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Stalin was "A very, very exceptional man, in every sense. That may not be comfortable news for us, but the fact is he was a gifted politician." Author Simon Sebag Montefiore talks about his biography "Young Stalin."
See the complete list of Book Prize nominees here.
Carolyn Kellogg
In the mid-1990s, a friend and I sent Arthur C. Clarke a letter soliciting his work for a small literary journal we co-edited. We didn’t expect to hear back from him -- but hear from him we did, in the form of what he called EGOgrams, chatty communiqués about his doings, sort of like the holiday letters people send out at the end of the year. He couldn’t submit a story, Clarke informed us, but we were welcome to publish selections from his correspondence, which is precisely what we did.
Here’s a link to what Clarke sent us -- charming, erudite and surprising, just like the man himself.
I couldn’t help thinking about this last night when I came across a video clip on YouTube that Clarke made in December, to mark his 90th birthday.
The themes are the same, but he was always adapting, using new media and technologies to let us know what he was thinking, to share with us his ongoing wonder at being alive.
David L. Ulin
I waited to watch the new literary coffee klatch Titlepage until the second episode was live, in hopes that it would begin to find its footing. As the first major Internet talk show about books -- whose host, Daniel Menaker, has serious editorial credentials -- it's a welcome, perhaps overdue, Internet venture.
After two episodes, it's clear that the show still has some kinks to work out. I was hoping for a show reminiscent of Dick Cavett's, all momentum and jittery intelligence, but it's more Charlie Rose-esque (plodding, people sitting in a circle).
The biggest challenge is the structure: All the authors sit on set as Menaker speaks to one after another, for about 10 minutes each. So in the first episode (pictured), Richard Price, Susan Choi, Colin Harrison and Charles Bock each spent 30-plus minutes in silence, waiting to be addressed, looking like uncomfortable schoolchildren. Why not take a cue from Rose and film the episodes discreetly? Or from Letterman and Leno and bring out one writer at a time, leading up to a hilarious multi-author conclusion? And how about a nice cushiony couch? I'm not the first person to notice that those chairs look awfully uncomfortable.
Although the first episode had a little author-on-author discussion (more! more!), the second, which was apparently filmed first, never let the authors talk to one another. What memoirists Sloane Crosley and Julie Klam might have discussed with Ceridwen Dovey, who's written a fable of violence, and Keith Gessen, who says that the character closest to him in his novel isn't the one named Keith, will remain a mystery.
Also, Menaker, who looks great, doesn't yet have the hang of reading off TV prompters. And while his elegantly scripted transitions from author to author give the show a nice flow, the pre-planning means that he's often veering away from the conversation thread. Although he seems to wane over the course of these 45- to 60-minute shows, it would still be nice to see him ask a natural follow-up question rather than shuffling to the next index card.
Despite the show's shortfalls, it contains a few surprise gems. Dovey, despite speaking last, was fantastically articulate, pithy and thoughtful. Bock's eager and candid discussion of craft was inspiring. And Price's admission of the extent to which he outlines, just to forestall doing his real writing, will be a comfort to procrastinators everywhere.
Carolyn Kellogg
It's one of the most famous murders in American history, the killing of 28-year-old Catherine (Kitty) Genovese, in the early hours of March 13, 1964, on Austin Street, in the borough of Queens, New York, around the corner from where she lived. While 38 people watched or listened without calling the police, Genovese was stabbed repeatedly, in three separate attacks over the course of half an hour, then sexually assaulted and left for dead. (She died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.) Two weeks later, the New York Times detailed all this in a Page One piece, and the Kitty Genovese story became a metaphor for contemporary urban apathy.
The Genovese murder forms the center of “Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case” (Melville House: 112 pp., $14.95 paper) by A. M. Rosenthal, who was the paper’s metropolitan editor at the time. But this little book is more a look at our collective guilt for Genovese’s murder, the way we are all complicit when the rules of society start breaking down.
