The Elegant Variation

TEV GUEST REVIEW (AND INTERVIEW): MATTHEW SIMMONS’S CREATION STORIES

Creation Stories
By Matthew Simmons
Happy Cobra Books
40 pp
FREE

GUEST REVIEW BY JIM RULAND

There's a revolution afoot. In the fast-paced, billion-dollar industry of literary chapbooks, eletronic books or making substantial inroads.

That was a joke.

Sort of.

Electronic books are becoming an increasingly legitimate option in the DIY writers playbook. They're the new blog. Readers accustomed to buying and talking about books online, encounter electronic books in spaces where they are on equal footing with books printed on paper. In fact, I encountered Matthew Simmons's Creation Stories on Good Reads. It received a review from one of my acquaintances on the site that made me curious to read it. Did I feel cheated when I clicked on the link and discovered a pdf file that I could download for free? Of course not. I was thrilled; ten minutes later is was sitting on my desk and I read it in the park that afternoon.

So what is it? Creation Stories is a curious mix of "short prose things." It doesn't really matter what the form is (joke, prose poem, blog post) they all have a beginning middle and end. Ergo: stories.

The stories are easy to enjoy, but afterwards you'll be hard pressed to say what they're about. Simmons has a playful yet earnest approach to fiction. He uses repetition and pays careful attention to syntax to erode the received wisdom of words and create new meanings for them in the context of his stories. This is not easy to do without going down the wormhole where Samuel Beckett and Getrude Stern play ping-pong with language for eternity, but Simmons pulls it off.

QUIZTUNES FOR MATTHEW SIMMONS:

TEV: Tell me about Happy Cobra Books.

MS: Tao Lin has a poem about wanting to start a band with the poem's reader. So I wrote to him and told him we should start a band. He sent me some recordings of himself playing the drums—and one full song—and I made some guitar noises and keyboard noises and vocal noises over them, and we put them up on a Myspace page. We went back and forth on a name, and eventually it came down to coming up with a silly sounding moniker that implied two characters in opposition to one another. He was Sad Bear. I tried to come up with the opposite of a sad bear, and landed on Happy Cobra. So, Sad Bear vs. Happy Cobra.

When I met Tao on a book tour, he told me I should make a chapbook. I'd never really considered doing so, but realized that I had a bunch of short pieces and old, buried-in-the-archive posts from The Man Who Couldn't Blog that I really liked. I also had a computer at work with InDesign, an hour for lunch, and absolutely no training in either the software or graphic design in general. I had, though, read and really enjoyed David Barringer's book, American Mutt Barks in the Yard. So, off I went. For the sake of continuity, I used the Happy Cobra name.

TEV: Technically, isn't a book something that's been "printed" and "bound"? Do you comprehend my 19^th century lingo?

MS: Sure. In fact, I have a few printed versions of Creation Stories. I've made 25 of the 50 I intend to print. I decided to give it away as a pdf because I said I was working on the book on my blog, and a few people were interested. But having no training in InDesign, I couldn't figure out how to make page spreads (turned out to be really freakin' easy in the end), and the file was just sitting on my computer. One day, I just decided to put the file on a website, and let people have it. I was going to give it away for free, anyway. People who have the small number of physical copies were only required to make something for me in return.

I work in a bookstore. I love books as physical objects. And sure, maybe there's some new word we need to come up with to describe deliberately collected pieces of writing bound by some sort of digital means. We could—here I'll borrow the way Barringer makes certain kinds of distinctions in American Mutt...I steal from that book all the time—go with printed books as books(p), and electronic books as books(e). But, then, a pdf file like Creation Stories or the books on Ubuweb don't have links in them, so they aren't hypertext. Maybe then we go with book(pdf) for one and and book(e) for the other. But the books on Bear Parade don't embed links in the text, still want to mimic the uninterrupted page to page flow of a book, so then we could have book(p), and book(pdf), and book(h), and book(e). Then there are those ebook reader things, which don't allow the audience to be distracted by email or two to three open windows. Book(p), book(pdf), book(h), book(e), book(r)? Seems like this could get really complicated.

TEV: What are the dimensions of the book(p)?

MS: It's about 4 1/4" by 5 1/2", but each one is cut by hand, so they are all slightly different.

TEV: And it's free?

MS: Yes.

TEV: By free do you mean "no charge"?

Yes, of course, but if readers like it, and feel at all inclined to compensate me in some way, I'd love it if they'd consider donating even a very small amount to the Puget Sound Race for the Cure. I'm running and have a donation page.

TEV: The title of your collection of "short prose things" is Creation Stories. The title implies truthiness and the subtitle won't commit to fiction. What's going on here?

MS: I tried to think of a good way of referring to the many different types of prose writing in the book(pdf)/book(p).

TEV: Could you please stop that?

MS: OK.

TEV: You were saying?

MS: Short-short fiction, prose poetry, list—some of them are just jokes, really. The connection was that they were all prose, all flush left, and I only really had a few words in which to describe them if I wanted to keep the cover uncluttered, so I defaulted to "short prose things." Maybe "stuff flush left" would've worked...Creation Stories 2: stuff flush left, maybe.

The desire for a not-so cluttered cover comes from my day job. I write the descriptions for author events at our store. Subtitles are out of control right now. Sometimes I wonder why a reader needs me at all—the subtitle says it all. Like that recent Onion joke about the Iron Man trailer covering what appears to be the entire plot of the movie. Laparoscope: One doctor's journey through the minds, lives, and intestinal tracts of his patients, with revelatory results in his personal and family life.

At first, there was a comma between "creation" and "stories" in the title. But I didn't like the way it looked, so I took it out. I think the title refers just as much to the cover image as the content. That's a drawing by an artist named Joseph Biel. It was hanging at the same gallery my brother shows at in Seattle, the Greg Kucera Gallery. It's on my wall right now. It reminds me that sometimes writing is a form of self-inflicted torture.

TEV: It is, isn’t it? In many stories you employ repetition to chip away at the meaning of words. Repetition is a kind of torture, but here you're encouraging the reader to pay attention to the way the words sound.

MS: I write longer stories, too, and there, I'm conscious of language, but it isn't necessarily the focus. When I write in a short form I like to think about the sounds of words and sentences. The impact of a short piece can't really come from the movement through a narrative arc; it doesn't come from an obsessively, intricately drawn character; it doesn't come from a full examination of the state of someone's being. For me, it comes from the language. That's almost always where I start anything I write, too: with a word or a phrase.

TEV: Some of these stories come from your blog, The Man Who Couldn't Blog, and while they have a peculiar relationship to blogging, they're stories. I think.

MS: They're something, anyway. I started the blog with this idea that it would have a simple constraint (that everything be a description of why the blogger couldn't blog that day), but I've gotten looser with the constraint as time has gone on. The Man Who Couldn't Blog is updated every Monday...or Tuesday depending on how much I had to do over the weekend. So, if the "can't blog" element seems tacked on, it's usually because it was. Sorry. I hope the rest of the piece makes up for the "tackiness."

TEV: What's next for Matthew Simmons and Happy Cobra?

