NOTEV on its Way

That would be "Novel of The Elegant Variation" for the uninitiated. Book blogger Mark Sarvas can now be known as novelist Mark Sarvas because he announced today that his book was bought by Bloomsbury and will be out in a year. Mark's been talking about this book since he started his blog, so it's thrilling to see that he's getting it published. Well done.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:17 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Widget Wars: A New Hope - Updated

Publishers want to be the only ones allowed to make digital copies of books, and what does the reading public get for it? Widgets. These self-contained online readers are meant to provide an anywhere-on-the-Web presence for books, especially on blogs and even, god forbid, on MySpace. But before we get to the merits of this initiative, lets look at what we're working with.

Earlier this week, HarperCollins unveiled its "Browse Inside" widget, and Random House followed soon after with its "Browse & Search" widget (announcing it to the world with a somewhat breathless "Breaking News" email alert). Both widgets have two components, a smaller interface that, when clicked, launches a larger digital reader. Here's an example of HarperCollins' widget (click it to launch the reader). And here's Random House's (It's at the right. Once again, click on the widget to launch the reader.) Right now, Random House has more than 5,000 books in the program while HarperCollins has nearly 2,000, though both publishers intend to make more titles available by widget. At a glance, the Random House offering is much nicer to look at, faster to load pages, and offers additional functions like search. So, if you want to know who winds the first round of the "Widget Wars," Random House does.

But who cares. Publishers have exerted a tremendous amount of effort to wrest control of their books from third-party digitizers like Google, and the apparent goal of this effort is to spawn viral campaigns for their books and little more. While somewhat nifty to look at, these widgets offer little more in terms of functionality than the Amazon "Look Inside" feature. The only real innovation is the ability to place these readers on any Web pages. Frankly, however, I fail to see how this serves anyone but the publishers looking to "virally" spread the word about their books.

As a book blogger, I am presumably an ideal candidate to place these widgets all over my Web site, but I have other, better ways to point people to info about books. A link to Amazon (or Powell's) makes it easy for my readers to find out most anything they might want to know about a book, from its physical dimensions, to reviews from critics and readers, to, in many cases, a peek inside the book. It's also important to note that both Amazon and Powell's actually provide an incentive for linking to them, offering a small commission, should site owners decide to take it, for sales that result from click-throughs to their sites. These online bookstores also let the site owner control the interaction, so that appearance of the links and images add to, rather than distract from the content of the site they are on.

These widgets, on the other hand, are akin to putting a big billboard on the side of your house and getting nothing in return.

At the same time, from the perspective of readers, I fail to see usefulness of these widgets. Offering a dozen or so pages is fine. Readers can get a taste of a book if they want, but in this context the widgets again serve as little more than ads. we are meant to stumble across them on blogs or at MySpace and be enticed to make an impulse buy. They do not, however, harness the power of the Web to approximate any sort of useful experience. There's a reason why you don't see any bookstores selling only Random House books or only HarperCollins books. People want access to a bigger chunk of the universe of books when they are researching, browsing, or buying. This is why third parties (book stores) handle the selling, and, they more I think about it, this is why third parties should handle the online experience as well. And right now, Google Book Search does this the best. They have a widget, too, and as you may have realized I'm not a fan of widgets, but at least Google's widget points to a useful service, where readers can discover (and if they want to, buy) books that interest them.

Regardless of what I think, though, the age of the widget is here. Plenty of companies want a piece of our blogs and MySpace pages, and publishers are just jumping on the bandwagon.

Update: I should add that Random House's broader offering, "Insight," is open to other publishers who want to sign on (for a fee, I'm guessing), and extends beyond the widget to potentially partnering with online retailers and making the contents of books accessible to search engines.

Also, as Bookblog.net points out, I missed that Random House lets people allows you to customize the "Buy" button to point to your preferred online bookstore and supports affiliate links. Based on this new info, I think Random House has actually put together a pretty compelling tool. (Though I still won't be likely to use it since I'd rather just point people off my site if they want to peek inside a book.)

- C. Max Magee @ 8:19 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Newspaper Violence

It seems likely to me that a few readers will not get past the introduction of Pete Dexter's new book, a collection of newspaper columns and magazine articles called Paper Trails. In it he 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."

The people who don't appreciate any of this, of course, are probably the same people who wrote to him over the years outraged by the way he treated his wife. For those who get Dexter, however, all of this is brilliant. Dexter is adamantly self-deprecating and willing to step on plenty of toes. He also used thousands of column inches to mercilessly tease his wife, as any reader of this collection will quickly discover. Naturally, to those with a sense of humor, it's clear that Mrs. Dexter is just the foil for his antics.

Though Dexter the newspaperman often comes off as brash and insensitive, compassion is Dexter's most irrepressible quality in this collection of columns. Written primarily for newspapers in Philadelphia and Sacramento, Dexter's columns evince a keen eye for people wronged by the system, and in them he slays corrupt cops, sleazy lawyers, and crooked politicians deftly with his pen. However, and this was a surprise to me, he also devotes plenty of ink to animals, his cats and dogs mostly, but there was also his memorable encounter with a peahen.

Columns like these, 1000-word missives shot out of a cannon, are not seen much these days. Nowadays, local newspaper columnists aren't the advocates they once were, instead getting caught up commenting on whatever was featured on CNN that day or hammering on petty controversies. It seems less likely that Dexter fell prey to those temptations during his newspaper career, and these 82 columns, stripped of their context and years or decades old, are no less affecting for it. It is a book that will make you laugh and cry nearly 82 times over.

The central thread running through the collection, of course, is Dexter himself, sometimes the comic hero, other times carrying the weight of human depravity - the murders, the missing bodies, the broken families, and the drunks - on his shoulders. The urban decay of the 1970s, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, is the backdrop to this book. He wrote about the violent city, and violence would help end his newspaper career when he was beaten nearly to death by a mob in South Philly in 1981. As Pete Hamill explains in the forward to Paper Trails, Dexter had gone that day to make peace with brother of a man who had died in a drug deal and who Dexter had written about, but the man turned on him. Dexter would move on and wrote novels and screenplays - and this collection includes some of Dexter's writing from that era, too - but even if Dexter hadn't achieved his late career success, one suspects he would not have been bitter about it.

Bonus Links: My review of Paris Trout; My review of Train; My review of Brotherly Love; The day I met Dexter.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:45 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Obsession, Obsessively Told: A Review of Tom McCarthy's Remainder

What if... What if you were an anonymous urbanite, going about your daily routine in, say, London, when some indescribable airborne object falls through the nothingness and crash-lands on your head, forever altering your somethingness...

What if that happened, and then it's months later. You've doubled back from the abyss and there you are, at home, relearning everything. Physically you're fine, but there's a gaping hole where your sense of connection used to be. A piece of the puzzle is missing and with it your own sense of reality. You wish you could piece together some sense of your previous self because only then, you think, you'd be complete. Occasionally you brush up against that reality - a scrap of paper, a passing word - something to tease you, to trigger the connection with your past, with your self.

And then the money. You learn that your bank balance has shot through the stratosphere, the result of a settlement from the perpetrators of your condition. And now, as they say, money is no object.

You think long and hard and you decide that the best use for your magical millions is to attempt to regain your reality - to rebuild, in every way, and by any means necessary, your vaguely-remembered life. This is the ultra-high concept of Tom McCarthy's meticulously plotted and crafted Remainder.

A rational search through memory doesn't work so our hero opts for the irrational. A memory shake-up. Everything in his past would have left a mark of some sort - some kind of footprint. So he sets out to trigger these marks randomly. Though consciously implementing a random search cancels out its randomness.

Eventually, he plots the few vague or triggered memories that he has and tries to rebuild his surroundings around them so that every step within this recreated environment would trigger his sense of whole. So he buys an apartment building that resembles the one in his memory, and then the surrounding buildings, alters them to match the half-remembered images in his mind. Then he auditions actors to populate his new/old world. These players would be there for him around the clock to repeatedly enact the triggered memories.

You'd think all of this would be implausible, but the rendering is so painstakingly detailed that every time you think, "but what about...?", you find that McCarthy is one step ahead of you. He's already worked out the logical leaps. And once you wrap your mind around the notion that money can buy any service, somehow the improbable becomes possible.

Our hero isn't the most likable of heroes, and more than once I became frustrated with his obsessive, often cruel, perfectionism. But then I remember that every supporting character is on his payroll. Everyone - his long-suffering facilitators, his "actors" - they all knew what they were getting into, at first at least, and are handsomely compensated.

