The Elegant Variation

SECRET AGENT BOWS

Props to Maud for bringing Secret Agent to life. In her new recurring segment, an agent from "a small, but well-regarded, literary agency in Manhattan" will take questions from readers. In installment number one, though, Maud is doing the asking.

You’ve been at this for a while now. How have your expectations changed in the years since you started?

When I first started working at an agency, editors had a lot more say over what they could buy. Now, even the most senior editors can be overruled by marketing, even if they desperately want something and only have to pay $20,000. So, unfortunately, I’m almost never 100% sure anymore that something will sell, and that’s the biggest change.

We can't wait to see the Secret Agent tackle these.

THE NEW NEW YORK TIMES

Everybody's chattering about redesigned NYTBR set to hit the stands this Sunday. The Times has outlined the changes in a press release that's making the rounds. The changes are deconstructed a bit more objectively over at PW.

For all the ballyhoo regarding layout, the section wastes little time in demanding judgment on its words. The first review begins, Eggers-like, on the front page. It's for the new Roth, which Paul Berman calls a "terrific political novel." (As a counter-factual history, the book is written "in a style his readers might never have predicted," while still maintaining Roth's stomping-ground dialogue. " 'You pulla the trig,' a kindly neighbor explains" to the Jewish working-class family in Newark trying to learn how to use a gun to defend itself.) The In Brief is gone. And 'New and Noteworthy Paperbacks' is replaced by something called Paperback Row, which appears to be basically the same thing with a new name. Ditto for Editors' choice (nee 'And Bear in Mind').

We watch our stoop with increasing curiosity ...

SAGAN FUNERAL

The BBC reports on the funeral of Francoise Sagan.

The funeral was attended by culture minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres and well-known faces from the Paris arts scene, including singer Juliette Greco.

Mourners were led by Sagan's son, Denis Westhoff, at the funeral in the village of Seuzac on Tuesday.

Read chapter one of her classic Bonjour, Tristesse if you've never checked it out:

A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me, but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.

IN THE TELEGRAPH

The Telegraph runs an across-the-pond take on The Plot Against America ...

Harmonising this witty but sombre fantasy with the naturalistic foreground was clearly a challenge; I'd say Roth pulls it off. As you'd expect, the issues raised aren't treated simplistically, and Roth contrives ambiguous fates for several key cast members.

Better put together than The Human Stain, The Plot Against America is another frighteningly intense performance from a novelist in his early 70s. Next year Roth will become only the third living American writer to be published by the Library of America. The last volume of its "comprehensive, definitive edition" is scheduled for 2013; at his current pace, the date might well prove premature.

... and profiles Master Eggers, taking care to ask him who he's voting for:

Who will you vote for in the US presidential elections, and why? Jim Gould, by e-mail

Kerry, because Bush is the most dangerous and blindingly extreme President we've had in the past 100 years. I think we're truly living in a nightmare of his making.

ROTH IN NEWSDAY, FORWARD

The press juggernaut for The Plot Against America continues, as Newsday takes this longish look.

Although the wider world might be surprised to see this tenderness surface so prominently in Roth's work, the writer's friends are not. Judith Dunford, the widow of literary critic Alfred Kazin, is quite familiar with this side of Roth. She and her husband were Roth's neighbors in northwest Connecticut when Kazin became ill and Roth "draped his wings" over her in a way that was not just moving, but helpful.

"The tenderness evident in his book 'Patrimony' and now in 'The Plot Against America' is certainly a part of his character," she says in an e-mail, "although not one usually pointed out.... He can be a very steadfast friend, and has an unusual gift in that he rallies to the sickbed. He would have been a good doctor."

The book is also reviewed in the Forward. More interestingly, though, the same issue takes a look at the historical issues underpining The Plot Against America.

