Omnivoracious

Friday Night Videos: Bright Shiny Morning versus Vodka Chelsea

Welcome once again to Friday Night Videos, where we aim to give you the kind of match-ups you deserve for hanging out here on the weekend. Tonight, in honor of his guest posting right here at Omnivoracious, it's James Frey talking about his new book Bright Shiny Morning (May 13) versus Chelsea Handler talking about Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea, which just hit the NYT bestseller list. Frey you already know about from his posts. Handler, who has a show on E! every weeknight at 11:30, is a little newer to the spotlight, but very talented. She's got incredible comic timing and has a great blend of irreverent, self-deprecating humor and biting satire. The Q&A from a bookstore gig displays her sharp wit and her quick-thinking approach to comedy. (More videos here.)

Purple Prose

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today 2 talk about 21 Nights, the just-announced debut book from Prince. Available September 9, 2008, it's a multi-media volume filled with poetry, lyrics, and 124 full-color images from photographer Randee St. Nicholas, who had an all-access behind-the-scenes pass ("on stage, backstage, and into his sleeping quarters") into the public and private life of the multi-award winner. The book highlights the energy of last year's record-breaking sold-out 21 concerts in 21 nights at London's O2 Arena, and will come packed with Indigo Nights, an exclusive 15-song CD featuring one brand-new song and 14 live versions of Prince classics and recent favorites that captures Prince's "speak-easy, after-hours, raw, after-show sessions of pure unadulterated jams."

--BTP

 

Guest Bookshelf: Mae Sander

Our new bookshelf banner atop Omnivoracious is courtesy of reader Mae Sander, who has these words of introduction:

In front of the books on this shelf is evidence of one of my reading interests: Shakespeare, represented by a bobble-head and a couple of small figures. The books behind Shakespeare reflect my interest in food history, Jewish history, and all varieties of ethnic cooking. You can guess from this selection that I enjoy a variety of approaches to writing about food. I like collections of authentic recipes such as Roden's Book of Jewish Food or Collin's The New Orleans Cookbook. I'm fond of portraits of families and their food, such as Koerner's A Taste of the Past or Rossant's Apricots on the Nile. And I appreciate scholarship like Jacob's Six Thousand Years of Bread or Gitlitz's A Drizzle of Honey -- a reconstruction of recipes of the secret Jews based on their testimony to the Inquisition. I write about my thoughts on food history, food books, and cooking on my blog, maefood.blogspot.com.

Thanks, Mae! Send your own bookshelf photos in to omnivoracious at amazon.com. --Tom

 

Friday Night Videos: Hidden Cities versus Toddler Reading a Dinosaur Encyclopedia

Tonight on Friday Night Videos, we bring committed bibliophiles across the world a clear choice--a clash of Titans that pits the brand-new Hidden Cities series by rising star Tim Lebbon and best-seller Christopher Golden (Mind the Gap, book one, out in May) against over five minutes of mind-numbing dinosaur name-reading by an anonymous toddler.

Yes, it's what you asked for in the non-stop phone calls, emails, and missives sent through my window with bricks. Lebbon and Golden beating up on a defenseless child. Enjoy!

(And remember: If you're here on a Friday night, you're not alone. There's at least one other.)

Book-Beer Pairings (Part II)--T.C. Boyle, Chip Kidd, Margo Lanagan, James Morrow, and More

     
(Large beer Drayman's Porter with Small Beer's Ant King; Dudman's novel and Old Speckled Hen.)

Much has happened since posting Part I of the book-beer pairings feature. First, I tested out Three Philosophers with Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton and found that (1) it is indeed a great Belgian-style beer, with some very subtle yet strong flavors, and (2) it goes very well with Groff's book.

Then, I decided to check in with Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press because...well, how can you do this kind of feature and not talk to a publisher called Small Beer Press? Gavin has a lot of respect for both books and beer--and access to both locally. “We have a fantastic brewery (ok, we have a few) in the Happy Valley in Massachusetts: the Berkshire Brewing Company. Their Traditional Pale Ale is a summer time treat and all winter we survive on their Drayman's Porter. Which is what we were drinking when the UPS guy delivered galleys of our next collection, Ben Rosenbaum's The Ant King.” (You can now download John Kessel’s excellent new collection The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Maureen F. McHugh's powerful Mothers & Other Monsters from the Small Beer website.)

So, without further rabbiting, the continuation of this landmark feature...

Guinness Versus Everything Else?!

Although most participants in the second half of this feature preferred matching a dark beer with their books, a few hold-outs for lighter imbibification include Thomas Disch, Nick Mamatas, and Chip Kidd—Kidd mostly because, as a purist, he deferred to his novel: “In The Learners, Happy and Himillsy down Rolling Rocks at Modern Apizz in New Haven, so that would appropriate. Otherwise, everyone drinks martinis.”

