The Amazon Push

A few months ago, I wrote about some of the oddities of Amazon's customer review system. I suggested that certain of Amazon's "Top Reviewers" had become semi-professionalized, and that some five-star customer reviews reach readers the same way reviews in the Times (and on blogs) do: as part of a well-organized press push. A story that appeared in Galleycat last week revealed something surprising (to me anyway): the Amazon push may work in the opposite direction, to keep an unwanted review from surfacing. Apparently, Deborah MacGillivray, a romance novelist, convinced Amazon to expunge the reviews and comments of a reviewer who had been critical of her work.

Again, it appears that Amazon's customer review system is evolving beyond "helpful, tell-it-like-it-is product information" into an extension of the publishing demimonde. This is not to say that there's anything wrong with the American review system, in which publicists send advance copies of books to influential readers in an attempt to get press; it is, rather, to argue that Amazon should take a good hard look at its system. On one hand, it could work harder to protect the disinterestedness of customer reviews (by not kowtowing to authors, for example, or by getting rid of the reviewer rankings). On the other, it might recast the review system as less of an aw-shucks, communitarian forum.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 12:24 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Tuesday on Fourth Avenue: Francisco Goldman, Anne Landsman, and Ceridwen Dovey

Coinciding with the start of the PEN World Voices Festival, Tuesday's installment of the Pacific Standard Fiction Series in Brooklyn features three internationally acclaimed novelists. Francisco Goldman (The Ordinary Seaman), Anne Landsman (The Rowing Lesson), and Ceridwen Dovey (Blood Kin) will read from works set in Guatemala, South Africa, and an unnamed dictatorship. In honor of Mr. Goldman's latest, a work of nonfiction, the theme for the evening is "Art, Politics, and Murder." The event is free. (For more information, see Time Out.)

[As Mr. Goldman has blurbed two of The Millions' favorite books, it seems fitting to offer a bonus link to his fantastic 2003 essay, "In the Shadow of the Patriarch," featuring cameos from Gabriel García Márquez and Alvaro Mutis, as well as early praise for Roberto Bolaño. ¡Buen apetito!]

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 5:46 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Gutenberg Eulogies?

Is there a "crisis in reading?" Last quarter's Barnes & Noble conference call; the well-publicized demise of certain book review supplements and independent bookstores; the gripes of our editor friends; and a whiff of desperation around the marketing of literary fiction (typically referred to as "so tough" or "a hard sell") would seem to confirm the encroachment of electronic reading matter - email, Facebook feeds, blogs - on the territory of print. Many of my students, ten years younger than I am, do not read books for pleasure. Sometimes, they don't even read for school.

On the other hand, a literary author, Jhumpa Lahiri, last week stood athwart the New York Times bestseller list. And huge chain bookstores apparently find it profitable to operate in towns like the one I grew up in, where previously you bought what K-Mart was selling, or you got bupkis.

A recent study conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts raised some alarms. "Fewer than half of all American adults now [read] literature," the NEA reported. But, as many among the commentariat were quick to point out, the NEA was methodologically hamstrung by its insistence on defining literature as fiction and poetry; does our weekly New Yorker binge count for nothing? And so the "Death of Reading" metanarrative receded, for a time, into the murk that birthed it.

Receded, that is, until Ursula K. Le Guin insisted on rousing it, via an essay in the February issue of Harper's Magazine. The thrust of Le Guin's argument was that readers weren't the problem, exactly; that pessimism about reading can be blamed on the conglomerates that have, in the last two decades, swallowed most of New York's most esteemed publishing houses. With its modest margins and arcane payment schedules, book publishing is more a labor of love than a maximizer of shareholder value, Le Guin pointed out; for every Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter, a thousand midlist authors languish in the wings. To the News Corps of the world, she posed the question, "Why don't you just get out of it, dump the ungrateful little pikers, and get on with the real business of business, ruling the world?"

But responses to Le Guin's piece have inadvertently suggested an alternative explanation for the angst about the health of reading: the publishing world's formidable self-regard. The editors whose letters grace Harper's April issue are talented and admirable people (without them, some of my favorite books would not have found me), but none of them seem able to see in Le Guin's essay anything other than a reflection of their own personal accomplishments.

On one hand, Andre Schiffrin, founder of The New Press and a vociferous critic of the publishing conglomerates, pronounces Le Guin "right on." After describing how his quondam employer, Bertelesmann-controlled Random House purged staff and backlists, "leaving only a hollowed-out label that can be affixed to any new book the group acquires," Schiffrin declares, "Literary publishing is insufficiently profitable to meet corporate expectations.... One solution to this problem," he suggests, "is to create not-for-profit firms as we did in starting The New Press."

On the other hand, Lorin Stein, Senior Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, finds Le Guin's essay "so depressing, in its knee-jerk snobbery and thoughtlessness, one hardly knows where to start." Le Guin's heroic readers of yore, he argues, "were part of a mass market, created by 'moneymaking entities' in the business of selling books." Without profit-motivated publishers (such as Holtzbrinck-backed FSG), writing becomes

a pastime for the few who can afford to write for nothing, with no prospect of fame or glory beyond the cozy ring of 'our own people.' Fewer readers means lower stakes, lower standards, and more crap getting passed off as the real thing.

Barbara Epler, Editor-in-Chief of the independent press New Directions, quite naturally defines the stakes more modestly. "Readers will always be here," she writes, agreeing with one of Le Guin's propositions. "That's how writers like W.G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño [both published by New Directions] catch on like wildfire. There have never been so many thriving, struggling, astonishingly nimble small literary presses busy making beautiful books."

And, of course, a reader affiliated with Columbia University sees an industrial strategy to rule the world through publishing - which is even more whimsical in its premises than Mr. Stein's notion that writers under the current dispensation aren't already people who more or less "write for nothing, with no prospect of fame or glory." (Or his parallel conceit that the nature of the book business remains substantially unchanged from the era of the "Ivanhoe-reading cowboy.")

