E a r t h G o a t

Dean Young

2010-12-09T09:33:00.001-08:00

I don't know if this is the right forum (edit as necessary, Grendel), but I received this unbelievably sad link about Dean Young this morning, and I'm passing it along to those who might not know. Basically, he needs a heart transplant, and the link offers a way to help.

At Iowa, I sat in on some poetry seminars with Dean, and he was a really smart, really cool guy. He lived in that crazy Victorian house, and I'm pretty sure he was more or less a hero to some of the poets who followed him from Chicago.

I had no idea about his condition, and I wish him all the best, as I'm sure everyone who knows him does.

Review: "The Warm Fuzzies" by Chris Adrian

2010-10-06T15:11:00.000-07:00

New Yorker fiction | September 27, 2010 issue
Approximate word count: 7200
POV: Third-person

Loved it. Not just because it reminded me of my childhood church/music experiences, but because Chris Adrian is able to get into a young teenage girl's (Molly's) head and just rock the thoughts that would fly through it. It's pretty remarkable how close and natural and believable this third-person is.

The situation is we have a large white family, led by a father who makes his children sing his original Christian songs in a group. The other thing is, they are constantly cycling in and out black foster children. Molly has seen them all, can barely remember who was who. But as Elizabeth McCracken reminded us, a story should answer the question: How is this night different from all other nights? Peabo, the latest foster kid, is how it is different.

Peabo gets under Molly's skin in a way the others haven't. He can't play the tambourine, but he can dance in her bedroom. The sexual undercurrent here is masterfully presented, and what Peabo does for Molly is bring her dormant rebellion to the surface just by being ... strange. Strange in a way that things are strange to kids, like little dances and gestures and movements that they make up meanings for.

I don't often have the pleasure of reading something so awkwardly reminiscent of my awkward years, so well attuned to the pubescent psyche, and so well and satisfactorily rendered to boot. Adrian zeroes in on the way Molly's frustrations and unspoken impulses undercurrently burble and patiently lets them develop delicious and trembling bit by bit until ... until the freaking great final scene.

Read it.

Review: "Birdsong" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

2010-09-23T12:28:00.000-07:00

New Yorker fiction | September 20, 2010 issue
Approximate word count: 5600
POV: First-person

I liked this better on the second read, but Frank Conroy said you should never count on a second read, because if a story doesn't grab you by the hair the first time through, there won't be one. Except in a case like this, where I'm reviewing it. It's not that it's a bad story, but there's nothing that stands out about it quite enough for me to recommend reading it (which is what a green light would mean).

It's the old "bitter other woman" tale, told from her point of view. In Lagos, Nigeria, the narrator is involved with a well-heeled married man whose wife is living in the US. For more than a year she lives with him in his estate on an island until realizing (who saw this coming?) that she will never have him. She breaks up with him. A story that has been told many, many times, and it's too bad there are no surprises to be had here. Sure, it's unusual to read about upper/middle class Africans, but something like that alone shouldn't recommend a story. You're busy!

I think the best thing about this, and which might make it worth reading (for writers looking to add to their bags of tricks) is the use of well-chosen details that add to the theme and setting. The details in this case come from the narrator, stuck in traffic, watching her fellow commuters interact with "hawkers" who approach the trapped drivers and try to sell them stuff. She notes how nobody trusts each other and everybody is wary. A guy buying a phone card makes the hawker wait while he verifies the number on his phone. She knows the bottles of beer being sold are warm but have been dipped in water to make them look cold. Her car is hit twice in the story, once by a motorbike (whose driver nervously proclaims there was no damage and speeds off) and once by a taxi (whose driver gets out and yells at her).

Her coworkers tie that vignette back to the theme -- that an unmarried woman gets no respect in Lagos. Her lover's driver is so contemptuous he will hardly speak to her. Neither will the waiter at the only restaurant her lover feels it's safe to take her to. All this leads the narrator to realize that although technically she is enjoying the partial companionship of dating a married man, she really has no power -- just as, in general, women have little power in the world around her.

But this is a short story, not a sociological case study. Something should happen -- she should make a choice, do something dramatic, get her freak on, something! Unfortunately she just meekly backs out of the whole thing and takes it out on her colleagues one day by being cranky. Finally she yells impotently at the woman in the car stuck next to her in the traffic jam. The woman -- all hoity-toity and superior-looking (as she imagines his wife is) -- has been staring at her all this time. "What is your problem? Why have you been staring at me? Do I owe you?" The woman just drives away as the traffic begins to clear.

That's a pretty weak ending. The emotion is never really released or resolved in this story, in fact. That's why I found it ultimately unsatisfying. Adichie clearly has the chops, with an Orange Prize and a MacArthur fellowship under her belt. The writing itself is excellent. But the story lacks punch.

Review: "The Landlord" by Wells Tower

2010-09-15T19:35:00.000-07:00

New Yorker fiction | September 13, 2010 issue
Approximate word count: 5800
POV: First-person

Here is a story with a bit of zeitgeist, told in the form of vignettes narrated by a North Carolina landlord named Coates who is dealing with the spatters of the popped housing bubble. Coates is losing his properties left and right and is headed for financial trouble. We enter the action by meeting a model tenant who lives in one of his slummier places, and the story properly ends with that tenant too, who turns out to be not such a model after all. In between those bookends the action bounces between the narrator's two handymen and his smart-ass artist daughter, who has recently moved back in with him from L.A.

And that is enough for a short story, if properly done.

There's not a lot that's necessary to say about this story. It's of the old-fashioned, Cheeveresque/Yatesian kind. The straightforward style wavers somewhere between formally flat and colloquial, with the choicest morsels bobbing along in the dialogue. The author is not trying to impress, but he's also got a good ear.

Coates sends his two handymen -- one an angry old misanthrope, the other a hulking fresh-faced youngster -- to Idaho to fix up the Idaho cottage his parents left him, and where he'd planned to retire but now must sell to relieve his mounting debts. The two men do not get along on the trip, and their telephone calls relay the distant action to Coates, providing humor.

It's his daughter Rhoda who is the heart of the story. She says she's moved back to work on a new "body" of paintings, that are kind of about...

To some extent, your problems with the real-estate stuff, and my parallel humiliation at having to move in with you. But in a broader sense it's about our collective lack of integrity and total fucking childishness in the wake of the financial crisis, i.e. the national epidemic of petulance and bratty outrage over the fact that poor people don't get to buy castles on credit anymore...

It's that voice, Rhoda's voice, that gives the story energy and spunk. She is the charismatic character, the oddball who sticks out, who provides a counterbalance to the narrator's ho-hum business-like even-keeledness. Vivid contrast is what she is. She goes around taking pictures of a huge limb that has fallen on his deck, seeing in it a symbol of the fallen state of America (or something, it doesn't matter -- put more Rhodas in stories, please). Yet what she's actually doing is creating paintings of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, which she explains is a kind of transmogrified sexual symbol that her dad inflicted on her as a kid by taking her to see the movie. The scenes between her and her father crackle on the page. Rhoda is alive and thinking in a way that the others, including the narrator, aren't.

I won't give away the ending, but I found it satisfying.

There's nothing new about this story, but it does the old very well -- it is charming and almost neat and symmetrical while managing to appeare loose and ragged around the edges. John Cheever and Richard Yates would like it, I think.

Grendel's Expatica Post on Bikram Yoga

2010-09-10T07:10:00.000-07:00

Badass.

At Swim, Two Birds

2010-06-24T05:51:00.000-07:00

Has anyone ever read this? I have to confess, I'd never even heard of it. Brian O'Nolan, writing under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien... I found a copy in my parents' house, picked it up, was blown away by the first dozen pages but then had to go to sleep. The enthusiastic cover blurbs by James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Graham Greene, and John Updike, given the comic nature of the writing, I assumed were fake, in that Irish literary hoax kind of way. But no... they are real. How could I have never heard of this book, and even more puzzling: what was it doing on my parents' bookshelves?

Deanna Fei interview

2010-05-20T08:05:00.000-07:00

Deanna Fei's first novel, A Thread of Sky, follows six women from three generations of a Chinese American family as they take a tour of both China and their own complex relationships. A New York Times Editors' Choice and an Indie Next Notable Book, Deanna's story is chock full of complex characters who face intertwining national and personal histories. We were lucky enough to catch up with the lovely and delightful author for the following interview. Pour a cup of tea, sit back...

You went on a package tour of China with three generations of women in your family. Did your novel come out of that experience, and if so, how did the novel depart from reality? Is that something you consciously forced or did it happen naturally on its own?

A Thread of Sky was inspired by my China experiences and my own family, but it departed from reality the moment I started writing it. I think that in writing any story, you have to cede control to your characters, to let them surprise you with the twists that their lives take—and this may be doubly true in writing any story with an autobiographical origin. For me, this mostly happened naturally, but particularly in revising, I tried to be vigilant in making sure that nothing remained in the novel simply because it had happened in real life. Everything had to be organic to these characters and their stories; otherwise, it simply didn’t belong.