Mamatas probably wouldn’t typify his pick as a light beer, although it is: “The official beer of Weinbergia, the country in Under My Roof, is Red Stripe.  Short and hip, sweet and a bit more dangerous than you might at first suspect.  Plus, hipsters dig it like they dig uncombed hair and T-shirts from 1985.”

Similarly, Disch, author of the forthcoming The Word of God: Or, Holy Writ Rewritten (coming July 1 from Tachyon Publications), selected either Rhinegold or Lowenbrau for his forthcoming farcical “memoir”: “In the New York of my youth (I was 17 when I got here in '57, and Miss Rhinegold was then an annual tradition. The contestants had their pictures posted in the subways. There was also a Miss Subways. They have both disappeared in our new, unsexed era, but there is another good reason to serve Rhinegold at the book party. It is the beer Wagner made famous. Not much of a beer in itself, as I recall, which is why it may have become extinct, and not the best opera in the Ring either, but no one has ever dared to bring out a beer called Gotterdammerung....I was actually in Lowenbrau Hofbrauhaus in Munich (in 1966). There were tiers of drinking halls where roisterers bellowed out drinking songs. A kind of Valhalla.”

Book-Beer Pairings (Part I): Arianna Huffington, Michael Chabon, Lauren Groff, and More

(Lauren Groff's Monsters paired with Brewery Ommegang's Three Philosophers, along with another great Ommegang beer, and an interloping stout.)

For a long time, I’ve wondered why wine and food should have all the fun. Here at Omnivoracious, we also believe in the complementary pairing of books with...beer. Now, please note that we’re not advocating irresponsible reading, but with the current popularity of micro-breweries and the role of beer in the writing of books over the centuries, it seems somehow irresponsible not to pair the two. We’re frankly a little surprised no one’s done it before.

Thus, I took it upon myself to explore the connection between hops and writing chops, going far afield to ask a diverse group of writers what beer or beers would go best with their latest work. The results were so revelatory and comprehensive that we’re running the first half of this feature today and the second half on Thursday...

Light Beers, Lambics, Arrogant Bastard, and More!

Naturally, everyone approached the question in a slightly different way. Eastern European surrealist Zoran Zivkovic appeared to have already sampled a brew or three, sending in the rhyming verse, “Drink Bud West, drink Bud East,/Drink Bud reading Steps through the Mist.” Elizabeth Hand echoed Zivkovic, even while confessing she hasn’t drunk beer in thirty years: “But the last time I did have one, it was almost certainly a glass of Bud with a shot-glass of Jack Daniels in it. A boilermaker, which is what Cass Neary in [the dark thriller] Generation Loss would drink--24/7, and minus the beer.”

Arianna Huffington, author of the just-released Right Is Wrong, decided on a more political (and surprisingly conservative) approach, writing, “Busch, of course!  Besides the homonymic convergence, distribution of this beer helped make Cindy McCain rich and funded John McCain’s political career.”

Other books that apparently take a lighter approach include Karen Joy Fowler’s Wit’s End, paired with Sierra Nevada Pale Ale: “The company describes it as a new take on a classic theme; it's light, but complex.  This is a North Californian company, which fits me and my book.  But what I like best is the slogan--‘the beer that made Chico famous.’ The where?”

This Is Why I Wish I Lived in New York (Although I Don't, Really)

Denis Johnson, who couldn't be at the ceremony last fall to accept his National Book Award (his wife Cindy did in his stead) for Tree of Smoke because he was reporting in Iraq, gave in recompense a reading from a work in progress at Manhattan's New School. Paper Cuts reports that he was, among other things, handsome and funny:

“This is from my work in progress,” he said. “It’s a short novel. Pretty literary stuff. But you’re sophisticated New Yorkers. You can handle it.”

The scene he read was about a gambler in debt to his bookie, the two of them driving around in a Cadillac with a big gun in the glove compartment. The sentences were not trippy or jazzy or mystical or visionary. They were not sprawling. Johnson read a couple of pages, then mugged a double take at his manuscript. “What the —? Where’s the literary? I thought I put something literary in my suitcase, but this is just cheap pulp fiction.” He grinned at us. Really, he explained, this was from a novel that will be serialized in Playboy, about a man down on his luck who meets a damsel in distress. He read on, turning the pages, pausing occasionally to drink from a water bottle or to laugh at one of his lines.

--Tom

Fake Covers for Fake Books by a Fake Writer. Yes!

Somebody knows exactly where my buttons are, and is pushing them. As much as I love Paris Review interviews and fake writers, I may have an even softer spot for fake writers, their fake books, and their fake book covers, and Nathaniel Rich's promotional site for his new novel, The Mayor's Tongue, having indulged the first, has now granted me the latter, with a full (and growing) gallery of covers of the various fictitious editions of the fictious writer Constance Eakins's fictitous books, contributed by some sharp designers and illustrators. And it's not just the idea of it, but the covers themselves, often period pieces that are not only spot-on but gorgeous in their own right. I love, for instance, Zach Dodson's vintage Penguin pb of Humboldt in the Amazon. But I really adore Joanna Neborsky's often Brit-feeling covers, of which it was hard to choose just two lovelies to feature above. I think Flowers, Flowers, Eat All the Flowers is my favorite, but I had to include Songs for Agata too because I am certain I bought a copy of that one for $5 in Philadelphia in 1988. It must be on my shelves somewhere...

But my real favorite is Ben Gibson's full-jacket treatment of The Uncles Ten (below), which I must confess I am fairly desperate to read (I imagine it in the Flann O'Brien vein...).

Want to show off your Photoshop chops and contribute your own? Drop it in the Eakins Covers Group Pool on Flickr, which has grown already since I first saw the page. And speaking of cover design, check out the Book Design Review's recent rave for the non-fictitious cover of the non-fictitious novel at the center of all this.

And now at some point I should actually get on to actually reading The Mayor's Tongue instead of hanging out the website all evening... --Tom

The Dog and Pony Show (Guest Blogger: Lisa Lutz)

It seems that a few people are curious about what a book tour involves, so I figured I'd take a stab at describing the experience in a kind of diary form.

Let me preface everything by saying that a book tour nowadays is a rare opportunity to promote your book. They cost publishers a lot of money, and no one is entirely sure how effective they are as a marketing tool. That said, if you're sent on a book tour, it's a good sign. Authors (especially new ones like me) need to be grateful for the vote of confidence it represents. That means they have to suck it up and be pleasant. At all times. Here's just a sampling of my most recent book tour experience:

Day 1. I wake up at 4:30 a.m. for a 7:00 a.m. flight to Philadelphia. I've slept only two hours because of my anxiety about the alarm clock not going off--a theme that marks much of the tour. My flight is almost on time, but my luggage is an hour late. When I arrive at the hotel, I have only an hour to clean myself up for the event. My media escort picks me up from the hotel and we drive about an hour to the event. I've been suffering motion sickness all day and the car ride is no different. I do the event with another author, Nancy Martin, who has brought in most of the crowd, which saves me the embarrassment of arriving at a bookstore with only one or two people in attendance. The evening ends well, however. Someone has made me a cake fashioned after my book jacket.

Day 2. Happens to be my birthday, but I keep that on the down-low. This is the day I've been dreading. I have a television interview on a local morning show. The whole idea of my nervous face being broadcast into thousands of homes makes me want to wretch. What gets me through is that it's local television and I know that neither I nor anyone I know is likely to ever see the interview. In this particular instance, I went to great pains to keep my friends in Philadelphia from discovering what I was up to that morning. I complete the interview and go back to my hotel room.

In the evening I'm interviewed by a local celebrity reporter at an event that sold tickets for $15 a head. I heard they sold six tickets in advance, but only two people show up. My friends had big plans to heckle me, but couldn't work up the nerve in a crowd that small. I wouldn't pay $15 to see me either, so I wasn't offended by the paltry crowd.

Day 3. I didn't get enough sleep the night before. Maybe four hours. I catch a 9 a.m. flight to Fort Myers, Florida, for a reading festival. There's a reception in which I can't drink my allotted booze because the shuttle driver took off before the last departure time, so I had to drive a number of authors (who were also not early) to the event.

Day 4. I'm 10 minutes late for my panel because I thought I understood the map and I didn't. I arrive apologetic and harried and hugely embarrassed. I also have no idea what's going on. I say a few things, but not much. I sign some books and then I go to my next panel. I am what I like to call a panel slacker. I don't feel comfortable fighting for attention, so I often end up saying very little and drinking more soda than I planned. That afternoon, I went back to the hotel and did laundry because they had coin operated machines and I didn't know when I'd have that opportunity again.

(My publisher would probably pay for hotel laundry services, but they're outrageously expensive and I simply can't justify using them. I ranted about this in the acknowledgments section of my latest book, which will presumably not go unnoticed by the hotel industry. Stay tuned.)

Day 5. There's something wrong with the hotel coffee, but I can't put my finger on it. It's only when I'm in the middle of my two-hour drive to Tampa that I realize I've been given decaf instead of regular. My head is pounding.

I'm exhausted and when I finally get to the city of my next event, I use the GPS to find a local Starbucks. I begin to wonder how anyone ever survived without those things. It is a beautiful Sunday afternoon in Tampa and the store is lovely and the owner reminds me that on a day like today, I shouldn't expect much of a crowd. The two people who do show up are a delight, and one of them is actually named Spellman. We sit and chat for about an hour; the store gives me a free book and I head off to the airport with time to spare. I'm told that the airport is about 20 minutes from the store. The process of finding a gas station and returning the rental car takes me about two hours total. I don't want to say anything bad about Tampa, but it's so flat you can't see the exits even when your GPS is telling you to exit. I fly to NY that night.

