Spare the banter, please

Jacket Copy's ongoing conversation about Denis Johnson's noir serial "Nobody Move" continues....

The challenge of writing crime fiction on deadline is dependent on one's ability to perfect the great lost art of witty banter. I found this out a few months ago when I was charged with writing an entire 300-page novel in three months — this from a writer who took two years to write a novel that clocked in at just under 200 pages and about 10 years to write a story collection that is on the bright side of 175 (though, to my credit, there are 12 entirely different stories there, so that's something) — and spent the first month doing things like playing Scrabulous on Facebook, googling the symptoms for various diseases I was certain I was coming down with and, strangely, completely dedicating myself to physical fitness for the first time in about, oh, 10 years. Maybe 15.

At any rate, those three months became two months, and I didn’t have a word on the page, so I decided I just needed to get people talking and eventually things would sort themselves out and I'd find that elusive flow. What I learned was that, unlike in my literary fiction, where characters utter a few lines of subtextual dialogue that then leads them to ruminate internally on the way their parents/husbands/wives/children/Elvis ruined their lives and brings them to a dreadful moment of self-realization, in crime fiction half the joy is pretending you're conjuring Nick and Nora Charles, where every line of dialogue is loaded with conflict, sexuality, violence, hubris and, periodically, a shred of evidence.

To get to those shreds, however, you sometimes end up going on and on, falling in love with the way your characters sound; in my case, I was thrilled by this new toughness that was coming out, the muscularity of the sentences, the staccato beats. (The other half of the fun, incidentally — and particularly if, like me, you've spent the balance of your career writing about the sad passages of memory and trauma — is blowing stuff up.) In a perfect scenario, you then go back and cut away the excess and find those nuggets of conversation that convey character, reveal your character's emotional state, deliver conflict and move the story forward ... while still being witty.

(More after the jump)

Mastering the situation

I really thought the second installment was going to be the problem one, but, as David has noted, Denis Johnson sails through without a hitch.

In his neat little book on Dickens, G.K. Chesterton (himself no mean hand at the thriller, the detective story and all manner of genre narrative) noted that Dickens, as his career went along, became a master of pace and delay. Rather than just piling everything in, and throwing ever more narrative logs on the fire (the equivalent of Chandler having men come through the door with guns in their hands), Dickens gained the confidence to take his time. And that's what Johnson is doing here. There's not much action in this installment but a lot more situation and character depth and, as David says, really sizzling dialogue.

(what surprised Richard Rayner, after the jump)

So Cal bookseller nominees announced

The Southern California Independent Booksellers Association has announced the nominees for its 2008 awards; all the authors are based in Southern California. I don't remember anything like this in Pittsburgh -- do other regional associations of booksellers have similar awards?

Congratulations to all the nominees. Links to the LA Times reviews are below.

Fiction:
"City of Thieves" by David Benioff
"Winged Creatures" by Roy Freirich
"Imagine Me and You" by Billy Mernit
"Harry, Revised" by Mark Sarvas
"The God of War" by Marisa Silver

T. Jefferson Parker Award For Mystery:
"Chasing Darkness" by Robert Crais
"Snitch Jacket" by Christopher Goffard
"Oscar Season" by Mary McNamara
"Judas Horse" by April Smith 
"Hollywood Crows" by Joseph Wambaugh
"Incomplete Revenge" by Jacqueline Winspear

Nonfiction and children's book nominees after the jump.

Denis Johnson's gym bag

Anita might distract the cops with her door-blowing smile, but she’s gone by the time two FBI agents show up at the hotel room. They’re the ones who tell Jimmy that Anita embezzled the $2.3 million. They’re looking for it.

Jimmy’s on his way out. He’s holding Gambol’s gym bag -- which holds Gambol’s big, inconvenient shotgun -- and tells the agents he’s got his own clothes in it, is all. The FBI agents -- who go on to search the hotel room for Anita’s embezzled money, or clues to it -- let Jimmy walk away. They never check inside his bag.

Strains belief, right?

But does it matter? That's after the jump.

Whole lotta shaking in books

The longlist for the Man Booker Prize has been announced: a baker's dozen of must-read fiction for 2008.

In the tradition of the very dead diarist Samuel Pepys, George Orwell will start blogging Aug. 9.

Literary tattoos get no respect from Gawker.

We have lots of respect for Stephen King, whose new novel "N." is being accompanied by this animated episodic series, which began Monday.

The journey(s) of 1000 Journals are chronicled in a new documentary opening in San Francisco.

Independent online journal The Quarterly Conversation has a new look for its new issue.

The author tracking/stalking site Booktour.com has a new look too.

In honor of today's earthquake, an excerpt from "The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith" after the jump.

Nobody Move: We're back ...

Last month, Jacket Copy opened an ongoing conversation about Denis Johnson's noir serial "Nobody Move," which is being published in four parts in Playboy. Part 2 has just hit the stands, and now we pick up where we left off. ...

Toward the end of our initial discussion of "Nobody Move," Richard Rayner noted that the real challenge of the project would not be in the first installment but in the second. The opening section was all about the setup. Part 2 would be where we would see whether Johnson's serial had legs.

Rayner's right, of course, as anyone who's seen this season's premiere of "Mad Men" can attest. And Part 2 of "Nobody Move" really delivers — moving the story along, offering a number of classically weird Johnson moments and, most important, having a lot of fun with the conventions of the genre, the hard-boiled talk and attitude of noir.

