The website Words Without Borders is celebrating revolution the entire month of July. If it happens to be raining where you are today, or if you're inside taking refuge from a barbecue, there is plenty of reading material to keep you distracted, even entranced.
There is fiction — the Stalin of "Stalin's Wife" isn't the Stalin — and there is nonfiction, the devastating excerpt from "The Arrest of Heberto Padilla and Belkis Cuza Malé." There is even an excerpt from the French graphic novel "Chaabi," which is wonderful in this English translation, although the rendering here is a bit small.
All the pieces appear in English. Original versions are in German, Catalan, Spanish and Norwegian — the last, unexpectedly, is "Black Sky, Black Sea," about Turkey.
If these tales make you curious about the writing of other nations — if it's still raining out there, or if the barbecue has gone cold — you can visit the page where PEN has archived many of the talks and readings from its 2008 World Voices Festival.
Meanwhile, many happy returns to the United States as we celebrate the 232nd anniversary of our own revolution.
— Carolyn Kellogg
Photo of Cuba's former Ministry of the Interior building in Havana by Mark Scott Johnson via Flickr
Richard's comments about the next installment of "Nobody Move" seem like a perfect place to wrap up phase one of our conversation, and look ahead to phase two.
So nobody move -- we'll be back next month to discuss the second part of Denis Johnson's serial novel, and to see where the story goes from here.
I first read Denis Johnson's "Angels" when I was in graduate school in Amherst, Mass., the novel having been loaned to me by someone housesitting for an older professor. I was only 23 and blown away. I knew all those people in "Angels," though I wished I hadn't grown up with them, and I was stunned that someone had written a novel so deeply immersed inside their heads.
So reading this first installment of "Nobody Move" is strange because, once again, we're completely immersed, and it's a good thing. Since I've been reading a lot of noir lately — my favorite being that of Ross Macdonald, Walter Mosley and now Raymond Chandler, because of Judith Freeman's fine nonfiction book about him — this was perfect.
And it's so damn funny. The dialogue is funny, perfect just like Chandler's. The details are hilarious — the log motel and the restaurants and the river.
But I agree with several things Carolyn and David have pointed out. First, why can't we see the scene where Luntz shoots Gambol? Why would Gambol have been on that kind of ride and let him put the gun in the glove compartment in the first place? (Again, I wish I didn't know people like this, or rides like this.) If Gambol's supposed to be too tired to do it right, I'd like to know.
Second, the whole serialization thing is strange. I love the way the headline trumpets On Deadline! Publishing History Begins Now.
But not really, given Dickens and Hardy and so many others, including the recent novels serialized in the New York Times Magazine.
Anyway, a month will pass, and I'll read again passionately, because I love Johnson and his style and his inimitable humor, which is beyond black and into some other netherworldly shade. But I probably will have to keep this story around.
Which brings me to Richard's comment about his son wanting the magazine. Yeah, only I live in a house with three feminist teenage girls, all of whom are taller than me. All very beautiful. All of whom gave me the most dubious, deadly looks when I mentioned that inside the FedEx envelope was Playboy. "I tell my grad students some of the best fiction in history has been published in Playboy," I said. "We just read a T.C. Boyle story in class that was originally in here."
They gave me the classic teenage answer. "Why?" Deadpan.
When I showed the cover to them (one is a college girl who reads Details, Esquire and about 10 other magazines and whose favorite magazine in the world is GQ), they all said quizzically, "People still read that?"
I cut the story out and threw the rest of the pages away, mostly because the cartoons were so bad. But I can't wait to see what happens with Anita. She's way better than a cartoon.
I wasn't sure what to expect of a serial hard-boiled noir in Playboy from Denis Johnson, but it wasn't a guy in a checkered vest singing barbershop. Lutz starts out as an anti-noir character, the kind of nebbish Bogart played at so well in the bookstore in "The Big Sleep." But of course, Bogart was still Philip Marlowe behind the facade, and similarly, Luntz isn't a putz underneath, at least not a wimpy one. We don't see the scene where he shoots the much-bigger Gambol — an interesting omission, evoked only by the wonderful passage Richard cites — but we wind up convinced that he's got the guts to take action.
I'm not sure what purpose the barbershop bit serves, other than to give readers an early misimpression of Luntz, and to stick him in that goofy getup for the violent and seductive scenes that follow. At this point, I find it a little hard to believe that gambler Luntz would join a barbershop group, and I hope there's some narrative payoff. I don't want it just to provide a quirky, Tarantino-like juxtaposition; I want it to make some kind of twisted sense.
Maybe that kind of tension — how can this fit? — is what keeps a reader hooked between serial installments. Sure, we're curious about Gambol's fate, and what will happen between Luntz and Anita, but it's the question of whether the author will pull everything together that keeps us intrigued. Sometimes I wonder whether Dickens threw in a random character every now and then just to keep things interesting, challenging himself to make sense of everything in his allotted space (a mere 18 episodes — 900 pages).
David points out that the dialogue doesn't always work, but I disagree. I love Johnson's characters' crosstalk — often they seem to be in two entirely separate conversations. And it's not like the characters don't notice. "This is starting to sound like one of those messed-up conversations," Anita says to Luntz. As both David and Richard have pointed out, in moments like this, it seems as if Johnson is having some fun.
