The Millions

Reader Beware

2009-07-06T07:50:00.001-04:00

Advance readers copies, the paperbacks sent out early to book reviewers, often contain special notes from authors or editors that impart a little back story or extol the virtues of the book at hand, but I've never seen an author's note quite like the one that Pete Dexter penned for the advance readers copies of his forthcoming novel Spooner:

As far as I know, sometime in November of last year, the book you have in your hands was three years late. There are many reasons it was three years late, probably the most conspicuous being that it was once 250 pages or so longer than the version you hold, and it takes maybe half a year to write an extra 250 pages, and at least twice that to subtract them back out. I realize this leaves another year and a half unaccounted for, and all I can say about that, readers, is get in line. Whole decades are missing from my life and I am pretty sure I wouldn't have it any other way.
At any rate; it turns out that bringing a book home three years past deadline presents problems for the publisher. Publications have to be set (again), covers drawn, generous comments collected - god knows how many of my greatest admirers have died while I've been diddling around with this thing - and so you can understand, perhaps, that in the end someone had to put his/her foot down and say enough, and in the end somebody did. Be assured it wasn't me. I could have kept this up for another five years. Oh, and a title. They thought a title might be nice.
All to say that what you have here, while not exactly a first draft, is further away from the finished product than most advanced readers' editions are, and when you come across sentences you particularly don't like, keep in mind that I probably didn't like them either. On the odd chance that the bad sentences are still there when the book comes out, then you should keep in mind that you're reading somebody who is still missing 18 months of the last 36, and has no idea about 2006 at all.

This isn't the first time that Dexter has prefaced a book with an introduction that threatens to divide his readers into those who get his sense of humor and those who don't. The introduction to Paper Trails (this time in the actual published edition), which collects Dexter's columns and articles from his legendary newspaper career, lets us know that he had little interest in collecting his columns in the first place. He tells us that the 82 columns and articles we are about to read will lack dates and any indication as to where they first appeared because, basically, he and his editor Rob Fleder didn't want to dig them up. He also calls the venerable Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley a "worn-out old whore."

What's interesting to me about Dexter is that, while his fiction is quite good, his wry, impolitic sense of humor doesn't always shine through in his noirish, almost hard-boiled novels. Instead, you need to read his (essential) Paper Trails or keep an eye out for things like the remarkable author's note quoted above.

Curiosities: The Life and Times of Fuzzy Dunlop

2009-07-05T16:13:00.000-04:00

Dr. Seuss Went to War: A Catalog of Political Cartoons by Dr. Seuss
The Philadelphia Inquirer profiles Joseph O'Neill (via).
A primer from Bookride for using the web to check the values of old books. "The first thing to remember is that most books are of low value or no value. Some books are worth less than nothing."
The second issue of Wag's Revue is out, featuring an interview with T.C. Boyle.
For fans of The Wire, issue four of darkmatter Journal analyzes the series with essays like "The Politics of Brisket: Jews and The Wire" and "The Subversion of Heteronormative Assumptions in HBO's The Wire".
The Rumpus gets listy with George Pelecanos' favorite Westerns
The Second Pass follows up on our "Most Anticipated" list with a few more books to look forward to.

The Millions Top Ten: June 2009

2009-07-02T10:12:00.000-04:00

We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we've been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you've been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you'll find our Millions Top Ten list for June, the list is also in our sidebar.

This Month	Last Month	Title	On List
1.	1.	Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences	5 months
2.	2.	2666	6 months
3.	4.	Olive Kitteridge	5 months
4.	6.	Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste	4 months
5.	7.	Infinite Jest	4 months
6.	3.	The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker	4 months
7.	10.	The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao	4 months
8.	5.	The Dud Avocado	6 months
9.	8.	Knockemstiff	4 months
10. (tie)	9.	Felonious Jazz	2 months
10. (tie)	-	The Savage Detectives	2 months

As summer set in, the titles on our list stayed mostly static. Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives returns to the list. Meanwhile, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is seeing some interest, probably from folks wanting to participate in Infinite Summer, a TMN sponsored group read of the book. Junot Díaz's Oscar Wao may be getting a boost from its inclusion in the higher reaches of our Prizewinners list last month. Finally, Olive Kitteridge continues to be a favorite among Millions readers, and Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog is still at the top thanks to the enduring interest in Garth's essay on the grammatical proclivities of our current president. Look for some changes to the list in the coming months as an impressive slate of new titles hits bookstores.

Have you been reading any of the books on our Top Ten list? Let us know what you think of them.

See also: Last month's list.

Most Anticipated: Rounding Out 2009, An Epic Year for Books

2009-07-01T06:18:00.001-04:00

At the beginning of the year, we noted that "2009 may be a great year for books." With the publishing schedule for the remainder of the year filled out, calling 2009 a great year for readers is now a certainty. If anything, 2009 is backloaded, with new titles coming in the second half of the year from legends like Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth and fan favorites like Lorrie Moore and Jonathan Lethem. A peek into 2010, meanwhile, reveals more literary excitement on tap, with new titles on the way from Jonathan Franzen, Joshua Ferris, and others. Below you'll find, in chronological order, the titles we're most looking forward to right now. (Special thanks to the illustrious members of The Millions Facebook group who let us know what they are looking forward to. Not everyone's suggestions made our list, but we appreciated hearing about all of them.)

In July, Dave Eggers continues the trend he started with What is the What, working closely with his subject to produce a work with elements of memoir and non-fiction. In Zeitoun, the subject is Abdulrahman Zeitoun, "a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four," who lived in New Orleans and disappeared in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. A few weeks ago, The Rumpus ran a long interview with Eggers that touches on Zeitoun, among several other topics. Eggers first encountered Zeitoun when McSweeney's put out Voices from the Storm, an oral history of Katrina, and he told The Rumpus, "Their story intrigued me from the start, given that it's at the intersection of so many issues in recent American life: the debacle of the government response to Katrina, the struggles facing even the most successful immigrants, a judicial system in need of repair, the problem of wrongful conviction, the paranoia wrought by the War on Terror, widespread Islamophobia." (Scroll down to October for more "Anticipated" action from Eggers.)

William T. Vollmann is known for his superhuman writing output, but his forthcoming book Imperial is a monster, even for him. Weighing in at 1,296 pages and carrying a list price of $55, this work of non-fiction is "an epic study," in the words of the publisher, of Imperial County, California along the U.S.-Mexico border. Ed offers quite a bit more discussion of the book. Don't miss the comments, where it's said that Vollmann has called the book "his Moby-Dick."

August kicks off with what will no doubt be a peculiar literary event, the publication of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. It is a rare thing these days when a flurry of media attention centers on someone who has no interest in basking in it. And so, perhaps as Pynchon intends, the focus will be on the book. Inherent Vice promises to be odd. It's 416 pages, shorter than the typical Pynchon doorstop, and the publisher Penguin, in its catalog, notes that Pynchon is "working in an unaccustomed genre" this time around. "Genre" seems to be the buzzword here. The book sports neon cover art and follows a private eye (Doc Sportello). The book begins: "She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to." Review copies are already out, and the early word is that the novel overlaps somewhat with and bears some similarities to Vineland.

Inherent Vice shares a release date with a new book by Richard Russo, That Old Cape Magic, which Entertainment Weekly has already called "very beach-y." (Sadly, it appears to have come in last in their poll to determine the "Must book of the summer.") It sounds like fairly standard "suburban malaise" fare in which a mid-life crisis is endured over the course of the summer, the upside for the reader being that Russo is bringing his considerable skills to the table. PW is fairly tepid on the book, "Though Russo can write gorgeous sentences and some situations are amazingly rendered... the navel-gazing interior monologues that constitute much of the novel lack the punch of Russo's earlier work."

Of Roberto Bolaño's forthcoming, newly translated novels, Millions contributor Lydia writes: "I almost never know about the hot, up-and-coming items, but I do happen to know about this one, and I feel that, like many readers, my relationship to Bolaño has been one of breathless anticipation since the moment I first heard his name. Which was like this: at my old job, I was going through the mail. There was a New Directions catalog of aforementioned hot, up-and-coming items. I haven't historically had a lot of interest in contemporary trade publications, but New Directions has a very warm spot in my heart because I associate it with The Berlin Stories. Anyway, in said mag I read a blurb about Nazi Literature in the Americas, and thought it sounded really neat, and then learned I would have to wait a year to read it, and since then it feels like there's been a lot of waiting - sometimes with glorious gratification at the end (2666), sometimes not (Nazi Literature in the Americas, ironically). It's thrilling that they keep coming! The Skating Rink in August, Monsieur Pain in 2010. It's like new the James Bond franchise (btw, I'm a Craig, not a Brosnan). I just love having something to look forward to. I hope I don't wet my pants on the way to the bookstore." (Bolaño fans will also be looking out for Melville House's Bolaño: The Last Interview And Other Conversations)

Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply returns to the territory of separated siblings (You Remind Me of Me looked at a pair of long-lost brothers.) This time, the focus is on twins, one of whom has been missing for ten years. The book garnered a blurb from Jonathan Franzen, who will appear later in this list and who says of Chaon's book, "I've been waiting for somebody to write the essential identity-theft novel, and I'm very glad Dan Chaon's the one to have done it"

Let's just get this out of the way: In September, you are going to hear a lot about Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol.

More importantly, we'll get Richard Powers' follow up to his award-winning novel The Echo Maker. In Generosity: An Enhancement, Powers explores the idea of patenting the human gene for happiness. Last year, Powers wrote about the human genome for GQ. There's not a lot of info available about this one but Ed Champion writes he "foresee(s) some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels," and Sarah Weinman "tweeted," "Richard Powers' new novel Generosity is about as audacious as a novel gets, and has fucked with my head as a reader every which way."

Lorrie Moore is set to deliver her first novel in over a decade, A Gate at the Stairs. All those Moore fans out there are faced with a huge dilemma this week. Do they read the "Childcare," the excerpt of the novel that is the fiction offering in this week's New Yorker, or do they avoid the magazine and hold out for two more months until the novel comes out? We've never been big fans of the New Yorker's packaging of novel excerpts as short stories, so to all the Moore fans out there, we say - avert your eyes when you reach page 70 of this week's issue!

Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall is already out in much of the rest of the English-speaking world. In The Guardian, Christopher Taylor described the book as "a carefully arranged sequence of interlocking stories" and said, "while many of the stories hinge on artistic talent - the risks and unkindnesses associated with it; who's got it and who hasn't - the strong focus on more widespread problems in life makes Nocturnes more than a writer's thoughts on his job." The Complete Review rounds up the rest of the early reactions.

Pete Dexter returns in September with Spooner. This one sounds like another dark, Southern tale not unlike Paris Trout, the book that first put Dexter on the fiction map. The first line of Spooner is "Spooner was born a few minutes previous to daybreak in the historic, honeysuckled little town of Milledgeville, Georgia, in a make-shift delivery room put together in the waiting area of the medical offices of Dr. Emil Wood."

We'll also get a new novel from E.L. Doctorow about a pair of brothers. Homer & Langley is about Homer and Langley Collyer, two famous Manhattan hoarders and recluses, who, after gaining notoriety for their obsessive habits and reportedly booby-trapped home, were found dead in 1947 surrounded by, according to Wikipedia, "over 100 tons of rubbish that they had amassed over several decades." Newsweek has an excerpt of the book. The novel's first line is "I'm Homer, the blind brother. I didn't lose my sight all at once, it was like the movies, a slow fade-out."

Dan Brown is no doubt getting serious bank for his return to airport bookshelves and grocery store check-out lines, but he's not the only one having a great recession. Audrey Niffenegger reportedly took home a $5 million advance for Her Fearful Symmetry, her follow-up to her very popular The Time Traveler's Wife. Niffenegger describes the book on her website: "The novel concerns a pair of mirror-image twins, Julia and Valentina Poole... Julia and Valentina are inseparable, and function almost as one being, although in temperament they are opposites."

Acclaimed novelist Margaret Atwood will have a new novel out in September called The Year of the Flood, which has been described as "a journey to the end of the world." The Random House catalog, meanwhile, called it a "dystopic masterpiece and a testament to her visionary power." If that all isn't intriguing enough, it appears that the book is maybe (or maybe not) the second book in a trilogy that was kicked off with Oryx & Crake. Atwood and her publishers have offered mixed signals on the trilogy question. Quill & Quire looked into the question, and included a quote from Atwood saying, "It's not a sequel and it's not a prequel... It's a simultaneouel." Ah, one of those.

In The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker covers well-trod literary ground by focusing on a writer protagonist. However, PW gave the book a starred review, calling it "lovely" and saying "Baker pulls off an original and touching story, demonstrating his remarkable writing ability while putting it under a microscope." Baker's protagonist is Paul Chowder, who is tasked with writing an introduction for a poet friend's anthology and delivers the book's stream of consciousness narration. By all early accounts the book is quite funny and also deeply immersed in poetry, with digressions on a number of history's great poets. The Simon & Schuster catalog calls the book a "beguiling love story about poetry."

It's my feeling the John Irving's fiction has fallen off quite a bit in recent years (the last really good read for me was A Son of the Circus), but I still keep an eye on Irving's new novels for any sign that he has regained his early career mojo. His last several books haven't tempted me, and it's probably too early to tell whether the Last Night in Twisted River will. Reading the first sentence of the publisher's description, we already find a couple of Irving's authorial tics, New Hampshire and bears: "In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear." Don't be surprised if a wrestler figures into the action somewhere in there. Still, Irving has compared the new book to The Cider House Rules. That's a good sign.

