Don’t Mess With the Bull

Newsday reports that artist Arturo Di Modica, creator of the "Charging Bull" sculpture near Wall Street in New York City, is suing Random House for featuring a photograph of the statue on the cover of A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, a book about the fall of Lehman Brothers. The copyright for the sculpture was registered with the U.S. copyright office in 1998. If this case makes it to trial, it will be an interesting case to watch from a copyright law perspective.

Books = Money Wasters

In an article titled Money Wasters to Avoid, the Baltimore Sun advises against buying books in this tough economy. Obviously, this advice comes from a non-reader: “Some books are nice to have - like your favorite one, for example. But really, buying the newest hardcover Jodi Picoult because you can not wait to get it from the library - not very smart.”

Now, really, are we supposed to make due with only one favorite book? I prefer Megan Halpern’s take on the topic over at MobyLives:

In fact, now is the time to buy books. Spending $25 on a hardcover goes a long way: a book is something to own, cherish, share, and read over and over again. A far more sound entertainment investment than a night at the movies, or dinner out on the town (although both things that I won’t be giving up either!). So support your local bookstores and show the Baltimore Sun that we haven’t forgotten how much of a treasure a book is.

Sweeping Up Glass by Carolyn Wall (a review)

Sweeping Up Glass: a novel
3.5 out of 5: In the backwoods of Kentucky, Olivia Harker Cross struggles to raise her grandson while living with her cantankerous mother and maintaining the family grocery business. Everything’s fine in this unconventional family until poachers start killing the Alaskan silver wolves brought to Kentucky by Olivia’s grandfather. As Olivia investigates the poachers, she uncovers decades-old secrets and must protect her family from the resulting dangers.

This story unfolds from the first-person point of view as Olivia narrates current events and mixes in memories from her childhood. Olivia’s unique voice is the center of gravity for this novel; it’s a constant and compelling force:

All in all, I have a crazy ma'am who owns a hundred dusty Bibles, a leggy boy with a too-soft heart, and no man to bed down with. And an Alaskan silver dying on my kitchen floor.

As engaging as it is, Olivia’s voice cannot compensate for this novel’s awkward plotting. The action in the final third of the book feels contrived, loaded with convenient coincidences and overly dramatic scenes. This final section, which reads like a thriller, is out of character with the pacing and style of the first two-thirds of the book. As I mentioned in a prior post, Sweeping Up Glass has the best first chapter I’ve read recently. Although the rest of the book didn’t live up to the initial promise of the first chapter, Sweeping Up Glass is an enjoyable and worthwhile read, particularly for those who like reading mysteries.

Chimpanzee Up for Booker Prize

Far and away the most unexpected title to be included on this year’s longlist for the prestigious Man Booker Prize is Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood, first published in the U.S. on March 3, 2009 and purported to be the autobiography of Cheeta, the chimpanzee who starred in the Tarzan films of the 1930s and 40s. Amazon.comlists the author of Me Cheeta as “Cheeta.” As the Telegraph reports, Me Cheeta is a “devastating satire of the debauched lifestyles of Hollywood's golden era stars.”

In October, a full seven months after the book’s publication, James Lever, a 38-year-old ghost writer from London, was revealed to be the actual author of Me Cheeta. After the book landed on the Booker longlist, Lever commented, “I'm delighted that after a long process of trying to sell it deadpan as work of non-fiction by a chimp that the Booker judges have accepted it as a novel.” He shouldn’t be too surprised. After all, the Booker judges will accept just about anything as a novel these days.

In case you’re wondering, the Financial Times reports that Summertime, by J.M. Coetzee, is “an early 3/1 favourite for the prize by Ladbrokes, the bookmaker.” Coetzee won the Booker prize in 1989 for Life & Times of Michael K and in 1999 for Disgrace. He also snagged the Nobel prize for Literature in 2003.

2009 Man Booker Prize Longlist Announced

The Man Booker Prize Longlist was announced yesterday. The ‘Man Booker dozen’ includes two previous winners (AS Byatt, JM Coetzee), some other heavy hitters (Hilary Mantel, Colm Toibin, William Trevor, Sarah Waters), and three debut novelists (Samantha Harvey, James Lever, Ed O'Loughlin). Here’s the list:

• The Children's Book, AS Byatt (Chatto and Windus)
• Summertime, JM Coetzee (Harvill Secker)
• The Quickening Maze, Adam Foulds (Jonathan Cape)
• How to Paint a Dead Man, Sarah Hall (Faber)
• The Wilderness, Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape)
• Me Cheeta, James Lever (Fourth Estate)
• Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)
• The Glass Room, Simon Mawer (Little, Brown)
• Not Untrue & Not Unkind, Ed O'Loughlin (Penguin - Ireland)
• Heliopolis, James Scudamore (Harvill Secker)
• Brooklyn, Colm Toibin (Viking)
• Love and Summer, William Trevor (Viking)
• The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters (Virago)

James Naughtie, the chair of judges, commented:

We believe it to be one of the strongest lists in recent memory, with two former winners, four past-shortlisted writers, three first-time novelists and a span of styles and themes that make this an outstandingly rich fictional mix.

This longlist was chosen from a total of 132 books, 121 of which were submitted by publishers and 11 of which were called in by the judges. The 6-book shortlist will be announced on September 8th, and the winner will be announced on October 6th.

David Versus Goliath

Back in 2006, after the Frankfurt Book Fair, HarperCollins made a $1 million bet on Jonathan Littell's French bestseller, Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones). It was an ill-advised bet. Despite the significant buzz surrounding the March 1st publication of The Kindly Ones in the U.S., Nielsen BookScan reports the book has sold only 17,000 copies. Even allowing for the fact that Nielsen BookScan counts only about 70% of a book’s sales, 17,000 is a paltry number compared to the book’s first printing of 150,000 copies. As Rachel Deahl comments in an article at Publishers Weekly, “a vitriolic first-person account of a fictional SS officer's life, coming in at just under 1,000 pages” is “an incredibly tough sell in America.”

On the same day The Kindly Ones was published with great fanfare, Melville House quietly published Every Man Dies Alone, another novel connected to the Third Reich, this one by deceased author Hans Fallada. Unlike The Kindly Ones, however, Melville House acquired Fallada’s novel for “a modest sum.” Also unlike The Kindly Ones, Every Man Dies Alone has gone on to become a “surprise hit” with 40,000 copies circulating.

(Via Literary Saloon)

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (a review)

Inherent Vice
4.5 out of 5: Cloaked as a detective thriller, Inherent Vice contains the snappy dialog, complicated plot, and criminal underworld types typical of the genre. Don’t be fooled by the packaging, though. This novel is pure everything-including-the-kitchen-sink Pynchon with satirical song lyrics, paranoia, drugs, pop culture, lawyers, sex, politics, zombies, more drugs, and a side-trip to Vegas. The neat resolution of a convoluted plot is not really the point. Instead, let go of your need for closure and join Pynchon for a buoyant romp through the psychedelic haze that was L.A. in the late 1960s.

Doc, an amiable, drug-addled personal investigator, stumbles onto a vicious international crime ring as he works on a case brought to him by his ex-girlfriend. By turns brilliant and bumbling, Doc exudes a kind of humble innocence and is the likeable center of this novel. He's both trustworthy and trustful and never far from questioning his own abilities and actions ("Did I say that outloud?"). In a typical example of the endearing workings of Doc's logic, he tries to deduce the origin of a postcard he receives "from some island he had never heard of out in the Pacific Ocean, with a lot of vowels in its name":

The cancellation was in French and initialed by a local postmaster, along with the notation courrier par lance-coco which as close as he could figure from the Petit Larousse must mean some kind of catapult mail delivery involving coconut shells, maybe as a way of dealing with an unapproachable reef.

In Doc's world, postcards delivered via coconut catapults make perfect sense.

Clearly, Pynchon is having fun with the detective genre. In one scene, Doc drives to a mansion protected by a moat with a drawbridge. After the drawbridge descends "rumbling and creaking," "the night was very quiet again—not even the distant freeway traffic could be heard, or the footpads of coyotes, or the slither of snakes." Beneath all the humor and satire, there's a darker message here. The fun is almost over for Doc and his fellow hippies as paranoia, the harbinger of future oppression, overtakes the fun-loving sixties "like blood in a swimming pool, till it occupies all the volume of the day."

At times Inherent Vice is overly constrained by its purported genre as Pynchon weaves together the complicated plotlines of a detective story, maintaining too tight a grasp on a linear reality. The excessive plotting hampers some of the book's whimsical exuberance. But, unlike much of Pynchon's previous work, Inherent Vice is eminently readable and even, at times, actually suspenseful. At under 400 pages, Inherent Vice is also one of Pynchon's shortest novels. If you've been too intimidated to attempt a Pynchon novel up to now, try this one.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (a review)

The Elegance of the Hedgehog
3.5 out of 5: The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a charming novel featuring an odd pair of protagonists. Renée, a widowed 54-year-old concierge for a luxury apartment building in Paris, is self-described as “short, ugly and plump” and is self-schooled in philosophy and literature. Renée’s story alternates with journal entries by Paloma, a precocious 12-year-old tenant in Renée’s building who plans to commit suicide on her 13th birthday to avoid the meaninglessness of life. Both Renée and Paloma view themselves as outsiders and hide their intellectual pursuits from their small-minded fellow tenants.

At times, Renee’s philosophical musings Paloma’s wordy essays stall this book’s momentum, particularly near the beginning of the book. Once a new tenant moves into the building and upsets the status quo, however, things start to get interesting. This amusing novel, deftly translated from the French by Alison Anderson, is lighthearted in style but not in substance. Despite its dark themes of death, suicide, and loneliness, The Elegance of the Hedgehog is oddly life-affirming and teaches us that no life is inconsequential.