You tell the stories of all six women in your novel, but if there's a main character, it's the mother, Irene, who gave up a scientific career to raise her daughters. How did you choose her as the protagonist, and what is it about her story in particular that grabbed you?

I was about a year into the writing when I realized that the story had to begin and end with Irene. My original intention was to give equal weight to all six women, but I came to see that Irene’s emotional journey was, in many ways, the heart of all of their journeys. She is the center of this family, in bridging the generations between her mother and her daughters and in providing the impetus for this reunion. While the other characters are, each for her own reasons, deeply ambivalent about embarking on this tour, Irene desperately wants to reconnect with her family and her ancestral home. Her hopes, her sense of deep disillusionment, and her eventual coming to terms helped form the overall arc of the novel.

One theme of the book is what it means to be Chinese American -- how nobody in America or China is satisfied by the answer to the question "Where are you from?" Did you get any closer to understanding why that question is so hard for everybody during the course of writing the novel?

During the writing of the novel, I did some extensive research into Chinese American history because it was the focus of one of my characters, Kay. For me, it crystallized the ways in which Asian Americans are often still treated as essentially foreign and the patterns of bias that have repeated themselves over two centuries. This surprises many people who don’t experience it, who think of Asians as “honorary whites,” which in itself is a demeaning category.

But I don’t think this question of “Where are you from?” is difficult for every Chinese American. In the novel, only Kay has been preoccupied with it, as a Chinese American activist and as a student of Chinese in Beijing. It’s only when Irene conceives of this tour of their ancestral home that the question is brought to the surface for all six women.

You went to Shanghai on a Fulbright grant to work on A Thread of Sky. What was that like?

It was a shock to land there without family or friends or work or school—basically, with nothing but a few (bad) chapters of my novel. There were plenty of days that I felt isolated and lost. But that’s partly what made it an ideal training ground for a writer. In a way, I had no choice but to immerse myself in my work. It was the only thing that gave structure to my life. Looking back, I’m not sure how else I could have written this book.

How did the publication of the book go? Was it hard to find an agent or publisher?

Publication was something of a saga. I found an agent right out of Iowa, and during my time in Shanghai, she often seemed like the only person who had any stake at all in my writing. Once I completed a draft, she wanted to submit it. I knew in my gut that it wasn’t ready—and I was right. After more rejections than I care to remember, we pulled it back. For months, I couldn’t look at the novel. I felt sick just thinking about it. Eventually, I realized that whether or not I ever published it, I wasn’t finished with it. For a year, I pulled it apart, tossed out hundreds of pages, revised it from beginning to end. When I was finally happy with it—as happy as a writer gets—I sent the revision to my agent, at which point she said she “just didn’t feel it anymore.” So we had a traumatic breakup, and I felt about ready to give up. But after a few months of sending out queries, I found another agent, who sold my novel in about a week.

Do you ever worry about pigeonholing? Like, do you feel as a Chinese American writer that the expectation will be that you'll always write about characters grappling with their cultural identity, for example?

Well, I’m Chinese American, and I’m a writer, so there’s nothing wrong with the label, per se. Sometimes it can be productive, in bringing more attention to underrepresented stories, and sometimes it serves to further ghettoize. I guess I’d argue that any Chinese American story should also be seen as American—and universal. I can only write what moves me, and I think Asian Americans will always be my subject, but I don’t think our stories must be defined by the struggle with cultural identity any more than any American story must be so defined.

Your writing is, I would say, smooth and beautiful and unflinching. Who are some writers who have influenced you?

I love your use of the word “unflinching.” It brings to mind a number of writers: Jean Rhys, Mary Gaitskill, Junot Diaz, Louise Erdrich. Word by word, I’m awed by the prose of Shirley Hazzard, Marilynne Robinson, Alice Munro, and John Cheever, among many others.

You're at work on your second novel. Can you tell us anything about it? Do you feel more confident this time, or is it like starting over, with square one insecurities and all that?

I can say, somewhat vaguely, that my second novel feels like a big departure from the first. It’s more plot-driven and it has nothing to do with China. In some ways, I feel more confident in that when I have those days of looking at the work and feeling like it’s total crap, I also know that that’s all part of the process. But I think one of the best things about writing is that it forces you to resist complacency.

That also means that it never gets easy.

What was Iowa like for you? What would you say you gained from the program there, if anything?

I would never call Iowa a nurturing environment, but I’m deeply grateful for having undergone the experience. The people who surrounded me there are the smartest bunch that ever surrounded me, and the closest friends I made there will be my ideal readers for life. And though I’ve heard of Iowa described as a competitive place in terms of publication and book deals and whatnot, I actually think there was a purity there that I haven’t found elsewhere—a love of literature for its own sake, a belief in writing as a calling, even the conviction that every single word must count.

You teach at a public school in Brooklyn. How rewarding do you find that, and do you see yourself teaching long term? Should we be worried about "kids these days" or do you think that generation is going to turn out well?

I think certain kids in certain schools are getting an excellent education, and I think we’re grossly failing the huge majority of this generation. And those we’re failing include, of course, a disproportionate number of children of lesser means and children of color—particularly boys. Even setting aside questions of morality and inequality and the legitimacy of this system, I often wonder why us literary types—or those who practice real journalism or fine arts or music or dance—don’t seem to connect this problem to the one we’re always lamenting: the shrinking audience for our art. Where is the next generation of audiences supposed to come from?

So many cultures have held dominance for long periods. Conventional wisdom says the 20th century was the American century, and now the 21st will be the Chinese century. Do you agree? How do you imagine that might play out? Should we all be learning Chinese (and if so, Mandarin or Cantonese)?

I don’t consider myself an expert on China, let alone the global stage, but there’s no question that in this century, China will play a larger role in every area—from foreign policy to business to the environment to art and design—than it did in the last. To the extent that one can make any overarching statement about such a vast entity, China certainly aspires to superpower status and Chinese people take pride in being citizens of a country whose very name translates as the central nation. It wouldn’t hurt anyone to learn Chinese (Mandarin is the dominant dialect, and only becoming more so) or to learn more about China. At the same time, it’s important to note that China is, like any country, complex and multifaceted and contradictory. I think we have a tendency to impose false dichotomies on it—China versus America, traditional versus modern, well-meaning or evil, weak or strong—that become barriers to true understanding.

Check out Deanna's Web site for lots more info: www.deannafei.com

Kerry talking about her book on the Radio

2010-05-18T08:47:00.000-07:00

I am "Chad from Rhode Island."

In honor of one of my favorite poets, gentleman, and an all-around stand-up guy.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/cr-radio/2010/02/17/pilgrimage-and-clerical-growth

Colum McCann

2010-05-07T11:22:00.000-07:00

I've got Let the Great World Spin next in my queue. Anyone feel like jumping onboard and chatting about it the next week or two or three?

(If so, you can find me in this post! I'll be here talking to myself.)

Danielle Trussoni interview

2010-04-19T08:04:00.000-07:00

Released last month, Danielle Trussoni's first novel, Angelology, immediately rocketed into the upper echelons of the New York Times bestseller list. The author, who had already published the highly praised memoir Falling Through the Earth, sat down with us to chat about her remarkable book, a layered, carefully plotted story of a young nun, a group of angel hunters, and the winged ones themselves.

Have you always been fascinated by angels? I never thought a lot about them, but once you start noticing them, they're everywhere. It's like they've been hiding in plain sight for, like, forever.

Actually, I wasn’t at all interested in angels per se. In fact, I had no intention of writing a novel that centered around angels, or a group of angels at all. I knew that I wanted the book to be set in a convent, and so I went to stay at one to do some research. While there, I happened upon a trove of books about angels. Once I started reading about them, I had the same realization that you did: They are everywhere in our culture and have been for a very long time.

What made you decide to create the Nephilim to be as terrifying as they are? These aren't exactly harp-playing cherubs. Something about how their wings can fold back -- through clothes -- thus making them undetectable ... I find unnerving.

The Nephilim in my book are sinister in a distinctly modern fashion. The original Nephilim—a group of half human half angel hybrids that are first mentioned as ‘Giants’ in Genesis 6—were the inspiration for the creatures I imagined. I wanted to invert the typical idea we have of angels as being beneficent guardians. I wanted to create a group of angels that were seductive, alluring, dark, and terrifying.

You're being compared to Dan Brown (most favorably, of course) and even to Umberto Eco. Do you feel like you've written a genre piece, and if so, did you study the "history/archeology thriller" world much before or during the writing of your book? There is something undeniably attractive these days about the idea of, okay, yes, so that's why history has unfolded this way. People want clean answers that reverberate a long way, and they sense they haven't been told the truth.

