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Bruce Bauman (left) and Steve Erickson (right) from Black Clock with Los Angeles magazine's Kit Rachlis.
When Book Expo is in New York, the only thing between you and party-hopping is the number of invites you can score. When it's in L.A., transportation is the issue.
BEA's activities are downtown at the Los Angeles Convention Center, but Friday night the parties were all over the place. The famed Knopf dinner was at Lucques in Beverly Hills. Harper Collins served cocktails in West Hollywood, as did Weinstein Books up the hill at Chateau Marmont. Me, I was all the way out in Santa Monica at Bergamot Station for the Los Angeles Magazine/Black Clock party.
As if writing novels and nonfiction and running the writing program weren't enough, Steve Erickson is also the film critic for Los Angeles magazine. Kit Rachlis is its editor -- years ago, the two worked at LA Weekly together. And CalArts' Black Clock -- which takes its name from an Erickson novel -- is edited by Erickson and Bruce Bauman. Luckily, they were all taking a break from their writing and editing responsibilities to throw this lovely (if extremely Westside) party.
Tonight there is one party right near the Convention Center, at the Figueroa Hotel. Whew!
Carolyn Kellogg
At 3:05 p.m., it was hard to tell who had the longer line: R.L. Stein or Berkeley Breathed. At the autograph area, a throng of conventioneers queued up for the chance to get books signed by two very distinct authors; one a weaver of juvenile horror and the other a penguin-obsessed, mustachioed cartoonist.
Although Stein's serialized novels -- "Goosebumps," "Fear Street" -- have become nearly an industry of their own and Breathed has settled with aplomb into life after Bloom County, I couldn't help but be the slightest bit enthralled. After all, I cut my teeth on the "Fear Street" series and spent most of high school figuring that Binkley and Milo had the right idea. The authors are themselves potent gateway drugs. Getting ensnared at the right age often leads to indulgence in books by Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft, along with a potent sense of whimsy and the tendency to laugh at jokes no one else thinks are funny. At least that was my experience.
But who was in line to get their books signed? Lanyard-dangling name tags ranged in origin from the Santa Monica Public School System to Harper Collins Publishers. It was almost the end of the day and conventioneers stood in patient, bubbly lines, chattering about the day's events and waiting to say hello to their heroes.
George Ducker
Google doesn't have a booth on the sprawling, endless concourse of the BEA. They're just upstairs in the South Hall, past the press room; the last door before an enormous window that peers over an empty corner of the Convention Center. Inside are several tables and a dozen or so Google-folk, waiting for their respective appointments with 'publishing partners.'
The way it's working these days is that Google has three ways of obtaining books. They can go through their system of colleges and public libraries (the New York Public Library being perhaps the largest). Or they have the publishers come to them. Or they can go get the publishers. "We're taking a proactive approach," said Tom Turvey, the director of Google Book Search Partnerships, in regards to Google's attempt to reach out to the publishing world.
Not wanting to be seen as brutish democratizers of authors' material, Google is selling their search engine through keywords like "marketability" and "exposure." The mission is to encourage publishers small and large alike that working with Google, and having said books more easily accessed through their visual cataloging of every page, will be to everyone's benefit: author and seller.
As it stands, there are millions of titles available through Google's book search. A quick scan brings up options as varied as H.G. Wells' "In the Days of the Comet," Martin McDonagh's play "The Cripple of Inishmaan" and McGraw-Hill's GED Study Program. And there they are. You can read them as fast as your internet connection will allow. Sound like a good thing? It probably is.
And of course, there are many more titles to come. Last week's decision by Microsoft to kill further development of their book search engine has left the gates wide open for the colorfully lettered internet giant, whose slogan, now quoted less often, is "Don't be evil."
George Ducker
Book publishing may be struggling, but there’s one area that seems to be managing fine under the circumstances: audiobooks. There’s a reason for it, as Nicolas Soames of Naxos AudioBooks explains. “People have less time to read but the desire is still there,” he says, “which is why they turn to us.”
That makes sense. With BEA this year in Los Angeles, the kingdom of commuters, it makes even more sense to see Naxos AudioBooks and similar companies here--and that they're doing reasonably well. As Soames notes, a worthy portion of their customer base, along with public libraries, consists of commuters.
Soames and his associates are publicizing the release in July of an award-winning production of “Othello” featuring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Ewan McGregor, Ian McKellen and many others. We would all like to spend our days reading in quiet, of course, if our lives allowed it. But if you don’t have this time, consider this as a consolation: McGregor as the cunning Iago. By Janus, commuting has just gotten better.
Nick Owchar
The man (with Hefner) back in 2004. (photo: Carol Kaelson ABC)
It was a crush of crepey cleavage and vintage Hollywood royalty Thursday night at George Hamilton’s book party at Il Cielo in Beverly Hills. We nibbled on porcini ravioli and tiny lambchops from hand-grown, organically fed micro sheep. We swilled house Chianti and watched as vintage 1980s television superstars paraded, air-kissed and lined up for photo ops.
There was leonine Loni Anderson, newly remarried and glowing behind her majestic cheekbones. She spooned chicly shagged and laid-back Stephanie Powers, who cocked a knee beside Linda Gray, still radiant nearly 20 years post-“Dallas.” Plumped lips curled into super-pro camera smiles all around. New York publishing lackeys watched in awe; this is why it’s good to hold Book Expo America in L.A.: star power, baby.
Suddenly the crowd parted and there was Hamilton himself, radiant in a bespoke suit and his signature 500-watt smile. His hair was shellacked to perfection, his teeth adazzle, skin burnished to the sheen of a fine, old wallet. The man, on the brink of 70, is still a total chick magnet. Women of all ages flocked to him, pulling wee cameras from tiny evening bags and jockeying for a photo, letting their hands linger in his as he smiled down at them.
