Kelly Link's 'Stranger Things Happen' returns in limited edition

The first collection of short stories by Kelly Link, "Stranger Things Happen," will be issued in a special edition this fall by Subterranean Press. Link, alongside Southern California's Aimee Bender, is a leading voice in the emergent genre of literary surrealist, speculative fiction.

"I'm assuming I'm not the only writer out there who loves both [H.P.] Lovecraft and Lorrie Moore," Link told the Times in 2008. "What I get when I write is some Lovecraft, plus some Lorrie Moore, hopefully plus a little of me in there as well. So it's about infinite recombinations."

"Stranger Things Happen" was initially released in 2001 by Small Beer Press, the publishing house founded by Link and her husband Gavin Grant, and it put both the writer and publisher on the map, and remains Small Beer's bestselling title. It's still in print, but as always, Small Beer Press sells it in paperback.

That will change with the new Subterranean Press edition of "Stranger Things Happen," which will be in hardcover. It will also feature new illustrations, by the artist Kathleen Jennings; that's her work on the cover, above.

The limited hardcover edition, a run of just 500 copies, will be $75. It comes with an 80-page hardcover chapbook with two previously uncollected short stories by Link. All special edition copies will be autographed by Link, and those ordered here can be personalized.

It's an interesting project -- readers can certainly pick up the more affordable paperback edition for $11.95, or the e-book for just $6.99. The new edition is for collectors, people who value the stories and want to see them in hardcover form, and who see value in a signed and numbered edition that is limited to 500 copies.

This is one of the ways that publishers can distinguish the print work they do from the e-books they issue, focusing on creating an object that's worth having. And Link's work seems a great place to start.

RELATED:

Faces to watch 2008: Kelly Link

Book review: Kelly Link's "Magic for Beginners"

Kelly Link redirects her off-kilter tales to young adults

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Images: The cover of the new edition of "Stranger Things Happen"  and Kelly Link. Credit: Small Beer Press

Remembering Ray Bradbury: What's your favorite book?

For those of us in Southern California, Ray Bradbury wasn't just an author, he was a fixture in our literary culture. Even in recent years, as he moved from his 80s to his 90s, he set up regular events at  bookstores: he could be found at Vroman's on Halloween, and at the Mystery & Imagination Bookshop on his birthday. These were occasions to buy books and get them signed, but they were also something more, a way to check in with Bradbury, to express appreciation for his work. Vroman's event planner Jen Ramos  says she saw the same people come back year after year, sometimes buying additional copies of the same book again and again.

But which book would that be? We asked people who follow @LATimesBooks on Twitter to tell us their favorite book by Bradbury, and got a wide variety of responses. Some people even told us what it was like to meet the man himself.

Ray Bradbury remembered

Readers on Twitter will remember Ray Bradbury for his many appearances around Los Angeles, and his many books and stories. We asked which are your favorites.

Storified by Carolyn Kellogg · Wed, Jun 06 2012 16:20:50

@latimesbooks met him at the thousand oaks library. Seemed a man with incredible curiosity and huge ideasJames Freymuth

@latimesbooks So many favorites, but my favorite of favorites from childhood on is #TheIllustratedMan.Raul Pumpkin

@latimesbooks Fahrenheit 451because of it's beauty in the midst of chaos. I saw him at the 2008 Festival of Books, he was magic.Becky Hope

@latimesbooks Favs were Fahrenheit 451 & Martian Chronicles. Met him several times at writer's events in LA area. A charming & gracious man.Jeanne Lyet Gassman

“@latimesbooks: Sci-fi pioneer Ray Bradbury dies at 91 http://lat.ms/L3qLvb” honored I was able to meet this man....opened my eyes to sci-fiKrysten Klein

@latimesbooks Saw him speak @ UCLA med school, in his 80s & still writing 3 books a year. Amazing.lirivera

@latimesbooks Book: Something Wicked This Way Comes. I did meet him, as a painfully young writer. He was generous and encouraging.Peggy Riley

