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In the fall books issue of the New Yorker there’s a lengthy conversation between Philip Roth and Hermione Lee about Roth’s new novel "Exit Ghost." As has been much reported, "Exit Ghost" will be the last book to feature Nathan Zuckerman, the literary alter ego who has appeared in nine of Roth’s novels, beginning with 1979’s "The Ghost Writer." Asked why he’s letting the character go, Roth  doesn’t really have an answer; rather, he talks about why he’s kept him around for so many years. Still, Roth ponders, "Will I miss him? No. I’m curious to see who and what will replace him"--which suggests that, in keeping with his productivity over the last decade or so, the 74-year-old Roth has no intention of slowing down.
Roth’s immensely thoughtful on a host of issues--novel-writing, his reading habits, the interplay of history and literature--although unfortunately, we can’t link to the interview; it’s not available online. (To hear Roth in his own words, give a listen to his Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross, which aired on Sept. 25.)
But more than anything, it’s his ideas on the role of fiction that resonate. "I’m not out to make fiction into a political statement," Roth says about "Exit Ghost," which takes place just before and after the 2004 presidential election. "Rather, I’m out to do what fiction and only fiction does: to portray in a sustained narrative those who did make political statements. I want to present in detail a strong political moment in our recent communal life, I want to try to understand what’s what, to be contiguous not with my biases or anyone else’s but with reality."
David L. Ulin
Cellist, Guggenheim fellow and award-winning author Mark Salzman will be honored tonight as the winner of the city of West Hollywood’s first Algonquin Literary Award.
Salzman gets the nod for the prize, given in honor of the late Dorothy Parker, one of the famed literary lunchers of the Algonquin Round Table, because, like Parker, he is “a wonderful example of a writer who has made a significant impact on his generation and the world of literature,” City Councilman John Heilman said. Salzman’s books include “True Notebooks: A Writer’s Year at Juvenile Hall” (2003) and “The Soloist” (1994).
The 7 p.m. ceremony at the Pacific Design Center costs $20 a person, with proceeds of the event, which is intended to be annual, going toward PEN in the Classroom, a writing program for underserved high school students in Southern California.
The event kick-starts Sunday’s sixth annual West Hollywood Book Fair, which will feature more than 300 authors on panels, giving readings and signing their books from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Attendees include John W. Dean, Susan Estrich, Gina Nahai, Lisa Fugard, Cecil Castellucci, Samantha Dunn, Alex Espinoza, Jessica Abel, Tara Ison and Will Beall.
The festival is at West Hollywood Park, 647 N. San Vicente Blvd.
Kristina Lindgren
One often hears writers complain about book tours. Traveling constantly, facing small crowds, having the dream of the next book interrupted by the need to promote this one--it’s all too much. Not to mention the unpredictability of facing the public--whom will you meet? Friends or foes?--which can make the experience more adventurous than some authors would like. Two pieces earlier this week touched on that, one in the Baltimore Sun and the other a satirical article on the Spoof about Alan Greenspan’s "rock star status" as he tours for "The Age of Turbulence." (Please remember, that piece is a fake!)
I’d expected to find poet and novelist Carol Muske-Dukes, back in L.A. this week to promote her novel "Channeling Mark Twain," just as weary about book touring as everyone else. Instead, she felt energized by the opportunity to discuss with live audiences a book that has eluded her for 20 years.
"I had the ideas for this book for a long time," she said before Wednesday night’s reading at Dutton’s Brentwood Bookstore. "But I was surprised with how long it took to find the right means of expressing them."
Muske-Dukes’ novel follows the experiences of Holly Mattox, a young professor teaching poetry to prison inmates and struggling to find her own place in the literary world of 1970s Manhattan. Part of the problem with writing it, she said, was that she saw two separate projects--one about making a literary life in the 1970s and another about teaching poetry in a prison. Then, the reasons for keeping them separated faded away; hey, she thought, I can do what I want, or, as one of her characters declares, "I get the whole all."
Muske-Dukes told the audience how the novel embodies her own struggle between a commitment to art and a commitment to social activism. Nothing, she said, challenged her notions of being a poet in the modern world more than teaching female inmates on Rikers Island, which she did for many years.
"There’s an urgency there, for these women need poetry to keep body and mind together," she said. "I went there thinking I was the instructor. I didn’t realize I’d be the one who was taught so much."
Next month, she will begin a new poetry course for inmates at Manhattan’s Bayview Correctional Facility. She said she hopes to bring along some young poets ready for the teaching challenge.
