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.

Truman Capote's sexy gaze and other book ads: A Q&A with Dwight Garner

In "Read Me," Dwight Garner compiles a century of print ads for books, funny and formal, subtle and sensational. Garner is a longtime book critic at the New York Times, where he also has blogged at Paper Cuts. For his book, he went deep into the archives -- of his own paper and other venues. Isolated, in "Read Me," on pages with white or black backgrounds, the ads bear the markings of having been physical artifacts -- they reveal uneven printing, the wear of ink rubbing off paper, shadows of what was printed on the reverse, even the shadow of a fold. As Garner explains in his decade-by-decade introductions, the ads are simultaneously commerce, art and a reflection of what's buzzing in the literary culture.

Jacket Copy: You write that the first print advertisement for anything was for a book.

Dwight Garner: Yes. It was for a very odd-sounding book, called “Perfect Occurrences of Every Daie journall in Parliament, and Other Moderate Intelligence.” The book was printed in London, and it’s a very convoluted ad, but it’s the first one. It includes the world “applauded” -- it’s a very dense ad, but I think if someone were to reprint that ad today, the world “applauded” would be at the top in 18-point type, with exclamation points.

JC: What was the genesis of your book?

DG: I was doing various research over time, looking for old reviews, old articles, old pieces of criticism, to write pieces I was writing or to edit pieces. I would come across, in magazines or newspapers, these fantastic old ads for books. Some of these ads were so striking, so rich with historical information about not only the books, but how books were sold at certain periods in our culture. I started collecting them. I began to go into  more archives, some of them paper archives, some electronic, grabbing these things. I just sort of fell in love with them.

JC: I imagine you have more than made it into the book.

DG: Oh yeah, we cut hundreds out, and it was a brutal process. I think there’s 300 or 400 in there now, which is quite a lot, but the book could have been twice as big. I think there are more out there for people to find. It’s funny that a project like this hasn’t been done before; they’re fascinating documents. I think we’ve boiled it down to a pretty great selection just from this century.

JC: It’s interesting to me that they’ve been removed from their contexts.

DG: They were from newspaper pages, and we singled them out as individual works of art.

JC: As you were flipping through those pages, how did these particular ads jump out at you?

DG: I looked for books that I love. I was particularly interested in the way literary fiction and literary books were marketed in America during this past century. I focused on well-known books, I focused on literary books, I focused on ads that were particularly striking, that had a distinctive look and really jumped off the page in some way.

JC: Like the Truman Capote ad [pictured]?

DG: That’s one of the most famous author photographs of all time. When that book was first published, I don’t think people had seen author photographs like that. That come-hither look that Capote is giving, lying in that chair the way he is, that stare is just so gripping and so strangely sexy. I think it caught people off guard in 1948, people just weren’t ready for that kind of direct sexual gaze. I think in the end it really helped to sell the book. 

JC: As a book critic, it's your job to read new books. Did you find yourself wanting to read any of these books after reading the ads?

DG: There were a lot of books that really appealed to me. I had never read Lillian Smith's "Strange Fruit," for example -- that's a book that I now plan to read. There's this very strange travel book called "Letter of Credit" by Jerome Weidman, published in 1940, which has one of the most hilarious ads in the book. The headline on the ad is "Not from the marijuana department." The ad is all about how the reviews for this book have been so great that it sounds like the in-house publicity department had been smoking marijuana while putting the ad together. It's just hilarious. But actually you look at the reviews, and they are fairly terrific, and it does make me want to know who Jerome Weidman is, because I don't know who he is. I've never read any Jerome Weidman. There were a number of books like that.

After the jump: How not to sell Cormac McCarthy.

Michael Chabon Q&A: Fatherhood and writing at midnight

Michael Chabon comes to Los Angeles tonight with his new nonfiction collection "Manhood for Amateurs: the Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son." Chabon may be known for his fiction such as "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," but he's turned his attention to concerns of daily life. 

He and his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, are the busy parents of four children. He spoke to Jacket Copy's Carolyn Kellogg via phone from a Pittsburgh hotel before his first reading. "You cook the foods you'd love to eat," he said. "You write the books you'd love to read."

All tickets for tonight's appearance at the L.A. Public Library's ALOUD discussion with David L. Ulin have been reserved, but standby hopefuls at ALOUD events often find a seat.

