Fiction and Faith

In the current issue of Bookforum, Benjamin Anastas asks "how might the novelist reconcile fiction and faith" in God, Living is Enormous. Anastas starts with the notion that, much like God created the world and its inhabitants, the novel "creates its own firmament between two covers, divides light from darkness, fills the waters with odd life-forms, and chokes the earth with abundance." Before the novel can undertake its work, it must take care of the competition: "[God] must be killed, captured, or paid off handsomely and sent into exile. He must be dealt with." Often, this is accomplished via "enshrinement of the individual."

At various points in his analysis, Anastas points to Susan Sontag's journals (published as Reborn), Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards's sermons, and contemporary fiction by Marilynne Robinson and Chris Adrian. Overall, it's an interesting article about the intersection of faith and fiction (though I wish it were longer).

Bookish Personal Ads

MobyLives tipped me off to the hilarious personal ads at the back of the London Review of Books. A few examples:

• Dear Academic Commissioning Editor. There is no greater exposition of Guy Debord’s commodity cycle than the advertising campaign for Magner’s Irish Cider. Please publish my thesis. Or make love to me; former Whitbread employee and part time Birkbeck PhD. M. 37.


• Possession is nine tenths of the law. Unless it’s possession of an A class drug, in which case it’s up to seven years, or an unlimited fine, or both. I’ll be out in 18 months though, probably, until then why not write to M.31 better at optimism than he is at transporting the Persians.


• Without my grandfather’s contribution to agricultural reforms in 1912, this nation would currently have to import its turnips. While you think about that I shall remove my clothes. Man. 55.


• I cast a magic spell on you. And now you are reading this advert in a literary magazine that exists only in your mind. Soon you will fall in love with me. When we meet, the odour will not concern you. Mr Mesmer: amateur hypnotist, professional shrimp-farmer (M, 51). Also available for weddings and birthdays.

If you want to see more, go here (scroll down to the personals).

Best of the Millennium

The Millions, with the help of a "distinguished panel of writers, editors, and critics," ranked the twenty best books of the new millennium (so far). Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections tops the list. All in all, it's a good list, but what's really interesting is the comparison between the panel's list and the list compiled by readers of the Millions. Junot Diaz's The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao tops the readers' list but doesn't appear anywhere on the panel's list. Roberto Bolano's 2666 does well on both lists, as do David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

Some of the titles that made the lists are surprising. In particular, I was surprised by the strong showing on both lists of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. I enjoyed Middlesex, but I'm not sure I'd put it on my personal "best of the millennium" list.

The Onion's Take on the End of Reading Rainbow

Since it's Monday, I thought a little humor would be appropriate. If you, like many others, are sad about the end of Reading Rainbow, a popular kids' television show promoting reading, check out this Onion story in which Levar Burton ostensibly comes clean about what it was like to work on the show for 26 years, including fond comments like this one:

At 25 years old, when the opportunity to earn a regular paycheck working on a children's show came along, it seemed like a pretty damn good idea. I was dead, dead wrong. Little did I know the next quarter century of my life would be an unrelenting blur of excruciating trips to some of the most boring places on earth. Apiaries, steam trains, old mills—every week they sent me to a fresh hellhole, and every week I had to interview the dullest people imaginable.

This Storybook Season

The Boston Globe ran a story recently about this “storybook season" we’re in the middle of consisting of “an unusually sumptuous feast for lovers of literary fiction.” Jane Jacobs, a book buyer for Porter Square Books comments, “I’ve been in business for 12 years, and I’ve never seen this many big-name authors publish in one season before.” Dana Brigham, co-owner of Brookline Books, says, “It’s the best fall we’ve seen in a long, long time for big [fiction] books.” The Globe story optimistically wonders whether “[t]his season’s focus on quality fiction may ultimately say something profound about its commercial viability for years to come.” Let’s hope so.

Win Coffee with Junot Díaz

On September 29th, the New York Civil Liberties Union Young Professionals are hosting the Just Art fundraiser at BAM Cafe in Brooklyn (tickets are $50). As part of the fundraiser, there will be an auction with plenty of interesting items, including a one-on-one coffee with Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Junot Díaz. The event will also feature “a progressive art show” and “do-it-yourself art stations where attendees can unleash their own creative instincts.”Get the full details at GalleyCat.

Another E-Reader

Netherlands-based IREX Technologies recently announced its plans to introduce a new e-reader device into an already-crowded marketplace. The IREX version is a $399 3G wireless stylus-touchscreen e-book reader with a 8.1” screen, placing the device squarely in competition with the Amazon Kindle and Sony’s just announced wireless e-reader, Daily Edition. Future IREX devices will include a true finger-tip touchscreen and a full-color e-ink touchscreen. Happily, the new IREX device will be compatible with most file formats (as contrasted with the Kindle, which only works with a proprietary format). In a detailed article, Publishers Weekly includes a statement by IREX’s CEO in support of open platform devices: “consumers should be able to buy books from any retailing source and use their books on different devices.” I agree.

