Omnivoracious

Guest Bookshelf: Ben Lukoff

We bring in the New Year with a Omnivoracious bookshelf from Ben Lukoff, our former colleague over on our music blog, Amazon Earworm (who I believed signed off from Earworm this fall with a post on his "concert experience of a lifetime": a Petula Clark show! Ben loves him some '60s Brit pop--and who can argue with "Downtown"?):

This is one of the seven bookshelves in my apartment: fairly typical in its mix of subjects (almost entirely non-fiction, heavy on the linguistics and philology with a bit of economics, history, and politics--plus some classic comics), but not so in that it is one of only two of those bookshelves shallow enough to only accommodate one row of titles. The book I acquired longest ago is probably Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle, bought for me by my father at the Seattle Museum of History & Industry gift shop sometime in the early 1980s. Second oldest is The Young Detective's Handbook, which my sister got me for my seventh birthday--I fancied myself a bit of an amateur Sherlock Holmes at the time. Next is The Glory of Their Times, a history of the early days of baseball my dad bought me when I was 10. The latest acquisition is, I think, The Elements of Murder--I've always been fascinated by toxic chemicals. I blame library sales, remainder bins, working at Amazon for over five years, and what used to be an excellent local secondhand-books scene for the fact that I may soon be forced to move to make room for not only the books on the back rows, but the ones filling the boxes in my living room, as well.

See Ben's full bookshelf and links, and contribute your own shelf photo to banner@omnivoracious.com. --Tom

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Kathryn Harrison on Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee: "What changes for Coetzee’s readers between 'Disgrace' and 'Diary of a Bad Year' is our opinion of the author. In this most recent 'novel,' we are deliberately manipulated by a form that is coy as well as playful, and it’s hard not to conclude Coetzee is more invested in his relationship with his readers than in his characters’ credibility and interactions with one another.... After all, how riveting can fictional entanglements be when compared with the more immediate and real relationship between a writer and his audience."
• Lee Siegel on Modernism by Peter Gay: "If anyone is aware of the complexity of modernist attitudes, it is Peter Gay. He is the country’s pre-eminent cultural historian and the author of masterpieces of social and intellectual reimagining including 'The Enlightenment,' 'Weimar Culture,' 'Freud' and the towering multi-volume study 'The Bourgeois Experience.' Such achievements make it all the more dismaying to find that in this rich, learned, briskly written, maddening yet necessary study, Gay’s formidable syntheses often run aground on lapses of knowledge and judgment."
• Tom Shone on The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved by Judith Freeman: "The author of four novels, Freeman is, you realize, a little more in love with mysteriousness than with mere mysteries, or their resolutions, and while the same could be said for Chandler, who never could keep track of who did what to whom in 'The Big Sleep,' this makes for a woozy kind of book, in which the blurry latitude afforded by long-distance 'obsession' consistently cuts against the more painstaking task of bringing the marriage into any kind of focus."
• Mark Costello on An Ordinary Spy by Joseph Weisberg: "Ruttenberg, the narrator, is a bit like the text, a sutured and negotiated personality. He can view his spying in heroic terms, hoping 'to protect and promote freedom.' But he is, at heart, a company man.... He is a team player for the evil C.I.A., that boogeyman of history. Yet the boogeyman seems to have the office culture of a savings bank in Cleveland. Among its other satisfactions, this book is surely the best portrait of the working C.I.A. we have had in many years."

Washington Post:

• Book World is on a New Year's holiday.

Los Angeles Times:

• Emily Barton on People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks: "Geraldine Brooks has ... half-found and half-invented a swashbuckling book and, despite occasional quirks, woven a tale that's haunting and satisfying. Her Sarajevo Haggadah embodies both the story of the survival of the Jews against terrible odds and the story of all thinking people's relationship to the past."
• Sarah Weinman on Salt River by James Sallis: "When Sallis' characters do make choices ... he doesn't always give the reader a sense of closure. Rather, he invites chaos back in, as when a major character is never seen again, his or her fate left outside the scope of the book.... Conventional crime fiction craves resolution, but by looking inside order's hairline fractures for any fleeting sense of chaos, the author creates a texture that is both comforting and quietly disturbing."

Globe & Mail:

• Greg Gatenby on The Whale Warriors by Peter Heller: "Throughout his book, and especially in the last chapter, Heller questions the morality of the tactics used by Watson, and even, albeit politely, questions his sanity. In other words, while no fan of whaling, Heller remains objective about his subject, and it is that relative aloofness that gives this account its authority. I have hundreds of whale books in my library, but this title easily earns a place among the top 10."