It was an anticipatory party for his October book, “Don’t Mind If I Do,” an intimate look at behind-the-scenes Hollywood, and if his ghostwriter (William Stadiem) did his job right, it should be a pip. Hamilton was at the "Cleopatra" wrap party where Richard Burton declared his love for Elizabeth Taylor in front of Eddie Fisher; he witnessed one of Judy Garland’s suicide attempts and, apparently, skinny-dipped with JFK (giving new meaning to the phrase “I knew John F. Kennedy and you’re no John F. Kennedy").
“I came on the scene in the '50s, and I didn’t want to be stuck in that plastic era,” Hamilton told me as I tried to stay focused on his words and not be hypnotized by his animal magnetism. “I wanted to write about what really happened.” He was inspired by David Niven’s books “The Moon’s a Balloon” and “Bring on the Empty Horses,” which brought the insider Hollywood memoir to a giddy new level in the 1970s.
There’s hope for similar fun from "Don't Mind If I Do" because Hamilton clearly knows everyone -- and is in on the joke about himself. The promotional goody bag was an assemblage of personalized M&Ms, sunglasses and exotic tanning products. The book's cover photo has him posed in a leopard-skin chair, in ascot, nonchalantly gesturing toward the camera. He has a reality show in the works, also called “Don’t Mind if I Do,” in which he freeloads his way around the world on his charm and good looks without ever having to touch money.
In this new age of the stubbled, rude and tattooed, Hamilton is old guard Hollywood. Back in the 1950s, Hamilton told me, his idols were Rudolph Valentino and the Duke of Windsor. “I was 30 years out of date back then!”
Erika Schickel
At the Amazon Kindle booth in the L.A. Convention Center, there are just two Kindles, which is not quite enough. People don't give them up easily, no matter how closely other Book Expo attendees gather. Scrums of conventioneers form. Everyone wants to hold it, to "turn" the "pages" of the electronic books within.
Kathy Schalk-Greene (above), a librarian from New Jersey, had seen the Kindle -- an electronic reader that can download and hold 200 books -- before, but this was the first one she'd gotten to hold. "It's very cool," she says. "I can really see the advantage of having that much content in that small space." Better than a bag of books, I suppose.
But Shalk-Greene sees this as just one more reading tool, one good for "convenience and mobility," rather than something that would replace books. Like so many book lovers, she has a fondness for the physicality of the books themselves.
Yesterday I heard a new term for these lovers of books with pages and binding: "Ink Sniffers." Add "Paper Caressers" and count me in.
Carolyn Kellogg
 On day one Book Expo kicked off with a panel called Editors' Buzz. Six editors each lauded one upcoming title. When they were done, the audience streamed past and picked up galleys of the books, stacked head-high by the door. (Note: that's head-high for me; I'm about five-foot-two.)
Notable was the omission of titles by such heavyweights as Stephen King or James Patterson -- his new book is being advertised on a massive banner outside the L.A. Convention Center. Instead, the five novels featured were by newcomers. (The sixth book, a nonfiction title, was a follow-up to a bestseller.) One seasoned attendee seemed to find this disturbing -- no names, no bigshots -- but I found it kind of exciting.
For publishers to push new novelists, to find something exciting about new voices -- that, to me as a reader, is good news. It's evidence of a kind of vivacity in the field if publishers focus on good, perhaps risky new works, in lieu of a proven writer. Although booksellers might be happier with another Harry Potter. Grabbing the swag after the buzz panel.
Carolyn Kellogg
Scott McClellan's memoir, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception," which officially debuts next week, has gone to #1 at Amazon and caused consternation among high-ranking Republicans who are speaking out publicly against the book.
Some say they are "puzzled" and "sad" about the former White House press secretary's claims, which others say are "patently false." Publishers Weekly compares this to "Casablanca," in which a fully-aware Captain Renault (Claude Raines) makes a show of being "shocked, shocked!" at the goings-on at Rick's; Publishers Weekly suggests that Karl Rove, Dan Bartlett, Dana Perino and Ari Fleischer are simultaneously performing the role.
So what does that make Scott McClellan? Is he Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), the Resistance fighter, putting everything on the line to fight for justice? Is he Humphrey Bogart in the role of Rick Blaine, keeping his head down and taking no sides, deciding belatedly to stand up to the authoritarian regime?
Or could he be the lovely Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), torn between two very different men, finally compelled to go with her conscience instead of her heart?
Carolyn Kellogg
I can't tell you the name of Daphne Gottlieb's new book — it's too anatomical — but I can link to it right here. It's a collection featuring nearly 30 stories that imagine the San Francisco performance poet and provocatrix in a variety of, er, compromising positions, written by a pretty good crew of West Coast underground literati, including Stephen Elliott, Ariel Gore, Bucky Sinister and Justin Chin.
There's no denying that Gottlieb's on to something with this project — a postmodern mash-up of truth and illusion that seeks to eclipse the line between how others see us and the way we see ourselves. The book had its genesis when she began to realize that some of her acquaintances were writing dirty stories about her (one appeared in Best American Erotica) that featured "[e]verything about me, it seems, except my underwear and my modesty." Eventually, Gottlieb put out a call for submissions; the result is this book.
I love the blurriness of this idea, the way fantasy and reality blend together until we don't know what's fiction or fact. Yet I'd be lying if I didn't admit to some discomfort — not because of the sex but because of the narcissism.
Here we have an almost perfect metaphor for the conundrum of contemporary culture, with its look-at-me self-absorption, its sense that the artist is more important than the art.
In the end, that too is what Gottlieb's book speaks to, whatever her intentions are.
