Omnivoracious

Comics in Translation: A Conversation with Kim Thompson of Fantagraphics Books

Norwegian-born Jason has written comics and graphic novels for years in both his native Norwegian and in French. Fantagraphics first published his graphic novella Hey, Wait... in 2001, and he's been building a steady base of U.S. fans ever since.

His latest collection, Low Moon (including the chess-battle Western "Low Moon" serialized in the New York Times Magazine in 2008), has filmic moments and comic pathos that have set a new standard for me for short fiction.

None of us would ever get to enjoy the wry dialogue of Low Moon or I Killed Adolf Hitler or The Left Bank Gang without the efforts of Fantagraphics' co-publisher and translator, Kim Thompson. Jason is just one of many cartoonists that Thompson has translated for Fantagraphics Books. In fact, he says that translations represent about 10 to 15 percent of what they publish every year.

Thompson graciously agreed to answer my translation and Jason questions:

Amazon.com: How did you first encounter Jason's work, and how did Fantagraphics decide to publish it?

Kim Thompson: To be honest, I'm not sure if his Norwegian publisher sent me copies or I saw the French edition of Hey, Wait..., but I do know that the minute I laid eyes on it I knew we wanted to publish it. Love at first sight!

Amazon.com: Was he the first comic artist you translated? What others do you translate now?

KT: No, no, not by a wide margin. I was translating Freddy Milton (Danish), Franquin and Hermann (French) and others way back in the 1980s, twenty years ago.

I translate pretty much every European foreign-language cartoonist we publish except for Matti Hagelberg who is Finnish (Finnish is well outside of my area of expertise) and a couple who do their own translations, such as Max Andersson. A more or less complete list of cartoonists whose comics I've worked on in the last couple years would be Nikoline Werdelin (Danish); Joost Swarte (Dutch); David B., Emile Bravo, Killoffer, Jacques Tardi, and Lewis Trondheim (French); Nicolas Mahler (German); Gabriella Giandelli, Igort, Leila Marzocchi, and Sergio Ponchione (Italian); Jason (Norwegian or French); Max (Spanish); and Martin Kellerman (Swedish). I also translated a bunch of captions from many of those languages in our upcoming book of ANTI-WAR CARTOONS.

In case you're wondering, I don't actually SPEAK all of those languages, but I can read them, more or less in some cases. My mother is Danish so Danish is my native language. Swedish and Norwegian are so close to Danish (they're basically almost dialects of one another -- in fact Norwegian and Danish were the same language not too long ago) that with a little work any Dane can read them pretty well, as I do. I learned Spanish in high school and kept up with it. I lived for six years in Germany and also studied German in high school, so that stuck with me too. I lived for three years in Holland. Italian is my weakest language, I sort of plow my way through that thanks to French and Spanish and use of a dictionary -- but all my Italian translations I always check with the authors anyway.

Amazon.com: Translation is such an immersive experience, even more than editing, and I wonder, do you feel differently attached or connected to the works you translate than to other works you publish?

KT: Yes, at times I feel almost like a co-creator. Which is arrogantly excessive, and the feeling fades soon enough! But I'm also more invested in these books because I work so hard on them, and in many cases, of course, such as Tardi, I'm literally fulfilling a childhood dream by translating them.

Graphic Novel Friday: Moomin, Book Four of the Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip

 
(From the fourth Moomin volume, recontextualized as Steampunk invention here.)

Drawn & Quarterly has been doing the world a great public service by reprinting the entirety of Tove Jansson's Moomin comics in oversized hardcover books. These comics haven't been available in English since their debut in the London Evening News in the 1950s. D&Q has just released book four, and it demonstrates the depth of Jansson's talent that this volume is just as entertaining and imaginative as the previous three volumes.

