Bulletproof Girl by Quinn Dalton

Quinn Dalton's recent collection Bulletproof Girl contains eleven stories about women in peril. Not physical peril in the tied to the railroad tracks "save me Indiana Jones" way, but social and emotional peril. Each story is a snapshot, a day or two in the life of a woman who has come up against something in her life that is big and hard to move. My favorite story was "Lennie Remembers the Angels" about an elderly woman who is paranoid about her neighbors but turns a blind eye to her son's transgressions. There is a physicality to her language in this story: damp heat, dark apartments and overpowering food smells. Like "Lennie," several of the stories in the collection could be mistaken for chapters in a novel; they aren't self-contained. Dalton is very good at fleshing out her characters, and we know their individual histories. As she leads her protagonists through their hard times, we are given stories that are as character-driven as they are plot-driven. The long title story broadens the themes the Dalton explores in the rest of the collection. Instead of one woman, we have three: Emery, May and Celeste, three generations from the same family, all at difficult crossroads and alternately comforting and pitying one another. Emery is smarting from the loss of her boyfriend, her mother May has been driven to odd obsessive behavior ever since her husband moved out, and old Celeste the grandmother is vibrant, but will not sympathize with her daughter, and instead takes them all on a macabre errand.

See also: Scott's review and his interview with Dalton

- C. Max Magee @ 12:39 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Staying Sane: More reading notes by Emre Peker

Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote has been on my reading list for a long time. Upon Max Magee's suggestion I picked up the recent translation by Edith Grossman sometime in January 2004. It took me a good 11 months to work up the appetite, desire and guts to indulge in this phenomenal piece of writing. Described by many as the beginning of modern novel, Don Quixote relates a crazed Alonso Quixano's sallies from his native La Mancha to various provinces of Spain. Beyond the usual adventures of the windmills, freeing of the slaves, and fair Dulcinea - all of which are a part of every child's introduction to fairy tales and literature - lies the second part of the novel. Cervantes published two Don Quixote novels, and whereas the first one colors our imaginations as children, the Part II - published ten years after Part I, in 1615 - brings forth Cervantes as a witty author who employs Don Quixote's insanity to illustrate the genius of his loyal servant Sanco Panza; the trivial entertainments of the Duke and the Duchess, whose cunning knowledge of the first novel, which is referred to numerous times in Part II, provide for the creative and chivalric plots that the nobles employ to ridicule Don Quixote; and a grand finale of sobriety that settles for once and all the history of Don Quixote. Cervantes ends the illustrious misadventures of Don Quixote to prevent new issues of fake Don Quixote novels from appearing. Cervantes' answer to authors who attempted to profit on the first Don Quixote's success, one Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda in particular, is derisive and rash - bordering on self flattery through his diatribe on other authors. Don Quixote opened a new window in my mind with its accessible language - thanks mostly to Grossman's spectacular translation - and cunning use of word plays, romantic approach to the bygone days of knight errantry, mockery of social dogmas, integration of tangent plots - oh yes, you read at least 3 unrelated short stories in the novel - and eternally modern style. The novel's mix of fantasy and reflections on society definitely place it in the pile of books the are must re-reads, albeit not in the short term - it will certainly take me a while to put aside another chunk of time for the second serving.

I was distracted at times from reading Don Quixote by Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings. Matt Clare, a close friend and literary fiend, was kind enough to present me with this magnificent work that captures a unique time period in British society. Clare's inscription on the cover reads "no Baron [on the Trees, by Italo Calvino, which I had presented to him earlier] to be sure, [but] the Lord may still have something to teach us." Indeed, Lord Henry Wotton quickly became a new idol of mine, decadent and lost, with no particular interest in anything that the London high society of the 1880s held dear, nor any high aspirations that provided for the chatter at tea parties. The Jekyll and Hyde nature of The Picture of Dorian Gray presents vain struggles and trivial issues in an intentionally serious tone, which mocks the core of British culture at the time. There is much to be said about the twists and turns of The Picture of Dorian Gray, which keep the reader on his toes and makes the story an amazing, insightful and philosophical page turner. What follows in the 4 plays and final ballad also collected under the same volume (Lady Windermere's Fan, Salome, An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Ernest, and The Ballad of Reading Gaol) is not as intense as the opener, but nevertheless very entertaining and universal. Oscar Wilde's only drawback is the limited nature of his subjects, but he does a phenomenal job in conveying the stuck up nature of the crowd that he once was a part of.