Is there a crisis in reading? Impossible to say, when "our own people," the arbiters of literary culture, decline one of its most valuable functions: self-criticism. To be fair to the editors quoted above, their enthusiasm on behalf of their respective projects is evidence of a laudable commitment to the culture of the book; as Lorin Stein puts it, "This is a business I believe in passionately." And if we are to blame someone for changing the subject from the state of reading to the state of publishing, it should be Le Guin herself. Still, in aggregate, these responses work to confound, rather than to clarify. Their diagnostic power is that of the Rorschach blot.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 10:46 AM ~ comments: 6 ~ Links to this post

 

Curiosities

• David Foster Wallace stranded on a desert island.
• Another reason to love Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley: his refreshingly enthusiastic take on "slacker fiction" and All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen, who, admittedly, "scarcely qualifies as a slacker."
• Paul Auster was a protesting, fence-tearing, rioting crazy '68er, too, it turns out.
• The phenomenal Burkhard Bilger supplements his New Yorker piece on folk-music field recordings with some audio.
• Malcolm Gladwell's seemingly endless string of public appearances continues. This one is, intriguingly, a public "book discussion" with the Washington, D.C. chief of police.
• With some speculating that CBS News is about to close up shop and that Katie Couric is on her way out, rumors are already swirling about the obligatory memoir.
• Jonathan Franzen answers the question "Do you regret your run-in with Oprah?" in a "Big Think" video. Aficionados of Franzen mannerisms may also enjoy the other fifteen or so Franzen videos that Big Think has available.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:29 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Call of the Wild: A Review of Peter Carey's His Illegal Self

A kind of antipodean counterpart to E.L. Doctorow (and now, like Doctorow, a resident of New York), the Australian novelist Peter Carey seems able to do virtually anything on the page. A master of plot, character, setting, phrasing, point-of-view, description, and dialogue (among other things), Carey has published sprawling bildungsromans and swift-moving capers, real travelogues and fake confessions, books for children and books for adults. Perhaps his greatest achievement, The True History of the Kelly Gang, is a Down Under Western filtered through the richly impoverished word-hoard of an uneducated outlaw. Like all of Carey's works, it boasts a narrative brio few writers can sustain.

In his new novel, His Illegal Self, Carey turns (as Doctorow did in Billy Bathgate) to a neglected genre: the boy's adventure story. In trenchant, gorgeous chapters, we follow seven-year-old Che Selkirk, the abandoned son of Sixties radicals, as he goes on the lam with a woman who seems vaguely familiar. Their flight takes them west across America, and eventually to the Australian outback (even as the narrative backtracks to the events that drove them to flee).

Carey is one of contemporary literature's great describers, and the picaresque mode allows him to indulge his lyrical gifts. At Kenoza Lake in upstate New York, we are told, "The geese would be heading up to Canada and the Boeings spinning their white contrails across the cold blue sky - loneliness and hope, expanding like paper flowers in water." Australia, by contrast, is a vision of fecundity:

A big tree had fallen, its clay- and pebble-crusted roots naked in the air like dried-out innards. The trunk, which made a bridge between the flood bank and the low bank, was about as big across as a man is tall and he soon found a place, just below the disturbed earth, where you could jump down onto its broad back, like the back of an elephant or a slippery seal, and he walked along it, with the kitten now meowing softly, down to the place where the timber splintered and smashed and speared into the earth.

Almost Biblically aggregative, such sentences alone might carry us through fifty pages or more. But Carey is after larger game. The novel's driving ambition is the evocation of innocence and experience, of the attachments and eventual heartbreaks that characterize both childhood and the 1960s. Which is to say, His Illegal Self rises and falls on the relationship between Che and Dial (and their relationship with one of the eccentrics they, like Huck and Jim, fall in with).

Carey can deliver a supporting character with Dickensian brilliance; a few lines are sufficient to capture both the comedy and the pathos of Che's Grandma Selkirk, for example, or of his erstwhile neighbor Cameron. ("He sat in ski socks before the electric radiator, spreading the skin condition that he hoped would save him from Vietnam.") Yet the novel's depiction of its two most central people sometimes stumbles. And so our emotional investment in them - and even our understanding of the plot - wavers, as though we are reading by candlelight.

This flickering quality arises from the formal challenge the novelist has set for himself here. Although a few asides lead us to believe that Che, our third-person protagonist, is remembering his childhood from some point in the future, Carey elects to narrate in virtually unbroken "free indirect style," foregoing interpretation by the author. The choice makes aesthetic and dramatic sense - aesthetically, it brings us close to the exotic intellect of the seven-year-old, and dramatically it allows Carey to withhold certain pieces of information without seeming coy.

It also gives Carey license to practice and perfect a technique for which the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky coined the term ostranenie (often translated as "defamiliarization.") Ostranenie involves trying to present a fictional object as it appears to consciousness, rather than trying to explain it for the benefit of the reader. The aim is the (illusory) overthrow of the mediating tyranny of the author. Here, for example, is a hotel, seen through Che's eyes:

Then they walked along green corridors with long tubes of light above, and the sounds of TVs applauding from the rooms. Dial's face was green in the hallway, then dark and shrunken inside the room.

It is defamiliarization that gives these sentences their beauty and their strangeness. In their almost erotic attention to sensory detail, they also capture a quality of consciousness peculiar to children. (A former elementary school teacher, I can testify that it's not uncommon for kids to have 20/10 vision; as noticers, children make Saul Bellow's heroes look positively obtuse.)

Yet an overreliance on defamiliarization is also the novel's chief weakness. We may sense in the passage quoted above that Dial has become momentarily frightening, but can only guess how, or why. Carey's emphasis on the external places us emotionally further away from Che than we ever are from Huck Finn, muddying the stakes of the novel. In a way, the extremes to which Carey pushes ostranenie could be said to proceed from false assumptions about consciousness - to underestimate the degree to which seven-year-olds do interpret and make sense of their worlds. And defamiliarization is like any other figure of speech. To be profligate with it is to deprive it of its power to discriminate among objects in the fictional world.

Then again, Che's failures of apprehension help drive the adventure forward, and when the emotional center of the novel precipitates out of the stream of images, about two-thirds of the way through - when, that is, Che has something to lose - the candle by which we've been reading flares up, and begins to give off a brighter light.

Still, one does wish for some moderation of style of the middle third of the book. However breathtaking the writing, His Illegal Self, falls short of a goal attainable to Peter Carey and to few other novelists: the creation of consciousness. Fans of Carey, of the English declarative sentence, and of books that end with a bang rather than a whimper, are encouraged to pick up His Illegal Self. But they should expect a transcendent amuse-bouche rather than a well-balanced meal - a book more likely to arouse appetites than to slake them.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 5:38 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Prizewinners Revisited

A while back, I put together a post called "The Prizewinners," which asked what books had been decreed by the major book awards to be the "best" books over that period. These awards are arbitrary but just as a certain number of batting titles and MVPs might qualify a baseball player for consideration by the Hall of Fame, so too do awards nudge an author towards the "canon" and secure places on literature class reading lists in perpetuity.

With two and a half years passed since I last performed this exercise, I thought it time to revisit it to see who is now climbing the list of prizewinners.