David L. Ulin
L.A.-based writer Ben Ehrenreich is a novelist and journalist. "The Suitors," his first novel, is loosely based on "The Odyssey," so we thought he might know something about journeys. With books.
Jacket Copy: Assuming you bring books with you when you travel, go on vacation, how do you determine how many? Is it a careful calculation or something less scientific?
Ben Ehrenreich: Mainly I cram books into every available space in my bags, take half of them out, then sneak half of those back in. I live under the hopeful illusion that I will have far more time to read than I ever end up having.
JC: Have you ever been stranded with nothing to read?
BE: Yes. Most memorably, I had been reporting in Afghanistan, had a stopover in Dubai on the way home. I realized as I stepped onto the plane back to Los Angeles that I had not only packed my sleeping pills in my checked bags, but all my books. I spent the next 20-some hours awake, staring at the seatback in front of me.
Read Ben's reading list after the jump.
Carolyn Kellogg
Continue reading Ben Ehrenreich's travel books »
One of the most exciting things about taking a trip is leaving responsibilities behind: To me, this opens up wide expanses of unspoken-for time. No grad school presentation prep, no comp class planning. And I can read, read, READ! — with the all the enthusiasm of a mad, gleeful Frankenstein.
Too much enthusiasm. That's a photo of some of the reading material I brought with me on my literary road trip. You might notice that it begins with James Joyce's "Ulysses" (it's about time I stopped avoiding this iconic work of modernist literature). We all know "Ulysses" is quite enough to tackle, but I brought along a huge bagful of other books and magazines I was itching to read — just in case I whipped through "Ulysses" in no time.
The first night, I read all of the first line ("Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.") before falling asleep.
The thing I fail to remember when packing is that time away isn't the block of empty space that it appears to be in my calendar. There are people to meet, meals to be eaten, places to visit, drinks to be imbibed, discussions to be had. Even sleep to be slept. All which makes travel worthwhile.
So maybe it would take reaching my destination before I made significant "Ulysses" progress. I probably wouldn't get to all the other books I packed, but you can read on for what I might have read, had I not been distracted by that margarita:
Carolyn Kellogg
Continue reading Take it with you »
The following few words for Memorial Day come to us from Chris Yates, whose lovely book “How to Fish” was just published by The Overlook Press this month:
 The obvious temptation now, after I've spent the last hour or so taking dictation from the river,is to cast again and try for another perch. Like any other angler who's just made a catch, I'm always fairly eager to get my line back in the water, but if I've just landed something special I feel it's not only dishonourable to the fish but also to the occasion if I don't pause to properly appreciate the moment. For now, I still feel a three-pounder is just too glorious to share the day with anyfish else.... I don't need a barrowful; all I ever hope is that, every now and then, some brilliant creature rises out of the secrecy of its river so I can rejoice in it and make a definite you-are-real-after-all contact.
If you can’t read this blog item, then I hope it means you are far from any computer, experiencing exactly the kind of quiet gestures of satisfaction that Yates is talking about.
If you are reading this item, promise that you will log off soon and, if the weather permits where you are, go outside and sit on the grass.
Nick Owchar
Many were horrified by the recent news, from Austria, that a man named Josef Fritzl had imprisoned his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and had seven children by her. One of the children had died, reports say, while three lived with her in a prison-like cellar and three lived normal lives upstairs with Fritzl and his wife. In all those years the neighbors did not suspect a thing.
 Readers of the novels and plays of Thomas Bernhard, however, have always been aware of a much darker reality. Bernhard's novels "Gargoyles," "Correction," "Frost," "The Lime Works" and "Extinction" immediately come to mind. In fact, a recent TLS article —"Josef Fritzl's Fictive Forebears" — Ritchie Robertson discussed an earlier Austrian literature that seemed to fully acknowledge a long history of such creeps as Fritzl and reminded me to take down from the shelf a story by Adalbert Stifter, "Tourmaline," included in "Limestone and Other Stories" (translated by David Luke and published by Harcourt Brace & World in 1968).
In "Tourmaline" we listen as a girl tells some of her story:
"He [the father] taught me a great many things and told me a lot of stories. He always locked the door when he went out. When I asked him what he wanted me to write as an exercise while he was away, he would answer: 'Describe how one day I shall lie dead in my coffin and they will bury me.' And then I said: 'But, Father, I've described that often already.' He would answer: 'Then describe how your mother wanders about the world in the torment of her heart, and how she dares not return, and how in the end she does away with herself in despair.' When I said: 'Father, I've described that as well many times already,' he would answer: 'Then describe it again.'... I would climb the ladder and look out through the window grating. There I could see the hems of women's dresses going past and I saw men's boots and fine coattails or the four feet of a dog...."
Stifter takes a little getting used to, but a detail like "the four feet of a dog" eases his writing into the memory permanently. Stifter's dates are 1805-1868. At the end of his life, he developed cirrhosis of the liver and on Jan. 25, 1868, slashed his throat and died two days later.
Thomas McGonigle
Denise Hamilton's review of Rick Riordan's "The Battle of the Labyrinth," in our section last week, gave us this fascinating image of Daedalus' maze:
"Riordan's genius is in reimagining classic myths for the 21st century, making them relevant to young adult readers while staying true to the spirit of the originals. 'Battle of the Labyrinth' focuses on the sinister maze where Theseus slew the Minotaur. But the labyrinth isn't under a palace in Crete anymore; it lies just below the mortal world, where 'it's been growing for thousands of years, lacing its way under Western cities, connecting everything together underground.' "
Now, in the new issue of Book Review, comes an unexpected echo in Chris Daley's take on, well, shoot, Los Angeles' sewer system. The book that Daley assesses for us is Anna Sklar's "Brown Acres: An Intimate History of the Los Angeles Sewer System," published by Angel City Press. The review looks at a fascinating and obviously overlooked aspect of life in the city, and I couldn't help but detect a faint whiff (sorry, couldn't resist) of the myth in this statement: "To call the process of building the underground network of pipes and ultimately a sewage treatment plant Herculean would be an understatement."
