NYT’s Top 10

The New York Times has whittled their list of 100 Notable Books of 2007 to a more manageable 10 Best Books of 2007.  They are:

Fiction:

• Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas
• Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (excerpt)
• The Savage Detectives by Robert Bolaño (excerpt)
• Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris (excerpt available at link)
• Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson (excerpt)

Non-Fiction:

• Imperial Life int he Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (excerpt)
  
• Little Heathens : Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish (excerpt)
• The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin (excerpt)
• The Ordeal Of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History by Linda Colley (excerpt)
• The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross (audio samples)

Another look at the Kindle

Most of the early coverage of the Kindle was pretty harsh. Salon has a review of the device that seems to be more even handed, although it is also fairly critical. Some interesting bits from the article:

Overall impression: “this thing is very much Version 1.0; it feels like an early-adopter product, like a concept Amazon wants us to get used to rather than a gadget you could live with for several years. ”

The reviewer notes that the interface is pretty old school. How old school? “…like it was made for cosmonauts.”

While text looks good, “pictures look like they were rendered on a circa-1990 dot-matrix printer.”

Subscription web content looks pretty bad, too. The Kindle version of the New York Times “resembles what the Web version of the Times looked like in about the middle-’90s. ”

The hefty price remains the big sticking point for the Salon reviewer, but he has an interesting analysis of what it would take to make the Kindle worth your while. Assuming that you buy mostly hard cover books,

As I calculate it, if you add in the $400 cost of the device, you’ll need to buy at least 40 e-books at $9.99 each to get an average per-book price lower than $20, roughly the cost of a standard bookstore hardcover.

If you’re sure you can read at least 40 books over the life of your Kindle — let’s say five years, so eight books a year — then sure, go ahead and buy one. You’ll save money in the long run, not to mention 40 books’ worth of shelf space.

Eight books a year? My guess is that the height of that bar includes everyone who visits this site. I’m just sayin’…

(Thanks to F.O.B. Frank for passing this along.)

Update: The Wall Street Journal’s widely respected Personal Technology columnist Walter Mossberg weighs in with what should be considered the final word on the Kindle.

NBCC’s Best Recommended

The National Book Critics Circle has just published their first of what will soon be monthly top 5 lists of “best recommended” books in three categories. How were the lists compiled? The NBCC explains:

Polling our nearly 800 members, as well as all the former finalists and winners of our book prize, we asked, What 2007 books have you read that you have truly loved?

As a member, I get to vote, too. Which might be the coolest part about the whole thing.  Here are the NBCC’s fiction selections for 2007:

Fiction

1.  Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead)
2. Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
3. Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (HarperCollins)
4. Philip Roth, Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin)
5. Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses (Graywolf)

Hey, look at that, Oscar Wao, which we reviewed just yesterday, is in at number 1.  Check out the Non-Fiction and Poetry Selections at the NBCC blog.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

I was given a copy of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by someone who couldn’t wait to be rid of it. That’s usually a tough addition to the to-be-read stack, but I had heard so much positive buzz about the book that I had to check it out despite the poor recommendation.  As it turns out, I thoroughly enjoyed the book and I think that Oscar Wao is a wonderfully inventive novel.

The titular Oscar is a book nerd with a weight problem. Worse still, Oscar is a science fiction junkie, binging on Star Trek, Japanese manja, and fantasy role playing games. The nickname “Wao” comes from being called Oscar Wilde by someone with a heavy Dominican accent, and it sticks. Oscar has a tough time in his Dominican neighborhood in New Jersey. The title also lets us know that ultimately things are not going to turn out well for Oscar.

The novel is much more than a coming-of-age story though. It’s a mini-epic that spans the lives of several generations of Oscar’s family. It also presents a lively history of “the Dominican Republic of Rafael Leonídas Trujillo Molina, the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated…” Trujillo was a bad dude:

Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his own private Mordor; not only did he lock the country away from the rest of the world, isolate it behind behind the plátano curtain, he acted like it was his very own plantation, acted like his owned everything and everyone, killed whomever he wanted to kill, sons, brothers, fathers, mothers, took women women away from their husbands on their wedding nights and then would brag publicly about “the great honeymoon” he’d had the night before. His Eye was everywhere; he had a secret police that out-Stasi’ed the Stasi…

The story is told from the point of view of several narrators, none of which are Oscar. Yunior, responsible for the quote above, is a hip, athletic, ladies man and otherwise polar opposite of Oscar, who somehow becomes Oscar’s only real friend in college. Yunior tells his parts of the story in a distinctive urban-Spanglish-hipster style.

