The Elegant Variation

BADASS GATSBY

No giveaway this week, folks.  Instead, we leave you to spend the holiday weekend mulling over Cracked.com's storyboards from Michael Bay's adaptation of The Great Gatsby ....  (Many thanks to dear old FOTEV GRC.)

READINGS, READINGS, READINGS

Numerous updates to the event sidebar, so if you're an RSS reader, click on through and check 'em out.

HOW PERCUSSION WORKS

For the many of us unable to make it, The Observer reports on James Wood's tambourine injury at Bryant Park yesterday.

The literary critic James Wood wounded his hand in Bryant Park today while playing the tambourine.

“I picked [it] up in a rather awkward way and was playing a song with it, and it began to rub away,” Mr. Wood said, showing off newly applied band-aids on his fingers.  “It just took the skin off.” 

For those not already acquainted with Wood's rhythmic gifts, we direct your attention here.

THINGS ARE TOUGH PARTOUT

It's not just over here that bookstores are going under.  The legendary Paris Brentanos is set to close, a victime of rising rents.  (Thanks, EG)

"THINK FANTASTIC"

To get you in the right frame of mind for our soon-to-be-unveiled Joseph O'Neill interview (in the final editing stages), check out today's story, in which he resists the "Gatsby" tag ...

"I'm slightly wary about putting those two books next to each other," he says. "I'm not going to come out of it well. Gatsby is regarded by many as the seminal American novel of the 20th century, so obviously one is reluctant to invite comparisons! But I must acknowledge that debt. I was influenced by Gatsby to a degree I didn't realize until I was halfway through the book, by which point my book was significantly different to accept the possibility that the plots are similar. They're even similar in perspective and mood, with narrators, outsiders who come to New York and leave sadder but wiser men."

TUESDAY MARGINALIA

* The tweet heard 'round the world.  Alice Hoffman is the latest writer to wish for some sort of global undo button.  We will never understand - and we oughtta know - why writers think there's an upside in taking on one's critics.  (Though we kinda like Stanley Crouch's style ... )

* It's that wonderful time of the year - the winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is announced.

"Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the "Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."

* Emma Garman, whose criticism we've long admired, looks at Nathalie Abi-Ezzi's A Girl Made of Dust for Words Without Borders.

* Hanif Kureishi on turning his second novel, The Black Album, into a stage play.

* Jens Petersen wins the Bachmann Prize for best German language novel.

* Maud Newton returns to give Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain another try. 

* Apropos of nothing at all, just saying - a reporter on NPR tonight actually said "razed to the ground."  If we tweeted, this is probably the sort of thing we'd tweet, but we don't, so it's stuck in here.  Seriously.  Razed to the ground.

* Making An Elephant, Graham Swift's collection of essays on writing, is reviewed in The Star.

"I find distasteful the idea that writers are on a permanent reconnaissance trip, one eye always on the lookout for what might fuel their work, he retorts.

* Lloyd Lockhart, the last man to interview Hemingway, has died at 89.

* And, finally ... Michael Bay ... James Frey ... the headlines just sort of write themselves, don't they?

L.A. EVENT - KATE CHRISTENSEN

Although we haven't yet read Trouble, we greatly admired Kate Christensen's previous novel, The Great Man (recommended to us by Maud Newton), and if it's at all possible for us to make our way over to Pasadena tonight, we'll check out her Vroman's reading.  We have a newborn; you have no excuse, so don't miss it.  Details here.

TEV GIVEAWAY: THE GOD OF WAR

I greatly admired Marisa Silver's fine novel, The God of War, when it came out last year.  Here's what I said about it over at the Barnes & Noble Review:

Common themes of family, guilt, dysfunction, and shame informed many of the stories in Silver's debut collection, Babe in Paradise (2001), as well as her first novel, No Direction Home (2005). These concerns remain present in The God of War, but the story is primarily a sustained meditation on questions of agency and volition; the acceptance (or refusal) of responsibility and the apportioning of blame. Indeed, her damaged cast has settled in this remote backwater in the futile hope of controlling their own fate beyond the reach of government and society. That they largely fail suggests how impervious to geography and inescapably human the so-called human condition really is.

The God of War has just been released in paperback, and I'm pleased to offer a copy this week to a lucky TEV reader.  (And I'm pretty sure I can arrange to have it signed for you, too.)  It's been a while since we've done one of these, so we're probably all a bit rusty on the rules.  Therefore:  Drop us an email, subject line "GIMME SOME SILVER".  Include your full mailing address, please, otherwise you will be disqualified and possibly mocked.  All entries will be accepted until Sunday, June 28 at 6 p.m. PST, at which time the Random Number Generator will practice its own special brand of tough love.  Until then ...