Jansson was Finnish, and her Moomins are benign hippo-looking troll creatures. The Moomins are a family unit, accompanied by a cast of revolving secondary characters including, erm, Snorkmaiden. The sense of family is strong in these comic strips, even when they argue. Also strong is the sense of humor, which varies from slapstick to a more subtle undercurrent of wry amusement about the world. Absurdity also plays a part, as when Moominpapa tries to reassemble two broken household appliances and winds up building a time machine instead. What makes the whole world of the Moomins work, however, is something kind of old-fashioned and yet sincere: love and affection not only for each other but for the world. Although conflict and plot complication based on conflict exist in Jansson's universe, she also manages to make the stories work because of themes like friendship and working together to solve problems. This sounds like it could be preachy or didactic, but it isn't--it's just hardwired into the subtext.

Books of the States: Lev Grossman on John Updike

Our short and incomplete literary tour of the states ends in Massachusetts, the home state of Lev Grossman (and his twin brother and fellow novelist Austin). Grossman's novels, including the bestselling Codex and his upcoming book, The Magicians, which I guarantee you'll be hearing a lot about in the next couple of months, have often fantastic settings, sometimes not even restricted to the dimension we are accustomed to, but for a representative Massachusetts book (I'm not even sure it's a favorite, rather than an impish jab at his Commonwealth fellows) he went suburban realist, to the notorious stories of John Updike's 1963 collection, Couples:

Video: Lev Grossman on Couples

--Tom

YA on Thursday: Cut-outs and "Other Matters Odd and Magical"

Maggie Stiefvater, who you may know from last year's Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception (a YA Wednesday favorite!) shows off her many talents in this book trailer for her upcoming novel, Shiver. The multi-talented Stiefvater not only made the cut-outs, she collaborated on the music:

For more details about the trailer and its related contest, see her blog.

(Thanks, The Book Girl Reviews!)

Favorite summer reads... Sideshow
This week, thankfully, I was handed a copy of Sideshow: Ten Original Tales of Freaks, Illusionists, and Other Matters Odd and Magical, a book of short stories for young adults that had weirdly been off my radar. It's everything that a YA book should be--funny, heartbreaking, attuned to the plight of the outsider. Each of these stories features a different aspect of the old-time circus sideshow, and that gives the authors a chance to play around with isolation, fear, and identity in interesting ways. Plus, it's a scary amazing line-up of fiction writers and graphic novelists. Aimee Bender's "The Bearded Girl" and Shawn Cheng's graphic story of a tricky shadow puppet troupe were stand-out favorites for me.

Quick links...
Finding Wonderland discusses Brit author Malorie Blackman, providing a nice intro to her work, especially Dead Gorgeous.

School Library Journal interviews Rebecca Stead, author of another stellar summer book, When You Reach Me, a comedy/SciFi/tween drama that defies the standard YA/middle grade formulas.

Siobhan Dowd posthumously wins the Carnegie Medal for Bog Child.

Good Morning America plugs "Hot Summer Reads", including Fragile Eternity, Along for the Ride, Surface Tension, Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side, and The Girls' Guide to Rocking.

Little Willow suggests So Punk Rock: And Other Ways to Disappoint Your Mother, and Paul (that's our Paul) reviews The Ask and the Answer, the much-awaited sequel to The Knife of Never Letting Go.

Happy reading.--Heidi

Omni Daily Crush: "The Jewel Box Garden"

In my very first Omnivoracious post (“Best Way to Make a Garden? Make a Garden Library”), I talked about how I'd populated my garden with plants I'd fallen in love with in books. Truthfully, it was more lust than love that drove me to plant a lot of what now greets me at home, and many of them first gave me sweaty palms in Thomas Hobbs's Jewel Box Garden, his follow-up to Shocking Beauty. (In fact, I'd wager a lot of gardeners first gasped over echeverias--those dazzlingly architectural tender succulents that come in a rainbow of pastels--when they got a look at his Vancouver, B.C., garden's exquisite succulent wall).

Hobbs is a hoot. He characterizes his relationship with plants thus: "Unknowingly, I allowed plants to enslave me as their spokesperson, caretaker and pimp." When I ran into him at a gardening conference last year and mentioned--not quite as casually as I'd planned--that I considered The Jewel Box Garden to be the single biggest influence on my gardening style, he laughed, slung his arm over my shoulders, and declared, "We should live together!"

