Hurry, Title!
Hurry! You still have a few days to enter the Author Enablers Writing Contest where you submit the first paragraph of a story titled When the Sparrow Cries Wolf. All you have is the title. The rest is up to you.
Books I’m Excited About #3: Josie and Jack by Kelly Braffet
Title: Josie And Jack
Author:Kelly Braffet
Relationship:Sent by the author’s publicist.
Synopsis: Hansel and Gretel set in industrial Pennsylvania. Oh and Hansel is a sociopath.
Acquired: See above
Excitement: Kelly and I chatted on the phone about web stuff and the Virtual Book Tour at the behest of her publicist. I liked her a lot. Blurbs from my friend Amanda Ward, whose taste I trust implicitly sealed the deal.
Early Verdict: Perhaps it will be my next bedside book. Although Bel Canto is in the queue now and that’s a tough pass-up.
All Consuming is back!
All Consuming, the web’s bestest book cataloging application is back and better than ever. Its creator, Erik Benson, explains the changes.
R.I.P. Saul Bellow:
In case you hadn’t heard, Saul Bellow, one of the giants of American literature, has died. He was 89. He leaves behind more than a dozen novels, a Nobel Prize, three National Book Awards and several generations of students.
I read Bellow’s novella Seize the Day in high school and found it thick and dull. But as I spent time as a journalist in publishing, as I interviewed other Jewish writers like Michael Chabon, Ethan Canin and others, again and again they pointed to Bellow as their inspiration. They claimed Bellow and novels like Henderson the Rain King and The Adventures of Augie March gave Jewish authors the permission to be more than chroniclers of the shtetl and the Lower East Side. Augie March’s first line "I am an American, Chicago born" gave two generations of Jewish authors the right to identify themselves as Americans as well as Jews. And while that assimilationist tendancy has fallen out of fashion (now, thankfully, it’s hip to be Jewish and proud of it), Jewish-American authors and American Jews at large first had to feel as though they too belonged in their adopted homeland, not as guests or interlopers, but as participating artists, workers, voters and citizens. Saul Bellow and his immense literary output stood at the head of this change and pushed forward hard.
Lit Blog Co-op:
My friend Mark Sarvas, proprietor of the excellent book blog The Elegant Variation has launched (with 19 friends) a super-cool idea:. What if 20 literary bloggers picked 4 books each year that have been overlooked by the mainstream press? Behold the Lit Blog Co-op. On May 15th, they make their first Read This! selection.
Congratulations Mark and everyone. How cool is this?
Books I’m Excited About #2: Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
Title: Assassination Vacation
Author: Sarah Vowell
Relationship: Saw it at my neighborhood bookstore and bought it immediately, as I have done with each of Sarah Vowell’s books.
Synopsis: Sarah Vowell takes a cross country roadtrip visiting sites of America’s most infamous political murders.
Acquired: See above.
Excitement: I’ve been a Vowell since 1997 when I first heard her pieces on "This American Life". I’ve since read all of her books as soon as I could get my hands on them. And since now she’s voiced a character in The Incredibles, is repped by the Steven Barclary Agency and thanks just about every young media demnigod you can think of in her acknowledgements (Eggers, Hornby and Ira Glass to name but three), I declare her to be officially leading the world’s greatest life. I sit somewhere between quiet awe, smoldering jealousy and the lingering hope that we’ll be friends someday.
Early Verdict: Next to the toilet. 10 pages in already.
Kevin Reviews Books…In Print:
I don’t do it a whole lot but my latest book review for the San Francisco Chronicle was published last Sunday. You can find it here.
Debuting Debasement:
Why do I feel strangly compelled to read Debutante: Rites and Regalia of American Debdom? Most likely a dangerous mix of bewilderment and perversion. Although this review helped clarify a little. The author, one Karal Ann Marling, is considered the "grande dame of American Studies", the field where I spent my last days of higher education. I don’t miss them much but the books were great.
Read Recently #5:
Blue Angel by Francine Prose
Backstory: I love novels about academica and had heard a bit about this one when it first came out in 2001. Bought a hardcover for $3 at last year’s San Francisco Library Book Sale. In December, while between books, I was looking for a solid, midrange novel, 250-300 pages and written by a woman. Blue Angel fit the bill.
Notes: Sentence by sentence, Prose is one of the best there is. Her lines are like the courses of a fine meal, laid out one at a time to be chewed and savored. It almost works against her. Blue Angel tells the story of a has-been writer in a cushy teaching job at a small Vermont college and is falling in love with a manipulative student who happens to be a much better writer than he. She’s got the college down and her plotting is confident and steady. But she does not so much inhabit her characters as she does describe them from behind glass. Because her prose (had to happen) is so strong, I didn’t mind as much, but if you’re the type of reader who doesn’t like the author standing between you and the story, it will bother you.
Verdict: This book, about writing, about sexual politics, set at a university was a slam dunk for me. But I had never read Prose’s work before. I hear if you’re familiar, it’s not one of her best.
What’s good for Margaret Atwood:
Is good enough for my friend Wendy. She’s got a book coming out in a few months and has taken it upon herself to invent a robot to do her signings. F*ckin hilairous.