MS: I have a book of short stories that I am editing and adding to. Most of the stories are out and in the hands of editors at literary journals right now—or in their slush piles, to be precise. One of them will be in the Sycamore Review at the end of the summer. It, I am happy to report, won their Wabash Fiction Prize. Beyond that, it's send out story, get rejection letter, send story somewhere else, get rejection letter, etc. for a while. But I think the book will be in good shape by fall, and I'll start looking for small publisher or short story collection prize. But, heck, maybe no one will want it. I might just put it out myself, eventually.

Happy Cobra Books has a second book in the design stage. It's a collection of stories by three writers: Chelsea Martin, Catherine Lacey, and Ellen Kennedy. I'll sew together 50 of those, give most to the writers, and then release the pdf book a little later. I make really ugly designs for really good interviews that I edit for Hobart, and there are a couple more of those in the works. Justin Dobbs and Blake Butler are collaborating on something for me. I'm also hoping to get a couple of short essays from my friends Josh Billings and Seth Pollins, but they are in the thick of their MFA work, and are likely pretty busy right now. I told Tao I'd like him to make a graphic novel for me. We'll see. Maybe only one or two of those things will happen.

THERE'S A RAT IN THE HOUSE...

Welcome to The Elegant Variation Vermin!

Most of you know me as the host of the irregular and irreverent reading series in the dark heart of L.A.'s Chinatown, Vermin on the Mount. At our most recent gathering, it was my pleasure to celebrate the publication of Harry, Revised with a small party. Mark served as guest curator and I relinquished my duties for the evening and now I get return the favor by guest blogging while Mark is on tour.

So what can you expect? There will be no posts about drug fiends in tight shorts professional cycling, James Bond, or The Beatles. I've got some book reviews and interviews that I'll share with you throughout the week organized around the theme of Good Things in Small Packages. In other words, I'm going to take a look at some books that are unusually small in terms of scope, genre, form and/or size. Books that defy conventions, are hard to classify, or just plain strange.

I'll also speak with some publishers and editors, share a long list with you, and reveal my all time favorite book in the Good Things in Small Packages category.

First, a remarkable short novel as haunting as Camus's The Stranger...

TEV GUEST REVIEW (AND INTERVIEW): PAMELA ERENS’S THE UNDERSTORY

The Understory
By Pamela Erens
Ironweed Press
142 pp
$11.95

GUEST REVIEW BY JIM RULAND

Don’t be fooled by The Understory’s low page count or the fact that it begins at a Buddhist monastery in rural Vermont. Pamela Erens’s novel is a letter bomb of a book, pulsing with savage potency. Its elegant prose, deliberate descriptions, and unhurried pace mask the sinister sensibilities percolating within the protagonist.

The Understory describes Jack Gorse’s eviction from his apartment in New York City. For most novels, this would mark the beginning of the story, but here it comprises the entire narrative arc. Erens reveals the details with care and deliberation so that we can absorb the implications—even though they elude the protagonist.

Gorse is a strange fellow ruled by obsessions. A former lawyer, he spends his days reading books and wandering New York’s Central Park, but he’s anything but carefree. His days are ordered by a rigorous schedule to which he is compelled to adhere. His interests--from horticulture to twins—invariably become subjects of intense infatuation. When a friendly architect who has been hired to renovate Gorse’s building makes an uncharacteristically kind gesture, Gorse unwittingly draws him into his web.

Because his compulsive behavior feels normal to Gorse, it feels normal to the reader as well – in much the same way that Meursault’s actions in Camus’s The Stranger seem exceedingly ordinary even when they are not. Gorse’s restless imagination provides the reader with a plethora of information about a wide range of subjects even as it drives the story to its grim conclusion. The Understory is both an ode to New York City and a psychological portrait of a life on the margins.

QUIZTUNES FOR PAMELA ERENS

TEV: Tell me about The Understory's path to publication.

PE: It has to have been one of the least auspicious ever, except maybe for that Confederacy of Dunces guy who killed himself. At least I'm still walking around.

When I look now at the manuscript that I sent around, if I were an agent I wouldn't have accepted it either. I got a lot of what I'd call "the nice letter" from agents. You know, "beautifully written, blah blah." But no takers. So I started to submit directly to small presses. Ironweed Press was running a competition that offered a contract and a small advance as the prize. I entered and won. I was lucky the competition judge saw something in the work.

By that point, I'd had some real time away from the manuscript, and I think my craft developed a lot during that period. My editor had some suggestions for revisions, and when I went back to the work I just tore it apart. I saw more and more that I wanted or needed to do. The revision kept taking longer and longer, but my editor was willing to wait and was open to all the changes. In the end, I had pretty much written a brand-new book.

TEV: Your protagonist spends an enviable amount of time in Central Park. Do you share his passion for the place?

PE: I love Central Park. I lived in New York City for many years and every day I walked from the West Side to the East Side through the Park to my job. The story of the creation of Central Park is incredibly inspiring, and part of that story is told in the novel. It's one of the rare examples of the right thing getting done against all the odds. That the city would agree to take a huge swath of prime real estate during a building and population explosion and set it aside for the recreational use of poor and rich alike--that's amazing. There were so many chances for the project to be derailed and it managed not to be derailed. The making of Central Park was extremely expensive and extremely challenging and extremely time-consuming. And now it is and for 150 years has been a beautiful expanse of of walks and lawns and bridges and flowers and trees and hills and secluded areas.

TEV: Gorse knows a great deal about horticulture. Did you have to learn what Gorse knows or are you a green thumb yourself?

PE: I'm a big faker. The plant world interests me, and I love the woods and this time of year on the East Coast when the cherry blossoms and azaleas and lilacs all bust out. But my actual knowledge is sketchy. I did a good bit of research for the book. My husband is a gardener, and some things I got from watching him or asking him. I just always felt that Gorse would have this passion that combines the natural/sensual and the analytical. The analytical part is his preoccupation with taxonomy, the way plants are categorized.

TEV: The world comes at Gorse through smells and sounds and he's in tune with the cycle of the seasons. Despite the fact that he spends his days reading and studying, he's animalistic in a way that's almost primitive. Was this your intention?

PE: I never thought of it in exactly that way, but I like how you put it. Yes, there's a contrast there. I think it has to do with the fact that Gorse lives, in his own words, "close to the ground" and without a lot of technology.

It's probably impossible for a human being to live without some sort of sensual life. Human contact and human sensuality are too threatening for Gorse, but he's able to enjoy touch and sight and smells through his connection to plants. He pays very close attention to plants--the same attention people will pay to a lover.

TEV: One of my favorite movies is Barton Fink and what makes the film so entertaining to watch over and over again are the facial expressions of the other characters whenever Barton goes off on one of his rants. It underscores that gap between how he sees himself and how he is perceived by others. One of the fascinating things about Gorse is that his mind appears quite orderly, but the reactions of those around him suggest that something's not quite right.

PE: I saw that movie a long time ago, and you've made me want to go back and watch it again. I'm glad the novel had that effect on you. That's what I wanted--for readers to glean things about Gorse from how other people react to him. At the same time I didn't want it to be indisputable that something's "wrong" with Gorse. There's that scene where he goes into the bookstore and the owner kicks him out. We never know why. We never know if there really is something disgusting about Gorse's physical presence, or whether the owner mistook him for someone else or was crazy himself. The important thing for me in that scene is the way Gorse reacted--it made him perceive something criminal in himself. Another person would have brushed off the insult as absurd, or would have gotten angry.

