Roundup
Written byPosted on February 27, 2006
Filed Under Roundup
- Jeeves is officially being retired from Ask Jeeves, presumably because paying out a licensing fee to the estate of P.G. Wodehouse was too much of a prohibitive cost. The new site is utterly bland without the literary butler.
- Reports from Comic-Con have trickled in: USA Today, GalleyCat, and many panel reports from Newsarama. Also, a Spawn/Batman crossover is in the works.
- Jeffrey Archer, a hack novelist known for prison time and pointing out the bleeding obvious, has acknowledged that his political career is over.
- Betsy Retallack has found an unusual poetic inspiration: her husband’s obsession with junky cars. The success of her first poetry collection has inspired a second book, Whither the Axle My Sweet Love Gutted for Me from the Yard?
- Is Vollmann’s Copernicus book “an onslaught of taxing concepts expressed in an often wearying style?” Or did Dava Sobel simply not take the time to parse the text? This kind of book reviewing defense/copout seems reminiscent of other prodigious authors.
- To read and possibly respond to later: James Wood on realist fiction. (Thanks, David!)
- Keith Gessen on Russian writer Vasily Grossman.
- Today is Paul Auster Day in Brooklyn. (via Jeff)
- Lev Grossman continues to demonstrate his irrelevance by asking E.L. Doctorow 10 questions that seem to have been prepared in 3 minutes. (via Mark)
- An IHT article on British small presses: are they better than the big guns?
- Are polished podcasts better? (via LHB)
- Dan Wickett plans to read a short story, a poem or an essay every day and comment upon it. Apparently, he got the idea from this interesting blog.
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Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
Expect Ask.com to hit the search engine junk heap within two years. Heaven forbid they should continue spending money on the one thing that made them distinctive–and how onerous could the Wodehouse estate’s terms been anyway?
Ed, I have to respectfully dissent regarding Vollmann. Now, I love Vollmann as much as the next guy (as long as the next guy isn’t you), but every once in a while somebody has got to tap him on the shoulder and say “yeah, we know you’re amazing, but you gotta do some rewrites, and cut some of it too”. Or else it’s just going to get worse and worse.
I tried to read Europe Central — I wasn’t having trouble parsing the sentences, but I was having trouble justifying why I’m going to spend like 80 hours of my life reading it all. Know what I mean?
What exactly do they have going for them, other than Jeeves?
I read UNCENTERING THE EARTH — it’s Vollmann’s most accessible work. It’s a pretty straight exploration of Copernicus’ work. At 240-something pages of text, plus notes, etc., it flies by. It was fun and I learned a couple of things.