Category: Richard Price

Videos From the 2008 National Book Festival

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Geraldine Brooks, James McBride, Kay Ryan, Neil Gaiman, Richard Price

I shot a few short videos of some of the authors I caught at yesterday’s National Book Festival. Not especially competently, I’m afraid—I’m working with a two-year-old personal digital camera. But the sound is better than I’d expected, and everybody here gets off a good line or two.

Neil Gaiman, responding to a question about whether his ego ever gets in the way of his work (1:36):

Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, reading her poem “Composition” (0:52):

James McBride, discussing one of the obvious models for his first novel, Miracle at St. Anna (2:12):

Geraldine Brooks, discussing the books that first got her interested in reading (2:21):

(The camera conked out before she got to the punchline. She was able to name the emotion she felt; it’s lust.)

Richard Price on writing for The Wire: (0:30):

Richard Price on writing dialogue (0:45):

Roundup: Don’t Talk That Way

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Charles Bock, Herbert Gold, Richard Price, Selden Edwards

In the process of blogging about Richard Price‘s Lush Life for the National Post, police dispatcher Heather Clark seems to have acquired a touch of Price’s rhythms: “I lived with a cop who metaphorically swept away the stress of his world with the comforting, sucking hum of the vacuum cleaner. In our seven years together he hoovered his way through three rugs, and blew the engines on six Dirt Devils (that doesn’t include the busted Bissell brooms). It doesn’t take the pain away, but it sure as hell takes away the caring.” (Lush Life is now out in the U.K., receiving unsurprisingly enthusiastic reviews.)

The Santa Barbara Independent has an expansive feature on Selden Edwards‘ The Little Book, a fall big book decades in the making. (h/t Liz)

Novelist Herbert Gold speaks with the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles about his new memoir, Still Alive!, which recounts his relationships with Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and other literary folk.

Finally, trust Radar to ask the tough questions. From an interview with Charles Bock:

I’m actually supposed to ask you about Bennington. Apparently, all of the girls there have claw-shaped vaginas that can recite Andrea Dworkin to the tune of “Old Dixie.” Is this true?
That’s really, really funny. I don’t know if Dworkin might be too outdated now. I can tell you this: During my time in the MFA program, I worked like absolute hell to get laid as much as I possibly could. At no time did any woman’s intimate area recite anything to me to the tune of “Old Dixie.”

Canadian Cops: Polite, Literate

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Richard Price

In relation to last week’s post about ways to innovate newspaper book sections, Canada’s National Post has an interesting idea—tap readers to blog about their reading of a book that relates to their expertise. The paper’s arts blog, The Ampersand, has invited a Toronto police officer to write about her experience reading Richard Price’s new novel, Lush Life. The first entry shines a little light on how different Toronto cops are from Price’s NYC ones:

When night watch detectives exit a tenement across the street from the scene, Matty watches as “one of them makes slant eyes with her fingertips, i.e., crammed to the rafters with Fooks”. Truly bad form if you’re a policing employee, it would be like openly farting or picking your nose in a five-star dining room. Twenty years ago we may have grunted and made such racial slurs, but that kind of behaviour is verboten “standing order 24” we say (racist comments, etc, etc will be punished, blah blah).

So What Else Is New?

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Jhumpa Lahiri, Richard Price, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Uncategorized

Yesterday the National Book Critics Circle announced its latest Good Reads list—a selection of recently published books recommended by its members. Here’s the fiction list (links and formatting direct from the announcement post on the NBCC blog, Critical Mass):

1. Richard Price, LUSH LIFE, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
2. Jhumpa Lahiri, UNACCUSTOMED EARTH, Knopf
3. Steven Millhauser, DANGEROUS LAUGHTER, Knopf
*4. Charles Baxter, THE SOUL THIEF, Pantheon
*4. Peter Carey, HIS ILLEGAL SELF, Knopf
*4. J. M. Coetzee, DIARY OF A BAD YEAR, Viking
*4. James Collins, BEGINNNER’S GREEK, Little, Brown
*4. Brian Hall, FALL OF FROST, Viking
*4. Roxana Robinson, COST, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
*4. Owen Sheers, RESISTANCE, Nan A. Talese: Doubleday

You won’t have to look far to find somebody argue that this list is stuffed with the usual suspects. That’s a somewhat odd complaint to me, as somebody who spent a couple of years contributing to pop-music polls. I mean, of course these lists are filled with known names—they’re consensus-building exercises. Surprises, practically by definition, aren’t going to rise to the top. And I’m skeptical about consensus-building exercises in the age of the long tail. But something to keep in mind: When I attended a gathering at Politics & Prose a few months back to discuss the last batch of selections, many of the folks who attended found all this stuff surprising, and you don’t show up at Politics & Prose on a balmy Saturday afternoon to listen to book critics natter on unless you care about reading.

This time around, I suspect that most folks with even a casual interest in contemporary literature have heard plenty about Price and Lahiri, and anybody who makes writing about books part of their daily business is thoroughly sick of the pair of ’em by now. That’s not to say that a list of books that a preponderance of critics cared about is valueless, though—if only for folks who might be curious about what critics care about, and transparency is always a good thing.