Like Oscar, Yunior is into books, writing, and sci-fi.  Yunior is cool enough to get away with it though, and he knows when to turn it off.  Yunior defends his use of sci fi references in his narrative by asking, “what’s more sci fi than Santo Domingo?”  The opression is so unthinkable that it must have taken place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far, away…

Yunior becomes a reluctant protector/big brother to Oscar while they are room mates in college. Yunior had his work cut out for him:

Trying to talk sense to Oscar was like trying to throw rocks at Unus the Untouchable. Dude was impenetrable. He’d hear me out and then shrug.

Nothing else has any efficay, I might as well be myself.

But your yourself sucks!

It is, lamentably, all I have.

The yin/yang of Oscar and Junior is one of several dualities that are presented in the book. The contrast between the hyper-sexualized macho Domincan myth embodied by Yunior and the emasculated life of Oscar mirror the power of Trujillo and the powerlessness of the Dominican Republic. Similarly, the defeminization of Oscar’s mother and sister reduces the suffering of the Dominicans to a personal level.

The ideas of fukú and zafa are another duality that are explored in the novel – curse vs. blessing. (A fukú is not your run of the mill curse. It is life altering torment that spans generations and is central to Oscar’s story.)  Fukú can spread across families and be handed down through the generations.  Fukú, or the belief in fukú, can become a prison.

Redemption through zafa can seem impossible, requiring extraordinary efforts. Yunior ends his introduction to the novel with the words, “Even now as I write these words I wonder if this book ain’t a zafa of sorts.” The question of whose zafa remains open and may even be the point of the book.

This novel will certainly be on my year end top 10 list, and I won’t be alone.  Michiko Kakutani, who seems to hate all fiction on general principle, gushed in her New York Times review:

“Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a wondrous, not-so-brief first novel that is so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets “Star Trek” meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West. It is funny, street-smart and keenly observed, ….An extraordinarily vibrant book that’s fueled by adrenaline-powered prose…

And there you have it.  Michiko and I give it two thumbs way up.

Links:

• If you have any doubts about reading the novel, please listen to Michael Silverblatt’s interview with the author on KCRW’s Bookworm. It’s fantastic. The host is moved to tears by the end of the interview. Sample quote: “Reading is a debt we owe…”
• VIBE interview (via Largehearted Boy)
• The New York Times profiles Junot Díaz
• A.O. Scott reviews the book in the NYT
• Díaz reads at Google
• Bookslut interview

As a bonus for actually reading all of all that:  I’m such a fan of this book that I feel compelled to pass along the copy of the book that was handed off to me.  Let me know in the comments if you’re willing to provide a good home to the book, and I’ll drop it in the mail.  I’ll pick a name at random if more than one person wants it.

Bad Sex 2007

The shortlist of the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award 2007 have been announced. As usual, The Guardian is there, with excerpts from the offenders contenders. The list is always good for a few belly laughs and some blushing.

I’ve only read one of the finalists, Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan, and I feel that I must come to the novel’s defense here. The fellow depicted in the excerpt is an independently wealthy 400-pound Russian who longs for the NYC hip-hop lifestyle. You try to write a scene featuring that guy gettin’ jiggy without sounding ridiculous. Also: the novel is called Absurdistan. Some level of absurdity might be expected.

Update:  The award went to Norman Mailer.  Talk about kicking a guy when he’s down.

Definitely Not a List

Across the pond, year end lists of the best books are sooooooo déclassé. Instead, The Guardian offers a simple compendium of authors and other “cultural figures” choosing their favorite books of 2007. (Chabon went with Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon, which has been in my to be read pile since Christmas of last year.)

