F. Scott Fitzgerald was a notoriously poor speller; it's one of those endearing details of the legend of a great writer. But none of us are Fitzgeralds, so to work on the mechanics of your writing, you can get started with Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors, which Broadway Books is set to publish this month by bestselling author Bill Bryson.
Despite its design — the terms are arranged alphabetically — Bryson calls it, in his preface, "a personal collection, built up over 30 years as a writer and editor ... so inevitably — inescapably — it reflects my own interests, experiences, and blind spots."
Among such blind spots are those traps familiar to anyone writing about literature (it's Stephen Dedalus, not Daedalus) or about medicine (it's Down syndrome, not Down's syndrome). There are also plenty of words that writers misapply: "crass," for instance, isn't just tasteless — it's "stupid and grossly ignorant to the point of insensitivity." "A thing must be pretty bad to be crass," Bryson writes. "Enormity" doesn't refer to size but to the wickedness of something. I'm guilty of misusing that one. An appendix on punctuation points out the many ways that writers are tripped up by commas.
Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors is a good read, strange as that may sound: It has been — how shall I say? — helpful to me in composing this sentence.
Nick Owchar
At his blog, ABC of Reading, Thomas McGonigle, one of our contributors, has posted an item about writers he'd like to see less from on forthcoming publisher catalog lists. What would they get in return? The post suggests having George Soros establish a fund to compensate these writers for their silence.
Provocative, yes. Among many big-name writers on the list (Ian McEwan, Seamus Heaney and Francine Prose), prominent near the top is John Updike, who has received his share of fairly lukewarm reviews for his novels in the past decade. In fact, he's received quite a few. I looked around. Of his 2006 novel, "Terrorist," for instance, James Wood wrote in the New Republic:
"It is the otherness of Islamicism that is missing in this book. Despite all the Koranic homework, there is a sense that what is alien in Islam to a Westerner remains alien to John Updike. What he has discovered, yet again, is merely the generalized fluid of God-plus-sex that has run throughout all his novels."
Adam Begley wrote in the New York Observer that Updike's 2004 book, "Villages," was too generic; the 2002 novel, "Seek My Face," was tedious to Ron Charles of the Christian Science Monitor. Los Angeles Times critic Susan Salter Reynolds wrote of Updike's 2000 book, "Licks of Love": "The stories are painstakingly written; effort shows on every page. There's too much detail, too much retelling of the characters' most ordinary thoughts. Most of the stories ... feel unfinished; summarily ended, as though Updike simply shrugged."
There are many who admire Updike's work, and I'm definitely among them, but the common thread in the criticisms is that he writes too often. This fall, in fact, he has a novel coming from Alfred A. Knopf, "The Widows of Eastwick," which picks up the story told in "The Witches of Eastwick." I wouldn't dare to tell a giant of American letters not to publish anymore, even if Soros said "yes" to the don't-write funding idea, but McGonigle's post made me think: If there were a little more time between Updike books — say, three years rather than two — perhaps there'd be more room at the bigger publishers for such writers as Gary Amdahl, who are doing exciting things.
Nick Owchar
Above: Friends helping me make my departure from Pittsburgh possible are, from left, Jamie Bono, Robert Yune, Emily Stone and Paul Ruggiero.
There is a grand road trip tradition in American letters that I find irresistible. Today I embark on another cross-country drive, and what I discovered, while packing, was that I have a lot of books (including a vintage paperback copy of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" with a man in a striped shirt and jaunty neck scarf). Perhaps an insane amount of books. Even after purging and triaging, books and books and books. Unlike Kerouac, I do not travel light.
My trip will take me south from Pittsburgh to Florida, then west, clear across the country, to Los Angeles. Along the way I will do as much reading as I can: A select few (dozen) books will ride up front with me.
But to make it a truly literary road trip, I plan to visit some literary landmarks along the way. The Washington Post wrote up several in Georgia, and it looks like the "On the Road" scroll is on display through May 31 in Austin, Tex. Obviously, that's not a complete literary tour. What are your suggestions?
Carolyn Kellogg
There were no Hells Angels at the Whisky a Go-Go on Thursday night, although a ripple of curiosity was circulating among the people waiting in line along Sunset Boulevard.
Would James Frey, whose newest offering is "Bright Shiny Morning," a novel set in Los Angeles, have the kind of bad karma on the West Coast the Rolling Stones had at Altamont when they used the motorcycle gang for security at the Bay Area speedway in 1969, which resulted in the death of one man and the symbolic death knell of the '60s?
Not at all.
Good behavior prevailed, discounting a little mosh pit action that briefly tore into a pair of tables near the stage. Frey’s self-proclaimed "Rock-and-Roll Book Tour" attracted not only the usual crowd of well-read graduates, but also a heady throng of about 100 high school kids who’d come just to see a popular band playing for free.
And what a band it was. Black Tide was its name, and the combined age of its four members couldn’t be more than 70. They played double bass-pedaled, flying V headbanger paeans. Their fans pumped their fists and shook their heads and managed to displace a handful of worried adults, most of them wearing glasses and clutching books.
How does one follow a set like that? With a book reading?
More ....
Read more "The band, the bodyguards: the James Frey show" »
On Monday evening, my daughter Sophie and I went to a screening of Prince Caspian, the new Chronicles of Narnia movie that opens tomorrow. Sophie is nine, and she had just read the book a couple of weeks ago; no sooner had the film started than she turned to me and whispered, "They left a lot of stuff out."
I was willing to take her word for it because, if truth be told, I don't remember many of the details; I read the Narnia books a long time ago, when I was Sophie's age. But the film was pretty good, I thought -- fast-paced, nicely constructed ... until, that is, the last 20 minutes when Aslan saves the day.
This has always been my problem with the Chronicles of Narnia, the way Aslan is so often absent, until, after 1,000 years or so of suffering, he decides to step in and make everything right. I understand the metaphor, understand C. S. Lewis' notion of faith and Christian humility, but (without getting into theology), I think it's a poor narrative device. What kind of beneficent force is Aslan, when he's so often negligent? And what does it do to the human agency of the characters that they get bailed out by this external power, rather than having to work things out (or not) themselves?
Sophie had a different issue. Although she liked the movie, she found its at-times-relentless violence off-putting; it's more fun to read, she told me, because you imagine what's going on in the story for yourself.
Yes, I thought, that's it exactly. No external agency.
David L. Ulin
Photo credit: Disney/Walden
Consider this: An author rides high on the publicity about his book, a stunning work of nonfiction. He commands huge amounts of money in advances and expected royalties. The book, an autobiography, promises a glimpse into lives unimagined by most people. Does this sound like James Frey soon after "A Million Little Pieces" was published and he was being celebrated by Oprah?
Uh, no. It refers to Clifford Irving, who, more than 30 years ago, duped his publishers, the media and various investigators into believing that he had actually interviewed the reclusive Howard Hughes and wrote his memoirs for him. A 1972 article in Time, "The Secret Life of Clifford Irving," summed up Irving's breathtaking rise and fall in this graf:
"Just weeks ago, Clifford Irving was looking forward to the publishing coup of the decade. He had control of well over half-a-million dollars in publishers' advances and prospects for immense royalties. Last week, with his story in a shambles, he sat in a Manhattan hotel waiting for the law to close in. The Irvings had been caught in forgery; his version of how he had acquired the book in personal meetings with Hughes was seriously shadowed. He tried to bargain with federal authorities for immunity ... in exchange for the full story, but the Government, apparently convinced that it has a solid case against the Irvings, was not interested."
Former Times staff writer Gina Piccalo talked to Irving last year on the occasion of the film "The Hoax," starring Richard Gere, which offered a version of Irving's incredible feat. Irving said something intriguing about the lasting effects of that scandal -- they haven't been lasting: "Let me put it to you this way.... I refuse to be caged by time and by the past. I try to live outside the cage. I know that the past -- all history -- is fiction. And so I can smile at it."
Responses to Frey's new work range from critical to adoring, but one thing no one can say with any certainty is that his career has been permanently tainted. You just can't accept that line of reasoning for him, especially when there is Irving, who now lives quietly in Aspen, Colo., and has published at least 10 books since the Hughes controversy in the 1970s. Forgiveness -- and forgetfulness -- seem eventual; some of the comments about our review seem to be leaning in that direction already.
Nick Owchar
 Does it surprise anybody that James Frey's novel "Bright Shiny Morning" is attracting so much attention?
Even though this book has nothing to do with the scandal around "A Million Little Pieces," and even though there is some distance -- more than two years -- separating this book's appearance from Frey's auto da fe on "Oprah," there has been plenty of response on the Web. Reactions have centered mostly on the differences between our paper's review by Times book editor David Ulin and Janet Maslin's for the New York Times.