Check back in about a month for a review of Gourmet Rhapsody, the novel Muriel Barbery wrote before The Elegance of the Hedgehog. An English translation of Gourmet Rhapsody will be published in the U.S. on August 25th.

Controversial Cover

As reported at GalleyCat, YA fantasy author Justine Larbalestier was excited by the favorable reaction to the cover for her new book Liar: "This cover was so well received by sales and marketing at Bloomsbury that for the first time in my career a cover for one of my books became the image used for the front of the catalogue." Things were looking good until someone actually read the book and discovered it's about a black girl. In responding to criticism, Larbalestier explained she had no choice but to accept a cover image inconsistent with Liar's protagonist:

Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don't sell. Sales reps have told me that many of their accounts won't take books with black covers. Booksellers have told me that they can't give away YAs with black covers. Authors have told me that their books with black covers are frequently not shelved in the same part of the library as other YA—they're exiled to the Urban Fiction section—and many bookshops simply don't stock them at all.

Clearly, as Larbalestier says, "all of us—writers, editors, designers, sales reps, booksellers, reviewers, readers, and parents of readers—will have to do better."

Bookforum.com Reborn

Bookforum has long been one of my favorite book-related periodicals. It's full of insightful articles and intelligent reviews of the right books. I even like the ads. And now, thanks to the recently improved website, Bookforum.com offers some great online content. I particularly like the new section called Syllabi, which contains focused book lists on topics like "postcollege ennui," "schizophrenic memoirs," and "comic novels."

This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper (a review)

This Is Where I Leave You
3 out of 5: In Jonathan Tropper’s latest novel, Judd Foxman is called back to his family home to satisfy his father’s dying wish that his family sit shiva for seven days. At first, the dysfunctional Foxman family is so caught up in their own troubles they’re barely able to mourn their dead father. Tropper’s clever, quick-paced prose nicely complements the Foxmans’ distracted self-absorption:

We are thinking about our kids, our lack of kids, about finances and fiancées and soon-to-be ex-wives, about the sex we’re not having, the sex our soon-to-be ex-wives are having, about loneliness and love and death and Dad, and this constant crowd is like a fog on a dark road; you just keep driving and watch it disperse in your low beams.

As the allotted days pass (and as the Foxman family spends more time together than they have in years), they begin to forget old grudges and to grow closer as a family.

This is Where I Leave You is both a hilarious reunion escapade and a sobering examination of death and the meaning of family. Tropper’s comic scenes succeed brilliantly, but his more serious passages are less successful and often superficial, leaving the weightier issues unexplored. This Is Where I Leave You will definitely leave you laughing, but don’t expect too much depth.

Worldly Summer Reading

At the National, Richard Whitehead creates an interactive map of “summer reading from around the world.” Click on a country, and get a book recommendation with this promise:

Every novel on this summer reading list promises to make you look at unfamiliar scenes and the people you encounter with fresh eyes. Yes, you could just buy a guidebook at the airport—but where’s the fun in that?

(Via Literary Saloon)

Packing Books

At Publishing Perspectives, Erin Cox talks about packing books for a summer vacation. Like Erin, I cultivate my stack of books “like some people cultivate gardens.” Her post started me thinking about my own book-packing habits. Most of my trips these days are work-related, rather than a summer vacation, so I need to pack fewer books than Erin (her list includes 14 titles). Nonetheless, I carefully consider (and reconsider) the books I pack for days before the trip. Here’s my general formula:

• A collection of short stories (or a recent issue of Bookforum, or a handful of back issues of One Story) for filling short gaps of time
• One completely mesmerizing, but fairly uncomplicated, novel to take my mind off bad patches of turbulence, rude cabdrivers, and noisy restaurants
• One challenging and thought-provoking book. This could be experimental fiction, poetry, a collection of essays or something similarly demanding. Such books are great for those solitary, uninterrupted evenings spent in hotel rooms.
• Something funny to counteract long days filled with meetings
• Something related to my destination, whether it’s a travel memoir, a collection of essays, or fiction
• An audiobook (or a collection of the latest episodes of my favorite book podcasts) to liven up workouts in gloomy hotel fitness centers

I don’t often satisfy every piece of this “formula,” but I always end up with a good mix of reading material for my trips. For example, for this week’s trip to Anchorage, Alaska, I’ve brought along:

• Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr.
• Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
• Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant
• Boy by James Hanley
• Finding Nouf by Zoe Ferraris (an audiobook)
• The latest three issues of One Story

61 Essential Postmodern Reads

The Jacket Copy blog at the LA Times lists “61 essential postmodern reads.” The list is annotated with helpful icons specifying each book’s particular postmodern characteristics like “plays with language” and “includes historical falsehoods.” A quick scan of the icons reveals certain characteristics that are shared by almost all the books on the list, including “disrupts/plays with form,” and “comments on its own bookishness.” The two books on the list with the most postmodern characteristics—each book is marked with 7 out of the possible 10 icons (not counting the icons for short or long books)—are Steve Erickson's Tours of the Black Clock and Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. Other books on the list don’t seem particularly postmodern, including Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project, and Michael Herr's Dispatches.

