The Elegant Variation

911: PLEASE HELP MISSING POET

As many sites have noted, the poet Craig Arnold is missing in Japan, and your help is needed to make sure the search continues.

“Craig Arnold, whom some of you know, has gone missing on a small volcanic island in Japan while on a creative exchange fellowship. Craig, an experienced explorer of volcanoes, never returned to his inn after leaving alone to research the island’s active volcano for the afternoon. The authorities are on the third day of searching for Craig, and are scouring the small island (of only 160 inhabitants) with dogs and helicopters. If he is not found by the end of the day, the authorities will call off the search.

We need your help to insure that the search will continue. The island and areas surrounding the volcano are small enough that an extended search will surely lead to Craig’s discovery.WE NEED PEOPLE TO CONTACT THEIR LOCAL CONGRESSPEOPLE AND SENATORS TO PRESSURE THE JAPANESE STATE DEPARTMENT TO CONTINUE THE SEARCH. WE ALSO NEED HELP SPARKING MEDIA ATTENTION FOR THIS STORY, WHICH WE ALSO HOPE MIGHT INCREASE PRESSURE ON JAPANESE AUTHORITIES TO FIND CRAIG.

HARRY, RIVISTO

Is it me, or do the international covers for Harry, Revised just keep getting better and better?

 

I went into a real swoon when I saw this gorgeous cover from Adelphi, the venerable Italian publishing firm.  I know I seem to say this with each new cover, but I think this one could be my favorite yet.

By the way, the paperback of Harry, Revised came out yesterday, so be sure to pop back here tomorrow when I will give away some signed copies ...

HOW ABOUT A BLURB?

Fans of James Bond know that it was the inclusion of From Russia With Love on a list of JFK's recent favorite books that propelled Ian Fleming to literary celebrity.  One hopes the same will happen to Netherland, which the Times reports the president has begun reading:

At the end of our conversation, when I asked him if he was reading anything good, he said he had become sick enough of briefing books to begin reading a novel in the evenings — “Netherland,” by Joseph O’Neill.

(Thanks to Reese Kwon.)

EVENTS: BEN GREENMAN (LA), BLACK WRITING IN THE AGE OF OBAMA (NY)

Two hot event alerts if you're looking for literary nourishment on either coast tonight.

In LA, New Yorker editor Ben Greenman will be reading from Please Step Back, his '60s flavored comic novel about mixed race rock star Rock Foxx.  You can read more about this Book Soup event here.

In NY, Ringshout and A Public Space present a panel on what the election of President Obama means for black writing and for the publishing of books by African Americans. Host Martha Southgate, author of Third Girl from the Left will be joined by James Hannaham, critic and author of the upcoming novel God Says No; essayist and Dale Peck smacker Stanley Crouch, author of Considering Genius and Artificial White Man; and historian and essayist Emily Bernard, editor of Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten. You can read more about the McNally Jackson event here.

WEDNESDAY MARGINALIA

* Defending James Wood from his legion of web-based kneebiters, Wyatt Mason notes - as we have previously - that "as he has written more the argument that his kingdom is that narrow becomes much harder to credit at all" and goes on to laud a critic who "has the regular, consistent capacity to remind me not why I read but how one can: with– among many virtues– care."  (The latest exhibit for the defense, as though any more were needed: Wood's excellent examination of Ian McEwan's use of manipulation as a literary technique in the LRB.)

* Dante's Inferno as a video game.  Seriously.

* Lous Begley considers Franz Kafka: The Office Writings for The New Republic.

Kafka's name is used in its adjectival form around the world by millions of people who have never read a line he wrote: "Kafkaesque" is the universal term for experiences of modern life that leave one anxious, disconcerted, and feeling helpless. It is an odd form of adulation that carries with it the potential for trivializing Kafka's work and its scope. But the grip of Kafka's fiction on readers of all ages seems undiminished and his appeal to scholars seems well nigh universal. His life and work continue to receive an extraordinary amount of attention from critics and literary theorists and historians, who have made the dissection of his texts the center of their careers.

* Liu Xiaobo is set to receive the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award.

* Boston reclaims a native son, Edgar Allan Poe (which, by the way, the Globe should start spelling correctly).

Like his famous raven that perched, never flitting, above the chamber door, Edgar Allen [sic] Poe today claimed a permanent place of honor in Boston's literary lore, as city officials dedicated Poe Square near the writer's birthplace.

* Jessa Crispin, founder of Bookslut, decamps Chicago for Berlin.  Auf wiedersehen, Jessa - we hardly knew ye.

* PW offers its wrap of the London Book Fair.

Perhaps the biggest topic of conversation this year was digital publishing; European publishers seem excited but nervous about delving into a market that is just awakening in their world. Numerous publishers mentioned that they were preparing their content to be e-book ready, and Ingram's Daniels said his conversations with European publishers have been less about education and more about execution.

* Something about Australia and cheap books and literary culture being imperiled - it looks important, maybe our readers Down Under can edify us?

* Laila Lalami has packed up and hit the road in support of her novel Secret Son, which we were fortunate enough to read in manuscript and loved.  She's interviewed at Powells, talks to Largehearted Boy and gets some love from the El Paso Times.

* God help us.  Yet another Ayn Rand comeback.  Wasn't Greenspan enough to teach you all a lesson?

* The New Yorker attends to António Lobo Antunes.

The Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes discovered his literary vocation while delivering babies, performing amputations, and carving up corpses. Lobo Antunes trained as a doctor, and in the early nineteen-seventies, during military service, he was dispatched to Angola, near the end of a futile war in which the faltering Portuguese empire grappled to retain its African colony. In a makeshift infirmary, he lopped off limbs while a queasy quartermaster—disqualified from operating because the sight of blood made him sick—turned away and recited instructions from a textbook. Lobo Antunes also assisted a witch doctor who presided over births. As he recalls in a new volume of essays and short stories, “The Fat Man and Infinity” (translated by Margaret Jull Costa; Norton; $26.95), he spent hours struggling “to pull living babies from half-dead mothers” and sometimes emerged into the daylight “holding in my hands a small tremulous life,” while mango trees rustled overhead and mandrills looked on. At such moments, he came “closest to what is commonly known as happiness.” The experience brought about a novelist’s epiphany. There was another way, Lobo Antunes saw, to fill the world with extra existences: characters could emerge fully formed from their creator’s brain, rather than making their blood-smeared escape from the womb.

* Disastrous results - when newspapers (in this case, the Seattle Times) assign film critics to review serious books (in this case, Anne Michaels's The Winter Vault.)  We've said it many times before, we say it one more time - the real crisis in book reviewing is that dailies print stuff like this.

* We'd never expect to see the words "Colson Whitehead" and "sentimental" in the same headline but that does appear to be the growing consensus on Sag Harbor.

* The National takes a long look at Wells Tower and his new collection.

* And, finally, you might enjoy checking out Wag's Review, a new and promising online literary journal.

NEW READINGS

If you are an LA area reader who follows TEV via RSS, you'll want to click through and check out the newly updated Worthy Readings sidebar: Phillip Lopate!  Joe Meno!  David Francis!  Kate Christensen! Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie! Colson Whitehead!  And more! It's all there waiting for you ...

GARDAM OBE

Jane Gardam is slated to receive an OBE according to her publishers, Europa Editions:

Jane Gardam, author of Old Filth and recipient of numerous literary awards and prizes, will receive the Order of the British Empire. Her OBE will be presented by Queen Elizabeth II at the June ceremonies at Buckingham Palace.

Jane Gardam’s new novel The Man in the Wooden Hat will be published by Europa Editions in November. It is the companion novel to Old Filth as it tells the story of Edward and Betty Feathers, this time from her perspective.

According to Europa publisher Kent Carroll, “taken together Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat are as fine a portrait of a marriage as ever been written in English. The second novel is every bit an equal to the first, which is high praise indeed.”

Old Filth from Betty Feathers's perspective.  We can't wait.  Until then, check out her TEV interview.