Here is the methodology I laid out back in 2005:

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

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

bold=winner, **=New to the list since the original "Prizewinners" post

• 11, 2003, The Known World by Edward P. Jones - C, I, N, P
• 9, 2001, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen - C, I, N, P
• 8, 1997, Underworld by Don DeLillio - C, I, N, P
• 7, 2005, The March by E.L. Doctorow - C, N, P **
• 7, 2004, Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst - B, C, W
• 7, 2002, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides - I, N, P
• 7, 2001, Atonement by Ian McEwan - B, N, W
• 7, 1998, The Hours by Michael Cunningham - C, I, P
• 7, 1997, Last Orders by Graham Swift - B, I, W
• 7, 1997, Quarantine by Jim Crace - B, I, W
• 6, 2007, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz - C, P **
• 6, 2005, The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai - B, C **
• 6, 2004, Gilead by Marilynn Robinson - N, P
• 5, 2007, Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson - N, P **
• 5, 2006, The Road by Cormac McCarthy - C, P **
• 5, 2006, The Echo Maker by Richard Powers - N, P **
• 5, 2005, Europe Central by William T. Vollmann - C, N **
• 5, 2005, The Accidental by Ali Smith - B, W **
• 5, 2004, The Master by Colm Toibin - B, I **
• 5, 2003, The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard - I, N
• 5, 2001, True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey - B, I
• 5, 2000, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon - C, P
• 5, 2000, The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood - B, I
• 5, 1999, Waiting by Ha Jin - N, P
• 5, 1999, Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee - B, C
• 5, 1999, Being Dead by Jim Crace - C, W
• 5, 1998, Charming Billy by Alice McDermott - I, N
• 5, 1997, American Pastoral by Philip Roth - C, P
• 5, 1996, Every Man for Himself by Beryl Bainbridge - B, W
• 5, 1996, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser - N, P
• 5, 1995, The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie - B, W
• 5, 1995, The Ghost Road by Pat Barker - B, W
• 5, 1995, Independence Day by Richard Ford - C, P
• 5, 1995, Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth - N, P
• 4, 2005, Veronica by Mary Gaitskill - C, N **
• 4, 2005, Arthur and George by Julian Barnes - B, I **
• 4, 2005, A Long, Long Way by Sebastian Barry - B, I **
• 4, 2005, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - B, C **
• 4, 2005, Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie - I, W **
• 4, 2004, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell - B, C
• 4, 2003, Brick Lane by Monica Ali - B, C
• 4, 2003, Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor - B, I
• 4, 2003, The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut - B, I
• 4, 2003, Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins - N, P
• 4, 2002, Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry - B, I
• 4, 2002, The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor - B, W
• 4, 2001, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry - B, I
• 4, 2001, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett - I, N
• 4, 2001, John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead - N, P
• 4, 2001, Oxygen by Andrew Miller - B, W
• 4, 2000, The Keepers of Truth by Michael Collins - B, I
• 4, 2000, When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro - B, W
• 4, 2000, Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates - N, P
• 4, 1999, Our Fathers by Andrew O'Hagan - B, I
• 4, 1999, Headlong by Michael Frayn - B, W
• 4, 1999, The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin - B, I
• 4, 1997, Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid - C, I
• 4, 1997, Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty - B, W
• 4, 1997, Enduring Love by Ian McEwan - I, W
• 4, 1997, The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick - I, N
• 4, 1996, Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood - B, I
• 4, 1995, In Every Face I Meet by Justin Cartwright - B, W

- C. Max Magee @ 10:25 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

The Way We Read

One of my favorite aspects of working in a bookstore was recommending stock to customers. Since I've kept a tight grip on my "to read" list my entire literate life, I was always puzzled and delighted by these strangers in need of book advice. What great power a bookseller has! It's incredibly gratifying to watch a customer purchase a novel or biography because you convinced them to do so; it's even better when they return to thank you for the recommendation.

I've recently become obsessed with the book choosing rituals of those around me. Are you the type to buy a book recommended by the cashier at your local bookstore? Or maybe you're like my friend Lisa, who falls down the Amazon rabbit hole, one recommendation begetting another. My friend Allison decides on books based on their last word. Seriously. Trusted Millions leader Max has an intense book choosing system known as The Reading Queue. Max's process is impressive, but the lack of choice would feel burdensome to me. I only buy one book at a time because I can't handle the expectation and pressure of so many unread books in my apartment, crying out: Pick me! Pick me! When I purchase something, I read it soon after - I scratch that reading itch.

Three years ago, Patrick wrote two posts (here and here) about his gender equalizing reading experiment, in which he alternated between reading books by men and books by women. The results were positive: the project broadened his reading habits, and he now reads authors of both genders pretty evenly. I haven't done anything so regimented, but his experiment did encourage me to shake up my own reading practices. I now keep statistics of what I've read, so that I can keep an eye on my tendencies, and go against them if I need to.

For instance, I've read 12 books since January 1st, 5 by women and 5 by men, the remaining two being anthologies. On the male-to-female ratio, I'd say things are looking good. So far, I've only read 2 books of nonfiction, but for me, that's an improvement. Last year, my 3 books of nonfiction were all about food or food production, so this year I'm branching out to other topics; in 2008 I've read Bill Buford's Heat (food, again), and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family (not food), and was incredibly moved by the latter. I always read a large number of short story collections, but this year those numbers will decrease because I want to read more novels (to help with writing one). Four months into the year, I've failed on my dead authors quota. So far, I've read only half of Jude the Obscure. Patrick has offered to assassinate Joshua Ferris for me, whose novel Then We Came to the End I'm currently reading, but I think that's a little extreme. I hope to dip into Flaubert and Wharton this summer to make up for this deficiency.

My latest 2008 reading goal is to read more books in translation, something I rarely do. Good thing The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano is waiting in the wings.

What are you reading this year, and why?

- Edan Lepucki @ 6:28 AM ~ comments: 8 ~ Links to this post

 

A List with a Twist

It began at the start of the year with Huck Finn, and Gulliver put in an appearance this week. Along the way, Gatsby and Don Quixote stood on the pedestal and took a bow, their tales championed, their authors heralded.

The Globe and Mail, that venerable institution which, not incidentally, happens to pay my salary, has summoned a panel of experts (not, repeat, NOT including yours truly) to choose 50 books - the finest fifty in literary history - drawn from fiction and non-fiction, and including tomes both classic and modern.

But this isn't just your garden variety list. No sir. For each book chosen, an essay is written by a noteworthy scribe (Alberto Manguel makes a case for Dante's Divine Comedy; Michael Ignatieff for Machiavelli's The Prince).

Each week, one essay is published. There is no order to the publication of the fifty.

We'll check back at the end of the year when the project comes to a close, but in the meantime, here's the latest essay, Victoria Glendinning's case for Swift's Gulliver's Travels. From there, scroll down and look on the left for individual links to each of the other essays published so far.

- Andrew Saikali @ 9:35 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Poetic Doubles: A Review of Jose Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

Zach Brennan is staff writer for two health publications in Washington, D.C.

The storyline is simple: a Portuguese physician and occasional poet, Ricardo Reis, returns to Portugal after sixteen years in Brazil. First he lives in a hotel and then he moves to an apartment. He loves two women, one is a chambermaid and the other is a virgin with a limp arm. The beginning of the Spanish revolution, and rise of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Salazar are set in the background. That's about it for plot.