Marry, Divorce, Travel the World, Get a Book Deal

Remember Elizabeth Gilbert’s international bestseller Eat, Pray, Love, the travel memoir that follows Gilbert on a trip through Italy, India, and Indonesia as she tries to recover from her divorce? Apparently impressed with his ex-wife’s literary success, Michael Cooper just sold the rights to his memoir, Displaced. Publishers Weekly reports that Displaced recounts Cooper’s post-divorce “'search for purpose' that leads him through the Middle East and other developing countries,” proving once and for all that what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Hyperion plans to publish Displaced in fall 2010.

Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga (a review)

Between the Assassinations
3.5 out of 5: This collection of short stories cleverly masquerades as a travel guide to the Indian town of Kittur, a fictional town of 193,432 residents located "on India's southwestern coast, between Goa and Calicut, and almost equidistant from the two." The book opens with a map of Kittur, labeled with the town’s streets, neighborhoods, and other landmarks, and the stories are named after these points of interest (e.g., The Railway Station, Lighthouse Hill, and Salt Market Village). Each story takes place “between the assassinations” of Indira Gandhi (1984) and Rajiv Gandhi (1991) and begins with a brief overview of the history and significance of the titular landmark written in the deadpan prose of a travel guide:

The famous Kittamma Devi Temple, a modern structure built in the Tamil style, stands on the site where an ancient shrine to the goddess is believed to have existed. It is within walking distance of the train station, and is often the first port of call for visitors to the town.

Adiga’s unobtrusive prose is peppered with just the right amount of sparkling phrases (“sunburned leaves” or “laminated” skies) to highlight its laudable restraint. The subtle cross-references and shared setting of these stories provide a kind of satisfying coherence often lacking in short story collections. This coherence, coupled with Adiga’s accomplished writing, almost makes up for the fact that too many of these stories lack sufficient direction. Without noticeable narrative arcs, some stories read more like random, surreptitious glimpses into ongoing lives. The glimpses are interesting but not as alive as they could be.

Inprint Brown Reading Series (Houston)

One of the best things about living in Houston (and, believe it or not, Houston is a great place to live) is the Inprint Brown Reading Series. Inprint is a nonprofit organization with a mission "to inspire readers and writers in Houston." The reading series line-up for the 2009-2010 season has just been announced, and it looks fantastic. As explained by the Inprint website: "Each reading features an on-stage interview, followed by a book sale and signing, run by Brazos Bookstore." Tickets for individual readings are just $5 and can be purchased online a few weeks prior to each reading. Season tickets (including parking passes and reserved seating) are $150.

Here's the schedule:

• Sept. 21: Joseph O'Neill (Netherland) and Marilynne Robinson (Home)
• Oct. 19: E.L. Doctorow (Homer & Langley)
• Jan. 11: Mary Karr (Lit)
• Jan. 25: David Wroblewski (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle)
• Mar. 1: John Banville (The Sea) and Abraham Verghese (Cutting for Stone)
• Mar. 22: Tracy Kidder (Strength in What Remains)
• April 12: Dorianne Laux (Facts About the Moon) and Patricia Smith (Blood Dazzler)
• May 3: Oscar Casares (Amigoland) and Gwendolyn Zepeda (Lone Star Legend)

Also, Kate DiCamillo is coming to Houston on October 18th as part of the Inprint Readings for Young People.

Frank McCourt: 1930-2009

I'm sorry to report that Frank McCourt died yesterday in New York at the age of 78. More here.

Books Worth Saving

As I’ve explained in a prior post, I generally view books as disposable objects, and “when I'm finished with a book, I have no qualms about giving it away, donating it to charity, or even (gasp!) throwing it away if it's not worth passing on.” I make an important exception to this general rule in the case of collectable books. For me, a collectable book is any book I admire as a physical object. Signed books, rare first editions, or books with beautiful or unique designs get promoted to my “keeper” bookshelf.

In this age of e-books and print-on-demand books, I sense a growing counter-movement to create and collect books worth saving. Book design has always been important, but some publishers are making it their niche. Take, for example, Chin Music Press in Seattle, Washington. Self-dubbed “Seattle’s antidote to the Kindle,” Chin Music is seeking “to recreate that sense of awe book lovers get when they enter the rare books room.” According to a review in the Orlando Sentinel, Chin Music’s recently published novel Oh! by Todd Shimoda “shows an amazing attention to detail and mood. The pages between chapters are peppered with illustrations from [the author’s wife] that capture the contemplative feel, and there are ‘exhibits,’ or bits of research along the way.” I have a copy of Oh!, and I can attest to its beauty, from the sparkles embedded in the brown endpapers and the buttery-soft paper to the colorful watercolor illustrations. This one’s a keeper. In the UK, Full Circle Editions has just launched its first book, The Burning of the Books. This new publisher is dedicated to producing beautiful books, and its first title is a “sequence of poems and images” that “form a visual and verbal tour-de-force.”