Sadly, it didn't work out (seems he was kidding--drat!), but I still love to virtually visit his world, particularly the Jewel Box, which hasn't left my bedside bookshelf since the book arrived in early '06. Sometimes--especially if I'm drifting off to sleep and trying to trade visions of spreadsheets and XML for some fantastic plantiness--I just soak in the pictures. Hobbs's flair for garden drama still gives this failed actress shivers. He's passionate about the value of making our wildest imagined worlds real, and his Jewel Box opens with a chapter called "Life, as we dream it could be."

He approaches the entire act of garden-making from the point of view of an artist ("Think of your garden, no matter how small, as an exhibition space"). But for Hobbs, it's not about just decorating. It even goes beyond creating gardens as a restorative oasis from the craziness of our larger lives. He dares us to "look deeper and find the door to your well of creativity. Access the scary side of your personality." He delivers his most practical advice on setting the stage through hardscaping, livening up your soil, and keeping your plants healthy with an aura of magic ("Stop thinking of yourself as a gardener and become an artistic, psychic liaison between plant and animal"). This sentence in particular resonated in my gut like a gong: "As I putter around in the garden, I like to envision one current going out of me and a different current coming in. I deliberately try to connect to something, and that is why my garden stops traffic."

Rereading this marvelous book last night, I realized that Hobbs had not only had a profound influence on my gardening style, but on my entire philosophy of gardening as creative, spiritually significant play with plants. When I'm grooving in the garden, I'm in that state of flow, and I can feel the plants flowing right back. (I have no doubt that's major factor for why my garden not only feels wonderful and keeps me sane, but has started to attract some exciting attention from some of the very authors and photographers whose work has inspired me.)

The Jewel Box Garden is published by Timber Press, a jewel of a publisher based in Portland, Oregon, devoted entirely to marvelous, information-rich books about plants. In the coming weeks, you're going to be hearing a lot more about Timber from me, as I revive my garden library series with a slew of profiles from many of my favorite Timber authors. Lots more fodder for those leafy dreams. --Mari Malcolm

Books of the States: Tracy Kidder on Richard Todd

In his recent books, Tracy Kidder has ranged from Haiti (in Mountains Beyond Mountains) to Vietnam (My Detachment) to Burundi (Strength in What Remains, a sequel of sorts to Mountains Beyond Mountains that comes out in late August), but many of his best-known books have been set in his home state of Massachusetts, from the hardware labs of The Soul of a New Machine to the Holyoke classroom of Among Schoolchildren and the Berkshire village in Home Town. He admits a conflict of interest in his choice for a favorite Massachusetts book--the author, Richard Todd, has been his editor and friend for over 30 years--but he makes an eloquent case for Todd's only book in a lengthy literary career, The Thing Itself:

Video: Tracy Kidder on The Thing Itself

--Tom

Omni Daily News

Catcher in the Rye Sequel Blocked
Guess Holden Caufield will remain a callow youth for a while longer--at least in the U.S.  A federal judge ruled late yesterday that the J.D. Salinger offensive was “likely to succeed on the merits of its copyright case" against Fredrik Colting, author of  60 Years Later--a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye. Colting plans to appeal the decision. His book will be released in Europe later this summer. [PW]

Governor's Book on Ice
The Observer reports that the scandal-ridden South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has been given the heave-ho by publisher Sentinel. The right-leaning imprint owned by Penguin had planned to publish the Governor's book on fiscal conservatism in spring of 2010. He has been released from his contract. [The New York Observer]

Everything Matters When the Clock Is Ticking
Author and Daily Beast critic Taylor Antrim takes a closer look at Ron Currie Jr.'s new novel Everything Matters! and the burgeoning literary genre of "pre-apocalyptic" novels.

"Deploying a lightly experimental structure, and an anything-goes approach to plotting, Currie, Jr. poses the question: What would you do if faced with the knowledge that the world is going to end with a comet hitting Earth on June 15, 2010, at 3:44 p.m. EST?"

Listen to Currie's thoughts on the "multiverse", "borrowing" from favorite authors, and more in our Omni podcast.  And in case you missed it earlier, check out our own Daphne Durham's take on the novel vs. Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan's The Strain.  [The Daily Beast]

--Lauren

Books of the States: Richard Russo on William Kennedy

As identified with Brooklyn as Jonathan Lethem is, Richard Russo is just as strongly associated with his own part of the Empire State, the upstate towns where his novels such as Nobody's Fool, Bridge of Sighs, and The Risk Pool are rooted. (His upcoming novel, That Old Cape Magic, though, takes a road trip to the Massachusetts vacationland of the title--I'll be posting our interview about the book in this space in the next few weeks.) For his representative New York book, he settled, with apologies to all those writers he would have liked to include as well, on the novel of a friend and fellow Pulitzer winner whose home turf of Albany is just a few dozen miles away from Russo's, but in a different world entirely: William Kennedy's Ironweed:

Video: Richard Russo on Ironweed

--Tom

Books of the States: Jonathan Lethem on L.J. Davis

These days, Brooklyn has a writer in every brownstone, but none is more closely identified with the borough than Jonathan Lethem, who grew up there and who has set perhaps his two most significant novels there as well, Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude. For his upcoming novel, Chronic City (which comes out in October and which I just described elsewhere as "meticulously hilarious"), however, he crosses the river to Manhattan and doesn't turn back. In fact, he mentioned to me in an interview I'll be posting here later this month that he did a text search of his manuscript for the word "Brooklyn," and it only came up twice, both times followed by "Bridge".

But when I asked him to think of a New York book, he returned to his home borough--indeed to a writer who lived on the same street where Lethem grew up: L.J. Davis, for whose 1971 novel of one man on the vanguard of gentrification, A Meaningful Life, Lethem wrote the introduction when it was reissued this year, after long being out of print, by New York Review Books:

Video: Jonathan Lethem on A Meaningful Life

--Tom

Books of the States: George Pelecanos on Edward P. Jones

Washington, D.C., whose non-political neighborhoods were so long neglected by novelists, is now blessed by two wonderful writers of intense local interests and loyalties, George Pelecanos and Edward P. Jones. Pelecanos has written 16 crime novels that span the last few decades of the city's life, while Jones, while he's best known for his single novel, The Known World, set in antebellum Virginia, is beloved by residents of the District for his two brilliant short story collections, Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar's Children. When I suggested choosing a state book to Pelecanos, his first thought was to choose something from Maryland, where he lives now, just across the District line, since D.C. has been as poorly represented by fiction as it has in Congress. But then we got to talking about Ed Jones, and he eagerly came back home, to talk about Jones's collection Lost in the City:

Video: George Pelecanos on Lost in the City

Stay tuned next week: I'll also be posting my interview with Pelecanos about his latest novel, The Way Home. --Tom

Omni Daily News

Buffett's Boy Stays on the Farm
Wall Street Journal reporters Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman profile farmer and philanthropist Howard Buffett (also the son of Warren Buffet) in today's paper and their just released book Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty. They describe Buffet, the Younger's passionate efforts to put technological advances and drought-resistant farming techniques into the hands of African farmers. [WSJ]

Deja vu for Jackson Bio
J. Randy Taraborelli's Jacko bio Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness a do-over. A lot has happened since 1990, so Taraborelli will be "updating" the book with additional material in time for a mid-July release. The book's refreshed title will be Michael Jackson: The Magic, The Madness, The Whole Story, 1958-2009.  [PW]

Glo Bro Story
Ever wonder what makes day-glo and fluorescent paint, uh, glow under white and black light?  The new children's nonfiction book,The Day-Glo Brothers: The True Story of Bob and Joe Switzer's Bright Ideas and Brand-New Colors, answers that question and tells the fascinating story of the sibling genius inventors.  Read Mark Frauenfelder's glowing review of Chris Barton's book, featuring groovy illustrations by Tony Persiani. You'll be thumb-wrestling your kids for this one. [BoingBoing]

--Lauren

Capybara Madness: Celeste and the Giant Hamster by Melanie Typaldos

 
  (Why, yes, it is the Rodent of Unusual Size that inspired Typaldos' book...)

Sometimes you discover hidden treasures purely by accident. That's certainly the case when it comes to Melanie Typaldos' Celeste and the Giant Hamster, and it demonstrates just why the Internet can so often be a wonderful tool.

