The Elegant Variation

TUESDAY MARGINALIA

For those of you who didn't make it to town, the podcast of our BEA appearance - The Author-preneur (not our title) - is now available ... If we were over in London Town, we'd drop everything to go hear Geoff Dyer talking about punctuality.  (We'd be on time.) ... Writing for Huffpo, Jane Smiley considers the "few essential truths about what writers do" as refracted through Solzhenitzyn, and at the Guardian, Donald Rayfield assesses his literary legacy ...Polish author Stefan Chwin avers that "Writing allows us to become better than we are" ... Julien Parme, a French novel we've been quite keen to read, is reviewed in the Independent ... Remembering Dostoyevsky in the Warsaw ghetto ... NPR profiles the literary-flavored band The Airborne Toxic Incident ... Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell face off in a new book ... David Haglund pays appropriate attention to developments on the Péter Esterházy front ... Condalmo catches us asleep at the switch and alerts us to Tom McCarthy's discussion of Tintin and the Secret of Literature ... An LA Times appreciation of the soon to close Acres of Books ... The essay Jim Ruland should have written: the literary legacy of NY Punk ... Sam Anderson is the latest high profile critic to take on How Fiction Works (though if he's going to quote n+1, he should also quote Wood's riposte: "it is easier to criticize that to propose") ... Without question, the most unpleasant part of getting published was asking for blurbs, though calling it "corrupt quid pro quo" strikes as us a bit overheated ... South Korean author Lee Chung-joon, who wrote "some 120 short and long stories over 40 years," has died ... Open Letters' August issue is now online ... and, finally, this just in from the Department of Now We've Seen It All ...

WEDNESDAY MARGINALIA

We're off to make an appearance at the Napa Valley Writers' Conference, so updates will be light this week since we're likely to be, well, drunk.  Or at least drinking.  In the interim, we leave you with these goodies:  A willfully stupid reading of James Wood's latest in the Washington Post - the first sentence alone disqualifies it from serious consideration (To refer to Graham Greene as one of Wood's "whipping boys" suggests a complete lack of familiarity with Wood's criticism, including his introduction to the Penguin reissue of The Heart of the Matter) ... Ireland touts a native son as a Booker favorite ... On the growing number of debut novels getting on the Booker longlist ... actually, the Guardian runs that particular story twice ... We also enjoy the brief flurry of national pride following the Booker announcement - the Welsh are pleased, as are the Irish, and somewhere there's probably an Australian article about the Toltz - oh, there it is ... OK, enough Booker ... We're glad to see Orwell's diaries headed our way in blog form, but we do ask the Telegraph headline writers this: Is there an offline variety of blog we haven't seen yet?  ... The Huffington Post is paying all sorts of attention to books, it seems - check out Lissa Warren on book blogs, and Jennifer Nix on The Lazarus Project ... Speaking of blogs, book reviews and the rest, Steve Wasserman and Kassia Krozser talked about the situation on the NewsHour ... Speaking of our friend Mr. Wasserman, go to Truthdig and enjoy a four-part video series of him in conversation with Ray Bradbury ... We, too, are read-walkers ... A literary renaissance in Marin?  Maybe we'll pop in on the way back ... The next L of A installment of Philip K. Dick novels is out ... Editor and Publisher reports on an unusual NYTBR correction ... The Huntingon Library (one of our favorite LA spots) has acquired Kent Haruf's archives ... As addicted to letters are we are, we can't wait for Penelope Fitzgerald's letters to come out Stateside - for now we can only watch forlornly at a distance ... A biography of the splendid Patrick Hamilton is a Guardian paperback of the week ... The latest dispatch from the Department of Fool Some of the People ... Ha Jin would like to visit China after 23 years but isn't happy about the censorship problem ... Turkey alleges that Orhan Pamuk was targeted for assassination ... The Wall Street Journal takes note of Chris Adrian and Adam Thirlwell ... A fascinating look at the introduction of the glorious John McGahern to Spanish-speaking audiences ... It's good to see Scott Timberg still at work, most recently with Michael Chabon ... and, finally, the schedule for the 2008-2009 season of literary events at the 92nd Street Y has just been posted with tickets on sale Thursday and it's the shit, yo.  It's almost enough to make us leave Earthquake Land.