Johnson opens Part 2 the morning after Part 1 ends, in the Log Inn Motel, where Jimmy Luntz has just slept with Anita Desilvera, a woman so out of his league that he has to keep looking at her to make sure she is real. There's a brief encounter with the cops, which Anita defuses through sheer animal lust: "At that moment," Johnson writes, "Anita came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her black hair slicked back, and flashed a smile that would have blown the doors off Jesus Christ."

"Blown the doors off Jesus Christ"? How's that for hard-boiled? It doesn't even matter that Johnson's image makes no sense — last time I looked, Jesus didn't have any doors.

In the beginning...

At the dawn of every book there is a sentence, a sentence that grabs the reader or reaches out tenderly toward him or throws a fireball at his face. If all it does is just sit there on the page, it's not doing its job, and it won't get much attention. At least not from io9, which today looks at some stellar first sentences of science fiction; William Gibson and Rudy Rucker and Orson Scott Card get nods. Dan Brown, too:

There are a lot of opening sentences that announce the start of a rollicking yarn, with an action sentence. Like this, from Dan Brown's Angels & Demons: "Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own." Boom! A guy's flesh is burning. It's exciting!

A couple of years ago, the literary journal American Book Review was hot on the case, and came up with its own 100 best first sentences. The list tends toward the iconic, memorable and short:

• Call me Ishmael. ("Moby-Dick," Herman Melville).
• Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. ("Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov)
• All this happened, more or less. ("Slaughterhouse Five," Kurt Vonnegut)
• You better not never tell nobody but God. ("The Color Purple," Alice Walker)
• A screaming comes across the sky. ("Gravity's Rainbow," Thomas Pynchon)

There are many paragraph-length sentences, too, most notably #95, Raymond Federman's "Double or Nothing," which with 396 words is the longest of the bunch.

The short sentences stand out in their lack of context. Melville didn't write "'Call me Ishmael,'" he said as he hurled the harpoon." Walker doesn't tell us who's talking, but we know right away that we're being let in on a secret. Vonnegut leads with a lie, Pynchon with disorientation. And Nabokov slips from words to lust in an instant. Maybe what it takes to make a sentence great is a kind of spare universality.

But then, the two lists intersect with a sentence that's specific to the point of becoming dated. From William Gibson, no less.

It's after the jump.

What Los Angeles is reading

At an alley off Cahuenga filled with people who waited for the Hotel Cafe to open for the monthly reading series Tongue and Groove. These well-heeled loiterers told Jacket Copy what they've been reading, both good and not-so-good.

   

In case the books go by too fast, a list is after the jump.

Carolyn Kellogg

Book highlights this week

We announce changes in book coverage here at the L.A. Times. Online, Books is a good destination; Jacket Copy too.

Michael Chabon talks about genre(s), and Jackie Collins talks about success.

The Hero Complex blog covers Comic-Con.

Tim Rutten reviews the memoir Still Alive! A Temporary Condition by Herbert Gold, and Heller McAlpin looks at Doris Lessing's fictionalized memoir Alfred & Emily. 

David Ulin reviews the story collection Lost in Uttar Pradesh by Evan S. Connell.

James Thurber's children's books are celebrated, as are the birthdays of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Chandler.

We find some bookshelves that are really secret doors (not secret anymore).

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Writing and running

In his review for us of Haruki Murakami's "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running," Peter Terzian writes:

Oates’ essay aside, the literature of running is as thin as a mesh singlet. Running pops up in fiction and poetry from time to time, from Homer to John Updike, but the sport doesn’t easily lend itself to the dramatic. The vagaries of weather, the joint pains and the repetition of putting one foot in front of the other can’t compete with the traded blows of the boxing ring or a home run.

Just a note: Last year, Running magazine hailed the return of John L. Parker with "Again to Carthage," a sequel of sorts to his 1970s cult classic "Once a Runner." It is considered a classic among runners. What other literature is there? What comes to mind is Alan Sillitoe's story “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” which is easy to recall because of the title. What else? There's Paul Maurer's "The Gift," also Benjamin Cheever's "Strides." But, as Terzian writes, much of the fiction, especially, is well below the mainstream radar, making it difficult to find.

Another interesting point that Terzian emphasizes: Writing and running are apt parallels. Despite the clubs that gather runners or writers together, despite the illusion of competition that a massive marathon suggests (see above) or a longlist for a book prize, both are lone activities. That is their essence. For that matter, the same is true of reading. We're all runners.

Nick Owchar

Photo credit: Grandma's Marathon, Clint Austin/AP

It's so easy, reading green

NPR has three green-reading recommendations from Washington Post environmental reporter Juliet Eilperin, books that "remind us what's at stake when we chip away at the landscape." Her choices: the 900-page anthology "American Earth," edited by Bill McKibben, and two more slender volumes, "Where The Wild Things Were: Life, Death and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators," by William Stolzenburg, and "The Carbon Age: How Life's Core Element Has Become Civilization's Greatest Threat," by Eric Roston.

Going local, LAist points out three green books by Angelenos. While "Vintage LA" is a bit of a stretch — is my thrift-store habit really "green"? — the other books are both green and practical. Sophie Uliano's "Gorgeously Green" focuses on green beauty and girly lifestyle, and "The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City," by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, does just what it says. The authors of "The Urban Homestead" continue to blog about their experiences, so when you're done planting your balcony garden, you can catch up on the latest in backyard chicken-tending and rocket stoves.

Also online is the large and lovely worldchanging.org, which hopes to present "the most important and innovative new tools, models and ideas for building a bright green future." Its book — Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century — has 600 pages of those ideas. McKibben called it "the Whole Earth Catalog retooled for the iPod generation."

Carolyn Kellogg

Photo of Paris' le Jardin de Tuilleries by Brian Pennington via Flickr

Book bits: Saul Bellow, John Holmes and mummies

In "Still Alive!," Herbert Gold's memoir, which we reviewed this week, a chapter is devoted to Gold's impressions of Saul Bellow, left, through all the years of their friendship. Here's a brief, interesting story about their early relationship that goes unmentioned in the review. When the editors at Viking read the manuscript of Gold's first novel, "Birth of a Hero," they were so impressed that they wanted to make sure a first-time novelist had really written it. What did they do? As Gold says:

Since my return address was Paris, some prudent soul thought to ask Saul for an opinion — Had I really written the book? Would I be likely to repay investment by writing another book? — and he gave it a favorable verdict.

I like that the publisher turned to Bellow to confirm whether the book had been plagiarized. It's just a reminder that questions of authenticity didn't begin with James Frey and Margaret Jones. How fortunate to be able to turn to a future Nobel laureate for some assistance.

On bad titles: I made a big deal about a book with the punning title "Abroad for Her Country" a few days ago. Now BearManor Media is publishing a biography of porn star John Holmes.

Yes, that's right, the title is "John Holmes: A Life Measured in Inches." The only bright side to this silly title is knowing that the publishers could have come up with something much worse. Please DO NOT send in suggested alternative titles.

Reading "The Book of the Dead": There it is, glaring at me from the side of a bus: a big, decaying face for the third “Mummy” movie coming next month. Just one further reminder that summer blockbusters have made an increasingly demonic turn — “Mamma Mia!” not included. Likely what you’ll find in this film are an aura of false supernaturalism, plenty of anachronisms and all-around cinematic phoniness -- that’s what Egyptologist Barry Kemp thought about the previous two films in this mummified franchise.

(More after the jump)

Soon I Will Be A Movie

Austin Grossman, author of "Soon I will Be Invincible," is wandering around Comic-Con wearing steampunk goggles and a brown velvet jacket that's got a 19th-century scientist vibe. He's in town because his book is in development for a movie with Strike Entertainment, which produced "Children of Men" (based on P.D. James' novel). Dan Weiss is working on the screenplay. "My agent is kind of a high flyer. He created a shell company and we kinda bought the rights for ourselves using someone else's money," Grossman says with a chuckle.

The book, which deals with a middle-aged supervillain going up against his bickering nemeses, was essentially a comic-book in literary form, yet it's considered literature—"One of the lessons of Joss Whedon's success is that you can do genre stuff, but it needs to have real characters, real feelings behind it, and it needs to be smart."

Grossman is a creative consultant on the film — note the lack of ironic tick-marks here; he appears to be actively involved. "There's a sense of the voice of Dr. Impossible I think that it's really crucial to get right. That's my major role."

Also much of the characters' background information ("backstory" for comics buffs) will be indicated through scene settings, newspapers lying around. "It's plotted more simply [than the book]," says Grossman. "What I like is that they kept the off-kilter rhythm of the scenes. A lot of the scenes end oddly in the novel, and we kept that."

As he leaves, Grossman says, "You know, I just realized, but Baron Ether (one of Grossman's characters) is kind of steampunk. Grossman is a recent steampunk convert, inspired by Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Ironically, Whedon has admitted that this YouTube short was inspired by seeing the title of Grossman's book. "Yeah, the goggles on the forehead-thing I'm wearing—that's Dr. Horrible's signature."

Laurel Maury

Doh! Sorry about that, Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, 109 years ago this week. In 1926, he published his first novel, "The Sun Also Rises."

It was a warm spring night and I sat at a table on the terrace of the Napolitain after Robert had gone, watching it get dark and the electric signs come on, and the red and green stop-and-go-traffic-signal, and the crowd going by, and the horse-cabs clippety-clopping along at the edge of the solid taxi traffic, and the poules going by, singly and in pairs, looking for the evening meal. I watched a good-looking girl walk past the table and watched her go up the street and lost sight of her, and watched another, and then saw the first one coming back again. She went by once more and I caught her eye, and she came over and sat down at the table. The waiter came up.
    "Well, what will you drink?" I asked.
    "Pernod."
    "That's not good for little girls."
    "Little girl yourself. Dites garçon, un pernod."
    "A pernod for me, too."
    "What's the matter?" she asked. "Going to a party?"

It's not too late to celebrate Papa Hemingway and his work — I understand, not everyone is so inclined — and I bet there's no place swankier than the Bar Hemingway at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Or if you want to stay in, you could throw yourself a Pernod party.

Or you could go out to a Hemingway bar — there seems to be no end to them. Are there any other authors who've so fully saturated our popular (drinking) culture?

Carolyn Kellogg

What Mad Men read and more book news

photo: AMC

New York Magazine's Culture Vulture parses the books "Mad Men" character Don Draper has been reading and suggests some others he might enjoy. Apparently today's men don't read on TV (but the women do!)