Prior to taking over the metropolitan desk, Rosenthal — who later went on to be the Times’ executive editor and an op-ed columnist — was a foreign correspondent, stationed in India and Poland. There, he saw all sorts of things he looked away from: “Cripples crawling in New Delhi’s Connaught Place, the capital’s shopping center then, wretched mishapen babies held out by filthy mothers in Calcutta — I turned away not in fear but in disgust and annoyance.” Where, then, he wants us to consider, is our moral authority to judge the Genovese witnesses when we all do similar things every day?
It’s a vivid argument, and 44 years later, it has more to tell us than some moralistic tale of apathy. “There are, it seems to me,” Rosenthal ends the book, “only two logical ways to look at the story of the murder of Catherine Genovese. One is the way of the neighbor on Austin Street — ‘Let’s forget the whole thing.’
“The other is to recognize that the bell tolls even on each man’s individual island, to recognize that every man must fear the witness in himself who whispers to close the window.”
David L. Ulin
(photo: Associated Press)
Arthur C. Clarke, a giant of modern science fiction, has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90. An aide told the Associated Press that Clarke had been suffering from breathing problems and had been in and out of the hospital.
It didn't seem possible that we would ever hear such news: Didn't Clarke seem timeless? As unchanged as the monolith discovered on the moon in the story "The Sentinel"? That story was later expanded into the novel "2001: A Space Odyssey." He was as prolific (the A.P. estimates that he authored more than 100 books) as he was optimistic about science and technology. His name is everywhere.
In his characteristically sniffy manner, critic Thomas Disch once called Clarke's "2010," a followup of sorts to "2001," as representative of the science fiction genre's "meat-and-potatoes mid-range." He also grudgingly pointed out that Isaac Asimov and Clarke were "as close to household words as any writers in the field."
Clarke certainly reached the mainstream, but not only because of his speculations about the future. I think it was also because readers detected something else dominant in some of his work: the presence of religious questions, even though Clarke himself was opposed to organized religion. That's what has always drawn me to him, and that is what has always startled students in my writing classes when, near the semester's end, I ask them to read a brief story of Clarke's called "The Star." A starship's chief astrophysicist, who also happens to be a Jesuit priest, undergoes a religious crisis when he realizes that a star that went supernova 3,000 years ago, annihilating the peace-loving inhabitants of a nearby planet, was the same star that brought the magi to Bethlehem to witness the birth of Jesus. The priest's realization of this is moving and ironic: It never disappoints students.
If there's any legacy that Clarke has left us, it is that science doesn't solve the problems of the human condition. In fact, science forces us to wrestle even more deeply with our beliefs, choices and what we understand about ourselves. Clarke struck notes that were poignant and challenging, as with this final, anguished question which ends "The Star":
"There can be no reasonable doubt: the ancient mystery is solved at last. Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?"
Nick Owchar
The website The Morning News is in the midst of its annual Tournament of Books, designed much like college basketball's March Madness (complete with sudden-death elimination and complex brackets). In the tournament, novels go head to head, and an author/critic/blogger judge declares a winner in each match. Two commentators -- Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner -- weigh in on the proceedings, just as those guys on ESPN do. It's not exactly scientific, but it is fun.
Take today's contest: "The Shadow Catcher," by Marianne Wiggins, faces off against Brock Clarke's "The Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England." Judge Helen DeWitt begins her assessment of the two books with a quote by Frederic Jameson on Theodore Adorno's use of Sigmund Freud ... an intellectual pile-on that might be a little daunting but for the commentators, who call DeWitt "one smart cookie" and themselves "mouth-breathing idiots." A little something in the analysis for everyone.
This matchup marks the end of the first round. Moving up in the competition are "Tree of Smoke" by Denis Johnson, "Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name" by Vendela Vida, "Then We Came to the End" by Joshua Ferris, "You Don't Love Me Yet" by Jonathan Lethem, "Shining at the Bottom of the Sea" by Stephen Marche, "Remainder" by Tom McCarthy, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz, and, yes, SoCal author Wiggins' "The Shadow Catcher."
The last two books on the list, by Diaz and Wiggins, are also nominated for the LA Times Book Prize in fiction.
