* As has been widely reported, Jonathan Lethem has selected one lucky winner for the film rights for You Don't Love Me Yet.
* Jon Wiener interviews Michael Chabon for Dissent.
JW: I’ve heard that the Jews can be argumentative. Has anybody been outraged by the portrayal of Jews in your book? Have you been called a self-hating Jew?
MC: So far the only person who has said such a thing was not himself Jewish, so his credentials, in my view, seemed a little bit impeachable. But it’s traditional for American Jewish writers that, if you depict Jewish characters engaged in some of the less admirable kinds of behavior that human beings engage in all over the planet, like greed, rapacity, violence, intolerance, if you attribute such behavior to Jews, some Jews get upset about that. They accuse you, in the Yiddish formulation, of “making a shande for the goyim”: airing dirty laundry in public, making a display of disunity at a time when unity is so important. It doesn’t matter what time it is, it’s always a time when unity is so important. The great example was pointed out to me by my mother, in the aftermath of some criticism of my work: Philip Roth, who many times in his career has been accused of this, for many books, starting at the very beginning with Goodbye Columbus. My mom said it was proof that I had finally arrived.
* Elmore Leonard - whose next novel is set in Venice - is set to appear as part of the excellent Writers Bloc series.
* We were delighted when a copy of Calvin Baker's Dominion arrived here the other day - Maud Newton has long been an admirer. Now Baker is the subject of this NPR profile.
* The one book that's sure not to make Oprah's book club.
* John Banville doesn't exactly invite us out to play handball but he is always nice enough to ask after our novel when our paths cross. But it's easy enough to relate to David Bezmozgis's Nextbook essay on what happens when the writer you admire most becomes a friend. (And if you've never read Natasha - go, go, go.)
* Marjane Satrapi is interviewed at Cannes, where she's promoting the film version of Persepolis.
The film "Persepolis," screening at the Cannes festival in competition, was adapted by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud from Satrapi's black and white graphic novels. The movie, in French, is something new in an art form that is spinning in all directions.
"I never saw it as a cartoon," the artist said in an interview. The artwork had to be in black and white, and the characters are never cute. There are none of the usual special effects - cars don't talk, Spidermen don't fly. But it is funny, imaginative, and sad, bringing the famous books to life.
* The new biography of Ralph Ellison has been getting a good deal of attention. Here's what the Christian Science Monitor has to say:
Rampersad is blunt about Ellison's last years. Ellison "was bedeviled by too rigid ideas about culture and art.... As a novelist, he had lost his way. And he had done so in proportion to his distancing himself from his fellow blacks." Yet for all Rampersad's criticisms, his portrait of Ellison is endearing. He shows us an American romantic haunted by his own high expectations – and tormented, ultimately, by self-doubt.
* Tom Teicholz's Tommywood column on one of the original typescripts of the Nuremberg Laws on display at the Skirball Center reminds us to mention that Saul Friedlander's long awaited concluding volume of this Nazi and Germany and the Jews has been released: The Years of Extermination is now available and, despite its grim subject matter, is prominently placed in our reading pile. (We emailed him years ago - pre-TEV - to see when it would be available. The reply was a terse "It's coming.")
* And, finally, we've said it before, we'll say it again - we love Patrick Hamilton.
Bezmozgis's essay is stunning. So much to admire about the piece I don't know where to start.
Posted by: Jim | May 23, 2007 at 10:38 AM
Heard Rampersad being interviewed about his Ellison book yesterday. He sounds a lot like Marvin Martian - that is, as Mel Blanc voiced him in his first appearance, rather than the later, more adenoidal one.
Posted by: CPO Sharkey | May 23, 2007 at 11:10 AM
Jim, I completely agree. It completely floored me when I read it and have been thinking about it ever since. Breathtaking, really.
Posted by: TEV | May 23, 2007 at 11:23 AM
Perhaps I missed it in the coverage here in the previous days, but thought I would pass along the following - it is James Woods reviewing Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
http://www.powells.com/review/2007_05_17.html?&PID=18
Apologies if this is old TEV news.
Posted by: Drew North | May 23, 2007 at 02:29 PM
"...As a novelist, he had lost his way. And he had done so in proportion to his distancing himself from his fellow blacks."
This is the kind of racial moralizing we could all do without, though, isn't it? Rampersand means well, I'm sure, but fixing the health of Ellison's talent to his fidelity to someone *else's* idea of the proper "distance" from his "people" is the kind of reductionist thinking that heaved Ellison into the pantheon with only one real novel (of questionable accomplishment)to his name in the first place.
Posted by: Steven Augustine | May 24, 2007 at 11:06 AM