Times Literary Supplement:

• Joyce Carol Oates on Bernard Malamud by Philip Davis: "It is rare that a biographer succeeds in evoking, with a novelist’s skill, such compassion for his (flawed, human) subject; yet more rare, that a biographer succeeds in so drawing the reader into the shimmering world he has constructed out of a small infinity of letters, drafts, notes, manuscripts, printed texts, interview transcripts etc, that the barrier between reader and subject becomes near-transparent."

The New Yorker:

• Joan Acocella on Kahlil Gibran: The Collected Works: "Gibran was familiar with Buddhist and Muslim holy books, and above all with the Bible.... In 'The Prophet' he Osterized all these into a warm, smooth, interconfessional soup that was perfect for twentieth-century readers, many of whom longed for the comforts of religion but did not wish to pledge allegiance to any church, let alone to any deity who might have left a record of how he wanted them to behave. It is no surprise that when those two trends—anti-authoritarianism and a nostalgia for sanctity—came together and produced the sixties, 'The Prophet' ’s sales climaxed."

--Tom

Age of Bronze: The Story of the Trojan War

   

Part One of Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze: Betrayal, originally scheduled for July of this year, is finally out from Image Comics in a handsome graphic novel edition. For those who haven't been following this saga, it's the tale of one man's quest (that's Shanower's) to detail all of Ancient History's greatest legend in comics form. If you were disappointed with the movie Troy and you're not sure you want to go back to the original source material, definitely check out Shanower's creation. He rather effortlessly has managed to re-imagine the myth as an illustrated narrative. If you think that's easy, just check out the list of character names with descriptions in the back of the book--or the copious bibliography of research materials.   

The Oak King: A Conversation with Peter S. Beagle

Omnivoracious readers may remember my brief post on Peter S. Beagle's great novel A Fine and Private Place back in November. As I wrote then, "If there's one novel that makes you contemplate life, friendship, love, and your place in the world, A Fine and Private Place is that book. A love story with ghosts that features a talking raven, told with a quiet eloquence and a wisdom that is satisfying without being sentimental, it's still my favorite novel by Beagle." Since then, Beagle took time out of his busy schedule to answer the following questions.

      

Amazon.com: When you were writing A Fine and Private Place, did you have any idea it was going to have such staying power?

Beagle: No. Not at all, of course. When I was 19 years old I never thought in terms of classics or being permanently around. I’d known enough writers, even at that age, to see that what happens to your work is so far out of your control you simply can’t afford to let that kind of concern enter your thinking.

Amazon.com: The publisher asked you to remove four chapters from the book. At the time, did you agree with the decision? Have your feelings about it changed over the years?

Beagle: At the time I was outraged. I fought every step of the way, and every sentence. Today I’m inordinately grateful to Marshall Best, the editor who did that. Marshall is long gone, so I just hope that back then I had sense and courtesy enough to say thank you. But I don’t think I realized fully what his effect on the book had been until many years later. If it weren’t for him I don’t think the book would still be in print. He’s also the one who came up with the title and the allusion to those marvelously appropriate lines from Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”--I'd originally called the book The Dark City, after the way that Jonathan Rebeck saw the graveyard. Titles, sad to say, have never been my strong suit. Most of my best have actually come from friends or editors.

The Behemoths Approach: Three Major SF/F Titles for 2008

 

That thunderous, earth-shattering sound vibrating through the pavement and up-ending your coffee is the harbinger of approaching giants: three novels of prodigious page count and ambitious intent. Yes, that's right, Iain M. Banks' new Culture SF novel Matter, Peter F. Hamilton's latest space opera The Dreaming Void, and first-time novelist Felix Gilman's incredibly imaginative New Weirdish urban fantasy Thunderer will all be unleashed upon the world in winter-spring 2008. You can either start running for your lives now, or show some spine, buckle down, and prepare to read over 1,600 pages of science fiction and fantasy goodness.

The only real question for the serious genre devotee is what plan of attack will work best--something you must work out before receiving the books. Once gazing upon their thick spines and mind-blowing covers, you will no doubt be struck dumb and senseless, unable to think properly.

Personally, I recommend beginning with Thunderer, the purest fantasy of the bunch (as well as the shortest and, well, it's always polite to give a brilliant new author the first position), followed by Matter, because it has a fair amount of fantasy in it. Much as in Banks's previous novel Inversions, Matter concerns the all-encompassing space-faring Culture impinging on a less technologically advanced culture. In this case, that culture resembles a somewhat Medieval society. Thus nicely protected from the bends by this gentle transition (Matter is also the second-longest of the three), you may easily pass on to Hamilton's all-out SF novel, The Dreaming Void (also the longest). There you'll find your space battles, your mysterious alien research facilities, and surprises galore.