Day 6. St. Patrick's Day. I'm allowed to sleep in, so I'm ecstatic. That afternoon, one of my publicists and I take a car service around the city, where I sign stock at variety of bookstores. We give up early because the street traffic on that day is unbelievable. I have drinks that evening with my editor and dinner with a friend.

Days when I'm not required to stand up in front of people and talk always seem kind of perfect.

Day 7. Also an easy day. I have the whole morning to write. I can't say I got much done, but I tried. I arrive at my agent's office in the afternoon. They serve me cake and strong coffee and we head off to my event. There are a few places, namely NY and LA, where I know enough people that I can usually rely on something resembling a crowd.

However, a handful of complete strangers have shown up just for the event, which is always a pleasant surprise.

Day 8. I fly to Houston. As I arrive at the airport, I realize I've caught a cold and I buy massive amounts of tissue. The flight is four hours and I'm in the very back row, feeling quite sorry for myself and cranky. The cab ride from the Houston airport to the hotel takes almost an hour. We have to stop at an ATM so I can get more money out. I have just enough time to shower and change before my escort arrives to take me to the event. I am convinced for a variety of reasons that no one--or maybe one person--will be at the bookstore. I am pleasantly mistaken.

"There are people here!" I shout at no one particular. It's moments like this that make the long travel days feel worth it.

Day 9. No sleep again. Early morning. I'm flying to Denver today. I have a middle seat and my cold is in full bloom. I blow my nose constantly, stuffing tissues into my pocket, trying not to disgust the passengers on either side of me. I feel miserable. I want to crawl into bed and stay there for a week.

My escort meets me in baggage claim. She's about 90 pounds, but she manages to lift my 50-pound piece of luggage into the trunk of her car, which is a good thing because I've discovered I can barely lift it. We drive to Boulder; I'm interviewed for an hour for a radio show; we drive back to the hotel. I clean myself up and go to a bookstore for a reading that night. I'm in desperate need of sleep. Before I go to bed, I try to decide whether a sleeping pill or nighttime cold medicine is my best bet. I go for the sleeping pill and manage some rest.

Day 10. I have a phone interview in the morning, but I'm so turned around by the time difference, the cold and maybe that sleeping pill, I completely forget to call into the radio station. I phone my publicist and apologize. I spend the day in bed, trying to get over my cold.

That night I go to another bookstore event and I get another cake.

Day 11-12. I fly to Phoenix. Because it's Easter weekend, I have the rest of the weekend free. I catch up on sleep; my cold finally goes away. I regroup for 10 more days of the same.

When I think back on the tour, it's a blur of memories that mostly involve going through security, packing luggage, meeting a variety of wonderful people whose names I'm ashamed to have forgotten, and receiving more baked goods than I ever thought possible. When all is said and done, the tour seems like it might have been good for my character. But still, I will always find it ironic that the people who get sent on book tours are typically the ones who are more comfortable being alone, in a room, writing. --Lisa Lutz

Junot Diaz, You've Just Won the Pulitzer... What Are You Going to Do Now?

Last summer, after turning over the last page of my advance galley of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I was floored by what I had just read and used any gathering of two or more people to announce to the world that it was my favorite novel of 2007. "You mean, so far?" No, the year. I was going all-in, even with a whole fall season of unread books in front of me.

So you can imagine how over-the-moon happy I was for Diaz last Monday when I heard that he'd won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. When I asked his editor, Sean McDonald, if he could help us get a few post-Pulitzer questions into Junot's inbox, I didn't expect Diaz would actually have the time to deliver (he'd just won the Pulitzer, after all!). But deliver he did, and along with the answers, he threw us the ultimate surprise--the opening passage (or what he calls "throat clearing") from the seemingly post-apocalyptic new book he's working on. Does this mean there's a Hugo Award in his future? We shall see...

--BTP

Amazon.com: Junot, first of all, congratulations! You've been on quite a ride since Oscar Wao came out last fall. You were awarded the Sargent First Novel Prize, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, topped countless Best of 2007 lists, and now the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Where were you when you found out you won the Pulitzer?

Diaz: I actually was in my mother's house in NJ. (Which, when you think about it, was where it all started for me, as an immigrant, as a young lover of books, in NJ.) The first call I could barely hear (my two-year-old nephew was having a bang-up time throwing his toys) so I went outside, out by the Hackensack River and called my agent, who hadn't yet gotten the official word. The real confirmation came ten minutes later. I was still on the bridge, freezing, and after a few minutes of stunned silence, just me and the traffic and the cattails, I walked home and gathered my mother and my sister and told them and I don't think I've ever seen them happier for me (though my mother did cry a little). My nephew was the best, he didn't give a damn about no Pulitzer, he just wanted me to chase him.

