Oprah pick Uwem Akpan in the Southland tonight

Oprah Book Club fans in the Southland can see Uwem Akpan this evening at Loyola Marymount University’s William H. Hannon Library. The author is set to appear at 5:30 p.m.

Akpan, a native of Nigeria, is the author of Oprah's latest book pick, "Say You're One of Them." The book marked two firsts for Oprah's Book Club: It was the first set in Africa and the first short story collection.

"He is the author of the most powerful collection of short stories that I believe I've ever read," Oprah said on her book club broadcast.

Akpan is a Jesuit priest who received a master of fine arts in creative writing from the University of Michigan. After earning his degree, he has returned to Nigeria, where he serves at Christ the King Church, Ilasamaja-Lagos, Nigeria.

"I started off going into the priesthood," Akpan said on the "Oprah" broadcast, "and the writing came later. For me, the two are very intertwined, right now, connected."

It is not Akpan's first visit to Southern California. Last year he appeared at the L.A. Times Festival of Books.  "Say You're One of Them" was a finalist for the L.A. Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Uwem Akpan. Credit: Comfort Ukpong / Little, Brown & Co.

National Book Awards include McCann, Eggers, Vidal

The National Book Award for Fiction went to Colum McCann for his novel "Let the Great World Spin," a story of New York in 1974 that doubles as an allegory of 9/11. It was the final award at the black-tie event Wednesday evening in New York City.

"In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the history books," McCann told the L.A. Times last week. "I think we need stories, and we need to tell the stories over and over and over not only to remind us, but to be able to have that clarity of experience that changes us, so that we know who we are now because of who we have been at some other time."

Juried awards were presented in three other categories. The nonfiction prize was awarded to T.J. Stiles for "The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt." Poetry went to Keith Waldrop, for "Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy," published by the University of California Press. Phillip Hoose took the award for young adult literature for "Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice"; Colvin joined him on the stage. 

Two awards were known in advance: Gore Vidal received the Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and Dave Eggers the Literarian Award. Those were presented before dinner -- downsized to chicken from last year's lamb -- after which the competition awards were announced.

A new award -- the Best of the National Book Awards -- was presented to celebrate the awards' 60th anniversary. After weeks of revisiting all the previous winners, five finalists were set to a public vote. More than 10,000 people voted online, and tonight, Flannery O'Connor's "The Complete Stories" beat out books by John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon and Eudora Welty to take the honor.

Since its start in 1950, the National Book Foundation, led by publishing professionals, has striven to reward excellence in American literature. It may not be the Oscars, but it's about as close as the publishing world gets.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Gore Vidal at the National Book Awards with presenter Joanne Woodward in the background. Credit:  Tina Fineberg / Associated Press

Reading? Aren't books good for anything else?

Books are pretty useless when it comes to multi-tasking. They're good for one thing -- reading -- and not much else. In the past, you might be able to stick them on a shelf and take them down again ... but still, nothing to do with them but read.

Until now. New Yorker contributor Bruce McCall has a helpful roster of non-reading book activities in "50 Things to Do with a Book (now that reading is dead)." The thing is, sad to say, another book, but it includes his illustrations in additions to the words. So you can look as well as read. That's two things.

And then there is the list, revelatory in its demonstration of just how many purposes a book might have. You can schlep books down the Nile and stack them in the form of pyramids. Or gather copies of "To Kill a Mockingbird" and chuck them at real live birds (mockingbirds not required). Another suggestion: strap a couple of thick tomes to your feet to create a pair of elevator books. 

I would tell you more of the 50 things, but I can't be bothered to read this book, can I? Besides, I'm using it as a cheese plate right now.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Books as furniture in the bookchair, on display at the London Design Festival 2008. Credit: Gill Rickson via Flickr.

Let Richard Dreyfuss' people go

 

A new audio-book version of the Bible, jam-packed with stars, has made it to shelves in time for the holidays. Richard Dreyfuss does Moses, Max Von Sydow does Noah and Gary Sinise is David, but they're just the beginning. The cast of 600 includes John Heard (Matthew), Lou Diamond Phillips (Mark), Chris McDonald (Luke) and Louis Gossett Jr. (John). Luke Perry is Judas. Who's Jesus? James Caviezel, who played the role once before, in Mel Gibson's "The Passion of Christ." Producer Carl Amari told The Times that he pitched the project to Christian publisher Thomas Nelson.

"I always thought it would be cool to do a radio drama of the Bible," said Amari, who grew up "not real religious" in the Catholic Church. "You're dramatizing the greatest story ever told. It's God's word. How can you make God's word lift off the page? With great actors, great sound effects and music."...

