It's a revolution of taste

Lev Grossman writes in the Wall Street Journal that the novel has finally 'made its peace with plot."

"After all, the discipline of the conventional literary novel is a pretty harsh one. To read one is to enter into a kind of depressed economy, where pleasure must be bought with large quantities of work and patience. The Modernists felt little obligation to entertain their readers. That was just the price you paid for your Joycean epiphany. Conversely they have trained us, Pavlovianly, to associate a crisp, dynamic, exciting plot with supermarket fiction, and cheap thrills, and embarrassment. Plot was the coward's way out, for people who can't deal with the real world. If you're having too much fun, you're doing it wrong."

I wonder if he's caught this bus after it's made a few stops, but it is nice to see.

The writers he cites as striking a blow for masterful plotting have been around for awhile but hey, good news is good news.

As for me, I think the cool kids should just start hanging out here.

Chaon interviewed at the Millions

One of my favourite blogs has scored an interview with Dan Chaon and now a whole lot of things make sense.

' Around the time I was finishing You Remind Me of Me, I also happened to write a story for McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, edited by Michael Chabon. Chabon’s project was to combine so-called literary writing with pulp and genre storytelling elements, and I was very much inspired by what he had to say. I felt like the story I wrote, “The Bees,” was a breakthrough for me, and I learned a lot from writers like Karen Joy Fowler, Kelly Link, George Saunders, Arthur Phillips, Kevin Brockmeier—and many others—who were doing interesting work with genre-bending."

That's a hell of a group, folks, and no more Dan Chaon links for awhile I promise. But Await Your Reply really is that good.

I'll get to this one soonest

Frank Portman loves YA fiction and that's okay

James Kelman used to be an angry young man. Now he's just....

Former Booker winner James Kelman needs a nap.

"The Scottish author said that his country preferred to celebrate "fucking detective fiction, or else some kind of child writer, or something that was not even new when Enid Blyton was writing The Faraway Tree, because she was writing about some upper middle-class young magician or some fucking crap".

Um..dude some of the best detective fiction in the world comes from Scotland.

power trio

The Washington Post reviews three new tomes about the business of music here

and Galleycat has a bit of fun gumshoeing their way to the new Oprah pick.

David

Dan Chaon at Wall Street Journal

I may have to subscribe to the WSJ, somebody over there sniffs out the good stuff.

Dan (Await Your Reply) Chaon- pronounced SHAWN, holds forth http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052970204683204574358411415113796.html

"Most people who grow up in poor communities are not becoming writers. I have students who are the first generation to go to college. They may be great writers, but they want to improve their lives, and becoming a writer is probably not the best way to do that.

too hot to blog

Or I'm just lazy, but nonetheless, I'm racing through Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply.

Bookslut has their take on the book here

Michael Schaub is a beautiful human being.


Dave

the upside is I was never that productive anyway

But this is going to seriously hurt my performance at the job I get when they fire me from this one.

Link via Bookslut

David

This makes it a blowout, folks

This makes the final score the Book 10 and the Kindle 0.

You gotta love it.

Dave

for a few dollars more

The literary magazine trade in Canada is hurting.

Specifically my local, the good people at the New Quarterly.

The link lays it out, but basically the feds have decided that current funding models duplicate things, and TNQ needs a fair bit of help to reach a plateau to the point where they can swim on their own.

The New Quarterly, and the small literary magazines like them are essential to the survival of Canadian literature.

Please go to the site to see what you can do.

David

the sun sets in the East?

A workshop wonders if Javanese literature is dying off due to a lack of interest from the kids.

'Beni Satya, an author from Jakarta, proposed a breakthrough in making Javanese literature more acceptable among today's society.

"It's no longer time to rely just on written Javanese," he pointed out.

To make the Javanese language more publicly acceptable, he added, literature must be supported by trendy media that society can easily access, such as stage and art performances.

"Indeed, these don't constitute literature, but this is my proposed strategy to make the language gain a greater foothold in society," he told the forum."

As long as everyone knows that Hollywood is no longer capable of telling coherent stories without books, okay?

David

Genre writing for dummies

Philip Marchand with some heavy lifting from Robert J Sawyer, on SF morphing into fantasy.

"The creators of the movie Star Trek, however, demonstrated no such scrupulosity. “In every previous Star Trek film, the time travel that had been done had been done with some sort of machine or device that we could understand,” Sawyer points out. “In this one, they just threw out something called ‘red matter.’ It literally was a magic substance. It was pixie dust. There was no rationale or explanation given it. It was just magic they pulled out of the air — or, to phrase it less politely — out of the writer’s butt.”"

It's that kind of lazy storytelling that made for a good looking and forgettable movie; and it's why the paperbacks in too many fantasy series are too heavy to lift, never mind read.