Follow this chain of events, if you will...

(1) A friend mentions as a joke that she wants a capybara for her birthday.

(2) This reignites my own interest in capybaras, the world's largest rodent, which leads to having a dream about capybaras.

(3) In the comments thread of the capybara dream-post, a capybara named Caplin Rous actually responds to me about my dream.

(4) I visit Caplin Rous's website and discover possibly the world's most famous capybara.

(5) I interview Caplin's owner, Melanie Typaldos for my blog, and the blogosphere explodes with love for giant rodents, with over forty thousand people reading the interview and BoingBoing linking to it under the title "Life with a 100 lb rodent that sounds like a Geiger counter when it's happy."

(6) Melanie helps my wife and me surprise our friend with a most excellent birthday photo (scroll down).

(7) Meanwhile, Melanie has sent me her children's book for ages nine through twelve, entitled Celeste and the Giant Hamster...

  

Now, just because someone owns a giant rodent doesn't necessarily mean they can write an engaging children's story that involves said giant rodent. In fact, given that the book is not out from a commercial publisher or large indie, I have to say I was not sure what to expect. You never know, and you never know when you have to make nice hrumphing noises about how "interesting" the book is while you vow never ever to mention it anywhere.

But the truth is, Celeste and the Giant Hamster is a wonderful book--a true hidden treasure that anyone should consider as a gift for children. The writing is strong and clever, the storyline making the reader want to find out what happens while also being fairly complex.

What's it about? As the back cover reads, "Celeste the Cat is tormented by her human’s insistence on keeping a dwarf hamster, appallingly named Celestina, as a pet. Enlisting the aid of two friends, the brave but intellectually challenged Tiger and overly-enthusiastic Ruby, she sets out to trap a giant hamster that is loose and living in a nearby field. She plans on placing the giant hamster in front of Celestina’s cage to show her owner what she thinks of pet rodents. The giant hamster--actually a capybara--proves to be a larger, stronger and more intelligent adversary than the cats expect, resulting in a series of humorous mishaps that leave the trio battered but not dispirited. Slowly the cats come to realize that the capybara is not the frightening monster they imagined. When the capybara has a litter of eight precocious capy-kittens, Celeste, Ruby and Tiger find themselves doing things they never imagined, like going for a swim and protecting baby rodents from a tough gang of tom cats."

What's particularly good here is how Typaldos uses the baby capybara as the foil to the scheming cats. And as their reaction to the capybara changes, so too does our perception of them as characters. Kids will also get a kick out of the photos of Caplin Rous on the back cover and accompanying the author bio. I'd not be at all surprised if a major publisher picked up this book for reprint. It's a very strong and unusual selection. Not to mention, if Caplin Rous isn't headed for superstar status, I don't know who is!

Meanwhile, I'm not sure the chain of events describe above has ended. After all, Caplin Rous has a birthday party coming up, capybaras are still infiltrating my dreams, and the cat Celeste may have more adventures in store...

Books of the States: Elizabeth Kostova on Thomas Lynch

In the Javits Center, the New York home of BookExpo, there was a giant, Dan Brown-sized banner advertising Elizabeth Kostova's second novel The Swan Thieves--which is no surprise, since her first book, The Historian, was a giant breakthrough bestseller. But The Swan Thieves doesn't come out until early next year, and there weren't any advance copies available yet to read, so we didn't do a full interview. She did stop by long enough, though, to say a few words about the upcoming book (which I'll post next week), and to talk about a favorite book from Michigan (where she went to grad school and wrote The Historian): The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch, a professional poet and working undertaker in his small Michigan town. (It's a favorite of mine too, and was on my Michigan list.)

