Random thoughts about Books

riverplate · Dec 23, 2008

It's about time we had a thread here about random items, news or observations...

Victor Hugo's Heirs Lose Battle Against Sequels - Guardian UK

It is the most read French novel outside France and has inspired numerous film adaptations and a hit West End musical that ran for more than 20 years. But Victor Hugo's epic novel Les Misérables also spawned France's longest-running literary spat of the new century...

Last night, after seven years of legal wrangling, Paris's court of appeal finally ruled in favour of the publishers and the two sequels, saying they did not constitute an attack on Hugo's rights.

The verdict, seen as a landmark decision, was hailed as victory by French publisher Plon and the author, François Cérésa. Several other publishing houses were said to be standing by to develop sequels to various classics, including another continuation of that other great untouchable, Flaubert's Madame Bovary.

The row caused intense speculation over what Hugo, an impassioned political campaigner for social justice and against censorship, would have made of the modern takes on his work.
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riverplate · Dec 23, 2008

Young Muslims Build a Subculture on an Underground Book - N.Y. Times

CLEVELAND — Five years ago, young Muslims across the United States began reading and passing along a blurry, photocopied novel called The Taqwacores, about imaginary punk rock Muslims in Buffalo.

“This book helped me create my identity,” said Naina Syed, 14, a high school freshman in Coventry, Conn. A Muslim born in Pakistan, Naina said she spent hours on the phone listening to her older sister read the novel to her. “When I finally read the book for myself,” she said, “it was an amazing experience.”

The novel is The Catcher in the Rye for young Muslims, said Carl W. Ernst, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Springing from the imagination of Michael Muhammad Knight, it inspired disaffected young Muslims in the United States to form real Muslim punk bands and build their own subculture.
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Dr. Wankler · Dec 24, 2008

Personal Best Book List for 2008

Brilliant idea.

I'll use this thread for my annual "your best books of the year" thread. So here's my Best Books of 2008 -- not the best books published this year: the best books I happened to read this year. Since it's a random thread, you can set your own rules:

Best Volume of Poetry: Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End

Best Novel: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

Best Book on Current Events/Politics: Jane Mayer's The Dark Side (honorable mentions to Tom Frank for The Wrecking Crew and to Jeffrey Toobin for The Nine

Best Travel Book: Henry Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.

Best Religion Book: Jacques Ellul's Anarchy and Christianity

Best book I can't readily classify: Ammon Shea's Reading the O.E.D.: One Man, One Year, 21,730 pages

And the Grand Prize: Best soccer book:

David Goldblatt's The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer

honorable mention to Christopher Merrill for his 1991 (or so) book, The Grass of Another Country

riverplate · Dec 25, 2008

Harold Pinter 1930-2008

Harold Pinter, Nobel-Winning Playwright, Dies at 78 - N.Y. Times

Harold Pinter, the British playwright whose gifts for finding the ominous in the everyday and the noise within silence made him the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation, died on Wednesday. He was 78 and lived in London. The cause was cancer, his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, said on Thursday...

In more than 30 plays — written between 1957 and 2000 and including masterworks like The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming and Betrayal — Mr. Pinter captured the anxiety and ambiguity of life in the second half of the 20th century with terse, hypnotic dialogue filled with gaping pauses and the prospect of imminent violence.

Along with another Nobel winner, Samuel Beckett, his friend and mentor, Mr. Pinter became one of the few modern playwrights whose names instantly evoke a sensibility. The adjective Pinteresque has become part of the cultural vocabulary as a byword for strong and unspecified menace.
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nicephoras · Dec 29, 2008

Re: Harold Pinter 1930-2008

Good idea on the Book of the Year concept, Dr. W. I've read too many books to remember them all while on the road, but I'll try to post later. I will say that for someone not terribly familiar with Communist Russia, Child 44 is an absolutely fantastic read. A surprising combination of moral considerations, interpersonal relationships and some backstory on what living in the USSR was like. There's also some very, very black humor.

riverplate · Dec 31, 2008

Still Paging Mr. Salinger - N.Y. Times

On Thursday, J. D. Salinger turns 90. There probably won’t be a party, or if there is we’ll never know. For more than 50 years Mr. Salinger has lived in seclusion in the small town of Cornish, N.H. For a while it used to be a journalistic sport for newspapers and magazines to send reporters up to Cornish in hopes of a sighting, or at least a quotation from a garrulous local, but Mr. Salinger hasn’t been photographed in decades now and the neighbors have all clammed up. He’s been so secretive he makes Thomas Pynchon seem like a gadabout.

Mr. Salinger’s disappearing act has succeeded so well, in fact, that it may be hard for readers who aren’t middle-aged to appreciate what a sensation he once caused. With its very first sentence, his novel The Catcher in the Rye, which came out in 1951, introduced a brand-new voice in American writing, and it quickly became a cult book, a rite of passage for the brainy and disaffected. Nine Stories, published two years later, made Mr. Salinger a darling of the critics as well, for the way it dismantled the traditional architecture of the short story and replaced it with one in which a story could turn on a tiny shift of mood or tone.

