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The newest issue of the Paris Review is just out and, among other things, it features an extended “Art of Fiction” interview with Israeli novelist David Grossman.
Talking to Jonathan Shainin, Grossman recalls his initiation into fiction; he also discusses his work as a news anchor for Kol Israel, the state radio station, as well as the three vivid works of journalism — “The Yellow Wind,” “Sleeping on a Wire” and “Death as a Way of Life” — in which he explored the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to the chagrin of many on the Israeli side.
Yet the most affecting material here has to do with Grossman’s youngest son, Uri, who was killed in August 2006 during the Israeli offensive in Lebanon. Grossman apologizes for not wanting to talk about this (“I need him to be private,” he says. “I’m sorry”), then goes on to excavate the territory of his grief:
“It’s a painful life now. It’s like hell in slow motion, all the time. I don’t try to escape grief. I face grief in an intense way in my writing, but not only in my writing. If I have to suffer, I want to understand my situation thoroughly. It’s not an easy place to be, but so be it. If I’m doomed to it, I want — it’s a human predicament, and I want to experience it. ...
“I’m always questioning what I observe. All the time I see the cracks, wherever I look — even before what happened to me. It’s a way of seeing, and I cannot say I chose it, but I surrendered to it quite happily because I think it’s an accurate view of the fragility of life. Anything that is calm and safe seems to me like an illusion.”
David L. Ulin
When he was 15, Christopher Paolini, author of the dragon fantasies "Eragon" and "Eldest" (which have sold about 12.5 million copies worldwide), launched his writing career by dressing in costume and shlepping his first novel, self-published, around to bookstores. While other kids his age spent their after-school hours playing football or video games, he developed a fantasy realm called Alagaësia. Now in his early 20s, a bestselling author with one movie to his credit (and presumably more to follow), Paolini has been signed by Alfred A. Knopf for the next two volumes of his saga, Publishers Weekly reports.
Originally, Paolini called his epic "The Inheritance Trilogy," but with this announcement, an obvious change is in order. Forget trilogy; now it’s "a cycle." No doubt, he has plenty of imagination to fill many more books, and from a publisher’s point of view, a cycle offers something that a trilogy doesn’t: a longer revenue stream.
Earlier today Paolini presented a video message about the announcement on his website. In it, he describes the struggles of the writing process and how his concept of the third novel expanded beyond his original outline.
"Maybe instead of having just a third book...maybe the 'Inheritance Trilogy' should become the 'Inheritance Cycle.' It was a big shift in my thinking to make that decision," he explains. "But the more I thought about it, the more I realized...the story needed this much space to properly tell it."
Nick Owchar
In the latest issue of Boston Review, Nicholas Delbanco has a deft and thoughtful essay called “Lastingness: How Growing Old Shapes Aesthetic Vision” that ought to be required reading for anyone considering the relationship of creativity and time.
Delbanco, it should be said, is a contributor toThe Times’ book pages; most recently, he’s written for us about Janet Malcolm and Malcolm Lowry. (Hmm, I think I see a through line here.)
In “Lastingness,” he ruminates on the peculiar challenges of the aging artist: to avoid repetition, to maintain stamina and commitment, to persevere. “I can remember,” he writes, “when each morning seemed a burnished, shining thing, when every afternoon and night brought with it the possibility of something or someone not known before. Today there’s very little new beneath the fictive sun.”
And yet, Delbanco continues, “a writer must believe that a tale’s invented incidents are ratified by telling, that made-up characters are worth describing, worth the damning or the saving. ... The name of the shipwrecked is legion, their number beyond counting, yet every once in a great while a storied hero manages to sail between the dangers safely, and the song gets sung.”
David L. Ulin
From 1976 to 1980, novelist Joe David Bellamy directed the Fiction International/St. Lawrence University Writers’ Conference in a rustic conference center along the shore of upstate New York’s Saranac Lake. I’d never heard of it until I picked up “The Lost Saranac Interviews: Forgotten Conversations With Famous Writers” (Writer’s Digest books: 280 pp., $19.99), a collection of transcripts from the five years of the conference, which Bellamy has just edited with his wife, Connie, an English professor at Virginia Wesleyan.