Dana Goodyear notes, at her blog for the New Yorker, that the extreme difference of opinion in the reviews attests to the book's "coastally polarizing effect." East Coasters love it because they think it's about Los Angeles; West Coasters don't, because they know it doesn't really reflect L.A. at all.
What do they think in Texas? That they need another review to sort things out.
Mediabistro calls Janet Maslin's review for the New York Times a "love letter" and asks whether mimicking Frey's writing style in the review is "dreadful."
Did she read the review aloud or go back and revise it? In a video on Amazon, Frey says, "When I'm writing it, I sort of work on every sentence as a sentence, and I speak it to myself, and I rewrite it until it sounds the way I hear it in my head. Once I've got that, you know, I just move on. I don't revise, really. I don't read, at all."
Meanwhile, "Bright Shiny Morning" has rocketed from No. 666 on Amazon a week ago to No. 25.
Carolyn Kellogg
Sitting in a Paris cafe can be highly effective. That is, as far as journalist-author Andrew Hussey and Granta are concerned.
Granta magazine asked a bunch of literary types, from publishers to bloggers, how they make the web work for them. Hussey has, perhaps, the most enviable lifestyle: He throws a laptop into his rucksack and bikes to local Paris cafes to tap in. Another journalist is more disciplined: He opens exactly six tabs in Firefox every morning (apparently, like some of us, he didn't leave a hectic array open the night before).
Litblogger Maud Newton has a pretty hectic lifestyle, abetted by her iPhone addiction. She writes: The very ADD impulses that enable me to blog the way I do tend to hamstring larger projects, like the novel I’m writing, the review that’s coming due, the day-job work. No doubt this is true of most people who keep weblogs for fun rather than for profit — a dying pursuit, apparently. What still excites me about the Internet is that it facilitates endless foraging, and not only courtesy of my favorite blogs and newspapers. As more publications and critics go digital, I find myself sampling the offerings of literary magazines, squandering hours in the Harper’s archives (which stretch back to 1850!), formulating ever more intricate and passionate dissents....
More habits, both good and compulsive, here.
Carolyn Kellogg
photo of the Cafe de Floré in Paris by sergeymk via Flickr
Thanks to careful readers of Jacket Copy who e-mailed me about Friday's steampunk posting, especially those pointing the way to another article about the steampunk movement that was commissioned by the New York Times a year ago and was spiked. Freelance writer Richard Morgan (who happens to share his name with a contemporary science fiction writer) has posted the article he wrote for the NYTimes at his website. Called "Steampunk: Remembering Yesterday's Tomorrows" (great title), this article provides what the NYTimes article lacks: a deeper sense of the philosophical attitudes behind the movement. Ruth La Ferla's article makes it all sound like fads and surfaces; Morgan argues otherwise. You be the judge.
What a fine piece, Richard. I can't imagine why that other paper didn't publish it (though Ron Hogan, at Galley Cat, suggests rightly that your piece didn't talk about steampunk fashions enough. Shame on you!). I wish you had come to us first.
Stay tuned for my June column of the Siren's Call at www.latimes.com/books: Steampunk will be the topic, and a new feature, "Reader Feedback," will be included for your insights and help.
Nick Owchar
Photo: Paramount Pictures; from 1999's "Sleepy Hollow"
In today's paper, our book editor, David Ulin, took sharp aim at James Frey's new novel, "Bright Shiny Morning." If you didn't notice, there's also a graffiti board set up so that you can weigh in on The Frey Saga, Part 2.
OK, so do you think Frey deserves another chance, especially for the reported million and a half dollars he received for this book? Is there really no such thing as bad publicity? Click here to go to the graffiti board and post your thoughts.
Nick Owchar
With West Virgina voters going to the polls today, my thoughts turn to West Virginia literature, about which I know, well, not that much. But last fall I did hear Ann Pancake read from her novel "Strange as This Weather Has Been." It's a character-driven tale about a West Virginia family coping with living in the shadow of a mountaintop removal mine (like the one pictured above). "Black floods" of dirt and debris are an ever-present threat. Children play among the felled trees, and coal miners are at odds with the mine owners. You can read an excerpt at Narrative Magazine (free registration required).
