- Martin Amis: “I did have [a midlife crisis]. Sorry to inform you that you’re going to get one every decade after you’re forty, and it’s a different kind of crisis every time. You can read every novel ever written and they won’t prepare you for it. My midlife crisis was bang on schedule: mid-forties, divorce, terrible realizations about death.”
- Should authors respond to wrong-headed reviews? (via Maud)
- Podcasts, Haggis?
- The 2006 Nebula ballot. (via Gwenda)
- Jodi Picoult visits the school were her book was banned.
- Has Jonathan Littell scandalized France? My own statistics show that France is scandalized in some way every 32 minutes.
- Levi Asher talks with Danny Simmons.
- “Literary classics” now available on DVD.
- Rudy Wiebe has won the 2007 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.
- Matthew Sharpe interviewed in Poets & Writers (via TEV)
- A new short story from Richard Russo at the Atlantic. Shockingly, it’s not behind a paywall. Has the Atlantic finally come to its senses? (via Dan Wickett)
- Teddy (via Other)
- Legos have changed.
- An honorary doc for Ozick. (via Orthofer)
- G.K. Chesterton gets the Golden Rule Jones Theater treatment.
- Mark Thwaite on Dawkins: “The God Delusion didn’t convince me at all, it just made me think Dawkins was a bit of a scary megalomaniac.”
- Scott Esposito: “Guess this is turning into ‘mean week’ here. Who will get dissed tomorrow?”
The “Wow, Where Did All These Deadlines Come From? Cool!” Roundup
– February 27, 2007Posted in: 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. (
Dear Sir,
Mr. Russo’s story was from the 2006 Fiction Issue of The Atlantic.
Yours,
DW
Slap slap slap slap forehead!