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TEV GIVEAWAY: TRESPASS
Back in January, Nan Talese lamented the fact that nothing short of a naked tour across America could stoke interest in Valerie Martin's Trespass:
There is a brief pause, during which a listener tries to imagine Martin, who's in town for a reading and who appears not to have an exhibitionistic bone in her 59-year-old body, impersonating Lady Godiva or launching herself across the Snake River Canyon.
Well, we thought we'd do our bit to help everyone involved remain clothed, and so we're happy to offer a copy of the novel that The New York Times called "the best kind of moral fiction," and the Los Angeles Times called "breath-stopping.." Here's Sue Halpern:
Over the past 30 years, Valerie Martin's novels and stories, although well received by critics, have made little dent in the public consciousness. The library at the college where I work has no record of her, for instance, and the local bookstore carries hardly any of her fiction, despite Martin's receipt of Britain's prestigious Orange Prize for her 2003 novel, "Property," which beat out work by stars like Zadie Smith, Carol Shields and Donna Tartt. This is too bad, because Martin deserves a wider audience — but it can also be a delight for the unsuspecting reader. Coming across her for the first time, you experience the frisson of discovery, especially when you learn that she's written a whole shelf of books, a dozen in all. Martin is an uncompromising, serious writer, concerned with both the eternal verities and what matters right now. She wants to know how the big questions play out in individual lives.
And so, the game remains the same. Send us off an email, subject line "KEEP YER CLOTHES ON," and include your full mailing address. Previous winners ineligible. We'll take all emails until 8 p.m. PST and then we turn to the Random Number Generator for a decision that will make at least one reader and Nan Talese happy. And, really, that's more or less entirely why we're here.
UPDATE: Congratulations to another longtime TEV reader/entrant, Grace Farag of Burbank, CA. We love it when the regulars get lucky!
ROOSTER UPDATE
Hectic around here today, posting erratic but we can now officially announce that we are, in fact, Rooster judges once more.
Posted at 09:23 AM in Tournament of Books | Permalink | Comments (1)
BOYLE ON DUTTON'S
T.C. Boyle offers his own rembrances of Dutton's in the Los Angeles Times.
It was like stumbling into a Borgesian reality in which everything was made of books -- the walls, the floors, the ceilings, even the employees. Before I could think, there was Scott Wannberg, one of the true literary zealots of our time, exploding from behind a cordillera of books to greet me. Within minutes, I'd signed the well-represented editions of my own titles, which were on permanent display right alongside those of all the authors I most admired, and then Scott was piling my arms high with books I absolutely just had to read. He had a sixth sense, knowing exactly what I wanted and needed, and from then on, though it was a bit of a haul from Woodland Hills, Dutton's was my bookshop.
Posted at 09:11 AM in Local Heroes | Permalink | Comments (0)
* The City Council has spoken - Bukowski's digs are now a landmark. (A tour bus company has already leapt at the opportunity.)
"Hollywood is famous not because everybody has been a saint or a nun," Los Angeles City Councilman Eric Garcetti told Reuters last week. "It's always attracted complicated and important people and Charles Bukowski certainly fits that mold."
* On the other hand, across town, Beyond Baroque is in danger of following in Dutton's footsteps.
* The Village Voice reviews three, um, depressing French novels. Which actually sound kinda cool. Which tells you something about us.
* Tom Wolfe is to receive the Carl Sandburg Literary Award ... which we can only assume has something to do with best use of exclamation marks!
Currently Wolfe is working on Back to Blood, a book set in Miami's immigrant communities — set for a 2009 release.
Oy. We wait not.
* Speaking of Wolfe, the current issue of Poets & Writers features a lengthy interview with editor Pat Strachan.
* Tim Lott wonders what has happened to love in literature, and then goes to Richard Curtis for his answer, who delivers more or less precisely what you dread, um, expect.
* We're thinking that "outsider" is an increasing inaccurate label for Cormac McCarthy but the Independent is running with it.
For acolytes, McCarthy has over the past decade become the alpha and omega of American fiction. When, last year, the New York Times Book Review polled 200 writers and critics to determine the 25 best American novels of the past quarter-century, McCarthy's gory historical landmark from 1985, Blood Meridian, came third (behind only Toni Morrison's Beloved and Don DeLillo's Underworld). The Border Trilogy that occupied McCarthy through the 1990s – All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain – also made the cut.