TUESDAY MARGINALIA

Our friends in the UK are fretting over the westward exodus of literary archives ... If the words "Literary Brooklyn" don't already set you running for the hills, Brooklyn Was Mine might be for you ... Our plans for our masterwork, Lassie Goes To Brooklyn, Rents An Expensive Small Aparment, Starts a Self-Important Literary Journal and Sells a Tedious Debut Novel, have been thwarted - the copyright appears headed back to her creator's daughter .... Ha Jin discusses his most memorable summer, which includes leaving his family behind to come here (ours, on the other hand, mostly features Pinky Tuscadero) ... One of the judges takes you inside the Samuel Johnson short list ... FOTEV Jack Pendarvis talks about his new novel, Awesome, in the Daily Mississippian ... We're definitely with Ross Raisin, who has been nominated for the lucrative Dylan Thomas Prize - waiting beats writing, because, you know, there's tips ... The blog v. critics thing continues, like some stubborn zombie, though to hear Jay Rayner tell it, "The problem with such arguments is that they risk becoming terribly binary: you are either for the critics or for the bloggers; happily the responses from both sides in this debate are more complex than that."  Presumably because Schickel and Birkerts have been banned ... Small talk with Siri Hustvedt ... The battle that reshaped children's literature (no, it's nothing to do with Harry Potter) ... Maps and Legends appeared to fly a bit under the radar down here (which is a shame) but Canada, at least, is talking notice ... We miss no opportunity to link to David Markson news ... No three words get us hotter faster than "literary agents fight" (except, perhaps, for "Attention K-mart shoppers") ... A full set of chapters of "the world's oldest surviving full-length novel" has been discovered in Tokyo ... Patrick McGrath, profiled in the Guardian ... Another literary landmark facing extinction ... Ian McEwan, in his own words, on his long lost brother ... And, finally, we really do feel for Tom Stoppard.  Seriously.  We're right there with you, Sir Tom.  But please don't sit it out for too long, eh?

THURSDAY MARGINALIA

Well, it didn't take much more than one look for the judge to send on our way - and so justice ducks a bullet for another year.  In the meantime, we're actually quite pleased with the discussions yesterday's post seems to have sparked, and we hope that will continue - a focus group extraordinaire, a gratis brainstorming session on just what really would make a superb online book review.  In the meantime, more literary news from around the globe:

Henrietta Rose-Innes, winner of the Caine Prize, had a feeling she might win ... Salman Rushdie remains the overwhelming favorite to win the Best of the Booker, which will be announced today ... Apropos Curtis Sittenfeld's new novel, American Wife, Buzz Sugar wants to know if you think the First Lady should be off limits as a literary subject ... Slugging it out over remnants of Kafka's estate found in a Tel Aviv apartment (The Guardian's coverage of same is here) ... Nam Le gets his very own LAist interview ... We can think of few things more dreadful than Victoria Glendinning's suggestion to hand over the Booker to the vox populi (C'mon, we're just back from jury duty ... we've seen what's out there and it's not pretty) ... though when you consider the bold move of handing Jhumpa Lahiri the Frank O'Connor award, perhaps she has a point ... Last thing on awards: Will someone please tell the geniuses at the Saroyan Prize that there's no way thirty titles constitute a short list ... "I think Putin stops at Dostoyevsky," she said, musing on whether Vladimir Putin had read Nabokov. "I think Nabokov would be very threatening to his whole worldview. He doesn't really provide for any exceptionalism and sovereign democracy." ... More on Obama's reading list ... Scott McLemee draws a line connecting WALL-E and Kenneth Burke ... PW editor-in-chief Sara Nelson talks about what the boomers are reading - apparently, they buy one in seven of all books ... Amitav Ghosh has a new novel out and Reuters goes to New Delhi to talk to him about it ... Sally Vickers, the most recent contributor to the Canongate Myths series, is profiled in the Irish Times ... We might credit this piece on the future of book technology a bit more if the Globe and Mail editors and reporters knew the difference between "Steven King" and "Stephen King" ... Of course, if Nick Hornby hates e-books, well that's good enough for us - we wash our hands of the future ... Take the Guardian's literary adaptation quiz and find out "if you're well-read or culturally illiterate" ... Martha's Vineyard has been rocked by the fire that damaged The Bunch of Grapes Bookstore ... And, finally, what happens when Philip Roth meets American pop culture:

Do not miss tomorrow's seriously awesome (did we really say that?) TEV giveaway ... Until then!