Video: Elizabeth Kostova on The Undertaking

--Tom

Books of the States: Michael Lewis on John Kennedy Toole

I've already posted my BookExpo interview with Michael Lewis, in which we talked about both his new book on fatherhood, Home Game, and his upcoming one on the Wall Street implosion, The Big Short. He's from New Orleans, but despite having named his son Walker (I asked: Walker Percy, along with Walker Evans, was indeed an inspiration), he chose another beloved local for his favorite Louisiana book: John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces:

Video: Michael Lewis on A Confederacy of Dunces

--Tom

Omni Daily News

Author Catches a Whale of a Prize
The Guardian reports that the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize--the UK's top nonfiction honor (make that honour)--and £20,000 went to author Philip Hoare for Leviathan a genre-busting consideration of the world's largest mammals from diverse perspectives including history, natural history, literature, and economics. For most of his life the author has been immersed in the study of his subject:  

"He [Hoare]traces his love of whales to reading Moby-Dick and vividly recalls his first actual encounter with a killer whale at Windsor safari park. Hoare now frequently travels to Cape Cod as a volunteer on a humpback whale identification programme."

Hoare's Leviathan faced some stiff competition on the Johnson Prize shortlist which included Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance, Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, David Grann's The Lost City of Z, and Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder (set to release on July 14). [The Guardian]

Hoffman Overtweets from Critical Review
Author Alice Hoffman didn't take too kindly to Roberta Silman's critical review of her latest novel The Story Sisters which ran in last Sunday's Boston Globe.  Hoffman didn't just sit there and stew, she blew off some steam by tweeting about it.  The LA Times reports that the author fired off 27 Twitter posts, but later apologized for her uncharacteristic outburst.  Amazon customer reviews of the novel have been generally positive. [LA Times]

--Lauren

Books of the States: Jane Smiley on Jetta Carleton

Jane Smiley may be best known as an Iowa writer, thanks to A Thousand Acres and Moo, and she now lives in California, the setting of her recent novel Ten Days in the Hills and her upcoming one, her first book for young readers, The Georges and the Jewels, which winningly revives the lost genre of the horse book for girls. But she grew up in Missouri, and the book she chose from that very literary state is Jetta Carleton's 1962 novel, The Moonflower Vine:

Video: Jane Smiley on The Moonflower Vine

--Tom

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

---

Pinch-hitting for Tom this week, and foul-tipped OMM out a day.  Apologies for the tardiness.  - Dave

---

New York Times

• Sunday Book Review cover: Paul Bloom on The Evolution of God by Robert Wright: "Wright's tone is reasoned and careful, even hesitant, throughout, and it is nice to read about issues like the morality of Christ and the meaning of jihad without getting the feeling that you are being shouted at. His views, though, are provocative and controversial. There is something here to annoy almost everyone."
• Janet Maslin on Conquest of the Useless by Werner Herzog: "As Conquest of the Useless reveals, Mr. Herzog is as canny about the film world as he is about the natural one. And he knows that he needs both to sustain him. Still, he sounds happiest while living in self-imposed exile from those who control his film’s financial destiny. And he is scathing about any collaborators who do not share his love of risk-taking."
• David Gates on Aleksandar Hemon's Love and Obstacles: "The best Hemon’s characters can hope for is an occasional random intersection of private fictions. His readers may have no better hope in their real lives, but in Hemon’s stories they can observe the strange, lonely artistry of the individual imagination from a distance that seems like no distance at all."
• Liesl Schillinger on another collection of short stories, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards by Robert Boswell: "Boswell inlays smooth, polished judgments into unsanded models of working-class and middle-class lives, setting off aspects of the characters’ makeup that they could not or would not reveal themselves ... Like headstrong drivers who refuse to stop for directions, these characters radiate the perverse pride of the self-­stranding."

Washington Post

• Tobias Grey on How to Win a Cosmic War by Reza Aslan: "Aslan's new book -- his second, after the bestselling No god but God, about the origins and evolution of Islam -- provides more than just historical precedent; it also offers a very persuasive argument for the best way to counter jihadism and its many splinter groups, such as al-Qaeda. 'Islamism,' Aslan says, 'can act as a foil to Jihadism. Unlike Jihadists, whose aims and aspirations rest on a cosmic plane, Islamists have material goals and legitimate ambitions that can be addressed by the state.' He defines Islamism as a 'nationalist ideology' based on religion, distinct from jihadism, which wants to 'erase all borders' and aspires to 'an idealized past of religious communalism.'"