Her reading, punctuated by many asides, afforded a special learning opportunity. During her research, she said, she found that Mark Twain frequented brothels during his years as a riverboat captain. This leads to the claim, by one inmate character in the novel, that she is related to the great American novelist. (That is where the book’s title comes from.)
"Twain said he only went to the brothels to drink and get into fights," Muske-Dukes said, grinning. "I’m sure we can imagine other dalliances, can’t we?"
The crowd laughed. There were also laughs as the author read the novel’s opening, in which Holly encounters a group of pimps in the waiting area at Rikers Island.
Intrigued by some of the poets Holly encounters, I asked Muske-Dukes on whom they might be based. (She acknowledges, after all, that the book is semi-autobiographical.) The magisterial, exiled Russian poet Joseph Kyrilikov? Easy: Joseph Brodsky. And the stuffy former poet laureate Baylor Drummond? Muske-Dukes said that after Mark Strand read the manuscript, he told her with amusement: "I hope I don’t act like that now!" As for Sam Glass, the literary magazine editor who cozies up to Holly ... well, she says, some questions are better left unanswered.
The most memorable part of the reading, though, was Muske-Dukes’ closing words. She read from a poem by a female character, based on someone she had actually encountered, whose face has been disfigured by her pimp:
...So he say: You never look good to no
Man again. And so right--I look no good
To him that other day when I shot him once
Then got the gun up under his chin.
Slick? I say--Better smile one last for me.
’Cause now you get to have a new Face too.
The atmosphere in the room was charged. Somebody gasped. I guess book tours do have their advantages.
Nick Owchar
 Lawrence Ferlinghetti turned 88 this year, but that doesn’t mean he’s calming down. His latest book, "Poetry as Insurgent Art" (New Directions: 90 pp. $12.95), is a nifty little call-to-arms espousing the radical position that poetry not only matters, but also might actually save us in the end. "If you would be a poet," Ferlinghetti writes, "create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic.... If you would be a great poet, strive to transcribe the consciousness of the race." Very Joycean, those final sentiments, but then Ferlinghetti’s always been a modernist, albeit a modernist who knows how to get up and dance.
"Poetry as Insurgent Art" is, in its author’s words, "still a work-in progress," consisting largely of writings from the 1970s and before. Don’t let that put you off, though; his insights are as relevant as they ever were. "Modern poetry," he warns, "is prose because it doesn’t have much duende, dark spirit of earth and blood, no soul of dark song, no passion musick. Like modern sculpture, it loves the concrete. Like minimal art, it minimizes emotion in favor of understated irony and implied intensity. As such it is the perfect poetry for technocratic man. But how often does this poetry rise above the mean sea level of his sparkling plain? Ezra Pound once decanted his opinion that only in times of decadence does poetry separate itself from music. And this is the way the world ends, not with a song but a whimper."
David L. Ulin
 To the despair of many trees, there are plenty of big books arriving this fall, including Ken Follett’s "World Without End," the followup to his 1989 bestseller "The Pillars of the Earth." It is a whompstomper of a book, measuring in at 988 pages and returning readers to the same medieval cathedral-building period of the previous book. Aside from Follett (and that recent novel about a boy-wizard, what’s his name?), many of the fat books now publishing come from long-since-departed authors. Among these, Ecco and Viking are presenting dueling translations of Tolstoy’s "War and Peace" while Overlook’s publication of John Cowper Powys’ massive Arthurian epic, "Porius," coincides with that publisher’s publication of "Descents of Memory," Morine Krissdóttir’s biography of the enigmatic novelist.
The one book, however, that deserves the most attention here is "The Last Cavalier," a forgotten novel by Alexander Dumas discovered by Dumas scholar Claude Schopp at the Bibliotheque National in Paris. Written as a newspaper serial by the ailing Dumas, the story was interrupted by Dumas’ death in 1870.
Schopp collected and edited the serial into a novel that appeared in France in 2005; in the United States, it is now being published (in a translation by Lauren Yoder) by Pegasus Press, a small New York-based publisher that is quickly turning into a force to be reckoned with--check out their website.