And just how perfect does his recreated environment need to be? Partial success is abject failure. The point for him is to capture the connection, not merely an acceptable re-enactment. And once captured, it must be repeated. Realness is a state, not an isolated action. To experience it, our narrator must return to it again and again. It is only in the constant repetition of a remembered action that he finds the connection that he seeks.

And until when? As the story progresses, you realize that our hero needs to do more than just re-enact his environment over and over again. He reaches a point in his obsession where he must merge with his action, slow down the motion and be one with his environment, with the increasingly hyper-real experiences that he's manufacturing. Only then will he feel complete.

Along with memory gaps, words and concepts have disappeared from our narrator's verbal toolbox. And so we also get a complete sense of narrative process. Like the Tourette's-affected hero of Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, we're privy to the machinations and linguistic somersaults that our narrator goes through to make himself understood.

A story of obsession, then, obsessively told. A meticulously rendered tale of meticulousness itself. It's hard not to feel simultaneously irritated at both the action and the narrator, and yet utterly compelled to see his obsession through.

- Andrew Saikali @ 6:42 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Assimilation of the Book Blog

I happened to notice recently, in my daily online wanderings, that the nominees have been announced for "The Seventh Annual Weblog Awards." As usual, the organizers have listed a couple dozen categories, and as usual the same handful of blogs, more or less, are in the running. Many of the usual suspects are there, Boing Boing, PostSecret, Dooce, Gizmodo, Instapundit, Daily Kos, Lifehacker, and the rest - blogs that are now big business, some of which are owned by big businesses.

The omission of "literary bloggers" from this long list of nominees naturally seemed glaring to me, having had a front row seat for the last four or so years as an amorphous and very loosely affiliated movement of bloggers has greatly expanded the realm of literary discourse in the U.S. and elsewhere. And though there has sometimes been an unhealthy "us against them" mentality between bloggers and professional critics, in many ways this friction has melted away as critics have become bloggers themselves and as a number of talented bloggers have begun to invade the book pages, providing a pool of talent and a new voice to book review sections that were shrinking and stultified.

This is a big deal. Bloggers have helped create a new literary discourse that benefits readers, writers, and critics - a place where reading and discussing books for pleasure can augment the sometimes joyless drudgery that newspaper criticism has become. (Note how Jerome Weeks, now of book/daddy, jumped from his regular newspaper gig: "So it'll be a relief to read for pleasure again. One reason it's particularly appealing these days is that it's so counter-culture -- so counter to our prevailing techno-bully rapid-response profit-margin mindset.").

Yet we need those sometimes bullying newspapers. As Kassia wrote in a post in the early days of the LBC, "Books don't have endless windows opening for them." This sentiment was echoed in an Orlando Sentinel essay by movie critic Roger Moore late last year: "Reviewers, in general, are canaries in the print journalism coal mine, the first to go. Classical music, books, visual arts and dance are dispensed with, or free-lanced off the bottom-line. That's happened everywhere I've ever worked." But as the big windows close, and criticism sections shrink or disappear, hundreds of smaller windows have opened.

In Kassia's LBC essay, she went on to write, "It's interesting to me that readers are leading the charge to discover and promote new, often overlooked fiction. Traditional avenues of literary coverage are necessarily limited in scope, even with the Internet." I have come to believe, and I hope people agree with me, that book blogging is more than just a hobby. I say this not in a self-promotional or self-aggrandizing way (so many others are better book bloggers than I), but looking at how the public discourse about books has changed over the last few years. So, the truth is, having thought about it, I'm not disappointed that not a single book blog - not even some of the best (TEV, Ed, Bookslut, Conversational Reading... I could go on and on) - was singled out for recognition by the Weblog Awards. Litblogs have somehow gone too far down the path of assimilation to be considered for such distinctions, I think. Book blogs and traditional book criticism have intermingled sufficiently that they are now, except in a few remaining dusty corners, one.

My declaring it doesn't make it so, but perhaps now, the us versus them mentality between the bloggers and the professional critics is mostly behind us. Which is good, because there are so many more books still to write about.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:15 AM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post

 

The Madness Approaches

All sorts of madness is coming in March. Of course, there is the basketball sort, of which it appears my long beleaguered alma mater may finally be taking part (go Wahoos!)

But more cogent to this blog and its readers, the literary world's more refined yet no less raucous brand of madness is on its way, The Morning News 2007 Tournament of Books. If you aren't familiar, here's how it works: the TMN editors pick a bunch of books from the past year or so and align them in a bracket, tournament style. However, instead of having these books hash it out on a basketball court, which wouldn't make much sense, TMN assigns each pair of books to a prominent blogger or reviewer or literary type, who then picks which one goes through to the next round.

Why does TMN do this? Well, tournament commissioner Kevin Guilfoile explains it thusly in this year's introductory essay:

Exchanging emails with the TMN editors after a few glasses of Argentinean Malbec, we each confessed that we're attracted to the sexiness of book awards despite the fact that book awards are also arbitrary and stupid.

And so the Tourney was born. Just like with that other tournament, the brackets aren't out yet, but several candidates have been named, among them a few books that have been reviewed here at The Millions, including Against the Day, which was reviewed by Garth, The Lay of the Land, which was reviewed by Noah, and Kate Atkinson's One Good Turn, which I wrote about a few months back.

Also, at the bottom of that introductory essay, readers can vote to pick which books should be included in the "Readers' Favorites round."

- C. Max Magee @ 6:40 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

War Poetry, Coming to a Theater Near You

On Feb. 9th, the documentary Operation Homecoming: Writing the War in Iraq went into limited release across the U.S. The movie follows the National Endowment of the Art's (NEA) program to help soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan put their experience into words. Although the movie itself has gotten mixed reviews, the program has been considered a great success. After workshops across the nation led by the likes of Vietnam veteran and novelist Tobias Wolff and Tom Clancy, soldiers' writings were collected in an anthology Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families. The book includes short stories, poems, letters and essays, arranged by theme and, unlike the movie, has received a considerable number of accolades.

Brian Turner, whose book Here, Bullet, a collection of poems on the war in Iraq, was reviewed here last week, was a participant in the workshop, and appears in the movie reading his poem "What Every Soldier Should Know." Although I haven't yet had the opportunity to see the movie or pick up a copy Operation Homecoming, I have in the past found great value in the first person accounts of World War II collected by Studs Terkel in his book The Good War, and especially in Haruya Cook's and Theodore Cook's Japan at War (an absolutely stunning accomplishment that is a must read for anyone interested in Japan's part in WWII.) The power of these accounts to educate and inform can't be overestimated and all indications are that Operation Homecoming will be an excellent resource for those interested in another perspective on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

More information on the Operation Homecoming Program is available through the NEA.

Bonus Links: Operation Homecoming mentioned in the New Yorker "War Issue." And a list of World War II non-fiction compiled with help from readers of The Millions.

- Ben Dooley @ 7:46 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

New Books Noted in the New Yorker

Just finished up the recent New Yorker double issue and a couple of items caught my eye. First, I noticed in the capsule book reviews that there is a new book by Andrea Levy out. I had no idea, and it's a shame because a new book by Levy should be big news. Her novel Small Island was one of the best books of the last five years (I read it in 2005.) This new book is called Fruit of the Lemon and it looks once again at Jamaican immigrants in England. While Small Island focused on the World War II era, however, in Fruit of the Lemon the action occurs in the 1970s, though racial tensions between the former colonizers and formerly colonized remain a major theme. This one is going on my list.

Secondly, the New Yorker's master essayist Louis Menand digs into a book I mentioned here a few months back, The Yale Book of Quotations. The more I hear about this book the more I want it. It sounds like one of those essential reference books that is both useful and endlessly entertaining. Here's a tidbit from Menand's review:

It is extremely interesting to know, for instance, that the phrase "Shit happens" was introduced to print by one Connie Eble, in a publication identified as "UNC-CH Slang" (presumably the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), in 1983. "Life's a bitch, and then you die," a closely related reflection, dates from 1982, the year it appeared in the Washington Post. "Been there, done that" entered the public discourse in 1983, via the Union Recorder, a publication out of the University of Sydney. "Get a life": the Washington Post, 1983. (What is it about the nineteen-eighties, anyway?) "Size doesn't matter," a phrase, or at least a hope, that would seem to have been around since the Pleistocene, did not see print until 1989, rather late in the history of the species, when it appeared in the Boston Globe.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:54 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

The Seeds of Conflict: A Review of Guerrillas by Jon Lee Anderson

Jon Lee Anderson is a top-tier foreign correspondent. Writing for the New Yorker, he has spent much of the current decade reporting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike many of his "embedded" colleagues, however, Anderson strays far from the relative safety of American protection into the homes and offices of people on the ground, talking to people from all walks of life, all the way up to heads of state.