Animal Farm

A while back, I participated in an online exercise that was supposed to match my personality with the book that was most like me, or most suited to my tastes, or somehow otherwise perfect for me. The result was George Orwell’s 1984, which I promptly started and then almost as promptly bailed on. No offense to those of you who loved that book or its author (and I must confess, I use the term “Orwellian” in everyday conversation almost as much as I use the term “Machevellian”, despite being an expert on neither Orwell or Machevelli), it just didn’t read well to me.

Despite that experience, though, when I spotted Orwell’s Animal Farm on my bookshelf, I decided to give it a shot (thanks in no small part to its diminutive size (a mere 139 smallish pages)). I believe I read this in high school, but like many high school shenanigans, I forgot what happened (although I had a general recollection).

Well, suffice it to say that this book is nothing short of phenomenal, particularly in light of when it was first published — 1946, on the heels of the conclusion of World War II. I will assume that most of you reading this post have read this book, and so I will not concern myself with not spoiling it (as I tend to do with most of my posts); if you haven’t read it, then (i) consider this a spoiler alert, and (ii) quit reading this and go read the book.

This book tells the story of a group of animals, led by pigs, who take over the farm on which they had been living under the tyrannical Mr. Jones. And while the book is subtitled “A Fairy Story”, the actual story itself involves not only metophorical tellings of the corruption that power can bring, but interweaves true life into those tellings. For example, the humans that live on the neighboring farms and in the village of Willingdon actually interact with the animals, sparring with them, speaking with them, and eventually engaging in commerce with them. So while the animals on the farm represent a metaphor for the downtrodden proletariat classes while under the reign of Mr. Jones, they later become functioning members of real world society, as animals. This observation may be neither here nor there, but I found it very engaging and just a fascinating way to tie the “fairy story” to the real world.

In any event, what I found most interesting about this story of the animals’ uprising and establishment of their own government, and the subsequent changing by that very government of its rules to favor those in control, including going back on its inital promises and fundamental “commandments” (sometimes by altering the commandments themselves), was the fact that the “lower classes” of animals were depicted for the most part as ignorant and incapable of forming their own opinions. Each time some of the animals noticed the pigs abusing their power by deviating from the rules that had been put in place, the pigs themselves (through Squealer) issued announcements and clarifying statements to put the concerned animals at ease, and these communications were apparently accepted by the animals as true.

What this pointed out to me was the valuable role that the media can play in society — questioning the government, investigating the activities of those in power, and speaking to the people freely (i.e., without governmental direction or censorship). I wasn’t around in the 1940′s, and so I don’t know what role the media played in communicating to the masses or questioning statements made by government; but a free press was certainly a modern day element that was missing in Orwell’s telling of this story. Not that a free press can prevent corruption or lies by those in power today.

NYT Notable 100

The New York Time has published its list of 100 notable books of the year.

The list also become a touchstone of sorts for this blog, since the annual notable books list is semi-responsible for our beginnings. After reading the 2004 list, I was surprised at how few of the books on the list I had ever heard of. I e-mailed the list to a few friends that were also avid readers with similar results. We collectively resolved to start paying better attention to printed reviews, to this new-fangled blogosphere that the kids were all talking about back then, and to the recommendations of our local independent booksellers. Two months later, the idea had somehow morphed into this blog, which will soon begin its fourth year.

For me, the experiment seems to be paying off on its modest goal of keeping myself slightly better informed. Reviewing this year’s list as an imperfect report card, I’ve only read seven of the fiction titles (with an 8th in the to-be-read stack). However, I think that I have at least passing knowledge of most of the books on the list, which is a huge improvement. The big shortcoming for me is on the non-fiction side of the divide. I haven’t read any of the notable non-fiction books.  Ouch.
Of course, no list is perfect or definitive. I like this one because of its breadth.  If nothing else, year-end lists are generally a good place to find books that might otherwise have slipped through the cracks.

Holiday Roundup

Burn Thanksgiving calories by pointing and clicking on these carefully curated links personally selected for your holiday enjoyment, edification, and aid in digestion:

The Swivet’s La Gringa, a bona fide e-book reader, is not down with the Kindle.

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow doesn’t like the Amazon Kindle either.

The Millions also weigh in on the Kindle. Based upon my unscientific sampling of the blogs of avid readers, no one is embracing the new technology.