@latimesbooks As a fellow Poe fanatic, I have a special love for The Exiles. Never met RB, but a friend did once. Said he was a lovely man.Undine

@latimesbooks My favorite Ray Bradbury book is my favorite book of all time: Dandelion Wine. It just makes me happy.M. E. Pickett

@latimesbooks Something Wicked This Way Comes inspired a lifelong love of wicked carnivals that eventually spawned my own writing career.Katy Towell

@latimesbooks "Fahrenheit 451" - Best critique of media-besotted society until "White Noise" was written. Never met but saw him speak.Bruce Watson

@latimesbooks can I be an honorary angelino? SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES changed the landscape if my family.Jennifer Wilson

@latimesbooks Read Farenheit 451 when Champaign-Urbana picked it as a their book for the whole community.Joanna Sholem

@latimesbooks #Ray Bradbury met him when he spoke at Bakersfield Business Conf circa 2000. Had him sign my copy of Fahrenheit 451. RIP.Charlie Powell

@latimesbooks Met him briefly at a book signing. My favorite is Martian Chronicles. The pictures he painted of another world still haunt me.Stephanie Thompson

Sand news. I always wanted to meet him. Science fiction pioneer Ray Bradbury, 91, has died http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2012/06/science-fiction-pioneer-ray-bradbury-91-has-died.html via @latimesbooksM. E. Pickett

We will miss you: Science fiction pioneer Ray Bradbury, 91, has died http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2012/06/science-fiction-pioneer-ray-bradbury-91-has-died.html via @latimesbooksPaolo Fior

What's your favorite book by Ray Bradbury?

RELATED:

Ray Bradbury and the dime-at-a-time typewriter of 'Fahrenheit 451'

Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451' is released as an e-book

Ray Bradbury essentials to reread, or read for the first time

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Ray Bradbury in 1997. Credit: Steve Castillo / Associated Press Photos

 

The New Yorker tries Twitter fiction with Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan's last book, "A Visit from the Goon Squad," won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. There is no Pulitzer yet for fiction published on Twitter, but that's where she's taking a couple of her characters from the novel, in a New Yorker experiment that starts today at 5 p.m. PDT.

Egan's new story, "Black Box," will be serialized on Twitter over 10 nights. Each night, it will be tweeted from @NYerfiction over the course of an hour. Each evening's Twitter postings constitute one installment, and that installment will appear on the New Yorker's revamped book blog, Page-Turner, after the installment has finished. Read it there or complete, in the magazine, when it hits newsstands May 28 -- look for the science fiction issue, dated June 4 and June 11.

That's the logistics: In real time (or real-ish time) on Twitter over 10 nights, or serialized on a blog, or all at once in print. It's an interesting experiment, one which seems designed to cover all the bases -- if you don't have the patience for the online serialization, just read the printed version.

Yet maybe Twitter is the way to go. Egan, who often plays with form, is using Twitter as a medium for telling the story, set in 2030. On Page-Turner, she explains what she was thinking while creating a story that would fit into Twitter's 140-character constrains:

Several of my long-standing fictional interests converged in the writing of “Black Box.” One involves fiction that takes the form of lists; stories that appear to be told inadvertently, using a narrator’s notes to him or herself. My working title for this story was “Lessons Learned,” and my hope was to tell a story whose shape would emerge from the lessons the narrator derived from each step in the action, rather than from descriptions of the action itself. Another long-term goal of mine has been to take a character from a naturalistic story and travel with her into a different genre. Jon Scieszka first put this idea into my head with his spectacular meta-fictional picture book, “The True Story of the Three Little Pigs!,” in which the three pigs move through picture books drawn in radically different styles, transforming visually into the style of each world they enter. I wondered whether I could do something analogous with a character from my novel “A Visit From the Goon Squad”: create a cartoon version of that person, for example -- or, in this case, a spy-thriller version. I’d also been wondering about how to write fiction whose structure would lend itself to serialization on Twitter. This is not a new idea, of course, but it’s a rich one -- because of the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and because of the odd poetry that can happen in a hundred and forty characters. I found myself imagining a series of terse mental dispatches from a female spy of the future, working undercover by the Mediterranean Sea. I wrote these bulletins by hand in a Japanese notebook that had eight rectangles on each page. The story was originally nearly twice its present length; it took me a year, on and off, to control and calibrate the material into what is now “Black Box.”