David

Jonathan Tropper-This is Where I Leave You

I've heard the name, but I've never picked up one of Jonathan Tropper's books until now.

The new novel, This is Where I Leave You, opens with the death of Mort Foxman, a not at all observant New England Jew whose apparent last wish was that his family sit shiva, the mourning process common to observant Jews to mourn his death.

Judd is one of the three brothers in tow here, who has just found out that his wife has been sleeping with his boss for a year. He's narrates most of the horror/hilarity to follow. Paul has issues left over from childhood that tie directly to Judd, and Philip "is the Paul McCarthey of our family: better looking than the rest of us, always facing a different direction in pictures, and occasionally rumoured to be dead." Wendy is the lone sister, a great character with overtones of Dorothy Parker.

There are kids, spouses therapists and mourners everywhere over the seven days and the novel moves quickly through the daily calendar.

The review below likens Tropper to Tom Perrotta and Nick Hornby, and that flies well enough for me. I never got particularly excited over Nick Hornby, but I'll follow a Tom Perrotta novel anywhere. As I tore through the book, I kept thinking that this is what Jonathan Franzen's Corrections would have been like if it were much funnier and built for speed.

The novels structure allows for plenty of set pieces and one or two fall flat, but that's a minor flaw in an otherwise hilarious sad, melancholic and knowing work that is already optioned for film and is going to vault Jonathan Tropper into heady company if there is any justice.

This is Where I Leave You is a great read, easily one of my favourites in a strong year;

full of laughs and hard won insight around the limits of matrimonial and familial love.

Purchase here

The Boston Herald has a piece on the author here.

David

Mixed media

While I choose to read the book pretty much all the time, late night paragon of virtue Craig Ferguson makes pretty much the same point as my man Chris Hedges does with Empire of Illusion (see below).

Craig just does it with a wee bit more dispatch.

David

Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges

A quick look around the American cable news channels in recent weeks shows a personalized and largely fact free debate around the health care bills before the U.S Congress, the Michael Jackson funeral and subsequent sideshows and the oddball story of whether or not Barack Obama was really born in America, thus calling into question his eligibility for the Presidency.
Books like Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion: The Death of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle is the sort of source material that historians in the coming decades may be glad to have access to, simply to determine when the wheels seemed to come off.
Hedges is a lefty, but with a masters degree in theology. In short, he’s able to punch with both rhetorical fists, and it makes for a much more rigorous read than the atheist vs. preachers tomes common to the non-fiction best seller lists of the past few years.
The Pulitzer Prize winning author, journalist and foreign correspondent reports on the absurdist theatre of the World Wrestling Entertainment empire, the pornography industry in southern California, a state currently out of money and running out of water; and he balances dispassion and outrage when chronicling what he calls our “inverted totalitarianism” or a culture in which politics is subservient to economics.
Taken together with debased entertainments, the rise of celebrity and consumer culture and the near passing of print culture America has become a place where intractable problems induce the beleaguered populace to seek comfort in celebrity train wrecks, gossip and spectacle.
Hedges writes,
“A culture dominated by images and slogans seduces those who are functionally literate, but who make the choice not to read. There have been other historical periods with high rates of illiteracy and vast propaganda campaigns. But not since the Soviet and fascist dictatorships, and perhaps the brutal authoritarian control of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, has the content of information been as skilfully and ruthlessly controlled and manipulated. Propaganda has become a substitute for ideas and ideology. Knowledge is confused with how we are made to feel. Commercial brands are mistaken for expressions of individuality. And in this precipitous decline of values and literacy, amongst those who cannot read and those who have given up reading, fertile ground for a new totalitarianism is being seeded.”
If that sounds over the top, Hedges notes that both the U.S. and Canada share a stat of an illiterate or semiliterate citizenry estimated at around 42 per cent.
Hedges cites many learned figures in media, academia and the social sciences and footnotes abound.
Most give Barack Obama credit for talking to Americans like they were adults, but few give him a chance at fundamental change, due to the machine of which he is beholden.
Hedges notes that Democrats raised much more money from corporations during the last election cycle than Republicans did.
Thus Chris Hedges believes that we have passed the point of saving an America that he grew up in.
He earnestly draws parallels with cultures throughout history born of symbols, charlatans and various systemic collapses and is hard pressed to see a country he loves ending differently.