The one word that unsettles me in the book's title is "intimate" — what does that mean? As far as I can tell from the publisher's site, Sklar didn't take the plunge like a latter-day Jean Valjean as part of her research. Thank goodness.
Read the rest of Daley's review here or peruse the entire issue of the Los Angeles Times Book Review here.
Nick Owchar
Freelance writers put up with a lot: Publishers Weekly is paying even less now for the brief reviews of forthcoming books that are a hallmark of every issue. The rate of $50 per review is dropping to $25. That's what Galley Cat reported this week, and that's what one of our contributors, very disgruntled about it, told me as well.
"Please know that we value the work you do for us," the announcement said, "and we sincerely hope you will continue to review for PW. Your astute reading and writing are what makes our magazine so valuable in the industry and we regret this necessary action. All of us here are also experiencing change but we expect that we will continue to be the gold standard in book reviewing."
This week PW's editor in chief, Sara Nelson, responded at Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle board of directors, and it's worthwhile to go there and read her comment and those who respond to it. I can't help but see both sides: In difficult times, no area of a budget is off limits. On the other hand, $25? There is a potential bright side in all of this, as pointed out by our frustrated contributor. She said that, for really fast readers, $50 was "a bit of pocket change to depend on.... I'm guessing this will ditch all the pros from PW's pages." If that happens, then maybe they should look us up. We're easy to find.
Nick Owchar
It's no simple task when Laura and Jenna Bush roll into Los Angeles for a book reading.
At 10 a.m., three hours before the First Lady and daughter took the stage at the L.A. Central Library, there were upward of 30 police officers milling about at the top of the grandiose escalators that creep down four stories beneath Grand Avenue. Outside, 17 Crown Victorias of varying neutral hues lined the no-parking zone on Flower Street.
The reading was to promote Laura and Jenna Bush's new children's book, "Read All About It." At an invitation-only event for supporters of the Los Angeles Public Library and the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, Laura and Jenna read from the book and took some questions in front of an audience of second-graders from Esperanza Elementary School and predominately well-heeled women.
With invitees arriving around noon, the Bush family was held up half an hour. In total, the reading and questions took about 20 minutes.
"Jenna just happened to have a friend in San Francisco who's getting married this weekend, so we were happy to stop by," Laura said, taking her seat. During her introduction she also spoke briefly about the Big Read operation, which is a kind of book exchange program with Egypt where Americans are introduced to authors like Naguib Mahfouz while Egyptians, in turn, get to read selected American authors.
Mrs. Bush sat next to the newly married Mrs. Jenna Bush Hager--fresh and alarmingly tanned from a European honeymoon -- and together, they took turns reading from their book as illustrations were projected onto a screen behind them. Both the second-graders and the adults had copies placed in their seats to facilitate reading along.
And what of the book itself?
Continue reading Laura and Jenna 'Read All About It' »
New Orleans today: a restored house next to one that remains vacant. Photo by Carolyn Kellogg.
Pia Z. Ehrhardt is the author of the book Famous Fathers and Other Stories; she has won many awards, including the 2005 Narrative Prize. She makes her home in New Orleans and, although she didn't know me from any other intrusive blogger, she graciously agreed to show me around. Before she'd finished, I was ready to move there.
Erhardt sat down with Jacket Copy to talk about her hometown and her work:
Jacket Copy: How long have you lived in New Orleans and what do you like about the city?
Pia Z. Ehrhardt:
I've lived in New Orleans since 1980, after leaving Mississippi to elope with my first husband. The marriage only lasted five shaky years, but I stayed put. I feel like I've been in a 30-year, up-and-down love affair with a city.
A lane of Live Oaks, shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005. Photo by Pia Z. Erhardt.
JC: How did the transformations caused by Hurricane Katrina in affect your relationship to and perception of New Orleans?
PZE: When I first returned to New Orleans in October (for the day, because my son and I were living in Houston for the fall semester), I saw a knocked apart, deeply wounded city and it broke my heart, because I didn't know how to help, what to do, how to grieve. It was like watching someone you love suffer and the prognosis is iffy at best. But this a fiercely resilient place. Everything was the color of ash, but within a few months, green started poking through, grass, new leaves, and bushes that had stayed under polluted water for three weeks flowered. People dragged their belongings out to the street, and they were moving ahead, trying to reclaim their homes and businesses and lives. So you keep going on bits of hope and progress. This is a patient and proud and steadfast town, as are its people, and, come to find out, so am I.
More after the jump.
Continue reading A writer's take on the new New Orleans »
I never know what I'll find on the road — for example, I was driving through Georgia and whizzed past this enormous peach on a pole.
In a more literary vein, later on I heard Mississippi public radio promote its upcoming special on Eudora Welty (to broadcast Sunday, May 25, or online here). Recorded at Symphony Space in New York earlier this month as part of the Selected Shorts series, the special includes readings of three Welty stories, biographer Suzanne Marrs and, as emcee, writer Ann Patchett. Guided tours of Welty's home in Jackson, Miss., are available Wednesdays-Fridays with advance reservations.
Still further down the road — Interstate 10, to be exact — after crossing from Mississippi into Louisiana, I suddenly found myself on the Stephen E. Ambrose Memorial Parkway. Ambrose, who died of cancer five years ago, wrote the well-known WWII books "Band of Brothers" and "D-Day." To honor his work with the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans, a segment of the I-10 was renamed for the famed historian in 2004. Which makes sense, but it certainly was a surprise.
