Readerville

“It Can’t Happen Here” by Sinclair Lewis

The Year of Reading Politically | #6: the 1930s
By Paul Clark

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.

The Creative Act, Times Two

By Meg Waite Clayton

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.

Dublin, Nicaragua and the NYPL: An Interview with Joseph O’Connor

By Pat D’Amico

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.

A Sense of Direction

(Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Taiwan)
By Nicole Clausing

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.

Neither a Borrower

By Michael Milburn

Illustration by D.G. Strong

This inquiry begins at the private middle school where I teach English, and where twice a week I monitor the playground at morning recess — backstopping errant soccer balls, mediating quarrels, sending casualties to the nurse, with their skinned elbows or squashed fingers. My colleague Robert stands nearby, overseeing his fifth graders in a fierce game of foursquare. When the foursquare is going smoothly and my own station is tranquil, we sidle over to each other to talk about books.

The Books of Summer, part 2B

By Pat D’Amico

This follow-up to our Books of Summer series [see part 1 and part 2A] includes some not so new, some brand new and some yet-to-be releases, all chosen for readers looking for a diverse list not wholly made up of chick-lit and pulpy P.I. series.

Let’s start off with Jincy Willett’s The Writing Class, set for a June 10th release. If ever there was a custom-made summer book for Readervillians, this is it. Amy Gallup lives alone with her apathetic hound dog. Self-described as bitter, she’s a once-successful author relegated to editing online résumés for a dollar a pop. An ideal, 16-year marriage to Max ended with his death from cancer; a successive, short-lived second marriage ended in divorce. She hasn’t had a visitor to her home in years, drinks too much, reluctantly started a blog (with hilarious results), and her only respite is the creative writing workshop she teaches part time at a local college. The story opens with an ominous, extremely snarky journal entry summarizing the first class of the new semester, and it’s obviously written by a twisted student. Amy’s been teaching these workshops for years, and she’s learned to keep her expectations low. This year’s crop of writer wannabes are the standard fare. So they seem, initially. There’s an obsessive kiss-up, who follows Amy from semester to semester, a neurosurgeon with Robin Cook aspirations, a wise-ass with real potential, a hardcore feminist, a former high school teacher (who turns out to be the best writer of the bunch), a lawyer, etc. Early semester classes are a hoot, the group’s dynamics brew inevitable conflicts, and Amy’s instruction, although earnest and well intentioned, reflects a teacher this close to permanent burnout. Until things begin to get very interesting. It starts off with a strange, middle of the night phone call to Amy’s house. Then students begin to report obscene commentary appearing on their peer reviews. When an especially cruel and dangerous prank is played on one of the students after class one Halloween night, Amy realizes she has to report the events before something really bad happens. She winds up getting dismissed from her position, a student gets murdered, and Amy knows, is certain, it’s the mysterious pervert from her writing class. But which one? Searching their fictional assignments for clues, Amy has to work with the students (knowing one of them is guilty as sin), in order to discover the identity of the murderer. Funny, smart, compassionate and literary, The Writing Class will hook you from page one. (Check out the clever book cover art. Each writing utensil represents a class member.)

Uncommon Readers

Flashback | The Readerville Journal, March/April 2003
By Sue Dickman

1996 was not a good year for me, and it got worse as the months progressed. By June, I was reduced to lying on my couch and crying. At one point, I managed to go to the used bookstore, returning home with William Styron’s Darkness Visible and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted. “Why didn’t you get The Bell Jar while you were at it?” a friend asked.

“Jack Gance” by Ward Just

The Year of Reading Politically | #5 of 12: the 1980s
By Paul Clark

Ward Just has written over a dozen novels that use politics or political service in one way or another as the skeleton for the plot. But his novels aren’t political thrillers or tales of espionage or roman à clefs about Washington, DC. In most of his novels — and Jack Gance is a good example — the characters’ lives swirl around politics, but the drama isn’t in the politics. It’s in how the characters interact with each other.

