Omnivoracious

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover (as detailed at length earlier today on Omni): George Will on Nixonland by Rick Perlstein: "In Perlstein’s mental universe, Nixon is a bit like God — not, Lord knows, because of Nixon’s perfect goodness and infinite mercy, but because Nixon is the explanation for everything.... 'How did Nixonland end?' Perlstein asks in the book’s last line. 'It has not ended yet.' But almost every page of Perlstein’s book illustrates the sharp contrast rather than a continuity with America today. It almost seems as though Perlstein, who was born in 1969, is reluctant to let go of the excitement he has experienced secondhand through the archives he has ransacked to such riveting effect."
• Maslin on Bright Shiny Morning by one of our other guests this week, James Frey: "The million little pieces guy was called James Frey. He got a second act. He got another chance. Look what he did with it. He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park. No more lying, no more melodrama, still run-on sentences still funny punctuation but so what. He became a furiously good storyteller this time."
• Kakutani on The Boat by Nam Le: "The other tales in this book ... circumnavigate the globe, demonstrating Mr. Le’s astonishing ability to channel the experiences of a multitude of characters, from a young child living in Hiroshima during World War II to a 14-year-old hit man in the barrios of Medellín to a high school jock in an Australian beach town. Mr. Le not only writes with an authority and poise rare even among longtime authors, but he also demonstrates an intuitive, gut-level ability to convey the psychological conflicts people experience when they find their own hopes and ambitions slamming up against familial expectations or the brute facts of history."
• Jennifer Senior on Blood Matters by Masha Gessen: "'Blood Matters' is valuable reading to almost anyone facing a huge health decision, not only for the literary commiseration it offers, but also for the inspired example of medical sleuthing on one’s own behalf that it provides. Gessen keeps an inflammatory topic at room temperature, writing elegantly and without self-pity. The book is very funny in places. (My favorite sentence, for reasons I can’t quite describe: 'DNA-testing equipment tends to fall into two categories: things that look like printers and things that look like toasters.') It’s also very lucid, even when the science gets complex. It’s a liberating book. Strange as it sounds, it would make a great Mother’s Day present."

Washington Post:

• Carolyn See on The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer: "Considering that Andrew Sean Greer is the author of the wildly imaginative 'Confessions of Max Tivoli' ... it will come as no surprise that the new novel is built on several narrative surprises that cannot (or should not) be revealed. So this will be a hard review to write.... This is a plot that deepens as surprises explode unexpectedly and terrifyingly. 'The Story of a Marriage' is more than worth the reader's attention. It's thoughtful, complex and exquisitely written."

Los Angeles Times:

• David L. Ulin on Frey's Bright Shiny Morning: "'Bright Shiny Morning' is a terrible book. One of the worst I've ever read. But you have to give James Frey credit for one thing: He's got chutzpah.... Whatever else his failings as a writer, Frey was once able to move his readers; how else do we explain the success of 'A Million Little Pieces'? It's just one of the ironies of this new book that his fictionalized memoir is a better novel than 'Bright Shiny Morning' could ever hope to be."
• Minna Proctor on Exiles by Ron Hansen: "In 'Exiles,' the dramatic inevitable belongs to the five drowned German nuns to whose memory the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins dedicated perhaps his most important work, 'The Wreck of the Deutschland,' a poem that was neither understood during his lifetime nor terribly well-liked.... From the magnificent words of Hopkins to the terrifying drama aboard the Deutschland, the promises of "Exiles" are superlative. The execution is tentative. If only Ron Hansen had plunged more deeply into those dark waters. If only a novel about fate, faith and poetry could give us more."

Are We Still in Nixonland?: Author One-on-One: Rick Perlstein and John Dean

We live in interesting times, for better or worse, but I must confess I find the times from the early 60s to the early 70s at least as interesting as ours. Everything seemed at stake, and everything was in flux. Mass movements changed things from the ground up, and flawed but fascinating figures at the top made courageous and tragic decisions (often in the same moment) whose effects we're still living with. But you don't need me to tell you about those years--we've been hearing about them (and hearing about them) ever since.

Which might make a new history of the era seem superfluous, even to a mild obsessive like me. But when the fat advance copy of Rick Perlstein's Nixonland hit my desk, I could tell it would be something special. For one thing, Perlstein had an excellent reputation from his first book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, which was acclaimed on both sides of the aisle for showing how the Goldwater presidential run in 1964, commonly considered an unmitigated disaster, actually laid the groundwork for the conservative movement that has dominated American politics for most of the past three decades. (By the way, Before the Storm is unaccountably out of print right now--a new edition is due out next spring, but for now you'll have to spend over $100 for a used copy on our site.) I was looking forward to seeing that perspective turned on the more familiar terrain of the Nixon years. And then there's the style of Nixonland: from a few random glances you could tell that it's written with a verve and glee that you don't expect from political history. And the book itself lived up to those early signs: dense with research that puts familiar events on the same plane with forgotten ones and full of a spirit that reminds you of one of his theses, that politics is always an emotional and visceral game, never more so than in times of massive and disorienting change. I made it my Best of the Month pick and even steamrolled my less-obsessed colleagues into making it our May Spotlight selection.

I wanted to bring Perlstein into dialogue on Omni, and I thought a perfect match for him would be former Nixon aide John Dean: in part because he lived at the center of many of the books' events (although the book ends with the '72 election, before Dean was on television sets across the country as the star of the Watergate hearings), but even more so because he's been a student of conservatism as well, and has held to his own identity as a "Goldwater conservative" even as, by his own reckoning, the shifting of the political spectrum has put someone like him much farther to the left than he'd ever have imagined. His newest book, following recent bestsellers like Worse than Watergate and Conservatives Without Conscience (not to mention his original bestseller and one of my all-time favorite political books, the memoir Blind Ambition), is Pure Goldwater, a collection, edited with Barry Goldwater Jr., of the late senator's journal entries and correspondence, which I hope will help lead the discussion toward Perlstein's first book and the Goldwater brand of conservatism as well.

Dean and Perlstein will be taking turns blogging here over the next couple of weeks. Dean begins things with a post this afternoon, which is a direct response to George Will's cover piece on Nixonland yesterday in the New York Times Book Review. May the rest of the discussion continue to be so lively! --Tom

The Most Bookery Booker: Down to Six

The Booker Prize potentates (in the persons in this go-round of judges Victoria Glendenning, Mariella Frostrup, and John Mullan) have chosen six finalists for the Best of the Booker prize (out of the 41 Booker winners eligible):

• Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (1999 winner)
• The Ghost Road by Pat Barker (1995)
• Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (1988)
• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
• The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer (1974)
• The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell (1973)

Notable snubs? Life of Pi? The English Patient? Possession? (Those are at least among the most popular winners in the US.) At this point, the selection of the winner is up to "you": that is, you can vote for the winner on the Man Booker website, although at this hour I can't see how to do it. Not that I could really do so myself in good conscience: it reveals me as either poorly read or Anglophobic* (or both!) that I've read exactly none of the well-known nominees. But nevertheless I'll root (and even vote) for The Siege of Krishnapur for the sole reason that it's published in the States by New York Review Books, whose exquisite taste has never ever steered me wrong.

And meanwhile, the required gripes. Yes, I enjoy book awards with some shamelessness, and I don't even mind the idea of a Best of the Booker. But what's embarrassing about this one is the prizegivers' lack of patience. Because they did this once before, for the Booker's 25th anniversary (the winner: Midnight's Children). So is it their 50th anniversary now? No, it's just the 40th. They just couldn't wait, could they? Ten years is a long time when you're itchy for PR in the downtime between fall prize seasons. But at this rate of accelerated impatience they'll want to do this again for the 45th anniversary, and before long they'll be running an updated contest every year: "Will Rushdie hold the title for one more year?" Even I might stop posting on the subject at that point. --Tom

*--I notice in retrospect that only two of the six are actually English by birth and upbringing--and some people even consider Farrell Irish--so maybe I should rephrase this to Commonwealthphobic.

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover (Chinese fiction issue): Jonathan Spence on Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan: "Although one can say that the political dramas narrated by Mo Yan are historically faithful to the currently known record, 'Life and Death' remains a wildly visionary and creative novel, constantly mocking and rearranging itself and jolting the reader with its own internal commentary.... From the start, the reader must be willing to share with Mo Yan the novel’s central conceit: that the five main narrators are not humans but animals, albeit ones who speak with sharply modulated human voices.... Such a brief summary may make the book sound too cute when it is, in fact, harsh and gritty, raunchy and funny."
• Pankaj Mishra on Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong: "The author’s preoccupation with his Chinese audience may not be the only source of frustration for foreign readers of Howard Goldblatt’s generally fluent translation. Jiang Rong seems to have barely attempted to transmute his experiences and epiphanies into fiction; his book reads like an extended polemic about the superiority of nomadic people and the dangers of a triumphant but brutishly ignorant modernity."
• David Margolick on 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris: "The history of the 1948 war desperately needs to be told, since it’s so barely understood or remembered and since so many of the issues that plague us today had their roots in that struggle.... No one is better suited to the task than Benny Morris, the Israeli historian who, in previous works, has cast an original and skeptical eye on his country’s founding myths. Whatever controversy he has stirred in the past, Morris relates the story of his new book soberly and somberly, evenhandedly and exhaustively. Definitely exhaustively, for '1948' can feel like 1948: that is, hard slogging. Some books can be both very important and very hard to read."
• Maslin on Audition by Barbara Walters: "If any single thing keeps 'Audition' from achieving the stature of Katharine Graham's 'Personal History,' the book that set the high-water mark for memoirs of the politically and socially well-connected, it is the excess decorousness built into Ms. Walters’s conversation. That is not to say that she lacks sharp elbows or that she is shy about remembering grievances or settling scores.... A little more barbed frankness would have gone rather far in a book that uses 'rather' as its favorite modifier."
• Maslin on A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs: "When Augusten Burroughs wrote 'Running With Scissors,' he regaled readers with hilarious tales of the domestic craziness he endured while growing up. Now in another family memoir Mr. Burroughs makes a crazy move of his own. 'A Wolf at the Table' is a portrait of the author’s apparently maniacal and Augusten-hating father. Determinedly unfunny, awkwardly histrionic and sometimes anything but credible, it repudiates everything that put Mr. Burroughs on the map."

Washington Post:

• Michael Dirda on Trauma by Patrick McGrath: "Beautifully crafted and paced, Trauma can be viewed as either a superb psychological thriller or as a masterly evocation of modern alienation and despair -- assuming, of course, there is any difference.... McGrath eschews splatter or gruesomeness, instead relating Charlie Weir's story in clear, quick-flowing prose, as if Dick Francis had rewritten Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. Trauma is, in short, a terrific literary entertainment, one that will keep you on edge, worried and guessing for 200 pages."

Los Angeles Times:

• Tim Rutten on Counselor by Ted Sorensen: "'Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History' is not only a fascinating memoir but also this election year's most important political book. Despite the subtitle's characteristic modesty, part of what makes "Counselor" so important is that its author was at the very center of so much that was important in American history and politics during the second half of the 20th century.... Sorensen's willingness to draw lessons concerning the current political situation from his experience is one of the several things that make "Counselor" such remarkably pleasurable and instructive reading." 

Guest Blogging: James Frey

As you may have noticed, our May guest blogging has already begun, with an author who has been out of the limelight for a while but is back with a big novel this month, James Frey. Or, as he may feel his nickname is by now, "Yes, That James Frey" (not to be confused, old Cubs and Earl Weaver fans, with this James Frey). You don't need me to fill you in on the backstory, or to supply you with an opinion on it, since you most likely have one already. But I should note that, despite all the hoo-ha, A Million Little Pieces still sells at a very healthy clip on our site, and still gets enthusiastic new customer reviews (for instance, JazzDroid's "poo poo on the naysayers") from readers who came to the book after it had started being packaged with a giant grain of salt. (Also of note: we picked it as our top book of the year back in those quiet, pre-Oprah days of 2003.)

And now, to cut through all the noise, we have James himself, sitting in for a month here. With our previous guests we've gone with a once-a-week posting schedule, but James wanted to stop by more frequently (as he has already), so we can look forward to regular updates from what will no doubt be a crazy month. He's spent these past few years working on his new novel, Bright Shiny Morning, which our own Daphne Durham has called a "swift and sprawling portrait of Los Angeles." It comes out May 13, and, as James mentioned in his first post, he's doing a somewhat untraditional book tour--although  from what he's told us about some of the plans, his description of "other writers reading with me, projected images, music, lights, live bands" may be a bit of an understatement. We're looking forward to seeing what happens, and we're glad James is able to join us this month. --Tom

P.S. To see more portraits of Los Angeles, take a look at James's annotated list of his top 12 books about LA, from classics like Chandler and Nathanael West to Bruce Wagner and "the first, and maybe only, truly great surfing novel," Tapping the Source.

P.P.S. Stay tuned for what's shaping up to be a busy and exciting month for authors on Omni, with guest appearances, starting next week, from multimedia triple-threat Miranda July and graphic design superstar Stefan Sagmeister as well as our second Author One-on-One, a discussion between Nixonland author Rick Perlstein and a former inner-circle resident of Nixonland (and current bestselling author) John Dean.

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

 

"When You're Born Into It": Margaret B. Jones's Unearthed Video

Pardon me for piling on but, well, I find it riveting to watch somebody just flat-out lie. Harry Allen at Media Assassin (yes, that "media assassin / Harry Allen") has obtained what appears to be a promo video shot with Margaret B. Jones--er, Peggy Seltzer's faux South Central memoir, Love and Consequences. Have at it (and read Allen's blow-by-blow critique):

(Via GalleyCat. Meanwhile, Ron at GalleyCat has been running an excellent series of posts about the endless trend toward using photos of women facing away from the camera on the covers of women's fiction, but, surprisingly, this now-notorious cover has not come up. Even if "Jones"'s story had been true I wouldn't have expected the cover photo to actually be of Jones and her adoptive "Big Mom," but does it strike anyone else as odd to be using stock photos on the cover of a memoir?) --Tom

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Leon Wieseltier on The Second Plane by Martin "Chucklehead" Amis: "Amis seems to regard his little curses as almost military contributions to the struggle. He has a hot, heroic view of himself. He writes as if he, with his wrinkled copies of Bernard Lewis and Philip Larkin, is what stands between us and the restoration of the caliphate.... Pity the writer who wants to be Bellow but is only Mailer.... You get the feeling, reading these pages, that for his side Amis will say almost anything, because being noticed is as important to him as being right. The complication is that there is considerable justice on Amis’s side.... I have never before assented to so many of the principles of a book and found it so awful." [Sorry for all the ellipses, but I had to squeeze in some of the best lines in this classic of vitriol.]
• Kakutani on The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich: "Writing in prose that combines the magical sleight of hand of Gabriel Garcia Marquez with the earthy, American rhythms of Faulkner, Ms. Erdrich traces the connections between these characters and their many friends and relatives with sympathy, humor and the unsentimental ardor of a writer who sees that the tragedy and comedy in her people’s lives are ineluctably commingled.... With 'The Plague of Doves,' she has written what is arguably her most ambitious — and in many ways, her most deeply affecting — work yet."
• Tom LeClair on Shadow Country by Peter Mathiessen: "By reducing his Watson materials to one volume, Matthiessen has sacrificed qualities that gave those novels their powerful reinforcing illusions of authenticity and artlessness. Book I still has that Ten Thousand Islands quality, but 'Shadow Country' as a whole is like the Tamiami Trail that crosses the Everglades. It offers a quicker and easier passage through the swamp, but fewer shades and shadows."
• Katie Roiphe on Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer: "One might wonder why this book, filled with mundane accounts of business deals, wills and birth records, is so riveting. It may be that one senses the passion in the archives, in the artifacts of daily life that Greer meticulously uncovers.... The details — so rare, so tangible — have the bareness of poetry. The world of Elizabethan England is so completely lost to us that these hard facts glow a little in the darkness."

Washington Post:

• David Leavitt on The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon: "Whether describing turn-of-the-century Chicago, with its mean tenements and decrepit outhouses, or the 'onionesque armpits' of a Moldovan pimp or an 'unreal McDonald's' in Moldova, 'shiny and sovereign and structurally optimistic,' Hemon is as much a writer of the senses as of the intellect.... [B]eauty and violence, in Hemon's universe, are far from mutually exclusive. Indeed, he seems determined not to let his readers (particularly his American readers) escape the experience of war as a personal affront and a personal transformation."
• Ron Charles on Erdrich's Plague of Doves: "What marks these stories ... is what has always set Erdrich apart and made her work seem miraculous: the jostling of pathos and comedy, tragedy and slapstick in a peculiar dance. As horrific as the crimes at the heart of this novel are, other sections remind us that Erdrich is a great comic writer.... 'I am sentenced to keep watch over this small patch of earth,' says one character, who could just as well be speaking for Erdrich herself, 'to judge its miseries and tell its stories. That's who I am.' Sit down and listen carefully."

Los Angeles Times:

• One more rave, by Brigitte Frase, for The Plague of Doves: "She gets better and better. If her first book, 'Love Medicine,' was a concerto, then ever since 'The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse,' she has been composing symphonies filled with a complex wisdom about the strands of darkness and light that make up a human life.... Erdrich moves seamlessly from grief to sexual ecstasy, from comedy ... to tragedy, from richly layered observations of nature and human nature to magical realism. She is less storyteller than medium. One has the sense that voices and events pour into her and reemerge with crackling intensity, as keening music trembling between sorrow and joy." 

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Terrence Rafferty on The Journey Home by Dermot Bolger [a 1990 novel only now brought out by the University of Texas Press]: "This is a mournful book, but not a glum one, really: the writer’s love of his agonized characters and his unsettled homeland is unmistakable, and redemptive. There is, as the young know and the old are prone to forget, a weird exhilaration about going all the way, even if where you find yourself is a little scary.... Wherever the 'real' Ireland is or was or will be, there are great chunks of it, with the smell and texture of Irish earth, in Dermot Bolger’s rich, conflicted, ferociously vital book. This is a novel full of rage and full of melancholy and full, to overflowing, of home truths."
• Janet Maslin on Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--and the Journey of a Generation: "'Girls Like Us' turns out to be unexpectedly captivating. And it defies expectations, to the point where Ms. Weller’s grand ambitions wind up fulfilled.... Never mind that her book has a tendency to gush and fawn. She has still put it together in revelatory ways, underscoring the generation-wide impact of her subjects’ songs and stories.... 'Girls Like Us' is a strong amalgam of nostalgia, feminist history, astute insight, beautiful music and irresistible gossip about the common factors in the three women’s lives."
• Marilyn Stasio on The SIlver Swan by Benjamin Black: "Make no mistake, Black is a grand writer with a seductive style, and the dark, repressive world he makes of postwar Dublin ... goes a long way to explain why everyone in this morally claustrophobic world is so sex-mad. But the conventions of crime fiction provide structural security for any exploratory attack on the subject of evil (or sin, as Black’s characters are more apt to define it), and failing to take full advantage of that freedom is like traveling all the way to Ireland and neglecting to visit either a church or a pub."

Washington Post:

• Ted Genoways on Posthumous Keats by Stanley Plumly: "If the mark of true genius is the effortless creation of something wholly new that, once seen, becomes self-evident -- as Plumly regards Keats's odes -- then it's apt that Plumly himself should have to mint a new genre to reckon with the young poet.... What contemporary critic would dare make such sweeping assertions or venture so deeply into the mind of his subject? What poet would engage in such exhaustive research or craft such an exacting portrait? Plumly shows us how bloodless and cold criticism has become in the last half-century by demonstrating how passionately engaged he is -- with the life he is writing, the poems he is explicating, the era he is recreating. The effect, at times, is like watching a resurrection -- not only of Keats, but of the cadaverous genre of literary criticism."
• Daniel Byman on Terror and Consent by Philip Bobbitt: "Despite his establishment pedigree, he is a thoroughgoing contrarian. Defying the nearly universal criticism among academics of the term 'war on terror,' Bobbitt embraces it, making a strong case -- better than the Bush administration has -- that the challenge can best be thought of as a series of wars.... My advice is that readers should approach Terror and Consent with a mixture of caution and open-mindedness. Not all of Bobbitt's pronouncements may be convincing. But his book constantly prods us to reexamine our preconceptions about terrorism, which is by itself some preparation for what may lie ahead."
• Peter Behrens on Fall of Frost by Brian Hall: "Hall's themes, like Frost's, are major: love, death, the anarchy of living, the tragedy implicit in creating children and poems. This is a book about a man confronting the world and struggling to make sense, through his work, of what he cannot otherwise grasp. Like Frost's poetry, Hall's novel is pungent, deceptively simple and magnificently sad."

Los Angeles Times:

• Jay Parini on Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin: "Anyone who comes to 'Lavinia' seeking a conventional realistic fiction will feel disappointed. This is a poem in the form of a novel, an elegant echo chamber for a canonical work, a reading of an epic poem, and a rewriting of that poem.... She addresses the primitive world, summons a vision and declares it pure. She has heard voices and channeled them in the language of Lavinia herself. And this voice has something wonderful and strange to tell us."

New York Sun:

• Benjamin Lytal on The White King by Gyorgy Dragoman: "A memoir of communist oppression, it is also an of-the-moment contribution to world literature, representing the childlike combination of wonder and irony currently in vogue across the globe.... There is always the risk that what should seem horrible will only become precious, a species of fairy tale awkwardly bearing the badge of politics. But unlike most such authors, Mr. Dragomán captures a childhood that feels less like a fairy tale than like a real childhood — perhaps because he actually lived it."

