Books

Chris McLaren (aka Big-Headed Canadian Whiskey Man) forwards along the news that Kelley Eskridge and Nicola Griffith are auctioning off naming rights in their next novels to benefit the African Well Fund:

Here are the links to the EBay auctions in which you can bid on the right to name a character in my next novel or in Nicola’s. Please feel free to forward these links to anyone you think might be interested.

The auction closes on Monday, November 14 at 9:00 AM PST.

Thank you for your support.

Kelley’s auction page

Nicola’s auction page

Or bid on other items in the general African Well Fund auction.

In an earlier announcement, Eskridge says:

Nicola and I are both participating in an upcoming eBay auction to benefit the African Well Fund (www.africanwellfund.org).  The AWF is a wonderful organization that funds the building of wells and springs in Africa.  They’ve brought clean water to tens of thousands of people.  The gift of a well or spring has an enormous impact on people’s lives: in many communities, women carry the weight of tens of pounds of water several miles every day in order to provide for their children, livestock, crops, cooking and washing.  Many people only have access to water that is contaminated with disease.  Two million children die each year from water-borne illnesses.  So helping build a well or spring isn’t just a matter of convenience—it saves lives.

Go to this reading tonight:

MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS Tuesday, November 8th at 7 p.m.

Kelly Link continues to cement her reputation as one of the most inventive short fiction authors writing today. Her new collection, Magic For Beginners has been critically acclaimed for its imagination and verve. One of her stories is included in Best American Short Stories 2005 edited by Michael Chabon. Kelly will read with Maureen McHugh, whose collection Mothers and Other Monsters was a BookSense choice in August and Dan Chaon, author of You Remind Me of Me.

Mac’s Backs ~ Books on Coventry
1820 Coventry Road Cleveland Heights, Ohio 44118
216-321-2665

Reminder via Darby.

Stacy Schiff reviews the new biography Jean-Jacques Rousseau: An Unruly Mind by Leo Damrosch in the NYTBR:

He did manage to indulge one of his greater talents, that of falling out with those who meant him well. Rousseau set such high standards for friendship that he was better off alone; by his 50’s the hypersensitivity bordered on mania. "Persecution has elevated my soul," he explained, courting it again and again. He quarreled with David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who had offered him asylum, and with whom he was never reconciled. In the delusional aftermath (Rousseau admitted later that he had succumbed to "an attack of madness"), he set about composing one of the earliest self-analyses in the history of literature.

The paradox was perfectly consistent with the life. "Confessions" was published only posthumously; it was some time before Rousseau’s ideas seeped into the drinking water. In his own day he was provocative but also outlandish. As Damrosch puts it, Rousseau was after all understood to be "describing a state of nature that never existed, a political system that never could exist and an educational scheme that never should exist." Social inequality, the will of the people, inalienable rights were meaningless concepts when Rousseau began ranting about them. Imagination was out of fashion; he was tiptoeing around the as-yet-undiscovered unconscious. He advocated idleness in the age of Adam Smith. If he suffered for being so much out of step with his own century, he can too easily be overlooked in ours. Without founding a school – it would have been inappropriate – Rousseau stands squarely if unsystematically at the root of democracy, autobiography, Romanticism, child-centered education, even psychoanalysis.

I have to admit a soft spot for Rousseau and this biography sounds like a great deal of fun.

Meghan McCarron weighs in on the chick lit = tempest making the rounds (again) this week:

The arguement, as well as I can parse it, goes, "Lots of women in the 19th century wrote a lot of popular but forgettable novels that society decried, and a tantalizingly similar thing is going on now. The 19th century produced Jane Austen, whose books (okay, movies) we all know and love, so it’s totally okay that the 21st century’s female literary culture resembles that of the 19th."

That is a terrible arguement. No one deserves that arguement. In fact, if I were to argue in favor of chick lit, from one genre ghetto to another, let’s say, I would put it like this: Pulp always has something to teach us. Its freedom from respectability allows it to experiment, most notably with voice and convention, in a way the literary mainstream rarely attempts (see: Chandler. See: Dick). Chick lit is no exception. I’ve read very little of it, but what charmed me about what I have read was the voice. It observed ravenously, it paid hommage to the world of female friendship, and made me laugh. It was wrapped around narratives that alternately bored me and made me uncomfortable, but it is a big mainstream testament that women are funny, and that women like funny, and women are paying just as much attention as wryly observing men to what’s going on. I am disgusted by the trend of properly MFA’d writers (Sittenfeld, as well as Meghan Daum, whose ‘Quality of Life Report’ has WAY more in common with "Good in Bed" than it does with any reasonable facsimilie of literary 20-something angst, blurbs and credentials aside) writing chick lit and then waving their degrees around and claiming they are somehow ‘better’ than it, when in many ways their literary insecurities actually hamper their efforts in the genre. Chick lit is doing some worthwhile things. To dismiss it as pure crap would be just as irresponsible and almost as dangerous as embracing it whole-heartedly.

Much more there.

*Not that there’s anything wrong with teapots.

BookWorld is full of spooktastic and Halloweeny reviews this week.