Jose Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, instead, centers The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis on the memories and tangents of the wandering, flawed, bored Reis and his meditations on art, sexual fantasies, and conversations with the ghost of his dead friend and fellow poet, Fernando Pessoa. The tension between storyline and uninhibited details and thought processes of Reis create questions that will not be answered directly by him or the narrative.

The book begins with a quote from the title character:

"Wise is the man who contents himself with the spectacle of the world." -Ricardo Reis

I thought it was unorthodox to begin a novel with a quote from the title character, so I looked up Reis and found that he was actually a heteronym (a poet develops an imaginary character and personality in order to write in a different style) for the real Fernando Pessoa, an early 20th-century Portuguese poet.

So it's not surprising that the poetic conversations between Reis and Pessoa, now a ghost in Saramago's novel, concentrate on the metaphysical relationships between the living and dead, the artist and his art, and also parallel what could be Saramago's own apprehensions about his creative progeny.

Pessoa says to Reis, his creation, "We mourn the man whom death takes from us, and the loss of his miraculous talent and the grace of his human presence, but only the man do we mourn, for destiny endowed his spirit and creative powers with a mysterious beauty that cannot perish."

The conversations mix seamlessly with Saramago's aphorisms, without paragraph breaks or chapters or standard quotation marks or even line breaks for speaker transitions. The sentence structure is similar to the Chilean author Roberto Bolano's and is easy to wander in and out of like a dream.

Reis, like Bolano, is a wanderer who doesn't seem content trying to describe his reasons for returning to Portugal, nor his relationships with two women, nearly his only contact with the outside world beyond his discussions with Pessoa. This failure of explanation also seems reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose characters don't quite understand or question why they've initially interacted and then fallen in love.

The novel takes patience but rewards careful reading, and can be supplemented with a reading of Pessoa's poems, written as Ricardo Reis, as well as an understanding of Reis' motto:

See life from a distance.
Never question it.
There's nothing it can
Tell you. The answer
Lies beyond the Gods.

- Editor @ 9:23 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Sailing the Seas with Francine Prose: Highlights from the PEN World Voices Schedule

About a month ago, I took the afternoon off and walked down to the Brooklyn cruise-ship terminal. Poets Essayists Novelists (PEN) had issued an open invitation to schmooze aboard the massive Queen Mary 2, in honor of its upcoming World Voices Festival here in New York. I had gone, of course, for the only chance I'll probably ever get to walk around what was once the world's largest cruise ship. And for the free lunch. I am a connoisseur of free lunch. But even if PEN hadn't plied me with champagne and lobster thermidor (and the chance to observe the literary demimonde in what I like to imagine is its natural habitat - Philip Gourevitch chasing his parking validation slip across a windswept parking lot; Dale Peck, the worst tambourine player of his generation, jamming with the house band on "Paperback Writer") I would still be writing this post. Why? Because I love PEN World Voices.

Now in its fourth year, the festival brings together writers from around the world for readings, conversations, panel discussions, and for a chance to meet readers. Unlike certain other jamborees that shall remain nameless, this one works actively to shape American literary tastes, rather than passively reflecting them. In past years I've found myself going to events to see Mark Danner and staying for Alma Guillermoprieta, or going to see Don DeLillo and discovering Tatyana Tolstaya and Alain Mabanckou. If you're in or near New York and you haven't yet been to the World Voices festival, it's well worth checking out. Again, I'm not just saying this because of the goat cheese terrine on a bed of baby field greens.

A complete listing of events can be found at the PEN website. Below are my picks for the most promising-looking events, free except where noted.

Tuesday, April 29

7 p.m.:

Circumference Celebrates Poetry in Translation With Brian Henry, Christina Svendsen, Jeffrey Yang, and special guests @ Housing Works Bookstore Cafe.

Wednesday, April 30

1 p.m.:

Five Years of the PEN Translation Fund: A Celebration With Esther Allen, Barbara Epler, Edwin Frank, Wen Huang, Sarah Khalili, Idra Novey, Christopher Southward, Eliot Weinberger, and others @ Segal Theater, CUNY Graduate Center: 365 Fifth Ave

8 p.m.:

Readings: Public Lives/Private Lives ($15) With Coral Bracho, Peter Esterhazy, Rian Malan, Ian McEwan, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Annie Proulx, Evelyn Schlag, A.B. Yehoshua; introduced by Salman Rushdie @ The Town Hall

Thursday, May 1

2:30 p.m.:

Resonances: Contemporary Writers on the Great Works
With Fatou Diome, Flora Drew, Ma Jian, Antonio Muñoz Molina, and Charles Simic; moderated by Esther Allen @ William and Anita Newman Library, Baruch College

4 p.m.

The Secret Lives of Cities With Yousef Al-Mohaimeed, Juan de Recacoechea, Joshua Furst, and Francisco Goldman; moderated by Matt Weiland @ Instituto Cervantes New York

6 p.m.

Publishers Weekly: On Translation With Morgan Entrekin, Edwin Frank, Halfdan Freihow, and Michael Kruger; moderated by Sara Nelson @ Elebash Recital Hall, CUNY Graduate Center: 365 5th Ave.

7p.m.

Thomas Bernhard and the Art of Failure With Horacio Castellanos Moya, Paul Holdengräber, Fatima Naqvi, and Dale Peck; moderated by Jonathan Taylor @ Austrian Cultural Forum

Friday, May 2

1 p.m.:

Reading the World With Peter Carey, Halfdan Freihow, Janet Malcolm, and Francesc Seres; introduced by Rachel Donadio @ Scandinavia House: 58 Park Ave.

8 p.m.:

Wristcutters: A Film Screening and Q&A with Etgar Keret @ Instituto Cervantes New York

Saturday, May 3

1p.m.:

Epic Journeys With Rabih Alameddine & Aleksandar Hemon @ Elebash Recital Hall, CUNY Graduate Center

4 p.m.:

A Tribute to Robert Walser With Susan Bernofsky, Deborah Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eugenides, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Michael Kruger @ Gilder Lehrman Hall, The Morgan Library & Museum

8 p.m.:

Review of Contemporary Fiction Presents New Catalan Fiction
With Charles Baxter, Josep M. Fonalleras, Merce Ibarz, and Francesc Seres; moderated by Mary Ann Newman @ Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House of NYU

Sunday, May 4

2 p.m.

Conversation: Jeffrey Eugenides & Daniel Kehlmann ($15) @ The New York Public Library, South Court Auditorium

6:30 p.m.