Related: Max's thoughts on Don Quixote

- C. Max Magee @ 7:35 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Battle of the Sexes (Part Deux) by Patrick Brown

I'm glad to see my last post got people talking. I guess I have to get into specifics now. Keep in mind that I've only read about ten books this year because it took me all of January and February to read Robert Caro's massive biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. (Incidentally, if you're looking to tone up for the summer months, I recommend all of Caro's books. Even the paperbacks come in weighty volumes perfect for curls or bench presses). After that it was a real relief to read a couple of books people have been hounding me to read: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping.

I'd read Atwood's Cat's Eye before and like it a lot, but The Handmaid's Tale is a masterpiece. My girlfriend has been teaching it to her ungrateful undergraduates, and I read it and got a few free lessons on the fascinating language play that goes on in the text. I don't think I've ever read a book that was so filling for both my heart and my head.

Housekeeping had been lying around my apartment, and, to be honest, I didn't want to read it. Nobody could really tell me what it was about or anything about it, for that matter, other than that they read it in college, it was beautiful, and they loved it. I read it in twelve hours. It's the kind of book that really ought to be read in a burst like that because its physical world is so distinct and so engrossing, it invites the reader to wander in and stay for awhile. I don't think I'd have liked it as much if I'd nibbled at it for a couple of weeks, but it was the perfect book for me at the perfect time. (Note: I was also, no doubt, caught up in the Marilynne Robinson zeitgeist. I heard her read from her new book Gilead, and for a while here in Iowa, it seemed like Marilynne was all people could talk about).

After these two terrific novels, I read Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss. It's a shame that congress passed that law that mandates everyone who writes about Krauss to refer to her as Jonathan Safran Foer's husband in the first three sentences (There, I've done it... I fear the man), because she's an incredible writer. Read the prologue to the book and see what I mean.

Of course no year of reading would be complete for me without a couple of books about genocide. Max had a great post on historians and journalists who write about the ugly moments in history, and I seem to be working my way through most of the books on his list. Two years ago I read Philip Gourevitch's We Wish To Inform You... about the Rwandan genocide. Last year it was Anne Applebaum's Gulag (a woman!), and this year it was Samantha Power's book A Problem from Hell. I confess that I forced myself to start this book (even while I was buying it I was apprehensive), but I didn't have to force myself to finish it. Power writes with clarity and precision about American foreign policy in a way that is easily understood without being too simplistic or dumbed-down. I saw Power on Charlie Rose last year and thought she was so smart and interesting. Her book didn't disappoint.

And now I'm tearing through Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (I'm ashamed to say I'd never read it). So I've only read a handful of books this year, but I must say that the women are walking all over the men (and that's with Robert Caro and JF Powers on Team Penis). I do find that my "To Be Read" list is still male-oriented, so if anybody has any suggestions of books by the fairer sex, let me know. I'm open to anything.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:16 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Battle of the Sexes by Patrick Brown

Earlier in the year, I took a look back at the books I'd read in 2004. I was surprised to find that most of them were by men. I'd always thought of myself as a guy who reads good books, regardless of who wrote them, but the facts proved otherwise. My girlfriend, meanwhile, pointed out that her reading list was split fairly evenly between the sexes. The only conclusion I could draw is that I am a chauvinist pig. Well, maybe not, but for a guy who claims he has no biases, my reading list was well stocked with white men and little else.

To remedy this, I've decided to try a little experiment this year. For the entire year, I am alternating between books by men and women. Aside from enforcing gender equality, this has so far leant some much needed discipline to my life.

Some of you will no doubt say, "But Patrick, I'm not a sexist pig. I don't have to force myself to read women, it comes naturally." My hat is off to you, but I'm sure you have a literary blind spot that could be addressed with a program like mine. Maybe you only read contemporary literature. Perhaps your reading list is strictly non-fiction. Maybe you haven't read a short story collection cover-to-cover since college. If any of these are true, I recommend developing a little curriculum of your own. You'll find your literary world blown wide open, and you'll introduce yourself to some great books you might not otherwise get around to reading.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:53 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Oprah and Edward P. Jones

At the Happy Booker, Wendi points to a New York Daily News article which mentions that Oprah has been recommending Edward P. Jones' 2003 novel The Known World to book clubs, leading to speculation that her own book club will return to contemporary fiction, and Jones' book will be her choice.

