Harry Potter Mania Flickers On

J.K. Rowling's slow, inexorable slide out of retirement continues. As we noted a couple of months ago, "For someone who's not writing any more books about Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling sure is doing a lot of dabbling."

Earlier this year, we wrote about one of Rowling's post-retirement dabblings, the production of seven handmade copies of Beedle the Bard, a book of "wizarding fairy tales" referred to in the Harry Potter series. Amazon spent $4 million on a copy, and then used it to market a writing contest. Part of the prize, incidentally, was the opportunity "to spend a weekend with the rare and delightful book of fairy tales (security guards included, of course)."

Now that prize doesn't look quite so exclusive, as Bloomsbury and Scholastic have made an edition the book available for the masses for just $7.59 and arriving in early December, just in time for the holidays. Amazon is going one further, offering up to 100,000 pricier facsimile "collector's editions," with "a reproduction of J.K. Rowling's handwritten introduction, metalwork and clasp, and replica gemstones," as well as various other accouterments.

All net proceeds go to a charity co-founded by Rowling.

- C. Max Magee @ 5:38 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

A Booker's Dozen: The 2008 Booker Longlist

So long as the Booker Prize keeps longlisting 13 titles, I'm going to keep making that joke. The Booker season is underway with the unveiling of 2008's longlist. As is often the case, it is a mix of exciting new names, relative unknowns and old standbys. In the later category is Salman Rushdie who, as the recent winner of the Best of the Booker, was essentially named the quintessential Booker author and would have thus seemed an odd omission, despite the tepid notices The Enchantress of Florence has received.

Perhaps worthy of more excitement is Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, which was the subject of dueling reviews from Garth and Kevin here at The Millions. The active commenting on Kevin's review in particular underlines the enthusiasm that this novel has generated. Tom Rob Smith's Child 44 has also generated quite a bit of enthusiasm this year. In December, Dan Kois of the New York magazine blog Vulture featured it in a contribution to our Year in Reading series. As always, the bookmakers have their own favorites: "Bookmakers William Hill have put Mr O'Neill as favourite to win the prestigious prize at 3/1, while Sir Salman has odds of 4/1."

All the Booker Prize longlisters are below (with excerpts where available):

• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (excerpt)
• Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold
• The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry (excerpt)
• From A to X by John Berger
• The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser (excerpt)
• Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh (excerpt)
• The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant (excerpt pdf)
• A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif (excerpt)
• The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher
• Netherland by Joseph O'Neill (excerpt)
• The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie (excerpt)
• Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith (excerpt)
• A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz (excerpt)

- C. Max Magee @ 8:27 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

NYRB Classics: Not Just for Grownups

We're not shy about our praise for NYRB Classics. Their volumes are smartly edited and well designed and quite a few favorite books of The Millions contributors - The Dud Avocado, Wheat That Springeth Green, and, of course, The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll - were first encountered in their NYRB Classics incarnations.

While I had always planned on passing NYRB Classics books down to my progeny one day, I've just discovered that I may get to do that sooner than I had anticipated. NYRB Classics has a line of children's books, the NYR Children's Collection.

One of the latest to come out under the imprint is James Thurber's The 13 Clocks with an introduction by Neil Gaiman and illustrations by Marc Simont. The new book provide fodder for Sonja Bolle's sentimental (in a good way) essay in the LA Times.

The 13 Clocks is the first book I remember loving, and it is one of the few books I managed to wrest from my family's library and preserve through all the mundane disasters of my life. Everything about it is dear to me: The texture of the cover, the cloth spine now in shreds, the gorgeous endpapers with the Duke's shadowy castle on the hill overlooking the sunlit town.

Young readers - and the older readers who are trying to get young readers to read good books - will likely find many more such discoveries among the NYR Children's Collection.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:44 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

The Quarterly Conversation Gets A New Look

The guest post comes to us from Scott Esposito. Scott is the editor of The Quarterly Conversation and the host of the literary blog Conversational Reading. His writing on books has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Chattahoochee Review, and the Rain Taxi Review of Books, among others.

The day a website redesigns itself, it's an admission of something. Exactly what, I think depends on the site itself, but inevitably it's a statement, a statement that is the product of a lot of thought. With all the work involved in a redesign, nobody would undertake one without good reason.

We've just redesigned The Quarterly Conversation, and I think I know what we're saying. One of the exciting things about this redesign is that we have an RSS feed, which now enables us to publish reviews and interviews in between issues. To kick things off, we just published a review of Monsieur by Jean-Philippe Toussaint and a review of Tom McCarthy's Tintin and the Secret of Literature. Later, in August, we'll be publishing an interview with a very innovative, fun author that promises to be quite interesting.

In addition to publishing more interviews and reviews, the RSS lets us send out regular news updates to readers of the site. So now we can share our pride at having been included in this year's Best of the Web anthology from Dzanc books; we're also alerting readers and potential contributors to a special section we'll be doing for the Winter issue.

The one thing you won't see change is our mission to publish high quality literary criticism. We're dedicated to giving our writers the space they need to write an in-depth book review, or to write a challenging, rewarding essay. We also remain dedicated to giving our writers the kind of close editing and feedback necessary to ensure that their piece is as good and substantive as can be. At a time when more and more old-media periodicals are openly proclaiming their belief that people want dumbed-down, superficial literary coverage, we remain steadfast in the belief that these exists a large audience that wants in-depth literary criticism that can be read by intelligent laypeople.

When we publish our 13th issue in September, we'll have been around for three years, and in that time the journal has gone from something some friends and I did on a lark to something with a solid foundation, four editors, a budget and production schedule, and writers from all over the globe who read and write in numerous languages.

In other words, the site has become a whole lot more professional; it's much less the vision of one man and much more a structure built and held up by many hands, and in acknowledgment of that, we've managed to develop - again with help, this time from two excellent web designers - a site that reflects the quality we've come to put into each issue.

The Quarterly Conversation is far from alone in this greater professionalism - many literature sites that originated around the same time have gone through similar developments, a fact that should please anyone who loves literature. In fact, it's appropriate that I write about this topic on The Millions, as it's developed into one of the most professionally run book blogs that I read.

I think what's going on in sites like The Quarterly Conversation and The Millions is something very timely and also something largely inevitable: many of the people who contribute to and operate these sites started out with nothing more than a blog and a simple desire to write about books. Bit by bit these people took what they were doing and made it better and better, and now the litblogosphere has produced some valuable resources and some intelligent critics who promise to become even better with time.

Of course, there has long been a dedicated literary scene, one that predates the emergence of blogs and online book reviews. What I'm happy to be observing is greater interaction and cooperation between the two. This is reflected in The Quarterly Conversation - a lot of our writers cross over between these two venues, and as time passes we're developing better and better relationships with some of the literary institutions that have been around for a while. Now that we've redesigned the site, this is something we're planning on focusing more energy on.

If you're new to The Quarterly Conversation, please drop by and see what we're all about. If you're already familiar with us, then come on over and see our new look. And make sure to let us know what you think and what you'd hope to see in future issues.

