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February 29, 2008

TEV GIVEAWAY: TRESPASS

VmtBack in January, Nan Talese lamented the fact that nothing short of a naked tour across America could stoke interest in Valerie Martin's Trespass:

There is a brief pause, during which a listener tries to imagine Martin, who's in town for a reading and who appears not to have an exhibitionistic bone in her 59-year-old body, impersonating Lady Godiva or launching herself across the Snake River Canyon.

Well, we thought we'd do our bit to help everyone involved remain clothed, and so we're happy to offer a copy of the novel that The New York Times called "the best kind of moral fiction," and the Los Angeles Times called "breath-stopping.."  Here's Sue Halpern:

Over the past 30 years, Valerie Martin’s novels and stories, although well received by critics, have made little dent in the public consciousness. The library at the college where I work has no record of her, for instance, and the local bookstore carries hardly any of her fiction, despite Martin’s receipt of Britain’s prestigious Orange Prize for her 2003 novel, “Property,” which beat out work by stars like Zadie Smith, Carol Shields and Donna Tartt. This is too bad, because Martin deserves a wider audience — but it can also be a delight for the unsuspecting reader. Coming across her for the first time, you experience the frisson of discovery, especially when you learn that she’s written a whole shelf of books, a dozen in all. Martin is an uncompromising, serious writer, concerned with both the eternal verities and what matters right now. She wants to know how the big questions play out in individual lives.

And so, the game remains the same.  Send us off an email, subject line "KEEP YER CLOTHES ON," and include your full mailing address.  Previous winners ineligible.  We'll take all emails until 8 p.m. PST and then we turn to the Random Number Generator for a decision that will make at least one reader and Nan Talese happy.  And, really, that's more or less entirely why we're here.

UPDATE: Congratulations to another longtime TEV reader/entrant, Grace Farag of Burbank, CA.  We love it when the regulars get lucky!

Posted at 12:01 AM in Giveaways |

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Comments

Martha Southgate

I started to enter the contest and then I read that article. As a fellow well-reviewed, poorly-selling author--and someone who met Martin at Bennington recently and liked her a great deal--I decided I should buy a copy. Thanks for making me think.

Posted by: Martha Southgate | February 29, 2008 at 07:24 AM

tod goldberg

Martin is a wonderful writer and, as Martha Southgate noted as well, I saw her at Bennington this winter and she was remarkable. She might not be an exhibitionist in the naked sense, but you put her in front of an audience and it's impossible not to want to read her work.

Posted by: tod goldberg | February 29, 2008 at 11:32 AM

Bob Thompson

Delighted to see TEV offering "Trespass," and with Martha Southgate's commendable decision to buy the book. But as the author of the "naked tour" piece you cite, I'd love it if you linked to the full Washington Post article rather than the chopped up LAT version, if only to restore the phrase "like the late, great Evel Knievel in drag."

Posted by: Bob Thompson | February 29, 2008 at 08:12 PM

TEV

Done! Sorry about that, Bob.

Posted by: TEV | March 01, 2008 at 10:27 AM

The comments to this entry are closed.

TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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