Baby Got Books

Yesterday we presented Part 1 of our interview with one of America’s Best Young Novelists, Dara Horn. Part 2 of the interview continues below.

BGB: You appear in a recent article in the New York Times about the Jewish Book Network, an organization that supports Jewish authors by coordinating book events nationally with Jewish Community Centers and other organizations. The results seem to be fairly impressive – the article names other authors who have participated in the network, such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krausse, Nathan Englander, Myla Goldberg, etc. How did you get involved with the group? Did you have to go through one of the “star search” style interviews described in the article? And finally, do you think that your experience with the Network was a big boost to your career when you were starting out?

DH: I was very lucky in that my first book was published in 2002, about a year or two before the Jewish Book Network began their auditioning system, so I was spared the trauma of having to pitch my book to an audience of hundreds of bookfair people in two minutes or less. At the time, the director of the program apparently just read my book and liked it, and I was invited to a Jewish Book Network lunch during BookExpo America (the annual book industry convention, which in 2002 happened to be held in New York, where I live) at which I basically ended up doing an audition—pitching the book to representatives of Jewish book fairs from around the country—but in a more one-on-one
kind of way. I think publishers have recognized what a resource this is for promoting books of Jewish interest, and as a result the Jewish Book Network had to set up the audition process because so many authors were interested in getting involved.

In my experience, the Jewish book fairs have been a wonderful way to build an audience for a new writer’s work. For Jewish communities in cities outside the northeast, these fairs are very important communal events, and they can draw pretty big audiences even for writers who aren’t so well known. People come to the fairs because of the community and to be involved in Jewish culture (particularly in parts of the country where such opportunities are rare), even if they haven’t previously heard of the author. For an author who hasn’t been on Oprah, having 25 people show up at a bookstore reading in St. Louis is usually an amazing turnout, but at the last Jewish book fair I spoke at in St. Louis, about two hundred people came. They do a remarkable job of building an audience.

It’s easy to be snobby about the Jewish book fairs, since not everyone in the audience is there solely out of a love of literature. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a Jewish book fair where at least one person didn’t ask me whether I was married and whether I wanted to meet their son/grandson/nephew/cousin’s-college-roommate’s-dogwalker. Despite all the crazies who tend to show up at bookstore readings (like the reader in Boston who presented me with a handmade collage with my name pasted across dozens of newspaper clippings about local murders), it must be said that no one at Barnes and Noble has ever tried to marry me off. But in an era where everyone is always complaining about how hard it is to sell books, I have nothing but gratitude for how the Jewish Book Network introduced my work to readers. And it is really a gift for a writer to be able to meet so many readers in person who have read and enjoyed her work.

BGB: Let’s talk about your most recent book. The World to Come is a wonderful novel that combines elements of the art heist genre, a bit of historical fiction, and a profound spiritual element. Let’s start with that last bit. The book presents a very comforting
idea – our unborn children are taught in heaven about our world by their own ancestors. I love this idea of “the world to come” as somewhat circular. How did you come up with this concept?

DH: It originated with a story in the Talmud about what happens to a child before he is born. In the story, we are told that the child spends the pregnancy being taught all of the secrets of the Torah—by which is meant not merely the five books of Moses, but all of the secrets of an ethical way of life. Just before the child’s birth, an angel slaps the child across the face (which is the reason why we all have dents below our noses), causing him to forget all of the things he has learned, and then, once he is born, he is forced the spend the rest of his life trying to remember. There is something terribly haunting about this story’s suggestion that when we learn new things, we are in fact remembering them from before we were born rather than learning them new. This implies a further question: from whom did we learn them?

In developing the supernatural “world to come” as it appears in the book, I answered this question by using another strand of Jewish tradition, the idea that one’s deceased ancestors bear the responsibility of being “gute beters” or “good requesters”—that is, that they are responsible for interceding with God on behalf of their descendants. This is a very old Jewish idea that is built into the structure of Jewish prayer, which repeatedly invokes the patriarchs and other ancestors by name, as well as the promises God made to these ancestors, when asking God to intervene in the present world. In the novel, I took these two traditional ideas and combined them, so that those who haven’t yet been born are taught all of these secrets by their own ancestors.

This may seem like pure fantasy, but I believe that the ideas behind both of these stories are reflected in the reality of genetic inheritance. A person at birth is exclusively made of spare parts from people who lived before him, but despite the fact that this is all that we are, we cannot access it or “remember” those who made us who we are. But the way I have dramatized this—which you refer to as “comforting”—is in fact much more than a metaphor for genetics, because it suggests that what we might rationally think of as genetic codes are in fact real people that we (or our parents) have known, and that therefore there is a way for such people to continue living.

I am interested in the points in human experience where religion, instead of being a metaphor, becomes a genuine description of life as we live it. No matter how rational or secular we become, we remain unable to answer two fundamental questions: when a person is born, where did he come from? And when a person dies, where did he go? Being present at a childbirth or a death makes it very difficult to be satisfied with a merely physical explanation of how a person (rather than merely a body) comes into our world or leaves it. I think it is possible to imagine that “the world to come” is just what the phrase suggests—that whether or not one chooses to believe in a supernatural world beyond our own, our reward or punishment for our acts in life is also embodied in the impression that those acts will leave on our own world in the future—that is, on the world, to come.

Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion in Part 3…

Interview Part 1

Interview Part 3

Check out this classy poster for the upcoming Brock Clarke reading that we’re co-sponsoring with Wordsmiths and The Wren’s Nest.  The poster was created by J Trav, the guitarist of The Sealions, who will be performing after the reading.  We’ll have much more to say about all this as we get closer to the event.  For now, I’m just going to admire this sweet poster.

Dara Horn is the author of two novels. Her first novel In the Image won the National Jewish Book Award, and the Reform Judaism Award for Jewish Fiction. Her second novel, The World to Come also won the National Jewish Book Award and was named an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Entertainment Weekly. I liked it an awful lot myself. Horn was also named one of the Best Young American Novelists by Granta. In addition to all of that, she also holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University where she studied Yiddish and Hebrew literature. She’s also a mother of two.

I was thrilled when she agreed to be interviewed by Baby Got Books, which shows up in some of my rambling early questions. Don’t worry, I eventually get a hold of myself. Below is Part 1 of our conversation that spanned several weeks via e-mail. Parts 2 and 3 will follow.

Baby Got Books: You were recently named to Granta’s list of Best Young American Novelists. How did you find out? Has being named to he list become a life/career changing event? Who of your fellow honorees are you most excited to join? Who are your contemporaries that should have made the list with you?

Dara Horn: I found this out through a phone call in December, which was preceded by an email from a Granta editor requesting my number in order to ask me a “rather delicate” question. I have the pessimist’s habit of always expecting the worst, so my immediate assumption was that I was somehow about to be sued. (My last novel was about Chagall, and I had had a similar fear when Chagall’s granddaughter called the publisher for a copy of the book. Fortunately she liked it.) I was quite amazed to hear the news, though it turned out that the “delicate” part of the question was that the magazine wanted to include never-before-published fiction from everyone selected… and needed everyone’s submissions in three weeks! I’ve never written a short story, so I didn’t have anything lying around to hand in other than the novel I’m currently working on. I had never published anything from a work-in-progress before, and it’s actually been very exciting to hear responses from readers about it.

The list of writers in the Granta issue is pretty remarkable, as is the issue itself. I don’t read a ton of contemporary fiction, so the fact that I was familiar with a fair number of them was enough to impress me. One of my favorite things about the other names on the list, though, is that one of them– Akhil Sharma– lives downstairs from me in my apartment building. Apparently it’s a very small literary world. As for authors I might have liked to see included, I’ll put in a plug here for Jon Papernik, whose The Ascent of Eli Israel I found fascinating, and for T Cooper, whose surprisingly strange Lipshitz Six was even better in the thinking-about-it-afterwards than it was in the reading itself.

The Granta selection was a bit of a career-changing event for me in that most of the honors my novels had received previously had been from Jewish literary sources, so this has given my work some new attention. As for “life-changing event,” though, I’m afraid the Granta people really couldn’t compete, because I gave birth to my second child a few weeks after the issue came out.

BGB: You’ve never written a short story! I’ve read that you wrote your first novel while in the middle of pursuing a doctorate in Yiddish and Hebrew comparative literature at Harvard. How did you decide to write a novel in the middle of what was surely a rigorous course of study? Having never written a short story how did you find the confidence to crank out a novel? How did you go about getting it published?

DH: No, I’ve never written a short story. That’s mainly because I never took a fiction-writing course after middle school. In the introduction to the Granta issue, the writer Elif Batuman (who happens to be my childhood best friend) is quoted as saying that the short story form is played out in American literature and is merely kept alive artificially through fiction-writing courses. I do agree with that. I also think that writing a short story and writing a novel are very different skills.