Amazon.com: I read online that "Diaz is not the first Latino to win the prize, but he is certainly the first cat from the streets to do so." How does that make you feel?

Diaz: I didn't have an easy childhood (who ever does?). I grew up super-poor, welfare, section 8 and food stamps all the way, in a community where us boys worried all the time about getting jumped and where mad people got recruited by the military. My mother was raising five kids on an income that didn't break ten grand a couple of years. She cleaned houses for people a lot better off than us and I still have this image of her on her hands and knees cleaning bathrooms. I'm as nerdy as they come, a deep lover of books, but those long hard years marked me as deeply as that river marked Conrad and maybe that's what the writer means when they say that I'm "from the street." If that's what the writer's getting at then I'll take it, I've no interest in erasing my particular version of the "American Experience." But if this is some hollow ghetto glorification... I didn't think I was so cool when I only had three shirts in high school and had to repeat twice a week. I didn't feel too "street" then. I felt like a goddamn loser.

Amazon.com: And what's it like to share the Pulitzer spotlight with Bob Dylan, who was awarded an honorary special citation?

Diaz: I'm one book, he's a lifetime. It feels great to be in such company. Now if somebody could score my goddaughters some tickets, I'll be the coolest godfather ever.

Amazon.com: Do all the awards make the over-a-decade gap between books worth the wait?

Diaz: The only thing that makes anything worth it is another book that moves people. But hey, in the meantime, the awards certainly keep you warm, psychically! No denying that.

Amazon.com: Hopefully we won't have to wait until 2017 until the next book?

Diaz: If I was the only writer in the world this would be a problem but luckily we have tens of thousands of cool writers to take the weight off. No matter who you're waiting for to publish I recommend a strong course of Samuel R. Delany (start with Dark Reflections and then graduate to his magnum opus Dhalgren) and my favorite crazy woman Natsuo Kirino (Grotesque). Always something on the shelves to keep you busy.

Amazon.com: Can you give us a little tease of what you're working on next?

Diaz: Oh sure, why not, who knows when it will ever see the light of day again. This is some opening throat-clearing from my next novel Dark America.

I'm somewhere in the Zone, traveling on top of an transport. Bound for City.

The only City there is.

What I see. Usually just the f-ckedup hide of the truck.  Every now and then I lift my head a little and see the other Travellers sucked onto the metal of the container like remora.  See the fresca from the night before, long hair whipping back in thousands of everchanging streams. See: fields of white crosses, an endless proliferation of kudzu, a basketball game between the Junior Klan and the Uncle Muhammed Youth League--a regular five on five with a ref and everything so you know we're in the End Times for real. And sometimes, if I'm not careful, I see my mother and my brother standing by the edge of the road. She has her hand on his shoulder and they still got snow clotting up the spaces between their toes. They're waving. Since the transport is automated it switches its lights on only when it detects another vehicle or when we're in civilization but at night on the interstates it feels like we're rushing through a corridor of whooshing air as unlit as a vein. We pass cities and zonafrancas and fortress towns and overhead roar fighter jets and gunships and every now and then the transport will squash something on the road. A rumble under the tires and then the return to the lullaby of the whoosh as whatever it is gets spat out behind the mud flaps in ruin.

I don't try to look around too much. We are going over a hundred miles an hour and there is a little indio kid on my left who I'm trying to keep from blowing off the top of the transport. About an hour ago his pops lost his grip on him and screamed one of those miserable Noooo's that reaches into even me and before the kid could catch sky I leaned over and pulled him in. You should have heard his little heart, seen his little face. Stupid, attracting attention. A Samaritan I'm not. Believe me. I could just as easily have watched the kid sail and said, Wepa!

At times like these, even hardguys like me, all we should do is hold on. Plenty folks get peeled off the transports, especially kids and the thins, turned into axle grease which is why these rigs are plastered with signs in English, Spanish, Krïol, Cantonese, Hmong, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Russian and Ghanaian: Stay The F-ck Off. Sometimes the local youth--when they're not immbolized on huff or bending each other over--will man the overpasses and drop debris on us, anything from bricks and firecrackers to hot oil and glass, get it all on ractives so they can spin the shit for laughs onto the net. The life of the Traveller, as they say, no es fácil. You should see how tired folks are after only a couple of hours on a transport. Praying for the next reforge, their arms trembling and these are the ones who got lucky and scored a roof spot. The ones who got to cling to the side rigging, muchacho, they're lucky if they're alive by the time we reach a depot.