Nobel Prize Speculation

It’s that time of year again. As always, the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on a Thursday in October. There are five possible dates to choose from: Oct. 1, 8, 15, 22, or 29. Last year, the announcement came on October 9th. But, since the Academy doesn’t begin deliberations until October, we can likely rule out October 1 and even October 8th is optimistic. I’m guessing we’ll get the announcement on the 15th or the 22nd.

The British bookies are already offering odds:

• Amos Oz 4/1
• Assia Djebar 5/1
• Luis Goytisola 6/1
• Joyce Carol Oates 7/1
• Philip Roth 7/1
• Adonis 8/1
• Antoni Tabucchi 9/1
• Claudio Magris 9/1
• Haruki Murakami 9/1
• Thomas Pynchon 9/1

Last year's winner, J.M.G. Le Clézio, started out at with odds around 14/1. Magris, Oz, Oates, and Roth were also favorites last year.

For more details, see Literary Saloon.

Vote for Your Favorite

As previously mentioned, the National Book Foundation is awarding the Best of the National Book Awards Fiction Prize this year in honor of the 60th anniversary of the National Book Awards. 140 writers chose the following 6 books for the shortlist:

• The Stories of John Cheever
• Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
• The Collected Stories of William Faulkner
• The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor
• Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
• The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

This is a rather bizarre shortlist dominated by short story collections. The winner, which will be chosen by public vote, will be announced on November 18th. The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor is currently in the lead. Exercise your right to vote here.

John the Revelator by Peter Murphy (a review)

John the Revelator
3.5 out of 5: In this debut novel by Irish music journalist Peter Murphy, John Devine faces the typical problems of a teenager, including awkward moments with women, experiments in substance abuse, evasion of parental controls, and a complicated friendship (complete with an opportunity for betrayal). But beneath the surface of this conventional bildungsroman, John’s story is refreshingly unique thanks to powerful supporting roles played by several eccentric characters from the small Irish town in which John lives, including John’s chain-smoking, Bible-quoting, mysteriously ill, single mother, his Rimbaud-obsessed friend, and a chocolate-addicted busybody who won’t move out of the house until John threatens to shoot her with a crossbow.

Adding to this odd brew, John suffers from cryptic and unsettling dreams involving a God-like figure who takes the form of a giant black crow (described as "omnipotent but impotent") and including haunting end-of-the-world scenes like this one:

Two blokes wearing billabong hats carry a cross improvised from railroad girders to the shore and lay it flat on the sand. A third man in a too-tight suit lies across it, his comb-over unwinding like a turban in the sea wind. They nail him through the wrists and ankles and raise it up. He hangs like a side of beef, bawling his head off, but they haven't planted the cross deep enough and it tilts slowly forward and hits the wet sand, the sounds of his torment muffled, mouth clogged up with silt.

This excerpt is a nice example of how Murphy’s prose, by turns coarse and poetic, creates beautiful and haunting images out of ugly things and inelegant words. Over the course of 300 pages, the effect is quite stunning.

Counteracting this novel’s brilliance is a fundamental infirmity of structure, primarily arising out of too many loose ends and a protagonist who’s less well-drawn than the supporting characters. Some of the book’s most distinctive elements—John’s unsettling dreams or his friend’s short stories—drift through the story like flotsam, untethered to the rest of the action and thus lacking in impact. Murphy is undoubtedly gifted as a novelist, but John the Revelator could use some structural refinement. I expect great things from this author in the future.

Van Booy Wins Frank O'Connor Award

The Guardian announces that Simon van Booy won this year's Frank O'Connor Award for his story collection Love Begins in Winter. I’ve had this book sitting on my shelf since May, so maybe this will be the push I need to pick it up. I've heard so many good things about Van Booy's work.

The annual Frank O’Connor Award comes with €35,000, making it the world’s richest short story prize. Other than Van Booy’s book, the shortlisted titles included: Petina Gappah’s An Elegy for Easterly, Charlotte Grimshaw’s Singularity, Shih-Li Kow’s Ripples and Other Stories, Philip O’Ceallaigh’s The Pleasant Light of Day, and Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Van Booy was initially “very nervous” about appearing at the Frank O'Connor festival as a shortlister for the prize, but he quickly got over his nervousness after reading the other shortlisted books. Why? Van Booy explains, “I was shocked by the quality of the work, and I knew I had no hope of winning."