The venerable William Trevor will have a new novel out, Love and Summer.

Millions reader Matthew looks forward to Laird Hunt's Ray of the Star, due in September, "because Laird's novels are fantastic." Of Kamby Bolongo Mean River by Robert Lopez, he writes "This is his sophomore novel; his first, Part of the World was bizarre and funny." He plans to read The Museum of Eterna's Novel by Macedonio Fernandez (arriving in 2010) "because Borges sez so."

October is sure to bring Wild Things mania and Dave Eggers is going to be right in the middle of it. He worked with Spike Jonze on the film version of Where the Wild Things Are. And, in what is sure to be the most literary novelization of a film (adapted from a children's book) ever, an Eggers-penned version of Wild Things is set to hit shelves when the movie comes out. There's also the fur-covered edition.

New Yorker readers have already gotten a taste of Jonathan Lethem's forthcoming book Chronic City. Of the excerpt, packaged as the story "Lostronaut," I wrote, "This story was pretty awesome. It was the only speculative fiction to land in The New Yorker this year, not quite making up for the absence of Murakami and Saunders from the magazine's pages. This story is told in the form of letters from Janice, a 'Lostronaut' aboard some sort of space station, to her 'Dearest Chase.' She and her fellow astronauts are trapped in orbit by Chinese space mines and that's not even the worst of it for poor Janice. While the premise and epistolary style are intriguing, Janice's unique, irrepressible voice really carries the story."

Readers are soon set to see the fruits of an ambitious project by R. Crumb, his illustrated Book of Genesis, a surprisingly faithful rendering of the first book of The Bible done in Crumb's unique style. Crumb talked about the project four years ago with Robert Hughes: "I was fooling around with Adam and Eve one day. Doodling about Adam and Eve. At first I did this satirical take off on Adam and Eve - lots of jokey asides and Jewish slang because they're Jewish right? God is Jewish... Finally I got over fooling around and I realized I just had to tell it straight."

Booker winner A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, according to publisher Knopf's description, "spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centers around a famous children's book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves." The book is out already in the UK, where a review in the Telegraph included this intriguing aside: "Byatt's publisher is keen to present The Children's Book, her first novel for seven years, as an equal to Possession, the work that secured her reputation and her mass-market appeal nearly 20 years ago. It certainly compares to its popular predecessor in its daring and scope and, unlike the more cerebral parts of Byatt's output, is its equivalent in terms of storytelling and readability."

J.M. Coetzee's Summertime is a follow up to Boyhood and Youth in Coetzee's series of memoirs. The NYRB recently published an excerpt.

Quite a lot of sub-par material has been published in order to satiate the ravenous demand for Hunter S. Thompson's writing. Thompson's essays for ESPN in his later years were uneven at best, but fans may find something to like in The Mutineer, which Simon & Schuster says is "The highly anticipated final volume of the previously unpublished letters of Hunter S. Thompson, king of Gonzo journalism and one of the greatest literary figures of our time." Insofar as HST,in his latter years, may have been more entertaining and lucid in his letters, this may put The Mutineer slightly above the low bar set by other recent HST collections. On the other hand, the book is edited by Johnny Depp, implying that the book is more about venerating the cult of HST than unearthing new work on par with his best efforts.

November will bring the publication of Michael Lewis' much anticipated chronicle of the financial crisis, The Big Short. In October last year, when economic uncertainty was at its height and fears were voiced in some rarefied quarters about the possibility of some sort of structural collapse, we wrote, "The world needs an exhaustive look at what happened in 2008 and why." There have already been several books about the collapse and what caused it, from The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown to The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, but many readers have been waiting for a book by Lewis, both because of his long history writing about Wall Street's excesses and because of the powerful essay he penned on the topic for Portfolio magazine in November. Some readers may be weary of the topic by the time the book comes out, but it's sure to garner some interest.

The great Philip Roth keeps churning out new novels. This year's offering is The Humbling, Roth's 30th novel. The publisher copy says "Everything is over for Simon Axler, the protagonist of Philip Roth's startling new book. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his talent, and his assurance." The NY Times reported that yet another Roth novel, Nemesis, is due in 2010.

Jonathan Safran Foer will have a non-fiction book out in November called Eating Animals, which most are guessing focuses on vegetarianism. An interview with Foer at Penguin's UK website would seem to confirm this. It doesn't mention the book, but the introduction says "Jonathan Safran Foer on why he doesn't eat anything with parents."

Millions reader Laurie points us to My Bird by Fariba Vafi, translated from Farsi and originally published in Iran in 2002. The publisher Syracuse University Press says: "The narrator, a housewife and young mother living in a low-income neighborhood in [modern] Tehran...[is] forced to raise [her] children alone and care for her ailing mother... One of the most acclaimed and best-selling contemporary Iranian writers." Laurie adds, "The novel won several literary awards in Iran and, according to a 2005 article in the New York Times, Vafi never attended college and writes when her children are in school."

2010: Probably the most anticipated book of next year will be the The Pale King, a coda to David Foster Wallace's sadly shortened life as a writer. We already know a fair amount about the book - it will center on an IRS agent - and three excerpts have been published already, "Good People" and "Wiggle Room" in The New Yorker and "The Compliance Branch" (pdf) in Harper's. A piece by D.T. Max went into some detail about The Pale King following DFW's death. Given the amount work that lies ahead for DFW's editors, this may be a second half of 2010 release.

Also possibly arriving in the second half of 2010 is Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, which we are just beginning to hear about. The book is the long-awaited follow-up to Franzen's loved, hated, celebrated, Oprah-snubbing novel of nearly a decade ago, The Corrections. Franzen has been coy about the title - the book is reportedly called Freedom - but readers got a taste of what Franzen has in store in "Good Neighbors," an excerpt that was published in the New Yorker a few weeks ago.

Joshua Ferris will follow up his blockbuster debut Then We Came to the End with The Unnamed. The Book Case writes, "The novel focuses on Tim and Jane Farnsworth, a long-married couple who seem to have it all. But Tim has twice battled a bizarre, inexplicable illness." Beattie's Book Blog mentions that the illness is that he "can't stop walking."

John McPhee has a new book due out called Silk Parachute. McPhee wrote a 1997 Shouts & Murmurs piece called "Silk Parachute" about his elderly mother. It begins "When your mother is ninety-nine years old, you have so many memories of her that they tend to overlap, intermingle, and blur."

Time Out NY says Sam Lipsyte's The Ask is about "Milo, a New York father who is on the brink of economic ruin, and covers themes including but not limited to 'work, war, sex, class, race, child-rearing, romantic comedies, Benjamin Franklin, cooking shows on death row, the old-model brain, the commercialization of sadness and the eroticization of chicken wire.'"

British publisher Faber says Rachel Cusk's The Bradshaw Variations "is a powerful novel about how our choices and our loves and the family life we build will always be an echo - a variation - of a theme played out in our own childhood."

In the comments or on your own blogs, let us know what books you're looking forward to.

Curiosities: SF Tour

2009-06-28T22:09:00.000-04:00

History's 10 best prison breaks.
A Paid Content column argues that the true genius of the Kindle is that it breaks the trend toward multi-tasking...
...But there is still a huge amount of confusion surrounding the Kindle's DRM policies.
AbeBooks aggregates some summer reading lists.
VQR compiles a brief reading list for those following the post-election protests in Iran.
Bay Area readers: Conversational Reading is taking a page from The Millions playbook and hosting a San Francisco indie bookstore walking tour. Sounds fun!

The Millions Interview: Matthew Vollmer and Nic Brown (Part II)

2009-06-25T06:46:00.001-04:00

Future Missionaries of America by Matthew Vollmer and Floodmarkers by Nic Brown are short story collections from debut writers with enormous gifts. Their work is beautiful, funny, and delightfully weird. Matthew and Nic were my classmates at Iowa, where they proved to be not only talented writers, but also sharp and passionate readers. Since they're pals, I thought it would be fun if Matthew and Nic interviewed each other about their books. It's a real thrill for me to see their stories in print, and to have them on The Millions.

In this second installment, Nic interviews Matthew about Future Missionaries of America. Of the book, the New York Times Book Review said, "Vollmer writes with equal dexterity about teenagers and adults, men and women, atheists and believers, Goths and jocks, dropouts and doctors - less interested in getting down any particular demographic, it would seem, than in revealing the humans beneath. Expertly structured and utterly convincing, these stories represent the arrival of a strong new voice." In part one, Matthew interviewed Nic.

Nic Brown: In your book, you write several amazing, matter-of-fact, contemporary, and complicated stories involving aspects of Christianity - namely Seventh Day Adventists. I know you have some family background with this religion. Did you feel uncomfortable at any point writing about people of this faith (and those only encountering it, like the protagonist of the book's title story), or worried about how any Seventh Day Adventists you know would react? How have they reacted?

Matthew Vollmer: Yes, it's true I grew up Seventh-day Adventist. People may find it hard to believe that stopping each week for 24 hours (sundown Friday to sundown Saturday) to rest, reflect, and abstain from "secular" activities (TV watching, sports, shopping, school, work, reading Mad magazine, etc.) could be great, but by and large being an SDA kid was pretty great, at least in my family. Sure, my church and grade school (and boarding academy) had some kooks, but as you pointed out in your interview, we're all freaks and there are kooks everywhere. When you grow up SDA, you grow up in a very tight knit group of people, the majority of whom like to have fun, even if they don't, by and large, dance or participate in competitive sports or listen to rock n roll or endorse the consumption of alcohol, drugs, tobacco, or "flesh foods." I suppose my problem began to emerge in college, once I started to ask questions about the "27 Fundamental Beliefs." Also, I started to meet people who weren't SDA. I started to appreciate different cultures, different cultural experiences, and eventually, I just found the SDA culture much too inhibitive, too insular. From my perspective, the SDA church was one that wanted to provide answers for why everything is the way it is. And those answers were often unsatisfying. Not to mention I surrendered the idea of having to have an answer for everything. I realized that sometimes, it's okay for things to remain mysterious.

For years I'd tried to write about the SDA experience. But usually, when I did, I aimed at the easiest possible targets, like hypocritical characters, or characters who cherish some secret sin or something; I wrote one really terrible story about a church Treasurer, who had a crush on a teenage boy operating a soft serve yogurt machine. But those stories didn't work as well; they seemed forced - as artificial and agenda-ridden as the bedtime stories I listened to as a kid, where "little Sammy never disobeyed his mommy and daddy again!" It wasn't until I stumbled upon the idea of writing about outsiders who experience SDA culture that I found I could really capture both the strangeness and earnestness of SDAs, and use representations of that culture as fuel for the story. Also, I could harness the energies of my own desire (and failure) to fully understand this peculiar group of people, while portraying them as real people with real struggles. Hopefully, despite the fact that SDAs might seem strange, I hope people will see them in a favorable light.

As for SDA reactions: I only know what people in my family have said (though I predict that plenty would be scandalized by the book). My father, who is one of my biggest supporters, has, as of this writing, still not read the book - but that's not saying a lot: he's more of a Suduku player and internet news reader. My mom read most of the stories beforehand, I think, and will usually offer some sort of vague praise, like, "I just don't know how you do it," or, "How do you think this stuff up?!" Which is sort of how my grandmother reacted. Imagine the nicest and sweetest person on the planet, a woman who has never said anything bad about anybody (and who always, always counteracts criticism of someone else with something positive), and who, when she sees a sex scene in a movie, says, "Aw... I was hoping they weren't going to be naughty!" And then imagine her reading a story collection by her grandson that's filled with foul language, sex scenes, violence, and all sorts of pathological behaviors. You know what she said? "It's not exactly my cup of tea, but what an amazing imagination you have!"

Finally (I know this is a long response, but you ask me about this SDA stuff and it really gets me going), my Uncle Don, whom I adore, and who played in a folk band in the 60s (and recently revived that band) that was the equivalent of the Grateful Dead for SDAs, asked me if he'd be able to use my book for devotionals with his church members. It was a joke, of course, and we both laughed, but I couldn't stop thinking about that. Like, why couldn't he use the book for devotionals? It was and is a book about people trying to figure out life and how to live it. So I wrote him and told him what I thought and lo and behold, he not only agreed, but said he'd felt bad about making that joke.

NB: You have some amazing settings: a national park, a laboratory researching hemophiliac dogs, an exhibition of preserved and dissected human bodies, and a religious boarding school, to name just a few. Can you talk about your inspiration for these?

MV: Evoking setting and using it to generate various effects in stories is one of my favorite things to do. I don't travel that much, but (thanks in part to friends & relatives who've been spread over the globe, some as missionaries) I've had the opportunity to see a lot of the world. Every setting in the book, I think, is a setting that I've visited in "real life." I worked at Yellowstone. I worked at a laboratory researching hemophiliac dogs & pigs. I worked as a field technician in Purdue's entomology department. I lived in Chapel Hill. I visited Idaho, Atlanta, Carolina Beach. And I attended a religious boarding school in north Georgia. All these settings offered up (at some point) ideas for characters and stories about those characters. Some characters are based on people I encountered in these places (like Mark Scheider, for instance). Others, like the widow in "Second Home," I came up with on my own. That particular story suggested itself during a visit with my parents and aunt and uncle to a cabin on Lake Sunnapee in New Hampshire. To avoid the older folks, I took a walk through the woods to another lake house, looked around, saw nobody was home, opened the door, and walked inside. I guess that was probably illegal, but I'm glad I did it. I stole a story from that house.