THURSDAY MARGINALIA

* Carolyn Kellogg offers sensible commentary on the l'affaire de Chris Anderson.

* Edward Hogan has won the Desmond Elliott Prize.

An "extraordinary new voice" with a tale of an albino in a depressed mining community has won the Desmond Elliott prize. Edward Hogan, who describes his previous jobs as "grass-strimmer, pot-washer, conservatory salesman, bloke holding the board in Leicester Square, and teacher", won the £10,000 first novel prize for Blackmoor, a novel set in a Derbyshire village at the time of the miners' strikes.

* Ismail Kadare has won the Asturias literature prize.

* Retracing the steps of Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall in the Times.

* Reducing literary classics to tweet-length.  Would that make the condensers "twits"?

In it, the authors will squish the jewels of world literature - they mention Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce and JK Rowling - into 20 tweets or less - that is 20 sentences each with fewer than 140 characters.

* Aleksandar Hemon plays twenty questions.

6. You're proud of this accomplishment, but why?

Once I fell asleep in a dentist's chair during a root canal. Keith Richards fell asleep during a Rolling Stones show, which is as impressive as can be, but I had a little nap with the dentist's hand up to his wrist in my mouth.

After years of being able to sleep in any situation: on the street, at work, in school etc., I managed to sleep through pain. That's pretty impressive, if I may say so myself.

And I wrote four books in English, not my native language. That's not too bad, either.

* Top ten literary threesomes.

* The Big Read is just throwing money at you - 269 new grants have been announced.

* Maud Newton on all things Jean Rhys - first, an epistolary essay at Granta online; and then, a biography reviewed at The Second Pass.

* And, finally, please check out Masha Hamilton's Afghan Women's Writing Project.

KULTURAs CLOSES

Santa Monica's KULTURAs Books is closing and heading back to Washington, D.C.

Husband-and-wife team Andrew MacDonald and Irene Coray decided to take a risk — pack up their highly successful 17-year-old bookstore in the middle of bustling Dupont Circle and take their chances in Santa Monica where the people are well-read but the weather is more inviting.

They figured that even at a 50 percent loss in sales from the Washington D.C. store, the change in atmosphere would be well worth the move.

Three years later, the owners of KULTURAs Books on Ocean Park Boulevard are preparing to head back to where it all started, a result of a more than anticipated dramatic decline in revenue.

You have until July 20 to stop by and apologize in person on behalf of all of Los Angeles ...  (Thanks, EG)

GALASSI INTERVIEWED

The legendary Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of FSG, is interviewed in Poets & Writers.

But what if you have some ambition, as all writers do, and really want a readership and think that you deserve one?
If they deserve one, they'll get one. I believe that. I believe that eventually they will get their readership. Now, I also think there are way more people writing books than are going to get a readership. But I think that the books that really make a difference are going to have a readership. It may not be immediate. There are many examples of writers who have labored in relative obscurity for a long time until their ship came in. Look at Bolaño. His great success is posthumous and not even in his own country.

Writing is its own reward. It has to be. I really believe that. This is a part of publishing that's really hard to come to grips with. But publishers can't make culture happen the way they want it to happen. They can stand up for what they believe in, and they can work to have an impact, but in the end it's like the brilliant thing that Helen Vendler said about poets. She was asked, "What's the canon?" and she said something like, "The poets are going to decide what the canon is. The poets who poets read are the canon." I think that, in the end, that's true about all literature. The books that people read over time, and keep reading, are the books that matter. We can huff and puff and pay money and advertise and everything else, but in the end, if the readers don't come, we can't do anything about it.

SHE SAID "POETASTER" ...

"Thanks from a grateful poetaster for your assistance, encouragement & criticism."  Edith Wharton's letters come up for auction.

THREE MINUTE STORIES

James Wood will be selecting and reading on air the winners of NPR's Summer Writing Contest.

CIRCLE OF LIT

There's something pleasantly circular about the fact that the signer/guitarist of the literarily named Airbone Toxic Event is writing his own novel.  Or trying to, anyway, between tours.

The attention still feels surreal to Jollett, who began his twenties as a budding novelist and freelancer. His writing credits include NPR, the Los Angeles Times and Filter magazine. In fact, Jollett was offered a column by NPR before Airborne formed.

SOME OF OUR BEST FRIENDS ARE OBSESSIVES

A U2 obsessive considers top 5 literary moments in the band's history.  Salman Rushdie figures prominently in one of them.

Rushdie later repaid the show of loyalty by writing the lyrics to 'The Ground Beneath Her Feet' (a track which appeared on the Japanese and British versions of 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind), drawn from the author's novel of the same name. He continues to be an outspoken supporter of the band.

