Category: Mark Twain

Links: Brought to You by Dell and Folgers Coffee

by Mark Athitakis, posted in George Saunders, Jane Smiley, Jonathan Lethem, Mark Twain, Paul Auster, Raymond Carver, Sherman Alexie, Tess Gallagher

Earlier this week the FTC released new guidelines on how bloggers must disclose their relationships with commercial entities. I haven’t spent much time thinking about this—unlike smart people who have—mainly because I suspect any battle between the gummint and bloggers will attack women and children first. Relatively speaking, me and my modest stack of advance reader’s copies aren’t worth anybody’s attention and trouble. I’ve always considered ARCs as a tool to do my job, not some great prize; I receive them, but, like editors at newspaper book reviews, I feel no particular obligation to review them, acknowledge their existence, or announce their provenance if I do get around to mentioning them.

George Saunders reports from a homeless tent city in Fresno, California.

Jane Smiley discusses her first novel for young adults, The Georges and the Jewels.

Sherman Alexie: “If I had been talking about drowning polar bears [instead of the Kindle], people would have been weeping with me. But nobody recognizes that a bookstore or library can also be a drowning polar bear. And right now in this country, magazines, newspapers, and bookstores are drowning polar bears.”

Paul Auster laments the death of independent bookstores in New York: “In my own city of New York, so many superb bookstores have gone out of business in the past years that the epidemic has reached tragic proportions. The Eighth Street Bookstore, the grand literary emporium of my youth, has been a shoe store for more than two decades now. The Gotham Book Mart (‘Wise Men Fish Here’), the home of the James Joyce Society, the home in exile for André Breton and other French Surrealists during World War II, closed its doors recently. Books and Company is gone. Endicott Books is gone. Coliseum Books is gone.”

A personal consideration of Raymond Carver along with some thoughts on Lishification, and a profile of his widow, Tess Gallagher.

A cache of Mark Twain‘s papers, including letters he wrote during the last months of his life, goes up for auction later this month.

Jonathan Lethem on his new novel, Chronic City: “I had to figure out, ok what should I be writing? I thought, the answer is always, I should write the thing that if I don’t write it, it wouldn’t exist… Maybe I could write a realistic social epic of the Upper East Side; it’s possible that I could do that. I feel that I’ve acquired a lot of those tools and inclinations, but to merge it with the dream-life material, I feel that’s my special task.”

Chicago gets a literary hall of fame.

Improved U.S.-China (Lit) Relations

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ernest Hemingway, Ha Jin, Jack London, Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser

Scholars at three universities—Iowa State University, Arizona State University, and Sichuan University in China—recently launched Project Yao, a database of American literature translated into Chinese. ASU English professor Joe Lockard explains the appeal of the idea:

“Why, for example, are there so many translations of Longfellow’s ‘Song of Hiawatha’ into Chinese? Since 1930 there have been five Hiawatha translations. What do such translations inform us about the global representation of native peoples in the United States?

“Have there been more recent translations of the work of Native American authors into Chinese? Is the translation economy shifting to acknowledge ethnic self-representation? These are the sorts of questions that one can begin to address by using the Project Yao database.”

The database only includes works of American literature published before 1920, so it’s no guide for what contemporary American writers are being read in China. And the database only covers translations published in China from 1999 on, so it’s not yet a very panoramic snapshot of how the country’s changing political climate affected what got translated. But it’s a fascinating start, and if nothing else shows how the hunger for the likes of Jack London and Theodore Dreiser remains undiminished. (Surprisingly, only one work of Mark Twain‘s appears in the database, and even then it’s just a short story.)

According to a 2007 interview with Ha Jin in Guernica, American writers apparently fell in and out of favor rapidly. So when a work by Ernest Hemingway became available, he took advantage of it:

When I was an undergrad in my junior year suddenly American literature became very popular. But at the time many of the books were not available. One book, The Old Man and the Sea, because it was a short book and was written in clear, very lucid, English, had a bilingual edition made just for the English students in China, so a lot of people knew that book. As a result, Chinese readers talked about Hemingway. In that story there’s a fight between a man and a shark. You can conquer but not defeat a man. We were taught a lot of Marxist morals. But this kind of Hemingway American mentality, at least as expressed in that small novel, was fresh to the young people at the time, so we all somehow believed in it. But when I was working on The Bridegroom, I was much older by then, I really wanted to give some comic touches instead of tragic. That’s why I made the narrator unable to remember Hemingway’s name.