Additionally, Egan told the New York Times that she is interested in serialization. "I'm fascinated by it. I love the 19th-century novels. I'm interested in ways to bring that back to fiction," she said.

In 2011, Egan told me that she wanted to continue trying to write things that posed a challenge. "One thing I really believe is that setting your sights beyond what you can do at a particular moment is a great way to force yourself to keep learning. To this day, I start a book and I think, 'Oh, no, I can't do it.' It's pretty scary, and it can be depressing to realize that you're working beyond your skill set. But hopefully, by the time I will have finished with it, I will have figured out how the hell to do it. That's the challenge. That's how you grow."

Twitter has not always been good to serialized fiction. In 2009, a short story by Rick Moody caused a stir after deluging many Twitter followers with the same tweets from a dozen different sources. Maybe "Black Box" -- all 8,500 words of it -- will get a better reception.

RELATED:

Jennifer Egan on her fractured storytelling

Jennifer Egan's "Goon Squad" optioned by HBO

Jennifer Egan, Siddhartha Mukherjee and Kay Ryan win Pulitzer Prizes

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Jennifer Egan in 2011. Credit: Henry Ray Abrams / Associated Press

Esquire, adding fiction ebooks, goes back to the future

On Monday, Esquire announced that it will launch a new line of fiction ebooks with the help of e-publisher Open Road Media. The ebook series will be titled, plainly, "Fiction for Men." Editor-in-Chief David Granger tells the New York Times that men's fiction is "plot-driven and exciting, where one thing happens after another."

That definition elicited groans on Twitter. "Oh good. Because lady readers & lady writers HATE exciting fiction when 'one thing happens after another,'" tweeted editor Reagan Arthur, who has her own imprint at Little, Brown. "Someone needs to tell Ian McKewan he's been writing women's fiction," wrote author Nichole Bernier. "Finally, men's fiction is getting its due. FINALLY," Maura Johnston, an editor at the Village Voice, tweeted. "So glad to see this neglected niche recognized,"  wrote Jennifer Weiner, whose work is often characterized as women's fiction.

Despite the ire, it makes sense that Esquire, a men's magazine, might try to go for fiction that men might like, reaching out to its reader base. In fact, it's done it before. In 1933, it first published an anthology of some of its best fiction, "The Bedside Esquire" (that title, too, was problematic; one publisher thought being in 'a bedside anything' was unbecoming a writer of stature). "The Bedside Esquire" included all kinds of writing from its magazine -- the controversial essay "Latins Are Lousy Lovers," a primer from famed attorney Clarence Darrow on how to choose a jury -- but was predominantly fiction.

Some of the authors found in a 1940 edition of "The Bedside Esquire" are legendary: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, D.H. Lawrence, Ben Hecht, John Steinbeck, Theodore Dreiser, Ring Lardner, Langston Hughes, Irwin Shaw and John Dos Passos. Others like Parke Cummings and Donal Hough, both of whom appear twice, prove to be less lasting. At 702 pages, however, there is a lot of fiction here to choose from.

With that history, what's interesting is that Esquire stopped thinking of fiction as something to be proud of. "Fiction begins to feel a little bit of a luxury," Granger told the New York Times. So the ebook offering is a kind of solution.

It is, unfortunately, sort of a muddled one. The first issue of its fiction ebook series will have stories by Luis Alberto Urrea, Aaron Gwyn and Jess Walter. It's being released in conjunction with the June/July issue of the magazine, which contains three different stories -- by Colum McCann, Lee Child, and the father/son team of Stephen King and Joe Hill. So Esquire readers who want fiction will get one set of stories in print, and an entirely different set of stories in the ebook. Let's hope they're good at figuring out which product to buy for which content.

Esquire's first "Fiction for Men" will be published June 12.

RELATED:

Curated short fiction: Recommended Reading

Have you seen this short story?

Steven Millhauser beats DeLillo, Pearlman for 2011 Story Prize

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: "The Bedside Esquire" anthology, 1940 edition. Credit: Carolyn Kellogg

Curating short fiction: Recommended Reading

This post has been updated. See below.

Electric Literature, which started out publishing a quarterly journal simultaneously in print, ebook, iPhone and Kindle form, is always up for trying something new. It regularly invites animators to create short videos of single sentences from its stories, like the one above. And way back in 2009, it published a short story in tweets by Rick Moody on Twitter, an experiment that was only partially creatively successful but that earned it an important literary place in the Twittersphere. What does a quarterly do with 150,000 followers in the long months between publication? Editor Benjamin Samuel decided curation is the thing.

Hence, Recommended Reading. It's a project that will publish one fiction story per week, with selections being made by a variety of readers who are in the know: an independent press, a writer, the kind folks at Electric Literature, and another literary journal. That's one month, then the cycle starts again.

The project went up on Kickstarter in April and swiftly reached its $10,000 goal (aided in part by a donor perk of a really cool flask). The organizers now hope to raise double that goal, and have about $3,500 and less than a week to go. Samuel explained what to expect from Recommended Reading, via email.

Jacket Copy: How many recommends will Recommended Reading make each week?

Benjamin Samuel: We'll publish one piece of fiction each week. It’s an ideal rate for readers who are already overwhelmed with options, and will help them focus on fiction that's worth spending time with.

The magazine runs on a four-week cycle of curators: the first week is a story chosen by Electric Literature, then an indie press like New Directions excerpts a collection or novel, then a guest editor like Jim Shepard picks a story, and then another journal like A Public Space re-releases work from their archives.

JC: Is Recommended Reading sort of like Longreads for fiction?

BS: I love Longreads and appreciate the comparison. While we have curation in common, the nature of Recommended Reading's model makes us somewhere between a salon, magazine and a digest. We want Recommended Reading to be a true community that’s passionate about literature, and we’ll do this in part by introducing readers to independent publishers as well as new and emerging writers. Each issue will feature a note from the editor, written by that week's partner, i.e., when we publish fiction from Melville House, Dennis Johnson will introduce that week's issue. We hope that this will increase awareness of the diversity of the indie publishing community, and hopefully translate into sales and subscriptions for our partners.

JC: Is there a pool of literary magazines and journals from which you'll be pulling stories?

BS: The first pool was Brooklyn based: A Public Space, Armchair/Shotgun, The Coffin Factory, and One Story. But we're not a Brooklyn-centric publication. My co-editor, Halimah Marcus, and I  spent most of the mayhem of this year's AWP meeting other editors and learning about the great magazines they’re creating. The indie publishing is diverse and flourishing, and we want to share our discoveries with our audience.

JC: Do you have plans to expand that pool?

BS: Absolutely. We're on the lookout for indie publishers with strong mission statements and who are committed to keeping literature a vibrant part of our culture. We’re also looking overseas to bring in international partners, as well as work in translation.

Have you seen this short story?

There are all kinds of literary journal formats: oversized, pocket-sized, letter-pressed, emailed, mimeographed and stapled, tablet-only, on postcards and so on. And then there is the Safety Pin Review.

Each issue of the Safety Pin Review is a very short short written on a piece of fabric in bold lettering. The fabric story is then pinned on someone's back, and they walk around wearing it. The person who stands behind them at the grocery store, or in line for a rock show, or walking across campus -- that's the readership. Oh, and you who can see a photo of it online.

Now, for the first time, the person wearing the story -- the "operative" -- can be found in Southern California. She's an undergraduate writer studying at Scripps College. The story she's wearing is "After the Punch, Before the Swell" by Sonja Vitow, the 24th issue of the magazine.

The founder and editor of the Safety Pin Review is Simon Jacobs, who describes himself as "a young writer of no particular renown." He's a 21-year-old mohawked linguistics student in Richmond, Ind., who was inspired to start publishing writing after discovering writers he loved on the internet.

"I wrote this giant, blustery angst-novel in high school and my first two years of college about an isolated, dying liberal arts school in the mountains, and was (and still am, to some degree) utterly convinced that it was a masterwork," he wrote to Jacket Copy in an email. "So I ventured online to find an agent/publisher/anyone, and promptly, happily drowned in what I found. Short, wrenching, rebellious fiction, unlike anything I'd ever read."

That's Flash Fiction -- short, sharp, and often written quickly without a redraft. He was particularly drawn to the author who goes by xTx, whom he asked to write the first Safety Pin Review story. She said yes. It was printed/worn by Jacobs himself in September 2011.

Since then, the stories have made their way further and further into the world. Each "operative" promises to wear the story wherever they go for a week. So far, stories have appeared in Chicago; New York; Seattle; New Orleans; Cambridge, Mass.; and Louisville, Ky.

Jacobs pays each author only $1, but there is something more sincere than symbolic in the effort. The cost to produce each issue, which exist only in a single edition, are about $10, which includes mailing to the "operative."

That's a tiny, independent operation, which is perhaps a fitting way to distribute flash fiction. The fabric -- and the personalization of wearing the story -- give weight to the short pieces that might be missed in the flood of words online.

Despite being immersed in this creative writing project, Jacobs has no plans to take any writing classes. "I prefer to fumble around on my own, make lots of mistakes and [mess] everything up," he writes. "I learn better that way."

RELATED:

Mary Otis, animated [video]

The Dave Eggers shower curtain

Steven Millhauser beats DeLillo, Pearlman for 2011 Story Prize

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: The Safety Pin Review's Southern California "operative." Credit: The Safety Pin Review

 

Six more days to nominate short stories for the Million Writers Award

When Jason Sanford began the Million Writers Award in 2003, it became a locus for finding good short fiction online. And short fiction that was published online was, as he notes, often overlooked by traditional short story prize venues such as the Pushcarts and O. Henry Prize.

The Million Writers Award grabbed the opportunity to rewrite what made award-worthy fiction from the outside, the Web side. And it still is: Any reader can nominate a piece of short fiction -- 1,000 words, max -- published online during 2011. Additionally, editors of online magazines are invited to nominate up to three stories from their sites. The nomination period opened March 26 and continues through April 9.

With the nomination process half over, more than 30 online magazines have submitted, including the Good Men Project, Juked and the Journal of Unlikely Entomology. Roughly 100 stories have been submitted by readers and by the authors themselves. It's OK to add your own.

All those stories will be culled by a handful of judges for a long list of notable stories in May, then whittled down to 10. Those final 10 will be put to a public vote, expected to take place in June, to determine the winner. It's all a lot of work, for a modest reward -- $300 plus a gift certificate for the winner (more, if more donors chip in).

It's worth noting that times have changed since 2003. One of the selections in "Best American Short Stories 2011" was an electronic-only publication -- although "The Sleep" by Caitlin Horrocks was published in the Atlantic Fiction for the Kindle, which isn't Web-based. But it indicates the trend: One of the three 2011 O. Henry Prize juror favorites was Jim Shepherd's "Your Fate Hurtles Down at You" from Electric Literature, which publishes simultaneously online and in print. And nominees for the Pushcart Prize can now be made by editors of magazines that are "print or online."