Jacket Copy: In the first essay in "Manhood for Amateurs," you say that if you've ever had a bad review, that sticks with you for a long time. Do you still read your reviews?

Michael Chabon: Definitely. Not all of them -- I don't necessarily go out of my way to read the reviews, but I also don't try to avoid it.

JC: In our review of your book, Steve Almond wrote that you're incapable of writing a boring sentence.

MC: How about that? That was very nice of him.

JC: But I wonder if maybe you're incapable of publishing a boring sentence? I'd like to ask you about your writing process. Because I'm guessing that these pieces did not spring fully formed onto the page.

MC: Oh, no, they definitely did. I actually just wrote them on napkins. While I was cooking dinner and watching a baseball game. 

JC: (laughs)

MC: I work really hard on my sentences, and on my paragraphs, too.

JC: It's kind of stunning to anyone who's ever tried to write that you and Ayelet have four kids and you both actually finish books. What's your routine? How do you make space to craft your work?

MC: Thank God school was invented. I don't know what we would do if it hadn't been. We send them away every day. They leave the house -- we drive them to school, and then we've got all this time. Ayelet works primarily, almost entirely during that period, and she's very efficient. When she's really working on a novel or whatever she gets her word count in every day, and that works well for her. I have a harder time -- my natural rhythm is to work at night, stay up late and to sleep late. I can get more writing done between midnight and 1 o'clock in the morning than at any other hour of the day. 

Unfortunately, that schedule does not work at all well in a family with small children. If I sleep late, then I miss out on what I think is the nicest, most pleasurable time of the day, of an ordinary, everyday routine. In the morning -- my kids are generally in a pretty good mood when they wake up, you know, we make breakfast. I hate missing out on that, so I get up. So that means I can't really stay up as late as I might like. Or else I don't get enough sleep. I struggle with the schedule. And I've been struggling with it for years. Lately, sleep has been losing out. I've been staying up late, and getting up early. It doesn't work as well for me as it does for Ayelet, and I envy her that she's more of a morning/day person than I am.

Often, I have to go away [to write]. I'll go to a place like the MacDowell Colony, or borrow somebody's cabin, or go to a hotel even. Stay up until all hours, and sleep late, and just crank. I can get a lot done. Even in three or four days, I can do about as much as I could do in a month at home. 

JC: Many of these pieces were written for Details -- were they written over a long period of time?

MC: My column just ended at Details -- my last one I think is on the newsstand right now. That was four years' worth of columns. They're not all in the book by any means. I only selected the ones that I could fit into an overall thematic kind of scheme, or at least the best ones of those.

JC: When you were putting together this idea of collecting stories about manhood in its various generational forms, was there an author you were looking up to, or was this filling a hole in our culture?

MC: Well, there's a lot of good personal writing out there right now, both stuff that's being written to be performed in a spoken-word setting and stuff that is written for the page. I don't think I had any illusions that I was necessarily breaking new ground, and that isn't really what motivated me to do it. It's more the impulse to turn your eye on the life around you. The experience of having children, of being a father, impelled me, not just in my writing but just on a daily basis in my thoughts and in my everyday reflections to look backward at my own life, my own childhood, my relationship with my father, with my brother, and to sort of look around me, not only what was going on in the world of my children and their family but other families, other kids around. Somehow it felt worthy of writing about -- it felt like I had a few things to say.

JC: You describe your father and your first father-in-law acting differently than you do. Do you see a period of continuing change with the role of fatherhood from their generation to yours, and then to your sons'?

MC: I imagine there will be, although I don't have the faintest idea how. Everything keeps changing, that's the one thing we can count on. The world has changed so much in not only in what a father is expected to do, but is allowed to do. It's not just that a father might face greater demands to be with his children, to be more involved with their daily care, but also that he's granted the privilege of doing that, it's something I wouldn't have wanted to miss out on. Even though it's often really boring and tedious, too. I don't know what it's going to mean for my sons to have grown up with the father that I've tried to be. I don't know if that's going to make things easier or harder or what. I feel very very close to both my sons, and I encourage them, as much as I can, to feel like it's OK for them to be whatever kind of man they want to be. If they see me walking around carrying a purse, taking my wallet and keys out of it, I don't know if that makes any kind of impression on them at all. 