To see a bunch of collectible books in one space, visit Librissime, a bookstore in Montreal, Quebec that only stocks books worth saving. As explained by Michael Ross at the Britannica blog, the owners of Librissime “celebrate books as objets d’art, and as essential for enriching your life. These books are stunning examples of the craft of bookmaking, published by publishers who, at various times—over the years and right through to the present—have produced the most glorious publications you will ever see.” And for those of you who prefer the books to come to you, check out Indiespensable, Powell’s high-end book subscription club. Of the twelve installments that have shipped (or are about to ship) since the club’s inception, half of them feature special collectible editions, and almost all of them have included signed, first editions.

May your shelves be filled with books worth saving.

Translations Some of Us Have Liked

If you need a book recommendation, think about choosing one of the books being considered for this year’s Best Translated Book (BTB) Award. Chad Post has compiled a list of some of the strong contenders over at Three Percent. This isn’t the long list for the award. That won’t be announced until much later this year. In Chad’s words, this list:

simply represents all of the titles that the nine BTB panelists (Monica Carter, Scott Esposito, Susan Harris, Annie Janusch, Brandon Kennedy, Bill Marx, Michael Orthofer, Chad W. Post, and Jeff Waxman) have recommended to each other to take a look at. It’s a sort of list of “books in the running,” or more accurately, “translations that some of us have liked.”

It’s a good list. Personally, I can vouch for Little Fingers by Filip Florian, Vilnius Poker by Ricardas Gavelis, Death in Spring by Merce Rodoreda, and Collector of Worlds by Iliya Trayanov. To that list, I’d add Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton (a review)

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
4 out of 5: In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton presents a series of essays on working life, each one focused on a different industry or career. In his own words, de Botton is attempting "a hymn to the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the modern workplace and, not least, its extraordinary claim to be able to provide us, alongside love, with the principal source of life's meaning." De Botton’s essays, written in his satisfyingly dense and artful prose, are accompanied by haunting black-and-white photographs illustrating either the bleakness or the beauty, and sometimes both, of our modern work landscapes.

De Botton’s aim in examining our working lives is two-fold. In addition to exploring our motivations to work and the meaning we hope to draw from our jobs, de Botton seeks to pierce the superficiality of our material world. Instead of viewing a package of cookies on the grocery store shelf as a simple afternoon snack, de Botton exhorts us to get beyond the surface to consider the hundreds, if not thousands, of people working every day to ensure those cookies are available to us. In this way, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is striving “to mitigate the deadening, uniquely modern sense of dislocation between the things we so heedlessly consume in the run of our daily lives and their unknown origins and creators."

Occasionally, de Botton's focus on certain unsavory details (like the smell of "freshly boiled cabbage or swede" pervading the home office of a career counselor) comes close to condescension. More often, de Botton treats his subjects with empathy and sensitivity. This beautifully designed and produced book is a pleasure to read.

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

After the successful release of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Philadelphia-based publisher Quirk Books is following up with more of the same. Publishers Weekly reports that Quirk’s next project will be Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, scheduled for publication on September 15th. The concept: “the Dashwood sisters, evicted from their childhood home by their conniving stepmother, land on a mysterious island full of man-eating sea creatures, instead of a nearby, downgraded, English cottage.” S&S&S will be even further from the Jane Austen classic than P&P&Z was. While P&P&Z retained 85% of Austen’s writing, S&S&S will retain only 60%.

Translation Woes

The beginning of this story is a happy one. Travel writer Michael Luongo’s best-selling book, Gay Travels in the Muslim World, has been translated into Arabic. In a New York Post Page 6 report, Luongo comments, "This is the first-ever gay book to have been translated into Arabic after first having been printed in English, so I am very proud." Here’s where things go downhill. Luongo’s Arabic publisher translated “gay” as “pervert,” creating a big problem for Luongo: “[T]he new book has in huge words 'Michael Luongo -- Pervert Travels in the Muslim World' across the cover." Not an ideal situation for Luongo’s upcoming book tour to the Mideast, including stops in Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan. Luongo’s asked his publisher to change the offensive word to "a more modern and polite one," but there’s no word yet on whether Luongo’s request will be granted.