Paging through this book makes me wish I could build a time machine and go back to the late 1970s, just so I could see it for myself. Partly, it’s the participants — among the bits and pieces here are interviews with Annie Dillard, Russell Banks and a very young Ann Beattie, as well as panels on “The Place of Autobiography in Fiction” with John Hawkes and Gail Godwin, and “The Pitfalls of First Novels” with Charles Simmons and E.L. Doctorow.
But equally alluring are the book’s copious photographs, which make me wonder: Is it possible that the world could ever be so young? There’s Dillard, looking like a high school kid in a baseball hat and pigtails, or Doctorow, Jayne Anne Phillips, Daniel Halpern and William Kittredge relaxing on the sun-splashed deck.
Actually, it’s less the literary talk than these pictures that keep me coming back. To see all those writers hanging out together is like getting a glimpse of some long lost, peaceful summer in which, it seems, there was nothing but time. Given our own rushed and desperate moment, that’s something to long for, and it’s what makes this unexpected volume resonate.
David L. Ulin
The Man Booker’s chairman Howard Davies isn’t the only angry critic these days. I know I’m late to this party, but if you haven’t read Melvin Bukiet’s offensive in the autumn issue of The American Scholar against what he calls "Brooklyn Books of Wonder," please do. Bukiet, who contributes to our section from time to time, attacks Dave Eggers, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer, Alice Sebold and others for creating fictions with a veneer of intellectualism and a core that is all wimpy sentimentality.
Whatever side you fall on, the argument is worth hearing. Too often these days, the only talk that seems to hover around successful books is when the author is going to get a movie deal or appear on Oprah. So it’s a relief to hear something different, even if you think Bukiet’s discussion is over the top. Looking at reactions around the Internet, it’s surprising the degree to which people are bothered by what he says. Can’t they see that this provocation is intentional, all of it calibrated by Bukiet to spark a discussion about contemporary literature?
Nick Owchar
More Hamsun: Penguin Classics’ continuing restoration project of the world’s great authors continues this month with a reissue of Knut Hamsun’s lovely novel "Growth of the Soil" (352 pp., $13 paper). The novel tells the story of Isak, a wanderer who carves a place for himself out of the unfriendly Scandinavian wilderness. It comes accompanied with a helpful introductory essay by Brad Leithauser which highlights, among other things, Hamsun’s enduring sympathy for the Nazi regime and how this has affected all subsequent assessments of him.
What shines through "Growth of the Soil," however, is a vision of a determined individual that seems unpolluted by the author’s politics. In fact, some of the most beautiful passages in this book, freshly translated by Sverre Lyngstad, have to do with the simple harmony Isak achieves with the natural world around him:
"The days were taken up with work on the soil, ever more work; he cleared new parcels of roots and rocks, plowed, manured, harrowed, chopped , and crumbled lumps of dirt with his hands and heels--always and everywhere the tiller of the soil who turned the fields into velvet carpets. He waited a few days, until it looked like rain, then he sowed the grain.... It was a solemn act on a mild, quiet evening with no wind...."
*
"Law Lit" is legit: The premise of "Law Lit" (The New Press: 296 pp., $26.95) seemed uninspiring--create a literary anthology consisting of excerpts from fictional lawyers and such. But the editor, Thane Rosenbaum, who writes for Book Review on occasion, brings the imagination of a fiction writer (which  he is, in spades) to the project. How foolish I was: I expected this would be a slog akin to Richard Posner’s sometimes tedious work on law and literature.
Despite the "love-hate relationship... between laymen and lawyers," Rosenbaum explains in a brief introduction, "we retain lawyers who bring us before the law--the refuge of last resort."
Then, with a minimum of commentary, he lets the selections speak for themselves, demonstrating in the process how thoroughly the legal system permeates Western literature. We find excerpts from one of the Western canon’s foundational texts, Sophocles’ "Oedipus, the King," as well as selections that come as no surprise--of course he includes a passage from "The Brothers Karamazov" and from Atticus Finch’s splendid, futile defense of Tom Robinson in "To Kill a Mockingbird."