In "The Plot Against America," Lindbergh stampedes the deadlocked Republican Convention, wins the nomination by acclaim, runs with Senator Wheeler against Roosevelt and wins. In the real world, it was only after Roosevelt's re-election that Lindbergh emerged as the president's symbolic opponent. He not only testified before Congress against intervention, but also continued to address America First rallies, greeted with shouts of "Our Next President!" in public appearances throughout the country. In his history of American Jews, the late Labor Zionist journalist Judd L. Teller evokes a charisma match between Lindbergh and FDR: "American Jewry suddenly found itself in the humiliating circumstance of dependence, like the medieval Jewish communities, upon the longevity in office of the reigning prince. FDR became in the Jewish imagination a pillar of fire and a pillar of smoke, a father and a guardian."

The hysteria around Lindbergh's appearance at a May 1941 rally in St. Louis caused his wife to fear that her husband might be assassinated. Suddenly, the boy aviator seemed like the avatar of a native American fascism. Both Time and Life ran photographs of Lindbergh and his colleagues appearing to give the Nazi salute while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes called Lindy "the Number One Nazi fellow traveler" and, after Lindbergh addressed a rally of 80,000 at the Hollywood Bowl, he remarked: "I have never heard this knight of the German Eagle denounce Hitler or Nazism or Mussolini or fascism... I have never heard him express a word of pity for the Poles or the Jews who have been slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands by Hitler's savages."

WE THOUGHT IT WAS BECAUSE WE ALWAYS FEEL LOST READING HER

Fans of Carol Shields have gotten together to build a labyrinth in her honor.

Catherine Shields, the third of Shields's five children and the only one still in Winnipeg, said her mother developed a fascination with mazes and labyrinths later in her life.

"I think it was evident in her work," the daughter said. "She liked the idea of being somewhere and not knowing exactly where you were going."

THE TEMPLE OF LETHEM

Jonathan Lethem will be casting his pearls of wisdom before the eager writing students of Temple University. (Admit it - you thought we were going to say "swine" didn't you ... )

They’ll have an opportunity to not only meet, but learn from, their idol when Lethem comes to campus from Oct. 4–8 to ingest, evaluate and inform student works as the program’s visiting writer for the fall semester.

“Graduate students in the creative writing program will be able to talk with Lethem one-on-one throughout the week—they’ll get to know the human that lives beyond the book jacket,” says Jena Osman, director of the graduate creative writing program. “The conversations that arise from these visits are crucial to the students’ understanding of what it means to be a practicing writer today.”

The "ingesting" part sounds a little rough. Jesus, who writes these things?

MOMENTOUS AFFAIRS OF STATE

This article takes a look at what is surely an arcane topic - the state of Swedish/British publishing relations. But paragraphs like this one are too good to pass up:

Selling books to Greeks and Spaniards, on the other hand, requires a sense of which trashy novels go best with the beach. Each year English books sell better in Sweden, and Piquemal for one is pleased.

The Swedes are essentially complaining that while they snap up British titles, the British are indifferent to Swedish offerings. They've also got a problem with children's literature. It's all terribly interesting.

Ahem.

More coffee, please.

FRANKFURT SPOTLIGHTS ARAB LITERARY TALENT

Deutsche Welle continues its Frankfurt Book Fair coverage by looking at this year's guests of honor, the Arab League, which receives some criticism for censorship.

Many popular Arab authors remain unknown in the West. That may change as the Frankfurt Book Fair invites the Arab League as guest of honor this year. But the nagging issue of censorship might not be touched upon at all.

Of the around 120,000 foreign fiction titles translated into German, only about 500 come from the Arab world. It's a telling statement on the lack of information in the West when it comes to the diversity of the literary landscape in the Arab countries.

JAFFE GRANT FOR WOMEN WRITERS

Rona Jaffe is about to award six $10,000 grants to women at the beginning of their writing careers.

The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Awards, Jaffe says, are intended to help not-yet-established writers hire baby-sitters, travel, take a break from jobs or do whatever they need to write.

So once again, the controlling gyno-hierarchy squeezes out the poor opressed male and -- (Jeez, people, we are SO kidding. We get a buck from each of you who actually bought in and felt that rising stab of indignation. But, seriously, did you know "gullible" isn't in the dictionary?)