The Third Annual Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture by Umberto Eco ($20) On the Advantages of Fiction for Life and Death
With Umberto Eco & Adam Gopnik; introduced by Francine Prose @ The Great Hall at Cooper Union

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 11:15 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Curiosities

• Both Ed and the Washington Post interview Tobias Wolff on the occasion of the release of his new collection, Our Story Begins.
• Bookride chronicles some of the most unlikely and amazing discoveries in the history of book collecting. In part one, he discusses many runners-up - including "An incredible collection of modern first editions, mostly fine in jackets turned up in the 1980s in a shed in the Australian desert causing dealers to fly in from New York, Berkeley and Santa Barbara." Part two covers the greatest find. It begins "In 1907, during his second expedition to Chinese Central Asia, Sir Aurel Stein, a Hungarian-born British archaeologist, encountered a monk who showed him a hoard of manuscripts preserved in a cave near Dunhuang."
• In BOMB, Zachary Lazar and Christopher Sorrentino discuss Lazar's book Sway. Lazar appeared in our Year in Reading.
• You may have to wait ten years for the rest of it, but Junot Diaz gives readers a sneak peak at his next novel at Omnivoracious.
• Baseball predictions, highly personalized.
• J.K. Rowling, now retired from writing about a boy wizard, has embarked on the next step of her career, protecting her legacy. First up is a lawsuit against a companion book written by a superfan librarian. But, as the Times seems to indicate with its account of the trial, that way madness lies: "The librarian, Steven Jan Vander Ark, had the mild-mannered demeanor of Ron Weasley, and the intelligence, charm - and haircut - of Harry Potter. Even his name sounds like that of a character in one of the books, if preceded by "Lord" or "Master." Although, at 50, he is older than Ms. Rowling, 42, he looked like a schoolboy, with an unlined face and caramel-colored hair parted down the middle."

- Editor @ 6:59 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Gladwell vs Gopnik: the great Canadian debate

The recent debate between Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik has come and gone, and by all accounts, it was an engaging afternoon. In attendance were such Canadian luminaries as Douglas Coupland, former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson, her husband - the writer John Ralston Saul, and my friend Morry.

Held at the University of Toronto's Convocation Hall, the two New Yorker staff writers (and expat Canadians) wittily deconstructed "Canada", reducing it to its fundamentals as they debated the question: Canada: Nation or Notion?

CBC Radio recorded the hour-long debate for its Ideas program. Listen here (mp3).

Macleans magazine, which organized the event, also has video footage of the debate.

- Andrew Saikali @ 10:30 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Tonight on 4th Avenue: Samantha Hunt and Alex Rose

Tonight's installment of the Pacific Standard Fiction Series here in Brooklyn features Samantha Hunt, author of The Invention of Everything Else, and Alex Rose, author of The Musical Illusionist. Both books feature inventors working at the turn of the last century, and so "invention" is the night's theme. Books will be for sale on-site, and drink specials will be chosen by dartboard. The reading starts at 7 p.m. Hope to see you there! (For more information, see Time Out.)

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 9:49 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Staff Picks: Sacks, Wittgenstein, Hendrix

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

The Island Of The Colorblind by Oliver Sacks recommended by Andrew

About fourteen years ago, neurologist and author Oliver Sacks made not one but two separate journeys to Micronesia. Published in 1996, The Island of the Colorblind contains accounts of both journeys. His 1993 visit to the island of Guam took him on an exploration of a disease called lytico-bodig, endemic to the island and which in different manifestations could resemble ALS, Parkinson's, or dementia. An account of this visit, "Cycad Island" forms half of this marvelous book.

A few months later, Sacks was back in Micronesia, this time to the islands of Pohnpei and Pingelap - the latter an atoll on which an astonishing minority of the population is achromatopic. Completely colorblind, achromatopes see the world in various shades of grey, but with an ability to detect differing luminances which are almost invisible to people without this condition. "The Island of the Colorblind" is Sacks' account of his visit.

Part travelogue, part scientific journal, part autobiography, The Island of the Colorblind reveals oceanic islands as completely independent from continental mainland, and from each other. Volcanic islands which rose from the ocean floor, each is insulated, and each has adapted to a unique set of obstacles over countless generations. It's a fascinating read.

Wittgenstein's Poker by David Edmonds and John Eidinow recommended by Timothy

There is great entertainment value in listening to two people engage in a philosophical debate, even if the participants are inebriated university students blathering on for hours. But what happens when the intellectual battle lasts a mere ten minutes between two of the world's most renowned philosophers? That was the scene in Cambridge, England, in 1946, when Ludwig Wittgenstein met Karl Popper for the first time, with Bertrand Russell on hand to witness the heated exchange between two great 20th century thinkers. Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers offers a detailed account of that moment and why so much confusion arose from a discussion about the role language plays in philosophy. While it may seem disproportionate to spend 300 pages to describe an event that lasted a mere ten minutes, authors David Edmonds and John Eidinow, both BBC journalists, offer a dense but readable explanation of the culture at Cambridge University, the biographies of these two great men and how a war-torn Europe factored into the debate.

Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy by Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek recommended by Emre

Nearly fifteen years ago, I trashed all my Bon Jovi tapes, stopped listening to my mother's Beatles records and embarked on my own quest for music. Previously I had been inclined toward Twisted Sisters, Guns N' Roses' "Appetite for Destruction," some classical music, Turkish pop and my mom's '60s folk music. Now, I was discovering Nirvana, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and most importantly Jimi Hendrix. I was obsessed with Hendrix like any adolescent boy who though a Fender Stratocaster was greater than god and could make the mountains tremble. At this point, my most revered possessions were that famous poster of Hendrix conjuring up flames from his burning guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival in '67 and Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy by Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek. Shapiro and Glebbeek's incredibly well-sourced, well-researched book provides an account of this guitar god's life that escapes hero-worship, yet does not shy away from glorifying the man where he merits it. Electric Gypsy remained my bible for a long time, I would whip it out to argue points on who is a better guitar player and cite it religiously. And, 15 years on, I still want to revisit the book, with a 200-page appendix that provides a perplexing chronicle of the equipment Hendrix used, including minute details like what guitar he used on each song (if memory serves me right). There are also great background stories, love stories and drug stories. Not to mention a ton of pictures. If you like Rock 'N Roll - in which case you must, by default, love Hendrix - you are most likely to get a serious thrill from the Electric Gypsy.

- Editor @ 7:49 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

On Enthusiasm and Criticism

The discussion about the future of book criticism can seem like a bubble sometimes, but I was reminded, in A.O. Scott's charming tribute to Roger Ebert in Sunday's New York Times, that book reviewers and their readers should not feel singled out in these challenging times. Scott noted the disappearance of movie critics as well at papers across the country, due to layoffs, buyouts, and cutting costs, adding:

Such attrition is hardly limited to movie reviewers, and it has more to do with the economics of newspapers than with the health of criticism as a cultural undertaking. If you spend time prowling the blogs, you may discover that the problem is not a shortage of criticism but a glut: an endless, sometimes bracing, sometimes vexing barrage of deep polemic, passionate analysis and fierce contention reflecting nearly every possible permutation of taste and sensibility.

I noted a year ago that the this same issue of the "economics of newspapers" had more to do with the demise of newspaper book coverage than anything else:

The important thing to remember, I think, is that the disappearance of book sections isn't a book section problem, it's a newspaper industry problem, and the solution to book section woes will come with the solutions to the larger newspaper industry problems.

Scott also takes umbrage at the notion that Ebert's famous TV career (which first brought him recognition with a show called "Sneak Previews") was somehow damaging to film criticism as a whole:

It seems to me that "Sneak Previews" and its descendants, far from advancing the vulgarization of film criticism, extended its reach and strengthened its essentially democratic character.

The same, perhaps, could be said of the role of personal publishing in film and book criticism which revels in the "essentially democratic character" of these pursuits.

I also noticed at one point in Scott's profile that he describes Ebert as an "enthusiast." This word can be derogatory, comparing the "amateur" critic to the professional one, but Scott uses it in a different sense, making clear a difference in attitudes and aims - enthusiasm versus criticism. This isn't to suggest that an enthusiast blindly loves every film he sees and that the critic is filled with disdain, it merely describes two different approaches, both useful and neither mutually exclusive and each speaking to audiences in certain ways. Part of the tension felt right now, perhaps, is that blogging and the internet have allowed for enthusiasm to encroach upon the terrain of criticism at a time when the arts landscape itself seems to be shrinking. Ebert (and Scott in his praise for him), however, provide a useful reminder that audiences perhaps gravitate most towards unique voices that are able to offer both enthusiasm and criticism rather than attempt to demarcate the boundaries between the two.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:29 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Paper Parody Pokes Fun at the WSJ

Some media pundits suggest that, as the new owner of the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch has set his sights on taking down the New York Times, or at least giving the paper a run for its money. So it was with no doubt some glee that the Times was able to report that the WSJ is a bit more thin skinned than Murdoch would have you believe.

The Times yesterday reported on a parody of the WSJ, My Wall Street Journal, created by Tony Hendra and with contributions from Andy Borowitz, Richard Belzer and Terry Jones. Apparently, the WSJ wasn't too keen on the tabloid format send-up and actually sent people around the city trying to snatch up copies before they landed in the hands of the general public. Or as the Times cheekily put it: "It seems someone at The Wall Street Journal really likes a biting new parody of the paper - likes it enough, in fact, to leave at least one newsstand with no copies remaining for anyone else to buy."

Media spat aside, it is also interesting to see an attempt at a one-off publication like this, particularly in the age of the internet. Fishbowl NY explained the business model:

The goal is to break even and, ideally, make money on the printing. "The business model is pretty simple, Hendra says. "Sell a lot of them." Manhattan Media will be "well into break even territory" if half of the 200,000 available on newsstands are sold (an additional 50,000 will be sold in bookstores). At $3.95 per paper, the company will gain almost $1 million in revenue - an amount Murdoch "loses on the New York Post before lunch," Hendra jokes - if the print run sells out.

They are even available at Amazon, sold as a "Single Issue Magazine."

- C. Max Magee @ 7:01 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

When He Was Good...

New York's NPR affiliate, WNYC, has posted downloadable audio of last weekend's 75th Birthday celebration for Philip Roth. Featured speakers include Jonathan Lethem, Charles D'Ambrosio, and Hermione Lee. Alvin Pepler, unfortunately, had a prior engagement...

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 2:49 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Classroom Dialogue in Iraqi Kurdistan: A Review of Ian Klaus' Elvis Is Titanic

There is a particular conundrum about teaching one's national history abroad - finding the fine line where intellectual honesty and nationalist interest overlap, without compromising one or subverting the other.

Ian Klaus diplomatically negotiates that fine line in Elvis Is Titanic: Classroom Tales From The Other Iraq, his eloquent account of the year he spent in Iraqi Kurdistan, teaching at Salahaddin University in Arbil. The Rhodes scholar, twenty-six when he arrived via Turkey in the spring of 2005, gave lessons in American history and culture to pupils who in turn taught the young American instructor not only about the unfamiliar region that would be his home for a year, but through their classroom dialogue, engaged him in an ongoing exploration of the many contradictions in American domestic and foreign policy. Or perhaps not policy, but rather its often distant cousin: practice.

Walking the students through Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, Klaus elicited, from his perceptive class, questions regarding such contradictions in America. Why, one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, were Americans still lynching each other, wielding a most undemocratic power? And, consequently, would the mid-century U.S. not lose moral authority abroad when such massive inconsistencies continued to exist at home? All of which forced Klaus into self-reflection and ultimately, but not disingenuously, he responded that one might judge a country not by a running total of its flaws, but by how vigorously its citizens struggle against those flaws. That, Klaus offers, without excusing flawed behavior, might be a more meaningful measure of a nation.

In addition to these welcome moments of self-reflection, we learn about the peculiar realities of life in Iraqi Kurdistan. In 1992, for instance, after Saddam Hussein cut the region off from the rest of the country, the UN, via sanctions, wound up cutting it off from the rest of the world.

As to Saddam, Klaus explores the full extent and effect of his brand of totalitarianism on Iraqi Kurdistan: "Dictatorship goes beyond curtailing those freedoms that define liberal democracy," Klaus states, pointing to the Kurds' "utterly disabling distraction" of living next to a tyrant. What, for instance, would a Kurd do when called to fight for Iraq in the war with Iran, potentially having to attack his own people?

On the arts, Klaus discovers a damaged region, attempting, slowly and with minimal success, to assert itself in the post-Saddam era. "Saddam had stifled creativity for so long it could not simply jump-start itself again."

Genial and popular (the hotel gardener offered Klaus sunflower seeds in exchange for a quick, daily lesson in grammar), the young American agreed to give a special lecture on a key figure in America's own artistic output over the past century: Ernest Hemingway. A close examination of the margin notes in a used copy of The Old Man And The Sea tellingly reveals that the previous reader, a Kurd, recognized what many Hemingway readers miss or fail to give him credit for: Hemingway's characters have doubt, resignation and love. There's always a "moment of human frailty."

While nominally teaching American History and English, no subject was off limits. A healthy exchange on the topic of globalization provides insight as to how Klaus' pupils view a considerably more open media (relative to the tight controls under Saddam). While the pupils were nearly unanimous in their praise of openness (and of globalization), Klaus challenged that "individuals are drawn to sites or channels that confirm what they already believe", and as a result, options are rendered somewhat irrelevant if you just seek automatic agreement.

The elephant in the room is of course the American occupation of Iraq. On that subject, Klaus is quite frank: "One of the great failings of the Bush administration was its inability to anticipate the evils and ugliness of which people thrust into a violent legal vacuum are capable... And this applies to both the occupiers and the occupied."

Klaus wrestles with his students' cynicism regarding U.S. motives. But he also discovers that they are equally pessimistic as to their own (i.e. the Kurds') reluctance to fully embrace freedom, their entrenched need to be "ruled."

Freedom was a new thing, but it was not an elixir; it would be what one made of it.

- Andrew Saikali @ 7:40 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

"April is the Cruelest Month..."