Dave

The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker has never been an easy writer to figure out.
After some well received novels, the American writer came to prominence in the early 1990’s with Vox, a slim, erotically charged tale of two strangers conducting an entire relationship only by phone.
Throughout his career Baker has largely eschewed a traditional narrative insofar as he is more interested in character and a diffuse description. Not much “happens” in a Nicholson Baker novel, but the joy is in the small details that reveal character and motivation.
I’ve not read any of the author’s non-fiction, but it seems that it also follows a path less trod upon.
The New York Times notes that “there is, it seems at first, a sort of madness in his method. He does not offer a straightforward narrative as a historian or a polemicist might do, but instead his book is made up of a set of vignettes, each containing a fact or a quotation from one of the main participants, or from someone who kept a diary. Most vignettes carry a date. Sometimes these entries come three to a page, sometimes they are slightly longer. Slowly, as you read, because of the variety in the tone and the shocking or tragic nature of the quotation, and because of how well chosen they are, “Human Smoke : The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization” becomes riveting and fascinating. It is as though a brilliant film editor, with an urgent argument to make, began to work with gripping newsreels.”

And so to Nicholson Baker’s new novel due in September, The Anthologist.
The reader is introduced to Paul Chowder, a minor American poet who is writing an introduction to a new anthology of poetry dedicated to rhyme and metre. Paul submitted an outline, got an advance and can’t bring the forty or so page introduction into focus. After frittering away time and money with no results, Roz, also a writer and Paul’s girlfriend leaves him.
“And that was it. My beautiful, patient, funny, short, loving girlfriend-the woman I’d been with longer than anyone else-moved out. She was right to leave me, but it felt really bad. Horrible, in fact.
Plus I was broke.”
In terms of plot, that’s pretty much it.
What follows is a beleaguered and lonely guy fending off a largely absent editor, drinking with a couple fictional (that is to say made up) writers, doing some remodeling for a next door neighbour and holding forth on the nature of poetry for the imagined reader.
The two hundred pages hence is in fact, the introduction that Chowder is fretting over, it’s just that prospective readers get to see the proverbial sausage getting made.
From here, the Anthologist acts as a dog whistle would. For lovers of poetry, the rest of the novel is a love letter to the English Romantics and the American modernist poets, a heartfelt and mannered appreciation to their lives and craft. For those whom poetry matters not, the rest of the Anthologist may read like biographical data and minutiae about a bunch of people named Tennyson, Swinburne and W.S Merwin.
I’m squarely in the former camp because poetry is elementally necessary in its own right, and even if it’s not often acknowledged-is the blood in the veins of the modern novel.
Without it too many novels read like fleshy movie scripts.
For a solid and entertaining appreciation of some of the major poets, the Anthologist is a great read, but it’s gratifying to see an author of Baker’s caliber continue to challenge himself with a fresh and daring work.

Dave

Independently omnipotent

The local paper reprints David Ulin's worries over the (latest) Amazon debacle.

I don't disagree with much, but his contention that Amazon represents a conundrum to those that have warned of homogenization in the book trade insofar as Amazon is an an "independent" shop, therefore blameless isn't the whole story.

That's analogous to saying that the New York Yankees are independent, but everyone knows that they're the driver of outrageous salaries that are ruining pro baseball.

Amazon is relentless in using it's influence to squeeze publishers, most of whom caved to the power of the newly minted chain stores years ago, and are in no position to draw a line in the sand now.

That aside, nice job newspaper of mine.


David

Call me

I'll pass on ownership of this, but I like his style.

To Mr. Patrick, a 66-year-old Toronto connoisseur, his one taste of 50-year-old Scotch tasted too much like the barrel. “It tasted okay, almost on the cusp of being overpowered by wood,” he said. “I drink more than I collect.”

Glenfiddich is releasing a limited run of 50-year old Scotches at sixteen thousand dollars a pop.

Jesus, for sixteen grand I could buy eternal happiness and still have a bit left over for a dozen bottles of a perfectly good drinkable Scotch.

But if you ever need a pliant drinking buddy sir, I can be at your door in a heartbeat.

I'll laugh at all of your jokes and leave when asked.

David

those two got along way too well for a used bookstore transaction..

but other than that, nice job.

Books 1 Kindle 0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzSzKAtfJNg&eurl=http://mhpbooks.com/mobylives/%3Fp%3D8656&feature=player_embedded

Dave

Chris Hedges-Empire of Illusion

Staying with the Globe, they've got an excerpt of Chris Hedges new book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. The author of War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning is back with a killer left hook of a treatise that leaves little room for optimism until the last couple pages. There's much to like, a few holes and I'll have a full review posted shortly.

David

Oh heck, quit your day job

I'm all for the continued existence of publishers and most of the people I come across who work for them are dedicated, smart and in it for the right reasons.

Having said that, Words Worth, like most bookstores caters to the self published author as well.

The Globe points out that the commonality is tenacity, a bit of start up money and a lot of luck.

The article trots out the current success story, and I'd like to add another.

Congratulations Andrea.

P.S- Self published authors also need to love self marketing.

David