(Via MobyLives)

Thomas Pynchon Teaser

I’ve just received my copy of Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Inherent Vice, scheduled for release on August 4th. Although I’ve only read the first two chapters so far, this excerpt from the beginning of chapter two will give you a good sense of the world of the novel:

Doc took the freeway out. The eastbound lanes teemed with VW buses in jittering paisleys, primer-coated street hemis, woodies of authentic Dearborn pine, TV-star-piloted Porsches, Cadillacs carrying dentists to extramarital trysts, windowless vans with lurid teen dramas in progress inside, pickups with mattresses full of country cousins from the San Joaquin, all wheeling along together down into these great horizonless fields of housing, under the power transmission lines, everybody’s radios lasing on the same couple of AM stations, under a sky like watered milk, and the white bombardment of a sun smogged into only a smear of probability, out in whose light you began to wonder if anything you’d call psychedelic could ever happen, or if—bummer!—all this time it had really been going on up north.

The technicolor sets, quick-paced action, and slick prose crammed into the first two chapters hint at the wild ride ahead. Check back for a review in a week or two.

Frank McCourt Near Death

The Irish Echo reports that Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Frank McCourt (Angela’s Ashes) is “suffering from life threatening meningitis.” Over the last several months, 78-year-old McCourt has been battling melanoma with treatments “having beneficial effects.” Now, meningitis may undo those effects, and the outlook is “not good.” McCourt’s brother stated, “Frank was okay for a bit and we had hopes for a while after the treatment for melanoma, but the meningitis turned it all around, turned it topsy-turvy."

McCourt is in a hospice in New York with his family.

Anxiety Reading

Publishers Weekly recently interviewed George Dawes Green, the author of Ravens, a novel that will be released by Grand Central Publishing on July 15th. Green had this to say about changes in the publishing industry:

PW: In that intervening time [14 years between novels], what changes did you notice in the publishing industry?

GDG: People aren’t reading books so much. They text and Twitter and Google a lot—anxiety reading—but they’re too jumpy for books.

I think the phrase “anxiety reading” is a good descriptor for what we do on the internet and our various mobile devices. We check e-mail, send a text, read a favorite blog, look up a topic on Wikipedia, check a friend’s status on Facebook, send a quick tweet, read a news story, go back to e-mail, and on and on and on. For many of us, our internet agility borders on obsessive-compulsive behavior. In Green’s words, it’s “jumpy.”Instead of the relaxing, transporting experience of reading a good book, internet reading feeds and produces anxiety. Not only is its pace frenetic and its quality unfocused, but its substance is often unsatisfying, requiring more clicking to follow-up on loose ends. To combat internet fatigue, I try to keep my internet reading limited to specific times of the day, reserving other times for the focused reading of books (including e-books).

New Words

It’s time for a new update of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, which means official recognition for some new words. The 2009 update of the 11th edition adds words like “staycation: a vacation spent at home or nearby” and “locovore: one who eats foods grown locally whenever possible.” Other new entries include waterboarding, carbon footprint, and fan fiction. Check out the list of new words and their definitions.

Book Giveaway: The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist

Other Press has generously offered to send two copies of Swedish author Ninni Holmqvist's The Unit to readers of Literary License. The Unit, Holmqvist's first novel (translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy), is described in a Washington Post review as "a haunting, deadpan tale."

Book description: One day in early spring, Dorrit Weger is checked into the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material. She is promised a nicely furnished apartment inside the Unit, where she will make new friends, enjoy the state of the art recreation facilities, and live the few remaining days of her life in comfort with people who are just like her. Here, women over the age of fifty and men over sixty–single, childless, and without jobs in progressive industries–are sequestered for their final few years; they are considered outsiders. In the Unit they are expected to contribute themselves for drug and psychological testing, and ultimately donate their organs, little by little, until the final donation. Despite the ruthless nature of this practice, the ethos of this near-future society and the Unit is to take care of others, and Dorrit finds herself living under very pleasant conditions: well-housed, well-fed, and well-attended. She is resigned to her fate and discovers her days there to be rather consoling and peaceful. But when she meets a man inside the Unit and falls in love, the extraordinary becomes a reality and life suddenly turns unbearable. Dorrit is faced with compliance or escape, and…well, then what? The Unit is a gripping exploration of a society in the throes of an experiment, in which the “dispensable” ones are convinced under gentle coercion of the importance of sacrificing for the “necessary” ones. Ninni Holmqvist has created a debut novel of humor, sorrow, and rage about love, the close bonds of friendship, and about a cynical, utilitarian way of thinking disguised as care.

If this sounds interesting to you, please e-mail me (litlicense AT gmail DOT com) with your name and address by this Friday, July 17th. I'll select two winners at random from the qualifying entrants. Sorry, but the quagmire that is international publishing rights limits this giveaway to those living in the U.S. Good luck!

(I'm just about finished with this novel and I can't put it down. It's a quick and disturbing read. Look for my review here at Literary License sometime later this month.)

Edited to note this giveaway has concluded. Thanks to everyone who participated!

