at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY on November 30. No matter where you were that day, and no matter where you’ve been since, he’ll make you never forget....

Read This: Murphy

I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a sucker for animal stories, and Hyeondo Park's online mini-comic Murphy does a marvelous job of storytelling. Follow the link. It'll take you all of two-three minutes to look at, maybe, and that's all the time Park needs to break your heart. I kinda get teary even just typing about it, to be honest. I think I'm going to leave the computer and go hug my cats now.

I'm in Writer's Digest!

"Does This Book Jacket Make Me Look Fat?" That's the title of an article I've written for Writer's Digest that solicits opinions and anecdotes from several women writers about whether you need to be pretty to be popular in the publishing marketplace. Laura Lippmann says, "It might get someone to pick up the book, but I'm not sure it can do much more than that," while agent Ginger Clark reveals that "if your agent is positioning you as the next big literary fiction genius—and therefore making it clear she's expecting people to bid high—she's probably doing so with the added bonus of you being attractive."

Hear This: Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

Since the DIY audiobook for Julian Rubinstein's Ballad of the Whiskey Robber has been a topic of discussion on GalleyCat, I was excited to see a sampler CD show up in my mailbox late last week, especially since the entire 11-hour-plus production is only available on iTunes or as an Audible.com download. (I didn't get the whole thing, but certainly enough to keep me entertained...)

To give you an idea of how the all-star production plays out, I've uploaded a quick soundbite of Eric Bogosian as a frustrated Hungarian detective (412K MP3 file), but there's also appearances from Jonathan Ames, Gary Shteyngart, Arthur Phillips, and Samantha Power. The disc includes Rubinstein's own performance of the book's theme song, which you can now hear on the real-life Whiskey Robber's MySpace page, as well as musical performances by One Ring Zero and other bands, plus a ten-minute NPR Weekend Edition segment about the book. Not too shabby!

Read This: The Dead Fish Museum

I've been dying to read Charles D'Ambrosio's latest short story collection, The Dead Fish Museum, for about a year and a half, ever since another writer recommended him to me.

If you still need convincing, check out the Stranger review where each of the eight stories gets reviewed by a different writer, including contributions from Jonathan Lethem and Dale Peck. You should also dig into a profile of D'Ambrosio in the Williamette Week, in which we learn about the book he pulled from publication because he'd grown dissatisfied by it: "With a novel, you are just inside this one world and you are committed to it. And I'd never done it before, and I got kind of messed up and thought I had to go a certain way.... It really turned me around for awhile." Well, now he's back—don't miss out.

Beatrice Reading List: Jack Fish

So I've been dipping back into J Milligan's Jack Fish, in anticipation of his appearance tonight at Coliseum Books (with some guy named Jonathan Ames) and it's reminding me all over again why I like it so much. Sure, a lot of it has to do with its New York-specific, and for that matter outer borough-specific, humor, but saying it's "just a New York book" would be like saying The Brother From Another Planet is "just a New York movie." And, yeah, I chose that example quite deliberately. Here's the thing: I love science fiction that stays true to its central conceits, but doesn't feel the constant need to take itself so damn seriously. So I dig the Pohl & Kornbluth collaborations, I dig Robert Sheckley and Frederic Brown, and now I'm digging J Milligan.

Peter Ackroyd's Shakespeare

Because of my busy schedule these days, I end up reading a lot of books piecemeal—a few chapters one day, a few more a couple weeks later—and that's how I'm getting through the latest biography by one of my favorite writers, Peter Ackroyd's Shakespeare. I was lucky enough to get to hear Ackroyd speak a few months back, at a Sunday brunch lecture sponsored by the 92nd St. Y, where he discussed the challenges in writing yet another biography about someone who, it seems, has a book published about him every single day...but also about the challenges of biography itself. "In fiction," Ackroyd observed, "you must always tell the truth, but in biography you're allowed to make things up." This was well before the whole James Frey thing, mind you; what Ackroyd was talking about was the way in which the genre relies equally upon imaginative reconstruction and scholarship to give a sense of a life. "What is the point of the historian or the biographer," he wondered, "iif we can't use imagination as a source for inspiration?"

During the question period, I asked him if he felt any difference between writing the big biographies like Shakespeare and the recent series of "brief lives" he's developed about subjects like Chaucer and J.M.W. Turner. "It doesn't make any difference as far as I can tell," he smiled. "The vision has to be approximately the same." And it is, I have to confess, a vision I'm usually willing to follow in just about any direction.

Beatrice Reading List: The Life of Benjamin Franklin

I can't actually say that I've finished J. A. Leo Lemay's The Life of Benjamin Franklin. For one thing, only the first two volumes of the projected seven have been published by the University of Pennsylvania Press yet, and I've only been able to dip into it in my spare time, so I'm still in the middle of the opening segment Journalist: 1706-1730. But what I've read so far has been pretty amazing—no matter how cluttered you think the Franklin biography field is, or even if you're not plugged into contemporary books on American history to care if there's a Franklin glut, try to make time for these books on your reading schedule. (Realistically, though, you'd probably need a two-week vacation...but to me that would be a great vacation; your standards may vary.)

It's a bit surprising to me that these two books (the second is Printer and Publisher: 1730-1747) haven't gotten much review attention yet, especially considering that yesterday was the 300th anniversary of Franklin's birth. I can't say that's an original observation on my part, since I only found out about the biography from Paul Collins's Weekend Stubble blog, where he wondered, "That silence is the sound of critics quietly leafing through the volumes and taking notes for upcoming reviews.... right?" If so, they must still be busy scribbling, because so far the only paper to issue a review is the Washington Times, where even Franklin scholars acknowledge Lemay's mastery (well, one scholar, anyway). That, and a Delaware paper mentioning last week that Franklin visited Delaware a couple of times, has been it so far. Meanwhile, Sidney Sheldon's memoir got a full page in the New York Times Book Review. I mean, I know it takes a while to read 1,020 pages of smallish print, but heck, even I would've cleared out some room on my schedule if somebody had asked!

Our Very First Contest: N.M. Kelby's Whale Season

Ever since N.M. Kelby's latest novel, Whale Season, showed up at our maildrop last week, Mrs. Beatrice has been reading it on the subway to and from work and telling me how great it is—and since the one paragraph she let me read to understand why she was giggling was pretty darn funny, I really can't wait until I get my crack at the book!

Now, as it happens, the day after Whale Season is officially released, the Westport Country Playhouse will host a Selected Shorts evening in which Joanne Woodward will read "Jubilation, Florida," a story Kelby published in One Story (and which I've heard Patricia Kalember read, and it's pretty amazing). To celebrate the two occasions, we're having ourselves a little giveaway!

[At which point I invited people to email me and receive the following:

• two passes to the Selected Shorts show at Westport
• a copy of Whale Season with an autographed bookplate
• a signed copy of the "Jubilation, Florida" issue of One Story

Congratulations to those of you who won—I'll probably do something like this again soon!]

Beatrice Reading List: The Atrocity Archives

"Len Deighton was not an author of spy thrillers but of horror, because all Cold War-era spy thrillers rely on the existential horror of nuclear annihilation to supply a frisson of terror that raises the stakes of the games their otherwise mundane characters play. And in contrast, H.P. Lovecraft was not an author of horror stories—or not entirely—for many of his preoccupations, from the obsessive collection of secret infomration to the infiltration and mapping of territories controlled by the alien, are at heart the obsessions of the thriller writer."

That's from Charles Stross's afterword to The Atrocity Archives, which collects two stories starring Bob Howard, a low-level programmer in a British intelligence agency dedicated to protecting the realm from the Nameless Ones on the other side of the universe. The fact that Bob's a programmer allows Stross to work in all sorts of great project management humor into the stories along with the occult terrorism: Think The Ipcress File landing in The Dunwich Horror by way of Office Space, and you've got an approximation of where the book's headed. Now, it might just be me, because I love any new twist on the Cthulhu Mythos , but I could barely put this book down over the weekend. (Although, strictly speaking, it's not really Mythos, just trades on the milieu.) One caveat: If stories about the Nazi's occult activities squick you out, you're not going to like "The Atrocity Archive" at all, as its secret history goes into great (and explicit) detail about the Third Reich's plans and activities, and the title is literal. But since you can read "The Concrete Jungle" online, why not give that a try? (And, yes, I've recommended that course of action before...)

What I've Been Reading Lately

Here's a few of the literary essays that have crossed my path in recent days:

• James Parker fills Boston Globe readers in on a significant trend in British fantasy, wondering if American readers and filmgoers are rediscovering JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis as comfort in times of war, then connects Watership Down to The Jungle Book, only to pivot and suggest the power of Watership comes not from its pastorality but from its violence.

• Doug Seibold's latest commentary for The Book Standard takes on the pernicious influence of bullcrit—"what you produce when you feel the need to give the impression that you've read a book or seen a film or heard a band that you haven't, though you've read or heard someone else's opinion about it, and you either rip off that opinion or tweak it to whatever degree the situation requires of you at the time." With so many books out there, he says, any meeting between a sales rep and a book buyer is bound to be full of it.

• Jennifer Howard's Chronicle of Higher Education article about scribbling in the margins considers the academic import of those sidenotes, especially when they come from famous readers like Coleridge. Who knew that all those !s and !!s I'd been leaving in my review galleys might actually be appreciated by future generations?
  

Finally, an article I didn't read—but only because I'd written it. For those who might have been curious about last month's overview of the New Age market, but don't have subscriptions to Publishers Weekly, the producers of What the Bleep Do We Know have put the article up for free viewing.

Buy My Friend's Book!

As part of my ongoing effort to get you to read Phil Campbell's Zioncheck for President, I hereby direct you to an excerpt published by his former employer, Seattle's alternative alternative newspaper, The Stranger, about his involvement in Grant Cogswell's campaign for a spot on the city council:

We tried to create an independent speaking tour for Grant. We didn’t have much success until Grant received permission from the owner of a popular outdoor theater to talk to his patrons for 10 or 15 minutes before The Wizard of Oz began. There would be several hundred people in attendance, more than all of the District Democratic meetings combined.

I didn’t drive Grant that night; I was too busy crunching some voter statistics we had just received. So Grant and Tara borrowed my car. Tara drove while Grant tried to think about what he would say to all of the families that he would be standing in front of.

They got to the theater with plenty of time before sundown, only to discover that the theater had moved the year before, and neither of them had any idea where it was now located.

Our volunteer coordinator called Grant’s cell phone, gave Grant the correct address, and urged him to hurry. The movie was going to start in five minutes, with or without him.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation
(Sitting Around Reading)*

I packed a lot of reading material for my week away from the blog--finally, a chance to read just for the fun of it! I started light, with Stephen King's The Colorado Kid. Hard Case Crime co-publisher Charles Ardai included a note explaining that the novella-length piece was a change of pace from their usual pulp-y fare, down right "experimental" in some ways; the "arty" flavor drove Orson Scott Card nuts when he reviewed the book for PW, but since I'd been forewarned I was able to appreciate the story not as a puzzle to be solved but as one of King's luxuriating baths in small-town Maine culture. In that sense, it actually reinforced certain impressions I had of Owen King's literary heritage.

Then, because a few months ago I had reviewed the Lewis Dabney bio of Edmund Wilson--which James Wood and Colm Toibin have discussed at great length more recently--I decided to finally tackle Memoirs of Hecate County, or "the smut book" as I kept telling Mrs. Beatrice. I liked the front half of the book, up to "The Princess With the Golden Hair," better than the final stories, and I have to admit that "Ellen Terhune" makes for a good fantasy read, while "Glimpses of Wilbur Flick" helps you see why Wilson admired Dawn Powell so much.

After that, I moved on to And Only to Deceive, a fantastic novel centered around a young widow's discovery of her late husband's role in the dubious provenance of certain classical antiquities in the British Museum. Because Tasha Alexander is my college classmate, I'm not in any position to review the book, exactly, but I loved it. I thought she nailed the Victorian setting, she told a riveting yarn, and she made the characters believable. And believe me, it's not always easy to do all three--after I finished that novel in a single afternoon, I decided I would finally try to read Dan Brown's Angels & Demons. But because I actually know stuff about the conspiracy elements he weaves into the story, and the characters are such cardboard cutouts, I was quickly underwhelmed, so I moved on to Colm Toibin's The Master, which Mrs. Beatrice had packed for herself. I'd only had a chance to read the opening sections when I met Toibin last year, but now I'm totally enthralled. I haven't quite finished yet, but maybe this weekend...

*And, yes, my summer vacation did take place the first week of fall. Heck, it multi-tasked as my honeymoon, five months after the wedding...

Katrina's 20th-Century Rivals

I'm surprised that John Barry's Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America is all the way back at nearly #8,000 on Amazon's rankings but pleased to note the synchronicity of the first two "Capitalized Phrases" the online retailer's search engine found in the book being "New Orleans" and "Red Cross."

And, wanting a little break from the slow crawl of actual information amidst all the "look at us in the rain" antics from CNN and MSNBC the other morning, I turned to Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938, which tore up most of the Northeast, especially Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Harry Shearer's been doing an okay job blogging about the aftermath of Katrina for the Huffington Post, but I'm thinking of what I suppose is an idealized dream scenario wherein an alternative media outlet with the kind of funding I imagine HuffPo to have could find somebody with specific expertise to dig into this story on short notice--and no, Salon's excerpt of a 15-year-old John McPhee book doesn't count. Not that you'll ever hear a bad word about McPhee from this corner...

Readerville for Political Junkies

Talking Points Memo, one of the few political blogs I read every morning, recently launched a companion discussion board with a book club section. This week, they're talking about Squandered Victory by Larry Diamond, a former adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. The book's about his efforts to help develop an Iraqi constitution and his increasing frustration at the "criminal negligence" he saw in American's handling of the (choose your own adjective for your own politics: liberated or conquered) nation. He'll be posting an essay or two in the club, and reacting to reader questions and comments, so it should make for an engaging bit of policy wonkery, just like the book. And I'm not the only one who liked it; check out David Rieff's thoughts in The Nation.

I'm Going by the Public Library Tomorrow

About a year ago, a friend of mine suggested that I should correct a gap in my reading history and take a look at Leonard Michaels. It turned out that some of his short stories are available online, including two stories about a mathematician named Nachman, "Nachman" (Threepenny Review) and "Cryptology" (New Yorker). And if you take time to root around in Google caches, you can come up with two more Nachman tales from the New Yorker, "Of Mystery There Is No End" and "Nachman from Los Angeles." (Will they ever be collected into one book? Time will tell!)

Now, Shalom Auslander lends his enthusiasm to the cause, telling Nextbook readers about how he first read Michaels on an Orthodox shuttle bus to New Jersey. "It is not a happy book," he says of I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, but then, "I was not a happy teen." And after reading those short stories again recently, "I felt like I'd just spent a month of Sabbaths locked in a suburban split-level ranch with my parents and siblings." Sign me up for some of that! (Because I can deal with family traumas in just about any ethnic variety as long as it's not Irish Catholics, you know.)

The article also features a podcast in which Auslander talks to Laurel Snyder about Michaels and reads the story "Murderers." Worth a listen if you've got some minutes to spare, or headphones in your cubicle...

Returning to Short Stories

Following yesterday's precedent, here are the further results of my short story collection dipping... I liked the two stories I read from Christopher Coake's We're in Trouble. First, there's the title piece: a suite of short-shorts in which three couples confront the terror of death. Each couple is at a different stage in their relationship, from a young man and woman who've just met to a husband who wants his wife of fifty-plus years to help him commit suicide rather than face cancer. Raw stuff, but Coake makes his characters real, with authentic dialogue and behavior. That's also the success of the longish "Abandon," in which a man and woman find themselves trapped in a remote cabin during an unexpected snowstorm. The story runs on two tracks, cutting between their present dilemma and flashbacks that explore the beginning of their relationship--with key insights that point towards the inevitable conclusion.

I'd been meaning to get to Lavanya Sankaran's The Red Carpet: Bangalore Stories for a while now, and unfortunately just hadn't gotten around to it until now. But "Alphabet Soup" was a fantastic story about a U.S.-born Indian-American whose college radical posturing finally convinces her father to send her to Bangalore so she can see what life is really like in her imagined native paradise. The awakening this "American Born Confused Desi"--which is how the story gets its title--is somewhat rude, but not to the point of cliché, and the gentle mockery the narrator expresses towards the character early on subtly shifts as her fantasy gives way to the world into which she's been plunged. I should get back to the other stories at some point, because this first one was quite excellent.

If you've been reading Beatrice since last year, and I tell you that I started reading a short story collection from Lauren Slater, you might feel a certain sense of dread coming on. I swear to God, I did my best to approach Blue Beyond Blue with a fresh mind; after all, now that Slater's writing straightforward fiction, the question of veracity becomes irrelevant, and just about all that need really concern me and any other reader is, are the stories any good? Well, the three I read were awful, and I'll explain why after the jump.

Continue reading Returning to Short Stories

Catching Up with Short Stories

When you run a successful bookblog, the review copies start to pile up, and lately I've been eying the stacks in the living room and foyer somewhat guiltily. As a partial and admittedly imperfect solution, I decided to get through some of the short story collections by reading just one or two stories. As I say, it's an imperfect solution, but I hope that by choosing the title stories and/or the longest stories, I'll be able to glean a reasonable sense of the authors which I can pass on to you.

I started with Owen King's We're All In This Together, which was at the forefront of my mind because his recent NYTBR coverage had killed off his worst fear--slightly. Because although they didn't get Anne Rice's son to review the book, Jon Zobenica still led off with "Owen King--it should just be said--is the son of Stephen." Although he then went on to suggest that the stories seem "inspired less by Dad than by Garrison Keillor on one of his political jags."

Which I totally didn't get at all, because in reading the collection's eponymous novella, I was immediately struck by how elements of Owen's voice resembled what was once tagged as Stephen's "Kmart realism." Not so much the use of brand names in this case, but the deep involvement of many of the characters in an immediately recognisable political culture (one of the main plot threads involves a dispute over the 2000 presidential election). Owen's characters are familiar to us in part because they share our concerns, or those of people we know, just as Stephen's characters do before the supernatural weirdness kicks in when he's writing at his best. (Let's not forget that "The Body" and "Apt Pupil," not to mention the novel Cujo, were grounded strictly in "reality.") There's no shame in a son following in his father's footsteps when it comes to creating believable characters with authentic personalities--although setting the story in Maine does somewhat underline the resemblance.

The title story in Javier Mariás' collection, When I Was Mortal, is a horror story, and a ghost story, but the two qualities don't line up the way you think they might. You see, here the horror happens to the ghost, as he's trapped in the existential nightmare of remembering everything about his life, including the bits he didn't really know the first time around. I found the prose style a bit too clever for my taste, like an intellectual twist on an EC Comics shocker, but some of our blogger friends quite like him.

Rod Liddle's "The Window," from Too Beautiful for You, was also a bit EC as it marched relentlessly to its grim ending, though more Shock Illustrated than Tales from the Crypt. It didn't help that I'd already seen this sort of "improper behavior" in too many stories before: imagine a cross between the Britchick-lit of, say, Lisa Jewell with the more nihilistic elements of old-school Brat Pack. A longer story, "Fucking Radu," just made Liddle's position in Bret Easton Ellis' shadow all the more obvious.

Tomorrow: three more collections, including the return of a "bad, bad writer."

Want to See Exotic Syria, the Crown Jewel of the Middle East?

Words Without Borders devotes its latest issue to Syrian literature, including a series of poems written in prison by Faraj Bayraqdar and a short story from Abd el-Salam al-Ujayli in which a young man visiting Seville runs into an elderly Arab gentleman who spins a tale for him:

"People say that it is a myth, but in Meknes alone I know of ten houses where the Keys of Return hang from their portals. Five centuries ago our ancestors, yours and mine, dear cousin, were forced out of this country to the shores of Africa. In the confusion of defeat and the humiliation of loss, they could not carry with them the land that they had watered with their blood nor the palaces their hands had built or the art treasures they had created in the paradise of Andalusia. They left everything behind, fleeing with their lives. But some carried with them to the other shore the keys of their palaces as mementos of the lost paradise and as prompts for the return. If by chance you were to enter the old homes in the alleys of Meknes, Fez, Melilla, all the way to Kayrawan, you will find in any one of them, at the entrance, a rusty key, its meaning forgotten by the present owners who think that it is nothing but a useless object. But if you really know the extent of what the world owes our ancestors, you had better kiss that rusty metal object and lift it up to your forehead in reverence, for it is one of the many Keys of Return."

To Infinity...and Beyond! Or Not...

Remember the Mundanes? Recently, the science-fiction radicals have been using their blog to catalog some of the responses to their manifesto (which, as you may recall, advocated "eschewing space opera theatrics and preposterous physics in favor of dense near-future realizations"). The latest round of debate seems to have begun when Ian McDonald noticed his latest novel, River of Gods, unintentionally fulfilled the Mundane manifesto. "Will I then be co-opted against my will, like being converted to Mormonism after your death?" he mused, adding, "[T]he Mundane Manifesto is totally unnecessary to produce the type of science-fiction it celebrates."

Charlie Stross (who I'm hoping to rope into an Author2Author) looked at the whole thing with bemusement, while commenting that the Mundanes seem to have attacked some of the surface problems with modern science fiction without addressing the underlying "cult of heroism." That bit of analysis got noticed at Blogcritics.org, while Lou Anders, the head of Prometheus Books's science fiction line, added further reflection.

