Omnivoracious

Cool new kid-lit blogs: one here and one on the way

It's a lucky day when you discover not just one but *two* brand-new kids' book blogs worth checking out. One is already up and the other is still coalescing into blog-ificence:

1. I.N.K., i.e. Interesting Nonfiction for Kids. This blog promises to bring even more "charm, wit, and good looks" to this sometimes-neglected subphylum of kid lit. So far so good, with savvy recommendations like these "handsells":

   You say you really enjoyed the terrific humor and insights of the recent Newbery honor winner THE WEDNESDAY WARS? Well, let me tell you, if you liked those rats, you'll be blown away by Rats. The Story of Rats and People by Al Marrin. It's rats through the ages, reproducing and thriving, even in a court of law.

   Are you the more sensitive type who usually enjoys a tender tearjerker like Jenny Downham's BEFORE I DIE about a girl's battle with incurable cancer? We NF people do diseases--and lots of them. Why not give ace NF writer James Cross Giblin's When Plague Strikes. The Black Death, Smallpox, AIDS a try? Mr. Giblin does not disappoint in his ability to totally immerse his readers in infection, illness and disease.

2. Guys Lit Wire. Don't get too excited just yet: this site still isn't up, but it should soon be a great resource for teen-boy-book recommendations--both for people seeking books for teen boys and (it is hoped) for "actual teenagers," too. With its Guys Read-flavored mission and help from multi-talented bloggers like Colleen Mondor and Sara Lewis Holmes, it's bound to be great.

And it should be noted: I found I.N.K. via Tea Cozy, which points out another great kid nonfiction resource, the ALA's Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults' list "I'm Not Making This Up." --Paul

William F. Buckley Jr.: 1925-2008

William F. Buckley, as you have likely heard by now, died today at his home in Connecticut. Given the conservative ascendancy in the United States over the last few decades, it must be argued that Buckley was one of the most influential Americans of the postwar era. Many people today are tracing a direct and simple genealogy of that ascendancy, following the line backward from Reagan's election in 1980 to the influential Goldwater campaign of 1964 to Buckley's early writings and his founding in 1955 of the National Review, ever since the leading voice of the movement (though many argue it has abandoned his legacy in recent years). And Buckley didn't just found the movement but was present throughout, as theorist, patron, and very public figurehead. He actively shepherded countless careers and influenced far more through his example, his magazine, and his debate show, The Firing Line, where he presided for over 30 years with a kind of baroque gentility, taking on all comers with his erudite murmurs and charmingly reptilian tics.

Buckley always felt a little before my time--I'm not sure if I've ever seen The Firing Line except on YouTube or when trying to find Zoom on PBS. (Perhaps the highest praise I received from my late grandmother was when she said my writing reminded her of Buckley's--"Your grandfather always admired him so much"--though I didn't take it as such a compliment at the time.) I think of him as a right-wing doppelganger of George Plimpton: the same bizarre patrician drawl, the same openness to experience and sense of adventure and pleasure in combat. He happily waded into the counterculture debates of the late 60s--like the recently departed Norman Mailer, he ran a failed campaign for mayor of New York, and also like Mailer he nearly came to blows with Gore Vidal (but then who hasn't?). And like Goldwater, he showed at times a willingness to change his views (or a refusal to adjust them when his movement moved elsewhere), repudiating his former support for segregation in the mid-60s (about time!) and sharply criticizing our current administration for various betrayals of conservatism.

The Web is full of assessments and appreciations today, beginning with the tributes collected at the National Review. The Times has a lengthy obituary and an ongoing Q&A with Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, who is writing a biography of Buckley (he has "quite a ways to go") and who relates this anecdote:

The South Carolina Book Festival: Great Hospitality, Great Literature

(Showing the diversity of the festival, from left-to-right, high-energy SF/Fantasy writer Jay Lake, the somewhat unclassifiable and delightful fiction writer Lauren Groff, dynamic poet Sean Thomas Dougherty, and "Southern" fiction writer Man Martin--who gave one of the best readings I've ever witnessed.)

I just returned from the South Carolina Book Festival, where my wife and I had a great time as guests, participating on panels and other events. (Ann's the fiction editor for Weird Tales and co-editor on our various anthologies). I can honestly say that it was one of the best-run festivals I've ever seen, and that we were made to feel like royalty the whole time. Which is not to say that at other events we've stepped off the plane and been instantly kneecapped by the organizers, but you could tell that the people running this festival really took pride in getting the details right. Not only that, they also really enjoyed themselves, which rubbed off on the participants.

Highlights of the festival included hanging out with the ever-entertaining Jay Lake, whose SF novel Mainspring will soon be released in a mass market edition, as well as meeting The Monsters of Templeton author Lauren Groff, not one but four state Poet Laureates (Marjorie Wentworth--South Carolina; Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda--Virginia; Joyce Brinkman--Indiana; Lisa Starr--Rhode Island), mystery writer James O. Born, historical thriller writer A.J. Hartley, legal thriller writer James Sheehan, mainstream literary novelist/short story writer Jason Ockert, YA novelist Alan Gratz, cookbook author Sallie Ann Robinson, and journalist Peter Zheutlin, among others. That's the great thing about a book festival as opposed to a convention focused on a narrower spectrum (for example, SF/F)--the sheer number of writers you meet from other genres and disciplines. To give you another example, I even met up with Lola Haskins again, a great poet I'd published in a 1980s literary journal and who I hadn't seen since. Ann, meanwhile, actually got to dance with the keynote speaker, Kevin O'Keefe, author of The Average American: The Extraordinary Search for the Nation's Most Ordinary Citizen.

Of course, making sure that diversity doesn't become chaos can be one of the biggest challenges facing a festival. Festival director Paula Watkins told me the most difficult part of her job is actually "Narrowing it all down to fit the space and time we have available. There are so many great writers out there. Getting ten pages of ideas down to three is a challenge."

Your Comments and Food Haikus (Guest Blogger: Michael Pollan)

Thanks for the many provocative posts this week, especially the thoughtful comments on the challenges of eating well when we’re feeling so stretched, both for time and money. Yes, there are people who can’t possibly invest any more time or money in their food, but before deciding that describes you, it’s well worth considering whether the issue is really resources or priorities. For many of us it turns out to be a matter of priorities.

A few readers offered some good rules of thumb. Thanks to Richard Demers for this one:

“The more packaging, the worse it is.” He explains: “Like the individually wrapped Biscotti, in a plastic tray, in a cardboard box with a plastic window, in a plastic grocery store bag.”

Richard also included the aphorism “Eating is an agricultural act,” which he acknowledges he “stole from somebody.” He guessed it was Carlo Petrini or Alice Waters, but in fact the line belongs to Wendell Berry, the Kentucky writer and farmer, who wrote a wonderful essay on the theme of this blog that I recommend to everyone interested in these issues. It’s called “The Pleasures of Eating,” and it appears in an anthology of his work called “What Are People For.” You can also find it on the web.

I wanted to share something I picked up in Portland last week, while on book tour. Before speaking at an event at the Bagdad Theater, sponsored by Powell’s bookstore, the audience was handed index cards and asked to compose a food haiku in the style of the one printed on the cover of In Defense of Food: “Eat food. Not too Much. Mostly Plants.” For some reason, that particular form and rhythm seems to be especially sticky, and it has spawned many imitations. (One of my favorites was submitted to the New York Times website: "Ate the plants. A whole heap. Still hungry.") Anyway, the audience at the Bagdad came up with some particularly sweet ones. Here are a few of my favorites (more are on the website of the magazine Edible Portland:

Grow corn
Just for food
Not cars

Go home
Rip up lawn
Plant kale

Sweet beet
Dye my mouth
Winter red

Earl Butz
Liked his corn
In cups

Feedlots
Make our beef
Torture raised

Picking fruit
Low hanging plum
You're mine

To eat
What I grow
Is heaven

As you can see, they’re not true haiku. (Two words/three words/two words) But try one: there’s something about the form that really works.

Look forward to reading yours.

Jonathan Barnes' The Somnambulist is Nothing to Sleep Through

   

Set in Victorian London, The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes is the kind of fun book that I couldn't resist blurbing when Barnes' editor at William Morrow asked me to a few months ago. This is what I said: "Sneaky, cheeky, and dark in the best possible way, this massively entertaining book manages to make the familiar daringly unfamiliar. I enjoyed the heck out of this novel." The Somnambulist has just been published in hardcover in the US, and I highly recommend you pick up a copy. It's received a starred review in Publishers Weekly as well as a lot of other praise. I think you'll find the exploits of, among others, the odd detective Edward Moon and his even odder sidekick, the Somnambulist, well worth your time. It's one of those books that both fantasy and non-fantasy readers should enjoy.

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: D.T. Max on Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser: "In his postmodern world, meanings are never unpacked. These are fables, not allegories, and their hermetic quality discourages us from wandering outside the text. It is for this reason that Millhauser seems less a descendant of Jorge Luis Borges, to whom he is sometimes compared, than of, say, Shirley Jackson or even 'The Twilight Zone.' These stories are offered for your consideration, nothing more."
• Polly Morrice on Beautiful Boy by David Sheff and Tweak by Nic Sheff: "'Beautiful Boy' is an addiction memoir once removed, depicting the collateral damage that a drug-abusing child inflicts, yet it underscores how the heartbreaking circle game of addiction can fetter a writer’s sense of what to include and, more important, when to stop.... While his father’s decision to lay open much of his life stems from a desire to help other families of addicts, Nic’s urge to tell all seems to derive in part from the lessons and language of rehab — his goal is to be 'authentic.' But Nic also admires chroniclers of wild descents — Rimbaud, Charles Bukowski — and the 25-year-old writer’s infatuation with them shows." On Thursday, Maslin wrote, "On the long, crowded shelf of addiction memoirs 'Beautiful Boy' is more notable for sturdiness and sense than for new insight." And tomorrow, Chip McGrath profiles both Sheffs.
• Stacey D'Erasmo on Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano: "Cross-referenced, complete with bibliography and a biographical list of secondary figures, 'Nazi Literature' is composed of a series of sketches, the compressed life stories of writers in North and South America who never existed, but all too easily could have. Goose-stepping caricatures à la 'The Producers' they are not; instead, they are frighteningly subtle, poignant and plausible."
• Alex Beam on The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead: "There is plenty not to like about this book, but here is what I did like: It is almost impossible to define. It is not exactly a memoir. A heart-tugging panegyric to father-son togetherness? Far from it.... It is sui generis, and that’s high praise these days."
• Kakutani on Love and Consequences by Margaret P. Jones: "Ms. Jones’s portraits of her family and friends are so sympathetic and unsentimental, so raw and tender and tough-minded that it’s clear to the reader that whatever detachment she learned as a child did not impair her capacity for caring. Instead it heightened her powers of observation, enabling her to write with a novelist’s eye for the psychological detail and an anthropologist’s eye for social rituals and routines."

Washington Post:

• Charles Matthews on Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris: "The conventional way of writing about five movies would be to devote a section of the book to each. But Harris does something more difficult and far more illuminating: He weaves together the stories of how each movie was conceived, crafted, released, critiqued and received.... Harris has created what seems likely to be one of the classics of popular film history, useful to dedicated students of film and cultural historians, and also to trivia buffs."
• Stephen Budiansky on The Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust: "If nothing else, this finely written book is a powerful corrective to all the romantic claptrap that still envelops a war that took as many American lives, 620,000, as all other wars from the Revolution to Korea combined."

Los Angeles Times:

• Susan Salter Reynolds on Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J.M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D.W. Winnicott: "It is a sigh of relief, this book, a defense of things that make us feel guilty: nostalgia, apron strings, the 'good-enough mother,' the lost mother, the nest, the childhood home, the beauty of boys at play. It is a defense of adolescence: 'The adolescent has time. The adolescent, perhaps, is the one who in actuality does not waste his time, but simply takes his time.'"

New York Sun:

• Eric Ormsby on Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories by Gregor von Rezzori: "Though 'Memoirs of an Anti-Semite' provides a caustic analysis of a deep moral malady, rendered all the more ominous by being set against the horrors of the Nazi rise to power, the novel is much more than this. A tremendous exuberance underlies its irony. Von Rezzori drew a long-forgotten world out of oblivion without the slightest note of sentimentality. It was as though he could rescue that world in its astonishing fullness only by exposing its deepest flaws."

Globe & Mail:

• Lynda Grace Philippsen on The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan: "The magic of Swan's fiction is in her ability to reveal and conceal at the same time. Her characters and her readers are simultaneously enmeshed in a fiction real as illusionary life. The pleasure for the reader is in the smudged distinctions between reality, memory, dream, illusion and image - the sense of being played by a fine mind and enjoying it."

The Guardian:

• Adam Mars-Jones on Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi (out in the U.S. in August): "If Hanif Kureishi's new novel has a fault, it is that its secondary characters are often so full of life that they upstage the principals and this is a fault for which most writers would cheerfully kill.... Something To Tell You is a return to the territory of his first and still best-loved novel, The Buddha of Suburbia."

The New Yorker:

• James Wood on His Illegal Self by Peter Carey and My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru: "Carey’s often beautiful novel, one of his best recent works, has the bruising tang of all his fiction, in which crooked colloquialism (frequently Australian vernacular), and poetic formality combine. The result is brilliantly vital: the world bulges out of the sentences.... 'My Revolutions' is dense and accumulative where 'His Illegal Self' is fleeting and photographic.... 'My Revolutions' is a strange, involving book, powerful in its utterly unembarrassed relation to the mundane."

--Tom

Guest Bookshelf: Jessa Crispin

GalleyCat's Ron Hogan's six-word memoir in Not Quite What I Was Planning is "Internet famous, for what that's worth," which could apply even more so ("Internet famouser"?) to Jessa Crispin, whose Bookslut blog and web mag was the flagship of the early independent book sites from its beginnings way back in 2002 and remains as busy and feisty as ever today. She and her many contributors (including our own Jeff VanderMeer) have always read as readers, not industry insiders or literary arbiters, with a taste for books high and low and in between. We certainly blog in her wake (you might even say that "Omnivoracious" is a fancy--and more polite--translation of "Bookslut"), and we think it's lovely that she's sent us a bookshelf photo to headline Omnivoracious this week. Here's what she has to say about it:

The books in the picture are from the nonfiction books I have hidden away in my bedroom. I used to have serious hoarding tendencies, and I would keep every single book I read. Now, if it's on my shelf it's either because I haven't read it yet (I have to admit I have not read about half of the books on that shelf) or because I think I might need it for later reference, because I think I'll reread it at some point, or because I have sentimental attachment to it. The book on that shelf I am the most attached to is the copy of The Golden Bough. It was given to me by my sister when I was 15, and I carried it with me everywhere. It took me six months to read, but I was smitten.

--Tom

McCarthy at the Oscars

Due to copyright enforcement, it's hard to find "the YouTubes" of it (as Hillary would say), but the cameramen working the Oscars had enough literary savvy to spot Cormac McCarthy in the auditorium last night among the Coen Brothers/No Country for Old Men contingent. And next to him, briefly seen, sat his young son, who was the inspiration for The Road and who I couldn't help pointing to and saying "Hey, that kid carries the fire!"

Incidentally, a friend of mine wrote a classic article a few years back about the Coen brothers' non-coincidental use of his surname for the fecklessly villainous Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo. Well worth reading.

Nikki McClure and The Midnight Folk

When I got Nikki McClure's The First 1000 Days: A Baby Journal and Awake to Nap as pre-baby gifts, I knew these were not your average baby books. What I didn't know from looking at her serene paper-cut illustrations--of babies, moms and dads, crows, boats, and vegetable gardens--is that Nikki McClure is a rock star.

A Different Stripe, the blog for NYRB Classics, clued me into this when they posted an appreciation of McClure with a preview of a cover she illustrated for The Midnight Folk, an upcoming edition in their children's classics line. This 1927 story by Brit poet John Masefield will be coming out in September as a follow-up to last October's The Box of Delights (Masefield's other Kay Harker book, written in 1935). 

McClure is definitely emerging as a rock-star illustrator. Her books and calendars are on display everywhere from quirky children's boutiques to chain bookstores to galleries. She cuts her illustrations by hand from a single sheet of black paper, a process she has used to propel herself from starving artist to the author-illustrator of an annual calendar series, various children's books, and, most recently, a collection of images from her calendars and other works, Collect Raindrops: The Seasons Gathered.

And she's a real rock star. McClure has been part of the Olympia rock scene as a collaborating visual artist since the early '90s and has designed posters and CD covers like this one for years. (Her website has a discography, as well as a portfolio of her current work.)

The downside to having a baby journal illustrated by Nikki McClure? Fear of spoiling the paper-cut images with ugly handwritten notes. Our pages all look something like this:

I'd better dive in soon with a black Sharpie so Silas doesn't get a baby journal on his 21st birthday full of stickie notes. --Heidi

Nebula Finalists Announced

As reported on writer Jay Lake's livejournal and elsewhere today, the finalists for the Nebula Awards, one of science fiction's top honors, have been announced, with winners revealed in April. In the novel category, they are:

Odyssey - McDevitt, Jack (Ace, Nov06)
The Accidental Time Machine - Haldeman, Joe (Ace, Aug07)
The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Chabon, Michael (HarperCollins, May07)
The New Moon's Arms - Hopkinson, Nalo (Warner Books, Feb07)
Ragamuffin - Buckell, Tobias (Tor, Jun07)

Congratulations to all of the finalists. It's worth pointing out that each of these books is, to some extent, completely different from the next. I don't envy the voters picking one, since it's almost impossible to compare them, but I think anyone handicapping the race would have to put some money down on the Chabon. That said, how do Amazon readers rate these books? Well, Odyssey gets the lowest ratings, followed by The Accidental Time Machine and The Yiddish Policemen's Union, with Ragamuffin and The New Moon's Arms tied at the top with a ranking of four-and-a-half stars.

I mention Jay Lake above not only because he's generally johnny-on-the-spot with this kind of news, but because his Mainspring was on the long list for the Nebula, and I've just acquired an advance copy of a loose "sequel," Escapement, which features one of the most interesting protagonists I've come across in awhile: Paolina Barthes, a young female genius stuck in a small village shadowed by the huge clockwork wall that figures so prominently in Lake's post-steampunk milieu. I wouldn't be at all surprised, based on my reading thus far, if Lake got another shot at the Nebulas next year. This is a very close-in character study, richly detailed. --JeffV

Moomin Moomin Moomin: Bliss for the Whole Family

 

Everybody give a big thank you to Drawn & Quarterly Press, which has begun reissuing Tove Jansson's Moomin comic strips in graphic novel form. The second volume just arrived at my door and like the first it's a beautiful oversized book featuring the antics of the hippo-like Moomin and his family. From dealing with obnoxious neighbors to doing ridiculous things for love, the Moomin family's adventures are funny, surreal, sometimes melancholy, and always rich and whimsical. In less skillful hands, this would be fodder for sticking one’s finger down one’s throat in revulsion at the treacly whimsy of it all. However, Tove Jansson was a pragmatist and also, if her work is any indication, a wise person. Beneath the gentle surface of Moomin there is a sly, wicked wit and much non-didactic commentary about the world and people’s place in it.

Something must be said about the effortlessness of these comic strips. There isn’t a word or image out of place. I cannot think of another comic strip that gives me as much pleasure as this one. There is also something uniquely calming and stress-relieving about reading Moomin that I can’t quite put into words but has something to do with the effortlessness I mention above. As Neil Gaiman says, "A lost treasure now rediscovered--one of the sweetest, strangest comics strips ever drawn or written. A surrealist masterpiece. Honest." You owe it to yourself to check it out.

World Fantasy Award Winner John Picacio's Take on Michael Moorcock's Elric

Multiple award-winning artist John Picacio recently completed work on Del Rey's new edition of Elric: The Stealer of Souls, volume 1 of the Chronicles of the Last Emperor of Melnibone. Picacio not only created the spectacular cover but many interior pieces, creating a truly unique book. This isn't the first time Picacio has animated Moorcock's work with his art--he also did the thirtieth-anniversary edition of Behold the Man awhile back. For Picacio, "[It] really feels like things coming full-circle because not only am I working with Mike again, but this time it's for one of the most iconic fantasy characters ever."

Picacio found Moorcock as easy to work with as the man's reputation suggests. When Picacio unveiled his "battleplan" for the Elric book, he met with Moorcock "to break it down with him [and] he just kept smiling and giving me the nod. A kind word here, a kind word there, but he...gave me virtually free rein. When I had questions, he was always quick to clarify, but never told me what to do. He's not only one of the great authors in the history of fantasy, but he's one of the great gentlemen."

Since Elric is an iconic character, I asked Picacio if he ever worried about trying to match the vision of the many readers who already have an idea in their heads of what Elric must look like. "Early on, a good friend pulled me aside and said, 'No matter what you do on Elric, you know a lot of people are gonna hate it, right?' Oddly enough, that really took the pressure off of me. I felt like, 'Hey, I might as well do my thing because there's no way to please everyone, so let's just go for it.'...[Besides,] Mike expects you to bring the absolute most potent and personal vision you can offer to the audience at the given moment."

Looking over this beautiful new edition, I'd say Picacio has accomplished what he set out to do. The art is vibrant, fluid, and complements the text perfectly--as the examples below attest. Also check out MonkeyBrain Books' beautiful Cover Story: The Art of John Picacio. And for more examples of art from Elric and a very cool contest, visit Revolution SF.

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

Tom's currently on vacation, so I'm taking a crack at Reviewing the Reviewers this week.  But fear not:  he will be back in Omnivoracious action before long.

--Dave

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review - Elizabeth Royte on The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman'€™s Fight to Save the World'€™s Most Beautiful Bird by Bruce Barcott:  " No, it doesn'€™t sound thrilling...but Barcott, a contributing editor at Outside magazine and the author of The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier, makes it so, mashing up adventure travel, biography and nature writing in a steamy climate of corruption and intrigue."
• Francine Prose on A Person of Interest by Susan Choi: "Thematically, A Person of Interest echoes Choi'€™s previous novel, American Woman, based loosely on the events surrounding the abduction of Patty Hearst. Both books testify to the appalling ease with which the past can catch up with and then overtake us. Both say something about what it means to live in a society that is simultaneously tolerant and suspicious, inclusive and all too ready to punish its citizens for the crime of being their authentic selves. Both succeed in making us feel deeply for characters who are profoundly flawed."
• On Valentine's Day, Patricia Cohen revealed the motivation behind Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason: "Walking home [on September 11th, 2001], to her Upper East Side apartment, [Ms. Jacoby] stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day's horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II. "€œThis is just like Pearl Harbor,"€ one of the men said.  The other asked, "What is Pearl Harbor?" "That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,"€ the first man replied. At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, "I decided to write this book."€

Washington Post:

• Ron Charles on The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt: "Samantha Hunt's magical new novel is a love letter to one of the world's most remarkable inventors. You may never have heard of Nikola Tesla, but he briefly outshone Edison and Westinghouse, and from the moment you wake up in the morning, you depend on devices made possible by his revolutionary work with electricity. Tesla was born in Serbia in 1856, and his life followed a rags-to-riches-to-rags trajectory that would sound melodramatic if it weren't so tragic and true -- or told with such surprising charm in The Invention of Everything Else."

Los Angeles Times:

• Soledad Santiago on The Flowers by Dagoberto Gilb: "Not since James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice has the unspoken so crackled with sexual tension. Lyrical passages don't always ring as true, but Gilb's dialogue, working class and downbeat, is inspired."€

New York Sun:

• Benjamin Lytal on Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser: "A new book by Steven Millhauser means a substantial treat. He may criticize the pleasures of escapism in his fiction, but he provides them himself. Like Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme, he takes the institutions of fun -€” parks, pleasure domes, fun houses -€” as his subject matter. But unlike these writers, Mr. Millhauser never quite makes a joke of it."

Globe & Mail:

• Paula Newberg on Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West by Benazir Bhutto: "A tragically timed volume, Reconciliation is equal parts memoir, political tract and revisionist history - a shambling narrative that reflects all too well her own and Pakistan's deeply seated confusions, traumas, uncertainties and unfulfilled ambitions."

Times Literary Supplement:

• Elizabeth Lowry on His Illegal Self by Peter Carey : "Peter Carey's fiction is populated by impostors, hoaxers and confidence tricksters: patchwork people, constructed selves caught up in the fraught and absorbing process of reinventing themselves. They are not always likeable, but even the least likeable have that spark of vitality, the high colouring, that distinguishes a successful fictional creation."

The New Yorker:

• Books Briefly Noted - The Lodger Shakespeare by Charles Nicholl: "€œThis entertaining biographical study of Shakespeare takes as its starting point a tantalizing document: the transcript of a 1612 lawsuit, involving his former landlord and a contested dowry, in which Shakespeare testified.  With lively readings of the plays and a nuanced portrait of their author, he capably captures ‘the simmering randiness of the age."

Table Talk, Take Two (Guest Blogger: Michael Pollan)

Readers:

Thanks for all your posts, which were full of interesting comments and provocations—but not a whole lot of new eating algorithms, I must say. I await more of those.

There were a lot of interesting posts on the challenge of eating well on a budget, as well as some proposed strategies and solutions. The fact is, we have a food systems (ie, a set of agricultural policies) that encourages farmers to grow lots of corn and soy, the building blocks of fast food (in the form of high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated soy oil and all the other industrial ingredients teased out of those two remarkable plants) and effectively discourages farmers from growing real food people can eat. The result is that the unhealthiest calories in the supermarket are the cheapest, and the healthiest calories the dearest.

But processed food is not necessarily so cheap—it’s only cheap on a per-calorie basis. It costs money to design, produce, market and package those Honeynut Cheerio Cereal bars with the layer of synthetic milk-like material in the middle. If you compare the price of those bars to the price of the oats they’re made from (79 cents a pound for rolled organic in my market), you’ll quickly see that the processed version is no bargain. They’ve figured out a way to get you to spend several dollars a pound for oats by adding sugar, “convenience,” and fortified vitamins --about which all you need to know was supplied by one reader: “An old preacher of my acquaintance used to say that, "enriched" foods was like a guy robbing you of all your money, then tossing you a sawbuck saying, "now you're enriched."

To eat well doesn’t necessarily take a lot more money, but it probably does take more time. What people are buying when they buy processed foods is convenience, by and large. Many people don’t think they have enough time to cook any more, and the food marketers are very good at flattering our sense of busyness. Look at how they portray the American family: either stressed out in the morning trying to get out of the house (does no one have an alarm clock that works?!?!?) or relaxing with snack foods in front of the TV. Hmmm. It’s  worth thinking about what you actually do with the time you save by eating convenience food. Is it really better spend than cooking a meal for people you love and then enjoying it with them?

As Leslie Batchelor wrote in her post, “Always prepare your food with love, gratitude, and joy in your heart not anger, frustration, bitterness, sadness, etc.... Enjoy the process of making the meal! I swear the food tastes better and is better for us.”

Till next week….

Let’s see more of those rules of thumb. My favorite thus far: “Always leave room for an apple.”

A Brilliant New Talent: J.M. McDermott

Debut novels are supposed to be creatures of a kind of limited, quicksilver brilliance: honest and earnest and showing flashes of talent. J.M. McDermott has eschewed that approach, producing the stunning Last Dragon, a kind of collaged swords-and-sorcery tale that owes as much to Gene Wolfe and the magic realists as to Fritz Leiber or George R.R. Martin. In fact, it uses a technique similar to that of Steve Erickson in his highly-acclaimed Zeroville from last year: short, sharp chapters that allow the reader room to make the book their own even as there's still a great sense of the dangerous and the surreal. It's the kind of triumph that any writer in mid-career would be proud of. As Paul Witcover wrote in a recent Sci Fi Weekly review, "this extraordinary first novel traces the labyrinthine history of a dying ruler whose patchy memories of the past swerve from the vivid to the unreliable in a hypnotic tangle of stark realism and impressionistic fantasy that has the visionary power of a fever dream. The comparison goes only so far, however. McDermott is not writing magic realism but robust fantasy, investing the traditional subject matter of the genre—magic, dragons, golems and more—with high literary craftsmanship." You can read a sample chapter on the publisher's webpage for the novel.

Who is J.M. McDermott and where did he come from? These were just two of the questions I set out to answer when I interviewed the author earlier this month...

                                                  

Enter Ellen Datlow's Inferno

Published late in 2007, Ellen Datlow's dark fantasy anthology Inferno was a highlight of the year that got overlooked by some readers. With the holidays behind us for good, though, it's been picking up steam. As part of spreading the word, I recently reviewed it for Sci Fi Weekly, where I wrote in part, "In reading Inferno, I was reminded at times of the old Whispers series I used to love, as well as such iconic stand-alone horror anthologies such as Prime Evil and Dark Forces. Time will tell whether Inferno is as good as those books, but for me it provided several fun hours of atmospheric, intelligent, scary, entertaining reading. Here's hoping Ellen Datlow can be persuaded to edit an Inferno 2 in the near future."

Featuring great work from Jeffrey Ford, Lucius Shepard, P.D. Cacek, Laird Barron, Nathan Ballingrud, Joyce Carol Oates, and others, Inferno should appeal to anyone who loves to curl up on a quiet night with a good scary read.

Datlow also includes an introduction about the horror and the rationale behind the anthology, which she's allowed us to excerpt below as an Amazon exclusive.

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Authors on the Tube: Remembering Benazir Bhutto

Mark Siegel, friend and advisor of the late Benazir Bhutto, discussed the last days and legacy of the former Pakistani prime minister on Wednesday's Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Regarding her return to Pakistan last fall, Siegel asserted that Bhutto was neither afraid nor ignorant of the dangers she faced by coming out of exile.

"She knew about...the dangers. She also thought it was her responsibility to put Pakistan first [in order] to fight for democracy.  It was that simple.  Pakistan before her own personal happiness, before her kids, before her family.  She hoped for the best, she prayed for the best, but she also planned for the worst."

For the entire interview, check out the clip here.

--Dave

Watching The Wire with the Thugs (and Reading with My Eyes Closed)

I wrote last month about Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader for a Day, one of my Best of the Month picks, and I was neither the first nor the last to describe it as a real-life, Chicago version of The Wire. This week I checked into the Freakonomics blog on the New York Times site for the first time in a while and saw that Venkatesh, who first came to popular notice when his work on the (lousy) economics of crack dealing was featured in that megaseller, has been guest-blogging about watching the fifth and final season with some self-described "real thugs" of his acquaintance.

Which is all just wonderful (and apparently they love the show), except that we are currently in obsessive catchup mode with The Wire at my home. We've Netflixed our way into the middle of season three, and now with season five live on the Home Box Office I've had to avert my eyes at any discussion of what's going on--and, as you'll notice if you're averting your eyes, there's a lot of that discussion these days. Even seeing a proper name pop out of a headline will tip you off that a character has survived a few more seasons, and just from the fragments of sentences I've let slip past my guard I've already spoiled major plot developments, which I now have to spend the next many months not revealing to my wife as we work our way through the episodes. So all I can say as I point you toward Venkatesh's Wire blogging is that it is there; I won't allow myself to find out anything more. And don't tell me! --Tom

Memoirettes, so far.

My life has not been all that interesting (as you’ll soon see), and that may be why the six-word formula is so compelling: instead of an ordinary life striving for distinction, with just six words at a go your story amounts to lots of little moments that define you long after they’ve passed, and the best part is you don’t have to wrest any meaning (or plotting) out of them. Here's my attempt to capture a few that, looking back, feel pretty formative. --Anne

Never could say the letter “S.”

This one taken from my mother, making a passing observation of my passions at the age of four. Still pretty true.

Grape jelly, books, and Julia Child.

Left New York, still looking back.

 

Tiny Books, Big Imaginations

Do you like small books? If you do, I've got a couple of recommendations: the Jabberwocky series and its sly, if shy, companion Bandersnatch. They all come from Sean Wallace at Prime Books, winner of a World Fantasy Award a couple of years ago. Jabberwocky (named after a poem by some obscure English children's writer) contains poetry and prose of a whimsical and surreal nature from the likes of such award-winners as Tim Pratt, Jane Yolen, Catherynne M. Valente, and Holly Phillips. Each of the three current volumes is a gem of a tiny paperback, perfect for carrying in a back pocket or bringing on a trip. Bandersnatch, meanwhile, is a tiny hardcover, so mysterious and self-effacing it doesn't even have a title or editor listed on the cover. You'd never even know that it's co-edited by Paul Tremblay, who just inked a huge deal with Henry Holt for a couple of mystery novels. Bandersnatch may be even better designed than Jabberwocky and has been meticulously edited by Tremblay. You may not recognize as many names in Bandersnatch, but it's fiction of high quality in the perfect little package. If you know someone who likes surreal fantasy and magic realism, this would be a great gift as it's unlikely they'll already have it.

Why do I like small books? Well, when I'm on vacation, it's a great rationalization for buying books in the first place: Oh, I'll just get this microscopic book here, that I have to pick up with tweezers. That way, it'll fit in my luggage. Of course, I wind up buying so many tiny books using that rationale that I wind up with less space than if I'd just bought big books to begin with. Not that I'm complaining...

Here's the full wrap-around art for Bandersnatch: