"[...] bathroom book for the literary reader"

"If you're an avid follower of contemporary fiction — if you bookmark The Millions, subscribe to Bookforum, grind your teeth over the latest flap involving Jonathan Franzen, and, first thing, pull out the Book Review when you get the Sunday New York Times — then John Freeman’s How To Read A Novelist is the perfect, and perfectly modest, book.

     It’s a bathroom book for the literary reader, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. Composed of 55 short author profiles that Freeman wrote between 2004 and 2013 for dozens of newspapers and magazines in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, it’s a terrific compendium of insights into what contemporary writers are thinking and how they present themselves. The subjects range from Nobel Laureates (Toni Morrison, Orhan Pamuk, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Imre Kertész, among others), writers who deserve to be Laureates (Philip Roth, Don DeLillo), top-tier novelists from all over the world (Edmundo Paz Soldán, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Salman Rushdie), a raft of younger American hotshots (Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, William T. Vollmann, Jeffrey Eugenides, Mark Z. Danielewski), and other big names like Margaret Atwood, E.L. Doctorow, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Haruki Murakami.
     The profiles are usually five to seven book pages and readable in 10 minutes or so: roughly what you’d get in a front-page spread in the 'arts and culture' section of a newspaper. They’re quick glimpses into an author’s life and work, and usually based on two- or three-hour interviews with the authors, held occasionally in their homes or in restaurants or, more often than not, in their publicist’s offices or in hotel rooms while they’re touring in support of their latest books."
— Cornel Bonca, Los Angeles Review of Books
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 Buy this book here...

"Kraus's dichotomy: Mac versus PC"

"Here, for example, is the first paragraph of [Karl Kraus's circa 1911] essay 'Heine and the Consequences.'

Two strains of intellectual vulgarity: defenselessness against content and defenselessness against form. The one experiences only the material side of art. It is of German origin. The other experiences even the rawest of materials artistically. It is of Romance origin. [Romance meaning Romance-language — French or Italian.] To the one, art is an instrument; to the other, life is an ornament. In which hell would the artist prefer to fry? He'd surely still rather live among the Germans. For although they've strapped art into the Procrustean Folding Bed of their commerce, they've also made life sober, and this is a blessing [...]

     Kraus's suspicion of the 'melody of life' in France and Italy still has merit. His contention here – that walking down a street in Paris or Rome is an aesthetic experience in itself – is confirmed by the ongoing popularity of France and Italy as vacation destinations and by the 'envy me' tone of American Francophiles and Italophiles announcing their travel plans. If you say you're taking a trip to Germany, you'd better be able to explain what specifically you're planning to do there, or else people will wonder why you're not going someplace where life is beautiful. Even now, Germany insists on content over form. If the concept of coolness had existed in Kraus's time, he might have said that Germany is uncool.
     This suggests a more contemporary version of Kraus's dichotomy: Isn't the essence of the Apple product that you achieve coolness simply by virtue of owning it? It doesn't even matter what you're creating on your Mac Air. Simply using a Mac Air, experiencing the elegant design of its hardware and software, is a pleasure in itself, like walking down a street in Paris. Whereas, when you're working on some clunky, utilitarian PC, the only thing to enjoy is the quality of your work itself. As Kraus says of Germanic life, the PC 'sobers' what you're doing; it allows you to see it unadorned. This was especially true in the years of DOS operating systems and early Windows."
— Jonathan Franzen, The Guardian
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Buy books by Jonathan Franzen (and Karl Kraus's books) here...

"[...] picked off and shunted [...]"

"Fiction asks a lot of people, says Meg Wolitzer, 'to tell them that you need to learn about these characters, to take time out in your day from being frightened for your livelihood and your children, to think about Susan and Bill, who don't exist. It's a nervy thing to ask.' She asks it of herself every time she sits down to write – 'What fiction ought to do' – and the answer had better be good. 'The anxiety makes me a stronger writer.'

