Norman Mailer is not 86 today

Norman Mailer would have turned 86 today, except that he died in November 2007.

But his memory lives on in The Mailer Review. Its fall 2008 issue, the journal's second, weighs in with more than 500 pages. It includes conversations and criticism, interviews and remembrances. Some of these were written and published; others were read at the April 2008 memorial for the author at Carnegie Hall. There are Mailer anecdotes from Günter Grass, Charlie Rose, Tina Brown, Lonnie (Mrs. Muhammad) Ali and Mailer's nine children, one of whom recounts mixing his father his last drink.

Norman Mailer won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1979 for "The Executioner's Song," and his novels were often considered secondary to his new journalism and essays. But not, apparently, by everyone:

"It's all fiction," William Kennedy quotes Mailer as saying. "It's a great swindle that civilization is pulling on itself, that there are two literary forms.... Nonfiction is fiction because you never get it right." Kennedy went on to say that Mailer "said more than once that the novel was on the way out.... He decided neither he nor any writers of his generation ever achieved it, but he was resolute that the novel was how you reached the broadest and deepest possible meaning of human experience."

And in his 2005 acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation Award, Mailer emphasized the importance of the novel:

The serious novel may soon be in danger of being adored with the same poignant concern we feel for endangered species.... The passion readers used to feel for venturing into a serious novel has withered.... The good serious novel, and most certainly the rare great novel, is now inimical to the needs of this market-place.... Novelists are rarely heroic. Gawky, half-formed, shy, perverse, spoiled, vain in their youth, so too, can their vision be astigmatic. Nonetheless, the best of them do look to honor the profound demands of their profession by offering insights with which good readers can enrich themselves the meaning of their lives. Whose comprehension of society is not more incisive after reading Proust, who does not know more about language once James Joyce is encountered, whose sense of compassion has not been deepened by living in Tolstoy's novels?

So, here is to future Tolstoys, future Joyces, Dostoyevskys, Prousts.

 

After the jump, Don Delillo, E.L. Doctorow and Gay Talese on Norman Mailer.

Are you ready for a new Kindle?

If you got a Kindle for Christmas, you might soon be old school rather than cutting edge. This week, Seattle-based Amazon.com sent out invitations for a Feb. 9 press event in New York -- at the Morgan Library & Museum -- sparking rumors that a Kindle 2.0 announcement is on the way.

Apple and Steve Jobs started the tradition of inviting the media to a mysterious press event and then debuting a shiny new product. And the last time Amazon held such an event was in 2007 -- at which it announced the Kindle. The rumors are swiftly morphing into definitive headlines, like Fast Company's "Amazon's Kindle 2 E-Reader to Debut on February 9."

What would a Kindle upgrade entail? Richard Doherty, a consumer electronics analyst, told the L.A. Times:

"We're fairly sure that it will be a new Kindle, one that will feature an improved black-and-white, grayscale screen and a better battery life."

Electronics analyst Tim Bajarin says that the company would probably relocate the page-forward and page-back buttons. "The first generation was too clunky," he said. "I would have to believe they've improved it."

Jeff Axup, a Kindle owner who happens to have a PhD in interaction design, suggests that the Kindle could be improved by giving it the ability to communicate with other Kindles. He closes his detailed review of the Kindle's functionality with this idea:

"Another thing Amazon seems to have missed along with most other mobile device manufacturers, is that numerous connected mobile devices can form user communities. There is apparently no features on the Kindle itself that link me to the book reviews of my friends, or that allow me to rate the books I've read from my device and have it recorded on my Amazon account. Electronic book clubs could sponsor cheaper books and share reviews linked from the book itself. I could publish my own content from my Kindle to a larger community on Amazon. The opportunities for connecting people engaged in the activity of reading are huge, but currently the device doesn't really support it.... I'm really looking forward to 2.0.

You can see the Kindle 2.0 here -- at least, it's probably the Kindle 2.0. The site Boy Genius Report posted this leaked photo back in October; maybe we'll see more of it on Feb. 9.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Amazon.com

Trinie Dalton's horrors and unicorns

In any 1970s horror movie worth its splatter budget, there’s a crucial moment when a comely young woman examines herself in a mirror and is promptly killed. For Trinie Dalton, such hopelessly clichéd moments are packed with clues to our darkest fears.