(As an aside, McDonald has also announced on his blog that Pyr will be publishing River of Gods in the U.S. sometime in 2006, which strikes me as about damn time somebody brought his books back into this country. But then I've said that already...)

Do I Meet Any of the 14? Judge for Yourself This Fall...

Having reached the halfway point of a 500-page biography I have to review for Tuesday morning, I decided to take a mental break by checking out the recently arrived 78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published & 14 Reasons Why It Just Might, by MacAdam/Cage editor Pat Walsh. The material covered by the first half of the title was pretty helpful; even though I will see my book coming out soon, I'm still learning a lot about what happens between the writing and the publication, and Walsh offers very straightforward explanations about how publishers decide to buy books and how agents decide to represent authors--not to mention why most manuscripts get rejected.

But it's the 14 reasons that will remain with me for every book I write after this. In fact, I'm thinking of phrasing them as questions, printing those questions out as a list, and then posting it in front of my desk as mental checkpoints. (Then again, as long as I'm writing at the far end of the living room, Mrs. Beatrice may veto putting up any sort of bulletin board near my work space, so I may have to avail myself of the Macintosh "Stickies" software...)

Secretly, This Is a Virtual Book Tour Post

So when I get an essay anthology like Bookmark Now, which Kevin Smokler organized to consider "writing in unreaderly times," the first thing I do is look at the resources section in the back of the book to see if he mentions me, especially since I'm still rather bitter about how all my friends' blogs got mentioned in a Telegraph article and I didn't, presumably because the reporter didn't have enough room after wasting an entire paragraph on stuff like Belle Du Jour that has nothing to do with bookblogs whatsoever... But Smokler does mention me, and says he reads the site "every day (or just about)," so clearly this is a good book.

Anyway, having established its credentials, I basically poke around to see if any of my friends are in it, which leads me straight to Tom Bissell and Stephanie Elizondo Griest, and then I look for people I've interviewed, which leads me to a fun piece by Adam Johnson about collaboration, which ends up being next to an essay written by the writing couple Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge, and after a few more of those I move on to the people I've just read, like novelist Michelle Richmond, and from there to the people I've read about, like blogger Pamela Ribon and Nell Freudenberger. (That's right; I haven't gotten around to actually reading Lucky Girls yet, and it's true: I suck.)

So here's the thing: I like what I've read so far (well, except from a "humor" piece on how to write for McSweeney's that's just lame), but frankly I'm not convinced by this whole "writing in unreaderly times" angle, especially since the best pieces don't contain any such alarmism. They're simply honest reflections from writers about the things in their lives that led them to this position. (Plus a bit of reportage about the blogging scene from Elizabeth Spiers.) And there's always room for writers who have compelling stories to tell about being writers, without tacking on some sort of now-ish theme. Should we take last year's NEA reports of "reading at risk" seriously? Probably. But that report has very little if anything to do with why you should take the best writing in Bookmark Now seriously, or (I suspect) why those standout essays were written.

(And, as it turns out, Kevin's guest appearance at The Elegant Variation leads to a discussion of the alleged risk...)

NYRB Classics: Howells and Casares

NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank concludes his guided tour of some of the line's highlights with a dual recommendation. Look for him tonight with John Banville at Three Lives, as Banville talks about J. G. Farrell...

"I want to bring up two wonderful and wonderfully unexpected love stories. If you can imagine Jane Austen as an American writer (if...), then William Dean Howells's Indian Summer might be her work. Acid and amusing and wise in equal degrees, this story of sudden infatuation and extensive (comic, awkward, excruciatingly embarrassing) reconsideration is a pleasure from beginning to end--and the end, let me assure you, for all the detours along the way, is happy.

"The Argentinean Adolfo Bioy Casares's The Invention of Morel is a surreal account of a fugitive who finds himself on a remote island, where the other inhabitants pay no attention to him, even as they go about a strange unvarying daily routine. When the narrator at last discovers that his beloved is only an image (he is caught in a kind of film loop) he wishes only to join her in her perfect unreality--which is of course the only conclusion to any perfect love."

NYRB Classics: Eustace and Hilda

Don't forget that tonight is the first of two consecutive evenings in which John Banville comes to Manhattan to celebrate NYRB Classics reaching its 150th title. He'll be at the Union Square Barnes & Noble tonight with Jonathan Lethem and Deborah Eisenberg. And if, like me, you can't see him tonight, you can still catch him Friday at Three Lives. Meanwhile, NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank continues to share some of his favorites in the line:

"Growing up is a more or less inescapable fact of life and unsurprisingly the subject of countless books. The NYRB Classics series includes a number that look at this experience from particularly surprising angles. Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica, which tells of troupe of not-so-innocent children who find themselves at the mercy of not-so-guilty pirates, is a great book, as is L.P. Hartley's tale of infatuation and exploitation, The Go-Between. Here though I’d especially like to single out Hartley's wonderful earlier book, Eustace and Hilda, the first section of which is a quite miraculous evocation not just of childhood but of how a child thinks and feels, of the whole texture of childhood experience. Thanks in part to this preternaturally vivid beginning the book as a whole--about a brother and sister who are both inseparable and incompatible, and for whom first impressions and final moments tragically converge--is unusually poignant and powerful."

And I'll spotlight another gem NYRB Classics has in this category: A Way of Life, Like Any Other, by Darcy O'Brien. One of the best child's-eye views of Hollywood I can recall reading.

NYRB Classics: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Another gem from the NYRB Classics line, handpicked by editor Edwin Frank:

"The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by the early 19th-century Scottish writer James Hogg, is a rich and complicated tale of madness that bears comparison with Wuthering Heights. The book's point of departure is in theology, specifically the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, which holds that our spiritual fate, our salvation or damnation, has already been decided by God and nothing we do is going to alter it one way or the other. In Hogg's book, this doctrine is the occasion for an extraordinary psychological exploration, a portrait of an unmistakably damned soul who is utterly persuaded of his perfect righteousness, believing that for him 'everything is permitted.' The psychic meltdown that accompanies his belated realization that perhaps he has got that wrong is truly harrowing. This horror story (it helped inspire Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) seems all the more to the point at a time when fundamentalists are running rampant both at home and abroad."

NYRB Classics: To Each His Own

Edwin Frank continues to cull some of his favorites from the NYRB Classics line...

"NYRB has published several novels and a volume of short stories by the Italian writer Leonardo Sciascia, along with his report on the murder of the Italian politician Aldo Moro. Of all these books, I think my favorite is the novel To Each His Own, a story of Sicily, silence, and suspicion in which even the most every day and innocent transactions between people are fraught with unforeseen danger. The ending of the book is all the more devastating for the fact that--at least after it is over--you feel like you knew it was coming all along.

"Also brilliant is Sciascia's The Day of the Owl, a story of the Mafia in which, by a perfectly perverse irony, the crime is 'solved' when the police succeed it in covering it up: the truth, as it were, is buried for good."

NYRB Classics: The Root and the Flower

This week, NYRB Classics will celebrate the publication of its 150th title, J.G. Farrell's The Singapore Grip. John Banville, who supplied an introduction to the NYRB edition of Farrell's Troubles, will come to New York to read from Farrell's work at two separate events: a big blowout at the Union Square Barnes & Noble on Thursday, May 19, where he'll share the podium with Deborah Eisenberg and Jonathan Lethem (reading from Dorothy Baker and Malcolm Braly, respectively), followed by a more intimate event at Three Lives on Friday where Banville will read solo. I've been a big fan of this series for years, and credit editor Edwin Frank with putting a lot of great writers on my radar screen. So I've invited him to present five of his favorites from the NYRB backlist which you might possibily enjoy as well. Here's the first:

"One of the things that NYRB Classics series sets out to do is to introduce readers to really good books that that aren't as well known as they should be, and one of the pleasures of working on it is that I also get a chance to find out about books I’ve never heard of before. One book I discovered through the series that I especially is LP Myers's The Root and the Flower, which was introduced to me by the wonderful essayist Eliot Weinberger. The story is set in India during the Mughal Empire, which might suggest it's a historical novel. But it isn't really. The book's concerns--sex, terror, religious uncertainty--are as contemporary as they are perennial, and the historical setting is really a way of putting them in perspective, of suggesting the strangeness of the way we live now.

"Set in a time of political, moral, and spiritual upheaval, the book has for its two main characters a father and his young son, each of whom is struggling to come to terms not only with the murder and mayhem that surround them but also with a host of internal demons. The book carries a psychological charge that reminds me of Dostoyevsky, contains brilliant satirical scenes of society that recall Proust, and displays gifts for describing nature and landscape and for dramatic action that are all Myers's own. A great adventure story that is also a journey through the darker regions of the soul, by a man who was, interestingly, close to George Orwell, though I'm not sure that The Root and the Flower, which even includes a war in Afghanistan, isn't in fact more timely now than 1984."

(By the way, if you can think of a book NYRB hasn't brought back into print yet but should, you can tell them about it.)

Floor Time for the Significant Other

So many books come through Beatrice headquarters that I can't possibly read them all--so sometimes the Significant Other gets to them before I do. It dawned on me yesterday, as I was making my way through some PW work, that as long as she's dipping into the review copies, maybe I can expand my coverage a bit...I mean, hey, if Mark Sarvas can exploit his own mother for blog entries...So here's the first in an irregular series of book reviews from the Significant Other.

I enjoyed Nabokov’s Butterfly, by Rick Gekoski. Gekoski gossips freely not only about the world of rare book dealing--one of the more amusing anecdotes concerns an American mobster with an enviable collection of James Joyce first editions--but about the authors of the books he deals. We learn, for example, about the short volume of poems that Graham Greene had published for his mistress, Catherine Walston; according to Gekoski, there are only 25 copies extant, although Gekoski refrains from quoting any of the poems "out of deference to my old friend." Gekoski, who has a Ph.D in English from Oxford and was a lecturer in English at the University of Warwick, also offers a number of thoughtful insights into the works themselves; I was particularly impressed with his take on A Confederacy of Dunces. The book is not without its drawbacks--Gekoski obviously thinks highly of himself, and is perhaps a bit too fond of name dropping--but if you don't mind the not-so-thin thread of self-aggrandizement, you’ll likely have a good time reading it.

Editorial Note: Gekoski may demur at publishing his old friend's love poems, but other folks have no such scruples, so you can read an excerpt here.

So Much for Retirement

Stephen King's just one of the many people who've come to admire the "good, clean, bare-knuckled storytelling" packed into every release from Hard Case Crime. So much so that he wants in on the action, which means The Colorado Kid, a mass-market paperback scheduled for October 2005, will be King's first fiction since the conclusion of the Dark Tower saga. Maybe they can reprint some of those old George Stark classics like Steel Machine next...

