If books won Oscars: Announcing the 2008 Audie Award Nominees

Award season: it's still with us! New this week are the nominees for the Audie Awards, which as far as I can tell boast the most unique categories for any literary or publishing industry prize: 30 by my count. Audie winners--including Audiobook of the Year (finalists for which will be announced next month), Multi-Voice Performance, Achievement in Production, and more--will be announced in Los Angeles in May. Inspired by...the Old Testament, a follow-up to last year's Audiobook of the Year, wins the most category nominations, with Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!) following closely behind (IMHO, even funnier than the hardcover).  Following is a sampling of nominees and categories--you can check out the full list here.  --Anne

Achievement in Production
· Dune, by Frank Herbert
· Inspired by...The Old Testament, with full-cast narration
· The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick
· Radio Theatre's Amazing Grace, by Paul McCusker and Dave Arnold
· Sweeney Todd and the String of Pearls, by Yuri Rasovsky

Biography/Memoir
· Einstein, by Walter Isaacson
· My Lobotomy, by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming
· Schulz and Peanuts, by David Michaelis
· Shakespeare, by Bill Bryson
· Tearing Down the Wall of Sound, by Mick Brown

Classic
· 1984, by George Orwell
· The Call of the Wild and White Fang, by Jack London
· Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
· A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
· Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Narration by the Author or Authors

· Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver
· Here If You Need Me, by Kate Braestrup
· Michael Tolliver Lives, by Armistead Maupin
· Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
· Pontoon, by Garrison Keillor
· The Traveler, by Ron McLarty

Science Fiction
· The Draco Tavern, by Larry Niven
· Dune, by Frank Herbert
· The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, by Jack Finney
· Marion Zimmer Bradley's Ravens of Avalon, by Diana L. Paxson
· Selections from Dreamsongs: 1, by George R.R. Martin

The Art of Bryan Talbot

Bryan Talbot's on a roll. The prolific artist and writer produced a bona fide masterpiece in Alice in Sunderland, which hit my Bookslut list of the top graphic novels of the year at #1, and this month he has a beautiful full-color retrospective of his talent, The Art of Bryan Talbot, with an introduction by Neil Gaiman. Arranged chronologically, the book covers early underground art, posters of and for rock stars, and, of course, sketches, drawings, and art from some of his most famous work, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, Judge Dredd, and The Tale of One Bad Rat. It's a well-deserved honor and a book that art fans and comics fans alike will want as part of their collection. I recently caught up with Talbot and asked him about his approach to his art.

Amazon.com: What motivates you and keeps you passionate about your art?
Bryan Talbot: I really don't know, I've never considered doing anything else. Writing and drawing is what I do. I suppose it's because I enjoy the results.

Amazon.com: How sensitive are you to falling into ruts and do you take conscious steps to avoid repeating yourself too much?
Bryan Talbot: It's easy to get into habitual ways of drawing things and I'm as much guilty of this as anyone else--after all, it's part of what makes a recognisable personal style. But I always try and think a lot about each image beforehand, try and envisage the best way of approaching it. When it comes to creating graphic novels I always deliberately work on something completely different to the previous one. After the non-genre realistic The Tale of One Bad Rat, I did the adult SF adventure Heart of Empire. After that I did Alice in Sunderland, which was different to anything I'd done before. Now I'm working on a steampunk detective/thriller with anthropomorphic characters. I've been describing it as Sherlock Holmes meets Sin City--with animals! If I didn't do something different each time I'd get very bored.

Musician Daniel Grandbois on the Books He Reads

      

Daniel Grandbois is one of those genuine double threats: an accomplished musician with three bands and a talented writer with a collection of short absurdist tales called Unlucky Lucky Days out in June. In his role as musician, Daniel plays or has played in three of the pioneering bands of "The Denver Sound": Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, Tarantella, and Munly. Described by some Amazon customers as alternative "gothic Americana," I'd add descriptors like country punk and some gorgeous gypsy/Eastern European folk music influences as well, especially when thinking of Tarantella. Which really means that this is really original and captivating American music. Other veterans of “The Denver Sound” include bands like DeVotchKa and 16 Horsepower. The latest Frommer’s Colorado guide identifies Munly and Slim Cessna's Auto Club when noting the rising international notoriety “The Denver Sound” is gaining. MTV’s Roadtrip Guide lists Munly’s “Amen Corner” as one of the five songs you have to listen to in Denver. If you haven't heard about Daniel Grandbois yet, you heard it here first: this talented, hardworking writer and musician is someone to watch. Recently, he talked to me via email about his reading habits and how it informs his music.

Amazon: What have you read lately and liked?

Daniel Grandbois: I’m in the middle of a gorgeous textbook from Oxford University Press, called The Evolution of Trees. Imagining the transformative journey plants had to make to leave the sea and colonize land sends shivers down my spine. I love seeing things from alien perspectives. Other nonfiction I’ve loved lately: Cabeza de Vaca’s account of being shipwrecked and stranded for a decade on this continent shortly after Columbus’s voyage, and Bartolome de Las Casas’ Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, which tells, grimly, of the wholesale slaughter of Native Americans by the Spaniards in the name of their “truer” God. Then, there would be Marie-Louise von Franz’s Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche. In the world of fiction: Robert Pinget’s Mahu, Calvino’s Cosmicomics, Coover’s Briar Rose, Grove’s collection of Beckett’s dramatic works, Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales, and Charles Martin’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Essex County Volume 1--A Highly-Recommended Alex Award Winner

As reported on Amazon a couple of weeks ago, the American Library Association have announced their Alex Award picks, spotlighting adult books with specific teen appeal. One of them was a favorite graphic novel from 2007, Jeff Lemire's Essex County Volume 1: Tales From the Farm. It's been five years since a graphic novel made the list. As I wrote in a Bookslut column several months back, "In this heartfelt and beautifully sparse tale of an orphaned ten-year-old named Lester, Jeff Lemire uses an illustration style that perfectly captures the wide open spaces of rural Ontario. After Lester’s mother dies, he’s sent to live on his uncle’s farm. He hardly knows his uncle and his father has long since left the scene. Lester forms a friendship with a gas station attendant named Jimmy Lebeuf who used to be a professional hockey player until a bad hit knocked him out of the game. Together, the two comics fans build a rich fantasy life revolving around the possibility of an alien invasion. In a watermark grayscale, Lemire also provides flashbacks to both Lebeuf’s career and the details surrounding the death of Lester’s mother. Another section, showing pages from Lester’s own home-made comic book, is imaginative and funny."

    

Highly recommended for all ages--and best of all, the equally evocative Essex County Volume 2: Ghost Stories is also available! - JeffV

Gregory Frost on Shadowbridge, His New Fantasy Epic

    

Gregory Frost's Shadowbridge, just out from Del Rey, seems poised to intrigue both readers who like traditional fantasy and those who are into cross-genre or interstitial fiction, with its rich blend of interlocking stories set in an intricate fantasy world, combined with the mysteries of a possibly continent-spanning bridge. Frost has always been a meticulous and thoughtful writer, whose novels include Tain, Remscela, and, most recently, Fitcher's Brides. His short fiction was collected in a beautiful book from Golden Gryphon Press, Attack of the Jazz Giants & Other Stories. In addition to writing fiction, Frost is also a wonderful instructor who has taught at the Clarion Writers Workshop several times and, along with Rachel Pastan, is directing the writing workshop at Swarthmore College. (Guests of the workshop this spring will include Frost's former teacher at the University of Iowa, T. Coraghessan Boyle.)

Shadowbridge has received fulsome praise from several sources, including The San Diego Tribune, The Denver Post, The Kansas City Star, and Fantasy Magazine. Gary K. Wolfe at Locus Magazine, the "Billboard" of the SF/F industry, wrote in part, "For all its painterly beauty, Shadowbridge is a tough-minded novel that confronts some disturbing issues, and that is remarkably efficient in the telling...Frost could be on his way toward a masterpiece." However, it also received a scathing review from John Clute at SciFi Weekly. We talked candidly about that review, about Shadowbridge, and about teaching in an email conversation earlier this month. (For more information on Frost, visit his website and his blog.)

Amazon.com: Let's cut right to the chase. Shadowbridge, which has received fulsome praise from most reviewers, was recently ripped by critic John Clute, which was followed by a series of posts online in your defense. Your own response to the review, in an email to me, was:  "One should never review books while suffering from hemorrhoids." Although this gives me an inkling of the answer to this question, I have to ask: How do you generally deal with negative reviews? And do you think the reading public has any idea of how a negative review can ruin a writer's day?

Gregory Frost: Humor tends to be my way of reacting--which, as a lot of humor does, emerges from pain. I find negative reviews very painful. I think if you give a damn at all about what you write, you’re going to feel the sting of a bad review.  If I started my day by reading reviews and hit something like that, I probably would spend the rest of the day if not the week unable to work.  Michael Swanwick put me on to the best solution some years back when he explained that he has his wife read the reviews and decide if he should see them. 

I think now, with the internet, we get reviews posted on fly-by-night genre sites by people who don’t know the difference between critiquing a work in progress in a workshop environment and a review. I might go so far as to suggest that some of them have no business whatsoever reviewing anything that doesn’t involve crayons. That can hardly apply to John Clute, so the most I can say there is I have no idea how I pressed his buttons, but the book does exactly what I want it to do and I’m sorry he was expecting something entirely different...at least that’s how his review felt to me. He also seems to be beating up the publisher for greedily splitting this story in half, you know, to make more money with two books instead of the one, whereas that was entirely my decision and not theirs. It was two books as it was pitched to Del Rey. At one point in its creation, I thought it might even be a trilogy, but as the story evolved, I saw that wasn’t going to be the case and I was not about to pad the thing out to make three flabby books (what Gary K. Wolfe in his review called “brown-bag trilogies”--gotta say, I love that term).  So once again I had a lean two-book work. John seems to have reacted as though if it had been a trilogy, then splitting the story would have been okay, but since it’s only two, that’s not okay. Well, tough.

Our Moment with Ben

New York magazine knew what they were talking about when they said, "If you've laughed in the last ten years, Ben Karlin was responsible." Karlin's career kicked off as the editor of The Onion and he is the former executive producer of the award-winning The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and co-creator and former executive producer of The Colbert Report. He was also a co-author and co-editor of the bestselling America (The Book) and his latest project takes him back to the book world as the editor of the anthology (with the best book title of 2008 so far) Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me, 212 pages of semi-insightful and mostly hilarious life lessons from a lineup of writers and comedians.

I recently caught up with Karlin to talk about his new book, the ongoing writers' strike, the serious job of writing comedy, and what makes him laugh (hint: it isn't America's Funniest Home Videos). You can read the complete interview or listen to the podcast on Amazon Wire. --BTP

Amazon.com: First question I have for you... Are you sporting a strike beard?

Karlin:   [Laughs] I don't have the ability to grow a strike beard. I can grow a series of strike patches.

Amazon.com: Have you been tuning in to see how Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are handling their return to the airwaves?

Karlin: You know, I haven't seen--I saw a little bit. For me, I think what's far more interesting has been not what they do in week one, but what they're going to do in week three. [Laughs] Week one you can really talk about, My god, we're back on the air and we don't have writers. You have a lot of games probably stored up. But I think the real challenge is probably going to be three or four weeks into this thing how fast they can dance. I guess those two guys probably are as well equipped as anyone on planet Earth to do that.

Amazon.com: So taking us back to December 2006 when you stepped down from your dual role as executive producer on both of those shows. I'm sure your days were filled with humor--

Karlin:   I was drunk. I just want you to know that. In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have done that.

Amazon.com: [Laughs] That must've been extremely stressful. Can you take us into a typical, or atypical, day for you back then?

Karlin: By the end--it was very different from when you're starting up a show than when the show has kind of found its legs. I liken it to perhaps how a small child grows. When a small child is learning to walk it's quite comical to see it on wobbly legs and it looks like it's not a small child but a drunk old man. But then the child soon learns to walk and can actually go places on its own. It's kind of the same deal with a new show. Starting up a show you always have to be around and making sure things are right and there isn't going to be a sharp object that the show will then fall and impale itself on (to keep using this metaphor until it's no longer useful).