But Anderson is at his best when he talks to the little guys who toil in the shadow of war, whether as participants or bystanders. His book Guerrillas is about those little guys. In Guerrillas, Anderson takes an almost anthropological view of five insurgent movements that simmered and raged in far flung corners of the globe: the mujahedin of Afghanistan, the FMLN of El Salvador, the Karen of Burma, the Polisario of Western Sahara, and the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The book covers a three year period, December 1988 to January 1992, that Anderson spent traveling around the world, putting time in with those groups. The book is not divided up by geography, as I had expected it would be, but instead Anderson finds themes that are common among guerrilla movements and spends a chapter on each one, beginning with "Creation Myths" and moving on to "Earning a Living" and "Making War," among others.

His point of view is steadfastly observant and unbiased. He chronicles in the same tone the atrocities committed by insurgents and their oppressors. Anderson's viewpoint is an interesting one, though. He portrays these movements as being in the grip of a sort of madness, for example:

In the refugee camps of Gaza, the desert of Western Sahara, the hills of Chalatenago, and the teak forests of Kawthoolei, revolutions are under way, and the guerrillas dwell in separate realities, parallel to those they are rebelling against.

This madness, brought on by oppression or at the very least the deprivation of life's comforts and a sense of safety, drive whole societies to embrace violence and killing as the only answer.

But Guerrillas is not merely a checklist of battles and conflicts, the book brims with bright characters, from mujahedin commanders in Afghanistan who slyly let their men blare outlawed music to bards among the compas in El Salvador who promote revolution through verse. Though Anderson does not share Ryszard Kapuscinski's tone of wonder and eye for quirky detail when enveloped in a foreign culture, his observations have considerable depth and provide the necessary context to shine a light on these often misunderstood conflicts.

Originally published in 1992, Guerrillas is improved in a 2004 paperback edition by an introduction and an afterword. The introduction dwells mostly on the then burgeoning insurgency in Iraq, drawing parallels to the insurgencies Anderson covered 15 years prior. In his view, what happened in Iraq was utterly predictable when viewed against the backdrops of earlier conflicts. The afterword, meanwhile, gives a "where are they now" update of the five guerrilla movements covered in the book. Some have fizzled or become legitimate political movements, while two have had far reaching consequences. The Palestinian and Israeli conflict has provided an ever worsening backdrop of violence in the region, while the Afgan insurgency against communist invaders metastasized into a haven for al Qaeda, and ultimately changed the world. This last point underscores the importance of Anderson's book. Upon original publication, the book must have seemed like a travelogue of dangerous places, but Anderson was really exploring the seeds of conflict that would grow to a global scale a decade hence.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:57 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question: The 50th in a Series (Hurricane Kids Sequel)

Cheryl writes in with this question:

My 72 year old father's favorite book is The Hurricane Kids on the Lost Islands by Oskar Lebeck and Gaylord DuBois. He read it as a teen. I was able to find it in a used book store a few years ago and gave it to him as a Christmas present. He was very touched. At the end of this book, the authors mention a sequel to the book titled The Hurricane Kids in the Canyon of Cliff Dwellers. I have searched and searched and have never been able to find this book. Was it ever published? If not, does anyone know what happened? I'm just curious. If the book exists... I would love to find it and if it isn't too expensive... I'd like to give it to my Dad.

Unfortunately, it appears as though a sequel to Hurricane Kids never made it. Sometimes referred to as a "King Kong clone" the original Hurricane Kids was an adventure tale from 1941, very much in keeping with the adventure stories and comics of the era. However, in my searches at bookfinder.com (which will almost invariably list any book you might be looking for) and the Library of Congress site the promised sequel never turned up. I also found a reference in William Barton's story "Off on a Starship" from a 2003 science fiction collection to a sequel sending the "Hurricane Kids" to "the Land of the Cave Dwellers," but that title turned out to be a dead end as well.

Still, there may be some other books out there that might interest your father. Oskar Lebeck, though he co-wrote Hurricane Kids, was best known as an editor of comics at Dell in the 1940s and 50s. Prior to that he was a stage designer and book illustrator. He would also write children's books, and co-create a popular science fiction comic called Twin Earths, which surmised an alien planet that orbited opposite ours, always hidden by the sun. DuBois, meanwhile, was first hired by Lebeck at Dell but would go on to become better known as the writer of the Tarzan comic for 25 years. Apparently, the "Hurricane Kids" also appeared as a comic in Dell's magazine Popular Comics; note the mention on this cover from 1941. But what is most likely to interest your father is two other books that Lebeck and DuBois wrote together. I wasn't able to ascertain exactly what these books are about, but the titles certainly speak of more adventure: Stratosphere Jim and His Flying Fortress and Rex, King of the Deep.

Thanks for the question, Cheryl!

- C. Max Magee @ 4:03 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question: The 49th in a Series (A Miniature Story)

Molly writes in with this question:

I'm hoping you remember a short story from the New Yorker published, I think, in 2006. Of course I don't remember the author or title, or the date of publication (spring? fall? no idea). But the story was about a minaturist who worked for a king, he made intricate replicas of the castle with accurate reproductions of drapes, paintings, furniture, etc. An exquisite craftsman, he grew bored and made minatures of his minatures. Eventually he mastered his art when he broke through the barrier of the visible, the ultimate in his craft. By then, he had many apprentices, and he was so beloved that they humored him in what they considered the pursuit of a senile old man. Ring any bells?

The story is called "In the Reign of Harad IV," and it is available on the New Yorker Web site. The story is by Steven Millhauser, and it appeared in the April 10th, 2006 issue. Molly does a good job of describing the story, and I remembered it pretty well, too, I think because it departs from the typical New Yorker story. Unlike the usual realism of New Yorker stories, "The Reign" is characterized by its magical elements and fable-like style. Millhauser is best know for his Pulitzer-winning novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer. Most recently, Millhauser published The King in the Tree in 2003.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:48 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Janet Fitch In Black & White

"Don't read this book if you are depressed. Yikes."--Amazon.com reader review of Paint It Black

Janet Fitch has a new book out, Paint It Black, and so that this dark etching might be properly framed, and hopefully some light then cast in its direction, some background information will prove useful. Fitch's first book, White Oleander, was selected for Oprah's Book Club shortly after it was published in 1999 (a movie followed in 2002.) This after Fitch had labored in relative obscurity for years in her home town, Los Angeles.

Oprah Winfrey, TV's well-read matriarch-cum-regent, has anointed more than a few deserving authors over the years.Jonathan Franzen is a member of some standing, though he has openly discussed the stigma of being a Book Club boy or girl. Oprah has moved mountains by moving Americans to read more, more Faulkner, more Garcia Marquez, more Carol Oates, Steinbeck, and - Sydney Poitier? In any case, Oprah has also moved a few books for hucksters like James Frey, a few more for the good people at, oh, Amazon.com. A writer would be right to wonder about the implications of being in The Club, because they are probably not all as easy to recognize and identify as the sudden affirmative media attention - and the accompanying thunderclap of fall-off-your-chair sales figures. For instance, what if the follow-up to your breakout book just isn't very good? Franzen has had less to say on that subject.

Without discernible irony, Janet Fitch once professed to maintain a shrine to Oprah in her home, something besides a television. And why should she not? After all, Oprah's induction of White Oleander into The Club made Janet Fitch an overnight success, validating years of work. The question is, what reader has a shrine to Janet Fitch, whether the devout Oprah acolyte, or, like me, just someone who picked up White Oleander at the sincere urging of a non-televised friend? And how many of the Fitch faithful will keep the candles burning for her now that Paint It Black is out?

It is hard to imagine that, with Paint It Black, support from the Oprah camp - surely the rock on which Fitch's wing of her publishing house, Little, Brown, rests - will not to some degree erode. More pointedly, Paint It Black will confound the serious reader engaged in a comparison of the book to its predecessor. It's not just that Paint It Black is a weak sophomore effort. It's that what preceded it was of such quality, and soared to such great heights.