Carolyn Kellogg
Matt Bell's personal writing milestone, recorded in his blog post "100,000!," should be a splash of cold water to readers and reviewers everywhere.
In our Book Review offices, editorial assistants deliver finished books and galleys by the boatload. It's not an exaggeration (maybe even a little conservative) to estimate that we receive 300 to 400 books daily. That can lead to insensitivity if you're not careful. Someone else's long, intense labor can become the flavor of the moment until the next load arrives. I've been susceptible to that, and Bell's post is just the right antidote. He writes of his own manuscript:
It took 132 days to get here, which means an average of 726 words per day -- Sounds low, doesn't it? My biggest word count gain in a single day was 2,390 words, and I've only had four days where I wrote over 2,000 words. My writing goal for the novel is five days a week, at least two hours or a thousand words a day.
Another interesting aspect of the writing life is captured in the blurb on the back of "Guernica," a novel coming from Bloomsbury in September. Yes, it arrived in today's deluge. The book tells the story of many lives in a Basque fishing village during the Spanish Civil War. The accompanying publicity material, seeking to draw parallels with other works, likens the novel to "The English Patient" and "Captain Corelli's Mandolin." More interesting to me was a comment about its author, Dave Boling, a sportswriter for the Tacoma News Tribune: The novel was written "almost entirely on the road as Boling traveled with the Seattle Seahawks football team..."
I've heard novelists explain that composing a novel roots them to one place and a predictable routine. Anything more disruptive threatens their concentration. Boling had no choice, of course. But I'm curious to know a little more about how constant travel, changing hotel rooms and sports deadlines detracted from -- or aided? -- his composing of this tale. You can be sure Jacket Copy will talk to him when the novel appears this fall.
Nick Owchar
Lake Ella in Tallahassee, site of the Black Dog Cafe, a writers' hangout.
Jeff VanderMeer is the author of "City of Saints and Madmen" and has twice won the World Fantasy Award. He and his wife, Ann, are co-editors of the anthologies "The New Weird," "Steampunk" and "Best American Fantasy (2007)." In between deadlines he shared his thoughts on books and the secrets of his adopted home city, Tallahassee, Fla.
Jacket Copy: Who are some of Tallahassee's best-known writers?
Jeff VanderMeer: This is a city teeming with writers, so it's a somewhat difficult question. At Florida State University, you have Robert Olen Butler, poet David Kirby and Mark Winegardner (best known for literary fiction until he did the "Godfather" spinoffs), Bob Shacochis and Julianna Baggott, for example. Daniel Maier-Katkin, another professor, just sold his account of the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger to a major publisher, so he'll be high-profile soon. Outside of the university, there's Mark Mustian, also a city commissioner, who just hit it big with a sale of a novel to Putnam (a writer to watch next year). I'm probably the resident "fantasist mascot," so to speak, and then there are host of others at the university and elsewhere working in poetry, fiction and nonfiction.
JC: Do authors in Tallahassee have a favorite hangout?
JVM: The Warehouse is FSU's hangout, since the university's literary readings are held there. I like Black Dog Cafe by Lake Ella, and you'll find other writers there on a pretty regular basis because it's got a nice view and the place is laid-back but with good service and coffee. All Saints Cafe is another favorite for writers around here.
Carolyn Kellogg
(Secrets of Tallahassee after the jump.)
Continue reading Bookishly from Tallahassee »
When in Lexington, Kentucky, stop by Stella's Deli at the corner of Jefferson and Ballard and you've got a good chance of catching sight of Gurney Norman, James Baker Hall or Bobbie Ann Mason noshing on the fare, all made from local ingredients. If my timing had been different -- if I hadn't arrived after they'd closed on Saturday -- I could tell you how delicious the food is, or show you a photo of the senior Kentucky literary figures.
Hall and Norman studied at the University of Kentucky (UK) before becoming Stegner fellows at Stanford University in 1960. In fact, four Kentucky students won the prestigious Stanford creative writing fellowships in just three years, and Hall attributes their success to the passion and ambition of one writing teacher, Robert Hazel. "He knew Phil Roth -- he called [him] Phil. And Bill Styron, he called Bill. And he claimed to know a lot of people that he did or didn’t know by first name. And it was dazzling, it was dazzling. We had never, ever imagined living in that world. We didn’t know what it was."
It's interesting that so many writers from this state university in Kentucky all imagined they could enter the world of the literary elite, just on the power of one emissary -- that they imagined it, and then they did it. "He made us think that we lived in that world, that we were ... that we were compatriots, that we were brothers, were William Styron and Phillip Roth. And they weren’t ... They weren’t in textbooks; they were in our conversation. Does this make any sense? They were in our conversations. And John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, and all of the Southern writers, and Frank O’Connor—they were our kin. They were our preceding generation or preceding two generations. They were where we came from. And it was not academic; it was nothing academic at all. It was one big family that he was the patriarch of."
The fact that I ended up in Lexington at all is due to the big, wide generous litblogging family, in the persons of Gwenda Bond (Shaken and Stirred) and her husband, writer Christopher Rowe. From their house, it's just a short walk, past beautiful architecture and friendly neighbors, to the center of downtown. We lunched outside (photo 6 in this slideshow from the local newspaper, the Herald-Leader) and watched bikers race. The sun shone. Dogs romped. It was lovely.
We went out for dinner then stayed out later than we should have at a bar with live bluegrass music, where I availed myself of -- what else? -- Kentucky bourbon.
When great authors die, the obituaries and appreciations that follow are too final, too absolute. They usually say something like: How tragic that we'll never hear from them again.