- Editor @ 7:04 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

A Scattering of Feeds

I don't know that anything has changed the way I consume information more than the discovery of online feed readers about four years ago. I went from skipping through a handful of sites or relying on someone else's ability to aggregate information to my own personalized and furiously flowing river of news. For an information glutton like myself, it is a feast that never ends (and that at times threatens to become overwhelming).

There's plenty to be said about the ways in which the internet, and feed readers in particular, continue to change the way we select and consume information, but a recent shift in my habits had me thinking about a particular element of this.

Until very recently, I was a user of Bloglines, which could be considered the grand-daddy of web-based feed readers. I started using it because it was more or less the only game in town when I was first looking for a feed reader. But now, as of a few days ago, I have switched to Google Reader. Basically, because of navigational peculiarities between the two tools, after the switch I am now consuming news, blogs, and other information in a subtly different way.

With Bloglines, I would go feed by feed. So I might read all the new posts up at Conversational Reading, move on to the new articles in the New York Times book section, and then catch up on the new posts at my favorite Baltimore Orioles blog. With Google Reader, on the other hand, the articles and posts are all thrown together. So, upon firing it up, I might see 30 new items waiting for me, all stacked up one after another, a blog post about the Orioles, a restaurant review in the Philly Inquirer, a post at Comics Curmudgeon, and then another blog post about the Orioles.

Something about this change struck me. It's like kicking the information overload that already threatens to overwhelm me up a notch. I'm wondering if I'll be able to take it. It's one thing to zip through 500 new items when they are organized by feed, quite another to have them all thrown in together. It's like reading a seemingly endless stream of non sequiturs.

In acclimating myself to the new format, I couldn't help but think that this is a trend that is only intensifying. The free-for-all, free-associative nature of the internet has been with us from its inception, but this way of consuming has spread to other forms of media as well. I don't know if I coined this term or not, but I look at us as the "iPod Shuffle generation," a group that values juxtapositions, randomness, and subjective experience more than paying any heed to externally defined genres. The New Yorker's Alex Ross says it better in an essay from 2004, "It seems to me that a lot of younger listeners think the way the iPod thinks. They are no longer so invested in a single genre, one that promises to mold their being or save the world." The radio industry has even formalized this idea with the "Jack FM" format, which Wikipedia says "promote themselves as having a larger and more varied playlist than other commercial radio stations," and tends to offer up an array of genres back to back in a way that goes against the straitjacketed philosophy of commercial radio.

The trend extends to TV as well, in the form of channels like current which plays short "pods," often viewer-created, about different topics that have little but the channel's overarching aesthetic to tie them together. With Tivos and DVRs, meanwhile, we create our own mish-moshed television playlists of shows that together, no television exec would dare propose as a primetime lineup. As bandwidth increases, so will the capabilities of our cable boxes, and TV will become ever more personalized and untethered from the channels and networks.

This, of course, sounds a lot like a feed reader, a totally user-controlled experience. It feels like the future, but nonetheless it is jarring, and every step in this direction takes some getting used to - or maybe I'm just getting older. Books, meanwhile - the tricks up the Kindle's sleeve and Kevin Kelly's controversial "futurism" of a couple years ago aside - seem immune from this mashing up. As such, they will continue to be marginalized as they have been for some time now by the onslaught of TV and the internet, but they will also provide a respite and a more peaceful experience that contrasts the madness of the hyper-aggregated world of information.

- C. Max Magee @ 2:19 PM ~ comments: 9 ~ Links to this post

 

Changing AP Style

When you go to journalism school (or start out at most traditional journalism jobs), you are issued a style guide as a soldier might be issued a weapon. Quite a few places have their own in-house style guides, reflecting the vernacular peculiarities of the publication or its region. For all others, the default tends to be the AP Stylebook, a utilitarian volume compiled by the AP and meant to keep all of its reporters' language consistent. Its influence, of course, has spread far wider.

As an avid AP Stylebook owner, I read with interest last month, Editor & Publisher's account of the changes in the latest edition of the Stylebook. In a way, the AP's regular shuffling in and out of new words and disused ones is not unlike the exercise played to great PR effect by dictionaries every year. The sometimes silly neologisms added to dictionaries make for easy news bites. Seeing "e-mail" or "LOL" printed on those thin pages seems to inspire amusement, dread, and maybe a little bit of pride. But ultimately it feels inconsequential as we watch our vocabulary race ahead of dictionaries, and dictionaries seem to have minimal influence on how we actually communicate.

An adjustment to the AP Stylebook, on the other hand, is a writ-in-stone change to what millions of people will read in publications around the world, and it will further influence the style guides at publications that use their own style guides. Certainly the AP is forced to, as the dictionaries do, catch up to trends in the spoken and written word - according to E&P, "'WMD,' 'iPhone' and 'anti-virus' are in, while 'barmaid,' 'blue blood' and 'malarkey' are out." - but the authority of the Stylebook would seem to bury the words that are being removed and give birth to those that are added.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:44 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Adventures in Research

Or, "About A Hedge-Whore Beggar-Woman Pretending to be Sick With Saint Fiacre's Disease, And A Long Thick Gut Made By Trickery Came Out of Her Bum"

There are times when research unearths something so unsurpassingly strange that it must be shared. Such is the case of the "Hedge-Whore." And she is hardly the only treat of her kind to be found in Ambroise Pare's 1573 On Monsters and Marvels (happily available in an excellent translation by Janis Pallister on Amazon!). The book is a theory of the causes of monsters (i.e. 1. Siamese twins, hermaphrodites, and animals of all kinds with too many or too few eyes, wings, horns, etc.; 2. some obviously impossible and fictional creatures - a colt with a man's face, for example; and 3. the maimed - the blind, those with wens, warts, or inverted lips), and an encyclopedia of them. Pare's theory is fascinating because unlike widespread folk-belief in Europe well into the seventeenth century, which held that a deformed child or animal's birth was a warning to mankind about the ugliness of sin (sin in physical form), a portend of national disaster, or an indication of a parental sin (usually adultery), Pare (a surgeon to the courts of two kings) allows for both religious and scientific explanations, and so his book embodies a time in which superstitious and scientific explanations of the world existed side by side. To Pare, if your child was born with an extra arm it could be a sign of God's wrath, the intervention of a demon, or the mother's unwholesome imaginings during conception, but it could also be the result of hereditary illness, damage in utero, and other "modern" diagnoses. (Of course, those of us who have spent any time on the Madonna of the Toast blog know that what I suggest to be outmoded superstition is still alive and well in our most modern of worlds.)

