Although Charlotte’s Mother Could Be My Mom’s Next-Door Neighbor
The Guardian offers up a satisfyingly vicious digested read of Tom Wolfe’s latest effort. Here’s an excerpt:
“Well, ah-ull be darned,” said Charlotte’s mother, “Fancy a hillbilly’s daughter go-un to Dupont”.
Charlotte grimaced at the way her mammy said ah-ull and go-un. She wished she would shut up. “I am Charlotte Simmons,” she said to herself.
The [...]
Remainders
Writer A.S. Byatt celebrates surrealist Eileen Agar, an artist who depicted female sexuality in her work. Agar once said the pleasure she took in life was visible, “Like a transparent skirt, or something like that.’” (The Guardian article includes a photograph of the artist wearing a transparent skirt while vacationing with her second husband [...]
Murakami on Readers’ Responses
Haruki Murakami takes his readers’ criticism seriously, reading 100 email messages every day and answering 10 – 20 of those:
I’m not interested in professional criticism, pro or con. I just don’t care. But I think it’s very important for me to read the words from my actual readers, the ones who pay their money to [...]
Housing Works/Book TV
Dennis Johnson of Melville House Books and Moby Lives has put together a panel of literary bloggers to appear this Friday at Housing Works in Soho. I’ll be participating with Dennis and the proprietors of Beatrice, Bookninja, Bookslut, and Moorish Girl. There’s some talk of the panel airing on Book TV, but at the [...]
2004 Books
The Guardian’s 2004 books quiz is available. Among the questions: “Which celebrity boasted of her autobiography that she had neither written, nor even read, it?” Yeah, I guessed Paris Hilton, too, but I was wrong. (Answers are available on a separate page.)
Also, British writers, actors and celebrities select [...]
Vaguely Book-Related, At Best
At Salon, Karen Maroda considers whether Sylvia Plath’s therapist, Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, was competent to treat the suicidal poet.
Kinky Friedman’s review of Jimmy Buffett’s latest fictional endeavor, A Salty Piece of Land, begins “There is a fine line between fiction and nonfiction, and I believe Jimmy Buffett and I snorted it in 1976.”
Kurt Vonnegut says [...]
The Smart Set: Lauren Cerand’s Weekly Events
The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that appears Mondays and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please submit details to lauren@maudnewton.com by the Thursday before publication for consideration.
11.29: Yes, yes, y’all – [...]
American Heritage Celebrates Fifty Years
The 50th anniversary issue of American Heritage purports to provide the “definitive guide to the greatest books” about the country’s past. The lists are uneven and sometimes odd, but interesting.
Max Byrd selects ten historical novels, including Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, Conrad Richter’s The Trees, and Gore Vidal’s Lincoln. [...]
Coffee, please, and then more coffee
Posting will be slow and spotty as I refamiliarize myself with the process of waking before noon and facing a new work week.
Meanwhile, my review of Elif Shafak’s The Saint of Incipient Insanities appeared in yesterday’s Newsday. Here’s a quick excerpt:
Vladimir Nabokov embarked upon his first English-language novel midway through his [...]
Thanksgiving Remainders
Annie breaking in here, with some holiday goodness, stealing into the blogosphere while all those American bloggers are stuffing themselves with turkey, ham, or — as I did once, thanks to a gracious and creative mom who was indulging my long-ago vegan phase — lentil-based faux turkey, carefully molded into realistic shapes. Delicious, pseudo-meaty goodness [...]
Readers’ Revival Suggestions
Sarah Yake writes:
This email isn’t about an out-of-print title, but rather about a great little publisher in England that is bringing books back into print, Persephone Books.
Most of the titles are by British women from the first half of the 20th century, and many of the authors were well-known in their day. Mollie Panter-Downes, one [...]
In Print One Year, Then Out?
Susan Ramsey, of the Athena Book Shop in Kalamazoo, MI, writes:
Out of Print, c’est moi. My official job at the Athena Book Shop is Out of Print searches, something the internet has made so much easier that any minute now people are going to figure out they don’t need me. What isn’t generally [...]
Cowan’s Out-of-Print Look at 70’s Culture Wars Still Relevant Today?
In the current issue of Columbia Journalism Review, Rick Perlstein recalls Tyler Cowan’s Tribes of America, an out-of-print book about the 1970’s “culture wars.” He heralds Cowan’s ability “to probe where those he disagreed with were coming from while still understanding why he disagreed with them” as a token of the author’s “moral seriousness [...]
Out-of-Print Expert Weighs In
Robert Nedelkoff, out-of-print maestro, sends this message:
I’ll begin by saying that for the last year and a half I’ve been on the advisory board of the Lost Books Club, which Mark Moskowitz set up with the late Leslie Fiedler as a result of the Stone Reader documentary, and that the LBC’s next selection, “The LBJ [...]
Brief Semi-Hiatus
I’ll be away through the 29th, visiting my sister, and giving thanks that my parents live more 500 miles away and are estranged from both of us.
Although I’d planned to take care of my email backlog before leaving, I’ve made nary a dent in the massive pile that’s accumulated. If you don’t hear from me [...]