When poet and essayist Michael Milburn arrived at Harvard for his freshman year, in 1975, he was immediately directed to a remedial reading class. If you’ve ever been told that there’s something wrong with reading slowly, you’ll appreciate his essay My Back Pages.
We’ve seen several other memoir-scandal spoofs and satires in the meantime, but none as amusing as Tramp Louie’s Not Another Literary Scandal.
John Weir’s debut novel, published in 1989, is an obscure favorite of many in the Readerville community. Sue Russell sings its praises in The Irreversible Decline.
It’s not often one gets to see a ballsy foreign film about two hot young would-be novelists vying for literary fame and fortune. Lisa Peet reviews “Reprise,” a film by Joachim Trier.
The hits keep on coming this week as we continue our highlights show (and continue work on our impending relaunch). Today’s selection is our recent interview with the esteemed Tony Horwitz, by Peter Cashwell.
How do you make a movie out of the memoir of a man who can do nothing but blink his left eye? Award-winning screenwriter Ronald Harwood spoke with Douglas Cruickshank about it.
I hope you're enjoying the highlights reel so far. There's an interesting conversation going on in the Bibliolounge, in our forum, which I want to call attention to. Kat Warren asked about the wealth of dog-centered novels, particularly in recent years, and wondered why cats get “short shrift.” Only half-jokingly, and expanding the thought to memoirs, I suggested that dogs are “literary” and cats are “commercial.” I’m not convinced I’m wrong. What do you think? Are cats too closely associated with genre fiction to be taken seriously in more literary work? Read the discussion and weigh in.
Today we revisit a charming essay from David Masello about his ritual of walking the block of Manhattan once occupied by E.B. White.
Next up for our highlights is James Klise’s tribute to the British novelist he dubs Patron Saint of Rejected Writers. (For more Odes, see the archive.)
Kicking off our highlights is Douglas Cruickshank’s interview with Pieter Hugo about his truly remarkable photographs of a traveling band of Nigerian performers. Be sure to click through and look at the images.
A letter from the proprietor
 Photo © Susan Ragan |
Hot Topics will be on hiatus as far as this page is concerned, but the Forum will be its usual treasure trove of links. In particular, keep an eye on Publishing News & Issues, All About Authors and Obituaries.
Enjoy the highlights show, and we’ll be back soon — better than ever.
—Karen Templer is the founder and editor of Readerville.
A compendium of notable reviews
by Kat Warren
» “A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano” by Katie Hafner
from Salon
“A piano, a piano tuner and his insane client.”
» “Telex from Cuba” by Rachel Kushner
from The New York Times Book Rview
This “novel [is] a dreamy, sweet-tart meditation on a vanished way of life and a failed attempt to make the world over in America’s image. Out of tropical rot, Kushner has fashioned a story that will linger like a whiff of decadent Colony perfume.”
Our Blog of the Week
For this installment we take a slightly different view of the phrase “blog of the week.” I think it’s safe to say that the book blog that saw the biggest bump in notoriety this week was Booksaga. What was it that brought sudden exposure to a fledgling, mild-mannered blog about “adventures in the book trade”? Well, sex and scandal, of course. Perry Falwell is a bookseller in Georgia who makes a sort of half-hearted attempt to keep his details private: He buys up books to sell online and some of his sources might frown on that. (Or, conversely, want to get in on the action.) He recently bought a cache of books from a widow, more as a kindness to her than anything else, only to find later that the husband had converted many of them to book boxes, in which he had stored pornographic Polaroids. Falwell blogged about it (complete with a photo of the find), uber-blogger Jason Kottke linked to it (as did countless others, including a link in our forum) and Falwell found himself with an instant audience of gawkers. Those who lingered long enough to peruse the rest of the blog will have found (not quite two dozen) faintly-genteel posts about life combing thrift stores and library sales, which could be either charming or deathly dull, but Falwell takes a bemused and writerly approach, and his sense of humor can be seen instantly in his categories list. It may well prove worth sticking around for.
—kt
Great reads and other finds for the literary-minded
Compiled by Pat D’Amico
Got an hour? The BBC4 adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s short story “The Enormous Space” is above, via YouTube. (Also at YouTube, have you seen/heard the VW ad with Richard Burton reciting Dylan Thomas’ “Under Milk Wood”?)
If you haven’t heard about, or test driven, Zoomii, you might want to rectify that soon. Zoomii is to bookstore shelving as Google Earth is to the planet. Created by Chris Thiessen and originally tied into Amazon.ca, it's a browsable virtual storefront, now also available in a US version. The original was buggy and very slow in Firefox, but those problems have been fixed. There’s buzz that Amazon is very interested in this application.
>> Can Science Fiction Go Too Far?
William Gibson talks about how 9/11 impacted his views on fiction.
>> Iowa teacher suspended for letting pupils read bestseller
Assigning The Freedom Writers Diary lost Connie Heermann her job.
>> Robert Harling, RIP
“Brilliant typographer and editor whose imagination helped transform domestic taste ...”
Flashback | Readerville.com, February 2003
The Odd Shelf #57
By Gayle Brandeis
I am not a formal person. I rarely brush my hair, rarely make the bed. I don’t like being boxed in to tetrameter, into a three-act structure, in my own work. I’m a huge fan of found forms, though — I love finding existing shapes in nature, in culture, and wrapping words around them. (My book Fruitflesh is structured around the growing cycle; my Dictionary Poems collection found its form in Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate). I love when other writers blow the dust off old, often taken-for-granted, structures and make something new. Here are a few examples.
>> Dannie Abse wins Welsh book award
The Presence is the poet’s memoir of his 50-year marriage (written after his wife’s death).
>> ABC establishes “Lost” book club
“... spotlighting volumes depicted in the past four seasons of the ... adventure series ...”
>> Judge throws out Indiana law on explicit material
Booksellers will not be registered and fined after all.
>> Spam Lit: the silver lining of junk mail?
Now there’s a question for you to ponder.
A pair of essays for you today:
>> Where Are the Queens of Nonfiction?
“Ira Glass, host of the radio and television program This American Life, claims that nonfiction is the most important and impressive art form of our day” — but why was it necessary, Anne Trubek wonders, to title his anthology The New Kings of Nonfiction. (Thanks, Kristin.)
>> A Shed of One’s Own
Having built a writing hut with his own two hands, Chris Routledge ruminates on the spaces famous writers have carved out for their work. (Thanks, Pat.)
Most Coveted Covers #181
By Karen Templer
When this cover popped up in our Judging a Book discussion last week, I’m pretty sure I let out a little gasp. Without a clue what it was about, I was immediately seduced by the orderly rows of patterned scrap, arranged on a piece of notebook paper and accented with a little bird. So pretty. As it turns out, I’m coveting it for more reasons than just Jill Shimabukuro’s lovely design. “I am a collector, something a lot of people can understand. My being a collector of nothing will require explanation,” writes William Davies King in the opening passage of Collections of Nothing. What he collects is more everything than nothing, but the sorts of things many people would think of as nothing (or certainly nothing collectible). The book is described as “part memoir, part reflection on the mania of acquisition” on the publisher’s website, where you’ll also find an excerpt and an essay by the author. If the book is half as good as it promises — or half as good as its cover — I’ll be thrilled.
—Karen Templer is the founder and editor of Readerville. All she’s reading for the moment are programming tutorials.
[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]
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