But to return to the Hedge Whore - who is, in fact, a fake monster. My internet researches have not yet led to a definitive definition of Saint Fiacre's disease, but since he seems to be the patron saint of hemorrhoids, fistulas, and venereal disease, I will let this excerpt lead you to your own conclusions (although the curious might visit Ireland's Eye as well; and more substantial information in the possession of a reader would be most welcome!). The account is one Pare had gotten from a Dr. Flecelle of Champigny:

while he was walking one day in his courtyard, a wench, very fleshy, came asking him alms in honor of Saint Fiacre, raising her petticoat and her chemise [and] showing a thick bowel, half a foot long and more, which came out of her bum, from which flowed a fluid similar to apostema matter, which had completely stained and besmeared her thighs, together with her chemise, before and behind, so that is was very ugly and foul to look upon. Having questioned her as to how long she had had this disease, she responded to him that it was about four years; then the aforementioned Flecelle, carefully considering her face and the condition of her body; recognized that it was impossible (she being so fat and full-bummed) that such a quantity of excrements could issue forth without her becoming emaciated, dried up, and hectic [wasted away]; and then in one leap he cast himself in great anger on this wench, giving her several kicks below the belly, so much so that he brought her to the ground and made the bowel [or gut] come out of her seat, along with the sound and noise and other stuff, too; and he forced her to declare the imposture to him, which she did, saying it was an ox's bowel, knotted in two places, one of which knots was inside her bum, and said bowel was filled with blood and milk mixed together, in which she had made several holes, so that this mixture would ooze out. And immediately recognizing this imposture, he kicked her several more times on the belly, so she pretended to be dead.

This has something of a long, long lost episode from "House, M.D." - the detective doctor, an expert diagnostician, sees through the patient's ruse and by unorthodox methods (many angry kicks to the belly) gets the patient to confess the fraud. But what I wouldn't give to know what the charlatan herself was thinking when she concocted her scheme. Would a few coins have made this adventure worthwhile? Were their grander hopes of becoming such a curiosity that the ox-gut trick would yield a permanent income?

P.S. A woman in England in the eighteenth century, Mary Toft (whom I always, for obvious reasons, want to call Mary Warren), "the Pretended Rabbit Breeder," passed off a similar scheme that involved putting fetal rabbits inside of herself and "birthing them" in the presence of a doctor. Toft was a sensation in London until the hoax was revealed and even after (she's giving birth to rabbits in Hogarth's "Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism"), but one wonders if that kind of fame was satisfying, how long the money lasted, and also about the physical costs to the woman. (If you're interested in Toft - and the doctors' reports of examining her are transfixing; her ability to simulate labor fooled many distinguished doctors - Dennis Todd's book Imagining Monsters has a very readable account of the whole affair.)

P.P.S. If your appetite for nether parts and bowels is not yet exhausted, let me recommend Elif Batuman's recent post concerning a golden enema borne by putti.

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 6:26 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Millions Interview: Joan Silber

Joan Silber's most recent novel, The Size of the World, is sweeping yet intimate, the kind of book that will take you across continents, and deep into characters' individual lives. She is the author of the story collection, Ideas of Heaven, which was nominated for the National Book Award, as well as four other works of fiction.

The Millions: The Size of the World is billed as a novel, although it could also be called a novel-in-stories or a collection of linked stories. While the book is in fact short stories that are either tangentially or deeply connected, it has the narrative drive of a more conventional novel. Really, it's addictive. When you were writing the book, did you conceive of it as belonging to a particular genre? How did you balance writing separate narratives while still maintaining such delightful readability?

Joan Silber: I did have the idea that I wanted to write a composite fiction more unified than what I'd done before - a hybrid between the novel and linked stories - but I didn't exactly know what I was doing till I was into it. Which is to say, I made it up as I went along but I mostly knew what I was after. It was very gratifying to me to see how certain characters (Owen especially, who has the ending chapter) could come in again and be re-imagined in a way that pushed the story further. I'm very glad if the connections themselves caused a kind of narrative suspense.

I knew this form would suit a book about people leaving home, with settings in Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, etc. But sometimes I think I won't ever go back to writing a single-plotted novel. There's a quote from John Berger, "Never again will a single story be told as if it's the only one." I think that's pretty much what I believe, and this method fits with that, for me.

TM: Last month you wrote for The Millions about reading books written by the citizens of the countries you're traveling in. Did this reading prepare and/or inspire you to pen your novel? What other kinds of research, if any, did you do for this book?

JS:I love doing research. Well, it's easier than writing. In the early stages the research gives me details - Michael Herr's Dispatches told me civilians in Vietnam were not liked by the military, for instance. Later, I zoom in on what I want - after I had written about an American woman married to a southern Thai Muslim, I went hunting for historical material on southern Thailand. And I found a great memoir by a tin prospector that served as the basis for another section.

I'm addicted to online research. While I was writing the book, I hit Google many, many times a day, looking up the Feast of San Giuseppe in Sicily or the rules for Thai monks or the languages of Indian groups in Chiapas, Mexico.

TM: I love to teach your story "My Shape" (which appears in Ideas of Heaven and was recently anthologized in the second edition of The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction) because it's a great example of how to tell a story in lush, detailed summary, rather than depicting it largely in scene. This pacing technique returns in The Size of the World, where you manage to capture a character's whole life (or close to that) in a single chapter. Is this is a conscious craft decision on your part? What's attractive to you about this kind of storytelling?

JS: I have two somewhat contradictory impulses at this point in my life. I'm a miniaturist by nature - I love the small moment seen intensely. And I love the sweep of time passing. (In real life too, it moves me to see how people surprise themselves by where they end up.) It was a nice discovery for me to see that summary could be written as if it were scene, drawn with details. And this allowed me to get the intimacy of close narration into stories with a broader scope.

I do like life-stories. The deepest ironies are in those lurching shifts people make, bit by bit.

TM: The narratives in The Size of the World are all told in the first person, as are the stories in Ideas of Heaven. Can you talk a little bit about your interest in the first person? What have been its benefits and drawbacks for you?

JS: I came a little late to first person - my first two books were written without it. It strikes me now (I just thought this) that, oddly enough, I came to it as I began to move further from myself. Perhaps third-person at first gave me a distance I needed, and then I needed something else. I'm always trying to capture the emotional logic of characters, what they say to themselves about what they're doing. I like the directness of hearing them sum themselves up. I'm not really trying to capture their speaking voices so much as their inner voices. The sentences are meant as translations of their thoughts.

If there's a decision about whether to "style" the prose to sound historical or flavored with vernacular, I usually opt for neutral wording. So, for instance, in the chapter about Annunziata, who comes from Sicily to New Jersey, I avoided inflecting her English (she'd probably think in Sicilian anyway) but I took pains to convey her reasoning.

"Pains" is right. It takes a lot of trial-and-error to get the voices, especially at first. But the commenting that first-person voices can do is very handy for jumping over spans of time.

TM: Ideas of Heaven was nominated for the National Book Award in 2004, and you were one of five women finalists. I was dismayed by the outcry following the nomination announcement; how did you deal with such reactions?

JS: I think critics felt left out of the loop, since they'd never heard of us. (I'd heard of most of us, actually.) Their strongest objection was that we weren't famous, which we already knew. I didn't immediately think the criticism was anti-female, but after a while I came to think that some of it was. The good part was that we five got to know each other - we had dinners at my house and at Lily's and have lunched in recent times. Christine Schutt has a terrific new novel out (Kate Walbert and I were at the kick-off reading) and Lily Tuck has a biography of the writer Elsa Morante out very soon. And we all like to think that Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's daughter was named Willa and not Kimberly because of our advice.

There were many good after-effects for me. A few months after the nomination, The New York Review of Books ran a great piece by Lorrie Moore, on that book and my others. What writer doesn't want that? I feel that the nomination put me on the map and is the reason I've been getting good coverage on this new book.

TM: Jessica on the Written Nerd blog calls you one of the most underrated writers in America, even after your National Book Award nomination. How do you feel about such a title?

JS: I was very thrilled to see what she wrote.

TM And, because this is a lit blog, I must ask you: What was the last great book you read?

JS: I can think of two - Colm Toibin's Mothers and Sons, a story collection, and Margot Livesey's novel, The House on Fortune Street. Toibin (whose previous book, The Master, I unexpectedly loved) packs each story with deft complexity, a resistance to the obvious, and a level of insight that is both cutting and humane. There's something beautifully startling about his work - I'm still trying to figure out how he does it. Margot Livesey's latest, The House on Fortune Street, is a novel with four interlocking parts, quite brilliantly composed. The plot has a center - there is the puzzle of a suicide to be solved - but it spins out in other directions. My judgment of various characters kept shifting and getting turned around. Especially remarkable is the nuanced treatment of a decent man with a Lewis Carroll-like attraction to young girls. A rare and original book.

- Edan Lepucki @ 7:17 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

David Brooks and Pop-Intellectualism

This morning's David Brooks column has reinvigorated my long-running discomfort with pop-intellectuals. "We're entering an era of epic legislation," his column begins. "There are at least five large problems that will compel the federal government to act in gigantic ways over the next few years." The bold assertion is a classic move of the pop-intellectual, who I think of as one who puts forth an idea as a new idea while lacking expertise in the field in which that idea would carry weight. The blending of disciplines is also a tell-tale pop-intellecual trait, and in the opening of his column, Brooks presents as a historian, a sociologist, and a political scientist, even though he is in fact none of the above.

One thing I always think about when I read pop-intellectuals like Brooks or Malcolm Gladwell (if Brooks is prince of the practice, Gladwell is king), is the shift over the last couple centuries or so from lay intellectualism to professional intellectualism (I'm not an intellectual historian and I don't know exactly where to date it - in my mind the the change took place concurrently with the the rise of method, around about the time of Darwin). Two hundred years ago it was good enough to be a well-educated citizen with a ruminative soul and you could write with authority about anything - philosophy, history, the natural world. Now to be taken seriously on any of those topics, to be seen as adding to our store of knowledge, you have to have a PhD and work in a university. In part, the change is due to the overall increase in knowledge - it required less learning to be an expert in mathematics a hundred years ago than it does now - but more than that, the change reflects the modern insight that learning shaped by disciplines simply produces better knowledge.

Journalists like Brooks and Gladwell can still add value by bringing academic discoveries to the public, but books like Bobos in Paradise and Blink make me cringe for the lack of rigor with which they synthesize anecdotes to produce new ideas. The problem is not so much the content, benign as it usually is, but the methods. Brooks' column, for example, actually promotes a tendency opposite of the one he intends. It makes people less effectively thoughtful, not more.

- Kevin Hartnett @ 4:43 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

The Best of the Best of the Best

In what seems peripherally related to our recent exercise in award aggregation, The Prizewinners, the Booker Prize recently announced their Best of the Booker, a prize to commeorate the 40th anniversary of the Prize and also to name the "best overall novel to have won the prize." It went, somewhat predictably, to Salman Rushdie for Midnight's Children - the book also won when the Booker gave out a similar award 15 years ago. Scott, however, makes a very compelling argument that J.G. Farrell's "novel of imperial decay," The Siege of Krishnapur, deserved to be honored instead.

Meanwhile, in what seems peripherally related to our recent exercise in books-in-translation aggregation, The Prizewinners International, the Lit Saloon points us to The Times' (UK) list of "the 50 outstanding literary translations from the last 50 years," presented alphabetically. Some Millions favorites like The Master and Margarita, 100 Years of Solitude, and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler appear. Interestingly, Edith Grossman, one of the most celebrated translators in recent years, does not make the list.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:54 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Curiosities

• The Exile, home of the War Nerd, is back online at a new address after being forced to fold their print operation.
• Lots of folks were excited about Mark Twain being on the cover of Time. So was Season, until she opened the magazine.
• Will Leitch's story of meeting Hunter S. Thompson is brilliant, funny, and heartbreaking.
• The New Anonymous is a literary magazine with a clever concept. According to EarthGoat, "No name on your submission, the readers never see names, the editors are anonymous." Will anyone submit their work? Who is behind this mysterious mag?
• Summer book lists, compiled.
• Ever wonder where the word "ok" comes from?

  "The abbreviation fad began in Boston in the summer of 1838 ... OFM, 'our first men,' and used expressions like NG, 'no go,' GT, 'gone to Texas,' and SP, 'small potatoes.' Many of the abbreviated expressions were exaggerated misspellings, a stock in trade of the humorists of the day. One predecessor of OK was OW, 'oll wright,' and there was also KY, 'know yuse,' KG, 'know go,' and NS, 'nuff said.' The general fad may have existed in spoken or informal written American English for a decade or more before its appearance in newspapers. OK's original presentation as 'all correct' was later varied with spellings such as 'Oll Korrect' or even 'Ole Kurreck'. Deliberate word play was associated with the acronym fad and was a yet broader contemporary American fad."

- Editor @ 8:32 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Oscar Wao Author Helps Inaugurate New Online Series

Pulitzer winner Junot Díaz talks with his fellow "Year in Reading" contributor Meghan O'Rourke in the debut episode of the online video series Open Book, co-sponsored by Slate and my alma mater. I'm thrilled that the producers elected to keep the same zany voice-over guy who reads Slate's audio podcasts. Future interviews, we're told, will include John Ashbery, Charles Simic, and Jonathan Safran Foer.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 5:48 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Writing in limbo: Censorship in Iran

CBC journalist Ghazal Mosadeq recently returned to Tehran from Toronto and filed an audio report for the Dispatches program on the current state of publishing and censorship in Iran. Writers, readers and book-sellers are all trapped in a system of rules which are often tacit, confused and haphazard.

Of particular interest is the lack of trust that has developed between reader and publisher as a result of years of censorship. Mosadeq also reports from a cemetery which contains the gravesite of twenty Iranian writers, some specifically requesting that they be buried there as a final chance to be separate from the repressive state. The government, meanwhile, tries to stop this, in an effort to avoid turning the cemetery into a shrine to its critics. Censored while alive; still censored after death.

Hear the 8-minute audio dispatch here (RealPlayer)

- Andrew Saikali @ 5:45 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Staff Picks: Niffenegger, Thewlis, Klam

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 Adventuress by Audrey Niffenegger recommended by Emily

If I was going to attempt to classify Audrey Niffenegger's beautiful, strange, and self-described "novel in pictures," I might put it somewhere in the hinterlands of the graphic novel/comic book genre (that's where it was when I first saw it at Foyles bookshop in London), but it feels to me much more like a children's picture book for adults. It is the book's stunning aquatints that give it its surreal, haunted and haunting quality, rather than the minimal narration provided on facing pages. The titular Adventuress is the creation of an alchemist father, and her dreamlike adventures include a coerced marriage, a metamorphosis into a moth, an affair with Napoleon, and the birth of a cat-child. As in another of her novels in pictures, The Three Incestuous Sisters, Niffenegger explores the fragility of happiness, the psychic costs of freakishness, and the pain and destruction caused by betrayal, and - in spite of these darker interests - the possibility of peace and reconciliation. For those who know Marcel Dzama's work (made famous by a print series in McSweeney's), Niffenegger's is reminiscent but somewhat less intent on disturbing. I also find myself thinking of William Blake's work when I consider Niffenegger's - but perhaps that has only to do with her medium. A startling book, both for its form and for the story it tells.

The Late Hector Kipling by David Thewlis recommended by Andrew

When middle-aged British painter Hector Kipling begins to draw us into his life, that life is a thing to behold. A noted artist, living with the lovely and loving Eleni, doted on by his parents, Hector also enjoys the camaraderie of his closest friends, fellow artists themselves. Then, as Hector's world begins to unravel, there is a disconnect between his narrated thoughts and his actions, and in one gothic twist after another, we descend into darkness.

Author David Thewlis is indeed British actor David Thewlis, veteran of Mike Leigh films, including a mesmerizing (and I believe largely improvised) turn in Naked. In his first novel, Thewlis' narration is vibrant, his dialogue caustic, and there's a beating heart beneath the lacerating prose.

Please Excuse My Daughter by Julie Klam recommended by Edan

I can count the number of memoirs I've read on three fingers, but I'd certainly read more if they were as funny and entertaining as this one. Ostensibly about how Klam's spoiled upbringing didn't prepare her for the harsh realities of the working world, Please Excuse My Daughter actually covers much more than that, from Klam's brief and ill-fated relationship with a Mafioso, to her torturous honeymoon with the delightful if diabetic Paul. This ain't serious reading, but it's heartfelt, and, man, is it hilarious and readable. This a Sunday-afternoon-in-July kind of book.

- Editor @ 8:00 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

A Treat for Mutis Fans: The Diary of Lecumberri

In my recent review of Alvaro Mutis' The Mansion, I noted the paucity of Mutis' writing available in English. Basically, there is Maqroll and not much else. From what I understand, much of what would remain of Mutis' writing to be published in an English-language edition would be his poetry, much of it featuring "Maqroll the Gaviero."

But there is also Mutis' account of his time in Lecumberri, a Mexico City prison, after being accused of fraud by his employer Standard Oil in Columbia. Mutis would write, "I never would have managed to write a single line about Maqroll el Gaviero, who has accompanied me here and there in my poetry, had I not lived those fifteen months in the place they call, with singular precision, 'the Black Palace.'"

Mutis' account, The Diary of Lecumberri, was published in 1959 by the Universidad Veracruzana and reprinted by Alfaguara in 1997.

In 1999, a journal called Hopscotch translated and published a substantial excerpt of The Diary of Lecumberri, which is available as a PDF. Also included are a petition to the President for Mutis' release penned by Octavio Paz and several letters that Mutis wrote to the journalist Elena Poniatowska from prison.

When things go bad in jail, when someone or something manages to break the closed procession of days and shuffles and tumbles them in a disorder coming from outside, when this happens, there are certain infallible symptoms, certain preliminary signs that announce the imminence of bad days. In the morning, at the first roll, a thick taste of rag dries the mouth and keeps us from saying hello to our cellmates. Everyone sits himself as well as he can, waiting for the sergeant to come and sign the report. Then comes the food. The cooks don't yell their usual "Anyone who takes bread!" to announce their arrival, or their "Anyone who wants atole," with which they break the mild spell left over from the dreams of those staggering around, never able to quite convince themselves that they are prisoners, that they are in jail. The meal arrives in silence and everyone approaches with his plate and his bowl to receive his allotted ration, and nobody protests, or asks for more, or says a word.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:22 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Dull Art: The New Yorker Obama Cover

The New Yorker opened the week in a lather of controversy surrounding the cover of its latest issue. The Barry Blitt illustration is a rather heavy-handed satire of the various smears that have circulated about Barack and Michelle Obama. Essentially, that he is a closet Muslim extremist and she a closet militant. Blitt's unsubtle drawing portrays them in the garb of these personas.

Speaking as a New Yorker fan, I can't stand these political satire covers. Aside from them not being very funny or interesting to look at, they lower the New Yorker to the level of the fray. The key to the New Yorker's success, however, has been its ability to place itself above all that.

Yes, the New Yorker is quite obviously a left leaning publication, but its journalism strives for even-handedness and the entire enterprise is built on a reverence for the facts, as its legendary fact-checking operation attests. By "the fray" I do not just mean politics, I also mean the "here today, gone tomorrow" jokes and the offhanded irony that seem to permeate most of our culture. The New Yorker, meanwhile, has always been so (justifiably) secure in its status, that neither its contents nor even its ideological leanings require an advertisement on the cover, which historically has been given over instead to a piece of art that exists simply for its own sake.

The political covers come across as jarring in this context. A couple of years ago another political cover caused a bit of controversy. The Bush/Cheney cover was a tired Brokeback Mountain rehash that got people riled up, and, as it turned out, it bumped a cover that was more topical and far more meaningful and in the spirit of the magazine.

Apparently, I may have been in the minority in this view, as the Mark Ulriksen Brokeback cover, along with a political Blitt cover, won awards.

It's not even the political content of these covers that bugs me - there have occasionally been some good political covers - it's their heavy-handed unfunniness that paints the magazine's readers with a very broad brush. I don't find the Obama cover to be offensive in the least, just easy and dumb.

If you feel the same way I do (or even if you think I've lost it), dig into the archives and enjoy the hundreds of sublime and clever covers that have graced the New Yorker over the years.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:57 PM ~ comments: 7 ~ Links to this post

 

South American Gothic: A Review of Alvaro Mutis' The Mansion

Longtime readers of this blog will know that The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll is one of my favorite books. While I think it stands as a very good book by nearly any standard, it has several qualities that appeal particularly to me. To boil these down, my affinity for the book is tied to the vast geography it covers, including many exotic locales and a few mundane. I also like the book as an example of Latin American magical realism that is stylistically different from Borges or Garcia Marquez, but to me just as satisfying.

Mutis is still relatively unknown, and were it not for the NYRB's impressive packaging of Maqroll, really a collection of seven novellas, and Edith Grossman's typically readable translation, it's likely that Mutis would have almost no presence among English-language readers at all. Prior to the NYRB edition of Maqroll, a pair of earlier collections had been put out, one containing three of the novellas and another containing four (those editions were also translated by Grossman). Aside from that, Mutis had published some short stories and quite a lot of poetry, much of it featuring "Maqroll the Gaviero," who would star in Mutis' novels.

As best as I've been able to tell, none of Mutis' poetry has been published in English-language editions, but in 2004, a small Canadian publisher Ekstasis Editions, put out a thin collection of some of Mutis' short fiction. Maqroll does not appear, but the book, The Mansion offers what felt to this reader, a batch of stories in which Mutis tries out the various writerly tools that he will wield to great effect in Maqroll.

The first portion of The Mansion is a novella, The Mansion of Araucaima, which supposedly was Mutis' answer to the director Luis Bunuel who claimed that it wasn't possible to write a gothic story set in the tropics. The idea being, I suppose, that the lushness of the region is at odds with the castles and dark mood that is emblematic of the genre. (It should be noted that the Bunuel story may be apocryphal. I read about it a few years ago, but more recent Googling hasn't turned much up about it.)

Regardless, Mutis' effort is fairly successful, and appropriately moody and dark. As he does in Maqroll, Mutis experiments with structure in The Mansion of Araucaima. He divides the story up into brief chapters, focusing on the different characters and on their dreams (the dreams presumably being a key gothic element) before, after much stage setting, he offers a chapter called "The Events," during which the novella's narrative commences.

The remaining stories also play with structure. Frame stories abound (Maqroll, of course, is a frame story which contains other frame stories). The stories in The Mansion start with sentences like "The pages you are about to read belong to a bundle of manuscripts sold at a book auction in London a few years before the end of the Second World War." and "A few facts surrounding the death of Alar the Illyrian... came to the attention of the Church at the Council of Nicaea when it discussed the canonization of a group of a group of Christians who had been martyred at the hands of the Turks."

While Mutis takes the reader, in this handful of stories, to many arcane places and dreams up snippets of immersive histories and mythologies, they also feel like explorations and fragments (one story is in fact subtitled "A Fragment"), as opposed to fully formed pieces. As such, it is impossible to recommend the book ahead of Maqroll, which makes, out of the threads that Mutis plays with in The Mansion, a deep and layered tapestry. Maqroll perhaps also benefits from Grossman's translation, which seems to disappear into the narrative, whereas Beatriz Hausner's translation of The Mansion is more workmanlike. For those who have already read Maqroll and have an interest in Mutis, The Mansion will be an instructive and brief diversion. In terms of pure reading pleasure, however, rereading Maqroll might be a better bet.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:26 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

May-December (In July)

In 1699, at the age of 32, Jonathan Swift wrote a list of resolutions for himself that he titled "When I come to be old." The first of these was, "Not to marry a young Woman." Improbably, reading this Swiftian direction set me compiling a list of movies in which men and women disregard his advice. I can't say it's in any way particularly timely, or suited to the season - unless nothing says "summer" to you like a nymphet in a bikini and heart-shaped sunglasses or Dustin Hoffman in full diving gear at the bottom of a pool.

• The Graduate
• Manhattan - oh, beauty and the beast: Mariel Hemingway in bed with Woody Allen. A great movie, and a beautiful movie (even if you find WA occasionally repulsive).
• Kubrick's Lolita (1962)
• Lolita (1997) The Kubrick Lolita goes in more for the "humor" of Nabokov's novel - a lot of slap-stick-y scenes with Peter Sellars as Clare Quilty. I prefer the remake because it goes in more for the tragedy. Jeremy Irons walks the monstrous/charming line superbly and Dominique Swain is more convincing that Sue Lyon as Lolita.
• Pretty Baby - Louis Malle's beautiful and creepy film about the daughter of a prostitute in a New Orleans whore house. A too young Brooke Shields, with Keith Carradine and Susan Sarandon.
• The Professional - remember Natalie Portman singing "Like a Virgin" to a flabbergasted Jean Reno?
• Beautiful Girls - Portman again, reprising her "old-soul" girl-woman vibe from The Professional opposite Timothy Hutton. (not that surprising that Portman was offered the Lolita role for 1997 remake)
• Lawn Dogs - highly recommended: Young Sam Rockwell and very young Mischa Barton. The solace and dangers of friendship in a deeply creepy suburbia.
• Harold and Maud - for the series of staged suicide scenes and Cat Stevens soundtrack alone, this is worth a watch, but there’s so much more...
• Venus - The great Peter O'Toole playing, as far as I can tell, himself. And he is charming. Plus the enormously fat actor now of Harry Potter/Uncle Vernon fame (once of Withnail/Uncle Monty fame) as one of O'Toole's pals (Richard Griffiths).
• Last Tango In Paris - Really old Marlon Brando and really young French hottie: borderline porn - kinda gross (not recommended to the faint of heart, or really anyone at all)
• Shopgirl - Steve Martin, Clare Danes, Jason Schwartzman, and Pete Sampras' babe wife
• Lost in Translation - another former goofball (Bill Murray) makes good as a serious leading man opposite Scarlett Johansson
• Y Tu Mama Tambien - not the rollicking good time the previews suggested it to be: brace yourself.
• Notes on a Scandal - Judy Dench and Cate Blanchett at their finest.
• American Pie - the movie that brought us "milf"
• The Good Girl - Jennifer Aniston playing a downtrodden housewife and Jake Gyllenhall (whose character renames himself Holden Caulfield) as her co-worker paramour at the Retail Rodeo.
• Laurel Canyon - Francis McDormand and Alessandro Nivola are the May-December pair, ably supported by Kate Beckinsale, Christian Bale, and Natasha McElhone. A good movie for repressed graduate students.

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 6:45 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

From the Newsstand: Eisenberg on Nádas

As others have noted, the current issue of The New York Review of Books features a long Deborah Eisenberg essay on the Hungarian novelist Péter Nádas (now available online courtesy of Powell's Bookstore). I've been interested in Nádas for some time (though the sheer size of A Book of Memories requires putting it off until next year) and in Eisenberg for longer, and so it may come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I found her essay completely beguiling.

Unlike certain other NYRB contributors - one can barely turn around these days without running into John Updike or Joyce Carol Oates, you know, appreciating this or reconsidering that - Eisenberg's critical corpus has so far been small. Possibly nonexistent. You won't find her penning introductions and encomiums and toasts; they'd probably run to 15,000 words and take her a year to write. All I knew of her literary taste, prior to reading "The Genius of Peter Nádas," was that it overlapped with mine (Robert Walser, Humberto Constantini).

As it turns out, Eisenberg brings to nonfiction the same philosophical and perceptual rigor, the same psychological acuity, and the same metaphorical daring that animate her stories. "After finishing [A Book of Memories], I, for one, felt irreversibly altered, as if the author had adjusted, with a set of tiny wrenches, molecular components of my brain," she writes, before going on to cover totalitarianism, war, literary style, and the situation of the American writer. It is almost enough to make one wish for more Eisenberg essays. Alas, time being finite, that might deprive us of Eisenberg fiction.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 6:21 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Curiosities

• Olsson's, a small chain that was an old standby among Washington D.C. independent bookstores, is likely to file for bankruptcy. It was the stores' ample music sections and gentrification that contributed most to its downfall. "'The book business is getting a little soft. It's not selling as much as it used to,' Olsson said. 'Our music sales went from 50 percent of our business to maybe 15. We lost a lot of revenue, and at the same time rents went up and real estate taxes went up. I don't know what we would have done differently. It's a killer.'"
• The linguistic capabilities of modern world leaders. Well done, Pope, well done.
• For those whose fantasies involve real estate: Private Islands for Sale

And a pair of audio items:

• Nam Le's The Boat is getting rave reviews. Here he visits The Leonard Lopate Show.
• Garth covered the PEN World Voices Tribute to Robert Walser. Interested readers can now listen to the entire event.

