- It looks like Soft Skull Founder Sander Hicks has opened up a bookstore/cafe. Before it was called Vox Pop, it was apparently styled “Down With the Man.”
- Kelly McMasters talks with Lydia Millet, who asks, “Why not be as bold as ‘Tristram Shandy’?” I’d take that sentiment a few steps further and suggest, “Why not be as bold as the Old Testament?” After all, with all that violence and cruelty and magical realism in there…oh, never mind.
- The next hot trend? Australian surfing literature.
- Shakespeare & Company isn’t the only bookstore going strong after 70 years. In Palo Alto, Bell’s Books continues to persevere.
- In Moraga, mysterious scrapbooks containing odd newspaper clippings from 120 years ago were left on the doorstep of the local historical society. No one knows where these painstakingly collected scrapbooks came from them. But it was either leaving the scrapbooks or a baby in a basket. The owners decided at the last minute that they wanted to keep the kid, overpopulation crisis be damned.
- Hiroshima haikus. What next? Auschwitz cantos? Oh wait.
- Francis Ford Coppola’s On the Road film project has, at long last, received the green light. Because this is a loose autobiographical version, the filmed Kerouac will be about 100 pounds heavier than the real Kerouac and own a winery.
- In Chicago, Steppenwolf will be featuring all new plays this season. Interestingly enough, they receive about 1,000 submissions a year. The remaining 990 or so will be staged at Slamsteppenwolf, Slumsteppenwolf and Nosteppenwolf.
- If you’re into Wagner and you live in Seattle, you have until August 28 to catch the four-opera marathon version of Ring des Nibelungen Like the King Tut museum in Los Angeles, it will only be schlepped out again when Germany needs cash.
- The Michael Jackson trial coverage isn’t over by a long shot. There are book deals to be had. What next? A finger-painting diary from Bubbles portraying Jackson’s stress during the days leading up to the verdict?
- Paul Theroux used drugs to write his new novel. He also used this paltry sensationalism to get a CNN article.
- And did we mention how much we heart Defamer?
The Post-Insomnia, Sleep-Deprived Roundup
– August 5, 2005Posted 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. (