The Elegant Variation

TUESDAY MARGINALIA

* The tweet heard 'round the world.  Alice Hoffman is the latest writer to wish for some sort of global undo button.  We will never understand - and we oughtta know - why writers think there's an upside in taking on one's critics.  (Though we kinda like Stanley Crouch's style ... )

* It's that wonderful time of the year - the winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is announced.

"Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the "Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."

* Emma Garman, whose criticism we've long admired, looks at Nathalie Abi-Ezzi's A Girl Made of Dust for Words Without Borders.

* Hanif Kureishi on turning his second novel, The Black Album, into a stage play.

* Jens Petersen wins the Bachmann Prize for best German language novel.

* Maud Newton returns to give Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain another try. 

* Apropos of nothing at all, just saying - a reporter on NPR tonight actually said "razed to the ground."  If we tweeted, this is probably the sort of thing we'd tweet, but we don't, so it's stuck in here.  Seriously.  Razed to the ground.

* Making An Elephant, Graham Swift's collection of essays on writing, is reviewed in The Star.

"I find distasteful the idea that writers are on a permanent reconnaissance trip, one eye always on the lookout for what might fuel their work, he retorts.

* Lloyd Lockhart, the last man to interview Hemingway, has died at 89.

* And, finally ... Michael Bay ... James Frey ... the headlines just sort of write themselves, don't they?

L.A. EVENT - KATE CHRISTENSEN

Although we haven't yet read Trouble, we greatly admired Kate Christensen's previous novel, The Great Man (recommended to us by Maud Newton), and if it's at all possible for us to make our way over to Pasadena tonight, we'll check out her Vroman's reading.  We have a newborn; you have no excuse, so don't miss it.  Details here.

TEV GIVEAWAY: THE GOD OF WAR

I greatly admired Marisa Silver's fine novel, The God of War, when it came out last year.  Here's what I said about it over at the Barnes & Noble Review:

Common themes of family, guilt, dysfunction, and shame informed many of the stories in Silver's debut collection, Babe in Paradise (2001), as well as her first novel, No Direction Home (2005). These concerns remain present in The God of War, but the story is primarily a sustained meditation on questions of agency and volition; the acceptance (or refusal) of responsibility and the apportioning of blame. Indeed, her damaged cast has settled in this remote backwater in the futile hope of controlling their own fate beyond the reach of government and society. That they largely fail suggests how impervious to geography and inescapably human the so-called human condition really is.

The God of War has just been released in paperback, and I'm pleased to offer a copy this week to a lucky TEV reader.  (And I'm pretty sure I can arrange to have it signed for you, too.)  It's been a while since we've done one of these, so we're probably all a bit rusty on the rules.  Therefore:  Drop us an email, subject line "GIMME SOME SILVER".  Include your full mailing address, please, otherwise you will be disqualified and possibly mocked.  All entries will be accepted until Sunday, June 28 at 6 p.m. PST, at which time the Random Number Generator will practice its own special brand of tough love.  Until then ...

THURSDAY MARGINALIA

* Carolyn Kellogg offers sensible commentary on the l'affaire de Chris Anderson.

* Edward Hogan has won the Desmond Elliott Prize.

An "extraordinary new voice" with a tale of an albino in a depressed mining community has won the Desmond Elliott prize. Edward Hogan, who describes his previous jobs as "grass-strimmer, pot-washer, conservatory salesman, bloke holding the board in Leicester Square, and teacher", won the £10,000 first novel prize for Blackmoor, a novel set in a Derbyshire village at the time of the miners' strikes.

* Ismail Kadare has won the Asturias literature prize.

* Retracing the steps of Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall in the Times.

* Reducing literary classics to tweet-length.  Would that make the condensers "twits"?

In it, the authors will squish the jewels of world literature - they mention Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce and JK Rowling - into 20 tweets or less - that is 20 sentences each with fewer than 140 characters.

* Aleksandar Hemon plays twenty questions.

6. You're proud of this accomplishment, but why?

Once I fell asleep in a dentist's chair during a root canal. Keith Richards fell asleep during a Rolling Stones show, which is as impressive as can be, but I had a little nap with the dentist's hand up to his wrist in my mouth.

After years of being able to sleep in any situation: on the street, at work, in school etc., I managed to sleep through pain. That's pretty impressive, if I may say so myself.

And I wrote four books in English, not my native language. That's not too bad, either.

* Top ten literary threesomes.

* The Big Read is just throwing money at you - 269 new grants have been announced.

* Maud Newton on all things Jean Rhys - first, an epistolary essay at Granta online; and then, a biography reviewed at The Second Pass.

* And, finally, please check out Masha Hamilton's Afghan Women's Writing Project.

KULTURAs CLOSES

Santa Monica's KULTURAs Books is closing and heading back to Washington, D.C.

Husband-and-wife team Andrew MacDonald and Irene Coray decided to take a risk — pack up their highly successful 17-year-old bookstore in the middle of bustling Dupont Circle and take their chances in Santa Monica where the people are well-read but the weather is more inviting.

They figured that even at a 50 percent loss in sales from the Washington D.C. store, the change in atmosphere would be well worth the move.

Three years later, the owners of KULTURAs Books on Ocean Park Boulevard are preparing to head back to where it all started, a result of a more than anticipated dramatic decline in revenue.

You have until July 20 to stop by and apologize in person on behalf of all of Los Angeles ...  (Thanks, EG)

GALASSI INTERVIEWED

The legendary Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of FSG, is interviewed in Poets & Writers.

But what if you have some ambition, as all writers do, and really want a readership and think that you deserve one?
If they deserve one, they'll get one. I believe that. I believe that eventually they will get their readership. Now, I also think there are way more people writing books than are going to get a readership. But I think that the books that really make a difference are going to have a readership. It may not be immediate. There are many examples of writers who have labored in relative obscurity for a long time until their ship came in. Look at Bolaño. His great success is posthumous and not even in his own country.

Writing is its own reward. It has to be. I really believe that. This is a part of publishing that's really hard to come to grips with. But publishers can't make culture happen the way they want it to happen. They can stand up for what they believe in, and they can work to have an impact, but in the end it's like the brilliant thing that Helen Vendler said about poets. She was asked, "What's the canon?" and she said something like, "The poets are going to decide what the canon is. The poets who poets read are the canon." I think that, in the end, that's true about all literature. The books that people read over time, and keep reading, are the books that matter. We can huff and puff and pay money and advertise and everything else, but in the end, if the readers don't come, we can't do anything about it.

SHE SAID "POETASTER" ...

"Thanks from a grateful poetaster for your assistance, encouragement & criticism."  Edith Wharton's letters come up for auction.

THREE MINUTE STORIES

James Wood will be selecting and reading on air the winners of NPR's Summer Writing Contest.

CIRCLE OF LIT

There's something pleasantly circular about the fact that the signer/guitarist of the literarily named Airbone Toxic Event is writing his own novel.  Or trying to, anyway, between tours.

The attention still feels surreal to Jollett, who began his twenties as a budding novelist and freelancer. His writing credits include NPR, the Los Angeles Times and Filter magazine. In fact, Jollett was offered a column by NPR before Airborne formed.

SOME OF OUR BEST FRIENDS ARE OBSESSIVES

A U2 obsessive considers top 5 literary moments in the band's history.  Salman Rushdie figures prominently in one of them.

Rushdie later repaid the show of loyalty by writing the lyrics to 'The Ground Beneath Her Feet' (a track which appeared on the Japanese and British versions of 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind), drawn from the author's novel of the same name. He continues to be an outspoken supporter of the band.