 Which is completely false. You're always hearing from writers after their deaths. The Guardian blog, for instance, praises the late Penelope Fitzgerald's "quiet genius" in a recent post that reminds us of stories found and just published in the Hudson Review and alerts us to a collection of her letters arriving in the U.K. later this year (with the U.S., I'm sure, bound to follow in 2009 — something to look forward to).
And other great authors who are members of the literary afterlife club include:
John Fowles: Check out the description of his papers deposited at the Harry Ransom Center to see what's there. It's amazing. All I can say to the researcher who tackles that mountain is: Good luck, and let me buy you a triple espresso.
Ernest Hemingway: We all know about this one. Already, after his 1961 suicide, his trunks contained a literary trove — "A Moveable Feast," "Islands in the Stream," "The Garden of Eden," "The Dangerous Summer," "True at First Light" and, most recently, "Under Kilimanjaro." All tapped out? Not sure — there are supposedly several file cabinets at Finca Vigia, Papa's Cuban residence, that have yet to be explored. That residence is so run-down, according to the blog One True Sentence, however, that maybe any overlooked manuscripts there have been ruined.
Such writers, who create so much material and then choose not to have it published, stun the rest of us with their abundance.
Hey, readers, who else?
Nick Owchar
While I was driving through Ohio, every sign for Zanesville (hometown of writer Zane Gray) made me think of "Winesburg, Ohio" by Sherwood Anderson. Anderson wasn't from Zanesville -- he was from Camden, on the west side of the state, and too far for me to visit. Besides, he later wound up in Marion, Va., where his legacy is celebrated.
For all the fame he had in his day -- he was a bestseller, a literary bon vivant and mentor to Faulkner and Hemingway -- Anderson doesn't get read much now. The beginning of one of his stories — "Hands" the opening to "Winesburg, Ohio" — after the jump.
Carolyn Kellogg
Continue reading Every sign for Zanesville makes me think of Winesburg »
F. Scott Fitzgerald was a notoriously poor speller; it's one of those endearing details of the legend of a great writer. But none of us are Fitzgeralds, so to work on the mechanics of your writing, you can get started with Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors, which Broadway Books is set to publish this month by bestselling author Bill Bryson.
Despite its design — the terms are arranged alphabetically — Bryson calls it, in his preface, "a personal collection, built up over 30 years as a writer and editor ... so inevitably — inescapably — it reflects my own interests, experiences, and blind spots."
Among such blind spots are those traps familiar to anyone writing about literature (it's Stephen Dedalus, not Daedalus) or about medicine (it's Down syndrome, not Down's syndrome). There are also plenty of words that writers misapply: "crass," for instance, isn't just tasteless — it's "stupid and grossly ignorant to the point of insensitivity." "A thing must be pretty bad to be crass," Bryson writes. "Enormity" doesn't refer to size but to the wickedness of something. I'm guilty of misusing that one. An appendix on punctuation points out the many ways that writers are tripped up by commas.
Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors is a good read, strange as that may sound: It has been — how shall I say? — helpful to me in composing this sentence.
Nick Owchar
At his blog, ABC of Reading, Thomas McGonigle, one of our contributors, has posted an item about writers he'd like to see less from on forthcoming publisher catalog lists. What would they get in return? The post suggests having George Soros establish a fund to compensate these writers for their silence.
Provocative, yes. Among many big-name writers on the list (Ian McEwan, Seamus Heaney and Francine Prose), prominent near the top is John Updike, who has received his share of fairly lukewarm reviews for his novels in the past decade. In fact, he's received quite a few. I looked around. Of his 2006 novel, "Terrorist," for instance, James Wood wrote in the New Republic:
"It is the otherness of Islamicism that is missing in this book. Despite all the Koranic homework, there is a sense that what is alien in Islam to a Westerner remains alien to John Updike. What he has discovered, yet again, is merely the generalized fluid of God-plus-sex that has run throughout all his novels."
Adam Begley wrote in the New York Observer that Updike's 2004 book, "Villages," was too generic; the 2002 novel, "Seek My Face," was tedious to Ron Charles of the Christian Science Monitor. Los Angeles Times critic Susan Salter Reynolds wrote of Updike's 2000 book, "Licks of Love": "The stories are painstakingly written; effort shows on every page. There's too much detail, too much retelling of the characters' most ordinary thoughts. Most of the stories ... feel unfinished; summarily ended, as though Updike simply shrugged."
There are many who admire Updike's work, and I'm definitely among them, but the common thread in the criticisms is that he writes too often. This fall, in fact, he has a novel coming from Alfred A. Knopf, "The Widows of Eastwick," which picks up the story told in "The Witches of Eastwick." I wouldn't dare to tell a giant of American letters not to publish anymore, even if Soros said "yes" to the don't-write funding idea, but McGonigle's post made me think: If there were a little more time between Updike books — say, three years rather than two — perhaps there'd be more room at the bigger publishers for such writers as Gary Amdahl, who are doing exciting things.
Nick Owchar
Above: Friends helping me make my departure from Pittsburgh possible are, from left, Jamie Bono, Robert Yune, Emily Stone and Paul Ruggiero.
There is a grand road trip tradition in American letters that I find irresistible. Today I embark on another cross-country drive, and what I discovered, while packing, was that I have a lot of books (including a vintage paperback copy of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" with a man in a striped shirt and jaunty neck scarf). Perhaps an insane amount of books. Even after purging and triaging, books and books and books. Unlike Kerouac, I do not travel light.
My trip will take me south from Pittsburgh to Florida, then west, clear across the country, to Los Angeles. Along the way I will do as much reading as I can: A select few (dozen) books will ride up front with me.