There’s something odd about the idea, isn’t there? That’s to say, the form of the serial novel doesn’t have the currency it did when Charles Dickens (above, left) and Wilkie Collins (above, right) were banging out monthly installments against a deadline for those magazines that Dickens ran and eventually owned. Such an undertaking has a gimmicky feel, and, in the case of the recent John Banville/Benjamin Black story in the New York Times Magazine, we were faced with a definitely wonky widget.
That said, the combination of Denis Johnson and Playboy feels much more promising. Was he winking in the direction of his own book, "Stars at Noon," when, early on in this first extract, a character says in a bit of dialogue: "Almost noon?" As usual, Johnson takes characters who start at the end of their tethers, a character situation that lends itself naturally toward noir and the pursuit thriller. Which is obviously, I hope, what we’re getting here — Denis Johnson channeling Elmore Leonard, with bits of "The Sopranos" thrown in, and making the gumbo his own.
For me, the thing got going with the scene break from the car so we get the look back at what just happened: "Standing at the pay phone, Jimmy Luntz punched a nine and a one and stopped. He couldn’t hear the dial tone. His ears still rang. That old Colt revolver made a bang that slapped you silly." It’s a lovely piece of writing, delivering a narrative surprise with observational acuity and making us smile besides.
Then there’s the scene where Luntz is trying to tie the tourniquet on the leg of the guy he’s just shot. "With surprising energy, Gambol suddenly tossed away his white hat. The wind caught it, and it sailed a dozen yards into the trees. Then he seemed to lose consciousness." He’s such a good writer. The sex scene at the end was great, and I look forward to seeing what Anita Desilvera gets up to with those Magnums she has stashed in the trunk of her car. Somehow the two main characters, Luntz and Anita, made me think of the kids in "Angels," Johnson’s first novel, now grown up in some spectacularly damaged way. At this point I’m definitely along for the ride — but then the set-up is probably the easiest bit of what Johnson is attempting here.
My 13-year old blinked when he saw me reading Playboy. "Hey, can I borrow that after you?" he said. He said he’d check out Denis Johnson too.
Editor's note: On Friday, Playboy published the first section of Denis Johnson’s “Nobody Move,” a serialized work of fiction that will come out in four parts. Jacket Copy will review “Nobody Move,” installment by installment; below, our take on Part 1.
My wife is appalled at Denis Johnson. “Why Playboy?” she wants to know. She’s referring, of course, to the venue for Johnson’s latest project, “Nobody Move,” a 40,000-word “novel” that the magazine is publishing as a serial in four installments; the first, in the July issue, has just come out.
As for me, I’m more interested in the way “Nobody Move” might help further eclipse the line between mass culture and literature, between the throwaway nature of periodicals and the lasting weight of art. Although serials are not as uncommon as they once were — see Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City,” Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” Stephen King’s “The Green Mile” and Michael Chabon’s “Gentlemen of the Road” — they require novelists who can think like journalists, who can write on deadline, who aren’t afraid to make a mess.
This is cool, exhilarating even, especially in a world in which literary culture is often far too insular, like a form of trivial pursuit. Johnson is one of those rare writers who wants to walk both sides of the line here, to go after a mass readership with work that challenges at every turn. That’s one of the things that attracts me to “Nobody Move,” the idea of Johnson’s bleakly existential vision woven in amid the naked women and advice columns on how to live the good life, as if he were the voice of the collective unconscious — or, more accurately, of the collective id.
Not only that, but “Nobody Move” comes billed as a noir, that darkest of American genres, the literary equivalent of the blues.
Credit: Pound in 1966, photographed by Jonathan Williams/David R. Godine Publishers.
Thomas McGonigle'stribute to novelist George Garrett yesterday, which included a link to other tributes at Virginia Quarterly Review, led to my inevitable lingering at VQR and the discovery of this gem: John Schneider on Ezra Pound's (sort of) career as a foreign correspondent.
Hemingway he wasn't. Pound spent a year, in the late 1950s, writing for the Richmond News Leader. The Virginia newspaper published only one article, an editorial attacking economist John Maynard Keynes under the headline "Keynes Brainwashed Electorate with Economic Hogwash." Schneider traces the circumstances that led to this odd development for the poet, who was indicted for treason for his infamous anti-American radio broadcasts from Rome during World War II. News Leader editor, James J. Kilpatrick, and local businessman Harry Meacham worked for the poet's release from St. Elizabeth's Hospital (where he was incarcerated after being deemed unfit to stand trial). When Pound was finally released, he offered to write for the newspaper once he returned to Italy, and Meacham assured the paper's editor, "Don't worry about his incoherence. This is eccentricity. In formal correspondence he is magnificent."
Well, not really. Pound typed messy, rambling pieces about the sorry state of U.S. presidential politics, Italian boxers, French elections, "The Mind of Europe" (of course he assumed he knew what everyone was thinking) and more. It's clear why the editors managed to salvage just one piece from the bunch: Pound's attack on Keynes takes the form of a mercifully brief anecdote, in which the poet encountered Keynes at "a tee party." Schneider's fascinating piece is followed by images of Pound's eight submitted articles. Check them out. As I looked at them, one thing was clear to me: I'm glad I never had to edit Ole Ez. What a nightmare it would have been.
