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Downtown for Democracy's road show touches down at UCLA's Royce Hall on October 5 for "an evening of readings by esteemed literary figures in support of presidential change in the November elections. Jonathan Safran Foer will host the evening and introduce other acclaimed authors including Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, Alice Sebold and David Foster Wallace."
Tickets range from $25 to $500 and, despite the narcoleptic effects of Sebold's fiction, TEV considers this one a decidedly worthy cause.
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The Christian Science Monitor adds its bouquet to the pile at Phillip Roth's feet, although they insist on imputing anti-Bush allegorical motives, despite Roth's recent disavowal of that notion.
Yes, Lindbergh comes off very bad in these pages. He spouts anti-Semitic canards that sound far more shocking now than in 1938, when he accepted the Nazis' Service Cross of the German Eagle "by order of the Fuhrer." But clearly Roth's real target isn't an anti-Semitic aviation hero who died 30 years ago. It's an electorate he sees as dazzled by attractive faces, moved by simple slogans, and cowed by ominous warnings about threats to our security.
Frank Rich had addressed this point with considerably more nuance in his Sunday essay on the book.
In an essay in Sunday's New York Times Book Review, Mr. Roth took a swipe at President Bush ("a man unfit to run a hardware store let alone a nation like this one") but not before saying that he conceived this book in December 2000, and that it would be "a mistake" to read it "as a roman à clef to the present moment in America." He's right. It can't be. Yet it's precisely because "The Plot Against America" wasn't written to make facile analogies between then and now that the light it casts on this present American moment seems so illuminating. Literature still can accomplish what nonfiction and ideologues can't. By sweeping us into an alternative universe, it lets us see the world we actually inhabit from another perspective.
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Mulk Raj Anand, described as "the father of Indo-Anglican literature," has died.
Anand's literary career was launched by family tragedy, instigated by the rigidity of the caste system. His first prose essay was a response to the suicide of an aunt, who had been excommunicated by his family for sharing a meal with a Muslim. His first major novel, Untouchable , published in 1935, was a chilling exposé of the day-to-day life of a member of India's Untouchable caste.
There's additional coverage to be found at the Telegraph, Matamat.com and Newindpress.com. And, finally, a personal reminiscence.
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The announcement of the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" grants has made its rounds through the blogosphere. We're pleased to note the inclusion of names like Edward P. Jones and Aleksandar Hemon, but we take special note of the inclusion of Rueben Martinez, who runs Libreria Martinez Books and Art Gallery right here in L.A.
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The gang at Bloomberg interviews Joyce Carol Oates and, unsurprisingly, the question of output is addressed.
Oates: ... People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away. One reason I'm more prolific than others is that I have no children and my husband is not a high-maintenance male. Other writers I know have to think about their children who need them, even if the children are 40 years old. It's a distraction, while our concentration is so much more seamless.
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For all those who continue to take issue with Philip Roth's retelling of history in The Plot Against America, who find it over the top, exceedingly fanciful, or flat-out ridiculous, please note that Wal-Mart is only now - in the wake of vocal customer complaints - stopping the sale of the infamous anti-Semitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The description, now withdrawn from the Wal-Mart (WMT: Research, Estimates) Web site, said, "If ... The Protocols are genuine (which can never be proven conclusively), it might cause some of us to keep a wary eye on world affairs. We neither support nor deny its message. We simply make it available for those who wish a copy."
Anti-Semitism: America's last "acceptable" prejudice.
(Link via Galleycat.)
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According to Publisher's Marketplace, DeLauné Michel - the force behind the Spoken Interludes reading series - has scored big time.
DeLauné Michel's first novel AFTERMATH OF DREAMING, pitched as "a cross between Anita Shreve and Jane Green," to Carrie Feron at William Morrow, for six figures, for two books, by Eileen Cope at Lowenstein-Yost (world English).
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The Telegraph reports on the Hemingway controversy surrounding what seems to amount to an unfunny humor piece.
Stewart, a regular in the same 1920s and 1930s literary scene as F Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, wrote in his 1975 autobiography that he was unimpressed with the story and neglected to send it to Vanity Fair as Hemingway had asked him to. "When he had sent me a 'funny' piece about myself to submit to Vanity Fair, I had decided that written humour was not his dish and had done nothing about it," he wrote. Now the manuscript has arrived at the magazine. But, frustratingly for Hemingway fans, it still cannot make it on to the pages because publication was blocked by custodians of the Hemingway estate.
It's a question we've wondered about before: Just who and what is served by seeing every scrap of an artist's material - whether it's private or merely rough - pushed out into the limelight. Presumably there is a point of diminshing returns for these things - how much light, for example, is this piece likely to shed on Hemingway? We already knew Papa wasn't (intentionally) a barrel of laughs. (We're tremendous Beatles fans, as you know, and the odd demo or outtake is certainly interesting but we see no need to listen to every recorded take of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer".) And although this isn't the case here, how much is there to be said for the wishes of the artist in question; rough sketches, demos, early drafts are often the stuff we desperately want to keep secret. How much does reading Trimalchio - as fascinating as we found it - really ultimately inform our reading of The Great Gatsby? And given the pains Fitzgerald went through to refine Gatsby to its final form, how would he feel to find its lesser incarnation freely available?
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The new issue of Night Train is now available, and it includes an interview with novelist Robert Hellenga.
Night Train also hosts the 2004 Richard Yates Short Story Award Competition which is being judged this year by Steve Almond - but we still like those guys anyway ...
(Richard Yates is much on our minds today following yesterday's excellent James Wood piece in the Guardian; coupled with the fact that we bought his short story collection from the remainder bin while in Monterey.)
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In his recent TEV guest review of Home Land, Jim Ruland called Sam Lipsyte the "funniest writer of his generation," and we're quite inclined to agree. We tore through Home Land in two joyful sittings and can't remember the last time we've laughed so hard. Lipsyte's constellation of oddly sympathetic losers is rendered with a sparkling, inspired prose style that's sent us off in search of all his prior work. In Lewis Miner's (a.k.a Teabag) woeful epistolary dispatches to his high school alumni newsletter ("I did not pan out."), we find an anti-hero for the age. Highly, highly recommended.