TUESDAY MARGINALIA

Chicago's clean, well-lighted place for writers ... The suicide of Thomas Disch has been widely noted already ... Authors are treated as rock stars at a Brazilian festival ... James Bond's irreconciliable differences ... Following on the heels of her cover review in the Times, L.A. author Rachel Kushner's Telex from Cuba is also reviewed in the Chronicle ... Laura Miller looks at Barack Obama's "taste for serious fiction" (although her notion that its "rare in the American male these days" doesn't hold up - it's pretty damn rare everywhere) ... Apropos the Booker of Booker business, Neel Mukherjee rolls his eyes at listmania ... Apparently, Richard Ford is actually a really good guy because he cried over Hurricane Katrina ... FOTEV Antoine Wilson gives Nam Le's The Boat a smart and enthusiastic reading ... The real crisis in book reviewing has to do with the fact that editors continue to publish efforts like this one ... By the time the AP gets on the story, all you can do is start measuring for coffins, but they've noted the foreclosure problems facing the great homes of American writers ... Pen pals for 57 years; you've gotta admire the OCD ... Alistair McCartney gets the latest Critical Mass Small Press Spotlight ... It appears we are dumber than a bag of rocks, and the reason?  The internet, of course ... Deborah Eisenberg reviews TEV favorite Peter Nadas in the NYRB ... And, finally, a furious Maitresse is preparing her defense of Paris from the slings and arrows of Dinaw Mengestu.  On attend.

THURSDAY MARGINALIA

NPR (which has actually bucked the trend and expanded book coverage) is the latest outlet to fall hard for the glorious Netherland ... (Speaking of Netherland, there will be no giveaway this week - we're going dark for the holiday - but you will definitely want to be paying attention to this space next Friday.) ... James Wood is profiled in PW, and gives a quote which sums up (for us) all that is wrong with the academy: "An academic said, 'it's embarrassing that he gets so worked up.' ” ... TEV Guest Reviewer Jim Ruland classes up the LA Times Book Review ... The new issue of Open Letters is online ... Widely noted already is agent Barbara Bauer's lawsuit against those sullying her reputation ... Dara Horn on the new translation of Der Nister's The Family Mashber ... A much-too-brief report from Tuesday's Manchester panel with Martin Amis and James Wood ... Cigar Aficionado looks at the Cuban tradition of reading aloud to workers in cigar factories: "The workers were read novels such as Les Miserables by Victor Hugo; works by Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville; and many other important Spanish, Cuban and Latin American writers. There was also the indispensable reading of newspapers. And famous cigar brands such as Romeo y Julieta and Montecristo were created because of the reading of William Shakespeare and Alexandre Dumas, the author of The Count of Monte Cristo." ... The male mid-life crisis, from Shakespeare to today's BMW motorbikes ... The San Francisco Bay Guardian notes Horacio Castellanos Moya's marvelous Senselessness (coming soon to a Recommended sidebar near you) and Moya is profiled in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review ... Fay Weldon finds Attachment "gratifyingly readable" ...  Bangladeshi novelist-in-hiding Taslima Nasreen joined international writers gathered at a literary conference in Stockholm Tuesday to deplore how censorship and persecution affect their work ... The Washington Post does a feature on "Bit o' Lit," a great D.C. area book excerpt freebie (which was kind enough to excerpt Harry, Revised for our aborted D.C. visit) ... Africa News reports on the growing success of Kwani Litfest ... The great Hungarian novelist George Konrad is interviewed at Hungarian Literature Online (via) ... Joyce Carol Oates?  Slacker!  Philip Roth?  Layabout!  Consider Rajesh Kumar with 1,250 novels and 2,000 short stories to his name ... Prague writer Lenka Reinerová has died at 92 ... A groovy Colm Toibin picture ... Looks like John Keats would have been very much at home in some sections of Brooklyn today ... Michael Ondaatje in conversation with Eleanor Wachtel ... Jonathan Karp's much-linked-to thoughts on "The Disposable Book" ... Nam Le in conversation with the L.A. Times (via Newsday) ... Despite all promises to the contrary, the obligatory James Bond post ...  A secret cache of love letters reveals how John Fowles, author of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, re-enacted his epic story of forbidden passion with a young student ... And, finally, we're not usually big into videos of writers talking about their work, but there's something undeniably charming about Rowan Somerville's no-frills production discussing the genesis of his novel The End of Sleep.  Happy holidays, y'all - see you back here on Monday.