In the 1960s, though, when he was at the peak of his fame, Mr. Salinger went silent. Franny and Zooey, a collection of two long stories about the fictional Glass family, came out in 1961; two more long stories about the Glasses, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, appeared together in book form in 1963. The last work of Mr. Salinger’s to appear in print was Hapworth 16, 1924, a short story that took up most of the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker. In the ’70s he stopped giving interviews, and in the late ’80s he went all the way to the Supreme Court to block the British critic Ian Hamilton from quoting his letters in a biography

So what has Mr. Salinger been doing for the last 40 years?
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Dr. Wankler · Jan 30, 2009

Today is the birthday of Richard Brautigan. He would be 74 if he were still alive:

I feel horrible. She doesn’t
love me and I wander around
the house like a sewing machine
that’s just finished sewing
a turd to a garbage can lid.

Dr. Wankler · Feb 3, 2009

Today, Feb. 3rd, is the Birthday of Gertrude Stein and of James Michener.

The Zodiac could not be reached for comment.

riverplate · Feb 11, 2009

Robert Anderson 1917-2009

Robert Anderson, Playwright of ‘Tea and Sympathy,’ Dies at 91 - N.Y. Times

Robert Anderson, a playwright whose intimate emotional dramas like Tea and Sympathy and I Never Sang for My Father attracted big names to the Broadway stage if not always substantial audiences to Broadway theaters, died Monday at home in Manhattan. He was 91. The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said Nevin Terence Busch, Mr. Anderson’s stepson.

Mr. Anderson was a contemporary of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, and though his reputation never ascended to the artistic heights that theirs did — his plays often walked a tightrope between realism and sentimentality — he was among the theater’s most visible, serious playwrights of the 1950s and ’60s.

Mr. Anderson also wrote screenplays, including those for The Sand Pebbles (1966), with Steve McQueen, and The Nun’s Story (1959), with Audrey Hepburn. But he thought of himself as a playwright who wrote movies for money. He had six plays on Broadway between 1953 and 1971, beginning with Tea and Sympathy, the story of a sensitive, artistic boy who is ostracized by his prep school classmates as a supposed homosexual but who is befriended — and ultimately sexually initiated — by the housemaster’s wife.

Tea and Sympathy, directed by Elia Kazan, starred Deborah Kerr in her Broadway debut, fresh from her steamy role as an adultress in From Here to Eternity. The play, which later became a film, ends with a scene considered salacious at the time and a famous final line. The housemaster’s wife, after leaving her husband, draws the student into her arms and says, “Years from now when you talk of this . . . and you will . . . be kind.”
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Atouk · Feb 12, 2009

Washington Post to End Stand-Alone Book Section

The Washington Post is dropping Book World as a separate Sunday section and moving its coverage of books and publishing elsewhere in the paper.

"Of course it's disappointing," Rachel Shea, the editor who will oversee The Post's coverage, said of yesterday's announcement. "It's nice to have a separate section with big display and a big shout-out to what the most important book is. But it's not worth gnashing our teeth about too much."

In dropping one of the few remaining stand-alone book sections in American newspapers, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli said that the coverage will be shifted to the Style section and a revamped Outlook section. Shea said that The Post would publish about three-quarters of the roughly 900 reviews it has carried each year. The change will take effect Feb. 22.

(article continues)
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Howard Zinn · Feb 14, 2009

20 years ago today since the Rushdie fatwa:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7889889.stm

BBC said:

BBC arts correspondent Lawrence Pollard said the controversy over the book could be seen as a defining moment for British society, both for race relations and freedom of speech.

"[It was] the catalyst for the emergence of a stronger sense of Muslim identity in Britain," he said. "Protestors had an issue around which to rally."

"Until that time there had been assumed support for the broad principle of free speech, the Rushdie affair introduced the question of how far free expression should be limited to avoid offending religious feelings in a multicultural society," he added.
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Dr. Wankler · Feb 17, 2009

Why does Hollywood make such crappy movies out of good books?