Being a writer isn’t so much a career as it is a disease, like finding out you have asthma at the age of six. After you’ve diagnosed it, you just have to find a way to work your life around it. I was always looking for ways to support myself that would accommodate this habit. When I was a college senior, I won a scholarship to spend the year after graduation at Cambridge University in England. It was the kind of set-up no one could turn down—tuition to study “anything at all,” a “scholarship suite” in an 18th century house, and a stipend big enough to pay for all the takeout Indian food one could possibly need. It should have been a dream come true, except that I got engaged a few months before graduation, and my fiancé had a job in America and couldn’t join me. I was therefore doomed to spend the year alone, crying into pints of Guinness in smoke-filled pubs packed with crazed soccer hooligans. I soon realized that I don’t like Guinness, smoke-filled pubs, or crazed soccer hooligans. When you spend a year in England avoiding these things, you have a lot of time on your hands. So even though I had begun my graduate work, I found that I still had plenty of time to write. I had never planned to write a novel, since I had never written any fiction at all before I started writing that book. I had always thought I would be a journalist, and to that end I kept a notebook where I would write down ideas for articles and essays. At some point I read straight through these ideas and realized that many of them were strangely related to each other, because of certain preoccupations I had at the time when I had written them. And I saw how they would make more sense as part of a novel. I was quite bored that year, and I really wrote it to entertain myself. The idea of publishing it was more of a dream than anything else.

The story of how I got the book published also involves something inane that happened in England. In college, I wrote a lot of magazine articles, and at one point a publisher contacted me and asked me if I would be interested in expanding an article I had written into a nonfiction book. I was then able to find an agent without much agony, since I already had a publisher lined up. The problem was that I ultimately decided not to write that book. Two years later, I was writing the novel in England, and my masters program in Hebrew literature hosted the Israeli author Meir Shalev for a lecture and dinner. During the dinner, Shalev sat at the center of the long table, and I sat on the end. I didn’t get to speak to Shalev at all, but instead I spoke to the person seated across from me: Shalev’s British publicist. At some point I mentioned that I had been writing a novel and that I had had a contact with an agent years before, but that he would never remember me now, so it seemed quite unrealistic to me to try to get it published that way. The publicist told me, “Of course he’ll remember you. It’s his job to remember people like you.” The next day I mailed the novel to this agent. He called me when he received it, agreed to represent me, and sold it to W.W. Norton.

I did write my second novel while getting a doctorate at Harvard, where graduate students generally drink a lot less beer. But the nice thing about a doctorate is that no one ever expects you to finish it. In academia, procrastination is a way of life, and I used this to my advantage. Whenever the dissertation became too frustrating, I’d procrastinate by writing the novel, and whenever the novel became too frustrating, I’d procrastinate by writing the dissertation. As a result I completed both without ever feeling like I was doing real work.

BGB: I agree to a point that modern short stories can often come across as annoyingly didactic, writer-ly exercises. There is also a sense that short story writing is akin to the literary minor leagues. Some of your fellow Granta “best young novelists” had not actually written a a novel and were honored based upon the strength of their short stories. The idea being, I suppose, that they are headed for the major leagues. I’m not sure I agree with that thought process. However, there are some great writers that are doing wonderful things with short stories. Can you not imagine that there will come a time when you would want to tell a story that would be perfectly captured in a short story or novella form?

DH: Well, I recently wrote an extremely short story (three paragraphs) on a cocktail napkin, for Esquire magazine’s “Napkin Fiction Project.” I assure you it was quite “minor league.” But the short story and novella forms are far from “minor league” in the literatures I study, Yiddish and Hebrew; the great modern masterworks in both those languages are all stories and novellas, not novels. So I’m not against the concept of short stories. I just don’t have any reason to think that I know how to write them. What motivates me in writing novels is developing characters and following the plot to see what happens next, since I don’t plan the books in advance. It’s my impression that one has to have some slight preconception of where one is going in order to write something shorter, though I may well be wrong about that. I’ve also grown very accustomed to writing novels; I like creating characters that I can live with for a long time and get to know really well, since you generally have to spend a few years with these people when you’re writing a book. It’s therefore hard for me to imagine doing what I would want to do with less time and space. But there was a time when I would have said that I had no idea how to write fiction at all, so why not?

Come back tomorrow for Part 2!

Interview Part 2

Interview Part 3 

I blame Dennis Quaid. As a native of New Orleans, I am a tough critic of representations of New Orleans that purport to be authentic. In a review of the new cop television drama K-Ville, set in a post-Katrina New Orleans, Slate exposed the many pitfalls of portraying New Orleans in film and on television. I had never heard the city called “the Big Easy” until the movie of the same name in which Dennis Quaid breaks out one of the worst Cajun accents ever documented. Movies that feature areas outside of New Orleans are usually centered around Deliverance-style depictions of Cajuns as murderous rednecks – tagline: “on the bayou no one can hear you scream!” Apparently, there is no Cajun Anti-Defamation League.

Books have a slightly better track record. Confederacy of Dunces is widely acknowledged as a literary masterpiece, as was Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Both novels won a Pulitzer Prize. William Faulkner lived in and wrote about New Orleans. National Book Award-winner Walker Percy called New Orleans home (and was instrumental in getting Confederacy published). Novels seem to do a better job with framing Louisiana in the proper perspective than film or television do. And yet, when confronted with contemporary novels that are set in Louisiana, skepticism is my first response.

I think that this skepticism is what kept me away from John Lee Burke’s novels for so long. His latest, The Tin Roof Blow Down, is the definitive post-Katrina novel – according to me. Despite glowing reviews, I was still reluctant to pick up Burke’s book based solely on the cover that depicts several over-used New Orleans clichés. French Quarter? Check. Dude playing the saxophone mournfully on a street corner? Check. Don’t even get me started on the author’s name being three times larger than the title.

This is the chip that I was carrying on my shoulder when a friend told me about Ken Well’s new book Crawfish Mountain. I feared the worst, but I decided to give it a go based on the trusted positive review of the author’s previous work. I’m happy to report that Crawfish Mountain is an entertaining book that gracefully avoids the potential pitfalls while portraying a Louisiana that is recognizable to people who have actually been there. And look at that cover! It actually looks like something that an artistically inclined relative would paint on an old piece of cypress to hang up at the fishing camp.

Wells is from a small town in Louisiana. He is also a journalist (formerly with the Wall Street Journal and now an editor with Portfolio magazine). These two facts go a long way towards explaining the book’s great eye for detail and its realistic dialog. Cajun phrases (English and French) are sprinkled throughout the book in the way that people actually talk in southern Louisiana. The dialog included some sayings that I have not heard since my grandparents passed away. I had to call my mother more than once to pass some of these along. This aspect of the book alone was a gift, but there is a fun and meaningful story in there as well.

The book centers on a Cajun recreational fisherman, Jason Pitre, who has inherited a fishing camp, the titular Crawfish Mountain, on a cheniére (an area of high ground) deep in the Louisiana wetlands. The idyll is threatened by the plans of unscrupulous Texas oil man whose world view revolves around dollars, power plays, and a lifelong Napoleon complex. Illegal dumping of hazardous oilfield wastes and plans to railroad a questionable right-of-way for a new pipeline places Crawfish Mountain at risk, as well as the surrounding pristine wetlands. Pitre is forced to fight back against the powerful business and political forces arrayed against him, which may include the colorful Louisiana Governor, to save his endangered way of life and his beloved bayous.

The novel takes place almost entirely in rural Louisiana with occasional forays into Baton Rouge, the capital and center of Louisiana politics. If New Orleans is mentioned at all, it is merely in passing. The destruction of New Orleans is not part of the primary “message” of this book. Hurricane Katrina is also not a central to this novel. The thoughtless destruction of Louisiana’s wetlands began well before Katrina, and the hurricane’s inclusion would be a distraction from the human bad actors that helped to enable, at least in part, the crushing devastation that resulted from Katrina. The villains here are greedy corporations, politicians on the take, and the always culpable Corps of Engineers.

If the book sounds vaguely like a Carl Hiaasen novel, you may be onto something. A blurb by Tom Wolfe says it rather plainly, “Ken Wells is the Cajun Carl Hiaasen.” Hiassen himself says, “No writer brings Louisiana’s wondrous bayou country to life more vividly, or with more affection, than Ken Wells.” Wells does not suffer from the comparison. Like Hiaasen, Wells uses the novel form to convey a message in an way that doesn’t feel like homework. In the Acknowledgements, Wells says:

Not all books have goals, but I did have one here: to attempt to tell a fun story about a serious subject, the decimation of Louisiana’s wetlands, which have been under siege from a variety of mostly man-made forces over the past several decades.