WEDNESDAY MARGINALIA

The Prospect looks at Beijing Coma and talks to its author, Ma Jian ... At The Atlantic, Megan McArdle has some advice for you guys who want to share your sci-fi jones with the wife: "Those of you who pitch science fiction to wives and girlfriends who do not enjoy it are probably saying something along the following lines: "Space ships! Alien monsters! Men in tights!" Instead, for women who find that sort of thing distasteful, talk about it as a fairy tale--only a fairy tale with science instead of magic. The basic emotional space it taps is the same." ... Thank you to the many readers who wrote in to alert us to sightandsounds.com's report on a new interpretation of Godot. (Scroll down to Die Welt 20.06.2008); Tom Teicholz has a bit more at his place ... UK publisher Hamish Hamilton has launched on an online literary magazine called Five Dials ... A report on the recent literary festival at Shakespeare & Co ... Ted Hughes's holiday home is open as a writers' retreat (insert Bell Jar joke of your choice) ... Sam Jordison, the literary luminary whose resume includes the masterwork Crap Towns, decides that Disgrace would be at home in one of his towns ... An inscribed presentation copy of a first edition of Emma is about to go on sale ... The International Herald Tribune considers "Egypt's Balzac," (their formulation, not ours) Naguib Mahfouz ... Like most of you, we rue the closing of Cody's Books ... Oh, and finally, we're still irritated by Ian McEwan's recent outburst, especially his contemptible assertion that "American Christians don't want to kill anyone in my city ... " Real Big Picture thinking, sir.  Barnett Slepian thanks you for your concern. 

TUESDAY MARGINALIA

Morning Wood: James Wood reviews Rivka Galchen's debut novel for the New Yorker ... and John Updike (who knows a thing or two about morning wood) reviews the new Ethan Canin in the same issue ...  As noted elsewhere, the IMPAC has been awarded to Rawi Hage (who was recently interviewed over at Nigel Beale's place) ... Astonishingly, even we are reaching 007 overload but we can't help nod in silent agreement with Michael Dirda: " 'If you could be any character in literature, who would you choose?' ...  I paused for a moment, put on my most sardonic look, and huskily whispered into the microphone, "Bond, James Bond." ... We were off yesterday but here's your obligatory Bloomsday link ... Fighting the good fight: Charles Nevsimal, editor of indie press Centennial Press, is the latest Bookslut heartthrob ... We've been complaining to anyone who will listen about how tiring the book tour has been, but Darin Strauss shames us into silence with his live-blogged 22-city tour in support of his new novel More Than It Hurts You ... And just when we thought we signed as many books as we could bear, Ken Follett breaks a record (his own) for book signing by scribbling 2,000 copies in Madrid ... We generally don't find author sites linkworthy but Aleksandar Hemon's is rather astonishing ... Kenzaburo Oe and Orhan Pamuk got together to discuss the influence of the West ... FOTEV Robert Birnbaum continues his conversation with Dagoberto Gilb ... The British critics are divided on Philip Glass's opera version of J.M. Coetzee's magisterial Waiting for the Barbarians: The Guardian: eh; The Independent: powerful; the Times: somewhere in between ... You know, we think To Kill a Mockingbird is a charming, lovely little book but when it's anointed The Greatest Book of All Time, maybe it really is time to go kill ourselves ... Military standards brought from the Waterloo battlefield by Sir Walter Scott have been found hidden in his home ... Tahar Ben Jelloun has been elected a member of the jury of the Prix Goncourt ... Read John Freeman's warm review of The Boat as an antitode to the recent NYTBR silliness (although, like other reviewers - including Kunzru - Freeman doesn't note that the opening story's protagonist is only ever called "Nam" not "Nam Le" which might seem like a distinction without a difference but such mistaken assumptions are, in fact, key to understanding that story) ... Speaking of NYTBR silliness, we're pleased as punch that David Guterson's latest has gotten a nice review for his latest (we rather liked Snow Falling on Cedars) but what is it with reviewers continuing to begin reviews yammering on about themselves?  And closing with "pitch perfect"?  Can we propose a permanent ban on that reviewing cliche? ... Conversations You Have at Twenty, Maud Newton's prize-winning essay, can now be read at Narrative Magazine (registration required) ... Are we alone in finding it difficult to feel sorry for Jhumpa Lahiri? ... Another writer who would have preferred having Ian McEwan having a go at the new James Bond ... If you're a writer, Norman Mailer's house is taking your applications ... As banal a take on BEA as you're likely to find anywhere ... Our interest in The Delighted States is only marginally diminished by Michael Dirda's assessment: "flashy, and pompous, and very long" ... We're still going to check it out ... Margaret Drabble honoured ... The presence of two of our favorite smart people, Steve Wasserman and C. Max Magee, is almost enough to make us willing to listen to Minnesota Public Radio's coverage of - newsflash! - the decline in book coverage. ... And, finally, permit us to bask in a little love from Down Under ... Note to self: send Jennifer Levasseur a fruit basket.