New York's New Yorkiest

New York magazine, which consistently concocts the smartest stunt features in bookland, does it again for their 40th anniversary issue, with their New York Canon, a list of the New Yorkiest movies, buildings, art, etc. created from 1968 to the present, including 26 books chosen, according to Sam Anderson's introduction, "along two mystical axes: one of all-around literary merit, and the other of 'New Yorkitude'—the degree to which a book allows itself to obsess over the city. Robert Caro's The Power Broker just about maxes out both axes." What's smart about the list is not so much the stunt as the books themselves, a rich and idiosyncratic selection that gets things right time and again (picking Philip Roth's Zuckerman Unbound, for instance: far from his best novel, but certainly his New Yorkiest, and being comfortable enough to choose Bright Lights, Big City without too much apology, as well as introducing me to books I've never heard of like Keith Mano's Take Five and Anne Winters's The Displaced of Capital). Rather than quibble with what's there, I'm driven to think of favorites of my own. Here's a short and informal addendum. I'd love to hear about your own NYC favorites in the comments.

• Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay, with Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer by Ben Katchor (1991). All right, one complaint: this does seem like a real omission: the first of Katchor's Knipl books, which more than anything (even more than Richard Price's new Lush Life, which is on the list) evoke for me the layers of humanity and history that collect on the lower reaches of Manhattan.
• When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth by Fernanda Eberstadt (1997). I came across this one a couple of years ago and kind of feel like Eberstadt's only champion. There are some angry customer reviews for this (which, like Cheap Novelties, is out of print), but when I read it I felt like I had stepped into an expansive, surprising (and very New Yorky) world: beautiful, dense, and intense, with the shifts of mood and fortune of a great old-fashioned novel. It's the one of her books that gets the balance just right.
• How I Became Hettie Jones by Hettie Jones (1990). A vivid but levelheaded memoir of Beat-era downtown bohemia (Jones was the (white) wife of LeRoi Jones before he, in turn, became Amiri Baraka).
• Gone to New York by Ian Frazier (2005). There's no one I'd rather walk around New York with (well, except maybe Frazier's New Yorker colleague Calvin Trillin), and these essays from the magazine, including his lengthy classic on Canal Street and that one in which he gets obsessed with all the plastic bags stuck in trees, are both fully lived and deeply observed.
• A Fairy Tale of New York by J.P. Donleavy (1973). I've never read anything else of Donleavy's, not even the sainted Ginger Man--in part because I'm told he tends to tell the same story again and again, in part because the one I have read is so satisfyingly full I don't feel like I need anything else. One of the strangest and most joyously funny books I know.
• My Pilgrim's Progress by George W.S. Trow (1999). I love Trow's brilliant little hand grenade, Within the Context of No Context, as much as anyone, but while that one mostly lives in its abstract aphorisms, this much-delayed follow-up, full of the weird and angry wit of the first book, is grounded in his intense relationship with the city he had by then abandoned.
• The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud (2006) and The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem (2003). I'm not unearthing any secret gems here, but New York's list doesn't include any novels between Kavalier and Clay (2000) and Lush Life (2008), and these are two of my favorites from that time.

What do you think?  I'm sure I'll think of a half dozen more as soon as I post this, but I know there are great ones out there I've never even heard of. --Tom

Exile in Bookville

It's only rock 'n' roll (and she likes it). In yesterday's New York Times Sunday Book Review, alt-rocker Liz Phair stepped into the lit-crit spotlight with her full-page review of Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance by iconic Ivy League indie-rocker Dean Wareham, of Galaxie 500 and Luna fame. Phair calls the book a "[p]art confessional, part unsentimental career diary" that "reads like good courtroom testimony: to the point, but peppered with juicy and unsolicited asides" (and even throws in a Hemingway name-check).

And in the "Up Front" section of the Book Review the editors report that Phair is putting the finishing touches on her debut book ("fiction, not memoir"), not to be confused with Camden Joy's book, The Last Rock Star Book, or: Liz Phair, a Rant.

--BTP

PS: Another daily reminder that I'm getting old... Was it really 15 years ago that Liz Phair released Exile in Guyville.

How Not to Write x 27

I'm a bit late in coming to it (via the Virginia Quarterly Review blog), but the editors of the Willesden Herald, having reaped a balance of fame and scorn for deciding, via the person of their final judge Zadie Smith, not to award their short story prize this year because none of the 850 entrants were good enough, have responded with a list of 27 reasons why your story might have been eliminated. Their tough-love approach may win them no more affection, but the results are interesting reading and would no doubt make a worthwhile checklist for anyone (myself included) lost down the wormhole of their own unread art. They got a little punchy towards the end, where you'll find some of my favorite entries:

23. Faux jollity. Particularly faux jollity centred around pubs, and particularly around pubs in Ireland. Industrially extruded quantities of guff about distant histories in small town life. Standing jokes that should have been left where they toppled. Weird spastic prose as if the task of writing the story had been given by a writer with a good idea to the former class dunce, now barman. I think humour only ever exists in something that sets out to be serious. Anything that sets out to be humorous is doomed.

24. Ankles. Particularly ankles in Asia. But I don't want to be overly negative and turn critique into a despicable blood sport, because there have been many charming, fascinating and amusing entries from the sub-continent as well as from Africa and other (to me) strange places. As a matter of fact, I’m not at all sure that Ankles in Asia, though it sounds worryingly now like a rare disease, is not in fact a virtue. Let a thousand professors dream of butterfly kisses with a thousand feisty young neighbour girls. And please do try us again with wonderful tales of African village life and politics.

27. Pastiche. There can be cases where the whole story is a cliché, if you see what I mean, which is usually to say that it is derivative in the extreme. If it's not a simple case of writing to a formula, this is more seriously a lack of a genuine "voice". What I usually say about pastiche is that I'm very impressed by people who can emulate other writers to a tee, because I find it difficult enough just to write like myself. Here's a little story: When I was a kid I used to sing myself to sleep at night. One Sunday I went to see The Jolson Story (I think I saw parts 1 and 2) at the Casino cinema in Finglas and memorised some of the songs. That night I began to sing them in bed, and trying to sound like Al Jolson. Lying back in the dark, after a while I asked my Grandad, who slept on the other side of the room, if he liked my new voice. I'll always remember his answer because it said so much. He said, "I prefer your own voice."

See also their extensive summary of the judging process and Zadie Smith's original announcement of the non-winner (all of which I find very appealing). --Tom

Amazon.com Exclusive: A Letter from Christopher Rice

Bestselling author Christopher Rice published his first novel, A Destiny of Souls, when he was just 22 years old. Since then his writing has been praised as "chillingly perverse," shocking, sexy... intricate," and "bold and ambitious." To mark the publication date of Blind Fall, his fourth novel, Rice was kind enough to e-mail us an exclusive letter to share with his readers on Amazon.

--BTP

 

 

 

Dear Amazon.com Reader,

Authors hate answering the question "what is your book about?" because deep down most of us are arrogant enough to believe that our books are about everything. Birth, death, love, grief. You name it, I probably think it’s in there somewhere, albeit sometimes only in the form a throwaway character, like a wisecracking gas station attendant who pops off a few good lines about living in the present as my main character bounces on the balls of his feet, impatient to be rung up so he can race to his next car-chase. But the longer I write for a living, the more it becomes clear to me that while arrogance is a helpful tool for dealing with one’s own negative reviews (or the death threats that have been posted alongside your promotional video on YouTube), the question “what is your book about” is one that I better have a coherent answer to long before it’s posed to me by anyone besides the ever-present critic who lives in my head. Otherwise I find myself writing entire chapters about the shape of a certain box hedge because I’ve lost my way and fallen prey to that childish belief that writing is about nothing more than filling up a page. (It is, kind of, but only when you’re past deadline.) That said, I can say with confidence that my latest thriller, Blind Fall, is a novel about self-acceptance. It’s about how we are often forced to let go of something we believed to be an absolute truth before we can treat ourselves with the same respect we would grant our closest friend. And in that sense, it is also a story about how our own visions of our past, of where we came from and what made us who we are, become incomplete and deceptive if we turn away from of those who walked the path with us and the insights they have to offer into our own personal history.

Phew! Got that out of the way. How was that Amazon.com editors? Did I win over some Jonathan Franzen readers with that one?

Please note that I referred to my own novel as a thriller. I did so with pride. As I’ve said now in numerous interviews, Blind Fall was intended to be lean, clear and forceful, a suspenseful story about gays in the military that might appeal to the broadest audience possible. That doesn’t mean I dumbed down or cleaned up a more “literary”--God, I hate that word--story that’s still sitting in my desk drawer. It means I chose to tell the entire story from the point-of-view of the character facing the greatest personal challenge of any in the book--John Houck, the battle-scarred Marine who discovers the comrade who saved his life in combat was secretly gay. Anything that didn’t serve John’s character, that didn’t ring true to who he was, didn’t make the cut. That was a challenge. I love the guy as much as I do any of my protagonists but let’s just say we probably wouldn’t end up voting for the same candidate in the Presidential election this coming November and we certainly have different CDs in rotation. (To get into character sometimes I would depart from my usual film score montages and get amped up on a little Coheed & Cambria and Incubus. Don’t laugh! It’s not that big of a stretch. I went to a Motley Crue concert when I was twelve.)