Charles Bock and Richard Price will read at Central Park's Summerstage in New York July 31, and they've got a rock-show style poster to prove it.

Is How Fiction Works, the new book by literary critic James Wood, prescriptive? Yes, everyone agrees. But there's some debate about how devoted he is to realism -- and Wood has jumped in to clarify.

Things'll be getting hot in San Francisco next weekend, with Stephen Elliott, Daniel Handler and more reading at Dirty Words: Litquake's Tribute to Smut -- the event also promises burlesque dancers and a corset fashion show. It's a benefit for Litquake, the week-long festival of literariness coming in October.

Feeling hot already? The Barnes & Noble Review has a capsule selection of five books on swimming to help you cool down.

And finally: "In writing, I am not my face." - Debra Winger writes on writing in the Washington Post.

Carolyn Kellogg

Comic-Con kicks off

Photo by Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times

San Diego is overflowing with comic fans as Comic-Con begins today: Tickets have sold out. Our new Hero Complex blog is in the door, keeping up on the movie previews and author signings and conference ephemera, including which branded bag is the hot property on the floor this year.

And of course there are photographers ready to take photos of all the Slave Leias and other costumed fans. Christa Miesner, above, dressed as another Star Wars character — Twi'Lek — at Comic-Con 2007.

Carolyn Kellogg

Narrative Magazine's big prize

There are so many literary journals that listing them all takes a huge database (Duotrope) or a really big website (Newpages). If you can navigate them, literary magazines are great places to find new fiction — and for new writers, they're a great way to get published.

Not that it's easy. Journals are so overwhelmed with submissions that sometimes they take two years to send out a simple rejection. One way to winnow the pack — and generate some cash — is to launch a contest. Often the contests have a moderate entry fee, 10 or 20 bucks, and some kind of cash prize. Usually the prize isn't all that much, sadly. But Narrative Magazine's got a lucrative pot for its current first-person story contest: $3,000 for the winner, $1,750 for second place and $1,000 for third. Spreading the money love around, the magazine will give 10 runners-up $125 each.

Submissions can be fiction or nonfiction, and the call for entries is clear:

We are looking for authors whose use of the first person demonstrates a sense of proportion and perspective, an engagement with the world beyond the self, for authors whose gifts of thought or feeling and of insight enhance a reader’s sense of connection and possibility. And, as always, we are looking for manuscripts with a strong narrative, in which the effects of language are intense and total. Reading the first-person narrator — the I of the story — we hope to find the most necessary, most intimate, most personal stories made universal.

The contest closes on July 31.

Carolyn Kellogg

Get 'em while they're free

Science fiction and fantasy publisher Tor is launching Tor.com, an online site with stories and art, authors blogging and facebook-like community features, all with a focus on otherworldly fiction. i09 editor Annalee Nuwitz writes, "Reading Tor.com is like jumping into a room where a lot of my favorite scifi writers and bloggers are chatting. Can't wait for more!"

This week - until Sunday - Tor.com is giving away books and digital versions of original art. You can download html, PDF or mobile versions of 24 titles, including John Scalzi's "Old Man War" and "Mistborn" by Brandon Sanderson. Just like the text, the art comes in cell phone, laptop and big screen sizes.

For people who already know the books, it's not a big deal, but for someone like me -- who has an abiding affection for science fiction but has fallen woefully behind -- it's a wonderful invitation to get back in the slipstream.

Carolyn Kellogg

cover art for "Zoe's Tale" by John Scalzi copyright John Harris / Tor.com

Happy birthday, Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler, an oil exec who lost his job for drinking and carrying on with a secretary, cleaned up to become one of the most enduring writers of detective fiction. The hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe and Chandler's take on Los Angeles have influenced generations of writers. To celebrate his birthday today, we asked some fans what they'd give him, or say to him, for his 120th.

Judith Freeman, author of the Chandler biography "The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved":  "A night with Cissy. And of course red roses."

Tod Goldberg, author of "Simplify" and contributor to "Las Vegas Noir": "I like to give people presents they can use, so I'd probably give Chandler a shovel and a pick-axe, which would be useful in getting out of the grave and for beating to death all the people — including this one — who've ripped him off over the years. I suspect Chandler would also find it very odd to go into a Barnes & Noble and find that every mid-list crime novelist is being compared to him, and usually favorably, in their jacket copy. In fact, I don't know a single crime writer (including members of my family!) who've not been called Chandleresque, which makes me think most people haven't really read much Raymond Chandler."

many more presents after the jump.

Behind those books - a secret door!

I don't know if it was Nancy Drew or the board game Clue or Scooby Doo, but at some point I imprinted on secret doors. Particularly secret doors hidden behind bookshelves. Pull a book and - surprise! - the shelf swings open, revealing a hidden room (or secret passage, or steps going down, or something grisly).

Nowadays homeowners can get bookshelf-disguising doors of their own. There are multiple retail versions and at least one custom designer. What the bookshelves hide varies, from saferooms to unsightly laundry rooms to rooms that become wine cellars. Sadly, the products seem too major to try to install in a rental, unless you have a landlord with a sense of intrigue.

One Australian with DIY skills built the shelves above, which, in the spirit of hidden doors, open when you pull on a Sherlock Holmes book. While his shelves conceal nothing more than a broom closet, with his talents I bet he could construct a secret passageway -- maybe to a conservatory.

To see one bookshelf do its thing, check out the video after the jump.

Words to live by — if you can

A very nice line from our Richard Rayner in his "Paperback Writers" column this week just past. He celebrates the centennial of the New Yorker's Joseph Mitchell, left, and offers this insight into the writer's abilities (before writer's block silenced him for some 30 years):

His career until 1964 had been a steady progression, in which the increased reach of his ambition had been matched by ever more perfect and discriminating execution.

Something every artist aspires to — and that few reach. And what happens when this position is finally attained? It can be lost, as Rayner later explains. Just a reminder for all those reachers out there. Nothing's permanent.

Nick Owchar

Jim Harrison on James Welch

There’s scorn aplenty in Jim Harrison’s introduction to a Penguin Classics reissue of James Welch’s early novel "The Death of Jim Loney." No one else would dare the following opening line: "Recently while rereading ‘The Death of Jim Loney’ I wanted to write or call Jim Welch in Missoula and talk about his novel but he’s dead."

Isn't that a direct violation of the "speak well of the dead" clause we’re all supposed to follow as card-carrying members of Western civilization? Harrison (right) isn't being insulting, but only he could get away with this type of lede.

Introductions are often easily discarded. They offer a few pages of warmup before the plunge into the narrative; they’re the treadmill before the exercise session begins. But what Harrison’s piece provides, besides the glowing praise for a writer who should not be far from any of our imaginations, are the cuts and jabs that are part of the trademark of his style. Here he is, casting a glance at his own career, with a parting shot at the academic profession:

It is arguable that we don’t have a national literature but the work of specific regions unrelated to tradition. Of course I’m nearly forty years away from the academy and don’t make a living inventing connections between writers.

Ouch. He’s faulting critics for trespassing, isn't he? Isn't the invention of connections what fiction writers practice? And here is a rich anecdote that captures his own discovery of the differences existing between the reality and romance of things:

A couple of decades ago in Key West I won a private detective’s license in a poker game and thought of myself as an operative for a few weeks until I became frightened when I learned the malefactors I was investigating carried guns, at which I determined that I should limit my daring to my imagination.

Harrison’s essay is one of those examples of when an introduction doesn’t function as a piece of forgettable support furniture, like a bedside table. After reading it, you can go on and read the Welch novel (and you really should), but you don’t have to.

Nick Owchar

Harrison photo: Ralph Radford

Puns are risky

Note from the Office of Bad Titles: Ok, I get this one (new from the University of Notre Dame Press) and its relevance to its author (Wilkowski was the first female acting ambassador in Latin America) but c'mon.

Some puns are funny very late at night but should never appear on the cover of a book: Does anyone remember, for instance, the dreaded "Cooking with Pooh"?

Nick Owchar

The other Bat man

Bat Segundo has been interviewing authors on his podcast since just about the beginning of podcast time. Segundo is the alter ego of Edward Champion, a litblogger who also writes book reviews, for this paper among others. Sadly, this week he announced that he's having trouble keeping the show going.

Shuttering the show would be a shame. Champion -- who took the character of Bat Segundo from the book "Ghostwritten" by David Mitchell -- gives equal time to highbrow literature and popular culture. The authors above are a representatively diverse sample: (clockwise from left) hostess/actress Amy Sedaris (in sprinkles), seminal DJ Grandmaster Flash, Whiting Award-winning Marianne Wiggins, professor/TV interviewer James Lipton, debut novelist Garth Risk Hallberg and Charles Baxter, a National book Award finalist who's considered a writers' writer. He's also talked to the prolific, intense William T. Vollman, bestselling chick-lit writer Jennifer Weiner and hundreds of other authors -- all archived on his site.

The interviews reveal that Champion is a passionate reader, one with both smarts and strong opinions. Sometimes he challenges writers, usually in good ways; occasionally he's annoyed them, as he reveals in this transcribed exchange with Oliver Sacks. His willingness to press a point -- even when this might alienate his subjects -- sets him apart as a contemporary interviewer. So do his elaborate, Bat Segundo introductions, which are produced with a mind-boggling creativity and variety.

As of this writing, it looks like Champion may have found a way to keep the Bat Segundo franchise going, possibly with a slimmer schedule. That's good news; the literary world would be darker without this caped crusader.

Carolyn Kellogg

Garth Rish Hallberg photo by Timothy Briner; Charles Baxter photo by Keith E. Johnson

The story behind the upcoming Homicide Report

photo of a memorial for shooting victim Dovon Harris at 114th Street near Central Avenue in Watts by Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times

Book insiders who subscribe to Publisher's Lunch caught the announcement this week that we can expect a new book from LA Times reporter Jill Leovy, which will be based on "reporting all 845 LA County murders last year - weavig [sic] together a kaleidoscopic narrative about a murder-wracked community in South Los Angeles with a new theory about race and America's homicide epidemic." Since Leovy also blogs here at the Times -- at the Homicide Report, which is as fascinating as it is troubling -- we wanted to know more about the project, the ideas behind it, and what crime books she reads.

Jacket Copy: Does your book chronicle all 845 murders in Los Angeles last year?
Jill Leovy: No. The book is not related to the Homicide Report blog, nor to my efforts to cover all homicides in Los Angeles County last year. (In reality, there were more then 900.) The book will be about the syndrome of high homicide rates among blacks in America, their causes and consequences.