When Amari projected that the venture would cost $4 million, the entire Thomas Nelson board of directors "looked at me," he recalled. It would be a leap of faith, given that the company's previous audio Bibles had cost at most $17,000 to produce. Then again, just 20,000 copies constituted a bestseller.

The audio Bible -- which is a faithful rendering of the New King James Version -- includes a musical score and evocative sound effects, just like a film."It's verbal Cinerama," said actor Michael York, who narrates both the Old and New Testaments. The 79-CD, 90-hour set costs $125.

This fall also saw the release of R. Crumb's "The Book of Genesis Illustrated"; is there a renewed interest in the Bible from secular quarters? "If you remove divinity from the equation, 'Genesis' becomes a human creation," David Ulin wrote in his review. "'A powerful text,' in Crumb's words, 'with layers of meaning that reach deep into our collective consciousness, our historical consciousness, if you will.'" Angelenos can see for themselves -- Crumb's original "Genesis" artwork is currently on display at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Actors Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss in 1975's "Jaws." Credit: Universal Studios

Marcel Theroux on Siberia, disaster and the bafflement of technology

In Marcel Theroux's National Book Award-nominated novel "Far North," Makepeace has survived in a remote Siberian town, essentially alone, until coming across a desperate adolescent raiding an empty house. This disturbance changes Makepeace's path, so that staying alive means searching out what bits of civilization might remain in a shattered world. It's the fourth novel for Theroux, who has traveled to Russia and the Ukraine, and the first since he worked on a documentary for the BBC about climate change.

Jacket Copy: Right now we're surrounded by post-apocalypse fictions: The movie "2012" just topped the weekend box office, the movie version of "The Road" is coming out, there's your book and Margaret Atwood's. What do you think the appeal is of setting stories after an apocalypse?

Marcel Theroux: I didn't embark on it to be a post-apocalyptic novel -- I can see why people say that about it – but I started with the character of Makepeace. I suppose to answer your question, I think one of the attractions is it gives you another angle on the way we live now. It's a way of writing about the present without seeming to write about the present. That's one of the things I liked about it. It makes you realize that things we take for granted are contingent and could change, and things haven't always been this way. In a very huge way, it situates the time we live in a much bigger historical perspective. In the case of post-apocalyptic books, it makes you think about the present from the point of view of disaster.

When I was writing "Far North," I was thinking a little bit about how the achievements of ancient Rome would have appeared to a Medieval peasant. For such a long time in Western history, the greatest technological and scientific achievements appeared to be behind us. It's only now that we feel like we're living at a cutting edge, and we feel that life is naturally linked to progress. But there's nothing natural about that, if you look at history.

JC: Makepeace is someone who is both savage and civilized, because she has a moral code.

MT: Yes, she's got a moral code. She's also got a possibly misplaced respect for her predecessors on the planet. She looks back at us and thinks we knew all sorts of things and were impressive and civilized and smart. I often think she got the wrong end of the stick about us. But there's something kind of noble about her desire to preserve what she sees as best about human beings.

JC: In some ways, that's made tangible in the books that she saves, which is how your book begins.

MT: She saves them, but she doesn't actually read them herself. She feels like she ought to, but it gives her a headache when she reads them. She feels kind of inadequate when she considers these treasures of her civilization, but she's the only person there.

JC: There are some mysterious elements that are beyond her.

MT: I think it's true of all of us that we're surrounded by things we take for granted but we don't actually understand. I'm looking around the [hotel] room, I see my mobile phone and my computer and a plasma-screen TV. I couldn't take one of these apart and put it together – I have a very primitive understanding of the way these things work. I think there is a huge gap between the technological sophistication of things around us and our actual understanding of them. I was interested in that gap.

Makepeace is a very resourceful person who is hugely capable. Like a lot of people in traditional societies, she can fix anything that goes wrong. She's mastered all the technology that she needs to master, albeit on a more basic level than mobile telephones. She feels an awe and inadequate when she's confronted by these things that we take for granted, like planes and cars and internal combustion engines.

It's somehow compelling when you have a narrator who's doing their best but somehow knows slightly less than the reader feels they do. I think it's good to feel superior to the narrator in a way – I think it's a good device. My knowledge about the world is greater than hers – there's a lot of things she's ignorant about, and she's aware of it. I was kind of interested in the idea that it's possible for knowledge to disappear.

JC: When she sees an airplane, it inspires her.