Los Angeles Times

• Eric Banks on The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys by Lilian Pizzichini: "Rhys' novels and stories are, of course, fictions, but to a remarkable extent they are drawn from her life, picked out of the diaries and journals she kept of an exceedingly messy and difficult existence. Yet Pizzichini seems to recognize the pickle this creates for a biographer and manages to present a compelling and appreciative portrait that makes terrific use of the material Rhys, Angier and others have already laid out in full view."

Wall Street Journal

• Frances Taliaferro on Strangers by Anita Brookner: “Strangers shares with other Brookner novels a mannerly, guarded atmosphere, as of characters born middle-aged. You’d like to shake them, urge them to behave badly, but ­inhibition is bred in their bones; they flee from intimacy even as they long for it."

Globe & Mail

• Karen Connelly on Zoya Phan's Little Daughter: "Little Daughter is not a literary memoir; the language is mostly plain and sturdy, with flashes of grace and brightness – and a few unfortunate clichés. The lack of artifice and artfulness serves the book well. As I read, I was repeatedly struck by the fact that a good story simply and clearly told is always a testament to the essential power of The Word."
• Robert Wiersema on The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón: "Despite its readability, there is nothing simple about The Angel's Game. The language is rich, and occasionally baroque, the characterizations are realistic and nuanced, and the twisting of the narrative serves to deepen the novel's thematic concerns, rather than simply existing for the sake of the storyline. The novel manages to be both high pulp and high art simultaneously, and reading it is a heady experience."

Times Literary Supplement

• Brian Schofield on The Empire Stops Here by Philip Parker: "In The Empire Stops Here, a blend of travelogue, classical history and archeology, Philip Parker has applied a wheeze Molesworth would be proud of, creating a sweeping journey ­aro­und the Roman world that sticks almost entirely to the good stuff. He does this by travelling along the outer edge of the imperial project — the limites, or frontiers of Rome, that marked where the great civilisation stopped and hostile territory began. His quest through the imperial badlands of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa succeeds in throwing fresh light onto the story of Rome and its often lunatic fringes, while offering classically minded travellers a few fresh ideas for routes and discoveries of their own."

Books of the States: Kristof and WuDunn on Cleary and Taleb

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, husband and wife, have collaborated for over 20 years as Pulitzer-winning New York Times correspondents and as the authors of three books, including the upcoming Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, which follows the engaged style, full of calls to action, that Kristof has become known for in his Times columns. Kristof is from Oregon and WuDunn is from New York City, and when I asked for some hometown reading, Kristof chose his fellow Yamhill County, Ore., native, Beverly Cleary, while WuDunn, with the recent Wall Street upheavals in mind, thought of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's ode to the improbable, The Black Swan:

Video: Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn on Beverly Cleary and The Black Swan

--Tom

Books of the States: Joshua Ferris on Mary Austin

Even after almost 20 years in Seattle I'm still enough of an East Coaster that I automatically think everything should begin there, but let's go left to right in this week's national tour, starting with California. Josh Ferris is from Illinois, and he wrote the Florida essay for State by State, but when I asked him to talk about a book that represented a state the one that came to mind was a recent discovery of his from the California desert, Mary Austin's 1903 book, The Land of Little Rain:

Video: Joshua Ferris on Mary Austin

Ferris, of course, is known for writing one of the most acclaimed debut novels in recent years, Then We Came to the End. His second novel, The Unnamed, won't be out until January, but I can report that it is both very different from his first one and remarkably good. I'll post our interview about it in the next few weeks.  --Tom

P.S. The book by John Daniel he mentions is Rogue River Journal, from Oregon, which brings us to our next video...

Author Books of the States: A Short Video Tour

While I was at BookExpo, I asked most of the authors I interviewed to do, in the spirit of our Books of the States project, a short video pitch for a favorite book from a state they know well. I've already posted China Mieville's appreciation (if that's the word) for H.P. Lovecraft's fascinatingly hateful story, "The Horror at Red Hook," and now with Independence Day approaching, I thought this would be an appropriate week to post all the others. So each day today through Thursday (we're taking Friday off, and I assume you are too), we'll post two or three videos representing states from Oregon to Massachusetts. Stay tuned. --Tom