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We finally got our hands on a copy of the new Los Angeles magazine (it's the Movie Issue) and, sure enough, there we are in living color on page 26. For those of you unlikely to be able to track down a copy soon, here's a hard-to-read PDF for your viewing pleasure. (Acrobat Reader required.)
Our obvious self-love notwithstanding, we would like to point out that we're fans of many of the other sites noted, especially LAist and LA Observed.
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Sixty years ago today the death camp at Auschwitz was liberated. A year earlier, the bigger part of my maternal grandfather's family was killed there.
My grandfather was held at Mauthausen. He was among the fortunate few survivors of the assault on European Jewry.
My parents don't really talk about this period in their lives, despite my repeated entreaties. I realize now I'm unlikely to ever know the details. I've alluded here previously how I came late to a fuller and meaningful grasp of the intertwined history of Europe and my family. It was the inspiration of my first short story The Number, and is also the theme of what I hope will be my third novel.
It's a day of quiet reflection for me; of marveling at the narrowness of chance with allows me to write this to you all; of considering family members forever unknown to me; of wondering at the terrible secret histories my parents endured.
Since this is a literary blog, it seemed appropriate to mark the day by noting some titles of note regarding the Holocaust in general and Auschwitz in particular. Adorno's dictum notwithstanding, the words continue to come, as they clearly must. Herewith an unscientific and personal sampling of my reading of note on the subject:
Fiction:
Fateless; Kaddish for an Unborn Child; Liquidation, Imre Kertesz. I haven't yet read this trilogy by the Hungarian Nobel Prize winner but it's sitting on my living room table. The truth is there's a certain amount of fear and hesitation at what is sure to be a painfully familiar journey (my father, as TEV readers know, is Hungarian, and my mother lived in Budapest). But any current literary consideration of Auschwitz must surely start here.
Spark of Life, Erich Maria Remarque. The author best known for All Quiet on the Western Front also wrote this tale of death camp prisoner 509.
The Shawl, Cynthia Ozick. In this justly celebrated book of short stories, the title story tells of a mother witnessing her baby's death at the hands of camp guards. Another story, "Rose," describes that same mother thirty years later, still haunted by the event.
The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., George Steiner. Misunderstood and attacked in its inital release, this harrowing and magnificently written novella imagines the capture and terrifying eloquent "trial" of a post-war Hitler, living in a South American jungle.
The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski. Kosinski, who like Primo Levi later committed suicide, penned "the greatest example of what is coming to be known as a 'second- generation' book: a contemporary report of the hell in which a survivor of the Holocaust must live, one generation after the event." (Thanks to Dave Lull and Lizzie for the quote/correction.)
The Archivist, Martha Cooley. Told after the fact, as news of the Holocaust becomes known, this deeply moving novel grapples with the question of how to absorb the awful knowledge.
Night, Elie Wiesel. Perhaps the best known of Holocaust novels.
Non-fiction:
If This is a Man, Primo Levi. The definitive account of life in Auschwitz. "Here there is no why."
The Destruction of the European Jews, Raul Hilberg. One of the first and, by many accounts, still the definitive overview of the Nazi's systematic extermination plan.
Ordinary Men and The Origins of the Final Solution, Christopher Browning. Browning is one the preeminent chroniclers of the Holocaust. His Ordinary Men is one of the most disturbing of Holocaust studies, as it examines the origins of the mobile killing units in the east, and how a group of blue collar middle aged men could become enthusiastic murderers. (Much of his data was co-opted for Daniel Goldhagen's profoundly flawed Hitler's Willing Executioners.) His latest book, the massive The Origins of the Final Solution, is a work poised to share the shelf with Hilberg as one of the most comprehensive and thorough reviews of the machinery of the Holocaust.
Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt. Her controversial New Yorker coverage which gave birth to the much-debated question of the "banality of evil."
Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1, Saul Friedlander. Probably the best overview and introduction to the subject.
Preempting the Holocaust, Lawrence Langer. Langer is a controversial chronicler of the Holocaust but his ideas resonate deeply with me and have informed much of my own thinking on the subject. He suggests, among other things, that it's deeply trivializing to play the "what would I have done" games, and that movies and novels on the Holocaust generally do a deep disservice as they approach the subject from a Triumph of the Spirit angle, which he argues is the wrong narrative.