     The Interestings, Wolitzer's ninth novel, is more ambitious than any she has written so far, tracking a group of friends from the moment they meet, at summer camp, up through the decades of their lives. It has done very well in the US, so that at 54, Wolitzer has become, as a friend joked to her recently, 'a 30-year overnight success.'
     The novel deserves acclaim, but it is a surprising hit, perhaps, given its subject matter and the downbeat nature of the heroine. It is a novel about envy, but not in the grand sense. Rather, it unpicks the insidious resentment that grows between friends who start out in the same place and whose fortunes diverge. 'Nobody tells you how long you should keep doing something,' she writes of the least successful in the circle, 'before you give up forever.'
     [...] Wolitzer remembers coming to New York with no money in her 20s and being surprised as the lives of herself and her friends started to diverge. "I lived in a tiny apartment, and there was this sense that we all had talent and would move forward. And suddenly people were picked off and shunted into these beautiful apartments that obviously their families had paid for, and I hadn't been told that this was going to happen. And it really could affect the trajectory of your whole career.'"
"— Emma Brockes, The Guardian
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"[…] But does the compulsion to excel make anybody happy? Or is it, rather, a prescription for disappointment in oneself and in the 'circumscribed world'?
     That’s the question that comes to preoccupy Jules Jacobson, the ambitious protagonist of Meg Wolitzer’s remarkable ninth novel, The Interestings, whose inclusive vision and generous sweep place it among the ranks of books like Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Jeffrey Eugenides’s Marriage Plot.
     The Interestings” is warm, all-American and acutely perceptive about the feelings and motivations of its characters, male and female, young and old, gay and straight; but it’s also stealthily, unassumingly and undeniably a novel of ideas. Wolitzer has been writing excellent fiction for 30 years, and it has always been this astute. From the start, her subject has been the practical, emotional and sexual fallout of women’s liberation, particularly as it affects mothers and children. But here she has written a novel that speaks as directly to men as to women. With this book, she has surpassed herself. Just don’t call her exceptional."
— Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times
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Buy all of Meg Wolitzer's books here...

" A story begins as a blind groping in the dark [...]"

"I don't think Alice Munro would care to be called my hero, or anyone's. And yet she is the writer whose female characters I feel the most kinship with. Whether she is a feminist writer or not, Munro has said: 'I never think about being a feminist writer, but of course I wouldn't know. I don't see things all put together that way.'"
— Nell Freudenberger, The Guardian

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"In his 2004 New York Times review of Alice Munro’s Runaway, author Jonathan Franzen painted himself into a corner by bluntly stating what has likely occurred to most reviewers of Munro’s work: 'Runaway is so good that I don’t want to talk about it here. Quotation can’t do the book justice, and neither can synopsis. The way to do it justice is to read it.'"
— Quill & Quire
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Buy all of Alice Munro's books here... just an hour's drive from Lake Huron and the region of Ontario where most of her stories are set.

Staging Success

"I can still vividly remember reading, back in 2001, the New York Times Magazine write-up on the release of The Corrections. It began:
     'Some days, Jonathan Franzen wrote in the dark. He did so in a spartan studio on 125th Street in East Harlem, behind soundproof walls and a window of double-paned glass. The blinds were drawn. The lights were off. And Franzen, hunched over his keyboard in a scavenged swivel chair held together with duct tape, wore earplugs, earmuffs and a blindfold. ''You can always find the 'home' keys on your computer,'' he says in an embarrassed whisper, explaining how he managed to type under such constraints. “They have little raised bumps.”'
     What could drive a man to such madness? Later in the piece, I learned:
     '"I'm very concerned with providing a maximally enthralling experience,'' Franzen says of his work. ''Another 20 years of boring literary novels, and the thing's dead.'''
     Even then, this struck me as a wonderful piece of theater. Imagine persuading the Times that you’ve personally saved the novel—blindfolded!
     [...] Franzen took to the pages of Harper’s, opining on the talent in the room, the condition of the novel, the condition of his novel. Nor did he court success through public gestures alone; his private life, too, he shaped ergonomically to the purpose. The very furniture of that tiny Harlem studio—the drawn blinds, the duct-taped chair—set the stage for his coup. Ears plugged, eyes covered, he willed himself to become the figure he’d dreamed of being, a figure he feared might go extinct: the celebrated novelist."
— Austin Allen, big think
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"This is, of course, a sales-driven industry, and in these internetty days there’s more competition and more ways to compete than ever. It’s not enough for the author to have written a book and for that book to be, however you define it, good – the author must also be visible online, actively selling and promoting their product to the best of their abilities.
     Whether or not this is the author’s job may no longer be a question. A web presence of some kind is almost always required for a new author, and web activity can only help. I just happened to be enough of a dork to already own a blog in some deplorable corner of the internet.
     The issue I’m starting to have my doubts about is the author’s visibility. I know it’s probably pie-in-the-sky idealism talking here, but I do think most types of art suffer the more the audience knows about the creator. Not only does familiarity lead to contempt, but (especially in literature) the anonymity of the creator’s voice lends it authority and impact. It becomes steadily harder to take someone’s work seriously the more you know about them.
     [...] It’s sort of a Catch-22 situation. For new authors, it’s so necessary to make sales that we are perfectly willing to create blogs and facebook groups and twitter hashtags for our work, and in many ways that can help considerably. But it’s also perfectly possible that the more we expose ourselves and lunge forward for our audience’s attention, the more we detract from the actual reading experience."
— Robert Jackson Bennett
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Paper Rocks

