- Dan Green offers a contrarian take on Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker.
- There can be no better barometer for how little literary figures matter than the Seattle Times year-end death list, which overlooks Octavia Butler and Gilbert Sorrentino. Butler’s exclusion is particularly egregious, given that she lived in Seattle. Way to go, team!
- A smörgåsbord of best of the year lists can be found in last Sunday’s Newsday, including editor Laurie Muchnick, Emily Gordon, and Maud Newton.
- The Toronto Star whips up an Alice Munro profile, which reads as if it was cobbled together from the obituaries file. Folks, Munro is still alive!
- If Hermione Eye were a man, Eye opines that he’d whack her on the back. Not at all, Ms. Eye. He’d probably plagiarize you first.
- Now open for Wikipedia-like catastrophes of the first order: The Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Remember kids, only you can decide history, only to find your careful ruminations reverted ten minutes later.
- Is Jakob Nielsen serious or satirical?
- Mariah Carey vs. Mary Carey
- Conservative blogs losing popularity? Who woulda thought? (via Maxine Clarke)
- Ship lit? Okay, I get it. We’re going to see twelve trend pieces in the Gray Lady on “____ lit” before the end of winter. But given certain realities, that promising essay on “tit lit” ain’t happening anytime soon. (via Brockman)
- Sorry, Derik, you’re my grumpy sage too.
- Preposterous revisionism going down in libraries. Sorry, Maud, but I can’t stay out of this either. Rabid, raccoon-eyed, baby carrot-chomping librarians scare the fuck out of me too. But, man, does righteous indignation about books get the job done sometimes.
Roundup
– January 2, 2007Posted in: Roundup, 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. (
In fairness to the Seattle Times, that’s an AP-generated list of people who died. (Which reminds me of my long unfulfilled dream to one year have that Oscar montage, you know the one, actually SET to an orchestral version of “People Who Died.”)
Thanks for the link — I’ve arrived!!