NB: And - is there such a thing as a robotic human baby that records your interactions with it, as depicted in Future Missionaries of America? Or did you come up with this?

MV: I get this question a lot. I WISH I'd come up with it. Maybe I should start saying that I did. At any rate, it's all real. I asked for information and the company said, "Are you an educator?" and I said yes so they sent me this brochure (which featured a cutaway diagram of one of the babies, which turned out to be really helpful) and a DVD (which I've since lost) that talked about how educators could use the babies in the classroom. It was awesome.

NB: Stylistically, your stories are all over the place. You have a footnoted will (in "Will & Testament"), a transcript of an answering machine message ("Man-O'-War"), a few first person narrators, a few third person. Some are more prose-driven ("Oh Land of National Paradise, How Glorious are thy Bounties"), and some defy reality (like my favorite, "Stewards of the Earth"). Did these stories arise from formal experimentation, or did the narrative ideas warrant the differing storytelling techniques?

MV: I'd ascribe the stylistic variations to several different factors. The first is that the stories in the collection came into being over the course of ten years. During that time, I played around with a lot of different styles and voices and narrative forms, and every year, the story manuscript evolved significantly. For a while, maybe during 02-03, I was really interested in the various forms a story could take and thought that it might be cool to publish a collection of stories in different sub-genres, since, in addition to the will and testament story, I had a story that took the form of the last entry in a hipster's blog, a letter from a deranged and estranged father to his son, and a story called "The Ghost of Bob Ross Paints Shit Town," which took the form of a transcript of one of Bob Ross' "The Joy of Painting" shows, only in this one, Bob Ross was dead and painting the neighborhood where I lived at the time, which included such characters a shirtless midget who liked to sit on the roof of his duplex, a boy with a rat tail, and a bearded man riding a moped with a parrot on his shoulder. Also, "The Gospel of Mark Schneider" was originally formatted like a series of chapters from the Bible, with a giant number at the beginning of each section and a number before each sentence (or verse). (At the time, however, VQR couldn't figure out how to translate that into whatever software they were using at the time, so I agreed to lose the formatting altogether, which was probably a good thing.)

Basically, I get an idea for a story and hope the voice can generate enough energy to sustain the narrative.

NB: In the story "Straightedge," a secondary character says that her father, "one of Marlon Brando's personal chefs, had acquired psychic powers after surviving an auto accident, and on the eve on the first moon walk, he'd dreamed of her mother... who he met the next day." I guess my question is: what? Did this actually come out of your brain?

MV: Ha! Yes!

NB: What are you working on now?

MV: I'm about four-fifths of the way through a first draft of a novel about young woman who has to postpone her dreams of being a collegiate basketball star because she gets knocked up by a soldier during a furlough. The young woman goes to work at a dental office as a receptionist, has the baby. The baby's father comes back, but he's changed - he eats all the time, chews tobacco, drinks constantly (though he claims he can't get drunk), doesn't sleep, and is obsessed with playing a disturbingly realistic online computer game called Operation Brutal Humiliation. By chance, the young woman meets another man named Donnie Trueblood, a whitewater rafting guide who claims to be a shaman and who informs her that she's lost her power animal. The rest of the novel documents the young woman's quest to retrieve this power animal and restore the man she fell in love with. Along the way there's an overweight 12-year-old magician, a loudmouthed woman who extols the virtues of Christian sex toys, a six foot six barber with a goiter the size of a grapefruit in his neck, and a grandfather dressed up as a vampire.

NB: Who do you like most: Desi Arnez, the Fonz, Magnum PI, McGiver, or John Locke from the TV show "Lost"?

MV: McGiver? Do you mean MacGyver? McGiver! Sounds like some crazy new promotion at McDonald's. Anyway, no question. Magnum rules.

Read part one in which Matthew interviews Nic.

The Millions Interview: Matthew Vollmer and Nic Brown (Part I)

2009-06-24T06:13:00.001-04:00

In this first installment, Matthew talks to Nic about his book. Floodmarkers is a collection of linked stories that take place in the fictional town of Lystra, North Carolina, on the day Hurricane Hugo hits in 1989. Daniel Wallace calls it "smart and funny and sexy," and Publisher's Weekly compared it to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio but, "simultaneously pared down and amped up, read to the sound of a jangly Strat."

Matthew Vollmer: My favorite thing about your book is that it's a total freak show. We've got a character who's in love with his cousin, another who makes out with his friend's wife, a veterinarian who's into child porn, a guy who makes his mohawk stiff using microwaved gelatin, a guy who keeps a dead dog in his deep freezer, a former bodybuilder who's feeling guilty about causing the death of a Vietnamese kid, and (my favorite) an aspiring actor who works in a hot dog factory and helps a fellow employee pop a zit on his back he can't reach.

Nic Brown: Well, we're all freaks! These people, if I wrote about the least interesting aspects of their life, might seem totally normal. Might. But we all have secrets or oddities, and that's what I like to write about. I mean, we live in a weird world, but it seems like most people ignore the weird and claim that everything is normal. I am trying to do the opposite.

MV: Where did the idea for this book originate? Did you have a collection of characters first, then realize, hey, it would be cool if I followed these guys during a freakish weather event, or was it the other way around? In other words, when exactly did your vision for this project begin (what, exactly, did you envision the first time you thought of the idea) and how did that vision change over time?

NB: For a while I found myself writing stories set in the late '80s, many of which had extreme weather. This tic made me recall Hurricane Hugo, and I began to hang all of these disparate scenes onto that one event. I think I was drawn to the '80s not because of the decade specifically, but rather because I was 12 or so at the end of the '80s, and at that age everything is magical and very important. So it's a sweet spot in my memory. As for the weather, I don't know. Storms are exciting. Hugo was very memorable for me, more for the build-up than the actual event. In Greensboro, where I was living at the time, we thought we were all going to die. We ended up just having some moderate flooding. But for the most part, the stories arose from the characters, or from a particular scene that I wanted to have happen. The weather was always secondary, and more a structural device that gave all of these events a shared catalyst.

MV: Once you knew that you wanted to write a series of stories set during Hugo, how did you proceed (apart from sitting down at your typewriter and pecking the keys with two fingers)?

NB: I decided to break the day into four sections (before sunrise, morning, afternoon, and evening), and try to make each proportional to the others. With this structure, I'd find that I had a character or event I wanted to use, then I would look at what I had written thus far and pick what part of the day needed to be filled. Writing short stories is so hard, because with each one you often have to create a whole world - a new setting, a new voice, a new tempo. This shared setting and structural formality made the writing a lot easier for me, and ended up producing a book that is somewhere in between a novel and a short story collection. It's a novel about a town; it's a story collection about a group of individuals.

MV: Were there other characters and/or stories and/or ideas you ended up not including? If so, talk about them and why you didn't use them.

NB: I did cut stories. One involved a group of friends who drive to Randolph County to a dance hall called the Rand Ole Opry where, during a barn dance, a man gets on stage and plays "Auld Lang Syne" on the accordion. It was really beautiful, but... I don't know. I guess it didn't go anywhere. I wrote another one about a blind man who lives in a duplex and falls in love with the woman on the other side of the house, then goes over there during the storm because he thinks he can hear her pets in distress (due to sensory compensation, he has super-sensitive hearing). He gets locked in and ends up breaking a bunch of stuff, then the woman comes home and finds him in her side of the house. I don't remember what happens after that. It made readers very nervous.

MV: Are any of your characters based on real people? Are you nervous about people recognizing themselves in the book?

NB: Many of my characters are based on real people. The most obvious is Manny (the trampoline thief in the story "Trampoline"). I have a friend who is Manny. Different name, and he never stole a trampoline or actually did any of the things the fictional Manny does, but he is basically the most uninhibited person I know (and one of the most unique looking - he looks like Sandra Bernhard). I have spent so much time with him that I can envision the type of thing he would say or do in a situation, and I enjoy embodying that uninhibited voice for a while. It's a great character to write about. My new book features a version of the same character much more extensively.

As for all the others based on real people, yes, I am nervous. And so I am going to say nothing more.

MV: Did you ever get sick of Lystra? Did you ever feel, when writing the book, that you were boxed in? Like, man, I would love to write a story that's NOT taking place during a hurricane? Or was it like hey, in this next story I'm gonna write, I'm excited to explore this part of this little universe I'm creating.

NB: I never got sick of Lystra – the structured format really helped my creative process – but I did long to write a story that involved different weather and took place over the course of more than one day. I think it is no coincidence that my new novel opens with a scene of extreme sunlight, told in first person.

MV: How much research did you have to do for the book - and what kinds of primary sources did you consult?

NB: I YouTubed weather reports from Hurricane Hugo. That was about it.

MV: You are known for liking small things. You drive a small car - when you're not driving a moped, which is like a small motorcycle. I also know that you enjoy small burgers. And shots of something called "cacao." Now, your first book is a book of short stories. And, unlike some collections, many of these are truly "short." I haven't counted the pages of most of your stories here, but I remember in workshop you used to turn in 15 or 16 pages like clockwork. I think most of the stories here are about that length. What can you say about the (relatively) short length of your stories?

NB: Hm. That is all true, and had gone basically undiagnosed until you pointed it out. It's an aesthetic preference I have across medium. When I play music, I prefer very stripped down arrangements. I work at an art museum, and when I have to discuss certain artworks, I usually lean towards the figurative and simple. And the same goes for my food, my modes of transport, and of course - my stories. I am not against extreme complexity or complicated structures or narratives, it's just that I respond more to something that I can grasp on all sides and feel like I have enough room to find every angle on it. For example, if I had a Ferrari, how would I ever explore all of the things it could do? And where would I park it? Whereas, with my moped, I know exactly how to maximize all of its engine capacity at every speed, I can work on its engine myself, and I can park it anywhere. To me, it's just as fascinating and fun. It's the same with my stories. If I can break them down enough where I feel like I've cut out everything unimportant and boring, then I can focus on a few simple aspects that I can get the most out of. If it works right, these smaller stories should be as complex as anything larger. And also less boring. I hope.

MV: One thing I saw you do especially well in your collection was to give readers a sense of what's at stake immediately and save background information for later on down the road. In almost every story, you pull back at some point to deliver a tight, punchy paragraph of expository writing that provides context about the character. These paragraphs are usually only about half a page long, if that, but they become nice little windows for peeking into characters' histories. Was it important for you to limit background information and flashbacks? And if so, why?

NB: I often write stories hoping to do without any backstory whatsoever. Backstory, flashback, exposition - I always feel like these are the areas that are most likely to lose a reader. That said, when I write a story without exposition or backstory, I usually find that I do need it, so I create these small condensed bits that give us what we need to know but don't ruin the tempo I'm trying to set.

MV: You wrote a novel (which I read a draft of last year and found hugely entertaining) while your collection was shopped around. Can you discuss the writing process and how it differed from Floodmarkers? What might you say about the novel that would make someone want to read it?

NB: The novel is called Doubles and is about a professional doubles tennis player who is trying to get back into the game after being in a temporary retirement. While writing it, I spent a lot of time with an actual professional doubles player (who let me accompany him to a bunch of tournaments, including the US Open - where he made it to the semifinals and I got to be on CBS sitting in the coach's box. Hilarious). In the process, I saw into the weird world of this ubiquitous yet obscure sport. The structure of a doubles team is like a marriage, of sorts, and I was fascinated with the personal relationships as well as the tennis side of things. I don't know. Mostly the book has nothing to do with tennis. It's about a complex love triangle, basically. But I am obsessed with tennis, so it was nice to work that in.

MV: I'm gonna throw you some names: Cliff. Cotton. Gary Malbaff. Pat Doublehead. Scoville. Evelyn Graham. Leanne Vanstory. Welborne Ray. Bojangles. Casper. Payton Craven. Confetti. Kylie Crook. Hyun Dang. Matthew! Explain how you come up with your AMAZING names!

NB: Well. Let's see. Matthew is named after you. Bojangles was the name of my old bloodhound. Scoville is the first name of one of my favorite tennis players. Other than that, I just I just made them up, or slightly adapted names of friends that I liked the sound of. I actually never thought of any of those listed as being that weird. Now I'm getting a complex. You always do this. You notice things that are obvious but that other people don't notice. That's why you do those impersonations that are so creepy. Like when I last saw you and you did my walk. Or my point. Neither of which I really knew I did until you did them. I thought the weirdest names were Janet and Dan Organtip. Those are pretty ridiculous.

MV: Is/was Meats and Treats (a place mentioned in your book) an actual place? Explain!

NB: Meats and Treats was indeed a real place. All I remember them having stocked was cigarettes, giblets, and turkey necks. It was located on Airport Road in Chapel Hill, and is now Fosters Market, a place run by one of Martha Stewart's homegirls.

MV: What's your next book (after Doubles) gonna be about?

NB: Come on now. One or two at a time. I'm not talking about number three just yet.

Read part two in which Nic interviews Matthew.

Staff Picks: Brooks, Richler, Snow, Codrescu, Waller

2009-06-23T06:11:00.001-04:00

The "staff picks" shelf in any good independent bookstore is a treasure trove of book recommendations. Unmoored from media hype and even timeliness, these books are championed by trusted fellow readers. With many former (and current) booksellers in our ranks, we offer our own "Staff Picks" in a feature appearing irregularly.