George Garrett died at home in Charlottesville, Va., in his sleep on May 25. He was the author of 34 books. I will remember him as the author of, among many others, "Death of the Fox," his re-creation of the life of Sir Walter Raleigh that easily stands comparison to Marguerite Yourcenar's "Memoirs of Hadrian"; for the short story "A Wreath for Garibaldi," which is one of the most successful re-creations of an intellectual milieu (Rome in the late 1950s); and for a poem, "Three Night Poems," whose second section, "U.S.A.," begins:
Say, they roll up the sidewalks all over town by 11:30 p.m. Lord, by midnight there's nothing moving, doing. Lone streetlights glare.
That section ends:
Dancer, giants, heroes and dreamers, where are you now? It's a fact — when a heart breaks it doesn't make a sound.
George, who wrote on literary matters millions of critical words, would have appreciated the selectivity of my listing. I want also to mention the years in Hollywood writing movies or for his plays. He was a raconteur among raconteurs but I cannot avoid talking about George's life as a teacher — year after strenuous year, he taught at places like Iowa, Wesleyan, Michigan, Columbia, Hollins and finally returned to where he began that career, the University of Virginia.
He was the best sort of teacher: worldly wise, widely read. He sought no disciples and only tried to help a student find his or her own voice. Happily, he leaves no school behind, no quirks or attitudes or themes that students will mimic. I won't name any of his very famous students (and there are many, some of whom pay tribute to George at Virginia Quarterly blog) for a simple reason: He treated all of his students with equal dignity, seriousness and profound kindness.
Just after receiving the email explaining that Garrett was at home under hospice care, I wrote to him
The Mystery Writers of America's awarded their Edgars (the annual prizes named for Mr. Poe, above) at a black-tie banquet in New York on Friday. I am no mystery expert, unlike my colleague Sarah Weinman, and I'm embarrassed to admit that usually many of the nominees are new to me.
Not this year though. Several of the nominees came from the another genre -- literary fiction, it's called, although I'm growing increasingly uncomfortable with this term. It seems presumptive: Is all other fiction non-literary?
Anyway, the point is that Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, Man Booker Prize winner John Banville (writing as Benjamin Black) and National Book Award nominee Susan Straight were all up for Edgars this year. That's Literature with a capital L.
Straight took the short story Edgar for "The Golden Gopher;" it can be found in the anthology Los Angeles Noir. I haven't read the story yet -- I bought the book directly from the publisher, Akashic, at a conference earlier this year and have been dying to get to it -- but I have been to the Golden Gopher of the title, one of downtown L.A.'s first seedy bars to get a high-end makeover.
Other fiction winners include John Hart for his novel, "Down River"; Tana French for her debut mystery, "In the Woods"; Megan Abbott for her original paperback novel, "Queenpin," and Tedd Arnold’s young adult mystery, "Rat Life." Former L.A. prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi won the best factual crime Edgar for his gargantuan work, "Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy."
I wonder, are the Edgars are getting a makeover themselves? Why nominate "literary" authors? Is mystery expanding outward? Or are other genres trying to horn in on a lucrative market? Why is Banville writing as Black, instead of just as himself? And what purpose do genre distinctions serve these days?
I know we just had our book festival, but this makes me want to be in New York.
But I am not in New York, so I get the next best thing: a blogorama about the event at MetaxuCafe. The site is gathering posts from smart bloggers who are in attendance, offering everything from a description of Rushdie's opening night remarks ("jolly") to a series of terrific photos. It's a way to catch up with the World Voices festival all in one place, instead of blog by blog.
If you already know enough about the political history of Burma, what's hot in Spanish literature and the real deal with Darfur, eh, there's no use checking it out. But otherwise....
The classic novelist and iconic rapper were both avid readers, and both of their libraries have been publicly catalogued. Now volunteers have added them to the library-sharing site Librarything. Other authors who've gotten the treatment are John Adams, Sylvia Plath, John Muir and Ernest Hemingway; in-progress are the book collections of James Joyce, Charles Darwin and Rembrandt.
Librarything is a lot like goodreads; although it isn't as technically showy, it came first and seems to be a little more fun. The people who started the famous-persons-libraries project have named their group "I See Dead People['s Books]." Nice.
Sadly, Fitzgerald and Shakur didn't have any books in common. Tupac's collection reflects an interest in African American poetry, spiritual searching (books on Buddha, the Kabbalah, the Tibetan "Book of the Dead") and practical guides for the music business. Fitzgerald -- whose collection of 322 books is hard to categorize -- apparently read some contemporaries (Sherwood Anderson) while avoiding others (Ernest Hemingway). Hmm... bad blood? Competitive? A question of taste?
Librarything is like going to a cocktail party at someone's house and wandering off to check out their books. Thanks to the Very Short List for showing me the way.