Margaret Atwood on green rabbits, writing sex and Twitter

Margaret Atwood comes to UCLA's Royce Hall tonight with a performance from her new novel, "The Year of the Flood." In the book, as two former eco-cult  members struggle to survive an environmental disaster, they remember leader Adam One and the lessons he taught to his flock, God's Gardeners. On the tour, each performance -- which includes actors, singers and Atwood as the narrator -- has taken a different shape. Atwood talked to Jacket Copy's Carolyn Kellogg by phone this week about the shows, the book, the difficulty in writing sex and what it's like to be a new blogger.

Jacket Copy: I understand you've been blogging, uploading pictures, using Twitter. What do you think about it?

Margaret Atwood: Part of it is really fun. And part of it is a lot of work -- as you know.

JC: What's the fun part?

MA: The fun part is probably the Twittering. Because it's short.

JC: Is it really you Twittering?

MA: Yes, it’s really me. Absolutely, it’s really me. But there were two false mes when I went on … my Twitter pals did something, and they disappeared.

JC: Has the Internet created a different level of engagement with readers than previous book tours?

MA: It puts you in the position of a journalist, in a way. You become the journalist of yourself. Which is really weird. But you also become the journalist of your own tour. For the blog, I've been taking pictures of the events we've been doing…. Sometimes they come out, and sometimes they don't.

JC: This must be your 30th book tour. Does this added component bring a new excitement to the experience?

MA: It brings a whole different number of levels to it. It's certainly different from anything I've done before. So it's certainly different from anything I've ever done before, because it is a multi kind of thing. First of all, we've got the website, which I built myself with the Scott Thornly company -- it was they who said, "Well you need to have a blog and a Twitter" so I said basically, "What are those?" I have a coach, I have this media coach called McLean Greaves and he's the one who Twitter/iPhone/webstreamed a party in my kitchen. It's very sort of horror movie-looking. It would be possible to do something that looked a little less like ghosts in my kitchen -- but it was an experiment, and I therefore now know how to do that on my iPhone. All of these are new things, and it's a very steep learning curve for me because I didn't know how to do any of this before August. I started the first blog entry from New York just before I got on the Queen Mary. I had to learn Wordpress -- that's been an experience too, because nobody has been teaching me. I've had to sort of figure it out. But the good thing about my Twitter pals, I can ask a question and somebody will tell me the answer.

JC: I'm not sure that all authors would try any of this. James Ellroy, for example, doesn't even use e-mail.

MA: I can understand that point of view. It can take you over. There's no question. You can spend hours doing this stuff, following up on tags people send you, and interesting stuff -- it can suck you in like a vortex. I'm not sure that it would be a thing you would want to do while you were actually writing a book.

JC: Which you're not doing right now – you're doing a series of performances. It's with a different set of performers each time?

MA: Think of it as a relay race. Or -- remember Mr. Potato Head? Think of it as Mr. Potato Head, in which each venue, each city that takes this on gets the basic potato: the script and a few rudimentary instructions as to how they might do it, with some optional choices. For instance, those who want not to use the swear words can take them out. They need to find a singing group. They get the CD [of the hymns in "The Year of the Flood"] and sheet music, so the singing group can learn the music. But they can do it any way they want, and they have done it any way they want. We've had all different interpretations of the three characters  because we use three readers to do them -- sometimes those have been professional actors, sometimes they've been people who work in bookstores. So we've had a wide range. The only thing they all have in common is that I'm the narrator in each one of them. It's been a wide-ranging experience that has involved a lot of people, and that is the most astounding thing about it. People have leapt into this, they've taken it on, they've put their own spin on it and they've had a great time doing it.

JC: As an author, what's it like to see your work interpreted and reinterpreted and reinterpreted?

MA: You know, it's reinterpreted every time someone reads the book. Because each reader is in effect playing the book, the way you would play a piece of music. And each of those readings or playings is different. The only difference is, usually I'm not standing in the room when they're doing that. I don't get to see it.

When you're doing it in public like this, you actually get to see the different interpretations, and that's been pretty fascinating, because it also makes you realize how differently people read books.

Bigfoot: Why do we believe in you?

The cover of this book reminds me of the thousands of pairs of Ugg boots I see girls wearing around L.A. Perhaps Bigfoot -- since we can never seem to pin that guy down completely -- is supporting himself somewhere out in the woods by designing the original pair of Uggs?