Dalton is the editor of “Mythtym,” a new anthology of essays, fiction and artwork -- both serious and campy -- about werewolves, unicorns and what she calls “mirror horror.” As she explains: “If you watch enough of those movies, they’re all exactly the same. These splattercore movies have their own tropes -- like how the best way to show blood is to cut someone up in the shower so you see it on the tiles. But then you realize that these clichés are based on archetypes. The mirror as a symbol seems most powerful in a time of fear, when people step back and look at themselves.”

“Mythtym” is both a deep investigation into (and a cheeky balm for) the things that scare us.  It’s comprised of three different zines that Dalton, author of “Wide Eyed” and “Dear New Girl or Whatever Your Name Is,” made over recent years.

In “Mirror Horror,” the first and largest section, she traces the theme of damning narcissism in works as diverse as the woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer and the bloodbucket slasher flicks of Dario Argento.

Then, echoing the wry spirit of her friend Miranda July, she follows up with a section devoted entirely to unicorn kitsch.

Unicorns -- really? The explanation why after the jump.

In books, fathers: Updike, Lethem, Asterix and more

Granta, for its fathers issue, has asked writers to riff on photos of their dads. More will be trickling online in the near future, but for now take a look at Jonathan Lethem on his father, Richard, and Jim Shepard on his dad, who he calls Shep.

John Updike died this week at the age of 76; book editor David Ulin's remembrance is here. Deceased or not, the prolific Updike has one more book on the way: "My Father's Tears and Other Stories," due in June from Knopf. Wait, maybe that should be "at least one more book ..."

A fight between a father and daughter is being played out in the papers in France. Gaul Albert Uderzo, who illustrated the Asterix series, was accused by his daughter, in a letter to Le Monde, of selling out by handing control of the comic to a French publisher. The elder Uderzo, now 81, responded in part, "To be accused by my own daughter, in the pages of the newspaper of reference, of being an old man, manipulated and deluded in his insatiable greed by the gnomes of finance, is already quite undignified ..." 

Author Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose debut short story collection "In Other Rooms, Other Wonders" hits shelves next month, talks to the litblog Beatrice about Turgenev. 

Turgenev is not the greatest of the Russian writers of prose fiction -- Nabokov ranks him fourth, after Tolstoy, Gogol, and Chekhov -- and “The Singers” is not my favorite short story. The ending, however, has always intrigued and troubled me, and often lodges in my mind when I’m considering the endings of my own stories.

The ending has a kind of a father's promise, and, as Mueenuddin explains, it rattles awkwardly against the story and the reader's expectations for it. Awkwardly in a good way.

(Note: none of the fathers mentioned are the surfer in the photo above.)

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo by Mike Baird via Flickr

Mellifluous, loquacious and scintillating

When thinking of good words, apparently, it's hard to separate them from their meanings. The site alphaDictionary has compiled its selection of the 100 most beautiful words in English (via Nigel Beale) -- in its entirety here or after the jump, with definitions. The list, when recited, is quite beautiful, and the words, for the most part, are familiar rather than obscure: adroit, champagne, dulcet, ebullient, efflorescence, paean, rhapsody.

There is a plethora (on the list) of words whose meanings are halcyon (on the list), even effervescent (on the list). If you try, you can find the negative -- surreptitious and beleaguer are both on the list -- but the victory would be Pyrrhic (on the list); anyone who can't enjoy the serendipity (on the list) of discovering diaphanous and ingenue together (both on the list) risks being called jejune (on the list).

You might have noticed a preponderance (not on the list) of words that don't sound particularly English. There does seem to be a definite Francophile (not on the list) bent to the words that made the grade. Is it the pretty, soft sounds? The unusual vowel pairings? The (not on the list) je ne sais quoi?

I'd suggest two more words for the list: copasetic (all good) and callipygean (I'll let you look it up). What words would you add?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Lonely Angel CP via Flickr

Seven questions on Virginia Woolf

This week marks the 127th anniversary of Virginia Woolf's birth, which made me think of Anne Fernald. It's not that much of a stretch; Anne, a thoughtful and engaged litblogger, is a Woolf scholar and author of "Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader" and is working on the Cambridge University Press edition of "Mrs. Dalloway." She teaches at Fordham University in New York, which will hold a conference on Viriginia Woolf -- "Woolf and the City" -- in June. She kindly agreed to answer seven questions -- from a Woolf novice.