The Moves Make the Man by Bruce Brooks recommended by Garth

It's been a long time since I read this 1984 coming-of-age novel, but its indelible images - the green glass of Mello Yello bottles, the soggy crackers used to make home-ec mock-apple pie, the railroad lantern by whose light the protagonists play night games of pickup basketball - remain seared into my memory. Author Bruce Brooks, a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, combines descriptive mastery with the kind of compassion that can't be taught. His story of an unlikely friendship also complicates some of our cherished myths about race and privilege. Though The Moves Make the Man, a Newbery Honor winner, might be slotted into young adult and sportswriting and Southern lit categories, it is no more a niche work than The Bluest Eye, or A Fan's Notes, or To Kill a Mockingbird, in whose illustrious company it belongs.

Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler recommended by Andrew

Richler's final novel, Barney's Version is a savagely funny piece of satire. It's also quite moving as it sweeps you through one man's life. Frank and cantankerous, Barney Panofsky lays bare his failed marriages, his work, and his possible crimes and misdemeanors. Somewhat unreliable as a narrator, Barney's memories are annotated by his son Michael, who provides clarification and correction to his father's version of events. Whenever I hear that a film adaptation of a beloved novel is in the works, I usually brace myself for disappointment, but with Paul Giamatti and Dustin Hoffman signed on to play the principal roles, I'm actually looking forward to this one.

The Strangers and Brothers series by C. P. Snow recommended by Lydia

This sequence of novels, beginning with A Time of Hope, takes place in England from World War One to the sixties. I haven't actually finished the series; I've only gotten through four out of a possible eleven. I'm a finisher, though, with the exception of Moby Dick on tape, The Alexandria Quartet, and Ulysses (fucking Ulysses, actually), so I am hoping for a completion date sometime before the autumn of my years.

I was overjoyed to learn of the existence of these books. I love novel series, and it is my dream to find another Dance to the Music of Time. Or at least a Forsyte Saga. Or at the absolute least, the one with the cave bears. As it happens, C. P. Snow sits somewhere on the spectrum between Powell and Auel. The books are not nearly so delightful as Dance to the Music of Time, but I am nevertheless enjoying them quite a bit. They relate the life of a middle-class man of limited means, who rises to great heights in several professions. It's a good chronicle of several English epochs and the attitudes found therein. The subject matter is not always riveting, but the books are quite readable. I realize that this doesn't exactly sound like a ringing endorsement, but most of the books I love have already been ringing-ly endorsed by someone else, and these are a step or two off the beaten path. So this is me, endorsing.

The Posthuman Dada Guide by Andrei Codrescu recommended by Anne

Dada wisdom, divined by Andrei Codrescu and dispersed throughout this guide includes: take a pseudonym (or many); embrace spam email as a form of cut-up poetry; and remember that "the only viable Dada is the banished Dada." Codrescu posits with wit that as creatures of the digital age, whose lives are beholden to IMs, email, iPhones, Google, and Facebook, we have entered a posthuman era where employing Dada's nonsense actually makes sense. Beginning with an imagined chess game in 1916 Zurich between Dada founder and poet Tristan Tzara and revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, Codrescu traces Dada from its nascence to show how Tzara and his rabble-rousers usurped and altered the course of twentieth-century thought. Dada resists meaning and revels in absurdity, and Codrescu would be the first to acknowledge this book doesn't provide a list of how-to's but rather resembles a nautical map that charts the currents of our times. "It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life," Codrescu warns. And for that reason alone, you just might want to try it.

The Magnificent Mrs. Tennant by David Waller recommended by Emily

How delightful to find a learned book that wears its scholarliness lightly: David Waller's lovely new biography of the Victorian grande dame and salonniere Gertrude Tennant is such a book. Because the magnificent subject of Waller's book lived from the end of the age of Jane Austen through the First World War, and lived both in France and in England, her biography offers a sort of intimate history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - its personalities and intellectual and cultural history. The famous and controversial explorer Henry Morton Stanley attended Mrs. Tennant's salons (the horrors of his expeditions to Africa are thought to have been among Conrad's models for Heart of Darkness), as did Labor Prime Minister William Gladstone, the famous Victorian painter John Everett Millais, and literary luminaries like Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Henry James, Robert Browning, and Ivan Turgenev.

Her acquaintance was a motley of all the aesthetic and intellectual trends of the age: Imperialist explorers, socialists, anarchists, ex-emperors, Romantic and realist novelists, mediums and experts in telepathy all passed through Mrs. Tennant's drawing room. Her allure as a biographical subject, however, is not limited to her extensive acquaintance: Tennant's ability to balance her absolute commitments to her husband and children with her gifts for friendship and graciousness and her interest in social and cultural life reveal a more nuanced view of the age, and of the possibilities available to Victorian women. Tennant was a cosmopolitan, a woman of the world, and "an angel in the house" (as the Victorian ideal of wifely and motherly virtue came to be known). Waller trusts Tennant to express herself; he quotes extensively from her diaries and letters. Her voice is earnest, warm, unpretentious, intelligent, loving. You will be glad to have met her. And you will see, through her life, a more refined view of English nineteenth century social and intellectual history.

Threads and Wires: A Review of Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin

2009-06-22T19:57:00.000-04:00

Just a few days before I embarked on Colum McCann's new novel Let the Great World Spin, we had a movie night at the Magee household. Lauren made some ice cream and our neighbors came over with Man on Wire, the 2008 Oscar-winning documentary about Philippe Petit and his walk on a tightrope strong between the two towers of New York City's World Trade Center in 1974, in hand.

While the film portrays Petit as a roguish eccentric (as anyone with his "hobby" would have to be), it also captures his famous walk as not so much a stunt as a sublime gesture - a graceful figure, clad all in black, impossibly high up, framed by massive towers and set against the huge morning sky. The film builds to this impressive, balletic payoff, a beautiful counterpoint to the antics of Petit and his cohort as they plot out and set into motion their daring plan.

Petit's personality is larger than life and so was his act. So it is perhaps no surprise that in centering his novel around Petit's walk, McCann makes the walk the book's gravitational center and ignores the voluble Petit almost entirely. In an author's note at the end of the book, McCann writes, "I have taken liberties with Petit's walk, while trying to remain true to the texture of the moment and its surroundings." And anyone who has watched Man on Wire will also find that with his few descriptions of the Petit's preparations, McCann has invented for him a new, if thinly sketched, backstory.

A tightrope walker graces the cover of the book and though many reviews (as this one has) will likely devote ink to the famous act, it is little more than a backdrop to a disparate cast of characters. If Let the Great World Spin were a play, the action would take place in front of a painted backdrop showing the towers and the speck-like walker bathed in the morning light. The backdrop would sometimes be alluded to, but the action it depicted would never be a part of the foreground.

The book traces a number of lives, ranging from mother and daughter hookers to a judge to an Irish priest of a particularly ascetic order. The priest is Corrigan, who, as a peculiarly selfless child, wandered from home and gave the blankets from his bed to homeless drunks. As an adult, he entered the priesthood and got himself posted to the Bronx where he lives in a housing project and becomes a sort of den mother and mascot to the complex's many prostitutes. Among them are Tillie and Jazzlyn Henderson, the mother and daughter pair, deeply jaded, scarred by heroin, but still irrepressible. These three, Corrigan's brother, and several others form one of the book's poles, and they are tied by a car accident to the novel's other pole, a couple living on Park Avenue, Solomon and Claire Soderburg. He is a judge, she an heiress, devastated by the loss of their only son in Vietnam. Claire has joined a support group with other mothers who have lost sons. She is painfully self-conscious, on the morning of the tightrope walk, about having the group - all hailing from the outer boroughs - into her status-signifying Park Avenue penthouse. There are a number of other characters as well, all tied to New York City in the 1970s in one way or another.

To string his line between the towers, Petit shot fishing wire across the gap with a bow and arrow, and then he and his helpers tied progressively stronger and heavier ropes together until his heavy, steel wire could be hauled across. In the same way, McCann's characters are at the outset connected by only the thinnest of filaments - proximity and shared experiences and not much else - but through the machinations of the plot and by dint of mishap and employment and chance they become more connected, sometimes tragically.

McCann's mastery of character and voice is on full display in Let the Great World Spin, especially the Claire Soderburg's fragile inner monologue and the mournful, staccato prison diary of Tillie Henderson. The novel is a bit shorter on plot, with much of the narrative energy devoted to the car accident at the center of the action and prizing out its impact on the lives of the characters. Some readers may wish the novel had more narrative to it, but McCann's well-sketched characters and sense of place may be enough to satisfy.

Evan Wright's America: Hella Real, Hella Harsh

2009-06-22T07:14:00.001-04:00

There's a scene early on in the mini-series version of Generation Kill in which Lee Tergesen, the actor who plays Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright, wins over the Marines from 1st Recon Battalion with whom he is embedded. Recon is the eyes and ears of Operation Iraqi Freedom and one of the forwardmost units to push deep into Iraq in the first days of the war. The jarheads address Wright simply as "Reporter," and treat him with a cool saltiness - until he lets slip that he used to write for Hustler. The soldiers, their raunchy humor already established, instantly warm to him. As the mission unfolds, Wright becomes the eyes and ears of the folks back home, evoking for his readers the cultish fraternity of American warriors on the front line of a strange war. HBO's Generation Kill was based on a New York Times bestseller by Evan Wright, and it was adapted for HBO by David Simon and Ed Burns, the architects of The Wire.

For his new collection of reported pieces, Hella Nation, Evan Wright breaks the ice in much the same way. In the introduction, he discusses his early years, a slow metamorphosis from shiftless slacker to crack reporter, starting with the unlikely gig as Hustler's entertainment editor. "My career at Hustler began with an overdose of Xanax," he writes, and we're off and stumbling.

Wright's back-assward path into serious journalism makes for entertaining reading, and there's an important point to it. In the early 1990s, his life was a parade of blurry tableaus: blackouts, bar fights, stealing cars, and "waking up in vacant lots or hospital emergency rooms not knowing how I had gotten there, or sometimes what my name was." In journalism, Wright found a way to cope with his demons and overcome his youthful conviction that "failure was a sort of philosophy to live by." He accomplished this turnaround by focusing on the lives of other people who lived at the margins of American society. In these remote places on the cultural map, the rivers run deep, the currents are swift and unpredictable, and people need a skillful guide if they wish to know what it's like to ride the whitewater.

His background as something of a misfit has enabled Wright to gain amazing access to the lives of other misfits. More than once, almost by chance, he has crossed paths with characters who live in parallel universes where values are warped and decorum non-existent. In "Portrait of a Con Artist," which first appeared in Rolling Stone in 2000, Wright wrote about Seth Warshavsky, a dot-com whiz kid in Seattle who founded an online porn company, Internet Entertainment Group. By the late nineties, IEG was being touted by Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal as the porn industry's version of Microsoft, supposedly earning revenue of $100 million in 1999.

Following his departure from Larry Flynt's Hustler, Wright moved from LA to Seattle and went to work for Warshavsky, a tourettic, human growth hormone-addicted porno-nerd-cum-Internet mogul. As chief Web editor, Wright soon learned that IEG was a sham, built around little more than smoke, mirrors, and Warshavsky's pathological relationship with the truth in all of his business dealings.

One thread that runs through all of the pieces in Hella Nation is Wright's straightforward, almost deadpan descriptions of scenes that are perfectly absurd. During his ill-fated tenure at IEG, such scenes were common. One unfolded when Warshavsky had Wright meet with a group of analysts from an investment bank that had agreed to underwrite IEG's initial public stock offering. Taking the men inside IEG's video porn production warehouse, Wright was surprised to find that just one of the dozen or so booths that were supposed to be broadcasting live nude girls 24/7 contained an actual live nude girl. Far from being dismayed by the inactivity at the warehouse, the analysts gathered around the single booth, enthralled by a nude woman's desultory masturbation before a webcam in a faux bedroom. "The one with the MBA from Harvard," writes Wright, "suggested I had better insist on receiving stock options from my boss - Warshavsky - ahead of the IPO. He shot me a jocular smile."

This is a deeper subtext that runs through much of Wright's work. As seemingly insane as many of his subjects are, their ridiculousness is often dwarfed by the ridiculousness of an American culture that is fascinated with, and eager to be taken in by, those risky characters who operate at society's margins. The credulous businessmen in "Portrait of a Con Artist" are in this way not unlike Wright's readership: ready, willing to be taken in. These are the stories that magazines like Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair live for. I, for one, was astounded and mesmerized by several of the stories in Hella Nation. I marveled at the access Wright was able to get and the thoroughness of his reporting. Only rarely did what he wrote strain my own credulity. Those moments were for the most part born of the skepticism of admiration.

The stories include a dispatch from Afghanistan (Rolling Stone, '02), where infantry soldiers from the Army's 3-187th Battalion, Fifth Platoon Delta, are ostensibly battling the Taliban. In fact, they spend most of their days laboring in 125-degree heat, discussing the rumored existence of a McDonald's in Kandahar, debating techniques for wiping your ass without toilet paper, and marveling at the disturbing proclivity of their Pashtun allies in the Anti-Taliban Forces to fraternize with young boys in their camp.

There are profiles of an alcoholic skateboard punk from West Haven, Connecticut (Rolling Stone '01), who won fame and corporate sponsorship in Hollywood by being featured doing never-before-seen tricks in underground skating videos, and a flamboyant Ultimate Fighting Challenge champ on whom the upstart blood sport had, at one time, hopes to pin (Men's Journal '02). In a breezy essay entitled "Scenes from My Life in Porn" (LA Weekly '00) Wright sketches some mostly humorous memories from his days working at Larry Flynt Productions. One of the oldest stories, first published in Hustler in late '97, is a profile of the rock group Motley Crue. At one point, the band's drummer, Tommy Lee, explains how he had once managed to run himself over with his own car: "'I pulled over to pee after drinking tons of beers,' Tommy relates. "'I left my Corvette in neutral, and it ran over both my legs. And dude, my leather pants fucking exploded.'"