Great news for Jones, but I see no reason why Oprah can't have both contemporary and classic picks at the same time. She only selects three or four books a year, so double that wouldn't be a big deal, and getting millions of people to read books like East of Eden and Anna Karenina isn't a bad thing.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:37 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Sunday Thoughts and Links

I really dug this write up of a visit by Edward P. Jones to a Seattle high school, where he talked to some kids about being a writer. I'm fascinated by Jones' persona. He's not a hermit, but neither is he a part of the more public contemporary literary crowd, all of whom seem to be associated with the same causes and who enjoy this sort of literary pseudo-fame while at the same time making a bit of a show about shying away from it. Of course I'm overgeneralizing here, but I'm sure you can think of some writers who might fit that description. I suppose my larger point is Jones seems to me to be a writer who, in an earlier time, would have only achieved fame late in his career or even posthumously, and I'm just really glad that he has gotten the acclaim that he deserves.

I saw the movie Fever Pitch last night and enjoyed the way last year's baseball season was woven into the story so well. It also made me very curious to read Nick Hornby's novel by the same name, in which the protagonist is a rabid soccer fan. I'm not a big Hornby fan, but I'm very curious to see if they managed to swap out the sport at the center of the story while keeping the same overall feeling. Quite a feat if they managed to do a good job of it. One thing is clear though, trying to slap a movie tie-in cover on Hornby's book wouldn't have worked very well.

Rodger Jacobs has set up a blog to track entries in his "Fitzgerald in Hollywood Short Fiction Contest."

Chicagoist looks at books "with local ties." I've read All This Heavenly Glory and Gods in Alabama, but the third book The Week You Weren't Here by Charles Blackstone sounds interesting.

- C. Max Magee @ 5:10 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

How prolific is too prolific?

There's a very entertaining article at the CBC Web site about the pros and cons of being prolific as a writer. It leads with a discussion of the output of Alexander McCall Smith of No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency fame, who regularly churns out 3,000 words at a sitting. Prolific authors are often envied, but if they happen to be genre writers they are likely to be derided as well, even as publishers covet them and count on them to bankroll riskier publishing endeavors:

The dream of most publishers is to have at least one "house author," a writer with a robust fan base who can dependably churn out one title a year - giving the publisher the financial solidity to take the occasional flyer on more challenging (read: less gainful) authors.

The article also includes a great quote from DFW:

Musing on the seemingly inexhaustible John Updike, David Foster Wallace once asked, "Has the son-of-a-bitch ever had one unpublished thought?" Updike's absurdly prodigious output - in the form of novels, as well as short stories, travel writing and literary criticism - has undermined his stature in the eyes of Foster Wallace, as well as many fiction readers.

I would tend to agree that volume can degrade one's reputation in the eyes of the reader. The article goes on to mention Joyce Carol Oates whose level of output many seem to take as a personal insult, and closes with an amusing comparison of Oates and Stephen King courtesy George Murray, proprietor of Bookninja.

Curious about the output of different writers? This search returns lots of interesting numbers.

- C. Max Magee @ 2:02 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Worth visiting

A William T. Vollman reading in the Bay Area is parsed and dissected for meaning by Ed and Scott and ... the upshot? He didn't shoot, or pretend to shoot, anyone. I'm still unclear, however, as to whether or not he was wearing jeans.

CAAF and Wendi point to an open letter from authors pleading with Oprah to turn the hallowed spotlight of her book club back to contemporary fiction. I say, forget Oprah, the Lit Blog Co-op's got you covered!

- C. Max Magee @ 3:25 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Literary power couples

I've been getting emails extolling the virtues of Nicole Krauss's new novel, The History of Love lately. She, by the way, is also known as the wife of Jonathan Safran Foer, and there has been some suggestion that her new novel suspiciously resembles his. Seems like sour grapes to me, but it did get me thinking about contemporary literary couples, and how it seems like there's a lot of them. There's Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt. And then there's the couples where the woman is the bigger star like Zadie Smith and Nick Laird (he's a poet... does that even count?) and Alice Sebold and Glen David Gold. There must be others... writers attract writers it seems.

This, of course, is not a new trend. Here's a list of some of history's literary power couples that I borrowed from a UPenn english department Web site: Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, and Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:11 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Game Time by Roger Angell

When it comes to baseball, the mind is unreliable and selective in what it remembers. Games and seasons blend into to one another and most second basemen or relief pitchers fade from view forever soon after they leave the diamond for good. Old teams and players live on only as lines of statistics in massive baseball encyclopedias or deep historical databases. Lost, too, are the millions of moments that make up every game. But Roger Angell has been quite good, over the years, at capturing those moments and preserving them as though in amber. And so, in reading his collection of baseball pieces that span more than forty years, one feels a bit like the lucky archeologist who has stumbled upon magnificent specimens so exquisitely preserved as to seem positively lifelike. Angell writes with almost scientific precision: "With the strange insect gaze of his shining eyeglasses, with his ominous Boche-like helmet pulled low... Reggie Jackson makes a frightening figure at bat." Angell is not just an observer; he is also the ultimate fan, rooting for childhood favorites or for a team whose story has caught his fancy that particular year. Game Time is laid out like the baseball year, with pieces about the languor and anticipation of spring training in the beginning and closing with multi-faceted recollections of several past World Series. The many pieces taken together are like one long summer spanning forty years, a summer when you went to the ballpark frequently but listened to most of the games on the radio on the back porch at dusk.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:41 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Birnbaum and Jonathan Safran Foer

At The Morning News, Robert Birnbaum interviews Jonathan Safran Foer. In his email announcing the interview, Birnbaum tries to elevate the current level of discourse surrounding Foer, who seems to have a target painted on his back these days:

First, a word about what you will not read here - no reference to Steve Almond's kvetchy and disingenuous hand wringing about Jon Foer's new novel (at MobyLives.com)or the exponentially vile and bombastic heaving by Harry Siegal about the same at the loathsome and vile NYC weekly that produces journalistic marvels such as "50 Loathsome New Yorkers" and includes novelists on that hit list.

The interview is long, and once again portrays Foer as thoughtful and unwilling to respond to criticism or praise, preferring to concentrate on just the reader and the writer:

Foer: Really good books are books that have two authors, the reader and the writer. Or maybe the idea of an author is actually just a combination of two people, the reader and the writer? So when writing you use the word "tree." Four letters. Very, very short word. Fits a couple millimeters on a page. But in the reader's mind it becomes a kind of idealized version of a tree, and that tree is different for each person who reads the book and because of that a book is customized for each person in a way a song never could be and as a painting never could be.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:22 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Windmill News

Wow, the Venezuelan government has printed one million free copies of Don Quixote to celebrate the book's 400th anniversary. That sure beats the "one book one city" thing we have in the states. Read about it at the BBC. (via bookglutton). Also, anyone who has endured the long wait for the Edith Grossman edition of Quixote to come out in paperback, take heart, it arrives on May 1. See also 400 Windmills.

- C. Max Magee @ 4:49 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Rounding up the book blog roundups

I've noticed lately that a couple of Web sites have put together litblog roundups. At Notes from the (Legal) Underground, they take a break from lawyering most weeks for the "The Monday Morning Books Blogging Post". Chekhov's Mistress, meanwhile, has a "Headlines" page which aggregates the headlines from dozens of litblogs and lists them on one easy to find page. (This is similar to what I've done in my "Book News via RSS" section which aggregates feeds from newspaper book sections.) Finally, I recently discovered a new participant in the litblog roundup racket. At New West, Allen M. Jones has put together the first two of what I hope will be many litblog roundups. Roundups aside, in my capacity as a graduate journalism student, I recommend that anyone with an interest in citizen or community journalism poke around the New West site.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:41 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Cult Fiction

In the Times (UK), a look at the forthcoming Rough Guide to Cult Fiction begs the question: what is cult fiction? "The editors note in an introduction that Toby Litt once said that in their purest form, cult books ought to have been out of print for ten years," Erica Wagner writes. She also notes that in order for there to be "cult fiction," the fans of such fiction must be cult-like in their devotion. The Rough Guide apparently contains some odd inclusions as well as omissions, but the concept made me think of my experience with cult fiction. Based on working at a book store, I would say that, among contemporary authors, Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Coupland, and, to a certain extent T.C. Boyle had cultish fans. During my reading life, I've only gotten really cultish about one author, Richard Brautigan, of whose poetry and fiction I was enamored as a teenager. Brautigan, I would imagine, fits the "cult fiction" label pretty well. Curious if anyone else uses this label, I found an interesting list of books that a library in Indiana has labeled "cult fiction."

