I have no problems with D. Parvas’s disdain for “wasted youth” memoirs (Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, Rolling Away: My Agony With Ecstasy), but I’ve a number of problems with Parvas’s plot-based prescription for the genre:

Yup. That’s all you gotta do for a book deal — pop some pills.

I could have sworn you had to actually do something impressive, like, say win a Nobel Prize (like physicist Richard Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!) or at least have an extraordinary story to tell (like Jeannette Walls’ Glass Castle or Marjane Satrapi’s two-volume Persepolis)….

As one who reads for thoughts and language and rarely plot, I’d like to suggest that the boring and insignificant among us can sometimes write worthy memoirs, too. Edmund White’s Story of a Boy didn’t require Appalachia; Woolf’s diaries didn’t require Iran. More importantly: we deem A Bell Jar worthy reading despite its similarities in subject matter to Elizabeth Wurtzel’s much-loathed Prozac Nation.

By critiquing recent memoirs in terms of what their writers have or haven’t lived through, Parvas sets up the wrong axis for measuring autobiographies’ worth. If anything, Parvas’s preference for certain types (and amounts) of experience mirrors the same disinterest in the language and quality of a memoirist’s introspection that “wasted youth” memoirs 1) encourage and 2) are encouraged by.

… a very long poem. At least mine are, I hope. -Sherman Alexie
… a line drawing; every part is there to add to the whole and no unnecessary strokes are present. -Unattributed
… an iceberg: nine-tenths of its meaning is submerged. -Ernest Hemingway
… a stone thrown into a pond. -Ali Smith

… a wagon wheel: the spokes must be connected to the hub, or graceful movement is impossible. -Mary Gordon
… a knife—strongly made, well balanced, and with an absolute minimum of moving parts. -Michael Swanwick
… a sniper’s bullet. Fast and shocking. -Jeffery Deaver
… a slap in the face. It must immediately sting, make itself known at once, and it must leave a red mark for hours to come. -Martin Booth
… a commando operation. You have to get in quickly, set your charges, and get out, leaving the reader to be caught up in the blast. -Michael Chabon

… Quarter horse racing … Novels are like Thoroughbred racing. -Marian Bray
… a motorcycle - very exciting, very fast and dangerous, but I wouldn’t want to ride one across Europe. -Jonathan Carroll
… an airplane: it has many parts and flies only if it built with a careful eye on science and engineering. -James Wallace Harris
… a child’s kite, a small wonder, a brief, bright moment. - Sean O’Faolain

… a time-capsule. -Clive Barker
… a snapshot. -The Writers Bureau

… looking through a keyhole. A novel is a 360-degree panoramic window. -Matthew Klam
… lighting your way through a dark cave with a tiny birthday candle. -“Avi”
… being in a darkened room, [and] a novel is like being in a darkened field. -Dan Chaon
… a kiss in the dark from a stranger. -Stephen King
… a kick in the teeth in the dark from a stranger. -Cory Doctorow

… having an infatuation, while … a novel is like having a marriage. -Lan Samantha Chan
… engaging in a brief affair, [and] writing a novel is more like a marriage. -Sarah Edgson
… something you could do in a fit of passion … Writing a novel is more like a marriage. -Mary Morris
… a weekend guest, [and] a novel is like a divorced relative staying with you. -Lev Raphael

… screaming out loud. -Isabel Allende
… a dream; it follows its own rules. -Isabel Allende
… an arrow that has one shot … while a novel is like embroidering a tapestry. -Isabel Allende

… a tightly argued summation in a trial, whereas a novel is the whole case. -Michael Dorris
… a revelation, [and] a novel is an evolution. -Unattributed

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There is no technically convincing theory of the short story — it is technically a genre, not a form, but resists the definitions that usually cluster around both. There is the defining length (an unedifying fifty-page range), there is the short story’s lonely voice from a submerged population (Frank O’Connor’s famous hypothesis) and there are various “slices of life” ideas and notions of literary apprenticeship … All of these convey what happens sometimes — what happens a lot — but in lieu of a truly winning overriding theory, we should rely perhaps on simple descriptions, in which case the more the merrier. Let me throw some inot the pot. Many that I’ve heard — and used myself — are fashioned as metaphors comparing shorter and longer narratives, attempting to define the one through its relationship to the other. A short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film. A short story is a weekend guest; a novel is a long-term boarder. A story is a brick; a novel is a brick wall. And my favorite, the assymetrical a short story is a flower; a novel is a job.

… Unlike novels or poems, but more akin to a play, the short story is also an end-oriented form, and in the best ones the endings shine a light back upon the story illuminating its meaning with both surprise and inevitability. If a story is not always, therapeutically, an axe for the frozen sea within us, then it is at least a pair of brutally sharpened ice skates.

— Lorrie Moore, Best American Short Stories 2004

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Patenting a simile for the short story may be every author’s birthright, but one would hope authors recognized the lack of originality behind, and resulting from, the impulse. Strangely, though, even the most original writers can lose their taste for novelty when writing about the craft of the short story. Even if their language remains lively, their metaphors wry, their voices charming and assertive, they end up offering facile, unadventurous, ideas. What is a short story? Something compact and pure, a poem by way of story, a universe in miniature, etc.

