Israeli author Etgar Keret is one of my favorite short-story writers; I enthused about him at length for the Rake a while back. He’s smart, irreverent, quick-hit–in other words, the kind of writer who pairs up nicely with somebody like George Saunders. They talk together in Pen America 8, the latest issue of PEN America’s journal. Its blog has an excerpt.
Month: February 2008
In News That Shocked Everybody Today…
Gawker liked a book, and didn’t even follow its in-house snark rules in praising it (via).
(Posting will be light today, as I’m managing a couple of deadlines and the obnoxious wintry mix that hit the D.C. area last night.)
A Man in Reno
Last week, following a writer’s recommendation, I picked up Willy Vlautin‘s The Motel Life, a sweet-sad-simple road story about two brothers in Reno. I enjoyed its simplicity–even the type formatting recalls middle-school reading primers–though that bare-bones style doesn’t recall Raymond Carver as much as critics say. Woody Guthrie lyrics might the better point of comparison–Vlautin loves free-flowing narratives that get told simply, have room for some humor and irony, but are mainly about something gone terribly wrong.
Vlautin, as it happens, is a musician–he plays in the alt-country band Richmond Fontaine–and his second novel, Northline, has just come out in the U.K. (It comes out in the U.S. this summer, in much the same way that The Motel Life came out overseas before arriving here.) The interview with Vlautin in the Guardian suggests another Reno story. Vlautin’s notes that the book has a soundtrack, and features a rare book trailer that I can get behind:
Take That, Nonexistent Problem!
Diana E. Sheets argues that the great American novel is dead. To do so, she lines up a couple of strawmen and proceeds to beat the crap out of ’em:
Path-breaking fiction telling the American story has been replaced with fabulist memoir (James Frey’s, “A Million Little Pieces” in 2003) and celebrity scandal (“If I Did It,” O.J. Simpson’s “hypothetical” account of the murder of his wife and Ronald Goldman. It was to be published by Regan Books/HarperCollins before it was cancelled and later reissued by Beaufort Books as “If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer” by the Goldman family with comments by ghostwriter Pablo Fenjves and journalist Dominick Dunne).
Are these the only American stories to be had in publishing today? What if books were judged based on ethical standards of quality and content?
Right. Last time I was at a bookstore it was nothing but Frey and O.J., O.J. and Frey. I wept, I tell ya. I wept. There’s a longer version of the piece, with quotes from Network, on Sheets’ site.
Better English Through the Apocalyptic Novel
Voice of America Special English, which is designed to help listeners improve their command of the language, has a feature on Thomas McGuane and Cormac McCarthy. I like the idea of using either of them as literacy-improving devices–The Road, in certain ways, seems clear and simple and irony-free enough to do the job very well.
The transcript of the piece includes this bit:
Thomas McGuane recently spoke at a literature event held by the Pen Faulkner organization in Washington, D.C. He praised the group for inviting writers to speak from all areas of the United States. Then he read two short stories. He also talked about what it was like to make movies. He talked about working with the actors Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson for a movie he wrote called “Missouri Breaks.” He said that when he worked on movies in the nineteen seventies, the industry was very different from what it is today.
I was there, and McGuane also talked about what it was like to get 3 a.m. phone calls from a fucked-up Steve McQueen. But maybe that sort of thing is only for advanced readers.
Dept. of Self Promotion
Now live on Washington City Paper‘s popular blog, City Desk, is my video interview with Manil Suri. Right: I’m learning. As I mentioned elsewhere, it’s a little frustrating to realize how much work is required to do something that winds up looking like a 5 a.m. public-affairs show in Schenectady. But Suri is a great conversationalist and was a great sport about the awkward filming setup (we recorded this in my office). More importantly, just by doing it, I figured out a ton of things that’ll make the next one go better. I didn’t get into journalism to do video–heck, I got into writing precisely to avoid that sort of thing–but with the journalism world what it is, everything is worth trying. And there’s a similar degree of satisfaction with recording something as with writing something–when it’s done, you’ve still done a Made Thing, and you’re still eager to get people to take a look at it.
Sunday Miscellany
The Financial Times reviews Junot Diaz‘s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, now out in the U.K.
The Case for Ink: 5 Reasons I Won’t Give Up on Books.
The Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, will open an exhibit in April featuring representations of Poe in comics.
At yesterday’s “A World of Fiction Writing” conference at American University, Josh Emmons participated in a panel titled “Fiction Under Forty,” and spoke a little about how young writers are discouraged from shopping short-story collections; first novels don’t sell too well, but debut story collections sell worse. Maybe this doesn’t apply to 53-year-old authors of debut story collections: The Wall Street Journal has a large takeout on Donald Ray Pollock, a longtime paper-mill worker whose first collection of short stories, Knockemstiff, comes out next month. (Sorry, that’s connected short stories. Is this a new thing, a workaround for first-timers to get around the marketing folks who complain that the first book is “just” a book of short stories? I’m sure the “connected story collection” has always been with us, but at this early hour I can’t recall a single one.) One of his stories is available for free; congratulations to Pollock for getting the phrase “hotter than a fat lady’s box” into a major American newspaper, online or otherwise.
New Dybek
The Washington Post‘s Sunday Magazine is its Valentine’s fiction issue, featuring stories by Stuart Dybek, Julia Alvarez, Walter Kirn, and Julie Orringer. Missing Chicago a little lately, I went straight to Dybek’s “Road to Cordoba,” a small North Side love story set in a very large Chicago blizzard; it’s a beautifully turned piece, with a quick detour into a bar that neatly evokes every red-brick-facade-Old-Style-sign-in-front-joint in the city:
The cramped, low-lit space was packed, or so it first appeared. Though only three men sat at the bar, they were so massive they seemed to fill the room. Their conversation stopped when I came in. I’d heard the rumor that players for the Chicago Bears sometimes drank there, but hadn’t believed it, probably because I’d heard it from Lise’s stepfather, Ray, who’d also told me that as a cliff-diver in Acapulco he’d once landed on a tiger shark with an impact that killed the shark. With all of Rush Street waiting to toast them, why would Bears drink at a dump like the Buena Chimes?
Dybek will discuss the story on the Post‘s Web site Monday.
Patter, Patter, Patter
The Guardian notes that James Patterson is now the most-borrowed author in British libraries. Clearly Patterson’s war of attrition is working: according to the latest issue of Publishers Weekly, the man has five books, most of them co-authored, coming out between now and July.
Dept. of Self Promotion
My brief review of Manil Suri‘s The Age of Shiva is now available at Washington City Paper‘s Web site. Suri reads at Politics & Prose on Monday.
Another D.C. note: I’ll be spending much of tomorrow, Saturday, at American University, checking out Washington Independent Writers’ Fiction Writing All-Day Seminar. A number of interesting writers are on the docket, including Susan Richards Shreve, Olga Grushin, and Edward P. Jones. The walk-in registration rate is a bit steep, but it’s a full day, and casual opportunities to meet writers don’t come along too often.
markathitakis.com 