- C. Max Magee @ 5:53 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

More Litblog Co-op Pub

The LBC gets another writeup, this time from the AP. Check it out, they lead with the "Oprah angle." Oh, and since my dad didn't understand my previous post about the LBC, I should clarify: yes, I am a member.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:43 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Books get big at Amazon

Confirming some rumors that have been floating around the Internet, Amazon unveiled a new design for its product pages today. This may not be of interest to many, but I am fascinated by the way Amazon evolves, adding features and slowly reinventing itself over time. Most striking about the new pages is the huge photo of the book cover that now gets prominent placement. This seems like a good thing for shoppers. When you're buying books over the Internet, it's hard to assess the more tangible aspects of a book, so the big photo seems like a good move. At first glance the pages are much longer as well with editorial reviews and then customer reviews stretching well down the page. The sidebar(s) are gone too, giving the pages a more spare look. I guess the idea here is that Amazon is pushing for the impulse buy... maybe trying to make readers more likely to buy the book without reading the reviews below. Here is a look at one of the new pages. Any thoughts?

Update: Whoa, they've added other features, too. Check this out. You can see the "the 100 most frequently used words in this book," and see other stats like number of characters (444,858 in Gilead) and words (84,830), which amounts to 5,424 words per dollar... not a bad deal, I guess.

Update 2: Now all this new stuff is gone. I wonder if the new features and look will come back or if Amazon was just performing some cruel experiment on us.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:54 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Cormac McCarthy news

A few weeks back the Rake posted a first look at Cormac McCarthy's forthcoming No Country for Old Men that he spotted on the forums of the "Official Website of the Cormac McCarthy Society." Now from those same forums comes news that an excerpt of No Country will run in the Summer 2005 Virginia Quarterly Review.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:25 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question: The 38th in a Series (The Fiction of LA)

Edan writes in with this question:

In preparation for this novel I'd like to write, I am restricting (most) of my reading to novels/stories about Los Angeles. So far, I've read the very entertaining and very haunting The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy, and am just now starting Southland by Nina Revoyr. Can you recommend some good LA fiction? Many people have already suggested Nathanael West and John Fante, and of course [Raymond] Chandler, but I'm more interested in contemporary stuff, a la Joan Didion (but not her, since I've already read her). And, I don't want Hollywood crap either... So, yes, character and landscape driven. Any ideas?

The two books that I've read that immediately come to mind are The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle and Jamesland by Michelle Huneven. I know you've read Jamesland [ed. We led a book club about it way back when], and I'm guessing you'd like books that treat Los Angeles in a similar way. In Jamesland, the "Hollywood" aspect is present but peripheral, which I think is true to the experience of many who live in Los Angeles. The book relies more on the main characters and on the setting, in this case the quiet neighborhoods on the east side of LA. The Tortilla Curtain is similarly character driven, and only a few of the characters have ties to Hollywood. (I remember one character is the guy who does the booming voiceovers for movie previews: "In a world, etc. etc."). The book follows two couples, well-off suburbanites and illegal aliens whose lives intersect in the hills and canyons just up the coast from Santa Monica, which are peppered with mansions and gated communities.

Anybody else got recommendations? Press the comment button.

- C. Max Magee @ 5:53 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Lan Samantha Chang gets the Iowa job

Earlier today it was announced that Lan Samantha Chang has been named the new director of the Iowa Writers Workshop. Here's what my friend in Iowa had to say about the choice:

So, yeah, Sam Chang. The gossip had her picked since last week. The students as a whole, are somewhat disappointed. Ben Marcus was definitely the favorite among everyone...for his exciting workshop and even more exciting craft talk, if not for his reading. We all knew he wouldn't get it though. Too much craziness, perhaps? Sam's workshop, as I reported, was great, and it's my hope that her leadership and fundraising skills match her teaching abilities. Since she's a workshop grad, I don't think much will change around here, which is both good and bad. It would've been nice to get some new blood around here.