In all seriousness though, Bigfoot really is an American tall-tale. Up there with the Loch Ness monster and other such mystic creatures we can never seem to find, he eludes us and yet we always choose to believe in him, just a little bit. Bigfoot embodies American ideals: Western ruggedness, the great outdoors, old-fashioned masculinity and perhaps a strange backwoods idea of what it is like to be larger than life.

In the case of author Joshua Blu Buhs, he tells us right away that Bigfoot is nothing but a myth - a figment of our wonderful imagining. And yet, Buhs wrote "Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend" to explain the complicated origins of the beast.

Jacket Copy: Straight from the start, you tell us that Bigfoot doesn’t exist. Even though you say there is no Bigfoot, why did you choose to pursue this mythical creature in your writing?

Buhs: Initially it was the fact that I didn’t think Bigfoot existed, which was interesting to me. It was also about American ideas of what the natural world is. Sort of like: Here’s a screen on which people can project their ideas about nature. Though it turned out not to be as much about nature as I originally thought it would be.

JC: Did you ever believe in Bigfoot as a kid?

Buhs: I think, looking back, it is possible. As I grew up, I became more interested in standard and mainstream science.

JC: Why are Americans obsessed with this legend? Where did the myth come from?

Buhs: The myth of Bigfoot really started in the 1950s. It certainly hadn't penetrated the modern American conscience until the '50s. The legend was popular with white, working-class men, where it sort of fit in, and eventually it worked its way into the mainstream.

JC: How did the Bigfoot myth appeal to working-class men?

Buhs: In the late 1960s and early 1970s, white, working-class men saw a stagnation in their opportunities and the amount of money they were making. Bigfoot then became a symbol of what they feared. And Bigfoot could also be what readers fantasized about -- escaping into the wilderness.

JC: Even if people know for a plain fact that this monster doesn’t exist, why do we still choose to believe?

The answer... after the jump.

Lily Burana on writing about being an ex-stripper Army wife

Lily Burana, a former punk rocker who wrote a memoir about stripping ("Strip City") and once posed for Playboy, might seem  an odd candidate to marry a military man. But that's exactly what she did, about seven years ago, before her then-boyfriend Mike, an Army officer, shipped out for Iraq. Her new memoir, "I Love a Man in Uniform," is about that experience and the many unexpected issues it raised for her. Jacket Copy asked her about writing and more.

Jacket Copy: You've written nonfiction before about your own life. In this case, the subject is both you and your relationship with your husband, Mike, which seems more complicated. Did you think about how what you were writing might affect him? Did that affect what you wrote?

Lily Burana: I thought about how writing about our relationship would affect him every moment I was working on the book! Soldiers live in camouflage not just physically but emotionally. That is to say, they are self-protective (and for good reason), so I wanted to be mindful of the balance between rigorous honesty and destructive disclosure. It affected my writing insomuch as I had him "vet" the book, so to speak — he had to approve everything I wrote about us. Which sounds more ridiculous than it really was. Ultimately, it was more a matter of "is this how you remember that night" than "do you approve of my writing, husband dear?" But I think a preservation-minded couple is well-advised to touch base with each other around any retelling of their story. "Rashomon" is not really a successful relationship template. It's a short trip from "She said, he said" to "You!!!"

JC: While you worked as a stripper and have written frankly about it, you barely mention sex during the chapters about your courtship. When you and Mike dated, was it as chaste as it seems on the page?

LB: Well, I didn't write anything about my sex life in "Strip City," either, so it was consistent between both books. It may seem "revealing" to write about stripping, but stripping is a job, not a personal engagement, and even though you are working almost-naked and presenting a sexualized work image, it's not your sex life, anymore than, say, a screen kiss really reflects an actress's true desire. "I Love a Man in Uniform" is way more revealing than "Strip City" on many levels. I suspect in "Strip City" I appeared to be showing more than I really was. But then, that's a stripper — or rather, ex-stripper — for ya, isn't it?

JC: The book references contemporary and vintage guidebooks of how to be a good Army wife. Did you use them as actual resources? Or were they research for how to write about your experiences?

LB: I totally used them. The Army doesn't set you up with how-to-be-a-wife classes or anything, so like many brides, I relied on those guides. I used the contemporary guidebooks for practical advice and the vintage ones as cautionary tales. One of the vintage guides even says something along the lines of "Don't expect Joe to help you with the dishes — his job is to protect our country!"

Writer's block and Diablo Cody ... after the jump.