Links: The Big Tent

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ann Beattie, David A. Taylor, David Foster Wallace, David Updike, Jonathan Lethem, Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain, Mary Gordon, Norman Mailer, Raymond Chandler

The National Book Festival is this Saturday on the National Mall. Enough people have confused me for an expert to ask if I have tips regarding what to do there and how to do it, but my suggestions are all pretty obvious and simple. Bring an umbrella, regardless of what the forecast says; make a point to at least walk through the Pavilion of the States, in which every state has a table plugging its literature (it’s as close at the event will get to promoting small-press books); and get a seat early for the bigger names. (There are probably people already parked for James Patterson.) Lastly, don’t stand in line for those C-SPAN tote bags; C-SPAN brought plenty, and one must preserve one’s dignity. The lineups are largely big names and self-explanatory, but seek out David A. Taylor, who’ll be discussing his history of the WPA Writers’ Project, Soul of a People; I interviewed Taylor for the blog earlier this year.

Marianne Wiggins‘ list of the best works of American fiction.

John Krasinski discussed his film version of Brief Interviews With Hideous Men shortly before David Foster Wallace died.

The Wall Street Journal has an excerpt from Look at the Birdie, a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s unpublished short fiction.

The most powerful influence on David Updike‘s fiction wasn’t his dad—it was Ann Beattie.

The Guardian uses Granta‘s Chicago issue as an opportunity to wonder if the big-city novel is dead.

Mark Twain, animal rights activist.

It’s the 25th anniversary of the New York State Writers Institute at the University of Albany, where Mary Gordon may or may not have tried to slug Norman Mailer in the middle of a panel discussion.

Catherine Corman‘s photography book Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler’s Imagined City, which has a preface by Jonathan Lethem, sounds fascinating, and it has a stellar Web site to match.

Links: First Family

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Don DeLillo, Jack Pendarvis, John Pipkin, John Steinbeck, Leonard Gardner, Mark Twain, Patrick Somerville, Paul Harding, Philipp Meyer, Upton Sinclair, Yiyun Li

The Center for Fiction has announced the finalists for its first novel prize: Philipp Meyer‘s American Rust, Patrick Somerville‘s The Cradle, Paul Harding‘s Tinkers, Yiyun Li‘s The Vagrants, and John Pipkin‘s Woodsburner. I can strongly endorse both The Vagrants and American Rust—more on the latter soon.

Daniel Menaker catalogs the various agonies of working in the publishing business today. “When you are trying to acquire books that hundreds of thousands of people will buy, read, and like, you have to have some of the eclectic and demotic taste of the reading public,” he writes, which rankles Michael Orthofer: “Why not give literary discernment a try?” he asks. I suspect the books reflecting literary discernment don’t get financed without the largesse that’s facilitated only when you luck out at making books that hundreds of thousands of people will buy, read, and like.

Case in point: MacAdam/Cage, a small press that prides itself on publishing fiction of literary discernment, is having financial troubles. Unfortunately, this means a delay for Jack Pendarvis’ upcoming novel, Shut Up, Ugly, but he’s taking it in stride.

On October 13 in New York, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, and others will participate in a reading of documents relating to the torture of detainees.

In related DeLillo news, the new cover for the paperback edition of White Noise is both very attractive and uncannily appropriate—something about illustrator Michael Cho’s style slyly echoes the satirical, pop-culture-soaked tone of the novel.

Leonard Gardner recalls his work on Fat City, both the book and the film. Regarding the fact that he never wrote a second novel, he has a stock answer: “Sometimes you only get to win one championship.”

A reminder that John Steinbeck‘s The Grapes of Wrath wasn’t admired in all quarters when it was first published.

In 1908 when burglars broke into Mark Twain‘s home in Redding, Connecticut. Twain would quip shortly after the incident: “Now they (the burglars) are in jail, and if they keep on, they will go to Congress. When a person starts down hill, you can never tell where he is going to stop.”

And American Agriculturist would like to call bullshit on people who compare the works of Michael Pollan et al to Upton Sinclair‘s The Jungle.

Links: Pocket Symphony

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Don DeLillo, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, James Ellroy, Mark Twain, Norman Mailer, Ray Bradbury

James Ellroy has very strong opinions about classical music: “‘I dig late Mozart,'” he says. ‘There’s a hair of dissonance, there’s more vavoom, the late symphonies. I got Böhm, the Berlin Philharmonic. I love the 21st Piano Concerto – “Elvira Madigan” – Sinfonia Concertante, the Clarinet Concerto. But that’s it. Haydn you can have, Handel you can have, Baroque I can’t listen to.'”

Matthew Yglesias is still catching hell for liking Moby-Dick. A Mother Jones blogger retorts: “I didn’t care for it. I’ll spare you the details since I’d just be opening myself up to quite justified charges of philistinism, and who needs that?” Yglesias did make an error in saying that you can’t understand America without it; the only book for which that’s true is the Bible, and then just the angry parts.

“Mailer felt obliged to make literature, or better yet a demonic theoretical broadside, out of his hump-piles and pungent smoke.”

Montana: America’s new home for werewolf fantasy novels.

The Ransom Center has a host of online materials relating to Edgar Allan Poe, in relation to the exhibit that opens there next week.

Eudora Welty‘s One Writer’s Beginnings helped keep Mary Chapin Carpenter from becoming miserable when she was starting to play her songs at D.C. clubs.

Production of the film version of Don DeLillo‘s End Zone is on hold.

The Chicago Tribune‘s Julia Keller, who once worried in public whether a graphic-novel adaptation of the 9/11 Commission Report represented “an advance or retreat for civilization” (no, really), is now sweating a graphic-novel adaptation to Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451: “I find myself wishing graphic novels weren’t so hip; their popularity has made me question my own motives. Am I just trying to sound cool? Is an affection for graphic novels by anyone over 25 simply the literary equivalent of buying a sports car or getting a face-lift?”

There’s a seminar on September 15 on whether Mark Twain would use Twitter. For some reason, Michael Buckley will be a part of this; frankly, I’d be more interested in reading a long essay by Twain about “What the Buck?”

It’s Labor Day weekend, so I likely won’t be around here until after the holiday. In the meantime, you can read the story about Studs Terkel, Labor Day, the yuppie couple, and the bus stop in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood—over and over again.

Links: Installment Plan

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Budd Schulberg, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Larry McMurtry, Mark Twain, Michael Cunningham, Raymond Carver, Rick Moody, Willard Motley

In the Wall Street Journal, Lee Siegel argues that we are no longer living in an “episodic” era for fiction, stories more about events than transformations featuring Huck Finn and Augie March. We are now, somewhat unfortunately, living in the “narrative” era, where we crave closure and emotional growth in our characters. This is, of course, all 9/11’s fault. Arguments to contrary will abound, I’m sure—hasn’t popular fiction always been “narrative,” and aren’t most satirical fiction writers today (George Saunders, etc) dealing in “episodic” fiction, as comic writers always have? Somebody organize a conference!

Speaking of: The International Conference of Mark Twain Studies is going on now in Elmira, New York. According to the video, discussions of cats and studious beard grooming are on offer.

A lovely collection of Rockwell Kent‘s illustrations for Moby-Dick.

Constance Fenimore Woolson sold more books in her time than her would-be beloved, Henry James, but James got global fame and a bust in the National Portrait Gallery; Woolson gets a plaque on Mackinac Island.

The Bud Billikin parade is this weekend, which may mean nothing to anybody reading this outside of Chicago. But it’s a big deal there—a South Side to-do launched to get the kids excited to go back to school, and the brainchild of novelist Willard Motley, considered “the most prolific novelist associated with the concluding years of the Black Chicago Renaissance.”

Rick Moody listens to music while writing, but no lyrics please: “He has a fondness for ‘experimental or serious music that doesn’t have lyrics.’ For him, this includes music by La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, Arthur Russell and Rhys Chatham.”

In addition to writing a new novel and a horror movie, Michael Cunningham is working on the screenplay to a Dusty Springfield biopic.

Larry McMurtry is pretty much done: “I’m about at the end of it. I can write certain things. I don’t think I can write fiction any more. I think I’ve used it up over 30 novels. That’s a lot of novels.”

Budd Schulberg—novelist (What Makes Sammy Run?), screenwriter (On the Waterfront), and Papa’s sparring partner—died this week at 95.

And PopMatters draws a few interesting connections between manga pioneer Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Raymond Carver.