So I think at the beginning, doing both shows, it was really like I was trying to split myself in two. Managing the day to day of The Daily Show--that's basically beyond a full-time job, and then on top of that you had the rush of the hiring of people and finding out exactly what the show was going to be, the kind of creative genesis stuff of the new show. Then once Colbert launched it was two very similar processes but in very different stages of being. So you're kind of wearing two different hats, dealing with, for example, a group of writers who have been working together for five or six years versus a group of writers who did not know each other 30 days ago. So it's a very different dynamic that you're trying to jump between different rooms, different buildings as well. And also putting on a very different type of hat in terms of how you're dealing with problems or creative challenges that come up when putting together a show.

I know that's a very obtuse kind of answer. It doesn't have the brass tacks, like, At 9AM I would have a cappuccino... But I feel like the day to day guts of putting together a comedy show is the least funny thing in the world.

Amazon.com: Did you have to turn in your scooter that you used to use to go back and forth?

Karlin:   No, I actually kept the scooter. I do not use it for such short distances anymore, though.

Brandon Sanderson on Robert Jordan and The Wheel of Time

With the tragic passing of Robert Jordan last year, the world lost a writer who had become an iconic figure to his millions of fans. In the weeks following Jordan's death, many of those same fans understandably wondered how or if the fantasist's bestselling The Wheel of Time series would be completed. Then news came from Tor that Brandon Sanderson, a fantasy and children's book author, had accepted an offer to write a final volume called A Memory of Light, using Jordan's dictated notes about the plot. Sanderson had been working on his own Mistborn series and a follow-up to Alcatraz and the Evil Librarians. I recently talked to Sanderson via email about Jordan's legacy and about how he became involved with A Memory of Light, which is scheduled for release in 2009.

      

(Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson)

Amazon.com: How well did you know Robert Jordan?

Brandon Sanderson: I didn't know him at all. I saw him once at a convention--once--and didn't even realize who it was until someone told me. To me, Mr. Jordan still is--and will probably always be--something of a mythical figure.

Amazon.com: What about his fiction do you particularly enjoy?

Brandon Sanderson: Robert Jordan's genius, in my opinion, was in his ability to blend the familiar with the original. When I read his books, particularly during my younger years, they felt like fantasy to me without reading like the same fantasy books I'd read so many times before. By now, he has become his own archetype, but at that point he was just so much more fresh than anything I'd read before. To this day, I love his world-building and his ability to get deep inside a character's mind and show you who they are and how they feel. As I've grown older, I have come to appreciate his ability to work lavish description and extensive world building into his stories without breaking the narrative. Reading his books is a treat for both the senses and the mind.

Amazon.com: What are your impressions of Jordan as a person and a working professional?

Brandon Sanderson: One thing stands out to me. During those last weeks before his passing, Mr. Jordan spent a great deal of time dictating the plot of this book to those around him. He felt that he had promised an ending to his fans, and was dedicated to making certain this book got finished for them. This coincides with everything else I know of the man. He was always kind and generous during signings and tours. He always spoke highly of his readers and the people around him. He was selfless. His mind was focused on his family first, his readers second, and himself as a distant third.

100 Books Every Child Should Read, UK-style

In mid-January, Telegraph.co.uk published a list of the "100 books every child should read." Like many must-read lists, it includes expected stalwarts such as Where the Wild Things Are, Charlotte's Web, The Chronicles of Narnia, and To Kill a Mockingbird. But this Brit list focuses on stories that are exciting to read (vs. books that teach you things you ought to know) and it actually has some titles I haven't seen on American recommended book lists.

I'm adding a sampling here, but I recommend clicking through to the actual list for the thoughtful introduction by author Michael Morpurgo about kids and stories, as well as fun thumbnail reviews like "A stirring tale," "No reader remains untouched," and my favorite: "Runcible." 

Early and Middle Years

The Tiger Who Came To Tea, Judith Kerr
Quoting their blurb:
"[The BBC's] Newsnight's Emily Maitlis has a theory that this book is an allegory about sex. Most children understand it as the story of a tiger that eats its hosts out of house and home. Debate continues."
If you're unfamiliar with this book, you can enjoy a lovely reading here.

Roald Dahl has five books on the list: The Twits, Danny, the Champion of the World, George's Marvelous Medicine, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and The BFG. (Notable exclusion: American favorite James and the Giant Peach.)

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, T.S. Eliot
I was surprised to find poetry on a general reading list. Maybe that's not so surprising in Britain, I don't know. I started reading these poems to my son based on a tip from my ex-hippie uncle who read them to his kids--and I love reading them aloud--but I have been afraid he might grow up unknowingly quoting lyrics from Cats. (Although, let's face it, quoting T.S. Eliot could be equally dorky.)

Comet in Moominland, Tove Jansson
A new discovery in our family, though very popular in Europe ("the Mickey Mouse of Finland.")

Early Teens

Frenchman's Creek, Daphne Du Maurier
"A swashbuckling love affair," chosen over her potentially more familiar titles, Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel.

Junk, Melvin Burgess
A "clear-eyed story of heroin addiction." This winner of the Guardian Fiction Award and the American Library Association's Carnegie Medal appears on a number of UK teen book review websites, though little seems to have been written about it in the U.S. (A more extensive review is available at Amazon.co.uk.)

The Rattle Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes
More poetry(!), recommended for the "higgledy-piggledy mix of glories within."

The American Library Association's website and Book Crush, by Nancy Pearl, contain similar lists focused for young American readers in case you want to compare. --Heidi

Getting Lost in Strange Museums

The Museum Vaults is the second in a series of four graphic novels published through an arrangement between the Louvre in Paris and New York-based publisher Nantier Beall Minoustchine. Written and illustrated by French artist, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, the graphic novel describes an art appraiser's descent into the depths of a strange, apparently limitless museum. Rendered in rich sepia tones, his journey takes on a Magritte-like quality, enhanced by several large panels, such as the one reproduced below the cut, that give a dizzying sense of space and perspective. According to the publisher, Mathieu has "managed to bite the hand that feeds him" with The Museum Vaults, by sending up "the pomposity of art history and of such museums as the Louvre...each chapter an additional exercise in the absurd aspects of organizing, showing, and critiquing art." This may or may not be true, but the overall effect shares more in common with the luminous sense of unease found in the work of Franz Kafka, combined with the spatial manipulation common to the stories of J.G. Ballard. As the reader descends into the museum along with the narrator, the sense of being plunged into a subtle and surreal adventure becomes ever more heightened until you find yourself almost literally lost in the book.

The Museum Vaults is fully the equal of the first book in the series, the extremely talented Nicolas De Crecy's Glacial Period, which describes the efforts of archaeologists thousands of years from now to dig up the ruins of the Louvre. It's a brilliant mirroring concept, since they're digging up not only the ruins of the museum, but the ruins preserved within the museum.

Before I visited the Louvre late last year I would have thought a graphic novel collaboration to perhaps be out of keeping with the museum's image. But the Louvre, like any great museum, is really just an assortment of odd objects created by often eccentric craftspeople and geniuses organized by scientists in love with the past to look as if said objects are, in fact, quite normal. That is the charm and mystique of a museum, along with, especially in the most venerable institutions, their use of space and light--both of which are masterful in The Museum Vaults.

Locus Online: The Best SF and Fantasy of 2007

Recently I contributed a year's best SF/Fantasy article to Locus Online that I think will interest book-hungry Amazon readers. If you're unfamiliar with Mark Kelly's Locus Online, it is perhaps the best internet source for all things genre, and the electronic presence of the hardcopy magazine.

My article includes several titles familiar to readers from the Amazon Best SF/Fantasy list posted last year. However, it also includes many book not on that list, all of which are linked to Amazon. You'll find novel, first novel, anthology, reprint, and graphic novel recommendations galore. And, for your immediate reading pleasure, I've turned the spotlight on four recommended titles below. (In addition to my article, also take a look at Claude Lalumiere's recommended reading.)

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Geoffrey C. Ward on This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust: "'The work of death was Civil War America’s most fundamental and most demanding undertaking,' [Gilpin writes]. Her account of how that work was done, much of it gleaned from the letters of those who found themselves forced to do it, is too richly detailed and covers too much ground to be summarized easily. She overlooks nothing — from the unsettling enthusiasm some men showed for killing to the near-universal struggle for an answer to the question posed by the Confederate poet Sidney Lanier: 'How does God have the heart to allow it?'"
• Ken Kalfus on All Shall Be Well; All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well by Tod Wodicka: "Although Wodicka turns up a provocative thought here and there, this musing, typical of Burt’s grief-laden vaporousness, serves also to illustrate the artless, wordy and underarticulated writing that makes 'All Shall Be Well' such a Black Death of a chore to read. Wodicka has chosen a narrative voice too depressive and portentous to manifest his ingenuity." On Thursday, though, Maslin called ASBWASBWAMTSBW "this tender, oddball book, one that performs a deft balancing act as it hides love, yearning and regret behind the mouthful of medieval incantation in its title."
• Kakutani on The Reserve by Russell Banks: "The plot of 'The Reserve,' which takes place in the Adirondacks in the summer of 1936, moves not with the swift, sharklike momentum of his best fiction but in a hokey, herky-jerky fashion that never lets the reader forget that Mr. Banks is standing there behind the proscenium, pulling the characters’ strings. Even the language he uses is weirdly secondhand: a bizarre mélange of Hemingwayesque action prose and romance-novel clichés that manages to feel faux macho and sickly sweet at the same time."
• Maslin on The Appeal by John Grisham: "Building a remarkable degree of suspense into the all too familiar ploys described here, Mr. Grisham delivers his savviest book in years. His extended vacation from hard-hitting fiction is over.... It barely matters that the characters in 'The Appeal' are essentially stick figures. What works for Mr. Grisham is his patient, lawyerly, inexorable way of dramatizing urgent moral issues."

Washington Post:

• Mindy Aloff on The Mitfords: Letters Between Six SIsters, edited by Charlotte Mosley: "The Mitfords could have been an operatic group biography on an epic scale: Instead, thanks to its editor's taste and discretion, it is chamber music with symphonic longings. Ironically, as the sororal voices drop away owing to irreparable feuds or lost letters or death, the surviving sisters become more serious and open. Tragedy and aging lead them to wisdom, or something very like it."

Los Angeles Times:

• Sven Birkerts on Banks's The Reserve: "Banks works with a vast palette and a sure stylistic command. 'The Reserve' gratifies page by page. But when the pages are gathered together, held in retrospect, there is the sense of an echo still awaited, some deeper gratification promised in the meditative pose of the mysterious, beautiful woman on the first page."
• Richard Schickel on An Ordinary Spy by Joseph Weisberg: "At a certain point, the reader begins to wonder whether 'An Ordinary Spy' might possibly be an extraordinary act of disinformation. Might its author still be a CIA employee, charged with portraying the agency in a benign light -- not exactly bumbling, but incapable of, say, water-boarding or extraordinary rendition? To hear Weisberg tell it, an American secret agent's chief concern seems to be defending his retirement package."

Globe & Mail:

• Catherine Bush on How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet: "It's hard, in fact, to convey how invigorating Millet's fiction is, how intelligent and thematically rich, how processes of thought are themselves made urgent and lively through the specificity of her observations and sentences that offer startlement, small and large. This isn't fiction that tells us how to live. Instead, it dramatizes the power of attentiveness to an expanded, if terribly flawed and potentially dying, world, attentiveness being a kind of tenderness, which is a kind of love."

The Guardian:

• Christopher Taylor on The Second Plane by Martin Amis: "'If September 11 had to happen,' he says in the introduction to The Second Plane, 'then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime.' His fans might not feel the same way. To some extent, the heavily self-parodic aspects of the enterprise - at one point he reports on treating Tony Blair to a disquisition on the Shia, whom he compared to 'nut-rissole artists' - make the crazy-uncle outbursts less alarming."

The New Yorker:

• Joan Acocella on God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 by David Levering Lewis: "The Muslims came to Europe, he writes, as 'the forward wave of civilization that was, by comparison with that of its enemies, an organic marvel of coordinated kingdoms, cultures, and technologies in service of a politico-cultural agenda incomparably superior' to that of the primitive people they encountered there. They did Europe a favor by invading. This is not a new idea, but Lewis takes it further: he clearly regrets that the Arabs did not go on to conquer the rest of Europe. The halting of their advance was instrumental, he writes, in creating 'an economically retarded, balkanized, and fratricidal Europe that . . . made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, persecutory religious intolerance, cultural particularism, and perpetual war.' It was 'one of the most significant losses in world history and certainly the most consequential since the fall of the Roman Empire.' This is a bold hypothesis."