"Last week Maurice Sendak visited The Colbert Report for a very entertaining two-part interview. After commenting on the complexity of children, the 'hopelessly vile' politician Newt Gingrich, and the abysmal current state of children’s literature, Sendak weighed in on e-books: 'Fuck them, is what I say,' griped Sendak. 'I hate those e-books. They cannot be the future. They may well be. I will be dead, I won’t give a shit.'
While the future is arguably already upon us when it comes to e-books, Sendak isn’t the only lauded author to speak out against the technology recently.
     At the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts in Cartagena, Colombia, Jonathan Franzen spoke of his dislike of e-books as well. 'The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it’s pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model,' said Franzen."
—Carmel Lobello, Death+Taxes
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"Maurice Sendak looks like one of his own creations: beady eyes, pointy eyebrows, the odd monsterish tuft of hair and a reputation for fierceness that makes you tip-toe up the path of his beautiful house in Connecticut like a child in a fairytale. Sendak has lived here for 40 years – until recently with his partner Eugene, who died in 2007; and now alone with his dog, Herman (after Melville), a large alsatian who barges to the door to greet us. 'He's German,' says Sendak, getting up from the table where he is doing a jigsaw puzzle of a monster from his most famous book, Where the Wild Things Are. Sotto voce, he adds: 'He doesn't know I'm Jewish.'
     At 83, Sendak is still enraged by almost everything that crosses his landscape. In the first 10 minutes of our meeting, he gets through: Ebooks: 'I hate them. It's like making believe there's another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of book! A book is a book is a book.'"
— Emma Brockes, The Guardian
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The Full Treatment

From: DIY Gadgets

"The news last week that HBO had optioned the works of William Faulkner for adaptation by Deadwood creator David Milch was treated in some press reports as incongruous. It shouldn’t have been. The mindless take on Deadwood is that it had a lot of swearing in it (which it did, but so what? — get over it, for cryin’ out loud!), yet viewers not mesmerized by the four-letter words noticed the Shakespearean and King Jamesian cadences of Milch’s dialogue from the start. Those influences are evident in Faulkner’s fiction, as well. (Also, let’s not forget we’re talking about a man who wrote a novel in which a woman is raped with a corncob — this isn’t Merchant-Ivory territory.) Milch and Faulkner is, in fact, an inspired pairing. [...]
     Television and the novel, while not exactly soul mates, have a lot more in common than the novel and theatrical film. Yet any novelist can testify that the second most common question he or she hears from readers (after 'Where do you get your ideas?') is 'Who would you like to see playing [main character] in the movie?' Fantasizing about the film version of a favorite book seems to be very common, but you have to wonder why. Rarely are a book’s most devoted admirers satisfied by the film, although when they are — as with the Harry Potter, Twilight and The Lord of the Rings franchises — popular enthusiasm can certainly be enormous.
     Far more often, however, the results are disappointing — let the recent adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go stand as a case in point. Much of a novel has to be cut to fit a 90- to 120-minute dramatization, and this can mean more than just the loss of supporting characters or scenes. Most movies conform to a three-act structure (some screenwriters will insist that it’s actually a four-act structure), a form with a proven ability to hold audiences’ interest through a single viewing. Novels, meant to be read over multiple sittings, have more freedom. Trimming a novel like Bleak House to fit the three-act format alters the fundamental shape of the work, often subtracting from the novel the very roominess and complication that made you love it in the first place.
     A television series, however, has the time to spread out and explore the byways and textures of a novel’s imagined world. Furthermore, while theatrical film is a medium in which the director reigns, in television, as Rushdie told the Observer, 'the writer is the primary creative artist. You have control in a way that you never have in the cinema. The Sopranos was David Chase, The West Wing was Aaron Sorkin.' "
— Laura Miller, Salon
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Book Mavens Everywhere…

"Living the Dream." Several boxes of books commemorating Martin Luther
King Jr. found in the Detroit Public Schools’ Roosevelt Warehouse, where tens
of thousands of other textbooks and countless other supplies have sat rotting
for more than two decades. — Text & photos: James Griffioen, Vice

"On Monday, November 7, 2011 Mayor Michael Bloomberg was in attendance at one of New York City’s top cultural and social events: The New York Public Library’s Library Lions gala. The individuals honored as Library Lions are, according to nypl.org, 'distinguished individuals who have made significant cultural and educational achievements to increase our understanding of the world around us.' The 2011 honorees included such literary luminaries as Tony Kushner, Isabel Wilkerson, Jonathan Franzen, Stacy Schiff, Ian McEwan, and the songwriter Natalie Merchant.
     On Monday, November 15, 2011 the books of many of those Library Lions mingled with broken shelves, ripped tents, and smashed computers in the aftermath of the raid on Zuccotti Park. The raid, authorized by Mayor Bloomberg, saw, among other things, the OWS People’s Library thrown in the trash. Perhaps, as Mayor Bloomberg enjoyed the library festivities on the 7th he was already planning the action that would destroy a different library on the 15th, or perhaps he was just enjoying the photo opportunity as he exchanged pleasantries with the authors who he held in high enough esteem as to have their works tossed into garbage trucks."
— Xeni Jardin, bOING bOING
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