It just so happens that the most recent Hard Case titles showed up on my desk last week, including a reprint of Day Keene's Home Is the Sailor and Allan Guthrie's Kiss Her Goodbye. If they're as good as the first batch of Hard Case books that came out last year, they're going to be some of the best crime fiction of 2005.

Too-Brief Looks at Books That Deserve Your Attention

I was going through the piles of books around my desk yesterday afternoon, and I came across a few trade paperbacks from Harlem Moon, the African-American imprint at Broadway Books, that reprint some early 20th-century classics. The Heart of Happy Hollow, a collection of short stories by Paul Laurence Dunbar, didn't especially hold my attention--but it wasn't the fault of his extensive use of dialect; I just don't happen to find a lot of late-19th- or early-20th-century American short fiction as engaging as I do more modern stories. Likewise, the opening pages of W.E.B. DuBois's first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece, seemed a little slow and archaic to my contemporary sensibilities, though pretty good for the period (again, by my casual reckoning which has huge gaps because this era has not been of major interest to me as far as American fiction is concerned). But it was The Colonel's Dream, by Charles W. Chesnutt, that really held my attention. Although it actually predates the DuBois by half a decade, the prose is more "modern" in the sense of a certain liveliness, and Chesnutt's command of character is damn strong. You wouldn't confuse this with a late-20th-century novel, but its robustness puts it at least a few years ahead of its time. I happen to find a lot of Ishmael Reed's introduction sloppy--not as bad as his James Brown review last weekend, but still pretty awful in spots--but Reed might well be on to something when he identifies Chesnutt as "a major American writer, who, had he been white, would have been canonized long before now."

The Buzz About Bee

Jason Little is self-syndicating the sequel to Shutterbug Follies on his website. It's a bit too early to tell just where "Motel Art Improvement Service" is headed, but I'm definitely along for the ride as Little posts new installments to his website every Sunday. And, in somewhat related news,Myla Goldberg's second novel, Wickett's Remedy, is going to come out in October, and if Doubleday doesn't have a ton of ARCs at BookExpo, it'll be heartbreaking...

Ooh, Ooh, Do "All You Zombies" Next!

"Last spring," recalls BoingBoing cohost Cory Doctorow, "in the wake of Ray Bradbury pitching a tantrum over Michael Moore appropriating the title of Fahrenheit 451 to make Fahrenheit 9/11, I conceived of a plan to write a series of stories with the same titles as famous sf shorts, which would pick apart the totalitarian assumptions underpinning some of sf's classic narratives." The first in that series has just been published online at Infinite Matrix: "I, Robot."

More than the Quotes Are Inverted, She Suggests

I'm not sure that you can really call something that's only updated two days a week a "blog" in the classical sense, but Scott McLemee's new "Intellectual Affairs" column is good reading, at any rate, and worth bracketing a little time on Tuesday and Thursday morning to peruse. And from his links, I discovered this imagined Henry James interview which Cynthia Ozick contributed to the Threepenny Review:

Interviewer: Well, true, they haven't stopped us from speculating that you're gay and always have been.

James: Indeed, there has been a frequency of jolly corners...delightful hours with Turgenev in Paris...the soliloquizing intimacy of one's London hearth in winter, or the socially convenient pleasures of the ever so felicitous Reform Club...going in to dinner with a gracious lady on one's arm in some grand country house...all rewardingly gay at times, to be sure; but neither have I been spared sojourns upon the bench of desolation. Despair, I own, dogged me in particular in the year 1895, when at the opening of my play, Guy Domville--

Interviewer (breaking in hurriedly): I mean you've loved men.

It's not quite Colm Tóibin or David Lodge, but it'll do for a moment's pleasure.

Now We're Waiting for the Third Coming

Wednesday White of Science Fiction Blog (who, incidentally, designed the Beatrice logo a decade ago) alerted me to the fact that Slacktivist briefly resumed his close readings of Left Behind for a few days late in December.

"Peace is a pretty major theme in the Bible [he notes]. But none of this matters to the prophecy nuts who are convinced that the Antichrist will be a man of peace. And since they believe that the most important thing for Christians to do is to be on the lookout against the Antichrist, and vigilantly opposed to his evil ways, they believe that Christians must oppose anyone who speaks of, pursues, or tries to make, peace. This is one of the most astonishing and dangerous aspects of the popularity of the End Times heresies promoted by people like LaHaye and Jenkins. It is one of this biggest reasons why this matters--deeply, truly, seriously matters."

NYT columnist Nick Kristof hit a similar theme last November, criticizing Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins for the inherent bigotry of their apocalypse porn. But nobody I've seen has gone after these guys with the thoroughness of the Slacktivist. See for yourself, encourage him to do more--though the site itself is going great guns, the Left Behind well hasn't been touched for over a month--and if you're in the media, write about his work.

Put It in Reverse and Hit It!

I'm adding a new literary magazine to the list at the bottom right-hand corner of the Beatrice.com homepage: the Backwards City Review. Cory Doctorow mentioned it on his blog because the most recent issue includes an excerpt from his forthcoming novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, a downloadable PDF excerpt at that. (You can also download Adam Berlin's short story "Speeding Away" while you're at it.)

The Best $7 You'll Spend All Week

I don't usually recommend music here, but since the new John Adams CD on Naxos contains his setting of Walt Whitman's "The Wound Dresser," I figure I can get away with it this once, even if the real reasons I bought the album were "Short Ride in a Fast Machine" and "Shaker Loops." But I was struck by this slightly wrongheaded comment in one of the reviews listed on the Naxos site, concerning Adams's arrangement of Whitman's description of his experiences as a war nurse:

"Does this kind of text really bear setting to music? I am not convinced, though I would not for one moment doubt Adams’ deep sincerity or seriousness, and there is indeed a terrible beauty about this music, full of compassion as it is. A moving yet very uncomfortable experience--which may well be precisely what the composer intended."

Yeah, I'm going to guess that when he chose to set a poem with lines such as "From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand / I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood," Adams wasn't aiming to make his listeners comfortable about the ravages of war. "Does this kind of text really bear setting to music?" Sheesh. Tell you what, though: I'll buy Leonard Slatkin dinner if he programs "The Wound Dresser" at the Kennedy Center by Veterans Day. Dinner and drinks if he conducts it on Veterans or Memorial Day.

From the Art Book Stack

I couldn't quite put my finger on why, but the more I stared at the cover of Sustenance & Desire, the more familiar it seemed. It wasn't until I peeked at the back cover flap that I realized Bascove was the artist responsible for two of my favorite series of book covers as a younger reader: the Penguin paperbacks of Robertson Davies's Deptford and Cornish trilogies and the original Mysterious Press editions of Jerome Charyn's Isaac Sidel novels. (For that matter, it had somehow never clicked for me that the two authors--whom I read a decade apart--shared a cover artist.) Now I can see what jogged my dim memories, although the fifteen paintings vividly reproduced here are quite different than that earlier work. There's a slightly more realistic quality to the human figures, a softness to the faces; the still lifes of fruits and vegetables, however, remain highly stylized--while they are unmistakably artichokes and leeks and eggplants, and the heirloom tomatoes especially so, most of them are also arresting patterns of color and line.

All of which is put into service to accompany an eclectic assortment of poems and essays on the various pleasures associated with food and the memory of food. My favorite juxtaposition--perhaps illustrative of the collection as a whole--prefaces Robin Robertson's "Artichoke" with Thomas Lynch's "Robin Robertson Gazed," which speculates on how one of Britain's best new poets created that particular poem. But there's plenty else to enjoy here: Calvin Trillin on gelato tasting in Italy, an Elizabeth Macklin terza rima about an espresso pot, a Basho haiku on morning tea...

Love Letters, Lost is a near-simultaneous arrival to the stacks of books on either side of my desk. It's the latest collection from Babbette Hines, who owns the Found: Photo gallery in Los Angeles. Although there are plenty of names in the love letters Hines compiles and reproduces, we still know about their writers only what they chose to share with their recipients, adding an air of mystery (and in some cases suspense) to the pages. I'm still shaking my head at the number of letters written on office stationery; that one guy at the Bank of Italy had it particularly bad for Dagmar... And are those photos of the people who wrote and read the letters? If Hines knows, she isn't telling... at least not yet.

And Just What Did Ward Cleaver Do in Mayfield, Anyway?

A contact at Trinity University Press passed along the delightful news that the demand for Peter Turchi's Maps of the Imagination has been so persistent that they're going back to the printers for more copies. Turchi's meditation on "the writer as cartographer" has quickly become a favorite of bookblogs such as The Mumpsimus and Tingle Alley. Poring over the gorgeous illustrations, and Turchi's elaborate concept of writing as an act of exploration and presentation much like mapmaking--where what you leave out can be as important, in some ways, as what you put in--made a believer out of me as well.

"In a surprising number of novels [Turchi writes], the characters are effectively jobless; they have been granted pyschic vacations from work by the author. Their occupations might be named, but they have no employers, no colleagues, no pressing work-related obligations; which is to say, they live in a world very different from that of most readers. (Long ago, bent over one of the blue-spined books I read the moment they entered the house, I noted that the Hardy boys, unfettered by schoolwork, lived in an endless teenage vacation.)"

Not very many critics can deliver equally convincing analyses of the Road Runner cartoons and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler; fewer still would be able to do it in such a way that readers who are themselves aspiring writers could find semi-practical inspiration for their next encounter with the blank page or screen. This turns out to be not so surprising: Turchi is the head of the creative writing program at Warren Wilson College, and this book has partial roots in a lecture which first appeared in an anthology of essays by WWC faculty, Bringing the Devil to His Knees.

Readers in the Pacific Northwest can hear Turchi speak in early April 2005. And, with any luck, I'm told, there will soon be online excerpts available at the book's Trinity web page.

Fox Executives Should Wear Tinfoil Hats Around This Guy

A little over three years ago, Jennifer Egan's Look at Me demonstrated the difficulty of writing satire in the 21st century, where our culture moves so fast that what seems ludicrous and over-the-top when you first type it out "doesn't seem funny and crazy" when it's finally published, as she told me; instead, "it seems like social commentary."

Likewise, in a week where "reality television" has brought us a former softcore porn actress reuniting with her birth parents, a staged romance between an over-the-hill actress and a hip-hop sideshow act, and (unless they edited it out) a drunk midget pissing in the corner, Erik Barmack's debut novel, The Virgin, which traces one contestant's path through a televised competition to be selected by a 26-year-old virgin, doesn't read as outrageous, but as an imaginative stew of moments we've seen on several different programs in the last year or two. Heck, it's even got a pretty good running parody of Television Without Pity.