Jacket Copy: I've never read any Virginia Woolf. Where should I start?

Anne Fernald: There are a lot of ways to start Woolf. If you are interested in experimental fiction, then "The Waves," her most experimental (and perhaps her most difficult) text, can be a good starting place. It follows six friends from childhood through middle age, all in interior monologues -- you flow, like waves, in and out of the thoughts of Rhoda, Jinny, Susan, Neville, Louis (based on T.S. Eliot, from St. *Louis*! ha), and Bernard.

But, if you prefer your novels more autobiographical, then "To the Lighthouse" is a lovely entry point. Woolf's most autobiographical novel, it depicts a large Victorian family on summer vacation and then charts the impact of WWI and other life events over the years. It's got Woolf's best artist-figure in it: Lily Briscoe, a frustrated painter.

For sheer perfection of prose, I love "A Room of One's Own," her 1929 feminist masterpiece. It's a great manifesto for all writers: the need for both privacy and the ability to roam about unmolested in the world. But I love it for its gorgeous sentences, its glorious metaphors, the amazing way that its pieces all fit together into a symphony.

Overall, for me, her masterpiece is "Mrs. Dalloway." There is a lot not to like about the main character, a hostess throwing a party (snore), but Woolf knows that and teaches you to care about her in spite of Clarissa's flaws. It's an amazing book and one of the best treatments of shellshock I know. A great version of the novel set in a single day, too.

JC: Which authors would you compare her work to -- James Joyce? William Burroughs? Someone entirely different?

AF: Joyce is right in many ways as "Mrs. Dalloway" (1925) is her answer to "Ulysses" (1922), a novel she didn't fully appreciate but was jealous of. But reading Woolf doesn't feel like reading Joyce. Woolf's allusions aren't sparkling on the surface, they are buried, echoing and resonating much more deeply. She shares E.M. Forster's sensibility: keenly aware of class issues that she would like to escape. She shares Shakespeare's ability to give you the impression that her fictional world is the whole world: that is, you can study Woolf for many years and not feel like you're missing vast avenues of human experience. Her feminism is like Katherine Mansfield's, in that it's not overt (as Rebecca West's often is), but manifest in the quiet frustration and desperation of women characters whose lives don't have enough choices. She's not good at writing sex, but she's wonderful at eros; it's easy to mistake the lack of sex for coldness, but it would be inaccurate to link her too closely to a chilly successor like Bowen. There is a lot of warmth in Woolf, but it emerges in friendships, in unspoken connections.

JC: It's 127 years since Woolf's birth; what place do you think she has in taken in the history of literature?

The answer ... after the jump.

R.I.P. John Updike

Literary lion John Updike has died. The 76-year-old's death has taken many by surprise; as recently as November, he was touring in support of his latest novel, "The Widows of Eastwick."

In Los Angeles, he appeared at UCLA, where he was interviewed by books editor David L. Ulin, who says:

I thought he was charming and self-deprecating, and before the interview we sat backstage and talked about baseball. I found him to be very down to earth, both as a person and in terms of the way he looked at his career. Most writers of his stature have a sense of themselves as somehow existing above the rest of us, but  Updike saw himself as a working writer even to the extent of decribing himself as a freelancer; and I found it deeply heartening that someone at his level of achievement still worried about keeping his name in print.

The author staked his claim on the literary landscape with 1960's "Rabbit, Run." The disaffected, philandering Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom captured both readers' and Updike's imaingations; he went on to write four other "Rabbit" books. But he didn't stop there; Updike wrote 27 novels, 13 short story collections, books of poetry, nonfiction and essays, at least one play and was recently still reviewing books for the New Yorker.

My memory of Updike is reading his story "A&P" in high school, in New England; I lived in a seaside town where we shopped at the A&P, so it had a sense of heightened reality. Last year, when I was teaching in Pittsburgh, I used the story in a lesson with my students about opening lines. I was thrilled to find that it resonated with them as much as it had with me, despite the gap of years, despite the story's unfamiliar brand names, despite the fact that the kids didn't even know that A&P was a grocery chain. That's a durability that authors can only hope for. And that's how I'll remember John Updike.

"In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits."

How will you remember him?

—Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Caleb Jones / Associated Press

Again, the cock crows

Sometimes it feels like the publishing world is awash in prizes. The last few days have brought us the National Book Critics Circle finalists, the American Library Assn. Awards, the Best Translated Book of the Year finalists and probably more that I can't keep up with. But one that I do keep up with is the Tournament of Books from The Morning News.

