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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...."
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"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
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