Nine years down the line, the division between print and online has dissolved quite a bit -- as well as been problematized by wireless content delivery to e-readers, smartphones and tablets that skips the Web altogether. But the Million Writers Award was designed not around the form but the content, to highlight new fiction appearing in new venues -- which it's still doing. Nominations are open -- wide open -- now.

RELATED:

Some of the Pushcart winners for 2011

Million Writers (short story) Award short list

Million Writers Award: more than 100 top short stories

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Writing at Starbucks. Credit: John W. Adkisson / Los Angeles Times

Steven Millhauser beats DeLillo, Pearlman for 2011 Story Prize

Steven Millhauser took the 2011 Story Prize in New York City Wednesday night, winning over fellow finalists Don DeLillo and Edith Pearlman. Millhauser will receive $20,000 for his collection "We Others: New and Selected Stories." In 1997, Millhauser won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel "Martin Dressler."

In addition to the $20,000, winner Millhauser was given a silver bowl. Runners-up Delillo and Pearlman  received $5,000 each. All three authors read at the ceremony -- DeLillo from "The Angel Esmeralda" and Pearlman, who recently won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, from "Binocular Vision."

A three-judge panel selected the winner: author Sherman Alexie; Louise Steinman, curator of the Los Angeles Public Library’s ALOUD series, who is also an author; and Breon Mitchell, a translator, professor of comparative literature, and director of the Lilly Library at Indiana University. I served as a judge of the 2009 Story Prize.

Founded in 2004, the Story Prize is designed to bring attention the craft and accomplishments of short fiction. Previous winners include Edwidge Danticat, Patrick O’Keeffe, Mary Gordon, Jim Shepard, Tobias Wolff, Daniyal Mueenuddin and Anthony Doerr. 

RELATED:

The Story Prize finalists: Delillo, Pearlman and Millhauser

Anthony Doerr awarded the 2010 Story Prize

Daniyal Mueenuddin, winner of the 2009 Story Prize

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Steven Millhauser, left, with the Story Prize's Larry Dark. Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Two N.Y. literary to-dos

Two worthy literary journals have benefits coming up in New York. This Angeleno won't be there, but perhaps you will.

First, in order of appearance, is the Paris Review's Spring Revel on April 3. Founded in 1953, the Paris Review has just released its 200th issue, which includes a new piece by John Jeremiah Sullivan, fiction by David Means and Lorrie Moore, poetry by Yusef Komunyakaa and Adrienne Rich, and interviews with Terry Southern (who died in 1995) and Bret Easton Ellis. The annual event is a gala; the ticket prices, which start at $500, pretty much ensure that the dress will be fancy and the festivities festive. That's not a bad thing, if you can swing it -- it's a benefit, after all, and will feature David Cross, Mona Simpson and Zadie Smith. (I doubt I'll ever type those three names in conjunction again.) New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers will receive the magazine's highest honor, the Hadada Prize. He spoke about his early experiences with the Paris Review here.

Did Paris seem like a particularly fertile place for that kind of literary production in the early fifties?

In 1952 — just think, it was only seven years after the war — Paris was still quite a broken up and poor place. There were many streets that you’d walk into, and the gutters and even sewers would be erupting, and you’d smell them. But this poverty conferred an advantage on people who had dollars — the rate was extremely high. So you could live cheaply and put out a magazine cheaply. It was only after three years, though, that we found that the printing we were getting was so messy. The printers, who were charming but usually drunk, had terrible trouble with English. So we moved the paper’s printing to Holland.

And you lived on a barge.

Yeah, a friend of mine had rented a barge for a season, and he said, "Listen, why don’t we join together?"

And this was Peter Duchin?

Peter Duchin, he was then a music student in Paris. We lived for a year on this Thames river barge. It was a lovely boat, about 90 feet. To live on the Seine is, I suppose, one of the nicest things you can do.