White Oleander does run before some powerful winds. It is written with a soulful savagery, the language never failing to try to capture both the broadest sweep of earthly beauty and the innermost essence of personal pain. The narrator, Astrid Magnussen, is fourteen when she begins her journey down a twisted chain of ever more fantastic and frightening L.A.-area foster homes. Astrid's mother, Ingrid, a noted poet, is sent to prison for poisoning a man who was her lover. Yet even in prison, where her notoriety and artistic standing seem only to grow, Ingrid Magnussen maintains a profound, almost malevolent influence over Astrid's life. Central to the book's success is Fitch's inspired evocation of the psychological connection between this mother and daughter, in all its complex, contradictory, and adversarial intensity. So, White Oleander not only floats, it slices over water into which other books sink.

Of course, White Oleander has its little leaks, and its leaks hint at some of the problems that sink its successor. It is too long - too much ballast, as it were, in the form of at times achingly florid, fulsome prose. In this passage, Astrid's voice rings with a concise clarity: "Niki and Yvonne had pierced my ears one day when they were bored. I let them do it. It pleased them to shape me. I'd learned, whatever you hung from my earlobes or put on my back, I was insoluble, like sand in water. Stir me up, I always came to rest on the bottom." But it keeps going, so on the same page: "I had been in foster care almost six years now, I had starved, wept, begged, my body was a battlefield, my spirit scarred and cratered as a city under siege." Fitch trips herself up when she indulges in such passages, running on (literally) with these broadest of brushstrokes. Then, maybe an author deserves to be spared the criticism of reaching a bit too far if she proves, as Janet Fitch has with White Oleander, that she is capable of rendering a nuanced beauty, and a dignity, out of the often pitiable human condition.

Enter Josie Tyrell, protagonist of Paint It Black. She is a humble Bakersfield bean sprout transplanted in the big, bad city. Josie's Harvard rich kid-turned-artist boyfriend, Michael, has a problem: he has just killed himself. Now Josie must struggle to find out who he really was. It's tough. Along the way, Josie forms an unlikely bond with Michael's overbearing, patrician mother, while occasionally navigating her way through the cemetery at Griffith Park, and the wilds of the 1980 L.A. punk scene, as it were, as it was, as it may have been. The book opens with Josie observing how an artist friend of hers, whom she poses for, becomes misty-eyed while listening to a John Lennon album in his studio, Lennon having just been killed. Josie's take: "people were playing the same fucking Beatles songs until you wanted to throw up." This is her disposition before she learns of the death of the love of her own life, but in any case, we're off.

The trade winds that propelled White Oleander to welcoming shores have somehow conflated into a perfect storm of literary peril, and Paint It Black is a balky boat. Like that of the former, the tone of the latter is heavy, yet somehow hollow, so that a passage such as the following: "How right that the body changed over time, becoming a gallery of scars, a canvas of experience, a testament to life and one's capacity to endure it," which so closely echoes the passages from W.O. cited above, here seems so painfully self-conscious, more of a glance behind the curtain than into the heart of the character on the stage. Fitch relies so heavily on this sort of weight-of-the-world internal monologue; it quickly becomes redundant, like slapping a corpse. Part of the comparative problem is the use of third person in Paint It Black, where White Oleander was told in the voice of Astrid Magnussen, who is, after all, a teenager, not to mention an extraordinarily compelling character. Josie Tyrell, not so much, though Fitch seems literally to want to crawl inside her skin, and maybe should have. It's tempting to judge third person narration more of a challenge because, unlike first person where the story is one big stream of monologue, the protagonist's voice does not automatically set the tone. To borrow a hackneyed writer's workshop phrase, the omniscient narrator must rely more on show than tell.

Fitch still shows a lot, a lot of Los Angeles, between Josie's two spheres, the jaded punk-rock bohemia, slowly choking on its own vomit; and the coldly cultured upper-crust, slowly, well, choking on its own vomit. There's vomit and excrement in every corner of this town. Witness this exchange between Josie and an exiled German punk rock hellion, Lola Lola:

"Americans insist on the superior shit, consuming acres of bran cereal, the better to have big attractive ones. Did you know that all the best perfume has a little bit of shit in it?"

Josie shook her head. A little turd floating in the Chanel No. 5.

Still with us? Okay then; moving on.

Fitch does know L.A. and, like a Joan Didion or a Mike Davis with a novelist's elan, she reaches yet again for something lofty: a description of the cultural anthropology of Los Angeles itself. White Oleander accomplished this feat so thoroughly that the book could be required reading in such a course of study. But in Paint It Black, the vision, the spheres, never coalesce into something true, or even plausible. Paint It Black is never quite dull, though, and therein lies perhaps the best evidence that the soulful savagery Fitch conjured in White Oleander still burns.

At bottom, what awaits people who read and enjoyed White Oleander when they pick up Paint It Black is perhaps just a letdown. This idea has something to do with the reason why White Oleander was chosen by Oprah for The Club, now 55 books strong, or thereabouts. The letdown has to do with confronting a character, a young female protagonist, Josie Tyrell, who, though outwardly similar in some ways to Astrid Magnussen, is in fact fundamentally her opposite. There may come a moment when the reader realizes that Josie Tyrell is categorically unstable, the anti-Astrid. The book as farce is an interesting way to read it. And maybe, just maybe, this is where Fitch jumps the mic on what was almost certain to be labeled an Oprah letdown, a sophomore slump, or what have you, this second novel of hers. Perhaps, shrine notwithstanding, Fitch was discerning when it came to confronting the curse of The Club, and set out to create the anti-Oleander, something cunningly irredeemable. Something for critics to crow about - or not, as the unfortunate case may be. And something for Oprah to ignore.

These two books are black and white, and there are exhausted homunculi out there for whom they may someday be read all over.

- Noah Deutsch @ 10:14 AM ~ comments: 7 ~ Links to this post

 

Wednesday Links

From icy Philadelphia, some links to start the day:

• The latest round at the LBC is over, but we've posted our nominees for the next round. Read the books now so you can discuss them with us in a month or so. I was a nominator this round and my pick is The Cottagers by Marshall N. Klimasewiski.
• An Ask Metafilter thread on books by women for men who don't like books by women. Lots of good recommendations... Might do a separate "booklist" post here at some point compiling all those suggestions.
• Dan Wickett's Dzanc Books has two more titles on the way, one by Yannick Murphy who wrote LBC nominee Here They Come and one by Wickett fave Peter Markus (who he mentioned in his 2006 best of here at The Millions.)
• Combining Garfield and reference books seems like a bad idea. Note: A groundbreaking work in that it is the "1st dictionary with attitude" (via)

- C. Max Magee @ 7:23 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Adventures in Publishing: A Field Guide to the North American Family

I'm pleased to announce that Mark Batty Publisher, a New York-based art & design press, will be publishing my first book this spring. Modeled on fin-de-siecle scientific manuals, A Field Guide to the North American Family: An Illustrated Novella presents the story of two families in 63 alphabetized entries: Adolescence, Boredom, Commitment... A lavish, full-color plate will illustrate each entry.

The book itself, in the tradition of Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch and of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, encourages collaborative reading via a system of cross-references. But in discussing the illustrations, MBP and I decided we didn't want the collaboration to end there. So this week, we're launching www.afieldguide.com, an online resource that allows interested artists to contribute digital images to the Field Guide. My dream has always been to have 40-60 photographers represented in the book, each offering their own distinct take on contemporary life.

Every image submitted via the "upload" page will be posted on the website, indexed and cross-referenced by the Field Guide's entry tags. They will remain there in perpetuity, along with contributors' bios and website links - a kind of networked reference work. In March, we'll select 63 images from contributors who've asked to be considered for the print edition, and those will become the images in the book. Each contributor will have a bio in the back of the book, and will receive a contributors' copy.

Writers who publish in literary magazines have long been used to the online submission process, but illustrating a book via internet collaboration is, I think, a relatively new thing. I'm excited to see how it works. If afieldguide.com succeeds, it seems to me, it might open some publishing doors for the explosion of online photographic activity: flickr, photoblogging, etc. And the book promises to be beautifully designed.

The photographic element of the book will only be as strong as the submissions we receive. So I want to take this opportunity to encourage readers of The Millions to explore afieldguide.com, to contribute an image or two, and to spread the word, via email and blog, to artists who might be interested in participating. Cheers.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 7:07 AM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

War Poetry. What is it Good For?