LATFOB - THE SHORT VERSION

We hope to share more detailed impressions of the weekend's Los Angeles Times Festival of Books presently, but some highlights:

* Listening to Michael Silverblatt, Pico Iyer, Katherine Dunn, Bernard Cooper and Geoff Dyer talk about ... well, nearly everything, in one of the most capacious and thoughtful panels of its kind we've ever seen. We suspect this one will enter the pantheon of greats, a panel that those who were there will always look back on reverently.  (The nominal topic was intersections of fiction and non-fiction but Silverblatt slipped the surly bonds of the rubric and the panel soared.)

 

* Jim Ruland's panel on post-apocalyptic fiction was another memorable outing, bringing together Todd Hasak-Lowy, Fiona Maazel, Lee Konstantinou and Jerry Stahl - who knew the end of the world could be so much goddamn fun?

* Too many inept moderators continue to mar the festival, folks who don't understand the concept of a conversation among the panelists.  Too many cookie-cutter questions, too little thoughtful preparation. 

* The Granta party in support of Equator books brought out LA's literati, some of whom were midly surprised at the price tags on Equator's collectibles.  (We managed to find a $30 copy of The Dean's December - and that was one of the bargains.)

* The usual fun in the green room, connecting with old friends and making new ones.  Lengthy conversations with Steve Wasserman and Michael Silverblatt on the state and future of criticism. 

(It was interesting to note a fairly constant hostility toward the Kindle - which had a table reserved to itself in the green room, no fooling - a hostility we don't share, and something we'll explore in more depth later.  But as authors are struggling to get their books in front of readers, it seems, well, silly, really, to deny any new avenue to bring readers into the fold.  Hey, we love our library and our paper just as much as the next reader but the generations in the wings don't romanticize these things like we do, and that's hardly a reason not to reach out to them.  End of Kindle aside.)

While you're waiting for us to get our act together, you can find detailed coverage at:

* Jacket Copy

* Ghost Word

* L.A. Observed

* Book Fox

* Sarah Weinman

Our one big complaint: It remains to us inconceivable, at this late date in the technological game, that every single panel should not be available - within 24 hours - as a video stream or podcast.  The time, expense and difficulty involved in something as rudimentary as creating a YouTube channel and getting all these panels uploaded is minimal.  The festival misses a golden opportunity to bring international eyes to what they doing, to have these conversations shared and dicussed among the millions unable to be in Los Angeles for the festival, and to help those who are forced every year to choose among three excellent panels all starting at once.  Goal for next year, folks:  Get this archived and available.  We guarantee festival sponsor Target will be delighted to have a ten-second logo at the opening of each clip.

Finally, we leave you with this BookTV oops, in which Laura Miller is identified as Lizzie Skurnick - even with, you know, like, really huge name placards right in front of them.

3MI (PLUS GIVEAWAY): DANIYAL MUEENUDDIN

We've been quite keen on Daniyal Mueenuddin's debut collection, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, so we're delighted to have him sit for a Three Minute Interview (3MI), combined with a special Friday giveaway at the end.  Remember the 3MI rules - the first three questions are custom, the remaining seven are the same for all comers.

Mueenuddin was brought up in Lahore, Pakistan and Elroy, Wisconsin.  A graduate of Dartmouth College and Yale Law School, his stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, and The Best American Short Stories 2008, selected by Salman Rushdie.  For a number of years he practiced law in New York.  He now lives on a farm in Pakistan’s southern Punjab.

1) Please tell us a little bit about the genesis of your short story collection and feel free, if you are so moved, to weigh in on the increasingly popular notion of "linked stories"?

DM: Since graduating from college in the US, I’ve lived in Pakistan on-and-off, managing a family farm in south Punjab. In the course of running this business I’ve met all sorts of characters, have come to know an isolated, intense, feudal world – the feudal aspect of it being important, because the feudal life is one of profoundly ramified connections.