A lengthy piece that first appeared in Rolling Stone in 2000 follows the activities of a group of young anarchists, starting with the infamous Battle of Seattle during the World Trade Organization's conference there: "As Wingnut inevitably says, when asked by police who his leader is, 'I work for Mother Earth, arrest her.'" Wingnut's other hero, we learn, is Ted Kaczynski. Wright travels with Wingnut from Seattle to a tree-sit high above the ground in the old-growth Douglas firs of the forest outside Eugene, Oregon, then down to LA. Wright covers a lot of ground, and he seems to prefer to treat every story as an embed.

There are two stories in Hella Nation that I found particularly engrossing. The first is an investigative piece about a young San Francisco gym teacher who was attacked by her neighbor's dogs in the hallway outside her apartment and killed. I remembered this gruesome story from when it happened in late 2001. Wright fills in astounding details. The dogs, rare Presa Canarios, were procured by a white supremacist while he served a life sentence in California state prison, and were being cared for by his lawyers, a married couple who had also legally adopted him. The couple exchanged pornographic letters with their "son," and, it was rumored, photographs of the wife engaged in sexual acts with the dogs.

The final story in the collection is a 25,000+ word profile of Pat Dollard that appeared in Vanity Fair in March '07. Dollard was a Hollywood agent and producer until he dropped out of sight around Thanksgiving of 2004, only to resurface in Iraq, embedded with Marines in Baghdad. He returned to LA with a self-shot documentary film about his experiences and a desire to become a "conservative icon, the Michael Moore of the right." Dollard's late sister, Ann, was a prominent liberal activist, well-known in elite Hollywood circles, but this is not the only thing about him that made his new direction surprising. As Wright writes, "When you consider that just eighteen months earlier Dollard was a confessed whore-loving, alcoholic, coked-out Hollywood agent, his transformation into the great hope of conservative America is nothing short of astonishing." Wright was first introduced to Dollard by a friend who believed Dollard could help him get Generation Kill made into a movie.

The back of Hella Nation has a quote from Newsday: "[Evan Wright's] style owes more to Hunter S. Thompson than to any sort of political correctness." I sort of disagree, and so does Wright. "Gonzo journalism was born and died with Hunter S. Thompson, and lives on only in his writing," he writes in the introduction. There's no gonzo to Wright's straightforward narrative approach - no madcap prose fraught with the writer's own drug-fueled lunacy, a staple of Thompson's work. Wright got that mostly out of his system before he became a serious journalist. Where Wright's writing is reminiscent of Thompson's is in certain conclusions about American culture that he leads the reader to. Wright's subjects are outsiders, but an Evan Wright story is itself a subversion. The mainstream magazine reader is the one on the outside looking in.

Modern Library Revue #40: The Heart of the Matter

2009-06-19T06:32:00.000-04:00

I have a slightly hard time with Graham Greene. I don't know why. I think his writing is very good. He has weighty themes and sexy titles. And yet I have found that I can't really remember anything about his novels beyond the most basic plot points. I'm talking about his "serious" fiction here. I could tell you the story of Travels With my Aunt in painful detail, but recalling The Power and the Glory, I can only come up with "The priest died." I also read The Quiet American; in that one I remember the American died. A pattern emerged in The Heart of the Matter, wherein the policeman was also called to Graham Greene's crowded firmament.

The Heart of the Matter might turn out to be more memorable for me because it is about unsavory colonials (Although I suppose The P & G and The QA are also about unsavory colonials, in their own ways. I guess most things are about unsavory colonials, when you get right down to it). But I was more receptive to The Heart of the Matter because it reminded me of one of my favorite books, Burmese Days, George Orwell's first novel and what I consider to be his unsung masterpiece. Burmese Days, like The Heart of the Matter, is about unsavory colonials, and it is about suicide. Both novels are populated with pathetic, overgrown schoolboys and refined women living for their husbands' promotions; in both you feel what a shoddy business colonialism is. Although I prefer Burmese Days and its overall effect, Greene's description of the bachelor cable censor and the bachelor spy (both graduates of the same second-rate school) competing at cockroach-hunting in the decrepit Bedford Hotel is a great moment in literature, and in the history of Empire.

The novels share a handful of other elements. (Let me to take a moment to apologize if my penchant for well-trod literary territory and retrograde comparey-contrasty analysis revolts readers, lowers the general tone, and threatens to turn this site into a high school English class, as one truculent darling recently noted in a thrilling commenter skirmish. Like Elvis, I'm just doin' [sic] the best I can.) At any rate, both of these novels have: 1. A rich, conniving Native, the baseness of whose mind is rather cheaply reflected in the grossness of his person. 2. A comparatively fetching young English woman, marooned in an undesirable outpost of empire. 3. A small, grumpy, racist English population, whose primary concern is the eternal struggle to keep the gin cold. 4. And, by christ, they've both got a main character whose surname is five letters and ends in a y!

Perhaps these similarities have to do with the universality of the colonial (and, dare I say, the post-colonial) experience and mentality. And maybe Graham Greene had a gander at Orwell's earlier novel and used it as a jumping-off point for his more complex and (to me) less convincing story. Because ultimately the novels diverge, and The Heart of the Matter goes in a puzzling direction.

Both novels end in a suicide. I understand the motivations of Orwell's wretched Flory, whose public disgrace, as a casualty of local political machinations, prevents him from marrying the (awful) woman of his dreams. Love hurts. And life, especially his, sucks. But Greene's Scoby, who is also a suicide and also in some respects a victim of local politics, is harder to empathize with. Scoby is a converted Catholic and a real boy scout. His official career is undistinguished, despite his devotion to his various duties. His young daughter has died. His wife is a trial but he tries to make her happy. She remains unhappy, and goes to live in South Africa, and through a series of extraordinary events, Scoby is unfaithful. The wife comes back, and then he is unfaithful to his mistress with the wife. He feels awfully guilty, but he takes Communion anyway which is a mortal sin, and then he's so distraught by this that he ends it all. Meanwhile, he finally gets that promotion. His life sucked too, maybe more than Flory's, but he seemed okay with it for the most part. It was the sinning that finally got him down.

I read Brideshead Revisited, where I learned that British Catholics are an obscurely persecuted minority who have to Stick Together No Matter What. I am also familiar with the adage about the converted and his alarming zeal. But still it seemed odd to me that Scoby committed one easily forgiven sin, and then made it worse by taking Communion, and then decided to do the one thing that is basically unfixable in his cosmology, which is to leave the party early and on purpose. It was clear that Scoby was bound for a sad end, but I thought it would be from borrowing money, or for not being whatever the word for "pukka" is in West Africa, or for some terrible scandal with his job. But no, it's all got to do with his immortal soul. I suppose I am very privileged in that, if I am in possession of an immortal soul, it gives me very little trouble, like an unerupted wisdom tooth.

And I wasn't quite sure what Graham Greene made of this behavior either - whether he presented this character as exemplary of an excess of virtue, or of Catholics being crazy, or whether he thought Scoby was a saint or an idiot or what. He's certainly the nicest person in the book. Maybe it isn't something easily categorized. Maybe it is, to use the abhorrent popular expression, what it is.

For a while I thought that Greene's novel was the less depressing one, because it dealt with somebody who is not like most people, instead of, as in Orwell's novel, with a a pretty ordinary man in an unfortunate spot. I venture to say that most people don't kill themselves because they've told two women they love them and then go to church, as Scoby does. I was going to say that Orwell's novel is more rugged and brutal than Greene's, without any of this airy-fairy spiritual stuff, but the more I think about it, the less I know (and the more confused I get). Most functioning organisms will almost always believe that life is better than death, but something about Scoby's psyche was obviously incompatible with life, even though he seemed like such a nice guy. I wanted to shake Scoby and say "Snap out of it, Scoby! You have every reason to live!" but even without the compromised immortal soul aspect, he really didn't really have a lot of good reasons to live.

Both Burmese Days and The Heart of the Matter seem to say that life, or life in a certain place, is kind of rubbish, but Greene takes it further to say that the most, I guess principled person, in the place isn't able to live in it. That, maybe, is the heart of the matter. And that's dark.

Slinging Stones at the Genre Goliath

2009-06-18T06:31:00.002-04:00

Sonya Chung is a freelance writer and creative writing teacher who nourishes her split personality by living part-time in the S. Bronx and part-time in rural PA. She writes and grows vegetables in both places. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, BOMB Magazine, and Sonora Review, among others. Her first novel, Long for This World, is forthcoming from Scribner in March 2010. You can find her fiction and blog-chronicles (adventures in publishing a first novel) at sonyachung.com.

I.
When a friend admits to me - usually a bit sheepishly, knowing that I am a literary writer and reader - that she is reading a paperback romance novel, or, even "worse," a series of them, I laugh it off and say, as sincerely as I can muster, Good for you, I'm sure you need the relaxation and escape, and we move on to the next topic.

In my fiction classes, I always ask students to fill out a brief survey on the first day of class so I can get a feel for their reading interests; invariably, a number of students list Dean Koontz or Dan Brown or Nora Roberts or (most recently and markedly) Stephenie Meyer as their touchstones. When I see these writers' names or hear them mentioned in class, something goes thud in my stomach and a low-grade dread begins to buzz in my head.

II.
Am I just an insufferable snob? Possibly. If you think so, feel free to stop reading now; we may be at an impasse.

III.
A spiritual war rages between art and entertainment, elitism and populism, the difficult pleasure and the mindless escape, complex meaning and convention-driven predictability... literary fiction and genre fiction.

Or not. On the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, a new "Summer Thriller" series - featuring, this past Sunday, a story (or serial installment?) by Dean Koontz. The protagonist is a whipsmart hostage negotiator who faces off with a Hannibal Lecter/Buffalo Bill-esque psychopath (he "displays" his dead [raped] female victims after dipping them in polyurethane). In a zippy plot twist (SPOILER alert), the hostage (ah coincidence!) turns out to be the negotiator's savvy wife; the revelation elicits a "gasp" from the psychopath.

In The New Yorker this week, a profile by staff writer Lauren Collins on prolific romance novelist Nora Roberts. I haven't read the full profile, but it's got Slate's XX Factor blogger Willa Paskin (presumably not currently a romance reader) ready to pick up a Roberts novel - "Collins makes the case, without ever overselling, that Roberts' books might not be totally devoid of artistic merit" - and eager to hang out with Roberts herself, who "comes across as a down-to-earth, foul-mouthed, self-deprecating, extremely grounded, extremely disciplined woman."

IV.
What is going on here? Are we in the literary and genre camps laying down our arms and reaching across the proverbial aisle to hold hands and work together? More importantly, is "not totally devoid of artistic merit" some kind of newly-acceptable standard for reading selection? (Like how the standards for "organic" loosen to near-meaninglessness as big farming corps get into the business?)

To anyone feeling ready to click away from this post in a huff: I feel a little like Sherman Alexie, who said last week in a follow-up to his feather-ruffling comments about the Kindle being elitist that he felt like David being mistook for Goliath.

With its obligatory happy endings, strict conventions, formula elements, and, above all, comforting predictability, genre fiction will always garner a wider audience than literary fiction. Which is another way of saying that more people buy books and spend time with the words in them to evade the (messy, complicated) world as it is than to see it more truly - in all its mystery, pain, complexity, and beauty. Resistance - perhaps opposition is not too strong a word - to genre fiction for a writer and reader of literary fiction is, in my opinion, a literary ecosystem imperative.

V.
Why do The New Yorker and The New York Times want me to rethink my dividing lines? Are my soul or my artistic integrity at risk of atrophying if I don't see the light and embrace a new political correctness that's deemed formulaic genre writing and literary writing more alike than they are different?

Let me, for the sake of this essay and the ensuing discussion, take a (overstated, survival-driven) hardliner's position: pure genre writing invites and indulges engagement and validation of our lesser, lazier, unthinking, hedonistic selves; well-wrought literary fiction affords, in the critic Harold Bloom's words, a difficult pleasure and illuminates the truths of the human soul, for better or for worse, thus opening the engaged reader to the possibility of courage, intellectual and emotional honesty, wisdom. Popular genre writing and literary writing represent diametrically opposed visions of the value and necessity of reading books; they are as different as lust and love, band-aids and surgery. To imply otherwise is to cop to hysterical anti-intellectualism and give credence to the same sorts of "elitist!" cries that sought to make Barack and Michelle Obama appear out of touch and John McCain a man of the people.

There are real stakes here. What you read matters.

VI.
But enjoy your genre books, I say. Life is tough, we all seek ways to effectively distract and soothe ourselves. Consume your genre series with gusto and pleasure, like a drippy, juicy bacon burger; kick back and let them carry you away weightlessly, like an after-midnight Wii session. But do not imagine or attempt to argue that they play a vital role in augmenting the human experience. They allow for, are designed for, reader passivity and thus do not do what Joe Meno described eloquently in Edan Lepucki's profile this week:

Books have a different place in our society than other media. Books are different from television or film because they ask you to finish the project. You have to be actively engaged to read a book. It's more like a blueprint. What it really is, is an opportunity... A book is a place where you're forced to use your imagination.