TEV: That's very true because in the middle of the book, a Buddhist monk counsels Gorse: "There's nothing more interesting, is there, than everyday life. Mistakes, oversights, misunderstandings. Every day we testify against ourselves." The key to the book, and to Gorse, is right there, but he doesn't really grasp it, does he?

PE: No, and that's the point, isn't it? All of us constantly overlook the clues we're leaking. As Gorse describes his various daily activities, the reader can presumably see some of the impulses, needs, and conflicts that drive him, but he isn't always aware of them. But I'm not entirely sure that having been more aware would have led to a different outcome. I'm a bit pessimistic that way.

TEV: You were recently named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. What's next?

PE: I'm working on two new novels, toggling between them, which may be a really stupid idea. I guess I'll find out. One is another novel for adults and one I see as a young adult novel. I've wanted to see if I can write a book for pre-teens and younger teenagers without sacrificing anything in emotional depth or resonance of language. The ideal would be a book that younger readers would enjoy but that adults could find up to snuff, too. I'm thinking of the way that Carson McCuller's The Member of the Wedding is read by junior high school students but reveals its full gorgeousness only to an adult. Sounder is another "kid's" book I read recently that just blew me away with its beauty. I think it's incredibly difficult to write a novel that can work on both the older-kid and adult levels. I'd love to pull it off.

As for The Understory, it would be nice to believe that the nomination will help more readers make their way to the novel. You never know, though. It's a small-press book. People have to dig a little to find it.

REMINDER

This week I am in Portland, New York and Boston and so will only be posting intermittently from the road.  But Jim Ruland has some real goodies lined up for the week, so do make sure to check in on what he's doing.  Hope to continue to see you all out there on the road.  I only wish I had time to swing by Philadelphia, too (if only to say thank you in person).  Dispatches and updates to follow.

TEV GIVEAWAY: THE WAR AGAINST CLICHE

One of our recent commentors challenged us for having joined the Martin Amis "pile-on."  We respectfully challenge that assertion on a few levels, the key being that "pile-on" has a connotation of an unfair wrong perpetrated against a defenseless creature.  If there is a critical mass of folks criticizing Amis (and we're scarcely alone), we suspect it has a good deal to do with the frequency and the idiocy of his public pronouncements on global politics.  Now, to some extent, this is unsurprising.  Anyone who even skimmed Amis's risible Koba the Dread came away with a sense that when Amis ventured into global politics, he was on decidedly unsure footing.

But what makes it all the more disappointing (for us, at least) is as a measure of how far he's fallen.  Although he might attribute his lapses to "thought experiments," we continue to come across tin-eared sound bite after tin-eared sound bite from a man who has so publicly and intelligently declared war on the cliche - cliches that now constitute his armaments.  Put another way, if his literary criticism weren't so goddammned wonderful, his recent foolishness wouldn't disturb us quite as much as it does.  But he is capable of wondrousness.  Consider, for example, his wonderful review of Underworld, included in his magnificent collection The War Against Cliche:

''Underworld'' surges with magisterial confidence through time (the last half century) and through space (Harlem, Phoenix, Vietnam, Kazakstan, Texas, the Bronx), mingling fictional characters with various heroes of cultural history (Sinatra, Hoover, Lenny Bruce). But its true loci are ''the white spaces on the map,'' the test sites, and its main actors are psychological ''downwinders,'' victims of the fallout from all the blasts -- blasts actual and imagined. DeLillo, the poet of paranoia and the ''world hum,'' pursues his theme unstridently; he is tenacious without being tendentious. Yet even his portraits of bland, hopeful, pre-postmodern American life -- his Americana -- glow with the sick light of betrayal, of innocence traduced or abused. The ''great thrown shadow'' has now receded and terror has returned to the merely local. MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) was exploded; and the bombs did not detonate. Still, the press-ganged children who wore the dog tags must live with a discontinuity in their minds and hearts. DeLillo's prologue is called ''The Triumph of Death,'' after the Breughel painting. In the end, death didn't triumph. It just ruled, for 50 years. I take DeLillo to be saying that all our better feelings took a beating during those decades. An ambient mortal fear constrained us. Love, even parental love, got harder to do.

Breathtaking.  From there, we've somehow come around to "Islam must get its house in order."  Hence our profound and continued irritation with the 2008 edition of Martin Amis.  He has, it seems, fallen on the battleground of his own war against cliche.

But we prefer our fond memories of the Amis continued in this volume (and in Experience), and so we are happy to offer up a lovely hardcover edition of this excellent collection of literary essays for your enjoyment.  Rules, rules, rules.  We'll take all emails, subject line "A HIT OR AMIS" (ouch, sorry), until 9 p.m. PST.  Please include your full mailing address, and previous winners are ineligible.  We'll turn to the RNG to select a winner and post the details when we're back from the trip.

TOUR DISPATCH: SEATTLE

Checking in very quickly from a pleasant cafe near the University of Washington on my only two-fer day of the tour - I had morning event in Pleasanton and I read tonight here in Seattle.  But I wanted to send you over to the Powells Blog, where I recently answered a question sent over by the wonderful folks there - namely, tell us something you're passionate about.  My answer - which has nothing to do with books - is up there now.

Elsewhere, Time Out New York gives Harry a little bit of love.

Finally, two items of note.  Next week, as I am tooling around the US, TEV guest host/reviewer/interviewer Jim Ruland has a load of interviews, reviews and other surprises planned.  Those who know him will attest that Jim always shows you a good time, so please do make him welcome.

Also, tomorrow's giveaway (yes, I will manage them even from the road) will address the Martin Amis question that continues to roil the backblog, so do come on by.

THURSDAY MARGINALIA: THE "ON THE ROAD" EDITION

* Yann Martel's Life of Pi has captured Abe Books' Best of the Booker survey, edging out Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.

* LA City Beat calls Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends "a treasure trove of intriguing and revealing looks at where Chabon goes to make up his worlds and how he tells his fables of the reconstruction."

* Steve Wasserman's book review section for Truthdig - to which we have proudly contributed - has won a Maggie Award.

* Martin Amis is collaborating on a screenplay adaptation of London Fields.  (We support any venture that prevents him from holding forth on geopolitics.)

Amis is working on the screenplay with Roberta Hanley, co-founder of Muse Productions, the film production company behind indie hits such as as The Virgin Suicides, Buffalo 66 and American Psycho. It's a good fit for Amis's novel, which was omitted from the Booker prize shortlist in 1989 amid fierce debate after two of the prize's judges deemed it misogynistic. The novel centres on the character of Nicola Six, a femme fatale who foresees the exact date and manner of her own death in a dream. Not knowing who the future "murderer" might be, she manipulates three potential candidates - crook Keith Talent, rich banker Guy Clinch and terminally ill American author Samson Young - into meeting at the Black Cross pub in west London's Portobello Road for her impending death.

* We propose a moratorium on the designation "unknown writer" which seems, will, sort of cold.  D. Hooijer is, presumably, known to her publishers, readers and even family.  And now she's won a big, fat prize.