Lots of related links can be found at Babies are Fireproof.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:40 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Baseball is Back

Those of you who've read this blog for a while know that during the summer I tend to pen the occasional post about baseball. Feel free to skip them if you like, but I just can't help myself. Now, on with it. In Chicago, I'm finding that the start of baseball season seems to awaken a collective joy across the city. Riding the El on Friday, I was startled by the conductor's gleeful announcement that the slowness of our train was due to the Cubs home opener. I also learned that the Cubs typically eschew night games at Wrigley Field because, essentially, night games would wake up the neighbors. Most modern stadiums are surrounded by moats of asphalt, but ancient Wrigley is nestled into a city block and surrounded by rowhouses and city traffic and streets lined with bars and diners. Driving north on Clark Street, the stadium explodes into view, surrounded on game day by throngs of fans. A whole section of the city turns into a clamoring carnival of baseball ferment. And then, a few blocks beyond, one returns to quiet streets lined with leafy trees and brick three flats. In the past few days I have noted the pleasure with which the Cubs fan declares that the season has returned. In my experience, they don't talk about the team's chances this year or the strength of the bullpen or anything pulled from the sports pages, they talk about how it feels to have baseball back. They tell me that it's so great to see people drinking beer in Cubs gear on their front porches and shouting "hey" to fans walking to the game. But mostly they sort of cock their heads back so as to gather in some springtime sun, still new enough to be a novelty. In Chicago, baseball doesn't just mean baseball, it means that the gloomy, icy, sunless winter is over. No more trudging through the ankle-deep snow in the pre-dawn darkness to the El, and no more returning by the same route - stepping in the same holes my feet made that morning - in darkness to a home whose clanging radiators provide a cozy warmth, which, over time, simply seems to be the temperature they have set for your prison cell. But, if you see Cubs fans marching through Wrigleyville, all that can be put to rest and forgotten until October, a whole baseball season away from now. There are some grizzled Chicago vets who insist to me that we're not out of the woods yet, that April chills and snows are not unheard of, but I ignore them because, well, baseball is here!

(I should note that my already considerable happiness at the return of baseball season has been further enhanced by the book I'm reading right now, a collection of baseball writing by the incomparable Roger Angell called Game Time : A Baseball Companion)

- C. Max Magee @ 4:06 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Michael Chabon news and other weekend bits

• From Michael Chabon's site, an update on his forthcoming novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and a preview of The Best American Short Stories 2005, which Chabon is editing. The inclusion of "at least four" genre stories, including ones by Dennis Lehane and Tom Bissell, will surely rankle literary purists.
• Letters to Frank Conroy from his students
• The AP's books guy, Hillel Italie, profiles FSG and highlights their penchant for publishing award-winning books.

- C. Max Magee @ 5:01 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question: The 37th in a Series (Prater? Violet?)

Linara writes in with a question about Christopher Isherwood's classic, Prater Violet:

What does the title Prater Violet imply? what is Prater Violet?

The Prater is a large public park in Vienna that contains amusement park rides, a planetarium and other attractions. (Learn more about The Prater here) The book Prater Violet is about the filming of a fictional musical of the same name which is set in the Vienna Prater. The novel is a stinging satire of Hollywood which places the vapid melodrama of the musical against the backdrop of the real world tragedy of the encroaching Nazi menace in Austria in the 1930s. As was typical of Isherwood, he based one of the characters in the book, a young screenwriter, on himself. If anyone else knows more about Prater Violet please leave a comment.

- C. Max Magee @ 4:11 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

More Litblog Co-op news

For those interested in the new Litblog Co-op, check out the article (reg. req.) that appears in today's LA Times featuring comments from litbloggers Mark Sarvas, Ed Champion, and MoorishGirl.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:59 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Litblogs Unite

Tired of fighting the good fight alone, pitted against the world, and one another, several of your favorite litblogs are joining forces. The Litblog Co-op...

- C. Max Magee @ 10:01 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Sad day in Iowa

Frank Conroy, longtime director of the Iowa Writers workshop died today after a battle with cancer. Here's the NY Times obit. (via ed)

- C. Max Magee @ 9:48 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Blog Post that Changed the World

In the Guardian, Richard Adams comments on the proliferation of "biographies of things," and the tendency of authors and publishers to assert that these things "changed the world." e.g. Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky.

In a sense, yes, all these things have changed the world, but only in a general sense that everything that exists changes the world.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:31 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Iowa Idol news

The Happy Booker knows that Richard Bausch is leaving Gearge Mason, but is he Iowa-bound? "Not necessarily."

- C. Max Magee @ 8:28 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Looking back on the 2004 National Book Award

Some of you may recall that the 2004 National Book Award caused quite a stir in newspaper book pages as well as on lit blogs last fall. The judges were decried by some for picking five finalists whose similarities - that all five of them were women hailing from NYC - were hard to ignore, and whose lack of name recognition left many perplexed. Others applauded the judges for making a statement, whether they meant to or not, that a lot of good, award-worthy fiction is not getting the recognition it deserves.