* Ida Fink, Tuvya Ruebner and Nili Mirsky are the winners of the 2008 Israel Prize for Literature, Poetry and Translation (respectively).
* Robert Frost, it appears, was all about the patronage.
``I'm glad there are some,'' he added, ``foolish enough to take care of fool poets. We'd lose all that when capitalism goes, you know,'' he said according to the AP.
* The mighty Lorin Stein on Norman Rush's Mortals, a James Wood favorite.
"Mortals" is one of those rare long books that's fun to read but no fun to review. The characters--expatriates in Botswana, as in "Mating"--are full of ideas (about marriage, Christianity, race, economic development, etc) and you can't tell which ones the author shares. Ordinarily the plot would sort these things out in a hurry. Most novels are justice machines. But Rush keeps you in suspense. Real, uncomfortable suspense--ideological suspense. The kind that reviewers tend to find "messy". ("Rush's attempts to meld political reality with domestic tragicomedy occasionally make the narrative unwieldy," Publishers Weekly)
* The Canadian press has picked up Sheila Heti's dream project.
* Novelist Peter Smith has a fine photo essay on writers' houses.
* Emma Garman profiles Philippe Grimbert for Nextbook.
He's not exaggerating. An unexpected international sensation, Un Secret has sold 700,000 copies in France alone (more than double the sales of Michel Houellebecq's last novel; the only literary work to have had similar success in France in recent years is another World War II novel by a Jewish author, Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes). Soon after Un Secret's 2004 publication it became clear that this spare, unsentimental novel was hitting a nerve. Raves—"a very beautiful work, its content matching its form in their wondrous simplicity" (Figaro); "a splendid book that gives the unspeakable written form" (Le Monde)—were followed by awards: the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, the Prix des Lectrice d'Elle, and the Prix Wizo for the best work of Jewish interest in French literature. In the three years since, the novel has been translated into twenty-two languages, published in thirty-five countries, and adapted by director Claude Miller into an acclaimed movie now on the festival circuit. This month it finally arrives in U.S. bookstores under the title Memory.
* Michael Gorra considers the problem of a Venice that exists for tourists only.
* Bill Moyers asks "What book should the winning presidential candidate take to the White House?" Us, we're thinking Harry, Revised but we probably have an agenda.
* And, finally, we're kinda grammar/style geeks, it's true, but we find this kind of stuff endlessly fascinating.
You know where we stand on this one, folks. If you want to have a meaningful opinion about Beautiful Children, check it out for yourselves. Well, Random House has just made that a good deal easier. From 12:01 a.m. Wednesday through midnight on Friday, they are offering the entire novel in a free PDF download. It's a pretty unprecedented move and speaks, we think, to Random House's belief in the novel (which hit the Times Bestseller List this week). So go and look at the book that even Gawker likes.
KIRIYAMA FINALISTS
The finalists for the Kiriyama Prize have been announced.
In fiction, finalists besides Malouf's Complete Stories include Lloyd Jones' Mister Pip, in which Dickens' Great Expectations inspires a young girl on Bougainville Island, off the coast of Papua New Guinea; Nicole Mones' The Last Chinese Chef; Roma Tearne's Mosquito and Zhu When's I Love Dollars, translated by Julia Lovell.
MORE ON DUTTON'S
The Los Angeles Times has more on the closing of Dutton's, which is set to close the day before we were set to read there.
Author Carolyn See described the store's decline and looming closing as "just sickening."
She said she prized the spot as a neighborhood meeting place, not just for literati but also for local dog walkers. "If you weren't the drinking kind," See said, "you could go there the way you'd go to a bar."
It's true. We popped around yesterday afternoon before a doctor's appointment in the neighborhood to find Antoine Wilson and Brigid Hughes sitting and chatting at cafe outside. We lamented the closing, and Hughes pointed out that she'd been unable to find a copy of the Silverblatt-recommended Their Dogs Came With Them by Helen Maria Viramontes's anywhere but Dutton's.
THINGS CONTINUE TO FALL APART
The latest to the club, Scott Timberg pens a lengthy and thoughtful appreciation of Things Fall Apart for the Los Angeles Times.
The book eventually released, "Things Fall Apart," became a critical hit in Britain as well as the first African novel to break through to the English-speaking world. Not only did it sell -- nearly 10 million copies, in 50 languages -- this slim, understated volume became the one African novel to break, unambiguously, into the often impenetrable Western canon. The book continues to live: High school kids and college students read it for class, while African novelists read it to pursue its ideas and themes.
To literary scholar John Marx of UC Davis, it's "the first novel of the African literary canon, to be sure, but also a key text in the body of writing one needs to know to be literate. I'd say that's the case not only in the English-speaking world but just about everywhere."
Posted at 12:10 AM in World Beat | Permalink | Comments (2)
A FEW THOUGHTS ON REVIEWS, PROMPTED BY PW & KIRKUS
Lee Goldberg scooped me with my own news yesterday, noting that Publishers Weekly has reviewed Harry, Revised. You can read the whole thing here, but here's the money quote:
... though there may be legions of writers spurned by his blog just willing for Sarvas to fail, this is a self-assured, comic and satisfying story
There was much celebrating and happy emailing going around yesterday, when Kirkus's considerably less kind review (not available online) came across the transom. Still, it's not a train wreck, and there's a usable quote there, too:
The book is fast-paced; there are nice comic touches; and Harry is, finally, rather compelling, selfish and damaged but recognizably human.
So I'm batting .500, which any ball player will tell you is an impressive stat. And what I said the other day holds absolutely true - good review or bad, I know enough to know it's one reader's opinion. I'm grateful for the good and don't take the bad personally. And I've been thinking about readers and opinions all day, since I linked to James Wood's review of His Illegal Self yesterday. (And what follows is a rare bit of thinking out loud, so please read on accordingly.)
When I got the green-light to review this book, I was excited because I love Peter Carey's work and couldn't wait to write about him, but once I got into the book, I was miserable at the prospect that my first bylined review of his work should be a negative one. I was further hobbled by only having about 450 words to make my case - so I do sympathize with PW and Kirkus reviewers - and I lament not having had more space to discuss specific failings of the book, the two key ones being the improbable flight to Australia, and Dial's implausible behavior.
So, of course, when James Wood's glowing review ran yesterday, it made me regret once again not having had more space to make my case. And it became another first - the first time I've reviewed the same novel as Wood, and disagreed no less. Given Wood's stature (and my all too well known fixation), it's enough to make one question one's critical chops.
But here's the thing. Wood touches on at least one of the aspects (though not the other) that troubled me:
Carey needs this never-apologize-never-explain form, not least because he decides to send his errant couple to Australia, not quite credibly. (Why not Mexico?)
The key difference between us is that Wood is quickly able to forgive this in light of the stunning prose of the novel and Carey's use of Wood's beloved free indirect style (about which he writes beautifully in How Fiction Works); whereas in my case, because the foundation of the book was so sloppily laid (and I think Wood is generous in his assessment), I simply could never give myself over to it the way he did. Similarly, I think, Carey fails to make Dial's willingness to throw away her promising future over this adventure remotely credible. These combined failings kept me from falling into the book the way I have with Carey's other novels.
And yet, it's still one person's opinion, isn't it? I remember when I got my first New York Times Book Review assignment. Folks, I don't mind telling you it scared me. Because, although I knew that a good review wouldn't necessarily help the book, a bad one would surely hurt it. And I remember thinking, "Who am I to have such power over someone else's work?" We tend to talk about how "The New York Times hated so-and-so," but it's not the institution, it's an individual who has been given the Times's imprimatur for the day. And so I read all eight or nine of James Wilcox's previous books for an 800-word review because I realized it was something to take very seriously, indeed. (And I was relieved when my second assignment was a first novel.) And now, whenever I read a review - any review - I am acutely aware of the individual sitting with highlighter and post-its at the other end, not the 48-point type name on the masthead.
At any rate, I end the day - and this ramble - reasonably happy with the state of things thus far. Besides, in the end, we all know that what really matters is what Harriet Klausner thinks ...
Posted at 12:01 AM in Harry, Revised, The Conversation | Permalink | Comments (6)
HEEEERRRREEE'S PINKY
Carolyn Kellogg has landed at Jacket Copy, considerably classing up the joint.
Posted at 08:42 PM in Litlinks | Permalink | Comments (0)