The comparisons to Dan Brown are coming in because of the treasure-hunt that occurs in Angelology, which is a modern version of the quest narrative, a very old and noble story that has been around for a very long time. I prefer the comparisons to Eco, but the truth of the matter is that marketing departments and book reviewers need to compare books to one another and need to create categories. I didn’t have a program or marketing plan or a genre in mind when I began to write this novel. There are obviously some genre conventions, but there are conventions in almost every variety of novel, or there would not be plot. For me, Angelology is a literary historical narrative that re-imagines an obscure passage in the Bible and posits that there is an alternative reality existing alongside our reality. It is also something of a bildungsroman—the heroine Evangeline develops and grows in a surprising fashion.

Angelology was a real discipline, it turns out. What were its practitioners like in the real world?

Angelology was a branch of theology that was practiced primarily in the medieval era. The purpose of Angelology was to discuss and debate the properties of angels, which could be anything from whether they are material or ethereal beings to which category or sphere an angel belonged to. It’s hard to imagine, but the study of angels was taken very seriously.

How was the book sold and what did you learn from that experience? You ended up with a movie deal to boot.

The book went out to publishers in late January of 2009. Within a few days, my agent (Eric Simonoff) had offers for Canadian rights and German rights. It was unusual to sell foreign rights first, but apparently this prompted New York houses to hurry and soon we had offers from seven houses. I was able to speak with editors on the phone about different approaches to editing the book. I am an intensive rewriter, and so I knew even then that I would want to work with a dedicated editor. After I settled upon an editor (Molly Stern at Viking), my agent called and said that we had offers for film rights from three production companies. Needless to say, it was overwhelming. That the book then went on to sell in 32 countries is still astonishing to me. I love that I will be able to reach readers from all over the world.

Your first book, Falling Through the Earth, was a rabidly praised memoir. Beyond the obvious "true vs. not true," how was writing a novel different from writing your memoir? Did the memoir help you find your voice?

I love that you say “rabidly praised’ because it was just that: it was either loved to distraction or met with venom. There was a lot of praise and a lot of critical attention, but there were also negative reactions. I was working on what would eventually become Falling Through the Earth when I was at Iowa, although it was in lots of different pieces at that time, and the version I wrote while at Iowa was never published. Falling was so emotionally draining for me to write that I knew I wanted to move as far as possible away from it. I wanted to let my imagination take over and see what I could come up with. The voice I found for Angelology is absolutely different than the one I found for Falling, but in the end, I think every new book requires a new voice, a new form, a new way of viewing the universe the characters inhabit. If one doesn’t push oneself into new territory it all becomes rather boring and repetitive.

You're already at work on a sequel: Angelopolis. What can you tell us about that, if anything? I don't think it's giving away too much to note that at the end of Angelology, there is a sense that from a broader perspective, things have barely begun. And one word crept into my mind as I closed the book: Superhero. Have you in fact created a franchise a la Da Vinci Code or Twilight?

Angelopolis is a follow up to Angelology, and will follow Verlaine (the hero of Angelology) and Evangeline (the heroine of Angelology) into the next stage of things. I hope that there is room for expansion, and that I’m still interested in these characters, but I won’t write another book about them if there isn’t. I have to be invested in the character and in the adventures they are having or I wouldn’t be able to write a word.

You split your time between France and the U.S. How do you work that, and how would you compare the two countries nowadays? Where do you live, and what's that like?

I live in the south of France, near Montpellier. I’m able to do this because I have Italian citizenship and am a citizen of the EU, so I can live and work here. I’ve always been something of a nomad. I’ve lived in Japan, Bulgaria, England and now France, but I am particularly in love with France, especially the region I live in, which is kind of like Texas—very wild and down to earth and unpretentious.

What was your experience at the Writers' Workshop like, and how did it shape you as a writer?

My time at Iowa absolutely shaped my career. It taught me the discipline I needed, it taught me how to take criticism graciously (which, believe me, was a hard lesson to learn), and it taught me that other people care about books as much as I do. There was also the luxury of having time to write. I came to the workshop with a newborn baby, and would never have been able to write without the fellowship I was awarded. I loved Jim McPherson and had good experiences with other teachers, but the real value of Iowa for me was the abundance of time I had to work.

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Check out the book's Web site. Keep up with Danielle on her Web site and follow her on Twitter.

The story behind Paul Harding's Pulitzer

2010-04-15T11:34:00.000-07:00

This should give hope and inspiration to everyone who's writing a book.

Daniel Alarcon reading tonight

2010-04-13T11:39:00.001-07:00

Same bat time, same bat place

Deanna Fei reading tonight

2010-04-08T12:20:00.001-07:00

Prairie Lights, 7pm

Angelology

2010-03-31T08:13:00.000-07:00

Danielle's novel is garnering well-deserved praise and sales.

Obama pays cash at Prairie Lights

2010-03-27T11:40:00.001-07:00

Awesome video of Obama buying kids' books at Prairie Lights. I used to work that register, thank you very much! The venerable Paul Ingram makes a funny cameo at the end.

A Thread of Sky

2010-03-10T14:29:00.000-08:00

Deanna Fei's novel is imminent! Pre-order today.

Really?

2010-03-04T07:07:00.000-08:00

Really.

Geoff Dyer Rules

2010-03-03T17:41:00.000-08:00

The Guardian Online recently posted a compilation of ten rules for writing from a couple dozen writers. Geoff Dyer's are my favorites, principally because of number seven:

"Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something."

Reading 3/14

2010-03-03T08:34:00.000-08:00

1. Apologies for talking about myself here. I was gently told to 'promote' via the interweb, and other than emailing myself, this is my only way to do that.

2. I'm (randomly) doing a reading on Sunday, 3/14, at Hue-Man Bookstore, 3pm. That's in Harlem, 2319 Frederick Douglass Blvd Between 124th and 125th Streets. I'm not sure any of you lives out there, but cool if anyone can make it. (Drinks after? Of course drinks after.)

New EG book club pick?

2010-02-24T10:01:00.001-08:00

Any interest in joining me for David Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten? I'm on page 5 and already being swept away...

The making of a book

2010-02-23T18:38:00.000-08:00

Check out this video about how books were made in 1947. Nothing to it, huh?

Dumbabomer manifesto

2010-02-18T15:45:00.000-08:00

At least Kazinski could write.

As usual The Onion nails it

2010-01-29T06:20:00.001-08:00

Bunch of phonies mourn JD Salinger

Personal finance Twitter?

2010-01-21T21:10:00.000-08:00

You've got to be kidding me. This will never ever take off. They really don't get it at all!

Hard Rain Falling

2010-01-18T03:53:00.001-08:00

If you can catch up with me on Hard Rain Failling, I'd love to have a conversation on it. This is a very good book.

This NYRB Classics Series is the future, I think, or part of it. Here are all these out-of-print wonders. Here is a strong name for separating the wheat from the chaff. Put the two together and you've got a business model.

Monkeytalk

2010-01-14T18:41:00.000-08:00

Perhaps it's a recent rewatching of Galaxy Quest or the recent release of The Invention of Lying (which I haven't seen yet), but it struck me when reading about deciphering the language of chimps that scientists figure out vocabulary from long, hard observation, but test usage mainly by telling whoppers--"Look! A cheetah!" It won't be long before Campbell's monkeys develop a new suffix that means, "according to the jerk."

Overview of upcoming books

2010-01-11T05:43:00.001-08:00

Millions article does in ten minutes what it would take you days to cobble together on your own...

Workshop reunion?

2010-01-08T06:52:00.001-08:00

Somehow my newsletter got misplaced. Could someone post the details of this here? When, where, etc. Anks.

Yep

2010-01-07T04:15:00.000-08:00

Junot Diaz on 2010 in, of all places, the WSJ.

Vintage Ad Browser

2010-01-05T08:13:00.000-08:00

Serious, long-term fun available here.

Another one of those loathsome in-character reviews

2009-12-18T13:16:00.001-08:00

God, I really, really, really, really, really hate it when reviewers do this. Should I read the book? Well, I'll have to make that decision based on information from somewhere else.

Await Your Reply

2009-12-18T06:10:00.000-08:00

Is it time yet? Can we start talking about the book? I doubt I'll get very deep, as that's not how I felt about the book. I felt the book was a kind of surface, somehow, ranging horizontally across space rather than vertically through levels of consciousness. I read the thing in three days. One night it kept me up till 4 in the morning. Long time since a book's done that, but I don't read a lot of whodunits or thrillers. Maybe they all do it.

I really liked the almost freakishly calm style of describing creepy events, and I appreciated the plain cleanliness of that style. This was a book all about character and story -- no fancy stuff, as Frank would say. I thought it was cool how the three storylines ever so gradually approached each other, and I thought even more of Chaon when I read later in an interview that at first he had no idea how the stories were connected, that they began as images, and he just followed them all, trusting that his subconscious would do the work, until he figured it all out toward the end of the writing (and as his wife was dying).

Miles was the most attractive to me in his self-conscious but helpless obsession, and Hayden was all the more vivid for appearing off-page (or apparently so) for so long. And I sympathized with Lucy in her better-than-it-was-but-wtf attitude. Looked forward to her sections, and my favorite part of the book was her feeling her way through Africa. I didn't care for Ryan for some reason. He was too weak for me -- weak in an annoying way, as opposed to Miles' endearing weakness.

