Rowling’s magnificent seven

The last time I saw a book treated with as much care as J.K. Rowling’s "The Tales of Beedle the Bard," I was at the Huntington Library in San Marino, looking at a display for the Gutenberg Bible. But wait, a distinction is necessary here: The experiences are hardly the same. The security surrounding that bible, a precious relic from the dawn of the printing age, hardly compares with the treatment given to a book of fairy tales handcopied and illustrated by the bestselling author.

"Tales" was referenced in the final Harry Potter novel, and Rowling gave its creation a personal touch, making the books by hand--take that, Gutenberg!--and stopping after making her seventh (Gutenberg to Rowling: "Is that it?"). One of the books was auctioned at Sotheby’s this week for $4 million to Internet retailer Amazon.com, all of which will go to a children’s relief organization co-founded by Rowling.

Now that the book is in Amazon’s gentle, gloved hands, you can get a tantalizing glimpse of that auction copy--bound in leather and decorated with silver, moonstones and skulls--as well as a synopsis of one of the tales, "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot." (Amazon promises to reveal more about the book’s contents soon in what must be one of the shrewdest efforts to keep Web traffic pouring into the site).

So far, customer discussion at the website centers on an obvious question: "What about us?" Despite the fact that the book is an extremely limited edition, it is hard to imagine not seeing it one day, either officially published or in bootleg form.

Nick Owchar

Reminiscing about Doris Lessing ...

Thirteen years before Doris Lessing was named the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature this October, she paid her first visit to Southern California. Although her engagements were in Los Angeles, the Lannan Foundation had arranged for her to stay at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Pasadena, apparently because she was eager to visit the Norton Simon and Huntington art galleries. My wife and I, both longtime students of her work, arranged to have lunch with her at the hotel immediately after her arrival from Washington, D.C.

Looking around the plush environment, Lessing indicated that she had stayed in a similar hostelry in the nation's capital: all peaches and cream, she said, not entirely approvingly. It would soon become apparent that, metaphorically speaking, such comfort wasn’t altogether her cup of tea. She was clearly someone who liked to stir things up, someone who thrived on contention. She was impossible to agree with — even when you did! Her escort from Lannan (which supports the work of contemporary writers and artists) was the most diplomatic of people, but the more emollient she tried to be, the more determined Lessing seemed to roil the conversational waters. Having seen this at such a low-key occasion, I was perhaps less surprised than most to observe Lessing’s grumpy and ungracious reaction to receiving the prize she had so long been denied.

Back in 1994, Lessing seemed to believe that everyone still thought of her as a militant communist and feminist, even when anyone who had read her work in recent years — and all three of her luncheon companions most certainly had — knew this to be no longer true, if indeed it ever had been. She was clearly hoping for a fight, but unfortunately for her, everyone at lunch was too much in tune with her for things to go that way.

Lessing's deliberately difficult behavior was quite at odds with her physical presence and demeanor. Making no concessions to appear youthful, she was an attractive and pleasant-looking woman despite her heavyset physique and gray hair, which she wore in the simplest of buns. Her strikingly blue eyes shone from a profoundly weather-beaten face, as wrinkled as W.H. Auden's. Her voice was mellifluous, beautifully modulated, with no trace of the harsh accent of colonial Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where she grew up, with its characteristic very short i's.

The one subject about which Lessing was not at all contrarian was food. Although she had just got off a plane, she was eager to try local dishes and discussed knowledgeably and enthusiastically the varieties of lobster, one of which she consumed with gusto and evident enjoyment.

Lessing, 88, who won’t be attending today's ceremonies in Stockholm, will miss out on those luscious Scandinavian delicacies at the banquet. She has said that her doctors have advised her not to travel, and indeed she has been hospitalized recently with back problems. But it's not a long flight from London to Stockholm, and one can even go quite easily, and quickly in a more comfortable fashion and comfortably by boat across the North Sea and then arrive by train. Having had the opportunity to size up her character firsthand, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Lessing is getting a certain satisfaction from making the Nobel people come to her. (The Nobel foundation has said it will deliver the $1.5-million prize to her in London.) The woman I know will definitely relish being the center of attention, rather than one among a group, however select, when the glittering gold medal is presented on her home turf.

— Martin Rubin

Martin Rubin, a frequent contributor to The Times Book Review, is the author of "Sarah Gertrude Millin: A South African Life."

Promoting words with deeds ...

Eager to foster literary community service, independent publisher Dzanc Books has awarded its inaugural prize for community service to an Emerson College graduate student for her proposal to teach creative writing in Boston area prisons.

Laura van den Berg, editor of the Massachusett college’s literary and arts journal, the Redivider, will receive half the $5,000 prize in January, when she begins her community service project, and the remainder when it is completed.

Van den Berg, 24, who is at work on a short-story collection tentatively titled "What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us," was among 160 applicants. Her "commitment to working with prisoners and helping Dzanc put together a written anthology from these workshops, coupled with her remarkable writing, moved her consistently and undeniably to the front of the list," author Steven Gillis, co-founder of the Michigan-based nonprofit publishing house, said in announcing the prize.

Van den Berg, a native of central Florida, said in a statement that she was "astonished and deeply honored" to have been selected, and called Gillis and Dzanc editors Dan Wickett and Keith Taylor "wonderful champions of literary fiction .... It's a huge gift to have the opportunity to work with them."

Dzanc Books, started by Gillis and Wickett in 2006 to champion writers whose work doesn't fit the marketing categories of for-profit presses, launched their annual competition earlier this year to encourage working writers who are also interested in bettering their communities. Dzanc also helps to develop school educational programs, workshops and writers-in-residence programs.

Kristina Lindgren

A master’s with moxie

We like the sound of this: a new master of arts program at CalArts in aesthetics and politics. And knowing CalArts, they don’t mean a program on designing campaign posters. They mean: Who controls the narrative? Who decides what’s good art that deserves money? How can we develop innovative strategies for public conversation?

They mean, and I quote from their announcement, a program that "aims to become a pole of attraction for students, artists, and scholars interested in the type of theorizing--a characteristic of continental thought--that contextualizes aesthetic and political phenomena within a dynamic space in which social meanings are generated, renewed and contested." Wow.

Susan Salter Reynolds

A healthy dose of favoritism: Book Review’s picks of 2007

It’s that time of year again, when reviewers and the media in general make their lists of noteworthy books. At Book Review, we’re no different; this Sunday, we release our list of favorite books for 2007. As we did last year, we’ve chosen 50 titles--25 in fiction and poetry, and 25 in nonfiction. We’ve also asked our online columnists to cite favorite mysteries, science fiction, children’s books and paperbacks.

One of the questions that often comes up around favorite books lists is the criteria for selection--how do these books get on the list? The process is different everywhere, but for us, it’s a mix of intention and serendipity. In the first place, we don’t look at other lists until ours is compiled; we don’t want to be influenced. In addition, we restrict our list to books that we’ve reviewed, which narrows the pool a little bit, although we review something in the vicinity of 1,000 books a year. Last, we use our original review as a guide; if it’s negative, that book doesn’t make the list.
Then we hash it out.

The way it works is this: Everybody on the Book Review staff comes up with his or her own set of selections. All of this goes into a master list. Some are obvious choices--Tim Weiner’s "Legacy of Ashes," for instance, or Judith Freeman’s "The Long Embrace." Others we argue over, going back and forth, discussing why a book worked for us or why it didn’t, making a case pro or con. The key is to recognize that all these lists are fundamentally subjective, which makes the whole experience much more fun. That’s why we call our list "Favorite Books" as opposed to "Best Books"; who’s to say, after all, what the best book truly is, or even if such a designation is relevant at all?

There’s also another subjective component at work--the size of the list. Our decision to settle on 50 titles is partly a concession to space, but it’s also meant to keep things from getting out of hand. If the list gets too long, it starts to blur, to become predictable, unspecialized. Better to err on the side of concision, even though this means certain books that might have made a longer list are inevitably left off.

And yet, this year, as in other years, we’ve highlighted some unexpected choices: Anders Nilsen’s "Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow," for instance, a profoundly moving experiment in graphic storytelling, and Irene Dische’s novel "The Empress of Weehawken."

What have we left off? There isn’t room to name them all, of course, but there are some notable omissions: Philip Roth’s "Exit Ghost," for instance, and Denis Johnson’s "Tree of Smoke," which won a National Book Award.

You can argue with that--and, in fact, you’re welcome to, for this is the ultimate role of the favorite books list. It’s a conversation-starter, not a definitive statement of what’s important, and when it works, it opens up a discussion between critic and reader. There are choices here that some of us at Book Review disagree with, both in terms of what has made the list and what has not. But that, too, is in the nature of the enterprise, which is, in the end, a matter of enthusiasm, an expression of the reader in us all.

David L. Ulin

Road maps for Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials"

One reason for the furor over "The Golden Compass" is that author Philip Pullman’s entire "His Dark Materials" trilogy has been mislabeled as young adult fantasy. This description is somewhat true, but as readers plunge into the story, they’re suddenly confronted by adult-size concepts of philosophy, string theory, consistorial courts, a Virgil-inspired underworld and an extinct papacy (once ruled by Pope John Calvin).

Huh? Isn’t this a kids’ story about talking animals and balloon rides? What’s going on here?

Below you’ll find a sampling of new books that explain what's going on in the trilogy. One of the most interesting points made here--see the entry for Claire Squires--has to do with an increasing number of "children’s" stories that are in fact "crossover books." Pullman is hardly the only author blurring genre lines today. Readers approaching these works with traditional expectations are bound to be shocked--much as, I imagine, someone is stunned when they open the Brothers Grimm and don’t find the Disneyfied fairy tales they were raised on.

If you’re interested in learning what Pullman’s trilogy is really about, a good place to start--aside from the books themselves--might be one of the following:

"The Rough Guide to Philip Pullman’s 'His Dark Materials' " by Paul Simpson (Rough Guide: $12.99 paper): This is a glossy little package containing overviews of the trilogy, Pullman’s other books and the new "Golden Compass" movie that has the slight whiff of a press release worked up into book form. Some features are silly (what are Pullman’s favorite foods? Cheese and ginger cake. Color? Green.) but others are intriguing, such as the inclusion of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting "Lady With an Ermine," which Simpson says was influential in Pullman’s imagining of daemons. When you see the painting, you may imagine it as I did: as Lyra and Pan dressed in Renaissance attire. In compact, very accessible form, Simpson presents the case for why he thinks Pullman’s trilogy is "arguably more ambitious than the fictional sagas by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis it is inevitably compared to."

"Philip Pullman: Master Storyteller" by Claire Squires (Continuum: $14.95): Published last year, this book is by far the best at explaining the literary and religious aspects of the trilogy. Squires also explains in a chapter that helps decode the current controversy over the movie-- "What Type of Story is ‘His Dark Materials?’ "--how the works of Pullman and others are "fostering a changing perception of children’s literature ... crossing and redrawing their boundaries." Among her other examples of crossover books are, not surprisingly, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and Mark Haddon’s "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time." Though Pullman "uses tropes that reoccur in writing for children," Squires explains, his works have also managed to defy simplistic categorization. Once the current movie controversy cools (will it?), it may be time for a fresh discussion of how genres are defined and packaged. Quick, somebody call the marketing department.

"Discovering ‘The Golden Compass’ " by George Beahm (Hampton Roads: $16.95): All the guides in this list overlap, and Beahm’s book is much like "The Rough Guide"--a light, swift general introduction. But the book also includes an interesting autobiographical sketch Pullman has written--"I Have a Feeling This All Belongs to Me"--as well as illustrations of gadgets and technology from the parallel worlds where Lyra and other characters live. With help from illustrator Tim Kirk, Beahm explores the many gadgets and inventions of everyday life in the book--anbaric parks, zeppelins, naphtha lamps and more--that are as real to Pullman’s characters as cellphones and coffee makers are to us.

"Exploring Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ " by Lois H. Gresh (St. Martin’s Griffin: $9.95): While all the books in this list include sections on science, Gresh’s discussions (she has written several other books about science and fictional worlds) are the best of all. Dark matter, dark energy--she updates us on the science of neutrinos, black holes, neutron stars and how these may relate to Dust, which has a biblical and scientific import for the trilogy. In case we needed reminding, Pullman is hardly a religious believer, but Gresh argues that he does have a faith in something greater than ourselves. "In ‘His Dark Materials,’ Pullman seems to be attacking traditional notions of God and religion, while supporting the notion of cosmic consciousness."

"Paradise Lost" by John Milton (Oxford University Press: $28): Finally, let’s hear from Pullman himself. OUP published a beautiful hardcover edition of Milton’s epic last year with engravings from the first illustrated edition in 1688. Although the book doesn’t have a scholarly apparatus, it includes an introductory essay by Pullman and his brief prefaces to all 12 of the poem’s books. Here we have Pullman explaining that he never set out to be a children’s author like Kenneth Grahame or A.A. Milne, but rather meant to explore the same theological issues that Milton did. Inspired by "Paradise Lost," he writes, "I found that ... I was beginning to tell the same story, too. I wasn’t worried about that, because I was well aware that there are many ways of telling the same story." Pullman’s way of telling the same story, then, gives us Lord Asriel in place of Milton’s Lucifer, Lyra and Will in place of Adam and Eve, and panserbjorne, mulefa and witches in place of Milton’s clashing angels and demons.
*
A final thought: Milton is a standard, stable part of the Western canon today, although in his time he found himself opposed (and, often, in physical danger) for his challenges to government and his views of free speech. The Modern Library has just published "The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton," a spectacular annotated volume edited by William Kerrigan, John Rumrich and Stephen M. Fallon (1,368 pp., $55). It includes, among much else, Milton’s argument that, when told not to read a book, people should exercise their judgments and think for themselves. "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue," Milton writes, "unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat."

No wonder Pullman admires him.

Nick Owchar

Does critical acclaim pay the bills? Hardly

Back in the good old days, literary prizes would barely buy a used beret. Aside from the big four — the Pulitzer, the Nobel, the Guggenheim and the MacArthur — literary prizes rarely topped $50,000. Imagine my surprise when I received an unassuming little press release announcing the winners of the 2008 Strauss Living winners, a $250,000 prize judged and administered by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Madison Smartt Bell (left) and William T. Vollmann each will receive $50,000 a year for the next five years. Vollmann, who lives in Sacramento, expressed his “gratitude and relief.” Bell, who lives in Maryland and does a lot of freelance journalism, said the prize bought him time. Russell Banks, Ann Beattie, Francine du Plessix Gray and Robert Stone were the judges. Banks said something about “these parlous times, when it’s all too tempting for literary artists to turn inward” to commemorate the announcement.

Harold Strauss was the editor in chief of Alfred A Knopf. He died in 1975. The Strauss Living Awards were established in 1983. In that year, the prize went to Cynthia Ozick and Raymond Carver. The American Academy, housed in three of New York’s toniest landmark buildings, designed by McKim, Mead & White, Cass Gilbert and Charles Pratt Huntington, was founded by, among others, William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

Susan Salter Reynolds

The moral 'Compass'

Whenever someone says the soon-to-be-released screen adaptation of Philip Pullman’s novel "The Golden Compass" is anti-religious, I want to ask: "Have you seen the film?"

I have, and perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is how thoroughly the book’s religious context has been stripped from the movie, making it less about the discontents of doctrine than the more amorphous battle between authoritarianism and free will.

Of course, even "The Golden Compass' " most vocal detractors are willing to acknowledge this; the film, they suggest, is something of a gateway to lure unsuspecting kids into reading Pullman’s heresies. That’s an argument Laura Miller convincingly takes apart in yesterday’s Book Review, calling it preposterous "that anyone would make a $180-million movie with the purpose of tricking children into reading a seditious book." (Miller's piece has prompted hundreds of responses from readers -- both pro and con.)

Indeed, watching "The Golden Compass," I found it hard to find anything seditious or insurrectionary about it--which, in my view, is too bad. Pullman’s novel has been reduced to something thin and insubstantial, a Hollywood feel-good extravaganza that could have (should have?) been much more.

Rather than focus on whether "The Golden Compass" is pushing an atheist agenda (it’s not), we’d be much better served by having an actual conversation about the larger questions it seeks to raise. What is the nature of existence? How about the relationship between religion and God?

More to the point, why is it that every time a film comes out that even tangentially challenges Christian orthodoxy, we have to go through this ridiculous song and dance? If Pullman has anything to tell us, it’s the value of free thinking. Why are we so scared of deciding for ourselves?

David L. Ulin

Denis Johnson speaks

In the wake of winning the National Book Award for his novel "Tree of Smoke" last month, Denis Johnson has given a rare Q&A interview to the National Book Foundation’s website.

Conducted by Bret Anthony Johnson, author of the story collection "Corpus Christi," the interview is, to put it charitably, sketchy, but features its share of nuggets nonetheless. Asked whether, during the more than 20 years he spent on "Tree of Smoke," he worried about the novel not working, Johnson replies, "Well, I’ve never thought about this before, but now that you ask, it occurs to me I don’t have much interest whether any of my books work or not."

Later, in response to a question about his ideal audience, he says, "I write for my wife, my agent, and my editor."

Best of all is his response to the (now-ubiquitous) question about the writer’s role in a culture in which reading appears to be in crisis, which Johnson frames in predictably broad terms.

"Storytellers," he says, "have enjoyed quite a wide audience over the last few centuries. Now it’s dwindling, and if the world’s leaders have their way, they’ll probably return us to an era when we tell tales around small fires in caves. But we’ll always have stories to tell. It’s nice to be doing it when folks still think it’s something worth giving out awards for."

David L. Ulin

Having your book and reading it too

If you thought Pacific Palisades was some unpatriotic Westside enclave, think again. Remember, this is the town that throws quite a Fourth of July parade every year. And just in time for Christmas shopping, under a picture of Uncle Sam, finger wagging, is the plea: "Village Books needs you!"

This scrappy independent store admits the fact that it is losing the battle against on-line shopping, big-box discounters, increasing rent and "a half-empty street," as it implores bibliophiles to get out and shop local this weekend. "Let us help you help us," the plea reads.

As an aficionada of local bookstores, I can’t help but root for the good folks at Village Books, which has been open for a decade, and I can’t help wondering why we treat such retailers as if they are creatures apart. They are more than just businesses, in our minds--they are community treasures, something to be cherished.

Well, guess what? Local bookstores are businesses. They need to pay rent. And salaries. And expenses. So if you love the idea of a local bookstore, pick one to shop at. And shop there. Smell the books. Soak up the literariness of it all. Sure, it might not have the selection of a bigger store, maybe not all the discounts, but the booksellers are almost always there with a helpful suggestion for a good read: They’ll order any book you want and probably have it ready for you in a day or two.

You love the ease of Amazon? Or the vastness of Borders? Well, then, put your money there but stop bemoaning the demise of the local store. And we should stop pulling at the heartstrings of the reading public every time a store hits hard times. Either shop there or stop your fussing.

  Orli Low