VII.
So with Roberts and Koontz now occupying prized real estate in the pages of The New Yorker and the New York Times, it's fight or flight as far as I can tell. Recently, I've been developing a list of what I call "bait n switch" books - books that bring together the strengths of both the genre and literary forms: suspense, sexual tension, absorbing dialogue, compelling plots, characters you come to love like your favorite pets; and fresh and inventive language, complex characterization, settings you can taste touch and smell, consequential ideas, ambiguity and surprise and mystery. I've given these as gifts or recommended them to people who tend to read only genre fiction or little fiction at all; with good response. My ultimate mission: to convert the unbelieving to the (crucial, soul-shaping) fact that you needn't ingest bad or "not that bad" writing in order to be entertained and/or absorbed by a book. For anyone who'd like to suit up for the battle:

Sarah Waters's Fingersmith (for erotic thriller lovers)
Pam Houston's Cowboys Are My Weakness and Lorrie Moore's Self-Help (for chic lit readers)
Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, Chekhov's "The Lady With the Pet Dog," and really anything by Henry James (for romance readers)
E.L. Doctorow's World's Fair and Ragtime (for Harry Potter and other boy-adventure fans)
Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son (for manly men who are into horror)
Poetry by Jane Kenyon and Rilke (for people "intimidated" by poetry)

The following two are a little riskier, but I'd like to try inflicting one or both of them on a poor unsuspecting soul one of these days:

Annie Dillard's The Maytrees (a simple, universal story of love/breakup/love again)
Roberto Bolaño's Last Evenings on Earth (pure storytelling, you hardly know what hit you)

And, if all else fails, well: there's always "The Wire."

[Image Credit: Randen Pederson]

Books on Stoops

2009-06-17T17:15:00.001-04:00

My wife and I are moving out of the apartment we've rented for the last five years and into another apartment in the same neighborhood. The onerous task of culling through our books has fallen to me - perhaps justly, since I'm the one who collected most of the damned things in the first place. My goal is to discard at least two boxes. I've been struck, though, by the number of books on my shelves that I found among other people's discards.

Indeed, hardly a day goes by in Brooklyn that I don't see a box of cast-off books sitting on a stoop or by a curb, with a "Free - Take Me" sign, or (once) a glow-stick casting its alien light over the offerings. The entire borough, viewed from a certain angle, is like a great rotating library: you take my copy of Mules and Men, I'll relieve you of your Sense and Sensibility.

What follows, in no particular order, is a catalogue of the 30 books I've apparently taken from other people's stoops over the last five years: a sort of portrait of a certain time and place. I'd be curious to hear about your own finds in the comments box below.

Baker, Nicholson: Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilization
Ackerman, Diane: A Natural History of the Senses
Maugham, W. Somerset: The Razor's Edge
Elizabethan Plays (a 1933 anthology; no author)
Heidegger, Martin: Being and Time (trans. Macquarrie & Robinson)
Baldassare Castiglione: The Book of the Courtier
Garcia Lorca, Frederico: Three Plays
Bréton, André, ed.: What is Surrealism?
Tsvetaeva, Marina: Selected Poems
Mitchell, David: Ghostwritten
Harvey, David: Spaces of Hope
Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm: Fairy Tales
Pinter, Harold: The Proust Screenplay
Marlowe, Christopher: Plays and Poems
Woolf, Virginia: Essays, vol. II
Faludi, Susan: Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
Merot, Pierre: Mammals
Pope, Alexander: The Rape of the Lock
Reed, Lou: Rock & Roll Heart (okay, it's a VHS tape, but still pretty cool)
Marcuse, Herbert: One-Dimensional Man
Calvino, Italo: Italian Folktales
Thompson, Willie: Postmodernism and History
Cocteau, Jean: Five Plays
Amis, Martin: Visiting Mrs. Nabokov
Gibbon, Edward: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. IV
Bissell, Tom: God Lives in St. Petersburg
Calasso, Roberto: Ka
Portis, Charles: Norwood
Didion, Joan: Miami
St. Augustine: The City of God

[Image credit: steelight]

The ABCs of Amazon

2009-06-17T06:11:00.001-04:00

You may have noticed that the search box on Amazon recently added an "auto-complete" feature. So if you start typing in letters, it starts suggesting things that begin with those letters. It's probably safe to assume that it suggests the most frequently searched words, so, if we look at Amazon's book section we can type in letters and discover, for each letter of the alphabet, the most popular searches on Amazon. Or, if you like, the ABCs of Amazon (a peek into the reading habits of America and, like it or not, a primer for what's popular in the world of books):

Angels & Demons
Breaking Dawn (The first of several Stephenie Meyer appearances)
Charlaine Harris
Dan Brown (no surprise here)
Eclipse (Another for Meyer)
Freakonomics
GRE
Harry Potter (as if there was any doubt)
ISBN number search (funny because ISBNs work in the search box)
James Patterson
Kindle (natch)
Lora Leigh
My Sister's Keeper (by Jodi Picoult)
Nora Roberts
Outliers (by Malcolm Gladwell)
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Zombies!)
Quilting
Renegade
Stephenie Meyer
Twilight (more Meyer)
Uglies
Vampire (You can chalk this one up to Meyer too)
Wicked
X-Men
Yoga
Zane

(Amazon has been known to personalize and regularly adjust its results, so your Amazon alphabet may vary.)

A Book is a Place: A Profile of Joe Meno

2009-06-16T06:38:00.001-04:00

At 35, Joe Meno has already published seven books and told Judith Regan - the infamous publisher of books by Jenna Jameson and (almost) O.J. Simpson - "You suck it." He's a sincere supporter of independent bookstores and presses, and he values the community of artists in his hometown of Chicago, where he still lives. Last week, Joe Meno came to Los Angeles as part of his tour for his most recent novel, The Great Perhaps, and the afternoon before his reading at Skylight Books, I met him at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel to continue a discussion we'd begun via email. We sat outside at the hotel's Tropicana Bar, and as European tourists breaststroked across the David Hockney-painted swimming pool nearby, June Gloom be damned, I asked, "Did Norton put you up in this glamorous hotel?" (I got married at the Roosevelt, so I know a thing or two about glamor.) Meno said yes; when I asked if nice hotels were one of the differences between his current publisher and Akashic - the small press who put out his previous two novels - he nodded. "But that's about all that's different," he said.

In previous interviews, Meno has alluded to the similarities between Akashic and Norton, and I asked him to elaborate. He described their likeminded editorial processes, first with Johnny Temple and Dan Sinker at Akashic, and then with Tom Mayer at Norton. His first two books, published by St. Martens and HarperCollins, did not get the kind of close attention he is now so grateful for. "The way that corporate publishing is set up nowadays, the editors don't have time, or they don't have the inclination, or necessarily the skills, to line edit. They really are like A&R people where they acquire the material and then you're kind of on your own. They're not responsible for what's inside of the book. What I really loved about Akashic - Johnny Temple and Dan Sinker - was that we would sit on a couch and go through each page at a time, line-by-line, word-by-word. Up until my third book, Hairstyles of the Damned, I'd never done that."

When Meno found out Norton and other large publishing houses were interested in The Great Perhaps, he asked each editor, "What needs work?" Tom Mayer had a lot of ideas, whereas other editors loved the novel as-is. "This is a 400-page book, that's just not possible," Meno told me with a laugh. "It spoke highly of what kind of editor [Tom] is, and what kind of place Norton is." Meno was quick to emphasize that Norton is an independent publisher, owned by its employees, and that, although older and much larger, it holds the same ideals as a small press like Akashic.

I asked Meno what changes he had made to the novel with Mayer's editorial assistance. Aside from a small structural revision at the opening, they worked most closely on the prose; for example, Mayer pointed out how many times Meno had used the word suddenly. "You get to that point as a writer," Meno said, "where the story, the characters, all that sound... is in place, and you can look at the language and how words work together. It's almost like poetry, like William Carlos Williams, where you're like, 'How does this look on the page?' It was great to work on that with Tom."

There were little things about working with Akashic that Meno had cherished, like being involved with his book's cover design and marketing campaign, and this level of input has continued with Norton (it was included in his contract, he said.) Meno credits his own involvement for the success of his books with Akashic. He said, "This is a book you've spent years working on, and you shouldn't be cut out from that process. My argument is that no one is going to have better ideas than the person who wrote the book about how it should be marketed and what the cover should look like."

Meno respects Norton and Akashic not only because they invite their authors into the publishing process, but because they're not afraid to try new things, and be innovative. Neither will be caught in an outdated paradigm. "It's a pretty lean year for publishing, and the next couple years will be," Meno said. "The publishers who survive are the ones who can make changes, and use the technology, but also be open to taking advantage of whatever the authors have to offer." He said of large, corporate publishers: "They're almost like printers. They take your manuscript, they print this book and put it out there, and clearly, that's not working."

In the ten years since his first novel was published, Meno says he has discovered his own agency as an author. When Tender as Hellfire came out, he thought publishers, "must know what they're doing, this is their business... but they actually work like people gambling on race horses. I knew as much about the book and how to market it as they did." He realized that getting in the car and doing a 36-city book tour, as he did for Hairstyles of the Damned, "could have the same result as millions of dollars in ad revenue." He went on: "There was room for invention. That's really gratifying to know. Even though this industry's been around a couple hundred years in the States, it's by no means all figured out yet. For people like Johnny Temple and Richard Nash, Norton, Melville House, there's so much room to invent. It took me a long time to figure that out."

Throughout my conversation with Meno, the words "sameness," and - perhaps its antidote - "invention," came up repeatedly. One aspect of the publishing and book world that Meno doesn't like is its uniformity. "What's acceptable or worthwhile or deemed literary is so narrow," he said. He continued:

There's a sameness to the book covers... there's an aesthetic sameness to the way books are being sold, the kind of books that are put out, the content. There's a sameness to the background of the writers - how many novelists graduated from Columbia... or Iowa. There's a sameness to the style, and what New York publishing deems serious. [The style] is heavily realistic. It's become increasingly in years bent more towards memoir, and almost journalistic. The era of inventive writing, writers like Vonnegut, Pynchon and Barthelme, outside of McSweeney's, is almost non-existent... If you want to be taken seriously as a writer, you write a certain kind of book, a certain tone, a certain style.
The more I write, the more I've come to realize that books have a different place in our society than other media. Books are different from television or film because they ask you to finish the project. You have to be actively engaged to read a book. It's more like a blueprint. What it really is, is an opportunity... A book is a place where you're forced to use your imagination. I find it disappointing that you're not being asked to imagine more.

Meno made it clear that many of the writers he admires, like Tobias Wolff and Aleksander Hemon, write in a realist style; it's simply the lack of diversity that bothers him. "I get nervous when it's all the same," he said. "There are plenty of writers who I admire who work outside of those boundaries but few of them are published by big houses, and few of them are known in America. They're certainly not being reviewed in the New York Times, and excerpts aren't being placed in the New Yorker. And I also think there's an aspect of age and generation. As new media comes into it, there's going to be shift."

The Great Perhaps, then, can be read as an attempt at complexity, both on an aesthetic level, with its many storytelling and formal devices, and on a thematic one, for its characters - the five Caspers - are trying to figure out this complicated, scary world without relying on dogma or easy answers. The novel, Meno said, is an attempt to answer the question: "How do you live in a world without having to rely on absolutes?" Of course, the novel never posits one simple solution; that would defeat the purpose of asking the question in the first place. Meno did say, however, that the historical sections of the book (which explore Jonathan Casper's cowardly ancestors, as well as cowardly moments in American history), are meant to show that "questions of courage and fear aren't limited to just our era. We seem to be motivated by fear a lot." Could this be one reason for publishing's refusal to reinvent? What are they afraid of?

Joe Meno seems more than willing to try new things in his work, to stretch his expectations of what he can do as a writer, and what a book can be. "When my first book came out, I was 22, I was working at a head shop. I couldn't believe someone was going to pay me and put my name on the book! That was the extent of my ambitions. Now of course [I] want my work to be seen as worthwhile, to be taken seriously." Referring to his most recent short story collection, Demon in the Spring, with its inside jacket made from beautiful firecracker paper, and a different artist illustrating each story, he said, "The book doesn't have to be just one thing. And increasingly we'll have to find other ways of approaching what a book is. There's room for artfulness... What's terrifying is that you know every time you're starting over, but that's also what's really rewarding. And why you keep doing it."

I enjoyed talking with Meno; even when discussing the flaws of the publishing world, he never lost that tone of hopefulness, that excitement for the alternatives. He seems to bring this desire for change and inventiveness to everything, even his teaching at Columbia College, where the writing classes are "process-oriented," meaning the students meet for over four hours to write, read published work, and exchange positive feedback. (This sounded amazing!) As with everything else, in the classroom, Meno values diversity and inventiveness. What can we learn from one another if we've all read the same books? "The basic premise of storytelling is trying to make a connection with people who are different from you," Meno said.

That night, after Meno's well-attended reading (he shared the stage with local writers Jim Ruland and Margaret Wappler), a few of us went for drinks at The Dresden. As Meno sipped his Blood & Sand (The Dresden's signature cocktail), legendary lounge singers Marty and Elayne serenaded him in honor of his new novel. "Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps...," Elayne crooned. We all felt hopeful.