- Editor @ 7:15 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Rarnaby Budge, or The Fine Art of the Knockoff

This weekend, hurtling toward the conclusion of Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit, I took a pit-stop to thumb through Edgar Johnson's biography of the author. I was curious to see what had triggered Dickens' transformation from the showman of the early novels to the architect of the series of dizzying edifices that began with Dombey and Son. I didn't find the answer I was looking for. I did, however, discover the wonderful fact that Dickens was the victim of plagiarists, who during his lifetime published knockoffs like David Copperful, Nikelas Nickelbery, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwickians, and - my favorite - Oliver Twiss.

You may recall that a couple of years ago, there were newspaper reports about Chinese J.K. Rowling manqués, who authored such blockbusters as Harry Potter and Beaker and Burn and Harry Potter and the Filler of Big. Apparently, this was no late-capitalist aberration, but part of a venerable literary tradition. I'm now wondering what might happen if some Millions favorites were plagiarized. The Corruptions? Jilliad? Shabbat's Theatre? The Amazing Adventurousness of Caviller and Quai? The Short Wonderful Life of Oskar Wow? Your suggestions are welcome below.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 6:38 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Rafael Nadal as Religious Experience?

In August, 2006, a few months after the first Federer-Nadal Wimbledon final, David Foster Wallace published "Roger Federer as Religious Experience," in the New York Times, a lengthy footnoted essay describing the sublimity of Roger Federer and the elements of top-flight tennis that can only be captured watching it live. The essay is not only the best piece of tennis writing I have ever read, but the best piece of sports writing, period. There are countless parts that merit reading out loud to whomever's nearby. One among them:

At least not entirely. TV tennis has its advantages, but these advantages have disadvantages, and chief among them is a certain illusion of intimacy. Television's slow-mo replays, its close-ups and graphics, all so privilege viewers that we're not even aware of how much is lost in broadcast. And a large part of what's lost is the sheer physicality of top tennis, a sense of the speeds at which the ball is moving and the players are reacting.

Yesterday's Federer-Nadal final reminded me of the piece, and, as I have done every year around this time for the past three, had me emailing it out to all my friends, beseeching them to read it, because this time, it really is worth it. It has become a fixation of our manic media culture to instantly assess a just-completed event's place in history. And in the same way that it drives web traffic and sells newspapers to inflate the significance of a "gaffe" by a presidential candidate, rarely a week goes by without some game or another receiving the brand of "classic" status on ESPN. But every now and again the genuine article comes along, making it obvious that all the other hyperbole was just that. Yesterday's Wimbledon final was that kind of event. I imagine DFW was watching. I hope he writes about it.

- Kevin Hartnett @ 8:33 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

The Manchurian Legacy

The New York Times ran an interesting article last week on the origins of the interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo Bay. The article claims that methods for questioning prisoners at the facility were directly adapted from those used by the Communist Chinese to torture and indoctrinate American soldiers during the Korean War. At the time, rumors regarding these techniques, known in Chinese as xinao - literally translated as "brainwashing" - inspired a few brief bouts of hysteria, as well as the "classic" novel The Manchurian Candidate, later made into a movie starring Frank Sinatra.

Those interested in peeking behind Guantanamo's walls should pick up a copy of Robert Lifton's classic work Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China [1]. Lifton, a Harvard professor, makes only a brief appearance in the Times article, but his book is the seminal work on brainwashing techniques and is often used as text for teaching about the indoctrination methods of cults. In the book, Lifton interviews a number of Westerners and Chinese who were subjected to thought reform, delving into their prison experience, as well as their lives before and after. Although Lifton spends too much time on Freudian psychoanalysis for my tastes, his case studies are raw and chilling accounts of people whose lives have been irreversibly altered. Although for most subjects the superficial effects of the indoctrination process quickly wore off, the psychological scars were permanent. The men and women Lifton interviewed are broken, struggling to piece together their dignity and sense of self.

The U.S. Military, of course, is not interested in indoctrination techniques, so much as the methods used by Chinese interrogators to elicit confessions from their prisoners. The irony is that the ultimate purpose of these techniques was not to obtain useful information, but to inculcate prisoners with Maoist ideology. As Lifton describes in detail, interrogators forced prisoners to confess to crimes they did not commit as a means of controlling their inner life. The so-called "confessions" were entirely made up, or, even more tellingly, force-fed to prisoners, who were expected to repeat them until they could no longer distinguish them from the truth.

The military knows this. After all, the armed forces and the CIA have used these techniques as part of SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) and similar training programs for years. These programs, which are meant to prepare personnel to resist torture methods they may encounter in the field, are rumored to use many of the techniques that appear in the Guantanamo Bay document. The programs reportedly emphasize the use of stress positions, waterboarding, and other "fraternity pranks" (as Rush Limbaugh affectionately referred to them) to elicit false confessions from participants.

What are the interrogators thinking? Their goals may not be that different than those of the Communist Chinese. After all, the Bush administration, much like the Maoists, is not interested in truth. Rather, they are interested in constructing their own reality. There's only a fine line between Mao's insistence that the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were successful and Bush's declaration that the war in Iraq was a "Mission Accomplished." As one Bush aide famously said in a quote that could be taken directly from Lifton's Eight Criteria for Thought Reform

"We create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do..." - "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush" New York Times Magazine October 17, 2004

This same reckless desire has led the administration to manufacture evidence for the war in Iraq, deny the truth of global climate change, and create countless fabrications that serve only to support their own insular vision of how they think the world ought to be. How surprising would it be then, if interrogators at Guantanamo Bay were not looking for the truth, but only for support for the administration's version of events, confessions they can use to further justify their actions, confessions they can use to try to convince us, the viewers at home, that they have been right all along. After all, the information possessed by Guantanamo's prisoners is as much as seven years out of date, seemingly well past its expiration date. And although seven years would seem to be ample time to conduct an interrogation, it's about the right length for Chinese reeducation methods.

But don't take my word for it. Read the book.

[1] Other chilling accounts of these techniques can be found in the excellent book Japan at War, which includes interviews with Japanese POWs who suffered through the Chinese reeducation process.

- Ben Dooley @ 7:24 PM ~ comments: 6 ~ Links to this post

 

A Fresh Page in Politics to Make an Author Weep?

Elections in the U.S. never excited me much - partly because I don't get to vote, but mostly due to the general lethargy of American voters. The brutal and breathtaking Democratic race for the nomination between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and the rise and fall and re-rise of Senator John McCain in the Republican field changed that, however. And not just for me.

While following the race to the presidency, I could not stop thinking about Thomas Geoghegan's The Secret Lives of Citizens: Pursuing the Promise of American Life. What had inspired this politically apathetic, almost bored citizenry to turn out in record numbers and pitch for their candidates? Another book review two to five years down the road may try to answer that question. In the meantime, Geoghegan's book might hold a candle on what may be going through the minds of this newly excited, interested cadre of voters.

The Secret Lives of Citizens chronicles the politically, bureaucratically disgruntled author's move from Washington, D.C., to Chicago in search of a participatory civic life. Geoghegan (pronounced gay-gan) in 1979 is working at the Carter Administration's Energy Department and is a firm believer in the New Deal and unions. He is a self-declared "national Democrat" and an unabashed political idealist - the way teenagers are in their first relationship: madly in love with everything about the affair and deeply disappointed at the end.