But there also are lesser-known legal moments here to startle and fascinate the unwary reader. There’s the odd trial before the King and Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carroll’s "Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland" as well as Robert Frost’s poem "The Self-Seeker," in which the practice of seeking damages is cast in a murky light: "The sin is/Accepting anything before he knows/Whether he’s ever going to walk again./It smells to me like a dishonest trick." Next time someone cites Shakespeare's familiar line in "Henry VI" ("The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers"), you might tell them: Now wait! I have just the right book for you.
Nick Owchar
J.R.R. Tolkien certainly deserves recognition in the fantasy genre for creating a fully-imagined realm, but he wasn’t the only one... or the first. Way back in 1939, Fritz Leiber gave us a glimpse of Nehwon--a land combining the Old West and the Arabian Nights--with his stories of the warrior duo Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.
 Over the last year, Darkhorse Comics has made a major rehabilitation effort for Leiber’s work starting with a graphic novel adaptation of the pair’s adventures pencilled by "Hellboy's" Mike Mignola. With inks by Al Williamson and the story adapted by Howard Chaykin, the graphic novel called "Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser" seems like a bold new work, not something that had been around for more than 70 years.
There’s something special about the way stories affect you as a child; each of us surely has at least one memory of a book that enchanted our young adolescent minds like no other book. For Chaykin, it was his encounter with Leiber as a 13-year-old kid. "The Sword & Sorcery craze that [Conan creator Robert E.] Howard begat with his Cimmerian berserker brought me to inarguably the wittiest and most sophisticated writer working in the genre, Fritz Leiber," Chayin writes in the introduction.
Now, along with this Mignola/Chaykin/Williamson version, Darkhorse has published three of Leiber’s original novels (a fourth is on its way next month), grouped under the title "Lankhmar" (the name of Nehwon’s principal city) and costing $12.95 each. These books lack any illustration--except for a rough map of Nehwon to help you get your bearings. But you know what? Leiber’s originals stand entirely on their own. The novels follow Fafhrd and Gray Mouser on a desperate journey after their happy lives with the women they love are violently destroyed. The prose is swift, imaginative, and clearly has endured the test of time. There’s his pseudo-antique syntax--"Likewise I shall never lift foot toward Lankhmar again"--and plenty of dramatic setpieces to fill a young boy’s imaginings or an adult who, confronted with suburbs and strip malls every day, just wants to dream awhile of a fantasy land far from office memos, fax machines and traffic jams.
Nick Owchar
Lest this be overlooked in all the excitement over Anne Enright’s Man Booker victory this week, sales of the Man Booker finalists paints a disappointing picture of what’s going on in bookselling. In various  articles about Enright’s win, recent sales numbers of the novels on the shortlist were cited, based on tracking by Nielsen Bookscan. Here’s the report:
"On Chesil Beach" by Ian McEwan: 120,362
"The Gathering" by Anne Enright: 3,253
"Darkmans" by Nicola Barker: 11,097
"Mister Pip" by Lloyd Jones: 5,170
"The Reluctant Fundamentalist" by Mohsin Hamid: 4,425
"Animal’s People" by Indra Sinha: 2,589
It is likely that these figures account for sales in Britain alone because not all of the titles--Sinha’s and Barker’s (the cover of the forthcoming American edition is shown here), for instance--have been published in the United States. One wonders what U.S. publication of the other titles might do for sales, though it is hard to imagine it would help all that much. These sales numbers offer another perspective on recent complaints by Man Booker chairman Howard Davies about professional reviewers. You may recall that, in announcing Enright’s win, he used his speech to criticize book reviewers for treating too gently established writers when their works are disappointing. We all know that the market for serious literature is a small one--some publishers lament that it is not just small but shrinking constantly. Maybe it is easier to dispense with glowing reviews when you feel that the cause of reading is at stake? That doesn’t excuse reviewers for "going easy" on the big names, but if the publishing world seems to be in crisis, it is may be easier to lose perspective and misunderstand one’s role as a reviewer. More fallout from Davies’ comments, I’m sure, is coming.