Avoiding Dan Brown

The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown's first new novel since international bestseller The Da Vinci Code, hits stores on September 15th. To avoid Brown mania, publishers are moving up the fall release dates of some of their highly-anticipated books, including books by William Trevor and Nick Hornby. The Guardian reports the comments of a senior executive at Penguin:

When we heard that Dan Brown's book was due out on September 15 there was a fair bit of reshuffling. William [Trevor]'s book was originally down for release in early September, and Nick [Hornby]'s book was initially due for publication at the end of September, but if you're fighting for the dearth of space on supermarket shelves and on best-seller lists when Brown is out, you've clearly got no chance of getting a book to number one, so we decided to go early. It has very much been a case of dominoes falling around Dan Brown.

Other significant names releasing books this fall ahead of Brown (in the UK) include JM Coetzee, Iain Banks, Fay Weldon, Rachel Cusk, and Margaret Atwood.

The Last Bridge by Teri Coyne (a review)

The Last Bridge: A Novel
3.5 out of 5: Teri Coyne’s latest novel, The Last Bridge, begins: “Two days after my father had a massive stroke, my mother shot herself in the head.” And, in terms of depressing plot elements, it’s downhill from there. Told from the perspective of an unlikable (but very believable) alcoholic, nicknamed “Cat” by her siblings, The Last Bridge alternates between the present and the past. As the three siblings converge on their childhood home for their mother’s funeral, the horrors of living with an abusive father are resurrected in flashbacks.

The Last Bridge is a soap opera with literary ambitions. The quick-moving plot, while always engaging, is often melodramatic. At times, Cat’s unmitigated negativity becomes tedious, and the plot device of her mother’s suicide note plays too central a role, breaking up the flow of the narrative. Also, certain “savior” characters that come into Cat’s life at convenient moments are completely unbelievable in their generosity. In spite of these significant issues, however, The Last Bridge is a gripping and well-paced novel. Darkly entertaining.

Shakespeare & Company

If you've never had the chance to visit Shakespeare & Company, that legendary bookstore in Paris, now you can take the virtual tour.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (a review)

The White Tiger: A Novel
4 out of 5: This novel masquerades as a series of letters written by an Indian man, Balram Halwai, to the Premier of China explaining what it is to be an “entrepreneur.” For Balram, the term “entrepreneur” is a euphemism for someone who has managed to rise above his caste, or social class, using whatever means required. In his persistent climb to the top, Balram takes advantage of the fluidity of identity offered by an unstable society in a state of transition. He assumes whatever position and character is most useful as he transforms himself from an uneducated village boy into a successful businessman in Bangalore.

Despite his upbeat entrepreneurial message, Balram’s narrative is filled with evidence of deep fissures in Indian society: between the high castes and the low castes, between those living in the Darkness (the rural, poor areas) and those living in the Light (the big cities), and between the rich masters and their poor servants. For Balram, these divisions reside within the body and are a kind of physical (and thus inescapable) marker:

A rich man's body is like a premium cotton pillow, white and soft and blank. Ours are different. My father's spine was a knotted rope, the kind that women use in villages to pull water from wells; the clavicle curved around his neck in high relief, like a dog's collar …. The story of a poor man's life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.

Balram’s letters are darkly humorous and written with a savage directness in consonance with the violence and immorality underlying his success. The epistolary format feels like a clumsy literary device rather than a natural platform for Balram’s story, but his story is engaging enough to overcome its inelegant construction. Overall, The White Tiger is an interesting glimpse into a complicated society in transition.

Best of the National Book Awards Fiction Prize

Taking a cue from the Best of the Booker Prize, the National Book Foundation will be awarding the Best of the National Book Awards Fiction Prize this year in honor of the 60th anniversary of the National Book Awards. A panel of 600 writers will choose 6 books for the shortlist, and, beginning September 21, the public will vote on the winner.

Libation, A Bitter Alchemy by Deirdre Heekin (a review)

Libation, A Bitter Alchemy
3.5 out of 5: In this collection of linked essays, Deirdre Heekin describes her growing appreciation for wine and the land from which it comes. Her musings range from her travels to the small winemaking villages in Italy to her life at home in Vermont where she and her husband own and manage an Italian restaurant that uses locally grown ingredients. In her own words, Heekin describes Libation as a book “about soil, vines, fruit, history, scent, taste, chemistry, and memory.”

The breadth of the topics covered—from high-end perfumery in Paris to a casual family meal in Tuscany—ensures something to interest just about any reader. The lack of a central focus, however, renders Libation a bit disjointed. Heekin is knowledgeable and passionate about the subjects she discusses. Her writing is mostly charming but occasionally overloaded with technical detail. Winemakers and restaurateurs will appreciate the rigorous treatment, but armchair tourists will be left wanting more whimsy and less technique.