Designed like the NCAA basketball tournament, the novels in the Tournament of Books face off in brackets during the month of March. Sober debate and careful consideration begin to give way to the silliness of the project -- what sense does it make, really, for the slender and bookish "Firmin" by Sam Savage to face off against Emily Barton's walloping historical fiction "Brookland"? The judges explain their decisions in each match online, which are then subject to amused commentary by the site's editors. The winner gets awarded a rooster -- in name, anyway; so far no author has been forced to accept a live rooster for the honor, although the editors threaten to present one.

The Tournament of Books is not a fair arbiter. Sasha Frere-Jones "only got through 300 pages" of "Against the Day" by Thomas Pynchon before deciding it was a loser, which made me, a fan, a bit bonkers. But it's that kind of competition: Judges can say, no, no sirree, no can do. In fact, Sam Lipsyte, the judge in the prior round, hadn't finished the 1,001-page novel either -- but he'd decided it was a winner.

The list of contenders in the 2009 Tournament of Books follows.

Neil Gaiman blogs and tweets the Newbery Medal

This morning, as the American Library Assn. prepared to announce its prizewinners, author Neil Gaiman was asleep in an L.A. hotel room. At least until a short time before 6 a.m. He blogs that the phone began ringing very early. The prize committee delivered the good, super-secret advance news: "The Graveyard Book" would be awarded the Newbery Medal.

You are on a speakerphone with at least 14 teachers and librarians and suchlike great, wise and good people, I thought. Do not start swearing like you did when you got the Hugo. This was a wise thing to think because otherwise huge, mighty and fourletter swears were gathering. I mean, that's what they're for. I think I said, You mean it's Monday?

Gaiman is a high-profile author who, as you can see, makes himself atypically available to online fans. Not only does he blog, he blogs about trying to not screw up. And he has continued to chronicle the morning's activities in 140-character bursts on Twitter.

More than 10,000 people follow Gaiman, who is on Twitter as "neilhimself." He provides a window into what it's like to be woken up to find out you've won the biggest award in children's literature. 

Around 8:30am: Thank you all for the  congratulations. (Beams joyfully.)  You can listen to the whole book for free at http://bit.ly/y8gk,  by the way.

Around 8:30am: argh. Interviews needed NOW with NYT, USA Today, PW and Washington Post. Am wet, not dressed and not packed or checked out. Right. Focus.

Around 9:30am: Right now in LAX EN ROUTE TO new york. 4 interviews down. God this is weird and wonderful.

Around 10:30am: On plane. Another 2 interviews done. Head spinning. Doors closed. Bye.

If you decide to follow Gaiman, like 10,000 others, realize that he will use swear words on Twitter. And if you see someone wandering around L.A. in the next couple of days who looks kind of like him, it might just be Neil himself -- he's heading back, he says, for a screening of "Coraline."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo credit:  Kimberly Butler

Editor in Chief Sara Nelson laid off at Publishers Weekly

Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, has been laid off this morning, according to the New York Times Arts Beat blog. Nelson is the victim of restructuring at PW's parent company, Reed Business Information, which also owns Library Journal and School Library Journal, among other publications. (Reed is laying off 7% of its staff.) Replacing Nelson will be Brian Kenney, editor in chief of School Library Journal; he will now run all three of Reed's publishing trade magazines.

No knock on Kenney -- who I don't know -- but this is an inexplicable decision, shortsighted and flat-out wrong. Nelson is a force in the publishing industry: a smart commentator, an enthusiastic advocate and an editor with her eye on the future, not the past. (She is also, I should note in the interest of disclosure, a regular participant at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.)

Ironically, in what looks like her last column for Publishers Weekly, posted on the Web this morning, Nelson writes about "feeling kind of hopeful," in part because of her hope "that -- please, please -- publishing business firings are coming to an end, at least for a while."

She describes a couple of new initiatives for print and online, discusses some new books she's been reading and concludes: "In other words, while everything suggests that the road ahead is going to be rocky, like many others in BookLand, we're still on our feet -- and moving forward -- because we're still passionate about what we do."

Passion is passion, of course, and business is business. But this is bad business, undertaken without any attention to editorial development, to the ideas and engagement a magazine such as Publishers Weekly needs.

-- David L. Ulin