That said -- and I'm quoting now from someone's comments on a workshop story of mine -- I'm not sure what it all added up to. What was my "takeaway," what did it reveal about human nature? Nothing I hadn't already thought about. What surprised me? Not a lot. I must have picked up the exact right clues along the way, and I'm usually not that good at solving mysteries. What did it teach me about writing? It reinforced "trust the reader" by being so spare but so precise in detail. And it demonstrated that atmosphere and background really do color a book -- his descriptions of landscapes (especially Nebraska), I thought, were effective and truly enhanced whatever mood was on offer at the time. But the book hasn't stayed with me that much. I haven't found myself re-caught in its language or visuals, as happens with a lot of other books. And here's my test: If someone asked whether I'd recommend it, I see myself shrugging...

Philly

2009-12-15T04:48:00.000-08:00

Anyone else going to MLA?

Non-literary Holiday Question

2009-12-14T08:05:00.000-08:00

We're looking for present ideas for a sparkly five-year old girl S. Santa's bringing one big present for each kid, this year, and her brother, C. (aged 8), helped things along by making a long list from catalogs. We've settled on a nifty race-car set for him. It will take up a lot of floor space and will probably draw attention from grandad . . . and maybe dad, too. So, we're looking for a present for S. that she'll like and play with and/or use; and that will also--this is important to S.--seem equal to what her brother got. Any ideas out there? She likes to draw and color; started the piano this year; and is learning to spell at a great pace. She likes to look pretty, but doesn't play a lot of dress-up. She's asked for a laptop (Haven't we all?), yet doesn't play much with the leapster she asked for last year. We can go as much as $125-150, but it's not the price so much as the effect. When C. is lying there racing formula one cars against his granddad, we want S. to feel just as proud of her . . . . .

Atlantic publishing stories on Kindle

2009-12-08T05:18:00.000-08:00

Here's the info. $3.99 per story though? That seems excessive...

Next book . . . ?

2009-11-30T09:22:00.000-08:00

It's been a week since anyone's commented on Netherland (and I'm happy to continue checking in on that conversation if it gets revived). Maybe we could kick around ideas for another book. I have a couple more normal ideas (I've never read anything by Dan Chaon, and I'd love to hear people's thoughts on 2666) and a very goofy one (Stephen King's new novel?), but as I've invested in these ideas about ten seconds of consideration, anything would be good.

(I'm happy to slow down the discussion, too: I was chomping at the bit too much last time, I'm afraid. Too excited to talk to adults! About books! What fun!)

Thoughts?

PhD fiction programs?

2009-11-25T04:14:00.001-08:00

Say, hypothetically, someone were interested in finding out about PhD programs where the novel you're writing becomes your PhD thesis. Any recommendations for programs like that?

From the Onion --

2009-11-23T09:44:00.000-08:00

Soon, it will come to this --

New 'Noveller' Allows People To Post Novels They Write During Course Of Their Day

SAN FRANCISCO—Noveller, the online macroblogging service that lets users post their impromptu narrative ruminations on modern life, society, and the nature of existence itself, celebrated its millionth post late last week, officially making it the world's most popular prose-sharing tool.
A Noveller user "novels" out his latest thoughts on the inherent frailty of man.
Social media experts said they're not surprised so many people have subscribed to the exciting new site, as it's the only online service in which users can post a major multivolume epic in the morning, and have it read, critiqued, and reNovelled by thousands of other people around the world before lunch.
"You know, before we came up with Noveller, we had all these friends creating these great 75,000- to 300,000-word works of fiction, but there was no quick, easy, fun way to share them," cofounder Chuck Gregory said. "To be honest, we were stunned there wasn't already anything like it out there. It seemed so obvious"
At 10 a.m. Pacific time on Mar. 13, Gregory and his team of programmers launched Noveller. By 10:03 a.m., the first-ever Noveller post—a primitive but vigorous account of an insurance salesman who becomes obsessed with his father's boyhood on a Philippines naval base—was put up by user johnnyK_67.
Within an hour, more than 300 user-generated "Novels" had been posted.
"I love it," said Sheena Wulf, a Novellist from Kansas City, MO. "If I'm ever sitting in a coffee shop and my sense of alienation and utter detachment from contemporary life provides me with sudden insight into the world that helped shape my family, I just grab my phone and Novel it out to people."
These days it seems as though everyone is constantly checking to see which of their friends came of age in a tenuous time and discovered their mentors and role models were not who they thought they were.
Added Wulf, "It's so simple."
Just months after its release, Noveller has become a cultural touchstone, despite countless jibes from critics who claim it has broken no new literary ground and oversimplifies the narrative form. Those who Novel on a daily basis claim to love the challenge of the utility's 140-page minimum, and popular Novellists such as TheRealJayDeeSalinger, no_i_am_not_thomas_pynchon, and aplusk soon boasted hundreds of thousands of followers.
"It makes me wonder how I ever kept track of my friends and their symbolic prose examinations of universal human experiences before this," user Joyce Carol Oates said. "I'm like, did we really ever actually go to libraries? Weird, right?"
But not everyone is so taken with the intricate-social-allegory-networking tool. In July, a University of Iowa graduate student died in a car accident while Novelling and driving, and Time magazine's "Death of the Noveller?" cover story last month cast doubts on the medium's long-term prospects.
"Nobody wants to go to their computer and read about what you had for breakfast and how it called to mind your boyhood, which morphed into a meditation on the relationship between life and art and, by extension, a metaphor for all social interaction," said Sam Alger, 24, who claimed to be "disgusted" by his friends' constant Novelling. "But some of them, it's all they do. It's like no one just talks to you for hours and hours on end any more."
"We get it: It's not just your story, but through its striving to explore basic human commonalities, it's everyone's story," Houston gas station manager Angie Ordway said. "That doesn't mean I want to go through hundreds of them whenever I open my phone."
Some, however, like MIT computer networking expert Rod Baines, argues that Noveller, which has been growing at a rate of roughly 10,000 users a day since its introduction, seems to have tapped into a previously undiscovered human need to take one's thoughts and feelings and transmute them into full-length narratives for hundreds or thousands of others to instantly see.
"I think everyone has at least one Noveller post in them," said Baines, who noted that he had just posted a sprawling, nuanced, multigenerational family saga while shopping that afternoon. "And half the fun is just following other people's Novels. Of course, that can become a problem if your employer ever finds out that he figures heavily in your satirical roman à clef."
"I've got to be especially careful," Baines added. "Mom follows my Noveller posts, and she just hates my use of the second person."

Raymond Carver biography review

2009-11-20T06:23:00.000-08:00

"Of course I kept him on a leash." -- his mom

This is Cricket

2009-11-09T07:49:00.000-08:00

Also: Wikipedia on Cricket law's elaborate treatment of "fair play."

Netherland

2009-11-06T09:44:00.001-08:00

Spoiler alert!

Impressions after 19 pages are entirely negative. But I'm admittedly quick to dislike things, and I hope the book improves and also that you'll all steer me right.

Thoughts:

-- the narrator is to this point dull, even dumb. The scene with the gun is an easy example, but his melodramatic pauses during conversations (some version of "I don't immediately answer" happens five times in three pages) are forced and annoying. Maybe he's a well-informed idiot like many Nabokov characters, which I'm hoping for, but so far the portrayal seems sincere, lacking irony. I'm worried.

-- the 'hook' is melodramatic . . . but at least it's dramatic. There's not much tension anywhere else, sadly: I'm waiting to see what happens with the hook: that's it: after 19 pages. No character development, either. Rachel is a complete blank. And I've discussed my feelings about the narrator.

-- the research about cricket is shoe-horned in and the speech about the civility of cricket rings false (somewhat the giving of the speech, but absolutely the reception. No one snickers?). ((Edit: I looked again and people do laugh. I can't tell if they're laughing 'with' or 'against' him, though. Clarity, Joe.))

-- the structure is clunky without any yield that I can see (a quick brief flashback within the larger flashback seems entirely unnecessary).

--the prose has enough vague evocations and lapses that I distrust the author. Two examples:

1. " . . . I find it hard to rid myself of the feeling that life carries a taint of aftermath." (That just makes me cringe -- not only 'taint,' but the vagueness is so blah. We're supposed to be interested in a guy who talks like this? Ugh.)

2. And this exchange:

"Oh," I say, "I'm sure I've told you about him. A cricket guy I used to know. A guy from Brooklyn."
She repeats after me, "Chuck Ramkissoon?"

(Um . . . maybe I need to look up 'repeat'?)

Yeah, I'm being nitpicky but just for spiteful fun. I'll keep going with the novel. Disagreement and revelations about my stupidity/impatience are entirely welcome and even hoped for.

For the stuck

2009-11-03T17:30:00.000-08:00

Assume many goats saw this in the NYT. Much delightful skewering.

