Unexpected roadtrip finds

I never know what I'll find on the road — for example, I was driving through Georgia and whizzed past this enormous peach on a pole.

In a more literary vein, later on I heard Mississippi public radio promote its upcoming special on Eudora Welty (to broadcast Sunday, May 25, or online here). Recorded at Symphony Space in New York earlier this month as part of the Selected Shorts series, the special includes readings of three Welty stories, biographer Suzanne Marrs and, as emcee, writer Ann Patchett. Guided tours of Welty's home in Jackson, Miss., are available Wednesdays-Fridays with advance reservations.

Still further down the road — Interstate 10, to be exact — after crossing from Mississippi into Louisiana, I suddenly found myself on the Stephen E. Ambrose Memorial Parkway. Ambrose, who died of cancer five years ago, wrote the well-known WWII books "Band of Brothers" and "D-Day." To honor his work with the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans, a segment of the I-10 was renamed for the famed historian in 2004. Which makes sense, but it certainly was a surprise.

Carolyn Kellogg

Bookishly from Tallahassee

Lake Ella in Tallahassee, site of the Black Dog Cafe, a writers' hangout.

Jeff VanderMeer is the author of "City of Saints and Madmen" and has twice won the World Fantasy Award. He and his wife, Ann, are co-editors of the anthologies "The New Weird," "Steampunk" and "Best American Fantasy (2007)." In between deadlines he shared his thoughts on books and the secrets of his adopted home city, Tallahassee, Fla.

Jacket Copy: Who are some of Tallahassee's best-known writers?

Jeff VanderMeer: This is a city teeming with writers, so it's a somewhat difficult question. At Florida State University, you have Robert Olen Butler, poet David Kirby and Mark Winegardner (best known for literary fiction until he did the "Godfather" spinoffs), Bob Shacochis and Julianna Baggott, for example. Daniel Maier-Katkin, another professor, just sold his account of the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger to a major publisher, so he'll be high-profile soon. Outside of the university, there's Mark Mustian, also a city commissioner, who just hit it big with a sale of a novel to Putnam (a writer to watch next year). I'm probably the resident "fantasist mascot," so to speak, and then there are host of others at the university and elsewhere working in poetry, fiction and nonfiction.

JC: Do authors in Tallahassee have a favorite hangout?

JVM: The Warehouse is FSU's hangout, since the university's literary readings are held there. I like Black Dog Cafe by Lake Ella, and you'll find other writers there on a pretty regular basis because it's got a nice view and the place is laid-back but with good service and coffee. All Saints Cafe is another favorite for writers around here.

Carolyn Kellogg

(Secrets of Tallahassee after the jump.)

Literary Lexington

When in Lexington, Kentucky, stop by Stella's Deli at the corner of Jefferson and Ballard and you've got a good chance of catching sight of Gurney Norman, James Baker Hall or Bobbie Ann Mason noshing on the fare, all made from local ingredients. If my timing had been different -- if I hadn't arrived after they'd closed on Saturday -- I could tell you how delicious the food is, or show you a photo of the senior Kentucky literary figures. 

Hall and Norman studied at the University of Kentucky (UK) before becoming Stegner fellows at Stanford University in 1960. In fact, four Kentucky students won the prestigious Stanford creative writing fellowships in just three years, and Hall attributes their success to the passion and ambition of one writing teacher, Robert Hazel.

"He knew Phil Roth -- he called [him] Phil. And Bill Styron, he called Bill. And he claimed to know a lot of people that he did or didn’t know by first name. And it was dazzling, it was dazzling. We had never, ever imagined living in that world. We didn’t know what it was."

It's interesting that so many writers from this state university in Kentucky all imagined they could enter the world of the literary elite, just on the power of one emissary -- that they imagined it, and then they did it.

"He made us think that we lived in that world, that we were ... that we were compatriots, that we were brothers, were William Styron and Phillip Roth. And they weren’t ... They weren’t in textbooks; they were in our conversation. Does this make any sense? They were in our conversations. And John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, and all of the Southern writers, and Frank O’Connor—they were our kin. They were our preceding generation or preceding two generations. They were where we came from. And it was not academic; it was nothing academic at all. It was one big family that he was the patriarch of."

The fact that I ended up in Lexington at all is due to the big, wide generous litblogging family, in the persons of Gwenda Bond (Shaken and Stirred) and her husband, writer Christopher Rowe. From their house, it's just a short walk, past beautiful architecture and friendly neighbors, to the center of downtown. We lunched outside (photo 6 in this slideshow from the local newspaper, the Herald-Leader) and watched bikers race. The sun shone. Dogs romped. It was lovely.

We went out for dinner then stayed out later than we should have at a bar with live bluegrass music, where I availed myself of -- what else? -- Kentucky bourbon.

Every sign for Zanesville makes me think of Winesburg

While I was driving through Ohio, every sign for Zanesville (hometown of writer Zane Gray) made me think of "Winesburg, Ohio" by Sherwood Anderson. Anderson wasn't from Zanesville -- he was from Camden, on the west side of the state, and too far for me to visit. Besides, he later wound up in Marion, Va., where his legacy is celebrated.

For all the fame he had in his day -- he was a bestseller, a literary bon vivant and mentor to Faulkner and Hemingway -- Anderson doesn't get read much now. The beginning of one of his stories — "Hands" the opening to "Winesburg, Ohio" — after the jump.

Carolyn Kellogg

Hit the road, Jack(et Copy)

Above: Friends helping me make my departure from Pittsburgh possible are, from left, Jamie Bono, Robert Yune, Emily Stone and Paul Ruggiero.

There is a grand road trip tradition in American letters that I find irresistible. Today I embark on another cross-country drive, and what I discovered, while packing, was that I have a lot of books (including a vintage paperback copy of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" with a man in a striped shirt and jaunty neck scarf). Perhaps an insane amount of books. Even after purging and triaging, books and books and books. Unlike Kerouac, I do not travel light.

My trip will take me south from Pittsburgh to Florida, then west, clear across the country, to Los Angeles. Along the way I will do as much reading as I can: A select few (dozen) books will ride up front with me.

But to make it a truly literary road trip, I plan to visit some literary landmarks along the way. The Washington Post wrote up several in Georgia, and it looks like the "On the Road" scroll is on display through May 31 in Austin, Tex. Obviously, that's not a complete literary tour. What are your suggestions?

Carolyn Kellogg

Flying the readerly skies

I think planes may be our last reading rooms.

If you can judge by the people sitting around me on my flights yesterday, that is. Last night, as others dozed in the darkened cabin, my row kept our lights on and read.

At the window: a tall gray-haired man reading a hardback on personal finance. Middle seat: a middle-aged woman with a hefty romance novel. Me, I was working on my laptop; I'd finished the novel and two short story collections in my bag.

The woman across the aisle from me was reading a magazine. She got to the end and then, apparently with nothing else to read, paged back through it slowly, scrutinizing every advertisement. She seemed to want words to fill the airplane ride. I felt bad for her -- I had a surplus of words with me. Should I offer her one of my books -- a short story collection, maybe? What if she was content re-reading her magazine? Eventually I left her to the pharmaceutical disclaimers, deciding that her reading material was none of my business.

On my earlier flight, the guy next to me pulled a worn, spine-cracked John Grisham thriller from his pocket. Its bookmark was a faded boarding pass from another airline; the last time he'd read it, it seemed, was when he was on a plane.

Maybe all we need to do to boost American reading rates is to give everyone free plane tickets.

Carolyn Kellogg

photo by Andrew J Stevens via flickr

Where would T.C. Boyle go?

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.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

RedFence: Festival of Books - Author Interviews from James Roland on Vimeo.

Kapuściński ... the poet?

Photo: AFP/Getty

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

a dead horizon

An indie bookstore expanding?

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."

The second reason: location, location.