Continue reading "A Short Story is Like ..."

So, it looks like Lorrie Moore was the judge for this year’s (upcoming) Best American Short Stories. From The Capital Times, “Wisconsin’s Progressive Newspaper”:

Madison writer Lorrie Moore, an acknowledged modern master of the short story, contemplates its appeal in her introduction to “The Best American Short Stories” of 2004, due out next month. “A story’s very shortness ensures its largeness of accomplishment,” Moore writes, “its selfhood and purity. Having long lost its ability to pay an author’s rent (in that golden blip between Henry James and television, F. Scott Fitzgerald, for one, wrote stories to fund his novels), the short story has been freed of its commercial life to became serious art, by virtually its every practitioner. As a result, short or long, a story lies less. It sings and informs and blurts. It has nothing to lose.”

I finally finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which probably only puts me about four years behind the rest of you. I read it compulsively all week, and I really enjoyed it, but I never fell head over heels for it. Other recent books I’ve read compulsively (In Cold Blood, The Quick & the Dead, The Wapshot Chronicle, to name a few) have not only enthralled me, they’ve filled me with a tingling creative desire, like a literary orgasm. When a book makes me actually crave the experience of sitting down to write, that’s when I know it’s Good. That never happened with Kav & Clay, and I say that as an enormous Mysteries of Pittsburgh fan. Reading Kav & Clay felt like watching a very good movie. Everything in the book fits together so neatly, in a way that makes films seem satisfying and literature seem contrived. Ergo, it came as little surprise yesterday when I discovered that the film adaptation (written by Chabon) is, in fact, in pre-production, starring Jude Law as Kavalier. Law is a fine actor, and easy on the eyes, but he sort of epitomizes the phrase Anglo-Saxon, and Kavalier is a dark, big-nosed Jewish guy from Prague.

I’ve been debating whether to post about this because it’s going to be hard to phrase exactly what my questions/concerns are in any sort of coherent way. But lack of coherence has never stopped me before, especially not in my writing, so here goes.

I totally lied about never finishing Cryptonomicon, and now that I’m finally done I’ve been tearing through shorter books as if they were those Rainbow Chips Deluxe cookies—you know, the ones with the fake M&Ms in them. Am I the only person over 15 who likes those? Anyway, I just read Jhumpa Lahiri’s new book, The Namesake.

Before I comment on the book itself, let me just state for the record that I adored Interpreter of Maladies and I’m not one of those people who scoffs at her Pulitzer. Some of the stories in that collection just killed me. I knew it would be a good idea for me to ramp down expectations for the novel.

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From the prologue to Wild Animus, by former Silicon Valley mogul Rich Shapero:

“Lindy Saltmarch regarded him mutely, her cheeks washed with tears. Beneath the band of her headset, a star-shaped scar flamed from her hairline. Rescue paraphernalia was piled beside her. The windshield cleared as the chopper came around the fumarole. Her fingers found the pendant on her sternum, lifting it to her lips. She kissed it as she peered down. The crater’s broken rim rose to rocky peaks in places, the snowy interior tumbled with ice and crossed by blue rifts. Seething solfatara rose from caves and pits, staining the snow lemon, and in a dozen places the crater’s bowl was streaked with rusty ash. At the base of an obelisk of ice, on a steep white slope gleaming with refrozen meltwater, a figure lay twisted. His head was dark and strangely enlarged, and his chest was splashed with blood. One leg verged the funnel of a steam vent, and the white tatters of his legging, eaten by volcanic acids, were flapping in the winds.

If this stuff floats your boat, and you happen to live in a hip, outdoorsy college town, you may be in luck. As part of a bold new marketing tactic, Too Far publishing (whose first and only release is Wild Animus) has hired “road warriors” to distribute free copies of the novel, according to the Missoula Independent. So far, thousands have been given away at outdoor concerts and festivals, mostly to “young dreamers” and �baby boomers who experienced the �60s first-hand.� The novel also comes free with a membership to Bookcrossing.com

I love free books as much as the next poor MFA grad, but can this possibly be a financially viable strategy for a small publisher? Or is it, as I suspect, merely an extravagant alternative to vanity publication for a wealthy would-be author?

Update: I hereby regret any snide and uncharitable sentiments I may have expressed regarding Mr. Shapero. Apparently, all proceeds from his book will be devoted to the protection of Alaskan wilderness areas. This officially makes him a better person than I, as any proceeds from my (hypothetical) future books will be devoted to booze and cigarettes. Still, I wonder whether Shapero will actually have any publishing profits with which to do good, if he keeps giving the book away. (Thanks for the tip, reader Joan!)

Every now and then I get the feeling that I’m actually inhabiting an alternate universe. The sole pupose of that universe (we’ll call it Universe X) is to exaggerate the failings of this universe (we’ll call it Universe A) to the point of satire. At first it all seems funny, but after a while, not so much. The book The American Prophecies: Ancient Scriptures Reveal Our Nation’s Future, which was number one on Amazon and BN.com yesterday, is also very popular in Universe X. The author of this lovely tome, a Michael Evans, “does not hide his vehement anti-Muslim leanings,” according to the Amazon review. What he does do, apparently, is use “biblical prophecy” to explain that “America’s problems—including the attack of 9-11—are indications of God’s fury over America’s split allegiance between the two famous descendents of Abraham: Ishmael and Isaac.” When people start reading the Bible like it’s the freaking Da Vinci Code, things can only get worse here in Universe A.