Vu Tran wins Whiting Award

2009-10-29T10:34:00.001-07:00

Way to go, Vu!

Electric Literature

2009-10-28T20:07:00.000-07:00

Check it out. More of what we need. Thx to Colette

Blogging is over?

2009-10-27T19:49:00.000-07:00

Things have changed a lot since this blog started. You have to scroll forever just to get past the archives. It's had a long run for a blog. But face it, things are different heading, it seems, into 2010. The Web's moved on, people are interested in different stuff, life is not the same.

I cast my glance at Facebook. It's much better than blogging in most ways. But it's more public than this niche here, and I'd never want to get rid of this, but it seems most people have moved on, away, to different sectors of life, as I have myself. What to do? Not everyone is on Facebook. Is it re-Balkanization?

Where did the conversation go? What's happening, as Dr Thompson wrote -- what's going on?

Brian, You Really Need To Cut This Shit Out

2009-10-26T07:20:00.000-07:00

IOWA CITY, Iowa — Iowa City police are investigating an early morning assault in which a man accused another of being a zombie, then punched him twice. Police said the assault occurred at 1:17 a.m. Sunday at an Iowa City restaurant south of the University of Iowa campus.

A man was ordering food when he was approached by another man who called him a zombie, then hit him in the eye. When the victim tried to call police on his cell phone, the man punched him again, breaking his nose.

The man then ran out a back door.

The victim was taken by ambulance to a hospital.

EG duo in VOA broadcast

2009-10-05T11:44:00.001-07:00

Our own Fid-alicious Fujo did a timely piece on Uwem Akpan for Voice of America. The story of how it happened began here with reviews and articles on the Goat. Anyway, you can listen to the audio or read the Web version.

Notepad Misc

2009-09-26T17:27:00.000-07:00

Contents of an iPhone's Notes file I just stumbled across.

Notepad misc

Music
Suede
Bothy band
Richard thompson
Euan macoll
Duffy (welsh girl)
Elliot smith

Movies
the visitor
Gaahswdwdewddqdqffsfeuuu
Real xt oolestate ideas
Mesquite, hb
Patoka lake
Email re Ohio River

Songs to record
techno drone drums
Fame - good one
All my loving

Dad: shoes smelled says thinks leather came off a cows rear end, and only thing wrong with Montana is it's full of bad people

Creation by franco ferruci the life of god as told to himself autobiography of god (_____ recommended)

Search yt for robin williams scottish golf

Rewrite ball of string story ending shortly after cop arrives

A vitamin with an ego

How do you entertain a blind man, a zombie that has to be cheerful [quoting Bill, who is blind. -- Ed.]

Every time I lie to you I really mean it

Bus 48 to barentzplein, van diemenstraat 50

Short story: the nap

Fleet foxes and grizzly bear

Crying underwater - a funny notion

New Nabokov approaching

2009-09-25T08:32:00.000-07:00

Ron Rosenbaum got a strange glimpse of the beast, which will arrive Nov 17.

Mr. Conroy's Neighborhood

2009-09-24T10:20:00.001-07:00

So the Dey and Shambough Houses will anchor a new writer's neighborhood....

Sweet interview with PJKM

2009-09-24T09:59:00.000-07:00

Don't miss out on any of the continuing authorial saga of Paula Morris.

Pile of Brown

2009-09-24T08:00:00.000-07:00

What are we trying to prove about ourselves when we trash a writer like Dan Brown and who are we trying to prove it to? Because I don't think they're paying attention.

Jung at heart

2009-09-20T19:55:00.000-07:00

I will be drooling over the impending release of this long-rumored book, but at $195 suggested retail ... I think I'll wait for the paperback.

Kakutani destroying the world

2009-09-14T10:59:00.001-07:00

Gary Sindell cynically breaks down the process of getting reviewed in the NYT.

New Lorrie Moore

2009-09-14T10:25:00.001-07:00

Maud Newton reviews it. Anyone tackling this yet?

Odd Adaptation

2009-09-09T11:11:00.000-07:00

There is a trailer out now for the film adaptation of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. If nothing else, the cast looks entertaining.

In praise of plot and the death of modernism

2009-08-30T10:52:00.000-07:00

This article by Lev Grossman is on the right track, I think. At least I kept nodding throughout it.

Loch Ness Monster Spotted on Google Maps!

2009-08-28T10:20:00.001-07:00

YAY!!!

Fiction comes to the instant gratification machine

2009-08-28T03:41:00.001-07:00

I don't like to crow too loudly about publications, but here's a neat one: I'll be part of the launch of Triple Quick Fiction with a story called "Crime of the Scene." If you have an iphone, be on the lookout. If you don't, you can patiently await the web app. This will be a crazy and wonderful experiment.

I have much to say about this attention span issue but I'll save it for another time.

Why I Write

2009-08-26T11:08:00.000-07:00

Did any of you read this piece by Stephen Elliott about why he writes? I found it unexpectedly moving.

Thoughts on Inglourious Basterds?

2009-08-25T15:48:00.000-07:00

I thoroughly enjoyed the film and plan to see it again. I liked it even more than I hoped I would. For one thing, the way scenes were stretched out, letting the tension build and build... I didn't know movies knew how to do that anymore (the first scene was especially brilliant in this way).

For another, something about the violence didn't bother me. I find myself more disturbed by film violence nowadays, but this -- gory as it was -- was sufficiently cartoony to never let me forget I was watching a Hollywood film. Compare to violence in The Hurt Locker, for example -- there I winced. In IB I was cheering.

Third, Christoph Waltz is going to be a big star in this country now. I hope he wins an Oscar. The Nazis in general were really well done. The Frankfurt Allegemaine said the portrayal of Nazis was spot on: "...as the pompous trash they were." A German friend of mine loved it, but thinks the German-dubbed version in Germany won't translate as well. She saw it in Holland, where they just subtitle.

After Grindhouse, I wasn't sure what to expect from Tarantino. Would he continue down the road of parody to self-parody? Thankfully the answer seems to be no. This is a mature effort and a thrilling piece of filmmaking.

Fun Gaiman/Adams thoughts on writing in the digital age

2009-08-20T06:09:00.000-07:00

This is worth a glance...

New Paula Morris YA novel is out

2009-08-10T16:26:00.000-07:00

And it's a ghost story to boot. Am I too old for it?

Gaddis recs?

2009-08-10T15:55:00.001-07:00

If I wanted to try something by William Gaddis, what should I start with?

Inherent Vice trailer

2009-08-06T10:17:00.000-07:00

Bumped from Trevor's comment...

Can't be much argument that that's the best book promotion there ever was. If you're of a mind, have a look at this Simpsons. It's the same voice, different accent.

Has anyone ever played it better than Pynchon? "That's with the seeds and stems o' course..." Give me a fucking break. Classic.

Pynchon's LA

2009-08-04T13:28:00.000-07:00

I know there are some rabid Pynchon fans here (looking at Grendel, askew) waiting for Inherent Vice. Wired Magazine has built an interactive map of LA based on the book. Looks like fun time-killing.

Comic Book Cities

2009-08-03T17:41:00.000-07:00

I thought some Goats might like this top 10 from a British Architecture journal. Makes me realize how much I've probably been missing with comic books and graphic novels. Anybody read Moebius's The Long Tomorrow (#5 on the list)? Just from the stills in the article, one can recognize (as the article points out) the source for cityscapes in "Blade Runner" and "the Fifth Element." Amazing.

Favorite line: Mister X looks like Le Corbusier on crack.

Floodwaters

2009-08-01T23:37:00.001-07:00

Nic Brown has received a wonderfully warm NYT review for his new collection of linked stories. I'd been wondering what to read next. I've gotten to swim in a lot of books this summer, partly because of a few days of real R&R. In the past couple weeks, I've read Wolff's A Boy's Life (very worthy of its rep--wow), re-read Malamud's The Natural (better and worse the second time around), read half of Berger's Little Big Man (I loved it, but the book belonged to the house where I was staying), and read Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind (this is why I rarely read bestsellers: it was so not, as the cover says, Borges meets Eco meets Garcia Marquez!). All that's left on the pile right now is the last chapter of another baseball novel, The Celebrant, by Eric Rolfe Greenbert (weaves fact and fiction around the early 20th c. giant Christy Mathewson), Kyle Beachy's the Slide (met him here in IC this summer), and, happily, Kiki P's recently published poetry collection Fort Red Border. Okay, and Brothers Karamazov, which I'll have to make time for (never read it, was liking it, but got drawn away). Fyodor refuses to let me put another hefty tome (like Diaz or Bolano) on the pile. Now, thankfully, Nic's book has temporarily solved the problem.

By the way, you'll see in the review a lengthy description of the collection's opening story, which should be recognizable--at least in the abstract--to anybody who was at the special workshop held by Jim Shepard during the WW director search. Very fond memories of Shepard getting deep into the POV of that party!