Links: Archive Search

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Andrew Sean Greer, David Foster Wallace, Ernest Hemingway, Ha Jin, John Irving, Lynn Stegner, Mark Twain, Russell Rowland, Thomas Pynchon, Wallace Stegner

Virginia Quarterly Review looks back on its early history with Wallace Stegner, including some manuscript scans.

Speaking of: Stegner’s daughter-in-law, novelist Lynn Stegner, is working on an anthology about what it means to grow up in the West with another writer, Russell Rowland. You say you haven’t read anything by Rowland? Don’t be so sure.

Peter Osnos visits a Beijing bookstore and looks approvingly on the many Western books available to him. “The neuralgic issue of censorship is confined to a substantial but specific range of books both in Chinese and from abroad,” Osnos writes. He and Ha Jin need to have a chat.

Mark Twain‘s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, has announced that 2010 will be the “Year of Twain,” marking the centennial of his death and 175th birthday. A dedicated Web site will cover all the exciting events happening next year; for now, you’ll have to settle for the Oak Ridge Boys, who hit town August 22.

Litchfield, New Hampshire, is still squabbling over how to put what stories on its reading lists after parents pitched a fit over the likes of David Sedaris and Laura Lippman appearing in the curriculum. “The stories are not appropriate ‘for developing minds that are very impressionable,'” a parent tells the Nashua Telegraph. One can only imagine the impression that high-school students get from watching their parents wring their hands in public.

Elsewhere in New Hampshire, parents are concerned about John Irving‘s A Prayer for Owen Meany. So, maybe just be careful about bringing books into New Hampshire for a while.

“I see from this paper’s letters section that various well-meaning but clueless liberals are upset by my recent assertion that Ernest Hemingway was on the wrong side in the Spanish Civil War.”

Somebody posing as Jay Murray Siskind, a professor in Don DeLillo‘s White Noise, wrote an essay about David Foster Wallace for the journal Modernism/Modernity. The joke was so funny that pretty much nobody got it for five years.

Wired‘s interactive map to Thomas Pynchon‘s Los Angeles has gone global.

And Andrew Sean Greer figures you can stop asking him about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button any time now.

Mark Twain’s Holy Writ

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Mark Twain

In 1905 Mark Twain wrote “The War-Prayer,” a brief short story with a straightforward pacifist message. Its criticism of jingoism—and the use of religion as a blunt instrument to support it—wouldn’t seem to be so terribly provocative that it couldn’t find a publisher, and by that point Twain’s reputation was so firmly established that it’s hard to imagine he couldn’t get anything he wrote to see the light of day. But Twain wrote it at a very jingoistic time, in the midst of the Philippine-American War (Stephen Kinzer‘s Overthrow provides a great backgrounder on how propagandistic that little-discussed era was); Harper’s Bazaar passed on the story, saying it was unfit for a woman’s magazine, and contractual issues prevented Twain from shopping it far elsewhere. “I don’t think the prayer will be published in my time,” Twain wrote to a friend. “None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth.”

Twain was right about the piece remaining unpublished in his lifetime. (Probably right about the dead and the truth, too.) The piece wasn’t published until 1923. It’s enjoyed a second life since then, especially among antiwar protesters, and in 2006 its reputation was solid enough that Mark Twain Studies, a Japan-based journal dedicated to the author, devoted a whopping 26 articles on the story, along with republications of the story’s original manuscript (PDF) and typescript (PDF). A new academic journal based at Stanford University, Journal of Transnational American Studies, has now seen fit to republish the whole shebang; I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thing, but just bouncing around it’s clear that there’s a wealth of great material inside. John J. Han discusses how the piece was repurposed (PDF) for a Babylon 5 episode; Michael J. Kiskis connects the story to Twain’s other antiwar writing, and to post-9/11 attitudes (PDF); and Twain biographer Ron Powers borrows some words from William Dean Howells to locate (PDF) just what it was about the story that made it so uniquely Twain, and what it is about America that makes the story’s message so easy to ignore:

“The War-Prayer” fully illustrates William Dean Howells’s shrewd analysis of what made Mark Twain’s diction transformative, even transcendent of its “period”: its “bottom of fury,” its “indignant sense of right and wrong,” “its “ardent hate of meanness and injustice.” These worthy passions propelled by “his single-minded use of words, which. . . express the plain, straight meaning their common acceptance has given them. . . He writes English as if it were a primitive and not a derivative language, without Gothic or Latin or Greek behind it.” Or focus-groups, or marketing, or Rove.

Links: Malaise Speech

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Bill Holm, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, Robert Coover, Russell Banks, Tao Lin, Wells Tower

Today is John Steinbeck‘s birthday. In his honor, the National Steinbeck Center is hosting events through the weekend; in related news, the entire country is hosting a massive Great Depression for the next five years or so.

Perhaps a commemorative Mark Twain coin would help?

Minnesota author Bill Holm, called the “polar bear of American literature,” has died. He was 65.

Those Robert Coover appearances at the University of Pennsylvania I mentioned earlier this week are now available online on video and MP3.

Russell Banks says Martin Scorsese‘s film adaptation of his novel The Darling is still moving along.

A healthy selection of works by Wells Tower, including an excerpt from his new collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, are online.

The viability of Tao Lin‘s plan to finance his writing by selling shares in his next novel is being disputed in the comments of yesterday’s post. Bright minds who understand finance and publishing better than I do are encouraged to weigh in. (Update: I got played on this. Maybe. Probably. Anyhow, lesson learned.)

Last call: Tomorrow I’ll be at an all-day seminar on fiction writing at George Mason University, put together by American Independent Writers. If you’ll be there, please say hi.

Links: Naming Rights

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Edward P. Jones, Eudora Welty, Mark Twain, Rudolfo Anaya

The Mississippi University for Women is pondering a name change—in part because, well, it’s a co-ed school. Among the three proposed names on the table is Welty-Reneau University, named after cofounder Sally Reneau and author Eudora Welty, who attended the school for two years. “I think it should be Welty University. That name seems like it would attract more males here,” says one student. Huh?

A high-school district in Newman, Calif., in the state’s central valley, is discussing whether to ban Rudolfo Anaya‘s novel Bless Me, Ultima (recently selected for the NEA’s Big Read program), because of profanity. Relevant quote: “Trustee RoseLee Hurst said the foul language is tantamount to violence and she’s an advocate for removing violence from schools.”

Meanwhile, Washington teacher John Foley thinks it’s time to phase out To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn, and Of Mice and Men from English curricula. At least he has some suggestions for replacements.

The finalists for the National Book Critics Circle awards were announced last night.

The winner of the Newbery Medal will be announced tomorrow.

The American Booksellers Association announced that 69 independent bookstores opened in 2008. No work on how many had to close its doors in that time, but things can’t be in complete crisis if Georgetown can handle a new shop dedicated to foreign literature and works in translation.

The Washington Monthly tapped a variety of authors and pundits to recommend books that President Obama should read. The list is stuffed, as you might expect, with a lot of policy tomes. But a few novels sneak in: Joel Garreau pitches Huck Finn (sorry, Mr. Foley!), Jeff Greenfield suggests a Washington novel I haven’t heard of, Garrett Epps‘ The Floating Island, David Ignatius recommends Graham Greene‘s The Quiet American. And George Pelecanos smartly submits that the new president get to know the best fiction writer living in D.C.:

I would recommend that President Obama read Lost in the City, by Edward P. Jones. It’s a short-story collection that brilliantly illuminates the humanity and struggles of everyday Washingtonians. Despite the phony Washington bashing during the campaign, D.C. is as Main Street as any place in America, and just as deserving of federal attention. The District could be a model for reform. A leader with Barack Obama’s intelligence and enthusiasm has the ability to make that happen.

The D.C.-Area Readings page is updated. Among the events coming up this week: Alex McLennan and James Matthews (whose collection of generally military-themed short stories, Last Known Position, I recommend) today at the Writer’s Center; Leonard Downie Jr. Monday at Politics & Prose (I recently reviewed his debut novel, The Rules of the Game, for Washington City Paper); the aforementioned George Pelecanos, also Monday at the Arlington Public Library; and former president Jimmy Carter, Wednesday at Borders Baileys Crossroads. Also, the Politics & Prose February schedule is now out, and anybody interested in getting tickets for Malcolm Gladwell’s Feb. 5 event at the Avalon Theatre should probably get on the horn to P&P ASAP: A former Postie who writes books that appeal to businesspeople and policy wonks, coming to a town that’s home to the Post and that’s full of businesspeople and policy wonks is bound to be a big deal.