- Mark Sarvas has cemented himself as the roaming reading attendee of the blogosphere. In addition to checking out David Foster Wallace (against his will! and with a rollicking backblog to boot!), he also has the skinny on Vermin on the Mount. We don’t believe San Francisco is the center of the literary universe, in part because the pronouncement was handed down from the mountain by Sam Tanenhaus, but we’ll be doing our best over the coming months to offer similar reports here, as time permits.
- Some of our favorite litbloggers will be on the Round Table, a WAMC radio program, this morning.
- Adobe Books, home to frenetic art shows and a great place to nab rare books has their books organized by color. If you’re in the San Francsico area, check it out.
- As predicted by nearly everyone, Suite Francaise, the long-lost novel written by Holocaust victim Irene Nemirovsky has taken the Renaudot. This is the first time that the esteemed French prize has been awarded posthumously. Foreign rights were garnered at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
- In what may be another sign of changing literary priorities, North Carolina Central University has withdrawn funding for its literary magazine. It was just $7,000 on the budget, and the money will now go to “student leadership and women’s issue programs.” The remaining $6,000, no doubt, will go to more perqs for the football team.
- Alice Munro gets another writeup — this time in Newsday. Fortunately, this time around, the article concentrates more on her writing (and her love for William Maxwell) rather than wasting column inches on her “thinnish” weight.
- Jonathan Rose has an intriguing article about the working class’s relationship with reading over the years.
- Nevada has a poet laureate?
- A film is in the works on the life of Sir Walter Scott.
- And Gerard Jones has gone Hollywood on us (via Moby).
Round
– November 8, 2004Posted in: Uncategorized
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (