Omnivoracious

Debating the First Draft of W.: The Authors vs. Oliver Stone

If you haven't run across it yet, for the past week Slate has been hosting a high-powered panel discussion bringing Oliver Stone together with three (and, finally, a fourth) of the best-known chroniclers of the Bush administration, to discuss his use of their work and others in his new movie W. Along with Jacob Weisberg, the former Slate editor whose book, The Bush Tragedy, provides much source material for the 41/43 father-son drama Stone portrays, they brought in Bob Woodward and Ron Suskind, who between them have written seven bestsellers on the administration, and today, on what appears to be the final day of the discussion, Hubris coauthor Michael Isikoff joined in with a specific anecdote from his book that Stone used for the movie.

There's a lot of discussion of Stone's dramatic license with the reported facts, with some pointed criticism (and Stone's defenses) of a few of the movie's more Stonian interpretive flights (which just about everyone who's seen W. has noted he has reined in considerably this time), and there's a lot of debate between the journalists about the exact timeline of when the war was decided upon. But what I like best is the shoptalk among these guys who have all been trying to write the first draft of history, without much help from the primary participants. Here's Suskind giving Woodward a backhanded compliment about his unique access:

Bob, clearly, has sat in what journalists generally consider "access heaven" in his unmatched colloquies with Bush. You have witnessed Bush jumping out of his chair to make a point, and many other moments from your interviews provide some signature scenes of this period. But, I wonder, Bob, if you think, looking back, that access to Bush has not been as valuable—hour for hour—as it has been with other presidents whom you've interviewed. I think it's fair to say that Bush and his team don't believe that truthful public disclosure and dialogue are among their central obligations. Other presidents have railed against the troublemakers in the press, but they felt, often reluctantly, that letting the American people know their mind—the good-enough reasons that drive action—was part of their job description. Frankly, I think the best book of your quartet is State of Denial—the one for which, I gather, you were not given access to Bush. But that's a rare occurrence. (The last president you wrote about who wouldn't grant an audience was Nixon, and, of course, you and Carl notched a few historic bell-ringers back then.)

And here's Isikoff arguing that all their discussion of various memos and anecdotes are somewhat beside the point in trying to figure out when the Decider decided (which he backs up with an anecdote from his own book):

We can debate endlessly what really motivated Bush in making the audacious decision to invade Iraq—the threat of WMD, the cooked-up evidence about connections between Saddam and al-Qaida, the need to be pre-emptive in the post-9/11 era, the desire to secure Mideast oil supplies. But I think the "tear it all down" line captures the essence of Bush's worldview. Why monkey around with diplomacy, U.N. inspections, and halfway measures? And the search for one key moment to pinpoint the "decision" time is probably illusory. Bush the Decider didn't actually decide in Cabinet or war-council meetings. His White House didn't thrash out option memos and debate them endlessly. He decided on what his gut told him, and his gut instincts were that he had had enough of trying to "box in" Saddam Hussein and that it was time to kick his ass and remove him through military force.

This all gives me an opportunity to point to a couple interviews I did for our Election 2008 store this fall with two of the participants above: Woodward and Suskind. They are both, like their recent books, The War Within and The Way of the World, focused mostly on events after those in Stone's movie. Woodward is concerned mostly with discussing a much later (and more successful) decision: Bush's choice to go forward with the "surge" in Iraq:

And with Suskind, we talked less about his administration reporting and more about what is the real focus of The Way of the World, the threat of nuclear proliferation and the importance of America's moral identity in controlling them:

I know not everybody (me included) prefers listening to reading, so I'll post transcripts of these separately in the next day or so as well. --Tom

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Sam Tanenhaus on The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike: "At 76, he still wrings more from a sentence than almost anyone else. His sorcery is startlingly fresh, page upon page.... The genius inheres in the precise observation, in the equally precise language, but above all in the illusion that the image has been received and processed in real time, when in truth Updike has slowed events to a dreamlike pace and given them a dream’s hyperreality, so that the distinction between the actual and the imagined feels erased."
• Maslin on George, Being George, edited by Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr.: "If Mr. Plimpton had nothing but the Zeus-like powers this book ascribes to him (and don’t think Zeus isn’t mentioned), he might become on the page what he seems never to have been in life: a bore. The peril of the oral-history format is that old friends’ flattery will overwhelm objectivity and interest.... Fortunately, 'George, Being George' also taps enough sharp-eyed observers ... to outweigh its occasional fatuousness and repetition."
• Kakutani on Lulu in Marrakech by Diane Johnson: "In her ridiculous new novel, 'Lulu in Marrakech,' Ms. Johnson attempts to use the post-9/11 hunt for terrorists and the tensions between America and the Islamic world as a backdrop for a social comedy about a clueless young American woman named Lulu.... That this unobservant, naïve and unresourceful ditz is supposed to be a covert C.I.A.  operative, assigned to trace the flow of money from Islamic charities in Marrakech to terrorist groups, is patently absurd, as is the trajectory of the plot, which abruptly moves from the subjects of house parties and romantic triangles to those of rendition and torture. It’s as though a romantic comedy starring Kate Hudson or Drew Barrymore as a kind of Marrakech Barbie had suddenly morphed into a brutal thriller about C.I.A. black sites and enhanced interrogations." On Sunday, Erica Wagner agreed: "The reader feels simply glum, locked in a window­less world of preconceptions never shattered and lessons never learned."
• David Hajdu on Hallelujah Junction by John Adams: "Although the sojourner scheme is a cliché among books by creative artists, politicians and pretty much everyone else, Adams plays it lightly. There is no more self-aggrandizement in this wry, smart and forthright memoir than there is in the venturesome but elegiac music of Adams’s maturity. Indeed, 'Hallelujah Junction' stands with books by Hector Berlioz and Louis Armstrong among the most readably incisive autobiographies of major musical figures."

Washington Post:

• Elaine Showalter on Updike's Widows of Eastwick: "In lieu of understanding American malaise in terms of women's lives, Widows is padded with digressions and irrelevant details, lengthy travelogues and tedious lectures.... Mercifully, before he schleps them to Antarctica and Peru, Updike sends the widows back to Eastwick on an unlikely holiday rental of the old mansion that Van Horne left behind. But without Van Horne, the life force and comic center of Witches, the women's adventures seem pallid and pointless. At the novel's end, Sukie and Alexandra are hopefully contemplating another tour, but for readers the spell is broken."
• Ron Charles on Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago: "Here Saramago catches us off guard once again, turning from the straight-faced absurdity of the novel's first section to a poignant romance. How can the most tender relationship that Saramago has ever written involve death as a nervous lover? This is a story that can't possibly work or affect us, but it does, deeply, sweetly. It's a novel to die for."

Los Angeles Times:

• James Sallis on The Complete Ripley Novels by Patricia Highsmith: "The genius of the five novels Highsmith eventually wrote about this character lies in the manner in which she lodges us so firmly in Ripley's head that his perception of the world begins to seem almost right to us. We become so immured in his world that, like him, we are unable to see beyond it.... Ripley is truly a self-made man, bringing us to silent recognition of the selfsame treacherous longings coiled and waiting in our hearts."

The Books of the States: Maine (4 electoral votes; Guest: Heidi Julavits)

First of all, as you regular readers may have noticed, that weeklong States break hasn't prevented me from falling behind the state-a-day plan again. That's likely to be true for the next bit: I'm fairly deep underwater with everything else right now in my finite days (and find myself spending more and more time on each state, for good reasons), so for the next couple of weeks, while things are frantic, I'm going to be spacing out the posts a bit. But we have some excellent guests coming up, including today, so stay tuned.

Today we have Heidi Julavits, who in her short career has published almost as many novels (3) as her native state, Maine, has electoral votes (4): The Mineral Palace, The Effect of Living Backwards, and The Uses of Enchantment, none of which, however, are set in the Pine Tree State (again, a completely unknown and inadequate state nickname...). She's also one of the founders and editors of the lovely magazine, The Believer, which I still buy at the store rather than subscribe to because I don't want to lose the fun of buying it in person.

Despite being born & bred in Maine, her State by State essay and her book list below are both full of the From Aways, the non-natives whose acceptance in their adopted state is apparently predicated on their capacity to amuse, and with whom she has come, despite her birth certificate, to identify. Here's a favorite section from her Maine piece:

I was born in Portland, Maine. I left the state when I was eighteen and returned at the age of thirty-three. My husband and I bought a house in a town three hours northeast of Portland. Thus I am a From Away in my home state.

The easy thing about being a From Away, however, is that your community has extremely low expectations for you. You're meant to screw up regularly at great cost to your homeowner's insurance, because such screwups are entertaining and an excellent way to warm the hearts of even the most indifferent natives. We proved highly entertaining. We showed up and promptly burst our pipes, ruining a room that had, based on the plaster and lathe we had to chunk into garbage bags, not been touched in nearly 200 years. In other words, we were the stupidest people in almost 200 hundred years to live in this house. We were welcomed throughout the land.

Here are her choices for the four books to represent Maine, along with a short introduction (I should mention that I was all set to put Stephen King on the Maine quarter until she went completely anticanonical and left him--along with Carolyn Chute, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Edna St. Vincent Millay--off the list. I'm more than happy to have a chance to engrave Robert McCloskey instead):

Few authors have succeeded in writing about Maine in a way that satisfies the native Mainer. I've been privy to many discussions where an out-of-Stater has attempted to capture the state on the page, and their efforts are mocked, derided, and ultimately dismissed by the natives. This is a harsh crowd. Immortalize them at your peril.

That said, Geoffrey Wolff wrote a fantastic nonfiction book about Maine called Edge of Maine; in it he cops to the folly of his undertaking (as a non-native who now lives full-time in Maine, he knows the dangerous territory upon which he treads), and does a pretty great job of claiming to know nothing while actually knowing quite a lot. It's some of the best writing about sailing on the coast I've encountered as well.

Another From Away who captured the loneliness, and the idiocy, of moving to Maine, is Elizabeth Etnier. Her book, On Gilbert Head, written in 1937 and sadly out of print, documents the travails she and her husband endure after moving to a remote point of land, and how they survive their first winter, and how their marriage starts to unravel. This is a genre unto itself--the out-of-print book written by the wife of the couple that's come to Maine to live a more pure existence, only to see their marriage go to hell.

The best books about Maine, however, tend to be children's books. Really there's no beating Robert McCloskey's One Morning In Maine. The rag-a-muffin children who are left to run along the grungy seashore unsupervised by their parents. The admonishment to swallow emotions. The irritating failure of outboard motors to catch. The prevailing bleak religion of Murphy's Law and the salvation found in ice cream and clam chowder. I used to identify with the kids and their desperation for food but now I identify with the parents--particularly the father when he has to row INTO the wind. Some day I hope to identify with the harbor seal.

Finally--Lost on a Mountain in Maine, as told to Joseph Egan by Donn Fendler, is a real-life adventure story (appropriate for ages 9-12, but adults like it too) about a boy who wanders away from his family and gets lost on Mount Katahdin for twelve days. He's bitten to hell by mosquitos and suffers terribly, but ultimately finds his way back to civilization by following telephone wires. For people who have vacationed in Maine during a bad weather spell, the book functions as a pretty cathartic metaphor for their own experience of miserable lostness.

--Tom

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

Tony Hillerman, 1925-2008

As you've likely heard, Tony Hillerman, whose series featuring Navajo Tribal Police detectives Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee made him one of the most beloved of American mystery masters, known as much for the atmosphere of his New Mexico settings and the humanity of his characters as for his classic plots, died on Sunday of pulmonary failure at the age of 83. The New York Times has a lengthy obituary, by Marilyn Stasio, and Sarah Weinman is collecting other links to tributes and appreciations, including one that everyone is linking to, a moving story from Deanne Stillman, a student of his when he was beginning the series and who has gone on to write her own books about the West, including the recent Mustang. Here's an attempt at a complete list of his books:

Leaphorn/Chee series:

• The Blessing Way
• Dance Hall of the Dead
• Listening Woman
• People of Darkness
• The Dark Wind
• The Ghostway
• Skinwalkers (the first to bring Leaphorn and Chee together)
• A Thief of Time (his own favorite, according to the Times)
• Talking God
• Coyote Waits
• Sacred Clowns
• The Fallen Man
• The First Eagle
• Hunting Badger
• The Wailing Wind
• The Sinister Pig
• The Shape Shifter

Other fiction:

• The Fly on the Wall
• Finding Moon

Nonfiction:

• Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir
• New Mexico, Rio Grande, and Other Essays
• The Great Taos Bank Robbery
• Talking Mysteries
• Hillerman Country
• Kilroy Was There
• Canyon de Chelly

Children's Books:

• The Boy Who Made Dragonfly
• Buster Mesquite's Cowboy Band

Anthologies:

• The Spell of New Mexico
• The Mysterious West
• The Best American Mysteries of the Century
• A New Omnibus of Crime
• The Best of the West
• The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories

About Hillerman:

• The Tony Hillerman Companion
• Tony Hillerman's Navajoland

--Tom

The Books of the States: Alabama (9 electoral votes)

This one's fun. After Mississippi and Illinois, which were packed as full of icons as one of those foldout Vanity Fair covers, it's a pleasure to step over to Alabama, which has its share of big names (two from little Monroeville alone), but still has some room for a few wild cards too. Some room, but not enough room, because, as you'll see, I found it hard to limit myself to the nine in the headline. At some point we'll have to make those cuts, but for now, let's keep it loose. I've just discovered some of these books, and I'd love to get a chance for a closer look at them.

So, the Yellowhammer State (really? that's the nickname? I've never heard that before):

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee: The one novel that everybody has read, right? Not me! So what do you think Miss Lee has been writing all these years since?
• Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote: Before Capote turned to Kansas and New York for his subjects, he made a splash at 23 with this autobiographical novel. And just as Capote is said to be the model for Dill in Mockingbird, his childhood pal Nelle Lee was, we're told, the original for this novel's tomboyish Idabel.
• Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans: We think of it as an icon of the '30s, but it was too strange to be swallowed at the time and wasn't rediscovered until the '60s. And now its very familiarity (the photos at least) makes it hard to read, in an entirely different way.
• At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 by Taylor Branch: Martin Luther King was born and raised in Georgia, but most of the central moments in his short career took place in Alabama. If his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" was book length, it would be a natural here, but you can find it in the collection, A Testament of Hope, on our Georgia list. But which of Branch's great trilogy to choose? Parting the Waters covers the Montgomery Bus Boycott, but I've put it in Georgia too. Pillar of Fire includes the main Birmingham events, but At Canaan's Edge, the final volume, begins with a set piece on the bloody march in Selma that could be a book in itself.
• The Omni-Americans by Albert Murray: Murray, who was born in Nokomis, Ala., and studied and taught at Tuskegee before joining the Air Force, is a favorite of mine: Ralph Ellison's best friend (whose reputation might yet eclipse his), and a funny, swinging (both rhythmic and pugnacious) critic. The hard part is which book to choose: the very local South to a Very Old Place, the legendary Stomping the Blues, or this against-the-grain, ahead-of-its-time critical classic.
• Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington: Speaking of Tuskegee, here is the old man himself. Washington lost his historical battle with W.E.B. DuBois a long time ago, but this autobiography, a brilliant promotional vehicle like everything he did, remains a fascinating work, playing its own changes on the already familiar traditions of African American self-making.
• The Story of My Life by Helen Keller: I should mention that Illinois and Alabama make two straight states whose real quarters actually do feature writers on our lists: Lincoln and Miss Keller--reason enough to include her beloved memoir here.
• The Ants by Edward O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler: Wilson split his youth between Washington, D.C., and the Alabama countryside before studying at the University of Alabama. You can read more about his development in Naturalist and in another collaboration with the German Hölldobler, Journey to the Ants, but this is his magnum opus: a lavish and definitive (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) guide to one of the Earth's central life forms.
• Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet by Eugene Walter: Walter's remarkable life (from Mobile to Greenwich Village, Paris, and Rome: early contributor to The Paris Review, translator and actor for Fellini, and friend to, well, everyone), found its legacy in this idiosyncratic posthumous book built from his interviews with Katherine Clark (which, amazingly, is already out of print).
• With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by E.B. Sledge: Acclaimed as one of the finest memoirs of war in the 20th century by some writers who know war, and the writing about war, as well as anyone: Paul Fussell, John Keegan, Victor Davis Hanson.
• Maybe I'll Pitch Forever by Satchel Paige: Baseball's greatest pitcher was also one of its greatest storytellers and self-mythologizers. Some more lives of bigger-than-life Alabamans: Allan Barra's The Last Coach: A Life of Paul "Bear" Bryant, Paul Hemphill's Lovesick Blues: The Life of Hank Williams, and Marshall Frady's Wallace.
• Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse: This was the first I'd come across this 1996 graphic novel of growing up gay in the last years of segregation, which arrived just before I starting paying attention to the form, but was #86 on on The Comics Journal's Top 100 comics of the century list.

--Tom

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

The Books of the States: Illinois (21 electoral votes)

I was taking Illinois a little for granted when it started to appear on the horizon. Yeah, Bellow, Terkel, Mamet, etc.: I knew there would be plenty there. But when I sat down to make up the list, I almost filled my 21 delegates before I got started. And these aren't just books that happen to have been written in Illinois, or by folks who grew up there and then moved on: they are about Illinois (or, most often, about Chicago: people have been trying to figure that "somber city" out for as long as it's represented on-the-make modernity). No wonder the Land of Lincoln was the first state Sufjan Stevens chose, after his native Michigan, for his own quixotic state project (let's see him do one a day, though, not one every few years...). So, overwhelmed, I'm going straight-out canonical again, with hardly even an underdog to be found. You tell me what I've missed, or undervalued: I know it's a lot.

• The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow: "I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent." A great opening line is like Ruth's called shot: it's the ambition as much as the execution that pleases (although it only pleases because of the execution). Bellow, Montreal-born, takes on a city--and a whole country--and nails it.
• Herzog by Saul Bellow: From on-the-make Augie to Moses Herzog, wondering what he's made of himself.
• Native Son by Richard Wright: How fitting that Mississippi is followed by Illinois: Wright's move from Black Boy to Bigger Thomas (though the books were written in the opposite order) was made by millions (cf. St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's Black Metropolis and Nicholas Lemann's The Promised Land).
• Speeches and Writings, Volume 1: 1832-1858 by Abraham Lincoln: Much as it pains me to snub the second volume of this Library of America collection, and the great words of his presidency, the local choice has to be this one, which culminates in his seven debates with Stephen Douglas in his losing race for the Senate in 1858.
• Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years by Carl Sandburg: A few hundred Lincoln biographies later, this unparalleled match of iconic writer and subject (what, you prefer Nathaniel Hawthorne on Franklin Pierce?), abridged here from the original six volumes, is still definitive, in style if not data.
• Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago by Mike Royko: Another match of icons, with Sandburg's labors to put Lincoln on a pedestal equaled by Royko's to knock Daley off his.
• Division Street: America by Studs Terkel: The great voice of the city has built his legend by collecting the voices of others. There's plenty of Chicago in his best-known book, Working, but this one, the first of his great oral histories, takes the city head-on at a time (1967) of bitter, well, division.
• Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser: Boy, I love me some Naturalism. The relentless math of Carrie's rise and Hurstwood's decline are devastating, and strangely enjoyable. For a minor Naturalist favorite, mostly forgotten, also see Henry Blake Fuller's The Cliff-Dwellers, with its tour-de-force opening comparing the skyscrapered Chicago streets to great natural canyons.
• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair: The stockyards stripped bare.
• Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman: The most influential economist since World War II (and the leader of the Chicago School) was a spirited and immensely successful popularizer. The ranks of U of C scholars whose ideas we're still living within are remarkable: John Dewey, Leo Strauss, Enrico Fermi, William Julius Wilson, Allan Bloom, and, yes, ex-con law prof Barack Obama.
• Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet: Which could be titled, "Capitalism and ___"? You fill in the blank: best answer gets a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired. (And yes, the play's most famous line is actually only found in the movie.)
• Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware: I'll confess: one of the only times a review blurb of mine has been quoted on a book is, self-mockingly, on the paperback of Jimmy Corrigan: "'Weighed down by its ambition'--The Stranger". Which I stand by, even as Jimmy has become the Great Graphic Novel of the age. But despite that quote Ware has always been my peer hero, the guy born the same year as me who has the greatest capacity to humble me with his talent and commitment. He's the David Foster Wallace of comics: hilarious, surprisingly tender, overflowing with ability, and holding himself to standards none of the rest of us mortals can even imagine. (And of course, may the similarities end there.)
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace: Speaking of whom, DFW always remained a Midwest boy abroad, and this first collection of essays (still my favorite of his books) includes his memorable pieces on the Illinois State Fair and his teen tennis career in the winds of Champaign-Urbana.
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers: I've never noticed that these two titles, by the two writers dealing most directly with the intersection of irony and earnestness, scanned so similarly until I put them together now...
• Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers: I kept coming back to Powers in the hope that one of his big puzzle-novels would turn out to be the one that put all his potential together. It turned out to be this one, a brilliant tale (like all of his are) of art and science that folds back on his own autobiography in a deeply affecting way.
• The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros: I happen to know we'll be seeing this on our guest Texas list too, but I couldn't leave this deceptively spare modern classic of Latina Chicago out of Illinois.
• Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow: I'm a fan of his more recent Reversible Errors too, but this is the blockbuster that, deservedly, put his Kindle County on the map.
• The Complete Little Orphan Annie, Volume 1 by Harold Gray: This new reissue series of the Tribune's classic strip is just getting started, with its most pointedly political years still to come.
• Selected Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks: She real cool.
• Chicago, City on the Make by Nelson Algren: A brawling, back-street companion to the elegance of E.B. White's Here Is New York. One could easily substitute here Algren's better-known Chicago novel, The Man with the Golden Arm.
• The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon: One of our favorite novels of 2008 joins 1908 Chicago with post-civil war Bosnia.

More, more, more: Studs Lonigan, Sara Paretsky, The Time Traveler's Wife, Ann Landers, Eight Men Out, the freshly demonized Rules for Radicals, Devil in the White City, Stuart Dybek, Adam Langer, Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Jane Addams... --Tom

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: David Kamp on Explainers by Jules Feiffer: "The new anthology 'Explainers,' which ­gathers all of Feiffer’s Village Voice strips from 1956 to 1966, is a welcome reintroduction — or introduction, for the uninitiated — to a great cartoonist who boldly bent his medium to adult purposes long before it was commonplace to do so. As squat and dense as a loaf of spelt bread, this book reproduces the first decade of 'Feiffer' in its entirety, and therefore captures in minute detail the birth and development of a whole new approach to cartooning."
• Kakutani on The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike: "The passage of time seems to have mellowed the witches and their creator as well, and 'The Widows of Eastwick,' while deeply flawed, is a less tendentious, more emotionally credible work than its predecessor. Mr. Updike is less interested here in scoring didactic points against feminism than he is in exploring the wages of time and age shared by men and women alike."
• Jean Edward Smith on Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief by James M. McPherson: "James M. McPherson’s 'Tried by War' is a perfect primer, not just for Civil War buffs or fans of Abraham Lincoln, but for anyone who wishes to under­stand the evolution of the president’s role as commander in chief. Few histo­rians write as well as McPherson, and none evoke the sound of battle with greater clarity. There is scarcely anyone writing today who mines original ­sources more diligently. In 'Tried by War,' McPherson draws on almost 50 years of research to present a cogent and concise narrative of how Lincoln, working against enormous odds, saved the United States of America."

Washington Post:

• Shashi Tharoor on Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh: "But the fine writing is in service of a larger cause, the reclaiming of a story appropriated for too long by its villains, those who, centuries ago, conquered foreign lands, subjugated and displaced their peoples, replaced their agriculture with cash crops that caused addiction and death, and enforced all this with the power of the gun masked by a rhetoric of civilization.... Ghosh, on behalf of history, is unforgiving, but his novel is also a delight. I can't wait to see what happens to these laborers and seamen, the defrocked raja and the transgendered mystic in the next volume."

Los Angeles Times:

• Susan Salter Reynolds on The English Major by Jim Harrison: "I believe in Jim Harrison. His last novel, 'Returning to Earth,' was rare and beautiful, with all the wild human nature he reminds us to long for.... But he is too hard on women in this novel, too callous, too shallow, and it makes his very sentence structure choppy and lopsided.... 'The English Major' feels like a novel that has taken too much Viagra. Sure, 'art loves biology,' art needs biology. But need is not the same as love. Need has a different voice. Cliff finds some peace in the end, only by breaking free of his gruff narrator, getting a new dog, finishing his project and giving his penis a rest."
• Sonja Bolle on ABC3D by Marion Bataille: "'ABC3D' takes my breath away, and seems to have the same effect on everyone who opens it.... The appeal is this: Alphabet books provide a form, like a sonnet. There is a clear structure. There must be an approach, like a musical theme; even if it's as simple as offering one word beginning with each letter, there are 26 variations to perform, all of which have to conform to the aesthetic established with the first letter. An author must get through the whole alphabet, accounting for every letter, even -- especially! -- that tricky X."