MT: It's pretty amazing, isn't it? An airplane is pretty amazing. Actually, traveling in an airplane is horrible, and it doesn't feel anything like amazing, but the idea of it. When was the first powered flight, 1906? [1903]. It is a miraculous thing. It's a device for letting the reader know – it's hard now, because the book's been reviewed, but I was thinking that at the beginning you could be in the American West in the 19th century. It's only the plane that makes you know for sure.

Sarah Palin quoting Pascal? Please.

If you're skeptical about Sarah Palin being the type to drop references to a 17th century French scientist and philosopher in her memoir "Going Rogue," you've got something in common with Tim Rutten, who reviews the book in our pages Tuesday. "It's customary for  politicians and celebrities to collaborate with a professional writer on books like this," Rutten writes."However, the name of Palin's collaborator -- the evangelical Christian writer and pro-life activist Lynn Vincent -- doesn't appear on the cover of 'Going Rogue.'" Rutten continues:

Collaborators sometimes trade such credits for higher fees, but their names usually appear prominently in the acknowledgments.

Palin's first acknowledgment goes to ... herself: "I'm very glad this writing exercise is over. I love to write, but not about myself. I'm thankful now to have kept journals about Alaska and my friends and family ever since I was a little girl...."

...the hand most obviously working throughout "Going Rogue" is Vincent's. The narrative is sprinkled with literary and philosophical references that one somehow doubts sprang from the copious pages of Palin's diaries, including the role of Blaise Pascal's philosophy in her girlhood conversion from Catholicism to Evangelical Protestantism.

Rutten notes that much of the early media coverage of the book focused on Palin's anger toward the news media. In addition, they found some sensational sound bites.

• Palin's counter to rumors of a possible split from husband Todd: "I watched Todd, tanned and shirtless, take the baby from my arms and walk him back to the ranch house.... Seeing Todd’s blue eyes smiling, I chuckled. 'Dang,' I thought. 'Divorce Todd? Have you seen Todd?' "
• Her affection for meat. "I eat pork chops, thick bacon burgers, and the seared fatty edges of a medium-well-done steak. But I especially love moose and caribou. I always remind people from outside our state that there's plenty of room for all Alaska's animals -- right next to the mashed potatoes."
• Criticisms of the McCain campaign handlers, Steve Schmidt in particular, who she says called her after she spoke on the phone to pranksters pretending to be French President Nicolas Sarkozy. "Right away, the phones started ringing," she writes. "One of the first calls was Schmidt, and the force of his screaming blew my hair back. 'How can anyone be so stupid?! Why would the president of France call a vice presidential candidate a few days out?!'" [Schmidt told Larry King his portrayal in the book is "total fiction."]

For Rutten, one of the most important aspects of Palin's book is the use of Ronald Reagan as a touchstone. "Palin is genuinely convincing in her admiration for Reagan, but one of the things she misses about his appeal was the utter absence of resentment from his persona," he writes. "This book, on the other hand, fairly seethes with resentment, particularly in the more than 100 pages devoted to the McCain-Palin campaign." But has she got the Gipper's magic? Read Rutten's conclusion here.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo credit: Associated Press / Harpo Productions, Inc. George Burns

Publishing as a business model. Seriously, Seth Godin?

Seth Godin is a smart guy. He got his MBA at Stanford and named one of his first companies Yoyodyne in a nod to Pynchon. His 10 marketing books have made various bestseller lists, and his blog is (currently) ranked by Ad Age as the #26 marketing blog on the internet.

So what was he thinking when he advised entrepreneurs today to eschew traditional funding streams -- banks and venture capitalists -- and go the publishing route?

It works like this: you have an idea, a fledgling business or a new market to enter. You find an amateur investor (a wealthy dentist, a retired executive) and raise the money to bring it to market. And in return? The investor gets $xx for every unit you sell. From the first one until forever.

No fancy bookkeeping, no board meetings, no worrying about the accounting. Instead, you pay a royalty on income. The rest is up to you.

Of course, this is exactly how the math of book publishing works. The publisher puts up money and keeps 80 or 90 percent of the income. You get the rest.

As elegant as this may sound -- no board meetings! No fancy bookkeeping! -- it's plain fantasy. Anyone who's ever published a book knows that the bookkeeping is fancy. And more important, everyone in publishing is becoming increasingly concerned that publishing, as a business model, isn't working.

One of the challenges facing publishing is that not all books are equal. A very few books sell very well; a few more make marginal profits; many never generate income at all. It's not much different from other creative industries, like music and film. Except that publishing historically created a mix in which the profits were modest, even wee -- rarely at the level that corporations expect. And in recent years, most publishers have been vertically integrated into a handful of corporations.