--Tom

Hunter's Run Explored: An Interview with Daniel Abraham, Gardner Dozois, and George R.R. Martin

(The US, special limited, and UK editions of Hunter's Run.)

What do you get when three stellar writers team up on a high-octane SF novel? You get Hunter's Run, which has been described as "Predator meets Camus' The Stranger". Out from Eos this month, it is the brainchild of NYT Bestseller George R.R. Martin, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning writer and editor Gardner Dozois, and critically acclaimed writer Daniel Abraham, one of the best of the next generation of fantasists. Hunter's Run mixes action and suspense with fascinating characters. Ramon Espejo comes up on the wrong side of the Enye, rulers of the planet of Sao Paulo. As Espejo tries to make sense of his fragmented memories, the stakes rise in a battle between powerful and ruthless species. Fans of all three writers should enjoy this well-crafted novel and, as with the best examples of synergy, it's difficult to tell who wrote what. (Completists may wish to check out the novella version still archived on Ellen Datlow's SciFiction.)

Now, collaborations between two writers are common. Collaborations between three writers are not. In part to satisfy my own curiosity, I recently conducted the following interview with Abraham, Dozois, and Martin, who talked about the process of creating the novel.

Amazon.com: Who came up with the idea for Hunter’s Run and how did the collaboration come to be?

George R.R. Martin: The story started with Gardner. The first time I read it, it was an untitled novella fragment that Gardner had submitted to a writer's workshop in Iowa in 1977. After a strong start, he had gotten stuck on it, and I suppose he was hoping that getting some comments and suggestions from other writers would help get him going again. I don't recall what suggestions I made, but I do remember liking the story...so much so that a couple of years later, when Gardner asked me if I'd like to collaborate with him on the still-untitled, still-unfinished novella, I was glad to jump in. I can claim credit for being the first to suggest that the story should be a novel. It took a couple more decades and another collaborator to accomplish that, but the idea was sound.

Amazon.com: What was the process of collaboration like? Layering, taking separate sections as your own, or...? And how did you resolve any disagreements?

Gardner Dozois: There were a lot of layers here, since it consisted of George overwriting me, Daniel overwriting both of us, and then me overwriting everyone else for the final draft. The major problem was keeping the voice as consistent a possible from section to section, since we didn't want a particular section to stand out in a "Oh, this must be the part Dozois put in" kind of a way. This was occasionally difficult, since, as a good modernist, Daniel prefers things to be as stark and minimalistic as possible, where a lot of the effect of my work and George's depends on color and the richness of the detail and the emotionality of the prose (making it either "evocative" or "purple," depending on your tastes). I handled this by putting back in a lot of the color and detail work that Daniel had cut as unnecessary to the plot, and also by adding paragraphs rich with color and detail early on in the novel as well, so that there'd be a consistency of tone from beginning to end. As the one who was doing the smoothing draft, I got the final say most of the time, although, of course, I consulted George and Daniel on controversial points.

Amazon.com: Daniel, I assume when you were growing up, you always imagined you would be collaborating on a novel with Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin. Am I right?

Daniel Abraham: Of course, but I always imagined it more as a regency romance with overtones of William S. Burroughs. Seriously, it never entered my mind as a possibility until George made the proposal. But I read over the draft they had and the outlined notes for how to move forward with it, and it was a good looking project. Plus it was Gardner and George. All very Marlon Brando offer-you-can't-refuse.

Secret Knowledge the Whole World Knows: Questions for David Goldblatt

As I've burnt out (somewhat) on what was my full-blown youthful sports nutdom, trying to put a little distance between myself and the 24-7 coverage of the endless American sports calendar, international soccer has seemed to me like a breath of fresh air, a secret transmission that, until cable and the internet brought the Premiership and Serie A into immediate electronic reach, you could only access via 2 am viewings at English pubs and imported magazines. The irony, of course, is that for the rest of the world soccer, or rather football, _is_ the ever-hyped, multi-zillion-dollar story, and these secret heroes who would only surface on our screens every four years at World Cup time, the Ballacks and Henrys and Kluiverts and Batistutas, were household names to billions. But even now, with Beckham playing (or least being paid) in L.A. and the Fox Soccer Channel piped into my very own home, reading about soccer still feels like samizdat, like underground knowledge.

Which is why I immediately grabbed David Goldblatt's The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer, and carved out enough time to read it, 992 pages and all. What I was hoping for was the vast backstory that I, steeped in no soccer culture beyond seeing Pele and the New York Cosmos play the Washington "Dips" in 1975 and playing years of youth soccer like every other suburban kid, had never gotten. But I got that and much more from The Ball Is Round, which is a global history as much as a soccer history, giving as much attention to the politics and culture surrounding the game as to the matches on the pitch (without ignoring those either), and teaching me, I'm embarrassed to admit, more about South American politics in the 20th century than I've ever picked up from any other source. With its style, its vastly informed ambition, and its balance between the political and the poetic, it's every bit the equivalent of Alex Ross's recent brainiac survey of 20th-century music, The Rest Is Noise. And like The Rest Is Noise, it sent me to the 'net for examples of the artists that its pages evoked so well (for example, Brazil's tragic star from the 50s, Garrincha, or this half-field shot from Pele I couldn't believe until I had seen it for myself--at 0:24, but try not to watch the next 8 minutes too, especially the glorious last goal, at 6:50). I asked David Goldblatt, its well-traveled author, a few questions about his book (which was, of course, subtitled A Global History of Football in its original UK version):

Amazon.com: There's a sentence in the middle of The Ball Is Round that to me sums up a great deal of the culture of football. After noting that Pelé had scored nearly a goal a game in over 1,300 professional matches--the sort of stat that would be on every page in a history of one of the major American sports but that is very rare in this one--you write, "This of course tells us nothing about all the goals he made." What stories do football fans tell about their sport and their stars?

Goldblatt: Well, in America not only would you be banging on about Pele's goal to game ratio but you would have been collecting statistics in a rational organized manner about his assists--a concept that had only entered soccer statistics in the last few years. The state of Brazilian football statistics during Pelé's career would not pass muster in Cooperstown in can tell you. Bill James would have a nervous breakdown with hopeless state of the data base. Soccer fans tell a lot the same stories that Americans tell themselves, sagas, epics, heroic tasks, near misses, dramatic comebacks, tales of curious individualists and unshakeable teams, but they are told in a the idioms, genres, vocabulary, and head space of hundreds of different cultures.

Amazon.com: I have to ask the inevitable question: why hasn't football--rather, soccer--ever taken hold in the United States (despite generations now who grow up playing it)? (And does the rest of the world care if it ever does?) I was fascinated by your comment in the American foreword that you recovered from finishing the book by ignoring soccer for half a year and only watching American sports. What did you notice?

Goldblatt: Contrary to the received wisdom I would say that soccer has taken hold in the US, if we look at participation figures amongst women and the young, and while MLS isn't about to challenge the premiership or Serie A for money or glamour it looks like it is now established on a firm footing. If the game can just tap into the rising Latino communities of America it could be pushing hockey for fourth sport.

That said it would still be just number 4. Baseball, football, and basketball have now had over a century's head start on soccer and between them created a wider sports culture--of expectations, tastes, and pleasures--that I think sometimes finds soccer incomprehensible ( what's with the draws?) or distasteful (all that diving). Soccer had its chance in the USA in the 1920s and 30s when East Coast professional leagues were drawing big crowds but a combination of bureaucratic infighting, the Wall Street crash, and the lingering ethnic associations of the game killed it for two generations.

The Three Potentially Offensive Pigs

I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow down your shoddily constructed...

Shoo-fly publishing's The Three Little Cowboy Builders is circulating the blogosphere as the latest casualty of eager political correctness. The digital pop-up book based on the classic story, The Three Little Pigs, was not shortlisted for the first annual (British government-backed) BETT Awards because, according to the panel of educator-judges, "the use of pigs raises cultural issues."

Today's BBC News report elaborated on the panel's judgment. Apparently, the use of pigs in the story was considered potentially offensive to Muslims. And Asians. And, well, construction workers:

The judges criticised the stereotyping in the story of the unfortunate pigs: "Is it true that all builders are cowboys, builders get their work blown down, and builders are like pigs?"

(Examples of judges' comments must have been released by someone associated with the book, because they are not reflected at all in this vague public statement, which essentially says that the book just wasn't good enough.)

Looking for some kind of response from any of the potentially offended communities, I found this Daily Mail article from March 2007, about a church school that renamed their Three Pigs musical "The Three Little Puppies." It includes a statement from Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra of the Muslim Council of Britain who said, "The vast majority of Muslims have no problem whatsoever with the Three Little Pigs. There's an issue about the eating of pork, which is forbidden, but there is no prohibition about reading stories about pigs."

No comment so far from the builders. Bob?

For the oft-maligned wolf's perspective, you can also check out children's laureate Jon Scieszka's The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs! --Heidi

A Costa, but not a killer

The Costa Book Awards, one of the second-rank British book awards (behind the Booker but still pretty big), announced their Book of the Year Tuesday: A.L. Kennedy's novel Day, about an RAF tailgunner reliving the war as a movie extra five years later, which just came out in the U.S. this month. Just a refresher for those scoring at home: the Costas (known until 2006 as the Whitbreads, when they were taken over by the coffeeshop chain, Costa Coffee--I'm not even sure what a Whitbread was or is) are given in five categories (First Novel, Novel, Biography, Poetry, and Children's Book), and then, among these five, one is chosen a few weeks later as the Book of the Year. Here's this year's winners (and our list of winners for the past five years):

• First Novel: What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn
• Novel: Day by A.L. Kennedy
• Biography: Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore
• Poetry: Tilt by Jean Sprackland
• Children's Book: The Bower Bird by Ann Kelley

Which gives us an opportunity to link further on A.L. Kennedy (who ranks very high on my embarrassing/enticing list of people I've never read who I really, really want to), specifically to Maud Newton's delicious post today about the email she got from ALK about how everyone who meets her seems to expect she'll be "homicidal," after Newton blogged about how "terrified" she had been to meet her. She quotes Kennedy's note at length, and I am sorely tempted to do the same because there really is hardly a stretch of more than three words in it that doesn't make me laugh. But here's how it begins:

Every time I meet strangers, it tends to go…

Them: Oh my God, you’re you.

Me: Yes. I am. I think.

Them: And you haven’t killed me with an axe.

Me: I don’t have an axe.

Them: I brought one with me just in case. So you wouldn’t get annoyed and kill me with a chair leg which would take longer and therefore be more painful.

Read on--you'll have an idea of why Kennedy these days is identified as "author and stand-up comic." --Tom

The Wind in the Willows: Papercutz Resurrects Classics Illustrated

For those who may have grown up with the original Classics Illustrated (1941 to 1971), Papercutz's decision to resurrect the series, starting with a wonderful version of The Wind in the Willows, will be welcome news. Adapted by Michel Plessix, this edition (originally published in 1998 independent of the CI series) features painstakingly detailed panels while preserving the best parts of Kenneth Grahame's original book. I have to admit I was skeptical at first because the original is a childhood favorite of mine, but Plessix understands both the playfulness and the soulfulness of Grahame and his adaptation is a sheer delight from cover to cover. The greatest pleasure for me was being able to experience all of Grahame's characters in this new light, as an adult.

Albert Kanter was the visionary publisher behind the original Classics Illustrated, which ranged from titles like The Corsican Brothers to Don Quixote. I remember many of these quite clearly from my reading in the mid-1970s, the comics so worn that I no longer have them. It was my first introduction to many of these classic, canonical books--and a very entertaining one, which made me want to read the original texts.

Upcoming volumes in both the Classics Illustrated and Classics Illustrated Deluxe series include Tales from the Brothers Grimm, Great Expectations, and The Invisible Man.

Here's a full-page reproduction from Plessix's The Wind in the Willows.

Hari Kunzru's Bookshelf: Researching the Revolution

I wrote last week about My Revolutions, Hari Kunzru's new novel, which is my January pick for our Significant Seven. And when poking around to learn more about him and the book, I came across his bare-bones home page, which features a larger version of the lovely bookshelf photo above, filled with what must have been his research materials for My Revolutions. I'm always fascinated by the process of research in writing fiction (how much to do it, when to stop and let imagination take over, etc.), but I nearly always despise those lengthy acknowledgments that often appear these days at the end (or worse, the beginning) of novels, explaining all the research materials used and thanking all those involved. It breaks the spell of the tale. My Revolutions does include such a note at the end, but it's written with some style and manages to still leave a great deal of mystery, so I didn't mind it. But even better is to see this jumbled shelf, raw and unexplained, as a hint of the sourcework that went into the story: the mystery of creation is for me not only retained, but deepened. And so in the spirit of the Omnivoracious annotated bookshelf, a partial listing of the books I can find in the photo (a treasure trove of Leftist theory and Sixties history) appears after the jump. --Tom

Science Fiction and Fantasy Links for a Lazy Tuesday

For SF/Fantasy fans just recovering from a long weekend, here's a links roundup for your Tuesday reading pleasure!

Read the prologue to space opera genius Iain M. Banks' new Culture novel, Matter: "A screen flicked into existence a couple of metres in front of the woman, filling half her field of view.  It showed, from a point a hundred metres above and in front of its leading edge, an army of men--some mounted, most on foot--marching along another section of the desert highway, all raising dust which piled into the air and drifted slowly away to the south-east. Sunlight glittered off the edges of raised spears and pikes."

Download bestselling fantasist Robin Hobb's Shaman's Crossing as part of Eos celebrating their ten-year anniversary: "Eos is 10 years old! To kick-off our yearlong anniversary party, we're giving away free e-books!  Every two months for 2008, we'll give away a new free e-book."

Wired Magazine weighs in on the role of the philosophical in SF: "If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best--and perhaps only--place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas."

SF Site lists the best science fiction and fantasy of 2007: "All in all, I'd say 2007 was a very good year, good enough so that the main problem was not in finding enough titles to make the list, but instead the problem was cutting titles that in many other years would have been automatic inclusions."

Sample J.G. Ballard's forthcoming autobiography: "I slipped out of the hotel and began to walk the street. The pavements were already crowded with food vendors, porters steering new photocopiers into office entrances, smartly dressed young secretaries shaking their heads at a plump and sweating 60-year-old European out on some dishevelled errand.

Duo Howard Waldrop and Lawrence Person's split review of Cloverfield: "When I first heard about Cloverfield, I was pretty lukewarm about the whole idea. After all, a great deal of the fun of a monster movie is seeing the monster. The other problem was the nature of the protagonists: When it comes to monsters eating club-hoping 20-something yuppie Manhattanites, right off the bat I'm rooting for the monster."

Techropolis attempts to parse what makes for a good SF movie: "Ah, the question that burns like a fire in the soul of every science fiction fan. Finally we shall know the answer."

And, finally--drum roll!--the top five celebrities zombies would avoid eating:  "5) Keith Richards--Zombies consider it bad form to turn on one of their own. They’re not cannibals, for goodness sake."

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• William Logan on A Treatise of Civil Power by Geoffrey Hill: "It’s dangerous for a poet to believe that gloom is the precondition for seriousness. If poetry for Hill is a 'mode of moral life' ('charred prayers / spiralling godwards on intense thermals'), the evidence here lies more in design than example — the morals are in lieu of, not on behalf. Poetry provides a moral life the way that standing on a pillar in the desert provides salvation — fine if you have a pillar, and a desert, and a terrific sense of balance; and if not, not."
• Ann Hodgman on The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories by Max Apple: "One of the pleasures of this book is that Apple makes you feel he knows everything about everything — or at least everything you know nothing about: shot-putting, running a liquor store or a car-salvage operation, Chinese gymnastics, what it’s like to try to sell 600,000 plastic laser swords. Nothing about the Upper East Side! Nothing about rich suburbs or the entertainment industry! Thank you, Mr. Apple!"
• Maslin on Duma Key by Stephen King: "Given this combination of author and setting, it’s inevitable that something terribly undead will show up before the book is over. But Mr. King’s use of horror is not what it used to be. It may still be the impetus for his stories, but it is no longer the foremost reason they’re interesting. Sure, he can still use supernatural effects to scare the wits out of you. But lately he also shows off other interests. In the wake of the 1999 roadside accident that permanently altered his consciousness, he has turned the evanescence of health and sanity into his books’ most disturbing source of fear."
• Maslin on Against the Machine by Lee Siegel: "Though Mr. Siegel is hardly the first observer to deem this a sinister side of Internet culture, he turns out to be an impressively tough, cogent and furious one. His diatribe would bring to mind the prescient haranguing style of Pauline Kael, even if Mr. Siegel, who does not treat his own reputation lightly, were not trumpeting the phrase 'Pauline Kael of the Internet' himself."

Washington Post:

• John Burdett on Beautiful Children by Charles Bock: "Las Vegas is the expression, in glitter and concrete, of America's brittle and mutating id. This is not the argument of Charles Bock's exceptional Beautiful Children, so much as the starting point from which he explores the survival strategies -- usually doomed -- of the citizen-mutants themselves. He proves an expert guide, being a native of the city with an encyclopedic knowledge of every perverted nook and narcissistic cranny. His ability to share a deep understanding of America's million or so lost street kids and their tormented parents gives the book a whiff of greatness."
• Mr. Jeff VanderMeer on Laura Warholic by Alexander Theroux: "It soon becomes clear that Theroux is using his amazing powers of grotesquery and caricature to make almost everyone look morally, ethically and intellectually ugly. As a result, the reader's delight at Theroux's descriptive powers quickly changes to disgust at the unrelenting brutishness of these characters, and that disgust, finally, is transformed into boredom as the barrage of details and constant repetitions begin to seem not only gratuitous but insulting to the reader."

Los Angeles Times:

• Donna Seaman on The Jewish Messiah by Arnon Grunberg: "Grunberg has as much talent as chutzpah and, beneath the absurdist vamping, a longing for justice, integrity and hope. With more books in line to be translated into English and more in the works, Grunberg, nearly past the bad-boy phase, will remain a caustic, goading and vital literary force if, as seems likely, he moves beyond puerile shock tactics and creates books of deeper resonance and more profound empathy."

Globe & Mail:

• Jason Anderson on Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson: "Wilson's [Celine] Dion distaste becomes the basis for a wide-ranging book, one predicated on the possibility that what repels us may say more about us than what attracts us. As he writes, 'What unpleasant truths might we learn from looking closer at our musical fears and loathings, at what we consider 'bad taste'?'"

The Guardian:

• Ursula K. LeGuin on People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks: "Full of action but with no leavening of humour, no psychological revelations, no vivid language to focus description, the chapters grind on. Most unhappily for a historical novel, there is little sensitivity to the local colour of thought and emotion, that openness to human difference which brings the past alive."

The New Yorker:

• Jill Lepore on The Way to Wealth by Benjamin Franklin: "This year marks the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of 'The Way to Wealth,' among the most famous pieces of American writing ever, and one of the most willfully misunderstood. A lay sermon about how industry begets riches (No Gains, without Pains), 'The Way to Wealth' has been taken for Benjamin Franklin’s—and even America’s—creed, and there’s a line or two of truth in that, but not a whole page. 'The Way to Wealth' is also a parody, stitched and bound between the covers of a sham."

--Tom

Can U Read Me Now?

Look out Paranormal Romance, the Cellphone Novel is the new literary sub-genre that's reaching manga-like popularity in Japan. Yesterday the New York Times reported that in 2007 50% of the top ten books on the Japanese bestsellers list originated as cellphone novels. Sparked by the coming-of-age of a generation of Japanese youth raised on cellphones and a change in billing structure that charges an affordable flat-rate fee for data transmission, the cellphone novel was born and hangnails replaced writer's block as an occupational hazard. Would-be authors text away their mostly first-person diary-like thoughts on their phone and upload the content to a website that facilitates the serialization of the works. The book itself remains triumphant in the end though, as that's how most readers are actually experiencing the novels.

--BTP

New on Amazon Wire: Madeleine Albright

In this week's episode of Amazon Wire, I got the chance to talk to Madeleine Albright, secretary of state under Bill Clinton and bestselling author ever since (Madam Secretary, her memoir, and The Mighty and the Almighty both did very well). Her new book is called Memo to the President Elect, and it is just that: a book of advice to the incoming president, whoever he or she is and whatever party he or she is from, about the subject Albright knows best: foreign policy. The first half of the book is full of practical recommendations for how to construct an administration and how to lead, and the second tours the hot spots around the globe, with advice on how to proceed (among the most important of which is, you can't do everything).

Sound dry? It's not--Albright is a graceful and funny writer, both diplomatic and direct, and she covers a lot of ground quickly and clearly. I imagine the "night notes" she sent to the president (her confidential memos) were a pleasure to receive. And our conversation was one of the most enjoyable I've had for Wire. We spoke in part about the place America currently has in the world and what the next president can do about it, the importance of speaking to even your worst enemies, and, since we talked in December just after the revised National Intelligence Estimate about Iran was made public, about the difficulty of judging intelligence. And although in our talk (as in her book) she didn't discuss specific candidates, when I asked her about the big campaign question of experience, she made a strong case for the importance of having built personal relationships across the world already (and, implicitly, a case for the candidate she's supporting elsewhere, Hillary Clinton). You can listen to the Wire podcast on the page for her book, and find more podcasts in our archives. --Tom

A shout-out to Poe: announcing the 2008 Edgar Award nominees

Your reading queue may already be waist-high now (I know mine is) with all the Best Ofs and award winners that have been rolling in, but who can resist the siren songs of this year's Edgar hopefuls? I mean, really. From Benjamin Black's Christine Falls to debut favorite (and favorite of ours) In the Woods and Michael Chabon's genre-bending The Yiddish Policeman's Union--not to mention the host of delectable discoveries (Who is Conrad Hirst, indeed?)--it's been a great year for mysteries. I'm eager to see who'll be taking an Edgar home in May. Cue the drum roll:

Best Novel:

· Christine Falls by Benjamin Black
· Priest by Ken Bruen
· The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon
· Soul Patch by Reed Farrel Coleman
· Down River by John Hart

Best First Novel by an American Author:
· Missing Witness by Gordon Campbell
· In the Woods by Tana French
· Snitch Jacket by Christopher Goffard
· Head Games by Craig McDonald
· Pyres by Derek Nikitas

Best Paperback Original:
· Queenpin by Megan Abbott
· Blood of Paradise by David Corbett
· Cruel Poetry by Vicki Hendricks
· Robbie's Wife by Russell Hill
· Who Is Conrad Hirst? by Kevin Wignall  

Best Fact Crime:
· The Birthday Party by Stanley Alpert
· Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi
· Chasing Justice by Kerry Max Cook
· Relentless Pursuit by Kevin Flynn
· Sacco & Vanzetti by Bruce Watson

Best Critical/Biographical Work:
· The Triumph of the Thriller by Patrick Anderson
· A Counter-History of Crime Fiction by Maurizio Ascari
· Deviance in Contemporary Crime Fiction by Christiana Gregoriou
· Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley
· Chester Gould: A Daughter's Biography of the Creator of Dick Tracy by Jean Gould O'Connell

Best Young Adult:
· Rat Life by Tedd Arnold
· Diamonds in the Shadow by Caroline B. Cooney
· Touching Snow by M. Sindy Felin
· Blood Brothers by S.A. Harazin
· Fragments by Jeffry W. Johnston  

Best Juvenile:
· The Name of This Book is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch
· Shadows on Society Hill by Evelyn Coleman
· Deep and Dark and Dangerous by Mary Downing Hahn 
· The Night Tourist by Katherine Marsh
· Sammy Keyes and the Wild Things by Wendelin Van Draanen  

Grand Master Award:
· Bill Pronzini

Speaking of Edgar, it happens that Poe would have celebrated his 199th birthday this past Saturday. (I wonder if the nominee announcement just the day before was intended to coincide? Do tell MW of A!) In any case, we all know Poe's life was regrettably short: imagine how many more spooky stories he might have penned had drink and tragedy not gotten the best of him? What I'd like to imagine just as much is what he'd think of his heir-apparents writing today. I suspect he'd enjoy the grisly detail to be found in books like Heartsick or get sucked into the dark underbelly of Charlie Huston's world, but what about that frightful element of surprise--that unknowable dark turn into something sinister and evil--that makes his stories so wonderfully creepy? It's a primal sort of macabre you find in Poe that I think must be hard to recreate in the here and now, where (we think) we have the tools to unravel any mystery. Of contemporary authors, who do you think gets close to hitting that eerie note? Stephen King is my best guess, though it's hard to say.  But I'm all worked up now for a good scare. --Anne

Ambush: David Coe's Shift In Focus

   

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. Today, it's David B. Coe, author of the recently published The Sorcerer's Plague, the first of his Southlands series, and a former winner of the Crawford Award. He's a very interesting and to my mind underrated fantasy author. If you haven't read his work, starting with this new Southlands series would be a good place to start. Coe has been tackling what I'd call a sea change in his fiction: a switch from multiple third-person characters to a single, first-person narrator. Sometimes this occurs in a single series, like the bestselling Michael Connelly's Bosch detective novels changing from third to first person, sometimes, as with Coe, to tell a radically different story.

"For the past few weeks I've been working on a number of new projects in addition to the Blood of the Southlands series that I'm currently writing. The interesting thing is that I think I'm going to be writing all these new projects (two new multibook series and a short story--none of them related to one another) in first person. Sounds like a small thing, I know. But epic fantasy, which is what I usually write, tends to be written in third person and from the points of view of many characters. This new work I'm doing will have only one point of view character, who will be telling his or her own story. Because of this, these stories tend to have more intimate voices, to be more character driven, and, in some ways, more coherent. The other thing about these projects is that, while all are fantasy, all of them also involve crime mysteries of some sort. They draw upon the tradition of first person narrative originated by the old mystery masters (Spillane, Hammet, etc.) and brought over to SF/Fantasy by people like Philip K. Dick. Anyway, this all represents an artistic departure for me, and I'm having fun with it."

Nebula Awards Long List Announced

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America has announced the long list for the prestigious Nebula Awards, from which the finalists will be chosen by SFWA members. It's quite a hodge podge of types and authors, plenty for everyone to choose from. I'm not sure who my money would be on--newcomers like Tobias Buckell, Hal Duncan, and Jay Lake, "famous outsiders" like Michael Chabon or J.K Rowling, established SF writers like Nalo Hopkinson and Peter Watts, or what I'd call "distinguished Old Masters," like Joe Haldeman and Jack McDevitt. Should be interesting--stay tuned! Before they parse it down, here's the list of novels for Amazon readers wishing to seek out some great SF. For the entire long list, visit the SFWA website.

Ragamuffin, by Tobias Buckell

The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon

Species Imperative #3: Regeneration, by Julie E. Czerneda

Vellum: The Book of All Hours, by Hal Duncan

The Accidental Time Machine, by Joe Haldeman

The New Moon's Arms, by Nalo Hopkinson

Mainspring, by Jay Lake

Odyssey, by Jack McDevitt

The Outback Stars, by Sandra McDonald

Strange Robby, by Selina Rosen

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling

Rollback, by Robert J. Sawyer

Blindsight, by Peter Watts

Bobby Fischer, 1943-2008

With the passing yesterday of Bobby Fischer, often recognized as the world's greatest chess player and one of its all-time eccentric, paranoid geniuses, I'd point you to the book I know best on the subject, Bobby Fischer Goes to War, by the team of David Edmonds and John Eidinow. Edmonds and Eidinow have carved out a wonderful niche for themselves of writing brainy and fun histories (Wittgenstein's Poker, Rousseau's Dog) that use a bizarre episode to open a window on an intellectual and cultural world (see the Grownup School list they selected for us on The Enlightenment), and for their second book they chose one of the weirdest and most compelling events in the 20th century, when the equally intricate game theories of the Cold War and international chess intersected in Reykjavik, Iceland, for the 1972 world championship chess match between Fischer and the Soviet Union's Boris Spassky. The drama and sheer nuttiness of that showdown can hardly be underestimated, and Edmonds and Eidinow do a sharp job of balancing the global public story with mundane and idiosyncratic personal details, especially those of life around a brilliant and demanding lunatic. My main memories of the book, in fact, are less of Fischer himself--as memorable as his talents and his behavior were--than of those around him, particularly the gentlemanly Spassky and the patient and forgiving Icelanders who befriended Fischer (and who were perhaps the reason he returned there to live before his death). --Tom

Ambushed: Sarah Monette on the Definition of Heroism

   

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. Today, it's critically acclaimed fantasy author Sarah Monette, whose creepy-cool The Bone Key features linked stories about a museum archivist who can see ghosts, ghouls, and incubi--a delightful combination of M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft. She recently collaborated with Elizabeth Bear on A Companion to Wolves. Monette has also written a series of highly praised novels set in the milieu of the strange city of Melusine: Melusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, and the forthcoming Corambis. Her short fiction has been collected in several year's best anthologies. Monette has been thinking about the definition of heroism:

"I just finished reading Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party by George R. Stewart, so I've been thinking a lot about definitions of heroism. Who's eligible to be a 'hero' and why? For Stewart, writing in 1936, action is heroic, and so he focuses on the men and on the relief parties which struggled to cross (and recross) the pass. But what stands out to me, reading his account, is the heroism of the women, especially Tamsen Donner, who died at Donner Lake but could have gotten safely to California if she had been willing to abandon her dying husband. And also the heroism of the children. Half of the Donner Party were under eighteen, and those children's suffering and courage is every bit as real and admirable and tragic as the suffering and courage of the adults. But it's harder to see, because it isn't the heroism of action; it's the heroism of endurance. And action makes for a better story."

How To Write a Novel in Two Months (While Still Blogging)

It's sure a roundabout way to read about one of your fellow bloggers (although we do live in opposite corners of the country), but via BoingBoing and GalleyCat today I found our own Jeff VanderMeer's lessons-learned from his latest writing project, a commissioned Predator novel (not his usual gig), filed under How to Write a Novel in Two Months. (I should note that he thinks it turned out pretty well). Among my favorite pieces of his eminently practical advice (some learned on the fly, some the fruit of the years of novel-writing that led up to this full-on sprint):

Make sure you support your efforts with sound process decisions. Most of the time, I wrote new scenes in the mornings, revised existing scenes in the afternoons, and spent my evenings on line-edits and rewrites of individual paragraphs here and there. By structuring my time this way, I made better progress than if I’d just focused on doing new scenes all day until the novel was done. Because by the time I’d finished writing the new scenes, most everything up to that point had already then been through a second or even third revision.

Base at least some of your main characters on people you know and really like, BUT make sure they are not people you have spent a lot of time with. I know it sounds paradoxical, but it turned out to be a very effective way for me to generate depth of character, almost like having some of the work done for me, but not all of it. Let me explain. In the novel, there is a character named Horia Ursu, the same name as one of my Romanian editors. Horia is a dear, dear friend who I correspond with via email and who Ann and I have met twice. We have spent perhaps a total of seven days together. I feel very close to him, I admire him greatly, but I don’t know him in the way I know Eric Schaller, for example, who illustrated City of Saints & Madmen. I’ve known Eric for more than a decade and we’ve spent a lot more time together. I could never use “Eric Schaller” as a name to animate a character quickly because I know too many details about his life. With Horia, there is a space there, a lack of knowledge in certain ways, that allowed me to create a very entertaining character in the novel by riffing off of what I did know and then filling in and making up details.

Meanwhile, if you do a little research on Omni you'll see that Jeff hardly disappeared from these pages during the last two months--I'm not sure how he managed to squeeze us in, but glad he did... --Tom

Best of the Month

We've introduced, somewhat quietly, a newish feature on the Amazon books pages called Best of the Month. It's an expanded version of the Significant Seven, the monthly editors' picks we started last spring, with more of our favorites highlighted (in the Seven on the Side), former editors' picks now out in paperback, leaderboards for the bestsellers of the month so far, and a very quiet (so far) discussion board (maybe I should say something about Ron Paul there and get things rolling...). We're planning to add a lot more features to the page in coming months: more of our editors' recommendations, but also ways to feature the busiest and most helpful customer reviews and discussions alongside our own. If you have anything you'd like to see on that page, please let us know, either in the discussion board on the page, or right here. We'd like it to become a one-stop shop where you can quickly get a look at the best books being released right now, and the best customer discussion going on on the site now too.

My pick for the Significant Seven this month was Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions.  I'll crib from my comments on the discussion board to say a little about why:

It wasn't the kind of book that I had in mind for months ahead of time (unlike, say, Richard Price's Lush Life, which has been a contender for next month for me since way back in the fall), but I put it in my vacation pile on a whim and it ended up being the one I got caught up in with great pleasure. That made curious my I hadn't heard more about it, since it had been out in the UK for months and Kunzru's first book, The Impressionist, made a giant splash over there. No awards shortlists, not much buzz for this one. And it's not a flashy book, unlike his others (apparently--this is the first of his I've read). But I just found it incredibly well made--nearly every scene and character given their individual, idiosyncratic due. It seems a very grownup book to me--Kunzru is willing to step back and do some old-fashioned realist storytelling and follow character and circumstance where they lead, even in the middle of a flashy tale-of-a-generation plot. It's the kind of story (60s radical reckons with past) that's been told a hundred times recently, but it seemed fresh and authentic to me.

It's not out yet in the US, but if anyone has seen an advance version or read it when it came out in the UK--or has read any of his other work--I'd love to hear what you think. I looked up the UK reviews for it: some thought it was too familiar a story, some felt like I did. David Mattin's rave in The Independent came the closest to my own thinking.

Meanwhile, I also nominated two books for Seven on the Side: Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader for the Day and David Goldblatt's The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer. Venkatesh is the sociologist profiled in one of the best-known chapters in Freakonomics (about the economics of crack dealing)--as a grad student at the University of Chicago, he began spending time at the Robert Taylor Homes, one of Chicago's giant housing projects that have since been leveled, much of it by the side of "JT," the local-leader of a crack-dealing gang called the Black Kings. He's written more academic books about his research into the urban underground economy (like last year's Off the Books), but this is a very non-academic memoir of his seven years of research, and all the political and personal complications it caused. It's in many ways a Chicago version of the Baltimore stories in The Wire, except that Venkatesh comes across as wide-eyed and almost willfully naive compared to David Simon's proud cynicism. (It's as if Det. Pryzbylewski went into academia.)

The Ball Is Round, meanwhile, is a gigantic and fascinating history of a subject that deserves (but has never gotten) such a thing. I expect to be posting a Q&A with the author here before too long, so I'll save further commentary until then.

January was a good month for books, but I think February is looking even better. I'm taking home an armload of candidates for the next Best of the Month tonight: we'll see... --Tom

Michael Moorcock Goes Metatemporal

Michael Moorcock, recently named one of the top 50 British writers of the post-war era, has written just about every kind of fiction you can imagine. That includes cross-temporal detective fiction. Say what? That's right. Cross-temporal detective fiction. In Moorcock's latest, The Metatemporal Detective, Seaton Begg and his constant companion, pathologist Dr “Taffy” Sinclair, both head the secret British Home Office section of the Metatemporal Investigation Department. As the book's dust jacket reveals, "Begg's cases cover a multitude of crimes in dozens of alternate worlds, generally where transport is run by electricity, where the internal combustion engine is unknown, and where giant airships are the chief form of international carrier." But the story is much richer and deeper than that. For example, who is the mysterious Sexton Blake? And why is Zenith the Albino such a compelling character? To get to the bottom of it all, I recently interrogated Mr. Moorcock...

Amazon.com: Why do you persist in mixing genres and ideas and milieus? Why can’t you just stand still every once in awhile?
Michael Moorcock: I'm easily bored. For that reason I usually don't read much genre fiction. I like fiction which precedes genre or when it has begun to parody or otherwise question the tropes.

(The marvelous cover of The Metatemporal Detective, by John Picacio, side-by-side with the original art.)

Can Michael Pollan Fix the American Diet, One Kid at a Time?

Feeding our kids should be simple, right? We've been feeding ourselves for years. How hard can it be to whip up some oatmeal and crush a banana? But everywhere you turn, there's an edict on what they can eat and when (yogurt and cheese at nine months, but no milk until one year--huh?), or how they should drink water (regular cup vs. sippie-cup), or how we need to make sure meal time is enjoyable so the kids don't grow up with food issues.

Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto speaks to one of my biggest anxieties as a new parent--feeding my child.

Talk about food issues, Pollan highlights the pitfalls (or pratfalls) of our culture's obsession with healthy eating. Expanding on his indictment of "nutritionism" from the January 28, 2007 New York Times Magazine, he presents tidbits of recent studies and statistics that range from the absurd (like how lobbyists manage to keep the acceptable level of free sugars in the U.S. diet at 25 percent of daily calories, despite the World Health Organization's recommended limit of 10 percent) to the downright embarrassing, like this statement from a 2001 study: "It has now been recognized that the low-fat campaign has been based on little scientific evidence and may have caused unintended health consequences." Oops.

Such factoids are entertaining (or disturbing, depending on what you've been eating), but what really comes in handy is Pollan's list of easy-to-remember guidelines like, "Avoid food products that make healthy claims" and "Don't eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." It's a great philosophical companion to helpful yet overwhelmingly detailed parenting staples like Super Baby Food.

Will In Defense of Food do for the local food movement what An Inconvenient Truth did for environmentalism? Maybe. I don't know. I do know that this book that never once mentions parenting or children is one of the best parenting guides I've found so far on the subject of food.

(For a quick NYT Book Review excerpt, see Old Media Monday, January 8.)--Heidi

Robin E. Brenner's Understanding Manga and Anime

       

(Author Robin E. Brenner in two of her animated incarnations, and the cover of Understanding Manga and Anime)

Ever wondered if there was more to anime and manga than meets the eye? Ever wondered if the fact that these primarily Asian (especially Japanese) art forms come with a different cultural context means they should be read differently? Librarian, author, former Eisner Award judge, and founder of the website No Flying No Tights Robin E. Brenner provides answers to this question and more in her superb Understanding Manga and Anime. Not only does she include a great capsule history of anime and manga in Japan and the West, she also breaks them into various categories, notes trends, discusses themes unique to both, and provides a recommended reading list. What I especially love about the book are the sidebars, which range from recipes for dessert sushi to unique visual clues in anime/manga, as well as stock character types, rising stars, and popular websites. The information is so well-organized and direct that even readers not interested in manga or anime will find much here to enjoy. And, for an indepth conversation about manga, read my interview with Brenner. - Jeff

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Jeffrey Rosen on Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment by Anthony Lewis: "In the 21st century, the heroic First Amendment tradition may seem like a noble vision from a distant era, in which heroes and villains were easier to identify. But that doesn’t diminish the inspiring achievements of First Amendment heroism. Conservative as well as liberal judges now agree that even speech we hate must be protected, and that is one of the glories of the American constitutional tradition. Anthony Lewis is right to celebrate it."
• Sylvia Brownrigg on Darkmans by Nicola Barker: "But to suggest that this dazzling, complex novel has anything quite as conventional as a plot would be misleading. There are plenty of mysteries — Who hung a bell on Beede’s cat? How did Beede come to be almost £40,000 in debt? Why was Kane’s car dented by a dead bird, frozen solid? — but Barker enjoys the journey of her storytelling too much to worry about when she’ll arrive at her destination. So great are her humor, wit and erudition that she’s able to charm us into sharing her tolerance of uncertainty and confusion."
• Charles Taylor on Sway by Zachary Lazar: "Lazar has taken territory, the 60s, where the individual blades of grass have long been trampled into the mud by legions of literary, sociological and critical boots, and found something new. What he evokes is unlikely to please either those who condemn the decade as a body blow to decency and authority, or those who celebrate it as a trippy carnival of raised consciousness and experimentation. Lazar’s is a book that has no time for preconceived ideas, that tells the reader exactly the things likely to disturb any cozy notions. He’s a bad-news bear and thus the most valuable kind of cultural commentator."
• Judith Warner on The Senator's Wife by Sue Miller: "I somehow feel that if I were a right-on woman, I would identify deeply with Miller’s hurting, bleeding, lactating heroines and greet her sensuous descriptions of fruit and soft rain with a great sigh of satisfaction. But I’m not and I don’t. For me, the world of her lushly invoked senses seems intensely claustrophobic, as precious and cloying as a purple-painted, patchouli-scented room."

Washington Post:

• Raymond Arsenault on Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore: "Gilmore makes a strong case that Cold War insecurities have promoted the false impression 'that middle-class black men in ties radicalized the nation.' ... By ignoring the movement's radical origins in the ideologically charged political and economic struggles of the early 20th century, she insists, 'we discount the forces that generated and sustained human rights during the 1930s and 1940s and privilege its religious, middle class, and male roots.' Misled by conservative politicians and the mainstream media, we have accepted a truncated and distorted version of civil rights history."

Los Angeles Times:

• Jesse Cohen on Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin: "Those head bones were to evolve in all sorts of interesting ways. Some of the jawbones of fish and reptiles became, in humans, the bones within our ears that allow us to process sound across a range of frequencies. This repurposing has its downside, however. Nerves that extend from facial muscles to our brain take complicated paths -- paths that reflect primitive skeletal placement. ...  'We can dress up a fish only so much without paying a price,' Shubin writes. We choke, succumb to hiccups, develop hemorrhoids and hernias and fall prey to heart disease all because our bodies are spruced-up versions of primitive models, and the kludges and patches that have developed over millions of years of evolution, like all kludges and patches, inevitably break down."

Globe & Mail:

• Gale Zoe Garnett on The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosley: "Reading the letters of the Mitford sisters is like living inside a vibrantly written, erudite and witty Masterpiece Theater series about six extraordinary (or, to use a Mitfordian word, extraorder) Englishwomen.... If all their epistolary exchanges had been included, we would have had more than four million words. And I would have spent much of the rest of my life reading them, because, with this enormous book, I have entered Mitfordland and connected to its people."

Times Literary Supplement:

• Jonathan Keates on A Quiet Adjustment by Benjamin Markovits (not yet available in the US): "Throughout Benjamin Markovits’s consummately successful realization of the most controversial protagonist in the Byronic drama, apart from its hero, he never loosens his control of stylistic resources or relaxes his often chilling scrutiny of the motives and aspirations governing the Regency caste to which both Byrons belonged. A Quiet Adjustment achieves authenticity through the refinement of its emotional discourse rather than set-dressing period details. Such artistry allows us to read it as both a resonantly modern novel and as a fiction whose truth has been stifled for almost 200 years."

The New Yorker:

• Adam Gopnik on This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust: "To deal with these horrors, a new set of social rituals, designed not so much to 'blind' survivors to the reality as to make them believe that the reality was necessary and noble, came into being. The beauty and originality of Faust’s book is that it shows how thoroughly the work of mourning became the business of capitalism, merchandised throughout a society."

--Tom

Start Putting on the Stickers: Caldecotts, Newberys, etc.

The Golden Globes and the National Book Critics Circle nominees weren't the only award news this weekend: the American Library Association also announced the big ones in kids' books: the Newbery and Caldecott medals, which carry a guarantee of immortality not even the major grownup awards can offer. It's remarkable how aware my 8-year-old is of what those shiny stickers mean. And he'll be happy to hear that one of his favorite books last year, The Invention of Hugo Cabret ("The longest book I've ever read!" he'll tell you), is going to get a gold seal of its own. Here are the Medalists (the winners) and the Honor Books (the runners-up) for the Caldecott and Newbery as well as the winners of the other ALA awards:

Newbery (for "most outstanding contribution to children's literature"):

• Medal: Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village by Laura Amy Schlitz, illustrated by Robert Byrd (a collection of 23 monologues that Schlitz, a Baltimore school librarian, originally wrote for her students to perform)
• Honor: Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis
• Honor: The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt
• Honor: Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson

Caldecott ("the most distinguished American picture book for children")

• Medal: The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick (the first novel to win the award)
• Honor: Henry's Freedom Box, illustrated by Kadir Nelson, written by Ellen Levine
• Honor: First the Egg by Laura Vaccaro Seeger
• Honor: The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain by Peter Sis
• Honor: Knuffle Bunny Too by Mo Willems

Michael L. Printz Award for Teen Literature:

• Medal: The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean
• Honor: Dreamquake by Elizabeth Knox
• Honor: One Whole and Perfect Day by Judith Clarke
• Honor: Repossessed by A.M. Jenkins
• Honor: Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath by Stephanie Hemphill

Coretta Scott King Awards ("recognizing African American authors and illustrators of outstanding books for children and young adults"):

• Author: Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis
• Illustrator: Let It Shine by Ashley Bryan

Mildred L. Batchelder Award ("outstanding children's book translated from a foreign language")

• Brave Story by Mikuyi Miyabe

Pura Belpre Awards ("to a Latino/Latina writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children"):

• Author: The Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Marzano by Margarita Engle
• Illustrator: Los Gatos Black on Halloween, illustrated by Yuyi Morales, written by Marisa Montes

Theodore Seuss Geisel Award ("the most distinguished American book for beginning readers")

• There Is a Bird on Your Head by Mo Willems

Odyssey Award ("the best audiobook produced for children or young adults"--the first time it's been awarded):

• Jazz by Walter Dean Myers, illustrated by Christopher Myers, produced by Arnie Cardillo

Sibert Medal ("the most distinguised informational book for children"):

• The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain by Peter Sis

And always one of best ideas for a prize list: the Alex Awards ("the 10 best adult books that appeal to teen audiences"):

• American Shaolin: Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China by Matthew Polly
• Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff
• Essex County, Vol. 1: Tales from the Farm by Jeff Lemire
• Ghengis: Birth of an Empire by Conn Iggulden
• The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle
• A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
• The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
• The Night Birds by Thomas Maltman
• The Spellman Files by Lisa Lutz

See previous winners of many of the ALA awards on our Award Winners page. --Tom

Meet Your 2007 National Book Critics Circle Awards Finalists

The Golden Globes wasn't the only award news this weekend. The National Book Critics Circle met to to select their 2007 finalists at San Francisco's literary landmark, City Lights Book. And it pays to be prolific as Joyce Carol Oates pulled a Cate Blanchett, garnering two nominations--one in Fiction and one in Autobiography. Winners will be announced on March 6. --BTP

Autobiography
Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone by Joshua Clark
Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat
The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982 by Joyce Carol Oates
Writing in an Age of Silence by Sara Paretsky
A Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin's Russia by Anna Politkovskaya

Nonfiction
American Transcendentalism by Philip Gura
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet Washington
Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA by Tim Weiner
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

Fiction
Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
In The Country of Men by Hisham Matar
The Gravedigger's Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates
The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins

Biography
Stanley: The Impossible Life Of Africa's Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal
Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee
Ralph Ellison by Arnold Rampersad
The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 by John Richardson
Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin

Poetry
Elegy by Mary Jo Bang
Modern Life by Matthea Harvey
Sleeping and Waking by Michael O'Brien
The Ballad of Jamie Allan by Tom Pickard
New Poems by Tadeusz Rozewicz

Criticism
Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints by Joan Acocella
Once Upon a Quniceanera by Julia Alvarez
The Terror Dream by Susan Faludi
Coltrane: The Story of a Sound by Ben Ratliff
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross

Ship of Fools: A Classic Definitely Worthy of Philip K. Dick

In a happy confluence of timing, considering the announcement of the PK Dick Award finalists last week, my holiday reading included Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo. Russo's creepy, haunting novel won a Philip K. Dick Award in 2001. I really loved this novel, which mixes space opera and horror with religious themes in an intriguing way. In addition to complex internal politics on the huge multi-generational spaceship/colony, Russo throws in a strange planet and a truly eerie alien spaceship. I've really never read a better description of an encounter with an alien object. Even better, Russo provides the closure the novel needs while still leaving some things open-ended. If you're looking for a suspenseful, exciting, and thoughtful read, this novel's for you. --Jeff

Kids' Books to Caucus By

In our home, we read political blogs compulsively (from smart liberals *and* smart conservatives) and we haven't been able to stop listening to streaming local radio from Iowa, New Hampshire, and now Nevada, all while watching the latest results tallied on Politico.

So how do we incorporate our kid into the action? At nine months, about the only way Silas gets involved is by laughing when we cheer and/or moan--in the most exaggerated way possible, for his entertainment--as primary results come in. And we may try to deploy his cuteness to sway fellow caucus-goers in February. (You have been warned, precinct #SEA 43-2059!)