Michael Dirda looks at a new translation of Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings (from which that illo comes):

Anyone who falls under the spell of The Book of Imaginary Beings should look out for several comparable (or complementary) works. Above all, don’t miss T.H. White’s The Book of Beasts , a translation, with delightful commentary, of a 12th-century bestiary; Willy Ley’s various excursions into "romantic zoology" (starting with The Lungfish, the Dodo, and the Unicorn ); Avram Davidson’s highly idiosyncratic and hard-to-find Adventures in Unhistory ; Peter Lum’s Fabulous Beasts ; Richard Carrington’s Mermaids and Mastodons ; and, not least, the grand-daddy of them all, Pliny’s Natural History (especially books 8 through 11). Here be wonders.

These are all excellent recommendations and I particularly love the Willy Ley books; hunt them down.

Oh, and Octavia Butler’s new vampire novel sounds AMAZING.

I kid; however, the YA books are the only ones I’ve a prayer of reading AND tend to get overlooked (plus, last year, Pete Hautman’s Godless rocked the house) so from the New York Times:

The finalists for the award in young people’s literature include a first-time novelist, Jeanne Birdsall, for "The Penderwicks" (Knopf), a story of four girls and their widowed father; and a previous finalist, Walter Dean Myers, whose new book, "Autobiography of My Dead Brother" (HarperTempest), tells of learning hard lessons while growing up in a tough neighborhood. Also on the short list are Adele Griffin’s "Where I Want to Be" (Putnam), a novel of sibling rivalry and mental illness; "Inexcusable" (Atheneum), an account of date rape told from the point of view of the accused, by Chris Lynch; and "Each Little Bird That Sings" (Harcourt), a Southern coming-of-age novel, by Deborah Wiles.

Anyone recommend or not? These seem a bit more messagey than last year’s finalists.

National Book Award nods are out:

Fiction: The March by E.L. Doctorow (Random House); Veronica by Mary Gaitskill (Pantheon); Trance by Christopher Sorrentino (FSG); Holy Skirts by Rene Steinke (William Morrow); Europe Central by William T. Vollmann (Viking)

Nonfiction: Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion by Alan Burdick (FSG); Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius by Leo Damrosch (Houghton Mifflin); The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (Knopf); 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn; Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free and Empire’s Slaves by Adam Hochschild (Houghton Mifflin)

Poetry: Where Shall I Wander by John Ashberry (Ecco); Star Dust by Frank Bidart (FSG); Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005 by Brendan Galvin (Louisiane State University Press); Migration: New and Selected Poems by W.S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press); The Moment’s Equation by Vern Rutsala (Ashland Poetry Press)

Young People’s Literature: The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall (Knopf); Where I Want to Be by Adele Griffin (Putnam); Inexcusable by Chris Lynch (Atheneum); Autobiography of My Dead Brother by Walter Dean Myers (HarperTempest); Each Little Bird That Sings by Deborah Wiles (Harcourt).

The first or "blue" issue of the Fairy Tale Review is a promise made good. It hardly seemed possible glancing through the announced table of contents that it could deliver, bold as it was with the names of some of my favorite writers: Stacey Richter, Kim Addonizio, Aimee Bender, Donna Tartt. Not to mention that all the contributions in titles or other familiar names had the air of fabulousness about them. I’ve heard a lot of buzz about a lot of new literary magazines and journals and even when they manage to deliver, it’s rarely in full.

The Fairy Tale Review, on the other hand, is a joy of constant surprise throughout. I’ve read it clean through today (after getting it in the mail yesterday) and I can’t remember the last time I honestly liked every piece in a magazine and loved more than one. And while the issue itself feels unified, the individual pieces are very different, some radically so, and it’s a wonder that nothing here feels out of place or even weighs down the whole. Kate Bernheimer is an editor queen.

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Women, Wolves and Wonders: Fairy Tale ReviewRead More »

Anne at the Vertical blog is back with a fabulous new edition of the Finger In The Throat (FITT) report, this time tearing into Marlon Brando’s posthumous novel Fan Tan (written with the help of Donald Cammell). It hurts so good:

Then, there’s the way Asian men look, very important, of course:

"In many Chinese faces there was a frightening cast to the skull. To Annie, the fashion in which the eyeballs nestled in their slots (just say it Brando, say "slits"!!!), protected by bone, suggested the priorities of survival and the inevitability of violence." (Later today on Judge Judy: "Your Honor, I killed him because I gots me these small little eyes stuck in the deep in my head-slots! It’s a natural priority!")

And because this makes me laugh even harder:

Well, if it weren’t enough that Chinese men have no smiling flex points in their facial skin, a lot of them are also dwarves:

"The coolie pointed out how large and heavy Annie was, and Annie kept agreeing, asking if the rickshaw man had ever offered a rebate to a small person – a dwarf, say, of which there have always been many in China."

Read the rest. Guarantee you’ll get the "high" points of Fan Tan.

Marcy Dermansky‘s Twins is never quite what you think. At first, I worried that I was reading the literary equivalent of Thirteen. There is a voyeuristic feeling that pervades much of the book, something which almost but not quite makes for an uncomfortable sensation while reading (do I even like this? I thought at first, riveted anyway). Once the Thirteen fears had passed, I worried that that uncomfortable sensation was too similar to the one brought about by the disturbingly close first person POV in a book I’d read earlier in the year (and ultimately felt ambivalent about). I’d just finished Jeff Ford’s The Girl in the Glass, which I adored, and worried that any book I tried next would not measure up.

But then as I kept reading and kept reading and could not put the fucking book down, I stopped worrying and learned to love that odd, visceral quality, to revel in it.

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She Got Game: TwinsRead More »