The Books of the States: Mississippi (6 electoral votes)

Okay, we're back on the march. I'm not sure that anyone even noticed our absence (I think it was more like if Bob Barr, not John McCain, had suspended his campaign) but we're tanned, rested, and ready, and we're starting with one of the easiest--or hardest--states, depending on how you look at it. The idea of picking just six books to represent Mississippi is absurd: the state may usually finish near the bottom in education stats, but per capita I think the only ones that can match it for literary firepower are Massachusetts, New York, and neighboring Louisiana (having to limit Washington, D.C., to just three books will be a challenge too). As I mentioned in introducing Pete Melman's Louisiana list, with a state like this you either have to go straight canonical and stick with the icons, or mix it up with some surprises and leave some folks howling (justifiably!) at the ones you left off.

My inclination for these lists is toward the canonical, but I'll throw in a little curveball below (and my honorable mention list would do many other states proud as their first string):

• Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner: All right, if you're going to do it, let's do it right: the Faulkneriest Faulkner, the doomful Southern past rising up in a swirl of consciousness and at least one thousand-word sentence. By the way, I ran across a piece on the web about fellow Mississippian Shelby Foote's 1936 review of Absalom, apparently one of the few at the time that recognized its greatness. I mention it because the review begins with one of the best sentences I've read in some time: "The characters of a William Faulkner novel seem to be struggling like monsters seen through a distorting glass, subsisting on some inward reserve of undefeat without air or food." Foote, I should mention, wrote it for a student journal while he was a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of North Carolina. Geez.
• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner: Only six spots, and Bill gets two? Yes. And this weird charmer is a nice appetizer for the great meal of Absalom. I "hated" Faulkner as a youngish reader until this one held my hand and showed me along...
• The Collected Stories by Eudora Welty: Forty-one tales to put up against anybody's.
• Black Boy by Richard Wright: Ralph Ellison famously wrote about the hero of Native Son that Richard Wright "could imagine Bigger, but Bigger could not possibly imagine Richard Wright." But in Wright's memoir of self-education against all obstructions, you can see how a young man, hemmed in, could still imagine becoming Richard Wright.
• Airships by Barry Hannah: The most-admired collection from Welty's successor as the Mississippian master of the short story.
• Oil Notes by Rick Bass: It's hard to remember, now that Bass has settled so definitively into the Montana wilderness, that he first came on the scene with the stories of Mississippi and Texas in The Watch and this one-of-a-kind memoir of working as a petroleum geologist in Jackson. It's a young book, and, as you can tell from the copy I just pulled out of my shelf for the first time in years, I carried it around a lot with me when I was young. Here's a bit from close to the end:

They're not alike at all, really: writing and geology. There's a deceit in writing; you're trying to pull all the clever elements together and toss out the dull and round-edged ones. Basically, it's building a lie and then swinging the lie's massiveness into the path of the reader and hiding behind it. Curiously, however, in geology, when I pour a cup of coffee and sit down and begin to map, I'm not hiding behind anything; there's no pretense, no deceit, just an inquisitive hunger and innocence where I am neither superior nor inferior to the reader, but am the reader. There's truly an amount of trust. The earth lies there, still, and obeys certain rules. I have faith that I am not going to let myself believe something that is not true. It is perhaps the purest thing I've ever done.

And that personal pick at the end bumps out any number of deserved claimants, which I am embarrassed to be leaving off: Larry Brown, Margaret Walker, Willie Morris, Donna Tartt, Anne Moody, Frederick Barthelme (how I'd love to include Double Down, the bizarre Biloxi gambling memoir written with his brother Steve), Lewis Nordan, Ellen Gilchrist, the aforementioned Mr. Foote, and Last Train from Memphis, that first volume of Guralnick's Elvis bio that I may have to find a way to shoehorn into Tennessee after all. --Tom

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

National Book Award Nominees Announced

Here are this year's National Book Award nominees, announced this morning by Scott Turow in Chicago. (I'm including our sales rank, as of about 11 am Pacific time this morning, for each book--I'm curious how those will change as a result of the nominations, so I'll check back in with updates over the next few weeks):

Fiction:

• The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon (Amazon sales rank: #4,012)
• Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner (#16,765)
• Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen (#6,413)
• Home by Marilynne Robinson (#191)
• The End by Salvatore Scibona (#497,039)

Nonfiction:

• This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust (#5,941)
• The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (#408)
• The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer (#518)
• Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives by Jim Sheeler (#17,638)
• The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order by Joan Wickersham (#44,054)

Poetry:

• Watching the Spring Festival by Frank Bidart (#181,954)
• Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems by Mark Doty (#21,019)
• Creatures of a Day by Reginald Gibbons (#211,573)
• Without Saying by Richard Howard (#495,848)
• Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith (#25,301)

Young People's Literature:

• Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson (#5,492)
• The Underneath by Kathi Appelt (#8,288)
• What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell (#67,479)
• The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart (#41,430)
• The Spectacular Now by Tim Tharp (no sales rank yet!)

As always, I find the field of good American fiction too wide to see many snubs--unlike last year, with Denis Johnson and Junot Diaz, no novel has really stepped forward as a major book this year so far. Probably the best reviewed American novel this year (Netherland), is by a Brit, as are many of my own fiction favorites (My Revolutions, Pravda, The Northern Clemency). I did think Home was very good, and it's good to see Hemon and great to see Rachel Kushner there for her debut (see my interview with her from July). The news on that list (for me at least) is The End, another first novel: I have to confess this is the first I've heard of it, but based on the reviews on our page for it, I want to track down a copy ASAP. There are only five customer reviews so far, but you can hear a chorus of jaws hitting the floor: one "WOW," one "wow," one "WHOA!", one "astonishing," and one "astonished."

On the other lists, we should have a Q&A with Annette Gordon-Reed soon on her book on the Hemings and Jefferson families (or, I should say, family). And on the Young People's list, a lot of people will just be discovering those picks: the last three books have not been released yet (they'll be available this month and next), which helps to explain the low (and in one case nonexistent) sales ranks. And a shout-out to our Lauren Nemroff, who pegged The Underneath as a future award winner on our Best of the Month page back in May.

The winners will be announced on November 19. --Tom

2008 Booker Prize: The White Tiger

Aravind Adiga just became the third debut novelist (and the first of the three not to include the word "God" in his or her title) to win the Man Booker Prize, for The White Tiger. (He's also the second winner to be younger than me at the time of the award, but who's counting...). The bookies (or, rather, the betting action their odds reflect) are right about the Booker about as often as they are about the Kentucky Derby, and once again the favorite (Sebastian Barry for The Secret Scripture) went home empty. Also among the disappointed was Philip Hensher for The Northern Clemency, which Knopf has moved up to a November pub date in the US, and which I am loving, but now at least when I champion it I won't just look like a Booker bandwagoneer.

The Booker judges said, "In the end, The White Tiger prevailed because the judges felt that it shocked and entertained in equal measure. The novel undertakes the extraordinarily difficult task of gaining and holding the reader's sympathy for a thoroughgoing villain. The book gains from dealing with pressing social issues and significant global developments with astonishing humour." If you're looking for some more graceful praise than that, the Literary Saloon has linked to more than a dozen reviews, mostly raves, although its own review only came out to a B-. The Economist called Adiga "the Charles Dickens of the call-centre generation" and his villainous hero, Balram Halwai, reminded the Independent on Sunday "of the endless talkers that populate the novels of the great Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal," but in the Washington Post, Tony D'Souza heard the echoes instead of "the pop and fluff of The Nanny Diaries irony." The book has also gathered 19 customer reviews on our site, almost all of them glowing, since it came out in the States in April. A new paperback edition, moved up in time for the announcement, was released today: a nice bet by the Free Press, although now they are going to have to update the little sticker that says "Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize." I used the cover image for the original hardcover above, though, because I think it's one of the loveliest of the year. --Tom

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Alan Furst on A Most Wanted Man by John le Carre: "Coincidentally, a few weeks after the cold war sat up in its coffin and smiled, John le Carré publishes one of the best novels he’s ever written. Maybe the best, it’s possible. What the hell got into him? Well, not quite 9/11, more its aftermath.... Something said earlier in this review might better be amended. The concept of 'best book' is difficult for the writer and reader; there are too many variables. Truer to say that this is le Carré’s strongest, most powerful novel, which has a great deal to do with its near perfect narrative pace and the pleasure of its prose, but even more to do with the emotions of its audience, what the reader brings to the book." Kakutani last week, not so much: "The moral chiaroscuro and nuanced ambiguities that distinguished his cold war novels give way, in these pages, to a blunter, more predictable story line that lurches, at times, into sentimentality and contrivance."
• J.R. Moehringer on State by State, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey (did you think I could pass up quoting this one?): "Weiland and Wilsey assembled 50 of America’s finest writers and asked them to contribute essays on the same general theme: why my state is special — or not. The result is a funny, moving, rousing collection, greater than the sum of its excellent parts, a convention of literary super­delegates, each one boisterously nominating his or her piece of the Republic."
• Elissa Schappell on When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson: "Conclusion: While Atkinson engages us with black humor and rich character development and while Reggie Chase is a delight, the absence of sustained suspense begins to fray our connection to the characters. Sensing perhaps that she’s lollygagging, Atkinson sprints for the last 75 pages, delivering a rushed, overly neat ending that, while cleanly tying up the big threads, leaves many questions about the characters and their futures unanswered. My powers of deduction suggest Atkinson’s 'When Will There Be Good News?' is, and this is just a theory, a setup for the next, and, I trust, more satisfying Jackson Brodie mystery. Of course I don’t have proof. That’s just a guess."

Washington Post:

• Ron Charles on Serena by Ron Rash: "Serena, the Lady Macbeth of Ron Rash's stirring new novel, wouldn't fret about getting out the damned spot. She wouldn't even wash her hands; she'd just lick it off. I couldn't take my eyes off this villainess, and any character who does ends up dead.... It's too hypnotic to break away from. Innocent people are in peril, and calamity seems as unstoppable as the millions of board feet Pemberton's men send surging down the river. And the final chapter is as flawless and captivating as anything I've read this year, a perfectly creepy shock that will leave you hearing nothing but the wind between the stumps."
• Donna Foote on Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America by Paul Tough: "We don't know how this story will end. Time will tell if Geoffrey Canada has hit on what it will take to break the cycle of poverty in America. In the meantime, there are lessons to be learned from the Harlem Children's Zone -- about the power of an idea, the role culture plays in student achievement, accountability, the indomitable human spirit. This book should be on every policymaker's reading list."

Los Angeles Times:

• Richard Rayner on The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly: "Critics often compare Connelly with Raymond Chandler, a readily comprehensible bracketing -- Chandler was, and Connelly is, the signature Los Angeles crime writer of his era -- but one that, in a way, does neither of them great service.... Chandler had no great command of plot; Connelly is a master of it, teasing out the lines of 'The Brass Verdict' in a seemingly effortless way. Chandler was a romantic, Connelly is a realist who gains power through precision and restraint."
• Susan Salter Reynolds on Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury by Alison Light: "It's a fair question: Do we really need another book on Bloomsbury? The answer is, resoundingly, yes. Especially 'Mrs. Woolf and the Servants.' Aside from the prurient and too-deep interests of fanatics like myself (a lifelong interest in details sordid and philosophical that rivals my daughter's fascination with 'Gossip Girl'), the fact remains: Without servants, there would have been no Bloomsbury."

The Books of the States: Intermission

In our normally scheduled programming, this would be the day for Mississippi, but, like John McCain, I'm going to suspend my campaign for a short time. Not for the sake of the country, but for my sanity. This has been as much fun as I expected (even more so, with all the excellent guest lists coming in), but a little crazier to actually do every single day, so I'm calling a week-long intermission in our march of the states. We'll start again next Monday with Mississippi (all those great books and only six slots to fill?!?) and we have many more excellent guests lined up to share their native expertise in the days to follow, including Heidi Julavits, Kevin Brockmeier, Maud Newton, Cristina Henriquez, Charles Bock, Benjamin Kunkel, Anthony Doerr, and, naturally, the State by State editors themselves, taking on their home states of Minnesota (Matt Weiland) and California (Sean Wilsey--55 electoral votes!).

I reserve the right to call another intermission down the road, Nicholas Nickleby-style (though I will not be serving dinner), if it comes to that. But we will be done by Christmas!

And we'll stay plenty busy on Omnivoracious: it's a big awards week, among many other things, with the Booker winner announced on Tuesday and the National Book Award nominees revealed on Wednesday. And in the meantime, keep writing in books that we've missed in the states we've already done. These lists are all works in progress. Thanks. --Tom

Nobel Prize to Blogger!

Well, we haven't quite gotten to the point where Cory Doctorow or Geoff Manaugh gets the invite to Stockholm, but a sidebar to Paul Krugman's Nobel for Economics win today that I haven't seen mentioned is that this may be the first time the big prize has gone to a prominent blogger (who had a very short post--with a very long comments/congratulations thread--about the news this morning). And of course also a sharply opinionated columnist for the New York Times. Who's next: Frank Rich getting a belated Literature nod for his theater criticism, or the Peace Prize committee continuing their recent green turn by tapping Tom Friedman?

With Krugman prominently in the fray for a solution to the current global meltdown (he's been advocating for a partial bank nationalization that the UK's Gordon Brown has just embraced and our own Hank Paulson appears to be moving toward), this award could not have been thrown more directly in the public mix of the moment. Krugman consciously made a move a while back toward public explanation and advocacy for his ideas while keeping up with his front-line academic work, and you can find his recent public manifestos in the bestsellers The Conscience of a Liberal and The Great Unraveling, but if you want to move further along the point-headed spectrum toward the work on trade and globalization that won him the prize, you could turn to two books of lectures for an academic audience (but still written, say the reviews, with his usual clarity), Geography and Trade and Development, Geography, and Economic Theory. And to go even further into the weeds, might I suggest Rethinking International Trade and Strategic Trade Policy and the New International Economics? And if you want to plunk down a few bills for some macroeconomics homeschooling, there is his standard textbook on the subject, International Economics: Theory and Policy. --Tom

P.S. I just have to point out the top graphic bar the Nobel site uses for their list of previous economics winners (see below) because the three gentlemen pictured (is the guy in the middle Milton Friedman?) look so adorably much like, well, economists. Although I must say most of the econ profs I had in college actually looked a lot more like the bearded Krugman....

P.P.S. Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has (of course) a much more authoritative look at Krugman's various books, if you're looking for the first, or the next, place to start reading.

The Books of the States: Indiana (11 electoral votes)

When I say "Indiana books" do you say "Booth Tarkington!"? Well I do, which may not be the best advertisement for Indiana books, since when you say "Booth Tarkington" most people say "Who?" (And even if you say "The Magnificent Ambersons," most people, if they said anything, would say "Orson Welles!" Or, if they were me, "Anne Baxter!") But scratch the surface a little and you get a fascinating tour of 20th-century America, including two well-loved writers who brought World War II home (in very different ways) and two of the landmark sociological studies of the midcentury, in honor of one of which I've chosen today's quarter subject, perhaps the least likely to be approved by the United States Mint.

• Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut: You won't get much argument from me that the book to pick from Indiana's best-known home-grown writer (who no doubt should be on the quarter above) is Slaughterhouse-Five, but Breakfast of Champions is the one of his major books that returns to the midwest: to Midland City, home of that unhinged Pontiac dealer, Dwayne Hoover.
• The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington: If you take 100 people who have seen Citizen Kane, probably 10 of them have seen The Magnificent Ambersons (even though it's better! Really!). Of those 10, probably one (okay, one if you're lucky) has read Tarkington's original novel, and I'm not that one. But still--I'd like to.
• Sexual Behavior in the American Male and Sexual Behavior in the American Female by Alfred Kinsey: I'll leave it to someone else to measure the percentage of the world we live in that can be accounted to Kinsey's taboo-obliterating studies, but as he passes from observer to observed, readers might substitute (or at least supplement) with James H. Jones's evenhandedly revelatory recent biography, Kinsey, or T.C. Boyle's Kinsey novel, The Inner Circle.
• Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture by Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd: What was once "Modern" is now vital history about middle America (specifically, Muncie, Ind.) in the '20s. Meanwhile, can I suggest a new nickname that, I admit, carries none of the mystery or spirit of the current Hoosier one: Indiana, The Studied State?
• Brave Men by Ernie Pyle: His front-line reporting of the lives of infantrymen--in this collection, those fighting in Europe in 1943 and 1944--made him the best-known World War II correspondent by the time of his death near Okinawa in 1945.
• Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back by Thomas Geoghegan: One of my favorite books: a one-of-a-kind memoir--funny, romantic, stylish, self-mocking but dead serious--of a Chicago labor lawyer whose biggest case is fighting for steelworker pensions in nearby Gary, Indiana: "Some people think Chicago is a tough town, but compared with Indiana ... well, it's like Burlington, Vermont. And if there is trouble in Chicago, it's Indiana where they dump the body."
• The Dillinger Days by John Toland: A fellow omnivore with a bit of a thing for the gangsters was first hooked by this fast-paced 1963 classic.
• Raintree County by Ross Lockridge: What is it about Raintree County, Lockridge's only novel before he took his life at age 33, that makes nearly every person who reviews it type the words "Great American Novel" (see the review quotes and customer reviews on the Amazon page)? Is it the 1088 pages? This would seem a perfect candidate to be a New York Review Books rediscovered classic if Chicago Review Press hadn't stepped in with their own 2007 edition.
• A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel: Kimmel's bestselling memoir of her small-town childhood is the only representative I have on the list from the new century, but please suggest your own ideas for the best people writing about Indiana today.
• The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody by Will Cuppy: Funny just doesn't last: What mid-century humorist could still have four books in print? Cuppy does, thanks to David R. Godine, and though I'm tempted to include How to Attract the Wombat (if only for the beauty of his pointlessly dyspeptic chapter title, "Birds That Can't Even Fly"), I'll go with his most popular book, a cut-'em-down-to-size tour through history's most infamous personalities.
• A Season on the Brink by John Feinstein: I'm not sure die-hard IU fans will approve, but if John Feinstein is the Bob Woodward (for better or worse) of sports journalism, this open-access account of a year with the shortest fuse in intercollegiate athletics, Bob Knight, was his All the President's Men.

--Tom

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

The Books of the States: Louisiana (9 electoral votes; Guest: Peter Charles Melman)

Louisiana, with almost as much per capita power in book-writing (and book-inspiring) as music-making, is one of those midsize states where you could fill up their book delegation with strictly iconic material. And god knows if I was doing the choosing that's what we'd end up with: a list of books you all could nod and say you'd heard of and maybe even read. So my thanks to Peter Charles Melman, our guest nominator for the Pelican State (can't a state as lively as Louisiana do better than that for a nickname?), for finding the right balance between familiar but undeniable and lesser-known but necessary. Even if he did knock my dear, dear Moviegoer off the list at the last moment: that's ice cold, Pete.

Pete was born in New York and has recently moved back there as part of the Great Brooklyn Writer Migration of the 00s, but he spent his teens in Lafayette, LA, and returned there for grad school in writing. And he returned again in his first novel, Landsman, a boisterous story of a rogue's redemption during the Civil War, sparked by his learning (from one of our other guest nominators, Tony Horwitz, as it happens) of the many Jews who fought for the Confederacy. (You can read our Q&A on the book from last year.) Here's his guided tour of literary Louisiana:

• The Awakening by Kate Chopin: Certainly literature has the power to move and delight, but I find that few novels actually deserve to be called "important." Chopin's novella, The Awakening, however, is as important a piece of fiction as you'll likely come across. Written in 1899, it details the emotional dislocation of Edna Pontellier, a woman so oppressed by the Creole Victorian culture into which she's married that she possesses neither the vocabulary to express her need for independence, nor the ability to truly understand it. Tragic, beautiful, and yep, important.
• The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld by Herbert Asbury: Thank God for Herbert Asbury, the unapologetic yellow journalist from the 1930s who, a few years before publishing this masterpiece on the bawdiness and tawdriness of the Vieux Carré, wrote The Gangs of New York. Asbury never met a descriptive adjective he didn't like, and his obvious love for dirty sex, tainted booze, pistol-whippings, and municipal corruption makes for a rollicking good time. Everything you ever wanted to know about the history of New Orleans depravity, but were afraid to ask your parish priest.
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole: While we're thanking God, let's show Him some appreciation for Walker Percy. Now, while his The Moviegoer came close to making my list — and I'm sure some will howl that it didn't — I do think it's critical to mention him. If for nothing else than for the wisdom he showed in humoring John Kennedy Toole's mother and actually reading, then publishing, the yellowed manuscript she planted on his desk at LSU. That manuscript was her dead son's sprawling novel, and would one day become, among other things, the most purchased used book at the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan. A Confederacy of Dunces is everything you've heard it to be: masterfully, if maniacally, crafted, at times offensive, at times tender, poignant as hell, ferociously funny. And if you've ever eaten a Bourbon Street Lucky Dog at 3:00 a.m., and have lived to tell about it, you know full well that Ignatius J. Reilly's fetishism is well-justified.
• Dancing After Hours by Andre Dubus: Andre Dubus could write. Goddamn, could he write. It doesn't matter that he spent much of his adult life in Massachusetts, where he died too young at 62; he was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, grew up in my adopted-hometown of Lafayette, and a few of the stories in this marvelous collection are set there, so in my book, he's a Louisiana boy, through and through. True, many of Dubus's themes flirt with conventionalism — adultery, faith, guilt — but the subtlety and sophistication with which he engages them lets you know immediately you're reading a master. What's more, literature runs rich in his family veins: his cousin, James Lee Burke, author of the Edgar Award-winning Dave Robicheaux mystery series, certainly deserves mention, as does his son, Andre Dubus III, author of the National Book Award finalist, House of Sand and Fog.
• Bloodline by Ernest J. Gaines: Since we're discussing short story collections, I've got to acknowledge Nobel Prize-nominee and my former thesis adviser at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, Ernest J. Gaines. As laconic as a stump, yet warmly so, Mr. Gaines offers in Bloodline a glimpse into one African-American community's struggle to maintain dignity in a world that would have otherwise. Mr. Gaines's "The Sky is Gray," an abbreviated bildungsroman of sorts, perhaps best typifies his work: regional in its style, universal in its ambition. When reading his work, you can almost feel Gaines's hope that whatever integrity he possesses — and he possesses much, I assure you — will flow ungoverned from his fountain pen onto his yellow legal pad (his preferred method of writing).
• The Civil War Diary of Clara Solomon by Clara Solomon: I came across Elliott Ashkenazi's edited Civil War Diary of Clara Solomon while researching a project of my own, and was shocked to discover that the sixteen-year-old Sephardic Jewess, Clara Solomon, was as neurotic as any youth of today, if about four hundred times as eloquent. My God, the phrases this girl was capable of crafting; mind you, many of them are as purple as the languorous Louisiana dusk, heaving with cloudbursts over the all-too-parched earth, but often gorgeously so. That said, for an account of civilian life in New Orleans before and during the Civil War, especially if for some arcane reason you happen to be seeking to view it through a Jewish lens, there can't be a finer resource.
• Alligator Sue by Sharon Arms Doucet and Anne Wilsdorf: Beyond the fact that a copy of this State Library of Louisiana Young Readers' Choice Award is inscribed to my one-year-old son, Charles Vilmos, by "[his] Louisiana friend, Sharon Arms Doucet," Alligator Sue delightfully calls into question just who we are and how we let others define us. De rigueur for young reading, perhaps, but any story with a heroine named Suzanne Marie Sabine Chicot Thibodeaux — Sue, for short — who gets raised by Mama Coco, a particularly forgiving alligator, is absolutely worth sharing. Just ask Charles Vilmos.
• A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler: Although I can see how some might consider Bob Butler's voicey, 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection to be cultural poaching, the Vietnamese immigrant population he appropriates in Good Scent generally comes across as lovingly and sensitively embraced. These stories are tender and sincere, and "Fairy Tale," one of the best in the collection, tackles head-on the worn trope of White Man Saves Non-White Whore in a way that, despite the odds, works wonderfully. Aside from setting the stories in Louisiana, Butler taught at McNeese State University in Lake Charles from 1985 to 2000, over a decade after serving as an intelligence office in the Vietnam War.
• All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren: Folks in Louisiana still like their politics, though without the same passion for the heretical that they used to. As a result, no discussion of Louisiana, either of its literature or of its politics, is complete without honoring Robert Penn Warren’s brilliant roman à clef, All the King's Men. Based on irreverent governor Huey P. Long's life, as seen through the guise of fictional Willie Stark, Penn Warren's novel is as much an investigation of the classical notion of hubris as it is mid-twentieth century Louisianan politics.  In short, it's not to be missed, even if the novel itself is anything but short. At 600 pages, Penn Warren, professor at LSU from 1933 to 1942, makes you earn it. Still, if you're not sure your attention span can handle a tome that thick, give a listen to ol' Willie: "Dirt's a funny thing, come to think of it, there ain't a thing but dirt on this green God's globe except what's under water, and that's dirt too. It's dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain't a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt." Ah yes, Southern literature.

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

Nobel Prize for Literature: Europe It Is!

The Swedes put their money, all 10 million kroner of it, where their chairman's mouth was, awarding the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio of France. Le Clézio was a bit of an underdog (14/1 odds from the bookies, I believe), and pretty much a complete unknown in the "insular" U.S., but he is a big deal at home: in 1994, according to Time, he was voted the best writer in the French language (although he said he would have voted for Julien Gracq). The Nobel committee called him an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization," and Le Clézio himself, who has led a nomadic life in Africa, Central America, and elsewhere (including Albuquerque these days) after spending much of his childhood in Nigeria, has said

Western culture has become too monolithic. It places the greatest possible emphasis on its urban and technical side, thus preventing the development of other forms of expression — religiosity and feelings, for example. The entire unknowable part of the human being is obscured in the name of rationalism. It is my awareness of this that has pushed me toward other civilizations.

I'll defer to the Literary Saloon for much of the coverage--they are on their game today, having already pulled review quotes all the way back to the 60s for many of his books--but the best piece I've found on him so far is Lev Grossman's in Time. Also see coverage from the New York Times and USA Today, and the Nobelers own bio-bibliography.

It looks like only five of his many works are currently in print in English translations:

• The Mexican Dream: Or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilization (1988, trans. 1993) (see the U. of Chicago Press's happy blog post about the prize)
• The Prospector (1985, trans. 1993)
• Onitsha (1991, trans. 1997)
• The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts (1982, trans. 2002)
• Wandering Star (1992, trans. 2004)

We've put together a more complete list of his English translations and French originals on our site. There was an earlier wave of translations in the 60s and 70s, when Le Clézio first became famous, and we have used copies of many of those available (including a copy of his debut, The Interrogation (with its excellent, very French New Wavey cover), going at last check for $575). Hey, is that the author himself on the cover? Based on this equally glamorous Cartier-Bresson photo of the author and his wife (found here), I think it must be:

But it looks like the books most frequently mentioned as his most important haven't made it into English yet. The Nobel committee cites Désert, which "contains magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert, contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants," as his "definitive breakthrough as a novelist." And according to USA Today, when the committee chair was asked to recommend a book to start reading Le Clézio with, "he suggested the autobiographical 2003 novel Revolutions," which has been translated into Swedish and German, but not yet into English. --Tom

P.S. This just gives me one more chance to post the greatest author award reaction of all time, Doris Lessing getting the Nobel news last year:

The Books of the States: Ohio (20 electoral votes)

I have to confess: I came pretty close to feeling that I had failed Ohio. This big battleground state is alloted 20 delegates, and I was scuffling a bit to get to that number. But somehow, remembering that Bill Waterson was from, of all places, Chagrin Falls, OH, made me feel a little better about my list, though it took me an extra day to get it on the blog and, as is my refrain, I am sure there are blind spots (or just plain old errors in judgment) that can be remedied with your help.

• Beloved by Toni Morrison: Burdened now with being the Great Novel of Our Time (and being assigned as required reading for a generation--just read some of our cranky customer reviews), but to my mind it's still worth all the praise it's gotten, if we could somehow chip away at the encrustation of honors and come back to it fresh again.
• Sula by Toni Morrison: A slim but no less powerful companion.
• Personal Memoirs by Ulysses S. Grant: A failed businessman, a great general, a mostly lousy president, and, at the end of it all, one of the finest American autobiographers.
• Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson: Another literary monument that can surprise you with its strangeness (that Wing Biddlebaum still haunts me).
• The Complete Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Waterson: Is there any piece of American art about whose sheer awesomeness there is such unanimous agreement?
• My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber: Ohio is not only the birthplace of presidents, but of New Yorker writers. This short and charming memoir looks back on his formative years in Columbus: "Nobody from Columbus has ever made a first-rate wanderer in the Conradean tradition. Some of them have been fairly good at disappearing for a few days to turn up in a hotel in Louisville with a bad headache and no recollection of how they got there, but they always scurry back."
• Family by Ian Frazier: My favorite New Yorker writer has always identified himself as a guy from Ohio while making a career out of writing about his adopted homes (the Great Plains, New York City, and soon Siberia). But in Family he excavated generations of his roots with his usual odd and sympathetic humor.
• Saturday Night by Susan Orlean: Yet another New Yorker Ohioan. She has yet to write her Ohio book, but in this first collection she kept to more domestic locations, observing Saturday night rituals across the U.S.
• The History of the Standard Oil Company by Ida Tarbell: This still-riveting expose of the tentacles of Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust, hq'd in Cleveland, could be paired with Titan, Ron Chernow's recent acclaimed John D. Rockefeller bio.
• In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William Gass: Gass's stubbornly elegant essays and his long-labored-over would-be masterpiece, The Tunnel, have come to overshadow this early collection of formalist gems, of which the breathtaking novella, "The Pederson Kid," is enough to put him on any list you are making.
• Crooked River Burning by Mark Winegardner: Before being given the keys to the Godfather franchise by the Puzo estate (with surprising success), Winegardner tackled the Great Cleveland Novel, earning comparisons to Franzen and Doctorow.
• Thomas and Beulah by Rita Dove: The former Poet Laureate's most celebrated collection is this "low-key epic" (to quote one of our customer reviewers) based on her grandparents' migration north to Akron.
• American Splendor by Harvey Pekar: Pekar, who joined with a series of artists to open comics to the autobiographical everyday, has met every embrace from the mass culture with his usual sour skepticism and has kept his focus intensely local on his life in Cleveland.
• Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny: Obviously, like all the Ohioan SF/fantasy master's work, not set anywhere close to Ohio, but our reviewer called this 1967 Hugo winner Zelazny's "finest work, ... a huge, lumbering, magical story."
• M.C. Higgins the Great by Virginia Hamilton: Our Emile Coulter said this story of environmental destruction, which swept the Newbery, the National Book Award, and the Horn Book Award for children's lit, "has a power that runs deeper than the coal seam snaking through M.C.'s mountain."
• New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver: Oliver has long called New England home, but much of her poetry still calls on her suburban Cleveland childhood.
• In the Blind by Eugene Marten: I found out about this stylishly terse tale of a life on the margins from customer Erin O'Brien's Best Cleveland Fiction Writers Listmania on our site.
• Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock: This 2008 debut knocked out our own Jon Foro, who expressed his admiration in terms far more visceral than I could conjure: "Pollock pulls no punches--his prose is blunt and visceral, as well as stylish and skilled--and reading these mini grand guignols can be like crunching on a mouthful of your own broken teeth."
• The Zane Grey Frontier Trilogy by Zane Grey: The pride of Zanesville, OH, and likely the bestselling Ohio writer of all time, looked further west for most of his subjects, but he based these early books on his own family history, when Ohio was itself the frontier.
• The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank by Erma Bombeck: Perhaps Grey's sales runner up among Ohio authors, Bombeck parlayed weekly columns for her suburban paper into one of the most popular syndicated columns of the 60s and 70s and a series of bestselling collections. As a 70s kid I thought this title was hilarious even before I knew what a septic tank was.

--Tom

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

The Books of the States: Tennessee (11 electoral votes)

The problem--the only problem--with a wonderful guest post like John Jeremiah Sullivan's on Kentucky yesterday is that now I have to follow it. So I apologize in advance for my carpetbagging attempt to represent the state of Tennessee. That said, I found plenty of good books to include, so much so that I'm having trouble limiting my list to just 11 (in fact, I failed). But no doubt I've missed many others; please add your own. Here goes:

• A Death in the Family by James Agee: The passionate variety of Agee's short career makes him prime for rediscovery again and again. Sainted for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (look for it when we get to Alabama), he can be reclaimed for his movie criticism, and recredited for his work on that great, weird film, The Night of the Hunter. A Death in the Family is his only novel and his most Tennessean book; unlike most of his other work, it was acclaimed when it first appeared, winning the Pulitzer. That was too late for Agee, though, who was already dead at the age of 45.
• Sweet Soul Music by Peter Guralnick: If limiting oneself to 11 books for Tennessee is hard, just think of the trouble in selecting a similar list of music. And what are the music books on Memphis and Nashville? Guralnick's classic on the rise and fall of Memphis's Stax Records is an obvious choice, although I was tempted to go instead with Careless Love, the second, Graceland-era half of his masterful Elvis biography (I'm saving the first volume for Mississippi, although space is going to be tough for that state).
• I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by Twelve Southerners: The legendary group manifesto from the Agrarians, a movement that organized at Vanderbilt in the '20s and '30s. Some of its members, like Robert Penn Warren, later distanced themselves, and they were often dismissed as mere Old South nostalgists, but people will still be reading this collection in a hundred years, and not only because it encapsulated a movement and a moment so well.
• The Children by David Halberstam: Halberstam cut his reporter's teeth covering the early Civil Rights movement for the Nashville Tennessean, and he returned to the story four decades later with this account of the young activists, led by James Lawson, who organized the Nashville sit-ins and went on to become some of the best-known civil rights leaders of the '60s.
• Suttree by Cormac McCarthy: The culmination of what everyone calls McCarthy's Faulkner period, before he set out for the Western borderlands and immortality.
• A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor: Taylor, a master of the short form, found late success (and a Pulitzer) with his second novel, whose story hinges, in great and knowing detail, on the social differences between Nashville and Memphis.
• The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett: The best-known Tennessee writer of our day has set most of her novels elsewhere (e.g., South America). Although her second novel, Taft, does take place in Memphis, I'll choose her well-loved first one, set just over the border in Kentucky.
• Poetry and the Age by Randall Jarrell: At Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle, they regularly ask well-known critics to recommend the five books they would put in their own Critical Library. Again and again the critics have chosen Jarrell's 1953 collection, Poetry and the Age: so much so that former NBCC president John Freeman was moved to reassess that lost (but clearly not forgotten) classic.
• Waylon: An Autobiography by Waylon Jennings: We've covered Memphis music, but what about Nashville? You could go with Nicholas Dawidoff's In the Country of Country (although he makes a point to search out country music beyond Nashville) or Charles K. Wolfe's A Good-Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry--or an even better book I don't know about---but I'm partial to this memoir by a Texan turned Nashville outlaw, which I came across on a vacation-home shelf a few years back and immediately put aside whatever I was reading so I could dive in.
• On Lynching by Ida B. Wells-Barnett: This fearless crusader, who refused to move to the colored train car (and bit the conductor who tried to budge her!) 71 years before Rosa Parks, stirred up so much ire with her Memphis newspapering that she had to move to Chicago, where she published the famous anti-lynching pamplets collected here.
• Shiloh by Shelby Foote: Foote wrote first about the war that would become his great subject in this fictional foot-soldiers' account of the pivotal west Tennessee battle.
• Kinflicks by Lisa Alther: A bestselling novel of second-wave feminism that follows a young Tennessee woman to college in New England and back. It's fallen out of print, but Doris Lessing's comparison of its "salty" humor to Tom Jones makes me want to track down a copy.
• Summer of the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion by Edward J. Larson: Larson won a 1998 Pulitzer for this history that overturned the Inherit the Wind myths about the "monkey trial," recalling the small-town boosterism and bizarre theatrics of the events in Denton Dayton, TN.
• And how can you have a Tennessee book list without its most famous son, Andrew Jackson? I'm not sure what the best book on Old Hickory is (Schlesinger's Age of Jackson? Robert Remini's three-volume biography?), but the timing is right to pencil in American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, upcoming from Newsweek editor and fellow Tennesseean Jon Meacham.

Well, there you have 14 already, and that's without mentioning that The Firm is set in Memphis... --Tom

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Garrison Keillor on Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes: "Julian Barnes, an atheist turned agnostic, has decided at the age of 62 to address his fear of death — why should an agnostic fear death who has no faith in an afterlife? How can you be frightened of Nothing? On this simple question Barnes has hung an elegant memoir and meditation, a deep seismic tremor of a book that keeps rumbling and grumbling in the mind for weeks thereafter.... I don’t know how this book will do in our hopeful country, with the author’s bleak face on the cover, but I will say a prayer for retail success. It is a beautiful and funny book, still booming in my head."
• Maslin on Serena by Ron Rash: "'Serena' is Ron Rash’s fourth novel. For those unfamiliar with the elegantly fine-tuned voice of this Appalachian poet and storyteller, a writer whose reputation has been largely regional despite an O. Henry Prize and other honors, it will prompt instant interest in his first, second and third."
• Alex Kuczynski on A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey Through Fatherhood and Divorce by Alec Baldwin: "As brilliant an actor as Baldwin can be, his comic acuity may be so keen partly because we associate him in real life with a darker, more dolorous personality. His new book, 'A Promise to Ourselves,' is a treatise on how the family law system in America is broken, and why it should be changed. It is a serious book, masquerading as a manifesto but eventually turning into a desperately sad memoir, layered beneath the polemic, about the failure of Baldwin’s marriage and his estrangement from his only child. It’s the curse of the comic not to be taken seriously when he or she wants to be serious."
• James Traub on Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq: "'Tell Me How This Ends' is the first book about this new Iraq. It’s a first-rate piece of work, probing and conscientious, though reading a good-news book about one of America’s all-time bad-news stories can take some getting used to.... You cannot help being struck by the radical difference between Bush and his world, and Petraeus and his. The ­55-year-old general is a superachiever who took on all the toughest training assignments and came away with the ­medals, a perfectionist who demands as much from others as from himself and a deeply reflective figure — he has a Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton — who continually adapts to the lessons of experience. Petraeus puts no special store by his gut intuitions; in Iraq, he surrounded himself with junior officers as analytical, and as driven, as he is. Robinson singles out as his greatest gift not leadership but 'intellectual rigor,' which compelled him 'to mount a sustained effort to understand the problem.'"

Washington Post:

• Jonathan Yardley on A Most Wanted Man by John le Carre: "As one who has reviewed his work for more than three decades, always with admiration and at times with unfettered enthusiasm, I'd place A Most Wanted Man toward the lower end of the 21 novels he has now written. It is intelligent, of course, and immensely informative about espionage and the people who engage in it, but its prose occasionally is flabby (especially when the heroine is involved), the feelings its central characters have for each other are utterly unconvincing, and it ends on a note of clichéd, knee-jerk anti-Americanism that I find repellent. Now in his late 70s, le Carré perhaps has earned the right to phone a novel in, and phoned-in is what this one is."
• Amy Wilentz on Michelle: A Biography by Liza Mundy: "It's an odd beast, neither tabloid nor tome, less a biography than a clip-job that incorporates interviews and profiles by many other journalists, along with interviews that Mundy did in Chicago.... Even though this is a quickie book meant to capitalize on the public's current interest in Michelle Obama, it also manages, quietly and implicitly, to discount the paranoid fulminations that she has often inspired, especially among right-wing commentators."

Los Angeles Times:

• Laurel Maury on The Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones: "[C]ritics and pundits were weighing in on a work that almost no one had seen. So what exactly is the book like? 'The Jewel of Medina' is a second-rate bodice ripper or, rather, a second-rate bodice ripper-style romance (it doesn't really have sex scenes). It's readable enough, but it suffers from large swaths of purple prose. Paragraphs read like ad copy for a Rudolph Valentino movie.... I suspect Jones wanted to write a feminist text, sort of Islam 101 for the post-'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' generation. I can't say whether, from a religious point of view, 'The Jewel of Medina' is worth the anguish it's caused, but as literature, it's a misstep-ridden, pleasant-enough mediocrity."
• Thane Rosenbaum on What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire by Antonio Lobo Antunes: "Lobo Antunes has taken stream of consciousness to a new extreme. 'What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire?' is a rushing river of interior reflection, piercing imagery and excruciating shame. The debt owed to Faulkner is apparent, with his cerebral self-awareness and utter disregard of narrative and grammatical convention. Yet, this is most assuredly not your grandmother's Faulkner -- Lobo Antunes is Faulkner on crack. 'What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire?' is a novel of abundant ambition and astonishing grace, reaffirming the author's reputation as a master stylist with a uniquely original voice."

 

The Books of the States: Kentucky (8 electoral votes; Guest: John Jeremiah Sullivan)

I'm already on record in this cross-country wander as being once narrowly diverted from a career of horseplaying and a subscriber to Harper's, so it's perhaps no surprise that I recall vividly "Horseman, Pass By," John Jeremiah Sullivan's lengthy 2002 piece from that magazine on his father, a sportswriter, and Kentucky horse racing. The article won a National Magazine Award and later grew into Blood Horses, a book about fathers and horses that one review called "As unconventionally lovely a book as you are likely to read for some time."

His State by State essay is also lovely and unconventional: steering clear of the travelogue or personal reminiscence for a profile of Constantine Rafinesque, an eccentric polymath genius (hmm, sounds like Guy Davenport--see below), born in the Ottoman Empire who became a botany professor at Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky., in the early 19th century before, according to legend cited by Wikipedia (and it doesn't get more authoritative than that!), leaving the university with a curse upon its halls, which were soon destroyed by fire. Here is a representative passage from that piece, concerning Native American earthen mounds:

There are a few places left in Kentucky, mostly on family farms, where you can see them as Rafinesque did, geometric land sculptures covered with grass, half in the field and half in the forest. Rafinesque declares it "high time that these monuments should all be accurately surveyed" and undertakes the work himself. But the book he produces, The American Nations, is worthless, an interminable pseudo-scholarly unfolding of his theories on the origin of New World societies, which he contends sprang from a voyage of Mediterranean
ür-colonizers, the Atalantes. On and on, lineages of chiefs, names, dates, for thousands of years, information that would change everything, had Rafinesque actually possessed it, had he not somehow himself been able to sit there and endure the sheer tedium of inventing it. And then, not content with fraud, he descends to forgery, cooking up an entire migration saga for the Lenape Indian tribe, one that corroborates to a striking extent his ideas about prehistory.

Sullivan, who was an editor at Harper's and now contributes to GQ, was born, like Hunter S. Thompson, in Louisville, and is even more qualified to make this selection than I'd thought, as he was the lucky one to do the Paris Review interview (not online, unfortunately) with Davenport, the singular man he calls below "the magician of Lexington," a South Carolina native who accepted an appointment at the University of Kentucky in 1963 and became a reason all by himself to read Kentucky. But not the only reason: pound for pound, I'm not sure any other state will be able to match the eight books he's chosen below for interest, locality, and strange variety:

• Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by Z.Z. Packer: Packer: Okay, born in Chicago, but grew up in Louisville and was graduated high school there. Has been described as "Louisville's" in the Courier-Journal--we can claim her. I remember when "Brownies" came out in Harper's in 1999, the atmosphere of newly arrived talent. Her novel about buffalo soldiers leaving the south and going west is one of the things to look forward to in American fiction.
• The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton: When things shake out, Merton's may be one of the minds we'll have to try to understand if we want to say what happened to the West in the twentieth century. Born in France, he was a theologian who spoke from inside of doubt. Also a singular writer. This, his greatest book, is a retelling of the Purgatorio, in the form of his own memoirs, taking for its Paradise a Trappist monastery in the bourbon country of Central Kentucky, where Merton spent most of the last thirty years of his life. (John Haskell must be aware of this parallel, in his own American Purgatorio, when he has the narrator drift down to Lexington; if not it's another mystery of that amazing novel.) Merton's journals of the Gethsemani years are good reading, too. Some time ago when they were published I took a magazine assignment to spend a week there, at the abbey, in silence, doing nothing but read them, and then review them. It was a foolhardy thing to do. The level of concentration made possible by that existence I found almost unbearable. Also the journals themselves are very lonely. He writes of his strange and obscure affair, a monk's affair, with a nurse in Lexington, who took care of him after a surgery. They were exposed--the abbot was reading her letters. Merton turned from this to an even deeper solitude.
• Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick: By far the saddest Lexington in literature is the one drowsily conjured in the early pages of this book. Hardwick died last year. She was a true stylist. Sleepless Nights is her purest exercise in style, told with the hypnotized-seeming confessionalism of the insomniac. It's impossible to forget this melancholy book.
• Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices by Robert Penn Warren: Robert "Red" Warren. Born Guthrie, Kentucky, in 1905. Fugitive Poet, Southern Agrarian, New Critic, famous novelist, famously tormented about race, finally something beyond that. I admire most his formal innovations. The stuff in the middle of All the King's Men, for instance, the Cass Mastern section: Warren inserted a small, perfect, extremely complex historical novella into the middle of what's otherwise a fully functioning political thriller. It's like you're crossing the river, and the water in one little place in the channel flows the other way. But Brother to Dragons is the obvious pick here. It may be the most authentically Kentucky book since Filson's Discovery and Present Settlement. Essentially a story about what happened to America's ember of the Enlightenment when we tried to carry it west. (Very violent things.) It's a play, a novel, a poem, also a work of scholarship. One of those weird unplaceable American hybrid books, like something Paul Metcalf might have written, if Metcalf had been a romantically wounded Southerner and not Melville's great-grandson.
• Lost Mountain by Erik Reece: A book about a controversial mining practice in use throughout the Appalachian coal country, known as mountain-topping. Instead of digging into the mountain, you blow off the top of it with explosives, then scoop out the coal, showering toxic debris into the rivers and streams. You turn the flattened peak into a golf course, or a "nature preserve" full of introduced plants. Reece sets out to answer a simple question: What would it be like to see a mountain older than the Himalayas die? He actually got the name of one, Lost Mountain, which had been targeted for this radical practice, and spent a year returning to the place, taking along one kind of expert or another--a botanist, a geologist--so that he would *know* this mountain when they detonated it. And then he does watch that happen. A powerful book. It gets into the complexities. Lots of Kentuckians in the counties where this takes place argue that the companies make jobs, and less dangerous ones, but Reece is persuasive in maintaining that no industry poisonous to its own workers' ecological communities can ever really be good for the local economy.
• The Death of Picasso by Guy Davenport: Prof. Davenport, the magician of Lexington (also Erik Reece's teacher at the University of Kentucky, it seems perverse not to add). His death a few years ago left a void. He was one of the last flickerings of that American modernist luminescence, the generations of writers who felt you had to hold the tradition in your head as a unified thing before you could even begin to speak about it. The effort warped many of them. It helped Guy that he was a certified genius polymath. He came to be at ease in whatever floating chamber he shared with Basho and Wittgenstein and Hugo Grotius and a couple of Greeks. In there he somehow devised a private postmodernism. You were welcome to sit and prompt him at the house in Bell Court, if you wanted. I remember one strange thing: he always burned his trash in the fireplace. That's not done anymore so close to the center of town. I nominate The Death of Picasso from among his astounding collections of essays because it contains this Kentucky scene, in a piece about Lèvi-Strauss called "The Anthropology of Table Manners":

The best display of manners on the part of a restaurant I have witnessed was at the Imperial Ramada Inn in Lexington, Kentucky, into the Middle Lawrence Welk Baroque dining room of which I once went with the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard (disguised as a businessman), the Trappist Thomas Merton (in mufti, dressed as a tobacco farmer with a tonsure), and an editor of Fortune who had wrecked his Hertz car coming from the airport and was covered in spattered blood from head to toe. Hollywood is used to such things (Linda Darnell having a milk shake with Frankenstein's monster between takes), and Rome and New York, but not Lexington, Kentucky. Our meal was served with no comment whatever from the waitresses, despite Merton's downing six martinis and the Fortune editor stanching his wounds with all the napkins.

• That Distant Land: Collected Stories by Wendell Berry: Any list of Kentucky writers that didn't include Berry would be from space. He is Kentucky writers. Also a culture hero to many for his back-to-the-land politics. He's one of the only people who's tried to go into that old 1930s Agrarian ethos and strip out the junk, the racial ideology and the medieval nostalgia, etc., and see if there's still something workable there. I like him best for the quiet forward pressure and almost funereal polish of his prose. That's very northern Kentucky somehow. They don't interrupt each other there. This collection includes a story of his that I love, "The Solemn Boy," sort of a mood piece. The name of one of its characters, Tol Proudfoot, reminds me of a curious thing you learn in Guy Davenport's The Geography of the Imagination, in his essay about J.R.R. Tolkien, which is that Tolkien, who taught languages at Oxford, had a former student of his land at a small college in Kentucky, and Tolkien used to amuse and puzzle this person by asking him to send his old professor last year's phonebook, when the new ones came out, because he liked the old Anglo-Saxon names, Barefoot and Baggins and whatnot, and needed them for something he was writing.
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories by Hunter S. Thompson: This is number eight, so also the moment when the obscenity of all I'm leaving out becomes hardest to ignore (everything that Chris Offutt has written, for starters, but especially No Heroes, his strange mountain memoir, a Kentucky homecoming story both experienced and told through the gauze of someone else's holocaust memories; and there's Harry Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands; also John Robert Shaw, the eighteenth-century well-digger whose Narrative of Thirty Years is largely a recounting of the several times he accidentally exploded himself with dynamite at the bottom of a well and almost died--that book ends like no other I know, with two obituaries for its author, the first false, coming after a spectacular blast when the editors thought it impossible for Shaw to survive and went to press prematurely, the second real, when he finally did perish, in yet another explosion!). But the delegate from Kentucky must be Hunter S. Thompson, R.I.P. 2005. Funny that he and Guy Davenport died so close together in time. I don't know if they were ever in a room together, at some Kentucky Writers thing or whatever. It would have been uncomfortable. But they knew a lot of the same gods, as Guy would have said. This edition of Fear and Loathing includes Thompson's "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved," in which he took the gonzo torch from Terry Southern. Whatever you think of where Thompson's writing went, that piece remains pure pleasure.