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

2009-07-28T13:23:00.001-07:00

I keep wanting to insert an "and" between "Brief" and "Wondrous"--not sure why that is. I think I did it in the last post but didn't find it in time to fix it. Anyway. I'm somewhat relieved in that I liked this one, though I didn't love it. Liked some parts an awful lot, though. Which leads me to a somewhat larger concern. Maybe it's that a little education is a dangerous thing, but reading has become terribly difficult, I find, in that it's really hard to flat-out enjoy something without succumbing to the urge to dissect it to bits. Oscar Wao, for example--enjoyable, to be sure, but I found myself respecting the project more than enjoying the read. Kind of like The Hangover, if any of you have seen it--I spent a lot of time while watching it impressed by its construction, how the pieces fit together quite well, but I did that instead of laughing. I'd be curious to hear if anyone else had the same feeling (re Oscar Wao or The Hangover, either way), but I'm even more curious to know what you've all been reading, in recent memory, that has been engaging/compelling enough to make you stop thinking about the process and just enjoy it. I'm struggling to remember, myself, but I think Jennifer Egan's The Keep might take those honors. I knew while I was reading it that it wasn't a perfect book, but I just didn't care--I had to know what happened next, and I think I need to read something like that soon. Recommendations, please, please, please.

Making Iowa City more literary

2009-07-28T05:30:00.000-07:00

William Ingles, owner of The Book Shop on South Dubuque, has some fine ideas for turning the "City of Literature" designation into action, results, and, frankly, money.

Frances de Peebles story honored

2009-07-28T05:25:00.000-07:00

Check out Fifty-Two Stories, which is featuring Frances' "The Drowned Woman."

You had to see this one coming

2009-07-20T07:36:00.000-07:00

From io9 ---

Amazon Secretly Removes "1984" From the Kindle
By Annalee Newitz

Thousands of people last week discovered that Amazon had quietly removed electronic copies of George Orwell's 1984 from their Kindle e-book readers. In the process, Amazon revealed how easy censorship will be in the Kindle age.

In this case, the mass e-book removals were motivated by copyright . A company called MobileReference, who did not own the copyrights to the books 1984 and Animal Farm, uploaded both books to the Kindle store and started selling them. When the rights owner heard about this, they contacted Amazon and asked that the e-books be removed. And Amazon decided to erase them not just from the store, but from all the Kindles where they'd been downloaded. Amazon operators used the Kindle wireless network, called WhisperNet, to quietly delete the books from people's devices and refund them the money they'd paid.

An uproar followed, with outraged customers pointing out the irony that Amazon was deleting copies of a novel about a fascist media state that constantly alters history by changing digital records of what has happened. Amazon's action flies in the face of what people expect when they purchase a book. Under the "right of first sale" in the U.S., people can do whatever they like with a book after purchasing it, including giving it to a friend or reselling it. There is no option for a bookseller to take that book back once it's sold.

Apparently, until last week, Amazon claimed it wouldn't take back purchased books either: The New York Times' Brad Stone reports:

Amazon's published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a "permanent copy of the applicable digital content."
But this isn't the first time there has been a problem with secret deletings. Stone adds:
Amazon appears to have deleted other purchased e-books from Kindles recently. Customers commenting on Web forums reported the disappearance of digital editions of the Harry Potter books and the novels of Ayn Rand over similar issues.

Now that the public is up in arms over the Kindle deletions, Amazon is once again promising good behavior. Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener told reporters:

We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances.

That "in these circumstances" bit doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. Sounds like books will be removed again under other (undefined) circumstances.

Regardless of whether you believe Amazon's promise to leave your Kindle alone, the company has tipped its hand and shown us the dark side of a culture where books are only available in electronic form. If the WhisperNet service from Kindle allows the company to delete books silently from your device, what other information might they have access to? Can the company monitor what you're reading and when - and then hand that over to law enforcement? Can it replace a book file with a different file whose content is changed?

Perhaps more than anything else, this mass deletion of 1984 has made it clear that collecting e-books is going to require some technical know-how. No e-book is truly yours unless you can get it off your Kindle and onto your computer - hopefully a computer that isn't connected to the internet.

Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

2009-07-17T12:07:00.000-07:00

I'm afraid my little reading project is not working out exactly as I'd hoped. I wanted to push myself to read more, to catch up on some of the books people have recommended, but I've gotten hung up on this one, which took much longer than I'd expected. I think I saw Hemon read once at Prairie Lights, and I must have enjoyed it quite a lot because I was inspired to buy whatever of his I could find. True to form, though, those books have remained unread on the unread-books shelf in my living room, and it wasn't until The Lazarus Project that I managed to motivate myself to finally read something he'd written. And I'm not sorry that I did, exactly--his writing is terrific, and there are some really vivid moments (and good jokes), but ultimately I'm starting to wonder if I'm just in too critical a frame of mind to enjoy anything right now, because I just couldn't get into this one. The premise is that a Bosnian expat in America decides to write a book about a murdered Jewish immigrant in early 20th century Chicago and travels back to Sarajevo for research. The present-day story is written in the past tense, with references back to the murder storyline written in the present tense, and presumably there are all sorts of connections between the two storylines that I couldn't begin to fathom. I'm hoping one of you might have read and liked it and can fill me in on what I'm so obviously missing.

Also reading and not particularly enjoying: Penelope Lively's The Blue Flower, given to me by the same friend who introduced me to Perdido Street Station and Little, Big, both excellent, so perhaps I can be forgiven not understanding the hype over this one, though it could just be my general distaste for historical fiction; Zoe Heller's The Believers, filled with some intensely unlikeable characters, something that somehow worked in The Corrections but doesn't fly all that well otherwise (though, to be fair, I did like What Was She Thinking? (Notes on a Scandal), even though the narrator in that one was clearly batshit crazy).

Next up: The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which has been so universally praised that I'm hoping it will jar me out of this streak of negativity. Onward!

That Old Chestnut

2009-07-14T05:07:00.000-07:00

James Wolcott considers a world without books.

Now that I have an ipod touch, I find that I read on it all the time and with much greater ease than I do on an actual computer. Using Instapaper, I read more fiction-- and longer articles--from the internet than I ever did without it. The urge to skim is gone. I don't feel my attention being pulled to another browser tab. The fundamental difference is both unexpected and physical. It doesn't seem to be a matter of screen size so much as my ability to hold the device in my hand and twist and turn with it like it is an actual book. The architecture of the ipod itself helps too, the way it eschews multitasking. You can do a lot with this little guy but you can't do it all at once. Really, that's what I love about it.

Are readers the petty snobs Wolcott suggests we are? Probably yes and no, but I'm glad to see the e/book debate moving away from stark grandiosity and into the tangible and banal. That's ultimately where it will reside for each reader, isn't it? Once the novelty and fear of e-books have worn off these decisions won't be so freighted and we'll all make them in private moments for reasons under no obligation to be articulated--or even articulable. As a prognosticator and a librarian, my sense is that this will make for a messy and uneven reality of practice, in which both technologies more or less coexist without incident or even much heady symbolism. But what do I know? They say people always overestimate the impact of a technology in its early period and underestimate it by the time it has managed full adoption.

ps-hey, guess what? A and I just moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where, as of next week, I'll be the English librarian at a university here. Seems like a good town. People sit on their front porches and the pizza is surprisingly good. Come visit when you can.

Great detailed analysis of Sarah Palin's modus operandi

2009-07-09T03:56:00.000-07:00

If you, like me, find yourself inexplicably fascinated by this character whenever she struts onto the national stage, you may have been wondering WHYYYY??? Why in God's name do I pay attention to what she says, does, thinks? According to this careful reading of her methods and presentation, it's because she is a kind of intuitive cultural genius. (h/t to Alex Chee)

Cheeni reading tonight in the IC

2009-07-06T04:44:00.001-07:00

Cheeni Rao, whom many of you may remember as your relentless softball coach, will be reading from his highly praised down-and-out drug enlightenment memoir In Hanuman's Hands tonight at 7 p.m. CST, Prairie Lights. It will also be streamed live on the World Wide Interwebs (check out that site for more upcoming readings).

Google book settlement

2009-07-06T04:29:00.000-07:00

Published a book? You need to read this Web site, because if you do nothing you will be opted into the Google Book Settlement. Which may not be a bad thing. Or which may be.

Remainder, by Tom McCarthy

2009-06-29T13:14:00.001-07:00

Mission accomplished, deadline achieved. The draft's a disaster, but hey, it's a disaster with an ending, so at least there's something to revise, right? And since I'm not going to be a 16-year-old wunderkind (thanks for that one, Grendel), I'll just shoot for Ben Fountain status, which means I've got some time.

In the meantime, I have some reading to do. I was pretty excited about Remainder because I have one friend who loves it and is bff with the author (who's a bit of an odd duck, from what I can tell), and another friend who loathed it with every tasty oatbran fiber of her being. Exciting! Plus there's Zadie Smith's article on the two paths for the novel, one of which (Joseph O'Neill's Netherland) I wasn't crazy about, which begs the question of whether I'd have any interest in the other path. Add to that the extremely mixed reactions over at the Tournament of Books, which I always enjoy, and you've got to figure you're in for something unusual.