Joe Hill and his dad: It was nice to find Joe Hill completely at ease talking about his father, Stephen King, during the science fiction/fantasy/horror panel Sunday morning. "He's my first reader," he said. "I've learned a lot from him." But, as he told the audience, he decided not to approach publishers as Joseph Hillstrom King (his given name) because "it would have been beneficial for me only in the short run."
"If I had done that, I'm sure they would have been willing to publish work that wasn't ready, just for the advantage of having a tie to my family," he said.
But because "Heart-Shaped Box" received favorable reviews, Hill feels comfortable enough now when the question is raised about his father. When an older audience member approached the mike and even complained -- "There's a lot that's wrong with horror today, all that slasher stuff, and much of it has to do with Stephen King" -- Hill responded that his father's work "in large part explores the experiences of the middle class, what they're feeling. I think he prides himself on being a reporter of what's going on. But if you want Lovecraft and all that, go ahead, man. It's a wide field. You can always find something else to read."
Other bits:Kevin Anderson, who completed Frank Herbert's "Dune" saga with Herbert's son, Brian, told the audience that a new motion picture of "Dune" may be in the works. "Let's keep our fingers crossed," he said. The special effects technology that's available today, he said, might lead to an even richer realization of that book than what one sees in David Lynch's 1984 film.
James Howard Kunstler wasn't on this panel (he was on a fiction panel later in the day), but he easily could have been for his novel "World Made By Hand." His novel looks at life in a future world where energy resources have run out and people revert to an existence resembling 19th century life.
I'm mentioning it here because Kunstler explained that he wanted his book to respond to the post-apocalyptic picture of the world that readers get in Cormac McCarthy's harrowing novel "The Road." "I want people to feel some hope about the future," he said. "I just want them to realize that there are alternatives to what that novel presents."
SoCal lit blogger John Fox and the good people of Red Fence hit the L.A. Times Festival of Books with a camera crew and tracked down some fabulous fictioneers (T.C. Boyle, Shelley Jackson, Lydia Millet among them) to ask them about art and literary pilgrimages.
Where have they gone? Which one ate a page of Shakespeare? Watch to find out.
Finishing a novel produces different feelings in different writers, or so three mighty practitioners of the form said Sunday at the L.A. Times Festival of Books.
Jane Smiley confessed to feeling spent, even a bit shaken, after completing the novels "A Thousand Acres" (1991) and "Moo" (1995).
Smiley's 1988 effort at epic writing, "The Greenlanders," on the other hand, left her feeling so energized that she immediately turned to finish another manuscript she'd set aside.
Ron Carlson was so thoroughly submerged in "Five Skies" (2007), his first novel in three decades (though he produced four short-story collections in the interim), that the experience was perhaps as exhausting as finishing up a quarter of teaching at UC Irvine, where he now co-directs the graduate fiction writing program.
Tobias Wolff, who has written two novels ("Ugly Rumours" and "Old School") and is considered a master of the memoir and short story (including the latest collection, "Our Story Begins"), usually finds himself in a celebratory mood on finishing a work. But he noted that the prolific Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope would finish one book and immediately begin another, adhering to a regimen of writing at least 10,000 words a week.
"If it were me, I'd be at the bar for about a year," Wolff said. Then drolly comparing his output to Trollope's, he added, "You will see there's a flaw in my procedure. It may be the celebration part."
L.A. Times staff writer Susan Salter Reynolds (and moderator of the panel, "Fiction: Serious Prose") also wanted to know their thoughts on the recent flaps about authors who presented elaborate fictions as memoir. (Remember mixed-race author Margaret B. Jones exposed as white writer Margaret Seltzer, who grew up in upper middle class Sherman Oaks, not in a foster family in the 'hood of South Central Los Angeles? And Mischa Defonseca, who admitted that her 1997 book, "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years," was a work of fiction?)
Carlson quipped: "All the dialog in my novel is 100% accurate!"
Wolff opined that perhaps some of the blame can be laid at the feet of gullible audiences. "Imagine their shock" he said of Defonseca's readers' reaction to her confession after believing that "a little girl toddled off into the woods and was raised by wolves."
But across town at USC, elementary school students at the 32nd Street/USC Performing Arts Magnet school (perhaps winners in waiting?) will gather to read some of their original poetry.
OK, so they had some help from writers Cecilia Woloch and Aimee Bender; it's still a great opportunity to hear what's on the minds of L.A.'s fourth-graders.
In its latest issue, the feminist magazine Bitch takes the New York Times Book Reviewto task: "It has become the place where serious feminist books come to die."
Author Sarah Seltzer writes in the article (titled, in part, "All the Misogyny Is Fit to Print") that "catfights" flare in the pages when younger women review books by older feminists. She points to Wonkette founding editor Ana Marie Cox's dismissiveness of bra-burning in her 2006 review of Katha Pollitt's essay collection, "Virginity or Death!," as a typical example:
“[Y]oung, educated, and otherwise liberal women who might, in another era, have found themselves burning bras and raising their consciousness would rather be fitted for the right bra ... and raising their credit limit. Katha Pollitt is the skunk at this 'Desperate Housewives' watching party.”