Once digested in this order, these novels, while still unruly monsters, will be much better behaved than they might otherwise, and you may safely leave them on the shelf without fear that they might devour your smaller, more timid books. --JeffV

Sunday at the Market with Patricia and Dorie

We're very fortunate that Seattle is a frequent stop on the cookbook book-tour circuit and this past spring celebrated food critic and cookbook author Patricia Wells visited Amazon for a late-morning talk over coffee. Wells has lived in France for more than 25 years and during our talk we asked her if she ever runs into  Dorie Greenspan and Ina Garten, two women who have also stopped by Amazon over the years and who also spend much of the year in the City of Lights. We pictured a high-end foodie sitcom of sorts, with these culinary all stars running into each other at the markets, shopping together, or tapping on each others' doors to borrow sugar cubes or exchange a recipe or two. Patricia was sweet enough to remember this and sent us an e-mail this past Sunday with photographic proof that such Parisian culinary adventures do exist. (A little French bird told us that we just might receive another photo for New Year's featuring a certain Barefoot Contessa.)

Happy holidays!

--BTP

There's a little corner of Paris that probably has more American foodies than many major American cities. The city's 6th and 7th arrondissement is inhabited by a happy party of part-timers and full timers, and since food is our mission, we tend to gather often for multi-course feasts. Cookbook writers Dorie Greenspan and Ina Garten are a stone's throw from our apartment on Rue du Bac. Eli Zabar and his wife Devon Fredericks are not far away, and restaurateurs Johanne Killeen and George Germon are just about to move in, too. So there’s never a problem if you need to borrow a tin of caviar or a few fresh black truffles!

Dorie and I get together often, and we manage to talk nonstop wherever we go. When she is in town, we meet on Sunday mornings at the Boulevard Raspail organic market, and talk so much that our shopping list has to take a serious back seat. We meet at the potato galette stand for breakfast and go on from there.

We all love to cook for one another, and surely one of our New Year's feasts will be made up of some of the fresh black truffles just coming into season: There might be scrambled eggs with truffles, fresh pasta and truffles, for sure the Chaource cow's milk cheese layered with the fragrant mushroom, and a lamb's lettuce salad dotted with minced truffle trimmings. Dorie will prepare dessert, of course, hopefully it will be her famous Chocolate-Crunched Caramel Tart.

Champagne and wine will flow freely, with our favorite house champagne, Rose de Jeanne, a 100% pinot noir from winemaker Cedric Bouchard, a white Châteauneuf-du-Pape old vines wine from Château du Beaucastel, and our own red Cotes du Rhône, Clos Chanteduc.

Dorie, her husband, Michael, myself and my husband, Walter will be sure to toast all of our readers, thanking them for their support, and wishing them a very delicious 2008!

Patricia Wells
Paris, France
23 December 2007

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: David Leavitt on Henry James: The Mature Master by Sheldon Novick: "Like its predecessor, 'Henry James: The Mature Master' strives to supplant the common view of James as 'a passive, fearful man, a detached observer of the life around him' with one of the writer as a gregarious, sometimes heroic, often troubled citizen of the world. Far from a sniffy celibate living comfortably on independent means or a 'little boy with his nose pressed against the glass of a shop window,' Novick’s James was an authentic cosmopolite who led a life as emotionally, sexually and financially complex as those of the characters in his fiction."
• Matt Weiland on Psychogeography: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place by Will Self and Ralph Steadman: "As with Self’s novels, the ideas behind his long walks can be more engaging than the walks themselves. This may be because on the page Self is a sprinter, not a distance man; certainly he is at his most perceptive and convincing when writing short and focused little pieces. Which is to say: Self is a natural and excellent columnist. So skip the introduction and proceed directly to the short pieces, all of which originally appeared as the Psychogeography column in the London newspaper The Independent."
• William Grimes on Smile When You're Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer by Chuck Thompson: "The book is a savagely funny act of revenge for years spent servicing the travel fantasies of gullible readers.... A cloud of guilt envelops Mr. Thompson as he writes, conscious that he and his travel-porn colleagues have strip mined the earth of its most precious resource: pleasant, undiscovered destinations. 'We venerate what we destroy,' he writes. 'But first we destroy.'"
• Kakutani on Her Last Death by Susanna Sonnenberg: "the wonder of this memoir is that the author survived her traumatic childhood and found a way of turning her memories into a fiercely observed, fluently written book that captures the chaos and confusions of her youth, the daughter of an unpredictable pill-and-coke addicted mother and a brilliant, self-absorbed father, neither of whom had the faintest idea of how to be a parent."