The reason, according to slate.com:

This is what the movies do to literature, typically: There's so much plot to get in that there's no time to tell the story. Perhaps it's the insecurity of Hollywood: Inflated by the borrowed prestige of books, producers and directors won't stray too far from the guide-ropes of the story. Revolutionary Road, for instance, feels less directed than curated. But in this bargain, Hollywood makes an unnecessary concession, in effect admitting that movies are dumber than books. How could we think otherwise when smart books are continually turned into witless movies? It's the ultimate head-to-head competition, and movies are the Washington Generals. Are there reverse examples, where a mediocre movie is turned into a good book? I can't think of one, though I've heard that the novelization of The Harder They Come is remarkably successful. No, until recently, I'd just about decided that film deserves its reduced reputation as the flashy, gelled-hair cousin to literature.

riverplate · Mar 4, 2009

Publisher’s Big Gamble on Divisive French Novel - N.Y. Times

It was always going to be a challenging sell. The Kindly Ones, the 983-page novel by Jonathan Littell that went on sale on Tuesday, is a fictionalized memoir of a remorseless former Nazi SS officer, who in addition to taking part in the mass extermination of the Jews, commits incest with his sister, sodomizes himself with a sausage and most likely kills his mother and stepfather. Oh, and it’s been translated from the French.

Then again, long before the book was released in the United States by the Harper imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, it came with a laureled publishing history. Mr. Littell, an English-speaking American who decided to write in French and now lives in Barcelona, Spain, won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award, as well as a prize from the Académie Française. The book, published as Les Bienveillantes in France in 2006, sold around 700,000 copies there. A French critic compared it to Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

It was the talk of the Frankfurt Book Fair two years ago, and the subject of a heated auction here in the United States, resulting in Harper’s paying, according to Publishers Weekly, about $1 million for the rights to publish the novel in this country. Now, as it hits bookstores — and the time is near when Harper will find out whether such a tome can earn back such a hefty advance — the novel is meeting a dramatically polarized critical response. Last week in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote that “the novel’s gushing fans, however, seem to have mistaken perversity for daring, pretension for ambition, an odious stunt for contrarian cleverness,” adding that the book was “willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent.”
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riverplate · Mar 5, 2009

Horton Foote 1916-2009

Horton Foote, Chronicler of America in Plays and Film, Dies at 92 - N.Y. Times

Horton Foote, who chronicled a wistful American odyssey through the 20th century in plays and films mostly set in a small town in Texas and who left a literary legacy as one of the country’s foremost storytellers, died on Wednesday in Hartford. He was 92 and lived in Pacific Palisades, Calif., and Wharton, Tex.

In a body of work for which he won the Pulitzer Prize and two Academy Awards, Mr. Foote was known as a writer’s writer, an author who never abandoned his vision even when Broadway and Hollywood temporarily turned their backs on him. In screenplays for movies like Tender Mercies, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Trip to Bountiful, and in plays like The Young Man From Atlanta and The Carpetbagger’s Children, Mr. Foote depicted the way ordinary people shoulder the ordinary burdens of life, finding drama in the resilience by which they carry on in the face of change, economic hardship, disappointment, loss and death...

Frank Rich, who as chief theater critic of The New York Times in the 1980s was one of Mr. Foote’s champions, once called him “one of America’s living literary wonders.” On Wednesday Mr. Rich described Mr. Foote as “a major American dramatist whose epic body of work recalls Chekhov in its quotidian comedy and heartbreak, and Faulkner in its ability to make his own corner of America stand for the whole.”
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nicodemus · Mar 8, 2009

Re: Horton Foote 1916-2009

A story from the Washington Post talks about how teen lit (and other popular fiction) is more popular than subversive texts on college campuses today:

...we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they're choosing books like 13-year-old girls...
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Dr. Wankler · Mar 9, 2009

I wish that article surprised me.

champmanager · Mar 9, 2009

Atouk said: ↑

Washington Post to End Stand-Alone Book Section
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That's funny. I stopped subscribing to the post on newyear's, and read it in the library on sundays now (thank you very much, crappy economy). But the library always took the bookworld aside and kept it behind the desk, so I didn't even know it had been discontinued.
That's a major disappointment, to put it mildly.

Val1 · Mar 10, 2009

^^^^^^^Yeah, it is too bad, mostly because the Post redesigned the Outlook section to accomodate more book reviews and the best seller lists. I loved Outlook, and it's just not the same section anymore.

Barracudas · Mar 10, 2009

Atouk said: ↑

Washington Post to End Stand-Alone Book Section
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champmanager said: ↑

That's funny. I stopped subscribing to the post on newyear's, and read it in the library on sundays now (thank you very much, crappy economy). But the library always took the bookworld aside and kept it behind the desk, so I didn't even know it had been discontinued.
That's a major disappointment, to put it mildly.
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I must admit that I did not catch this until today, and had been wondering where that section went. [I am away on weekends a lot and miss the Sunday paper on occassion]

The quality of the Washington Post has been going down, and this move takes it a few levels lower!

riverplate · Mar 13, 2009

James Purdy, Darkly Comic Writer, Dies at 94 - N.Y. Times

James Purdy, whose dark, often savagely comic fiction evoked a psychic American landscape of deluded innocence, sexual obsession, violence and isolation, died Friday in Englewood, N.J. He was 94 and lived in Brooklyn Heights. His death was confirmed by John Uecker, a friend and assistant.