FIRST FATHER'S DAY

My wife asked me how I wanted to mark my first Father's Day.  I normally love going out - brunch is a favorite - but I'm not quite ready to take Clara out into the world, so I opted for a simple, homebound request.  A pizza and a James Bond movie.  That seemed appropriately dad-like.  The pizza came from Lamonica's, which I recently stumbled into and found surprisingly good.  The Bond, this time, was Thunderball.  I knew it had to be a Connery film, preferably one I hadn't watched in a while.  (My first choice was You Only Live Twice, but my copy of that DVD is defective.  A replacement has been ordered.)

So it's been a day of pizza, Bond, and especially catching up on lost sleep.  But there's an undeniably bittersweet air to the day, coming almost exactly three months to the day since my father died.  As we had our breakfast this morning, I remembered a Father's Day moment from about fifteen years ago.

I was spending Father's Day weekend in Big Sur with my best friend at a favorite inn of ours.   We were sitting in the dining room, enjoying a leisurely Sunday morning breakfast, when a lady entered and addressed the only other people present, a young couple at the next table.  "Are those your children out front?" she asked.  The couple nodded.  "They're lovely.  You must be very proud.  Happy Father's Day."  At the sound of those last words, I leapt out of my chair as though it had just kicked me, and raced from the room.  I found the pay phone in the lobby (these were pre-cell days, and anyway, I think there's still no reception in Big Sur), and called my father (collect, I fear) to wish him Happy Father's Day.  I returned sheepishly to breakfast, where the couple grinned at me.  "Did you reach your Dad?" they asked.  I did, and I thanked them for reminding me.

My greatest sorrow at the loss of my father is that he didn't get to meet his granddaughter.  This saddened him, too, and he told me he was sorry he would not see her.  I am not at all inclined to mystical thinking, but my mother informs me that my father had an unconscious habit of placing his thumb between his index and middle finger - apparently, an obscene gesture in Russia.  Whatever its meaning, Clara appears to do the same thing.  (Though I'll advise her to cool it if we ever visit Moscow.)

Finally, I share the absolutely perfect present Mrs. TEV gave me today.  If only I had one of these growing up ... Literary hijinks resume tomorrow.

ONE MORE WEEK ...

... until regular Friday giveaways return.  We've just about got the hang of this whole baby/blogging balance.  Until then, have a lovely weekend, and Happy Father's Day to all you TEV-reading dads ...

GO!

Kate Christensen will be here in L.A. later this month (see left sidebar) but for our New York readers, you have the chance to catch her tonight in conversation with Maud Newton.  We'd be there if we could; you can be, so go and enjoy.

L.A. EVENT: MARK SARVAS & DAMION SEARLS

If you're in the Los Angeles area, I hope you will consider coming out Saturday night for my only appearance in support of the paperback edition of Harry, Revised.  I will be sharing the stage with Damion Searls, a talented author and translator whose Dalkey collection,What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, is witty and inventive, so even if you're heard my schtick before, you still have a reason to come by.

The appearance will be held at Book Soup (details after the jump), and I would love for my one L.A. area appearance to be a smash and to see as many friendly faces as possible.  Book Soup is centrally located, there's parking in the rear and it's not a school night, so please do stop by and say hi - there will probably even be drinking and such afterwards.  The details are after the jump.  Hope you see you!

WEDNESDAY MARGINALIA

* The LA Weekly arrives a bit late in the game to the whole James Wood/How Fiction Works tussle but the frank Q&A is worth your while.

It seems very humble, helpful, and earnest in its endeavors. Though that didn’t stop Walter Kirn from painting you as the world’s greatest snob in The Times.

I was bemused by the Walter Kirn attack — that’s diplomatese for “I wanted him dead and bound in the trunk of a Lincoln Town Car.” It was the purest American anti-intellectualism: Fiction, he claimed, is about noise on the streets, not words on the page, because words on the page mean ... the library. And that is where I spend all my time, apparently. His review traded in the coarsest binarisms: On one side, according to Kirn, there are [Henry] James and Flaubert, tortured and isolated souls, who spent their lives rubbing nouns and adjectives together in onanistic bliss, and on the other side, there is ... none other than David Foster Wallace! Does Kirn think Wallace did not spend Jamesian amounts of time and energy rubbing together exquisite nouns and adjectives? Of course, he did. Writers who care about language care about such things as nouns and adjectival phrases. They aren’t cowboys — at least, not on the page.

And then there were all the silly things he said about my having a Burberry coat. Alas, he revealed much more about his own social anxieties than he did about my criticism.

* Paris marks Bloomsday.

* Reconsidering Life and Times of Michael K.  (Speaking of Coetzee, FOTEV Andie points us to this tantalizing but slight glimpse of his next.)

* A word of advice to academic literary critics.