Washington Post:

• Jason Roberts on Stanley by Tim Jeal: "Jeal's biography is an unalloyed triumph, not only because it is painstakingly researched and eminently readable, but because it never loses sight of the abandoned child in the man, driving him forward, 'able to frighten, able to suffer, but also able to command love and obedience.' Such a personality, Jeal notes, is 'an extinct species, and all the more remarkable for that.'"
• Jonah Lehrer on The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker: "The Stuff of Thought concludes with an optimistic gloss on the power of language to lead us out of the Platonic cave, so that we can 'transcend our cognitive and emotional limitations.' It's a nice try at a happy ending, but I don't buy it. The Stuff of Thought, after all, is really about the limits of language, the way our prose and poetry are bound by innate constraints we can't even comprehend."

Los Angeles Times:

• Matthew Sharpe on It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature by Diane Williams: "What, then, is good about depicting egregious feelings and behavior in language that is resolutely strange? Couldn't one, a reader might ask, be coaxed from one's habits of perception by stories written in more quotidian language and depicting more kindness and politeness? Perhaps, but the extremity that Williams depicts and the extremity of the depiction evoke something akin to the pity and fear that the great writers of antiquity considered central to literature. Her stories, by removing you from ordinary literary experience, place you more deeply in ordinary life. 'Isn't ordinary life strange?' they ask, and in so asking, they revivify and console."

Globe & Mail:

• Greg Buium on Coltrane: The Story of a Sound by Ben Ratliff: "Ratliff ... could easily have written something persnickety and parochial; music writers too often adore the equivalent of inside baseball. Instead, he's turned a real jazz book into an immediate declaration of relevance. Coltrane is about artistic influence and American culture, and Ratliff uses perhaps the toughest matter at a critic's disposal to tell this story: a musician's sound."
• Claire Berlinski on Other Colors by Orhan Pamuk: "For page upon page, Pamuk stresses in these self-enamoured tones that he is a man who really likes to read books. Good ones, too, by famous writers like Dostoyevsky and Borges - not, you know, easy ones. He's different from other Turks, you see. But he's not like the Europeans, either. He's an outsider, eternally apart, rejected by all, accepted by no one (the Nobel committee aside)."

The Guardian:

• Tibor Fischer on The White King by Gyorgy Dragoman: "The novel won awards in Hungary, and it's easy to see why. It's the Just William books teamed up with Nineteen Eighty-Four; a superb novel about childhood, schooldays and gang fights, but one that manages to put the world of the adults firmly into focus as well. The first few chapters struggle in a sort of Joycean-Beckettian straitjacket (as an indication of his intellectual weight, Dragomán translated Watt into Hungarian for fun), but then Dragomán forgets all that and lets the narrative rip, shifting the characters around like he's Stephen King or Elmore Leonard."

The New Yorker:

• No new issue this week, so go back and read more of the Fiction issue.

K.J. Parker's The Engineer Trilogy

First published in England a few years back, Devices and Desires, Evil for Evil, and The Escapement--the three books of K.J. Parker's The Engineer Trilogy--were released by Orbit in North America on an audacious one-a-month schedule starting this past October. Which means that you now can pick up the entire set in what I can only describe as beautifully designed editions. I haven't yet made it through all three novels, but from what I have read I think it's unlikely readers will be disappointed. This is well-written, complicated adult fantasy fiction. From one single act--a death sentence for an engineer who has violated guild law--comes a firestorm of consequences when the engineer escapes and vows vengeance. Especially in the second and third books, this then opens up into even more complex intrigue and war. Parker's muscular prose, fascinating characters, and intricate world-building should appeal to anyone who likes fantasy fiction.

Monster Spotter's Guide to North America

      

This holiday season, on those long, endless hikes you take with your squabbling extended family into anonymous woodland prior to sitting down to a feast of carbs, you could do worse than take along the Monster Spotter's Guide to North America. Here in Florida, for example, you'd look up the section on the mighty Skunk Ape (p. 51) and pick up some pointers--like the fact that it enjoys stealing "pots of lima beans." Oh--and it smells like something found in a dumpster. These are important facts to know if you want to survive out in the wilderness. From Abominable Swamp Slob to Zombies, divided up by region of the country (with additional sections on Mexico and Canada), this book has you covered--complete with drawings and maps. Check out their website as well.--JeffV

