If you are a local TEV reader, make sure you pop by Village Books in Pacific Palisades this weekend, where every book in the store will be marked down 25%. Go and support local independent bookstores!
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January 29, 2010
January 28, 2010
January 27, 2010
AMIS WATCH CONTINUES
Marty. Please. Shut the fuck up.
His latest: J.M. Coetzee has "no talent." Is further comment even necessary?
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NOTA BENE: THE INFINITIES
"On the subject of fathers: Adam has not seen his yet. When they arrived last night he pleaded his and Helen's weariness after the journey and said they would go straight to bed. He thought that to visit the old man then would have been gruesome; he would have felt like a body-snatcher measuring up a fresh specimen, or a vampire-hunter breaking into a crypt. Although he has not told her so he thinks his mother should not have insisted on taking Pa out of the hospital. Bringing him home to die is a throwback, something Granny Godley would have approved. Yet this morning he is sorry that he did not go at once and at least look at him, his fallen father, for with each hour that passes it will be so much the harder to force himself up those stairs and into that sickroom. He does not know how he will behave at the side of what everyone, without saying so, has acknowledged is his father's deathbed. He has never been at a death before and hopes not to have to be present for this one."
- The Infinities, John Banville
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January 26, 2010
HAITI BENEFIT READING
Please attend this night of readings, music and dancing to raise money for medical aid to Haiti. The evening will feature readings from Will Alexander, Gloria Alvarez, Tisa Bryant, Percival Everett, Sesshu Foster, Veronica Gonzales, Jen Hofer, Doug Kearney, Chris Kraus, Maggie Nelson, Abel Salas; plus live music from Ceci Bastida and Domingo Siete and DJ sets from Glenn Red, Concise, and Gomez comes alive.
It will all get started at 8pm this coming Saturday at Trópico de Nopal Gallery in Echo Park. All the money raised will go to Partners in Health, which has been providing free medical care to Haiti's poor for the last two decades.
The details: Saturday January 30, 2010 at 8 p.m. Trópico de Nopal Gallery 1665 Beverly Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90026 - $10 at the door (more if you can spare it!)
If you won’t be able to attend Saturday, please consider donating directly to Partners in Health.
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January 25, 2010
MONDAY MARGINALIA - THE "DID YOU MISS US?" EDITION
We're still digging out but we're back on the job around here with a considerable backlog of goodies ...
* During our absence, the Story Prize finalists were announced - including Victoria Patterson, recently interviewed right here at TEV.
* Speculation is rife about the potential impact of Apple's rumored tablet on the publishing industry. (Enough qualifiers there?)
* The National Book Critics Circle has announced their 2009 award finalists.
* It's been a while since Martin Amis said anything to embarrass himself, but he's starting the year off right with talk of euthanasia booths for the elderly ...
But none of those opponents were as tough as his new target promises to be. Now 60, Amis has picked a fight with the grey power of Britain's ageing population, calling for euthanasia "booths" on street corners where they can terminate their lives with "a martini and a medal".
The author of Time's Arrow and London Fields said in an interview at the weekend that he believes Britain faces a "civil war" between young and old, as a "silver �tsunami" of increasingly ageing people puts pressure on society.
(Of course, he does have a new novel on its way ... Much less annoying, here he is on Time's Arrow.)
* A recap of the Jaipur Literature Festival.
* The Big Read is headed to San Diego, taking on The Grapes of Wrath.
* Tales of woe as authors try to go it alone with minimal promotional support from their publishers. (Related: Stephen Elliott's DIY Book Tour.)
He added, "As Carolyn See (author of 'Making a Literary Life') says, your book is dead after four months. That's when they start pulling it off the shelf to make room for new books. All books die eventually, in a certain way, but I don't want to let that happen without really giving it my attention."
* Ian McEwan has become the first mainstream British author to sign an exclusive deal through Amazon to double the royalties he receives on his backlist.
* Chinamanda Ngozi Adichie on Chinua Achebe for Salon.
* Ursula K. Le Guin is rallying writers against Google Books.
Le Guin's petition includes such luminaries as notable science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson and Nick Harkaway, author of the bestselling debut novel The Gone-Away World.
* Peter Carey's new novel, Parrot and Olivier in America, is reviewed in the Irish Times.