During the Second World War - unquestionably the "decisive, ideological struggle" of its time - the government instituted a draft, income taxes rose as high as 82%, food and luxury goods were rationed, and people further participated in the war effort by buying war bonds and planting victory gardens. What the President has often referred to as the "decisive, ideological struggle of our time," (italics mine) has not inspired in our nation a corresponding spirit of sacrifice or sense of urgency. Even he, the war's greatest supporter, tells us that to do our part, we need only shop and watch the increasingly blood-spattered and heart-rending images of destruction on the nightly news. Explosive violence is met with half-measures, and as Congress continues its endless posturing, Bush soldiers on and Iraq spirals into disaster. If only we could invest as much in this reckless war - to either win it or defeat it - as Brian Turner has in his poetry, we might still see ourselves free of the whole vile mess.

Turner has done his part. After graduating from the University of Oregon with an MFA in poetry, he spent seven years in the U.S. Army, including one year as an infantry leader in Iraq. It was during this time that he composed Here, Bullet, an attempt not only to chronicle his involvement in the war, but also to serve as witness to its human cost. In this, Turner has succeeded as few have. Eschewing the easy route, Turner expands his telling of the war beyond the bounds of his own experience to encompass not only those who fight and die with him, but the lives of average Iraqis and, most strikingly, those he fights against.

Although Turner's views on war in general are made clear in such poems as "Gilgamesh in Fossil Relief" and "Sadiq," where he writes to his fellow soldiers, "it should break your heart to kill," the majority of the book avoids politics, with Turner only betraying his true sentiments in the last few pages, when, observing the aftermath of a bombing, he writes:

The stunned gather body parts from the roadway
to collect in cardboard boxes
which will not be taped and shipped
to the White House lawn, not buried
under the green sod thrown over, box by box
emptied into the rich soil in silence
while a Marine sentry stands guard
at the National Monument, Tomb of the Unknown,
our own land given to these, to say
if this is freedom, then we will share it.

Although Turner understandably felt it necessary to address his feelings on the war, his work pays its greatest dividends when it avoids partisanship. Instead of haranguing the reader, his vivid imagery and often shocking juxtapositions force the reader to come to terms with the war as it is being lived. His eye for telling details is sharp - a mustache and wedding ring lie forlorn on the sidewalk after a roadside bombing, glow in the dark stars on the ceiling of an arms dealer's home - and his descriptions of violence are an integral part of the work, always horrific, sometimes possessing a distressing beauty, never gratuitous.

In the year or so Here, Bullet has been out, although no reviewer has dared question Turner's qualifications, many have been critical of his language, commenting on a tendency towards purple prose and cliched usage. But by reducing the poems to a mere formal exercise, these critics miss the point. It's not Turner's language, as stirring as it often is, that gives his work its power, but his eye for detail and his unwillingness to spare his readers. These aren't the self-indulgent maunderings of a neurasthenic MFA at a bucolic liberal arts college, these are epistles written in blood, and in this context, even the cliches work: the image of sunflowers turning their faces to the dawn as seen through the site of a sniper rifle in "Observation Post #71" or "R&R"'s paean to "beer... so cold it sweats in your hand" closely followed by the seeming non sequitur, "I'm all out of adrenaline, all out of smoking incendiaries." The combination of the familiar and the harrowing catches the reader off-guard, and the impact, as in all the best writing, comes not from form, but truth.

If there is one real complaint to be made about the book, it is that Turner's work borrows heavily from the tradition of the poet/warrior, an archetype that has existed at least since the days of ancient Greece, when the soldier Archilochus wrote:

Some Saian mountaineer
Struts today with my shield.
I threw it down by a bush and ran
When the fighting got hot.
Life seemed somehow more precious.
It was a beautiful shield.
I know where I can buy another
Exactly like it, just as round.

It's difficult to imagine anyone expressing the idea better, and the few weak pieces in the collection, such as "Cole's Guitar," bring nothing new to such commonly rendered themes as camp life. But despite these similarities, Turner takes a risk, unique at least in my reading, by making a genuine attempt to understand the people who he fights for and against. Where many poets have addressed their enemy as a faceless other, acknowledging, at best, the universality of human suffering, Turner has clearly studied Iraq and makes a concerted effort to use what he has learned to draw a clearer picture of the war. Excerpts from the Qur'an and historical references provide some necessary context for the war, which, as he writes in his opening poem "A Soldier's Arabic," "starts where we would end it... an echo of history, recited again." Turner skillfully deploys this knowledge, sharing it with the reader in lessons in the book's introductory poems, then building on those lessons, exposing the reader to the same words and images until what was once unfamiliar resonates deeply. This resonance combines with a (considering the circumstances) remarkable display of imaginative empathy to create Turner's best poems and reaches its culmination in "2,000 lbs" a narrative of a suicide bombing told from the perspectives of Iraqis, American soldiers, and the bomber himself. In fifty to a hundred years, this is the poem that teachers will use to teach the Iraq War, much as Wilfed Owens' poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" is used when discussing the First World War.

So Here, Bullet, a great book. So what? Who wants to read it? Many people complain of "Iraq fatigue," and it is undeniable that the constant grim headlines and footage from the war make even the staunchest supporters (are there any left?) wish it would all just go away. There's already more information available than can be digested, and it's questionable if even the most diligent study will bear fruit. Why, then, should anyone care about one more book in a seemingly endless series devoted to the topic? Why would anyone want to know this war better? The issue, in my opinion, is not attempting to know the war, but attempting to identify with it. Art serves its highest purpose when it helps us to cultivate our sympathies. Because many of us have no personal stake in the war, it's too easy to turn off the television or ignore the headlines, to pretend the war isn't there or to let someone else take responsibility for a mess that isn't "mine" to clean up. But the war goes on, whether we voted for it or not, and everyday it destroys lives. We need to care, and for those of us who can't yet identify with the lives of soldiers and Iraqis dying half a world away, Turner's poetry is more than great literature, it's a revelation.

- Ben Dooley @ 1:41 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Uncle Bob's Van: A Review of Robert Stone's Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties

My father used to tell the story of the summer he spent touring Europe with his Uncle John. For five memorable weeks, he was allowed (or forced, depending on his mood) to ride shotgun in a decrepit VW bus, barnstorming the battlefields of World War II, listening to John - an uncle by marriage, practically a stranger - spin tales as tall as the day was long... never once stopping to pee. Last week, as I raced through Robert Stone's new memoir, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, I found myself recalling the tone with which my dad described that Continental adventure, a kind of affectionate exasperation, or exasperated affection. Revisiting mid-century America in Robert Stone's company, it turns out, is a lot like traveling with a garrulous uncle. One is not always certain one's getting the straight dope, nor is the telling without its longeurs. But one would hate not to have made the trip.

Stone himself returns repeatedly to questions of veracity, and declares himself to be after bigger fish than "just the facts":

So much can be said about the intersections of life and language, the degree to which language can be made to serve the truth. By the truth I mean unresisted insight, which is what gets us by, which makes one person's life and sufferings comprehensible to another. We take an experience, or a character, an event, and so to speak we write a poem about it.

The deepest insights in Prime Green harmonize the sensory impressions of how the world felt then to young Bob Stone, with the hard-won skepticism of a writer many years his senior. In chapters on Ken Kesey and Vietnam and helter-skelter Los Angeles, Stone probes the self-delusions and selfishness that underwrote the Sixties counterculture, while doing honor to its outsized personalities and nobler aspirations.

The story starts not in the Sixties proper, but in 1958, aboard a naval transport ship traversing the globe. We see Robert Stone, fresh out of high school, exploring the shore and dreaming away the days at sea. The beauty of the ocean and its creatures would seem to bespeak the essential benevolence of nature, but racism in South Africa and a bombing campaign in Egypt trumpet the human capacity for ugliness. (Both the Rousseauvian and the Hobbesian notes will crescendo in the decade to come.) Back home in New York, Stone gets married and tries to write. After a stint in New Orleans, he moves to California as a Stegner fellow at Stanford, falls in with a band of proto-hippies led by Ken Kesey, and thus launches headlong into the turbulent waters of the Sixties.

Writing about Kesey, Stone is at his best. The half of Prime Green that deals with Kesey could have been expanded and published on its own, under a separate title - Remembering the Chief. As it is, Stone's account provides a compassionate complement to Tom Wolfe's depiction of the Merry Pranksters in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Stone's love for Kesey is evident, yet a kind of fraternal competitiveness allows him to see the man behind the persona more fully than did Wolfe. We feel the powerful allure of Kesey's charisma, without which the Sixties of pop-cultural memory might not have come into being - the "psychedelic movement," the Grateful Dead, the road to Woodstock. But we also see glimmers of fascism and paranoia around the edges of Kesey's ubermensch antinomianism... the beginning of the road to Altamont. More importantly, we come to understand the long silence that followed Kesey's early burst of literary brilliance.

Stone himself suffered no such silence - after winning the National Book Award for his first novel, AHall of Mirrors, he published six others, as well as a book of short stories. (Larry McMurtry was also part of the prodigious group of Stegner fellows from the early 60s). In his seventh decade, Stone can still hammer out sentences of marvelous felicity and a kind of raffish charm. Moreover, focusing on his late friend and colleague Kesey frees Stone from the burden of writing about himself, which tends to nudge the aforementioned felicity toward glibness. The deceits and adulterous episodes that have marked his remarkable forty-five year marriage, for example, are mentioned almost in passing, tossed off as jokes. And the dark side of the author's hard drug use, like that of free love, is everywhere alluded to but nowhere dramatized. "We had gone to a party in La Honda in 1963 that followed us out the door and into the street and filled the world with funny colors. But the prank was on us." End chapter. (More please! one thinks.)

Apart from the long middle section that lingers on Kesey, Stone is most affecting when exploring his own failures of nerve and/or judgment. In early passages on South Africa and Jim-Crow New Orleans, he laments his own inability to take a public stand against apartheid, and thus illuminates the degree to which institutional racism depends on the silence and complicity of forward-thinking people. A queasy interlude in L.A. finds parents and their small children sharing balloons of nitrous oxide.

When, would you believe, this one little tyke made this snarky face right at me and said ha ha or hee hee or some shit, 'These aren't balloons! They're condoms!' [...] We'd been getting loaded watching small innocent children sucking gas from condoms.

An uproarious chapter recounts Stone's stint writing for a tabloid called "the National Thunder. It was an imitation of the National Enquirer, lacking the delicacy and taste of the original." And a late section on Vietnam, in which Stone excoriates himself for being a tourist in other people's combat zone, hammers home the horrific senselessness of that war. (I regret to say that I've never read anything else by Robert Stone, but I plan to start with Dog Soldiers this summer.)

While providing a showcase for these bravura episodes, Prime Green remains somewhat ramshackle as a memoir. This may befit the anarchic, unfocused nature of the Sixties themselves, but it also speaks to an unsettling trend in the burgeoning confessional market: the memoir-as-article-collection. As with Jonathan Franzen's The Discomfort Zone, substantial chunks of Prime Green were first serialized in magazine form; to make them cohere into a sustained narrative requires a degree of readerly imagination, a filling in of holes.

Read Prime Green as a kind of compilation album, however - a sampler of Robert Stone's range - and a quite different and more satisfying book emerges. In the course of 230 quick pages, we meet Ram Dass and Alger Hiss, undertake adventures in sex, drugs, war, and parenting, and encounter "unresisted insight" and wry humor in almost every paragraph. It's like riding shotgun with Uncle John, except the trip moves faster, and touches down on five continents, and we can climb off this bus whenever we like. Buses, come to think of it, play a special role here. In Robert Stone's nimble hands, Kesey's "Furthur" becomes a metaphor for the Sixties themselves. Whether one was on the bus or off the bus back then, whether or not one had yet been born, one now lives, for better or for worse, in the landscape the counterculture transformed. It was, as Stone puts it, "...a journey of such holiness that being there - mere vulgar location - was instantly beside the point. From the moment the first demented teenager waved a naked farewell as Neal Cassady threw the clutch, everything entered the numinous."

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 11:16 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Food Fight: Anthony Bourdain Slams Rachael Ray

We've talked about Anthony Bourdain here before, I love food, hell, Millions contributor Patrick even has a food blog, so this is fair game. At Michael Ruhlman's blog Bourdain decided to go through the roster of Food Network personalities and either praise them or lambaste them. I have to say, I agree with him on most points (though I can't watch more than 30 seconds of Emeril without my eyes bleeding). Best by far, though, are his comments on Rachael Ray, and just in case you're too lazy to click through to read them, I'll paste them for you here because they are not to be missed:

Complain all you want. It's like railing against the pounding surf. She only grows stronger and more powerful. Her ear-shattering tones louder and louder. We KNOW she can't cook. She shrewdly tells us so. So...what is she selling us? Really? She's selling us satisfaction, the smug reassurance that mediocrity is quite enough. She's a friendly, familiar face who appears regularly on our screens to tell us that "Even your dumb, lazy ass can cook this!" Wallowing in your own crapulence on your Cheeto-littered couch you watch her and think, "Hell...I could do that. I ain't gonna...but I could--if I wanted! Now where's my damn jug a Diet Pepsi?" Where the saintly Julia Child sought to raise expectations, to enlighten us, make us better--teach us--and in fact, did, Rachael uses her strange and terrible powers to narcotize her public with her hypnotic mantra of Yummo and Evoo and Sammys. "You're doing just fine. You don't even have to chop an onion--you can buy it already chopped. Aspire to nothing...Just sit there. Have another Triscuit..Sleep...sleep..."

Damn. (via Black Marks)

Books for Anthony Bourdain fans:

• Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
• No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach
• The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones

Books for Rachael Ray fans:

• Rachael Ray 365: No Repeats--A Year of Deliciously Different Dinners
• Just In Time
• Classic 30-Minute Meals: The All-Occasion Cookbook

- C. Max Magee @ 5:30 PM ~ comments: 6 ~ Links to this post

 

HarperCollins BlogHer Follow Up

Following up on my recent post about HarperCollins teaming with the BlogHer women's blog network, I received from clarifications from HarperCollins on the nature of the arrangement. As I noted, HarperCollins is sponsoring "virtual book tours," making review copies of several books available for bloggers in the network to read and review "and participate in book title discussions on their own blogs and on BlogHer.org."

I had also noted that BlogHer runs an ad network, and said that "it doesn't appear as though HarperCollins will be buying ads through the network, but if that does happen, then this initiative will have crossed a line."

It turns out that I missed the point. The whole thing is an above board ad campaign from HarperCollins with no real editorial involvement in what BlogHer members write or don't write about the books.

HarperCollins wrote me today to say that the arrangement is purely a branded sponsorship. HarperCollins is getting to promote and advertise its books, but it's up to the bloggers decide if they want to discuss the books. BlogHer's editors, meanwhile, have no involvement in the tour in any way, nor do they endorse the selected titles. It was also pointed out to me that the virtual book tour will never appear on the BlogHer home page, which is reserved for editorial content, but it will be promoted in an ad. HarperCollins also stressed to me that BlogHer is very sensitive about its editorial integrity, and both sides see this feature as a branded sponsorship, rather than a stamp of editorial approval from BlogHer on HarperCollins books.

And, now that this has all been cleared up, I think it's a pretty creative way for a publisher to build a presence in the world of blogs. I'm curious to see how successful it turns out to be.

- C. Max Magee @ 5:25 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

A Note on Literary Nonfiction

Though I'm a little late in getting around to it, I wanted note Scott's recent essay on literary nonfiction at Conversational Reading. Inspired by the recent discussion of Ryszard Kapuscinski following his death, Scott highlights three notable practitioners of the form: Lawrence Weschler, Jonathan Raban, and Geoff Dyer. I am a huge fan of literary non-fiction (or long-form journalism), so I enjoyed Scott's in depth look at these three writers.

Those who are interested in this form and who are looking to fill out a "to be read" pile with some literary non-fiction should take a look at couple of fairly comprehensive booklists that have been posted here in the past. The first is a list inspired by Robert Boynton's The New New Journalism a collection of interviews of some of the top names in literary non-fiction. Ours is a companion reading list of the books by the writers featured in Boynton's book. We also have a reading list from a class at NYU taught by Lawrence Weschler. Millions contributor Garth took the class a couple of years ago and jotted down titles and names that the class delved into or just touched upon. It's a terrific resource.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:37 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Literary Magazines: A Roundtable, Part 3

For Part 3 of our Literary Magazines Roundtable, we talked to Christopher D. Salyers, one of the editors of the New York-based SIC. Salyers comes from a design background, and it shows. The first issue of SIC has a beautiful cover, and, better yet, fits in your back pocket for ease of transport.

The Millions: Why SIC? Why now?

Christopher D. Salyers: Author (and Fiction Magazine head) Mark Mirsky [...] was the harsh catalyst, that unsure voice questioning why America's current state of fiction wasn't more of a blood-bathed battleground. Or that's how I took it, at least. Through MFA programs (and the publishing community) we run into other excellent writers.

TM: How do you distinguish yourself in a crowded marketplace?

CDS: New York City needs more of an outlet, and not just any outlet: SIC brands itself as a unified vision, style, and moniker. While our stories won't read as editorially unified as say, a journal like Noon will to the average reader, SIC is aware of how it operates and milks it: we're the mix tape of literary journals, collecting voices from every single angle of the spectrum and meshing it all into one solid road trip... And we're pocket size. You gotta love the pocket size.

TM: What are your wildest dreams for your publication?

CDS: It would be great if we could increase circulation and print run. Currently we're sold in NYC, Baltimore, Chicago, Montreal, Paris and San Francisco. Word-of-mouth has got us to where we are at the moment. The more people read, the more great writers learn of us and the more great fiction we print. Everything's connected.

TM: Whom do you consider your models of lit-mag excellence?

CD: Noon is great, though it would benefit from a little more editorial eclecticism. A Public Space is a hot one right now, too.

TM: How did your first issue come together?

CDS: Thousands of submissions via Craigslist posts, our friends and acquaintances. Not to mention the elbow grease. We literally got together once a week, reading submission after submission. I don't even want to think about it! But it's great to find those stories that stand out, that grab you by the balls or heart. I also design the thing, and that takes time as well. It's a lot of work!

TM: (If you care to delve into this) What are the economics of literary magazines? How do you support the endeavor?

CDS: It's all about grant money, private funds, and issue sales. Fortunately I don't deal directly with the money for SIC, but I'm aware of its heartache. You'd be surprised how easily journals and magazines fold; it's such a fucking tightrope these days. In the future we hope to become a NFP enterprise, to keep it smooth.

TM: Who subscribes to literary magazines, and who reads them? What responsibilities, if any, do the writing community and the publishing industry have toward little magazines?

CDS: To answer the first question: people who write more than people who read [...] though I'd like to think that heavy readers dip into journals just as often as they dip into novels/novellas. Or they should, at least. There's so much great stuff out there that won't ever get picked up by large houses like Knopf and Penguin. Journals are your only link to what's "underground" in fiction. And for the second question: I'd say the only responsibility anyone should have is to pick us up and give us a try.

(Again, we urge readers of The Millions to voice their opinions on the state of the literary magazine by using the comment button below. Perhaps we'll create an honor roll of the best literary magazines out there, or something.)

Parts 1 & 2

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 1:38 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

HarperCollins Teams with Women's Blog Network

HarperCollins, which has been more and more active in many facets of the online world, is rolling out a "virtual book tour" with the BlogHer Advertising Network and Community. With hundreds of blogs in the network, BlogHer represents an ample crop of writers and readers for HarperCollins, which is spurred on by BlogHer's data that among women who read blogs in the network "32 percent spent at least $100 purchasing books online in the past six months." The idea is that HarperCollins will make review copies of several books available for bloggers in the network to read and review "and participate in book title discussions on their own blogs and on BlogHer.org."

It all seems like a perfectly reasonable plan to build an Oprah-like grass roots phenomenon, but I have two reservations. First, Oprah doesn't have a special arrangement with any specific publisher, and while there is likely some corporate horse-trading behind the scenes when she makes her picks, at least we know she isn't limited to only talking about selections from a small subset of all the books out there. Secondly, BlogHer operates an ad network. From the press release, it doesn't appear as though HarperCollins will be buying ads through the network, but if that does happen, then this initiative will have crossed a line. Obviously, I have no problem with advertising on blogs and/or getting review copies from publishers, but advertising shouldn't be explicitly tied to an initiative like this.

Update: Some of the concerns I raised have been addressed in a followup post.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:16 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Book Critic Brouhaha

The NBCC hand wringing over the nomination of Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept in the Criticism category for the NBCC Awards has jumped from the blogs to the New York Times.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:59 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Literary Magazines: A Roundtable, Part 2

Next up in our series of interviews with lit-mag editors is Yasmine Alwan, co-founder of the Brooklyn-based Tantalum. Yasmine, an old colleague of mine from NYU, is herself a talented fabulist whose work has appeared in such well-regarded publications as NOON. After earning her M.F.A., Yasmine started Tantalum with her pal Cynthia Nelson. The first issue, with a handsome letter-pressed cover from Red Hook's Ugly Duckling Presse, features experimental prose with an emphasis on language, in the great tradition of Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett. Contributors include Leslie Scalapino, Sara Marcus, and Martha Ronk.

The Millions: What possessed you to start your own literary magazine? How did the first issue come together?

Yasmine Alwan: The why right now is entirely personal. I had never thought to start a magazine - in fact I thought quite the opposite, "why should I when there are so many out there" - when a professor of mine, Lytle Shaw, talked about what it had meant for him to start a magazine (which was Shark) and how it had opened a new [...] space to write into, from, toward (these are my words; he had much better ones). Also, I remember once Robert Fitterman answering a question about the danger of a small or "exclusive" readership, and he said something to the effect of how he wasn't necessarily worried about his readership, because he felt like it was always being "made" by his work and surrounding people's work. That struck me as a profound point, relievedly moving against what I hear some writers talking about, worrying about their work complying to market dictates and wanting market attentions. [...] The idea of making an audience or rather a community to write to and with was striking, thrilling.

TM: How does Tantalum distinguish itself in a crowded marketplace?

YA: There's such a multiplicity of prose writing out there and what can occur in the name of prose seems to me to be limitless. "Fiction," even, is a word that makes me feel restless because it is burdened by familiar codes of representation of reality, time, character etc. It seems to me that I can turn in many directions and get a confirmation on my expectations, but that is exactly what I don't want in terms of prose - that satisfaction upon "delivery" of the familiar. I would rather read something that asks me to take it apart or for which I have to take myself apart a little bit. You could also say I am engaged by prose that is highly sensitive to language or organized around it, although the fictions in Tantalum are driven by a wider range of engagements (image, sound, concepts, appropriations, character, metafictional thoughts, etc.). When soliciting, we tried to leave the map open.

TM: How do you support the endeavor, economically?

YA: I just paid for it myself. I hope to gain access to grant money for the next round. [...] Although my starting Tantalum right now is just idiosyncratic timing, there is a wide upwelling of DIY publishing happening these days. I think it born out of the shifts in megapublishing and the ways in which some people are shrugging off the expectation of publishing via traditional means. It's really quite exciting.

(Our literary magazine roundtable concludes on Friday, with an interview with one of the editors of [sic]. We encourage our readers to leave comments below on the state of the literary magazine. Do you read lit-mags? Why or why not? What do you look for in a litmag? What are your favorites? And so on...)

Parts 1 & 3

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 8:31 AM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Pynchon Wikified: A Reader's Aid

I wanted to follow up on my attempt to review Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day by sharing a few resources I found helpful. After reading the book, which took 23 days, I barnstormed through a lot of reviews, many of them silly. A couple I found insightful are available in complete versions online. Luc Sante's "Inside the Time Machine" appeared in The New York Review of Books. Michael Wood's "Humming Along" appeared in The London Review of Books. Each of these reviews, in its own way, reaffirms the valuable role the long-form book-review plays, and speaks to the ongoing relevance of publications like the NYRB, the LRB, The Believer, and Bookforum.

Even more useful, for me, was a recent phenomenon: the wiki. Though I still tend to privilege the O.E.D. over AskJeeves, I can't think of an instance where the Internet has proven more congenial to literary study than it has in the case of the Pynchon wiki. Where readers of Joyce and Nabokov had to wait years for annotations of Ulysses and Lolita to appear, AtD annotations have appeared online at roughly the speed it takes to read the book. Annotations contributed collectively, and subject to collective revisions, help correct for ideological bias and factual error.

Though obsessive decoding of texts can sometimes obscure the richer pleasures of a difficult novel, the wiki, because it's a more casual reading experience than a thick volume of annotations, seems to make frivolous annotation more transparently frivolous. At the same time, it makes it easy for a novel reader to pause, retrieve crucial information, and then return to the book. I can only hope wikis for books like The Recognitions, The Tunnel, and Infinite Jest are forthcoming.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 5:52 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Literary Magazines: A Roundtable, Part I

Aside from the money, the fame, and the groupies, publishing a literary magazine these days can be a thankless task. There are hundreds - maybe thousands - of good writers out there, but there are almost as many publications, and few of them pay professional rates. Print is expensive, and it can be difficult to develop a following outside the circle of writers who want to be published in your pages. Money is tight and hours long, as submissions flow in like water. Developing a distinctive and relevant sensibility is crucial.

This week, The Millions interviews the editors of three quite unique new literary magazines: Canteen, [sic], and Tantalum. We also invite our readers to offer their comments on the state of the lit-mag union: How often do you read literary journals? What do you look for? What are the standout publications? What would it take to get you to subscribe?

First up is Sean Finney, editor of the full-color, bicoastal literary feast Canteen. The first issue, featuring work by Andrew Sean Greer, Julie Orringer, David Shulman, and (full disclosure) yours truly, debuts this spring.

The Millions: How do you distinguish yourself in a crowded marketplace?

Sean Finney: There are, despite what many say, no shortage of good stories, poems, and articles. Each year there are more and each year it becomes easier to access them. Supply outpaces demand; thus indifference. But demand is growing for [publications] who sell not the literary and artistic product, but artistic participation. Create an M.F.A.-conferring magazine and it would sell. Canteen can't do that, so we try to lift the curtain on process in kinky ways that get [writers] excited. We also hope the vehicle itself is distinguished: a carefully designed print magazine with quality paper, binding, printing, and samples of artistic product too. Process has to get you somewhere, after all.

TM: What are your wildest dreams for your publication? What do you need to realize them?

SF: Raging parties with famous writers and libidinous sophisticates who buy tons of copies and make everyone at Canteen really popular. To achieve this we probably need a really hot band, preferably one you can talk over.

TM: How did your first issue come together?

SF: There's a now very popular and well reviewed San Francisco restaurant called Canteen. My friend Dennis Leary is the chef and owner who knew he had the skills to create a foodie pilgrimage, but he didn't dedicate the temple just to repast, so we created a high-powered literary salon over dinner and brief "intercourse" readings. The press liked it too. Stephen Pierson, our publisher, saw the germ of a magazine in the dinners. And here we are, named after a San Francisco restaurant and published in New York.

TM: How do you support the endeavor economically?

SF: We currently support the endeavor entirely through vice, the game of poker in particular. Our publisher is a fulltime online shark.

TM: What responsibilities, if any, do the writing community and the publishing industry have toward little magazines?

SF: The same responsibility that successful technologists and investors have towards high-tech incubators. That's an argument. But are little magazines investments for anyone in the established industry, or just responsibilities? Aren't they supposed to do the work of agents for free?

Parts 2 & 3

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 7:52 PM ~ comments: 6 ~ Links to this post

 

Monday Links

We've got some great stuff in the pipeline at The Millions, starting with a lierary magazine roundtable (part one of which will be up shortly), but before we get to that a couple of quick links:

• This week at the LBC we're discussing our winter 2007 Read This! selection, Wizard of the Crow by Ngugl wa Thiong'o. A roundtable discussion kicks off a week that will include a contest, an interview, a podcast, and more.
• Speaking of the LBC, a past selection, and one of my favorites from among the books we've read, Firmin by Sam Savage, has been named a finalist for the Barnes & Noble 2006 Discover Great New Writers Awards. That little rat just keeps on trucking along.
• And finally, Robert Birnbaum sits down with Richard Ford (again) for another great interview. Thanks to Millions contributor Noah, we had some great coverage of Ford's most recent book, The Lay of the Land, in November, including a review, a reader question, and a (very brief) interview.

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- C. Max Magee @ 7:14 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The World of Tomorrow, Today: An Attempt at a Review of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day

Let us for a moment, reader, move beyond the dreary cacophony of snap-judgments - the mindless hatchetwork of critics who abandoned the novel halfway through, the predictable enthusiasms of the Elect, the hedged bets of those who managed to finish just in time for deadline. Let us distance ourselves from the welter of conflicting reports, reviews, and rumors swirling in the cultural Aether. Let us imagine for ourselves a time-machine; let us step inside; let us hurtle 100 years into the future and look back on the unexplained event that was Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. Let us, that is, undertake a project not unlike the project of the novel itself. Reader, let us try to make it mean something.

1.

The year is 2107. Thomas Pynchon is, not surprisingly, well-represented on bookshelves. Still in print, still read. Thanks in no small part to the late-period efflorescence of Mason & Dixon, (and of course the extraordinary seventh and eighth novels), the man is now recognized as one of the 20 or 30 Great American Voices: tough and tender, erudite and foolish, and oddly, it turns out, elegiac. Witness, for example, Against the Day's aging matriarch Mayva Traverse, here in the employ of the Oust family:

Too fast almost to register, the years had taken Mayva from a high-strung girl with foreign-looking eyes to this calm dumpling of a housekeeper in a prosperous home that might as well be halfway back east, set upwind from the sparks and soot of the trains, where she kept portraits and knickknacks dusted, knew how much everything cost, what time to the minute each of the Oust kids would wake (all but the one maybe, the one with the destiny), and where each of the family was likely to've gone when they weren't in the house...her once spellbinding eyes brought back, as field-creatures are re-enfolded at the end of day, into orbits grown pillow-soft, on watch within, guarding a thousand secrets of these old Territories never set down, and of how inevitable, right from the minute the first easterners showed up, would be the betrayal of everyday life out here, so hard-won, into the suburban penance the newcomers had long acceded to. The children in her care never saw past the kind and forever bustling old gal, never imagined her back in Leadville raising all species of hell...

Were B.R. Meyers still living, he would doubtless be able to pick this apart: there's a mixed metaphor, the imprecision of "re-enfolded," a dangling modifier or two... But what did B.R. Meyers make of Melville? Damn it, Pynchon's is great American prose, its looseness and openness to error being what makes it American as well as great. And if Pynchon's bardic breath remained as long as it was in Gravity's Rainbow, his syntax, we now know, gradually grew clearer. Notice the ellipsis in the middle of that first sentence, giving the reader room to rest. Notice the way the eyes are then "brought back" syntactically as well as figuratively. Notice the range of the diction, from the sublime to the vernacular. Notice what Anthony Lane, way back in the year 1997, called "a resolute refusal to turn pretty." In the late works, as in the early ones, Pynchon flirted with portentousness, but some inner gravity kept his language rooted.

From 2107, it is likewise easy to see that Pynchon's accomplishment did not end with his sentences and paragraphs and novels, but extended to the aesthetic, cultural, and political possibilities they disclosed for several generations of artists. Here, on our adamantium coffee table, lies a moldering copy of Bookforum's 2006 festchrift for Gravity's Rainbow... and a dusty Tin House Books edition of Zak Smith's illustrations. And across the room, on a glow-in-the-dark desk, are stacks of novels by the writers Pynchon transformed. Without Gravity's Rainbow, no Infinite Jest. No White Teeth. No Mao II. (Or fill the time capsule with your own favorite "hysterical realists" (to excavate an old James Wood formulation.)) Not since Yoknapatawpha paved the way for Macondo did an author, for better or worse, open up so much territory for his peers.

In the context of these achievements, local and global - and in the context of Pynchon's public invisibility (itself possibility-disclosing) - the appearance of each novel generated extraordinary expectations. Mason & Dixon, published exactly 110 years ago, raised the bar higher, proving that Pynchon was capable of equaling if not surpassing his own masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow. Then Against the Day arrived, a seeming aberration. No one could agree. It was either his best novel or his worst. It was neither. It was both, sometimes on the same page. In a career full of oddities, it was itself an oddity (which maybe made it, via the kind of Rube-Goldberg dialectic Pynchon always excelled in, his most representative novel.)

2.

The plot, such as it is, concerns three groups of characters entangled both by accidents of circumstance and by the common denominator of innocence lost. It is Hamlet by way of Jules Verne, B. Traven, and Graham Greene... a revenge delayed for no apparent reason, in this case for 900 pages.

First, we have the Traverses, a rough-and-tumble family in the mining country of Colorado, circa 1890. The murder of the patriarch, terrorist-cum-freedom fighter Webb Traverse, presents his offspring - hedonistic Reef, dutiful Frank, brainy Kit, and