Wayward and unclassifiable, Mr. Purdy, the author of the novels Malcolm and The Nephew, labored at the margins of the literary mainstream, inspiring veneration or disdain. His nearly 20 novels and numerous short stories and plays either enchanted or baffled critics with their gothic treatment of small-town innocents adrift in a corrupt and meaningless world, his distinctive blend of plain speech with ornate, florid locutions, and the hallucinatory quality of his often degraded scenes...

If Mr. Purdy made limited headway against what he called, in an autobiographical sketch, “the anesthetic, hypocritical, preppy and stagnant New York literary establishment,” he was proclaimed “an authentic American genius” by Gore Vidal and admired extravagantly by writers like Angus Wilson, John Cowper Powys and Edith Sitwell, who, reviewing the stories and short plays collected in Children Is All (1962), wrote that Mr. Purdy would “come to be recognized as one of the greatest living writers of fiction in our language.”
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riverplate · Apr 4, 2009

The Letters of Samuel Beckett - Volume I

I’ll Go On; The Letters of Samuel Beckett - N.Y. Times Book Review

Submerged for years in a murk of international literary diplomacy and scrupulous academic exertion, The Letters of Samuel Beckett has finally surfaced; and an elating cultural moment is upon us. It is also a slightly surprising moment. Beckett, in his published output and authorial persona, was rigorously spare and self-effacing. Who knew that in his private writing he would be so humanly forthcoming? We always knew he was brilliant — but this brilliant? Just as the otherworldliness of tennis pros is most starkly revealed in their casual warm-up drills, so these letters, in which intellectual and linguistic winners are struck at will, offer a humbling, thrilling revelation of the difference between Beckett’s game and the one played by the rest of us. (Beckett played tennis, incidentally.)

This volume (three more are promised) auspiciously begins with two notes from Beckett to James Joyce, in the second of which (from April 1929) this 23-year-old lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris politely briefs the maestro on the distinction between the infinitive and substantive forms of a Greek phrase.

Rather more forebodingly, the volume ends with a letter, dated June 10, 1940, regarding a billiards game the following Friday. Rain checks were presumably issued, because Friday was the day the Germans occupied Paris.
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riverplate · Apr 10, 2009

Publisher to Release New Batch of Vonnegut Stories - N.Y. Times

NEW YORK (AP) — A posthumous collection of short stories by Kurt Vonnegut will be released this November. The collection, called Look at the Birdie, contains 14 stories by the author of Slaughterhouse-Five and other works, Delacorte Press announced Friday.

The publisher says it plans to reissue 15 Vonnegut titles including Mother Night, The Sirens of Titan, Galapagos and Slaughterhouse-Five. Also due: another collection of his unpublished writings and a book of letters sent to and from the author during his life. More never-before-seen stories by Vonnegut appeared in the 2008 collection Armageddon in Retrospect.
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cormacraig · Apr 16, 2009

riverplate said: ↑

Publisher to Release New Batch of Vonnegut Stories - N.Y. Times
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In a way this makes me happy, but it also makes me a bit worried that now they're gonna start cash-cowing one of my favorite authors.

riverplate · Apr 20, 2009

2009 Pulitzer Prizes

The winners of the 2009 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced...

HISTORY: ANNETTE GORDON-REED
“The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family”

BIOGRAPHY: JON MEACHAM
“American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House”

FICTION: ELIZABETH STROUT
“Olive Kitteridge”

GENERAL NONFICTION: DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON
“Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II”

DRAMA: LYNN NOTTAGE
“Ruined”

POETRY: W.S. MERWIN
“The Shadow of Sirius”

riverplate · Jun 7, 2009

Submitting to a Play’s Spell, Without the Stage - Dwight Gardner, N.Y. Times

Not so long ago in America, keeping up with new plays was part of what it meant to be literate, and publishers did good business by stocking the drama sections in bookstores. New Directions published Tennessee Williams; Atheneum made a bundle from Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf; Random House issued many plays in hardcover, including Oklahoma! in 1943; Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, for Viking Press, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

If you didn’t live near New York, or couldn’t afford tickets, you picked up the print editions if you wanted to be part of the conversation. Those days, sadly, are pretty much gone. Readers’ eyeballs have fled elsewhere. New plays are hard to find in bookstores. They are issued, if at all, mostly by university presses and boutique publishers.

The excuses for not theater-going are easy to list: it’s hell to find a babysitter, Netflix is a lovely narcotic, and it’s hard to commit to loading that much money onto a Visa card. You could just about fly to Dublin and back for the price of a Broadway ticket and a decent meal. But what’s the excuse for not reading some of these plays?

This year, with Sunday evening’s Tony Awards on the horizon, I decided to, well, act. I got my hands on all four of the best play nominees and sat down to read them, having seen exactly none of the productions...
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