Thursday, April 17th, is the first national Poem in Your Pocket Day. To celebrate, carry around one of your favorite poems in - you guessed it - your pocket, and share it with anyone who will listen. You can download and print poems for the occasion at Poets.org. Or, if you're more technologically savvy, simply carry around your iPhone and play for your friends and family a poem from Continental Review, an online magazine which features video readings of poetry. (I highly recommend those by Kiki Petrosino)

At the Vroman's bookstore blog, our very own Patrick Brown is honoring National Poetry Month by posting and discussing a poem a day. So far he's covered, among others, Anne Sexton, Robert Hass, and Edward Hirsch, whose new collection Special Orders, came out in March.

If you need more inspiration to read (and buy!) poetry this April, try this, or this, or this.

- Edan Lepucki @ 11:47 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Amazon Begins Marketing Its Big Potter Purchase

After spending nearly $4 million on a rare piece of Harry Potter ephemera, one of only seven existing handmade copies of J.K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a book of five "wizarding fairy tales," referenced in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the online bookseller has putting its big investment to use. Amazon recently announced a "Beedle the Bard Ballad Writing Contest." Grand Prize winners will go to London "to spend a weekend with the rare and delightful book of fairy tales (security guards included, of course)." All the finalists also snag $1,000 gift certificates.

The Harry Potter series, arguably the most lucrative book franchise in history, ended last summer, but expect to see many such related merchandising efforts in the coming years as Amazon and other booksellers look for ways to continue cashing in on Potter-mania. (Thanks, Laurie)

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

 

Introducing the War Nerd

If there's anything worth valuing after the last eight years, it's straight talk. It turns out to be much rarer than you might think. When you find somebody truly unburdened by social mores or corporate expectations, you realize that all the stuff you thought was straight talk was just doublespeak. I'm no anti-media conspiracy theorist, but you read a column or two by the War Nerd, Gary Brecher, whose first ever collection, The War Nerd, is being put out by Soft Skull, and you realize you've been getting the news with a lot less truth, perspective, and humor.

Now it may seem antithetical to crown Brecher, which after all is a pseudonym, the king of telling it like it is, but when we're talking samizdat, there's value in staying undercover. Brecher's backstory is that he's a schmo in a cubicle in Sacramento pounding away at his data entry gig. He's a self-described friendless, overweight creep who's probably been voted most likely to show up at work and mow everybody down. The upside of this unlikeable persona is that Brecher is a bonafide self-taught expert in military history, whose lifelong bitterness at being the unloved fat kid remains unchecked. He's a War Nerd.

That Brecher's War Nerd ravings appear in Moscow-based expat newspaper is telling, as if mutual incompatibility between Brecher and mainstream media requires that his words appear in what might be considered the diametric opposite of the New York Times or Washington Post. The eXile, an English-language biweekly free newspaper with a misogynistic bent and often vile content, both feeds off of Moscow's corrupt culture and offers a rebuke to it, particularly as Vladimir Putin has strangled the media there over the last several years.

Brecher is by far the best thing on offer in The eXile, though he definitely is likely to offend to a good portion of the public if they read enough of his columns (we suggest the sensitive and politically correct steer clear). His sensibility, that of the basement-dwelling war fanatic, is hard to convey, so I'll just share a choice excerpt from his recent column on Kosovo declaring independence and America's simplistic official response.

I'll get to the battle in a minute--it's a glorious battle and deserves retelling--but first I want to talk about Condi's tantrum over people caring about stuff that happened long ago. I've heard this a lot: "Can't they just get over it?" There's some rule in California, it's like a misdemeanor to care about anything that happened more than a week ago. And Condi, the all-American spinster, picked up that notion and ran with it, because as we all know Condi had to be twice as dull as her rivals. So here's Condi solving the problems of Balkan history in a mall-girl whine: "I mean come ON! 1389? I wasn't even BORN then!"

I can't stop here. Read on:

Well, Condi, have a seat on that mall ottoman, the one between the American Eagle store and the foodcourt, and let Uncle Gary tell you something very important: You see, L'il Condi, some people actually care about stuff that happened a long time ago. Yeah, seriously. Like, for example, me. I care more about one particular day in 1779 than I do about my whole sophomore year in high school. Because on September 23, 1779 a Scottish-American rebel privateer named John Paul Jones maneuvered his soggy old raider, the Bon Homme Richard, next to a much bigger British warship, the Serapis, and lashed the ships together to make sure no quarter could be asked or given. And even though the Brits blew his little ship apart right under him, Jones refused to surrender and scared his Brit counterparts into surrendering themselves.

That day gave me a reason to live. All my sophomore year gave me was the strong impression that people were stupid and nasty. So excuse me, Condi, I'll take 1779. A lot of people will take any year in the past over a lot of years in the present.

And the year 1389, the one you want the Serbs to get over? Well, 1389 means even more to the Serbs than Jones' victory means to me. The battle they fought against the Turks that year is the main plotline in every song and story the Serbs tell to this day. It taught generations of Serb boys what was expected of them, how honorable warriors are supposed to act.

I suspect Condi's other, deeper problem with the Serbs' 1389-ophilia is that the Serbs didn't even win that day. Talk about un-American! They hang around dreaming of this old battle, and it was a defeat? Gawd, get a life!

Well, not everybody wants a life, Condi. There's a lot to be said for glorious death instead. Ever read the Bible, for example? Not that you have to. A lot of the great old European warrior stories are about defeats. The Anglo-Saxons sang about getting stomped by the Vikings at Maldon, and the Franks just couldn't get enough of the Song of Roland, which is a whole epic poem about how Roland, Charlemagne's Custer, lost his whole command. They should do a poster of that battle, with Roland as this Conan-the-Barbarian hero battling to the end, surrounded by hacked Saracens, wearing a t-shirt that says, "It's a Euro thing, you wouldn't understand."

It's international news coverage with a soul and acne, not to mention a deeply contrarian point of view.

If you're a War Nerd fan like I am, you may wonder who Brecher is exactly.

Wikipedia, as of this writing, suggests that he's really John Dolan, an eXile editor. Soft Skull's publisher Richard Nash told me, "I published Mark Ames's [eXile's founding editor] Going Postal and he asked me if I'd be up for doing a War Nerd book and I said hell yeah!" As for the identity of Brecher, Nash said "We decided not to get into the whole Who is Gary Brecher thing, sorry!" As War Nerd fans already know, however, Brecher's murky persona only heightens his outsider genius.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:03 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Survey Says: People Are Reading

Here's news. In a new survey conducted by polling firm Harris, "over one-third of Americans read more than ten books in typical year." As regulars on the literature-is-a-dying-art beat, we know that this flies in the face of countless other surveys which have found that the typical American home contains just six books, all of which are used as doorstops.

To pull a couple such surveys at random from Google, a National Endowment for the Arts study "Reading at Risk" (PDF) found that in 2002 only 56.6% of Americans had read any book at all that year, while the percentage having read a work of "literature" was just 46.7%. An AP-Ipsos poll last year found that one in four hadn't read any books over the prior year (though presumably three out of four had).