Jack Gance is a political coming-of-age novel, following Gance from his childhood in the 1940s to the late 1980s. His journey progresses from the stately setting of the university, to the smoked-filled rooms of downtown Chicago, to the august buildings of Washington, DC, and then back to slightly less smoked-filled rooms when he returns to his home state to run for office.

You Can Quote Me On This

Flashback | The Readerville Journal, November/December 2002
By David Masello

Illustration by Mignon Khargie

I live with someone who collects toy cars — 4,255 and counting, all parked in a one-bedroom apartment. I collect one thing: quotes I find in books, articles and letters. When I’ve finished reading something, I search out my marginalia brackets and record those passages in a quote journal. Even though I read scores of books a year, my single journal, begun a decade ago, is just half full.

I’m highly selective about what I keep. As my partner tells me, there are two kinds of toy car collectors: those who must have everything, and those, like himself, who collect only what they like. Although I’ll sometimes photocopy an entire Mary Oliver poem or write out a page from a Truman Capote novel, most of what gets recorded is no longer than a sentence. The quotes are my objects, albeit intangible ones, whose value and purpose lie in their intrinsic abilities to conjure.

Ode to a Lesser-Known Genius: Charles Portis

Flashback | The Readerville Journal, November/December 2002
By Douglas Cruickshank

Illustration by Jeff Crosby

It’s Sunday evening in Petaluma, California, the former Egg Capital of the World, the current World’s Wristwrestling Capital and the site of the World’s Ugliest Dog Championship. I’m eating supper in a gas station that’s been converted into a taqueria when in walks a big man wearing a black cap, black jeans and a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt. He is carrying a small child who’s wearing pajamas decorated with pictures of dinosaurs. The jukebox is blasting mariachi music. The man twirls around several times on his boot heels with the happy child then comes to a stop in front of the cash register. I watch this bit of choreography then go back to my chimichanga, and to Norwood, Charles Portis’ first novel.

A gas station that’s been converted into a taqueria is a perfect place to read Portis because it’s the type of establishment in which his odd, funny, profoundly American characters frequently find themselves in most of his five novels: Norwood (1966), True Grit (1968), The Dog of the South (1979), Masters of Atlantis (1985) and Gringos (1991). They are the books that moved writer Ron Rosenbaum to crown him “perhaps the most original, indescribable sui generis talent overlooked by literary culture in America” and the country’s “least known great novelist.” (Rosenbaum’s laudatory columns in The New York Observer and Esquire encouraged Overlook Press to put all of Portis’ novels back in print.)

“Reprise,” a film by Joachim Trier

By Lisa Peet

Joachim Trier’s debut feature film, Reprise, opens at a self-conscious turning point: Phillip (Anders Danielson Lie) and Erik (Espen Klouman-Hoiner), twentyish writers and friends since grade school, are about to drop their respective manuscripts into a yawning Oslo mailbox. The envelopes land inside, launching a rapid-fire, future-conditional, split-screen daydream of how they envision their brilliant careers from that point on: women conquered, literary revolutions sparked, expatriation and reunion, all in the space of a minute. “This is where it all begins,” says Phillip. In a nice touch, when their future-conditional novels are flipped over by an anonymous hand, the black-and-white author photos come to life and grin self-consciously at each other.

I Love My Cover

By Ellen Sussman

I love my book cover.

I’ve never been able to say that before. And damn, it feels good.

Writers dreams of the day when they’ll hold their book in their hands, when they’ll show it to friends, when they’ll see it on the front table of their local independent bookstore. And yet, so many writers I know have confessed a dirty little secret: They don’t like their covers. They’re not usually comfortable talking about this — after all, we’re the lucky writers who actually see our books make it into print. And our publishers are doing so much to make our books succeed (or so we want to think), how can we be unappreciative? Besides, what do we know about marketing? We’re the writers, not the publicists or editors or marketing and sales geniuses, all of whom spent many a long meeting trying to package each book in such a way as to lure every passerby to pick it up, run their hands lovingly over the cover and dash to the cash register.

The Books of Summer, part 2A

Yep, that’s right, there’s even more to come
By Pat D’Amico

Early 2008 releases brought us: wonderfully imagined and researched fictional treatments of the lives of Aeneas’ second wife, Lavinia, and Lady Macbeth, a morality tale set among 19th-century fur trappers and gold diggers in British Columbia, a brilliant reimagining of the tragic and turbulent life of Robert Frost, a haunting tale of friendship with literary parallels, a violent night in backwoods Vermont, a bleak, visionary foreshadowing of post-apocalyptic New England, and a futuristic duel where the main character must outwit himself. Well, dust off those library cards, save up those Mother’s and Father’s Day gift certificates, and clip those bookstore coupons, because new and upcoming releases promise more great reading ahead.

Myth and Misadventure: An Interview with Tony Horwitz

By Peter Cashwell

Tony Horwitz’s unique combination of archival research with hands-on history has made his books on the Civil War (Confederates in the Attic) and the exploration of the Pacific (Blue Latitudes) critical and commercial successes. In his newest book, A Voyage Long and Strange, Pulitzer-winner Horwitz devotes his attention to the lesser-known aspects of North America’s exploration, conquest and colonization by Europeans. Giving overdue attention to the Norse and Spanish explorers, whose adventures are typically ignored in favor of the traditional tales of the settlement of Plymouth or Jamestown, as well as to the native peoples whose civilizations were displaced or destroyed by the likes of Columbus and de Soto, the book poses profound questions about the role of history and mythology in American life.

Returning to Readerville for the first time since his discussion of Blue Latitudes, Tony Horwitz chatted with me by email about A Voyage Long and Strange.

The Books of Summer, part one

Editor's note: We want to start you off right this season, so we've got not one but two summer book roundups for you. Today, David Abrams tells us which of the coming releases he can't wait to park himself on a lounge chair with; and coming up we've got Pat D'Amico on which ones she can't wait for you to read so she'll have someone to talk about them with!

By David Abrams

The dog days of summer are fast approaching and while some folks will be reaching for mass-market beach books (not that there’s anything wrong with that), publishers have good news for readers who want something a little more substantial to go along with their sand and suntan lotion. Here are some of the upcoming releases in literary fiction (with a few nonfiction titles sprinkled in) that I’ve got my eye on:

“The Marrow of Tradition” by Charles W. Chesnutt

The Year of Reading Politically | #4 of 12: the 1900s
By Paul Clark

The long process of picking a Democratic presidential nominee drags on, with the next significant primaries on May 6, in Indiana and North Carolina. The United States may elect its first black president this year, but even if Barack Obama doesn’t win in November, his strong showing throughout the primaries so far has ensured that race and questions of racial identity have been a regular part of the political debate.

So, what’s new?, I thought to myself, as I read Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition. Written in the wake of what has been called, variously, the “Wilmington (N.C.) race riot of 1898” or the “Wilmington coup d’état,” Chesnutt’s novel takes the events in Wilmington as a starting point for his tale of racial identity, family secrets and political upheaval.

I Thing I Love You

By David Abrams

Illustration by D.G. Strong

As of 2:23 on the afternoon I am writing this, my home library consists of exactly 4,530 books. Of those, 387 were first published in the 1980s, 650 were written between 1900 and 1949, and 245 come from the 19th century. I own four Hardy Boys mysteries, 32 featuring Hercule Poirot and six with Nero Wolfe. Out of the 4,530 volumes on my shelf, I have assigned them to one or more categories, including short story collections (467 books), westerns (180), biographies (123), and books about Alaska (65), Hollywood (66), the Iraq War (24), the Vietnam War (17) and Christmas (13).

I know all this and can report it to you with full authority because in just five clicks of the mouse, I have visited my profile at LibraryThing, a site I first joined in April 2006 and which, like the best of most-useful sites, has grown like a virus in my life ever since. Not a day goes by when I don't log on and gaze with pride, love and reverence at my online catalog of books.

The Two Miss Pettigrews

Adaptation Nation
By D.G. Strong

Editor's note: Readerville contributor D.G. Strong is the type who believes (mostly rightly) that books and movies are two different things, and that a faithful adaptation isn't likely to be a very good movie. Still, readers want to know: How is the movie different from the book? So today we launch D.G.'s semi-regular column on adaptations. Adaptation Nation assumes you've read the book and seen the movie or that you're not concerned about "spoilers." If that’s not true of you, read at your own risk.
—kt

When it comes to film adaptations of books, there used to be just four varieties (given here in order of likelihood): 1. bad adaptations of bad books, 2. bad adaptations of good books, 3. good adaptations of bad books and 4. good adaptations of good books. Now, which qualify as which is always fodder for lively discussion, maybe drinks thrown in the face and perhaps — if you're lucky — mild fisticuffs. ... continue reading

A Library Divided

Flashback | The Readerville Journal, January/February 2003
By Nancy Weber

Illustration by D.G. Strong

For the first time in 20 years, my books stand in crisp rows and the shelves have room to spare. It's awful.

In theory, a constant goal of the marriage was an orderly library. In reality, the abiding aesthetic was piles and heaps all over our Far West Village loft, the smart chaos typical of two people who are each reading six different books at any given time and persist in buying more. With so many sentences waiting, who had time to separate the plays from the short stories, much less alphabetize? If the collected poems of Yeats didn't come to hand when needed, we'd buy another copy; a marriage can't have too much Yeats. And in case of divorce, we dared joke — because we were that sure of each other — a second copy would simplify the divvying up. ... continue reading

Ode to a Lesser-Known Genius: Mary Lee Settle

Flashback | The Readerville Journal, January/February 2003
By Gretchen Moran Laskas

Photo courtesy of West Virginia State Archives

Stumbling onto Mary Lee Settle's work was a definitive moment in my life. I was browsing in the stacks of the Washington, D.C., Public Library in 1995, and I spotted a book titled O Beulah Land. Having grown up singing the hymn, I couldn't resist a peek at the book. The moment I opened it and began to scan its pages, I knew I had "come home," as the old hymns say. I had found a writer not only to read, to admire, but also to learn from. I had found my mentor. ... continue reading

Me and My Good Dead Poet Friend Elizabeth Bishop

By Sue Russell

Illustration by D.G. Strong

Some of my best friends are dead poets. Best friends are people who help you when you're down. They know what's on your mind before you say it. They don't compete with you, and you really don't need to compete with them, though Harold Bloom, Mr. Anxiety of Influence himself, may argue differently. We feel protective of our friends. We feel bad for them if they don't get invited to the good parties (i.e., anthologies), and we may even put in a good word for them to people we know who do the inviting. Elizabeth Bishop is one of my best dead writer friends. I met her, or at least got to know her better, through some of her friends from the dead poet pool, like Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. I liked it that she played big sister to another one of my dead poet friends, May Swenson. I got to know some of Elizabeth's living friends by going to these cocktail parties called conferences. I flew all the way to Key West from Pittsburgh to hang out with those folks but felt a little hemmed in among the yammering tourists. ... continue reading

"Lucky Bastard" by Charles McCarry

The Year of Reading Politically | #3 of 12
By Paul Clark

At the end of this acerbically amusing novel from 1998, Charles McCarry includes the following in a "To the Reader" note:

Lucky Bastard is a work of the imagination in which no character is based on anyone who ever lived and no reference is intended to anything that ever happened in the real world. ... [I]n our time history became fiction and fiction history. It is no simple matter to reclaim the one from the other.

McCarry probably felt compelled to write such a note, given that his novel's main character is a hypersexual man who dodges the draft during the Vietnam war, gets a scholarship to study in Europe, returns to the U.S. and marries a woman he meets in law school (who becomes the breadwinner in the family), and starts a career in state politics, rising from attorney general to governor and then the presumptive favorite to become president.

Not like anything in real life at all. ... continue reading

Cristina Garcia, Or the Poetry of Supreme Fiction

Flashback | The Readerville Journal, May/June 2003
By Danyel Smith

Illustration by Christian Clayton

The Monkey King was made God of Victorious Strife. At the beginning of the pilgrimage a helmet had been fitted on the Monkey King's head which contracted upon his skull when he was wayward or wanton. The agony of the contractions had caused him to refrain from wickedness. When, therefore, he was given his new title, the Monkey King begged to have his helmet removed since he had now become an enlightened one. The answer that was given was that if the Monkey King was indeed enlightened, the helmet would have gone of its own accord. The Monkey King reached up to feel his head and found that the helmet had disappeared.
—Ending of one of the many versions of the Chinese legend of the Monkey King

She laughs a lot. Reads relentlessly. Plays herself down with casual, unselfconscious charm.

From her home in Santa Monica, California, a cheerful Cristina Garcia endures the hopeful awkwardness of her daughter Pilar's clarinet exercises — scales, scales and scales again. With the exact same breeziness, Garcia shares her passion for Wallace Stevens, Federico Garcia Lorca, Anne Carson and her quest for the Perfect Cuban Black Beans. In all the talk about writing and books, Garcia doesn't mention that, in addition to Monkey Hunting, her first novel in six years, Cubanisimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature was also published in April. She edited the collection. ... continue reading

My Back Pages

By Michael Milburn

Illustration by D.G. Strong

"Read slowly and mull."
—Samuel Pickering

A remedial reading class may be the last place one would expect to find a Harvard freshman, but that's where I was ordered to appear after failing a proficiency test required of all new students. This wasn't supposed to happen. Though I had always been a terrible test taker, English was my strongest subject. My A's in high school literature classes had offset my C's in math and science, and, along with a family legacy, had smoothed my way into Harvard in 1975. Besides, I liked reading, and completed more challenging books in my free time than most of my classmates bothered to open for their courses.

Still, my performance on the test, which measured both speed and comprehension, shouldn't have surprised me. I'm a frustratingly sluggish reader and thinker. Not stupid, just slow to absorb information. Abraham Lincoln once likened his mind to a piece of steel: A great deal of time and effort was required to scratch anything onto it, but once information was there, it was there forever. I like to think that this is true of me, though the stuff that achieves permanence on my piece of steel usually strikes me as trivial: memory fragments, song lyrics, sports statistics, details of celebrities' lives. This tendency to retain the chaff rather than the wheat from what I read turned out to be the worst kind of handicap to bring to Harvard. ... continue reading

Tolstoy's Tale of Two Marriages

Flashback | The Readerville Journal, November/December 2002
By Kate Moses

One 1970s summer Saturday when my brothers and I had been rounded up from in front of the television and grimly conducted to the garage of our childhood home, my mother paused in the midst of what seemed to us a familiar tearful tirade about chronic cleaning issues, ungrateful children and subsequent maternal escape fantasies. ("You never ... you always ... I wish I could just leave!") As I said, she paused to stand disheartened amidst the repository of banal suburban squalor that was our garage, we children guiltily shuffling, fingering the handlebar fringe on our dusty bicycles, glancing at the covers of heaped-up National Geographics and tuning her out. Our father must have been at his office; he was forever at his office. Only our mother's uncharacteristic pause caught my attention, her genuinely pained sigh — the sound of having your breath knocked out of you — and I saw her staring up at a queue of forgotten books shelved on the wall above the freezer and the cabinet, where we kept rock salt and tire chains. "Oh," she gasped to herself, her hair sweaty under a red bandana. She was looking at the title on the faded spine of a copy of Anna Karenina. ... continue reading