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

Nobel Week: It's Europe vs. the USA Already

Okay, I'm starting to sound like a WWF announcer (are you ready ruuuuuuumble?) but it is funny that the same Nobel season in which the Swedish chair of the literature prize committee asserted that Americans were not up to European standards saw the first award of the week, for Medicine, go to the French researchers whose claim to discovering the AIDS virus was embroiled in dispute with an American researcher, Robert Gallo, who was not included in today's award. I make no claims to being able to adjudicate the science of the controversy (despite growing up in a National Institutes of Health family, where my dad and Gallo both worked), but it does seem that despite Gallo's "disappointment" at not joining his French colleagues, the controversy (which required at one point an agreement between President Reagan and Prime Minister Chirac) has cooled and the scientific consensus has settled that Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier do have the legitimate claim to first scientific dibs here. Even Anthony Fauci, a high-profile administrator at NIH, "agreed there's no doubt the French scientists first identified the virus. He said they, and zur Hausen [who shared the award for his work on cervical cancer], deserved the Nobel. Fauci said that if additional researchers could have been included, Gallo 'would have been an obvious choice to be added to that list.'"

If you want to return to the bitter days of this '80s scientific controversy (carried on amid the general panic, anger, and shame surrounding the AIDS crisis), NBC's Robert Bazell has a short summary, and you can also visit our contentious customer review section for John Crewdson's Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo (whose take on Gallo is obvious from its subtitle). Gallo and Montagnier also wrote their own versions of the discovery and dispute: Gallo in Virus Hunting: AIDS, Cancer, and the Human Retrovirus: A Story of Scientific Discovery and Montagnier in Virus: The Co-Discoverer of HIV Tracks Its Rampage and Charts the Future. --Tom

The Books of the States: Vermont (3 electoral votes)

Vermont didn't fall into place as easily for me as Rhode Island did. Maybe because the state has always been full of people who decamped for the woods from NYC and elsewhere--I have to confess the list I ended up with is too. I like the three I came to choose, but I would love to hear what someone rooted there thinks we should be reading about the Green Mountain State.

• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson: Legend apparently has it (and apparently has it wrong) that Jackson wrote "The Lottery" on returning home one day in North Bennington, VT (where her husband taught at Bennington College), after being pelted with rocks by kids in the village. I was set to pick The Lottery and Other Stories, but was swayed by Jonathan Lethem, who always strikes me as just about the best reader in the United States of America, and who claims We Have Always Lived in the Castle, another expression of--to put it mildly--discomfort with village life, is her true masterpiece. And I'm sure The Haunting of Hill House or her Erma Bombeck-with-an-edge memoir, Life Among the Savages, would have their supporters too. (By the way, the Penguin Book Club at Amazon just finished discussing We Have Always as their summer book.)
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt: My friend and colleague Brad Parsons would have my head if I didn't include this favorite, another fictional version of Bennington, this time veiled as Hampden College. That's not far from "Camden College," the thin disguise that her fellow grad Bret Easton Ellis gave it in The Rules of Attraction, and there's also a Bennington section, full of Ellisian decadence, in Lethem's Fortress of Solitude.
• Hoagland on Nature by Edward Hoagland: This is a personal pick: my favorite thing about my Harper's subscription has become the pleasure of seeing Hoagland's byline once a year or so and then getting up to my elbows in one of his long, meandering essays that take some announced subject as the occasion for endless and fruitful detours through wherever his sentences lead him, often to the yearly rhythms of his rural VT environs. I'm not sure the sense of a writer thinking is ever stronger.

These three-book states are tough. Among the others that could argue for a place here:

• Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner's much-loved last novel, which centers around yearly summer-home reunions by a Vermont pond.
• Norman Rockwell: 332 Magazine Covers: Rockwell, so identified with small-town America, was born and raised in New York City, but he spent much of the peak of his career living and drawing in Arlington, VT.
• Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991 by Hayden Carruth: Of all the urban transplants to Vermont, no one seems to have taken to his new surroundings with quite the intensity as Carruth, who died just last week. He lived in Vermont only in the middle years of a long and hard life, but much of his best-known work is grounded in that time, and he has said that he transformed himself and found his voice there.
• A Stranger in the Kingdom by Howard Frank Mosher: Mosher is the contemporary novelist who has made the most concerted project of writing about the state, particularly the "Northern Kingdom" along the Canadian border.
• My Garden by Jamaica Kincaid: the fabulous Kincaid has lived in Vermont for many years, but she, with this very local exception, has mainly written about her home island of Antigua and New York City.
• Midwives by Chris Bohjalian: the bestselling novelists' weekly columns for his local VT paper are collected in Idyll Banter.
• A Cool Million by Nathanael West: I'm about as big a N. West fan as they come, so I must note his over-the-top Horatio Alger satire, whose hero, Lemuel Pitkin, hails from humble circumstances in Ottsville, VT.
• Vermont has become a bit of a comics hotbed: Alison Bechdel lives there now (she drew the Vermont essay for State by State), and the Center for Cartoon Studies, one of the first institutions of the new wave of indie comics, opened its doors in White River Junction a few years ago. But the best-known VT native in comics? Frank Miller, of all people. It's hard to make a case that Sin City or The Dark Knight Returns qualify as Vermont books.

--Tom

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

Nobel Update: Next European Winner Due Thursday

Well, in the middle of our biggest blog project yet, what was (by far) our most trafficked and commented-upon post in recent months? Our little squib passing along the instantly notorious quotes from the head of the Nobel literature committee that everyone else was passing along. So here's an update: the literature prize, always given on a Thursday in October, will be announced next week, on October 9. (The other Nobels are always given during a single October week, but the literature committee I guess reserves the right to bicker further and sometimes announces a week or two later.)

This despite one of Herr Engdahl's less-remarked-on quotes in that same article: "Engdahl suggested the announcement date could be a few weeks away, saying 'it could take some time' before the academy settles on a name." Clearly they settled pretty quickly. And maybe Engdahl was blowing a lot of smoke in general (lowering expectations, as they say in the debating game) and plans to go with an American anyway, after softening the blow to his fellow continentals by insulting the rest of the US first. The thought also crossed my mind at the time that he was trying to shift the bookies' line to get some inside money down on Roth or Oates, but clearly the bookies aren't buying: Ladbrokes in the UK have three Americans in their top six favorites (Oates and Roth at 5/1, DeLillo at 7/1), with Pynchon in shouting distance at 14/1. My heart's with Munro or Roth (or the Korean Ko Un), but I'd put my money on Amos Oz.

If you want to follow this tempest further, the Literary Saloon, your first stop for international lit-award news (and international lit news in general, if you're not one of those insular Americans) has a nice roundup. --Tom

The Books of the States: Rhode Island (4 electoral votes)

I've been looking forward to Rhode Island day, in part because, my Frederick Douglass dream aside, I'm not sure there's a writer quarter I'd enjoy seeing more than the one to the right. To begin with, there is Lovecraft's dour shovel of a mug, and then there is the pleasant thought of such a deeply odd fish (or, to use language he might prefer, a hideous, slimy creature from the black seas of infinity) appearing on government-issued currency. And he is a famous homebody, sticking close to Providence, Rhode Island, where he was born and where he returned for good after a failed attempt at marriage in Brooklyn.

I'm also pro-RI because I quickly came up with an interesting and tidy little list of four books, each remarkable in their own quite different ways. But, fearing another John Irving debacle, I didn't stop my researches there, and so it's a little harder to limit myself now to four, but here goes:

• H.P. Lovecraft: Tales by H.P. Lovecraft: The authoritative Library of America edition. I challenge you to name a book with better Statistically Improbably Phrases than this one: "curvilinear hieroglyphs, greenish soapstones, tarry stickiness, twilight abysses, nameless scent, spiky image, shunned house, twilit grotto, elder things, membraneous wings, attic laboratory, hill noises, fishy odour, domed hills, buzzing voice, scientific zeal, frantic note, lurking fear, blasted heath, captive mind, slanting wall, frantic letter, grocery boy". My god--what's your favorite? They tell a skin-prickling story all by themselves (and I do fear for that "grocery boy"...).
• A Key into the Language of America by Roger Williams: The founder of Rhode Island also wrote one of its great and strange books, this little 1643 guide to the language and culture of the Narragansett, remarkable in its time and ours for its openhanded approach to native culture. Am I wrong to say that this can hold its own with Moby-Dick and The Postman Always Rings Twice as one of the most brilliant opening paragraphs in American literature: "Observation. The Natives are of two sorts, (as the English are). Some more Rude and Clownish, who are not so apt to Salute, but upon Salutation resalute lovingly. Others, and the generall, are sober and grave, and yet chearfull in a meane, and as ready to begin a Salutation as to Resalute, which yet the English generally begin, out of desire to Civilize them."
• The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: This early feminist story of a young wife and mother losing her mind is every bit as chilling as the creepiest Lovecraft tale.
• Saints and Strangers by Angela Carter (it's out of print?!? geez...): Not her best-known book, but my favorite, and one of my favorites by anybody anywhere (speaking of opening paragraphs, I lived under the spell of the opening of "The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe" for about three years.) The best stories in the collection are her bloody British fabulist's response to American history (especially the masterful "Fall River Axe Murders"), although the connections to Rhode Island in particular are admittedly slim (she taught at Brown in the early '80s).

What a strange and fantastic group of four, but there are certainly other contenders. Staying at Brown, there are the great postmodernists who ruled there for decades, Robert Coover and John Hawkes, although neither of them wrote in particular about RI, as far as I know. And across town at RISD, there has been David Macaulay, the meticulous opener of worlds for kids. Updike set The Witches of Eastwick (and, presumably, the new Widows) in RI, Galway Kinnell and Spalding Gray were raised there, and a master of modern weird, Paul di Filippo, was born in Providence and lives there today. --Tom

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

The Books of the States: North Carolina (15 electoral votes; Guest: Randall Kenan)

Thanks to Brad for shouldering the biggest and most thankless task of trimming the countless fine books from the Empire State down to a tidy 31 (I'll have to lobby him further to find a place for Ben Katchor in the starting lineup). And thanks to Randall Kenan for today's labor of love: a wonderful tour of the Tar Heel State through 15 of its books and writers that I imagine Weiland and Wilsey would have accepted as a fine North Carolina essay for State by State if Kenan had chosen to submit it.

Instead, he wrote about hogs. Here's a rather mouth-watering passage from his State by State essay:

I am as partisan as they come and do not apologize to any man, woman, or child. The best barbecue in the world comes from North Carolina. And not just from anywhere in North Carolina: from the eastern part of the state.
    I make no apologies, therefore, in stating with great emphatic zeal and extreme prejudice that a hog should be cooked over a pit, over choice wood, for at least half a day, preferably twice that long. Whole. The tender meat should then be disarticulated from the bones, skin and all, which, in this case, will be a cakewalk as the flesh has been rendered into a state of tender, moist, near-gelatinous compliance, the smell of which should cause mild hallucinations. Next the cooked meat should be chopped--not pulled, plucked, sliced, or otherwise mishandled--chopped. Then it should be mixed with a vinegar-based solution of such clarity and spiciness as to augment but not detract from the suzerainty of slowly roasted hog flesh. The beast gave up its life for your delectation. That should be honored.

It's not all delicious: there is much talk in the piece of industrial hog poop and also hog sex. As he says, you should take the hog whole.

Kenan was raised in Chinquapin, North Carolina (needless to say, in the eastern part of the state), and after years in New York and elsewhere, he has returned to teach in Chapel Hill at his alma mater, the University of North Carolina. After his debut novel, A Visitation of Spirits, he made a splash (and first came to my awareness) with the very modern folk tales of Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. More recently he's written Walking on Water, a deeply personal survey of what it means to be black in America, and The Fire This Time, a post-Katrina update of James Baldwin's classic civil-rights-era book.

Here are his picks to represent North Carolina:

• Collected Poems: 1951-1971 by A.R. Ammons: Two National Book Awards, a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen Prize, a MacArthur "Genius" grant -- yeah, yeah, big deal. Who cares?  Before his death in 2001 all the people who knew their poetry and who could be intimidating and arch about the increasingly arcane -- alas –- world of poetry, would point to Archie Ammons as one of the great AMERICAN poets of the 20th Century. I'm astonished by how often he is left off the list of great Southern writers, as if one can't be both at the same time. Raised on a tobacco farm and educated at Wake Forest University (in biology) and for a time a teacher on the Outer Banks, he is quintessentially a Tar Heel. His work tends toward the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, and like the Walden Pond dude, Ammons returns often to the wild land of his childhood, to talking crows and tobacco barns and the white spires of Protestant religion, and more, so much more. Garbage (1993) is the magnum opus -- and a pure delight to read. But one would do well to treat one’s self to Collected Poems:1951-1971 or the briefer Selected Poems done for the Library of America.
• Entering Ephesus by Daphne Athas: North Carolinians think of Chapel Hill the way Californians think of Berkley, or Wisconsians think of Madison -- they're not like the rest of us, but they are ours. Overwhelmed by massive land-grant universities, reputed hotbeds of liberalism and "alternative" lifestyles, state legislatures love to beat up on these villages when the budgets get tight, and sing their praises when the basketball team wins. If there is one book that tells it like it is about Chapel Hill, North Carolina, it is Daphne Athas's luminous 1971 novel, Entering Ephesus. Like Thomas Wolfe's Pulpit Hill, Athas's Ephesus is a stand-in for the tiny university town. But more, Athas –- who was transplanted to NC from Massachusetts in 1939 as a little girl -– casts her net wide and deals not only with the Ivory Tower and all the colorful social and intellectual in habitués, but also with the life of Niggertown, the local mill town where all the workers with true backbone lived. A pure joy to read.
• Beast of the Southern Wild by Doris Betts. Not only a writer of prose fiction, but something of a firebrand and social and literary paragon, Betts has long been a favorite of North Carolingians. Her novels cover a great deal of territory, from the mills of the piedmont to the Donner Party and the Nevada desert to children suffering with chronic illness -- she contains multitudes. Her short stories also, very like her contemporary, Alice Munro, are worlds in miniature. 1973's Beasts of the Southern Wild remains one of her most read, and adapted (spawning an Academy Award-winning short film and an off-Broadway musical, "The Ugliest Pilgrim" into Violet, 1981, and Violet, 1998).

Nobel to US: Drop Dead

Looks like you can use those SAS frequent flyer miles for something else, Philip. All award nerds and bored literary columnists can thank Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the literature jury for the Nobel Prize, for stirring things up today with his comments that Americans aren't qualified for the big prize they haven't won since 1993:

Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world ... not the United States.... The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.

I had come to understand that no American (especially Roth) was getting the prize until Bush was out of office, but it looks like things may go deeper than that, and we in the provinces (where, admittedly, we could read a little more translated literature) will have to watch from the sidelines while Europe gives itself another one of those gold medals with the picture of the dynamite tycoon on it. David Remnick of the New Yorker gets the best response in the AP article: "And if he looked harder at the American scene that he dwells on, he would see the vitality in the generation of Roth, Updike, and DeLillo, as well as in many younger writers, some of them sons and daughters of immigrants writing in their adopted English. None of these poor souls, old or young, seem ravaged by the horrors of Coca-Cola." Speaking of insular, it's worth noting that of the eight books by Americans in our editors' top 10 last year, three are by first-generation immigrants and one by the son of immigrants.

Does his contempt extend to Canadians? I've been holding out for Alice Munro for some time now, but it's true that her work shows no influence of the work of Michel Houellebecq, so she may be ineligible. --Tom

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Jill Abramson on The War Within by Bob Woodward: "Woodward’s evolving consciousness furnishes the true drama of these books. There is damning material in all four volumes, but in the first two, Woodward was unable or unwilling to fully acknowledge this. As the war turned sour and Bush’s flaws overwhelmed his strengths, Woodward began to reassess both Bush and his own earlier views. He ends by providing readers not just the material to draw their own judgments but a harsh judgment of Bush himself. In so doing, he has stepped much closer to the role of ­biographer, not just ­stenographer."
• Maslin on The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder: "Mr. Buffett made a smart choice when he chose Alice Schroeder as his Boswell. Yes, he found an appreciative biographer with whom he seems to have a warm rapport. But he also found a writer able to keep pace with the wild swerves in the Buffett story and the intricacies of Mr. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway business empire. Ms. Schroeder is as insightful about her subject’s precise anticipation of current financial crises as she is about his quirky personal story. And she is a clear explicator of fiscal issues. This sprawling, colorful biography will mesmerize anyone interested in who Mr. Buffett is or how he got that way."
• Rachel Donadio on Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg: "Greenberg’s refusal — or inability — to think positively, or reductively, is one of his best qualities. What sets 'Hurry Down Sunshine' apart from the great horde of mediocre memoirs, with their sitcom emotions and too neatly resolved fights and reconciliations, is Greenberg’s frank pessimism, dark humor and fundamental incapacity to make sense of his daughter’s ordeal, let alone to derive an uplifting moral from it."

Washington Post:

• Elizabeth Hand on The Other Side of the Island by Allegra Goodman: "Allegra Goodman alludes to a number of children's classics in The Other Side of the Island, including Bridge to Terabithia , The Wizard of Oz and The Secret Garden. It's a risky ploy, inviting comparison to beloved books. But in Goodman's case, it pays off, as this gripping, beautifully written novel may one day join their ranks. A dystopian page-turner, The Other Side of the Island evokes other YA favorites -- in particular, Lois Lowry's The Giver-- books that use well-worn tropes of science fiction and coming-of-age tales to confront adult issues such as authoritarian governments and global warming."
• Jonathan Yardley on American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, Movie-Making, and the Crime of the Century by Howard Blum: "The crime and its aftermath make for a compelling story, but you'd scarcely know that from this dreadful book, a thoroughgoing dud from first page to last.... What he's written (and written badly...) is a piece of hack journalism that attempts to fabricate connections between three interesting men of the day but almost entirely fails to do so. My own hunch is that Blum thinks he's written a nonfiction variation on the themes played in E.L. Doctorow's celebrated novel Ragtime, but such magic as Doctorow managed to extract from the same point in American history is utterly absent in this contrived, plodding, self-infatuated 'tome.'"

Los Angeles Times:

• Erin Aubry Kaplan on Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America by Paul Tough: "Tough's book is about the magnitude of the task undertaken by one man and his staff of acolytes, but Tough is more interested in what that monumental task reveals about the rest of us. He lauds Canada's efforts to give poor black children the opportunity he deeply believes they deserve, but he also questions why society as a whole seems not to share Canada's view. One thing Tough puts in stark relief is the fact that the goal of equality in education has been replaced with exhortations for excellence, a nice way of saying that every community is on its own, including communities of poor black kids who need the most help and suffer the worst effects of isolation."

The Books of the States: Virginia (13 electoral votes; Guest: Tony Horwitz)

I've had a few inquiries about why I didn't include Edgar Allan Poe, so famously deceased in Baltimore, on my Maryland list. I had seen him already on the list for Virginia that Tony Horwitz, our guest nominator for today, had sent in, and I immediately began building fortifications for (yet another) cross-border skirmish, but further research convinced me to graciously cede his provenance to Richmond, the city of his upbringing. By the way, in the course of such researches I came to the website of the Poe Museum in Richmond, where they list, among other exhibits, a display of the various causes suggested over the years of Poe's mysterious death, including "1857 Beating," "1984 Alcohol Dehydrogenase," "1996 Rabies," and "1999 Carbon Monoxide Poisoning."

Which is entirely in keeping with Horwitz's mortuary of an essay on Virginia in State by State, which begins with an anecdote of a diorama night in his son's fourth-grade class in rural Va. that featured box after box--"a cardboard catacomb"--of death shrines to martyred Confederates, murdered Indians, famous suicides, and of course the doomed Poe himself. Horwitz writes:

When I told the teacher her students seemed morbidly inclined, she laughed and said, "At this age, kids don't care about the Declaration of Independence. All they want to know is, 'What was the body count?'" If that's so, they Virginia is a fourth-grader's paradise. Having lived in six states and toured the other four, I've never seen one so steeped in gore. Nor is there another that clings to its dark history so insistently. Hotel Colorado or Hotel Arizona I imagine as sunny, uncluttered places. Hotel Virginia, inescapably, is a charnel house.

This is a bit of a case of people-who-live-in-glass-coffins, as the history-obsessed Horwitz has picked at many of those old bones himself, in bestselling books of travel and history like Confederates in the Attic, Blue Latitudes, and, most recently, A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World. And for his suggested list of Virginia books, he's chosen a list that's appropriately heavy on history, including some of the central texts of America's founding as well as more recent fictional revisions. Here are Tony Horwitz's 11 representative Virginia books:

• The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, edited by Philip Barbour (is this the only edition, going for $1,500 on our site?): John Smith was an escape artist, a first-class egotist, and a colorful chronicler of the Jamestown settlement he helped found. His vivid dispatches about genocide against Indians and cannibalism by the English (one settler even killed and salted his pregnant wife) remind us why Pilgrim Plymouth is more celebrated by Americans than the Virginia colony that preceded it.
• Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson: Though not as well-known as TJ's earlier work, the Declaration of Independence, this is a revealing portrait of Virginia in 1781, when the state's western boundary extended to the Mississippi and its legal punishments included "death by poison," gibbeting, pillory, and ducking for witchcraft.
• The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, edited by Gary Moulton: Meriwether Lewis and William Clark became famous for their trek to the Pacific, but both were Virginians by birth and sensibility. Their journals are a thrilling window into the American frontier at the start of the 19th century.
• The Portable Edgar Allan Poe: Though he was born in Boston and died in Baltimore, Poe spent much of his youth in Richmond and once declared, "I am a Virginian. At least I call myself one." Since Poe is best remembered for his poems and macabre short fiction, I've nominated one of the many anthologies of his work.
• R.E. Lee by Douglas Southall Freeman (abridged edition): Freeman won a Pulitzer for his 1934 biography of the Southern general and icon. The son of a Confederate soldier, writing at a time when the Lost Cause was still cherished in Virginia, Freeman is overly worshipful of Lee. But he writes with a novelistic verve matched by few biographers since.
• Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia's Ex-Slaves, edited by Charles Perdue, Thomas Barden and Robert Phillips: Who better to tell us what slavery was like than slaves themselves? During the Great Depression, interviewers working for the WPA and state writers' projects collected oral testimonies from elderly ex-slaves across the South. Those that survive from Virginia are collected in this wonderful volume, without adornment or changes to the vernacular speech as it was recorded over seventy years ago. This is a must-read for anyone who still clings to a moonlight-and-magnolia image of the Old South.
• The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron: A Pulitzer-winner for fiction, and a book that ignited a firestorm in the '60s because it's by a white Virginian who imagines his way into the mind of America's most renowned slave rebel. Controversy aside, this is a classic of Southern writing--Styron at his ripe, earthy best.
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard: Yet another Pulitzer for this meditative account of a year rambling around Tinker Creek, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwestern Virginia. Lyrical, spiritual, and a masterpiece of nature writing by an author who can make muskrats riveting.
• Growing Up, by Russell Baker: One of my favorite autobiographies, in part because Baker hails from an unsung corner of rural Virginia where I lived for many years. He gets the region and everything else just right, and writes with a modest wit that’s gone almost extinct in this era of overwrought, self-pitying memoirs. And yeah, Baker's book got a Pulitzer, too.
• The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe: This book has nothing to do with Virginia, but Wolfe was raised and educated in the state and this is my favorite of his many works. It tells of the early days of the space race and America's first astronauts in prose so vivid that The Right Stuff reads better than most novels, including Wolfe's own. Worth reading just for the first 50 pages or so, a model of the "New Journalism" Wolfe pioneered.
• The Known World by Edward P. Jones: A fifth and final Pulitzer winner and perhaps the best of the lot. Jones, an African-American novelist, recreates a part of antebellum Virginia where some blacks were slave-owners themselves. A downer, as befits its subject, but the best and most nuanced evocation I've read of slavery's toll.

Tony has left two open spots: what would you nominate for them? Matthew Sharpe's gleefully anachronistic novel, Jamestown? Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta series? James Branch Cabell? Ellen Glasgow? Rita Mae Brown? Rita Dove? V.C. (the "V" is for Virginia!) Andrews's classic incest saga, Flowers in the Attic? --Tom

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

The Books of the States: New Hampshire (4 electoral votes)

Thought you'd see Robert Frost replace the Old Man of the Mountain to the right? Oh, by all rights you should, but I must be feeling punchy after making mostly canonical choices so far, so instead you get Grace Metalious, the "Pandora in Blue Jeans" who peeked behind the curtain of small town New England propriety in Peyton Place, and gave New Hampshire its biggest blockbuster until Dan Brown discovered the Renaissance.

Blockbusters aside, the flinty soil of New Hampshire appears to grow poets (or at least to attract transplants). Maybe it's having Frost as a model, but it would be easy to fill out the Granite State's four slots just with poets. I didn't:

• Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays by Robert Frost: The impulse to go with one of his original collections, like North of Boston or, of course, New Hampshire, is overcome by the fact that only larger collections like this one from the Library of America are now in print.
• Affliction by Russell Banks: The claustrophobia of family and winter. And then there's his Continental Drift, which should get half a spot in New Hampshire and half in Florida--I'm not sure there's another American book so clearly and consciously split between two states.
• Peyton Place by Grace Metalious: "If I'm a lousy writer, then an awful lot of people have lousy taste."
• Without by Donald Hall and Otherwise by Jane Kenyon: To represent NH's remarkable lineup of post-Frost poets (e.g., Charles Simic, Maxine Kumin), this pairing of Hall's poems about his wife Kenyon's death, and the collection of her work that the two of them put together in her last days.

More honorable mention: May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude, Stephen Vincent Benet's The Devil and Daniel Webster ("They say whenever the devil comes near Marshfield, even now, he gives it a wide berth. And he hasn't been seen in the state of New Hampshire from that day to this. I'm not talking about Massachusetts or Vermont."), and bestselling residents Dan Brown and Jodi Picoult. --Tom

P.S. Oh brother, how embarrassing: I completely left off John Irving, and it's hard to imagine a major novelist being more identified with a state than Irving is with New Hampshire. Where to begin? I've always liked Garp, but the passion among some folks in our offices for A Prayer for Owen Meany is something to behold. My apologies for the omission to wrestlers, trained bears, and abortionists everywhere.

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

The Books of the States: South Carolina (8 electoral votes; Guest: Jack Hitt)

We have our second guest contributor today, and our first from among the State by State writers. Jack Hitt was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina--he's the author of Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim's Route into Spain (1994), but if you're like me, you know him best as a byline and masthead presence on some of the best things going in American culture: he was a contributor to the late, lamented Lingua Franca, and is currently a contributing editor at the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and This American Life. For the latter show, he won a Peabody for his reporting from Guantanamo Bay, and he created one of my favorite and best-remembered segments, "The Super," the infectiously hilarious and bizarre tale of his apartment super in New York City, some of whose strange and unbelievable stories turn out to be frighteningly true.

Here's the opening of from his State by State essay:

When South Carolinians proposed to separate from the United States in December 1860, a state legislator named James Louis Perigru vehemently opposed the idea. As the story goes--and it's a story every South Carolinian can tell you--Perigru rose to his feet and declared that he opposed secession because "South Carolina was too small to be a sovereign nation, and too large to be an insane asylum."

And here are his inspired choices for the Palmetto State:

• Edisto: A Novel [new edition apparently coming out in February] by Padgett Powell [the man on our quarter, with apologies to Believer illustrator Tony Millionaire]: This brilliant book's protagonist is South Carolina's Huck Finn, our Jim the Boy, our Holden Caulfield. The kid's name is Simons Manigault and Powell perfectly channels the voice of a barrier island pícaro, ranging across a rich Lowcountry landscape, encountering coastal eccentrics for a perfect read (especially amazing since Powell is a Floridian). It is the best novel featuring all things South Carolina; really, really funny; and when it first appeared, every honest SC writer ran into the nearest closet and let out a primal cry of envy.
• South Carolina: A History by Walter Edgar. History is a contact sport in South Carolina, sort of our version of rugby, only with fewer moments of courtliness. History is usually discussed late at night, when sunny reality doesn't have much of a say, and typically includes bogus claims of ancestral participation in key events. And yet: all sides agree that there is a standard text, a solid history and a great read in Walter Edgar.
• The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustava Vassa, the African by Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself. A friend gave me this book, an 18th century slave's biography and an early argument against the terrorism of slavery. Now there is a new theory that Equiano invented his whole story of African origin, and that he was actually a clever South Carolinian who knew how to market books by black authors, colonial-style (quite an achievement, if true). This argument also enrages people. As does any argument about racial history. Take Denmark Vesey (start with David Robertson's Denmark Vesey: The Buried Story of America's Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It) and then dip into the debate between Edward Pearson and the revisionists. There are many more of these fights, involving Ben Tillman, the Stono Rebellion, and on up to the Orangeburg Massacre. Did I mention Ed Ball's Slaves in the Family? All of these books can cause lots of foaming at the mouth and broken noses. (See above entry about Walter Edgar.) To get a head start on the next round of fisticuffs, pre-order Katherine Charron's upcoming biography of Septima Clark, coming out next fall from UNC Press.
• Mellowed by Time by Elizabeth O'Neill Verner. Not a written book but a collection of the old lady's pencil sketches. Charleston is now crowded with artists who pump out tediously maudlin watercolors of undulating marsh grass and stately church spires. Verner was there first, and I still love the beauty of her lines. Perhaps it's because she limned the town at a key moment: on the cusp between Charleston the place and Charleston the dream.
• Porgy by Dubose Heyward. When I was researching a high school paper on South Carolina literary figures, my Aunt Minnie at the Charleston Library Society took me to the vault to see 19th century poet Henry Timrod's original manuscripts. His final poem had stuff on it. "Oh," said Minnie, "Timrod died of TB writing this very poem; that's part of his lung." The point is, I read Timrod and he was just awful. I thought maybe H.L. Mencken's charge about the "Sahara of the Bozart" was just, but no: The first writer to run his hands through all that makes South Carolina mesmerizing and transmute it into beauty and story was Dubose Heyward. That tradition has been carried on by Josephine Pinckney (Three O'Clock Dinner), Josephine Humphrey (Dreams of Sleep), Dorothy Allison (Bastard Out of Carolina), and Pat Conroy (The Water Is Wide--still my favorite of all his great yarns).
• The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook by Matt Lee and Ted Lee. Oh, I know: How dare me? Not mention Charleston Receipts first? Look, I'd rather discuss the virtues of Denmark Vesey at the Carolina Yacht Club than get into a quarrel about this venerable Carolina tome. But the grand Junior League classic, written by everyone's dowager aunt (incuding mine), contains some tongue-paralyzingly bad recipes. What I love about the Lee Bros. is how they confected a book that works with all the great local ingredients (crab, grits, island tomatoes, civy bean, fish, shrimp, corn, etc.) and created dishes that are in fact fresh and new, yet manage to stay within the undefinable ethos of the Carolina culinary tradition. I did not grow up eating grits and oxtails, but you wouldn't know it if you ate at my house today.
• Trembling of a Leaf by John Colleton (aka Robert Marks). Lame-o porn of the most pitiful soft-core variety by a guy who lived on Tradd Street. The paperback cover of this hideous book (title lifted wholesale from Somerset Maugham) shows a young buck looking down at a bosomy 1970-ish Carolina belle in a courtyard with her peignoir trashily left open (it's fiction). When I sent out an email to friends to kick me some titles, many of them just sent back a reminiscence of how Marks created, as one correspondent wrote, "a sort of southern-fried Plato's Retreat, attracting all kinds of libertine Charlestonians (hey, it was the 70's)." Marks forever captured the intimate likenesses of some Carolinians with his crotchless prose found between the (sweaty) covers of such titles as Two Nymphs Named Melissa, Between Cloris and Amy, Barefoot on Jill (that's right, on), The Delights of Anna, Enjoyment of Amy, Enticement of Cindy, and my fave: Up in Mamie's Diary. Locals are still parsing just what characters are based on actual local folk: join in the fun.
• The Story of Sea Island Cotton by Richard Dwight Porcher and Sarah Fick. The genre of telling cultural history through a single crop ("Salt"; "Cod": "The Story of Corn") has several Carolina variants. Sea Island cotton--distinct from inland cotton--was grown in levied plots at the shore, flushed of salt ingeniously by diked fresh water creeks. Slave towns were built on remote sandbars, the remnants of which remain. But two consecutive hurricanes eventually rendered the plant extinct as well as one more southern culture, literally, gone with the wind. Also, new rice histories in South Carolina tell a similar tale. Start with The Seed from Madagascar by former SC Governor Duncan Clinch Heyward. It establishes the claim that rice came to SC by accident when a passing 17th century merchant paid for his goods with a bag of odd looking seed. That view is now challenged by new evidence establishing that highly skilled slaves possessed the agronomic experience needed to make rice the first Carolina economy: Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation by Judith Ann Carney.

--Tom

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

The Books of the States: Maryland (10 electoral votes)

Okay, here it is: the reason I started this whole escapade, my newly minted Frederick Douglass quarter. Looks pretty sharp, doesn't it?

I've already had a fair amount to say about Maryland writers, but one thing I discovered between then and now (actually in doing my Connecticut research), was that the original "Uncle Tom's Cabin," where Josiah Henson, from whose narrative of his escape from slavery Harriet Beecher Stowe took some of the inspiration for her novel, is still standing, about 25 blocks--and two shopping plazas--from the house where I grew up. How did no one tell me about that? Hmph.

Speaking of my Maryland, I'm still waiting to read the book that tells the story of my Maryland, the muggy, sprawling suburbs on the federal payroll. We've spawned a few novelists from around my generation (Michael Chabon, Andrew Sean Greer, Myla Goldberg, to begin with), but they haven't written much about where they grew up yet, as far as I know. I guess I should write that book but, well, I don't find it that interesting either! (It is true that, at least from what I've been able to tell from skimming, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants takes place at least in part in my old stomping grounds...).

But there are better stories to tell about Maryland, and here are 10 (or, rather, 11) of them:

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave by Frederick Douglass: If you think we just discovered memoirs in American publishing... Douglass's self-taught tale was of course a remarkable achievement, but 160 years later its evocative precision holds up on the page as far more than that.
• A Mencken Chrestomathy by H.L. Mencken: I'm not inclined to choose catchall anthologies as representatives, and you could certainly go with his landmark, The American Language, instead, but for a working journalist like Mencken, this collection of daily vituperation, chosen by Mencken himself, seems appropriate. Also of note: Terry Teachout's recent Mencken bio, The Skeptic.
• The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth: This monumental satire of the colonial Chesapeake is a reminder that postmodernist fiction, for all its game-playing, can still be intensely local.
• Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon: The book that began it all--Homicide, The Corner, and the-greatest-show-in-the-history-of-television, The Wire--remains a master work in its own right, a record of Simon's year with Baltimore homicide as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. (And of course there is Simon's wife, Laura Lippman, who has staked out the fictional side of Baltimore crime with her Tess Monaghan series and acclaimed standalones like Every Secret Thing.)
• Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay by William W. Warner: The classic account of the blue crab fishery, which my mom the science teacher really thought I should read when I was 13, but I stubbornly stuck to Sports Illustrated.
• Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler: This is my favorite of the Tylers I've read, and it's the one that really broke her out as a major writer, but Tyler fans, tell me which one you like best.
• The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy: Originally published by the Naval Institute Press, this out-of-nowhere blockbuster made Clancy the idol of the legions of amateur national security aficionados (and plenty of local pros too).
• The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson: For years a Fish and Wildlife Service bureaucrat, Carson first became a household name with this bestseller and National Book Award winner, a decade before Silent Spring.
• Shock Value by John Waters: A memoir and tribute to bad taste and to Baltimore, "the hairdo capital of the world."
• Cloud Nine by James M. Cain: This Annapolis native will no doubt be well represented on the California list, but after his heyday was over he moved back to Maryland and kept writing. My friend Josh, a hard-boiled fan, insists that his late Md. novel, Cloud Nine, is top-notch--I'm going to try to give it a read before we make these lists final.
• Picking Winners: A Horseplayer's Guide by Andrew Beyer: But if Cloud Nine doesn't hold up, I'm prepared to step in with this item that I just couldn't leave off the list. I grew up reading Beyer in the Washington Post, and he's long been a handicapping legend, both for his innovative speed figures and for the style and pleasure of his writing. (He made horseplaying sound so appealing that I'm a little surprised I didn't turn out a track hound myself.) He may have written for the Post, but there aren't any horses running in D.C. proper, and many of his work days were spent at nearby Laurel and Pimlico.

--Tom

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

MacArthur Fellows 2008: Two Writers, and Many More Books

In the middle of book awards season (with the Booker, Nobel, and National Book Award all hitting in the next month or so), come the phone calls from the MacArthur Foundation, which lead to their recepients being called "geniuses" and cashing quarterly $25,000 checks for the next five years. They aren't book awards, but a few writers are always pulled into their golden net. This year two "writers" got the call:

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the young Nigerian novelist who now lives in Maryland, author of Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus.
• Alex Ross, New Yorker classical music critic and author of last year's big and acclaimed (by me among others) history of 20th-century art music, The Rest Is Noise. You can listen to our interview with him, and stop by his blog (which makes no mention of the award yet).

But that doesn't mean the other winners haven't written books (or had books written about them). Here's what I found from this year's 25:

• Will Allen, described by the MacArthurites as an "urban farmer": He published The War on Bugs last year, which "reveals how advertisers, editors, scientists, large scale farmers, government agencies, and even Dr. Seuss, colluded to convince farmers to use deadly chemicals, hormones, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in an effort to pad their wallets and control the American farm enterprise."
• Tara Donovan, sculptor: Tara Donovan, the catalogue from her first full-career exhibition, was released last week, including a conversation between Donovan and Lawrence Weschler, which to me is an even better badge of honor than the MacArthur nod. See some of her sculptures here.
• Andrea Ghez, astrophysicist: She has written You Can Be a Woman Astronomer, a book for elementary-grade readers about her career.
• Stephen Houston, anthropologist-epigrapher: His scholarly books on the Maya include The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience Among the Classic Maya and The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process.
• David Montgomery, geomorphologist: He's written two general-interest books on his work (both of which look pretty fascinating to me), Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, which argues that "soil is humanity's most essential resource" (and which led one customer reviewer, a friend of his, to mention that Dave is also "an entertaining pop-folk guitar[ist], who leads with guitar and vocals the local band 'Big Dirt.'"), and King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon.
• Peter Pronovost, critical care physician: I can't find a book by or about him, but you might remember him from Atul Gawande's profile of him in The New Yorker last December.
• Nancy Siraisi, historian of medicine: Among her books are History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning and Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine.

And you can also listen to two of the winners:

• Leila Josefowicz, violinist: I have no idea which ones to recommend, but the MacArthurs mentioned her recent Shostakovich recording in particular.
• Miguel Zenon, saxophonist: Awake (you can watch a behind-the-scenes video there), Jibaro, Ceremonial, and Looking Forward.

--Tom

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: David Gates on Indignation by Philip Roth: "'Everyman' and 'Exit Ghost' both have a mood of sorrowful resignation; this book goes about its grieving savagely. And of all Roth’s recent novels, it ventures farthest into the unknowable. In his unshowy way, with all his quotidian specificity and merciless skepticism, Roth is attempting to storm heaven — an endeavor all the more desperately daring because he seems dead certain it’s not there." On Tuesday, Kakutani was grouchier: "It’s a joke that Mr. Roth delivers with consummate poise and a couple of bravura touches, but a joke, in the end, that doesn’t amount to a full-fledged novel."
• Maslin on The Given Day by Dennis Lehane: "No more thinking of Mr. Lehane as an author of detective novels that make good movies ('Gone, Baby, Gone') and tell devastatingly bleak Boston stories ('Mystic River'). He has written a majestic, fiery epic that moves him far beyond the confines of the crime genre. Shades of Doctorow and Dreiser surround Mr. Lehane’s choice of 1919 as the time for this expansive story. It is not simply the relatively unexplored eventfulness of that year that makes 'The Given Day' so far reaching; it’s the relentless fierce-terrible nature of the turmoil on parade."
• A.O. Scott on Home by Marilynne Robinson: "She is somehow able to infuse what can sound like dowdy, common words — words like courtesy and kindness, shame and forgiveness, transgression and grace — with a startling measure of their old luster and gravity. Phrases many of us have heard and known since childhood come in her hands to have the depth of dark sayings, and her parable of a family’s partial restoration is also a story to trouble your sleep and afflict your conscience."
• James J. Sheehan on Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe by Mark Mazower: "'Hitler’s Empire' is a useful antidote to the argument — most recently advanced in Nicholson Baker's 'Human Smoke' — that World War II was neither necessary nor just. While we should never underestimate or forget the appalling cost, Mazower’s eloquent and instructive book reminds us what the world would have been like if Hitler’s enemies had been unwilling or unable to pay the price of defeating him."

Washington Post:

• Jonathan Yardley on Lehane's Given Day: "Lehane has done something brave and ambitious: He has written a historical novel that unquestionably is his grab for the brass ring, an effort to establish his credentials in literary as well as commercial terms.... Meticulously researched and rich in period detail, it pulls the reader so rapidly through its complex and interesting story that it's easy to lose sight of its shortcomings. But they are there, and they arise from the uneasy balance Lehane strikes (whether consciously or not) between the conventions of suspense fiction and his larger literary ambitions, as well as from his awkward attempt to connect a famous historical figure of the period to his fictional characters."
• James Mann on Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency by Barton Gellman: "Until now, I assumed it would take decades, the eventual declassification of documents and considerably more historical perspective for an author (say, some future Robert Caro ) to uncover and describe Cheney's secretive role. But Barton Gellman's outstanding new book, Angler, could well turn out to be the most revealing account of Cheney's activities as vice president that ever gets written.... There will almost certainly be no vice president as powerful as Cheney for decades, and no account of what he has wrought that is as compelling as this book."

Los Angeles Times:

• Sarah Weinman on Lehane's Given Day: "Despite its length and gargantuan scope of emotion and sociological ramifications, 'The Given Day' is a smooth read. In that respect, Lehane is as much like contemporaries George Pelecanos and Richard Price as he is like the bygone Boston-based John P. Marquand, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who understood the masses could absorb complex thought by turning the pages. 'The Given Day' may not pack the devastating wallop of Marquand's masterwork 'Point of No Return,' but it should draw unintended strength from the latter's title. From here on in, Lehane should proceed as a novelist, without genre boundaries imposed on him."
• Susan Salter Reynolds on Miss Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum: "'Ms. Hempel Chronicles' is a deeply affecting book because it reveals that human beings, because we are human, often feel many different emotions at once. We take on roles we are not always, strictly or bureaucratically speaking, qualified to perform. And yet, our vulnerability, our confusion often makes us infinitely more capable of empathizing with and relating to others."

The Books of the States: Connecticut (7 electoral votes)

I'm trying to be disciplined and settle on just one state representative to engrave on my Photoshop state quarters, but for Connecticut I offer you two: the supreme Wallace Stevens seems the unavoidable pick for top Nutmegger, but one of my very favorite author photos is of Steven Millhauser, for the way it captures its subject's shy but insistent theatricality. He almost looks like a gawky teen made up to look like a grandfather for the high school play, or a sweetly odd uncle about to wow you with a magic trick--both of which are completely in keeping with the mood of a Millhauser story. I wanted to see how he would look on a quarter too, so today we have two.

Meanwhile, I have to make a confession: in idly making my first state assignments, I assumed the easiest pick for Connecticut would be John Cheever: the only trouble would be whether to just include his stories or add a novel or his journals too. Well, who knew that the men on those suburban trains were heading to Westchester County, not Greenwich? Oh, lots of people, I'm sure, but not me until now, for which I am deeply embarrassed. We'll have to leave the midcentury adman ennui to Richard Yates...

Here are my suggested seven--actually eight, since I can't bear to leave one of them off. In a pinch I guess it'd be Barnum, but let's see how things go:

• The Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens: The dream of every commuter-rail creative: the insurance executive who flowered after 50 as the most gracefully brainy of American poets.
• Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates: Resurrected more than once in the past couple of decades, and now ready to be immortalized (or, more likely, overwhelmed) by the Reunion of Leo and Kate.
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain: Twain's first book after Huck Finn was also his first about his adopted home state.
• Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill: O'Neill's exhumation of his Connecticut childhood was so traumatic that he stipulated it not be performed until 25 years after his death. (His widow waited three.)
• American Dictionary of the English Language by Noah Webster: The most American of books drove its author into a debt that lasted to his death.
• Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright by Steven Millhauser. Millhauser told his fellow Stratford, Conn., native Jim Shepard, "Everything I had to say about Stratford is in my first novel, though in a fractured, splintered, meticulously distorted way.... It’s the sense, given to me by growing up in that neighborhood, in that town, of what an American small-town street feels like and smells like, what kitchens and cellars and attics are like, what roadside weeds and telephone poles are like. There’s plenty I don’t know about American life, but those things are mine."
• The Ice Storm by Rick Moody: Boy, our customer reviewers really like the movie better, but I love them both.
• The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself by P.T. Barnum: Barnum's Museum might have been on Broadway in Manhattan, but the Yankee huckster was bred and mostly headquartered in Connecticut.

Also: Amy Bloom's stories, the original firebrand Jonathan Edwards, maybe Uncle Tom's Cabin, by longtime Connecticut resident Harriet Beecher Stowe, although that one could be claimed by any number of states. --Tom

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

The Books of the States: Georgia (15 electoral votes)

As impressed as I was with New Jersey yesterday, I have to say that Georgia, with its identical 15 electoral slots to fill, holds up its end of the deal. Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers, plus one-of-a-kind cultural icons like Gone with the Wind, The Color Purple, and Deliverance, not to mention the preacher whose words might be better known to us than any other 20th-century writer? That's a pretty good start. (Am I the only one in whose mind O'Connor and McCullers are joined? It's not really that I confuse them, but between the early successes and the early illnesses, the first names that sound like last names, and the last names that scan almost the same.... I imagine they look alike, too, although they really don't at all.)

I burned up too much of my blogging time this afternoon digging into those David Foster Wallace videos, so I'll have to leave you my nominations shorn of much of the usual commentary, but here are 15 to reckon with.

• The Collected Stories by Flannery O'Connor
• Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
• The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers: Is this the right one of hers to choose? Just because Oprah said so, doesn't mean we have to.
• Cane by Jean Toomer
• The Color Purple by Alice Walker
• Deliverance by James Dickey: No doubt Dickey fans would say I should go with his poetry instead, and I'm sure I could be convinced to, but still...
• Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (I resisted the urge to include Sherman's memoirs too...)
• A Testament of Hope by Martin Luther King Jr.
• Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch: How do you best represent Georgia's greatest son? With his own writing, and also the first volume of Branch's great civil rights trilogy, which covers the whole map but does introduce you to the beginnings of the Atlanta preacher's son and Morehouse man, and his first fame next door in Montgomery, Alabama.
• Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell
• Killers of the Dream by Lillian Smith
• A Childhood by Harry Crews
• Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson
• Praying for Sheetrock by Melissa Fay Greene
• Those Bones Are Not My Child by Toni Cade Bambara: her friend Toni Morrison considered this posthumous novel about the Atlanta child murders Bambara's best.

There are plenty more candidates I can think of: Mark Pendergast's For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, Al Stump's revisionist biography of Ty Cobb, Kim Cooper's excellent 33 1/3 book on the Athens genius behind Neutral Milk Hotel, John Lewis's civil rights memoir, Joel Chandler's Uncle Remus collections, Olive Ann Burns, Anne Rivers Siddons, Ferrol Sams, Calder Willingham, Pearl Cleage...  Let us know what you'd like to see here. --Tom

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

Watching DFW: State Fair Twirlers and Cruise Ship Service

There have been many, many more comments and tributes about David Foster Wallace since our first responses last weekend. We could hardly catalogue them all, but a couple places you might want to stop by, if you want to read more, are the tribute pages put together by Edward Champion and McSweeney's (the latter is especially full of life, including a photo sequence of DFW swapping a trademark bandanna for a Lucky Charms t-shirt and an anecdote that ends with him digging through a dumpster for a spit cup: "Mind if I dip in your car?"), and the archive of his articles and stories Harper's has put up (including the famous state fair and cruise ship pieces, as well as two I remember vividly about windy teen tennis and uptight grammarians, of which he was one). But what I wanted to share with you until I got distracted by the above were videos. I ran across one today and it led me to another and I was glad and sad to watch them and wanted to share.

Here's Dave (one of the McSwy's notes, from a former student, reports that the whole "David Foster Wallace" thing was thrust upon him by agents/publishers to separate him from all the other Dave Wallaces) reading from the baton-twirler sequence in the Harper's state fair piece (listen for the "whorp-whorping" toward the end):

And in Italy, talking about postmodernists trying to tell old-fashioned stories:

You'll find a lot more related videos from that conference, with Franzen and Zadie Smith popping up in the background. Here he is reading from the state fair piece (including a different version of the twirlers) and the cruise ship piece (it's a long one):

And, finally, here is another video that keeps popping up as a related video for the rest of these, called Roger Federer as Religious Experience. No sign of DFW in it (oh, I see, there's a quote from him in the info section), but the connection is clear to anyone who's read him on tennis or Federer in particular. Watching it and thinking of DFW's awed, good-enough-to-know-what-greatness-means appreciation for a master like Federer, and then of one's own awe at Wallace, a rare Federer in his own craft, well, it's hard to keep watching...

--Tom

Talking to Philip Roth: Indignation and the Ethics of Spoilers

I meant to post this yesterday, in honor of New Jersey Day, but, well, it got very late. But I recently had the opportunity to talk to Newark's (well, now Connecticut's) own Philip Roth about his new book, Indignation. The responses to this one are all over the map, like they seem to be for every new book he writes these days, but, having read a whole lot of Roth over the past year or so (in preparation for talking to him last year), I'm one of the ones who thinks the new one is superb (it's my Best of the Month pick for September). It may not be as ambitious as American Pastoral or The Counterlife, say, or quite as exquisite as The Ghost Writer or Goodbye, Columbus, but to say it's, oh, the seventh- or eighth-best Roth book is still saying a lot. It's a tight little comedy, but I've found it very haunting, both in the reading and in the remembering.

There's a revelation about 50 pages into the book that, when I talked to him, I planned to keep under wraps, just because I had enjoyed its sly unveiling so much and didn't want to deprive anyone else of the pleasure. But it's so central to the book that Roth spilled the beans anyway, after I had boxed him in with a clumsy question that made it all but unavoidable. How do you handle talking about a plot point like that? A number of the reviewers have met that question head on. Kakutani, rather spitefully to my mind, blew the twist in the very first line of her fairly negative review on Tuesday, while David Gates (is he not the best front-line critic writing these days?) in what will be the cover review in the Times on Sunday (you can get an early peek in the International Herald Tribune today), is far more graceful about it, revealing it himself but with the same sort of storyteller's skill and enjoyment that Roth himself uses. (Plus, I agree with him about the book.)