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

Predictable Irrationality or Hidden Rationality?: Our First Author One-on-One

Now that we've started bringing authors onto Omni, we thought the next step would be to open the floor to two authors to talk directly to each other, without our getting in the way. (But feel free to get in the way yourself in the Comments section.) How often, for instance, would you like to see a book review, instead of serving as the final word, start a back and forth between the author and the reviewer (played out somewhere less infantile than the Letters to the Editor sandbox)? Or see debut authors trade notes about what it's like to have your first book published? We're hardly the first people to think of this sort of thing (Slate has done it well for years, although not as often as they used to), but it's new to us, so we're excited.

And we're excited about our first pairing, which was so glaringly obvious and potentially fascinating that it forced us into action. One of the liveliest and most popular new subgenres in publishing (along with Vampire Romance and Brett Favre Tributes) is Popular Economics, bustling with witty contrarian analyses of the ways the dismal science can illuminate our everyday lives, all coming in the wake of the blockbuster Freaknomics. But not all Pop Econ books are alike. In fact, on the surface, it looks like the two most popular new books in the genre this year, Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational and Tim Harford's The Logic of Life, have a pretty basic disagreement. Ariely, says his book jacket, "refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways," while Harford's book jacket replies, "Under the surface of everyday insanity, life is logical after all." So, underneath it all, are we irrational or rational? (Or is one man's irrationality another's rationality?)

That's a fine disagreement to begin with, but from reading both books, you can tell the sides would not remain so simply divided (despite the doctored fight photo above that Ariely sent in when we proposed the idea--Ariely's in the red trunks and Harford's in the green, white and red). In part, this is a piece of a larger debate between traditional rationalist economics (Harford is an economics columnist for the Financial Times and Slate and the author of the bestselling Undercover Economist) and the newer field of behavioral economics (Ariely is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT), but more than that, it will be, I hope, a conversation between two smart and funny guys with a rare talent for connecting complex ideas to our daily lives.

The conversation actually began in February, when Harford wrote a largely positive review of Predictably Irrational in the FT. Here's a quote:

I could scarcely imagine a better introduction to “behavioural economics”, a discipline of growing influence that sits on the boundary between economics and psychology. But opinions differ among economists as to whether behavioural economics seriously challenges the long-held basic assumption of economics that we make rational choices, or whether it merely illuminates some fascinating but relatively minor human foibles.

Ariely continues things here on Omni with his first post today. Harford will follow later in the week, and for the next few weeks we'll keep roughly to a Monday/Thursday schedule. Please add your own comments to the discussion in the meantime, and thanks for joining us. --Tom

P.S. You'll notice Dan Ariely's photo a couple places on our page: our interview with him is also featured in the current episode of our Amazon Wire podcast (you can play the podcast in the right column of the blog while it's the current episode, or find it in the archives).

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Niall Ferguson on Terror and Consent by Philip Bobbitt: "'Terror and Consent' is in many ways a manifesto for a new Atlanticism, not just a reassertion but a reinvention of the dominant role of the trans-Atlantic alliance. It will be read with pleasure by men of a certain age, class and education from Manhattan’s Upper East Side to London’s West End. But 'Terror and Consent' is much more than that readership might suggest. This is quite simply the most profound book to have been written on the subject of American foreign policy since the attacks of 9/11 — indeed, since the end of the cold war." [I have to add here that I started this giant book with great interest a little while back and found it borderline incomprehensible. I'd like to think that Ferguson's rave might lead me back to the book now, but, let's be honest, it's far more likely to substitute for it.]
• William Grimes on McMafia by Misha Glenny: "Mr. Glenny sets a fast pace as he races from one criminal hot spot to another, riding with marijuana traffickers in British Columbia, walking into pachinko parlors in Tokyo, visiting brothels in Tel Aviv and scoping out the sex clubs in Dubai. For sheer enterprise he is hard to beat, but anything like a clear picture of global crime eludes him." [This one, by contrast, which provides a nice, depressing complement to Bobbitt's book, I thought was excellent. The chaotic feeling Grimes describes I found a plus.]
• Erica Wagner on The Rain Before It Falls by Jonathan Coe: "'The Rain Before It Falls' is a peculiar book, to put it kindly; it is itself a failure, in more brutal terms. It’s peculiar because it’s hard to understand why Coe, an accomplished novelist, did (it seems) everything in his power to distance his readers from the characters and situations he wishes to portray."
• Charles Taylor on The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Graff: "In the end, all of Groff’s parodies and pastiches cannot disguise that she’s written a very simple tale of homecoming and reconciliation. Her talent appears to be simpler and more openly emotional than she acknowledges. Though she throws in ending after ending, Groff also ties things together quite nicely; if what had preceded these multiple endings had been less showy, you could even say satisfyingly."

Washington Post:

• Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore on Ida: A Sword Among Lions by Paula Giddings: "Giddings set out to write a definitive biography and has succeeded spectacularly. Ida gradually brings us to see the world through Wells's eyes; as she shops for a new seersucker suit that we know she can't afford or feels betrayed when fellow activists try to leave her off the list of founders of the NAACP,  we come to love this brave and wise woman. Read it and weep. Then give it to the last person who told you that ideals are a waste of time."