TUESDAY MARGINALIA

Back from Chicago, getting up to speed, much literary news in the hopper ... First and foremost, many have noted that Diesel has announced plans to fill the Brentwood bookstore void left by Duttons' closing ... At Sentences, Wyatt Mason continues his discussion about authors responding to critics by reproducing Philip Roth's written but unsent reply to Diana Trilling ... Writing for The Rake, Max Ross attributes something of the sad state of criticism to the critics themselves: "To say that irrelevant models breed irrelevant reviews is one thing, but to me there seems also to be a lack of discipline on the critic's end." Unlike the critics he spanks, he provides evidence for his claim ...  A portrait of the man thought to be the inspiration for Mr. Darcy is about to go to auction ... The finalists for the 31st annual Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award, whose previous winners include Anne Michaels, have been announced (though Amazon obviously comes late to the game) ... New York takes note of the increasingly nasty NYTBR, though they leave out Hari Kunzru's egregious misreading of Nam Le's The Boat, and are too kind to David Gates's witless review of the new Rushdie ... Speaking of Rushdie, Sir Salman is playing to packed houses in Canada ... Today's installment of Bait & Switch headlines ... Tattoos: "no longer the edgy insignia of the free spirited but the arty-farty must-have accessory of the middle classes" ... Chicago Tribune dispatches from Printers Row ...  TEV guest host emeritus Katherine Taylor has a new story up at Five Chapters ... And, finally, we can't recall if we mentioned the Coffee House Press 50% off sale that will last all month, but if we did, we're saying it again, and if we didn't, go now.   We hope to be back a bit later or tomorrow with a post on What the John Banville Obsessive Completist Must Own, so stay tuned.

THURSDAY MARGINALIA

Sir Salman Rushdie sits for a long and interesting interview with the Barnes & Noble Review (and is also featured in the teaser edition of Volume III of Picador's glorious Paris Review Interviews series, which we haven't set down since BEA) ... Another high-profile publishing departure as Jane Friedman decamps HarperCollins ... The Orange Prize has been awarded to Rose Tremain for The Road Home ... Who, the Guardian wonders, should replace Sebastian Faulks (an unsurprising smash) when it comes time to write the next James Bond adventure?  McEwan is name-checked but "he disapproves of smoking so strongly that 007's nemesis would probably set fire to him or herself with a cigarette."  (We are available for the gig.)  ... A rare First Folio has sold for a real shitpot ... Check out Narrative Magazine's new "Works in Progress" feature, in which the likes of T.C. Boyle and Cynthia Ozick show you what they are working on ... Previously untranslated Bolano is always good to get us going (and exactly how the hell does one code a tilde in HTML?) ... On the joys of discovering Wilfrid Sheed ... We agree that The Invention of Love is, indeed, "masterly and underrated," so we're pleased to see the Guardian paying some attention to AE Housman ...  Anna Porter's Kasztner's Train: The True Story of Rezso Kasztner, Unknown Hero of the Holocaust, (sitting right here in the TBR stack) will receive the history prize marking the 20th anniversary of the Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Awards ...The riches on offer with the newest issue of Open Letters defy summary, so we simply advise you to go ... Those who feel we tread too harshly on Martin Amis must be secretly relieved for the existence of V.S. Naipaul, who can always be counted on to provide the dumbest sound bite of the week ... Alan Cheuse's roundup of summer reading is up at NPR and includes Nam Le's lauded collection The Boat ... "Schlappschwanzliteratur (direct translation: “limp-dick” literature)" ... Ortiz v. Tolstoy ... Joanna Hershon discusses her novel The German Bride with Nextbook ... Nigel Beale chats with Frank Wilson ... John Hodgman has called Elizabeth Gilbert's story "The Famous Torn and Restored Lit Cigarette Trick" the best short story he's ever read, and the Paris Review has made it available online ... Isabel Allende interviewed by Reuters ... We would be remiss not to note the passing of George Garrett ... The novels of George Orwell are reconsidered at the Sun ... And, finally, the real reason we launched The Elegant Variation.