Robert Birnbaum, who, contrary to current rumors, is not interviewing book warehouse workers, talks with Frederick Busch. And since proper beer nomenclature is of pressing importance these days, I should point out that Mr. Busch has no relation to any novelist named Anheuser.
In any event, these two cats talk about everything from poetry to nameless dogs to Stephen King to the four greatest Hollywood novels. Joe Bob says check it out.
It looks like things are gearing up in Alameda come November for the Alameda Book Fair. A few authors have been signed up, 826 Valencia is hosting “a workshop for youth (ages 14-19) who love to write, or want to,” and there’s even an “open mic poetry reading.” Unfortunately, the reading has set some ground rules for those hoping to push the envelope:
(one poem only, please, and keep it PG-13!)
I suppose perfervid (or perhaps we should say “perverted”) poets will have to unload their family-friendly 400-stanza cantos in order to fall within this threshold.
The Man Booker Shortlist has been announced:
If there’s any lesson to be learned here, if you’re a British novelist who wants to win the Man Booker, change your last name to Smith.
Over at Slate this week, there’s been a discussion on Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch, the followup to her book Nickled and Dimed. This time around, Ehrenreich has moved up the class ladder, pretending to be middle-class and trying to land a job in media or public relations. She goes by her maiden name. She refuses to use any and all contacts, let alone friends for financial or moral aid (although she does allow herself to use references).
The book has been given to various economists to assess and what’ s interesting is the personal nature of their criticisms. Results? They claim that the book is not so much about the middle-class people around Ehrenreich, but Ehrenreich herself. In particular, Alan Wolfe opines, “The construct of the book borders on the unethical; social scientists would never permit an experiment with this much faking. But it also renders the book uninteresting. Who cares what happens to a person who does not exist? You don’t, Tyler, and, frankly, neither do I.”
So the real question here is whether Bait and Switch a stunt similar to Morgan Spurlock’s and whether an empirical approach is now the only way to convey an issue to a mass audience. If it is, this raises an interesting question: Is putting one’s self through various hardships the new form of “scholarship” for a popular nonfiction title? Further, have we reached a point where polemics must be driven by a personality (in this case, the self-styled Barbara Alexander) rather than the bigger picture (burgeoning unemployment among middle-class professionals)?
[UPDATE: Over at Galleycat, A.J. Jacobs weighs in on so-called “stunt writing.”]