The storm that blew through D.C. all of a sudden yesterday afternoon and evening knocked out the power at my home; posting will resume once Pepco fixes whatever it is that needs fixing.
Author: Mark Athitakis
Western Swing
Nextbook’s Joanna Smith Rakoff interviews Joanna Hershon, whose third novel, The German Bride, tells the story of Jewish settlers in Santa Fe in the 1860s. Hershon notes some of the stories that she uncovered in the course of her research:
Life was really no joke in terms of the danger. Just the fact that she arrived in Santa Fe after crossing the country was an incredible achievement. Because on the way there were incredible dangers—cholera and Indians at the time, and yes, on the way there, there was a time where they arrived at a camp site in the middle of the night, and they made camp, and then woke up at dawn only to realize that they had slept on the site of a massacre. So there were bodies everywhere.
Speculative Markets
A friend of mine has fair-to-middling luck playing the McSweeney’s speculative market—snapping up whatever junk the publisher has put out, waiting a bit, then selling it at a tidy profit to some nerd who probably hasn’t read it either. (An eBay search suggests he won’t be retiring soon, but there are probably black markets for Eggersiana I haven’t heard about. Want my first edition of You Shall Know Our Velocity!? Make me an offer.) An article by Anne Trubek in the Utne Reader (originally published last fall in Good) studies the vicissitudes of collecting “hypermodern” literature, giving some space to McSweeney’s fare, with a few other options. William T. Vollmann isn’t one of them, though. Trubek writes:
Collecting is a risky game, though. Some scored with McCarthy, but followers of William T. Vollmann lost big in the 1990s. Ken Lopez, a bookseller who specializes in modern and hypermodern titles, told me of a failed attempt to corner Vollmann futures: “A small group of young guys got together to monopolize the market,” he says. “They would travel to book signings, buy 10 copies of Vollmann’s books for $17.50, and mark the prices up to $100.” But they overshot, and today the market is overstocked, supply having outstripped demand.
Name Recognition
A little while back the Charlotte Observer pondered the fading legacy of William Saroyan. In the meantime, the Fresno Bee has been digging in and investigating it, building a neat widgety timeline, posting an unpublished novella, Follow, and more, wrapping up its coverage with long feature on whether Saroyan’s reputation will improve in the future. (Fresno State University has a course on Saroyan, but it’s part of the Armenian Studies department, not English.) One suggestion as to why Saroyan isn’t on the top of readers’ and critics’ book piles:
But Saroyan’s legacy suffers because he has no great novels to his credit, said Fresno journalist and writer Mark Arax, who knew Saroyan.
“He was spontaneous,” Arax said. “He wrote in these incredible bursts of energy and creativity. That kind of talent served him best in short stories. I think he found the writing of the great American novel, and all the character development you have to do, a little tedious.”
Roundup: Get Me Rewrite
The Southwest Florida News-Press catches up with Peter Matthiessen on Shadow Country, his recent reworking of three previous novels. Money quote: “In the Watson story, there are so many things that I wanted to talk about – the frontier, indigenous people, the loss of wildlife and landscape, and the growing, growing corporate greed that takes over everything. And when I put it out in unsatisfactory form as far as I was concerned, instead of turning to a new thing, I realized I wanted to get this right because it’s a very important American story. I had to know that this book exists in its proper form somewhere.”
Orson Scott Card speaks to School Library Journal about YA lit, Mormonism, his alleged homophobia, his massive output, and more.
Four books have been added to the NEA’s Big Read program: Louise Erdrich‘s Love Medicine, Tim O’Brien‘s The Things They Carried, Thornton Wilder‘s The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Our Town, and a collection of poetry and stories by Edgar Allan Poe.
Your moment of zen: Voice of America Special English’s latest author feature is on Louisa May Alcott.
What’s in Store
Random House commissioned Zogby International to conduct a poll of more than 8,000 Americans about their book-buying habits. You can read the findings online (PDF). (Via)
Some interesting details pop up, once you scrape away the “American Dream Materialists” vs. “American Dream Spiritualists” funny business. (I have a sociologist in the family who cautions me not to treat Zogby as the gold standard in social research—I’m not articulate enough to restate all the reasons, though of course a poll on book buying commissioned by a company that’s trying to get you to buy books has inherent issues. And it’s an Internet poll, which I have to imagine skews the facts too.) Lots of us buy books at independent stores (49 percent) but not very often (9 percent of the time). We like Barnes & Noble brick-and-mortar stores (47 percent) but not their online store (10 percent). Being able to find a book quickly online is more important that knowing what others thought about it. End-caps aren’t terribly useful. Hardly anybody cares about e-books.
Most interesting (at least to my own selfish interests), we consider book reviews an important factor in our book buying (49 percent)—a huge trouncing of Oprah Winfrey, who only inspires book buying five percent of the time. (Jon Stewart beat her with eight percent—where’s his book club?) Thing is, I wish I knew what people have in mind when they hear the term “book review.” Does it mean a reader review on an Amazon page or a post on a book blog or a piece in a literary review? Probably some mix of all three—after all, we’re in an era where a lot of younger readers don’t especially notice whether a story they take to appeared on the New York Times or the AP wire (“I saw it on the Internet”). Attention pollsters: Maybe break out the question into subcategories of “review” next time around?
Update: Caleb Crain weighs in.
Roundup: Strange Cargo
Edward P. Jones still isn’t working on another novel. After a reading at Boston University last month (video here, which also features Catherine Tudish and Ha Jin), he told the audience, “even if I were, it’s hard to talk about that kind of thing. It’s like you’re pregnant, and somebody talks about the future of your child, at 5, at 10, at 15, but all you’re hoping for is happiness and health. You can’t think much beyond that.”
I hadn’t heard about the Kinky Friedman precedent until I read an interview with Jonathan Miles in USA Today. Miles talks about his new novel, Dear American Airlines, which didn’t get much static from the carrier thanks to Friedman’s Elvis, Jesus, and Coca-Cola. Not that he wasn’t concerned: “American seems euphonious and iconic,” he says. “‘Dear JetBlue’ doesn’t work as well.”
Blogging from the Hay Festival, John Freeman notes that Lorrie Moore was asked by an audience member whether the United States is more receptive to short-story writers. Jhumpa Lahiri comes in handy in answering that question these days:
America has annual anthologies, such as the Best American Short Stories, which regularly sell over 100,000 copies a year, as well as prizes for stories and workshops galore. Occasionally a collection strikes a cord and people buy it. Ethan Canin’s The Emperor of Air was a bestseller, as was Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America, while Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest collection, “Unaccustomed Earth,” which is tremendous, debuted on the “New York Times” list at number one (you can read an extract here).
Lahiri’s phenomenal success in the form is still, of course, an aberration. In response to the publisher’s question from the audience, Moore ultimately argued that Lahiri’s book of stories was such a phenomenal success because the publisher believed in it (and because it’s also a very good book).
Road Burn
Keith Gessen went on a book tour and all he got was a stupid feeling of uselessness. He writes in the Stranger:
What’s the point of a book tour? Publishers don’t believe in them anymore, and given the amount of money my publisher blew on my hotel rooms, I can see why. And airline travel, let’s face it, is immoral. But there’s still got to be something valuable about going out to face the people and reading to them directly from your book, taking their friendly questions (from the internet, you’d think I’d be confronted in every town by at least one screaming blogger; in fact, on the whole tour, not a single angry question)—something must happen to them from that. Or maybe only to you. That is, to me.
Which may explain why so much promotion of authors these days try to avoid all that travel. A story on Greatreporter.com covers some of those efforts—BookVideos, Titlepage, and 30-minute features produced by Powell’s Books. As Susan Choi puts it, “I think a lot of us have that experience of stumping around the country trying to connect with our readers, but we can’t be everywhere, and the people who read our books are scattered around.”
American Made
Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer who’s deeply influenced by American ones—it’s telling that his upcoming memoir of distance running is titled What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. So it’s not that surprising to hear that in recent years he’s been translating a host of American classics, including The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, The Long Goodbye, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. (Miss Brolly reports on stumbling over a copy of that last book.) Speaking with the Mainichi Daily News (which is apparently running a week’s worth of interviews with the author), Murakami calls out Raymond Chandler for special attention:
“Chandler’s writing style really grabbed me,” he says. “There’s something special about his writing. For years, I’ve always wondered what it was. Even after I’d translated him, though, I’m still wondering what it is that makes him special.”
Murakami’s strong interest in the secret behind that writing style was also evident in the long postscript he wrote for his translation of “The Long Goodbye.” In the afterword, Murakami writes: “Chandler’s creativity lies in the ‘ego set like a black box.'”
If there’s a listing somewhere in English of all the books that Murakami has translated, I can’t find it. But a quick Google shows that his love for American pop culture is evident: He’s translated a book on Pet Sounds and Mikal Gilmore‘s Shot to the Heart.
Roundup: Fighting Words
Among the many fine pieces in the new Bookforum—and as Wyatt Mason reminds us, there’s still plenty of serious literary criticism being done—is an interview with Ron Hansen, who talks about (among other things) what drew him to writing about the West: “Part of it was that I thought the western seemed loaded with potential to tell us who we are now but had fallen on hard times with its melodrama and clichés of character and plot. I hoped to take the typical outlaw narratives as seriously as Shakespeare took Holinshed’s Chronicles and to find in the West of the nineteenth century some genetic markers for our present condition.”
If you’re studying alcoholism in American literature, you have plenty to work with: The Amherst Bulletin reports on an upcoming UMass continuing-ed course featuring Robert Louis Stevenson, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Yates, and more. (via)
Oddest goodie-bag gift ever: To thank John Irving for showing up, the Guardian Hay festival is bringing in a Greco-Roman wrestling champ, so the novelist-wrestler could get in a workout.
The Independent sits down with Gore Vidal, still snippy about his reputation:
“Mailer once said that ‘Vidal lacks the wound.’ What do you think he was referring to: the fact that your grandfather was a senator? Your privileged upbringing?”
“Privileged? You mean more privileged than a fat boy from South Africa,” Vidal snaps [Mailer’s father was born in Cape Town] “with a doting mother?”
markathitakis.com 