But little did I know that for even slightly older kids, there's a slew of new political books out--even picture books! Publishers Weekly just posted a thoughtful and seemingly exhaustive list of new books this year on politics and elections, from novels to kid-friendly biographies of current candidates to a scrapbook-style history of Lincoln. (Sadly, there are no Huckaberry or Chicka Chicka DNC board books.)

There are lots of intriguing titles on the list, including a DK book on the voting process, an entry from one of my favorite kids' book dogs, and even a story written by White House press correspondent/legend Helen Thomas. Check out the informative PW article for more commentary and context on all the books, but here's the list--and if you don't see a link, that probably just means the publication date is still too far out:

Sir Edmund Hillary, 1919-2008

Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to stand atop Mt. Everest (along with climbing partner Tenzing Norgay), died January 10 at the age of 88. Hillary, a  tall, gangly New Zealander, made his pioneering ascent on May 29, 1953 as part of a British expedition to the world's tallest peak--four days before the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Despite his instant fame and empire-wide hero status, Hillary steadfastly maintained a humble attitude toward his achievement; until Tenzing's death in 1986, Hillary refused to acknowledge that it was he--and not Tenzing--who first reached the top, a sign of ultimate respect for his friend. As he later wrote in View from the Summit:

We drew closer together as Tenzing brought in the slack on the rope. I continued cutting a line of steps upwards. Next moment I had moved onto a flattish exposed area of snow with nothing by space in every direction ... Tenzing quickly joined me and we looked round in wonder. To our immense satisfaction we realized with had reached the top of the world.

In the decades since, Hillary had devoted himself to founding schools and hospitals in Tenzing's native Nepal, a pursuit that given him more pride than climbing the mountain itself.  Today the world lost a man whose stature rivaled that of the world's tallest--and before Hillary, indomitable--peak. --Jon

There Will Be Milkshakes

"I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!"

If you've seen Paul Thomas Anderson's new American epic, There Will Be Blood (loosely based on Upton Sinclair's Oil!) you've no doubt left the theater with this brilliant line, delivered maniacally by Daniel Day Lewis as oil baron Daniel Plainview, still ringing in your ears. On the pop-culture front it's promising to enter the lexicon along with "I see dead people," "Say hello to my little friend!" and "It's not personal, it's business." This week New York Magazine's Vulture blog made a plea to save this most excellent (and very bizarre) line from becoming a SportsCenter catchphrase. If anything, we hope the line will inspire more milkshake consumption. Keep in mind that July is National Ice Cream Month. In a cinematic milkshake mash-up, we'd like to bring together the best of both worlds--National Vanilla Milkshake Day (June 21) and National Chocolate Milkshake Day (September 12)--for a serve-anytime-of-year confection that would be just perfect for a movie-inspired menu item on this year's Oscar party circuit. --BTP

Malted Black-and-White Milkshake in the Style of Daniel Plainview
(Adapted from Bobby Flay's Boy Meets Grill)

• 1 pint good-quality vanilla ice cream, slightly softened
• 2 tablespoons of malt powder
• 3 ounces chocolate sauce
• 2-3 ounces bourbon
• Whipped cream (for garnish)
• Shaved bittersweet chocolate (for garnish)
• Cherry (for garnish)

Place ice cream, malt powder, chocolate sauce, and bourbon in a blender and blend until smooth. Pour shake into a tall glass. Garnish with a large dollop of whipped cream, chocolate shavings, and a cherry on top. Serve with an enormous straw.

Don't Get Any of That Blood on the White Suit: New Tom Wolfe

The big publishing news last week was that Tom Wolfe, after 43 years (!) at the thrifty Nobel Prize factory over at Farrar Straus Giroux, has signed with Little, Brown for his upcoming novel, Back to Blood (not listed on our site yet), for the reported sum of $6 to 7 million (a sum which his last book, I Am Charlotte Simmons, would not have come close to earning back, it has also been reported). Now this week New York's Vulture blog has gotten its greedy mitts on Wolfe's 28-page proposal for the book, about a half-a-page of which they share with the general reading public. It's a fictional (but of course heavily reported!) expose of the racial politics of Miami, covering "class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption, and ambition." "Our story begins"--so begins the proposal--"inside the mind of a young Cuban policeman." I dunno--who do you trust to tell a complex modern tale of race and class and get "inside the minds" of its principals: Richard Price? Junot Diaz? Or Tom Wolfe? He wouldn't be my first choice, but we shall see...

Also via Vulture, a link to comics blogger Laura Hudson's mom's very funny review of The Best American Comics 2007, edited by Chris Ware. Her response to the navel-gazery (which, I should note, I at times adore): "There’s a tendency to want to say to a lot of those stories, 'hey, suck it up a little.'" --Tom

Philip K. Dick Award Finalists Announced

The 2007 Philip K. Dick Award nominees, for "distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States," have been announced: Jon Armstrong's Grey, Elizabeth Bear's Undertow, Minister Faust's From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain, M. John Harrison's Nova Swing, Adam Roberts' Gradisil, Karen Traviss' Ally, and Sean Williams' Saturn Returns.

Elizabeth Bear and M. John Harrison have both been featured on Amazon in recent months, and both have now received their second PK Dick Award nominations.

Contacted by Amazon, Bear said, "I was totally surprised...there's been so little buzz over Undertow that I was pretty sure nobody on Earth had read it. It's absolutely a thrill. Writing is a broadcast medium, in some ways--we have no idea what people think when they read our stuff. Just knowing somebody out there thought it was a worthwhile book...makes me feel less like I'm killing trees for no good reason except to feed my own ego (there should be an emoticon here, but it would be a complicated one comprised of chagrin, self-mockery, and sheer excitement)."

While Bear received her first nomination last year, for Carnival (which received a Special Citation from the judges), Harrison's first nomination came back in 1984 for the now-classic In Viriconium. Harrison was also surprised,  but believes "Nova Swing is in the Phil Dick tradition." The reception of the novel in the United States has been good, while "winning the Arthur C. Clarke Award helped in the UK. Currently, Harrison is working on a new novel.

The judges for the 2007 award are Steve Miller, Chris Moriarity, Steven Piziks, Randy Schroeder, and Ann Tonsor Zeddies. The winner and any special citations will be announced at Norwescon on March 21. - Jeff

2666 in 2008? More from Wimmer and a British Top 50

Catching up over at PaperCuts: Dwight Garner sends his usual three questions to Natasha Wimmer, providing an update on the Q&A we did with her last spring. She has pretty much the most interesting job on the planet to me right now: after translating Roberto Bolano's gigantic novel, The Savage Detectives (my favorite book from last year), she's been working away at his even more gigantic novel, 2666, which, last I heard, was due out this year, although the translation is not listed on our site yet. What a magical task she does: take this wonderful thing that's hidden away by a wall of language and give it a new life in the English-speaking world. (And--more magic--she's been making a baby at the same time.) The translations that get all the attention these days are the high-profile reworkings of classics like War and Peace and The Aeneid, and it is fascinating to see how a book we know can get turned into something (slightly) different in new hands. But nothing near so fascinating as finding a great new book of genius laid on your doorstep for the first time.

And boy, this answer makes me even more antsy to read 2666 (and also wish that I had the bilingual chops to be a translator):

Bolaño really gives the translator a workout. I also researched Black Panther history, pseudo-academic jargon (actually, some of that came naturally), World War II German army terminology, Soviet rhetoric, boxing lingo, obscure forms of divination and forensic science vocabulary, among other things. If that makes the novel sound like a hodgepodge, I promise it’s not. Even the most obscure detours are thoroughly Bolaño-ized - filtered through his weird, ominous, comic worldview.

Also, as in the photo she gave us for our Q&A, she's drinking a cup of coffee in someplace lovely.

Mr. Garner also points to a new argument-starter launched by the Times of London: a list (ranked--thank you!) of the top 50 postwar British writers. As much as I love rankings, this one seems particularly fresh to me, maybe just 'cause it's territory that I haven't been over & over to the point of exhaustion. I have plenty of gaps in my Anglo-reading, so I can't really claim to argue authoritatively with the list, and I kind of like that too. But on first glance it's very friendly to writers in the margins of the literary "genres" of fantasy, SF, spy tales, and children's books (Tolkien, Lewis, Fleming, Dahl, Peake, LeCarre, Banks, Rowling, Pullman, Sutcliffe, Moorcock) and to poets (starting with #1, Philip Larkin) but not to some of the lit stars of the moment (no Zadie Smith, no Alan Hollinghurst, no David Mitchell, no Graham Swift). Who else is missing or maligned? No P.D. James or Ian Rankin? Ian McEwan 21 spots below Ian Fleming? No Margaret Drabble? And has anyone read anything by William Golding (their #3 pick) besides the one everybody (except me) has read? What do you think? I'm especially curious what my Anglophilic colleague Mike Smith has to say. --Tom

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover ("The Islam Issue"): Ayaan Hirsi Ali on The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam's Threat to the Enlightenment by Lee Harris: "To argue, as Harris seems to do, that children born and bred in superstitious cultures that value fanaticism and create phalanxes of alpha males are doomed — and will doom others — to an existence governed by the law of the jungle is to ignore the lessons of the West’s own past.... Many of the Westerners who were born into the law of the jungle, with its alpha males and submissive females, have since become acquainted with the culture of reason and have adopted it."
• Eric Ormsby on God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 by David Levering Lewis: "Lewis’s own examples show that civic harmony in Umayyad Spain was more the result of shrewd statecraft and common sense than of some vague and anachronistic ideal of 'tolerance'.... Though well aware of the overly rosy picture often painted of Muslim Spain, Lewis sometimes accepts it himself. Nowadays, we know all too well that the enforced wearing of badges to signify religious affiliation is hardly a sign of tolerance. That was true in Muslim Spain too."
• William Dalrymple on The Adventures of Amir Hamza: "'The Adventures of Amir Hamza' is the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' of medieval Persia, a rollicking, magic-filled heroic saga.... At this perilous moment in history, the Hamza epic, with its mixed Hindu and Muslim idiom, its tales of love and seduction, its anti-clericalism (mullahs are a running joke throughout the book), its stories of powerful and resourceful women, and its mocking of male misogyny, is a reminder of an Islamic world the West seems to have forgotten: one that is imaginative and heterodox — and as far as can be from the puritanical Wahhabi Islam that the Saudis have succeeded in spreading throughout much of the modern Middle East."
• Maslin on In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan: "In this lively, invaluable book ... he assails some of the most fundamental tenets of nutritionism: that food is simply the sum of its parts, that the effects of individual nutrients can be scientifically measured, that the primary purpose of eating is to maintain health, and that eating requires expert advice. Experts, he says, often do a better job of muddying these issues than of shedding light on them. And it serves their own purposes to create confusion."

Washington Post:

• Jonathan Yardley on People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks: "it's a book that resides comfortably in a place we too often imagine to be a no-man's land between popular fiction and literature. Brooks tells a believable and engaging story about sympathetic but imperfect characters -- 'popular' fiction demands all of that -- but she also does the business of literature, exploring serious themes and writing about them in handsome prose. She appears to be finding readers and admirers in growing numbers, and People of the Book no doubt will increase those numbers."
• Ron Charles on How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet: "How the Dead Dream surprises in the other direction, largely avoiding the hectoring, lecturing tone of those big-name, environmentally self-conscious novels. For one thing, Millet doesn't spend a lot of space on the old news that the ecosystem is slipping into a silent spring. Instead, How the Dead Dream focuses on the quiet existential crisis that arises from living in a dying world."

Los Angeles Times:

• Thomas Lynch on Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir by David Rieff: "Some see death as a transition while others see it as extinction. [Susan] Sontag studied in this latter school and tutored her only son in its grim lessons. What is clear from his book ... is that while she battled cancer, she waged war on mortality. That we get sick was acceptable to her. That we die was not. Pain, suffering, the awful losses her disease exacted, were all endurable so long as her consciousness remained animate."

