Roundup
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on July 24, 2008
Filed Under Roundup
- Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men? The Shadow knows!
- So if I understand Sarah’s post correctly, James Wood and sheepshagging jokes represent a new kind of nonoverlapping magisteria, and someone needs to start uploading racy photos of James Wood in lewd positions at Cabo San Lucas damn pronto. Also, Mark Sarvas has read How Fiction Works six times. And that was just in the last week. It remains unknown just how many times James Wood has read himself. But all this talk of how one should read James Wood, and whether one should read James Wood, and how frequently one should read James Wood makes me wonder why nobody is actually responding to what James Wood has to say about books. To add further confusion, James Wood is also leaving comments at Vulture. I can only conclude that all this is a grand ruse to get James Wood on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, perhaps accompanied by Stephenie Meyer and two naked Dixie Chicks with post-structuralist buzz words printed on their naked bodies.
- Tao Lin has posted some details on his second novel. And if he’s concerned about The Easter Parade being 54,000 words, consider also that The Great Gatsby is only around 50,000 words and would therefore fall into Tao’s organic cold-brewed iced coffee category. (As Shane observes, Tao’s post has been deleted.)
- John Fox sings the praises of Small Beer Press, but neglects to inform us just how much beer he imbibed before writing his post.
- Colleen collects a number of interesting reactions concerning class and YA literature.
- Scott has a few ideas on where litblogs need to go in the face of declining newspapers.
- Wyatt Mason talks with Adam Thirlwell. (via Orthofer)
- Superhero motifs and book design. (via Slushpile)
- The Watchmen trailer appearing with The Dark Knight has caused sales of the graphic novel to jump. But the Moore-Batman association is also boosting sales of Moore’s Batman: The Killing Joke. What is the lesson to be learned here? Appearances of books on film and television (such as placing The Third Policeman on Lost) do help. But I believe these books sold because (a) the movie trailer is considered a respectful and relatively noninvasive form of advertising and (b) Lost, being a television show with numerous references, has led numerous fans to ferret out the meaning by any means necessary. In other words, it isn’t just the appearance of a writer’s name or a book that moves books. It’s the context. The way that a book’s appearance and relationship with the present material inspires curiosity on the part of the reader. The way that the context itself doesn’t treat audience members like morons or a generalized 18-34 demographic.
- Speaking of which, Douglas McLennan has some interesting things to say on this topic. (via Dan Green)
- According to Forbes, J.K. Rowling has been named the richest celebrity. And it’s certainly promising to learn that an author can trump a number of idiot actors. Sorry, Tom Cruise. Guess you’ll have to expand your dynamic potential through that Ponzi scam masquerading as a cult.
- And I missed the news a few weeks ago, but Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle is at long last coming out in English.
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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.)
Regarding Mr. Wood, and the various reactions to his book’s release, can I simply say I’m somewhat astonished that many folks are treating his identification of “free indirect style” as some sort of revelation (I’m quite shocked to read about profs at Columbia, Iowa, etc., starting to use it, apparently for the first time), while from my perspective it’s really just the first time someone’s given it a name.
Not to toot my own horn, but this technique struck me as somewhat evident in many of the most popular writers one is likely to encounter in any M.F.A. program (as I did). In other words, anyone who sets to studying/analyzing fiction in attempt to do it well.
Reading some of the reviews/stories about Mr. Wood’s book reminded me of my own “revelation” to this very idea; it took me a day or so to remember exactly what I’d identified it in, and it came to me recently. From Chekhov’s (no surprise) “The Lady with the Dog”:
“A man walked up to them — probably a keeper — looked at them and walked away.”
I guess the funny thing to me is that I assumed anyone who actually taught writing would be teaching this to his or her students already.
/mytwocents