Over the last few months, as I’ve looked at 120 years of novels about American politics, I’ve been surprised how often American writers have filtered their experiences of the political process into dystopian novels. The combination of a charismatic politician, shadowy advisers and a rabid collection of supporters are often grist for a plot that ultimately points to the downfall of the American way.

Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here (1935) is one of the best known of these types of novels. It chronicles the rise to the presidency of Sen. Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, a folksy politician from a western state with a devoted following of bitter, unemployed or underemployed men. Although Windrip’s ascendancy shares similarities with what was happening in Italy and Germany in the 1930s, Lewis was likely also thinking of homegrown politicians like Louisiana senator Huey Long when he wrote the book. 

It’s mid-Monday morning, the 23rd, as I’m typing this. It’s been all of ten minutes since I stumbled into a blog called if:book and already I’m so rapt I can hardly stand to wait until Saturday to post this. “A Project of The Institute for the Future of the Book,” a literary think tank, the blog has been “the daily record of [their] inquiry into a wide range of topics, all in some way fitting into the techno-cultural puzzle that is the future of reading and writing.” In other words, it’s about the intersection of books and technology. That can mean following issues like fair use, digitization, archiving and the aggregation of metadata, or it can mean showcasing remarkable and amusing things like this, or even inventing new technologies for reading and remarking on books. They’re currently asking some existential questions about the blog itself and apparently working on a redesign, but whatever happens going forward, it’s easy to imagine spending hours and hours with just the existing archives. 

I enjoy reading about gardens nearly as much as I enjoy gardening; which is to say, immensely. I’m as big a voyeur about gardens as I am about homes, so I love a big, glossy picture book. (Bonus points if it has multiple shots per garden.) But I am also drawn to essay collections, memoirs, how-to, you name it. Though gardens are year-round entities where I live, the first week of summer is high garden time, and, as such, a prime opportunity to share some of my favorites from a very long shelf.

Publishing my first novel several years ago meant arranging in-store appearances, printing up postcards and compiling mailing lists, of the snail-mail variety — with the occasional dip into online promotion. With my new novel, The Wednesday Sisters, it’s more about the book trailer.

If you don’t know what a book trailer is, think movie trailer for the printed word: one to three minutes of video meant to find its way around the Internet, enticing people to rush out and buy the book. Like many authors, my initial reaction was Of course! It’ll go viral, and the next thing you know I’ll be seeing my name in The New York Times. The truth, though, is as complicated as the truth tends to be.

John Gall’s cover for Shelley Jackson’s The Melancholy of Anatomy presses a lot of my personal design buttons: medical illustration, images turned sideways, type on a label, and a combination of a sans-serif typeface and a serif one. What I like best about it is that there’s a whole lot of possible creepy going on (the disembodied eyeballs on the spine would probably be a dealbreaker for a lot of people) but Gall somehow reins it all in so that it looks more like a museum display than a horror show. I think it’s the label that does it, and the slightly modern sans-serif typeface used for Stories and the author’s name. I would have been tempted to slide that author name over to line up with the right end of Stories, but Gall keeps it modern and throws off your expectation by aligning those two elements differently, centering Jackson’s name beneath the label. It’s an unusual, subtle choice, and it pays off. The whole package is a winner.

Redemption Falls is the second installment in Joseph O’Connor’s planned trilogy of the Irish immigrant experience in 19th-century America. It’s the follow-up to the hugely successful and critically acclaimed Star of the Sea. At times heartbreaking, bawdy, cruel and exciting, and told in lush prose with authentic, unforgettable voices, it is no Far and Away cliché but a rich and deeply rewarding reading experience. In conjunction with its US paperback release this month, the author generously participated in the following email exchange.

First off, welcome to Readerville, and thank you for taking the time. Before we get to Redemption Falls, I’d like to talk about your youthful Sandinista experience, if you don’t mind. I find this part of your background fascinating — not only because as a nineteen-year-old, I lived in the Mexican hills outside of Cholula among a colorful community of international students and Vietnam Vets, but also because of its topicality. Could you talk a little bit about that experience, and whether it has informed your perception of today’s current affairs?

On a Sunday morning in February 1985 my mother was killed in a car accident. I was twenty-one that year, a student at university.  Her departure, so sudden, so violent in its nature, meant all kinds of things could never happen now. Our family had not been happy; my parents’ marriage had ended some years previously. Her death left unanswered questions. 

This may seem like an obvious choice, but no listing of the web’s best book blogs would be complete without The New York Times’ Paper Cuts. Launched a year ago as Dwight Garner’s blog, it has since become a group blog for staffers of the review, so the tone and focus of it has changed a bit over time. When it was just Garner (who, full disclosure, I worked with at Salon many moons ago), it was a reflection of his own unique take on the world of books. Some of his best posts came from inspired ambling through the magnificent Times morgue of ads, photos and other treasures, which were interspersed with still-regular items like brief interviews and song lists. I was worried when the change occurred, but now it is multiple smart and interesting people drawing on the the paper’s content and archives in all sorts of creative ways, as well as simply formulating posts about whatever’s on their minds — from the dearth of book venues in midtown Manhattan to whether JFK really told Berlin he was a jelly doughnut. So without ever really seeming aimless, they’re making the sort of blog where you just don’t ever know what might turn up on a given day.

I hadn’t intended to play chicken with a train that day. Like most things in my life to that point, it just sort of happened.

I wasn’t even supposed to be there, in the cypress forests of Taiwan — I hadn’t planned to be in Taiwan at all. Until just a few weeks earlier, I’d been expecting to spend that summer — the summer of 1989 — in Beijing, as part of a group of 25 students who would cap a year of Chinese language study with a summer spent in China’s capital.

I passed the spring term of my freshman year at Dartmouth reading newspapers and watching TV news intently for the first time in my life. Physically, I was in New England, but in spirit I was with the student protesters 10,000 miles away in Tiananmen Square. 

I believe the name Keith Hayes is new to Most Coveted Covers, but he joins the list with bravado. I speak, of course, of his cover for The Lemur, by Benjamin Black (aka John Banville). Yes it is another example of great use of a stock photo. And yes it does remind me, in a way, of Never Drank the Kool-Aid. But this is so beautifully bold and simple: just a square-jawed man in a white shirt against a black ground; a pure white puff of smoke; a little bit of light on his black hair. Hayes had the good sense to drop those exquisite black letterforms onto the smoke, and some white type lower down. So the only color is the man’s lips and skin. It’s sort of smelly and scintillating at the same time, isn’t it? It also benefits from being a slender paperback with deckled edges and French flaps. The spine is white with black pinstripes, the back is black with white type, and the insides of the cover (where endpapers would be were it hardcover) is also flooded black, with the PicadorCrime logo dropped out of it. If they treat all their books this way, I may have to start paying closer attention. Because I’m not generally a crime fan, but I’m taking this gent to bed with me tonight.

For writer and book reviewer Mark Athitakis, it’s all about American fiction. Or, more specifically, American literary fiction. He basically makes one post a day, every weekday, to his spare, straightforwardly named, text-only blog Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes. The standard post consists of a pointer to, a little bit of commentary on and a quote from a thought-provoking essay or review somewhere else on the web. (He also does the occasional roundup.) Then each post is categorized by the American fiction author it pertains to. In a case like a post on author Ben Fountain writing about Ernest Hemingway, it gets filed under both names, and there’s a growing list of those names in the right column. There is (frustratingly) no dated archive, only the name categories, but it appears he’s been doing this for six months. So right now if you choose Ben Fountain’s name out of the list, you only get one entry; if you choose Hemingway’s, you get four. But you can see how this will snowball, especially if he keeps up the pace. So what he’s creating is simultaneously one man’s view of American fiction and a terrific, organic reference tool.