* Dennis Lehane is among the many who paid tribute to Robert B. Parker, who died last week - at his writing desk - at the age of 77.
What's lost in his massive success and prodigious output is how revolutionary those early Spenser books were. He lifted the genre out of the ham-fisted macho '50s ethos it had been mostly mired in for two decades (Ross Macdonald and a few other notables notwithstanding, of course) and brought it into the '70s, all sly and sexy and edgy-funny.
* Small talk with Joyce Carol Oates at the Financial Times.
* Heller McAlpin is one of the few critics who seems to get precisely what Joshua Ferris is up to with his new novel, The Unnamed.
* Alex Clark asks whether the golden promise of the McEwan-Amis-Ishiguro generation has been fulfilled.
* Tom Stoppard interviewed in the Telegraph, wearing a fright wig, apparently.
At this point I interrupt, filling the pause, and he loses his train of thought.
A grin. ‘Perhaps that was God telling me to shut up. For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all.
* Small publishers contemplate life without Borders.
* David Malouf and Peter Carey are amongsix Australian novelists to have new stamps in their honor.
* The Chicago Tribune suggests that Graham Greene's 1966 novel The Comedians still holds up as a portrait of Haitian despair.
* A Bollywood adaptation of Midnight's Children is in the works.
* Lest we think it's only American youth that's illiterate, the Telegraph advises that British young uns aren't much better read.
The survey suggested that nearly two in ten children thought Fagin played football for Manchester United rather than picked pockets in Dickens's Oliver Twist. And Moby Dick is, according to nearly half the children asked, a pop star not a man-eating whale.
* The University of Pennsylvania is the chosen home of the Chaim Potok papers. (Sorry, couldn't help it.)
* The Wall Street Journal on the death of the slush pile.
* Muriel Spark's 1992 autobiography is reissued in the UK.
* And, finally, Harry, Revised gets a truly lovely review in Le Monde.
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January 15, 2010
TEV GIVEAWAY: EVERYTHING RAVAGED, EVERYTHING BURNED
Wells Tower's short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned was one of 2009's critical darlings. A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year, it received raves from Kakutani to Ruland. Here's what no less a short story luminary than Deborah Eisenberg had to say about the collection in the New York Review of Books:
The phrase "well-crafted" suggests an unfortunate analogy between a piece of fiction and a piece of furniture. And there is a surprising amount of fiction around that is reasonably accomplished and graceful, or strikingly ornamented, or that skillfully reproduces previous successes in structure or tone and yet feels synthetic and inert -- made up, in short, rather than like something that has been transcribed from a revelatory vision.
That cannot be said of Wells Tower's wonderful first collection of short fiction, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. The stories are indeed solid and polished; in fact, they're conspicuously artful, but proficiency -- obviously a sine qua non of any good work -- and finesse are irritating only when they substitute for soul, and this book seems to have come forth from a deep, disruptive source. The stories live and breathe with purpose.
The collection has just been released in paperback from Picador and we're happy to offer a copy to a lucky TEV reader. It's been a while, so to remind everyone of the rules: Just drop an email, subject line "RAVAGE ME". Make sure you include your full mailing address. (You'd be surprised how often people leave out this step.) We'll take all entries until 6 p.m. PST on Sunday, January 17, and then we'll turn to the Random Number Generator to select a winner. (The RNG is notoriously unmoved by pleas, threats and bribes but they are always amusing to your host.) We'll post the winner on Monday and return with literary news on Tuesday.
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January 13, 2010
READINGS
We're jet-lagged and thawing ever so slowly, but the Worthy Readings sidebar has been updated with the first spate of 2010 events, so do check them out. Literary news should return to these parts tomorrow, along with a return of the Friday giveaway this week. More fun in the weeks ahead, and there still five seats open in the UCLA's hottest Novel I class of the year ...
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January 04, 2010
TO PARIS
I'm off to Paris, where the French edition of Harry, Revised will be published next week. So things will be quiet here until my return. In my absence, please visit the fine sites noted to the left. Also, a reminder - if you're in the LA area, there is still some space available in my Novel I class at UCLA, which kicks off January 19. You can check out my syllabus if you like, subject to change, of course.
See you all next week ... à bientôt.
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WORTHY READINGS
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."
RECOMMENDED
- Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal by Rob Riemen
This slim volume by the president and founder of the Nexus Institute, a European-based humanist think-tank, stands as the most stirring redoubt against the ascendant forces of know-nothingness that we've come across in a long time. A full-throated, unapologetic defense of the virtues of Western Civ – in which "elite" is not and never should be a dirty word – this inspiring exploration of high art and high ideals is divided into three sections: The first looks at the life of Riemen's great hero Thomas Mann as a model for the examined life. The second imagines a series of conversations from turning points in European intellectual history, populated with the likes of Socrates, Nietzsche and others. The final section, "Be Brave," is nothing less than an exhortation to dig deep, especially in times of risk. The notion of nobility of the spirit might strike some modern ears as quaint but it seems more desperately necessary than ever before, and there are worse ways to read the accessible Nobility of Spirit than as a crash refresher in the Great Thinkers, free of academic jargon and cant. As a meditation on what is at stake when the pursuit of high ideals is elbowed aside by the pursuit of fleeting material gain, however, Nobility of Spirit might well be the most prescient book we've yet read on what's at stake in the current election cycle and in the developing global situation. Agree or disagree with Riemen's profound, ambitious and high-minded plea, you will be thinking about his words for a long time. It's been ages since a work of non-fiction moved us this way. Read it. Discuss it. Argue about it. - Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
With rave reviews from James Wood, Michiko Kakutani and Dwight Garner, it might not seem like we need to tell you to drop everything and go read Netherland, but we are telling you, and here's why: The way book coverage works these days, everyone talks about the same book for about two or three weeks, and then they move on and the book is more or less forgotten. Whereas a berth here in the Recommended sidebar keeps noteworthy titles in view for a good, long time, which is the sort of sustained attention this marvelous novel deserves. A Gatsby-like meditation on exclusion and otherness, it's an unforgettable New York story in which the post 9/11 lives of Hans, a Dutch banker estranged from his English wife, and Chuck Ramkissoon, a mysterious cricket entrepreneur, intertwine. The New York City of the immigrant margins is unforgettably invoked in gorgeous, precise prose, and the novel's luminous conclusion is a radiant beacon illuminating one of our essential questions, the question of belonging. Our strongest possible recommendation.
- Dictation: A Quartet by Cynthia Ozick
"History," wrote Henry James in a 1910 letter to his amanuensis Theodora Bosanquet, "is strangely written." This casual aside could easily serve as the epigraph of Cynthia Ozick's superb new collection Dictation, which concerns itself with lost worlds evoked by languages -- languages which separate and obscure as readily as they bind. It can be risky to look for connective tissue between stories written years apart and published in magazines ranging from The Conradian to The New Yorker. But themes of deception, posterity, and above all, the glory of language -- at once malleable and intractable -- knit together this quartet, recasting the whole as the harmonious product of Ozick's formidable talent. Read the entire review here
- Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee
Now, on the one hand, you scarcely need us to alert you to the existence of a new J.M. Coetzee novel, or even to have us tell you it's worth reading. But we can tell you - we insist on telling you that Diary of a Bad Year is a triumph, easily Coetzee's most affecting and fully wrought work since Disgrace. Formally inventive, the book intertwines two narratives with the author's own Strong Opinions, a series of seemingly discrete philosophical and political essays. The cumulative effect of this strange trio is deeply moving and thought provoking. It's increasingly rare in this thoroughly post-post-modern age to raise the kind of questions in fiction Coetzee handles so masterfully - right down to what is it, exactly, that we expect (or need) from our novels. It's telling that, for all of his serious pronouncements on subjects ranging from censorship to pedophilia to the use of torture, it's finally a few pages from The Brothers Karamazov that brings him to tears. Moving, wise and - how's this for a surprise - funny and lightly self-mocking, Diary of a Bad Year might well be the book of the year and Coetzee is surely our essential novelist. We haven't stopped thinking about it since we set it down.
- The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt
David Leavitt's magnificent new novel tells the story of the unlikely friendship between the British mathematician G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, mathematical autodidact and prodigy who had been working as a clerk in Madras, and who would turn out to be one of the great mathematical minds of the century. Ramanujan reluctantly joined Hardy in England - a move that would ultimately prove to his detriment - and the men set to work on proving the Riemann Hypothesis, one of mathematics' great unsolved problems. The Indian Clerk, an epic and elegant work which spans continents and decades, encompasses a World War, and boasts a cast of characters that includes Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Lytton Strachey. Leavitt renders the complex mathematics in a manner that resonates emotionally as well as intellectually, and writes with crystalline elegance. The metaphor of the prime number – divisible only by one and itself – is beautifully apt for this tale of these two isolated geniuses. Leavitt's control of this dense, sprawling material is impressive – astonishing, at times – and yet despite its scope, he keeps us focused on his great themes of unknowability and identity. The Indian Clerk might be set in the past but it doesn't resemble most so-called "historical fiction." Rather, it's an ageless meditation on the quests for knowledge and for the self – and how frequently the two are intertwined – that is, finally, as timeless as the music of the primes. (View our full week of coverage here.)
- Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
Joshua Ferris' warm and funny debut novel is an antidote to the sneering likes of The Office and Max Barry's Company. Treating his characters with both affection and respect, Ferris takes us into a Chicago ad agency at the onset of the dot-bomb. Careers are in jeopardy, nerves are frayed and petty turf wars are fought. But there are bigger stakes in the balance, and Ferris' weirdly indeterminate point of view that's mostly first person plural, underscores the shared humanity of everyone who has ever had to sit behind a desk. It's a luminous, affecting debut and you can read the first chapter right here.
- Christine Falls by Benjamin Black
Coming to these shores at last, John Banville's thriller, written under the nom de plume Benjamin Black, has drawn rave reviews across the pond since it first appeared last October. Those who feared Banville might turn in an overly literary effort needn't worry. Influenced by Simenon's romans durs (hard stories), Banville unspools a dark mystery set in 1950s Dublin concerning itself with, among other things, the church's trade in orphans. At the heart of the book is the coroner Quirke, a Banvillean creation on par with Alex Cleave and Freddie Montgomery. Dublin is rendered with a damp, creaky specificity – you can almost taste the whisky.
- The Paris Review Interviews, I by The Paris Review and Philip Gourevitch
Scanning our Recommended selections, one might conclude we're addicted to interviews, and one would be correct. If author interviews are like crack to us, then the Paris Review author interviews must surely be the gold standard of crack (a comparison Plimpton might not have embraced). The newly issued The Paris Review Interviews, Volume I (Picador) rolls out the heavy hitters. Who can possibly turn away from the likes of Saul Bellow, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges, Dorothy Parker, Robert Gottlieb and others? The interviews are formal and thoughtful but never dry and can replace any dozen "how-to" books on writing. What can be more comforting than hearing Bellow, answering a question on preparations and conception, admit "Well, I don't know exactly how it's done.” The best part of this collection? The "Volume I" in the title, with its promise of more volumes to come.
- The Dead Fish Museum: Stories by Charles D'Ambrosio
The best short story collection we've read since ... well, certainly since we've started this blog. And we might even say "ever" if Dubliners didn't cast such a long shadow. The short story is not our preferred form but D'Ambrosio's eight brilliant stories are almost enough to convert us. Defy the conventional wisdom that short story collections don't sell and treat yourself to this marvel. (We're especially partial, naturally, to "Screenwriter".)
- The Mystery Guest by Grégoire Bouillier *Now in Paperback*
What would you do if the woman who’d left you high and dry ten years ago called out of the blue to invite you to a party without any further explanation? If you’re French, you’d probably spend a lot of time pondering the Deeper Significance Of It All, which is exactly what Grégoire Bouillier does for the 120 hilarious pages of The Mystery Guest. This slim, witty memoir follows Bouillier through the party from hell, and is a case study in Gallic self-abasement. Before it’s all done, you’ll set fire to any turtleneck hanging in your closet and think twice before buying an expensive Bordeaux as a gift. But fear not – just when it seems that all is, indeed, random and pointless and there is no Deeper Significance, salvation arrives in the unlikely form of Virginia Woolf, and the tale ends on a note of unforced optimism. Parfait.
- Ticknor by Sheila Heti
When George Ticknor's Life of William Hickling Prescott was published in 1864, it received rapturous notices, and reviewers were quick to point out that the long-standing friendship between Prescott and Ticknor made the latter an ideal Boswell. Sheila Heti has pulled this obscure leaf from the literary archives and fashioned a mordantly funny anti-history; a pungent and hilarious study of bitterness and promise unfulfilled. As a fretful Ticknor navigates his way through the rain-soaked streets of Boston to Prescott's house ("But I am not a late man. I hate to be late."), he recalls his decidedly one-sided lifelong friendship with his great subject. Unlike the real-life Ticknor, this one is an embittered also-ran, full of plans and intentions never realized, always alive to the fashionable whispers behind his back. Heti seamlessly inhabits Ticknor's fussy 19th-century diction with a feat of virtuoso ventriloquism that puts one in mind of The Remains of the Day. Heti's Ticknor would be insufferable if he weren't so funny, and in the end, the black humor brings a leavening poignancy to this brief tale. But don't let the size fool you — this 109-page first novel is small but scarcely slight; it is as dense and textured as a truffle.
- The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers by Vendela Vida
No, your eyes aren't deceiving you and yes, we are recommending a Believer product. Twenty-three interviews (a third presented for the first time) pairing the likes of Zadie Smith with Ian McEwan, Jonathan Lethem with Paul Auster, Edward P. Jones and ZZ Packer, and Adam Thirwell with Tom Stoppard make this collection a must-read. Lifted out of the context of some of the magazine's worst twee excesses, the interviews stand admirably on their own as largely thoughtful dialogues on craft. A handful of interviewers seem more interested in themselves than in their subjects but in the main this collection will prove irresistible to writers of any stripe - struggling or established - and to readers seeking a window into the creative process.
- The Sea by John Banville
John Banville's latest novel returns him to the Booker Prize shortlist for the first time since 1989's The Book of Evidence. In The Sea, we find Banville in transition, moving from the icy, restrained narrators of The Untouchable, Eclipse and Shroud toward warmer climes. Max Morden has returned to the vacation spot of his youth as he grieves the death of his wife. Remembering his first, fatal love, Morden works to reconcile himself to his loss. Banville's trademark linguistic virtuosity is everpresent but some of the chilly control is relinquished and Max mourns and rages in ways that mark a new direction for Banville - and there's at least one great twist which you'll never see coming. Given the politicized nature of the British literary scene, Banville's shot at the prize might be hobbled by his controversial McEwan review but we're rooting for our longtime favorite to go all the way at last. UPDATE: Our man won!
- Here Is Where We Meet by John Berger
We've been fans of Booker Prize winner John Berger for ages, and we're delighted to have received an early copy of his latest work, Here is Where We Meet. In this lovely, elliptical, melancholy "fictional memoir," Berger traverses European cities from Libson to Geneva to Islington, conversing with shades from his past – He encounters his dead mother on a Lisbon tram, a beloved mentor in a Krakow market. Along the way, we're treated to marvelous and occasionally heart-rending glimpses of an extraordinary life, a lyrical elegy to the 20th century from a man who - in his eighth decade - remains committed to his political beliefs and almost childlike in his openness to people, places and experiences. There's no conventional narrative here, and those seeking plot are advised to look elsewhere. But Here is Where We Meet offers a wise, moving and poetic look at the life of an artist traversing the European century from a novelist whose talent remains undimmed in his twilight years.
- Home Land by Sam Lipsyte
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.
THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism
- A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines & The Man Who Knew Too Much (Philadelphia Inquirer)
- Athena (Boldtype)
- Dictation: A Quartet (Barnes and Noble Review)
- Foreskin's Lament (Philadelphia Inquirer)
- Here Is Where We Meet (Boldtype)
- His Illegal Self (Dallas Morning News)
- Hunk City (New York Times Book Review)
- I Love You, Beth Cooper (New York Times Book Review)
- In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars (Truthdig)
- In the Kitchen (Barnes & Noble Review)
- Indignation (Barnes and Noble Review)
- Out of My Skin (Bookforum)
- Personal Days (New York Times Book Review)
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (The Modern Word)
- The End of Mr. Y (Philadelphia Inquirer)
- The God of War (Barnes and Noble Review)
- The Northern Clemency (Barnes & Noble Review)
- The Raw Shark Texts (Philadelphia Inquirer)
- Ticknor (Philadelphia Inquirer)
- Tom Stoppard's Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon (Threepenny Review)
- Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles (Los Angeles Review)
SECOND LOOK
- The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald
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
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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