"A Traveler from Altruria" by William Dean Howells

The Year of Reading Politically | #2 of 12
By Paul Clark

By 1892, William Dean Howells had already published the novels that would ensure his literary legacy — The Rise of Silas Lapham, Indian Summer and A Hazard of New Fortunes among them. He had moved from Cambridge to New York City to become editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. Although he had been actively involved in Republican politics, even writing a biography of Rutherford B. Hayes, he had over the previous decade become increasingly disenchanted with the GOP and more interested in the progressive politics of the era. In a letter to his father in November of 1892 he noted that the Republican party was "a lie in defamation of its past. It promises nothing in the way of economic or social reform, and it is only less corrupt than the scoundrelly democracy. The only live and honest party is the People's Party."

That fall he started writing a series of articles in Cosmopolitan that later was published as the novel, A Traveler from Altruria. This utopian novel was in the vein of dozens of novels published in the United States between the end of the Civil War and the end of the century. (The most popular of these novels, probably the only one remembered by most readers, was Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward.) ... continue reading

The Lost Story

Flashback | The Readerville Journal, September/October 2002
By Susan Ito

Illustration by Bob Bechtol

It is a miraculous thing, to search for something for decades, to come to doubt its existence outside your own memory, and then to have it handed to you, solid and whole.

For 30 years I have yearned for a story that was read to me when I was 12 by a woman in a beige bathrobe, the mother of a summer friend of mine — I don't remember either of their first names anymore. The husband and father, who lived with his family in Charlotte, North Carolina, was a sales trainee of my father's. My mother and I had driven south from New Jersey to where he was working the Gift Show in the cavernous Merchandise Mart.

The man, named Roberts, was large and bearded, and I had a bit of a crush on him. He looked like Grizzly Adams, and he lumbered after my father, hugging a clipboard of order forms, trying to learn how to be a salesman. He had a girl my age, and after a day or two of playing waitress together — taking orders of coffee and biscuits for the salesmen and the customers — she invited me home for a sleep over. They lived in a small house with a big yard, almost smothered by green foliage. I remember a pleasant dinner, and bathing in the sweet drawl of their Carolina voices. The girl and I played a game with dice on the floor of their parlor, and she showed me her cheerleading outfit, and the paperback yearbook from her junior high school, and we pointed out which boy was cutest on each page.

But my eyes kept drifting to the wall of books that climbed to the ceiling of that room, and after a while I went and stood by them, holding my head sideways to read the titles. Our home did not have even one bookshelf (although we had four televisions) other than the one that was built into the desk in my bedroom. All the books in the house were mine. I had not been fully aware until that moment that adults, other than teachers and librarians, liked to read as well. ... continue reading

Puritan: Look After Thy Stomach

By Karen Templer

Photo by Elizabeth Berger

There's been no shortage of books about food in recent years — you've no doubt noticed. From Anthony Bourdain to John McPhee to Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver (not to mention everyone from Suzanne Somers to Dr. Oz), the subject has been tackled repeatedly and with gusto. Frederick Kaufman, on the other hand, isn't so much interested in food. His interest lies in our relationship to food, or more specifically (and interestingly), in food's role in America's history and national identity — from the Puritans who fasted before their voyage to the New World and feasted upon arrival to modern-day raw milk smugglers, food engineers, and, yes, Rachael Ray.

You may have seen Kaufman's 2005 article in Harper's, famously titled Debbie Does Salad, which is actually the first chapter of his new book, A Short History of the American Stomach. While many use the term 'gastroporn' to describe today's food media approach, Kaufman studied Food Network footage with a porn industry executive and crafted a point-by-point comparison. It was just part of his quest to understand the network's rise and its popularity even among people who aren't especially interested in cooking. And as with the rest of the book, it's some combination of funny, informed, and educational.