But to make it a truly literary road trip, I plan to visit some literary landmarks along the way. The Washington Post wrote up several in Georgia, and it looks like the "On the Road" scroll is on display through May 31 in Austin, Tex. Obviously, that's not a complete literary tour. What are your suggestions?
Carolyn Kellogg
There were no Hells Angels at the Whisky a Go-Go on Thursday night, although a ripple of curiosity was circulating among the people waiting in line along Sunset Boulevard.
Would James Frey, whose newest offering is "Bright Shiny Morning," a novel set in Los Angeles, have the kind of bad karma on the West Coast the Rolling Stones had at Altamont when they used the motorcycle gang for security at the Bay Area speedway in 1969, which resulted in the death of one man and the symbolic death knell of the '60s?
Not at all.
Good behavior prevailed, discounting a little mosh pit action that briefly tore into a pair of tables near the stage. Frey’s self-proclaimed "Rock-and-Roll Book Tour" attracted not only the usual crowd of well-read graduates, but also a heady throng of about 100 high school kids who’d come just to see a popular band playing for free.
And what a band it was. Black Tide was its name, and the combined age of its four members couldn’t be more than 70. They played double bass-pedaled, flying V headbanger paeans. Their fans pumped their fists and shook their heads and managed to displace a handful of worried adults, most of them wearing glasses and clutching books.
How does one follow a set like that? With a book reading?
More ....
Continue reading The band, the bodyguards: the James Frey show »
On Monday evening, my daughter Sophie and I went to a screening of Prince Caspian, the new Chronicles of Narnia movie that opens tomorrow. Sophie is nine, and she had just read the book a couple of weeks ago; no sooner had the film started than she turned to me and whispered, "They left a lot of stuff out."
I was willing to take her word for it because, if truth be told, I don't remember many of the details; I read the Narnia books a long time ago, when I was Sophie's age. But the film was pretty good, I thought -- fast-paced, nicely constructed ... until, that is, the last 20 minutes when Aslan saves the day.
This has always been my problem with the Chronicles of Narnia, the way Aslan is so often absent, until, after 1,000 years or so of suffering, he decides to step in and make everything right. I understand the metaphor, understand C. S. Lewis' notion of faith and Christian humility, but (without getting into theology), I think it's a poor narrative device. What kind of beneficent force is Aslan, when he's so often negligent? And what does it do to the human agency of the characters that they get bailed out by this external power, rather than having to work things out (or not) themselves?
Sophie had a different issue. Although she liked the movie, she found its at-times-relentless violence off-putting; it's more fun to read, she told me, because you imagine what's going on in the story for yourself.
Yes, I thought, that's it exactly. No external agency.
David L. Ulin
Photo credit: Disney/Walden
Consider this: An author rides high on the publicity about his book, a stunning work of nonfiction. He commands huge amounts of money in advances and expected royalties. The book, an autobiography, promises a glimpse into lives unimagined by most people. Does this sound like James Frey soon after "A Million Little Pieces" was published and he was being celebrated by Oprah?
Uh, no. It refers to Clifford Irving, who, more than 30 years ago, duped his publishers, the media and various investigators into believing that he had actually interviewed the reclusive Howard Hughes and wrote his memoirs for him. A 1972 article in Time, "The Secret Life of Clifford Irving," summed up Irving's breathtaking rise and fall in this graf:
"Just weeks ago, Clifford Irving was looking forward to the publishing coup of the decade. He had control of well over half-a-million dollars in publishers' advances and prospects for immense royalties. Last week, with his story in a shambles, he sat in a Manhattan hotel waiting for the law to close in. The Irvings had been caught in forgery; his version of how he had acquired the book in personal meetings with Hughes was seriously shadowed. He tried to bargain with federal authorities for immunity ... in exchange for the full story, but the Government, apparently convinced that it has a solid case against the Irvings, was not interested."
Former Times staff writer Gina Piccalo talked to Irving last year on the occasion of the film "The Hoax," starring Richard Gere, which offered a version of Irving's incredible feat. Irving said something intriguing about the lasting effects of that scandal -- they haven't been lasting: "Let me put it to you this way.... I refuse to be caged by time and by the past. I try to live outside the cage. I know that the past -- all history -- is fiction. And so I can smile at it."
Responses to Frey's new work range from critical to adoring, but one thing no one can say with any certainty is that his career has been permanently tainted. You just can't accept that line of reasoning for him, especially when there is Irving, who now lives quietly in Aspen, Colo., and has published at least 10 books since the Hughes controversy in the 1970s. Forgiveness -- and forgetfulness -- seem eventual; some of the comments about our review seem to be leaning in that direction already.
Nick Owchar
 Does it surprise anybody that James Frey's novel "Bright Shiny Morning" is attracting so much attention?
Even though this book has nothing to do with the scandal around "A Million Little Pieces," and even though there is some distance -- more than two years -- separating this book's appearance from Frey's auto da fe on "Oprah," there has been plenty of response on the Web. Reactions have centered mostly on the differences between our paper's review by Times book editor David Ulin and Janet Maslin's for the New York Times.
Dana Goodyear notes, at her blog for the New Yorker, that the extreme difference of opinion in the reviews attests to the book's "coastally polarizing effect." East Coasters love it because they think it's about Los Angeles; West Coasters don't, because they know it doesn't really reflect L.A. at all.
What do they think in Texas? That they need another review to sort things out.
Mediabistro calls Janet Maslin's review for the New York Times a "love letter" and asks whether mimicking Frey's writing style in the review is "dreadful."
Did she read the review aloud or go back and revise it? In a video on Amazon, Frey says, "When I'm writing it, I sort of work on every sentence as a sentence, and I speak it to myself, and I rewrite it until it sounds the way I hear it in my head. Once I've got that, you know, I just move on. I don't revise, really. I don't read, at all."