November 7th: First Annual National Bookstore Day

In a Hallmark-like maneuver, Publishers Weekly is designating November 7th as the first annual National Bookstore Day, a day that PW describes as “devoted to celebrating bookselling and the vibrant culture of bookstores” and “with the goal of driving new (and loyal) customers into bookstores.” PW is sponsoring announcements throughout September and October and is asking bookstores to participate with discounts and other activities. PW is also planning to talk to publishers about “special bookseller discounts on selected titles in recognition of National Bookstore Day.”

It will be interesting to see if anyone (booksellers or publishers) picks up on this idea. I haven’t yet seen anything in my community, but it’s early yet.

Beg, Borrow, Steal by Michael Greenberg (a review)

Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life
4 out of 5: Beg, Borrow, Steal is a collection of short essays about a writer’s life, specifically Michael Greenberg's life, in New York City. Although Greenberg has met with some success as a writer (his memoir Hurry Down Sunshine was well-received), it hasn't been easy for him. These brief vignettes reveal the constant struggle faced by a Greenberg between his art and his need to earn a paycheck.

With self-deprecatory wit, Greenberg writes about the various jobs he's resorted to over the years (taxi driver, court translator for criminals, furniture mover, waiter, seller of cosmetics, and "work-for-hire" writing contracts). He also writes with insight about the city's overlooked institutions, including a soup kitchen for the homeless and a treatment center for the mentally ill. From these byways, Greenberg mines nuggets of wisdom like this comment about the insolvability of insanity:

There may no more be a solution to insanity than there is a key to consciousness itself, and our attempts to find one--from the priestly attentiveness of Freud to the chemical tinkering of pharmacologist with the brain's limbic system, the way the Federal Reserve tinkers with the money supply to keep the economy from crashing--merely reflect our wish to tame an unknowable area of existence.

Greenberg's perspective is unflinchingly honest and, despite life's challenges, ultimately optimistic. These essays originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. Clocking in between 1100 and 1200 words, they're the perfect way to spend five idle minutes.

The World Readers Go Global

Duke University Press recently started an expansion of its World Readers series:

Building on the success of the popular Latin America Readers, this new series will provide vivid, thought-provoking introductions to the history, culture, and politics of countries, cities, and regions around the world, including images and carefully selected texts about a specific location, each volume will feature many perspectives, including those of scholars, journalists, activists, novelists, poets, and politicians: historical and contemporary figures, men and women, racial and ethnic minorities, residents providing first-hand accounts and outsiders looking in. Much of the material will be translated into English for the first time. The World Readers are intended for travelers, scholars, and students alike.

Sounds pretty interesting. The expanded coverage starts with The Indonesia Reader and The Alaska Native Reader.

Editing Dan Brown

At the Globe and Mail, Brian Davis takes a shot at editing the first two chapters of Dan Brown’s just released novel, The Lost Symbol. Davis’s comments, embedded in Brown’s manuscript in track changes format, are hilarious (if a bit snarky).

Finalists for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

Here are this year's five finalists for the $10,000 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize:

• American Rust by Philipp Meyer (Spiegel & Grau)
• The Cradle by Patrick Somerville (Little, Brown and Co.)
• Tinkers by Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press)
• The Vagrants by Yivun Lin (Random House)
• Woodsburner by John Pipkin from (Doubleday/Nan A. Talese)

I’m glad to see one title from a small publisher on the list (Tinkers). Last year’s winner was Hannah Tinti’s The Good Thief.

Oprah's Next Pick Revealed

It looks like the speculation about Oprah's next book club pick was accurate. Here's an update from GalleyCat:

Earlier this morning, USA Today ran an item with a brief statement from senior editor Ron Hogan explaining [GalleyCat's] prediction for Oprah Winfrey's next book club pick—we went with Uwem Akpan's short story collection Say You're One of Them based on the price-point data, but we also felt that it was a book that would speak to Oprah's heart. Just a few hours later, Washington Post book eview editor Ron Charles went on Twitter to report that the databases at Ingram, a major book distributor, had inadvertently revealed our hunches were correct: Akpan was Winfrey's pick.

I don't believe Oprah has ever chosen a short story collection before, so this is something new for her. Congratulations to Akpan, who basically just won the literary lottery.

The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville (a review)

The Lieutenant
4 out of 5: The author's note accompanying Kate Grenville’s latest novel describes The Lieutenant as "a work of fiction ... inspired by recorded events." The recorded events are those of the life of astronomer, mathematician, and linguist William Dawes, who traveled to New South Wales in 1788 as a soldier with the first load of British prisoners tasked with establishing a British colony. Grenville’s version of Dawes, named Daniel Rooke, quickly establishes himself as a recluse once in New South Wales. Rooke builds a solitary hut on a promontory and spends his time recording weather conditions and tracing the paths of the stars.