What I do know a bit more about are narratives of presidential campaigns. A few favorites after the jump.
photo from www.stopmountainremoval.org
Read more "Readings for West Virginia Primary day" »
Coudal Partners, a design/advertising/interactive firm in Chicago, is in my RSS reader. And I admit, I avoid it. Because when I follow their links, I get sucked into category-defying Web excellence, to the extent that later I look up, dazed, completely unsure of what I was supposed to be doing but full of, say, booktitle-bandname combos like " The Things They Might Be Giants Carried," "Jane Eyre's Addiction" and "Abba Karenina."
But today I followed the time suck to end all time sucks, their Museum of Online Museums -- aka the MoOM. It is what it says it is and includes everything from the wondrously mundane -- The Grocery List Collection -- to the exquisite, like Duke University's Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library and the British Library's online gallery of great books. You might look at some ancient illustrated texts close up or find yourself wondering why William Burroughs' classic was published in England as The Naked Lunch -- as if the title referred to a single nudist luncheon appointment.
The image above comes from a WPA pamphlet that's part of the Smithsonian's collection, where I ended up after clicking through on a link for WPA calendars. This is all interesting, possibly addictive Internet exploration. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Carolyn Kellogg
If you're visiting the Pasadena Museum of California Art this week, may I recommend something?
On display is the California Art Club's 97th annual Gold Medal Juried Exhibition. Look for the winning bronze sculpture, "Fr. Electrico" by Christopher Slatoff. Study it carefully. Walk slowly around it.
From the front, it depicts a father carrying his exhausted son in his arms.
From behind, the father's back is engraved with symbols and images -- an intentional
Read more "Bradbury in bronze" »
Sure, old file cabinets are hunks of junk, but where would the cause of literature be without them? How many times have you heard about the discovery of a writer's manuscript in an old drawer or ancient stack of yellowing paper in an office?
If it weren't for such finds, the Paris Review would've needed something else to fill Pages 148-169 of its new spring issue: These pages contain a "lost interview" with Leonard Michaels, which David Reid and Ernest Machen conducted with him in 1986 "amid the great hubbub" of Michaels' life and in spite of his reservations. The interviewers write that the interview was never published (though they don't explain why) but that a typescript was found in the Paris Review offices last year. You can read a sample of the interview for free, although it doesn't include some of his insights into the writing process, such as this one:
Interviewer: There are novelists who think that writing short stories is like painting china compared to writing novels.
Michaels: I don't know who you have in mind, but please don't tell me. It's a question of attention span, or maybe toilet training, for those novelists. Maybe they assume that a character is, like themselves, capable of astounding concentration on a subject, unrelieved for years and years. From early to late, in a seven-hundred-page work, their hero goes on and on, disburdening himself of a sentiment of being and a vision of the world as if, at the end, he will be congratulated by his mother. I've never met anyone, except for people who are profoundly depressed or trapped in some neurosis, who exhibited a novelistic consistency. Usually they can't remember where they were or what they did last week.
Of course it's surly: It's Michaels! This interview is a welcome, unexpected invitation to reconsider an important writer's work. Hard to believe it's more than 20 years old. Sounds like it was recorded yesterday. Thank goodness for that file cabinet.
Nick Owchar
Photo credit: UCR /California Museum of Photography
This weekend's Book Review includes RJ Smith's take on The James Brown Reader: 50 Years of Writing About the Godfather of Soul, an anthology of articles written about the hardest working man in show business. In this 1976 video -- "Sex Machine" with some "Get on the Good Foot" -- a 43-year-old Brown sings, commands the audience and his band with equal vigor, and drops a split.
After the jump, more James Brown video fun. Happy Sunday.
Carolyn Kellogg
Read more "Get Up Offa That Thing" »
Jesse left a comment here asking for more lit journals, and I admit, it can be hard to find them (unless you happen across this pile on my living room floor). More useful, indeed, is Newpages, a site that perfectly fits the bill for his hope for "maybe one website that lists many."
Newpages is kind of internet old-school in that it's one site that collects and vets many links (remember when that's what Yahoo did?); the site is described as "News, information and guides to independent bookstores, independent publishers, literary magazines, alternative periodicals, independent record labels, alternative newsweeklies and more."
I'm not entirely sure it makes sense to divide literary journals into two categories, print and online, since many magazines now do both. But one thing's certain: there are so many of these periodicals that they publish more than you're likely to be able to read. (Unless you read very fast. And are immortal.)
Which makes Newpages' filtering that much more valuable. If you're not interested in poetry, skip Bateau and Earthshine; or if you're looking for creative nonfiction, look for Event's special issue each year.
So Jesse, go over to Newpages for your literary journal fix. Hope you find what you need.
Carolyn Kellogg
Steampunk is another entry point into the Victorian era by way of a wormhole: a subculture movement that is the result of an "intersection of technology and romance," as it was reported in some East Coast newspaper this week. Philip Pullman's alternate version of the world--with zeppelins, golden compasses and anbaric-powered gadgets--in "His Dark Materials" taps into it; so do the stories of Jules Verne and the movie "Brazil"; William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's "The Difference Engine" anticipated it. At Jake von Slatt's Steampunk Workshop, you'll see an image of a personal computer framed in brass, looking more appropriate on the deck of an airship than in someone's home office.
" I still haven't gotten a handle on it," Jake confesses about the steampunk movement. I agree with him. He adds: "But anything that brings together such a wide range of artists, makers and fans has got to be good."
Next month, Tachyon will publish an anthology dedicated to giving readers a sense of what it means to define steampunk as a vision of "Victorian elegance and modern technology." The book includes context--surveys of steampunk in pop culture--as well as stories by Joe R. Lansdale, James P. Blaylock, Michael Chabon and others, in addition to excerpts from influential works by Michael Moorcock and Neal Stephenson.
All I can say right now is, it's a great time to be a reader.
Nick Owchar
Photo credit: New Line Cinema
Two years ago, any admirer of Gabriel García Márquez's work had to just say, OK, that's it, "Memories of My Melacholy Whores" is the last fiction we'll ever see from the maestro before he takes leave of us and floats up into the clouds.
At the time, he told a Spanish newspaper that his heart wasn't in writing another novel, though readers could certainly still look for additional installments of his memoir, which began with the publication of "Living to Tell the Tale." Now, various news sources are reporting that he's close to finishing another 250-page novel.
Our reviewer of "Memories," Gene H. Bell-Villada, said that this work possessed a "wistful sense of worlds forever gone ... an exquisitely wrought tale, and Edith Grossman's translation ably captures its autumnal beauty."
"Memories" won't be his parting gesture after all. As the Guardian nicely puts it, García Márquez has "rediscovered his muse."
Nick Owchar
Photo: Actor Hector Elizondo in 2007 film of "Love in the Time of Cholera."
Photo credit: Daniel Daza / Stone Village Pictures
 America's second-most elusive author turns 71 today, if Internet sources are to be believed.
There's something charming about Pynchon's unwillingness to jump into the churn of literary culture, as many authors feel compelled these days to blog and respond to reviews and go on "Charlie Rose" and do book tours and read at festivals and talk to NPR book shows and whatever else they can to reach new readers. Without any of these things, Pynchon has built a devoted, even cult-like following.
This weekend, in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Freebird Books & Goods held a pre-birthday bash for Pynchon fans; the lighthearted invitation sparked some controversy. Attendees on Sunday dined on items from "Gravity's Rainbow" and sent faxes (ostensibly) to the man himself.
The fax number is one trace of evidence that Pynchon lives and breathes. He's also written occasionally for the New York Times and, around the time of the publication of "Mason & Dixon" in 1997, was photographed in New York.
His most fun -- and unexpected -- engagement with popular culture was his appearance on the animated TV show "The Simpsons." Drawn with a bag over his head, Pynchon (allegedly) spoke his own lines, which included shouting to passing motorists, "Hey, over here, have your picture taken with a reclusive author! Today only, we’ll throw in a free autograph. But wait! There’s more!"
So I hold out hope that if he's watching TV (while not writing 1,000-plus-page dense and brilliant novels), he's also on the Internet. Wouldn't it be nice for Thomas Pynchon to google himself and wind up reading this birthday greeting?
Happy birthday, Thomas Pynchon!
Carolyn Kellogg
"And Tango Makes Three," a children's book about a penguin family with two dads, is again at the top of the list of the American Library Assn.'s most challenged books.
According to an article in the Advocate, the library association considers a book to be "challenged" when there has been a formal written request that "materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.''
 The association's director of its Office for Intellectual Freedom, Judith Krug, told the Associated Press: "The complaints are that young children will believe that homosexuality is a lifestyle that is acceptable. The people complaining, of course, don't agree with that.''
This bit of news coincided with a book that arrived at our offices the other day. I can only imagine what opponents of "And Tango Makes Three" will think of Joel Derfner's "Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever," published this month by Broadway Books, if it makes it to their local libraries.
The library association also points out that other books on the challenged list include Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," Philip Pullman's "The Golden Compass" and Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."
Nick Owchar
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