All that said, I’m an NBCC member, and I was mindful this time around about not being one more person boosting Lush Life—much as I love it, it doesn’t need any more help. My pick was Rudolph Wurlitzer‘s The Drop Edge of Yonder, about which more soon.

Crime Fiction Isn’t Real Fiction. Except When It Is. But Wait…

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Richard Price

James Wood has a nice piece on Richard Price‘s Lush Life–though in truth it’s actually a neat little primer on how great dialogue does useful figurative work and isn’t just a play at “realism.” All the same, I stopped paying close attention when I got to this line:

Price has greater novelistic ambitions than his genre can accommodate, and one longs to see him free himself from the tram track of the police procedural. For that is exactly what his language does, time and again: it breaks away.

If his language successfully transcends genre fiction, then what is it he needs to break free of? Wood’s complaint here seems close to the argument that genre fiction can’t be “real” fiction. Lacking much background on Wood, I can’t speak to his long-held opinions on the matter, but it seems like a shallow argument that’s beneath his stature.

First Thoughts on Titlepage.tv

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Charles Bock, Colin Harrison, Daniel Menaker, Richard Price, Susan Choi

The first episode of Titlepage, an online video site featuring much-decorated literary editor Daniel Menaker in conversation with writers, is up now. Featured in episode one: Richard Price, Charles Bock, Colin Harrison, and Susan Choi. I haven’t had a chance yet to process the full hour-long conversation, but there are a lot of things to like: Menaker is an engaging host who’s clearly familiar with the books he’s talking about, he’s made some good choices in writers to feature, and the video format allows you to easily skip ahead to the interview with each author.

Not so great:  The “Talking Together” bit at the end, which makes me wonder why four authors  are sitting together in the same room if they’re not going to engage with each other too much. Much of the conversation is polite and round-table-y, and while I wasn’t hoping for a Price-Choi cage match, the energy level doesn’t change a whole lot throughout, and one-on-one conversations can be more fun to watch (even if Charlie Rose is the guy doing the interrupting).

Roundup: You May Have the Falcon…

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Adrian Tomine, Dashiell Hammett, Dept. of Self-Promotion, Nicholson Baker, Richard Price

Stephanie Salter tries to get her head around Dashiell Hammett‘s The Maltese Falcon. My old place in San Francisco was just a couple of blocks from the apartment where Hammett wrote that novel; back in 2001 I wrote a story about the guy who lived (lives?) there.

Nicholson Baker writing “Wikipedia is just an incredible thing” is like Rick James saying “Cocaine is a hell of a drug”–the dude’s found the thing that’s going to reshape his life for years, for better or for worse. As he points out: “All big Internet successes—e-mail, AOL chat, Facebook, Gawker, Second Life, YouTube, Daily Kos, World of Warcraft—have a more or less addictive component—they hook you because they are solitary ways to be social: you keep checking in, peeking in, as you would to some noisy party going on downstairs in a house while you’re trying to sleep.”

A couple of DoSP notes. I have a brief review of Adrian Tomine‘s Shortcomings in Washington City Paper; Tomine is at Politics and Prose on Wednesday. My review of Richard Price‘s excellent new novel, Lush Life, is in today’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune. At the National Book Critics Circle blog, Critical Mass, I’ve been gathering up various materials related to Price’s Clockers; an extended version of the interview with Price that first appeared on City Paper’s Web site is running in three parts. Parts of that interview dedicated specifically to Lush Life are now up at the Chicago Sun-Times Web site. Many thanks to NBCC president John Freeman for proposing the idea, and to Price for giving up so much of his time to weather a fusillade of questions about something he did three books ago.

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.

Dept. of Self-Promotion

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Simon, Richard Price

“What Happened to Our Show?,” my essay on the fifth season of The Wire, is the cover story in this week’s Washington City Paper. If you’re not keeping up with the show, or simply don’t feel compelled to read (yet another) journalist expounding on journalist David Simon‘s take on journalism, you may wish to skip to my interview with Richard Price. The conversation is mainly about Clockers–our chat was conducted as part of the NBCC’s “In Retrospect” series and should run in full…someday–but he also discusses The Wire, TV journalism, why he didn’t cover basketball for the New Yorker, and more.

Vice’s Fiction Issue

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Cormac McCarthy, Gary Fisketjon, Jim Shepard, Mary Gaitskill, Nick Tosches, Raymond Carver, Richard Price, Robert Coover

There’s lots of great stuff in Vice‘s second fiction issue–pieces by Richard Price, Mary Gaitskill, Robert Coover, Jim Shepard, Nick Tosches, and more–but I keyed in on this interview with editor Gary Fisketjon, who’s worked with Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, and more. All I can say to this bit is that I’m trying…:

Is there a temperament of a good editor?

I’ve known all sorts, but I should think the best would prove to be patient, understanding, careful, honest, and forthright rather than falsely flattering or disingenuous, celebratory, certainly, and sympathetic as well about all the trying circumstances all writers face nearly all the time. We’re all in this together, but only because writers have enabled us to be part of it.