Not surprisingly, Thanksgiving features prominently in the book. The quintessential American holiday, it manages to be neither especially patriotic nor materialistic in nature. It's a holiday about food, and moreover, too much of it. What is surprising is what Kaufman has dug up, through years of research, on Early American eating disorders and even a Puritanical fixation on indigestion. Citing such sources as Cotton Mather, the Beecher sisters, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ben Franklin, Fannie Farmer, Barry Sears and even the Torah, Kaufman tells what is essentially a morality tale. As it turns out, never in the history of America has there been any shortage of books about food. Kaufman is continuing a grand tradition while taking an amusing meta look at it. He spoke with me by phone about the book. ... continue reading

Mr. and Mrs. Dove

Illustration by D.G. Strong

By Katherine Mansfield

Of course he knew — no man better — that he hadn't a ghost of a chance, he hadn't an earthly. The very idea of such a thing was preposterous. So preposterous that he'd perfectly understand it if her father — well, whatever her father chose to do he'd perfectly understand. In fact, nothing short of desperation, nothing short of the fact that this was positively his last day in England for God knows how long, would have screwed him up to it. And even now ... He chose a tie out of the chest of drawers, a blue and cream check tie, and sat on the side of his bed. Supposing she replied, "What impertinence!" would he be surprised? Not in the least, he decided, turning up his soft collar and turning it down over the tie. He expected her to say something like that. He didn't see, if he looked at the affair dead soberly, what else she could say. ... continue reading

The Talented Ms. Highsmith

Illustration by Martin McMurray

Flashback | The Readerville Journal, July/August 2003
By Sue Russell

A common complaint about biographies of writers is that the work should be able to "stand for itself," without any cult of personality being formed around the author. However, very few literary personalities are as interesting as Patricia Highsmith, and very few lives are as closely linked with a body of work. Throughout her career, Highsmith sought recognition by her American publishers and readers as more than a genre writer. She felt that the European audience was more inclined to look beyond such labels. Now that she is no longer here to enjoy the validation, as it so often happens, she may be getting her wish. ... continue reading

A Condensed Tree Grows

Illustration by Bob Bechtol

By Gretchen VanEsselstyn

For ten years, my favorite book was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Reader's Digest Condensed Version. I read it again and again, hypnotized. What drew me, a bookwormy suburban 1970s kid, into this often-dark story of deprivation, loss and eventual triumph in turn-of-the century Brooklyn? It is about a lonely young girl who loves to read. Bingo.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn gave me a connection with the past and with my own family's history in New York City. The poverty that the characters endured was far away enough to seem fascinating, though you would not have to go far back on my family tree to find similar hardships. The Tammany politics, the race relations, the war news, all breezed past me, over my head. But the background wasn't important. I knew that I loved Francie and that we would always be friends.

When Francie told a lie, explaining that she would give a "charity" pumpkin pie to two poor children she knew, I sweated for her, knowing how it felt to walk the line between truth and fiction. I bit my lip when Johnny died and wept out loud when Katie requested that "acute alcoholism" be removed from his death certificate. Each time I closed the book, I wished that I could learn more about Francie and her family, that I could find out what happened next. My wish came true. ... continue reading

"Washington, D.C." by Gore Vidal

The Year of Reading Politically | #1 of 12
By Paul Clark

When I was in high school in the early 1970s, I read the usual authors that teenage boys get hooked on, such as Tolkien, Vonnegut and Heinlein. To be honest, however, my favorite author during those years was Fletcher Knebel. His books — Seven Days in May, Convention, Night of Camp David, Vanished — all dealt with the intrigues of political campaigns and Washington, D.C. And they contained little that related to the way American politics was taught in school.