Nine Suitcases, Bela Zsolt. Another Hungarian, this one writing as a memoirist. I began reading this a few weeks ago but had to set it aside. It's clear, however, that it's a powerful, monumental work, newly available in this country.
Maus I & II, Art Spiegelman. The graphic novels that got the world paying attention. I'm more partial to Maus II but both are unforgettable reads.
I Shall Bear Witness I & II, Victor Klemperer. The recently published extraordinary daily journal of the rise of the persecution of the Jews, culminating with the firebombing of Dresden.
Finally, you can find many interesting link on the Literature of the Holocaust here.
Not a cheerful reading list, I know, and not one to be taken in one sitting. But an essential one, to be sure.
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You're going to have to flip a coin Thursday night, folks. If you're out Pasadena way, the fine folks at Vromans will be presenting Tom Perotta (Little Children) at 7 p.m.
If Downtown is more your speed, the Cole's Reading Series will be presenting TEV fave Joshuah Bearman and Glen David Gold at 8 p.m.
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The San Francisco Bay Guardian tries to look at San Francisco literary magazines but ends up writing mostly about McSweeney's (with a dash of Zoetrope thrown in).
Indeed, my survey found that formats range, contents clash, and few see themselves as being part of any avant-garde. It must be said, however, that San Francisco literary magazines do share certain characteristics and social roles, in much the way stereotypical sitcom family members may crack the same one-liners without looking related in any way.
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Over at the Sun, Gary Shapiro has the skinny on the new Inside Higher Ed site, which includes FOTEV Scott McLemee in their roster.
An upstart Web site called Inside Higher Ed occupied a table at the recent Modern Language Association’s annual meeting in Philadelphia, sharing the floor with venerable academic publishers such as Oxford University Press and Yale University Press.
Three colleagues from the Chronicle of Higher Education, with a combined 55 years at the publication — Scott Jaschik, Doug Lederman, and Kathlene Collins — left in 2003 and later joined together to found Inside Higher Ed. It is already an online source of news and commentary for academics, and there’s more to come.
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So apparently Joyce Carol Oates is something of a boxing nut.
Years ago in the early 1950s when my father first took me to a Golden Gloves boxing tournament in Buffalo, New York,” Oates writes, “I asked him why the boys wanted to fight one another, why they were willing to get hurt. As if it were an explanation my father said, ‘Boxers don’t feel pain quite the way we do.’”
“Pain,” she adds, “in the proper context, is something other than pain.”
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The Telegraph's Literary Life reports that the publication of Richard Doyle's novel Tsunami has been shelved indefinitely.
Its tale of a killer wave hitting the eastern seaboard of America – caused by volcanic activity in the Canary Islands (which real-life scientists say will happen sooner or later) – is deemed too scary to publish at present.
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The Quills Literacy Foundation is offering up a new award based on a People's Choice-style model, as though that will somehow magically make book awards more relevant.
Nominations for the award in each category will be made beginning in May by a panel of booksellers, librarians and others. The consumers will be able to vote in the fall for the winners in the categories of best book of the year; rookie of the year, to a first-time author; children's book; graphic novel; literary fiction; suspense, mystery or thriller; science fiction, fantasy or horror; romance; biography or memoir; religion or spirituality; science; health and self improvement; sports; business; and history, current events and politics.
Yep, that makes us want to skeedadle down to Borders ...
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The LA Weekly's Brendan Bernhard takes a looooooong look at our "premier Hollywood novelist" Bruce Wagner.
The standard interpretation is that Wagner’s books are about hell, Hollywood style, a satanic entertainment kingdom run by "H.I.V.I.P.’s" and other assorted monsters who torture their assistants between yoga classes and betray their best friends whenever they have reason to, which is often. It’s a place where a screenwriter who’s adapted Gogol’s Dead Souls doesn’t leave his house for 15 years because he’s waiting for a call back from the studio. But of course it’s when he finally does leave that the trouble starts.
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Michael Cox, an Irish author, just sold his first novel - after a thirty-year wait - for a shitpot of money.
Michael Cox has secured what is thought to be the largest ever advance for his debut novel The Meaning of Night.
The 55-year-old has been drafting the book since his mid-20s.
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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.