For the first many years while living here I wrote only poetry, and so made little use of this material. After undergoing a period of time as a lawyer in the U.S., which cured me of most worldly ambitions, I consciously decided to switch from poetry to prose. Short stories appealed to me more than a novel, for my maiden effort – they require more discipline, curb self-indulgence – and then, there’s less likelihood of slogging into a swamp and wasting years wandering knee deep in background story and the lives of peripheral characters. As for the notion of connected stories, most good collections tell a larger story, the story of the whole.

2) Please tell us what it was like to have Salman Rushdie select one of your stories for Best American Short Stories of 2008? How did you find out?

Undiluted joy, of course. At that time my book had not come out, I had published only two or three little stories. That Salman Rushdie knew my name – seemed in itself a miracle. It came out of the blue, an email from my agent Bill Clegg – who has the wonderful habit of surprising me with little and big successes, publications and sales, etc.

3) What do you think America's top misconception about Pakistan is?

Many of your readers will remember Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts – from which:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along….

The point is, that while great atrocities are committed, and the world stares, most Pakistanis go on with their wolfish or doggy lives – terrorism is only a small part of our daily experience. Life is job and family and little things.

Having said that, it’s quite possible that there will sooner or later be great disruptions in Pakistan, in which case our lives will change profoundly – and perhaps your lives in the West will be changed too, if the extremists prevail in Pakistan and have safe haven or – God forbid – have nukes.

4) What is the best book we've never heard of?

Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter

5) Windows or Mac?

Windows – Mac doesn’t work in the third world – nobody understands how to troubleshoot it, the old programs and Chinese etc. programs are not compatible. I often wish, however, that all the Microsoft engineers had a single neck – and I were the barber.

6) Why do you live where you live?

Livelihood, loyalty to place, fascination with the landscape and people, desire to explore this aspect of my identity – and stories, characters, predicaments. Life here in the Pakistan’s bushiest boonies is red of tooth and claw, more colorful and intense than any other place I’ve been.

7) What was the most memorable meal of your life?

Living in Oslo on a Fulbright, I met the woman who is now my wife. At the time I owned for cooking gear: one glass, one knife, one spoon, one plate, one bowl, and a water boiler. Literally the day after we met I went out and bought pots, pans, glasses, flatware, a whole elaborate kitchen. Egg timer. Things I’ve never used. Those wooden skewers for shish kebab that lurk for years in your kitchen drawers. I toiled over stove and saucepan through noons and nights, cookbooks flying, reaching a crescendo at the end of ten days - osso buco with tomatoes, olives and gremolata (try finding veal shank in Oslo – not easy), mashed yellow turnips with crispy shallots, Barefoot Contessa Caesar salad, and for desert, Mrs. Iskian’s cheese cake. For breakfast I served a parmesan, ham and mushroom frittata.

8) What was the last library book you took out and why?

A book of V.S. Pritchett’s essays – I had just finished reading his collected short stories, and was ravenous for more, couldn’t wait for Amazon to deliver. (I was living in the US at the time – where I live in Pakistan we have neither libraries nor Amazon.)

9) Name three things on your desk right now that aren't books or computer equipment.

A bottle of Tabasco sauce, for my mid-morning cheese toast; a VHF phone; a rosewood box that someone gave me, with a cover made from a Ding Dong Bubble bubble gum package – a bizarre cat logo on a blue background, with big bells attached to its Tom-and-Jerry ears.

10) What's at the top of your Netflix queue?

No delivery, I’m reliant on bootleg from the local market, Legally Blonde II being the medium of what’s available.

Thanks to our good friends at Norton, we are pleased to offer five signed copies of Mueenuddin's collection to five lucky TEV readers.  Everyone knows the drill, but for those who feign ignorance: Drop us an email, subject line "MICROSOFT'S BARBER".  Include your full mailing address.  We'll take all entries until 10 p.m. PST at which point the Random Number Generator will do its weekly dance of joy and woe.  Anon.

UPDATE: Congratulations to our winners Ruth Freeman, Scott Anreder, Jesse Doris, Kim Allen-Niesen and Megan Sohar.

THURSDAY MARGINALIA

* Juan Marse has won the Cervantes Prize.  And the Orange Prize shortlist has been announced.