Then again, being in-the-moment rather than twenty minutes into the future can be a strength, if you want to get at the character-driven drama beneath the satirical conceit. And though there's still some first-novel bumps, Barmack does have a pretty good grip on the two stories of transformation he wants to tell--the main narrative thread following contestant Jeb, who exerts his energy into creating and maintaining a phony persona for the cameras, and the shadow story of the virgin herself (although once the final revelations come out, her string of emails does become somewhat confusing in retrospect...) In any event, reading about reality TV certainly isn't going to rot your mind the way actually watching it will--and you can get the fictional equivalent of an entire season's storyline in the time it would take you to watch one program's extra-long season finale.

Next, I'll Use My Powers to Bring Back LAX

used with permission of TheNorm.com

A few weeks ago, I mentioned the effort to save The Norm. Apparently, it worked, because Michael Jantze started releasing new strips on TheNorm.com Monday. Granted, you have to pony up at least $25 to see what unfolds in 2005, but if previous years are anything to go by, it will be so worth it. Trust me.

The Universe Is Shaped Exactly Like the Earth

I was catching up recently with some back issues of Locus when I came across a reference in one of the book reviews to "a splinter group among SF writers who dub themselves the Mundanes, devoted to eschewing space opera theatrics and preposterous physics in favor of dense near-future realizations." And I thought, well, that's the stuff for me, since I'm already a fan of authors like Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, and William Gibson.

Turns out they have an online manifesto that celebrates, among other things, "the imaginative challenge that awaits any SF author who accepts that this is it: Earth is all we have," then asks, "What will we do with it?" They also have a blog with a lot of compelling elaboration upon their basic themes...and if you're at all interested in how any fiction grapples with real-world issues, I think you'll find it interesting. (A little more info can be found in a conversation between writers Geoff Ryman, who serves as a sort of Mundane mentor, and Kit Reed. That page has its own amusing properties; I'd quite forgotten how entertaining the MUD/MOO paradigm could be...)

Just Make Sure Matter-Eater Lad Shows Up, and I'm Sold

Mark Waid is one of the best writers in comic books these days, and I've been a fan of his for close to twenty years now--back from the days when he was writing about comics for Amazing Heroes. This week, the first issue of Legion of Super-Heroes, his reboot of one of DC's niftiest franchises, hits the stands. It's the first time in years I've been motivated to buy an actual issue of a mainstream comic rather than wait for the inevitable trade paperback, and it doesn't disappoint. For some background on the series, you can check out Waid's interviews with Comic Book Resources and Pulse readers. In another interview with Comic Shop Newsarama, which I honestly tried to find online, Waid elaborates:

"The characters will drive everything. Political intrigue, astounding villains with chilling schemes, wild and bizarre threats to the universe--the more imaginative and futuristic the better, snapshots of societal change--all that's great, and... readers will get as much of that as they demand. But every story, every single story--whether it's the A plot, the B subplot, or the C sub-subplot, must always be about one or more Legionnaires and how what's hapening for the next thirty or sixty or ninety pages is affecting them."

Oh, and let's not forget Barry Kitson, Waid's frequent collaborator, whose visual revamping of the 31st century's greatest superhero team deserves some recognition as well.

Happy Birthday, David Markson

We bookbloggers think David Markson is swell. Don't just take my word for it, though; ask Mark Sarvas or Edward Champion, the latter of whom wonders aloud why all you book reviewers with your year-end lists seem to have forgotten Vanishing Point.

Although, in all fairness, the fact that I'd forgotten about it--about most books published this year, in fact--while I was busy crash-writing my own manuscript is the main reason I'm glad I don't do year-end lists on my site, so I can understand how your memories might be swamped.

Well, This Put Me Right Off Poker Night

Actually, that's not true; I'm staying home from my monthly poker game because I've got to write two chapters worth of photo captions for The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane tonight. But even if I were easily unnerved, Nathaniel Lachenmeyer's 13: The Story of the World's Most Popular Superstition isn't really a fright inducer, but an entertaining look at, well, "the world's most popular superstition" and how it got that way. I never knew until today, for example, that the original title of Friday the 13th was Long Night at Camp Blood, which lends itself much less to sequel titling... Anyway, this was a fun diversion while I was taking an afternoon break from the keyboard, and I imagine you might enjoy it, too.

No Live Report, But a Strong Recommendation

I left the Outer Boroughs last night with every intention of hearing Stephen Amidon read from Human Capital, but a total shutdown along the B/D/F corridor with just fifteen minutes to get from midtown to Greenwich Village knocked my plans for a loop, so I turned around and kept reading from the novel on the subway ride home. I'm liking it a lot--the fact that it's published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and thus in that FSG typeface is reinforcing my mental associations with the Jonathan Franzen/"lives caught up in the absurdities of capitalist-materialist culture" genre, but I wouldn't peg Amidon as a Franzen imitator by a long shot.

Robin Vidimos underscores the bleakness, but calls the novel "thought-provoking." Ron Charles discusses how you can't easily lump Amidon in with other, lazier satirists of suburbia, because his novel "generates heart-thumping suspense from the crises of ordinary people trying to earn a living and take care of their children. Indeed, it's the awful plausibility of the plot that make this story so tense and involving." Jonathan Yardley also praises the characters as "interesting and sympathetic and very real," adding, "If there's anyone writing about [the suburbs] now with the clarity, insight and honesty that he brings to the task, I'm unaware of it."

Michiko Kakutani is, of course, not so impressed, claiming the novel "never lives up to its Dreiseresque ambition," though she does seem to like it as a "soap-opera-ish" story in the Endless Love vein. (Be forewarned that she reveals the tragic event that sets the downwardly spiraling plot in motion...) The mixed reaction from NYT continued when Deborah Friedell suggested "Amidon has too well demonstrated the superficiality of his characters and their world," implying that the book itself might be just as shallow. Dan Cryer of Newsdayalso felt disappointment in the "workmanlike" prose, noting oddly, "There's not a memorable sentence in the book begging the reader to stop and admire." You know what, though? I consider that a good thing. Cryer says it's because "nothing is allowed to impede breakneck storytelling," but I believe that the novel's straightforward language serves to take the attention away from the author and put it where it belongs: on the story and the characters. And so far, I haven't seen evidence of shallowness--what I've seen is a fiction writer who's confident enough not to bang you over the head with his talking points. Read Human Capital for yourself, and see if you don't agree with me.

For Boston, For Boston, Thy Glory Is Our Own

Though a more sensible man might have gone to bed much earlier, I felt as if I should see Game 4 of the Sox/Yankees championship series through to David Ortiz's twelfth-inning homer, even though I know that the curse of the Bambino will kick in eventually. In fact, during the earlier innings, I was diverting half my attention to Dan Shaughnessy's fun little history of the black cloud that follows the Red Sox around. But earlier in the day, taking a break from my book reviewing duties, I grinned over a novel that casts a satiric look at two questions all us fans ask at one point or another: What would it take for the Sox to win? And how much would we accept in the name of victory?

David Ferrell's Screwball has its flaws; the dialogue doesn't always ring true, and some of the plot twists hit the extreme edge of implausibility. But these minor problems don't do that much to undercut Ferrell's basic appeal, which is a lot like that of early Christopher Buckley, and nothing can diminish the brilliance of the premise: The Sox have a serial killer in the lineup, but the front office is willing to overlook that problem until the World Series is over, and the stress is driving the manager nuts. The manager is actually what made the novel work for me--while a lot of the plot just makes stuff happen and brings the reader along for the ride, the manager's psychological burden, even played for laughs, maybe because it's played for laughs, thoroughly held my attention and made me care about what he would do next, rather than what would happen to him. Screwball is just out in paperback, and I'm sure it's selling great in Boston, but I'd recommend you baseball fans outside Beantown give it a try as well.

DATELINE LOS ANGELES: Hollywood Novels, Take One

In Los Angeles proper now, chez Elegant Variation as it happens--we bloggers like to support each other when we can, and Mark's graciously provided me with a place to crash while I'm in town doing photo research for The Karen Black Project. Before coming here, I dropped in at Dutton's, one of my favorite bookstores in the nation (and not just because I worked there for a year fresh out of grad school). Picked up some things I'd been looking for, a special treat for the Significant Other, and an impulse purchase of the unabridged audio version of The Plot Against America read by Ron Silver. So I'll probably get a chunk of that onto my iPod and listen to it on the flight home Friday...

But maybe you want to hear about the Hollywood novels promised above. Everybody has a guilty pleasure genre--sometimes more than one--and the Hollywood novel is mine, as long as it's not too trashy. Sure, I like the obvious choices, like What Makes Sammy Run? and The Big Laugh: how can you not love a book that ends "He is Hubert Ward the movie star and no son of a bitch can take that away from him. Ha ha ha ha ha"? But my absolute faves are Gavin Lambert's four novels set in Los Angeles, especially Inside Daisy Clover; as I was just telling somebody the other day, I honestly consider Lambert the Dawn Powell of Los Angeles, and it's a shame his fiction isn't easier to find in this country. Anyway, in deference to this trip to Los Angeles, I've been dipping into some more recent Hollywood fiction to see what's going on in the genre...

You might remember last week when I commented on Michiko Kakutani's pan of Elizabeth Frank's Cheat and Charmer, suggesting that her "use of the press kit blurbs as a bludgeon against the author" was a bit lazy. I still hold to that principle, but now that I'm a couple chapters in, I can see why she lost it. If your teeth get set on edge by dialogue like "That must be some marriage--the most beautiful girl in the world and the most talented man of our time," this is not going to be the novel for you. Truth to tell, I'm finding the dialogue more than a little implausible myself, but I'm such a sucker for blacklist-era stories that I'm going on anyway. The main problem I'm finding is something Kakutani mentioned early in her review, when she compares the novel to "an old-fashioned Hollywood sudser, one of those glossy Douglas Sirk melodramas." Cheat and Charmer seems to equate a sweeping grand style with grand significance, and as a result the strokes can be extremely broad. But what actually made Sirk work (in my own opinion) was the accuracy of the smaller gestures--it's first and foremost the realistic portrayal of the characters from the ground up that makes the big things that happen to them matter. So far, the cast of Cheat and Charmer seems comprised of types rather than personalities, and as a result I don't so much care what happens to them yet as I'm simply cruising along out of curiosity about what direction Frank will steer the story in next.

I'm having a better reaction to Cathleen Schine's She Is Me, although "Hollywood novel" might be a bit reductive in this case, even if one of the main characters is an academic who's been lured out to LA to write a screenplay. Schine's characters are much more believable to me precisely because of how she builds them up through their actions in situations we can all recognize. Their reactions seem more natural, more authentic somehow, and I will admit that I personally am a sucker for plots that build up slowly out of discrete events rather than through straight-line narratives where nearly everything that happens leads inevitably to what happens next. That's just how I am. Anyway, She Is Me is a novel I am reading because I'm genuinely interested in how these characters handle these situations.

