Author: Mark Athitakis

Better English Through the Apocalyptic Novel

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Cormac McCarthy, Thomas McGuane

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

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Manil Suri

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

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Donald Ray Pollock, Edgar Allan Poe, Josh Emmons, Junot Diaz

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

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Julia Alvarez, Julie Orringer, Stuart Dybek, Walter Kirn

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.

Dept. of Self Promotion

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Edward P. Jones, Manil Suri, Olga Grushin, Susan Richards Shreve

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.

So That’s Where the Plot for This Season of The Wire Comes From…

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Simon

byline.jpg

Boing Boing links to a collection of vintage pulp-novel covers. Here’s the description for the Andrew Garve novel pictured:

(1951)
There was only one thing wrong with Edgar Jessop.

HE WASN’T QUITE SANE!

And his newspaper colleagues were plotting against him, giving juicy asignments to willing girl reporters, promoting underlings and leaving his talent to rot in insignificance.

But he could show them!

And he did – – by committing an almost clueless murder, and daring the authorities to solve it.

But with his enemies multiplying around him, one murder wasn’t enough. There was another – – and plans for more – – until, slowly and relentlessly, the police closed the net.

“Plainsong” on Stage

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Kent Haruf

The stage adaptation of Kent Haruf‘s Plainsong had its world premiere in Denver last week. From the Denver Post’s review:

“Plainsong” is satisfyingly executed in nearly every conceivable way, culminating in a three-hankie third act — for being harrowing, then heartbreaking and finally for being just some kind of wonderful. It’s infused with old-fashioned heart but stays remarkably free of treacle and never shies from the underlying realities of small-town ignorance, hatred and violence.

At three hours, it’s long, but other than perhaps consolidating its two intermissions into one, there isn’t much to lose in a narrative that, admittedly, takes some getting used to. Eric Schmiedl’s fluid adaptation is remarkably faithful to the book — some might even say too faithful. With its ever-rotating narrators, the presentation seems at first more a staged reading of the book than a performed play. You wonder if we’re being cheated of action.

But it’s soon apparent that smart, meticulous decisions have been made about how best to convey every piece of this story so as to be true to a colorful swath of characters and interrelated stories, while keeping things manageable for the audience. Like a river, it flows when it needs to flow, and like a breeze, it breathes when it needs to breathe. Vicki Smith’s deceptively sparse and ever-shifting set plays an integral part in maintaining the staging’s remarkable flow, with pieces constantly shifting, sliding, rising and lowering.

On the Table

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Jon Clinch

Jon Clinch, author of Finn, a novel that reimagined the life of Huckleberry Finn’s father, is participating in a contest that asks readers to assemble a menu based on the book. If I’m remembering Finn correctly, the only reasonable things to serve related to the novel are whiskey and hate, but the PR folks are hoping you’ll be a little more polite:

Use your imagination. Use your frying pan. Use catfish
and whiskey and fatback bacon and cornbread and sunfish and baking powder
biscuits and … well, you get the idea.

Big-City Reissues

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Richard Price, Tom Wolfe

Richard Price‘s 1992 novel Clockers, about which I’ll be shutting up any day now, is getting reissued on March 10. Interestingly, Tom Wolfe‘s 1987 novel Bonfire of the Vanities will be reissued the same day. When Clockers came out it was often compared to Wolfe’s big New York novel, which seems a little odd, now; its perspective and attitude couldn’t be more different. But Price told me the book did get him feeling competitive:

[W]hen Bonfire of the Vanities came out, and I read it, it made me crazy, because I felt like, “I want to go back to writing books.” Not that I wanted write like Tom Wolfe. But he was writing about the kind of things that I wanted to write about and hadn’t written about in so long. The book itself made me nuts, made me want to write.