Globe & Mail:

• Peter Behrens on Endgame, 1945 by David Stafford: "Millions of stories that made no sense at all, even in the context of a world deranged by war, were happening every hour of every day in 1945. Stafford has found his way to some them by sifting the memoirs, journals, letters and archives of a handful of individuals - U.S., British and Canadian infantrymen, commandos, intelligence officers, BBC reporters, a UN Refugee Relief administrator, a concentration-camp survivor - who were on the ground.... There are no groundbreaking revelations. The larger story of the war's end in Western Europe has been told before, but Stafford's witnesses are up close and personal, and their stories have freshness and pungency."

The Guardian:

• Michel Faber on Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie: "On December 31 2007, Peter Pan passed into public domain, freeing Lost Girls to be sold in UK bookstores.... Moore's greatest strength, apart from the prodigious fertility of his imagination, is structure. A work of pornography that is 16 years in the making ought to be plotlessly incoherent, fitfully improvised and full of premature climaxes. Lost Girls is a sophisticated, cunningly conceived narrative that builds with Tantric sureness towards its finale."

The New Yorker:

• No full-length review, so here's a bit of a Briefly Noted review of Staring Back by Chris Marker: "The images are both global and intimate, capturing political demonstrations at home and abroad, along with the faces of friends and strangers encountered in the course of making movies in Paris, Havana, Guinea Bissau, and Tokyo. Accompanied by text in Marker’s inimitable voice, the collection stands as further testimony to his commitment to record not just social struggle but the poetry behind it."

--Tom

Our Family's Holiday Book Recap

Heidi and I just got back from a long holiday break, including three family xmases and a New Year's trip to Vegas (in which we learned that 8-month-old Silas could care less about the Bellagio's fountains, but he loves fireworks and trying to eat Keno tickets). Silas and his cousin got plenty of books, so I figured I'd share some of the highlights:

• Winter in White: A Mini Pop-up Treat: For my money, you can't beat The Night Before Christmas for yuletide Robert Sabuda pop-up madness, but my mom got Silas this smaller, more subtle Sabuda pop-up and it seems like just the right scale.
• Gallop: Why hasn't this been done before? The low-tech, zoetrope-like animations (patented as "Scanimations") in this stout little board/pop-up book are weirdly compelling. A horse, cat, turtle, eagle, etc., comes to life on each page--without batteries or a screen--looking much like primitive Muybridge animations. The effect is too subtle for Silas (who finds everything fascinating), but kids who are even a little older will appreciate the coolness. I'd think that Robert Sabuda would be kicking himself over not thinking of this first, but he's got an admiring blurb right there on the back cover.
• Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What Do You See?: I'm such a sucker for Eric Carle's illustration style, and this board book has fun rhymes and repetition, too. Plus, all the animals in this particular book are endangered, so you can have fun reading a loud while also feeling terrible about destroying the planet. (How much habitat did I destroy from buying yet another board book? I don't even want to think about it.)
• Moomin books: My comics-loving friends and my Finnish friends (okay, one Finnish friend) couldn't believe that we'd never heard of Moomin. Moomin "is, like, the Mickey Mouse of our country"--with, I now know, an amusement park and everything. I loved a clever and goofy die-cut kids' book with the Moomin characters called The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My, but grownups and older kids will get way more out of the popular and very fun comic strip, a densely idiosyncratic serial that's more like Barnaby or Krazy Kat than more current strips. It was originally published in English in the 1950s in the London Evening News and has been collected in nicely oversized hardbacks by Canadian comics publisher Drawn and Quarterly. I devoured volumes one and two.
• The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: This was the sleeper hit of Christmas, for Silas' almost 5-year-old cousin, and for me and his dad. It should be noted that this was from the library, because we couldn't find it anywhere--despite trying, since Silas' cousin carried it with him everywhere, even though the entire beat-up book was in black and white, and he couldn't read the entries. He just kept asking, "Who is this? Who is that?" And we'd tell him, "Oh, that's Kang the Conqueror. Let's see, he's, uh... from the 40th century. And... he traveled back in time to become a pharaoh." And so on, through hundreds (thousands?) of entries. This seemed like classic, mastery-of-arcane-knowledge boy reading--like the way I (and his dad, coincidentally) would read the Guinness Book of World Records cover to cover and back again growing up. We never did find the Marvel guide in print before Christmas, so he could have his own copy, but it looks like an updated edition is coming out this spring. (We got him another slightly age-inappropriate book instead, DK's Spider-Man Ultimate Guide, to feed his growing Spidey obsession. We got bonus points because it matched his pajamas.)
• Drawn to Enchant: This wasn't a gift for anyone but just a book that I was carrying around reading, which has a ton of amazing illustrations, images, and ephemera, from children's books going back well over a century. I wouldn't recommend the book to anyone who isn't particularly interested in kids' literature, but Slate (where I originally learned about it) has a great slideshow of the highlights, including my favorite, an early sketch of Gandalf and Bilbo by Maurice Sendak, from a book that was never produced:

--Paul

Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists

 

In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists, compiled and edited by Todd Hignite, is an elegant soft-cover coffee table book. Containing extended, indepth interviews with such marvelous creators as Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Robert Crumb, Chris Ware, Ivan Brunetti, and Art Spiegelman, In the Studio provides an unofficial, history of comics over the last thirty years. Hignite's introductions to each cartoonist create additional context, as do color and black-and-white panels. The interviews are completely in the cartoonists' own words, without questions included, which puts the focus squarely on the person being interviewed. The art and comics integrated with the text helps create a dialogue, Hignite inserting visuals from the history of comics when the interview topic demands it. (For example, the piece reproduced above is from a scrapbook made by Charles Burns' father, a source of great inspiration for Burns.) Reflecting thought and concern for the total package--from design to contents to typography--In the Studio is perfect for graphic novel enthusiasts.

Big Cheese Indeed: Congratulations Ambassador Scieszka

Jon Scieszka, author of more than two dozen superbly sly children's books, including the Caldecott Honor book The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales is now an especially big cheese. The New York Times reports that the Library of Congress (LOC) has just named Scieszka the first national ambassador for young children's literature.  During his tenure as ambassador, the dynamic and charismatic author will travel across the country to inspire kids to read. Scieszka will also be working hard to motivate parents, teachers, librarians--and the average American for that matter--to take up the cause of children's literacy. 

As the kids of this new millennium devote more and more of their free time to playing video games, the challenge to capture some of their attention (and keep it) is certainly daunting. But, if anyone has the chops to do it, Scieszka does. This former grade school teacher-turned author not only has the institutional support of the LOC, but, perhaps more importantly--he truly knows what makes young readers tick.  The proof lies in his wickedly funny books that manage to win over even the most reading-reluctant boys and girls.  --Lauren

Earthquake in Iowa: Background Reading

Ready to jump on a bandwagon? Last night's caucus participation in Iowa represented roughly a tenth of a percent of the American population, but that weirdo quirk (one of many!) in the American presidential electoral system nevertheless feels like it sparked some sort of revolution in national politics, with two charismatic outsiders (one on the national radar for over three years, one best known until a few months ago for his diet book) upsetting the favorites of their parties' establishments, at least for a week. Many people, of course, have gotten to know Barack Obama already through his books, first his bestselling memoir, Dreams from My Father, and then his even better-selling manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, but Mike Huckabee has been even more prolific with his pen: he published two books last year, From Hope to Higher Ground (an updated paperback edition is coming out on February 5) and Character Makes a Difference (a revised version of his 1997 book, Character Is the Issue?). And then there's that diet book, Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork: A 12-Stop Program to End Bad Habits and Begin a Healthy Lifestyle, and two more books from his time as governor of Arkansas still in print: Living Beyond Your Lifetime: How to Be Intentional About the Legacy You Leave and Kids Who Kill: Confronting Our Culture of Violence (which got some recent attention for its apples-and-oranges list of cultural conflicts besetting our country: "Abortion, environmentalism, AIDS, pornography, drug abuse, and homosexual activism").

Shifting to an even more tumultuous election on the other side of the globe, I'm a little late in reporting that the late Benazir Bhutto had, according to her publisher, turned in her final revisions for a new book just hours before her assassination last week. It will appear in tne U.S. in April under the original title, which now of course carries a bitter irony: Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West. [Update: the publication date has just been moved up to February 12.]  --Tom

New Year's with Ina and Patricia

In a Christmas Eve post we shared a holiday message from food writer Patricia Wells along with an exclusive snapshot she shared of her shopping at a Paris outdoor market with fellow cookbook writer and part-time Parisian Dorie Greenspan. Patricia promised a New Year's photo to share with Amazon and this lovely note just landed in our inbox. What exactly is on the menu when two of the food world's favorite women and their husbands get together for a holiday meal? Read on to find out.

--BTP

New Year's is a time for family, so we gathered together a family of friends to celebrate the arrival of 2008, which we all agree will be a special, positive year for all of us. We spent it at our farmhouse in Provence, with Ina and Jeffrey Garten, who arrived on the TGV from Paris with plenty of champagne and chocolates. For the feasts, my husband, Walter, made his spectacular scrambled eggs with fresh black truffles, a remarkable oyster casserole prepared with gigantic fresh oysters from Brittany, and a wedding-cake sort of cheese course: the fat creamy Chaource cheese from Champagne which he cut into three layers and spread with truffle butter and truffles. I dried grapes from our vineyard and prepared a "Vintage 2007 Old Vines" raisin bread, and offered a golden sponge cake made with lemons from our trees, fresh local olive oil, and almonds, and prepared a mixed berry sauce from summer fruit we froze for the occasion. We both have new books coming out  this year--Ina's is Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics, out with Clarkson Potter in October, and Walter and I have written our memoirs, We've Always Had Paris... which will be out with Harper Collins in May. We all look forward to seeing many of our readers this year, and wish all health and happiness in 2008.   

--Patricia Wells

Ambush: Hal Duncan on Why SF is Really Fantasy

        

For the second in the "ambush" series, in which I check in unexpectedly on SF and Fantasy writers to see what they're thinking about, and in some cases struggling with, I contacted Hal Duncan, whose highly praised Vellum and Ink are two of the most mind-blowing and ambitious SF-Fantasy novels of the past decade (well worth reading if you haven't already). Duncan has been working through the "difference" between genres and gave us this snippet in advance of posting his complete thoughts on his blog.

Duncan writes: "As SF writers and readers we are ready, it seems, to abandon the limitation of light speed that comes with Einsteinian Relativity so we can play with FTL, or to ignore the physical foundations of mind in the neurochemistry of the brain so that we can use ESP. We are willing to ditch the Conservation of Energy that is a basic aspect of Newtonian thermodynamics in order to portray teleportation as an act of mere will, to swallow jaunting as an ability to transport oneself instantaneously through space-time. We are more than able to throw away the very coherence of the space-time continuum we exist in so we can imagine a road that links all possible times and all possible histories. If we're ready, willing and able to play this fast and loose with science why should we draw the line at equivalent paradigm shifts that, for us, render a work fantasy rather than SF? Aren't the secondary worlds of fantasy simply alternative realities where the archaeological distinction of gracile and robust hominids translates to elves and dwarves as distinct races? Aren't the magical powers of fantasy just the telekinetic talent to manipulate a reality tractable to the human will? Aren't all the spurious fabrications of fantasy in fact equally as recastable as rational speculations if only we accept paradigm shifts no more radical in truth than those required with the seminal SF of Bester and Zelazny?"

I'll be interested to see what Amazon's hard core science fiction readers think of this argument. When does a work of fiction become fantasy in your eyes? What is it about science fiction that makes you appreciate it more than fantasy? --JeffV

Selah Saterstrom's The Meat and Spirit Plan

   

Coffee House Press' PR kit for The Meat and Spirit Plan uses the word "searing" to describe this unusual coming-of-age story set in Scotland and the the southern town of Beau Repose, and for once I can't argue with a publicist. Selah Saterstrom's novel will, in fact, sear the hair off your head and leave you muttering "wow" more than once. Composed of short, darkly muscular chapters, The Meat and Spirit Plan has no fat on it at all. The intense and sometimes cryptic scenes featuring our sometimes strung-out heroine are often so personal and revealing that we begin to feel we're reading a truly original novel. When Katherine Dunn, author of the classic Geek Love, writes about the book that it's "ferocious and dazzling, the work of a savage poet," each scene "a hard polished gem of raunch and revelation," she's not kidding. Definitely recommended. It makes me want to check out her previous novel, The Pink Institution.

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