Scientists at the Institute of the Obvious have found that as students are spending less time reading, their corresponding reading test scores are also decreasing.

Mark your calendars, kids. You can get your pictures taken with A-hole Santa and Crappy the Elf at Criminal Records on Dec. 1.

The Covers Blog has a round-up of the best bookshelves of 2007.

The Book Design Review collects the best book covers of 2007. This is my favorite:

Atlanta author/poet Laurel Snyder will be drunk and naked in Washington, DC next week. Govern yourself accordingly.

The Wall Street Journal gets to know Ian McEwan.

The WSJ also salutes the other great American road trip memoir.

Mark Hinson’s blog at the Tallahassee Democrat remembers the craziest author reading that has ever been brought to my attention. (via Pinky’s Paperhaus)

C heck out the photo essay Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Lower East Side at Slate.

McSweeney’s reports on the ripple effects of the writers’ strike:

With their natural predators, the screenwriters, out of the literary ecosystem, poet herds thrive and proliferate, soon overrunning their native habitats and exhausting their food supply. Before long, having any unlocked windows in one’s house becomes an invitation to poets to bust in, which they unfailingly do, spouting some goofy-ass nonsense while grabbing whatever is in the fridge.

Brock Clarke: The Recap

Monday night was the big Brock Clarke reading (An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England) that we proudly co-hosted along with Wordsmiths and The Wren’s Nest.  You might have read something about that here over the past few weeks. If you weren’t there, you missed a great evening. Here’s a quick recap:

DJ Hacks from Resonator mag set the mood with lots of arson-themed music. Check out the caution tape decorating the reading/tune mixing stage.  It’s all about the details.  This was destined to be the finest arson-themed book reading in the southeast from the get-go.

Just before DJ Hacks started doing his thing, Amelia from The Wren’s Nest rolled in with falafels, humus, and other assorted treats.  If you could find fellow Nest-er Lain’s bottle opener key chain, there was also tasty cold beer.

Brock Clarke read from his book for a good 20-30 minutes (a big chunk of the Robert Frost home scene if you’ve read the book). Following the reading he did some Q&A.  Mr. Clarke revealed that he found the voice of Sam, the protagonist of Arsonist’s Guide, in Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King (which I Bookmooch-ed upon arriving home). He also said that he has been well received at the Emily Dickinson house and Amherst, MA, both of which featured prominently in the novel.  After taking questions, Mr. Clarke signed books for the assembled.

After signing books, Brock (we’re all on a first name basis now) mingled with the crowd, posed for pictures with the beautiful people, and took in the Wordsmiths vibe.  But wait!  There’s more!

Sealions brought the rock to finish up the evening. J Trav, the guitarist there on the left, is also the artist for the outstanding and very cool poster that we used to promote the evening.  I hadn’t seen Sealions live before, so that was a nice way to close out a Monday night.

If you missed it, be sure to catch us next time.

Amazon’s Kindle

Over the weekend I read through a Newsweek article about Amazon’s new e-book reader, the Kindle. The article reads like an ad for the device without much in the way of hard questions about the new gizmo. Lo and behold, the Kindle showed up on Amazon’s web site yesterday, and it’s ready for shipping.

If you read this blog, however infrequently, you are the target audience for what is being hailed as “the iPod for books.” I’m unconvinced, but I’m interested in hearing what other people think.

Here are my scattered thoughts on the Kindle:

First impression: I hate the name.

Second impression: It’s $399. Have they lost their minds?

A few items of interest that come from the Newsweek article:

Here’s a deal breaker for me:

Bezos explains that it’s only fair to charge less for e-books because you can’t give them as gifts, and due to restrictive antipiracy software, you can’t lend them out or resell them.

Saddling the e-books with digital rights management (DRM) means that you won’t be able to use the books that you’ve purchased however you like. That sucks. It didn’t work for the music industry. Amazon knew this and is now selling DRM-free music files for download in a direct challenge to iTunes. In addition, you won’t be able to read Kindle books on your Sony e-book reader and vice-versa. Why does Amazon think that this broken-by-design approach will work with books? Unfortunately Newsweek doesn’t ask.

I don’t know what to make of this:

The Kindle is not just for books. Via the Amazon store, you can subscribe to newspapers (the Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Le Monde) and magazines (The Atlantic). When issues go to press, the virtual publications are automatically beamed into your Kindle. (It’s much closer to a virtual newsboy tossing the publication on your doorstep than accessing the contents a piece at a time on the Web.) You can also subscribe to selected blogs, which cost either 99 cents or $1.99 a month per blog.

Why would you pay any money to subscribe to a blog? Is this an idiot tax for people who are too lazy to figure out how to use Google Reader? The article doesn’t mention the costs of the newspapers, which are all available for free online, too (with the exception of the WSJ which will be free soon enough). What am I missing here?

The Newsweek article also makes some fairly ridiculous statements, such as the following:

“Michael Chabon will have to rethink how he writes for this medium,” he says. Brantley envisions wiki-style collaborations where the author, instead of being the sole authority, is a “superuser,” the lead wolf of a creative pack.

Hey! No need to drag Chabon into this. The article also throws out this bizarre expert reference:

“Book clubs could meet inside of a book,” says Bob Stein, a pioneer of digital media who now heads the Institute for the Future of the Book, a foundation-funded organization based in his Brooklyn, N.Y., town house.

For bonus points, the article also references the assistant director of the Institute. How do I get to start a “foundation-funded” Institute with my buddies that’s run out of my townhouse?

Boing-Boing’s new gadget blog took the Kimble for a test drive. Their findings:

• You can not read PDF files at all. That stinks.
• You have to jump through some hoops to read other types of files.
• Access to the web appears to be free, but you can pay to subscribe to blogs (pay for RSS?)
• “Too Expensive”
• “Feels like my first iPod”

On the plus side, the device will have always on wireless internet (based on cell phone technology not WiFi) at no additional cost, i.e. no usage fees or monthly bills. If you can access e-mail and surf the web how you like, it might actually be worth the cost on that basis alone. I suspect that it will ship with very limited internet access. We’ll see.

What it will take to get me into a Kindle:

• No DRM on e-book files. None. Even better, create a Shelfari-style Kindle social networking site accessible from my Kimble where I can loan books off of my shelf to my friends.
• Drop the price about $300
• Complete access to the web. For free.
• Support all document formats
• Let me easily buy books from other vendors
• Set me up in a foundation-funded Institute-type employment situation

Believe me, I’m no Luddite. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on an iPod. The “iPod for books” seems to have a few major obstacles to overcome before I even think about it. Given the recent iPhone price drop fiasco, why would you even want to be the first kid on your block to buy one?

I’m interested to hear what your initial thoughts are. Is anyone actually thinking about buying one of these?

Additional reading on the Kindle:

The Guardian

New York Times

Gizmodo – “Inside the Kindle is the Oxford American Dictionary, but you can only look up words that you run across while reading—you can’t just type them in.”

Wall Street Journal 

An Arsonist’s Guide

Tonight we’re co-hosting a reading at Wordsmiths Books for An Arsonist’s Guide to Writer’s Homes in New England by Brock Clarke. The evening is free and includes DJ Hacks spinning tunes before the reading and the Sealions performing live music afterwards. Free food and beverage will be served throughout. It should be a fine evening of “capital C” Culture. We’ve mentioned the event several times here over the last few weeks, but we haven’t talked about the book itself in any real detail yet.

I enjoyed the novel thoroughly, which is one of the reasons that I’m excited that we were given the opportunity to co-host this evening.

The novel begins:

I, Sam Pulsifer, am the man who accidentally burned down the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Massachusetts, and who in the process killed two people, for which I spent 10 years in prison and, as letters from scholars of American literature tell me, for which I will continue to pay a high price long into the not-so-sweet hereafter.

That quote sets the tone for this book. It’s dark – our narrator has been found guilty of arson/murder – and yet he somehow remains likable through the telling of his story. It’s also archly comic. The role that story telling can play in our lives is an important theme in the novel.

We learn that Sam’s mother began to tell him horror stories that featured the Emily Dickinson House, a vaguely sinister local landmark in Amherst, after his father left the family for a time. “Those must have been some stories,” says the judge at Sam’s trial. Expanding on his line of questioning, the judge says:

Can a story be good only if it produces an effect? If the effect is a bad one, but intended, has the story done its job? Is it then a good story? If the story produces an effect other than the one intended one, is then a bad story? Can a story be said to produce an effect at all? Should we expect it to? Can we blame the story for anything? Can a story actually do anything at all?

After his release from prison, Sam tries to create a new life. In order to not be judged by his past, Sam tries to hide the truth and builds his new life on a foundation of lies. Big lies. Sam on being a liar:

I told another lie. Because this is what you do when you’re a liar: you tell a lie, and then another one, and after a while you hope that the lies end up being less painful than the truth, or at least that is the lie that you tell yourself.

Soon, reality begins to intrude on Sam’s life. Someone begins to burn down other writers’ homes in New England, and naturally Sam is a prime suspect. As the lies begin to unravel, marital problems add to Sam’s woes. I don’t know why, but I loved this line:

Fear and love might leave a man complacent, but jealousy will always get him out of the van.

Along the way, almost all aspects of literary life are commented upon by Sam, who is not a reader. Authors’ homes museum are one obvious target of Sam’s commentary. Book readings (!), book clubs, corporate book stores, and British kids’ books all come under fire along the way. Most disturbing of all, however, is Sam’s offhand attack on reader’s themselves:

…this was another reason why people read: not so that they would feel less lonely, but so that other people would think that they looked less lonely with a book in their hands and therefore not pity them and leave them alone.

Oh, Sam, that hurts. Sam also has a rather inspired bit on memoirs vs. fiction that I can’t tell you about, because it could ruin your reading of the novel.

As I said earlier, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. It’s smart, it’s funny, and this Brock Clarke guy can write. Early on in my reading of the novel, I replaced my bookmark with a index card so I could keep track of especially inspired lines and passages. I never do that. File this one in the “recommended” column.

If you’re in the Atlanta area, you can pick up the novel tonight, meet the author, and hang out with all of the cool kids. Throw some free eats, drinks, And music into the bargain, and you’ve got yourself a can’t lose proposition. See you there.

Besides Wordmsiths, the other co-sponsor of the evening’s festivities is The Wren’s Nest, an author’s home museum. That’s inspired genius right there. If you make it out tonight, be sure to say hello.

Additional info on the reading is here.

Petropolis

I first heard about Petropolis in an interview that ran on Maud Newton’s blog. In her introduction to the interview with Anya Ulinich (conducted by Kevin Kinsella), Maud says, “I defy you to read the interview and not come away with the sense that you should pick up a copy immediately.” She didn’t even have to “double dog” dare me. It was Book Mooch-ed within the hour.

The novel tells the story of Sasha Goldberg, part Jewish, part African, and member of a Russian family that was part of the intelligentsia and now living in in pre-Glasnost Siberia. That’s a lot of baggage to carry around as a child. She’s a bright little girl growing up to be an awkward teenager who is beginning to realize that she may not exactly blend in with the blond-haired Russians all around her.

Sasha lives in the industrial town of Asbestos 2, home of the second biggest Siberian asbestos mine. Is there anything more depressing sounding that attending the Asbestos 2 Secondary School 13? How about going to art school at the District 7 Evening Art Studio for Children? The scenes in Siberia, and later Moscow, are hilarious and heartbreakingly bleak in equal measure.

Sasha’s father left the family to emigrate to the US while she was still young, and her proud mother wants more for her daughter than Asbestos 2 is prepared to offer. Through some shady dealings with her application, Sasha is accepted into a prestigious arts academy. Eventually and through an unexpected avenue, Sasha finds her way to the United States.

Sasha’s tale of immigration to the United States holds a mirror up to our own absurdities. In Arizona, Sasha notes the miles of sidewalks that no one uses from the windows of a bus. Another character in the story calls her preference for public transportation a third-world vestige that will hopefully be outgrown.  Sasha’s travels through the US lead her to Chicago and finally to New York City, where her long-lost father may or may not now live.

I enjoyed Petropolis, and I’m grateful that I stumbled across the author interview on Maud’s site.  I’m also a sucker for the Russians, modern or “classic,”  so I imagine that I was predisposed to liking this novel.  If you want to take the novel for a test drive, you can read the first chapter here.

Like Sasha, Anya Ulinich is herself a Russian immigrant, Jewish, and an artist.  She has also lived in Arizona, Chicago, and New York City.  She took a break from painting, which was her profession, to write Petropolis, which is her first novel.

Lo!

Dana Stevens reviews the movie Beowulf in verse.

National Book Awards & Oprah & Okra

Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke won the National Book Award for Fiction last night.

Other winners:

• Sherman Alexie won the Literature for Young People’s Award for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
• Tim Wiener’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA won the Non-Fiction Prize
• Robert Hass’ Time and Materials won the prize for Poetry
• Joan Didion and Terry Gross won honorary Medals

In a shocking coincidence, Oprah announced her new book pick on the same day that the National Book Awards were handed out. Crazy timing. Oprah’s new book will be Ken Follet’s 900+ page The Pillars of the Earth.

Billboard of the month: last week driving from Mississippi to New Orleans I saw an advertisement for the Zatarain’s Cajun seasoning company that reads “As seen on Okra.” Sadly, I did not have my camera. However, I did find a version of the sign on Flickr.

Did we mention…?

The initial event in what some are calling the Baby Got Books Reading Series* is taking place in less than a week. (*OK. Actually, no one is calling it the BGB Reading Series except me.) Don’t forget to mark those calendars, line up baby-sitters, and clear your schedule for November 19th.

Along with Wordsmiths Books and the Wren’s Nest, we’re proud to welcome Brock Clarke who will be reading from the excellent novel An Arsonist’s Guide To Writers’ Homes in New England. The evening includes DJ Hacks on the 1′s and 2′s before the reading and live music by the Sealions afterwards. There will also be food and beverage. All for free.

The details:

Please see: Wordsmiths’ Russ interviews Brock Clarke in anticipation of the upcoming event.

Are you happy now, Norman Mailer?

As you’ve likely read everywhere, Norman Mailer died at the age of 84 this week. Pick from a menu of obits at Book Ninja. It’s been a while since I’ve run into Norman Mailer. I think the last time that I saw him was a few years ago at the Dragonfly Inn in rural Connecticut.  Wait. I wasn’t there…

Guest Blogger: Yannick Murphy

Mata Hari was an exotic dancer that was famously executed for spying during Wold War I. A non-fiction account of Mata Hari’s life released earlier this year suggests that Mata Hari “…was convicted not for espionage but for her lack of shame.” Yannick Murphy’s new novel, Signed, Mata Hari, presents the famous dancer’s version of events. To celebrate the release of the book (out today at better bookstores everywhere), Yannick Murphy dropped by (virtually) to file a guest post here at BGB.

SIGNED, YANNICK MURPHY

I’m writing this to apologize to whoever it was who bought the November ELLE magazine issue with the book review page torn out of it. It was my mother who did it. Yes, my mother went into the supermarket, found the aisle with the magazines, found the book review of my new novel SIGNED, MATA HARI and tore out the page. I had no idea my mother was capable of such a heinous crime, or maybe I did know, even after all the years of her preaching the difference between right and wrong, I knew she could do it.

I had something of my mother’s nature in mind when I wrote and imagined the voice of Mata Hari. My mother, like Mata Hari, was very beautiful in her prime. My mother, like Mata Hari, is the kind of woman who can speak eloquently about a number of subjects, she is educated and prides herself on her impressive array of worldwide knowledge, but she is obviously the kind of woman who can commit a crime and then justify it by saying she didn’t have the money for a magazine that she had no interest in reading, except for, of course, the page that mentioned her daughter’s name and book.

So you see, dear person with the missing page, I had a most excellent model for understanding my Mata Hari character, I grew up knowing her one could almost say. Mata Hari, like my mother, was able to justify her actions. In Mata Hari’s case, these actions (mostly innocent in her own eyes and therefore aren’t they really innocent?) led to her eventual conviction for espionage. And who is to say, besides the law, that my mother’s justifications and Mata Hari’s justifications aren’t valid? My mother, for instance, can’t afford a luxury item like a big fat issue of a fashion magazine filled with styles that she would believe are inappropriate for someone her age anyway. My mother would say that you, dear person with the missing page, probably aren’t even interested in books and that you probably wouldn’t even miss the page. (I of course, regret that you have had to miss my review. I would have hoped that you’d read the review and then run out the door and buy a copy of my book and twenty extra copies on top of that to give to your friends.) My mother is also grieving for a loved one right now, and who wouldn’t pity her, she probably thinks, who wouldn’t allow her, maybe just this once, a little bout of kleptomania?

In closing, dear person with the missing page, I am sorry for my mother’s crime and I do hope you eventually get to read the review of my book that was featured in ELLE, it was a nice one.
Signed,

Yannick Murphy

The Publisher has graciously provided us with a copy of the book to pass along to one of our readers. If you’d like a FREE copy of Signed, Mata Hari of your very own, leave us a note in the comments. We’ll pick a random winner by the end of the week to take home one of these:

Also, Yannick Murphy: greatest name ever? Discuss.

Additional reading:

• Excerpt from the book
• The book was reviewed favorably this weekend in the San Francisco Chronicle.
• Yannick Murphy’s web site
• WikPedia: Mata Hari

LA. Stories

As luck would have it, work brought me to the southern Lousiana/Mississippi border area last week. I was able to run into New Orleans for lunch and quick stop at Faulkner House Books. The tiny Faulkner House is quickly becoming my all time favorite book store. The books are mostly hard cover contemporary fiction, but they also have an amazing collection of classic first editions (this visit I saw firsts for To Kill A Mockingbird, Grapes of Wrath, Catcher in the Rye, and others). They also have some non-fiction, poetry, and a stand alone short story collection. Because space is so light (your kitchen may be bigger than the store), there is usually only one volume of each book, but each book has been clearly hand picked by someone who loves books. While I was there, a customer with a stated preference for non-fiction asked the owner, Joe DeSalvo, why he preferred reading fiction. DeSalvo said, “I like fiction because I want to understand the truth.”

The Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society is holding its annual festival this coming weekend in New Orleans. I can’t find a link..

In other NOLA news:

Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose has a great article about the local reaction to the new TV cop-drama K-Ville:

Anyone who watched the first episode of the show was likely perplexed by fictional New Orleans police officer Marlin Boulet’s repeated references to “gumbo parties.” Sure, it seems a simple enough idea: Have a party, serve gumbo. Hence, a gumbo party…

“In the first 50 seconds of the first show, the guy said ‘gumbo party,’ and I couldn’t make a roux fast enough,” Dyer said last Monday night as friends and associates filed into his Bywater home to participate in the city’s newest fad.

Another of Rose’s recent columns was about a young guy who felt the pull to return to New Orleans so strongly that he rode his bike home. From New York City.

Finally: amateur mixologists, I call on you for assistance. I picked up a bottle of Absolut New Orleans flavored vodka. What does New Orleans taste like? — Apparently mango and black pepper. So the question is: what do I mix this with?

Reading on the Bayou

Our Cajun Correspondent, my mom, sent word/pictures of a recent book signing on the bayou. Ken Wells was signing his new book Crawfish Mountain at the recently opened (and independent) Cherry Books in Thibodeaux, Louisiana. The book store owners reportedly had to leave in a rush to get more copies of the book. They had sold out of all that they had on hand before the event even started. Luckily, they were able to get enough books (from somewhere) for all in attendance.

Mom getting my book signed by Ken Wells

Cherry Books takes its name from the previous owner of the building. Mr. Cherry was well known to the residents of Thibodeaux, because he was the town cobbler. Yes. Cobbler. The bookshelves are decorated with shoes that Mr. Cherry made. The bookstore owners found the shoes while renovating the space and decided to pay tribute to the well-liked Mr. Cherry.

Locally made shoes adorn the shelves

ANYWAY – I reviewed Crawfish Mountain a week or so ago. The book was also favorably reviewed recently in The Washington Post. One of the only negatives in the WP review was that the author thought that “it does strain even improbability” that so many of the key characters would happen to know one another. Believe me, everybody knows everybody on the bayou. You can also listen to the author talk about the book on NPR’s All Things Considered.