With the announcement of the Pulitzer winner on Monday, the four major American fiction prizes (the other two are the National Book Critics Circle Awards and the PEN/Faulkner) have been awarded for 2004 and it's possible to put the controversial NBA picks in perspective. For starters, I think it's quite interesting that not a single NBA finalist was recognized by any of the other prizes. It's possible that there was a backlash against the NBA finalists, but it's more likely that this year the NBA judges simply took a different course than the rest of the literary establishment.

I was especially surprised to discover that Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer and NBCC Awards and finalist for the PEN/Faulkner was in fact eligible for the NBA this year, yet was not deemed worthy of even a finalist spot for that award. Now that all the votes have been tallied, it's clear that the National Book Award judges tried to go in a different direction this year, and no one else followed.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:18 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Saul Bellow dead at 89

One of America's greatest writers has died. He was a three time National Book Award winner and Nobel Laureate. Obit here.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:36 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Book to movie news

Scott Rudin the Hollywood producer known for bringing adaptations of contemporary literature to the silver screen - he was responsible for Wonder Boys and The Hours, for example - may be on his way out at Paramount. This means that several forthcoming literary adaptations could be in jeopardy, including big screen versions of three new books: Ian McEwan's Saturday, Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. Farther along in their development are The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon and, of course, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. Though adaptations can be a risky proposition, I do hope that some of these end up getting made if only to satisfy my curiosity. Here's the story from the Hollywood Reporter.

- C. Max Magee @ 2:52 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Zadie Smith: Fashion Plate

In what must be a first, a literary author is being praised for her fashion sense. Zadie Smith has been named one of Britain's top 10 "fashion icons" by Harpers & Queen magazine. Here's a look at Smith in some of those stylish duds.

- C. Max Magee @ 2:51 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story Contest

Millions contributor Rodger Jacobs is continuing his efforts to get a street in Los Angeles named after F. Scott Fitzgerald. Now, he's put together a short story competition to further commemorate the author. Here's the release:

The film production and web publishing company responsible for the petition drive to name the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Hayworth Avenue in honor of the late F. Scott Fitzgerald has announced a short fiction competition to further commemorate the author on the sixty-fifth anniversary of his passing. At the time of his demise on December 21, 1940, the celebrated author of The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night was living at 1443 North Hayworth Avenue in the home of gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. Rodger Jacobs, President of 8763 Wonderland Ltd., is requesting works of original fiction of no more than four hundred words on the subject of F. Scott Fitzgerald's last days in Hollywood. "The stories can deal with Scott directly or indirectly," says Jacobs, "just as long as they somehow address F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood." Entries will be judged on originality and overall style. Prizes will be announced "sometime in the near future." The deadline for short fiction entries is August 1, 2005. Entries may be e-mailed to fitzgeraldinhollywood@yahoo.com. There is no fee for entrants, though Pay Pal donations are suggested to help defray costs involved in mounting the continuing petition drive. The F. Scott Fitzgerald Memorial Petition can be viewed and electronically signed here.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:56 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Millions Turns Two

March 24, was The Millions' second birthday. In the year since my last "happy birthday" post, blogs have become firmly mainstream. It's become difficult to find a person who asks the once common question, "What's a blog?" The book blog world has become amazingly robust in the last year, meriting frequent mentions in the mainstream media and providing a real alternative to newspaper book coverage that manages, at best, to reach some of the readers some of the time. Based on the many emails I get, book blogs have become a venue of conversation (and a potential outlet for promotion) for authors and publishers. For those who bemoan the stagnation of the literary world - and all of the book bloggers seem to do it from time to time - we are in the midst of a shift, if not yet a revolution, in national (and international) literary discussion, which has migrated from book club meetings and bookstore aisles out into the open. I am regularly delighted when a Millions reader, and book lover, leaves a comment or sends me an email, thus entering the conversation. I also love the loose give and take among the several dozen book blogs and the way themes will propagate across the blog landscape one after another until there is a dense web of conversation floating among us in the ether. The best thing about this is it appears to be just the beginning. I have ten times as many regular visitors as I did at this time a year ago, and new book blogs appear almost weekly it seems, adding further depth to the discourse. When I started, I just figured it might be fun to write about books as a way to make use of all the time I spent surrounded by them at the bookstore. Everything that's happened beyond that has been gravy. Thanks for two great years, Millions readers (and contributors)!

- C. Max Magee @ 10:47 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post