Alice Munro Wins Booker Int’l

One of our favorite writers, Alice Munro, has become the third recipient of the Booker International Prize. The Booker International is awarded every two years to recognize authors for lifetime achievement. The judging panel, which included Jane Smiley, had the following comment:

Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels.  To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before.

Munro’s latest collection of short stories, Too Much Happiness, will be published in October. Much to celebrate!

Another Book Review Bites the Dust

Sad story on NPR today about the death of The Washington Post’s Book World, yet another book review that’s gone belly up in the last few years. Do people really have an aversion to complex sentences?

One of the last two major, stand-alone print book sections died this past Sunday, when The Washington Post published its last edition of Book World. The paper will still review books, but only The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle will continue to run a full mini-magazine devoted to books. It is a heavy symbolic blow to readers, writers and publishers. And it is an injury to our collective literacy and, thus, to our wisdom and intellectual agility.

The U.S.: A New Chapter

My guess is that most people (including myself) were too excited to listen to Elizabeth Alexander’s post-Obama-speech poem today, but the BBC posted an interesting article about the poem’s inclusion in the festivities.  Alexander, a Yale professor and friend of Obama’s, had this to say when asked what she wanted her poem to accomplish:

I am hoping to offer language that will give people a moment of pause. That there is almost a quiet pool in which they are able to stand and think for a moment. I think that’s part of what poetry does. It arrests us.

Great answer to a not-so-great question. The poem, which begins ”Praise song for the day,” is posted at the New York Times.

November ‘08 Clippings

After two months of traveling and general upheaval, I am getting back to what is truly important in life: Books. Anyone else feel slightly dead inside when they aren’t reading?

• The U.K. Telegraph reports on Helene Barr’s journal, written during the Nazi occupation of France, which has just been published and is being compared favorably with Anne Frank’s diary.

 

• A recent study argues that fiction better explains current events and complex global issues than academic writing. I agree.

 

• A president who reads? Everyone’s talking about which FDR biography Obama’s been toting around the country. (He’s also a fan of my personal favorite, Abe Lincoln.)

 

• Charlie Rose speaks with Toni Morrison about her latest novel, A Mercy.

 

• And Annie Leibovitz talks about her famous photo shoots with Whoopi Goldberg and Meryl Streep—and her new book—on NPR today. 

 

• Finally: This requires a subscription to the magazine, but Harper’s (December 2008) gave Edith Wharton some time in the spotlight with their article, “What Edith Knew: Freeing Wharton from The Master’s Shadow.” Of course they’re talking about Henry James, and how Wharton was and still is shortchanged by people who insist on comparing the two very different writers.

The Booker: Behind the Scenes

If it isn’t evident by now, I’m a Booker groupie. Which is why I love this latest article from The Guardian, with a bit of dirt about the last 30 years, the eccentric judging process for each winner, and other gossip:

What is really interesting is that nobody thought Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin was her best book. Where Simon’s mental agility paid off was in persuading us all (except Mariella) that Atwood deserved the prize anyway – for all the times she’d nearly won it and had been pipped at the post by a lesser writer.

A Book Review’s Slow Death

Is anyone as depressed as I am about the dwindling L.A. Times Book Review? First, it was inhumanely spliced with the Opinion section. Now, its measly few pages are buried in movie-dominated “Calendar.” Steve Wasserman complains in Publisher’s Weekly:

The longrunning Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is expected to continue, but Wasserman observed that without the Book Review itself, “the book festival will be a hollow joke.” He urged readers  and writers “to join with us as we protest this sad and backward step.”   

New Poet Laureate Announced

And the honor goes to Kay Ryan, UCLA alumna and winner of the 1994 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, worth $100,000. The New York Times has posted some of Ryan’s brief but bold poems. In the Times interview, Ryan says she never wanted to be a poet, never wanted the recognition that sometimes accompanies it.

But in the end “I couldn’t resist,” she said. “It was in a strange way taking over my mind. My mind was on its own finding things and rhyming things. I was getting diseased.”