* The Christian Science Monitor proposes reinventing the Pulitzers.

Today, if the Pulitzers recognized excellence across a wider range of print and electronic content, they could help lift journalism once more.

* More forward thinking is displayed by the reliably thoughtful gang at The Millions, where Garth Risk Hallberg kicks off a series of posts on the future of book coverage.

* Tributes to JG Ballard continue to appear.  Granta offers remembrances from the likes of Hari Kunzru and Jonathan Lethem, and Salon weighs in with Simon Reynolds's far-reaching consideration.

But in death as in life, Ballard never quite got his full due as a thinker as well as a storyteller; he was a penetrating and endlessly provocative theorist about the intersections between culture and technology, media and desire. This tendency to think of him only as a fabulist is understandable to an extent, given that he never wrote a full-length book of nonfiction that condensed and focused his ideas. Instead his insights, speculations and polemical barbs are scattered across a panoply of reviews, columns, memoiristic essays, think pieces and single-topic commentaries written for or spoken to newspapers looking for the Ballardian take on some current event, issue or innovation.

* TEV favorite Luis Alberto Urrea describes life as an act of literary creation for NPR's This I Believe.

* Emory University is set to unveil the Alice Walker archives.

* CNET offers a list of five iPhone apps for writers.  (We would give our left RAM chip for an iPhone edition of the OED.)

* Two New Guinea tribesmen have filed a $10 million defamation lawsuit against author Jared Diamond.  There's really no end to the joke headline possibilities on this one, is there?

* The Best Israeli Novelist you've never heard of, at least according to The Jewish Week.

The same goes for most readers outside of Israel. In his home country, Shalev is mentioned in the same breath as David Grossman and Amos Oz, Israel’s two most renowned writers. And though his novels steadily appear in translations abroad (in over 20 languages no less), internationally he is still a lesser-known name. It is perhaps all the more surprising since his work has both literary cachet — dense as it is with biblical allusions and classic literary themes — and is also deliriously entertaining. Shalev, to put a finer point on it, is a funny writer.

* The Bookseller has the view from the London Book Fair - "Fewer people, more focus."

* The Columbia Spectator talks to William Gass.  (Thanks to Dave Lull.)

SPEC: Last fall Horace Engdahl, the secretary of the jury for the Nobel Prize in literature, told the Associated Press that “[t]he US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.” These remarks caused quite a stir at the time (and were almost certainly dispiriting to the likes of Philip Roth and Don DeLillo). Do you think there’s any merit to Engdahl’s assessment? An do you think there’s something of imaginative value that stands to be gained when a writer grapples with the translation of thoughts and feelings from one language into another?

WG: We don’t translate enough.  That part is true.  But we are getting better.  And we don’t buy translations.  That indicates our provinciality.  But what people read in the U.S. and in Europe is mostly trash, and much of it is from the U.S.  American junk of all kinds is everywhere.  Significant American writers rushed to support, extol, and copy the Latin American boom.  But Latin Americans weren’t Europeans, who are the provincial ones here. We read Calvino, Kis, Sebald… etc.  French and other language departments went goofy over deconstruction, and made its import unwisely popular.  I founded and directed the International Writers Center at Washington University for a decade.  Incidentally, Robbe Grillet was on our faculty.  Philip Roth did wonderful things to support Polish etc. writers, and tackled Israeli issues in one of his greatest books.  Perhaps it is Europe who is insular.  Writers like Hawkes, and Coover lived or live part time in Europe.  You have to be aware of all of literature because local writing (that with only local interest; Faulkner is not local) is doomed to languish.

* Happy 50th birthday to The Elements of Style.

* And so we dance on, boats against the current ... The Great Gatsby as ballet.

* Daniel Olivas interviews Frances Dinkelspiel for the Jewish Journal.

* And, finally, the always excellent Michael Gorra gives AJ Liebling a well-deserved consideration over at The Smart Set.  (We've already ordered a copy of Between Meals on the strength of Gorra's recommendation.)