* Always worth your time - the wonderful Laila Lalami on Thomas McCarthy at The Nation.

* Serious props to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.  In an era when books struggle to be reviewed at all, they actually return to Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero to give it a second consideration, which puts us in mind of something we believe John Freeman recently said, to the effect that Tree of Smoke deserved more than the usual milisecond of critical consideration given the time that went into its creation.  And, it turns out, in this case the reviewer in question is pleased.  (OK, it's short, but it's the thought that counts.)

* Ngugi wa Mirii, who was recently killed in a car accident, is remembered in an allAfrica.com editorial.

As a culture worker and artist, writer, playwright, and film-maker, Ngugi wa Mirii encouraged personal introspection and dynamic thinking which he hoped would contribute to African unity through social and cultural ideas.

"The musicians must of necessity compose lyrics that not only entertain but should educate and inform, the playwrights must dramatise the drama of life, journalists should report without fear or favour. Novelists, actors, film-makers are called upon to shed light through historical analysis," he wrote.

* And, finally - James Bond reads Benjamin Black.  Who can resist?  We sure can't.

TRAVEL DAY

I'm on the road now, first to San Francisco and then Seattle, for some readings.  I will update as opportunities present from the road, but in the meantime, topping the list of things far worse than recent travails, a writer could have his mother talking smack about him day and night to the press, which is exactly what Madame Houellebecq continues to do, to anyone who will listen:

Then, in 1998, when Houellebecq was at the height of his fame, she says she stumbled upon an article about him winning a literary prize for Atomised. (In the photo he was wearing "the same anorak he had been wearing for years".) She went to a bookshop, picked up Atomised and was furious. "I said, 'Fuck, it's not true.' He described me as a kind of whore, kept by I don't know what American. That's slander. All my life I've toiled to earn money for other people. I want him to apologise. If I was law-suit minded, I would have sued him and won."

I'm not expecting problems, but MOTEV is bound and gagged in the cellar for the duration.  Just to be safe.  (She's Austrian.  It makes a certain kind of sense.)

THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGING?

A self-published author is among the finalists for the Frank O'Connor international short story prize.

Jhumpa Lahiri's latest collection, Unaccustomed Earth, recently topped the US book charts and has been immediately pegged as the frontrunner. But the prize for the year's best short story collection in English has a record of rewarding new talent over established names - so Mary Rochford's self-published volume, Gilded Shadows should not be written off too quickly.

The article includes the complete long list, which features the likes of Benjamin Percy, Jim Shepard and Anne Enright.

INDIAN CLERK IN THE NEWS

David Leavitt's wonderful The Indian Clerk - to which we recently devoted an entire week - is a PEN/Faulkner award finalist.

Although a novelist who chooses real people and events has much of the details already available, Leavitt finds that "the main challenge to that kind of book is to write about a world you were not around to witness. You can't rely on your sensory experience as you can with a contemporary novel. Still, it's fun to imagine what it was like."

The ceremony will be held on Saturday in Washington, D.C.

PANT, PANT

Clearly, there's a pattern emerging here and it's likely to afflict us throughout May - book signing the night before, mad delayed scramble to get posts up the next day.  We've got to make a quick DMV-related court appearance (speeding, traffic school) and then we'll be back here posting away in the late morning.  Until then, drive safely ...

LA TIMES & READINGS

You've probably already seen this Q&A in today's LA Times Calendar section but linking to it is a good excuse to remind you to pop out to Vroman's this evening and say hi.  And if you are a westsider, please do make the extra effort to come support Village Books in the Palisades tomorrow - I don't think I can bear losing another westside independent.  Details here.

DEPARTMENT OF GOOD THINGS HAPPENING TO NICE PEOPLE

We are pleased as punch to note that our dear friend Maud Newton has won second prize in Narrative Magazine's 2008 Love Story Contest for her story Conversations You Have At Twenty.  You can see what she has to say about it here.

COULD WE, PERHAPS, KEEP OUR RESPONSES TO OURSELVES?

Let us all share a collective tear for Martin Amis who, according to the Globe and Mail, is "feeling vulnerable" ...

Amis sighs, or least lets out an exasperated breath. He's had more public lashings than most critics have had free lunches, and you sense this latest won't finish him off. “Is the discourse so limited?” he asks. “Is there not room for this? I make no recommendations in this book, I propose no actions. This is just the novelist in the street having a response to an enormous development.”

NOBODY SAYS "FATUOUS" QUITE LIKE A NABOKOV

Dmitri Nabokov sits for a New York Times interview to discuss his decision to publish The Original of Laura.

Why would your father have wanted “Laura” destroyed?

In a calmer moment, if he were no longer in a race against death to complete the work, I think, sincerely, that he would not. By the same token, if one wants to finish something before dying, one perseveres to the utmost, rather than destroying it. This should be an obvious answer to a rather fatuous question some have posed: Why didn’t he burn it well ahead of time and have done with it?

CRACE ARCHIVES TO AUSTIN

The archives of Jim Crace - author of TEV favorite Being Dead - have been acquired by The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin.

The archive contains all of Crace's manuscripts, not just of his novels but of stories, plays and essays. The collection also includes notes and outlines for works, reviews, trade journals, radio plays, art work, recordings, press clippings, juvenilia, correspondence and a proposal for two novels, "The Finalist" and "Archipelago."

The juvenilia bit is especially interesting just now as we've been considering a garage purge and are agonizing over what to keep.  How many writers, we wonder, keep everything?  Are you hoarder or a streamliner?  Advice and perspectives welcome.

DEEP BREATH

We are totally fried from a wonderful weekend of book fun, including Saturday night's Skylight reading and last night's Vermin on the Mount launch, which featured some truly memorable readings by Marisa Silver, Marianne Meyerhoff and Teresa Carmody.  Many thanks to all those who attended.

There's plenty of literary news beyond the Times, but we're completely exhausted from celebrating, so posts will be delayed until around lunch.  Until then, however, David Milofsky namechecks a few familiar blogs in his column on what the web can offer to the future of reviewing, but of special note is the attention he pays to the Barnes and Noble review:

Perhaps the most significant new outlet for reviews is the Barnes & Noble Review, which was launched just last October. In addition to being more nicely designed, the Review has the added advantage of many brick-and-mortar B&N bookstores to help promote it.

Jim Mustich, editor in chief of the B&N Review, said in an e-mail message, "We run one new 1,000- word review every weekday. In addition, we also review six titles in our Spotlight section and feature 50 titles with brief annotations in our Long List Section."

We've said it before, we'll say it again - this is the future, so pay attention.  Back in a few hours, bright eyed and bushy tailed.