Older female reviewers also draw criticism. Seltzer cites "Arts section doyenne Michiko Kakutani’s" 2007 put-down of Susan Faludi’s book, "The Terror Dream": "This, sadly, is the sort of tendentious, self-important, sloppily reasoned book that gives feminism a bad name."
Seltzer finds the opening line of Kakutani’s review "particularly perplexing because it reveals her belief that feminism has a bad name to begin with (it certainly seems to around the Timesoffices) and that feminists themselves, rather than sexism, are responsible for said bad name."
That's certainly well-reasoned, and Seltzer's article, if a little snarky, is definitely worth a read. It includes some sobering figures: The ratio of male-to-female-authors in the NYT's Book Review is about 2 to 1. Reviewers? Same thing.
Of course I wondered how the L.A. Times Book Review's gender balance stacks up. I did an incredibly unscientific survey of three Sunday Book Review sections from early 2008. There were a total of 28 books by male authors reviewed compared with 11 by female authors (a ratio of about 2.5 to 1). When it comes to the reviewers, the majority flips: 16 women to 14 men.
These figures don't really tell the story. How do you tally a book by a man who has a female editor? (I count it as both a male and a female author.) How about the book written by a man and translated by a husband-and-wife team? (Answer: two men, one woman.) As I said, it's an unscientific tally.
For hard numbers about gender balance in book reviews across the country, Sisters in Crime keeps careful track, but just of the number of mystery novels by men and women.
Counting is fun, but how useful is it? Such summaries don't track which books get cover treatment and considerable length versus those given capsule reviews. Nor do the numbers address the tone of reviews, which really is at the heart of the complaint in Bitch.
In the face of a citywide budget crisis, the Los Angeles Public Library is proposing a service charge for books circulated through inter-library loan. If approved, the $1-a-book fee will take effect July 1.
If this were a kind of luxury tax, it wouldn't seem all that bad. I mean, a dollar, right? But some people are concerned that it'll affect the smallest, least-funded branch libraries -- and their patrons -- the most. That's why they've launched this blog urging people to write to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and library leaders and to organize opposition to the fee before the May 1 City Council hearing on the library's budget.
There are about 70 branches of the L.A. Public Library serving the city's readers (a few branches are currently closed for repairs). Obviously, not all branches can have every book, but most are available within the library system -- via inter-library loans -- for free. Author Cecil Castellucci, who volunteers at a public school in Echo Park, told the no-fee campaign organizers:
As a read-aloud volunteer at Mayberry Elementary school, I use this service to get the perfect books to read to the students. For example, I used the inter-library loan service to get books on opera to read aloud to the kids in preparation for their field trip to the L.A. Opera. As a young adult author, I find it appalling to be charging $1 for an inter-library loan.
While the organizers are soliciting suggestions for how to support the library, I know of one sure way coming up April 30. It's the library's annual gala dinner, a fund-raiser for the library foundation that this year will honor author Larry McMurtry ("Lonesome Dove," "Terms of Endearment," "The Last Picture Show"). Tickets are $750 apiece. Sure, that's a lot of smackers; but it would also pay for a lot of books zooming around the city through inter-library loans.
Well, it seems that C.S. Lewis doesn't hold the patent on inventing the magical wardrobe that transports children to other worlds. Edith Nesbit deserves more of the credit for her 1909 story, "The Aunt and Amabel," in which a young girl, banished by her aunt to a bedroom for committing some vague act of mischief, escapes her loneliness thus:
She went straight to the Big Wardrobe and turned its glass handle.
"I expect it's only shelves and people's best hats," she said. But she only said it. People often say what they don't mean, so that if things turn out as they don't expect, they can say "I told you so," but this is most dishonest to one's self, and being dishonest to one's self is almost worse than being dishonest to other people. Amabel would never have done it if she had been herself. But she was out of herself with anger and unhappiness.
Of course it wasn't hats. It was, most amazingly, a crystal cave, very oddly shaped like a railway station. It seemed to be lighted by stars, which is, of course, unusual in a booking office, and over the station clock was a full moon. The clock had no figures, only 'Now' in shining letters all round it, twelve times. ...
A train station too, huh? Shades of Mr. Potter. This delightful short story is among a rich selection that Douglas A. Anderson includes in "Tales Before Narnia: The Roots of Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction." Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen: A Tale in Seven Stories" gives us not only a
When novelist Lisa See reads a good book, she likes to "curl up with a cup of tea." Which is why it seemed a natural when Celestial Seasonings proposed using her latest bestseller, "Peony in Love," to promote its online book club, Adventure at Every Turn.
"I thought it was a really great match," See said. "First of all, tea and China, they kind of go together. And when I read a book, tea is always involved."
For "Peony," just out in paperback, the Colorado-based tea purveyor put together a fetching box of herbal selections compatible with the 17th century coming-of-age story, along with a variety of suggestions for book club discussions, recipes and decorating ideas. See said the starter kits, usually available only to online subscribers, were in great demand at book signings she gave recently.
Turns out the online demand has been so great (15,000 members and counting), there are no more kits for "Peony" or the club’s first selection in December, "The End of the Alphabet" by C.S. Richardson, according to a Celestial Seasonings spokeswoman. And because the promotional budget has been exhausted, club members will have to content themselves with website recommendations for the next selection, "Pomegranate Soup" by Marsha Mehran.
Celestial spokeswoman Alison Hazlinger said the company's online book club grew out of a detailed survey of customers, 70% of whom said that "reading books" was their favorite leisure activity.
The company's outreach to readers is the same thing publishers, including See's (Random House), are trying to do, the author says. "Book clubs sell a lot of books, and they start a conversation. It's not just about selling one book or one cup of tea, you're reaching five to 15 people at once — and you're starting a conversation."
Author Tayari Jones was moved by the vicious attacks last year on a Haitian mother and son in Dunbar Village, a housing project in West Palm Beach, Fla. To help the victims, she has organized a very literary online auction, which is now live on EBay.
There are books, of course, many of which are signed by the authors. But most exciting -- especially for aspiring writers -- are the critiques. Want to hear what George Saunders thinks of your story? You can, for just (at this writing) about $180.
Recently, O'Nan, a Pittsburgh native, spoke to Hot Metal Bridge, the literary magazine at the University of Pittsburgh.*
Hot Metal Bridge: Some have called you “the bard of the working class.” Is this a title you embrace, or are these readers off the mark?
Stewart O’Nan: I think the only person who’s ever called me that is my editor, trying to put together some sort of fetching jacket copy. I write about average people, but I hope they’re from all classes and all walks. Certainly I’ve paid a lot of attention to people with low-paying jobs in books like "The Lobster" or "The Good Wife" or "Everyday People," but the other two books around those are "Wish You Were Here," about an upper-middle-class family, and "The Night Country," which takes place in the high-end suburbs of Connecticut.
HMB: Most of your books are grounded by a very tangible sense of place. What is it about setting that is so important to you as a writer?
SO'N: People are where they come from and where they live. They’re defined by the culture around them, down to the weather and the land. Even a manufactured culture like the culture of the workplace—the Lobster, for instance. Setting determines what’s possible, what’s probable and what’s inevitable for a character.
There's more here. Or if you want to give O'Nan a listen, he appeared on the marvelous literary podcast The Bat Segundo Show, discussing "Last Night at the Lobster," in December -- play online or download.
Carolyn Kellogg
* Full disclosure: I attend the University of Pittsburgh and was the founding editor of Hot Metal Bridge, from which I have now retired.
We are now on the third day of National Poetry Month (it seemed disrespectful to mention it on the first, April Fool's Day). Toronto poetry lovers need only walk to bpNichol Lane at the University of Toronto to read the late Canadian poet bpNichol's haiku (above).
In addition to the myriad events, celebrations and readings planned at libraries, bookstores and venues across the United States this month, you can enjoy poetry by signing up to get a poem a day by e-mail. Poetry lovers are encouraged to put a poem in their pocket on April 17, then share it with friends.
If you'd rather just linger online, Poets.org, the Academy of American Poets website, is packed with delights. Browse for poems, by poet or even by subject, then read online or listen to recordings. Learn about the difference between Yeats and Keats. Buy poet-geek gifts like autographed broadsides or the Emily Dickinson T-shirt from the online store.
For your pleasure (and mine), see a poem by Angeleno writer Wanda Coleman below.
In his 1891 novel, "New Grub Street," English writer George Gissing dissects the jaded cynicism of the publishing world as deftly as any novelist ever has. And yet, if you're a writer, to read the book is oddly self-revealing, as if looking at a dusty old mirror and discovering "The Picture of Dorian Gray."
Here's a taste:
"People have got that ancient prejudice so firmly rooted in their heads -- that one mustn't write save at the dictation of the Holy Spirit. I tell you, writing is a business. Get together half a dozen fair specimens of the Sunday-school prize; study them; discover the essential points of such composition; hit upon new attractions; then go to work methodically, so many pages a day. There's no question of the divine afflatus; that belongs to another sphere of life. We talk of literature as a trade, not of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. If I could only get that into poor Reardon's head. He thinks me a gross beast, often enough. What the devil -- I mean what on earth is there in typography to make everything it deals with sacred? I don't advocate the propogation of vicious literature; I only speak of good, coarse, marketable stuff for the world's vulgar. You just give it a thought, Maud; talk it over with Dora."
He resumed presently:
"I maintain that we people of brains are justified in supplying the mob with the food it likes. We are not geniuses, and if we sit down in a spirit of long-eared gravity we shall produce only commonplace stuff. Let us use our wits to earn money, and make the best we can of our lives. If only I had the skill, I would produce novels out-trashing the trashiest that ever sold fifty thousand copies. But it needs skill, mind you; and to deny it is a gross error of the literary pedants. To please the vulgar you must, one way or another, incarnate the genius of vulgarity. For my own part, I shan't be able to address the bulkiest multitude; my talent doesn't lend itself to that form. I shall write for the upper-middle class of intellect, the people who like to feel that what they are reading has some special cleverness, but who can't distinguish between stones and paste. That's why I'm so slow in warming to the work. Every month I feel surer of myself, however. That last thing of mine in 'The West End' distinctly hit the mark; it wasn't too flashy, it wasn't too solid. I heard fellows speak of it in the train."
Jhumpa Lahiri's new story collection, "Unaccustomed Earth," was reviewed Sunday in our pages. Reviewer Lisa Fugard calls the book "a howl from the heart of a writer working at the height of her powers."
Lahiri, 40, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction with her debut collection, "Interpreter of Maladies," and followed it up with the bestselling book-turned-movie, "The Namesake." Her new collection includes the story "Hell-Heaven," which ran in the New Yorker in 2004. That same year she appeared at the NewYorker Festival; in this film clip, she reads from her story and answers audience questions.
Classics scholar Robert Fagles' bestselling translations from the Greek and Latin reminded us, as Seamus Heaney did with his "Beowulf," of the continuing power and appeal of epic poems. We may feel sorry to lose so important a translator as Fagles, who died March 26 at age 74. Yet one can't help but see his passing in the context of his career-long preoccupation, in "The Odyssey" and "The Aeneid," with the necessity of journeys.
Good wishes and safe passage on your new travels, Mr. Fagles. Below are some words from a fellow student of Virgil that I think you'd appreciate.
The days that are past And the others to come Gathered, in the present.
For years and through the centuries A surprise at every moment In the knowledge we are still in life, That living ever flows, always flowing, Unexpected gift and pain In the continuous whirl of empty change.
Such in keeping with our fate Is this journey I continue, In the flash of an instant Unearthing and inventing Time from first to last, Refugee like all the others Who have been, who are, who are to come.
Giuseppe Ungaretti (translated by Andrew Frisardi)
By his own count, the late Ryszard Kapuściński covered 27 incidents of revolution, war and upheaval around the world -- and recorded much of it in such books as "The Soccer War," "The Shadow of the Sun" and "Imperium"before he died on Jan. 23, 2007. Many of his fans may be surprised to learn that the Polish journalist also wrote poetry -- although one might wonder when he possibly found the time.
Although there was much fanfare around the appearance of Kapuściński's final book, "Travels With Herodotus," which was published not long after his death, it's disappointing that "I Wrote Stone," now published in English for the first time by Biblioasis, has come out with not so much as a single trumpet sounding.
Translated by Diana Kuprel and Marek Kusiba, this slim volume gathers poetry Kapuściński wrote over 40 years. Slim, yes, but hardly insubstantial.
Big events -- such as the murder of the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba -- may have been treated lyrically in his prose, but Kapuściński's translators note that he believed poetry could "illuminate dimensions of human experience that otherwise would remain unknowable." These poems capture the moments between crises, impressions that carry a book-length argument in a few lines. "Magellan Reaches Tierra Del Fuego," for example, ends on this note of despair:
They stand gazing — they hope for paradise and the caravel reaches the shore and they see sand, stone and cliffs
The University of Iowa caused a bit of a dust-up recently by changing the terms for graduate theses -- to make them “open access,” available online, for free, to anyone. Students in the writing program, one of the country’s most prestigious, balked.
Eventually, the issue was resolved: The Chronicle of Higher Education reports (sorry, registration is required for the article) that the university will not publish theses from students in the writing programs as open-access documents.
Not all college students are so lucky. Many top film schools -- including USC's -- hold the rights to their students’ final projects. George Lucas is rumored to have resorted to stealing the negative to his short film “Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB” from the school. That worked out OK for him -– it became the basis for his first feature, “THX 1138,” starring Robert Duvall. But the university now makes sure to keep closer tabs on its students' work.
Yup, amid a steady drumbeat of news about Southland bookstores closing their doors due to rising rents and declining sales comes word that a Los Feliz landmark will nearly double in size.
Come May — give or take a few weeks — Skylight Books will open a second space right next door in the 1934 building at the corner of Vermont and Melbourne avenues, promises general manager and co-owner Kerry Slattery.
"It's all so exciting," Slattery writes in a March newsletter to Skylight's faithful. "It will be at least a few months before all is ready, but we plan to move our art, film, music, theater and a few other sections to the new space, which will allow us to also expand a few sections."
Why now, as Dutton's Brentwood Books prepares to close its doors at the end of the month and Book Soup shutters its Costa Mesa satellite store?
Two reasons, Slattery tells Jacket Copy:
Unlike the development pressures facing Doug Dutton's store and the high-end retail rent at South Coast Plaza, Skylight has "a supportive landlord who is offering us the space for a fair rent," she says. "He could have rented this space for a lot more money to some chain operation. He thinks that the bookstore is an important thing."
In 1960, "Little Toot," a Los Angeles Public Library bookmobile, was retired in favor of a new, larger book van. From the looks of things, officials declined to call the new touring library Big Toot.
Here in this sprawling Turkish city on the Bosphorus Strait is a wide hilltop boulevard full of pedestrians and trams and lined with bright shops, both local and international. Between the fashion and the food found along this street, Istiklal Caddesi, there are also many bookstores. They sell Turkish- and English-language books, and even Turkish translations of literary classics.
Turkey doesn't have a tradition of public libraries, so bookstores have a greater social role to fill. A wonderful example of such an oasis of erudition is Homer Kitabevi ("kitabevi" means "bookstore" in Turkish), just off Istiklal on Yeni Çarşi Cadessi, a steep, narrow street often crammed with taxis heading uphill.
Homer's owner, Ayşen Boylu, is a former urban archeologist who opened the bookstore 13 years ago; she was working on her PhD and found a dearth of the kind of books she needed. Today, Homer is packed with smart books on history and criticism, architecture and art, literature and religion. Most popular, Boylu says, are books on archeology, history, philosophy and photography. The store's runaway hit? Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason." You can see Boylu in her store, and pics of more bookstores in Istanbul, after the jump.
I'm staying in Istanbul with my American friend Gloria Fisk, a literature professor who is working on a book about the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk and his reception at home and abroad. Last year she explored the ways her college students read the Nobel Prize-winning novelist in an article for n+1 magazine. Here we talk about her perceptions so far:
Q: How has Orhan Pamuk’s work shaped your ideas about Turkey? Gloria Fisk: I read "The Black Book" years ago, and it created this really vivid image of the city that I always wanted to come visit. I started paying attention to Turkish culture and politics.... [Pamuk's 1994 novel] had these really beautiful images of the city and the characters were really lively. To me it was ... evocative and real. But now I realize that most Turkish readers hate that book and think that that was the beginning of his downfall, and consider readers like me who got sucked into it Orientalist dupes.
Q: In Turkey, Pamuk is not universally adored? GF: He’s universally hated.
Q: Really? GF: I’m being a little flip. That’s an exaggeration, but he alienates most Turkish readers, for one reason or another.
Q: Pamuk made people angry by making public comments about the Armenian genocide of 1915-1918, right? GF: He alienated the ultra-nationalists with that. What didn’t happen was the sort of rallying around him that you might expect from intellectuals and progressives.
Q: Or the secularists? GF: Definitely not. Many of the most extreme nationalists are also secularists. Because the Turkish republic has secularist foundations, any threat to the nation is perceived as a threat to secularism, too. And any recognition of the Armenian genocide can be understood as a threat to the nation. Pamuk alienated hardline secularists by speaking to a foreign journalist about this shameful event that happened during the formative years of the republic.
Second, here's a tidbit from the Q&A that Penguin Books did with Jones (who admitted last week that her real name is Margaret "Peggy" SeltzerÖ) about a scene that always made her -- and her editor -- cry:
Q: What was the scene that affected both of you so much?
A: It was the scene in which my little sisters and I were walking home from the Korean grocery store and Nishia dropped a carton of milk. It burst open and the milk streamed into the gutter. She burst into tears, begging me not to be mad as she stooped down trying to scrape it all back into the broken carton. I told her I wasn’t mad. But I was. That was a half-gallon of milk wasted and two dollars gone. Even now, as an adult, just thinking about that—thinking about the choices you were given as a child that weren’t kid choices—makes me want to cry.
Crying over spilled milk? Did no one noticed that at its heart, this weeper is nothing more than an overworked cliché? Really?
Third, lit blogger Ron Hogan, who has been nobly anti-pile-on, writes that Jones/Seltzer's editor, Sarah McGrath, was doing her job, picking up a story that was apparently so compelling that it also fooled a Pulitzer-grade book critic like the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani, who said on Feb. 28,"Ms. Jones has done an amazing job of conjuring up her old neighborhood," thanks to "a novelist's eye for the psychological detail and an anthropologist's eye for social rituals and routines."
To which I would respond (heck, I am responding) that part of the problem is that Kakutani's feel for the truth of South L.A.'s "social rituals and routines" seems inevitably formed by the same pop culture hand-me-downs from which Jones/Seltzer seems to have crafted her book.
Finally, if you want to get with Madd Ronald, the gang member whose message about Peggy appeared on the now-defunct International Brother/SisterHood website, he's on MySpace.
Editor's note: On Friday, Playboy published the first section of Denis Johnson’s “Nobody Move,” a serialized work of fiction that will come out in four parts. Jacket Copy will review “Nobody Move,” installment by installment; below, our take on Part 1.
George Garrett died at home in Charlottesville, Va., in his sleep on May 25. He was the author of 34 books. I will remember him as the author of, among many others, "Death of the Fox," his re-creation of the life of Sir Walter Raleigh that easily stands comparison to Marguerite Yourcenar's "Memoirs of Hadrian"; for the short story "A Wreath for Garibaldi," which is one of the most successful re-creations of an intellectual milieu (Rome in the late 1950s); and for a poem, "Three Night Poems," whose second section, "U.S.A.," begins:
"If I had done that, I'm sure they would have been willing to publish work that wasn't ready, just for the advantage of having a tie to my family," he said. 
realization of that book than what one sees in David Lynch's 1984 film.
Finishing a novel produces different feelings in different writers, or so three mighty practitioners of the form said Sunday at the L.A. Times Festival of Books.
In its latest issue, the feminist magazine Bitch takes the New York Times Book Review 
Stewart O'Nan's "Last Night at the Lobster" is among 
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Book Editor, Los Angeles Times
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Assistant Editor, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Assistant Editor, Los Angeles Times Book Review
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