Everything Old Is New Again (And Still Great)

Michael Moorcock is hotter than ever just now. Not only is DC Comics presenting a new Elric miniseries with artwork by Walt Simonson, another division of the Time Warner conglomerate--Warner Books' Aspect fantasy line--has revived his 1978 novel, Gloriana; Or, The Unfulfill'd Queen, with a new afterword in which the author places the controversial (in England) work in its historical and literary context and provides an alternate version of the chapter that caused much of the fuss. Meanwhile, Thunder's Mouth Press reprints the Moorcock-edited New Worlds anthology.

Two of the authors in that collection have had some of their luster restored by Overlook Press in its latest round of reissues of "lost" science fiction and fantasy classics. First off is Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron, which caused a furor in Parliament upon publication in the late '60s; Spinrad tells the tale (and a couple others besides). Then there's The Complete Roderick, which puts John Sladek's two novels about Roderick the robot in a single volume, which should make Michael Dirda, who called Sladek "funnier than Vonnegut at his best," awfully happy. Heck, it makes me happy--I've been trying to find both books ever since I first heard about them as a teenage SF fan, when they were discussed in the sort of reverential tones Quentin Tarantino uses for Wong Kar-Wai films.

Continue reading Everything Old Is New Again (And Still Great)

It's a Hard Case Life for Us...

USA Today correspondent Jacqueline Blais delivers the goods on the launch of Hard Case Crime, the line of tough-as-nails paperback crime novels that mixes classics from guys like Lawrence Block and Donald Westlake with a new generation that includes Max Phillips and Richard Aleas. Okay, so they're the imprint's co-founders; Aleas is a pseudonym for publisher Charles Ardai. You got to start somewhere, and Phillips' Fade to Blonde is a hell of a place to start, as I found out this weekend. I love everything about this book--the tightly wound prose, the painted cover's promise of sex and danger, hell, even the typeface meets the classic pulp standards. And if you think the picture you're seeing now is cool, be sure to check out that Aleas book, because the dame on that cover was painted by the same guy who did the poster for Breakfast at Tiffany's. Mark my words, these guys are going to become the Black Lizard of the 21st century...

I Am Officially Insanely Jealous

Paul Murray's the other side of 30 from me, the young side, and he's got a hilarious novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes. I'm about two hundred pages in so far, and it's the funniest thing I've read since...well, since the last Wodehouse novel I read, which is hardly surprising since Murray's taken Plum's model of a dim, indolent young well-to-do and brought it kicking and screaming into contemporary Dublin in the form of Charles Hythloday. John Freeman's review has been floating around a few papers--I've linked to the Denver Post version, but it's also run in Newsday and The Commercial Appeal. It's the only critical take I've seen on the book so far, other than the usual PW graf, but rest assured you'll probably hear more about it in the weeks to come.

Catching Up With 100 Bullets

A couple years ago, I took advantage of an increase in free time brought about by a dotcom layoff to get back into reading comic books, since I'd always wanted to read Astro City and Grant Morrison's run on JLA but was always too busy summarizing books about Bill Clinton's sex life. I also took a glance at First Shot, Last Call, the first 100 Bullets collection. The two story arcs it collected had a good pulp feel to them, and though I wasn't entirely sold on Eduardo Risso's ultraexpressionist teeth and eyes, the stylized art generally appealed to me, especially when it most seemed like a colorized stab at Frank Miller's Sin City style.

I didn't pick up on the underlying narrative details, but then I wasn't supposed to figure out that much that early, I realize in retrospect. But I put the comic aside in favor of more Grant Morrison stuff, and it wasn't until the latest installment, 100 Bullets: Samurai, was reviewed in the NYTBR a few weeks ago that my curiosity was really reraised. The artwork's gotten better and the storytelling's gotten tighter. The first story arc is a prison story with an air of authenticity fans of Oz will instantly recognize, while the second changes pace completely--a disastrously wrong night at a roadside wildlife attraction that wouldn't have been out of place in an old Black Lizard tale. The deep story is definitely rising closer to the surface now, becoming more apparently integral to the other stories around it; one assumes that will continue as the second half of Brian Azzarello's grand narrative unfolds in future issues. And I'm a little more intrigued now by the notion of combining gutter-level noir tales with a much higher overarching conspiracy...and you can get a (frustratingly opaque) hint at where things are headed from this downloadable excerpt (with nasty words blacked out for all ages).

Azzarello has done interviews about comics writing and 100 Bullets

In Translation

Another month, another installation of Words Without Borders. The July issue features "religious literature," and the first item I clicked on was a translation of Wang Wei by David Hinton, whose version of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching was a significant influence on my own work. But there's also a batch of medieval Hebrew poetry and samples of verse by Sohab Sepehri:

How delicious this water is!
How refreshing this stream!
Those people who live upstream,
how fortunate they are!
May their springs be ever fresh,
their cows always fertile!
I haven't seen their village,
But surely, God's foot is on
their threshing floor and
the moonlight there illuminates
the width of their words.
The walls are low in the village upstream.
Blue there is really blue.
When buds blossom, they know, those people.
What a village it must be!
May its streets be filled with music!

Why, We Were Just Talking About Charles McCarry

Patrick Anderson of the Dallas-Fort Worth Star-Telegram reviews Old Boys, the novel that begins with news of the death of Charles McCarry's master spy, Paul Christopher, then snowballs into a caper where jihadists who might have some stray Russian nukes and would love to get their hands on a document that could've come straight out of Irving Wallace's The Word--which just happens to have passed through the hands of Reinhard Heydrich... In lesser hands this could have been a crappy potboiler, but McCarry brings a strongly honed sensibility to the material and manages to make it all seem credible. It took me a couple dozen subway rides to get to the end, but I was always hooked. Book of Joe says, "I believe that Charles McCarry is the best American writer of spy and espionage fiction working today." With the exception of a good argument to be made for Alan Furst, I don't have much reason to doubt that assessment.

Ex-Sassy Columnist Moves Forward

Trawling the web for suitable blog material, I discovered that my acquaintance Marjorie Ingall has a column at the Forward. Poking around the archives turned up at least one article with a book bent: an appreciation of Free to Be... You and Me.

I was oblivious to most of the heavy-handed messages about bias and liberation. I liked the bouncy tunes and humor of the album and the super-cool graphic design and humor of the book. I did sometimes know there was a didactic intent I was not getting; both of Dan Greenburg's contributions — a poem about sartorial conformity and another about the perils of assuming that certain jobs are for certain genders — annoyed the living daylights out of me. "Don't dress your cat in an apron/just 'cause he's learning to bake"? Uh, why not? Boy kitties like to get flour on their clothes? I didn't get it.

Also found a swell Ben Katchor page, which is always a good thing. I keep forgetting to make the time to look for my favorite cartoonists, and Katchor is definitely one. Want to know another? Sure you do!

"Meister Singer," To Steal a Headline

From the Village Voice, no less...in a story from earlier this month which offers an interesting perspective on how today's Jewish American writers might be looking at the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

No one should cast Singer as the voice of naive tradition; he was a sophisticate... Rather than as a traditionalist—or even a modernist—Singer might best be considered in the company of the great postmodern magical-historical writers like Toni Morrison or Gabriel García Márquez. Singer's Frampols and Shidlovtzes are constructed along similar lines to Morrison's Bottom or Márquez's Macondo; the combination of realistic detail and fantastical subject matter re-creates and interrogates lost histories, reanimating a vanished world and undermining conventional understandings of that bygone place.

I've noted the centennial before, but you might want to take a look at a recent interview I conducted by email with Ilan Stavans, the editor of the three-volume Library of America edition of Singer's short stories. I haven't been able to do any more than glance at the stories yet, between maintaining this blog, doing work that gets me paid, and having a personal life, but I did enjoy an afternoon spent with Singer: An Album, a short illustrated biography with appreciations by authors like Jonathan Safran Foer and Cynthia Ozick as well as a literary roundtable discussion.

More Poetry Books Should Come With CDs

Towards the end of National Poetry Month, I stumbled onto a batch of new collections from New Issues, the poetry wing of Western Michigan University's press and, as review books do, they quickly got overwhelmed by even newer arrivals. I kept meaning to sort through them and say something about Gerry LaFemina, Gretchen Mattox, David Dodd Lee, and Christine Hume, but just never got around to it. But today I decided to give the CD that comes with M.L. Liebler's The Moon a Box a whirl, and it's pretty cool in a jazzy Graham Parker sort of way, with guest musicians that include the legendary Al Kooper. Too bad his website doesn't seem to come with MP3s for folks to sample the wares...

Speaking of Free Books...

Marc Horne has made his science fiction novel, My Tokyo Death Cult, freely available through a Creative Commons license. I'm only through the first chapter, but it sure as hell looks like it might be a good read. (Thanks to BoingBoing for the tip.)

I've Been Meaning to Mention This One for Ages,
But Like a Moon-Calf, I Keep Forgetting

I am the proud co-possessor (with the Significant Other) of a complete second edition Oxford English Dictionary, but of course one wants to have a nice one-volume thing you can use to look up words casually. Well, a while back I acquired Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, which I suppose I shouldn't really trust all that much, but it's so damn fun I can't resist. And certainly comes in handy when I'm looking at historical novels; in The Confusion Neal Stephenson makes a reference to a "Nine-Hammers" that I couldn't quite figure out, until Johnson pointed the way to the "ninnyhammer," otherwise known as a simpleton.

Science Fiction in Full Color

It's no surprise to regular Beatrice readers that I'm a comic book fan, so I don't really need to explain how it is that I happened to get into Orbiter, which is essentially a novella by Warren Ellis and Colleen Doran. More specifically, it's the type of science fiction novella that, in purely textual form, wouldn't have been out of place in Analog when I was reading it back in the 1980s...and heck, might still not be, for all I know. Though it's about the space program, Ellis never loses sight of the human motivations, and Doran does a great job of catching the inner conflicts these folks struggle with through her depiction of posture and gesture. I especially love the subdued quality of the ending; if you discount the back page shot, which to me comes across as an endpaper, Ellis and Doran essentially end on a close-up and a line of dialogue that suggest the sheer awesomeness of what the characters are about to experience yet root that moment in a very human, graspable way ... not easy to do when what you're depicting is [SPOILER ALERT] a group of scientists about to joyride a space shuttle outfitted with alien technology to the ends of the universe.

I'd been holding off on the monthly issues of Grant Morrison's The Filth last year specifically because I wanted to tackle it all in one burst. Well, the collection's out now, and it's as mind-blowing as I'd expected and then some. It's about a middle-aged loner who loves his cat finding out that he's really a soldier in the war against the forces of chaos...except he's never really sure that it's not all in his head, and for the longest chunk of time, neither are you. The story builds off the vibe Morrison developed in his years writing The Invisibles, but strips away much of the romanticism (unless you happen to find apocalyptism sexy) and reflects one of his key personal interests:

As a practicing magician for over two decades now, I reached a point over a year ago where I felt it was time to take the terrifying 'Oath of the Abyss' and ascend to the 'grade' of ipssissimus - as it's known in the Aleister Crowley Golden Dawn hierarchical system of magical attainment. This requires undergoing an ordeal, the nature of which amounts to a personality-shattering meditation upon and encounter with the incoherent forces of 'the Dark Side' of the so-called Tree of Life, that is, all the negative states of consciousness available to us as human beings - fear, guilt, shame, hatred, loneliness, sickness, pain etc.. The 7 Dwarves of Horror basically. During the twelve months of actually writing The Filth scripts I was so overwhelmed by these 'dark' forces that I almost committed suicide on several occasions and spent most of the year in a state of intense psychological and physical distress. I can happily say that the ordeal is now over; I was able to process all this negative energy into my writing and emerge from the Land of Shadow changed forever and having attained the highest possible grade of Ceremonial Magic. Big deal.

I shudder to think what this might imply about Seaguy.

A Collection of Artful Dodgers, So to Speak

I had no idea when I was at the launch party for Brooklyn Noir last week that Dinitia Smith might have been there covering the anthology for the NYT arts section.

Three stories in Brooklyn Noir happen to be by clerks in the same Kings County courthouse. Mr. McLoughlin's "When All This Was Bay Ridge" is about a man who searches for the identity of a woman in a photograph with his father, a woman who is not his mother. Mr. McLoughlin's colleague Lou Manfredo contributed "Case Closed," set in Bensonhurst, about a detective drawn to a woman who is a victim of a sexual assault. A third story is by C. J. Sullivan, who also writes a column for The New York Press. Called "Slipping Into Darkness" and set in Bushwick, it is about a Latino woman who is pulled inexorably back into the life of the ghetto that her family has tried so hard to escape.

The launch party may have been at Manhattan's Partners & Crime, but the beer was from Brooklyn--and the summer tour will hit just about every one of the borough's neighborhoods. Be sure to catch at least one; the stories I've read so far have been great!

Another Week, Another Sy Hersh Article...

...and as long as he keeps writing them, I'll keep mentioning them. "The Gray Zone" considers the possibility that what happened at Abu Ghraib was the result of policy decisions made by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials to apply a "special-access program" of interrogation used on a limited, secret basis in Afghanistan to detainees in the Iraqi prison:

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

New Gaitskill Essay in Sunday WaPo

Mary Gaitskill offers an account of how she and her husband welcomed underprivileged children into their home with rocky, but moving, results.

Required Reading, Magazine Division

Seymour Hersh continues his investigation into how Abu Ghraib was allowed to degenerate into the moral sinkhole it has become under American occupation:

Secrecy and wishful thinking, the Pentagon official said, are defining characteristics of Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, and shaped its response to the reports from Abu Ghraib. “They always want to delay the release of bad news—in the hope that something good will break,” he said. The habit of procrastination in the face of bad news led to disconnects between Rumsfeld and the Army staff officers who were assigned to planning for troop requirements in Iraq. A year ago, the Pentagon official told me, when it became clear that the Army would have to call up more reserve units to deal with the insurgency, “we had call-up orders that languished for thirty or forty days in the office of the Secretary of Defense.” Rumsfeld’s staff always seemed to be waiting for something to turn up—for the problem to take care of itself, without any additional troops. The official explained, “They were hoping that they wouldn’t have to make a decision.”

Sure, I've Plugged It Before.
And I'll Do It Again in a Heartbeat

"There's nothing like seeing his work in its entirety, day after day, the little changes..."

--Jean Schulz on The Complete Peanuts, Volume 1.

Double Dortmunder

One of my few regrets about attending all sorts of events tangentially related to the Edgars last week was that I was only able to catch a passing glimpse of Donald Westlake, but at least I've been able to get a strong dose of his comic crime fiction since then. First there was Thieves' Dozen, eleven short stories starring John Dortmunder and his crew. (Well, okay, one story is actually about a different crew, led by a fellow named John Rumsey, but it's really a Dortmunder story, even though it isn't.) Each of these capers--well, one really isn't a caper--fits perfectly in the short story format...though it is a bit disconcerting, in the 1999 tale "Now What?", for Dortmunder's cabbie to be a terrorist, and on the Brooklyn Bridge headed into Manhattan...would Westlake try the same plot twist today? Who can say? (Well, he could, I guess, but I didn't know to ask him then!)

Immediately after the stories came the latest Dortmunder novel, The Road to Ruin, and it just goes to show that Westlake's secondary characters are as hilariously well-written as his stars. More story means more people, more points of view, more unexpected twists. And--go figure--when Dortmunder needs a new identity to pull off the inside job at the heart of this novel, he finds himself answering to the name "John Rumsey." (Read the first two chapters.)

And I'm not the only one bulking up on Westlake like this, of course. Terry Mapes did, too, and had a fine time at it.

While the Baroque Cycle Spins Its Wheels...

I finally finished Neal Stephenson's The Confusion the other day, after many late night incursions, driving myself to the ends of chapters before allowing myself to sleep, and I enjoyed it thoroughly; surely this is the only novel set in late 17th-century Europe to include a sly allusion to Reservoir Dogs. (At least, I'm pretty sure that's what's going on in that scene...) Salon went gaga for Stephenson recently, as Laura Miller did the interview and Andrew Leonard the review.

As the plot thickens, it becomes less and less clear whether the entire "Baroque Cycle" is intended to be primarily a historical novel or a science fiction/fantasy novel set in the past. That one of the characters appears to be immortal creates enough ambiguity on its own; combining that with what may be King Solomon's gold, dare I say, confuses the issue considerably. There's some precedent for a degree of fantasy in the "serious" historical novel--Dorothy Dunnett's Nicholas de Fleury had some psychic powers--but in the long run, Stephenson might intend the cycle as science fiction of a different sort, which he explains to Miller:

Fiction that's not considered good unless it has interesting ideas in it. You can write a minimalist short story that's set in a trailer park or a Connecticut suburb that might be considered a literary masterpiece or well-regarded by literary types, but science fiction people wouldn't find it very interesting unless it had somewhere in it a cool idea that would make them say, "That's interesting. I never thought of that before." If it's got that, then science fiction people will embrace it and bring it into the big-tent view of science fiction.

All right then, but what shall hold me over for the next six months until The System of the World brings the trilogy to a close?

Continue reading While the Baroque Cycle Spins Its Wheels...

Congratulations Are in Order

I've been a big fan of Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own since reading it on the train up to the Ancestral Home last Christmas, so I was vicariously psyched for the book when it was up for the National Book Critics Circle award for biography. And though Elie didn't take that prize home, he has just won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Way to go! Those of you who haven't yet picked up this group portrait of four of 20th-century literary America's most prominent Catholic writers--Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy--have a real discovery ahead of you. For more information from an explicitly Catholic perspective or one not so explicit but perhaps heavily implicit, or a strictly secular point of view, read...well, those reviews, and maybe also Charles Morris from the NYTBR.

(See the rest of the PEN winners.)

Previously, the Only Jane's I Read
Involved Military Aircraft

Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club has charmed many reviewers, including both Patricia T. O'Conner (" This is a surprising novel, and there isn't a boring line in it") and Richard Eder ("Like Austen, the author fashions her frayed and fractious strands into bows at the end; not to compel our belief but detachedly to adorn it") at NYT. At the Detroit Free Press, Marta Salij picks the book for the paper's own monthly book club:

Fowler's story of a book club that reads Jane Austen is so clever and so delightfully written that you don't need to know anything about Jane Austen to love it. All you need to bring is a love of books and of the kinds of stories that have a little love, a little humor and a little pathos all mixed together in them.

Ron Charles in the Christian Science Monitor, Chris Watson in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, David Kipen in the San Francisco Chronicle, Mollie Wilson in the Village Voice, Anita Sama in USA Today--all encourage you to read it. And so do I, just as Gwenda Bond did unto me, for which I am heartily glad.

Continue reading Previously, the Only Jane's I Read
Involved Military Aircraft

Let's Talk About Sex

According to NPR, Paulo Coelho is an international publishing sensation who's never really caught on in the United States. Probably, if my cursory examinations are anything to go by, because we've already got Tom Robbins and Richard Bach and Robert Pirsig. Anyway, I tried my best to start his latest, Eleven Minutes, and I just couldn't wade through the tale of a prostitute struggling with the tension between raw sexuality and spiritual union. Maybe he just got a raw deal from his translator, but honestly, it all just seemed rather trite.

I was expecting a similar reaction to Davitt Sigerson's Faithful after reading a profile in the New York Observer, but the novel surprised me with the strength of its characterizations. There's a few moments when the sex talk surrounding Trish, the "Mobius strip of a milk white gal" who "likes to taste herself on your dick," gets a little ridiculous, but I was generally impressed with Sigerson's elliptical treatment of the emotional dynamics between Nick and Trish after their marriage breaks up because she runs into her ex, Joe, and buys that whole "you should be with me" line, even as she's already pregnant with Nick's child. Sigerson's prose is still a little rough around the edges, but his characters fumble their way through their confusion in a convincing fashion, so I expect he'll get even better as he keeps at it.

Philip Gulley: "Indiana's Garrison Keillor"

Circumstances placed the first three novels by Philip Gulley in my path this weekend, so I gave them a whirl--and though my ultimate reaction was mixed, things got off to a good start with Home to Harmony, which is narrated by Sam Gardner as he returns to his hometown to take over ministerial duties at the local Friends Meeting. In twenty-four short chapters, he introduces us to various residents of Harmony, but periodically slipping the yoke of first-person narration to delve into their thoughts, feelings, and history, perhaps a bit like the Stage Manager of Our Town. It's a nifty touch that actually makes certain characters a bit more sympathetic, as we encounter town busybodies though the eyes of a man doing his best to find the good in them.

In the next book, Just Shy of Harmony, however, Gulley switches to a third-person omniscient narration that also frequently shifts from past to present tense, and a bit of the personal touch is lost in the process. Not all of it; there's still the occasional "stage manager's" glimpse into characters' inner thoughts, after all, only now it comes from out of thin air rather than from someone who's lived most of his life around these people. This "more objective" perspective does free up Gulley to delve even deeper into the lives of other characters, but it also ultimately makes the less sympathetic characters, well, less sympathetic.

Continue reading Philip Gulley: "Indiana's Garrison Keillor"

Foodies, Prepare to Be Entertained

I just finished reading Poppy Z. Brite's Liquor, which I've mentioned before in these pages, and my expectations were more than satisfied. To those (a) fans of her horror novels prepared to hate Liquor because she's sold out and (b) non-fans of her horror novel convinced she can't make it in the mainstream, I'd say she more than rises to the challenges. Even without the supernatural elements, this is clearly Brite territory, strongly rooted in its New Orleans setting but not so much as it ward off non-natives. (Actually, most of the expository passages do a pretty good job of highlighting the subtleties without appearing to point out the obvious, at least to a reader who only set foot in the city once, nearly 20 years ago.) And the matter-of-fact treatment of the queer bond between her two protagonists, Rickey and G-Man, is one of the book's strongest assets, demonstrating Brite's skill with character relationships without calling attention to itself. In fact, though the love between the two men is quite real, I think it would be fair to assume that they would sooner think of themselves as "cooks" than as "gay;" their love for each other is presented as both natural and incidental, with not a trace of distracting self-reflexive angst to be found. Now, some reviewers think a certain subplot, which builds up to a climactic showdown, adds an element of "hothouse melodrama" to the story, but my sense is that, while this secondary character's arc does get a little outlandish, it's not that exaggerated a personalization of that old Bill Cosby gag:

I said to a guy, "Tell me.  What is it about cocaine that makes it so wonderful?"  and the guy said, "Well, it intensifies your personality" and I said "Yes, but what if you're an asshole?"

And the liquor-soaked entrees sound damn tasty, too. For that matter, so do the appetizers. Brite's getting written up in all sorts of places like Entertainment Weekly, but Saveur ought to pay her a visit, too.

Read more about Liquor (and Rickey and G-Man) in this Disinfo interview from 2002. Or read the first chapter (PDF).

Oddly, Kevin Bacon's Nowhere to Be Found

Remember how Edward Sorel used to do illustrations of the first encounters between two famous people? (For example, Marlon Brando and Tennessee Williams.) Over the weekend, I started dipping into A Chance Meeting, a new book by Rachel Cohen that's combines the "first (and in some cases only) encounter" with the "six degrees of separation" principle to show how Hart Crane connects Alfred Stieglitz to Charlie Chaplin, to pick one case. DoubleTake has her version of the encounter between Mark Twain and Ulysses S. Grant, while the Guardian presents edited versions of three other encounters from the book (including the night Crane met Chaplin). Cohen's personal website offers very abbreviated summaries of each encounter, too.

In the Village Voice, Vivek Narayanan had mixed feelings, but enjoyed the "tidbits of gossip." In BookPage, Robert Weibezahl praises Cohen's "solid assumptions" and admits she makes him want to go back to the authors she writes about. And you can hear what David Kipen had to say about the book on NPR.

Major League Besuboru

Back when I was in junior high, I stumbled onto a book called The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, in which Robert Whiting revealed to American readers how the sport of baseball had flourished in Japan, and how Japanese players had adopted a bushido-like code of play. Twenty years later, The Meaning of Ichiro considers the impact players raised in the Japanese system are having as they come over to play on American teams. Obviously, as you can guess from the title, Seattle Mariner Ichiro Suzuki is a major center of attention, but Whiting also takes a close look at other success stories, like Hideo Nomo and Hideki Matsui, as well as some players like Hideki Irabu and Tsuyoshi Shinjo whose performance was somewhat mixed. But he's just as effective on the backstory, discussing the turbulent relationship between the Japanese and American leagues, or the continuing disdain among many Japanese for the American style of play; the chapter on Bobby Valentine's first stint managing a Japanese team is fantastic journalism. But really the whole book is highly readable, the sort of thing you could probably polish off on a weekend afternoon but end up talking about with other baseball fans for at least a few hours afterwards.

I recently saw Whiting speak about the book at the Japan Society, but unfortunately I had to duck out just as questions were starting--I probably should have pressed him for any hot tips for players to add to my first ever rotisserie league team, since I've already got both Matsuis, Ichiro, Seattle closer Shigetoshi Hasegawa, and Cardinals outfielder So Taguchi. (I have to confess I'm a pretty casual fan these days, after being a huge sabermetrical obsessive in junior high and high school, to the point of developing my own homemade version of Strat-O-Matic, before eventually switching to comic books.)

Three Cheers for the Avant-Garde

I've known for some time now about David Markson's Vanishing Point, what with the enthusiasm of fellow bloggers and reviewers. But it took an interview in last week's Publishers Weekly (not available online, unless you subscribe) before I finally moved my copy to the top of the reading stack, and I'm glad I did. Other reviewers can attest to the captivating quality of the novel's patchwork assemblage of facts about authors through which the musings of Author flit in and out; I'm just getting started, but I'm hooked. Even though Markson's experimental approach to these existential meditations on artists' lives (and deaths) might make a Book Babe wince, Vanishing Point is not at all "precious" and, in fact, quite readable--addictively so, when you get right down to it--and I seriously doubt that anybody else who loves books, and who loves reading, will respond with anything less than enthusiasm.

It Made Us Smart And Happy

This is a work of propaganda. It’s a story about choosing smarts over happiness. Except if I give the pencil a push: then it’s a story about choosing happiness over smarts.

Cory Doctorow's second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, may well be arriving at your local bookstore even as you read this, but as with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory's releasing the book under a Creative Commons license. Which means that you can either buy a printed copy or download an electronic version for free. I've been reading it on my Handspring, with a quick-and-dirty PDB file I converted from the raw text, and it's fantastic.

The story itself takes place in one of those Max Headroom "twenty minutes into the future" universes, apparently in the early future of the Down and Out world, but the dynamics of text messaging on cell phones, Internet Relay Chat and smart mobs (among other things) will all be instantly recognizable to anyone who's spent time online. In some ways, Cory's writing old-school science fiction, where the entire story emerges out of particular scientific threads, teased out and amplified so the author can draw out their ramifications, but with the science strongly foregrounded, much discussed by characters, etc. But he knows how to do it without turning the whole thing into a dry philosophical debate or a string of expository dialogues; Art Berry, the protagonist who shifts between first- and third-person narration, is thoroughly believable and his crisis is compelling. The near-future setting is a big help here, as his world is largely the one we all know and have to deal with ourselves.

I don't want to give a whole lot away here, so here's the deal: I have this vague, largely unarticulated theory about science fiction where even when the set decorations are at their most high-tech, things really boil down to the social sciences. So a story that's ostensibly about technology is really about how technology affects society. (No particularly stunning insight, I'm sure, and undoubtedly written about by at least a dozen critics before me.) Anyway, Cory's obviously thought long and hard about how technology changes our lives, and he's equally adept at depicting those changes on the microlevel of the individual as well as the macrolevel of society. If you like science fiction, you'll love this book. And if you don't think you like science fiction, you'll have to adjust your attitudes ever so slightly after you've read this.

Continue reading It Made Us Smart And Happy

I'm "Consulting My Inner Edmund Wilson," IYKWIM, AITYD

Michael Dirda reviews Mr. Paradise, the new Elmore Leonard, which I just happened to receive yesterday. So far, all I can tell you is that the first chapter is typically brilliant Leonard, but this is pretty much what I'll be doing with my Sunday afternoon while The Significant Other and her friend take over the apartment for unpacking maneuvers, I can assure you.

Yoga is as yoga does

Elizabeth Kadetsky's First There Is a Mountain is described in the subtitle as a "yoga romance," and her yoga practice spanning nearly two decades features prominently. She took her first yoga class in a dojo at UC Santa Cruz because, she writes, "I'd already tried Tai Chi and Frisbee in New York." Something about the way that first class left her feeling kept her coming back for more but, she admits, that wasn't entirely a good thing, and she goes on over the course of the book to rigorously examine how doing the poses tied in to an anorexic-like desire to destroy her body in order to attain a more "pure" level of existence.

Kadetsky also had the opportunity to study in India under B. K. S. Iyengar, and therein hangs another tale.

Continue reading Yoga is as yoga does

Been shopping? No, been shopping!

With the eagerly anticipated Return to the Outer Boroughs now less than two weeks away, I took some time earlier today to gather together a bunch of advance reader copies that had been gathering dust on the floor next to the sofa over to Housing Works Café where I knew they'd eventually find a good home. But right there on the bookcase opposite the front counter I spotted a copy of Fallingwater Rising, a "biography" of Frank Lloyd Wright's most iconic building, by architectural historian Franklin Toker. With 16, count 'em 16, pages of color photographs. So of course I had to have me some of that, especially at half-price.

A quick browse of the outer tables also turned up Small Pieces Loosely Joined by David Weinberger, whose name turns up a lot on many of the technocultural blogs I've been reading of late. I'm a sucker for Internet theory and have been pretty much since I got my email account the first day of grad school, so I'm willing to spend an afternoon, probably after the Return, glancing at this. (Apparently Weinberger's currently consulting for Howard Dean on Internet organizing, so I must have him to blame for my daily emails from Joe Trippi. Not that I'm complaining; at least the Dean campaign's communiques don't lapse into the whining tones all too common to MoveOn.org's missives.)

Though I hadn't really been intending to get anything apart from maybe some stuff on 17th-century England I've been wanting to read so I can better appreciate Neal Stephenson's is doing with that Baroque Cycle of his, I guess coming back with two books after getting rid of a dozen isn't so bad, all things considered.

Aliena, Jake, Orientis oppidum...

Well, my Latin's a little rusty, but I tried. Anyway, I was up last night reading Pompeii, another one of my Christmas presents. Robert Harris has come up with a great historical potboiler. The parallels between Ampliatus, the main "villain" of the novel, and modern-day figures like Donald Trump or Michael Milken are a bit heavyhanded ("Lucrum gaudium!" or "Profit is joy!" is a particularly amusing version of "Greed is good!"), but it's all great fun, and the level of detail on ancient Roman aqueduct engineering seems quite rich indeed. So rich that the care Harris put into getting the volcanological details right might not be obvious at first glance...

For those who are interested in making the comparison, Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii is available through Project Gutenberg.

The Usual Gang of Idiots

Among the books I received as presents this Christmas: Mad Art, a whirlwind tour of most of the artists who've drawn for Mad at one point or another over the years. Now, I haven't actually read an issue of the magazine since junior high, so I had no idea, for example, that Drew Friedman and Sherry Flenniken had been drawing for the magazine...or that, if the samples of recent artwork are to be believed, the target audience may have shifted up by about 5-10 years. I actually remember a lot of stuff they show from the late '70s and early '80s, though I didn't know from Mort Drucker and Jack Davis back then. My only complaints? I wouldn't have minded seeing more of the classic stuff, especially more Dave Berg, and in many cases I wouldn't mind bigger reproductions. But otherwise I think the book's just swell. Go buy it already.

Overloading on fantasy...

When I was at the ancestral home for the weekend after Christmas, I found a box of books that had lain dormant for over a decade. Among the treasures found therein was the discarded public library copy of The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, which I've been eagerly rereading over the last three days. I was surprised by how much of it I'd forgotten; it's still an amazing historical fantasy. (In the rereading, I made particular note of the doubling theme, which plays out in a different way in Powers' most recent novel, Declare, described in, among other places, this interview.

Continue reading Overloading on fantasy...