Curiosities: The Aerosol Ebook Enhancer

2009-06-15T18:51:00.000-04:00

One way to go green: the San Francisco Public Library is making library cards from corn.
The New York Times mines the data from its integrated dictionary feature to find the words its readers most frequently look up: sui generis, solipsistic, louche...
Bill Simmons talks basketball with The New Yorker (via)
Inspired by the attention surrounding J.D. Salinger's lawsuit to block an unauthorized sequel to The Catcher in the Rye, Patrick Brown at Vroman's has put together an impressive, involved post cataloging and discussing literary remixes.
It's not too late to get in on TMN's "Infinte Summer," a summer-long group read of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.
For those ebook fans who miss that "new book smell."
Speaking of enhancing ebooks, what happens to book signings in the age of the ebook? Sign the Kindle?!
Sonya Chung's thoughtful take on Dan Baum's Twitter essay about being fired from The New Yorker, including a comment from Baum himself.
Mark Sarvas says don't fear the Kindle at HuffPo
Carolyn Kellogg shares some satire for the bookish set.
The Millions' Collaborative Atlas of Book Stores and Literary Places has now been viewed over 500,000 times!
From TMN, "A Terrifically Bad Idea: 10 cafes, 10 macchiatos, one morning, by bike."
High concept fun from The Washington Post: "We asked authors which book character they would like to accompany them for a day on the beach." (thanks Arna)
Wikipedia find of the week: List of child prodigies.
Further Reading: Jeff Hobbes' "Open Letter to Kanye West" generated many supportive comments from other proud readers.

The Prizewinners 2008/2009

2009-06-15T07:08:00.006-04:00

With the awarding of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award last week, the 2008/2009 literary award season is now over, which gives us the opportunity to update our list of prizewinners.

Though literary prizes are arbitrary in many ways, our prizewinners post is compiled in the same spirit that one might tally up batting titles and MVPs to determine if a baseball player should be considered for the Hall of Fame. These awards nudge an author towards the "canon" and secure them places on literature class reading lists for decades to come.

Most notably, after being named to the IMPAC shortlist, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz has joined the ranks of the most celebrated novels of the last 15 years, making it, along with the other books near the top of the list, something of a modern classic.

Here is our methodology:

I wanted to include both American books and British books, as well as the English-language books from other countries that are eligible to win some of these awards. I started with the National Book Award and the Pulitzer from the American side and the Booker and Costa from the British side. Because I wanted the British books to "compete" with the American books, I also looked at a couple of awards that recognize books from both sides of the ocean, the National Book Critics Circle Awards and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The IMPAC is probably the weakest of all these, but since it is both more international and more populist than the other awards, I thought it added something. The glaring omission is the PEN/Faulkner, but it would have skewed everything too much in favor of the American books, so I left it out.

I looked at these six awards from 1995 to the present, awarding three points for winning an award and two points for an appearance on a shortlist or as a finalist. Here's the key that goes with the list: B=Booker Prize, C=National Book Critics Circle Award, I=International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, N=National Book Award, P=Pulitzer Prize, W=Costa Book Award [formerly the Whitbread] bold=winner, red=New to the list or moved up* the list since last year's "Prizewinners" post

*Note that the IMPAC considers books a year after the other awards do, and so this year's IMPAC shortlist nods added to point totals from last year in the case of three books.

11, 2003, The Known World by Edward P. Jones - C, I, N, P
9, 2001, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen - C, I, N, P
8, 1997, Underworld by Don DeLillo - C, I, N, P

8, 2007, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz - C, P, I
7, 2005, The March by E.L. Doctorow - C, N, P
7, 2004, Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst - B, C, W
7, 2002, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides - I, N, P
7, 2001, Atonement by Ian McEwan - B, C, W
7, 1998, The Hours by Michael Cunningham - C, I, P
7, 1997, Last Orders by Graham Swift - B, I, W
7, 1997, Quarantine by Jim Crace - B, I, W
6, 2005, The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai - B, C
6, 2004, Gilead by Marilynn Robinson - C, P

5, 2008, The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry - B, W

5, 2008, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout - C, P
5, 2007, Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson - N, P
5, 2006, The Road by Cormac McCarthy - C, P
5, 2006, The Echo Maker by Richard Powers - N, P
5, 2005, Europe Central by William T. Vollmann - C, N
5, 2005, The Accidental by Ali Smith - B, W
5, 2004, The Master by Colm Toibin - B, I
5, 2003, The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard - I, N
5, 2001, True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey - B, I
5, 2000, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon - C, P
5, 2000, The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood - B, I
5, 1999, Waiting by Ha Jin - N, P
5, 1999, Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee - B, C
5, 1999, Being Dead by Jim Crace - C, W
5, 1998, Charming Billy by Alice McDermott - I, N
5, 1997, American Pastoral by Philip Roth - C, P
5, 1996, Every Man for Himself by Beryl Bainbridge - B, W
5, 1996, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser - N, P
5, 1995, The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie - B, W
5, 1995, The Ghost Road by Pat Barker - B, W
5, 1995, Independence Day by Richard Ford - C, P
5, 1995, Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth - N, P

4, 2008, Home by Marilynn Robinson - C, N

4, 2008, The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon - C, N

4, 2007, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid - B, I

4, 2007, Animal's People by Indra Sinha - B, I
4, 2005, Veronica by Mary Gaitskill - C, N
4, 2005, Arthur and George by Julian Barnes - B, I
4, 2005, A Long, Long Way by Sebastian Barry - B, I
4, 2005, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - B, C
4, 2005, Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie - I, W
4, 2004, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell - B, C
4, 2003, Brick Lane by Monica Ali - B, C
4, 2003, Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor - B, I
4, 2003, The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut - B, I
4, 2003, Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins - N, P
4, 2002, Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry - B, I
4, 2002, The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor - B, W
4, 2001, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry - B, I
4, 2001, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett - I, N
4, 2001, John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead - N, P
4, 2001, Oxygen by Andrew Miller - B, W
4, 2000, The Keepers of Truth by Michael Collins - B, I
4, 2000, When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro - B, W
4, 2000, Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates - N, P
4, 1999, Our Fathers by Andrew O'Hagan - B, I
4, 1999, Headlong by Michael Frayn - B, W
4, 1999, The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin - B, I
4, 1997, Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid - C, I
4, 1997, Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty - B, W
4, 1997, Enduring Love by Ian McEwan - I, W
4, 1997, The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick - I, N
4, 1996, Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood - B, I
4, 1995, In Every Face I Meet by Justin Cartwright - B, W

Baseball's Raucous Early Days: The Glory of Their Times by Lawrence Ritter

2009-06-13T14:34:00.000-04:00

My father in law has a huge collection of radio programs that he has taped and cataloged over the last two or three decades, and several years ago he gave me a couple of interesting tapes from the late 1980s. They contain a recorded performance of a baseball-themed show put on by the late baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti and one of my favorite essayists, New Yorker staffer and renowned baseball writer Roger Angell.

The show, which is about two hours long, consists of readings of baseball essays, stories, and poetry. The work of John Updike is represented as is that of Garrison Keillor, but when I listened to the tapes, I was most interested in an excerpt from a book called The Glory of Their Times: The Story of Baseball Told By the Men Who Played It, a book that was put together by Lawrence Ritter, a former economics professor at NYU who died in 2004. Ritter was also a big baseball fan, and shortly after Ty Cobb's death in 1961, inspired by the outpouring of myth and legend that occasioned Cobb's passing, Ritter decided to record for posterity an oral history of the early years of professional baseball. Over the next several years, Ritter traveled 75,000 miles, crisscrossing the country, tape recorder in hand, seeking out the game's oldest living veterans, men who played in the decades leading up to and after World War I. The result, first published in 1966 and updated and expanded in 1984, is among the most cherished baseball books around.

With the baseball season hitting its sweet spot, I cracked the spine of my tattered copy of Ritter's compilation, and what I found within was a look into a lost period of time - before radio, before TV, and before even the prevalence of still cameras - brimming with color about the game's rough beginnings as America's national pastime.

To give just a sample of the gems contained within the Glory of Their Times, this is what I learned reading Fred "Snow" Snodgrass' chapter, a representative sample of the sorts of details in the book that are sure to amaze any fan of today's game:

Christy Mathewson "never pitched on Sunday, or even dressed in uniform," but "he made a good part of his expenses every year playing poker."
Snodgrass wore a baggy uniform to try to increase the chances of getting hit by pitches, and, failing that, he would dive for the ground on an inside pitch and pinch his arm to raise a welt so he could show the ump where he got "beaned."
There was more than one deaf and dumb ballplayer during this era, and, judging by this book, they were all nicknamed "Dummy." Dummy Taylor, who played on the Giants with Snodgrass, "took it as an affront if you didn't learn to converse with him," and consequently everyone on the team learned sign language.
A mysterious man named Charles Victory Faust emerged from the stands before a game in 1911 and told the Giants that a fortune teller had told him that if he pitched for the team, they would win the pennant. Superstitious manager (and baseball legend) John McGraw took Faust on the road with the team, and "every day from that day on, Charles Victory Faust was in uniform and he warmed up sincerely to pitch that game." Of course, he never actually pitched, but the Giants did win the pennant in 1911. Faust joined them again in 1912, and again the Giants won the pennant. By 1913, Faust had become a fan favorite and McGraw let Faust come in and pitch an inning, much to the fans' delight. Needless to say, the Giants won the pennant again in 1913.
In 1908 Fred Merkle lost the pennant for the Giants because of a famous, "bonehead" play. He was on first and Moose McCormick on third in the bottom half of the ninth inning in a 1-1 ballgame against the Cubs in the last week of the season. Al Bridwell hit a single to center and McCormick scored from third. The fans rushed the field and Merkle sprinted to the clubhouse to avoid the madness - without stepping on second. Cubs shortstop Johnny Evers (of the famous Tinkers, Evers, Chance infield) noticed this, found the ball in the crowd, got in a tussle with the Giants third base coach, tagged second base for the force out, and then convinced the umps to come back out onto the field to reconsider the play. The umps overturned the win, ruling in the Cubs favor.
There was a rumor that as a nervous habit, Phillies pitcher Harry Coveleski, "always carried some bologna in his back pocket and chewed on that bologna throughout the game."
In 1914, the Boston Braves went from last place on July 4th to contending for the pennant by season's end. Interest in the team was so great that "they put ropes up in the outfield and thousands of people were sitting and standing and standing behind the ropes, right on the playing field."
Snodgrass, playing the outfield, got into a shouting match with the Boston fans, and the incensed mayor of Boston got out of his box seat and marched onto the field and demanded that the umps remove Snodgrass from the game.

There is a sense that the modern game has lost much of its charm, that it is all spectacle. The game 100 years ago was certainly charming, but, as The Glory of Their Times makes clear, it was perhaps more the spectacle back then, a game of colorful characters and nicknames, brawls and backroom dealings, and fights over money with capricious owners. Some things just don't change. It's also true that for a game that we seemingly know so much about, the book shows just how little we know about professional baseball's formative days.

Ritter's amazing chronicle of the early years of baseball is essential for anyone with a deep interest in the game.

Man Gone Down Takes the IMPAC

2009-06-11T19:54:00.000-04:00

The 2008-09 book award season has come to a close with the awarding of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award to Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas. You'll recall that libraries around the world can nominate books for the prize, and these nominations, taken together, comprise a very long longlist. These are then whittled down by judges to a shortlist and then ultimately whittled further leaving a winner.

Despite this year's odd occurrence of an all-male shortlist, the award typically does a very good job of highlighting diverse and often underappreciated titles. Case in point, Man Gone Down is a debut novel put out by independent publishing house Grove/Atlantic. Publishers Weekly writes of the book "For all of the introspection and occasional indulgence in self-pity, the narrator retains a note of hard-won optimism, and Thomas resolutely steers him clear of sentimentality." And a very brief excerpt is available at the Grove/Atlantic site. Even more interesting, author Thomas is American, but his book was nominated for the longlist by just a single library in Barbados.

Toronto's Tell-Tale Heart

2009-06-11T07:01:00.000-04:00

In the darkened Anglican church, separated from a looming early-Victorian tower by an idyllic garden, we summoned the spirits and welcomed the macabre into our tell-tale hearts.

Nestled at the bottom of Grange Park, the city's bustle was a two-minute walk away, but it could have been two-hundred years away as the Luminato arts festival presented "Gothic Toronto: Writing The City Macabre", an evening of six local authors - among them Ann-Marie MacDonald and Andrew Pyper - reading freshly-commissioned works which shone a black light on Toronto's neighborhoods.

The spirit of Edgar Allan Poe is everywhere in this year's Luminato festival - this year marking the 200th anniversary of his birth. Earlier in the week, there was another reading of gothic fiction by assorted writers, and an evening with Coraline author Neil Gaiman, reading from his latest - The Graveyard Book. There was also a Poe-inspired cabaret, and "Nevermore" - a Poe-inspired theatre piece.

But tonight, as the lights dimmed in St. George the Martyr church, it was all about Toronto-the-sinister. For me, Andrew Pyper's "When You Were Beautiful" dug deepest. Set on a dodgy stretch of Queen Street West, this short tale of memory and loss was spun with equal parts eeriness and sadness.

When the evening ended and I was back walking among the mortals, I could swear there was a disembodied voice whispering in my ear, trying to lure me back into the desperate depths where Toronto's darkest souls cry for release.