And it turns out "unusual" works pretty well as a descriptor here. This is definitely not a Workshop-friendly type of read--the characters are made out of the thinnest cardboard, with the main character nameless and the only other real person of interest described only in terms of the whirring of the gears in his brain. Our narrator has been struck down by some sort of airborne technological detritus, which has left him unable to remember how to do even the most basic things, but which has also left him with a giant cash settlement as long as he never tells anyone what happened. Not a hard deal to accept given that he can't remember anything in the first place. After a misleading blip where he seems to be trying to use the money for good (charity) or evil (hookers and blow), he settles on using it to recreate settings that interest him--first an apartment building filled with residents who do things like practice piano and cook liver, and then the scenes of accidents that happened nearby.

If this all sounds a bit plot-free, rest assured, it mostly is. It's also quite readable, which I wasn't really expecting but which was a pleasant surprise. With that said, though, while I enjoy a novel of ideas as much as the next girl, I'm not quite convinced that the ideas we're dealing with here elevated the book enough to make up for the fact that it's basically impossible to get invested in the characters (and thus the situation). And if you're someone who reads for the pleasure of getting to know the people in the book, you're probably going to want to throw the book at the wall. I look forward to hearing if anyone actually did.

16-year-old sells novel she wrote when she was 13

2009-06-28T07:28:00.001-07:00

Read it and weep, bitches.

UPDATE: Vantage Press turns out to be a Vanity publisher, as pointed out by Gun in a comment. So she didn't sell her novel at all -- she bought it.

Oh snap

2009-06-20T05:55:00.001-07:00

Warning--Impending Usurpation of Blog for Selfish Purposes

2009-06-17T09:35:00.001-07:00

I'm finding myself a bit motivationally challenged of late, having blown through an arbitrarily-set May 31 deadline for finishing a draft of this stupid book I'm working on (props to E. McCracken for noting, years ago, that the terminology for one's first novel is anything but "novel" [i.e., "project," "giant thingy," etc.] but that the second is always "stupid f*%&ing novel"). I also haven't been reading much of note--lots of crappy mysteries, but I'm feeling behind in terms of the good stuff. That's where the usurpation of the blog comes in--I have a plan that perhaps you'll be able to help me with. I'm making the second arbitrary deadline of the end of June a firm one, and after that I'm going to start catching up on my reading. I'm designating the month of July read-all-the-crap-people-keep-telling-me-about month, and I thought I'd post some thoughts on what I think, with the goal of eliciting similar comments from you guys because, frankly, I miss talking about this stuff with all of you. Or at least those of you whose user names I can remember.

And here, just to give a sense of the plan, I'll start early. I just finished Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances, which I found very readable and intelligent but somewhat unsatisfying. It's about a man who believes, upon his wife's return home one day, that she's actually been replaced by a simulacrum of herself. Though the phrase "Capgras syndrome" is never mentioned, anyone who's read Richard Powers's The Echo Maker will likely call it to mind. Given that the main character is a psychiatrist (and therefore a medical doctor), the missing term looms a bit too large for my taste, though I'd be curious to hear what others think, if anyone's read it. (And I do recommend the Powers--really enjoyed it.)

More Paul Ingram

2009-06-11T02:23:00.000-07:00

By popular demand -- and because it's just so awesome when Paul talks about books.

Random cool music video

2009-06-10T06:57:00.001-07:00

White Winter Hymnal from Grandchildren on Vimeo.

So You Can Read It in the Bathroom

2009-06-08T07:33:00.000-07:00

Remember wondering, at the announcement of its publication, how they would stretch DFW's commencement address at Kenyon to book-length? Well, the solution is one aphoristically-presented sentence per page.

Summer Reading with Paul Ingram

2009-06-08T02:09:00.001-07:00

SF Chronicle interview with Ethan

2009-06-05T00:21:00.000-07:00

is here, in advance of the Litquake festival.

Marilynne Robinsom wins Orange Prize

2009-06-05T00:16:00.000-07:00

Another feather in her illustrious cap.

NYer article on writing programs

2009-06-04T23:15:00.000-07:00

In case you hadn't seen this...

Practically Perfect

2009-05-28T05:27:00.001-07:00

Count me among Alice Munro's admirers. But I've got a question: what is it about this woman's fiction that continually elicits descriptions of perfection? I'm looking for a nitty-gritty discussion of craft here.

Perfection implies fidelity to a pre-existing template. Formalism. I think with Munro the template is one largely of her own invention or, at least, stylization. It's hers, but we can recognize it from a mile away. Sometimes, also, "perfect" describes a nakedness of technical prowess, perhaps even of such impressive proportions that it eclipses emotional response. We admire perfection, but do we love it? In neither way is "perfect" a word that makes me want to read something (maybe a rhetorical text, but not a fiction.)

What does perfect mean when we're discussing Munro? Because I guess I can admit that I don't have as much love as I have admiration for this writer. Of the later, I have copious amounts. I don't want to understate that and thus invite misunderstanding. I think she's one of a kind, and she deserves all the laurels she gets. But I read her dutifully and without craving. Of course it's never very long before I'm engrossed and wondering why I don't read more Munro. But it never quite hits me where I live. As they say.

Should perfection be something fiction aspires to?

Does perfect fiction suggest one of those problematic but often fruitful conflations of a subjective model for a universal one? There's no subjectivity like the one so passionately experienced, so eager to be manifest for others, as the one that believes it is universal.

The "Bechoosing": EU elections

2009-05-22T00:24:00.001-07:00

We received in the mail, like everyone in Europe, our "Candidate List for the Leaders of the European Parliament," for the election (the "bechoosing" -- love that) on June 4. There's not much excitement about this that I can see. I've seen two political signs in Haarlem so far. I'll translate the names of the Dutch parties vying to represent the Netherlands -- bearing in mind the admonition at the top: "The head of the household is requested to give this list to the other household members for reading."

But whom should we vote for?

1. European People's Party (aligned with no. 6)
2. European Social Democrats (aligned with no. 4)
3. European Liberal Democrats (aligned with no. 7)
4. Green Left
5. Socialist Party
6. Christian Union
7. Democratic 66
8. Newropeans
9. Europe Affordable and Durable
10. Solidarity
11. Party for the Animals
12. European Whistleblowers Party (literally: "Loud Bell Clapping")
13. The Greens
14. Party For Freedom
15. Liberal Democratic Party
16. Party for European Politics
17. Liberty

Instructions include:

* Valid ID required
* Your ballot, which is coming in the mail, will contain your voting location. If you prefer to vote somewhere else in the city, you can do that.
* Voting is between 7:30 a.m. and 9 p.m.

Cristina Henriquez interview: The World in Half

2009-05-19T02:04:00.000-07:00

Illustrious classmate Cristina Henriquez, author of Come Together, Fall Apart, has published her first novel, The World in Half, to rave reviews from readers and critics alike. We'll spare you the enviable blurbage and get straight to the interview. Cristina was kind enough to talk to us once again to us about the book and her writing process.

Can you give us some background on how the novel got started and how long you worked on it?

It started with a very vague idea to write something about the Panama Canal. It's probably the most salient association many people have with Panama, and I was interested in telling the story of it from a perspective that's underrepresented in most historical accounts of its construction -- that of the West Indian laborers who were brought in by the boatloads to do the dangerous and messy work of building the thing and of the Panamanians whose country it irrevocably changed and has consequently defined.

So I started down that path and had written about 300 pages when it was brought to my attention (by my editor) that perhaps there was a better way to tell the story. I was writing in third-person, with a huge cast of characters, and she thought that maybe one of those characters -- Mira -- should tell the story. As heartbroken as I was to have to throw out 300 pages of work, I suspected maybe my editor was right. I'd always had the feeling the something was off in the first version. So I told my editor I'd give it 50 pages and see if having Mira as the narrator felt any better. Of course, as soon as I shifted the point of view, the entire story changed. Some of the stuff about the canal is still in the book, but it became Mira's story, which soon enveloped me in its own way.

From that first failed start until the end, I was working on the book for
about four years.

How was writing a novel different from writing stories?

The main challenge for me was this idea that I could never see the novel as a whole. I couldn't wrap my head around something so large and unwieldy. With stories, I have a fairly strong handle on what it is by the time I finish a first draft, but that was never the case as I worked on the novel. I¹m always aiming for a finished piece that feels spherical, and I rely a lot on that sense of shape to tell me whether something is done and whether its successful. Because I never felt like I could see the whole of the novel all at once, I never felt like I could accurately ascertain the shape of it. I had to rely much more on outside readers to tell me whether it all made sense from beginning to end because I just lost sight of it at some point.

It's kind of hard to talk about your book without spoilers, but your protagonist goes to Panama looking for her father and finds something -- a few things -- other than what she was expecting. How did you decide what would happen -- I mean, did you know the whole time, or did the solution emerge somehow more or less on its own?

