Month: January 2008

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry

Cormac McCarthy has sold his archives, including the draft of an unfinished novel, to the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University-San Marcos for $2 million. The SWC has an interesting assortment of arcana, as this CBC story notes in its last graf:

Also housed in the collection are the production archives of the Lonesome Dove miniseries and the animated TV show King of the Hill as well as the archives of writers such as Sam Shepard.

It’s also home to the Willie Nelson Collection.

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Goodis, George Pelecanos, Marcus Sakey

There’s apparently an award for everything, and the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association has announced its nominations for the Dilys, given to the mystery and crime novel that its member bookstores most enjoyed selling. This sort of thing would be off my radar entirely, except that one of the nominees, Marcus Sakey‘s The Blade Itself, was one of the best crime novels I’ve read in recent years. To be truthful, I don’t keep up with the genre as much as I’d like to, but the novel scratched a lot of itches: it’s a Chicago novel that understands how fractured Chicago’s class structure is, its heroes are defined by their ordinariness (something I’ve always liked about George Pelecanos‘ books), and there’s an out-of-time, postwar noir feel to the story that recalls my all-time favorite noir author, David Goodis. Here’s what I wrote about The Blade Itself for Kirkus Reviews:

One man’s attempts to shake off his checkered past are foiled when his old partner in crime returns.

Danny Carter and Evan McGann used to be a great team. The two grew up in Bridgeport, a rough-and-tumble and predominantly Irish Chicago neighborhood, where they quickly graduated from shoplifting to knocking over pawnshops. When one such heist goes bad, Danny’s able to get away without being caught, but Evan winds up doing a seven-year prison bid. Once paroled, Evan makes a beeline for Chicago, where Danny’s been keeping his nose clean by working as a construction foreman and settling into a comfy life with his girlfriend, who runs a hip nightclub. A standard-issue kidnapping plot ensues, but though there’s a ring of familiarity to the material, Sakey proves he has the chops to eventually do better things. He has a great feel for the moral dilemmas created by Danny’s return to criminal life, and he makes the most of Chicago’s geographical split between its north side (upscale, educated) and south side (working-class, pugnacious) without overworking the metaphor. The dialogue has all the efficiency and punch the genre demands, and Evan is a fully imagined thug-he’s simultaneously charismatic and fearsomely violent, and though his actions strain believability in the later chapters, he never becomes a tough-guy caricature. (And Sakey doesn’t shy away from describing the occasional bit of savagery in unsettling detail.) The author is working with themes and tones reminiscent of George Pelecanos; he shares the same interest in exploring the ill-lit corners of a city, prefers heroes who have a rough past and some dirt under their fingernails and has little interest in police or professional gumshoes. That streetwise attitude makes him a valuable addition to Chicago crime lit, a landscape currently dominated by authors of detective stories (Sara Paretsky) and legal thrillers (Scott Turow).

A promising start from a writer willing to get deep into a city’s grit. Agent: Scott Miller/Trident Media Group

Stones Cold

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Zachary Lazar

I wonder at times if critical acclaim for books about 60s may say more about the folks running book reviews than the books themselves. (Call it Tree of Smoke Syndrome.) But there’s a convincing case for Zachary Lazar‘s novel about the Rolling Stones, Sway, in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, even if it serves more to remind me how great this book is:

This is a novel about the ’60s in which the great political upheavals, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, civil rights, Vietnam and the assassinations are barely mentioned. The Beatles, who stood for the greatest sustained explosion of the utopian ideal in all of pop, are dismissed by one character as a group “from Liverpool of all places.” In contrast to the love-and-peace ethos the decade is remembered for, every early Stones gig here ends with a fight. Crowds seem to pack Midlands blues clubs for the sheer pleasure of trying to beat up the band. In “Sway” the freedom that is often vaunted as the cri de coeur of the ’60s is entirely stripped of its communal ideal. It is, instead, a way for people who have always felt themselves on the outside not to feel they have to fit in. It’s a freedom that can result in “Street Fighting Man” or “Scorpio Rising,” or in a group of murderous hippies invading two homes and slaughtering the inhabitants on the orders of a petty thief and failed rock star. Freedom, Lazar is saying, does not inevitably result in noble aspirations.

Largehearted Boy has a playlist for the novel compiled by Lazar.

NBCC Winners

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Andre Aciman, Daniel Alarcón, Edwidge Danticat, Ha Jin, Joyce Carol Oates, Junot Diaz, Robert Stone, Sara Paretsky, Shalom Auslander, Vendela Vida

For what I imagine was the first time in history, the announcement of finalists in the National Book Critics Circle annual awards was about as sophisticated as the Golden Globe Awards. The finalists are listed below. (The NBCC’s blog, Critical Mass, liveblogged the whole thing.) Following that list is the ballot I submitted; not much overlap. (I considered The Rest Is Noise to be a nonfiction book, more a critical history than a book of criticism, and I thought of Brother, I’m Dying more as a reported personal history than an autobiography, but making tough calls like those is what the NBCC is for, I suppose.)

Autobiography
Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone, Free Press
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying, Knopf
Joyce Carol Oates, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982, Ecco
Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence, Verso
Anna Politkovskaya: Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin’s Russia, Random House

Nonfiction
Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism, Farrar, Straus
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848, Oxford University Press
Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, Doubleday
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, Doubleday
Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, Thomas Dunne BKs/St. Martin’s

Fiction
Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games, HarperCollins
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Riverhead
Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men. Dial Press
Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravediggers Daughter. HarperCollins
Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher, S. & S.

Biography
Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life Of Africa’s Greatest Explorer, Yale University Press
Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, Knopf
Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison. Knopf
John Richardson, The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, Knopf
Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy, Penguin Press

Poetry
Mary Jo Bang, Elegy, Graywolf
Matthea Harvey, Modern Life, Graywolf
Michael O’Brien, Sleeping and Waking, Flood
Tom Pickard, The Ballad of Jamie Allan, Flood
Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems, Archipelago

Criticism
Acocella, Joan. Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, Pantheon
Alvarez, Julia. Once Upon a Quniceanera, Viking
Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream, Metropolitan/Holt
Ratliff, Ben. Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, Farrar, Straus
Ross, Alex. The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Farrar, Straus

Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing

Sam Anderson — winner

Finalists:
Brooke Allen
Ron Charles
Walter Kirn
Adam Kirsch

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award
Emilie Buchwald, writier, editor, and publisher of Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis

My ballot: 

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
1. Shalom Auslander, “Foreskin’s Lament” (Riverhead)
2. Stacey Grenrock Woods, “I, California” (Scribner)
3. Robert Stone, “Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties” (Ecco)
BIOGRAPHY
1. David Michaelis, “Schulz and Peanuts” (HarperCollins)
2. Dennis McDougal, “Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times” (Wiley)

FICTION

1. Ha Jin, “A Free Life” (Pantheon)
2. Daniel Alarcon, “Lost City Radio” (HarperCollins)
3. Vendela Vida, “Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name” (Ecco)
4. Junot Diaz, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (Riverhead)
5. Andre Aciman, “Call Me by Your Name” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
NONFICTION
1. Edwidge Danticat, “Brother, I’m Dying” (Knopf)
2. Alex Ross, “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
3. Ann Hagedorn, “Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919” (Simon & Schuster)
4. Paula Kamen, “Finding Iris Chang: Friendship, Ambition, and the Loss of an Extraordinary Mind” (Da Capo)
5. Peter Schmidt, “Color and Money: How Rich White Kids Are Winning the War Over College Affirmative Action” (Palgrave Macmillan)

Technical Difficulties

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Thomas McGuane

“Man plans and God laughs” is a phrase that’s been rattling around in my head in the past week, as I’ve caught up on some of Thomas McGuane‘s earlier novels. At the moment the phrase also seems to apply to my ambitions for this blog–my intention to post daily is getting botched by the fact that my laptop no longer acknowledges the existence of my hard drive. Help is on the way, but posts may be intermittent until the middle of next week. Thanks to those of you who’ve checked in during the first week. It’s much appreciated.

Bloodbath and Beyond

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Henry Kisor

I’m no stranger to staff cutbacks, budget cuts, and whatever other slicing and dicing newspaper owners now feel they need to do to preserve profitability. (See here.) I’m sad to see what it’s done to my shop, and I feel bad as well for the folks at the Chicago Sun-Times, which has provided a home for a lot of my book reviews, interviews, and cultural pieces in recent years. That’s thanks to Henry Kisor, the paper’s former books editor–now retired but busily managing a successful career as a mystery author and blogger. Henry was generous enough to take a chance on me when I was just about to give up on doing cultural journalism, and I can’t imagine any young, ambitious critic would have the same kind of luck I did cold-calling the paper now; Henry’s post today has an accounting of some of the damage that’s already been done as the paper plans 30-some layoffs. Among the losses are Lloyd Sachs, one of the best cultural reporters in Chicago, and Avis Weathersbee, who, by all reports, defended the role of the the books section in the paper–clearly a thankless job in this decade.

News and Notes

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Adam Langer, David Foster Wallace, Mark Sarvas

I woke up this morning–just like in blues songs!–and discovered the blue screen of death on my creaky laptop. So we’ll make this quick, pointing to a few relevant notes from the feedreader:

* Beatrice points to the trailer for Adam Langer‘s Ellington Boulevard.

* The Millions is excited at the prospect of a new David Foster Wallace novel.

* The Elegant Variation honcho Mark Sarvas is arranging a giveaway of an ARC of his upcoming debut novel, Harry, Revised.

Dirda on Crowley

by Mark Athitakis, posted in John Crowley

crowley-200-72.gifIn the latest issue of The American Scholar, Michael Dirda makes a convincing case for the fantasy novels of John Crowley, whose Endless Things comes out in came out last May.

John Crowley, now in his mid-60s, teaches at Yale and continues to write, giving no indication that he plans to slow down. Even during the decades he was working on Aegypt, he managed to bring out a dozen or so short stories, an award-winning novella (Great Work of Time) and the well-received novels The Translator and Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land. His early science fiction, above all, Engine Summer, is back in print, and he is at work on a new book. With Little, Big, Crowley established himself as America’s greatest living writer of fantasy. Aegypt confirms that he is one of our finest living writers, period.

Dept. of Self-Promotion

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Sue Miller

My capsule review of Sue Miller‘s new novel, The Senator’s Wife, is up now:

Men tend to have a hard time getting out of Sue Miller novels in one piece: They get flung into light posts, wind up with tuberculosis, or get banished from their homes due to some disloyal fuck-up. (The film Inventing the Abbots was based on a Sue Miller story; so, it seems, are most episodes of Cheaters.) Miller’s anger at men nearly rivals Philip Roth’s rage at women, though it’s impossible to confuse the two writers….

USA Today‘s Web site has an excerpt from the novel. Miller reads at Politics & Prose on Jan. 14.

Trailer Park

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Jami Attenberg

I’m trying, but I don’t get the point of book trailers for novels–I’m not sure if visuals usefully promote books, I’m not convinced the average YouTube visitor is compelled to watch book trailers, and by and large publishers’ sites don’t point people to them. And there’s a quality issue too–I’ve seen a lot that are little more than a slideshow assemblages of Flickr images combined with crummy audio.

All that said, I’m happy to see the good stuff when it shows up. City Paper is running a review of Jami Attenberg‘s novel The Kept Man in this week’s issue; hunting around for a trailer, I found this nicely assembled one, shot around the novel’s Williamsburg, Brooklyn setting: