Stunningly stupid parental reactions
August 10, 2010
Chris Abani, who, besides being an amazing writer, is an all-around great guy, had his novel Graceland yanked from a 10th grade reading list in Jacksonville, Florida. Why? An anonymous parent complained about it.
You know, the novel that won the:
PEN/Hemingway Award and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award; it was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Oh, and is that the Today Show Book Club sticker on the cover? I think it is.
Frankly, Chris, I’d take this as a compliment. Keep doing what you’re doing.
The book as an art object
August 8, 2010
It’s been done before. Joe Meno did it with the gorgeous cloth-backed short story collection Demons in the Spring, which had each story illustrated by a different artist. I remember, a few years ago, when I worked at Borders, having a signed copy of David LaChapelle’s superfolio Artists and Prostitutes, and I thought they were nuts for leaving a copy of a $4,000 book out for people to touch. The damn thing weighed over 40 pounds, and there were just two of them, counting the fingerprinted copy, in the largest store in the country.
But the thing is, both of these books are stunningly beautiful, an object to behold, if only for the sake of holding it.
Now there’s this one, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, which, at $625 ($421–it’s on sale at Amazon!) is a six-volume desk set. I can’t help but feel that for foodies and chefs alike, it is as the LaChappelle book is to photographers.
But I’m heartened, in this age of iPads and Kindles and all of their various clones, that people like Meno and publishers are willing to go out on a limb and make beautiful books for the sake of making books. Nothing feels like something that you can hold in your hand and savor (pardon the food pun)—the smell of the paper and ink, the weight of it in your hand, the beauty of it sitting on your shelf.
After the Workshop… then what?
April 3, 2010
If you go through the archives, you’ll find out the shit that went down with my dad taking his own life last summer. Since then, I’ve struggled to read, and finish, so much as a short story. My mind just kind of wanders, and I lose interest.
But I just finished devouring John McNally‘s latest novel, After the Workshop. Somehow, it was the right book at the right time. I’ve got some writing that I need to do—I’m reading a story I’ve yet to write at a wedding in Iowa in two months—but I’ve felt like without writing through what my dad did, I couldn’t get to it. I needed a bit of a kick in the pants.
So I finished this book—a gorgeously rendered novel about a stalled writer who takes a gig as a media escort, carting writers from the airport to book signings in his mufflerless car, his unfinished manuscript taunting him from under a pile of phone books. And it occurred to me that I’ve got to set my issues with my dad aside and start something fresh. I’m itching to sit down at the keyboard again. I know what I’m going to write for the wedding.
John’s short stories from the award-winning collections Troublemakers and Ghosts of Chicago have always gotten me unstuck when I didn’t know what happened next in my thesis/novel, which is finally DONE done and ready to send out. McNally’s one of those writers who should be hugely famous. And to me, he is. Besides being a hell of a guy, and making my mom cry with his heartfelt inscription in her copy of After the Workshop, somehow, he’s the one whose work always gets me unstuck. And with this book, he’s done it in a huge way.
National Book Award finalists are out
October 14, 2009
So the National Book Foundation announced its finalists for the 2009 NBA.
Honestly, I haven’t read any of them, though I’ve read great reviews of all of them (plus, according to Judge Lydia Millet‘s Facebook page, “Far Bright Star by Robert Olmstead and Paul Harding’s Tinkers.”)
Speaking of the five-author panel of fiction judges, Lydia Millet is one of three—count ‘em, THREE!—Story Week alumni. Junot Diaz appeared at the 2007 Story Week Festival of Writer’s between winning the National Book Critic’s Circle Award and the Pulitzer for The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Charles Johnson came by before my time at Columbia College, and won the NBA in 1990 for Middle Passage.
Good company to be in. Congrats to all the finalists!
The cream ought to rise
September 8, 2009
In a market where publishers are putting out fewer and fewer books (down 3.2 percent to just about 275,000 titles in 2008), the best writing ought to rise to the top, right? That is, if publishers have tighter budgets, editors ought to have less discretionary money for the long shot, and the best writing ought to burst forth from the slush pile. Personally, I think the literary marketplace should be contracting a lot more than it already has. There’s far too much white noise out there for great new voices to shout through.
Then today, on the, well, Today Show, the penultimate marketing position for authors (just behind Oprah, and don’t get me started there), we see my former Governor, Rod Blagojevich, making an ass out of himself and going against pretty much every bit of legal advice he’s been given. So what does this mean for the literary marketplace?
Nothing much.
After all, some turds float to the top, too.
Billy Lombardo’s new site
August 23, 2009
Billy Lombardo is a hell of a Chicago writer. And his new Web site, which is much slicker than mine, just went live at www.billylombardo.com. You ought to pay him a visit there. I’m just cracking his latest, How to Hold a Woman, and he graced us with his presence at the 2009 Story Week’s tribute to Nelson Algren.
How Come No One Celebrates My Alcoholism Like John Cheever’s?
February 18, 2009
AWP wrapped on Saturday, yet more than one person I know still aches from the long nights of alcohol and idiocy. Then, while cruising the archives of The Onion, I spot this gem.
How Come No One Celebrates My Alcoholism Like John Cheever’s?
You know, seminal American author John Cheever and I have a lot in common. He needed to drink a fifth of scotch before he had the courage to utter a word to another human being, and so do I. Much like Cheever, I’m completely blotto by 10 a.m. because of a deep, withering fear that my family will eventually discover my bisexuality. And, to top it all off, we were both born in Wollaston, Massachusetts, if you can believe it! But just because he’s one of history’s finest short story writers, Cheever’s epic benders are considered delightful, whereas I’ve just got a “serious problem with alcohol.”
What a bunch of horseshit.
You wouldn’t believe some of the outlandish and totally inappropriate things my drunkenness has caused me to do. Dark, crazy stuff. But guess what? I didn’t write Falconer, so I’m a disgrace to everyone who loves me. It’s discriminatory.
Pure genius.
Why Yates? And why now?
February 8, 2009
Bookslut.com has a wonderfully insightful feature on the incomparable Richard Yates that asks, “Why Yates? And why now?” It’s got some great background on the flawed genius behind Revolutionary Road (the film version of which is a fantastic adaptation that you really ought to see).
In 1999, the Boston Review published Stewart O’Nan’s long appreciation of Richard Yates, whose fiction had fallen out of print after his death in 1992. How, he asked, can Yates, who “represents an important aspect of the American experience: the confusion of the post-war boom,” be so neglected? A “fine writer” and gifted mortician, Yates anatomizes the desiccated corpse of “American individualism,” the hollowed-out hopes of a country and its citizens.
So began Yates’s second coming: Revolutionary Road was reissued the next year, and his other novels soon followed. In 2001, Picador released his collected stories. His fiction appeared in The New Yorker for the first time.
Read the rest over at Bookslut.com.