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Those of you who have been keeping up with the debate over Nicholson Baker’s latest, Checkpoint, have probably already read the New York Times’ review, but I figured I’d link to it anyway. I have to say, though the review started out a bit vitriolic, I’m not entirely sure how it comes down. I’m curious to read the book, but I’m cheap so I’ll probably wait for paperback or try to score a copy at the library. I have to admit to getting a kick out of some of Baker’s stuff in the past, The Everlasting Story of Nory notwithstanding. I enjoyed the pseudo-illicit thrill of reading Vox and The Fermata in public, knowing they looked like literary fiction but were super-smutty. But maybe it’s just that I haven’t been on a date in a while. And I thought The Mezzanine was great, though it appears to have set David Foster Wallace on a mission to trump Baker’s use of footnotes with his endnotes. I think Baker wins in a page-by-page analysis. Compare Baker with even the most endnote-riddled page of Infinite Jest and you’ll see what I mean.

…for Donald Justice. (info via Mister Nouse.)

If you’d like to read some of his poetry, you can find it here and here and here.

Lewis Carroll’s scrapbooks are now available for viewing online, thanks to the LOC. As you might expect, his amateur child porn is not on display. This little girl however, is at least as disturbing. (Via Boing Boing.)

Janet Maslin looks at recent or upcoming offerings by James Patterson, Danielle Steel, Stephen King, and others in a new installment of “Crowd Pleasers.”

On Danielle Steel’s character descriptions: She would rather focus on inadvertent fabulousness, as in: “She had never paid much attention to the impact she had on men, she was always too busy thinking and talking about a variety of topics.”

About Christopher Andersen’s latest: “Sex, power, money, lies, scandal, tragedy and betrayal were the things that defined the public lives of both women,” he writes, by way of explaining how “American Evita” equates Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton with Eva Perón.

Describing Drive Me Crazy, by Eric Jerome Dickey: This novel’s main character, an ex-con turned chauffeur called Driver, is the kind of guy who can say “you’re silk and lace in a blue jean world” and get away with it. Mr. Dickey’s characters have enough sultry self-confidence to suggest, at their best, a Prince song on paper.

Russell Smith, writing for the Globe and Mail, wonders why Canadian fiction is so insistent upon distinguishing green things:

You have a character who is a sea captain or a railway engineer or a prostitute, and he or she looks along the railway tracks behind the old house (you know, the one that he/she is going to find his/her mother’s old letters in), and this person’s gaze casually registers milkweed, burdock and something-wort (dusty, in poignant decline, this ragged, humble, valiant greenery). Or he/she notes the receding vistas of spruce and cedar, occasionally punctuated by elm and beech.

Smith goes on to ask, “Why do writers find this such romantic lexical territory?” — a good question, but one he intends as a statement, as in, fucking romanticism. So, instead of pursuing the question to an answer, he launches into a critique of writers who, intoxicated by “the natural and the language used to describe it,” hoist upon their characters inauthentic knowledge.

How did this brakeman/bartender/ballerina come to know all these words? It is, after all, through a character’s eyes that we see most fictional landscapes. Is this not just the author showing off a fine literary/scientific knowledge that this specific character shouldn’t have?

I agree: authors who do that are annoying. But I’m also annoyed that Smith settles for a lame “showing off” hypothesis. The question is, why show off with that? “Showing off” is not a simple impulse, to which other things can be reduced; good analysis would realize how culturally mediated that term is, and ask why what’s being “shown off” has value. If naming plants is simply meant to show off knowledge, for example, wouldn’t such insecure precision show up elsewhere (in descriptions of architecture, food, clothing, etc.)? Why not examine the intended effect, or the unexamined and inherited literary mode, of naming nature? Does it neutralize the dangers of “pathetic fallacies,” or serve as the modern incarnation of Romanticism’s reliance on theology? Or, does it simply, as this page suggests, directly and indirectly criticize modernity? Or, is it an attempt at forging, belonging to, or demarcating, a national literature?

Related links:
-What is ecocriticism?
-“In the green team: James Hopkin looks at how eco-critics are sending ripples through literature”
-“Forget deconstruction—today’s hippest literary critics have gone green”
-Regionalism and ecocriticism
-Religion and Nature Writing in Canada

Update: Read the comments for some great points by Steve (of onepotmeal) and others.

“The town of Hope, where I was born, has very good feng shui.”

So begins Clinton’s memoir, or so it does in China — where, Kitabkhana writes, My Life has been thoroughly “sanitised by… translators and book pirates.”

Here’s another, more fruity, example of the “sanitized” memoir’s prose, as provided by Sky News:

“She (Hillary) was as beautiful as a princess. I told her my name is Big Watermelon.”

-Slate reports on Jane Smiley’s “epistolary relationship with the New York Times.” “Depending on what’s going on in the world, I send them a letter every day,” the writer says. “Some days I send two.” (And some days she wears Sunglasses After Dark and poses for a pic like one I’ve never seen before.)

-Also up at Slate: Summary Judgments of The Irresponsible Self and n+1. (n+1 on The Believer: “Mere belief is hostile to the whole idea of thinking.”)

-Dear Mister Mailer “is a year of weekly letters Tseverin Furey wrote to literary legend Norman Mailer, from February 2003 to February 2004.” 

-WordCount is an elegant and interactive ranking of the 86,800 most frequently used words in English, and is best used with disregard to the ideas espoused on its “about” page:

Observing closely ranked words tells us a great deal about our culture. For instance, “God” is one word from “began”, two words from “start”, and six words from “war”. Another sequence is “america ensure oil opportunity”. Conspiracists unite! As ever, the more one explores, the more is revealed.

-Related: wordmap, which “creates a spring-based graph of word similarity.”

-JK Rowling has never heard of eugenics and, possibly, Nazism. To quote a headline from the Scotsman: “Author ‘chilled’ to learn Harry’s half-blood status has Nazi parallels.”

-Moorish Girl reports that film rights to Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran have been sold, and a reader writes in to Maud about Hollywood’s vampiric appetite for books.

-Earlier today, OGIC provided excerpts from, and commentary on, the work of M.F.K. Fisher —a writer I’d never heard of, but who seems like ideal reading for lonely baths, nights without electricity, and agrophobic mornings — the touchstones of my life.

-Wired poses a not-so-simple question to Sam Tanenhaus, Deborah Treisman and Lynne Truss: “Would Moby Dick be better if Melville had used a word processor?” Generously, Maud posts 2/3 of their answers — which, unfortunately, are not available online.

-BoingBoing reports that blogger Simon Cozens has begun translating The Pillow Book (Makura no Soshi) into English, and is blogging the results.

-Andrea (Like the Red Panda) posts the first chapter of her second novel, named To Feel Stuff. (And, in less exciting news, I recently revised and posted a three year-old prose poem/short story.)

-Rake’s Progress, extending “Baker Watch” to Day 27, finds another senseless anti-Baker quote at MichNews.com, where Barbara J. Slock (of Republican and Proud) writes, “This book is nothing more than a thinly veiled assassination plot against President Bush. Written as fiction so he will not arrested, Baker makes no secret that it is the sitting president that he hates so much that he daydreams about someone killing him.” Further “Baker Watch” readings: Days 21, 17, 16, 8, and 7.

-Kevin Smokler’s brainchild, the “Virtual Book Tour,” arranges for authors to tour the web from home, guest-posting throughout a day or week at popular blogs and websites. Today (update: not anymore), author MJ Rose, promoting The Halo Effect, “tours” Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind and TEV.
So far, Rose has linked (on both blogs, for insurance) to the Chicago Sun-Times piece “The End of Books,” where we find this Tour-reflexive quote from a rep at HarperCollins: “Television, the radio, the Internet, video games — all the things that are supposedly taking up consumer time — I only see them as giving us an advantage and helping us to market our book product.” But, if the Virtual Tour fails to bring in readers, Rose has a backup plan for online book publicity: web raffles for a “Halo Effect charm bracelet!”

& industry news:

• With a six-figure bid, Ginjer Buchanan at Berkley/Ace wins publishing rights to Douglas Clegg’s vampire trilogy, The Vampyricon. Clegg’s agent, providing the PW report its necessary — one-part redundant, one-part optimistic — Rice reference, catch-phrases the trilogy as “Anne Rice Meets the Arthurian Legends.”

• Riverhead publisher Cindy Spiegel picks up rights to James Martin’s The Meaning of the 21st Century: Humanity’s Greatest Challenge —a title that, by offering two questions but no answers, seems as large and mysterious as the book’s six-figure deal.

• Simon & Schuster reports a sales gain of almost 13% in its second quarter and, ramming elbows deeper into the competition, brings on board Justin Loeber, formerly of HarperCollins, as Atria Books’ VP director of publicity.

• IDW Publishing announces that Editor-in-Chief Jeff Mariotte’s will be replaced by Chris Ryall, “of Movie Poop Shoot.com.” In this particular case, I wonder if a lack of credentials might inspire greater confidence.
  • Related: BookSquare, questioning IDW’s stated commitment to independent publishing, writes, “Oh sure, it looks good on the surface, but we do wonder if unleasing books based on television series such as 24 and CSI sends a strong ‘down with the man’ message.”

While politicians’ (mis)interpretations of fact have often called upon “poetic license,” this may be the first time a politician’s interpretation of poetry has been criticized as counter-factual.

Aleksandar Hemon, writing for Slate, calls Daniel Wagner’s A Movie … and a Book “the worst book I have ever voluntarily read.”

The significance of Wagner’s scribbling is that it is exactly what you end up with if publishing and fiction writing become a pursuit of cheap hipness and movie rights. The blatant soliciting for a movie option altogether mocks the obsolescent category of literate readers—A Movie … and a Book is an awful movie treatment undercover as a godawful novel. If Wagner’s début represents a new cynicism in the industry currently enmeshed in a publishing frenzy, the day when editors will hire some good-looking people to pretend to be writers—the literary equivalent of ‘N Sync—could be only weeks away.

But, if bad books rely on formulas, so do reviews of them: a reviewer traces a bad book back to an equally bad trend — and the trend, more often than not, amounts to how such a bad book got sold and written. Hemon’s review, though, adds this twist: publishers know how bad their books are, and simply call the adjective irrelevent.

As if we didn’t already suspect writers of harboring rock star-sized ambitions, complete with unchaperoned groupies and free designer threads, Ed Park, writing for the Village Voice, notes that book titles have started to sound a lot like popular bands’ names.

Since the ’60s, bands have tried on book titles for size, with results inspired (the Velvet Underground, from a book on s&m by one Michael Leigh, a copy of which was found lying on the Bowery by a VU associate) and maybe not so much (the Doors, from Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell). Now comes a mirror move. In perhaps the first significant titling trend since the fin-de-siècle proliferation of occupational-sounding tags (The Intuitionist, The Verificationist, The Catastrophist, et al.), there’s a batch of current novels that sound a lot like band names: Duncan Sprott’s The Ptolemies, Keith Ridgway’s The Parts, George Hagen’s The Laments.

But, given that I rarely have to look up band names, the real question, I think, is how a common article (“the”) came to be the harbinger, and cliché, of the cutting-edge. (Link via the ever-readable RP.)

Related: “For a jaded generation of late twenty- and early thirtysomethings, literature is filling the slot once occupied by nightclubs, records, trucker caps and magazines,” writes the London Times. The article (found via bookslut) goes on to call cult author JT Leroy “[literature’s] own radical underground pop star” and, further down, lists today’s “hip-lit heroes” — a phrasing even more heinous than the easily-abused genre name “chick-lit.”

As two Key West bars fight over which was Papa’s favorite, and the owner of Hemingway’s last house quarrels with its neighbors over opening the house to public tours, one contest concerning Hemingway has come to its yearly, and peaceful, resolution. According to Reuters, John Stubbings, a 65-year old realtor from North Carolina, “beat out a teetotaling short story writer from Kazakhstan and nearly 140 other snowy-haired, bearded men from around the world in this year’s Ernest Hemingway Look-Alike Contest.” The article continues,

In a memorable tribute, first-time contestant Vladimir Malikov — a pensioner from Almaty, Kazakhstan — presented Stubbings with a gold-trimmed emerald green hat and a symbolic donkey representing good luck.

An avid Hemingway fan and short story writer, Malikov, 65, sold his possessions and collected donations to fulfill his dream of attending the event.

Just caught this post over at MeFi:

“Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script.”

Eunoia ("beautiful thinking") is the shortest word in the English language that contains all five vowels. It is also the title of a poetry collection by Canadian author Christian Bok. In addition to writing each chapter using only words that contain one vowel, (Flash presentation of Chapter "E") Bok also greatly limits himself in other ways. An amazing accomplishment that won the $40 000 Griffith Poetry Prize in 2002, Eunoia is best experienced in its spoken form. (MP3 links)
(If you don’t know Bok’s poetry, you still might know his other work. He has also created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon.)

“A sad, shabby truth about me: I can’t tell if poetry scans,” CAAF writes. “This presented a bit of a problem in college as I was, um, training to be a poet.”

I hear you, loud and clear, sans stresses. I’ve always assumed my inability to scan poetry was related to my constant (and famous-among-friends) mispronunciation of common English words — in turn, related to either learning a large part of my vocabulary from my French father or a childhood head trauma (I used to fall sideways off park slides; I don’t know how). Or, again, maybe my inability is related to a sad, complete lack of musical talent. (“Grouping, meter, duration, contour, and timbral similarity are mind/brain systems shared by music and language, whereas linguistic syntax and semantics and musical pitch relations are systems not shared by the two domains.”)

Continue reading "please, i don't need more stress"

-Andrea, author of Like the Red Panda, has posted a FAQ on her blog in response to “the influx of emails asking the same writerly questions.” Writerly questions include “What was your query letter like?” and “Can I send you excerpts of my own work, with the hopes that you’ll pass it onto your agent?” (Can I?)

-The Lit Saloon criticizes the lack of respect accorded to P.O.D. books. “How can readers possibly respect reviewers who pre-judge books solely based on how they are published ? Isn’t that exactly the sort of attitude that undermines and threatens a true literary culture… ?”

-A quote from Janet Maslin’s latest review, titled “Ronnie’s Awfully Fertile for a Dead Guy”: “Philip likes to read Anne Sexton’s poetry. This only heightens this story’s doomy intimations.” And, later: “Not one but two characters are attacked with shovels.”

-When the NY Times announced it was serializing The Great Gatsby as part of its “Great Summer Read,” lit bloggers asked, why not serialize new or unknown fiction? Unfortunately, not all new fiction is good, and USA Today is kicking off its own attempt at serialized fiction with Chip Kidd’s The Learners, “a sequel of sorts” to Kidd’s debut novel, The Cheese Monkeys. A USA Today article promises “a new chapter of his exclusive, seven-part novella” will be available online each Thursday at openbook.usatoday.com. And if you don’t know what to make of the adjective “exclusive,” the USA Today article also mentions that “Kidd plans to expand his novella into a full-length book, tentatively set for release in 2006.” (If anyone wants exclusive rights to drafts of my novel-in-progress, in exchange for one month’s rent money, drop me a line at NathalieC at aol dot com.)

-Pop Matters reviews W.G. Sebald: A Critical Companion, and calls the book’s essays “intellectually astute, critically observant and deeply informative,” and “in some cases … also exquisitely written.” Link found at Mark’s.

-Golden Rule Jones links to a short Chicago Sun-Times piece on Marilynne Robinson’s anticipated, upcoming, follow-up to Housekeeping — reminding me that, five months ago, I meant to post my responses to a reading Robinson gave from Gilead, the new novel. While I find (or, given the state of my apartment, search in vain for) my notes from the reading, I’d like to direct your attention to an excerpt from Robinson’s essay, “”The Tyranny of Petty Coercion,” from the latest issue of Harper’s.

-Lastly, I recommend the post “Dude Does Not Write Like a Lady,” over at the Cupcake series. Topics discussed therein: the preferential treatment given to white boys in workshops, and contemporary fiction’s need for more large breasts and wet t-shirts.

Powells.com, celebrating its 10th year online, is hosting an essay contest asking readers to describe their “most memorable reading experience of the last ten years.” For inspiration, the site has also posed the question to professional writers and posted their responses — among them, this reflection on genre fiction by Michael Cunningham (also quoted at Rake’s Progress):

A while ago, I ran into a friend who told me he was on his way to have sex with a guy he’d just met. I asked him whether it was a nascent romance, or just meaningless sex. He looked at me quizzically and said, “Have you ever had meaningless sex?”

Of course I hadn’t. There’s no such thing, is there?

I’m tempted to respond similarly to a question regarding my most meaningful reading experience in the last ten years. Have you ever had a meaningless reading experience?

Still, it would be foolish to deny that there are various levels of intensity and resonance, in sex or in reading. One of my more meaningful recent reading experiences has arisen not out of a single book but a body of books, which had one thing in common: they were the kind of books I’d always assumed I would never read.

They were, specifically, genre books — books that were shelved in their own sections, under such headings as Mystery, Science Fiction, and Romance. I was preparing to write a novel that employed certain genre devices (I’m still working on it, and worry sometimes I’ll still be working it in the year 2020). I had, until then, confined myself to the vague territory known as “serious fiction.” For research purposes, I ventured across the line.

A lot of the genre books were, frankly, terrible. Some of them were revelatory.

In an airport I picked up a thriller called The Straw Men by Michael Marshall. It proved to be so smart and dense, so politically astute, as to bear comparison to Don DeLillo. I read a passel of mysteries by Ruth Rendell, who I’ve come to adore. I was properly unnerved by the novels of Dean Koontz, whose sentences are far from lovely (and are not meant to be), but who has a deep understanding of what frightens us, and why.

Maybe most remarkable, though, were some of the science fiction novels I read. Prominent among them: Atlantis: Three Tales by Samuel R. Delany, Idoru by William Gibson, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin, Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. As it turns out, the novel of ideas is alive and well. It just tends to be kept in particular sections of bookstores and libraries.

This particular discovery of mine will naturally seem naïve to those who have been reading promiscuously across genre lines all their lives. Still, none of us has the time or energy to read all the books that matter. We all perform triage of a sort when choosing our next book. It was something — it was meaningful — for me to realize that the choices, for me, are more varied, more numerous, more daunting, than I’d ever imagined.

Related: Bloomberg.com interviews Cunningham. (Via TEV.)

While googling terms related to my previous post, I came across this: Rory’s Book Club. (Literally everyone on TV’s got one.)

Want to be more like [Gilmore Girls’] Rory? Read a book! Need help choosing one? Join Rory’s Book Club! Every other week we’ll be adding two more amazing books, so you’ll never run out of great choices.

Surprisingly, the reading choices are agreeable, ranging from Brick Lane to The Portable Dorothy Parker.

The results are in for this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which famously solicits bad opening lines to imaginary novels.

Over the years, I’ve noticed a consistent formula employed by the contest winners: begin with a relatively conventional premise, and, via careless metaphors and subsequent reflection on those metaphors, diverge from the initial premise into uncharted, pointless and pedestrian, territory.

For example, this year’s winner, penned by former National Spelling Bee contestant Dave Zobel:

She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight … summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp’s tail … though the term “love affair” now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism … not unlike “sand vein,” which is after all an intestine, not a vein … and that tarry substance inside certainly isn’t sand … and that brought her back to Ramon.

Personally, I prefer the genre winners:

Winner: Adventure Category

The legend about Padre Castillo’s gold being buried deep in the Blackwolf Hills had lain untold for centuries and will continue to do so for this story is not about hidden treasure, nor is it set in any mountainous terrain whatsoever.

Winner: Children’s Literature

Jack planted the magic beans and in one night a giant beanstalk grew all the way from the earth up to the clouds—which sounds like a lie, but it can be done with genetic engineering, and although a few people are against eating gene-engineered foods like those beans it’s a high-paying career to think about for when you grow up.

Winner: Detective

Detective Micky Blarke arrived on the scene at 2:14 am, and gave his cigarette such a severe pull that rookie Paul Simmons swore the insides of the detective’s cheeks touched, but the judge indicated that that amount of detail was not necessary in his testimony, and instructed the jury to disregard that statement.

From the Boston Globe:

DOES POETRY NEED muckrakers? The secretive operators of the website Foetry (www.foetry.com), a self-described “American poetry watchdog,” certainly think so. They promise, from behind a cloak of anonymity, to uncover scandals among the publishers of contemporary poetry, dishing dirt on “fraudulent `contests,”’ as their homepage has it, “tracking the sycophants,” “naming the names,” and generally cleaning house…

…Foetry reads like a cross between the Drudge Report and Consumer Reports, anonymously investigating (and spreading) rumors to further the cause of transparency. Its longest-running debate spotlights the prestigious New York-based magazine and book publisher Fence, lately a magnet for writers of difficult verse, which shows Iowa roots both on its masthead and in its choice of young poets. On the site’s discussion board, Fence founder Rebecca Wolff, who attended UMass-Amherst and Iowa, explained the submission process in numbing detail, writing that “the preponderance of Iowans” proves only “that those of us who judge these contests are in some kind of agreement with those who make the decisions about who goes to the Iowa Writers Workshop.” One reader responded by suggesting, absurdly, that Wolff be charged under racketeering laws.

Barbara Feinberg, writing for the NY Times, bemoans the current state of summer reading lists. She remembers, as a child, reading stories about “children making kooky inventions” and “a fat little witch afraid of Halloween.” And she compares those innocent stories from thirty years ago to the ones today’s children are required to read:

A 10-year-old attending the creative arts program I run told me, “Those books give me a headache in my stomach.”

I can see why. Here are some novels assigned this summer to American sixth-graders, all winners of the highest literary prizes: “Walk Two Moons,” by Sharon Creech, chronicles a daughter’s search for her missing mother, who fled, it turns out, because of a deep depression after a miscarriage and subsequent hysterectomy. At the end, the girl discovers that her mother was killed in a bus accident. In “Belle Prater’s Boy,” by Ruth White, a missing father is found to have died because he shot himself in the face; Belle Prater, the errant mother, is never found, although her son remembers her saying that she’s in a straitjacket: “Squeezed to death. I can’t move. I can’t breathe. I have to get out of here.” A far gentler book, “Because of Winn-Dixie,” by Kate DiCamillo, is about a girl who finds a friendly dog who in turn helps her rebuild her life. But she must do that because her mother abandoned her; we are told also that the mother “loved to drink.”

…The rationale for exposing 10-year-olds to such potentially upsetting books is that children who read about situations different from their own gain a larger frame of reference for understanding human behavior and cultural diversity. Some educators believe that life is harder than it used to be; books shouldn’t shield children from this. The argument is, as the head of the English department in a school here in Westchester County told parents, that anxiety is useful to children.

(I think that’s also Disney’s mentality.)

Related: Titles and summaries of children’s books, collected three years ago when I was working on a story about a young boy with a disability:

Continue reading "You know, don't you, that a story titled "Belle Prater's Boy" isn't going to end well"

Some books on the craft of writing devote their contents to the hardships of getting published. Other books on writing, by their lack of content, remind us that publication gets easier if you forsake the craft of writing.

Take The Writer’s Guide to Character Traits, for example. The author’s introduction asserts that “one-dimensional, uninteresting characters have become unacceptable to the reading public, who like both characters and plots,” and continues,

I wrote this book because I thought it would be fun for me and helpful for others to have easy, accurate lists of qualities that hang together in personality types. It is a crash course in psychology for writers.

If only I could have been a writer back when uninteresting characters were acceptable and the reading public didn’t even like characters and plots. (Failing that, I could have been, given the state of literature, a Peckian critic.) Mainly, though, I quote this passage for its idea that “easy, accurate lists of qualities” can help writers move away from creating “one-dimensional” characters. (Because, baby, two-dimensional is where it’s at!)

Some examples of what you’ll “learn” from The Writer’s Guide to Character Traits (besides the easiest path to a book deal being compiling reference guides to stereotypes):

Continue reading "Writing Fiction: Not as Easy as Writing Books About Writing Fiction."

-to Terry and OGIC, for About Last Night’s first year anniversary. From yesterday’s Publishers Lunch (quoted more fully at Terry’s):

Finally, the big blog occasion this week is the one-year anniversary of cultural critic Terry Teachout’s abundant blog About Last Night …

…What strikes me is the way Teachout has utterly changed his profile as a critic and his relationship with his audience through his blog in just a year. It’s no accident that he’s had three books coming during the year that he’s been blogging, and he’s developed a meaningful connection with a large circle of readers (he cites about half a million page views).

Go here for a sample of the past year’s About Last Night highlights.

-to Andrea, of the weblog This Afternoon in Drama, for the great write-up her first novel received last week in Salon. Christopher Farah writes,

These days, real life is filled with enough of our own self-absorbed, self-entitled bellyaching. Do we really have to read about it in fiction as well?

After finishing “Like the Red Panda,” and finding myself steadily sucked into the world of teenage protagonist and narrator Stella Parish, I’ve come to this conclusion: Yes, we do — sometimes. This happens to be one of those times.

Further down in the review:

This subtle interplay between hope and despair lends Stella a universality that’s appealing and likable, comfortable and familiar, capturing in the quirks of her personality all the contradictions that make the high school years both so overwhelming and so memorable. She has a fantastic eye for the kind of ridiculous hypocrisy that seems especially prevalent at the adolescent phase, when one first begins to rectify the dreams of youth with the realities of being an adult. But her selflessness and purity of intention allow us to care deeply about Stella, where other disillusioned types might come across merely as selfish and annoying.

Our care for Stella gives her ultimate intention — to kill herself after her graduation — that much more resonance. We admire her conviction and her resoluteness, but we cannot bear the thought of such a vibrant individual dying. And that’s exactly why “Like the Red Panda” rises above the triviality of a typical teen-angst anthem: By artfully evoking the despair, even the hopelessness, of such an endearing character, Seigel reaffirms our own private hope that maybe, after all, life does have meaning.

As authors start scavaging chick lit to savage it, a question emerges: can literature as a medium sustain the self-referential, simulacra[p] impulses of Hollywood comedies (Scream trash compacted into Scary Movie)?

This month’s BookPage interview features Eric Garcia, author of the new chick lit parody Cassandra French’s Finishing School for Boys. Garcia, pained by the slow pace of chick lit, in which women meet “men who are … good, not great” and “spend the next 300 pages of the book or 90 minutes of the movie sort of whining about it,” decided to write a chick lit corrective. He asked himself how the genre would change if its typically whiny heroine were replaced by a strong-willed one, and then based Finishing School for Boys on his answer.

Here’s the plot summary BookPage provides:

Cassie French is a 29-year-old business lawyer for a Hollywood studio with the requisite wacky mom, lecherous boss and two beautiful best friends: a skeletally thin supermodel and a studio exec who is sleeping with her shrink. What they don’t know is that Cassie has three handsome young bachelors drugged and handcuffed to cots in her basement, where she instructs them in the finer things in life, and occasionally has sex with them.

(But if a film adaptation of Finishing School wanted to transcend parody and create the first horror classic of the new millenium, all it would really need to do is cast Courtney Love as man-trapping Cassie.)

As the Lit Saloon reported earlier this week, BookWatch is back. The tone is fatigued, but when (when: now) I’m coming down from an Adderall high, I find others’ fatigue welcoming, whether or not I agree with its expressed content. Here’s an excerpt from today’s BookWatch post, and a gratuitous list of my dis/agreements (to that purpose, imposed footnotes):

Back when I was posting with more regularity, I had the energy to come into my office job in the morning, research some articles, and get them posted, but the fun in it seems to be gone.

I mean, what do I really care if Dale Peck gets punched in the face?¹ Who the fuck is Dale Peck other than a pissant critic anyway?

Dave Eggers recent writing only contributes to his tiresome phoniness.² Jonathan Franzen sucks eggs. Rick Moody is more of a motherfucker than Oedipus. David Foster Wallace swings his intellect like a war club.³

Jonathan Lethem is alright, Michael Chabon, David Markson, Stephen Dixon, Lorrie Moore and Stephen Milhauser, but Steve Almond? Good Sir Christ, why does anybody even bother to read My Life in Heavy Metal?⁴

Continue reading "BookWatch Winded"

Since school ended, I’m always in catch-up mode reading my favorite blogs. And sometimes a text capsule, buried in blog archives for only a month or week, already looks like a quaint or innocent artifact.

Or, I’m over-selling my point. All I really wanted to say is that, in light of the recent Peck smack-down, it’s funny to read Andrea’s July 1 entry, “Call to Pens”:

When I read this week that an author I met at BookExpo America is getting “lots of buzz” on her gross forthcoming novel, I began to wonder why writers don’t have official rivalries like rappers.

…I know that Rick Moody has Dale Peck, but that doesn’t really count because Rick hasn’t officially launched his counterattack. What I’m aiming for is a system of full-on engagement.

I wasn’t able to place what the Crouch v. Peck fight reminded me of, until I reread Ed’s interview with Linda Yablonsky: “Yablonsky reminded me that Crouch is, in her words, ‘five times the size’ of Peck.”

Oh, right, now I remember: Punch-Out.

Related links:
-Old Hag rounds up the lit cabal’s response.
-Gawker’s first entry on the story
-Salon compares James Wood and Dale Peck — “two critics, one revered and the other almost universally reviled.”

From Monday’s Publisher Lunch:

Penguin quietly launched a new direct-to-consumer sales venture called Family Books at home in late June, officially announcing the program within the direct sales trade. A Tupperware-style sales force of “independent consultants” will be recruited to use what the company calls, “The ‘party plan’ method of selling books at gatherings in private homes.” Consultants can earn 25 percent commissions, and bonuses of five to 7 percent, plus slices of revenue generated by “your personally sponsored consultants” and more. At the outset, the line offers 200 books, primarily from DK and mostly for the children’s market, “with a particular emphasis on preschool and young readers.”

Even if we shut out grim mental images of circle dresses and shag carpet living, and allow that Penguin’s ‘party plan’ might, for youngsters, inject reading with the glow and excitment of group play, it’s sad to learn that, for today’s kids, even play-dates can have corporate sponsors.

Related: Ipsos Finds Consumer Spending on Children’s Books Increases in a Stagnant Market