Then there are the bookstores, which are closing. And the online retailers, which are discounting. Ginormous unrecoupable celebrity advances. Archaic modes of delivery and returns. Readers going online -- scattering -- to get their content. Can books survive the online content boom? Will today's toddlers even give what we think of as a book -- the kind with covers and paper pages -- a second glance? How can the publishing industry go digital and avoid the piracy and swapping issues the music industry faced?

You don't have to listen to me go on. Here's New York magazine with the big picture (the story, from last year, includes comments like "It's a very trying time" from the president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

If publishing is the best model Seth Godin can think of, it seems like the real trick here is finding the willing investor. And for that, you'll need a couple of Max Bialystocks and Leo Blooms -- they were great at securing matrons with fat wallets in "The Producers."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Seth Godin's book "Permission Marketing" discounted from $25 to $5.99 by Border's Books; the company laid off nearly 900 people between January and April 2009. Credit: wombatunderground1 via Flickr.

The opposite of an e-book

People rarely make 'em like they used to. The video above shows, in 3,000 photos, how one woman created 35 handcrafted copies of her book, "The Complex of All of These." It took her two months. But isn't it beautiful? (via Coudal Partners)

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Haunted: Michael Mewshaw on his 'Lying With the Dead'

Will Michael Mewshaw ever slow down? At age 66, Mewshaw continues to be productive as a novelist, book reviewer, travel writer, investigative journalist and tennis reporter. "Lying With the Dead," his 11th novel, has just appeared (his 19th book, "Between Terror and Tourism," will be published this winter). And yet, NPR's Alan Cheuse has called him “the best novelist in America that nobody knows.”  If that’s true, then it must be said that Mewshaw has been hiding in plain sight. In the course of a varied career, the experiences Mewshaw has had are quite unique, as he suggests: “I’ve played basketball with Julius ‘Dr. J’ Erving, played tennis against Roy Emerson and spent two weeks in Rome with Sharon Stone when she starred in the film of my novel, 'Year of the Gun' -- and I never scored with any of them.” Jacket Copy talked to Mewshaw on the occasion of his new novel and its relationship to his past.

"Lying With the Dead" has the feel of a novel with deep personal meaning.  You end with an afterword connecting it to incidents from your childhood.

All my novels have personal meaning for me. But while the Dresbach murders, which directly touched my family and which I wrote about in "Life for Death" in 1980, can be seen as the genesis of "Lying With the Dead," it would be wrong to read the book as autobiography. Rather than a factual account, it’s a meditation on possibilities, a reflection on the impact of similar events on different characters.

The mother in "Lying With the Dead" seems frighteningly real. Where did she come from?

A much different place than my biological mother. The fictional Mom came from my imagination. The character in the book isn’t my mother, any more than the character of Candy is my sister. In real life, I had polio as a kid. In the novel, Candy’s life is defined by the disease. That’s how fiction works, through a process of selection and rearrangement.

Still, there are the murders from your childhood. Why go back to them?

I’ve never really gone away from them. Murder, family turmoil, confusion about names and identities run through my books -- the nonfiction as well as the fiction. Call them themes, call them obsessions. I believe the Greeks had it right: Man hands on misery to man. But he hands on other things too: forgiveness, hope, redemption.

For all the references to Greek tragedy in "Lying With the Dead," there’s a lot to suggest you’re also a Catholic novelist.

Well, I’m Catholic and I write. But the category of "Catholic novelist" has never gained traction in the U.S.  In a 40-year career I’ve never been referred to as a Catholic writer. Maybe Catholicism has simply passed into midstream America, and its beliefs and rituals have lost any stigma -- which is a good thing -- yet have also lost any great resonance ... which is a shame if true.

Your work is divided between fiction and nonfiction, literature and journalism.  Did you plan it that way? Does one feed the other?

There was no plan. I published five novels and expected to continue teaching creative writing. But with "Life for Death," my first nonfiction book, I found a different way to make a living. In that sense, the nonfiction didn’t just “feed” my fiction. It fed my family. But I don’t want to leave the impression I did hackwork to pay the bills. I turned down some plum jobs that didn’t interest me. I refused to do a script for Goldcrest Films about Ali Agca, the Turk who shot Pope John Paul II, and backed out of a $150,000 deal as a ghostwriter for a top political advisor. But then, in 2008, for an advance barely big enough to cover expenses, I traveled overland across North Africa from Egypt to Morocco to do a book. What real writer wouldn’t want to do that when there’s supposed to be a clash of civilizations?