You can listen to our conversation below, in which we talk about how to time such a revelation, as well as related matters like the Chinese national anthem, the late editor (and his old friend) Ted Solotaroff, and whether Indignation is a "'50s, Bob Newhart Portnoy."

--Tom

P.S. I just noticed that my predecessor here (by many years now!), the wise James Marcus, had his own time with Roth recently and has a nice piece about it in the LA Times.

The Books of the States: New Jersey (15 electoral votes)

For a state that has always struggled to find its identity in the shadow of nearby cities--while being best known perhaps for the highway that gets you from of those cities to the other--New Jersey has produced a powerhouse lineup of writers and books that aren't just from Jersey, but are consciously about Jersey. There are a few mid-size states that might be able to compete with NJ's top 15, but, with the exception perhaps of Louisiana, I'm not sure that any of them will be as full of books that don't just happen to be from that state--they couldn't be from anywhere else. Here are my suggestions:

• Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth
• American Pastoral by Philip Roth: You could easily fill out the whole list of 15 with books from Newark's favorite son, who has sent almost as many book-review copyeditors to their reference books to check the spelling of "Weequahic" as Faulkner did for "Yoknapatawpha." Cases could certainly be made for including Portnoy's Complaint, The Plot Against America, and Patrimony, among others, but these two make fitting bookends for his remarkably prolific career, and are also the most directly about the social landscape of New Jersey.
• The Pine Barrens by John McPhee
• A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton by John McPhee: Two local books from the New Yorker master who was born in Princeton, attended Princeton High and Princeton U., and taught for decades at, yes, Princeton.
• Paterson by William Carlos Williams: American poetry doesn't get more local than this modernist classic from the good doctor.
• The Sportswriter by Richard Ford: A Mississippi-raised writer who has written so well about Montana nailed the voice of the Eastern suburbs with Haddam's Frank Bascombe.
• Clockers by Richard Price: A short drive down the turnpike from fictional Haddam is fictional Dempsy, where Price set this modern crime classic.
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz: How far does the shadow of the Dominican dictator Trujillo extend? All the way to a lonely sci-fi geek trying to find some game in the Rutgers dorms.
• One for the Money by Janet Evanovich: Evanovich found her voice from the very beginning with the tough but charming Trenton bail bondswoman Stephanie Plum.
• Tell No One by Harlan Coben: Coben's first post-Bolitar thriller brought him back to his home state for what was one of his most popular books even before the hit French movie adaptation this summer.
• The Figured Wheel by Robert Pinsky: Three decades of collected poems from the former Poet Laureate, although you might instead choose his more recent collection, Jersey Rain, for obvious reasons.
• The Meadowlands by Robert Sullivan: Sullivan found the stubborn survival of nature in Jersey's toxic swamps; he didn't find Hoffa.
• No Cause for Indictment: An Autopsy of Newark by Ronald Porambo: Under threats to his life, Porambo reported the '67 Newark riots in what Nixonland author Rick Perlstein has called "a monument in investigative journalism."
• Washington's Crossing by David Hackett Fischer: The Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the decisive battles of Trenton and Princeton in the winter after the Declaration of Independence.
• Racing in the Street: The Springsteen Reader, edited by June Skinner Sawyers: You didn't think we'd get out of here without the Boss, did you? Is there a great (or even really good) Springsteen book? And how about Mr. Frank Sinatra of Hoboken, NJ? Where's the great Sinatra book? A life like his certainly deserves the two-volume treatment that Guralnick gave Elvis--I'd be surprised if someone isn't under contract to write that right now.

That's a very solid lineup, but I'm sure I'm missing something. Please fill in the gaps, or blow my picks out of the water entirely. --Tom

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

The Books of the States: Pennsylvania (21 electoral votes; Guest: Stewart O'Nan)

We're pleased to move into the big battleground state of Pennsylvania today with a great deal of help. Our first guest Books of the States contributor is Pittsburgh native Stewart O'Nan. He has since moved on to Connecticut, where recent books of his like Last Night at the Lobster have been set (and where he has become enough of a New Englander to cowrite a book about the Red Sox with Mainer Stephen King). But he returned to his roots for us and put together a list of 14 local favorites to start our Pennsylvania list with. His new novel, Songs for the Missing (set in the Midwest), comes out on October 30.

• The Homewood Trilogy (Damballah, Hiding Place, Sent for You Yesterday), John Edgar Wideman: Two novels and a story collection from an African American neighborhood in Pittsburgh that form the beginnings of a deep and searching family saga.
• Brothers and Keepers, John Edgar Wideman: An intimate memoir recounting his brother's arrest and ongoing incarceration for a killing.  A portrait of a family, a city and a system.
• Olinger Stories, John Updike: Nostalgic yet always piercing views of smalltown life in the Eastern part of the state.  Updike's love of detail delivers his world whole.
• The Rabbit Books, John Updike: A trip through time, absorbing and disgorging every damn thing in American life, as everyman/schmuck Harry Angstrom lives and lusts and dies, and Shillington, PA, changes from an energetic small town into a plump, overstuffed suburb.
• South Street, David Bradley: Long since gentrified, this formerly funky section of Philadelphia gives Bradley a chance to fictionally frame the cultural chasms of 1970s America.
• Spellbound, David McKain: A memoir of growing up in Bradford, PA. Marvelously honest about the relationships of parents and children.
• Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon: Set mostly in the Oakland and Squirrel Hill neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, a hilarious novel of academia and ambition.
• Mickelsson's Ghosts, John Gardner: His last novel, a rambling philosophical mystery of a possibly mad professor lost in the Endless Mountains of the far northeast corner of the state.
• The Johnstown Flood, David McCullough: A nonfiction account of privilege and tragedy from America's most popular popular historian.
• Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger: Most folks would call this a novel of New York City, but the first 69 pages and the tone of Holden's voice come directly from Pencey, a fictionalized boarding school like so many in the eastern part of the state.
• Eyesores, Eric Shade: A rollicking collection of stories set in Windfall, a depressed Western PA town like the author's home of Altoona.  Much drinking, driving and sad weirdness (or weird sadness).
• The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara: Enough Gettysburg to last the average reader a lifetime.
• About Three Bricks Shy of a Load, Roy Blount, Jr.:We Picksburghers love our Steelers. Roy Blount shows the rest of you just how much.
• Our Kind, Kate Walbert: A smart, lyrical novel-in-stories about a tightly knit group of "women of a certain age" holding on in a far-flung, upscale suburb of Philadelphia.

What would you add (or argue with)? To go back a little ways, you'd have to include Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, as well as something about the Constitutional Convention (Catherine Drinker Bowen's classic Miracle at Philadelphia?), and I might suggest one of Charles Brockden Brown's weirdo early gothic novels, Arthur Mervyn. And then there's the plays in August Wilson's Century Cycle, John O'Hara (Appointment in Samarra), the noir master David Goodis (Down There, which became Shoot the Piano Player after the Truffaut adaptation), and Annie Dillard's American Childhood, about her early days in Pittsburgh. Send us more! --Tom

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

P.S. All due respect to former Gov. Tom Ridge, who made the pick, but the Pennsylvania quarter has to be one of the most nondescript grab bags in the series: the outline of the state, a keystone, and one of those ladies in drapery holding up something symbolic. Would you rather have that, or the impish face of the Bard of Shillington himself? I'd pay 50 cents at least for that quarter.

The Books of the States: Delaware (3 electoral votes)

We start our project small, but with a high degree of difficulty. Some of the upcoming states daunt me a little (California--55 books? Massachusetts--only 12?), but none more than the first one, Delaware, known best for being, well, first. What comes to mind when you think of when you think of Delaware writers, or Delaware books? Yes, I'm still waiting. I've asked a lot of people, and gotten the same (that is, no) answer. I asked Google, and it tells me about Jonathan Kellerman's Alex Delaware series. I asked Craig Taylor, the Canadian Londoner who wrote the Delaware piece for State by State (and who edits Hamish Hamilton's new online magazine, Five Dials), and he came up nearly empty too, although he did mention a "salacious history of the DuPont family" and offered, "Do let me know if you decide to do a feature on how to tend chickens on the books blog. I know a few Delawareans who could help out with that."

There is one very Delawarean book that has spent some time in our Top 100 this summer, but one of my goals for this project is not to have Joe Biden's memoir end up on our Delaware list. But thanks to some research, some luck, and the help of an online librarian I found via the Delaware library system but who turned out to live in Indiana, we have some possibilities to start with:

• W.D. Snodgrass (pictured above), Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems. Snodgrass won the Pulitzer in 1960 for his first collection, Heart's Needle, which was later credited for inaugurating the confessional school of poetry. He was born near Pittsburgh but taught at the University of Delaware from 1980 to 1994.
• Robert Montgomery Bird, Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself. Bird was born and raised in New Castle, and then moved to Pennsylvania and is remembered (that all happened in the early 19th century) as a novelist of dark satires and a playwright. All the recommendation I need on this one is that New York Review Books brought it back into print this January and says it's a precursor to Naked Lunch! But if you want more, Poe apparently called it "very clever" way back then.
• Tom Douglas, I Love Crab Cakes!. Douglas is the best-known chef in Seattle, but he's a Delaware native and his specialty is that Eastern Shore favorite, the crab cake.
• Marisa de los Santos, Love Walked In. De los Santos teaches at the University of Delaware too, and she wrote this bestseller (and future Sarah Jessica Parker vehicle) there, although it's set in nearby Philly.
• Dudley Cammett Lunt, Taylors Gut: In the Delaware State. While wandering through a giant used book store recently with the Delaware problem on my mind, I found they actually had a single book in the Ds in their state section, this naturalist's account of a year at a local pond from 1968, which, miraculously, appears to be in print. A sample quote: "On a freshwater marsh such as Thousand Acre, a man must call softly and seductively and when he has the flight turned, he stops save for a low chuckle or two as the birds near the decoys. But not so on a salt marsh like the Woodland Beach flats. There the calls must be loud, sharp, harsh and incessant. If he even hesitates when they are coming in, they will veer off and be gone, leaving him out of breath and utterly frustrated."
• Gerard Colby Zilg, Du Pont: Behind the Nylon Curtain. Is this Taylor's "salacious history"? According to a customer review, Delaware's first family did their best to suppress this 1974 expose.

What do you think? I'm not so sure we've knocked Joe Biden out of the running yet (he certainly gets Delawarey points). Please help us discover some more. Tomorrow: Pennsylvania. --Tom
 

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Books, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Author.

So reads Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution, or at least it does in the version I have around here somewhere. The Electoral College is, of course, the most absurd and distorting contraption of our sometimes-elegant democracy, and doubtless the red and blue cones in your eyes are going to wear out from all the electoral maps you'll see over the next couple of months (we don't escape blame for that here). But over the next couple months (the next 51 weekdays, to be exact), inspired by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey's new anthology, State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (see our interview), we're going to use the clunky structure of the electoral college to build a map of our own, a reader's map of the United States that will, we hope, be either a complement or an antidote to the relentless election season, whichever you prefer.

I grew up in Maryland, and despite--or maybe because of--its lack of an identity, have always felt loyal to the Old Line State, even now that I live 3,000 miles away. (You can get an idea of how muddled an identity Maryland has from one of its other nicknames--we have plenty!--"America in Miniature." If you can't figure out the one thing you are, why not claim everything?) When the U.S. Mint introduced their state quarter series, I stupidly got my hopes up that instead of some abstract symbol they would put one of the great American writers on the Maryland quarter: Frederick Douglass. Honor one of the finest acts of self-creation in American history (and a book that in a few short pages brings the Maryland landscape, both country and city, alive, as well as its tragic history)? No such luck: they went with "the country's largest wooden dome built without nails" instead.

But think of the writers who can be collected within that strange, jagged border that carries the name, "Maryland." Some were born there and stayed (H.L. Mencken, John Barth, Nora Roberts, Tom Clancy, David Simon, Laura Lippman), some grew up there and left (Douglass, Michael Chabon, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Ann Beattie, Myla Goldberg), some arrived from elsewhere (Edgar Allan Poe, Anne Tyler, Rachel Carson, Madison Smartt Bell). And others may have written well about Maryland without ever having set foot there. (F. Scott Fitzgerald may not be known as a Maryland writer, but we got him too in the end: he's buried with Zelda in a little cemetery on Rockville Pike, not too far down the road from where I used to get dropped off on summer Mondays to play Putt-Putt all day.) Sounds like a pretty good lineup for a little nobody state, but I'm sure it could be matched by any number of others.

And that's what we aim to find out. Here's our plan: from now through November 25 (that's 51 weekdays), we'll put up a post a day, covering the states in the order they joined the union (just like the quarters), and finishing with the District of Columbia. Our goal is to choose as many books for each state as it has delegates in the Electoral College (e.g., 3 for Delaware, 17 for Michigan, and, uh, 55 for California), but that won't be where we start. We're going to need your help on this: we haven't read a country's worth of books ("Omnivoracious" means we're hungry to read everything, not that we have). So for each day we'll make our own nominations (and in many cases we'll bring in guest writers from those states--many of them contributors to State by State--to make their own recommendations), but then we'll open the floor to you and anyone else who wanders in through the Internet pipes. We'll leave each post up as a discussion area for the whole process, and then at some point soon after we've posted on all the states, we'll put together a final list of 538 books, our reader's map of the country.

What are our criteria? What makes a good "Maryland" book, for instance? Well, that's going to be self-defining--you can make a case any way you like. (We liked the way New York magazine defined their "New York canon" earlier this year: "The key was that the choices be unmistakably New Yorky." Potter Stewart would have been proud.) But an ideal book wouldn't just be written by someone from the state--it would tell you something about the state, so The Sot-Weed Factor or Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant or Homicide get big Maryland points, while Michael Chabon's books are more likely to end up on the Alaska, New York, or Pennsylvania lists. And how will we narrow down the choices at the end? Well, by fiat, if you must know, but we promise that we'll pay close attention to both the volume and the quality of the nominations, so please, speak up! Tell us of the big books we were idiots to forget, or the unknown books we'd love to read if only we knew of them. We're not just looking for fiction, either: history, kids' books, art books, anything you can make a case for. We're relying on your local expertise.

I've been told by a few people that this is a crazy escapade to be setting out on, and by many more (often the same people) that it sounds like a whole lot of fun. Hope you think so too. We'll start things off with Delaware later today (and it's a toughie, let me tell you), and go on from there, with our first guest contributor, Stewart O'Nan, giving us his Pennsylvania picks tomorrow. --Tom

P.S. This idea is too good for us to be the only ones to have thought of it. In my previous post, Kristen from Book Club Classics comments that she and Melanie Jones have tag-teamed on weekly state picks, and they are two-thirds of the way through. Here's their latest one (Dennis Lehane for Massachusetts), which includes a list of their previous ones at the bottom.

P.P.S. Just came across this, while state-obsessed: Want to match state stereotypes with what researchers have found? Gene Expression links to a paper by university researchers that rate the levels of "Neuroticism," "Extraversion," "Conscientiousness," "Agreeableness," and "Openness" in each state in handy maps. Pretty fascinating. (Washington state: agreeable, introverted, not neurotic? Sounds right...) (Via Sullivan)

50 Writers, 50 States: Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey on State by State

When I first met Minnesota's own Matt Weiland at BookExpo a few years ago, he was living in London, as an editor for the great literary magazine Granta, and had gone native to the extent that he (and his friend Sean Wilsey) had edited a book on soccer, The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, for which they asked 32 writers to write essays on the 32 countries playing in the 2006 tournament. Not too long ago, Matt moved back to the States to work on another great literary magazine, The Paris Review, and started getting back in touch with his home. By his own report, he began

hitting the Americana hard: I read Moby-Dick and Huck Finn again, and I gorged on Preston Sturges films and Will Eisner comics and the aching Old Time music that is heavy on banjos and beards. I spent a long Sunday walking down Broadway and a weekend bicycling on the Jersey Shore and a week driving 3,000 miles though the Midwest. I ate a whole lot of pie.

That's from his preface to an even more ambitious geographical stunt he concocted with Wilsey, State by State: A Panoramic Portrait. They commissioned 50 writers for essays on the 50 states (and added an interview about that underrepresented district, Washington, D.C., with its best-known chronicler, Edward P. Jones). Inspired by the WPA guides of the '30s Federal Writers Project, Weiland and Wilsey asked writers from Louise Erdrich and Jonathan Franzen to Anthony Bourdain and Sarah Vowell to write about the states they knew best--or, in some cases, states they'd never set foot in before.

It's a great idea and, it turns out, a gorgeous and smart book, looking enough like an old social studies textbook that I was tempted to write my name and homeroom in the back, except that it would have marred the lovely endpapers by the cartoonist Seth. And their inspired project has inspired a number of other stunts: our I-5 and internet neighbors at Powell's have based their third "Out of the Book" movie on State by State, which, judging by the trailer available for viewing, looks adorable and funny. And today we're embarking on a folly of our own: a project to choose (with help from you and some guest contributors, including many of the writers in State by State) the best books from each state. (Much more on that later.) But first, I talked with Matt and Sean a few days ago about regional identities, how they put the book together, where to go to get beat up in Key West, and grade-school censorship in Minnesota. You can read the interview below, but if you'd like to get an immediate sense of the regional distinctions that still remain in our homogenizing society, take a listen to this short clip (in which we discuss, of all things, regional distinctions in our homogenizing society), and note Matt's clipped Minnesota notes, Sean's mellow California tones, and my own suburban Maryland mumble.

Amazon.com: What state--or states--are you calling from?

Sean: We're both in New York city.

Amazon.com: Okay, level with me: you asked 50 writers to write about 50 states, but they all live in Brooklyn, don't they?

Matt: Oh, that is a low blow.

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

Note: with the Wall Street Journal putting more of their content online, I've added them to my weekly circuit.

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Robert Stone on The Forever War by Dexter Filkins: "Now, in the tradition of 'Dispatches,' with the publication of Dexter Filkins’s stunning book, 'The Forever War,' it seems the journals of the brave correspondents assigned to the Middle East will take their place as the pre-eminent record of America’s late-imperial adventures, the heart of these heartless exercises in disaster, maybe some consolation to those maimed and bereaved in them.... The contrast of his eloquence and humanity with the shameless snake-oil salesmanship employed by the American government to get the thing started serves us well."
• Jennifer Szalai on City of Refuge by Tom Piazza: "If all of this sounds both well intentioned and schematic, that’s because it is. 'City of Refuge' seems to have been planned as a novel about the triumph of virtue in the face of disaster; not a novel concerned with what may or may not happen to virtue in the lives of particular characters, but a novel in which the characters are deployed to show that virtue will, in the end, prevail.... The haste with which so many lines seem to have been written, the plucking of sentimentality’s low-hanging fruit, suggests a novelist who assumes he can neglect literary possibilities in his pronouncement of what he takes to be a Greater Truth."
• Maslin on Goldengrove by Francine Prose: "Her modest-sounding book turns out to be beautifully wrought.... 'Goldengrove' is one of Ms. Prose’s gentler books — far more so than the bitingly satirical 'A Changed Man.' But it’s not a sentimental one. It draws the reader into and then out of 'that hushed and watery border zone where we live alongside the dead,' and it does this with mostly effortless narrative verve. And it scorns the bathos of its genre, so it does not become an invitation to wallow in suffering. It prefers the comforts of strength, growth and forward motion."

Washington Post:

• Ron Charles on Indignation by Philip Roth: "Copies of Indignation, Philip Roth's ferocious little tale, ought to be handed out on college campuses along with condoms and tetanus shots. This cathartic story might vent some of the volatile self-righteousness that can consume the lives of passionate young people (and, yes, old people too). It's not that it breaks any new ground; the author's favorite themes are all here ... but with Indignation, Roth presents his most concentrated parable of self-destructive fury."
• Josiah Bunting III on The War Within by Bob Woodward: "Mainly, it is a study of what happens when men and women, charged with leading the country in wartime or with counseling those who lead, do not tell each other what they really think. White House advisers are faithless to their responsibilities if they withhold their conclusions and convictions from those they serve, or from their colleagues. It is a toxicity that, by Woodward's account, infected the whole grim process."
• Fergus M. Bordewich on The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed: "Liberating the woman known to Jefferson's smirking enemies as 'dusky Sally' from the lumber room of scandal and legend, Gordon-Reed leads her into the daylight of a country where slaves and masters met on intimate terms. In so doing, Gordon-Reed also shines an uncompromisingly fresh but not unsympathetic light on the most elusive of the Founding Fathers."

Los Angeles Times:

• Tim Rutten on Roth's Indignation: "One of the ways to recognize  truly great writers is that even their mistakes engage us. Philip Roth is our greatest living novelist, and his new book, 'Indignation,' is an irritating, puzzling and fascinating bundle of mistakes, miscalculations and self-indulgences." (For what it's worth, Rutten is wrong, and Charles above is right, about this one.)
• Jim Ruland on Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine by Stanley Crawford: "'Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine' -- the book's most inelegant passage is its title -- is a brave and audacious novel whose style, structure, story and language come together like strands of hemp spliced into an intricate knot.Is the premise fantastic? Absolutely. But the novel's emotional truth is as instructive as any fable. Marriage, Crawford seems to be saying, is more than a long sea voyage: It's like being press-ganged onto a sloop ruled by a bullying first mate and a treacherous captain.... His novel is to marriage what Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road' is to parenting."

David Foster Wallace: Two Stories, and the Fall of Videophony

Thanks, Brad. I realize that over the past dozen years since Infinite Jest came out, I've walked around with a tiny good feeling somewhere deep in my filing system (and more than a few times--including once I can remember distinctly just a few weeks ago--it's popped up into my consciousness and made me smile) that "David Foster Wallace is working on something big right now, and some day I'll get to read it." As unimaginably terrible (or worse: terribly imaginable) as the personal side of this story is, I'm also already mourning the words (many, many words, always tumbling on that edge between fussily exact and colloquially sloppy) that he won't write now and that we won't read.

(Less consciously, I think I also carried around the idea that at some point, if I stuck around in the book world long enough, I might get to play some tennis with DFW, I guess my generational equivalent of going marlin fishing with Hemingway. I figured he would be hilarious, maybe sort of a jerk but more likely gracious and sweet, and I'm sure he would have creamed me.)

I have a couple "David Foster Wallace stories" that I tell, both from before I got into the book business (or rather, got farther in than the usual business of being a reader). The first one I tell more often because it's a lot simpler and has two punch lines: I went to see him read at our local Elliott Bay Books on the Infinite Jest tour--it was medium-packed there, but I was front and center, although I hadn't read anything of his fiction yet and remember being vaguely annoyed that he had written something so long that no one would ever read. He read the video telephony section of the book (see below) and I can still say that I have never been in another room where complete strangers were laughing so hard together. The moment that I remember best (and that I'm glad to think of this evening) was when DFW himself, deservedly joyful at his own brilliance or just infected by the response of the rest of us, had to stop mid-sentence for a few seconds because he was laughing so hard. The rest of that story, though, is that after the reading, he said thanks and headed directly off the podium, where he was met halfway to the exit by the young man from the bookstore who had introduced him. As I remember it, the host mentioned that, per tradition, they had planned to open the floor to a Q&A, and there was an awkward moment--which felt much longer than a moment--when DFW didn't really say anything but made clear that he preferred not to. They remained standing, awkwardly, at that halfway point at the side of the audience and somehow, either invited or not, someone from the audience did speak up with a standard post-reading question like "Who are your influences?", to which Wallace muttered, "If that's what the questions are going to be like, then no," and continued his exit. To my mind, the second moment, quickly translated in my mind to "Wow, David Foster Wallace is a dick," was overwhelmed by the pleasure and camaraderie of the first, although I'm not sure everyone else there felt that way. 

Election 2008: A Map of America's Reading

You may have already come across it on our site, but I wanted to call out a new Election 2008 page we launched today. The centerpiece is a snazzy, data-drenched map of the country (thanks Christel, John, Jana, and everyone else who knows things I don't and helped build it), with each state colored with varying shades of red or blue depending on the political book-buying habits of our customers there over the past 60 days (the map is updated every day). There's plenty to click around on there: for each state you can see the percentages of "red" and "blue" books purchased there and two "local favorites" (not the bestselling political books there, necessarily, but the ones that are selling relatively better there than in other places). And you can also go back in time to see how the map looked in previous two-month periods during this year and 2004. (The image above is how the map looked on September 9, 2008, but you'll have to go to the page itself to see it in action.)

I'll leave it up to you to interpret the map as you like (yep, it's pretty red right now), and to make your own discoveries. But I find clicking around to see the local favorites pretty fascinating (yes, Sarah is the favorite red book in Alaska and Joe Biden's memoir is the favorite blue one in Delaware--and, for that matter, "Fritz" Hollings apparently remains beloved in South Carolina). And going through the 2004 maps in order is rather stunning: it's blue, blue, blue (especially after Bill Clinton's My Life came out in June), but click on July-August and boy, everything suddenly turns to red (thanks, Swift Boaters). Things swing back a bit before the election, and then in November-December it's mostly blue again, as depressed Democrats turned to Tom Frank and George Lakoff to explain what happened (and keep it from happening again). We have no expectations that the maps reflect voting or will predict the election, but they do tell a story.

You can read an explanation of how the map works, and how we chose the red and blue books (as well as the long list of "purple" books that didn't fit either category), and there's plenty more to see on the page, including author interviews, which we'll be adding more of over the next two months, and meters comparing book sales for the presidential and vice presidential candidates. We know politics can make everybody crazy (I'm pretty sure the roller coasters of this endless election year are giving me an ulcer), but we thought this would be an entertaining and mildly enlightening way to give a new perspective on this serious ritual. Enjoy. --Tom

P.S. I'm sorry for not making this clearer: the image above is not the snazzy interactive map itself--you have to go to the Election 2008 page for that. I've linked the map now so that a click will send you there.

Booker Shortlist Announced: Big Names Gone

Showing an inclination for big, fat sagas and a lack of interest in the biggest names and the bookies' favorites from their longlist, the Booker judges announced their shortlist of six this morning:

• Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
• Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
• Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies
• Linda Grant, The Clothes on Their Backs
• Philip Hensher, The Northern Clemency (UK edition; not out in the US until February, although I wouldn't be surprised to see it get moved up now)
• Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

Not on the list: Salman Rushdie, Joseph O'Neill, for his acclaimed (in America, at least) Netherland, and Michelle de Kretser's touted Lost Dog. Such were the expectations that the chair of the judges could make a headline by saying something that one would think would be self-evident, that Rushdie's Enchantress of Florence was "not good enough" to make the list (sorry, Daphne!).

So what is on the list? Maybe not big names, but big books: Ghosh, Hensher, and Toltz each top 500 pages. There's been a lot of advance word on Sea of Poppies, and I've already expressed my interest in A Fraction of the Whole, but the one that appeals to me most is The Northern Clemency. There's only one customer review for it so far on our UK site (by Nina, from "England"), but it really made me want read the book (I think "Nina" and I like the same things):

I finished The Northern Clemency 4 weeks ago and have been letting it sink in. It is a wonderfully resonant novel, and the people and places still live within my head. It is, for want of a better word, a 'family saga', following the lives of two Sheffield families from the 1970s to today but it is also much more than that. It creates an entire world with a 'cast of dozens', with some marvellous cameo chapters devoted to secondary figures who make the world come alive. It is terribly emotionally involving; it made me weep twice, and this is _because_ of its sparse language that allows the reader to fill in the gaps. The book threw me in and tumbled me about, lulled me into complacency and then hurled something unexpected at me.

I loved the way we weave in and out of different people's consciousnesses, and i never quite knew where I was going to end up.

The prose in this novel is to die for. Some favourite images include the phrase ' She looked at him, sharpening a pencil in her head' and, 'He danced, moving from one foot to the other and making vague clay-shaping motions with his hands.' I hope this gives you a tiny idea of the wonderfully assured mastery of this author. I knew I was in good hands from page 1, and I wasn't let down.

I loved the build-up and the way people get mentioned on p.2 and then disappear from view until they unexpectedly reappear on p.64 in new, delightful combinations. I was entranced by the insight that suspense and surprise needn't come from the story itself but can come entirely from the plot, that is, from the way the story is presented. Unexpected revelations sneak up on you and give you delicious shivers of recognition.
I absolutely loved it. I only wish there were additional amazon stars to mete out because this deserves 7 of them. It is truly outstanding.

"Sharpening a pencil in her head"! That's enough to draw me in. There's also a well-timed interview with Hensher live on the Guardian book pages this week.

The winner's announced on October 14. --Tom

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

Big books out this week--and big disagreements about them--make for a long installment of Old Media Monday:

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Caroline Elkins on The House at Sugar Beach by Helene Cooper: "At its heart, 'The House at Sugar Beach' is a coming-of-age story told with unremitting honesty. With her pedigree and her freedom from internalized racism, Cooper is liberated to enjoy a social universe that is a fluid mix of all things American and African.... While Cooper’s memoir is mesmerizing in its portrayal of a Liberia rarely witnessed, its description of the psychological devastation — and coping mechanisms — brought on by profound loss is equally captivating."
• Kakutani on The War Within by Bob Woodward: "This volume contains less compelling news than Mr. Woodward’s earlier Bush books and makes for considerably less gripping reading.... Much of 'The War Within' simply ratifies the picture that has already emerged from newspaper and magazine articles and dozens of books by journalists and former administration insiders. It’s a picture of an administration riven by internal conflicts..., an administration in which the advice of experts was frequently ignored or dismissed, traditional policy-making channels were routinely circumvented, policy often took a backseat to electoral politics, accountability was repeatedly evaded, and few advisers dared speak truth to power."
• Kakutani's knives are busy this week. Here she is on Home by Marilynne Robinson: "Whereas Ms. Robinson used her remarkable descriptive powers and pointillist prose in 'Gilead' to give the reader a keen sense of that small, Midwestern town and to conjure up the history of John Ames’s uncommon family, she focuses in this novel on the unhappy emotional mathematics of Jack’s relationship with his father, a task unsuited to her strongest gifts as a writer.... This results in a static, even suffocating narrative in which very little is dramatized, and much is recalled secondhand."
• Ron Carlson on Fine Just the Way It Is by Annie Proulx: "All but one of the stories in 'Fine Just the Way It Is' range from the 19th century to the modern day and offer a world in which the natural elements are murderous and folks aren’t much better.... From time to time, you glimpse an Eden in Proulx’s world, and when you see it, you’d better take a photograph, because it won’t last long."
• S. Kirk Walsh on A Better Angel by Chris Adrian: "In 'A Better Angel' Chris Adrian creates his own lexicon of grief that moves from quiet moments of anguish to sharp fits of rage. The stories in this collection feature fatal car crashes, attempted suicides, incurable illnesses and the tragic events of 9/11. But don’t be deterred by the dismal subject matter. Mr. Adrian is a gifted, courageous writer ... and with this collection he continues to take far-reaching risks. Unspeakable grief and the innate will to survive create opposing forces in these stories, producing a universe bursting with humor and life."

Washington Post:

• Joseph S. Nye Jr. on Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman: "Like it or not, we need Tom Friedman. The peripatetic columnist has made himself a major interpreter of the confusing world we inhabit. He travels to the farthest reaches, interviews everyone from peasants to chief executives and expresses big ideas in clear and memorable prose. While pettifogging academics (a select few of whom he favors) complain that his catchy phrases and anecdotes sometimes obscure deeper analysis, by and large Friedman gets the big issues right."
• Ron Charles on Robinson's Home: "Even more than their stylistic beauty, what's miraculous about Gilead and Home is their explicit focus on spiritual affliction, discussed in the hard terms of Protestant theology. Robinson uses the words 'grace,' 'salvation' and 'prayer' frequently and without embarrassment and without drifting into the gassy lingo of ecumenical spirituality. Her characters cower in the shadow of perdition."
• Michael Dirda on Anathem by Neal Stephenson: "Everyone has gone all out for Anathem. I fully expected to join the stampede. Alas, I can't even lope slowly alongside the herd. Oh, Anathem will certainly be admired for its intelligence, ambition, control and ingenuity. But loved? Enjoyed? The book reminds me of Harold Brodkey's The Runaway Soul from 17 years ago -- much anticipated, in places quite brilliant, but ultimately grandiose, overwrought and pretty damn dull. That's an awful thing to say about a novel as formidable as Anathem, but there's no getting around it."

Los Angeles Times:

• Laura Miller on Stephenson's Anathem: "'Anathem' is massive ... with a steep initial learning curve, but worth the effort all the same. Fiction that expertly ranges from social satire to adventure yarn to lucid explications of concepts such as configuration space is rare indeed. If Indiana Jones turned quantum physicist and took over Jostein Gaarder's bestselling novel-cum-philosophy-primer 'Sophie's World,' well, that might come close."
• Emily Barton on Robinson's Home: "Robinson has chosen to revisit certain scenes in her new novel, 'Home,' this time writing from the perspective of Glory Boughton, one of 'Gilead's' minor characters. Yet this co-quel has a beauty all its own.... The two volumes belong together because they complement each other in so many ways. They fit with and around each other perfectly, each complete on its own, yet enriching and enlivening the other. But both are books of such beauty and power that they ultimately beggar description. If I cannot do 'Home' justice in describing it, I can, at least, commend it to you with my whole heart."
• Susan Salter Reynolds on An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken: "This is an intimate book -- McCracken does not spare us her anger, fear, frustration or despondency. It is also a wildly important book -- we do not live alongside the dead the way we ought to: We sweep them off to the margins as quickly as possible."

Sargent First Novel Nominees: More Library Love for Young Writers

Yesterday I quoted Janet Maslin comparing Hannah Tinti's new novel The Good Thief to the blockbuster Story of Edgar Sawtelle as two examples of "plain-spoken fiction full of traditional virtues," and today both books appear on the shortlist for the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction's third annual John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize (via GalleyCat):

• The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block
• Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen
• Dervishes by Beth Helms
• Songs for the Butcher's Daughter by Peter Manseau
• Personal Days by Ed Park
• The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti
• The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

It's a newish prize, but with a pretty good track record: last year's winner, Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, went on of course to win the Pulitzer too, and the inaugural prize went to Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which ended up, among other things, on the New York Times's Best 10 Books of the year list. (And I'm sorry to be annoying with the name-dropping, but the coincidence is too odd not to mention: Diaz and Pessl are the only two novelists I've had lunch with at a particular restaurant near our offices. So if any superstitious 2008 nominee will be in Seattle and would like to improve their chances before the winner is announced in early December, I'm extending an open invitation to dine at Tulio at 5th Ave. and Spring St.)

And meanwhile, what's with the arms race among New York libraries and their young writer awards? The New York Public Library gives out their Young Literary Lions prize in the spring; the onus apparently is now on the Morgan Library and Schomburg Center to follow with well-funded awards for literary beginners. One almost suspects that the libraries, like operas and symphonies, have been told by their boards of directors to attract a new generation of patrons; therefore, prizes for their peers. You might think libraries would look instead to recognizing longer-lived value, and it's reassuring to see that the Merc's other two awards, both excellent ideas, do just that: the Maxwell E. Perkins Award, a lifetime achievement prize for "an editor, publisher, or agent who over the course of his or her career has discovered, nurtured and championed writers of fiction in the United States" (which recalls the recent discussion here of "legendary" editors), and the Clifton Fadiman Medal, for "a work of fiction, by a living American author, which deserves rediscovery and a wider readership" and which was published more than 10 years before. I think of this one as the New York Review Books award, since it resurrects exactly the same sort of lost classic that my favorite publishing series does, so it's fitting that the first Fadiman winner, in 2000, is currently published by NYRB (and was indeed written by one of the founders of the New York Review): Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights. I'll also note that the second winner, The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, is one of my own most beloved rediscoveries--I only came to it a few years ago, after reading Hazzard's The Great Fire, and it immediately became one of my all-time favorite books. --Tom

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Joyce Carol Oates on American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld: "Curtis Sittenfeld surely did not intend to create, in this mostly amiable, entertaining novel, anything so ambitious — or so presumptuous — as a political/cultural allegory in the 19th-century mode, yet 'American Wife' might be deconstructed as a parable of America in the years of the second Bush presidency: the 'American wife' is in fact the American people, or at least those millions of Americans who voted for a less-than-qualified president in two elections — the all-forgiving enabler for whom the bromide 'love' excuses all." On Friday, Kakutani liked the book until the politics took over: "In the final pages of 'American Wife'... it’s clear that Ms. Sittenfeld has stopped channeling the thoughts and feelings of a character she has so meticulously created and instead begun using that heroine as a sock puppet for her own views on the unhappy tenure of the Bush administration."
• Maslin on The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti, a "darkly transporting debut novel": "Recently in 'The Story of Edgar Sawtelle,' and now in 'The Good Thief,' the reader can find plain-spoken fiction full of traditional virtues: strong plotting, pure lucidity, visceral momentum and a total absence of writerly mannerisms."
• Dave Itzkoff on The World in Six Songs by Daniel Levitin: "Music, Levitin argues, is not just something to help pass the time on road trips and a swell facilitator for meeting girls: it is, he writes, 'the soundtrack of civilization' — a force that shaped us as a species and prepared us for the higher-order task of sharing complex communications with one another.... [T]o the extent that 'The World in Six Songs' succeeds, it works much like a great piece of pop music, whose combined elements can induce feelings of enlightenment and euphoria, even when some of the words don’t hold up to closer scrutiny."
• Mark Danner on The Way of the World by Ron Suskind: "In a crowded, highly talented field, Mr. Suskind bids fair to claim the crown as the most perceptive, incisive, dogged chronicler of the inner workings of the Bush administration.... At bottom, Mr. Suskind is intent on posing deeper questions: about transparency and the 'dying cult' of secrecy; about 'defining human progress together'; about the 'lack of imagination about what the nation might yet become.' These are hard, frustrating, complicated matters to which he offers only tentative answers, some of them vague, sentimental, even naïve. But he is brave enough to try to discover, through relentless reporting and a sustained and admirable act of sympathy, the right questions. In this age of scandal, we must be grateful to him for that."

Washington Post:

• Ron Charles on Tinti's The Good Thief: "It may be too quaint to imagine there are still families reading aloud together at night (so many Web sites, so little time), but if you're out there, consider Hannah Tinti's charming first novel.... Ren's plight is creaky with sentimentality, but Tinti knows how to keep her balance as she steps through these hoary conventions of Victorian melodrama. By the time she finishes describing Ren's little collection of stolen objects and his muted despair, I wanted to sign the adoption papers myself."
• Robert G. Kaiser on The Limits of Power by Andrew Bacevich: " This compact, meaty volume ought to be on the reading list of every candidate for national office -- House, Senate or the White House -- in November's elections. In an age of cant and baloney, Andrew Bacevich offers a bracing slap of reality.... Bacevich is argumentative, and his case is not proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but at the end of this book, a serious reader has a difficult choice: to embrace Bacevich's general view or to construct a genuinely persuasive alternative. For many years our leaders have failed to do either."

Los Angeles Times:

• Stacey D'Erasmo on The Road Home by Rose Tremain: "She proves herself again magically capable of animating a character from the inside out, illuminating the heart of one modern exile with an extraordinary degree of love, imagination and insight. The pleasure, the wit and the joy in humanity that Tremain brings to every page do what literature, at its best, should do: connect us, as E.M. Forster famously exhorted. Particularly, connect us to the invisible, the lonely, the barely seen."

Ur-WASPs at Work: More on Rust Hills

For those of you who don't swim against the chronological current of the blog (or who don't read the comments section), I just wanted to point you to an anecdotal addendum that Gerald Howard sent in for my post last week on the passing of editors Ted Solotaroff and Rust Hills. I had quoted Howard's appreciation of Solotaroff; he adds his memory of watching Hills in action, along with another Viking Penguin editor, Cork Smith:

These two ur-WASP gentlemen were tossing around what might be the contents of the eventual anthology GREAT ESQUIRE FICTION, and it was sort of wonderful to watch them and then it was sort of excruciating, as there was a lot of fumbling around and opinions that never yielded any concrete result and pointless general woolgathering. I eventually absented myself, but the book of course lived up to its title.

He also reminds us of a further connection between the two men: Solotaroff's response to Hills's "Red Hot Center" (in his map of the American literary establishment) gave him the title for his essay collection, The Red Hot Vacuum.

What a pleasure to hear that direct reminiscence. If there are any other readers with memories of Hills or Solotaroff, I'd love to hear them. --Tom

P.S. Why are editors so often referred to as "legendary"? I used it a couple times in my post, and Howard used it too to describe Cork Smith (while acknowledging its diluted power by calling him "TRULY legendary"). I guess it's fairly obvious: editors do their work in the dark for the most part, and, like Negro League ballplayers or old whaling captains, their reputations are built by word of mouth. And so, in keeping with the exacting use of language that is their profession, "legendary" is a literal description (if an overused one): legendary editors are the ones we tell stories about. So please: more legends, about these or other editors!

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Max Rodenbeck on A Path Out of the Desert by Kenneth Pollack: "Pollack seems oddly unaware of history’s motivating forces. To assert that 'what triggers revolutions, civil wars and other internal unrest is psychological factors, particularly feelings of extreme despair,' is plain silly. The Boston Tea Party could not have been prevented by Prozac.... What is troubling about Pollack’s view, which is fairly representative of his fellow liberal interventionists, who are likely to be in power soon, is its lack of clarity.... No matter what good will America’s 'policy community' proclaims toward the Middle East, this mix of blinkered indulgence of Israel and disdain for the rest of the region, as well as a predilection for Wilsonian dreams over achievable goals, suggests we will remain in the wilderness for some time to come."
• Miranda Seymour on White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson by Brenda Wineapple: "By restoring the colonel to what now seems his rightful position — as a courageous, principled radical who was Dickinson’s chosen reader, admirer and advocate — Wineapple throws what she describes as 'a small, considered beam' upon the work and life of these two 'seemingly incompatible friends,' the recluse and the activist. That 'beam,' when directed by a writer as thorough and intuitive as Wineapple, brightens not only the pale figures of the poet and the hitherto elusive colonel but the poems for which, upon occasion, Dickinson drew inspiration from Higginson’s more active life."
• Robert Macfarlane on Ghost Train to the Eastern Star by Paul Theroux: "Certain writers have a style that can be best likened to body odor: irresistible to some, obnoxious to many and apparently imperceptible to the writer himself. Theroux’s lack of self-awareness, his failure to observe the basic hygiene of modesty, is compelling in its way. How can anyone be this narcissistic, you wonder in disbelief, in appalled fascination.... After reading the auto-hagiography of the Turkmen leader Niyazov, Theroux summarizes it as 'pages and pages … most of it self-reverential.' He could be writing a press release for his own book."
• Charles Taylor on The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson: "Handsomely reconstituted by New Directions from the scarce original editions, 'The Unfortunates' comes in a box of 27 unbound chapters.... Picking up the sheaves of 'The Unfortunates,' sometimes only a page, that familiar heft is replaced by the feel of the ephemeral, even fragile, and that translates, as we are reading, to the fragility of the experiences we are reading about: friendship, marriage, betrayal, parenthood, early death.... This book, with no belief in God, no hope of heaven, makes you feel the stuff of life as sacred, and our inability to hold on to it as damnation enough for anyone to be made to bear."

Washington Post:

• Douglas Wolk on Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw: "The young cartoonist Dash Shaw comes down firmly on the symbolic end of the comics continuum. Shaw isn't much of a draftsman in the conventional sense, but he's got a gift for evoking what things feel like and mean, rather than what they look like.... All of Shaw's formal experimentation ... works in the service of the story's emotional impact: It's a sprawling mess, but a fascinating, affecting sprawling mess, whose raw invention and sentimental core justify each other."

Los Angeles Times:

• Tim Rutten on Theroux's Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: "What's really remarkable about "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star" is how much it reveals about Theroux the writer.... One of the problems Theroux presents to the careful reader is the fact that he's a compelling writer who is essentially unlikable. In part, that's a consequence of his blimpish judgments on everyone upon whom his disapproval settles -- including the rich and the Chinese, as a people."
• Jane Smiley on Man in the Dark by Paul Auster: " Brill, Brick, Frisk, darkness, metafiction, sinuous and elegant style. Yup, it's Paul Auster.... A narrative built of layers and layers of disorientation is not new for Auster -- this is, in fact, his specialty. It used to be that his young men were disoriented and that their disorientation afforded the reader a new way of seeing the world. Now it is his old men who are disoriented, but their way of seeing the world is more weary than fresh. Frankly, this book could be funnier. Or darker. Or meaner. Or something."

Losing Two Legends of a Lost Art: Ted Solotaroff and Rust Hills

I'm often on the obit desk here at Omni central, and were I not on vacation last week I would have liked to note the passing, nearly in tandem, of two legends of the rather narrow field of magazine fiction editing, Ted Solotaroff (mostly at his own paperback-style journal, The New American Review) and Rust Hills (mostly at Esquire, back when it was the best magazine in the business, and then later when it wasn't). But happily, especially since my knowledge of their careers is mainly second- and third-hand, others have stepped in, including Thomas Beller in Slate, who speculates why both men still had a hunger to find and edit new work long after they had left their powerful positions:

Editing is really about deciding—you have to decide whether you like the overall voice and content of what you are reading, and if you do, you have to make certain decisions about the internal life of the piece. Editing can be at its most profound when it involves making a vague, almost aphoristic remark that might change a writer's entire focus, and it can be most profound when it entails wrestling with minutia, adding commas or subtracting them and, in this tiny way, changing the whole style and feel of a piece of writing. The malleability of a piece of writing as it is experienced by the reader in draft form makes reading more taxing than it would be on the printed page. But it also brings with it a bump of excitement. It lends a feeling of power and adventure to the reading experience. I assume that this feeling of power—and also, if you are discovering a writer, the vicarious sense of accomplishment and, finally, the bright moment of seeing beyond what is there on the page to what could be there—is what draws people to being fiction editors, especially fiction editors for magazines, which is one of the strangest and hardest-to-describe professions. There used to be so many of them! Where have they gone?

Beller also recommends the "bracing" charms of "Writing in the Cold," an essay of Solotaroff's describing all a young writer is up against (collected in A Few Good Voices in My Head, and also, as far as I can tell from the publisher's site, in the more recent--and still in print--collection, The Literary Community).

You can read what the embalmer of record, the New York Times, said about Solotaroff and Hills; Bruce Weber's Hills piece is notable both for its fantastically glamorous 1973 photo (my god, that hair!), copied above, and for this equally fantastic sentence: "With a brilliant smile and the early facial creases of happy dissipation, he was known for being cranky, curious, passive-aggressive and, most of all, persnickety." Weber quotes Ann Beattie as saying he was "great at titles," a talent he took to excess, in a 70s-time-capsule sort of way, in what Weber calls his "fussy-man trilogy" of essay collections, How to Do Things Right: The Revelations of a Fussy Man, How to Retire at 41, or Dropping Out of the Rat Race Without Going Down the Drain, and How to Be Good, or the Somewhat Tricky Business of Attaining Moral Virtue in a Society That’s Not Just Corrupt But Corrupting, Without Being Completely Out-of-It. Hills's most notorious achievement was his stunt feature in Esquire in 1963 diagramming, unapologetically, "The Structure of the American Literary Establishment," grouping writers, agents, publishers, etc., around the "red-hot center" of American writing (which I think was The Paris Review). Has no enterprising and nostalgic young blogger dug out that old issue and scanned the map? I can't find it anywhere on the web...

Also in Slate, fairly-legendary-himself editor Gerald Howard contributed an appreciation of Solotaroff's New American Review, which lasted from 1967 to 1977 as a one-of-a-kind literary phenomenon that it seems could only have existed (barely) at that cultural moment: a regular highbrow anthology, curated by a single visionary editor and published in mass market form, selling 100,000 copies in drugstores as well as bookstores. Howard's list of some of its remarkable contributors is too long to reproduce, but his assessment of the "best literary magazine ever" isn't: "Man, did it deliver."

As Beller notes, there were enough copies of the NAR bought that you'll still run across old issues in used bookstores all the time: a few have passed through my own hands over the years, although I can't find any on my shelves now (maybe because I ran across them so much I just figured I could dip my hand back down in the stream any time to pick out another). An assiduous user of our search mechanism could put together her own inexpensive collection, including the first issue, an inscribed copy of which Howard counts among his most valued possessions.

--Tom

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Walter Kirn on How Fiction Works by James Wood: "The heroes of this great artistic labor tend to be semimonastic intro­verts who, like Wood’s beloved Henry James and Gustave Flaubert, toil with the doors shut and locked, in soundproof splendid isolation, attentive to the subtle frictions among nouns and adjectival phrases.... For the vicarish Wood, sequestered in his chamber, part of the fiction writer’s true vocation appears to be acoustic regulation — the engineering of a mental space in which literary whispers can be heard.... For someone who professes to understand the fine machinations of characterization, Wood seems oblivious to the eminently resistible prose style of his donnish, finicky persona."
• Kakutani on The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank: "Less humorous and far more hectoring than '[What's the Matter with] Kansas,' this volume quickly devolves into a highly partisan, Manichaean-minded screed against conservatives and private-sector economics.... Mr. Frank comes across in these pages as a sort of parody of the liberal right-wingers love to hate — as someone in love with big government for the sake of big government and opposed to all manner of capitalism and entrepreneurial initiative." Meanwhile, on Sunday, Michael Lind notes "Frank’s portrait of the conservative movement ... sacrifices complexity to caricature," but says, "With rare exceptions like John Kenneth Galbraith, conservatives ... have been the best satirists. In Thomas Frank, the American left has found its own Juvenal."
• Sophie Gee on The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson: "The lovers in 'The Gargoyle' have the intimacy of roommates who hook up when they get drunk, not a time-defying passion. Their thoughts, feelings, conversations and affections are so unformed, so hampered by sentiment and under­powered awkwardness that the courage, endurance and under­standing ascribed to them seem silly. Davidson’s lovers are dysfunctional and quirky, qualities that can look a bit like profundity from a distance, but they don’t have emotional or imaginative depth or range, which at the end of the day are the only things that can make a love story deep and wide-ranging."
• Douglas Wolk on Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko: "The portrait that emerges here is of an artist whose principles have ossified into bitter perversity.... Ditko isn’t easy to love. As vivid as his work is, it’s never been pretty, and he’s never returned to his most famous creations for a victory lap or courted attention beyond acknowledgment of his work. The raw, nightmarish visions of his art are all he offers, and all he’s ever needed to offer."

Washington Post:

• John A. Nagl on The Strongest Tribe by Bing West: "West has made 15 reporting trips to Iraq over the last six years and is almost as personally invested in the current conflict as he was in Vietnam; this book, his third on Iraq, is his attempt to ensure that the 'endgame' in Iraq turns out better than in his last war. It is increasingly possible to believe that it will."