Virginia Woolf's Return

What if you could walk in Virginia Woolf's shoes in the classroom and imagine how she might have taught creative writing? What kind of advice might she have given? That's the premise of Danell Jones' audacious The Virginia Woolf Writers' Workshop: Seven Lessons to Inspire Great Writing. To be honest, I was skeptical. Jones has chosen to dramatize Woolf in the classroom, creating little fictional scenes that include Woolf's advice as conjured up by the author. Each chapter ends with a series of exercises. What gives the book legitimacy is Jones's copious research, using Woolf's essays, letters, and diaries as source material. It's clear that Jones loves Woolf and means to reanimate her with respect and fondness. It's still a somewhat jarring effect at first, but as you slide into the book you forget the conceit and become fascinated by the advice. From Killing the Angel in the House (about the value of modesty) to quotes like "A true novelist can no more cease to receive impressions than a fish in mid-ocean can cease to let the water rush through his gills," you do get a coherent impression of Woolf as a creative writing teacher. More importantly, by the end of The Virginia Woolf Writers' Workshop, I realized that I was getting more context and more of some hard-to-define but essential element from encountering Woolf's words clothed in Jones's conceit. So, if you're one of the millions of would-be writers here in North America, pick up this oddly beguiling, lovingly designed guide.

Best of the Year Roundup

At some point the best of the year lists came in so fast that I couldn't keep up with them anymore, but, for the list geeks like me--or late holiday shoppers--I'm going to link to as many of them here as I can. Some are straight top 10 lists, some are, in the British style, more idiosyncratic surveys of contributors' favorites from the year. As I've said, I like the sporting discipline of the top 10 list (ranked, preferably!), but after seeing so many lists pile in (with so many of the same books atop them), the weirder and more reflective surveys of individual favorites are very appealing as well. But for those who love rankings, Michael Cader of the subscription-only Publishers Lunch went to the trouble of doing something I'm glad he saved me from doing myself: adding up the favorites from nine different sources (our own top 20 included) to come up with a "list of lists." I'll begin things with that top 10, and then the list links commence:

1. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
2. The Brief Wondrous LIfe of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
3. Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
4. Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner
5. Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat
6. The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon
7. Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis
8. The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross
9. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
10. The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

Here goes (in addition to the Time, New York Times, and National Book Critics Circle picks posted before), with a pick of interest pulled out from each one:

• Washington Post Top 10 (click on Top 10 Books of 2007) (The Unnatural History of the Sea by Callum Roberts)
• Post critic Jonathan Yardley's top 10 (Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon)
• Boston Globe 16 best (The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies)
• Los Angeles Times: fiction, nonfiction, children's, mystery, scifi (The Happiest Man in the World by Alec Wilkinson)
• Village Voice top 20 (Nobodies by John Bowe)
• New York magazine's Year in Books (e.g. top 11) (Wall and Piece by Banksy)
• Salon's top 10 (Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations by Georgina Howell) and top graphic novels (The Salon by Nick Bertozzi)
• The Times of London Christmas favorites in 20 categories (The Ghost by Robert Harris)
• Michael Upchurch's top 10 in the Seattle Times (The Empress of Weehawken by Irene Dische)
• Slate's Year in Books: a couple dozen picks by staffers and contributors (A Free Life by Ha Jin)
• The Millions book blog: favorites from an excellent lineup of authors and bloggers (Endless Things by John Crowley)
• The Guardian: fiction top 10 and much more, including a long list of writers' favorites (The Whisperers by Orlando Figes)
• Best economics books of 2007, from the NYT's David Leonhardt (Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer by Shannon Brownlee)

Oh, there's more, more, more out there, many of which you'll find in the vast year-end-list compendium at Filmoculous. --Tom

Tsar of the Year

Well, so much for my prognosticating abilities: Time announced their Person of the Year today, and it wasn't David Petraeus, nor was it J.K. Rowling, nor was it Al Gore. I don't feel as bad about the person they did select, Vladimir Putin (I did say he'd be an "interesting choice"), as about the fact that Petraeus, who I had pegged as the clear favorite, was apparently only their fifth choice. Maybe the commenters to the last post who thought that Time, as a "Leftist" rag, would never pick the general had a point, although on my scale Putin sits pretty far to the right of Petraeus. But meanwhile, this gives me one more chance to remind everyone that President Putin is, like Gore and Rowling, a published author: while in office he found time to cowrite Judo: History, Theory, Practice. But he still has some catching up to do: Joseph Stalin, in addition to being named Man of the Year twice, was a poet early in his career (as described in Simon Sebag Montefiore's new Young Stalin) and authored an endless series of books, including his, um, contribution to literary criticism, Marxism and Problems of Linguistics. --Tom

Poly-Creative: An Interview with Writer and Actor Michael Boatman

The multi-talented Michael Boatman, star of movies and television, has now turned his attention to writing fiction, with a first collection of "mean little stories from the wrong side of the tracks" called God Laughs When You Die, featuring an introduction from horror master David J. Schow. Boatman's fiction is taut, honest, and dark. Joe Lansdale said about the collection, "[he] writes like a visitor from hell. Someone out on short term leave for bad behavior. I love this stuff. He's one of the new, and more than promising writers making his mark." (For Boatman's fascinating recent essay "Lady Hollywood", click here.) I recently interviewed Boatman via email about his new direction.

    

Amazon.com: First off, please describe where you are as you’re answering these questions.

Michael Boatman: I'm sitting in my office, which is downstairs in the basement of my house. The windows in my office look out over my backyard and a thick patch of woods. It's 9:00 AM on a foggy December morning.

Amazon.com: How long have you been writing?

Michael Boatman: I've been writing for about thirteen years. I started after I injured my leg in a freakish household accident. I was unable to work for about twelve weeks. One day, Don Cheadle, who is a good friend, stopped by for a visit. He took one look at me, fat, bearded and depressed, and encouraged me to explore writing, as I had always expressed an interest in creating a screenplay. The screenplay was terrible, but I loved the process and I've been writing ever since.

Amazon.com: Where do writing and acting intersect creatively? How do they influence each other in your life?

Michael Boatman: Acting and writing both stem from the most primal form of entertainment, which is storytelling. I've come to believe that I actually became an actor as a kind of creative misfire. I was always a voracious reader. To this day, I'm unable to go anywhere without a book. However, writing was something I'd never considered. It seemed too mystical, something working-class kids from the inner city weren't supposed to do.  I stumbled into acting in high-school, (of course to meet chicks) I discovered that I enjoyed being a part of a creative endeavor. After more than twenty years as an actor, I've realized that, at least for me, the two art forms are linked. An actor communicates his part of the larger story in which he participates, but a writer creates the story. Now I find telling my own stories more compelling than communicating other authors' stories.

old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Edward Hirsch on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Simon Armitage: "'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' is a medieval romance (it inherits a body of Arthurian legends that had circulated in England for a couple of centuries) but also an outlandish ghost story, a gripping morality tale and a weird thriller. It is a sexual teaser that keeps you on the edge of your seat. It’s easy to imagine huddling around the fire to listen to it. You can tear through it in a night or two — I couldn’t put down Simon Armitage’s compulsively readable new verse translation — and linger over it for years."
• Jennifer GIlmore on Love Falls by Esther Freud: "The expectation is obvious: this girl will come to know her elusive father; she will break out from her troubled, tentative girlhood and become a confident woman. Will she find a fairy-tale love as well? While Esther Freud’s sixth novel, 'Love Falls,' follows this all-too-familiar arc, her depiction of Lara is so charming and observant, her writing so dynamic, that all the clichés of a youthful summer of self-discovery are transcended."
• Mark Kamine on Charm City by Madison Smartt Bell: "A standard tourist itinerary can be gleaned from the handful of walks Bell describes, but Frommer would serve better for those interested in simply seeing the sights and eating fine food. Bell’s Baltimore is a real city: complex, ever changing, often gritty and dangerous, always interesting.... Guides to cities are easy enough to come by. Guides to cities’ souls are not. 'Charm City' is both."
• P.J. O'Rourke on Starbucked by Taylor Clark: "I never came to like 'Starbucked.' But I grew very fond of its writer. Most books about social and business phenomena give the reader something to think about. This book gave the author something to think about.... I experienced the pleasure a teacher must feel when he watches a kid with promise outgrowing the vagaries and muddles of immaturity (and the jitters of too many coffee-fueled all-nighters) and coming into his own as a young man of learning, reason and sense."

Washington Post:

• Michael Dirda on American Transcendentalism by Philip Gura: "There's nothing perfunctory or dryly academic about American Transcendentalism. Philip F. Gura writes a lean, impassioned prose, chockablock with anecdote and information.... [H]is exciting, even eye-opening book shows us that from 1830 to 1850 a group of New England preachers and intellectuals confronted what has proved to be the great polarizing tension in American history, that between hyperindividualism and the claims of social justice and human brotherhood."
• Ron Charles on Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips: "Marie Phillips's first novel, Gods Behaving Badly, hovers somewhere between Pride and Prejudice and an episode of 'Bewitched.' I'm not complaining; I have an unusually high regard for Elizabeth Montgomery's oeuvre. And Austen got off some good lines, too."

Los Angeles Times:

• Debby Applegate on Gura's American Transcendentalism: "Gura untangles this complex web of ideas and characters and weaves them into a clear, coherent and compelling tale of America's first, and maybe greatest, major intellectual movement.... 'American Transcendentalism,' brilliant as it is, will not be easy or particularly enjoyable for the casual reader. But students, scholars and those who are thrilled by the intellectual chase will be grateful to Gura for many years to come."
• Will Self on America from the Air by Daniel Mathews and James S. Jackson: "My hunch is that the way in which every aspect of air travel is trammeled by the ineffably dull -- tedious airport architecture, monotonous Muzak, anodyne announcements, superfluous consumer opportunities -- is the result of an unconscious collective denial. After all, if the flight crew wore winged helmets and 'Ride of the Valkyries' were blasting over the PA as the plane picked up speed on the runway, and then, when the oily behemoth slipped the surly bonds of gravity, the captain cried 'Wheeeee!' the latent anxieties of every passenger would be unleashed.... Set against this mass willing of ennui, "America From the Air" comes as a heaven-sent corrective: I urge you to buy it. I think it might, quite possibly, be the best book I have ever read."

Globe & Mail:

• Merilyn Simonds on The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett: "At a stage when the novel has grown almost claustrophobically interior, The Air We Breathe is a refreshing examination of human connectedness.... [T]he pieces of this novel settle brilliantly into what amounts to an allegory of what America is and what it could be. It is, unequivocally, her best work yet."

The Independent:

• Katy Guest on The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford: "[T]he short story is alive and well and mostly living in America. Not that you would immediately guess it, to read Richard Ford's introduction. In it, he laments 'the cold, suffocating hands of the American writing-program industry on our faltering national literary 'product'; [and] the sad decline of the traditional story form'. If such an authority as Ford insists that American literature is being straitened by a creative writing sausage factory, it would take a brave critic to contradict him. But if that is the case then he must have searched long and hard to find 44 vibrant, shocking, fresh and classic stories such as he presents here."

The New Yorker:

• The Fiction Issue, featuring stories by Junot Diaz, Anne Enright, Lore Segal, and Jhumpa Lahiri, as well as a remarkable section on Gordon Lish's editing of Raymond Carver's stories, including Carver's original text of "Beginners" (and Lish's edits that turned it into "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love") and an intense series of letters from Carver to Lish: "I think I had best pull out, Gordon, before it goes any further. I realize I stand every chance of losing your love and friendship over this. But I strongly feel I stand every chance of losing my soul and my mental health over it, if I don’t take that risk. I’m still in the process of recovery and trying to get well from the alcoholism, and I just can’t take any chances, something as momentous and permanent as this, that would put my head in some jeopardy. That’s it, it’s in my head. You have made so many of these stories better, my God, with the lighter editing and trimming. But those others, those three, I guess, I’m liable to croak if they came out that way."
• James Wood on Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee: "Coetzee’s chaste, exact, ashen prose may look like the very embers of restraint, but it is drawn, again and again, to passionate extremity.... Coetzee seems compelled to test his celebrated restraint against subjects and ideas whose extremity challenges novelistic representation."
• John Updike on The Art of the American Snapshot: "Without a felt connection to one’s own mortal course through a lifetime of circumstance, snapshots become baffling and boring.... The prints in 'The Art of the American Snapshot' are reproduced at their actual modest size, with lots of blazingly white space, and have taken their riddles into oblivion with their anonymous creators. Is the baby, for instance, lying on an open packed suitcase, apparently asleep, alive or dead?"

--Tom

Ambush: Author David Keck on Fame and Obscurity

      

As part of a new feature, I'll be checking in on various writers and asking what's currently on their minds. Think of it as a literary ambush, Amazon-style. To kick it off, I pinged critically acclaimed fantasy author David Keck earlier today, author of the highly recommended In the Eye of Heaven and the forthcoming In a Time of Treason, and he had this to say:

"Today, I’ve been thinking about every writer’s nightmare: obscurity...At this very moment, my wife is climbing around our bookshelves (reorganizing our little library in preparation for a move). And, as she turns over the stack, I keep spotting books that I’ve never heard of. Magical novels plastered with rave reviews--that never quite caught on. All around the room are award winners whose fame vanished with the echoes of the authors’ acceptance speeches. Smiles, applause, and then poof! Obscurity is a little like death for the book that is its victim. And so, for a writer, thoughts along these lines can become like a morbid fear of germs. You don’t want to end up locked in your penthouse breathing through a literary dust mask. Really, you don’t. Of course, the reading public can help writers avoid obscurity through any number of simple and inexpensive means. Buying books is one, of course. Talking about books is another. And we live in such an interconnected age, that a little spark of goodwill can prairie-fire its way around the world. It’s easy to follow our various curiosities and to seek out new and interesting work (even if no ad company ever knew its name). As for the writers themselves, I have a sneaking suspicion that every writer keeps a secret and egomaniacal flame deep inside that tells him that his book must live forever. That his book is different."