I also chose to tell you who the killer was about 70 pages in. Why? Because this novel is not a whodunit. This novel is a what-the-hell-are-they-going-to-do, but that’s got a few too many words in it so we call those thrillers. Don’t get me wrong; there are some twists and turns along the way, but I didn’t want the reader breaking sweat over who was responsible for the murder that starts off the action. I wanted the reader’s heart to become invested in the relationship between John, the straight (and more than a little homophobic) Marine, and Alex, the secret gay lover of the man who saved John’s life. How are these two very different men going to come to accept one another, if at all? This is the question that dominated my thoughts while I was writing the book, and if you decide to give it a read, I hope it dominates yours as well. Sometimes the best suspense comes not from the revelation of a previously concealed detail that’s been skillfully foreshadowed, but from wondering how a character you have come to know intimately over the course of many chapters is going to react to a seemingly insurmountable set of obstacles. That’s what I was shooting for with Blind Fall.

So there you have it, along with a few unsolicited personal details about yours truly. (Like the fact that I went to a Motley Crue concert when I was twelve.) At the very least, I hope Blind Fall keeps some of you up late at night. For the next month, my late nights will all be spent in hotels as I cross the country to promote this puppy. There’s a full tour schedule on my website www.christopherricebooks.com Maybe I’ll get to meet some of you along the way.

Best,

Christopher Rice

Four Things I Learned on My Vacation

1. Stephen King was right about Meg Gardiner. The Dirty Secrets Club, featuring forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett (she performs “psychological autopsies” to determine if a victim’s death was natural, suicide, or homicide) is a smart and thrilling ride. Kudos to King and Dutton for bringing her to the US.

2. Apparently, I like westerns. So Brave Young and Handsome, Enger's follow up to Peace Like a River (my fave book from 2001), is terrific--the kind of book I want to hand out like candy after I've read it. A lyrical and evocative tale of valiant outlaws and relentless bounty hunters, it's a must-read for fans of Enger, The Brothers K (a book everyone should put at the top of their list right now) and Plainsong.

3. Thrillers dominate poolside. No one batted an eye when I pulled out Severance Package, which, by the way is fast and fun but seriously violent, even for me (and I loved The Wheelman). Booklist gives it "two thumbs up" but I can only think about how Swierczynski would have shot or chopped those thumbs off on page two. Back to poolside reading--I spotted multiple copies of the new Grisham, Down River (I almost stopped to chat with the woman reading, but she was nearing the end, and I didn't want to interrupt her), and Andrew Gross's The Blue Zone. I saw only one person reading the ubiquitous Memory Keeper's Daughter, but several people reading books by Chuck Palahniuk (including one boy who looked about 12).

4. I like myself better on vacation. I'm much less cranky when my to-do list includes only three tasks: 1. Read. 2. Eat. 3. Apply sunscreen. Soaking up the sun also allowed me to finally come up with a few six-word memoirs like my fellow omnivores. --Daphne

--Family history:

Don't mess with my little sister.

--Words to live by (applies to work, family, and sports):

Don't boo your own team. Ever.

--Advice for my fellow bibliophiles:

Life is short. Read better books.

National Book Critics Circle Awards: 2007 Winners Announced

The winners of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced last night in New York City. Founded in 1974, the NBCC is a nonprofit organization composed of nearly 700 active book reviewers. --BTP

Autobiography
Winner

• Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat

Finalists

• Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone by Joshua Clark
•  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
Winner

• Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet Washington

Finalists

• American Transcendentalism by Philip Gura
• What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe
• Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA by Tim Weiner
• The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

Fiction
Winner

• The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Finalists

• Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
•  In The Country of Men by Hisham Matar
• The Gravedigger's Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates
• The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins

Biography
Winner

• Stanley: The Impossible Life Of Africa's Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal

Finalists

•  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
Winner

• Elegy by Mary Jo Bang

Finalists 

• 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
Winner

• The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross

Finalists

• 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

Do Adult YA Readers Need to Grow Up?

Roger Sutton, editor-in-chief of The Horn Book, sparked an interesting discussion on his blog today with some casually derisive remarks about grown-ups who prefer to read children's books and YA novels:

As annoying as adults who dismiss children's books as unworthy of attention can be, I also feel my jaw clench when a fellow adult tells me that he or she prefers children's books to adult books because they have better writing or values or stories. This is just sentimental ignorance. ... Adults whose taste in recreational reading ends with the YA novel need to grow up.

Some fans of his Read Roger blog (with its "rants and raves" on children's books) were not too happy when he turned his barbs on them. Many of the commenters gave surprisingly specific reasons for liking YA better, like this one:

Ouch! I feel indicted. I do prefer to read children's literature, mainly due to narrative structure. I like fairly linear plots and neatly resolved endings, which puts me off a lot of adult literary fiction (with the exception of some South American authors). So I read a lot of Dickens and children's lit.

Commenters identified Scott Westerfeld and Stephenie Meyer among the YA authors who write the kind of stories they like to read, grown-up or not. --Heidi

The South Carolina Book Festival: Great Hospitality, Great Literature

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

I just returned from the South Carolina Book Festival, where my wife and I had a great time as guests, participating on panels and other events. (Ann's the fiction editor for Weird Tales and co-editor on our