Perhaps because of his isolation from the larger settlement, Rooke befriends a group of natives, including a young girl who takes on the task of teaching Rooke her language:

What he had not learned from Latin or Greek he was learning from the people of New South Wales. It was this: you did not learn a language without entering into a relationship with the people who spoke it with you. His friendship with Tagaran was not a list of objects, or the words for things eaten or not eaten, thrown or not thrown. It was the slow constructing of the map of a relationship.

As Rooke forges relationships, tension increases between the other settlers and the natives, setting the stage for conflict.

In The Lieutenant, Grenville deftly avoids the stereotypes that so often haunt stories about the displacement of native populations by white settlement. Grenville’s simple prose subtly builds up to a dramatic event with significant moral implications. Perhaps because it is based on the historical record, Rooke’s story is never overly dramatic and always rings true. His experiences demonstrate the power of language and hint at the peaceful coexistence that could have been.

Goodbye to a Houston Legend

The beloved Alabama Bookstop closed for good on September 15th (one day before a fancy new Barnes and Noble location opened in the River Oaks Shopping Center on West Gray). The store, which occupied an old art deco theater on the corner of Shepherd and West Alabama, was a Houston legend.

An appreciation of the store in the Houston Press includes recollections of the store's heyday from John Cramer, a loyal store employee from 1994 until 2008. See, for example, this memory of the time Ozzy Osbourbe came in to the store:

He bought a book on genocide and another on venereal disease. He said the book on V.D. was for his daughter and was for informational purposes only, and he wanted everyone to know that although the book on genocide was for him, he was not a Nazi.

Those of you interested in what will happen to the 13,000 square foot space, read the speculations at Swamplot.

No More Obama Endorsements

Algonquin was hoping to include a quote from President Obama on the book jacket of Hard Work: A Life On and Off the Court, a memoir by University of North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams. The quote, which lauded Williams’s coaching abilities, was part of a statement made by the President during a campaign stop last year. Algonquin removed the quote from the design of the book jacket after its legal team concluded that “sitting presidents cannot make commercial endorsements.” The White House press office confirmed the conclusion: “As a general matter, the White House does not authorize the use of the President’s likeness or words for commercial purposes.” Hard Work is scheduled for publication in November.

Gourmet Rhapsody by Muriel Barbery (a review)

2.5 out of 5: In Gourmet Rhapsody, Muriel Barbery's first novel (though her second to be translated into English), internationally-renowned food critic Monsieur Pierre Arthens is on his deathbed. Before he dies, however, Arthens must identify one final flavor: "A forgotten flavor, lodged in my deepest self, and which has surfaced at the twilight of my life as the only truth ever told during that lifetime—or the only true thing ever accomplished."

As Arthens recollects memorable meals and favorite foods, including grilled sardines, freshly baked bread, orange sorbet, and mayonnaise, he dismisses taste after taste as "not the one I seek now at the gates of death." Arthens's musings are full of appreciations of simple foods, like this homage to a tomato eaten straight from the garden:

The raw tomato, devoured in the garden when freshly picked, is a horn of abundance of simple sensations, a radiating rush in one's mouth that brings with it every pleasure. The resistance of the skin—slightly taut, just enough; the luscious yield of the tissues, their seed-filled liqueur oozing to the corners of one's lips, and that one wipes away without any fear of staining one's fingers; this plump little globe unleashing a flood of nature inside us: a tomato, an adventure.

Tag-teaming with Arthens's memories are chapters told from the various perspectives of Arthens's family (including pets), his doctor, his lovers, and even the concierge Renée (a major character in The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Barbery's bestselling second novel). These chapters shed light on Arthens's complicated character and also raise some interesting moral and philosophical questions. Unfortunately, each satellite character gets only one brief chapter, and the end result is insubstantial and unsatisfying.

Arthens's disjointed recollections add to this novel's problem of substance (or, rather, lack thereof). Arthens's desire to identify one final flavor feels contrived, and his reminiscences are food-focused at the expense of developing any sort of cohesive narrative. As an appreciation of food, Gourmet Rhapsody achieves more success than it does as a novel but, ultimately, it fails to live up to its full potential. Arthens's baroque descriptions lack naturalness and charm, and his voice often feels too studied and haughty. If you want to read something by Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a safer bet. If you're interested in food writing, your time is better spent with a master of that genre: for example, M.F.K. Fisher.

Dan Brown "Temporarily Crippled"

Why Dan Brown fans had to wait so long (about 6 years) for his follow up to The Da Vinci Code:

I was already writing The Lost Symbol when I started to realize The Da Vinci Code would be big. The thing that happened to me and must happen to any writer who's had success is that I temporarily became very self-aware. Instead of writing and saying, 'This is what the character does,' you say, 'Wait, millions of people are going to read this.' It's sort of like a tennis player who thinks too hard about a stroke--you're temporarily crippled. [Then] the furor died down, and I realized that none of it had any relevance to what I was doing. I'm just a guy who tells a story.

Get the full intervew at Parade.

Booker Commentary

Lorna Bradbury, the Telegraph’s fiction editor, thinks this year’s Booker shortlist “outstrips even 2005 in terms of literary merit” and “concentrates on quality and seriousness.” (The 2005 shortlist included novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, and John Banville.) Bradbury remarks on the number of female authors to make this year’s shortlist (3 out of 6), a fact which she finds “striking.” Also, it’s notable that, excepting J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime, this year’s list “contains barely a whiff of anything tricksy or post-modern. These novels are old-fashioned affairs concerned with the pleasures of plot and character.”

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, a historical novel about the life and times of Thomas Cromwell, is the current favorite to win the prize, but Bradbury’s money is on A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book. Like me, Bradbury is “saddened” that William Trevor’s Love and Summer—a novel she describes as “quite his best novel in years”—didn’t make the shortlist.

Prescient or Short-Sighted?

Cushing Academy, a private, co-ed boarding school 90 minutes outside of Boston, has made the dramatic decision to eliminate all books from its library and to create a digital "learning center." The Boston Globe reports the learning center will be populated with laptop-friendly study carrels and flat-screen TVs "that will project data from the Internet." The reference desk will be replaced with "a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine." (Cappuccino for high schoolers?) Those students actually "looking to spend more time with literature" can use one of the learning center's eighteen e-readers. Those not lucky enough to get a reader, will have to read their texts on their computers. (Would you care to read Moby Dick on a computer?)

James Tracy, Cushing's headmaster, comments, "When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books. ... We see this as a model for the 21st-century school." Aside from a few children's books and collectable works, Cushing's 20,000-volume collection of books will be given away to local schools and libraries. Liz Vezina, Cushing's librarian for 17 years, feels differently:

It makes me sad. ... I’m going to miss [the books.] I love books. I’ve grown up with them, and there’s something lost when they’re virtual. There’s a sensual side to them - the smell, the feel, the physicality of a book is something really special.

(Amen to that.) Alexander Coyle, chairman of Cushing's history department, favors a less extreme approach: "A lot us are wondering how this changes the dignity of the library, and why we can’t move to increase digital resources while keeping the books.’’

Don't Quit Your Day Job

Many writers have a day job to support their writing. For T.S. Eliot, his day job was an essential part of his writing. A new exhibition opening later this month at the British Library shines a spotlight on Eliot's career with publishing house Faber, and, before Faber, his position as a bank clerk with Lloyd's. Eliot was attached to his jobs and found them critical to his writing. So much so that when the Bloomsbury group arranged a fund to provide Eliot with an income of £500 per year so he could write without the constraint of a job, Eliot refused.

Rachel Foss, British Library's curator of modern literary manuscripts, explains that Eliot was embarrassed and irritated by the Eliot Fellowship Fund:

This idea that Eliot should be freed from the drudgery of work misses the point that he was actually very interested in the minutiae of every day life - he was a commentator on the quotidian, and really thrived on the routine of office life at Lloyd's and then later at Faber.

The exhibition—titled In a Bloomsbury Square: T.S. Eliot the Publisher—runs from mid-September through mid-December in the Folio Society Gallery at the British Library.

Rhyming Life & Death by Amos Oz (a review)

Rhyming Life and Death
3 out of 5: This slim, inventive novel covers an 8-hour period in which a well-known author (referred to, simply, as the Author) participates in a reading from his recently published book. All the while, the Author concocts fictional personalities and stories about the real people he encounters during the course of the evening. Two men in a café, observed as the Author eats a pre-reading omelet, become “a gangster’s henchman” and his “agent of sorts, or perhaps a hairdryer salesman.” The waitress is cast in a week-long romance with “the reserve goalkeeper of Bnei-Yehuda football team.”

During the reading and afterwards, as the Author walks the city until 4 a.m., his stories spin out into ever greater layers of complexity and interrelatedness, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. Through it all, the Author questions why he writes and discovers his art has become his only connection to the world:

[H]e continues to watch them and write about them so as to touch them without touching, and so that they touch him without really touching him. … He is covered in shame and confusion because he observes them all from a distance, from the wings, as if they all exist only for him to make use of in his books. And with the shame comes a profound sadness that he is always an outsider, unable to touch or to be touched ….

Rhyming Life & Death is an interesting conceptual novel. Oz’s deconstruction of the creative process is unsettling because it reveals just how quickly we, the readers, will adopt a story line as a kind of “reality,” at least with respect to the protagonist. While this book’s cerebral pleasures are many, its emotional resonance falls flat. It’s difficult to care much about the Author’s roughly-drawn characters and sketchy stories, making Rhyming Life & Death more of an engaging philosophical exercise than a novel.

2009 Man Booker Prize Shortlist

The shortlist for the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction was just announced:

• The Children's Book (Chatto and Windus) by A.S. Byatt
• Summertime (Harvill Secker) by J.M. Coetzee
• The Quickening Maze (Jonathan Cape) by Adam Foulds
• Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate) by Hilary Mantel
• The Glass Room (Little Brown UK) by Simon Mawer
• The Little Stranger (Virago) by Sarah Waters

About the shortlist, Chair of the Judges, James Naughtie, commented:

The choice will be a difficult one. There is thundering narrative, great inventiveness, poetry and sharp human insight in abundance. These are six writers on the top of their form. They've given us great enjoyment already, and it's a measure of our confidence in their books that all of us are looking forward to reading them yet again before we decide on the prizewinner. What more could we ask?

This is a short list full of veterans. J.M. Coetzee could be the first author to win the Booker Prize three times if he wins this year with Summertime. His previous winners include Disgrace (1999) and Life & Times of Michael K (1983). A.S. Byatt has the opportunity to pick up a second Booker for The Children’s Book. She won the Prize in 1990 with Possession. Hilary Mantel's been on the Booker longlist (Beyond Black, 2005), and Sarah Waters has twice been on the shortlist (Fingersmith, 2002 and The Night Watch, 2006). Both Mantel and Byatt have been judges of the prize in the past.

I’m disappointed William Trevor’s fantastic novel Love and Summer didn’t make the cut, though I’m glad James Lever’s Me Cheeta, the purported autobiography of Cheeta, the chimpanzee who starred in the Tarzan films of the 1930s and 40s, isn’t on the short list. Also missing are the three debut novelists (Samantha Harvey, James Lever, Ed O'Loughlin) included on the long list. To see the rest of the long list, go here. This year’s winner will be announced on October 6th.

Subway Reading

In an article in the New York Times, Alexis Mainland explores reading on the subway, which she describes as “a New York ritual.” In preparation for her piece, Mainland “spent 12 hours crisscrossing four boroughs underground, asking people what they were reading and why.” The results of her work are interesting (a patent lawyer learning Italian for the heck of it, two Talmud-reading brothers) and entertaining (as actress learning lines for an audition for a movie remake of The A-Team).

The Publishing Industry Gets a New Sitcom

As reported in Reuters and elsewhere, CBS has acquired the script for a situational comedy tentatively titled Open Books and has committed to produce a pilot. Written by Will & Grace alumna Gail Lerner, Open Books features a book editor and her circle of friends. Lerner decided to focus the show on publishing, she states, because "I like the frustrations, the collaborative process. ... Publishing is a lot like sitcoms. Although both are supposedly dying, that only makes people more passionate about creating the next great novel or show."

At Entertainment Weekly's Shelf Life, Kate Ward is "optimistic about Open Books, providing it stays away from sappy romantic storylines."

The Locust and the Bird by Hanan Al-Shaykh (a review)

The Locust and the Bird: My Mother's Story
2.5 out of 5: In this “memoir,” Lebanese writer Hanan Al-Shaykh tells the story of her mother Kamila. Forced into marriage when only 14 years old and when in love with another man, Kamila spends the rest of her life seeking happiness and love within the constraints of an oppressive society. Al-Shaykh’s fictionalized portrayal, written as a first-person account of Kamila’s life from early youth through death, provides a rare insider’s view into a cloistered world.

Kamila narrates her story with refreshing directness, but the simplicity of the prose often lacks lyricism and emotion. Further, while I respect Kamila’s unrelenting strength in the face of great oppression, I was repeatedly frustrated by her ever-present superficiality and immaturity. In typical fashion, when a neighbor gives Kamila a coin to make a devotion to Sitt Zaynab during a pilgrimmage, Kamila decides to keep the coin for herself: "Forgive me, Sitt Zaynab. ... You've so many jewels here. Let me keep this coin. Let's pretend I've put the coin inside the enclosure." In another instance, stuck in a horrible predicament, Kamila makes a promise to God that she will never set foot in her lover's room again if God will protect her from discovery. God delivered his half of the bargain, but Kamila "found I wasn't putting on my shoes and going home." Undoubtedly, such falseness was necessary for Kamila’s survival, but it’s not a particularly likeable trait in a protagonist. The Locust and the Bird reveals an unknown and interesting world in a less-than-compelling way.

