- 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.
Roundup
– February 27, 2006Posted in: Roundup
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. (
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.