The story follows the life of Count Hector de Sainte Hermine, imprisoned by Napoleon Bonaparte for his royalist allegiance. Unfinished as it is, this novel isn’t a mere "Edwin Drood": The last Dickens manuscript barely establishes scenes, characters and motivations before it cruelly stops, leaving us without any sense of where Dickens might have taken it. "The Last Cavalier" amounts to more than 700 pages of incident and adventure, giving us a rich taste of the melodrama that stirred readers of Le Moniteur universel each morning as they looked for the next daily installment. Reviews have been unanimous in praising "The Last Cavalier": The novel is a reminder that readers are always willing to make time for epic storytelling when the narrative is in the hands of a master. Pegasus Books has done a real service to world literature by giving us an English translation of this once-forgotten work.
Nick Owchar
When a book is on an award juggernaut -- like Cormac McCarthy’s "The Road" -- the process of awarding it more literary prizes seems predestined. How could the writer not win this or that award? And yet, no book has "inevitable winner" stamped on it: Marianne Wiggins’ essay for us earlier this year, about being a National Book Award judge, told us so--so too does Giles Foden’s explanation earlier this week in the Guardian about the decisions behind this year’s Man Booker shortlist.
The piece by Foden (author of "The Last King of Scotland") is meant to illuminate the process--and, I suspect, to enable him to vent his grief about failing to get favorites of his own, like Pat Barker’s "Life Class," into the final lineup. But it only makes the process sound confusing. Much has been said about the major names that missed the finalist cut--J.M. Coetzee, Michael Ondaatje, Doris Lessing and Barker--but I’m more intrigued by Foden’s mention, almost in passing, of all the books he admired that never stood a chance. Why is Benjamin Markovits’ "Imposture," a story of Lord Byron’s doctor, John Polidori, not worth consideration? Or Justin Cartwright’s imagining of the plot to assassinate Hitler, "The Song Before It Is Sung"? Not big enough in scale or concept? Why not?
"When five people have to agree on 13 books from a 110-strong original entry," Foden cautions, "there are bound to be casualties."
A depressing side note: The Nota Bene column in the Sept 14 Times Literary Supplement reports that, Ian McEwan’s "On Chesil Beach" aside, the only other book on the shortlist that has sold more than 1,000 copies is Mohsin Hamid’s "The Reluctant Fundamentalist." Will being a nominee make a difference? Wait and see.
Maybe the selection of the winner should be left in the hands of the British gaming site Ladbrokes--they give Lloyd Jones’ "Mister Pip" the edge over McEwan!
Nick Owchar
That’s the American Library Assn.’s mantra this year for Banned Books Week, the group’s 26th annual celebration of the freedom to read. The weeklong event begins Sept. 29 at thousands of libraries and bookstores across the nation.
“Part of living in a democracy means respecting each other’s differences and the right of all people to choose for themselves what they and their families read,” Judith F. Krug, director of the library group’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said in a statement. “We must remain vigilant to assure that would-be censors don’t threaten the very basis of our democracy.”
In 2006, there were 546 reported formal requests, or challenges, to remove certain books from library shelves, most (61%) by parents and most (71%) at school libraries, according to the library group’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, which has been compiling book challenges made in the United States since 1990. Offensive language, sexual content, violence and mention of drugs are the reasons most often cited.
Topping the 2006 list of books receiving the most challenges to school and public libraries was “And Tango Makes Three,” a tale of two male penguins parenting an egg from a mixed-sex penguin couple that critics decried as anti-family and pro-homosexuality. Toni Morrison’s novels “Beloved” and “The Bluest Eye” made the list, as did Cecily von Ziegesar’s “Gossip Girl” series and Carolyn Mackler’s “The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things.”
Off the list this year are the usual targets: “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger, “Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain. But the most challenged books of the 21st century remain J.K. Rowling’s enormously popular “Harry Potter” books.
“Not every book is right for every reader,” said Loriene Roy, president of the American Library Assn. “Libraries serve users from a variety of backgrounds — that’s why libraries need, and have — such a wide range of materials. Individuals must have the right to choose what materials are suitable for themselves and their families.”
The theme of Banned Books Week 2007 is “Ahoy! Treasure Your Freedom to Read and Get Hooked on a Banned Book.” Libraries and bookstores around the country are expected to mount exhibits and schedule readings and special events through Oct. 6. Other campaign sponsors are the American Booksellers Assn., the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the Assn. of American Publishers, the American Society of Journalists and Authors and the National Assn. of College Stores.
Kristina Lindgren
The book publishing industry today operates much as it did in the early 1900s, except the role of editor Maxwell Perkins usually is played by someone like Sarah Silverman. Agents and editors still want to see submitted work on paper, so one of the industry’s quaintest and most onerous remnants is the “slush pile” — the mound of unsolicited manuscripts that accumulates in depressing drifts in an agent or editor’s inbox. Somebody has to read them, usually an underpaid assistant fresh out of college, and write a rejection letter that creates the illusion that the writer’s precious work was read and thoroughly evaluated before being tossed aside like a plate of medieval table scraps.
True, once in a great while a story surfaces that gives hope to all. Publicists love to claim that some languishing manuscript was plucked from the slush, noticed and published to great acclaim, its lowly “Seabiscuit”-like pedigree stoking the dreams of writers everywhere. It does happen. The bad news: It probably won’t happen to you.
That said, “award-winning” author C.J. Lyons — her awards were for romance novels; her first medical suspense novel debuts in April — has some tips. She occasionally hosts an online workshop called “Break Free of the Slush Pile: Queries, Pitches and Hooks.” It’s a chance to learn from someone who got her first two contracts via the slush pile.
C.J. sent along some tips for slush pile avoidance. Chief among them:
“Write the damn book! Agents and editors report that 80% of the manuscripts they request never show up on their doorstep — or if they do, it’s months to years later. Why? Because the writer pitched the manuscript before it was finished. Think elephants have long memories? It’s nothing compared to an agent’s or editor’s memory of the time you wasted.”
Martin J. Smith
Smith is a senior editor for the L.A. Times’ West magazine.
Bright and shiny: "Bright Shiny Morning" is not only the title of James Frey’s first novel (set in Southern California), which HarperCollins will publish next year. It probably also describes how the fallen memoirist felt waking up on the day after the contract was completed. It’s rumored to be a very lucrative book deal, though no dollar amount has yet come out; undoubtedly the publisher is anticipating that a large segment of the 1.7 million people who bought "A Million Little Pieces" in paperback will give this official work of fiction a try--if only out of curiosity.
Clash of titans: How is this possible? Even though J.K. Rowling has influenced millions upon millions of readers, Roald Dahl is still ahead of her in the "favorite children’s author" category." Rowling’s not just behind Dahl: She’s in fourth place! C.S. Lewis was ranked second, and Peter Pan creator J.M. Barrie was third.
The British entertainment channel ITV3 conducted the poll in preparation for Roald Dahl Day, which is observed throughout the United Kingdom today but especially in Cardiff, Wales, where Dahl was born on Sept. 13, 1916. ITV3 reports that its poll surveyed people "aged up to 34" for the survey. No mention of the survey size, though, or what sort of questions were asked. Here are the top 10 results:
1. Roald Dahl
2. C.S. Lewis
3. J.M. Barrie
4. J.K. Rowling
5. Anthony Horowitz
6. Jacqueline Wilson
7. Dr. Seuss
8. Philip Pullman
9. Francesca Simon
10. Enid Blyton
Nick Owchar
It's not just students who are eagerly anticipating J.K. Rowling's arrival in Los Angeles next month. The adults were pretty revved up as well about Monday's announcement of the 40 schools that each will send 40 lucky Harry Potter fans to an Oct. 15 event at the Kodak Theatre.
Rowling will read from "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," take questions and sign a book for each student. (Los Angeles will be one of only four U.S. stops on Rowling's "Open Book Tour" to promote the final book in the blockbuster series.)
The announcement of which L.A. Unified schools were chosen (randomly, it turns out, by local district administrators) was made at Nobel Middle School in Northridge, where assistant principal Rebecca Huffman welcomed the hubbub.
"A lot of the teachers are as excited as the kids," Huffman said, adding that teachers at her school will hold an essay contest to choose the attendees. Huffman expects several hundred entries from among the school's 2,300 students, and she added that, as a reader of six or so books a week, she welcomes the excitement. "I think any kind of reading ... helps in their education."
Over at Berendo Middle School in the L.A.'s West Adams area, principal Bob Bilovsky echoed Huffman's thrill at his school being chosen. Like his fellow 39 fellow principals, Bilovsky has an automatic invite to the event and was pretty excited at the prospect of being at Rowling's reading.
"I marvel at this person's imagination," Bilovsky said, adding that he looks forward "to being able to meet someone who created this whole world." And, since he gets to take two teachers or administrators with him, he said, "everyone wants to be my best friend."
Orli Low
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doesn’t really have an answer; rather, he talks about why he’s kept him around for so many years. Still, Roth ponders, "Will I miss him? No. I’m curious to see who and what will replace him"--which suggests that, in keeping with his productivity over the last decade or so, the 74-year-old Roth has no intention of slowing down.
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Book Editor, Los Angeles Times
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