TEV GIVEAWAY: HIS ILLEGAL SELF

Now, it's true as some of you might recall, that we didn't exactly love Peter Carey's His Illegal Self and we more or less said so (albeit respectfully) in the Dallas Morning News.  But plenty of others did love it and, after all, every review is just one person's opinion.  And we know there is no shortage of Peter Carey fans out there - among whom we would still happily stand and be counted - and so we're pleased to offer a copy of His Illegal Self for this week's TEV giveaway.  Here's what James Wood had to say in the New Yorker:

Carey’s often beautiful novel, one of his best recent works, has the bruising tang of all his fiction, in which crooked colloquialism (frequently Australian vernacular), and poetic formality combine. The result is brilliantly vital: the world bulges out of the sentences. A man is described as “not hurrying, but prancy in bare feet.” A boy feels “squiffy in the stomach.” A beat-up car has a “busted sunken boneless backseat.”An Upper East Side matron brings back to her apartment her “powdery friends from the English-Speaking Union.” An Australian shack has a veranda “where bats hung like broken rags.” When the novel’s heroine is unhappy, her mouth turns down: “She didn’t know he saw that, the way the whole of her lower face could lose its bones.”

And so, you know the drill.  Drop us an email, subject line "WHAT THE HECK DO YOU KNOW, ANYWAY?"  Please be sure to include your full mailing address and, yes, previous winners are once again ineligible.  (We forgot that one last time.)  We'll take all entries until 7 p.m. PST and then the Random Number Generator will do the deed.

Until then, please do check out the post below and try to come by for one of the Harry, Revised events around town this weekend.

UPDATE: The RNG anoints Cheryl Klein of Los Angeles - congratulations!

TOUR BEGINS

Well, the official Harry, Revised tour gets underway these weekend with four events here in town before I hit the road, and I'm hoping to see as many of you as possible.  Here's the skinny:

For Hollywood and Central L.A. - I'm kicking off the tour with a reading at Skylight Books on Saturday, May 3 at 7:30 p.m.  I hear there might be cupcakes in the house ...

For Pasadena and the Eastside - I'll be reading at the venerable Vroman's on Monday, May 5 at 7 p.m. 

For the Westside - I will be reading right here in my home neighborhood on Tuesday May 6, when I appear at Village Books in the Palisades at 7:30 p.m.  I'd like to make a special pleading to my westside friends and readers - Village Books has been having a rough time of it, and we can't afford to lose another westside bookstore.  The Palisades only seems far - it's really just up the hill from Santa Monica.  And I was in there today and they have a nice big pile of books waiting for you - so please, all of you in Venice, Palms, the Marina, Brentwood, Santa Monica - do make the extra effort for them.

The Launch Party - And all of you, no matter what part of town you live in, are invited to a very special installment of Vermin on the Mount, which Jim Ruland has rechristened Vermin, Revised. There is a great lineup of really interesting readers who I had a hand in selecting - Marisa Silver, Marianne Meyerhoff and Teresa Carmody.  The wonderful artwork is below, and I'm told there will be cake and all sorts of planned merriment and embarrassment, so please do come on out to celebrate on Sunday night.

Details on all the tour stops can be found here.  I'm off to the races ...

THURSDAY MARGINALIA

* The only drag about starting up a book tour now is missing the wonderful PEN World Voices festival in New York.  Fortunately, MetaxuCafe is rounding up the reports.

* NPR speaks to Dmitri Nabokov about The Original of Laura.

* Good things happening to nice people: Ron Currie, Jr. wins the Young Lions Award.

The end of the evening brought us back to the reason for being there. Ron Currie, Jr., won for his novel God is Dead, and he hugged his mom for a really long time before accepting the check. It’s his first novel, and with glitterati bearing witness, it might just change his life.

* Another Michiko Kakutani: Ogre piece, this time in the Guardian, occasioned by a Harvard Crimson report of Jonathan Franzen's appearance in James Wood's class, in which Franzen remarked that "the stupidest person in New York City is currently the lead reviewer of fiction for the New York Times".  (Thanks to David Clarke.)

* Mark Doty, who just stood upon the stage of the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, is profiled with his partner Paul Lisicky in the Ithaca Times.

Doty, in fact, has almost finished a new book, which will come out in a series with Graywolf Press devoted to The Art of.... Doty's assignment was the 'art of description,' a task he savored, though he did so with caution. "I'm particularly talking about poetry, which represents the visual world, the sensual world, in this project. And, it turns out, of course, that when you're talking about description, you're talking about everything: you're talking about how perception is rendered in language, and why. One must ask: Why do we want to do that? Why is it satisfying? In any case, I'm almost finished with it," he adds.

* The new issue of Boldtype is now online and awaits your attention.

* Michel Houellebecq is publicly served up a helping of Mere's Merde.

"My son can go and get screwed by whomever he wants, he can write another book, I don't give a toss," she says in one excerpt, widely published in French media on Wednesday.

"But if he has the misfortune of sticking my name on anything again he'll get my walking stick in his face and that'll knock his teeth out," she says in what newspapers described as a typical sample.

* Norman Mailer is remembered at Central Connecticut State University.

* Charles Simic is set to make his final appearance as Poet Laureate on May 8.

* An early look at the guest list of this year's Hay-on-Wye festival.

* The OUP Blog would like your thoughts on "What constitutes literary importance?"

* And, finally, our brilliant advice to Arundhati Roy, who "says she is not comfortable with the activist tag and wants to be identified as a writer only," is, well in that case, why don't you, oh, maybe write another novel?

TEV GUEST INTERVIEW: NINA REVOYR

GUEST INTERVIEW BY DENISE HAMILTON

Nina Revoyr was born in Japan to a Japanese mother and a white American father, and grew up in Tokyo, Wisconsin, and Los Angeles. She is the author of The Necessary Hunger and Southland and her books have been Los Angeles Times bestsellers, Book Sense 76 picks, finalists for the Edgar Award and winners of the Ferro Grumley Award and the Lambda Literary awards.

Revoyr’s new book, The Age of Dreaming, recounts the story of a Japanese silent film star in the early days of Hollywood and forty years later, as he faces the hard truths of his past. While inspired by the story of a real-life actor named Sessue Hayakawa, Revoyr has created a compelling fictional character and breathed new life into a forgotten and little known slice of early Hollywood through her use of vivid detail and atmosphere.

Q: This book reads to me almost like literary archeology. I’m an LA native and a former L.A. Times reporter and so I delude myself that I know the history of this place. And yet I had no idea of the vibrant Japanese theater world that existed here in the early days of the 20th century. What drew you to the Sessue-type character and also the actress Hanako, whose poise, elegance, independence and doomed love for Jun inform the book?

A: I was intrigued by the fact that there was a famous Japanese movie star and sex symbol at a time of such virulent anti-Japanese prejudice. In the early 20th century, Japanese couldn’t own land, Japanese kids were barred from public schools in San Francisco, restricted covenants were in effect, and various groups were pushing for the complete exclusion of Japanese immigrants. And yet it was in this environment that Sessue Hayakawa became an A-list star. I was interested in what it would cost someone, both professionally and personally, to achieve mainstream success in that context.

More fundamentally, though, I wanted to imagine what becomes of someone who stops doing what he loves. Unlike Hayakawa, my protagonist, Jun Nakayama, stops acting altogether when he’s thirty. This, for me, is what the book is really about. I started writing The Age of Dreaming at a time when I was very discouraged about my work. My second book was being rejected everywhere and I hadn’t written in over a year. I just imagined what I’d feel like later, in my 70s, if I never tried to write another book.

The Hanako character is, in many ways, the counterpoint to Jun. She acts purely for the joy of the work itself; she doesn’t get caught up in other people’s notions of success. Jun recognizes that Hanako has a certain authenticity and purity that he doesn’t—which is why he’s both drawn to her, and intimidated. She’s not a success because her work gets a lot of attention, but because she keeps doing what she loves. And Jun’s real failure is not the loss of his stardom but his inability to press on in the face of obstacles.

Q: Did being Japanese-American give you any insights into that world?

A: Yes, my own background did help me enter Jun and Hanako’s world—not just the fact that I’m half-Japanese, but that I lived in Japan and moved to Los Angeles. I understand the sense of possibility in L.A. and in America; the feeling of breaking free of old restrictions. But I also understand what it’s like to be a person of color in largely white artistic world. There are still certain expectations of what stories can be told, and how. And people don’t always get what you’re trying to do.

Q: Was it hard to find the voice for a 73-year-old? Where did you have to go in your head to channel the distant, almost depressive, formal disengaged tone?

A: Jun’s voice was not that hard to enter. I tend to have my own uptight tendencies, and I’ve been accused of being a crusty old man myself. And of course many of the emotions Jun tries so hard to contain—about his art, about his boneheaded choices in love—are emotions that I’m all too familiar with. Jun may, on the surface, seem very different than me—but in some ways, this is the most autobiographical novel I’ve written.

Q: Why did you choose first person?

A: Because I wanted to put the reader right in the middle of Jun’s self-deceptions and denial, his carefully constructed persona. And then I wanted show very intimately how those constructs fall apart. Jun struggles so hard to keep a lid on the secrets of his past, and on his own emotions—but they all wriggle through in the end. He finally begins to acknowledge why his career fell apart, and to understand his own actions and their consequences. This was important to me. I love Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, but unlike Ishiguro’s unreliable narrators, who tend to be witnesses, Jun is an active participant in his own downfall.

Q: Had you seen many silent movies when you started this book? Were you a fan of the genre? What is it about them that captivates us?

A: I hadn’t seen any silent films before I started writing this book, but yes, I’ve become a fan. There’s a subtlety and beauty to silent films that’s quite different from the movies of today. To me, silent films have a lot in common with poetry. Both forms rely heavily on suggestion and imagery, and both depend on the readers or viewers to bring their own interpretive powers to bear. Both forms demand a more active engagement—you can’t just lie back and receive silent films the way you would, say, most TV shows.

I was also very drawn to the era itself. Many of the early people in film—actors, directors, producers—came from nothing and rose to stardom. In the Teens and early Twenties, it seemed like anything was possible. There was a sense of energy and optimism around the silent film industry that mirrored the energy and optimism of Los Angeles. And of course the qualities that drew people to Los Angeles then still exist today. People still come here—from all over the country, from all over the world—to reinvent themselves, to create better lives.

Q: You must have done a ton of research?

A: I did the bulk of my research after I’d already written a couple of drafts. I knew about Hayakawa, and I knew about the William Desmond Taylor murder, which is basis of the murder of Jun’s director. But there’s an extent to which too much research can be unhelpful, because you feel restricted by fact. I needed to find my own way into the story; to make it, in a sense, about me. Once I’d done that, then I went back and did research to fill in the holes—what cars people drove, for example, or when the war bonds were released.

Q: Do you outline and plot? Did you know where the Jun character was going?

A: No, not really. In general, I don’t start writing because I have answers. I start writing because I have questions, which I hope to answer through the course of working on the book. In this case, again, I had two main questions: What is it like to achieve fame and success in a world that doesn’t really approve of you? And what happens if you stop doing what you love—what do you become?

I did know, however, that I wanted to draw parallels between the past and present. In both this book and my last one, I incorporate a lot of history. And I wanted to show that history doesn’t stay safely in the past; that it can bear upon or be repeated in the present. Jun’s very conditional stardom, for example, wasn’t only a reality of the 1920s. A lot of what he is coping with early in his career is still relevant to actors of color—or artists of any minority group—today.

Jun is shocked, for example, that he’s ultimately offered the same kind of role in 1964 that he played a half a century before. But I’d argue that things aren’t all that different today. Asians in Hollywood are still largely confined to certain kinds of roles: the comic figure, the martial arts figure (Jackie Chan is both), the bad guy, the brute. It’s still acceptable for there to be a character in yellow face—like the Miss Swan character on MAD TV. And then there’s “Lust, Caution,” which I saw recently and actually really dug. But the Tony Leung character is both beautiful and violent, and his sexiness is completely linked to his brutality. Those same qualities could describe a lot of the characters that Jun played, and also Hayakawa.

Q: Two of your three novels feature a murder mystery and in fact, while you’re a literary writer, your last book Southland was also a finalist for the Edgar Award, named after Edgar Allen Poe and bestowed by the Mystery Writers of America. Do you consider yourself a crime writer manqué? A la John Banville? What is it about a murder that allows writers to frame the story?

A: I consider myself a writer who absolutely believes in strong, complex characters and compelling plots. For me, that’s sometimes meant building a book around a mystery structure, and sometimes not. But the concern with story and character is always there. Margaret Atwood once wrote a wonderful piece for Best American Short Stories about what she looks for as a reader, and it basically boils down to wanting a good story that is urgently told. Sometimes people try to create an artificial division between writing that’s concerned with language or technique vs. writing that is “about” a particular issue. But the books I like most are concerned with all of these things. They’re beautifully written and technically interesting, but they are also about something larger then themselves. They’re stories that hold my attention, that need to be told.

I strive to achieve that kind of narrative urgency in all of my novels. You want to create that sense of “What happens next?” and that is definitely one of the appeals of a mystery structure. Sometimes readers are more willing to go along with serious social and racial themes if the story is compelling, a la John Sayles’ wonderful movie Lone Star. With both Southland and The Age of Dreaming I also had protagonists who were simply not going to look at their lives unless faced with something drastic, like an unexplained death. But in both my first book, The Necessary Hunger, and the new book I’m working on now, I try to create that sense of urgency in a different way—by setting up a set of circumstances that result in heightened tension and lead to some kind of climax or resolution.

In general, though, I think that the definitions of “literary” fiction and genre fiction are not that useful anymore. Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain wrote incredibly beautiful sentences and some of the most evocative fiction you could ever hope for. And now you have literary writers like Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon writing books that are essentially mysteries. Chabon and Susan Straight are nominated for Edgars this year, as I was, as you mentioned, for my last book. But I’d argue that even beyond these “literary mysteries,” many other novels incorporate elements of a mystery structure. Look at novels like Beloved, or The Remains of the Day, or Possession. Each of these books is built around a central hidden secret that is revealed through the course of the story.

Q: Were you daunted by the idea of writing a Hollywood novel? It’s one of the most over-examined topics, and I say this as someone who’s just written a Hollywood novel set in 1949 and struggled with how to find a fresh angle. And yet you did it beautifully!

A: A little, because it’s not a scene or an area that I’m deeply familiar with—certainly not in the way I know the inner city. But I approached Hollywood as more of a backdrop than a subject, if that makes sense. The book’s themes of race, the weight of history, the choices you make at key moments in your life, of love and loss, are things that I’ve addressed before. So the issues I was dealing with weren’t really that new; they just took place on a different canvas. And maybe it was a bit less daunting for me because of the distance of time. No one alive remembers what things were like in 1915, so it’s easier to imagine, to project.