Uniformity and Blandness: Designing the Body of Work

2009-06-10T06:44:00.001-04:00

If you are a popular and prolific enough author, an interesting thing happens to your books, they all begin to look the same. This is the primary outward manifestation of an author as a brand. As a large oeuvre gets rounded out to perhaps a dozen or two titles, the publisher picks a certain design and rereleases all the titles to have that design. This makes a lot of sense. If you are a fan of Prolific Author A and are working your way through his body of work, you'll soon be on the lookout for the distinctive style his publisher has chosen for his paperbacks. The problem is that all too often, these uniform designs are ugly. My prescription, however, is to scale back on the shared elements and to try to present each book more uniquely so that it feels like as much effort has gone into packaging each individual book as went into to writing it.

From my days in the bookstore, I know how important, often subconsciously so, book cover design can be. With that in the mind, there are some very well-known authors whose uniformly designed books are doing them a disservice and deserve an overhaul:

The Vintage paperback editions of William Faulkner's novels have it all: terrible fonts, jarring colors, and strange, bland art. The covers betray none of the complexity of Faulkner's work and instead promise soft-focus confusion. They feel dated and badly in need of a refresh. Better versions: Check out the prior paperback covers of As I Lay Dying from Penguin and Vintage.

Maybe it's the frames around the Ballantine John Irving paperback covers, but they remind me of hotel art. Irving's masterful narratives have been reduced to representative but inanimate objects - a nurse's uniform, a motorcycle - that occupy the safe middle ground that Irving's books eschew. Better versions: There is a certain dignity to the text-only designs that once graced Irving's covers.

For a writer as inventive and unique as Kurt Vonnegut, it sure seems like a shame to just slap a big "V" on all his covers and call it a day. Better versions: They may not offer a uniform look, bit I prefer the energy of the old pocket paperback versions of Vonnegut's novels.

Far better are the Vintage Murakami paperbacks, which evoke some of the most jarring and surreal qualities of Murakami's fiction. They also maintain a consistent aesthetic and yet they still vary from title to title. Even better versions: The Chip Kidd-designed British hardcover of Wind-Up Bird Chronicle captures the vivid imagery while hinting at the underlying complexity.

Ask a Book Question: #73 (Tuesday New Releases)

2009-06-09T07:37:00.000-04:00

Poornima writes in with this question:

Why is it that new hardcovers seem to always release on a Tuesday? I have noticed this pattern a lot and I wonder if there is a reason.

The Tuesday release date is an industry standard, and not just for books; new CDs and DVDs are almost invariably released on Tuesdays. Before we get to why this might be, though, a quick note about book releases: 99% of books don't have a hard release date at all. Generally, books are set to arrive during a particular month, and bookstores just put the books on the shelves when they arrive at the store. Only the most popular books merit a street date that is actually enforced. These books arrive ahead of the date in boxes marked "Do not open before..." and they sit there until that date arrives. For Oprah picks (and other big TV book club picks) these boxes don't even have a book title listed on them. The box might just be marked "Oprah book club selection." I suspect that not many books have specific street dates because, for many stores, it wouldn't be feasible to store all the books that have been shipped but can't yet be offered for sale.

In the book world, street dates exist for books that will have a large, unified publicity push behind them. They include the "book club" books noted above and generally any other book by a recognizable name. In the fiction world, for example, Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice and Richard Russo's That Old Cape Magic are set to hit shelves on the first Tuesday in August. But why Tuesday?

An Ask Metafilter thread and a Google Answers item offer some clues, though both focus on music and movies. Among the theories thrown around on those pages, a few would seem to make the most sense for the publishing world:

"If a Tuesday release is selling well, there still is time to order more before the weekend." This makes sense, as it can often be difficult to gauge just how popular a release will be.
"Consumers know when to look for new releases." This explains why new releases continue to be on Tuesdays but not why it was decided they should be on Tuesday in the first place.
Consolidating the releases to one day greatly reduces the costs to the distributor. (This doesn't explain why it has to be a Tuesday, nor does it account for the fact that new releases often arrive at stores prior to Tuesdays.)
Tuesday is traditionally the lowest sales day of the week, so popular new releases boost otherwise weak sales.

My theory, somewhat inspired by what I read in the above links and somewhat drawn from experience is that releasing a new book on Tuesday allows for several full days of book-related hype in the media to get people interested leading into the weekend when most of the shopping happens. Allowing a weekend to break up the media hype cycle too soon might let the new book fall from people's consciousness before they got a chance to buy.

Anyone in publishing got the real story on Tuesday releases? Let us know.

So What if They're Wordy?: An Open Letter to Kanye West

2009-06-08T06:34:00.001-04:00

Jeff Hobbs grew up amid the perfumy mushroom farms of Kennet Square, PA. He is the author of the novel, The Tourists, as well as dozens of grant proposals written on behalf of the African Rainforest Conservancy, for which he served as Executive Director for three years. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and the little girl within her ballooning belly, and he talks mostly to his dog, Noah.

Dear Mr. West,

On behalf of my daughter, who is due on October 8th and so thus far has been shielded by the womb from the loud, generally vacuous remarks of all current celebrity-cum-philosophers - and on behalf of every child living in America who has ever been negatively influenced by a "Kanye-ism" - I would just like to say: Shame on you, 'Ye.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book's autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life.

These are your words that you employed, oddly enough, while promoting your own forthcoming book, Thank You and You're Welcome. This tome of "theories" is reportedly composed of 52 pages and possibly fewer words, since many pages contain only a single almost-sentence, and others are left blank - perhaps a nod toward your blank sense of responsibility for those who pay attention to what you say. Your self-purported intent is to "end the confusion" of Kanye misquotes, which has apparently been plaguing the universe for some time now.

Just a heads-up here: Not only does the inherent irony at play in these words make you appear unintelligent, which you obviously aren't, but you have also undermined the privilege of living in a country in which we can read anything and everything we choose or, as in your unfortunate case, nothing at all. Though you may be a self-proclaimed "proud non-reader," surely you cannot be proud of rallying others to follow you in this non-ambition.

My understanding is that you are a remarkable musician and producer, termed by many a musical genius. You have sold millions of records, won the highest awards, started a respected charitable foundation to help underprivileged children stay in school, cultivated countless fans the world over, and become a bona fide voice of your generation. At the very least, you are that rare talent who appeals to a fan base as demographically diverse as it is ardent.

So how could you, the son of an English professor no less, say something so destructive, so moronically conceived, and so contrary to the vaguely youth-centric message of your own music? I ask this question in seriousness and with all the respect I can summon, which admittedly isn't much at the moment.

With regard to the first part of your statement, I grant that the novel as a form, excluding your own, tends to be somewhat "wordy." It is, after all, typically composed of words. And plenty of the greatest novelists - Hemmingway, Rushdie, Naipaul, and Mailer come to mind - could correctly be dubbed "self-absorbed," bordering on self-obsessed. It does require a certain amount of arrogance to believe a work of fiction that originates in your brain might be worth a stranger's time, let alone his money. You know this arrogance very well; in fact, you have coined your own special term for it: Flyness.

Incidentally, our president is wordy and self-absorbed, and he might turn out to be the flyest leader we've ever had. There are wordy and self-absorbed carpenters out there, and doctors and schoolteachers and, with you as a standard-bearer, musicians - all of whom have contributions to make to society. In many ways, America is a wordy and self-absorbed nation. We are no less fly for being so.

So while those two descriptive gems are ultimately harmless, what I shame you for is your presumption to take away, or at the very least discredit, the unique, valuable, and timeless relationship that a child can forge with the world through books.

The written word is the only art medium that necessitates a sincere, sometimes even arduous, effort on the part of its audience. Rather than enter instantaneously into the individual's heart and soul via a direct, simple sensory channel - most commonly sight and sound, and, in the case of a great chef, taste and smell - a printed word must first be filtered, interpreted, and aligned with one's consciousness through both the right and left sides of the brain; the sensations an inspired sentence brings to bloom within the individual's interior represent a collaboration between author and reader, a synthesis of dual experience in this world. This special co-mingling can occur between two people who grew up neighbors in the same small Midwestern town, or between a 12-year old Catholic girl in the Bronx reading the words of an 80-year old Hindu man in Calcutta. Basically, what I hope to teach my daughter is that, though reading usually necessitates seclusion - not an easy concept to pitch to a kid, or, apparently, to a hip hop artist - the more you read, the smarter you become; opening a book is a completely self-generated means by which a child may grow more thoughtful, more worldly, more sensitive to others, regardless of what school district he lives in or what his standardized test scores are.

A novel takes you away like no other medium can, and while a multi-millionaire music mogul like yourself has no doubt lived an extraordinary "real life" - has experienced directly so many fascinating people and places most of us ordinary folks could never dream of - the majority of your fans, and 99.9% of Americans, do not have the time nor the means to emulate you. Most of us would very much like to "get information from doing stuff," as you sagely advise, if only our access to the world beyond our immediate environment weren't limited, basically, to books, television, and music. I venture that escaping into the work of Harper Lee, Jack London, Alice Walker - hell, even Stephenie Meyer, who can barely write an English sentence - is more worthwhile for American youth than, say, watching an MTV Cribs episode featuring Kanye West, or listening to such classics as "Dreaming of Fucking Lil' Kim," even in hi-def surround sound.

And yet, the written word is being slowly phased out of our culture, no thanks to comments such as yours; it is becoming increasingly apparent that the slow, solitary act of paging through a book has only marginal space on today's manic, hyper-social canvass. Newspapers are streamlining one by one to cut costs, and the first step in that process invariably entails nixing the Books section. American publishers are faring little better than the auto industry, sans taxpayer bailout. We live in an era in which the first stories some kids read are penned by Madonna, Sesame Street is considered "unhealthy" (because the Cookie Monster promotes obesity, you see), Gawker is a premier source of literary news, snark reigns supreme, the vast majority of written correspondence involves progressions of three-letter acronyms ricocheted across cell phone towers, and, sadly but truly, the blurted opinions of Kanye West actually count for something.

Being as your charitable work is geared toward furthering the education of our children, being as the country reads less now than it ever has in its history at the same time as our school system falls behind those of other developed nations, being as you are technically an author now, and being as you are and will remain a role model to so many tens of millions of people - perhaps you, Mr. West, might atone for your statement by (just a thought here) finding a book that means something to you and then recommending it to your fans, thus investing your words in their future rather than your own.

To quote you once more, from your song, "Champion": "'Cause who the kids gonna listen to? Huh? I guess me if it isn't you."

Best Regards,

Jeff Hobbs (Proud Reader)

Curiosities: Seekers, Idiots, Grazers, Browsers, Campers, Independents, Time-Sucks

2009-06-07T17:08:00.003-04:00

Lots of action with the online mags: There's a new issue of The Hipster Book Club, with a review of Aleksander Hemon's Love and Other Obstacles, and an interview with Glen David Gold. There's a new Quarterly Conversation, which includes Scott Esposito's thoughtful consideration of Cormac McCarthy. Issue 3 of N1BR is out. And the first issue of The Point includes a piece on David Foster Wallace's legacy.
Brooklyn gets a new bookstore: Greenlight!
Corpus Librus, the BEA edition
In an interview with Ed Champion, Sherman Alexie clarifies his comments about the Kindle being elitist.
Tibor Fischer shares a first look at Thomas Pynchon's forthcoming Inherent Vice.
The seven types of bookstore customers. (via)
An incredible collection of pocket paperback colophons.
Coming soon from The Onion, Inventory, a collection of "obsessively specific pop-culture lists."
The Ask Metafilter crowd suggests what to read after 2666.
For fans of style guides, here's one from The Economist
FOUND Magazine founder Davy Rothbart is crazy about vintage NBA jerseys. (via)
Further Reading: Edan's post on gifting books in a digital age generated a bunch of interesting comments. Be sure to check them out. On a related note, in PopMatters, Michael Antman bemoans the disappearance of the "physical manifestations of contemporary culture."

The Reading Coincidence

2009-06-05T06:34:00.000-04:00

I'm sorry to be redundant and mention books about which I have just written, but I wanted to remark on a phenomenon.

So, last week, discovering that I was out of things to read, I visited a secondhand book shop with ten minutes to spare and grabbed, basically at random:

The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis (which I had never heard of but which was attached to Lucky Jim)
Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy (an outre pick for me. I had heard of it, but until I bought it I had no idea I wanted to read it)

First I read The Heart of the Matter, then The Rachel Papers. In The Rachel Papers, young Charles Highland mentions the books in his childhood room, among them, The Heart of the Matter, which he later quotes. That's not particularly interesting. Graham Greene is hardly obscure. But then, Highland's Oxford tutor Bellamy says, apropos of basically nothing "...I believe a distant encestor [sic] of mine wrote a utopia novel. Looking Beckwards [sic] it was called..."

Throughout my life as a reader I have noticed this thing happening over and over; a book I read after finishing a seemingly unrelated book turns out to be linked to the previous book in some way, however small or irrelevant. I know I'm not totally alone, because if you Google "reading coincidences" (I know, I know, pathetic Googling), the top three results sort of address what I'm talking about.

The cynical among you will point out that, given the extreme narrowness of canonical Western literature in general, and the extreme narrowness of my mind and reading habits in particular, it's no wonder that everything starts to refer and self-refer in an endless, inbred loop. You have a point. But, all the same, doesn't it sometimes happen to you? Every book you read in a short period of time mentions one of the other books you just read, or a movie you saw last week, or even, like, a dream someone told you against your will? Doesn't it? And isn't it weird?

What is it called? Is there, perhaps, a pertinent volume of Remembrance of Things Past to which I should address myself? And don't mention the madeleine. This is not a moment for the goddamned madeleine.