Nick Owchar
For a recluse, Cormac McCarthy sure is starting to get around. First, there was his June 5 interview with Oprah Winfrey; now, he’s chatting with … Joel and Ethan Coen?
Yes, in the current issue of Time magazine, McCarthy sits down with the Coen brothers, whose adaptation of his 2005 novel “No Country for Old Men” hits the screen Nov. 9. Time’s Lev Grossman moderates.
What’s interesting about the conversation is that it actually seems to be a conversation, with a lot of back and forth about both art and life.
Here’s a taste:
E.C. Do you ever get, in terms of novel writing, stuff that’s too outrageous? One wouldn’t guess that you reject stuff as being too outrageous.
C.M. I don’t know, you’re somewhat constrained in writing a novel, I think. Like, I’m not a fan of some of the Latin American writers, magical realism. You know, it’s hard enough to get people to believe what you’re telling them without making it impossible. It has to be vaguely plausible.
E.C. So it’s not an impulse that you even have.
C.M. No, not really. Because I think that’s misdirected. In films you can do outrageous stuff, because hey, you can’t argue with it; there it is. But I don’t know. There’s lots of stuff that you would like to do, you know. As your future gets shorter, you have to ...
J.C. Prioritize?
C.M. Yeah. Somewhat. A friend of mine, who’s slightly older than me, told me, “I don’t even buy green bananas anymore.” [He laughs.] I’m not quite there yet, but I understood what he was saying.
David L. Ulin
I’ve always been a sucker for a small book, the kind you can read in a single sitting, a pamphlet or a chapbook, so slender, so discrete. That’s why I like Bük America, the Hollywood-based imprint that got its start in 2005 publishing pamphlets (5-by-7, 16 to 32 pages) in curated sets of six.
The point, Bük’s website tells us, is to offer “one provocative essay, short story, portfolio of pictures, collection of poems or other surprising entertainment, readable in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee.” The fourth set is just out, and its, er, büks can be purchased individually for $1.49 or together in a nifty little red cardboard “Bükcase” for $11.95.
Of course the Bük idea is a gimmick, but it’s a gimmick that works. Where else would you find, say, Bram Stoker’s “Dracula’s Guest,” Dave Hickey’s “Liberace: A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz” or “The Constitution of the United States” juxtaposed against one another, like the jumbled thoughts of the collective consciousness?
Bük’s new set of titles is equally eclectic, featuring Charles Baudelaire’s “Transcendence and Other Poems,” Bertrand Russell’s 21-word illustrated fable “History of the World in Epitome” (“Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he was capable. The end,” it reads in its entirety) and Peter Hujar’s photo collection “Animals.” Best of all is “The Telephone,” a deft little meditation on technology and style by the essayist Akiko Busch, whose most recent book is “Nine Ways to Cross a River.”
According to Bük, these pamphlets provide a way for busy people to keep their hands in, to find new ways in which to read. More to the point, they seem to fill a gap left increasingly by magazines, which rarely publish this type of material any more. Either way, there’s something smart and unexpected about this project, the way each slipcased set of pamphlets freely mixes the old and new, the classic and the cutting edge. If nothing else, it reminds us that good writing comes in all sorts of packages, and that it never goes out of style.
David L. Ulin
What’s as stunning as Anne Enright’s "The Gathering" winning this year’s Man Booker Prize? The comments made by Sir Howard Davies, Man Booker chairman, who used the award ceremony Tuesday night to attack the state of book reviewing in the U.K. Davies’ speech dominates coverage in today’s Times of London, with Enright clearly in the background--even though the piece features a prominent photo of her with a strange expression on her face (shock, perhaps, at her unexpected win?).
 Davies (left) complains that, too often, reviewers soft-pedal mediocre works by established writers, while ignoring vibrant new voices altogether. This star treatment hurts the greater cause of contemporary literature.
"There appear to be some novels where people leave their critical faculties at home," Davies said during the Booker announcement. "They decide ‘so and so is a great novelist’ or ‘an up-and-coming novelist,’ and give them the reverential treatment."
The article ends with an exercise in contrasts: Davies’ comments on recent novels by Jeanette Winterson, Ben Okri and J.M. Coetzee are set beside what British critics wrote about them. One is left with the distinct feeling that the reviews are, well, a bit too fulsome, just as Davies contends.
A piece on Okri’s "Starbook" in the Observer says the book "stands in the grand tradition of myth-making exemplified in ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ and ‘Midnight’s Children.’ " This may well be, but such grandiose comparisons are more often the stuff of press releases--not critical reviews. What is Davies’ take on the novel? "It’s more or less unreadable," he said, "but you would never catch that from the reviews because of the status that Okri has achieved."
Meanwhile, TLS editor Peter Stothard fires back at Davies on his paper’s blog, defending his choice of reviewer for Coetzee’s latest book.
Nick Owchar
Photo credit: London School of Economics
Pierre Bayard’s "How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read" (Bloomsbury: 186 pp., $19.95) comes out in the United States at the end of this month, but it’s been a hot topic in the book world for the better part of a year. In February, the New York Times called it "a survivor’s guide to life in the chattering classes," while over the summer, on the National Book Critics Circle’s blog Critical Mass, Publishers Weekly contributing editor Marcela Valdes noted: "I’m the kind of person who gets irritated if I find out someone’s spouting off about a book he or she hasn’t read.... Could it be that my irritation is  entirely misplaced?"
I don’t know what I think of Bayard’s book because (as seems only appropriate) I haven’t read it yet. But I’m nonplused, I must admit, by the idea that the chattering classes need a survivor’s guide. At the heart of such an argument is the notion of literature as a status fetish, to which we respond out of intellectual or aesthetic insecurity rather than any abiding hunger to communicate. Maybe that’s true, but not for real readers, who are generally willing to acknowledge what they have and haven’t read. How do you learn, after all, if you can’t admit that you don’t know everything, that there are works and authors with whom you’re not yet acquainted, with whom you haven’t had the opportunity (or the inclination) to connect?
To be fair, Bayard appears to have more than that in mind. What he’s arguing against is the tyranny of the canon, the belief that certain books are better for us than others and that we can benefit from them only if we read them from beginning to end. That’s a valid point, Madeline K.B. Ross noted in April in the Harvard Crimson: "While I’m skeptical of the logic of a book that argues against reading ... the idea that there is a canon of great literature that one must read in order to be cultured is daunting and unrealistic."
I agree. But if it’s the tyranny of the canon that’s the issue, why not look at it head on? Why not admit that engaged readers are always constructing their own canons, that the books that mean the most to us are generally those we discover for ourselves? Why frame reading as a parlor trick, where we learn strategies for faking it, for redirecting the conversation until it becomes a kind of game? As for me, I’d rather talk about what’s inside the books--even those I haven’t read.
David L. Ulin
The tireless S.T. Joshi--whose very fine editions of M.R. James’ tales were published by Penguin over the past year--has edited "American Supernatural Tales" (Penguin: 478 pp., $16 paper), an odd, satisfying collection that does what the best anthologies do--give us some favorites even as it rescues other names that might have been forgotten.
 What makes a supernatural tale "American"? Not much, it seems. There doesn’t seem to be any specific national criteria at work here except that these stories are written by Americans and occur in this country. Aside from that, these stories, like all good creepers, are universal--speaking to our common dread of strangers, weird cats, phone calls in the middle of the night, fear of the dark and anything else that can unsettle us.
There are familiar selections like Poe’s "The Fall of the House of Usher" (pure gothic magnificence) and Henry James’ "The Real Right Thing" (pure gothic agony to read him), and surprising ones like Charles Beaumont’s "The Vanishing American" (his name may be familiar to you from Rod Serling’s "The Twilight Zone," for which he wrote many episodes) and Clark Ashton Smith’s "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis," a clear homage to H.P. Lovecraft (his "The Call of Cthulu" is here too). Joshi also includes Joyce Carol Oates’ "Demon" as well as a short story by Stephen King, "Night Surf," which describes the strains on a small group of survivors after a viral plague has destroyed the human race.
I was sorry not to see Charles Brockden Brown represented; he’s one of the earliest American writers to proudly make a living solely from his pen. But Joshi’s rules for inclusion are strict, and Brockden Brown’s stories, he explains, give readers a situation "where the supernatural is suggested at the outset but ultimately explained away as the product of misconstrual or trickery." So, ok.
But I was also delighted by Joshi’s other choices, including T.E.D. Klein’s "The Events at Poroth Farm," in which a teacher stays at a farm in upstate New Jersey as he prepares a class on gothic literature. The character’s fevered journal entries end up reading like a brilliant "essay" on European horror stories, as he plows through "Dracula," "Melmoth the Wanderer," "The Mysteries of Udolpho" and much more while trying to make sense of the strange behavior of the felines that call the farm home. In the end, the mystery remains elusive, illustrating what the teacher-narrator complains about in Ann Radcliffe’s work: "Radcliffe’s unfortunate penchant for explaining away all her ghosts and apparitions really a mistake and a bore."
So don’t explain anything, Joshi’s fine anthology tells us, just sit back and shiver.
Nick Owchar
Hephzibah Anderson of Bloomberg News is surprised that, despite the buzz around Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize win and the forthcoming Man Booker announcement, the Frankfurt Book Fair has been dominated mainly by talk about books featuring animals.
Why animals? Well, book publishing is one of those areas that disregards what every stock investor knows: past history is no indicator of future performance. As a result, publishers are still scavenging for imitators of yesterday’s big hits such as Sara Gruen’s "Water for Elephants" and Yann Martel’s "Life of Pi." These novels, however, were such big hits because they were sleepers; part of their success had to do with the fact that no one was expecting them. So the next big bestsellers are, by that rule, way off everybody’s radar. But the dealings at Frankfurt suggest that no one is paying attention: Everyone there is still stuck in the past.
Nick Owchar
Say what you will about literary prizes, but over the last three years the National Book Award has become the cream of the crop. Last year, the National Book Foundation's fiction award went to Richard Powers' monumental "The Echo Maker." In 2005, the NBA was the first major national book prize to honor the achievement of William T. Vollmann, one of the most ambitious, if difficult, novelists working in the United States.
The 2007 NBA finalists were announced this morning, and, as expected, they're an eclectic bunch. Among the nonfiction honorees are Edwidge Danticat's blistering family memoir, "Brother, I’m Dying," and Christopher Hitchens' anti-religious diatribe, "God Is Not Great." The young people's literature list includes Sherman Alexie's first young adult novel, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian," and Brian Selznick's genre-busting "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," which tells its story half in pictures and half in words.
The fiction finalists, in particular, represent a who's who of writers to whom we ought to pay attention: Lydia Davis, for her collection of short stories, "Varieties of Disturbance"; Denis Johnson for his Vietnam War epic "Tree of Smoke"; and the woefully under-appreciated Jim Shepard, whose new collection, "Like You'd Understand, Anyway," continues his investigations into the shadow territory between mass culture and literary art. My own reservations about the Johnson novel notwithstanding, the judges who put these three writers on a single short list understand what their business is about.
On some level, I suppose, this may have to do with the debacle of the 2004 National Book Awards, when the fiction finalists were widely criticized for being too insular (only one of the five books selected had sold more than 2,000 copies). But in the end, that's probably too simplistic, for the NBA award has been no stranger to controversy over the years. In 2003, Harold Bloom created a stir when he attacked as "egregious" the decision to give Stephen King its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters; Bloom also walked out of the 1998 prize ceremony after his "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" lost the nonfiction award to Edward Ball's "Slaves in the Family."
More to the point, the foundation that administers the prizes seems to have recognized that there need be no real divide between good books and books that people actually want to read. Looking at this latest short list, you see a lot of writers who’ve been working a little bit below the radar, a lot of writers who haven't been recognized at this level of visibility before. This, I would suggest, is the true function of literary awards — to direct our attention, to push literature forward by eschewing safe choices, by identifying excellence wherever it is found.
Either way, it's a hell of a list, and a sharp rebuke to anyone who might suggest that literary culture in this country is at risk.
David L. Ulin
David Halberstam’s “The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War” has gotten a lot of attention since it came out in late September, with glowing reviews and the late author’s friends tag-teaming on a national publicity tour. Yet overlooked amid the hoopla is the reissue of a lesser-known Halberstam book about Southeast Asia — his 1971 mini-portrait, “Ho” (Rowman & Littlefield: 118 pp., $16.95 paper). An impressionistic look at onetime North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, this is less a biography than a political meditation, an inquiry into one man’s ability to affect not just the history of his country but also that of the world. “And how long do you Americans want to fight?” Halberstam quotes North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong toward the end of this potent little volume. “One year, two years, three years, five years, ten years, twenty years ... we will be happy to accommodate you.”
These days, of course, it’s impossible to read such a statement without relating it to current events. The power of “Ho,” however, is its specificity as a piece of history. Yes, Halberstam means to tell us, history offers lessons; we must learn from them or repeat them, as George Santayana famously said. But Ho was very much a man of his moment, a peasant for whom insurrection was, Halberstam suggests, inherently practical, a way to give his people back their land. “My portrait was of Ho not as a great Marxist theoretician, but as a nationalist-pragmatist, a man who was most assuredly a Marxist, but was first and foremost a nationalist and a patriot,” the author wrote in a preface to this new edition, completed just a month before his death on April 23. Here, we get a glimpse of Halberstam at his most revealing — an astute observer who could always see the forest for the trees.
David L. Ulin
Evidently bowing to public concern about its racist content, Little, Brown has dropped the controversial title “Tintin in the Congo” from its fall list and its planned 24-volume box set of the beloved mid-20th-century stories about the intrepid globe-trotting adventurer.
Little, Brown publicist Melanie Chang didn’t explain why the book had been dropped from the fall release schedule, but she told Publishers Weekly that it was being pulled from the commemorative set because “given the controversy surrounding the Congo title, we felt including it in the box set would eclipse the true intention of the collection, which is to showcase Hergé’s extraordinary art and his remarkable contribution to the graphic arts.”
The Borders chain had already decided in July that it would follow the lead of its British bookstores and place the book on adult-content shelves because of its colonial-era depiction of black Africans who resemble monkeys and speak pidgin English.
“Tintin in the Congo,” first published in 1931, was Belgian artist Hergé’s second book in a series chronicling the adventures of a quick-witted young reporter and his fluffy white dog, Snowy. Hergé, the pen name of Belgian cartoonist Georges Rémi, actually redrew the book in 1946 to excise references to the Congo as a Belgian colony. But it was not reprinted in Britain until recently because it still contained such images as a black woman bowing to Tintin and saying, “White man very great. ... White mister is big juju man!”
When the book was released there earlier this year, Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality denounced it for depicting black Africans as “savage natives” who “look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles.”
In light of the controversy, the U.S. publisher promised in July that it would try to “contextualize” the stereotypes Europeans had about black Africans at the time. Could that have proved harder than anyone thought?
Little, Brown says it still plans to reissue “Tintin in the Land of the Soviets” and “Tintin and Alph-Art” in November as part of a centenary celebration of the author’s work. But the publisher is delaying release of the box set to coincide with a Tintin movie planned by directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson. “We felt it best to time the publication of the box set closer to the release of what is sure to be a spectacular film,” Chang said.
Exactly when that will be is unclear. The duo only just signed British TV writer Steven Moffat (“Doctor Who”) to adapt three Tintin stories for the screen, Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported Tuesday.
All three will be shot in 3-D, using the same motion-capture style Jackson used to create Gollum in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. According to Variety, Spielberg finally succeeded last year in his quarter-century quest to secure screen rights to the Tintin series. Spielberg and Jackson haven’t revealed which three of Hergé’s titles they’ll film.
Kristina Lindgren
On Oct. 3, 1957 — 50 years ago this week — Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl and Other Poems” was found to  have “redeeming social importance” by San Francisco Municipal Judge Clayton W. Horn in a landmark civil case. “Howl” had been impounded by U.S. customs officials and its publisher, City Lights Books, had been charged with obscenity; Horn’s decision helped pave the way for a much more open culture, in which dissenting viewpoints, language and aesthetics might become part of the mainstream.
And yet, five decades later, it looks as if we’re back to fighting at least some of the same battles, even where an acknowledged classic such as “Howl” is concerned. Earlier this week, rather than air a 1959 recording of Ginsberg reading his poem, New York radio station WBAI-FM chose to stream the material on the Internet. The logic? WBAI and its parent organization, the Pacifica Radio network, were concerned that the Federal Communications Commission, which in 2005 was given congressional approval to significantly increase penalties for indecency, would level “draconian ... fines” that might potentially lead to bankruptcy.
It doesn’t take a genius to see the real obscenity here: the use of amorphous standards of “decency “and “decorum” to restrict diversity of speech. The fact that it involves “Howl” — long a symbol of free expression — only adds insult to irony. Haven’t we already worked this out as a culture? Don’t we have more pressing issues to take on? Apparently, this is how we honor an American masterpiece, by keeping it off the public airwaves, even though it’s been read there many times over the last half a century.
David L. Ulin
In considering Rajaa Alsanea's novel "Girls of Riyadh," the London Times Literary Supplement's reviewer complained, among other things, about the book's use of tedious clichés in describing the world of young Saudi women. (Our reviewer, Judith Freeman, found the book to be entertaining, but she too found the language uneven in its quality.)
A letter in the Sept. 28 issue of the TLS from Marilyn Booth, who translated the novel into English for Penguin Press, is a disclaimer of sorts, explaining what may have really gone on. Reviewer Stephen Henighan, she writes, "is correct about the English text's shortcomings.... When I submitted the translation to Penguin ... I was informed that the author intended to rewrite it, and thereafter I was kept entirely out of the process. The resulting text, with its clichéd language, erasures of Arabic idioms I had translated, and unnecessary footnotes, does not reflect the care that I took to produce a lively, idiomatic translation."
That didn’t cause Booth to strip her name from the text. It's there on the title page, beneath Alsanea's. Hypocrisy? I don’t think so. She spent enough time on the project that, as botched as she says the final result was, she probably felt her sweat and effort still deserved a mention going beyond the acknowledgments page.
The most troubling thing about her letter, however, is what she suggests about the conditions under which many translators work today. Booth, director of the University of Illinois’ program in South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, characterizes it as a demeaning, combative relationship with publishing houses: "Perhaps the larger scandal, though, is that for some publishers and writers, literary translators remain derivative servitors rather than creative artists, a notion fostered by a long tradition within Euro-American letters of the writer as solitary genius and translation as a mechanical exercise."
Nick Owchar
With profits down across the publishing industry, it's no surprise that the Independent Book Publishers Assn. has come out against the online sale of book galleys.
Normally, no one really cares about what happens with galley copies which, in case you're unclear about this, refers to pre-publication books used for various promotional reasons. Booksellers look at these advance reading copies to decide what to buy for their stores and book sections like ours use them to assign reviews and plan schedules.
Even though most galleys come with some sort of warning — something like "any sale or distribution to the public is a violation of the law" — some invariably land in the hands of the reading public. Stores or such online marketplaces as AbeBooks (which is mentioned by the publisher’s group) make it possible for book lovers to buy a cheap advance copy — with the added thrill of having a favorite author weeks, even months, ahead of the superstore down the block.
But there's also a lucrative market for them among collectors who can turn a buck on these advance copies. You see some of these people at the annual BookExpo America walking away from booths with multiple copies of a galley that are likely to find their way onto EBay. (C'mon, they're not really taking them for a reading club!) These folks aren’t interested in galleys as literature, they're just collectibles — and the book association's resolution seems directed mostly at them.
It's a shame, though, if superb online book resources like AbeBooks — and some readers with precious few dollars to spare — are hurt by this.
Nick Owchar
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