Los Angeles Times:

• Erica Schickel on Waiter Rant by "The Waiter": "'Waiter Rant' has all the fixings for fun.... He delivers a smorgasbord of objectionable personalities and high-stress situations, always serving from the left, rendering his stories impeccably but perhaps a little stiffly. Everybody gets their due: his temperamental, paranoid bosses; the noble, illegal busboys; the slacker co-waiters. But Dublanica's true bile is reserved for customers: the rude, the ridiculous, the entitled, the drunk, the horny, the stoned and, worst of all, the Foodies. 'The Food Network,' he writes, 'is, quite simply, the Death Star of American cooking.'"
• Richard Eder on How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken by Daniel Mendelsohn: "Sharp as he can be in his judgments, he is equally sharp in identifying the virtues of what he doesn't like. He gives a spacious view of the countryside, whatever the particular road he hews through it. He takes his subjects seriously, but not himself. Like Snow White, you might say, he whistles while he works."

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Alan Brinkley on The Dark Side by Jane Mayer: "In some respects, the Bush administration is simply following a familiar path by responding to real dangers with illegal and deplorable methods. But Jane Mayer’s extraordinary and invaluable book suggests that it would be difficult to find any precedent in American history for the scale, brutality and illegality of the torture and degradation inflicted on detainees over the last six years; and that it would be even harder to imagine a set of policies more likely to increase the dangers facing the United States and the world."
• Thomas Mallon on Can You Ever Forgive Me: Memoirs of a Literary Forger by Lee Israel: "Israel displayed an excellent ear and fine false turn of phrase during the 15 or so months in the early 1990s when she sold hundreds of phony celebrity letters — and a lot of filched real ones — to about 30 different dealers. Now, all these years later, she’s written a slender, sordid and pretty damned fabulous book about her misadventures.... If I were a librarian, I wouldn’t let Lee Israel through the door, but I’d certainly make sure I had her latest book on the shelves. If I were an editor, I’d sign her up to write a biography of Louise Brooks — and not just to keep her out of trouble."
• Nicholson Baker on Reading the OED by Ammon Shea: "The effect of this book on me was to make me like Ammon Shea and, briefly, to hate English. What a choking, God-awful mash it is! Surely French is better. Then I recovered and saw its greatness afresh. The O.E.D., Shea notes, is 'a catalog of the foibles of the human condition.' Shea has walked the wildwood of our gnarled, ancient speech and returned singing incomprehensible sounds in a language that turns out to be our own."
• Kakutani on Alfred & Emily by Doris Lessing: "Doris Lessing once declared that 'fiction makes a better job of the truth' than straightforward reminiscence, and while that might well be true of her celebrated and semi-autobiographical Martha Quest novels, it’s an observation that doesn’t apply at all to her latest book, 'Alfred & Emily,' an intriguing work that is half fiction, half memoir. The sketchy, insubstantial first half of the book imagines what her parents’ lives might have been like if World War I had never occurred. The potent and harrowing second half recounts the real life story of her parents, and the incalculable ways in which the war fractured their dreams and psyches and left them stranded in the bush in Africa, eking out a meager existence on a tiny farm in Rhodesia."

Washington Post:

• Ron Charles on The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson: "In the opening pages of The Gargoyle, Andrew Davidson's outrageous new novel, a pornographer high on cocaine runs his car off a mountain road. The vehicle bursts into flames and burns him to a crisp. Welcome to the pain-riddled world of an acerbic, 35-year-old man who loses everything in those fiery minutes: his career, his fortune, his skin -- all broiled away. This is a story for people who like their literary entertainment well done."
• Joel Brouwer on White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson by Brenda Wineapple: "Brenda Wineapple ... brings a scholar's diligence and a novelist's imagination to her account of Dickinson and Higginson's relationship, crafting a tour de force that should delight specialists and casual readers alike. The book's individual strands of inquiry -- Higginson's life, Dickinson's poems, the letters that passed between them, and the historical, political and artistic contexts of the age -- are interesting in and of themselves, but when intertwined so as to inform and strengthen each other, they're fascinating."

Los Angeles Times:

• Uh, I hate to kick a book section when it's down, but their new book pages are nearly unreadable in Firefox (at least on my machine).
• Nick Owchar on A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans: "'A Good and Happy Child' is so well done that part of me wishes I had missed it: I like to sleep soundly at night. Now, I find myself checking the doors and windows more often than I used to and listening to make sure it's really the cat I'm hearing in the hall.... By tapping into our own fears, 'A Good and Happy Child' leaves us buzzing with dread long after we have put it down."
  

Booker Longlist Announced

The fall awards season kicked off today with the announcement of the longlist for the Booker Prize, 13 books long to be exact. As usual it's a mix of books that have already come out in the US, ones that are out in the UK but not the US, and ones that haven't come out anywhere yet:

• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
• Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold (out here and in the UK in November)
• The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
• From A to X by John Berger
• The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
• Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
• The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant (available in Canada and the UK)
• A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
• The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher (UK edition; out in the US in February)
• Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
• The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
• Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
• A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

A couple of big names (Rushdie, fresh off defending his Best of the Bookers crown, as well as former prize-hating Booker winner John Berger), but on a list this long, the immediate story is who was left off and in this case that includes big and biggish names like Peter Carey, Tim Winton, James Kelman, and Zoe Heller. There's been a very active discussion board on the Booker site, with a lot of debate about possible nominees--often by people who have actually read the books!--but when they tallied their longlist predictions, they didn't fare so well, getting only Rushdie, Barry, Hanif, and Adiga right. Among those they were particularly excited about that didn't make it were Winton's Breath, Alexis Wright's Carpentaria, Andrew Crumey's Sputnik Caledonia, and Damon Galgut's The Impostor.

What will move on to the shortlist (announced September 9)? Netherland is probably the best-reviewed book of the year so far in the US (where it is set), but I don't think it's been quite as rapturously received in the UK, while my sense is that Rushdie's book was better reviewed in the UK (at least by John Sutherland, who doesn't have to eat his copy yet) than here. We've made both Enchantress of Florence and A Case of Exploding Mangoes Best of the Month picks so far this year. And most of the talk about the longlist will likely center on Child 44, a highly promoted and well-reviewed debut that is an unabashed thriller (see Richard K. Morgan on Omni earlier this month on genre fiction and the Booker). The one I'm most intrigued by is Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole, which has gotten comparisons to Dickens, Irving, David Foster Wallace, Marisha Pessl, and last year's finalist Nicola Barker for being both enormous and hilarious. --Tom

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Charles McGrath on Thrumpton Hall by Miranda Seymour: "Her odd and oddly affecting book, beautifully written, is in part a story of house-love that borders on madness. It’s also the story of her father, and not the least of its accomplishments is that it instantly catapults him into the front rank of impossible and eccentric English parents — right up there with the overbearing Thomas Butler, nightmarish father of Samuel; with Evelyn Waugh, who wrote that 'I despise all my seven children equally'; and even with Lord Redesdale, Nancy Mitford’s 'Farve,' who once kicked a young man off the family estate just because he carried a pocket comb."
• Henry Alford on Collections of Nothing by William Davies King: "Part memoir and part disquisition on the psychological impulses behind the urge to accumulate, 'Collections of Nothing' is a wonderfully frank and engaging look at one man’s detritus-fueled pathology. King’s honesty and ambivalence about his pastime only increases his emotional connection to the reader. I wanted, by turns, to breast-feed and strangle him." [Ed: I love this book.]
• Tom Vanderbilt on Spiral Jetta by Erin Hogan: "I was never quite sure what Hogan was looking for when she set out — self-fulfillment or some new insights into what art is, or what it is for — or indeed whether she found it. But I loved the ride. In 'Spiral Jetta,' an unashamedly honest, slyly uproarious, ever-probing book, art doesn’t magically have the power to change lives, but it can, perhaps no less powerfully, change ways of seeing."
• Richard Eder on The Creator's Map by Emilio Calderon: "Like 'Da Vinci,' its mysteries are no more than mystifications. Unlike its exemplar, it is put together clumsily: an assemble-it-yourself kit enclosed with instructions in Korean.... A more skillful handling would frame it all as a running mystery; instead it becomes a creeping confusion. To succeed, a mystery smuggles its truth past the reader. Here, the smuggling is done so awkwardly as to spill out rattly chunks of hint, contradiction and clue while trying to get through."

Washington Post:

• Greg Myre on A Path Out of the Desert by Kenneth Pollack: "Pollack is persuasive in his new book, but it helps to have a touch of amnesia. Those with a working memory may recall that six years ago, Pollack said there was too much hand-wringing about the potential pitfalls of invading Iraq. 'Those who argue that the United States would inevitably become the target of unhappy Iraqis generally also assume that the Iraqi population would be hostile to U.S. forces from the outset,' he wrote. 'However, the best evidence we have suggests that the Iraqi people would be pleased to be liberated.'"
• Ron Charles on The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry: "Beneath all this hype is a moderately entertaining story of three generations in a setting rich with Wiccan wisdom and deadly misogyny.... If you're the kind of person who copies such sayings on index cards and sticks them on your refrigerator, you'll love these little ornaments, but if you're the kind of person who mocks those people, you may want to peer into the lace and see yourself reading a different novel."

Los Angeles Times:

• As you may have heard, the LA Times, as part of yet another round of newsroom cost-cutting by the Tribune Company, is shutting down their Sunday book review section and folding the remaining book coverage into their Calendar section. This Sunday's was the last edition of the review, and books editor David Ulin had a short note about the change. The NBCC's Critical Mass has been covering the coverage (and the general trend that may cause this column to run out of links before long): they link, among other places, to the letter of protest from four former Times book editors and to Scott McLemee's lament about the short-sightedness of newspapers abandoning the print culture they are a part of. For my part, I'll just say that of the dailies I keep an eye on in preparing Old Media Monday, the LA Times has carried, along with the New York Sun, pound for pound the most interesting reviews of the most interesting books--often ones no one else is reviewing--and I hope Ulin and his team are able to keep up their solid work under reduced circumstances.
• Kenneth Turan on The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe: a "fiendishly comprehensive look at a civilization so unexpectedly multifaceted that it's best viewed as a Yiddish-speaking Atlantis, a lost world buried forever by the volcano of Nazi mass murder.... More than accessible, the 'YIVO Encyclopedia' is so compulsively browsable that you can disappear within its pages for hours without a trace, the equivalent of diving into the coolest, deepest of pools. These volumes should come with a warning label, cautioning the time-challenged that they are entering at their own risk."
• Peter Terzian on What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami: "The flat, colloquial style that serves to heighten the magical qualities of Murakami's fiction makes this work of straightforward nonfiction sound pedestrian. Clichés abound: The heat of a city in summer is 'something else,' squirrels run around 'like crazy' and young Harvard students run 'like the wind.' For a book by such a gifted writer, 'What I Talk About When I Talk About Running' reads as though it could have been written by anyone."

 

The Murderer and the Schoolboy: The Two Sides of John Banville

Talking about yourself in the third person is generally reserved for dictators, professional athletes, and movie stars, but in this morning's Washington Post, Irish author John Banville manages to refer himself as "John Banville" without making you feel like the cultural apocalypse is nigh. It's a necessity, in fact, because Banville, for publishing purposes, has become two people, the Booker Prize-winning literary novelist John Banville and the mystery writer Benjamin Black. It's a fascinating piece about why a writer might choose to write (openly) under two names: for one thing, it's refreshingly clear that Banville doesn't think of "John Banville" as his authentic, only self--or at least he doesn't think so any more. Instead, it's as much of a pen name, a put-on identity, as "Benjamin Black." And, to hear him tell it, Benjamin Black is having a lot more fun:

Banville takes three to five years to finish a book. Black can do it in that many months. That's because "what you get with John Banville is an extreme of concentration. What you get with Benjamin Black is, I hope, spontaneity." He's writing "very quickly, very fluently, and not thinking about it."...

"Benjamin Black is like a schoolboy who's been given an extra week's Christmas holiday," Banville says.

"This, of course, is worrying. To enjoy writing is deeply worrying. I must be doing something wrong."...

"I see now that it was a device to get John Banville to think differently," he explains. For too long he'd been writing first-person narratives about men in deep trouble who are all "intensely telling their own story."

By comparison, in his Wikipedia entry his first wife is quoted as saying that living with Banville, when writing as Banville, was like being with "a murderer who's just come back from a particularly bloody killing."

According to the Post profile, the two identities might be moving closer to being one, with the next Banville novel having learned a few things from Black, and the next Black sounding like it's heading into Banville territory. Such fraternizing with a pop genre, by the way, is a remarkable move for someone who accepted his Booker Prize in 2005 by lamenting how middlebrow the award had become in recent years and saying "It is nice to see a work of art win the Booker prize."

If, like me, you still haven't read either B, the three Benjamin Black books (all published since the last Banville appeared--can you tell he's having fun?) are Christine Falls, The Silver Swan, and The Lemur (new this summer). He's been more prolific (over a much longer time) as Banville, whose best-known books are The Sea, which beat out one of the best shortlists in memory (Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, etc.) to win the Booker and become his first book to sell more than a few thousand copies, and The Book of Evidence, which many have called his masterpiece and which I've been told by The Greatest Banville Fan of Them All, The Elegant Variation's Mark Sarvas, is the place to begin. --Tom

Randy Pausch, 1960-2008

We learned, like everyone else, that Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon professor whose "Last Lecture" became one of the most popular videos on the net and then a bestselling book by the same name, died this morning in Virginia. That justifiably famous lecture lives in a number of places, including here--all of which will no doubt find their server capacities tested again this morning. If you're one of the six people who haven't watched it yet, fair warning: block out your schedule and grab a box of tissues--it's over an hour long and today his good-natured and irrepressible generosity in the face of his terminal diagnosis will be even more likely to set you to bawling.

Dr. Pausch was gracious enough to take the time to answer a few questions from us this spring when the book came out. Here's his last answer, about his unabashedly goofy hobby of winning gigantic stuffed animals at carnivals:

Amazon.com: And last, the most important question: What's the secret for knocking down those milk bottles on the midway?

Pausch: Two-part answer:
      1) long arms
      2) discretionary income / persistence

Actually, I was never good at the milk bottles. I'm more of a ring toss and softball-in-milk-can guy, myself. More seriously, though, most people try these games once, don't win immediately, and then give up. I've won *lots* of midway stuffed animals, but I don't ever recall winning one on the very first try. Nor did I expect to. That's why I think midway games are a great metaphor for life.

That response reminds me of one of the best known lines from the lecture, and the one that's stayed in my head: "The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people!"

You can read the full Q&A on our page for the book, where you can also see a couple of short videos from him. But the best resource for all of his videos is the page put together by his friend and colleague Gabriel Robins: go there and you may not get anything done the rest of the day. (Although if you watch his Time Management lecture what you learn may bring you that hour back in multiples later on.) --Tom

(Let's Go Back to) Rockville: Which Cowman Is Andrew Sean Greer?

It's become kind of a joke around here that I can trace some convoluted friend-of-friend(-of-friend) relationship with just about anybody who walks in the door--I am, apparently, the Kevin Bacon of internet book retailing. I'm not sure if it's that I'm actually more connected to people (it's hard to believe it, since I actually don't get out of the house very much), or just that I'm always curious about finding out if I am. But the most fun of these connections (better even than figuring out with Khaled Hosseini that I went to high school with his wife) I knew about ahead of time: when The Confessions of Max Tivoli made Andrew Sean Greer a household name a few years ago (at least among households that read a lot), my mom mentioned that she was his science teacher back in junior high in Rockville, Md. So when he came by our offices to talk about his new book, The Story of a Marriage (which, by the way, was the most one of our author meetings has ever felt like a book club: no publishing gossip or book-tour tales--everybody wanted to talk passionately about, yes, the book itself), I sprung that connection on him and it was a pleasure to see him light up and say he remembered her well.

Well, a while later, after I had passed on his greetings to my mom, she sent me a photo that the school had unearthed of Andy starring in the 8th grade musical, in the plum role of Curly in Oklahoma!--complete with bright red chaps and mid-'80s aviator glasses. I immediately passed it on to Andy to check whether a) it was okay to post it on the blog, and b) it was actually him, because I knew he had an identical twin brother. Andy replied that it was, in fact, his brother Mike (he could tell by the glasses), but that they had both been in the show and he thought he could dig up one of himself. And indeed he did, so you can compare:

If you want to make further comparisons, check the more up-to-date photos of Andy and Mike (who has the not-at-all-funny job of Director of Web Technology at The Onion). --Tom

Guest Bookshelf: Ginger Burton

The new bookshelf you may have noticed atop Omni is courtesy of reader Ginger Burton, who adds this note about her books and herself. (Share your own bookshelf photo by mailing a .jpg to omnivoracious.)

I like to consider myself an eccentric reader. There aren't many genres I consider to be uncharted territory. My books range from the terrifying words of Clive Barker, who keeps me checking beneath my bed on occasion, to the desperate prose of Carson McCullers. Without The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, I wouldn't have the proper words to describe music's effect on me. My need for suspense is filled with Stephen King, Dan Brown, and James Patterson. I'm always anxiously awaiting their next book.

The Kite Runner is a book that will always stay with me. The story is indescribable until you've experienced it. It's that good. I've probably recommended it more than any other book I've read.

Michael Chabon's Kavalier & Clay describes my love of comic books. A great way to see a comic book rise from an idea to actuality.

The other books on my shelf hold a special place in my heart and will remain there forever.

I'm currently studying at Purdue University with a focus on Communication. Most of my reading these days comes from the pages of a textbook followed by intense memorization. Although, when I can I like to burrow into a corner of the union lounge and lose myself inside a good book.

Thanks, Ginger. --Tom

Words That Last: Literary Tattoos

The Daily Telegraph alerted us (although we can't remember how we got to the Telegraph article in the first place) to Contrariwise, a blog that collects photos of literary and other wordy tattoos (is it new, or am I just too stupid to figure out how to see the archives?). Vonnegut and the Little Prince appear to be especially popular, and I'm sure the wowser below is not the only Fight Club tattoo walking around out there. (Meanwhile, I can't pass up the opportunity to link yet again to one of my favorite photos ever taken with my camera, of a grand tattoo of one of America's finest writers.)

I love words, but man, some of those giant paragraphs are overwhelming. I've never been much of a tattoo man (I don't even want to tie my identity to something long enough to put a bumper sticker on my car, much less write something forever on my body), but I must admit the Harriet the Spy is pretty sharp. Is there any bit of book that I would be willing to commit to putting on my skin for the rest of my life? My first thought was, "No way," but then I thought I could stick by "Up, and to Clayton!" pretty much for eternity. (First to spot the reference gets, well, my congratulations, triple if no Google was involved.) Or maybe Sam or Mr. Bikferd from Who Needs Donuts?.

Are there any words you'd be willing to wear? --Tom

P.S. Juliet, my colleague who passed this along to me, thought it had come from our friends at Slog, but then she couldn't find it there. But, weirdly, while I was writing my post, their books editor, Paul Constant, was writing his own post about lit tats, featuring a different blog (although some of the same photos). I feel that my mind is not my own...

Jerome Holtzman, 1926-2008

It was mainly as an excuse to post the photograph above that I started to note the death this weekend of "the Dean" of Chicago sportswriters, Jerome Holtzman. I lived in Chicago in 1989, the year the photo appeared in the Chicago Tribune, and a roommate from that time reminded me today, when passing on the news, that we had it prominently displayed on our apartment wall (it may, in fact, have been our only decoration). Holtzman's on the right, of course, next to Don Zimmer, best known for his altercations, two decades apart, with Red Sox pitchers Bill Lee (who called him "the Gerbil") and Pedro Martinez, for managing the Cubs to a rare division title that year, and for the metal plate put in his head after an early beaning that almost killed him. The glories of the photograph are self-evident; I don't think anything has ever made me want to be a sportswriter more than its portrait of pot-bellied fellowship.

But when reading around about Holtzman, I was reminded that his name was on the spine of one of my favorite books growing up. I had two paperbacks in my early teens that I read and read to the point that their covers fell off: The Book of Lists, and Fielder's Choice, an anthology of baseball fiction edited by Mr. Holtzman who, at the time, I didn't know from Adam. I haven't looked at that collection in decades, but it had a hell of a lineup, introducing me to Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Ring Lardner, James Thurber, Mordecai Richler, and Robert Coover, whose Universal Baseball Association, Inc., was one of the first things that hinted to me that at some point I might want to move on from made-up baseball leagues to more important things like, well, made-up stories. In fact, thinking of it now, that book (a gift from some wise relation) no doubt had as much influence as anything on my ending up doing what I do today. Whatever it is exactly that I do... --Tom

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Kathryn Harrison on Real World by Natsuo Kirino: "As Dostoyevsky did in 'Crime and Punishment,' Kirino pushes her antihero to murder as a means of philosophical statement and communicates an authorial anxiety that contemporary social ills will destroy humanity. But while Dostoyevsky sets up a contest between Christian love and a pernicious nihilism that inspires barbarity, Kirino’s 'Real World' offers no possibility of god or redemption."
• Maslin on The Condition by Jennifer Haigh: "As she demonstrated in 'Mrs. Kimble' and particularly in 'Baker Towers,' Ms. Haigh has a great gift for telling interwoven family stories and doing justice to all the different perspectives they present. She is subtle and intuitive about the whole McKotch household, which in 1976 is based in Concord, Mass. And when the family ruptures — because, even in an uncommonly good version of the tragic-family-secret book, it inevitably will — she does justice to each McKotch’s way of absorbing that change."
• Howard Hampton on Heavy Metal Islam by Mark LeVine: "'Heavy Metal Islam' gets trapped by its good intentions whenever it attempts to shoehorn the headbangers’ intransigence into preconceived political slots. Metal music, however you parse it, is dystopian in the extreme: hyper-aggressively embracing the death instinct, regimented chaos, deliriously fetishized morbidity. Call it cathartic, sure, even a way of keeping sane in an insane world (as one performer here says, 'We play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal'), but don’t confuse it with 'If I Had a Hammer.' Unless it’s a hammer of the nihilist gods aimed at your forehead — not to hammer out justice or a warning or 'the common struggle for democracy and economic equality,' but to crack your skull open, scrape out your pulverized brains and feed them to the wolverines."
• Marilyn Stasio on The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale (hot on the heels of its Samuel Johnson Prize last week): "Summerscale accomplishes what modern genre authors hardly bother to do anymore, which is to use a murder investigation as a portal to a wider world. When put in historical context, every aspect of this case tells us something about mid-Victorian society, from prevailing attitudes about women ('prone to insanity'), children ('full of savage whims and impulses,' according to one 19th-century physician) and servants ('outsiders who might be spies or seducers') to the morality-based intellectual constructs that codified such views of human behavior."

Washington Post:

• Martha Sherrill on The Eaves of Heaven by Andrew X. Pham: "Poised to inherit everything, Thong Pham instead lost it all, as Andrew X. Pham, his son, recounts in this gorgeously written book. But this is not ultimately a story of loss and upheaval, nor is it simply a retelling of Vietnam's war-torn history from a Vietnamese point of view. Many other books have ably covered that ground. The Eaves of Heaven is something entirely new: an effort to recapture the moments of beauty and transcendence that emerged from these events."
• Maureen Freely on We Are Now Beginning Our Descent by James Meek: "I was able to look out over the same seas and islands that featured in Kellas's thoughts. I was so gripped by the story that I carried the book open in my hand through passport control and customs. I am full of admiration for Meek's precise and lyrical prose, for his mapping of the political landscapes through which his characters drift and for his evocation of the strange, torn geometries of the life in the global news stream. But what I most treasure in this novel is its generosity. We carry the flaws of the world inside us. But -- however difficult, desperate and demented its manifestations -- there is also love."

Los Angeles Times:

• Gideon Lewis-Kraus on How Fiction Works by James Wood: "As the burden of the novelist is to give her readers reason to keep reading, the burden of the untethered critic (as opposed to the academic one, whose authority is institutionally granted) is to offer enough gratuitous pleasure and intelligence that he is taken seriously. Reading Wood, no matter the book under review, provides enormous pleasure; his prose is at once buoyant and momentous, his judgment swift with imperial grace."

Best Business Books Ever? (Non-fiction, non-how-to division)

New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera, following up on his declaration that Bryan Burrough and John Helyar's Barbarians at the Gate was "one of the greatest business books ever written," posted an annotated list of his top 15 business books, after first narrowing the field to eliminate fiction (he's still looking for enough good ones) and management and advice books. So these are, I guess, the best nonfiction business narratives (still a pretty healthy subgenre), in no particular order (via Shelf Awareness):

• Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
• Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis
• The Devil's Candy: Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco by Julie Salamon
• The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson
• Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street by David McClintick
• The Go-Go Years: The Drama and Crashing Finale of Wall Street's Bullish 60s by John Brooks
• The Kingdom and the Power: Behind the Scenes at the New York Times by Gay Talese
• Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow
• Do You Sincerely Want to Be Rich?: The Full Story of Bernard Cornfeld and I.O.S. by Charles Raw, Bruce Page, and Godfrey Hodgson
• Disney War by James B. Stewart
• The Informant by Kurt Eichenwald
• Father, Son & Co.: My Life at IBM and Beyond by Thomas J. Watson and Peter Petre
• When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein
• Greed and Glory on Wall Street by Ken Auletta