The solutions emerged as I wrote. Generally speaking, I'm a very practical writer. I don't subscribe to the idea of Writing As Mystical Experience. But at the risk of sounding hokey, I do often find that the story leads me more than I lead the story. Characters say things I didn't expect them to say, they change the course of the action, they respond to a question and something in their response suggests a whole character trait that then, as the author, I want to track down and come up with back story for and everything spins outward and outward. For me, that's how I HAVE to write. The less I know in advance, the better the writing, the more natural the plot. So I tried -- I always try -- to know as little as I could when I sat down each day. Or even when I thought I knew which direction I was headed, to be willing to deviate from the plan. That's more or less how I operated throughout. Naturally, because it was a novel, I had to work ahead a least a little bit, but for the first draft I tried just to follow the story for the most part and to deal with the sense-making/fine-tuning/does-everything-match-up stuff in revision.

The character of Danilo felt especially real to me. Did you make him up whole cloth, or is he based on someone you met, or did certain Panamanians or national characteristics coalesce into him, or...?

I saw a photo years and years ago of a boy whose expression had always intrigued me. I mean, I just saw it randomly on a website or something. But I saved it as inspiration for a character one day. So I think, physically at least, I had that boy in mind when I was writing Danilo. But otherwise, he's entirely invented.

Your father's family lives in Panama. How often do you visit and do you speak Spanish down there?

I visit every year on average. The last time I was there was in February. I speak Spanish when I have to (meaning, when I'm not near anyone who can translate for me) and I can make myself understood. But I'm SO self-conscious about my Spanish and so crippled by the expectation that I SHOULD be able to speak it, that I tend to withdraw and not practice it as much as I could while I'm there.

Your book strikes me as essentially about communication -- what it conveys, how the simple presence of information changes people, what is lost when it is blocked or hidden. This theme occurs both in the uncovered secret that ends up changing Mira's life, but also in the opposite way with her mother, whose Alzheimer's is systematically stripping her of information. Did you consciously set that up -- that Mira's mother, who hid information from Mira, would be herself "punished" by a disease that does the same thing to her?

I would love to say I set it up that way from the start. That would make me seem very clever. But no, it was more a case of having those two elements in the book and then seeing much later how they related to each other and deepened the themes of the book. I had a teacher once who said that the goal of writing was to bring the unconscious to consciousness. And that's exactly how it works much of the time. I'm just writing, writing, writing and I don't necessarily know on first glance why I'm throwing in the things I am. It's not until I step back and look at it that I can start to suss out the ways my unconscious was doing work for me -- in magical, amazing ways that my conscious mind probably never could -- and then I can start drawing all of that to the surface and making connections more explicit and shaping the narrative in response to what's already there.

You've said you looked at your Panamanian stories and your American stories and realized your Panamanian ones were better. Better in what way, and why do you think that was so?

I've been thinking and thinking about this question, and I'm still not sure about the answer. I think I just found that the stories set in Panama were truer in some way. To break that down even further, I think they were more personal. I was writing about something closer to my heart than than anything I had written before, and that showed. I also think that a lot of the "American" fiction I was writing was terribly derivative. I was trying to imitate the writers I loved -- George Saunders, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme -- even though each of them is of course inimitable. But when I started writing the Panama stories, that felt like untreaded terrain. Those stories were mine. I stopped imitating and just wrote.

You recently complete a book tour. How was it? Where did you go? Did you get a good reception? What's happening out there in the world of readers?

I started off in Little Rock at the Arkansas Literary Festival, where I met some great authors (including Kevin Brockmeier -- Iowa represent!) and had a lot of fun. Then I was off to Seattle for two readings, then to Austin, Houston, New York City, and finally I did a reading in Dallas. I love to tour because friends I haven't seen in ages come out and say hello, and also because it reminds me how many people out there are honestly interested in reading. People get very excited to have a book signed or to ask questions about characters they've fallen in love with, and that's so, so heartening to see.

Are you using social media to promote your work? What are you doing in that arena and how is it working for you?

I'm on Facebook (become my fan!) and Goodreads. Facebook in particular has been great for spreading the word. Book sales are largely generated by word-of-mouth, and buzz has the potential to spread quickly online. It seems to be very useful in getting people out to events, too, which is great. And, you know, beyond that it gives me an easy way to bug everybody from time to time about what I'm up to writing-wise or to remind them that they should buy my book for their entire family at Christmas.

How is Ryan? How is Sofia? How is Chicago?

Great, great, and finally warm -- hooray!

What's next? I've heard you're already working on another novel. Have you put short story writing on the back burner?

I am working on something that feels novel-ish, but it's so early that it's entirely possible it will fall apart. I've been working on stories, too. I've written two in the past few months and for me, there's just nothing like it. I adore short stories. I will never give them up entirely. But longer work seems to have wormed its way into my system as well.

See the previous Earth Goat interview with Cristina.

Line editing The Da Vinci Code

2009-05-16T01:11:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine, Robert Glick, is taking a wry, brief crack at re-editing Dan Brown's book properly...

Uwem Akpan Review - excerpt from Farafina Magazine

2009-05-12T05:22:00.000-07:00

SAY YOU’RE ONE OF THEM

Small Beginnings
When his mother asked her young son, Uwem Akpan, to write a play for her to be performed at the Parish Mothers’ Day event, he wrote a script and got a cast together. But after practising for a week, he got cold feet.

“I lost my liver, as they say, and disappeared. The play didn’t happen.”

Since then, the 37-year-old Nigerian writer and Jesuit priest has come a long way.

In the summer of 2005, the prestigious American magazine, the New Yorker, published his short story, “An Ex-mas Feast”, in its debut fiction issue. This was the first story he had ever submitted for publication in the United States. A year later, a second story, “My Parent’s Bedroom”, appeared in the New Yorker and was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing.

Realist, tense, without apology, Uwem Akpan’s fiction is alarming. In his new book, Say You’re One of Them, he looks through children’s eyes at a modern Africa in crisis on many levels. The three short stories and two novellas that make up the collection are set in six countries—Kenya, Benin, Gabon, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Rwanda—and cover issues as dark and diverse as child trafficking, religious violence and genocide.

Luxurious Hearses
In the tightly strung novella, “Luxurious Hearses,” a Nigerian teenager tries to hide his mixed Christian/Muslim identity as he waits to travel south with a busload of Christians fleeing religious persecution in the North.

Before reading this story I, like many outside of Nigeria, had a fairly fuzzy notion about the conflict between Northern and Southern Nigeria. I knew it had to do with religion. I’d heard the news reports about Sharia law and the woman who was sentenced to be stoned to death. I suppose I cared in the way that you feel you should care about other people’s suffering. But all the same, I was only distantly aware, theoretically sympathetic. It was not difficult to shrug off, like flicking a fly off my forearm.

And then I met Jubril. Or Gabriel, depending on whether you are a Muslim extremist or a fanatical Christian. A young protagonist caught in the inter-religious conflict of the early Nigerian democracy, baptised a Christian by his father in the south but brought up as a Muslim in the northern town of Khamfi, he is a complex and flawed character.

And now that I’ve sat with Jubril for a few hours (I read slowly), I have a far greater understanding of the many-layered potent mix of history, religion, poverty, corruption, greed, fear and power, that can boil up into violence. I don’t feel like I’ve learnt such a thing from reading a book in a long time. This is the power of Akpan’s writing—to slide you so snugly into someone’s shoes that you can get as close to sharing their experience as possible. You may just recognise the human side of such inhuman circumstances.

Humanity
It was well after I’d read through the collection that I realised these are stories about child prostitutes, glue sniffing babies, religious zealots, abusive mothers, murderer husbands, child-trafficking uncles, prejudiced parents and child soldiers. Akpan’s characters are some of the least socially acceptable people in the world.

More...

Boston Globe article on Seth Harwood

2009-05-10T02:30:00.000-07:00

This is cool. Go Seth!

Cricket music

2009-05-06T07:54:00.000-07:00

Sound of crickets slowed down sounds like a choir.

New novel from Denis Johnson

2009-05-06T07:16:00.000-07:00

Anybody read this on the Playboy installment plan? "I only read it for the Denis Johnson novels."

Pigs Don't Really Deserve This

2009-04-30T18:17:00.000-07:00

Let's start calling it banker's flu.

You're Pulitzerin' my leg

2009-04-27T01:06:00.000-07:00

2009 Prizes announced. Anyone read Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout? How do poets feel about Merwyn nabbing a second one? (I must confess I've never been anything but bored by anything I've read by him.)

Danny MacAskill

2009-04-24T00:59:00.000-07:00

Really, it's like riding a bike... Oh, here's another one, even more ridiculous:

h/t Gawker/Alexander Chee

Cheeni's book is out

2009-04-21T08:06:00.000-07:00

What a great, great idea, this Web video promo. I already couldn't wait to read it.