The era of my high school years certainly influenced what I read. In July of 1972, the raucous and undisciplined Democratic convention provided fascinating television. In the summer of 1973, I spent as much time watching the Senate Watergate hearings as doing anything else. In the summer of 1974 I had my first real job, but I followed with rapt interest the unraveling of Nixon's second term and his resignation that summer. ... continue reading

Mark Twain: Reinvented in Paradise

By Douglas Cruickshank

"You go away for a long time and return a different person — you never come all the way back."
—Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari

In 1866, Mark Twain spent four months in Hawaii, then known as the Sandwich Islands, on assignment for California's Sacramento Union newspaper. He'd agreed to write a series of letters during the trip, which was his first outside the United States. The Union published 25 of them.

Twain had not yet written a book in 1866, but just four months before his trip to the islands he'd placed himself in the national consciousness with the appearance of Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog in New York's Saturday Press, The piece was reprinted widely in U.S. newspapers. ... continue reading

Ode to a Lesser-Known Genius: Barbara Pym

Illustration by DG Strong

By James Klise

I was looking for the book equivalent of comfort food when I began reading Barbara Pym's novels six years ago. "Which threat color is it today?" I wondered each morning, packing my briefcase with bottled water, flashlight, and cell phone. I live in Chicago, and there was a long period when the news reports kept hinting we might face a terrifying subway emergency en route to work. Pym's books helped me to forget about all that. Her London novels remind us that, even in a big city, life is broken down into neighborhoods, parishes, business offices; each of these, seen through Pym's honest and benevolent gaze, takes on the spirit of a country village, where effortless humor can be found at church bazaars and dull anthropology lectures, and a thrill can be felt upon the arrival of an attractive new neighbor.

For aspiring writers, Pym's body of work offers an added gift: The story of her roller-coaster ride career gives us all hope for some success (just one published book, who would begrudge a person this?) before death summons us from our laptops. ... continue reading

Changing the Mind of War

Flashback | The Readerville Journal, March/April 2003
By Kate Maloy

Illustration by Katherine Streeter

"The great god Mars tries to blind us when we enter his realm, and when we leave he gives us a generous cup of the waters of Lethe to drink."
—J. Glenn Gray

Will Durant once calculated that in all of recorded history only twenty-nine years have been free of any war in any country. Human beings are in the habit of war. It is so deeply a part of our collective consciousness — our worldview — that we cannot envision a world without it. We say war is inevitable; we say it arises from an ungovernable, unchangeable part of human nature.

Categorically transforming a worldview, especially one that is held by virtually all the world, takes either a cataclysm or a very long time. We can afford neither, for a cataclysm could spell the end of the world, and, given the possibility that the war we face right now could run quickly out of control, the time we have left in which to avert a cataclysm may be very short.

It is easy, but dangerous, to feel powerless and afraid in times like these, when war comes without serious Congressional debate, amid the erosion of civil rights, in defiance of international law and despite the opposition of millions. The best antidote to powerlessness is action, and often the way to ignite action, odd as it may sound, is first to read about the very thing we fear. Reading can calm and clear the mind. ... continue reading

Channeling Doug

Illustration by DG Strong

By Sue Russell

Yesterday I completed my review of the two Ethel Merman biographies and sent it to the editor in California. Actually, the review had written itself. This assignment was one I didn't choose. It had belonged to my friend Doug, who died suddenly in December of a cerebral hemorrhage. Because Doug and I were working on a writing project together, his family gave me access to his laptop. I found the Merman assignment in his email correspondence with the editor, and I didn't want anyone to think he was missing a deadline. ... continue reading

Men, Hyenas and Pieter Hugo

[click for additional photos]

By Douglas Cruickshank

I look at a lot of photographs, both in galleries and books, but I was stopped in my tracks when I recently came across an image from The Hyena & Other Men, an astonishing and disquieting new book by the gifted South African photographer Pieter Hugo. At a time when we're constantly bombarded by images, many of them cliché and derivative, Hugo's pictures astonish because one simply has not seen anything like them before. They're disturbing because they conjure a place and a time (today, it turns out) in which the line between the