Los Angeles Times:

• Jack Lynch on Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer: "Germaine Greer works to fill the 'wife-shaped void in the biography of William Shakespeare.' The result is learned, rousing, lively -- and often downright infuriating. Greer is no scholarly dilettante. She wrote her Cambridge doctoral dissertation on Shakespeare, and she knows her way around an archive.... She also writes engagingly; the book will be an exciting read even for nonspecialists.... The real problem with 'Shakespeare's Wife' is that it says more about fantasies than about the real world -- both the fantasies of the old-fashioned misogynists and of the modern feminist."
• Richard Eder on All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen: "His achingly comic command of the hopes, vanities, foibles and quandaries of his peers has produced something better than fashionably maneuvered satire. It is irony (of a rare cosmopolitan sort) that this Russian-born writer brings to the New York scene, a pond that takes itself to be the ocean. He evokes the world's culture along with our own."

Omni Newsletter Outage

Just a logistics note: as some of you may have noticed, our daily newsletter has been offline for a short while. Our apologies: we're revamping the behind-the-scenes machinery a little bit and will have it available again soon. (And we'll give a shout when we do.)

Thanks for your patience, but in the meantime we're still blogging away right here. Stay tuned, as this week we're launching our first author discussion, between Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational) and Tim Harford (The Logic of Life). --Tom

Mail from the Gods

After a couple of days of being too busy to open it, my mail (as it does more often than I'd care to admit) has piled up to the point I can barely escape my cubicle, but some sixth sense told me I should open a small package from HarperCollins at the top of the pile, and ... jackpot: the latest reissue of Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga, which, as I have often confessed to friends and colleagues who looked at me like I had just owned up to not knowing Catcher in the Rye, I have never read. Glorious! And so to kick off your weekend, here's a short selection of the index entries from the timeless tale of rock'n'roll decadence:

• American tour (First, 1968-1969), blizzard incident, 70-71
• American tour (Ninth, 1973), death threats, 201, 203
• American tour (Ninth, 1973), hotel destruction, 201
• American tour (Tenth, 1975), calamities of, 232-33, 235, 237, 244
• American tour (Tenth, 1975), Squeaky Fromme incident, 248-49
• Beck, Jeff, erratic temperament of, 23-24
• Bonham, John, French hotel destruction, 184
• Bonham, John, Monte Carlo gun incident, 274-75
• Bonham, John, stripping onstage, 90
• Clark, Dick, 29
• Crowley, Aleister, life of, 107-9
• "Dazed and Confused," twenty-minute version, 146
• Devil, See Satan
• Grant, Peter, assault charges, Oakland, 286, 290
• Grant, Peter, Canadian assault charges, 144
• Groupies, Page's feelings about, 78
• Jones, John Paul, pact with Satan and, 95, 308
• Magic, Bonham death rumors, 305
• Marx, Groucho, 223
• Page, Jimmy, black magic and, 95
• Page, Jimmy, fuzzbox and, 17
• Plant, Robert, duality of, 187, 269
• Plant, Robert, sheep farm of, 155-56, 203, 276
• Satan, satanic messages on records, 9, 310-11
• Seattle, Washington, Shark Episode, 78-80
• Yardbirds, Oxford May Ball fiasco, 24-25

--Tom

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

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Liesl Schillinger on Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri: "Lahiri handles her characters without leaving any fingerprints. She allows them to grow as if unguided, as if she were accompanying them rather than training them through the espalier of her narration. Reading her stories is like watching time-lapse nature videos of different plants, each with its own inherent growth cycle, breaking through the soil, spreading into bloom or collapsing back to earth." And on Friday, Kakutani said, "A Chekhovian sense of loss blows through these new stories: a reminder of Ms. Lahiri’s appreciation of the wages of time and mortality and her understanding too of the missed connections that plague her husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and friends."
• Kakutani on The Second Plane--"these chuckleheaded essays"--by Martin Amis: "This pretentious, formalistic argument underscores Mr. Amis’s efforts to deal with a vast historic tragedy with preening, self-consciously literary musings.... 'The Second Plane' is such a weak, risible and often objectionable volume that the reader finishes it convinced that Mr. Amis should stick to writing fiction and literary criticism, as he’s thoroughly discredited himself with these essays as any sort of political or social commentator."
• Liz Phair (yes, that Liz) on Black Postcards by Dean Wareham: See Brad's post from earlier today.
• Joshua Henkin on Last Last Chance by Fiona Maazel: "Maazel’s book has enough event — and enough eccentricity — to torpedo your average novel. But 'Last Last Chance' isn’t your average novel, thanks in no small part to Maazel’s funny, lacerating prose. The book fits squarely in the tradition of novels about the wealthy and dissolute, but ultimately it’s less John Cheever than Denis Johnson — the Denis Johnson of 'Jesus’ Son,' with its drug-addled narrators."

Washington Post:

• Michael Dirda on The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel: "Surely, though, the man is your typical melancholy, dry-as-dust bibliophile? Nope. Not only does Manguel own wonderful books housed in an eat-your-heart-out library in an idyllic part of France, he seems, well, content. According to The Library at Night, he lives with someone he loves, writes during the morning, potters among his books throughout the day and evening, and, come nightfall, sips wine in the garden with visiting friends from around the world. Sigh."

Los Angeles Times:

• Ron Carlson on Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen: "In 'Shadow Country,' Matthiessen revisits his three novels about the career of Watson ('Killing Mister Watson,' 'Lost Man's River' and 'Bone by Bone') and fits them together so that they unfold, layer by layer, mystery by mystery, episode by episode, gathering, gathering, nodding back and forth, in a tangle not unlike the living imbroglio in which the tale is set, the impenetrable jungle wetland of the Florida lowlands. I'll just say right here that the book took my sleeve and like the ancient mariner would not let go."