Meanwhile, "Bright Shiny Morning" has rocketed from No. 666 on Amazon a week ago to No. 25.
Carolyn Kellogg
Sitting in a Paris cafe can be highly effective. That is, as far as journalist-author Andrew Hussey and Granta are concerned.
Granta magazine asked a bunch of literary types, from publishers to bloggers, how they make the web work for them. Hussey has, perhaps, the most enviable lifestyle: He throws a laptop into his rucksack and bikes to local Paris cafes to tap in. Another journalist is more disciplined: He opens exactly six tabs in Firefox every morning (apparently, like some of us, he didn't leave a hectic array open the night before).
Litblogger Maud Newton has a pretty hectic lifestyle, abetted by her iPhone addiction. She writes: The very ADD impulses that enable me to blog the way I do tend to hamstring larger projects, like the novel I’m writing, the review that’s coming due, the day-job work. No doubt this is true of most people who keep weblogs for fun rather than for profit — a dying pursuit, apparently. What still excites me about the Internet is that it facilitates endless foraging, and not only courtesy of my favorite blogs and newspapers. As more publications and critics go digital, I find myself sampling the offerings of literary magazines, squandering hours in the Harper’s archives (which stretch back to 1850!), formulating ever more intricate and passionate dissents....
More habits, both good and compulsive, here.
Carolyn Kellogg
photo of the Cafe de Floré in Paris by sergeymk via Flickr
Thanks to careful readers of Jacket Copy who e-mailed me about Friday's steampunk posting, especially those pointing the way to another article about the steampunk movement that was commissioned by the New York Times a year ago and was spiked. Freelance writer Richard Morgan (who happens to share his name with a contemporary science fiction writer) has posted the article he wrote for the NYTimes at his website. Called "Steampunk: Remembering Yesterday's Tomorrows" (great title), this article provides what the NYTimes article lacks: a deeper sense of the philosophical attitudes behind the movement. Ruth La Ferla's article makes it all sound like fads and surfaces; Morgan argues otherwise. You be the judge.
What a fine piece, Richard. I can't imagine why that other paper didn't publish it (though Ron Hogan, at Galley Cat, suggests rightly that your piece didn't talk about steampunk fashions enough. Shame on you!). I wish you had come to us first.
Stay tuned for my June column of the Siren's Call at www.latimes.com/books: Steampunk will be the topic, and a new feature, "Reader Feedback," will be included for your insights and help.
Nick Owchar
Photo: Paramount Pictures; from 1999's "Sleepy Hollow"
In today's paper, our book editor, David Ulin, took sharp aim at James Frey's new novel, "Bright Shiny Morning." If you didn't notice, there's also a graffiti board set up so that you can weigh in on The Frey Saga, Part 2.
OK, so do you think Frey deserves another chance, especially for the reported million and a half dollars he received for this book? Is there really no such thing as bad publicity? Click here to go to the graffiti board and post your thoughts.
Nick Owchar
With West Virgina voters going to the polls today, my thoughts turn to West Virginia literature, about which I know, well, not that much. But last fall I did hear Ann Pancake read from her novel "Strange as This Weather Has Been." It's a character-driven tale about a West Virginia family coping with living in the shadow of a mountaintop removal mine (like the one pictured above). "Black floods" of dirt and debris are an ever-present threat. Children play among the felled trees, and coal miners are at odds with the mine owners. You can read an excerpt at Narrative Magazine (free registration required).
What I do know a bit more about are narratives of presidential campaigns. A few favorites after the jump.
photo from www.stopmountainremoval.org
Continue reading Readings for West Virginia Primary day »
Coudal Partners, a design/advertising/interactive firm in Chicago, is in my RSS reader. And I admit, I avoid it. Because when I follow their links, I get sucked into category-defying Web excellence, to the extent that later I look up, dazed, completely unsure of what I was supposed to be doing but full of, say, booktitle-bandname combos like " The Things They Might Be Giants Carried," "Jane Eyre's Addiction" and "Abba Karenina."
But today I followed the time suck to end all time sucks, their Museum of Online Museums -- aka the MoOM. It is what it says it is and includes everything from the wondrously mundane -- The Grocery List Collection -- to the exquisite, like Duke University's Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library and the British Library's online gallery of great books. You might look at some ancient illustrated texts close up or find yourself wondering why William Burroughs' classic was published in England as The Naked Lunch -- as if the title referred to a single nudist luncheon appointment.
The image above comes from a WPA pamphlet that's part of the Smithsonian's collection, where I ended up after clicking through on a link for WPA calendars. This is all interesting, possibly addictive Internet exploration. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Carolyn Kellogg
If you're visiting the Pasadena Museum of California Art this week, may I recommend something?
On display is the California Art Club's 97th annual Gold Medal Juried Exhibition. Look for the winning bronze sculpture, "Fr. Electrico" by Christopher Slatoff. Study it carefully. Walk slowly around it.
From the front, it depicts a father carrying his exhausted son in his arms.
From behind, the father's back is engraved with symbols and images -- an intentional
Continue reading Bradbury in bronze »
Sure, old file cabinets are hunks of junk, but where would the cause of literature be without them? How many times have you heard about the discovery of a writer's manuscript in an old drawer or ancient stack of yellowing paper in an office?
If it weren't for such finds, the Paris Review would've needed something else to fill Pages 148-169 of its new spring issue: These pages contain a "lost interview" with Leonard Michaels, which David Reid and Ernest Machen conducted with him in 1986 "amid the great hubbub" of Michaels' life and in spite of his reservations. The interviewers write that the interview was never published (though they don't explai | |