Two weeks later, more or less, is the One Story Literary Debutante Ball. The cost of entry is lower -- tickets start at $75 and max at $500 (although yes, larger donations are welcome). That makes sense, as part of the point of One Story's fundraiser is to celebrate writers just coming into their own. One Story celebrates, in tongue-in-cheek debutante style, writers who have been published in its pages whose first books have come out in the past year. This year's debutante class and their books:

Ramona Ausubel, "No One is Here Except All of Us" (Riverhead)
Megan Mayhew Bergman, "Birds of a Lesser Paradise" (Scribner)
Caitlin Horrocks, "This Is Not Your City" (Sarabande Books)
Katherine Karlin, "Send Me Work: Stories" (Triquarterly)
Miroslav Penkov, "East of the West: A Country in Stories" (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
Anna Solomon, "The Little Bride" (Riverhead)
Arlaina Tibensky, "And Then Things Fall Apart" (Simon Pulse)

Each author will be "presented" by an editor or teacher that has served as a mentor. The event will also honor Ann Patchett for her support of writers -- which now includes opening the independent Parnassus Books in Nashville. One Story publishes a single story in each issue, delivering the pocket-sized magazine to your mailbox about once every three weeks. At that rate, the 10-year-old magazine is close to catching up to the senior Paris Review, a quarterly -- One Story is on issue #161.

RELATED:

Ann Patchett's lessons on writing, from Byliner

Mingling with the Paris Review and PEN

The Asterix and Obelix of literary magazines

-- Carolyn Kellogg

This Sunday: John Leonard, AIDS and Carl Hiaasen, too

He was once the literary editor of the Nation and editor of the New York Times Book Review, but John Leonard was perhaps the most important literary critic in the last half of the 20^th century. Our book critic David L. Ulin examines Leonard’s collected work “Reading for My Life: Writings, 1958-2008” and finds that Leonard articulated “a worldview through his criticism, to refract his reading through a wider lens.” Ulin also notes that Leonard was “widely credited with bringing such writers as Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Maxine Hong Kingston to the attention of an American readership…”

Ulin also describes his passionate commitment to writing in a passage in which Leonard describes the death threat, the fatwa, against Salman Rushdie. “It has been a disgraceful week. A maniac puts out a $5.2-million contract on one of the best writers in the English language, and how does the civilized world respond? France and Germany won’t publish 'The Satanic Verses'; Canada won’t sell it … and a brave new philistinism struts its stuff all over Mediapolis USA, telling us that Rushdie’s unreadable anyway.”

Strong stuff from a firm believer in a writer’s right to write. Ulin’s review leads our coverage in Sunday Arts & Books.

About 180 degrees away from Leonard’s work is the latest young-adult offering from Carl Hiaasen. The title is “Chomp” and the story is a sendup of reality television. In this story's case, the show is “Expedition Survival,” and its star is Derek Badger, a former Irish folk dancer, who can swallow a live salamander without actually vomiting. And while he may not throw up, he has other attributes that are a bit troublesome in a reality setting populated by cumbersome critters. He’s a klutz. And that’s how the story develops. Carpenter calls this “delightful” and “laugh out-loud” funny.

Also this week, Thomas H. Maugh, a former staffer who made science and medicine issues easily understandable for decades, turns his hand to  “Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It,” a history of the pandemic by journalist Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin, a medical anthropologist and epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health’s AIDS Prevention Research Project. Repeated analyses have shown, the authors argue, that AIDS became epidemic only in regions where the number of each person’s sexual activity was high. The authors' views on controlling the spread of the disease suggest that “the best solution is a change in sexual mores.” They cite the example of Uganda, where the biggest inroads against the disease were made in the 1980s and 1990s. Leaders in that country used a potent weapon: fear.

 “Thinking the Twentieth Century” is a fearless exploration of ideas from a great public intellectual, Tony Judt, while he lay dying of Amytrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease). This is Judt’s swan song, and he's joined by Timothy Snyder, a Yale history professor. Our reviewer, Martin Rubin, writes that Judt’s focus is on Europe and takes the reader “on a wild ride through the ideological currents and shoals of 20^th century thought.”

More after the jump