Q: Did you struggle with the architecture of the novel? It’s an extremely delicately constructed tale, in which you dole out information at precisely timed intervals. And it all leads up to something quite unexpected. There is a difference between what the reader knows and what the narrator admits. Was that tricky? How did you determine what to reveal when?

A: I love the whole structuring aspect of writing a novel. It’s a huge challenge, but really, it’s so much fun. It does involve a lot of rewriting—as well as constantly adding on and adding in. I tend to write in layers, and grow the book from the inside out: each time something new gets put in, there’s a domino effect, and I have to add other things elsewhere. It’s not a fast or efficient process, but I do hope it helps create a book with a certain complexity and internal logic. The trick then, of course, is to make it all look effortless and inevitable.

I don’t tend to outline my own books as I’m writing them—but I will sometimes create detailed outlines of books I’ve already read, specifically so I can study the structure. This was especially important, for this book, in terms of when and how to reveal information. Jun is an unreliable narrator not only in that he withholds information, but also in that he doesn’t always understand the significance of the things he knows. And he discovers certain important facts at the same time the reader does. But what he finally learns has nothing to do with what the plot appears to be about. As with Southland, I start out with a big social and historical landscape—and yet the revelations end up being very personal and intimate.

Q: What’s next?

A: A very different and much shorter book. The present is in Los Angeles—but the events of the story take place in rural Wisconsin in the 1970s. It’s about a mixed-race Japanese-American kid who’s the only person of color in a small town—until a young black couple arrives and all hell breaks loose. It deals with family, identity, loyalty, and masculinity and violence. There’s a lot of joy in the story—I wanted to capture my love of the outdoors, of baseball and dogs. But it’s also the darkest book I’ve ever written. For this one, I read a lot of Norman Maclean, Wendell Berry, Larry Watson—all those guys who write so lovingly about both the land and social issues. For me artistically, I really try to do something different with every book. My model in this respect is Pat Barker, whom I love, and who’s always reinventing herself. It’s more fun for me if I don’t really know if I can pull off what I’m trying to do. If I’m not at least a little nervous, I’m probably not pushing myself enough.

Crime novelist Denise Hamilton edited the short story anthology Los Angeles Noir. Her new book “The Last Embrace” will be published in July by Scribner.

MEANWHILE, WE'RE STILL WAITING FOR OUR TWO HUNDRED BUCKS

The Los Angeles Times's Scott Timberg reports on a hoax in which con artists posing as authors are trying to bilk indie bookstore owners out of some Western Union cash.

This tale is typical: Slattery was heading out of the store, not long ago, to see a movie down the street when a staffer handed her the phone. The caller addressed her like an old friend: "Oh -- thank God I got you before you left," he began.

The call came from someone who said he was the Los Angeles blogger and first novelist Mark Sarvas, who was reading at the store in a few days and seemed to be in a pinch. His car had been impounded, he needed money to get it back and he needed it right away.

"I thought, 'Why isn't he calling his wife?' " recalled Slattery. "But maybe he can't reach anybody, maybe he had an extra drink. . . . It never occurred to me that it wasn't him.

Actually, Mrs. TEV learned to stop taking our calls long ago ...

WHAT WE'LL BE DOING ALL DAY

The Granta website redesign has been unveiled.  Go, go, go!

CORTAZAR PROFILE

Julio Cortázar - whose sublime Autonauts of the Cosmoroute we touted last year on NPR - is profiled in the Yemen Times.  Nothing new here, but it's nice to see him getting any attention at all.

Cortázar belonged to the boom generation of Latin American writers who broke new ground with their works during the 1950s and 1960s. His literary career, which lasted almost 40 years, includes short stories, novels, plays, poetry, translations, and essays of literary criticism. His work is strongly influenced by surrealism with attempting to raise consciousness above reality in his fantastical short stories. He combined existential questioning with experimental writing techniques in his works and many of his stories follow the logic of hallucinations and obsessions.

I READ THE NEWS TODAY, OH BOY

Dear God, the Beatles meets a literary festival.  How can we resist?

The mini-festival will open on May 14 with an appearance by Mark Lewisohn, long regarded as the world’s leading authority on The Beatles. He has documented the group in an almost hour- by-hour, day-by-day process in a series of books, as well as co- authoring The Beatles’ London.

FESTIVAL RECAPS

I am completely spent from a wonderfully bookish weekend, and will spend most of today catching up, so I direct you to the excellent coverage to be found at Jacket Copy, Counterbalance and Bookfox.  I also want to thank everyone who turned out for our First Fiction panel and special thanks to all of you who came to the book signing afterwards.  There's a long tour ahead of me but it's hard to imagine a thrill that will compare to seeing the line of people with copies of Harry in their hands.  We managed to sell out!  (Although Ruland's been calling me a sellout for years.)

More to come (including giveaway winners) as I dig out from purgatory.  In the meantime, I do commend Nam Le's Five Chapters entry, "Teheran Calling," to your attention.

"DICTATION" REVIEW

My review of Cynthia Ozick's superb Dictation: A Quartet - which I somehow managed to write without talking about myself - can now be found at the Barnes and Noble Review.  Here's the opening:

"History," wrote Henry James in a 1910 letter to his amanuensis Theodora Bosanquet, "is strangely written." This casual aside could easily serve as the epigraph of Cynthia Ozick's superb new collection, Dictation, which concerns itself with lost worlds evoked by languages -- languages that separate and obscure as readily as they bind. It can be risky to look for connective tissue between stories written years apart and published in magazines ranging from The Conradian to The New Yorker. But themes of deception, posterity, and, above all, the glory of language -- at once malleable and intractable -- knit together this quartet, recasting the whole as the harmonious product of Ozick's formidable talent.

You can read the whole thing here.  (Public thanks to Michael Gorra who alerted me to The Conradian connection.)

TEV GIVEAWAY: TINTIN AND THE SECRET OF LITERATURE

Did you think we'd forgotten about you?  Not all, just a bit busy here as festival weekend gets underway.  But before we disappear into panel-and-party-land, we are happy to be able to offer a copy of Tom McCarthy's superb Tintin and the Secret of Literature for this week's giveaway.

Regular readers will know that we are great Tintin fans, and when we learned that the book hadn't found a US publisher, we contacted Richard Nash, who is doing God's work in Brooklyn, who showed his usual excellent taste and acquired the book. You can find our discussion from last July here.

Here's what the Guardian had to say about the 2006 UK release:

One of the remarkable strengths of Tintin, McCarthy explains, is that 'within a simple medium for children is a mastery of plot and symbol, theme and subtext far superior to that displayed by most "real" novelists. If you want to be a writer,' he says, 'study The Castafiore Emerald' (his favourite of the series). 'It holds all of literature's formal keys, its trade secrets.'

Who can resist that, right?  OK, then, you know what to do.  Drop us an email, subject line "BILLIONS OF BLUE BLISTERING BARNACLES" and please be sure to include your full mailing address.  Due to the late start we are taking all entries until noon PST on Saturday, and some time before the weekend is out, the Random Number Generator will pick a lucky winner.  Until then, see you around UCLA.

UPDATE: Congratulations to winners Lillian Heytvelt and Jeff Carroll!

LOS ANGELES TIMES FESTIVAL OF BOOKS

It is that time of year once again - the nation's biggest literary festival, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, is upon us.  You can stll score some tickets for events through Ticketmaster, or else take your chances waiting on line as you puzzle over whether to see Lee Siegel foam at the mouth or Tod Goldberg say "fucktard" in a crowded room.  (We actually don't care where you go as long as you please please please come to our First Novel panel on Sunday morning and say hello.)

There are tips and roundups and fretting at various blogs around the web, notably from Tod, Callie and Pinky.  See you this weekend and don't forget the sunblock - we always do and come home looking like a rhubarb.  We won't be live-blogging the awards or the festival - we're going to enjoy our first run through as an author - but we absolutely will provide reports as the weekend progresses.

MAILBAG GOODIES

We know that everyone is long past feeling sorry for our dilemma of too many books.  Life sucks, poor guy, all those free books.  Yeah, it's hard to hurt, we know.  But they come and come and come, and though we seem to be making more and more trips to Goodwill, the piles are serious enough that Mrs. TEV periodically threatens us with various legal maneuvers. 

That said, every now and then a title comes through that catches our eye and, rather than going into the pile to be evaluated (which can lead to the pile to be separated and later prioritized) (which leads to another pile to be shelved), it actually goes to the head of the class and lands with a smack on our desk.  (Where it usually sits for several weeks as other titles crawl up over it.)  But with any luck, the desk titles get an early perusal which sometimes graduates to a full-fledged impromptu read, thus wreaking havoc with anything resembling a system around here.

Well, not one but two books hit the desk this week, both of a decidedly academic bent.  Now, "academic" isn't a dirty word around here (unless we're playing The Naughty Professor with Mrs. TEV) but our reading primetime is usually reserved for novels.  Still, never having properly studied literature in school (majoring indifferently in journalism), the anniversary edition of Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction (University of Minnesota Press) caught our eye.  The preface to the anniversary edition finds Eagleton as entertaining and pugnacious as ever, and writing with a clarity that holds the promise to make what is essentially a textbook an engrossing read.  It will be accompanying us on our book tour travels, mostly so we'll look smart sitting on Southwest.

On the other hand, we are getting right into Rob Riemen's Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal (Yale), a slender volume drawing on Thomas Mann's idea of "the quintessence of a civilized world" which is "the sole corrective for human history."  Riemen's elegant introduction movingly sets the stage for this post 9/11 consideration and chapter exhortations like "Be Brave" have already pulled us in.  Given MOTEV's devotion to Mann (forcing Death in Venice on us at a tender age and The Magic Mountain at a later one), and given the sad state of the world, it seems we could do far worse than to contemplate some nobility of the spirit.  We'll check back and let you know if the book's promise is fulfilled.

GAINES AWARD

Word has gone out that the April 30 deadline for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, a $10,000 national award for African-American fiction, is approaching fast.  Book-length works of fiction published in 2007 and written by an African-American are eligible for entry.  No entry fee is required­to enter, simply send an entry form and 8 copies of the book to: 

The Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence
c/o The Baton Rouge Area Foundation
402 N. Fourth St.
Baton Rouge, LA 70802

Entry forms are available at www.ErnestJGainesAward.org .

THURSDAY MARGINALIA

* Juan Gelman has won the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most prestigious literary award.

Gelman, 77, is considered Argentina's poet laureate and once belonged to the Montoneros, a leftist guerrilla group that fought the Argentine juntas that ruled in the 1970s and '80s.

* You've already heard about problems facing The Mount.  Now a Scottish trust has been formed to try and save Sir Walter Scott's "most famous home."  Elsewhere in News Of Writers' Houses, Norman Mailer's house is set to become a writers colony.

* Although we're well past the point of interest with respect to Christopher Hitchens, we share this lengthy Prospect profile for those whose taste for punishment is limitless.

For Hitchens, 1968 had little to do with the cultural explosion of the time—music, drugs, alternative lifestyles—and he remains a rather macho figure, untouched by feminism, except in an abstract political form. He had been recruited to his "eccentric" organisation—the International Socialists, or IS—in Oxford shortly before arriving at the university. He was noticed heckling a Maoist at an anti-Vietnam war meeting, and was approached by Peter Sedgwick, who Hitchens describes as a "noble remnant of the libertarian left." At the time, the Oxford IS had five members. By the end of 1968, there were around 300. The exhilarating sense of operating on a large scale from within a tiny organisation is one that has suited Hitchens for most of his career since.

* Can there be a dumber idea out there than a print version of Wikipedia?

* A Nobel Prize for food?  Who knew?

* The best reason to date not to live in Brooklyn - to avoid the anxiety and/or crippling shame of being left off the Brooklyn Literary 100 list.  Can the Queens 15 list be far behind?

* Goncourt Prize winner and Academie francaise member Maurice Druon turns 90 and motherland Russia takes note.

* Prague is hosting a month-long biennale honouring Borges and Kafka.

Up until late May, biennale visitors will get a chance to see, for example, a screening of Jan Němec’s 1975 film of The Metamorphosis as well as a version of The Trial put on at Prague’s Divadlo Komedie (Comedy Theatre). There is also an installation featuring Borges’ writing. The Franz Kafka Society’s Markéta Mališová again.

* Anne Enright has entered the Hennessy X.O. Hall of Fame, which prompts all sorts of questions about product placement and someone's inability to spell "Man Booker," but when you consider where liquor sponorships dollars go in this country, it's probably churlish to complain.

* If you are looking for something to do tonight in NYC, you could do a whole lot worse than to find yourself at Habitus Magazine's event with Arnon Grunberg.  (Here in L.A., we'll be attending a screening of the long awaited Fugitive Pieces, about which we plan to report as soon as we can.)

* Finally, if you are a deep-pocketed TEV reader, you might want to consider attending the Los Angeles Public Library Awards Dinner honoring Larry McMurtry.  Individual tickets start at (gulp!) $750 but there are few better causes than supporting your library, dontcha think?

NOTA BENE: THE END OF SLEEP

"Fin looked in awe at the half-dozen lightly charcoaled cubes of meat before him.  Each was plump with thick-grained gleaming juiciness.  Fin tore off a palm-sized swatch of bread and wrapped it around the biggest chunk of meat.  Hot, garlicky, juices fired into his mouth as he bit into it, and he could taste that pink tender flesh in the middle give up its structure to a delicious mulch.  As he chewed, eyes closed, almost swooning with aromatic delight, he discovered that one side of the meat was hiding toasted sesame seeds.

Chewing for Fin was an activity that absorbed all his attention.  (His father had once revealed to him, as if passing on a great secret, that mastication was the only part of the digestive process that could be consciously affected.)  The meat was extraordinary - spicy, luscious, tender and suffused with the flavour of thyme.  One of the great kebabs of all time.  And Fin kept a close tally of such things."

- Rowan Somerville, The End of Sleep (coming in July from W.W. Norton)