-- Desmond O'Grady

O'Grady's books include the novel "Dinny Going Down" and a travel book about Italy's Abruzzo region, "The Sybil, the Shepherd and the Saint."

Photo: Michael Mewshaw. Credit: Sharon Wohlmuth

The reviews pour in for Nabokov's 'The Original of Laura'

After being locked up in a Swiss vault for decades, Vladimir Nabokov's final work, "The Original of Laura," has been published by his son, Dmitri. Although Nabokov left instructions with his wife that his last novel-in-progress -- written on 138 index cards -- should be destroyed, she couldn't bring herself to follow his wishes. As she'd saved "Lolita" from a similar fate when he'd tried to burn it, her hesitation is understandable.

"The Original of Laura" doesn't look much like a novel. Nabokov's index cards are faithfully reproduced on the upper half of each page and fully transcribed in prose below. Noted book designer Chip Kidd surrounded the index cards with perforations so they can be punched out, stacked and reshuffled -- just as Nabokov used to shuffle them himself. But that still doesn't make it a book, and "the lavish packaging is more than a little disproportionate," our reviewer James Marcus writes. "As a novel -- even as the sketch of a novel, with operating instructions enclosed -- 'The Original of Laura' is largely an exercise in frustration."

The plot of "The Original of Laura" is described by the Wall Street Journal: "A flighty adventuress named Flora, the daughter of an artistic couple, becomes, as the years pass, the subject of a scandalous novel, 'My Laura.' It has been written, we are told, 'by a neurotic and hesitant man of letters' (a former lover, it is suggested). Young Flora experiences sex early, not excluding a groping encounter at age 12 with a lecher named (drum roll) Hubert H. Hubert, a paramour of Flora's own flighty mother. Years later, she marries fat, wealthy Philip Wild, another older man, with whom after three years she becomes bored—then faithless."

In our review, Marcus writes: "At once we are given to understand that Flora, with her protective carapace of contempt, is not only the heart of the work but is also herself a walking, talking, fornicating metaphor. 'Her exquisite bone structure,' we read, 'immediately slipped into a novel -- became in fact the secret structure of that novel, besides supporting a number of poems.' No doubt we are encountering the original of 'The Original of Laura,' who the enchanting author will now put through her metafictional paces." But Nabakov fails to follow this through in much length.

Instead, he switches focus to Flora's husband, Philip Wild, who is attempting to imagine erasing himself out of existence, in a "process of self-obliteration." In the N.Y. Times, Michiko Kakutani writes, "Most hauntingly, given the circumstances of its composition, 'Laura' explores the subjects of death and the otherworldly with contemplative urgency."

"Philip Wild's 'dying by auto-dissolution' is a clever device of a particularly Nabokovian sort, with the added heft of Nabokov's actual dying looming over it," Aleksander Hemon writes in Slate. "The editing and packaging  of 'The Original of Laura,' complete with the subtitle 'Dying Is Fun' and the obliteration list at the end, suggest a concerted effort to exploit to the hilt this possible relation to Nabokov's own disintegration: His illness and suffering are meant to enhance the weak text and fuel the industry-orchestrated drama. Otherwise, the fragments dealing with Wild's self-eradication traverse the border between plain silly and ridiculously serious -- and are, at times, sloppily prolix...."

At Bookforum (free registration required), John Banville doesn't mind. "The book is deeply interesting, not so much for what it thinks itself to be as for what we know it is: a master's final work." What does set his teeth on edge is the son's introduction. "Dmitri Nabokov's introduction is a lamentable performance, stridently defensive, slippery on particulars, and frequently repellent in tone."

But while most reviewers, including our own, think the work makes for an interesting artifact, Hemon disagrees. "It is safe to say that what is published as the novel titled 'The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun)' is not a result Nabokov desired or would welcome," he writes. " 'The Original of Laura' can't escape the musty air of an estate sale: The trinkets that piled up in the attic; the damp books from the basement; the old man's stained cravat; the lonely figurines that used to be part of a cherished set; the mismatched, overworn clothing -- all are brought out in the hope that there might appear a buyer for those sad objects, someone blinded by literary nostalgia and willing to rescue the family possessions from the waste basket."

As for estate sales, well, the Nabokov estate is having one. The blog the Literary Saloon points us to this auction at Christie's: Nabakov's 138 "Original of Laura" index cards are up for auction and are expected to sell for $400,000 to $600,000.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Vladimir Nabakov in Switzerland in 1973. Credit: R.T. Kahn