Speaking of the Booker: Barry Unsworth

Littoral, the year-round blog of the Key West Literary Seminar, recently interviewed England’s (and now Italy’s) Barry Unsworth, whose novel Sacred Hunger won the Booker Prize in 1993. Unsworth’s new book, Land of Marvels, is due on shelves early next year. In Littoral’s thoughtful interview, Unsworth discusses historical fiction, expatriatism, writing, and the “cleft persona:”

I suppose I’ve always seen the world in darker tones in my persona as novelist than in the other persona of every day, the social and domestic being. I’m pretty sure that I share this divided nature with a great many other novelists.  

Booker of Bookers

I can’t imagine anyone winning a writing contest over Ian McEwan, but Salman Rushdie has done it! (Sorry, I mean “Sir” Salman.) Ian wasn’t even nominated for the prize…but he will be, one day. Rushdie won for his 1981 book, Midnight’s Children, which claimed the award once before and beat the likes of Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee.

Knowledge Still 0

And here, from Mark Morford at San Francisco Chronicle, is a more personal account on the decline of reading amidst the “new media vortex.” Sad, but for me, surprisingly hopeful. I don’t think books will ever truly disappear. Maybe they’ll look like Amazon’s Kindle (or will come in digestible capsules) someday, but people will always need stories, and our huge community of writers will always crave them in written form. For writers, books are like long letters to each other, or tapping on the walls of our cells. We will keep up the tradition, no matter the circumstance.

Overall, the message is bleak: Fewer writers of real talent are being discovered, fewer publishers are willing to take any sort of risk, and serious, literary-minded reading, that glorious pastime, that fine personal art, the immersive and transportive and beautiful intellectual fertilizer, appears to be giving way to the more addictive but far less nourishing hellbeast of new media and the Net.

Narcissism 1, Knowledge 0

Time to feed my pet peeve: the elevation of pop culture over true culture–art, literature, history. Every once in a while, I post an article about the latest NEA or other survey decrying the slow, painful death of reading in America. And now I advertise an entire book about it: The Dumbest Generation, by Mark Bauerlein, wonderfully reviewed in the L.A. Times (excerpted below).

Bauerlein takes the distress over non-reading a step further by linking it with other disturbing/annoying societal changes, such as increased narcissism. Could there really be a link?

Increasingly disconnected from the “adult” world of tradition, culture, history, context and the ability to sit down for more than five minutes with a book, today’s digital generation is becoming insulated in its own stultifying cocoon of bad spelling, civic illiteracy and endless postings that hopelessly confuse triviality with transcendence. Two-thirds of U.S. undergraduates now score above average on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, up 30% since 1982, he reports.

At fault is not just technology but also a newly indulgent attitude among parents, educators and other mentors, who, Bauerlein argues, lack the courage to risk “being labeled a curmudgeon and a reactionary.”

But is he? The natural (and anticipated) response would indeed be to dismiss him as your archetypal cranky old professor who just can’t understand why “kids these days” don’t find Shakespeare as timeless as he always has. Such alarmism ignores the context and history he accuses the youth of lacking — the fact that mass ignorance and apathy have always been widespread in anti-intellectual America, especially among the youth. Maybe something is different this time. But, of course. Something is different every time.

The Disorder of Longing!

It might seem strange to put an exclamation point after that heading…until I tell you that this particular heading is the title of a colleague’s first novel! As of this month, The Disorder of Longing by Natasha Bauman has hit the shelves. Congratulations, Natasha!

When Good Reviews Go Bad

I know Janet Maslin is trying to make a funny point about James Frey’s writing style in her New York Times critique of his latest, legitimate, very popular memoi– I mean, novel– Bright Shiny Morning. But she’s just a little irritating:

The million little pieces guy was called James Frey. He got a second act. He got another chance. Look what he did with it. He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park. No more lying, no more melodrama, still run-on sentences still funny punctuation but so what. He became a furiously good storyteller this time.

Smug.

I’m intrigued by all the great reviews and the sold-out crowds for his readings, and I’ll admit I thought his whole Million Little Pieces fiasco was kind of charming. But does Maslin’s tongue-in-cheek review, though ultimately positive, really help sell the book? I hate it when critics try to be clever.

One Book, One Community?

What happened to the “One Book” program? The last I heard, Los Angeles was encouraged to read Fahrenheit 451, and in 2004, all of California was supposedly reading The Grapes of Wrath. Washington D.C.’s Center for the Book has a listing of all state One Book programs, some of which appear to have died. Perhaps the National Endowment for the Arts is right about reading’s impending death.

(More on that subject in the February 2008 Harper’s from Ursula Le Guin, “Notes on the Alleged Decline of Reading”.)

But speaking of the NEA, the Guardian reports on the second year of the organization’s initiative, “Big Read Egypt/U.S,” wherein Egyptians will read three American books and we will read one Hugo-esque Egyptian novel: Naguib Mahfouz’s The Thief and the Dogs, releasing from Amazon on June 3. The Big Egypt program starts in September. Now, if they would just publicize it a little more…

Inspirational Article: Write More

Thanks to John Hewitt of Poewar.com for this article I came across today: Five Ways to Become a Productive Writer. Good advice, practical and achievable.

Summer in Provincetown

The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown still has some openings in its summer writing workshops (sorry, Amy Bloom is taken but she has a waiting list). Take classes in the mornings from authors like Pam Houston, Matthew Klam, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Julia Glass. If you’re visually inclined, you can also choose a photography or art class. Author readings are held almost every night in the Center’s auditorium. I attended a week-long workshop here three years ago, and rode my rented bike from an afternoon at Herring Cove beach to see Grace Paley and Robert Pinsky read poetry. I highly recommend the FAWC experience. It’s a great jump-start for your creativity and, away from crowded Commercial Street, Provincetown is a magical place.

If you want to read up on the tip of the Cape before you go, try any of area resident Mary Oliver’s poetry, Michael Cunningham’s beautiful Land’s End: A Walk In Provincetown, and Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees.

L.A. Bookstores Beware

One of my favorite bookstores, Skylight in Los Feliz,  has already been a victim of the latest con game: Callers claiming to be an author in need of money. The L.A. Times reports on the ugly scam:

With the explosion of computer viruses, identity theft and Nigerian e-mail scams over the last few years, it may have been inevitable that bookstores got a part of the action. And slowly but surely, stores are being contacted by people claiming to be someone they’re not and trying to persuade the bookstore staff to send them money. It’s bewildering to a community that operates largely on trust and personal relationships. 

Is Reading Environmentally Unsound?

I wish I didn’t worry about what the printing business does to the earth–it adds an element of guilt to publishing your work. The Guardian has a good article on alternatives to killing trees: Bookswapping sites (sorry, Jeanette Winterson) like Paper Back Swap and BookMooch. I’m partial to finding books in the wild, though (via Book Crossing), and am a regular contributor of overdue fines at the local library…

Literary Litmus Test

Amused by this essay in the New York Times about compatibility in relationships being determined (or affected) by reading choices. Who does your lover read? (Or does your lover read?) And do you agree with his/her choices, or are you repulsed by them?

I’ll admit I’ve never had a long-term relationship with anyone who’s been an avid reader, especially of literature. It’s been a source of disappointment for me, but a relationship-breaker? Not yet.

Countdown to L.A. Times Book Fest!

One month from today, more than a hundred thousand people will crowd the UCLA campus for the 13th annual Los Angeles Times Book Festival. I look forward to it every year. The site recently posted its panel schedule for Saturday and Sunday, April 26 and 27. Tickets go on sale the Sunday prior, April 20th, for 75 cents each. (Believe me, if you can pull yourself out of bed and get to a Ticketmaster outlet, it’s best to go on Sunday. Many of them will already be sold out by Monday.)

Some highlights: Aimee Bender, Wanda Coleman, Amy Gerstler (one of the best poets EVER), Tobias Wolff, Jane Smiley, and Robert Pinsky, as well as scores of other authors and book-related booths. It’s fantastic.

Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Times