 

2008 Pulitzers Announced

There's no doubt a lot of back-slapping going on the Washington Post newsroom this afternoon (and, as someone who grew up on the Post, it's always a pleasure to read a headline like this in the New York Times: "Washington Post Wins 6 Pulitzer Prizes"), but in bookland, here are the winners of the 2008 Pulitzers (two finalists in each category are announced at the same time as the winners):

• Fiction: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (finalists: Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson and Shakespeare's Kitchen by Lore Segal)
• History: What God Hath Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe (finalists: Nixon and Kissinger by Robert Dallek and The Coldest Winter by David Halberstam)
• Biography: Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson (finalists: The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein by Martin Duberman and The Life of Kingsley Amis by Zachary Leader)
• General Nonfiction: The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedlander (finalists: The Cigarette Century by Allan Brandt and The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross)
• Poetry (two winners!): Time and Materials by Robert Hass and Failure by Philip Schultz (finalist: Messenger by Ellen Bryant Voigt)
• Drama: August: Osage County by Tracy Letts (finalists: Yellow Face by David Henry Hwang (not in print yet, apparently) and Dying City by Christopher Shinn)

Also, breaking with their recent tradition of honoring deceased jazz geniuses, the board gave Bob Dylan a Special Citation for his "lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power." And when I went to see if Mark Feeney, who won the Criticism prize for his writing on film and art for the Boston Globe, had published any books, I found this, which, for someone like me who has pretty much memorized All the President's Men, looks like candy: Nixon at the Movies: A Book About Belief.

Meanwhile, my remark last week that the Pulitzer had in recent years been pretty consistently picking the consensus choice for best novel of the year was certainly confirmed, as their choice of Oscar Wao follows the National Book Critics Circle award and his recent victory in the 2008 Tournament of Books, as well as wide-ranging critical love (and high praise in these parts too). The big surprise on the list above is Eden's Outcasts, which flew under the radar (or least my radar) since its release last August, although our six customer reviewers were unanimous in their praise. Glad to see it will be finding more readers. And for a nice side note on fiction finalist Lore Segal (also author of the fabulous Tell Me a Mitzi) see the last question in our interview with her former student Matthew Sharpe, who dedicated Jamestown to her. Our list of previous Pulitzer winners is here. --Tom

P.S. I didn't think this through until after posting, but what exactly makes The Years of Extermination a General Nonfiction book and What God Hath Wrought a History book? Doesn't the presence of a date range in your subtitle pretty much guarantee you belong in History?

221 days to 2666

I've bowed to no one in my advance hype for Roberto Bolano's masterpiece-in-waiting, 2666, but the Literary Saloon beat me to the story in my own backyard by noticing that the book has appeared on our site with a release date of November 11 (I've checked with Farrar Straus and that is indeed the right date). And he further discovered that there will be two parallel editions: a single-volume, 912-page hardcover, and a three-volume paperback boxed set. What can I say: I'll probably get both, even if the publisher doesn't send them to me. And I bet I'll read the paperbacks. But why stop at 3 volumes? I adored the six-paperback galley set of Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games that Harper sent out last winter:

The Saloon also linked to some of the continuing chatter about The Savage Detectives, including an essay from translator (and coffee drinker) Natasha Wimmer and a roundtable discussion at Bookninja. --Tom

IMPAC Impact?

The shortlist for the--[deep breath]--2008 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award was announced yesterday. In typical IMPAC fashion (they begin their process by announcing a reallylonglist of 137 nominees), the shortlist is pretty long at eight books:

• The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas (Spain)
• The Sweet and Simple Kind by Yasmine Gooneratne (Sri Lanka)
• De Niro's Game by Rawi Hage (Lebanon/Canada)
• Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones (Australia)
• Let It Be Morning by Sayed Kashua (Israel)
• The Attack by Yasmina Khadra (Algeria)
• The Woman Who Waited by Andrei Makine (Russia)
• Winterwood by Patrick McCabe (Ireland)

As I've mentioned before, the IMPAC is one of the more idiosyncratic awards around notable for, along with its infinite longlist, a) its giant (100,000-euro) prize, which, with current exchange rates, dwarfs any US prize; b) its lengthy nomination process, which results in a shortlist of often fairly old books--many of this year's, you may notice, were published in the US in 2006, and one, Dreams of Speaking, has apparently even had time to go out of print here; and c) its interesting and authentically international choices. Last year, for instance, the prize helped put Per Petterson's late-breaking hit Out Stealing Horses on the map.

And speaking of awards, don't forget that the last big 2007 book prizes, the Pulitzers, are announced on Monday. They are pretty much the opposite of the IMPAC, since they don't announce the nominees beforehand (they just quietly list, in the tiniest type possible, two finalists along with the winner). As the last award of the season, the Pulitzers have lately come to seem like they anoint the consensus book-of-the-year pick (The Road, Gilead, The Known World, and Middlesex in recent years), and this year they can play tiebreaker between Denis Johnson's NBA-winning Tree of Smoke and Junot Diaz's NBCC-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. --Tom

Guest Bookshelf: Shannon Roudebush

A few words from Shannon Roudebush, the Omnivoracious reader whose bookshelf photo tops Omni this week (see the full photo with links and share your own by mailing a .jpg to omnivoracious at amazon.com):

My husband and I live in IN with our two little girls, ages 7 and 5 1/2. We own and operate a family erosion control business. When I'm not busy with family or work, I love to read. I'm in a reading group on Shelfari and we're all attempting to read 100 books in 2008. My shelf shows some of the books in my to-be-read pile for the challenge. As of the end of March, I've read 34 books, so I'm keeping pace pretty well. Hopefully, by the end of the year, I will have met the challenge. The best book I've read so far this year, in my opinion, is definitely The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett.

--Tom

Pop-Up Minimalism

Has the Rinehart/Sabuda-led pop-up-book moment peaked? It's been one of the most fun trends to watch in bookmaking (the legal kind) the past few years, and perhaps it's a sign of maturity that, along with the increasingly baroque constructions from the masters, some artists are stepping back toward simple elegance. Via Paper Cuts, you can see (read?) the complete three-dimensional text of Marion Bataille's ABC3D, which despite a release date still half a year away has already made an appearance in our Top 100 (at least according to Paper Cuts: it's at the still-respectable #1,257 as I write). The pleasure and the playfulness of the demonstration speak for itself:

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Steven Brill on The Appeal by John Grisham: "There’s lots of other intrigue worthy of a Grisham novel — missing witnesses, destroyed evidence, insider stock trading. It’s a shame, though, that Grisham’s grace in constructing a sophisticated story is so poorly matched by his writing.... Still, Grisham keeps his story moving. And he not only moves to a surprising ending but makes a real point about how judicial elections undermine the integrity of any justice system."
• Kakutani on The Bin Ladens by Steve Coll: "It is a book that possesses the novelistic energy of a rags-to-riches family epic, following its sprawling cast of characters as they travel from Mecca and Medina to Las Vegas and Disney World, and yet, at the same time, it is a book that, in tracing the connections between the public and the private, the political and the personal, stands as a substantive bookend to Mr. Coll’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2004 book, 'Ghost Wars.'"
• David Orr on Elegy by Mary Jo Bang: "This is a tightly focused, completely forthright collection written almost entirely in the bleakest key imaginable. The poems aren’t all great, some of them aren’t even good, but collectively they are overwhelming — which is both a compliment to Bang’s talent and to the toughness of mind that allowed her to attempt this difficult project in the first place."
• Evan Thomas on Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 by Max Hastings: Hastings "is equally adept at analyzing the broad sweep of strategy and creating thrilling set pieces that put the reader in the cockpit of a fighter plane or the conning tower of a submarine. But he is best on the human cost of war.... Americans were shocked by the Japanese massacre of civilians in Manila. After a month of constant bombardment, the United States Army left much of the city in rubble."

Washington Post:

• Thomas de Waal on One Soldier's War by Arkady Babchenko: "The memoir, by turns horrific, sad and funny, fills a big gap by providing us with the first-person experiences of an articulate Russian soldier. As one tale of savagery follows another, however, the story becomes increasingly frustrating to the reader who knows the Russian political context. The end of one war, a two-year interlude and the start of a second war are barely registered as the narrative becomes war-without-end, totally enclosed within a soldier's helmet and a company of men."

Los Angeles Times:

• Nathaniel Rich on Bastard Tongues by Derek Bickerton: "Some linguistic scholars sit at home and analyze field data, others convene demographically vetted test groups, but Derek Bickerton will have none of that cautious bunk. In 'Bastard Tongues,' his 'favorite modus operandi was simply to drive around until I saw a bar I liked the look of.' Drunks, he explains, 'are the world's most underrated language teaching resource.'"

New York Sun:

• John Merriman on Napoleon: The Path to Power by Philip Dwyer: "Mr. Dwyer hates Napoleon. (The Napoleon buffs will not like this one.) But he knows an enormous amount about the man, and we can perhaps understand his distaste."

The Art of Fake Fiction

I am, as I think I have noted in this space before, a geek for the Paris Review interviews. In my college library I procrastinated my way through all of those old Writers at Work collections when I should have been studying up on the Yugoslav economy or some such immediate assignment, and I still keep an eye on the newsstands to see which authors have been brought into the Art of Fiction canon in the latest issue (this issue, by the way, it's Kenzaburo Oe). So when I got an advance copy of Nathaniel Rich's upcoming debut novel, The Mayor's Tongue, with an unexplained photocopy of an interview (The Art of Fiction XXI) with the writer Constance Eakins folded inside, well, I felt that someone had found my alley and parked right there. It's a fun pastiche, down to the spine-shading to make it look like the Xeroxes I've made of my favorite exchanges over the years, and you can see it for yourself on the still-building site for the book .

Who is Eakins? It appears on first glance that he's not one of the main characters of The Mayor's Tongue, but rather a main character for one of the main characters (who idolizes him). In the interview, he comes across as some sort of a combination of Chuck Norris, Gore Vidal, and Thomas Pynchon:

Interviewer:
Did you write this morning?

Eakins:
I did. I wrote twenty-three pages. That's what it's come to. I used to write ten thousand words a day and sometimes even more, in my golden years. But now it's just a paltry seven thousand or so. Things move so slowly sometimes I feel that I am living in reverse. This is the trouble with being in one's thirties, and past one's prime.

Interviewer:
Do you write by longhand?

Eakins:
Yes, but I often go back to typewriter when my arm can't keep up with the jet engine that is my image-narrative-thought-machine.

Interviewer:
What do you mean by "image-narrative-thought-machine"?

Eakins:
Brain.

And the book itself? I haven't gone past the first page, but Rich's well-placed use there of the phrase "excessively affricative" does give me hope that it will live up to the promising blurbs from Gary Shteyngart ("Here is a young writer who is not afraid to give literature a kick in the pants") and Stephen King ("a novel brimming with brio"), and makes me, even more than the fake interview, want to keep reading. --Tom

P.S. I just noticed that Nathaniel Rich also happens to be a senior editor at the Paris Review, which explains how he got the layout just right...