To compare apples and apples, Harris finds that 91% of Americans read a book over the last year, though of those, only 27% read "literature."

Can anything be made of these surveys other than that they are a little silly?

- C. Max Magee @ 8:07 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Curiosities

• It's good to see James Wood covering Richard Price in The New Yorker; and even better to hear Price himself on Fresh Air.
• And also from The New Yorker, may we recommend Dan Chiasson's wonderful essay on Frank O'Hara?
• Luc Sante's blog pretty much has to be good.
• Derek, the guy who got both Max and Garth started blogging in the first place, is taking part in a big group blog at the Washington Post covering the Nationals baseball team and its new stadium.
• With features like this reconsideration of The Gnostic Gospels, the New York Sun is quietly building what may be the country's best books section.
• "Growing Up Radical: An Interview with Peter Carey" (via scott)
• "On Magic Feelism" - n+1 considers Kevin Brockmeier's The View from the Seventh Layer
• Boris Kachka profiles Jhumpa Lahiri in New York
• Surreal: "Garfield" minus Garfield. Alternatively, "Garfield" without Garfield's thought bubbles.
• Nobody knows if the Kindle is a hit, AP says, but something is happening.
• A book graveyard in Russia.
• Languagehat's specialty: a thoroughly edifying investigation of a phrase pulled out of thin air.
• American Book Review has developed their own lists of 100 Best Last Lines from Novels (PDF) and 100 Best First Lines from Novels
• The Boston Globe argues that Bringing Down the House, the basis for the new movie 21, is not a work of nonfiction.

- Editor @ 10:17 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Save the Bloggers

We all work very hard at The Millions. But writing about books, despite being, uh, serious business, is not necessarily life threatening. Blogging for the 24/7 news cycle is, apparently.

Sticking with journalism's good-old "three is a trend" praxis and using three bloggers who suffered heart attacks, two of them fatal, the New York Times published a front-page story Sunday, highlighting the strains and risks of strenuous blogging for Web sites like TechCrunch, Gizmodo, and Gawker, among others.

I am beginning to suspect that the Gray Lady is attracted to this hot young thing. A month ago on Sunday the paper published a story about politicos blogging from DC. In what read like a oh-look-at-my-fabulous-blogging-life article, the Times described life in assorted "flophouses" where 20-somethings all cohabitated and blogged together, having parties on Super Tuesday to celebrate - and, of course, write about - the primaries. OK, there's only one flophouse, but the assorted houses do exist.

And while DC bloggers help shape the political landscape, their Wall Street cousins are said to be moving markets, according to this academic study. Tip of the day: following financial blogs and short selling stocks accordingly may make you a quick buck - not a bad deal in this economy.

Alternatively, you can tune in to The Millions, where we shun heart attacks and continue to post at our leisurely - and hopefully satisfactory - pace.

- Emre Peker @ 6:34 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

2008's Pulitzer Winners

The Tournament of Books is a wacky enterprise, but for the second year in a row, it has predicted the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Last year it was Cormac McCarthy's The Road, this year it's Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Here are this year's Pulitzer winners and finalists with excerpts where available:

Fiction

• Winner: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz - Junot Díaz participates in our Year in Reading
• Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson - excerpt, Garth's review
• Shakespeare's Kitchen by Lore Segal

General Nonfiction:

• Winner: The Years of Extermination by Saul Friedlander
• The Cigarette Century by Allan Brandt
• The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross - excerpt

History:

• Winner: What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe
• Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power by Robert Dallek - excerpt
• The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by the late David Halberstam

Biography:

• Winner: Eden's Outcasts by John Matteson
• The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein by Martin Duberman - excerpt
• The Life of Kingsley Amis by Zachary Leader - excerpt

Winners and finalists in other categories are available at the Pulitzer Web site.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:20 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Experiments in Publishing

HarperCollins is trying a new model with an imprint that cuts out author advances in favor of a larger proportion of royalties and eliminates remainders (also known as returns) entirely. The industry has been debating the pros and cons of the move since the Friday announcement. As has been only sparsely discussed in the media, HarperCollins isn't the first to try this business model. Millions contributor Ben profiled MacMillan New Writing last year:

No agents are involved, the publishing house accepts direct submissions, and writers get no advance, but earn 20% royalties.

Sounds good, no? But it's not all upside. Not only are the writers' contracts non-negotiable, but Macmillan receives all subsidiary rights to the book and a first look at the author's second book. Critics have reacted strongly, calling the imprint "literary slave drivers" and "vanity publishers," and indulging in apocalyptic predictions of the end of publishing as we know it.

And for a little more color on "remainders," a much despised element of the book industry, check out a post of mine from several years ago explaining the curious life cycle of the remaindered book.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:06 AM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

The Market Meltdown Explained

Every time the stock market crashes, someone gets famous for having predicted it. Though some will argue that there's always somebody arguing that armageddon is right around the corner (and that even a stopped clock is right twice a day), one of the voices who predicted our current economic crisis - banker and economic historian Charles R. Morris - is getting quite a bit of praise on Wall Street and his recently released book, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash, is selling like hotcakes.

Thanks to our 24-hour news cycle, newsworthy events (9/11, Katrina, elections, the Red Sox winning the World Series, etc.) often spawn books that are rushed into print so that they can be in front of readers before the next headline has taken the spotlight. Morris' book is unique in that it's not a rush job, he began formulating the ideas behind it back in 2005, basing his pessimistic view on the activities of hedge funds and other Wall Street firms. As a recent NPR interview put it, "He ran a company that created the software investment banks and hedge funds use to build these new, exotic credit instruments. And he saw how they used his software, and thought, 'This is crazy,' he says. 'I was sure that people weren't keeping track of the trends so they had proper margins and collateral and so forth.'"

For those interested in the topic, the NPR interview linked above is good, as is The Economist's review, which explains just how far back the roots of the crisis go, in Morris' estimation, "Mr Morris deftly joins the dots between the Keynesian liberalism of the 1960s, the crippling stagflation of the 1970s and the free-market experimentation of the 1980s and 1990s, before entering the world of ultra-cheap money and financial innovation gone mad."

At Foreign Policy Morris has offered up an 8-step explanation for what exactly went wrong and gives some insight into what happens next. Despite some technical terminology, this article should prove quite illuminating for those bewildered by our current economic crisis.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:12 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Amazon and the Future of Retailing

Amazon isn't content just to get your online shopping dollars. Now it wants to travel with you, untethered. Amazon's recently unveiled TextBuyIt lets you buy stuff from the online store with a few keystrokes on any old mobile phone.

The implications here are interesting. Shopping by text message seems clunky, especially in the age of the iPhone, but my guess is that Amazon is trying to build the mobile shopping habit for when everybody has iPhone-caliber browsing abilities at their fingertips. This era likely isn't far off. This means that folks will be able to walk around their local Barnes & Noble or Best Buy, handle the goods, and the