It’s nice to have a set of clearly articulated goals to compare against when you’re reviewing a novel. In my reading of this novel, Wells does more than just meet these goals. This is an entertaining novel that pits a likable underdog against black hat villains, while also telling the important story of how Louisiana’s wetlands, on the same scale as Florida’s Everglades, are under serious threat. I couldn’t put it down. If you’re a fan of Hiaasen novels or are interested in reading a realistic portrayal of Cajun people, I highly recommend Crawfish Mountain.

Earlier this week, Shaft posted a review of The Sociopath Next Door. It made me think of the host of Hardball, Chris Matthews. Matthews was recently on The Daily Show promoting his new book, Life’s a Campaign. The book purportedly shows how to get what you want by running your life like it was a political campaign. For example, Matthews says in the interview that Bill Clinton got lots of girls in college by listening, while he, Chris Matthews, tried to get girls by drinking beer and acting cool. Therefore, the secret is to pretend that you care what people are saying in order to get what you want. Stewart calls the book “sad” and says it was written before and called The Prince. You think that a guy who hosts a show called Hardball would be better equipped to handle criticism. You’d be wrong. See the interview here.

If you’d like to try out Stewart’s act yourself, Matthews will be reading at the Carter Center on November 19th. Of course, you should already have other plans that evening…

Professor Dumbledore’s outing has actually received some thoughtful consideration around the internet. Some reactions you may have missed:

• At Salon, Rebecca Traister says that J.K. Rowling needs to shut up and let the books speak for themselves, “…from a literary perspective, she’s out of control here.” (Thanks for the link, Frank.)
• At JewishyIrishy, Laurel Snyder thinks that Rowling missed an opportunity by not making the revelation in her books, “I feel like Rowling missed her shot. But I’m glad she’s outing him now.”
• At The Onion, a “man on the street interview” finds someone not caught up in the hoopla: “Wow. I hadn’t heard that. I’ve been really busy lately not caring about the sexual preferences of fictional people.”

The NYT Book Review interviews Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis (film version comes out in the US on Dec 25!). Is it me, or is Satrapi one crabby lady? When was the last time you heard someone throw out “bourgeoisie” in a conversation?

Callie at the CounterBalance blog has been on a roll:

• Part 1 of a recap of a Junot Diaz reading in L.A.
• An interview with Mark Z. Danielewski
• Another reason to love 90 year-old first time author Millard Kaufman

The Millions blog dreams up a hilarious list of the top 10 most anticipated books.

La Bloga interviews Junot Diaz (that guy is everywhere).

The Coen Brothers talk to Carmac McCarthy: “If it were a reality show it would be called Eccentric Genius Island.”

You’ve seen the video explanation of Web 2.0 and the follow-up clip about the r/evolution in the handling of information.  Now Gabe and Max present: How to Get the Dream Life of Your Dreams Using the Internet.

“I thought that the Internet was just for scientists?”

“Not anymore!”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPsUmhqncAg[/youtube]

The speed of life:  a “kid” at work was impressed yesterday by my “old school” iPod.

Kinky Friedman is enthusiastic in his praise of Warren Ellis’ first novel, Crooked Little Vein, comparing Ellis to “a bipolar Raymond Chandler.”  Warren Ellis is a well known and respected author of comic books.  Among his works is the recent and critically acclaimed Desolation Jones comic.  The Amazon write-up for DesJo echoes Kinky, calling the comic “Chandleresque.”   Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, blurbs, “this book is Dante on paint fumes.”  Intrigued, I had to read on.

The story begins as many detective stories do.  A down on his heels private detective sits in an office on the shadier side of skid row, hungover, broke, and hating life. Things quickly veer into the bizarre. For starters, the client who arrives to hire detective Mike McGill is the President’s Chief of Staff.  The Chief of Staff is a heroin addict – “I have a stressful job.” The assignment? “Find the other Constitution of the United States.” This one contains the “real intent” of the founders and contains invisible amendments.

Mike McGill is the perfect man for the job. He knows the seamy underbelly of the world, reluctantly, better than anyone. McGill explains it like this:

You want to call me a shit magnet, fine, I’m a shit magnet. But what I am is the unluckiest bastard you ever met. I have to take this work because it’s all I can do, but please, I don’t look for this stuff.

What comprises “this stuff” are uniquely scummy scumbags that more often than not have the strangest sexual predilections that you’ve never thought about.  Not once. You’ll either laugh out loud or be horribly offended.  Honestly, it can go either way.  Or both ways simultaneously.

The novel is more than just a book length roll in filth.  Underneath the framework of the classic detective story/thriller (and the hilarious/shocking depravity), Ellis presents a sly look at the modern world from the viewpoint of deep within the handbasket we’re all going to hell in.   The book also poses questions about the limits of – ahem – personal freedoms.  As you may have guessed from that bit about the Constitution and the President’s Chief of Staff, Ellis has a few things to say about the state of our body politic as well.

The description of Desolation Jones on Amazon reads, “Ellis’ best comics are character-based thrillers involving high concepts and heavy attitudes.”  I’m going to say that Ellis hit each of those touchstones in this debut.   Hopefully it is clear that this book isn’t for everyone.  The easily offended and humorless should head for the exits.  And for God’s sake, keep it away from the kids.  It is good fun and an entertaining read for everyone else.

Additional reading:

• Spend some time looking around the author’s blog for a sense of his style/viewpoint.
• Check out the cover of a special limited edition that will keep you up nights.
• Entertainment Weekly says, “It is impossible to make the following point too early in this review: Crooked Little Vein, …is not for the faint of heart. It cannot be responsibly recommended to those who are prudish… Fans of the Bush administration are cautioned, as is just about everyone’s mother.”

A few weeks ago, I posted a YouTube clip that I thought did a fantastic job of explaining what Web 2.0 is and the possibilities therein.  The creator of that video has a new clip that dives deeper into Web 2.0, specifically the revolution in the handling of information.  I’m beginning to realize that I am a huge info geek and that this stuff excites me more than it should.  Check it out for yourself:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM[/youtube]

A frequently asked question: “How do you find the time to go out looking for the stuff that you post on your blog?”  If you’re doing it right, the information finds you.  This clip, like the previous clip, found me via my newsreader (this time via BoingBoing).

In need of something to read recently, I found The Sociopath Next Door, by Martha Stout, Ph.D., on our bookshelf. Sounds interesting, no?

This book is a very telling and very insightful look into the human conscience, or, in the case of sociopaths, the lack thereof. Did you know that 1 out of 25 Americans has no conscience? And do you even know that means? Well, this book provides a pretty thoughtful perspective on that fact and its consequences.

The human conscience is basically an emotional attachment to others that provides us with a moral compass and helps us to “do the right thing”. But a sociopath — that is, the one out of 25 Americans that does not have a conscience — is not affected one iota about feelings for other people or guilt or shame or any of the other emotions that drive what most of us do. He or she generally has one objective — to “win” or to “dominate” in whatever their circumstances are.

What I found most insightful in this book was the revelation (which I guess seems kind of obvious in hindsight) that not all sociopaths are your stereotypical “cold-blooded killers”; in fact, many of them are not violent at all. But they are selfish and scheming, and are often smart enough (in the cognitive sense) to mask their lack of conscience by outwardly exhibiting socially acceptable behaviors. Not because they want to be liked, but because they are manipulating everyone around them for their own gain (whatever they view that to be).

The other fascinating element of sociopathy that this book examines is the evolutionary aspect of it. If sociopathy is partially hereditary (which it is believed to be), it would seem that over time the sociopaths and the rest of us would “battle” until only one side remained. And it would also seem that the sociopaths, although smaller in number initially, would have the upper hand because they would be able to lie, cheat and steal their way to victory. As Dr. Stout puts it:

Picture people stranded on a small, remote island with limited resources. In the long run, what kind of individual is likely to survive — an honest, moral person, or someone ruthless . . . . If there were few others on the island for the survivors to make babies with — and given that sociopathy is at least partially genetically determined — over a great many generations, might we not end up with an island populated mainly by people who possessed no conscience? Then would not this population of sociopaths proceed without a second thought to deplete the island’s resources completely, and all die?

The book attempts to answer these questions through discussions of various theories of natural selection, including group selection, kin selection, and even gene selection. In discussing this last theory, Dr. Stout quotes Samuel Butler as saying, “A chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg.” Thus, genes for emotional attachment (i.e., conscience) are “selfish” and and exist to enhance their own proliferation. Fascinating stuff.

Now I don’t want any of you to think that the above is intended to be an exhaustive overview of this subject; rather, this it is intended to be a teaser about what this book has to share. And if you’re like me, after reading this you will at least temporarily look at the world through a different lens, attempting to figure out which of the people you know are sociopaths.

As reported literally everywhere, Dumbledore was gay. I can sense the right-wing anti-book contingent redoubling their library banning efforts as we speak. I’m sure that some media outlets reported the news in a responsible and non-sensational manner. My newspaper, on the other hand, decided to show a picture of Daniel Radcliffe (Harry) on its web site with the caption, “Guess which Potter character is gay!”

Book Ninja speculates about other upcoming revelations: “Hermione was actually an Ojibwe performance artist, Ron was a disenfranchised inner-city black youth, and Hagrid was a crippled Viet Nam vet living in a world he never made.”

It was a weekend in Atlanta where it was easy to have some relatively low impact literary-type experiences.

I received two tickets to see Gogol Bordello on Friday night, compliments of my favorite record store. I’ve mentioned the band here before, mostly because of the singer/lead guy Eugene Hütz. He’s a US immigrant, Ukranian gypsy, and a Chernobyl survivor. Hütz also played the role of the Ukranian translator, Alex, in the movie version of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (that’s part of the literary connection). The band takes part of its name from the Russian author Nikolai Gogol (that’s another part of the literary connection). I describe them as a sort of Cirque de Soleil on a week-long vodka-fueled bender. They describe themselves as gypsy/immigrant punks. Either way, in addition to the standard punk instrumentation, they also have an accordion player, a violinist, two female back-up singers/percussionists (including a marching band-style bass drum), and a guy who runs around the stage with a microphone dancing/jumping around/singing back-up/doing dub reggae style vocals. It’s different.

Eugene Hütz busts a move

The show itself was insane. There was occasional slam dancing in the impromptu mosh pit. There was crowd surfing and a stage dive or two. Mostly the crowd just jumped up and down continuously for the whole show. Before the show even started, the crowd was dancing to Zorba the Greek mixed with hip hop beats. It was nuts. The bottom line is you’ve got to see these guys live to fully appreciate what they do. At the very least, you’ll see something that you’ve never seen on stage before – ever.

• Check out Eugene Hütz on NPR’s Fresh Air.
• Catch a video here.

The Little Five Points Halloween Parade was on Saturday evening. This could be the best low concept Halloween parade held anywhere. Things got started when a headless horseman galloped down the street on an actual horse (another literary reference if you’re keeping score at home). There was a disappointingly small Star Wars contingent this year, and the Klingons didn’t even show up. Things turned literary – sort of – when Atlanta author (Bleachy Haired Honky Bitch, Confessions of a Recovering Slut) and Creative Loafing columnist Hollis Gillespie rode by in a truck with a friend dressed as a French fry and another friend in drag. They were yelling something incomprehensible out of megaphones. That’s the beauty of the L5P Halloween parade.

Author Hollis Gillespie seated (and out of view) behind the french fry.

On Sunday I missed our pal Frank’s panel discussion on R.E.M. in Athens, GA. Drat.

Update: In addition to missing Frank, I also missed the Dalai Lama.

Each of the Booker short-listed novels will be made available for free (no pay) download.  In this scenario, I think I can see myself checking out The Gathering.  I also expect to finally get my Mr Pip on.

Why sign up for an MFA program or workshop when all you need to know about creative writing was aired last evening on My Name is Earl. Earl attended a creative writing class is prison, which resulted in each of the main characters taking a stab at putting a story on paper. Randy’s action/adventure tale featuring H.R. Pufnstuf as his sidekick was inspired genius. Genius! I tell you.

The Dalai Lama will be in town October 20-22 to be installed as a Presidential Distinguished Professor at Emory University. So we have that going for us… (Discussion question: Will the Dalai Lama be more remembered for (a) working to achieve world peace, or (b) stiffing caddy Carl Spackler on his tip?)

The New York Times reports on the massive advertising campaign designed to get Atlantans listening to audio books. Check out the Atlanta Listens! website for a flavor of the campaign.

On Sunday, October 21, That Truncheon Thing’s Frank will be a member of an elite panel discussing R.E.M.’s Athens musical and artistic roots. The panel is part of a day long program hosted by the Athens Historical Society — R.E.M. in Perspective: An Athens History. For more info, visit TTT and the Athens Historical Society. If you’re of a certain age and from a certain part of the country, it doesn’t get any cooler than that.

BGB reader Nicole sent word that next week (Oct. 24-28) is the first LGBTQ Literary Festival. I don’t know what the “Q” stands for. The Festival will be hosted by the Atlanta Central Library. Surprisingly, the library’s web site doesn’t appear to have any information about the event. Not a word that I can find. Nice sponsorship. Here’s what Outwrite will be doing. If you want more info on the rest of the Fest, use the “contact us” link to send us a message, and I’ll forward you the press release.

Related? Lance Bass, formerly of boy ban *NSYNC – “one of the biggest bands in music history” – ahem, will be reading from his tell-all memoir at Outwrite Bookstore on October 25.

And don’t forget to mark your calendars for the Baby Got Books co-sponsored event, Brock Clarke reading from An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England.  There will be literature, there will be music, there will be food and beverage.  It will be a bacchanal.  November 19th.  Write it down.  More info here.

Our pals at Wordsmiths are are searching for an intern.  If you or someone you know are a college student looking to pad that resume with real world book store experience, check out this announcement for more info.   It’ll be a cool job involving lots of hanging out with famous authors and such. Heck, I’d apply if I didn’t have a job…and was a college student…

The annual Booker Prize winner is usually a no-brainer purchase for me. Even if I haven’t heard of the book prior to the announcement, chances are it will turn out to be an excellent read. This year’s winner though…eh, I don’t know.

The Booker Prize was awarded last night to The Gathering by Anne Enright. The Booker’s web site calls the story an “exhilaratingly bleak family epic.” Are they trying to minimize book sales?

Has anyone read it?

Update: Posts elsewhere have me rethinking my initial gut reaction to the Booker winner:

• The Millions
• My Tragic Right Hip
• Counter Balance
• Critical Mass…

…In short, just about everyone else.

Update 2: The publisher has just announced a reprint run of 75,000 copies, which just goes to show what I know.

New York Magazine has the story on how the Wall Street Journal pulled off the coup of getting the near recluse Bill Watterson to review the new Charles Schultz biography (via Bookslut).  I  was a huge Calvin and Hobbes fan, and I thought the review was fantastic.  Bonus points: Bill Watterson looks exactly like Calvin’s dad.

Nick Hornby has a new book out for “Young Adults” (YA). It’s ok for actual adults to read books from that section of the bookstore, too. Honest. In this month’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading Column” in The Believer Hornby says:

…dismissing YA books because you’re not a young adult is a little bit like refusing to watch thrillers on the grounds that you’re not a policeman or a dangerous criminal…

True, he has an alterior motive for this viewpoint, but the idea is relatively sound. Anyway… I was handed an advance reading copy by a mysterious benefactor (thanks MB!), so I had to take it out for a spin.

Hornby’s best characters have been damaged adult males with arrested development (see High Fidelity, About a Boy, and the non-fiction Fever Pitch). His most rubbish characters have arisen when he attempts to write from a female perspective (see How to be Good). I skipped A Long Way Down, because I feared the worst. His latest, Slam, is a return to adolescent male form that Hornby does so well. Literally.

Slam is told from the point of view of a teenage boy – a 15 year old kid into skateboarding, video games, and hanging out. Sam’s mother and father are divorced. Whenever he needs manly advice, he turns to the poster of skateboarder Tony Hawk on his wall. Sam has read Hawk’s autobiography (Hawk – Occupation: Skateboarder) so many times that whenever he has an important life question to ask a relevant fragment from the book can usually serve as a reasonable response – a “What Would Tony Do” exercise.

Things are going pretty well for Sam, relatively speaking, until he meets a girl and the wheels seemingly come off of his young life. Shortly after launching into a relationship with his first girlfriend, Sam learns that he will become a teenage father. He reacts how you might expect – he takes off for a coastal town where he vacationed once and throws his cellphone into the ocean, ready to begin a new life on the run. With Tony Hawk’s sage counsel and a few flashes into the future to see how things turn out, Sam gets it sorted out — eventually. And that last part is not nearly as cheesy as I made it sound.

Hornby does a beautiful job of capturing the inner workings of the teenage male mind – such as it is – with remarkable precision. It’s uncanny. This is definitely one of Hornby’s better books. If you’re a Hornby fan, you can read this one without hesitiation. And if you’ve got a teenager around, you may want to pick up a copy to scare ‘em celibate without being preachy.

Additional Reading:

• Big thumbs up from the Washington Post Book World
• Hornby talks to the Time Online (UK) about the book
• Tony Hawk’s web site

Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, reviews the new Charles Schultz biography in the Wall Street Journal.  Why its worth reading: get to the bottom of the subtext of Lucy and Schroeder’s relationship.

Is it me or is more of this kind of thing suddenly showing up for free on the Wall Street Journal.  I hope I didn’t just jinx it by asking that…