Ron Charles Reviews Laurie Sheck’s Debut

Generally, I don’t post about other reviews, particularly those appearing in the major papers, because I know you’ll find them on your own if you’re interested. Ron Charles’s recent review in the Washington Post of Laurie Sheck’s debut novel, A Monster’s Notes, is so compelling, however, that I feel an unusual need to cite to it. Charles describes A Monster’s Notes as “a baffling 500-page book” composed of “thousands of little scraps stitched together: bits of letters, journal entries, newspaper clippings, marginalia, interviews, dreams, lists, Web pages, lesson plans and translated passages, full of additions and words x'd out.”

It sounds like a challenging read:

[A Monster’s Notes is] a fire hose of erudition that sprays out allusions to 3,000 years of history, science, philosophy and literature, the kind of novel that keeps you chained to Wikipedia unless you're on a first-name basis with Boethius, Cao Xuequin, Dante, Marco Polo, Locke, Diogenes, Maimonides and especially the Romantic poets, along with their parents, lovers, children and pets. I'm sure somewhere there's a reader smart enough (or dishonest enough) to enjoy this novel in all its rich allusiveness, but I spent the entire ordeal lurching along about 50 IQ points behind.

The rest of the review is equally entertaining. I’m almost tempted to read the book.

The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer (a review)

The Story of a Marriage: A Novel
4.5 out of 5: The Story of a Marriage examines the marriage of Pearlie and Holland Cook during a brief period of time in 1953. In many ways, the Cook’s marriage is superficially ordinary, but, like most marriages, it’s internally complicated and weighty: “like those giant heavenly bodies invisible to the human eye, it can only be charted by its gravity, its pull on everything around it.”

This quiet novel is full of self-awareness. The story is remarkably controlled, each detail playing a critical role. In precise and well-crafted prose, Greer reveals the flaws in our assumptions. Just when you think you’ve got the story figured out, Greer shows just how wrong you’ve been all along. The book begins with an appropriate warning:

We think we know the ones we love. Our husbands, our wives. We know them—we are them, sometimes …. But what we love turns out to be a poor translation, a translation we ourselves have made, from a language we barely know. We try to get past it to the original, but we never can.

The Story of a Marriage is about the things we do to construct our view of another person. Ultimately, the person we think we know is nothing more than our own mind’s reconciliation of the mysteries that make up another being:

[A] lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we’ve married him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled in by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be.

The Story of a Marriage is a masterpiece of the nuances of marriage. It’s poignant and beautiful and well worth reading.

Amazon's Best Books of 2009 (so far)

If you haven’t had enough lists, check out Amazon’s list of “the top 10 must-reads of the year so far.” And if that’s not enough, Amazon has additional top ten lists for fiction, non-fiction, young readers, and a category described as “hidden gems.” All in all, the lists are fairly interesting and diverse (particularly the fiction list).

Book Club for the Homeless

Every Tuesday morning, a group of homeless men meet at a church in Boston to discuss literature. As reported in the Boston Globe, the story of the club’s origin reads like a fairy tale, but it’s all the more touching because it’s true:

The story of the book club, now in its 10th month, is a tale of ordinary city life upended. It began with a stunningly unlikely friendship, between two men from different worlds: Peter Resnik, a high-powered lawyer on his way to work, and Rob, a homeless man guarding a friend’s shopping cart on Boston Common. Through months of daily conversations, that began with jokes and sports talk and gradually delved deeper, they found a common interest: literature. And when they saw the bridge that they had built, they recognized its potential for others.

Read the full article if you have the time. It reaffirms the status of literature as a basic human need.

A Few Good Mysteries

If you’re looking for something light and entertaining to read this summer, consider one of these mysteries. While these novels may not be on the top of the literary heap (I’d give each of them a 3 out of 5), they’re all well-written page-turners—just the thing when you need to keep one eye on the kids playing in the waves.

Bleeding Heart Squareby Andrew Taylor
In this historical mystery, a woman married to a wealthy but brutal politician gives up her marriage and comfortable lifestyle to live with her drunken and penniless father. She soon uncovers a series of inexplicable coincidences and, in putting together the pieces, discovers a horrific crime. The strong protagonist is likeable, and the constantly shifting point of view keeps the action lively.

The Physick Book of Deliverance Daneby Katherine Howe
A graduate student working to renovate her grandmother's house uncovers a clue tying her family to the historic Salem witch trials of 1692. Her ensuing quest to understand her family's dark history becomes linked to her need to find a source document to support her graduate thesis. Alternating between 1991 and 1692, this book is historical fiction combined with a contemporary mystery along with a bit of romance and magic.

Gold of Kings: A Novelby Davis Bunn
When her grandfather dies under mysterious circumstances, a young art and antiquities dealer must decipher the cryptic clues he left behind. Her investigation leads her on a dangerous treasure hunt around the world in the company of a professional treasure hunter and a federal agent. This international thriller will appeal to those interested in the treasures of antiquity and the exotic locations in which they're found.