Carolyn Kellogg
If you collect books, you've probably noticed that they're made of paper, and that paper comes from trees. Raz Godelnik noticed -- he thinks green (not Irish, eco-ish) -- and he wanted to balance his books with new trees. So he started the website Eco-Libris; there, anyone can donate money to plant trees to offset book purchases.
It's not a direct replacement; the donations won't support new trees to be planted for pulp. Instead, Eco-Libris trees will be planted in Central America and Africa, in regions of deforestation, by one of three nonprofits: The Alliance for International Reforestation, Ripple Africa or Sustainable Harvest International. Of course, a donation to those nonprofits -- or any others involved in tree planting, like LA's Treepeople -- could be made by any booklover at any time.
But Eco-Libris makes the formula simple: for your X books, give to plant X trees. Easy.
It costs about a dollar per book (less, if you're talking hundreds). In return for your donation, you'll get a sticker that proclaims "one tree has been planted for this book."
And you might also breathe easier.
Carolyn Kellogg
photo by Bachmont via flickr
(Photo credit: Alastair Grant/Associated Press)
Anne Enright’s breakthrough success with the novel "The Gathering," which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, hasn’t changed her attitudes to the writing life. Talking to Declan Meade in the spring issue of the fine Dublin-based literary magazine, The Stinging Fly, Enright describes the demanding process of revision, Irish mothers, paying the bills, winning the Booker and much more.
(To learn how to get a copy of the entire interview, check out the subscriptions at the website. Go on, it’s plenty worth it.) Here are some excerpts:
Meade: I’ve read in another interview you did that your advice to new writers would be that it is the rewriting that is all important. When you rewrite, are you building up the work or paring it back?
Enright: If I’m talking to new writers one of the things I say is that what you have to do is manage your emotions about your work. I think the first impulse of writing is in a place of flow, a really very blessed place to be in, writing a first draft. Some writers find it very difficult to rewrite because of the disgust that they feel for that act of what psychoanalysts call extromission. Adam Philips gave this great talk in Dublin and he was saying how R.D. Laing had done this experiment on it. He made people spit into a glass of water and then drink it and then spit into the glass again, and nobody could do this more than four times; they couldn’t drink any more. And Philips himself, I asked him, does he do it, does he edit his work and he said no, I don’t drink the spit, I won’t drink the spit (laughs). I say that rewriting is where it’s at, and I say it because people write work that could be good if only they’d rewrite it. And their emotions about it are less than relevant (laughs).
I rewrite all the time. So when somebody says they do six drafts or something like that, I’m always amazed because I don’t know how they know. A book is never a stable object for me and it is never finished. I rewrite when I’m doing a reading! My early rewriting is a question of distillation and concentration; the challenge is to make it undiluted. And a lot of it is working on the rhythm....
Yup, amid a steady drumbeat of news about Southland bookstores closing their doors due to rising rents and declining sales comes word that a Los Feliz landmark will nearly double in size.
Come May — give or take a few weeks — Skylight Books will open a second space right next door in the 1934 building at the corner of Vermont and Melbourne avenues, promises general manager and co-owner Kerry Slattery.
"It's all so exciting," Slattery writes in a March newsletter to Skylight's faithful. "It will be at least a few months before all is ready, but we plan to move our art, film, music, theater and a few other sections to the new space, which will allow us to also expand a few sections."
Why now, as Dutton's Brentwood Books prepares to close its doors at the end of the month and Book Soup shutters its Costa Mesa satellite store?
Two reasons, Slattery tells Jacket Copy:
Unlike the development pressures facing Doug Dutton's store and the high-end retail rent at South Coast Plaza, Skylight has "a supportive landlord who is offering us the space for a fair rent," she says. "He could have rented this space for a lot more money to some chain operation. He thinks that the bookstore is an important thing."
The second reason: location, location.
In 1960, "Little Toot," a Los Angeles Public Library bookmobile, was retired in favor of a new, larger book van. From the looks of things, officials declined to call the new touring library Big Toot.
Photo from the L.A. Examiner Prints Collection, via the USC Libraries Digital Archive
Carolyn Kellogg
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