Literary License Will Be Back Tomorrow

Dumitru Tsepeneag on Translation: “My words had to die so I could survive”

I just read Dumitru Tsepeneag's Pigeon Post (Dalkey 2008, translated from the French by Jane Kuntz) and, much to my delight, discovered the transcript of a June 2008 interview of Tsepeneag included with the novel. Tsepeneag, a Romanian, was living in exile in Paris when he wrote Pigeon Post. Although Tsepeneag wrote his early works in Romanian, his native language, he switched to writing in French sometime towards the end of the 1970s. Here’s an excerpt from the interview in which he explains the switch:

Why did I start writing in French? Well, to be perfectly honest, I switched to French to please my French publisher, who told me that my books did not sell well and translations were very costly.

Sound familiar? During the same interview Tsepeneag also explained his discomfort with translation:

[W]hat worried me in the process of translation was that my Romanian words were serving the only purpose of finding French equivalents for them—my translator’s words, the only ones that would be visible in the end. My words were mere passageways, humble and ephemeral ones, condemned to complete anonymity, buried at the bottom of a drawer. In any event, I couldn’t publish my books in Romania, they were forbidden there because I was an opponent of the communist regime. In such conditions, writing had become a sort of mortal execution: my words had to die so that I, the writer, could survive as an author.

After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Tsepeneag began writing in Romanian again as a kind of revenge.

See the full interview here.

Pigeon Post by Dumitru Tsepeneag (a review)

Pigeon Post
4 out of 5: Pigeon Post, a novel by Romanian author Dumitru Tsepeneag, challenges our underlying assumptions about novels and their writers. Rejecting traditional narrative structure, Pigeon Post instead is made up of fragments ostensibly composed by an anxious writer, named Ed, struggling to write a novel. Bits of dialog and memories mingle with recipes for herbal teas, a story involving a chess master, and descriptions of scenes Ed glimpses from his apartment window. To enliven his novel-writing project, Ed turns to three longtime friends (Edward, Edgar, and Edmund) and solicits memories from them to add to his novel-in-progress. In this collaborative writing project, it’s never clear what’s real and what’s imagined, what’s part of Ed’s novel and what’s part of Ed’s daily life. Indeed, it’s quite likely Ed’s three “helpers” are nothing more than facets of his own imagination, each with a distinct artistic vision for the novel. In an interview in June 2008, Tsepeneag likened Pigeon Post to "a creative writing workshop.”

Slowly, out of the tangle of seemingly unrelated fragments, several cohesive story lines emerge, but they are never fully explored. Nor does Pigeon Post offer much in the way of thematic development (in that same interview, Tsepeneag admits to no more than “the shadow of a theme”). Early in the novel, in a passage where Ed describes his writing project, Tsepeneag signals what kind of reader he’s hoping to reach:

When all’s said and done, I’m piecing together a puzzle that doesn’t exist. In the insane hope that when I’m through, I’ll manage to put forward a more or less consistent story. I’m counting a little on the reader here, on the kind that’s capable of hanging in there to the end, or remaining active and alert like a detective in a dentist’s waiting room.

Pigeon Post is frustrating and unsatisfying on many levels, mostly those related to our desire to read a good tale in an accessible form. Viewed as an experiment in structure and identity, however, this novel is a deliciously complex subversion of our expectations, right up to the elegant twist at the very end.

Conscience Point by Erica Abeel (a review)

Conscience Point: a novel
3 out of 5: Madeleine “Maddy” Shaye, an accomplished concert pianist and television personality, lives a content life with her adopted daughter and her longtime boyfriend, Nick Ashcroft. As you might expect, Maddy’s perfect life begins to slowly unravel bit by bit, first her career and then her family. Abeel maintains a high level of suspense as the story progresses, skipping from Maddy’s past to the present and back again.

Abeel’s prose is similarly nimble, though its studied flippancy takes some getting used to. This passage describing Maddy’s culinary failure and Nick’s save is typical of Abeel’s style throughout:

He cooked—partly by necessity. She'd curdled the beef Stroganoff for a dinner party, but Nick just laughed it off; their unspoken compact was never blame the other; the word "Strogo" became their code for gastric alert. Sure, he was bossy as hell in the kitchen, and as for the cleanup ... But ta-da! he'd set out steaming bowls of zuppa di pesce, exuding essence of sea.

Abeel’s upbeat, casual prose seems inconsistent with Conscience Point’s overriding darkness. It’s this darkness—a kind of pervasive Gothic atmosphere—that is this novel’s most compelling feature. Other redeeming qualities include Abeel’s graceful treatment of Maddy’s musical career and the supporting character of Violet, Nick’s sister. Although Violet rarely appears in the novel, her force is apparent throughout. Overall, Conscience Point is a suspenseful family drama written in somewhat distracting prose.

Profile of Guillermo Rosales

The Miami Herald has a nice profile of the life and some of the works of Cuban writer Guillermo Rosales, known for his writings depicting “the psychic blowback of life under communism.” Blacklisted by Fidel Castro's government and plagued by schizophrenia, Rosales fled to Miami in 1980. He spent the next thirteen years in and out of mental institutions and eventually killed himself on July 6, 1993 at the age of 47.

The Herald’s profile includes an in-depth examination of Rosales’s The Halfway House, an autobiographical novel first published in 1987 and based on Rosales’s time in a mental institution in Little Havana. New Directions published a new translation of The Halfway House in May of this year. Saturday's Glory, Sunday's Resurrection, a finalist for Cuba's 1968 Casa de las Americas award and perhaps Rosales’s best known work, will be published in English by New Directions in 2010.

Stephenie Meyer's Sells Wuthering Heights

Thanks to Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, Emily Bronte's classic novel Wuthering Heights is enjoying a comeback. Not only is Wuthering Heights the favorite book of one of Twilight's lead characters (Bella Swan), but the 1847 novel has been given a make-over with a new Twilight-inspired cover design.

The Telegraph reports that the edition with the new cover "has sold more than 10,000 copies in Waterstone's booksellers stores since May, more than twice as many as the traditional Penguin Classics edition." While I don't have an opinion on Meyer's bestselling series (or at least not one I'm willing to state in public), I'm glad to see so many people discovering a very worthy classic.

Accelerated Reader

In an essay at the NYT Book Review, Susan Straight bemoans "the rise of Accelerated Reader, a 'reading management' software system that helps teachers track student reading through computerized comprehension tests and awards students points for books they read based on length and difficulty, as measured by a scientifically researched readability rating." Never having heard of Accelerated Reader, I found Straight's essay informative and well-reasoned. If poorly implemented, Accelerated Reader has some frightening consequences:

Librarians and teachers report that students will almost always refuse to read a book not on the Accelerated Reader list, because they won’t receive points. They base their reading choices not on something they think looks interesting, but by how many points they will get. The passion and serendipity of choosing a book at the library based on the subject or the cover or the first page is nearly gone, as well as the excitement of reading a book simply for pleasure.

If you have children in a school that's adopted the Accelerated Reader system, you'll want to read Straight's essay.

Love or Something Like It by Deirdre Shaw (a review)

Love or Something Like It: A Novel
3.5 out of 5: Love or Something Like It, Deirdre Shaw’s debut novel, follows Lacey Brennan out to Los Angeles as she leaves New York and moves in with her new husband Toby, a T.V. writer. In the glitzy world of L.A., the parties are extravagant, friendships are fickle, competition for glamorous jobs in the movie and TV industry is fierce, and everyone is fueled by optimistic dreams:

Everyone who came to L.A. believed in the possibility, perhaps even the inevitability, of their own success. They would get the audition, write the script, pitch the idea that would send them shooting to the top. We had all just turned thirty. No one entertained the concept of becoming a failed artist. This was not part of the dream.

Shaw has close personal experience with the complicated world of L.A., and her honest, nuanced portrayal of the city—nicely told via Lacey’s unguarded and raw voice—is far from the stereotypical view we’ve come to expect. What begins as an exciting adventure quickly turns sour when Lacey finds herself in a dead-end job with a failing marriage:

I could grow old here never having reached my dreams, not even one, without ever knowing any sense of success; I could die out here or disappear here, sink into drink and despair here, and no one would notice.

Love or Something Like It reveals both the ups and the downs of this City of Dreams with wit and sensitivity. At times, this novel’s chapters read like independent short stories rather than parts of a cohesive whole. This minor complaint is easily overcome by Shaw’s accomplished writing and her clear empathy for her characters. By the end, you’ll feel like Lacey is one of your friends, and you’ll be proud of what she’s accomplished over the course of these 250 pages.

Pennsylvania Libraries in Jeopardy

Due to a two-month state budget impasse, the Library Journal reports that Pennsylvania's public libraries are in jeopardy. A lack of funding has already forced one branch to close (the Allentown South Branch), and others are preparing to close if relief doesn't come soon.

Philadelpha is facing what the city calls "'the most radical, painful, and unprecedented dismantling of City government'" since 1951, including the closing of all libraries and recreation centers, and massive cuts in almost all departments."

Joyce Carol Oates on Ted Kennedy

In a thoughtful essay in the Guardian, Joyce Carol Oates borrows a question posed by poet John Berryman--"Is wickedness soluble in art?"--and reframes it to consider the life of late Senator Ted Kennedy--"Is wickedness soluble in good deeds?" Ultimately, Oates suggests "individuals of dubious character and cruel deeds may redeem themselves in selfless actions."