Jacket Copy: Will you focus on a specific area or region?
JL: The book will be mostly reported out of Los Angeles, but it seeks to explain a national phenomenon. High homicide rates among blacks are everywhere -- not just in Los Angeles but in Detroit, Washington D.C., New Orleans, and many rural areas and smaller cities as well. The examples in the book will be drawn largely from Watts and South-Central Los Angeles where I have long worked, but the argument is for the whole country.

JC: Without giving too much away, what can you tell us about your "new theory about race and America's homicide epidemic"? The answer... after the jump.

'The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher': I told you it was good

The Victorian era is a rich, seemingly bottomless mine for writers: in science fiction, the authors known collectively as the Steampunks have tapped it for their fantasies; and many authors--such as Anne Perry, Will Thomas, G.H. Dahlquist and so many more--continually revisit that period for novels of mayhem and mystery.

Kate Summerscale's (left) "The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher" was published earlier this year. It presented the true account of a child's murder on a family's estate and the efforts of investigators to find the perpetrator among the members of the household. In unfolding the story, the author gave readers the context of 19th century crime detection and the public's fascination with that singular figure, the detective. Many papers reviewed it. My column The Siren's Call featured a review for The Times.  The book was honored this week with the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction.

As part of the prize, Summerscale, a former literary editor of the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph, will receive more than $60,000. The 10-year-old prize was organized by the BBC. Summerscale's book succeeded over finalists including  Orlando Figes' "The Whisperers'' about Soviet Russia, Patrick French's authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul, "The World Is What It Is" and New Yorker music critic Alex Ross' survey of music from the last century, "The Rest Is Noise.'' The Guardian has a particularly good overview of this year's prize and why it won.

This isn't the only important prize announcement this week. Our colleague Carolyn Kellogg offers another right here at Jacket Copy.

Nick Owchar

To be young, talented, and (maybe) rich

The Dylan Thomas Prize, all $119,938.38 (or £60,000) of it, is awarded annually to one skilled, not-yet-30-year-old writer. This weekend, the 14 authors on the prize's long list were announced. One finalist -- Dinaw Mengestu -- has already done well in the awards department, winning the Guardian's 2007 First Book Award and the Los Angeles Times' 2007 Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.

Authors can hail from any country in the world, as long as they write in English. The long list is:

Priya Basil (U.K.) for the novel "Ishq and Mushq"
Susan Barker (U.K.) for the novel "The Orientalist and the Ghost"
Caroline Bird (U.K.) for the poetry collection "Trouble Came to the Turnip"
Zoë Brigley (U.K.) for the poetry collection "The Secret"
Ben Dolnick (U.S.) for the novel "Zoology"
Ceridwen Dovey (South Africa) for the novel "Blood Kin"
Joe Dunthorne (U.K.) for the novel "Submarine"
Susan Fletcher (U.K.) for the novel "Oystercatchers"
Adam Green (U.K.) for the novel "Satsuma Sun - Mover"
Edward Hogan (U.K.) for the novel "Blackmoor"
Porochista Khakpour (Iran) for the novel "Sons and Other Flammable Objects"
Nam Le (Vietnam) for the short story collection "The Boat"
Dinaw Mengestu (Ethiopia) for "Children of the Revolution" (published in the U.S. as "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears")
Kei Miller (Jamaica) for the poetry collection "There Is an Anger That Moves"
Ross Raisin (U.K.) for the novel "God's Own Country" (published in the U.S. as "Out Backward")
Karen Russell (U.S.) for the short story collection "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised By Wolves"

Just being nominated is an honor. But I bet it's hard to remember that winning isn't everything when the prize is nearly $120,000.

Carolyn Kellogg

photo of author Nam Le reading in Los Angeles by Carolyn Kellogg

Sampling books on the new iPhone

The 7.5 hours I spent on a Pasadena sidewalk on Friday were worth it— let's just start with that. I love my new iPhone. But after admiring its sleek styling and watching the GPS trace my Gold Line ride in real time, I wanted to get down to business. I heard you can read books on these things.

There are hundreds of new apps — they work on the first generation of iPhones, too — and I began my search assuming that I'd need to get an e-book reader and then go find some e-books.

But first I stumbled across the Harper Collins offering, which seemed like a good place to start. After pointing my iPhone's Web browser to the Harper Collins mobile page and selecting the iPhone option, I got a list of titles:

• "Beyond the Body Farm" by Dr. Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson
• "The Case for the Real Jesus" by Lee Strobel
• "Ike: An American Hero" by Michael Korda
• "A Killer's Kiss" by William Lashner
• "Life on the Refrigerator Door" by Alice Kuipers
• "Love is a Many Trousered Thing" by Louise Rennison
• "The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions" by Marcus J. Borg and N Wright
• "Now and Forever" by Ray Bradbury
• "Obama: From Promise to Power" by David Mendell
• "Soul Catcher" by Michael C. White
• "Sweet Revenge" by Diane Mott Davidson
• "When the Game Is Over, It All Goes Back in the Box" by John Ortberg
• "Winning" by Jack Welch and Suzy Welch

I was hoping for a little more literary fiction — like Annie Dillard's "The Maytrees," which can be previewed on the publisher's Browse Inside page — but I knew where I wanted to begin. The book, and the reading experience, after the jump.

Memo from the past

Books are receptacles of human thought, and they are also, quite literally, receptacles — who has not found an old movie stub, photo or grocery list that had been acting as a bookmark?

Recently, a reader delivered to Book Review a tiny piece of its heritage, a note retrieved from a book and dated to 1978. The note was written by Robert Kirsch, one of Book Review’s earliest editors and critics, and also father of our regular contributor, author Jonathan Kirsch, and grandfather of poet and critic Adam Kirsch.

The note writer, a Mr. Katzin, apparently contacted Kirsch to find out more about the papers of James Boswell, edited in a series by Frederick A. Pottle. Such an exchange was much more common and routine in those pre-bibliofind days.

Brief but gracious, brief but engaged, Kirsch's reply serves as an example of a hospitality that seems harder to muster today. What, to respond to a reader’s question? In a handwritten note? With a friendly tone? You expect too much! "Indeed, Pottle did!" Kirsch writes at one point. "There are now eight or nine volumes." He then directs the reader to possible sources for the existing volumes. The note had been found inside a book donated to a local library: Thanks to Connie Unger for finding it and for realizing we might like it for our archives.

Of course I put the note in the mail to his son. But before I did, I held it in my hands and felt the distance between his time and ours.

Nick Owchar

The upside to the New Yorker's Obama controversy

Everyone's up in arms about the image of a Muslim Barack and machine-gun toting Michelle Obama on the cover of the July 21 issue of the New Yorker.

As far as I'm concerned, it's a cartoon — not designed to deceive, like a doctored photo — and if our friends and neighbors laugh at "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report," I'm certain they're sophisticated enough to understand a little illustrated satire. But maybe someone out there thinks this accurately represents how Barack Obama moves through the world.

This is for sure: This is bringing a lot of attention to the (often low-key) New Yorker, and the magazine will likely sell more copies than in an average week. Which means new readers.

So who benefits? Fictionwise, it's SoCal local Sarah Shun-lien Bynum — author of "Madeline Is Sleeping" — whose story "Yurt" is in this issue. There are brief reviews of the novels "City of Thieves" by David Benioff and Poppy Adams' "The Sister."

As always, there is plenty of excellent nonfiction to be found in the New Yorker, in articles on current affairs and essays and criticism. Of course you can read about Barack Obama inside, and catch up on restaurants and music and movies.

As for nonfiction books, in this issue attention is paid to wine, the poet Mayakovsky and a 167-year-old book on gardening (lawns, yes or no?).

There's even a little bit of satire in the mag, too: a piece called "14 Passive-Aggressive Appetizers" by Yoni Brenner. And all those cartoons. Isn't it clear that the New Yorker doesn't want to be taken too seriously?

Carolyn Kellogg

Godard: genius or gasbag?

Maybe the problem is the length: Richard Brody's biography of Jean-Luc Godard, "Everything Is Cinema," thumps down at 702 pages. To spend that much time with a single subject requires something of the reader: enthusiasm, affection. Without a sufficient level of goodwill, the result can easily be enmity.

"Now we know how one of the greatest of all filmmakers — the man who so radically changed cinema in 1959 with his debut feature, 'Breathless' — became an intolerable gasbag. That probably wasn’t Brody’s aim in writing this exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting, critical biography."

That was Stephanie Zacharek writing for the New York Times. Our own reviewer Richard Schickel fared little better, admitting, "I have rarely been so glad to come to the end of an admirable book." Both reviewers find Godard's personality difficult (also "annoying," "stubbornly confounding" and "perhaps the victim of attention-deficit disorder"). But all these qualities, which might make reading a long biography not much fun, don't make Godard any less of a filmmaker.

In 1959, Godard's film "Breathless" launched the French New Wave into American movie theaters and the dialogue of American filmmaking. Godard had also been a critic — for Cahiers du Cinéma — and he was, as Schickel notes, "a useful motormouth." But while many critics are dismissive of his later work, the Telegraph praises Godard's film legacy, explaining:

"This is an artist who has reinvented himself as often as Madonna, and to rather more invigorating effect. You can accuse him of pretentiousness and incomprehensibility, but you could never accuse him of (to use a 1960s term) selling out, and in this era of the two-minute attention-span we must treasure those few remaining artists whose work forces us to use our brains."

In its review, Time Out New York turns back to the movies and recommends watching Godard's early films. It also suggests reading a collection of Godard's essays and interviews: And "Godard on Godard" is only 300 pages.

Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in "Breathless."

Listening to Leonard Susskind

In college, I had a roommate who came off an acid trip babbling endlessly about "the universal hologram." When she became obsessed with repeatedly washing down the walls of our room with bleach, I chalked it up to post-trip craziness. But maybe I should have paid closer attention: Theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind has proposed a holographic principle that might just be crazy enough to be true, according to Jesse Cohen, who reviews Susskind's latest book today.

In "The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics," Susskind not only discusses the holographic principle and string theory, the book is also "a gregarious narrative of intellectual brinkmanship."

In this interview with rock musician and physicist Brian Cox, Susskind shows his amiability while discussing string theory over wine.

If you like Susskind's style, you can sit in on his continuing education class in quantum mechanics; Stanford has put the series of all nine lectures online.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

The week in books: from Bond to black power

Florence is hot: "The Monster of Florence" by Douglas Preston is #13 in our nonfiction bestsellers list; "The Enchantress of Florence" by Salman Rushdie is #2 in fiction.

Rushdie won the Booker of Bookers this week for his 1981 winner book "Midnight's Children," prompting Jacket Copy to look at other trophies he's gathered (pretty ladies all).

"First Stop in the New World" looked into the inner life of Mexico City, while we got the straight talk from Gustavo Arellano, the writer behind the O.C. Weekly column and book called "¡Ask a Mexican!"

James Bond got kicked around and Janet Carlson kicked up her heels.

We looked at black power, in the upper crust of Stephen L. Carter's novel "Palace Council" and the historic political role of African-American entertainers, from Paul Robeson to Spike Lee, in Richard Iton's "In Search of the Black Fantastic."

Speaking of powerful African Americans: Barack Obama has two nonfiction books on the L.A. Times paperback bestsellers list, "The Audacity of Hope" at #3 and "Dreams From My Father" at #8. (John McCain's "Why Courage Matters" does not appear in the Top 10).

Carolyn Kellogg

The Rehabilitation Squad

"Knoxville: Summer, 1915" is one of those passages that has turned my turgid rail commute into something bearable. Since first reading this in school, the disputed opening pages of James Agee’s "A Death in the Family," I have returned to it often. When I first read it, I looked for more of this kind of anguished lyricism, but was disappointed when I could not find it (Agee's stories were hard to find in collections, and even the rest of the novel seemed in shadow beside this luminosity).

There was a collection of Agee’s poems, edited by the epic translator Robert Fitzgerald, but those were the pre-pre-Amazon days, and I resigned myself to the fact that I might never find them. Old wishes were realized this week with the arrival of a galley of the forthcoming "James Agee: Selected Poems," which the Library of America will publish in the fall.

Here is yet another effort to keep a writer’s name and work within our reach. The L of A has already published much of Agee’s work; there are also the efforts of editor Michael A. Lofaro to keep Agee's name before our eyes  (although his "restoration" of "A Death in the Family" has not received apprecation from all quarters, especially not in the pages of our Book Review).

Andrew Hudgins, editor of "Selected Poems," says it contains much of the Fitzgerald edition. There are familiar pieces here (like the stirring dedication to Walker Evans at the beginning of "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men"  that begins "Against time and the damages of the brain/sharpen and calibrate..."). But there are other things that come as a surprise, such as "John Carter," his failed attempt à la Byron’s "Don Juan" to chronicle the life of a modern young man. Or else there's this surprising little bit, about work habits:

Wake up Threeish,
Clean up the sink
Air out the bedroom
Pour out a drink
Drink to the daylight
Sit down and think
I’m Open All Night.

Can't you hear the mock humor? Can't you feel the defiance? This is the kind of voice that helps you through difficult times, through times of self-doubt. Though Agee never published more than one volume, "Permit Me Voyage," he kept writing poetry, Hudgins tells us. I’m glad that he did.

Nick Owchar

(Photo credit: Associated Press)

The Empty Mirror

July is looking like the cruelest month.

On July 4, Thomas M. Disch, the under-recognized author of the visionary science fiction classics Camp Concentration and 334, committed suicide in his Manhattan apartment. He was 68. Book Review contributor Edward Champion -- or his alter ego Bat Segundo -- did the last in person interview with Disch. You can link to a podcast here. In this Sunday's Book Review, James Sallis, an old friend of Disch's, remembers both the writer and the human being.

Yet Disch wasn't the only writer to die on July 4: Janwillem Van de Wetering died at age 77 at his home in Maine. Van de Wetering is known primarily as a mystery novelist, but I remember him for two nonfiction books he wrote in the 1970s, The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery and A Glimpse of Nothingness: Experiences in an American Zen Community.

I read those books back-to-back the summer after my freshman year in college, along with a lot of other stuff -- Black Elk Speaks, The Teachings of Don Juan -- that, I hoped, would give me some kind of mystical insight. Mostly, it didn't -- or perhaps it's more accurate to say that I was looking for answers that no book can provide. But Van de Wetering's two memoirs opened up another kind of insight, making accessible the notion of Zen-like acceptance, an ideal to which I continue (in my better moments) to aspire.

I never read Van de Wetering's mysteries, never wanted to, never felt the need.

But I still carry around my copies of "The Empty Mirror" and "A Glimpse of Nothingness," to remind me of who I once was and who I may yet someday be.

David L. Ulin

Literature meets activism: Barbara Ehrenriech

A car wash employee speaks with a labor representative/translator on his left; author Barbara Ehrenreich (in green) listens from the sidelines.

Barbara Ehrenriech was full of conversation at Skylight Books Thursday night. She read a few satiric passages from her new book "The Land is Their Land" but mostly talked liberal politics to a receptive audience. Heads nodded at what she called "the growing division in our society between the extremely rich and everybody else." There were several spontaneous bursts of applause.

It started to feel a little like an affluent dinner party of "The Nation" subscribers, everyone in quite comfortable circumstances agreeing on our leftist politics. But Ehrenriech, who worked low-wage jobs to research her 2001 book "Nickel and Dimed," did more than just preach to the converted. To read exactly what she said, see below ...

Salman Rushdie among the women

Go ahead and smile, Salman.

  (Nicholas Kamm, AFP/Getty)

You've been seen with many enchantresses of late. First, there is your novel "The Enchantress of Florence," a story brimming with the bewitchments of the female gender.

There's also that White House outing in April with actress Olivia Wilde on your arm:

(AFP/Getty Images)