Elizabeth Bear: Leaving the Competition in the Dust

Elizabeth Bear might just be one of the hardest working writers out there, with a flurry of novels over the past few years that have garnered her Philip K. Dick Award consideration and won her the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. Praised by writers like Richard Morgan and David Brin, she brings a gritty toughness and honesty to her fiction, mixed with an unexpected lyricism. Her new book, just being released by Bantam Spectrum, is Dust, the first in a new space opera trilogy. The basic situation--a space colony orbiting a doomed sun struggles to retain order--may sound familiar, but the weird society that has evolved in the colony is nothing if out-of-the-ordinary, having as much in common with fantasy as science fiction. There are angels in this colony and a much diminished god, among other mysteries.

 

Bear said in an email interview about Dust that "Everything I write is in some manner a comedy of ethics. [But] I've never written anything quite in this mold--sort of space-opera-like and epic--before. Basically, I got to spend a lot of time coming up with crazy ideas, and having a heck of a lot of fun doing it." Despite those "crazy ideas," Bear's favorite part of writing Dust was something much more central: creating the protagonists. "Rien and Perceval were more fun to write than almost anybody else I have ever written. They're scrappy, basically decent people, and I like them both a lot."

Since Bear has been a full-time writer for the past few years, I asked her if anything about the full-time writer lifestyle had surprised her. "You know, I think I had a pretty clear idea of what it would be like. My dad is a self-employed luthier and a musician, so the freelance lifestyle was pretty much devoid of shocks for me. Also, I know a lot of recipes for dried beans and pasta, so I do all right!"

You can read more from Bear on freelancing and other interesting topics on her always lively and sometimes controversial blog. Next for Bear is the novel Ink and Steel, the latest in her Promethean Age series, due out in July 2008, with the follow-up to Dust, Chill, to be released in 2009.

How to Eat Like Jonathan Lethem

As someone who is equally at home on both sides of the literary and culinary fence, today's Grub Street post of Jonathan Lethem's New York Diet (where a featured New Yorker chronicles a week's worth of eating) had me at chili-cheese fries. The author of Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, and most recently, You Don't Love Me Yet, ticks off every bagel, bowl of cereal, and Vietnamese sandwich that crossed his lips this week (though the days/dates seem to be off according to the James Bond wall calendar at my desk). He reports that his "tendency is to go from purity to decadence, like I'm reliving the fall of a great empire," adding "I sound extremely healthful, like I'm some kind of Zen purist. By dinner I'm in the Caligula phase."

Here's hoping that someday soon you'll be able to walk into a Boerum Hill deli and order "The Jonathan Lethem" from the sandwich board.

--BTP

Five Tales, Seven Copies, One Book: J.K. Rowling's Tales of Beedle the Bard

As you may have heard, J.K. Rowling has created a new book of fairy tales, but unlike her last book, which has reached print runs in the tens of millions, this one has a very limited edition: seven. Handwritten and illustrated by Rowling herself and bound in morocco leather, silver ornaments, and semi-precious stones, The Tales of Beedle the Bard is a collection of five wizarding fairy tales. (The tales played a crucial role in the plot of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows after Dumbledore left them to Hermione Granger, but only one of them, "The Tale of the Three Brothers," was included in the story.) Of the seven copies, Rowling gave six to "those most intimately involved" with the Potter books (names as yet unknown), and the last was auctioned off this morning at Sotheby's in London, with proceeds going to The Children's Voice, an organization cofounded by Rowling that campaigns for children's rights.

The book, which according to the AP was expected to sell for around $100,000, ended up selling for 1.95 million pounds (or, given the state of the U.S. dollar these days, $3.98 million). The buyer was unknown at the time of purchase, but later today was revealed to be ... Amazon.com. So needless to say, you can now read more about the book on our site, including some lovely photographs, a few of which I've added below. And there's an already-busy discussion board, where we (and our customers) are answering as many questions as we can about the book. --Tom