Tiring from all the hoops he has to jump through to push for energy policies, Geoghegan decides to go after smaller fish. He considers cities where civic participation is a relished norm, a place where people know their representatives and turn out to vote, an urban setting that breathes politics. Chicago quickly climbs to the top of his list.

But Chicago is a political animal. There is nothing civic about politics in the Windy City. It does not take Geoghegan long to this find out, but he makes his peace and uses the opportunity to delve into the Founding Fathers, the constitution, the federal structure, causes of voter apathy and the New Deal, among other issues. He muses about the failures of the electoral college and the inequality of equal representation of each state in the U.S. Senate. And all in good, light fun.

Geoghegan cannot help himself, however. Eventually he joins the mayoral campaign of Harold Washington - the first of two black Chicago mayors. (The second is Eugene Sawyer, who was elected by the city council to complete Washington's term after he died in office.) Geoghegan's campaign war stories and reverence for the occasion is telling of the 2008 elections.

Washington's effort was historic and unparalleled. His staff brought out all the disenfranchised black votes to beat the Democratic machine. Washington clinched the nomination from two white establishment figures: current mayor and son of legendary ex-mayor and party boss Richard J. Daley, Richard M., and incumbent Jane Byrne. Then, Washington beat his own party in the elections, which rallied behind the white Republican candidate. His achievements were not only due to the South Side, but also because the white "elites" of Lincoln Park, who came out to support him.

North Chicagoans like Geoghegan were giddy with excitement. They knocked on doors, led rallies, manned telephones. This was a democratic revolution.

Now, it seems, the U.S. is on the cusp of yet another revolution. This election is historic in many aspects. The Democrats were down to a woman and a black man until the last primaries. The Republicans might shed Karl Rove politics and redefine their party around McCain. With a slumping economy, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, record oil prices, climate change, renewable energy and the next round of Supreme Court appointments hanging in the balance, the outcome of November elections has the potential to set the agenda for generations. All of this, it seems, has triggered an awakening in the electorate.

Geoghegan must be giddy, again. If you too are excited, check out The Secret Lives of Citizens for one politico's take on what motivates people - and why it really, really, truly, seriously matters. Geoghegan's quick, 251-page stream of consciousness will grab you and paint a solid picture of America that is at once different, yet eerily similar. If you believe in, or at least hope for, change through politics, you will find an agreeable guide in The Secret Lives of Citizens, which succeeds in not taking itself too seriously while making a strong case for political participation.

- Emre Peker @ 8:33 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

The Most Anticipated Books of the Rest of 2008

As we reach the year's midpoint, it's time to look at some of the books we are most looking forward to for the second half. There are many, many intriguing books on the docket for the next six months, but these are some of the most notable. Please share your most anticipated books in the comments.

August: Chris Adrian wowed readers in 2006 with his post-apocalyptic novel The Children's Hospital. That novel's ardent fans will be pleased to get their hands on a new collection of stories called A Better Angel. The collection's title story appeared in the New Yorker in 2006. More recently, Adrian offered up a personal essay in the New York Times Magazine about getting a tattoo.

September: Philip Roth remains tireless, and his latest effort arrives in September, less than year after Exit Ghost garnered seemingly wall-to-wall coverage. With Indignation, Roth takes readers to 1951 America and introduces a young man, a son of a New Jersey butcher, trying to avoid the draft and the Korean War. An early review (with spoilers) offers, "Indignation is a sad and bloody book, and even if it delivers nothing particularly new - indeed, most of Roth's books could be retitled Indignation - it is a fine supplement to Roth's late achievements. And we learn a lot about kosher butchery."

Norwegian author Per Petterson collected a number of international prizes and upped his name recognition with Out Stealing Horses, which appeared to much acclaim in English in 2005 and won the IMPAC two years later. I read and enjoyed his In the Wake, which was written before Horses but appeared afterward in translation. Of that book, I wrote, the "boundary between madness and loneliness is plumbed to great effect." Petterson's latest to be translated for American audiences, To Siberia, is his second novel. Like Petterson's other novels, To Siberia is inspired by his parents, who died in a ferry accident along with two of his brothers in 1990. A snippet of an excerpt is available at the NYRB (and more if you are a subscriber).

According to our Prizewinners post, Marilynne Robinson's 2004 book Gilead was one of the most celebrated novels of the last thirteen years. Gilead arrived 24 years after Robinson's debut, Housekeeping, but Robinson's latest, Home, comes after only a four-year hiatus. As Publishers Weekly first reported, "Home shares its setting with Gilead, and its action is concurrent with that novel's. Characters from Gilead will also appear in Home."

Kate Atkinson is bringing back her reluctant detective Jackson Brodie for a third book, When Will There Be Good News?. An early review on a blog is mixed, and apparently he has a wife in this one. (Not sure how all the Brodie fans will take that!)

Garth writes: "David Heatley's My Brain is Hanging Upside Down is a graphic novel that takes readers deep into the uncomfortable psychological undercurrents of everyday American life. Like Chris Ware, who gave him a prominent blurb, David Heatley is a double threat with a pen: both words and drawings are adventures in style."

Garth writes: "Indie stalwart Joe Meno delivers Demons in the Spring, a new collection of 20 stories, each of them illustrated by a leading graphic artist."

October: John Barth, one of the leading lights of American fiction, has a new book on the way. The Development is, according to the publisher promo copy, "a touching, comic, deeply humane collection of linked stories about surprising developments in a gated community." A story from the book "Toga Party," appeared in Fiction magazine and in the Best American Short Stories 2007. There's not much on the book just yet, but "Toga Party" won some praise from readers.

Also making October an impressive month for new books will be Death with Interruptions by Nobel laureate Jose Saramago. Though the book will no doubt be allegorical like many of Saramago's works, the title is apparently meant somewhat literally as the story involves eternal life.

Garth writes: "Ingo Schulze's 2005 tome, New Lives, finally reaches American shores, in a translation by the magnificent John E. Woods. According to Schulze, it concerns an aesthete who finds himself plunged into the sturm and drang of capitalist life. Die Zeit called it 'the best novel about German reunification.' Period."

John Updike will follow up one of his best known novels, 1984's The Witches of Eastwick, with a sequel, The Widows of Eastwick.

Sara Gruen of Water for Elephants fame will return with Ape House. It "features the amazing bonobo ape."

November: Garth writes: "Characteristically, Roberto Bolaño throws a curveball, delivering 2666 a massive final novel that both does and doesn't match the hype surrounding it. I haven't decided whether or not it's a good book, but it is, indisputably, a great one. I devoured it in a week and haven't stopped thinking about it since."

It's not every year that we get a new book from an American Nobel laureate, but this year we will get A Mercy from Toni Morrison. The promo description on Amazon is downright mysterious, offering this brief blurb: "A new novel, set, like Beloved, in the American past." But she has been reading from the book at various events and Wikipedia already has some details, though these appear to be pulled from promotional material as well. We can glean that the novel will take place in the 17th century, the early days of slavery in the Americas.

Please let us know what books you are most looking forward to for the second half of 2008 in the comments.

- C. Max Magee @ 12:01 AM ~ comments: 16 ~ Links to this post