* Tablet Magazine launches On The Bookshelf, looking at Soloveitchik, Céline, Salinger, and more.

* Ha'aretz hands over the paper to a group of 31 writers for the day, and the Guardian likes the results.

Roni Somek cheered up the weather page with his poem Summer Sonnet ("Summer is the pencil / that is least sharp / in the seasons' pencil case"), while Eshkol Nevo was (perhaps mistakenly) given the TV review, starting his piece "I didn't watch TV yesterday".

* It's good to be a poet in the UK - they actually get knighted.

* Another Kindle objection answered - authors can (and do) sign them.  (By the way, speaking of the Kindle, Michael Antman distinguished himself around here last week with some very thoughtful comments on the subject, and we absolutely urge you to check out his full length essay on the subject over at Pop Matters.  Thought-provoking and admirably free of cant.)

* Many thanks to Carl Bromley for alerting us to Eduardo Galeano on The Writing Life.

* And, finally, this is old so perhaps you've seen it already but it was new to us (thanks, Paul), and we're speechless at this collection of the most beautiful libraries in the world.  How many of them have you visited?

IRAN WRITERS ROUND UP

Litlinks are feeling just a bit trivial at the moment (which doesn't mean we won't return to our full trivial selves by tomorrow), so for now we direct you to this round up of Iranian writers offering their first thoughts on the unfolding drama.

HAPPY BLOOMSDAY

Updates are running behind this morning but we'll have some new posts up in a few hours.  Until then, Happy Bloomsday to the lot of you.  Here's Colum McCann on his family memories of Ulysses.

Soon my grandfather was emerging from the novel. The further I went in, the more complex he got. The man whom I had met only once was becoming flesh and blood through the pages of a fiction. After all, he had walked the very same streets of Dublin, on the same day as Leopold Bloom. I began to see my grandfather outside Dlugacz’s butcher shop, his hat cocked sideways, watching the moving “hams” of a young girl. I wondered if he had a penchant for “the inner organs of beasts and fowls.” I heard him arguing with the Citizen in Barney Kiernan’s pub. I felt him mourn the loss of a child.

REVIEW: IN THE KITCHEN

My review of Monica Ali's new novel, In The Kitchen, has gone live at the Barnes & Noble Review. It begins thus:

What hath Anthony Bourdain wrought? In the wake of all the imitators it spawned, it can be hard to remember just how bracing Kitchen Confidential was when it was published back in 2000. There had always been famous cooks -- Julia Child, Graham Kerr -- but Bourdain somehow managed to simultaneously deglamorize the kitchen and make it sexy and dangerous. From Top Chef to Hell's Kitchen to Ratatouille, the not-so-humble chef (mostly bad-tempered, mostly male) has emerged as a cultural icon. Names like Keller, Robuchon, Senderens, and Achtaz, once known only to the cognoscenti, are now common currency, and even the layman can tell a sous-chef from a saucier.

One of the kitchen's dirty secrets that Bourdain was intent on exposing was how much of the unseen labor necessary for preparing fine food was done by people of color, often underpaid, often illegal. It's a setting that would have held obvious attractions for Monica Ali. In her two prior novels, the superb Booker-nominated Brick Lane and the less sure-footed Alejento Blue, Ali has been a messenger of multiculturalism, drawing back the veil on the subtleties of life in an increasingly diverse world with elegance and empathy. And, indeed, her new novel, In the Kitchen, is at its very best in its deft handling of a large and ethnically varied cast, as she guides them through the "part prison, part lunatic asylum, part community hall" that is the kitchen of London's Imperial Hotel.

You can read the entire review here.

MICHAEL THOMAS WINS IMPAC

Wow.  Love to see stories like this one.  Michael Thomas unseats some huge names to take home the IMPAC Dublin Prize.

A debut novelist who says he's never really had a proper job has won the world's richest literary award. American writer Michael Thomas beat authors including Philip Roth, Doris Lessing and Joyce Carol Oates to take the €100,000 (£85,000) Impac Dublin prize with his debut novel, Man Gone Down.

THE LONG READ

Two long pieces have our attention this week.  We've only begun both, but they seem promising so we bring them to your attention here.  First, there's Daniel Torday on "Fatalism in the stories of Edward P. Jones" ...

It’s a startling move in a straightforward realist narrative, not entirely unlike the moment in Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Frances Macomber,” when after about a dozen pages of mundane description of a rich man hunting, we’re suddenly thrust into the head of the lion that will maul Macomber to death. The narrative rules as they’ve been established appear suddenly to be broken; we’re given access to a new moment out of chronology and we can only assume that it’s for a particular reason; now it’s up to us as readers to figure out why we’ve gained that access. Where discussion of contemporary fiction tends to be increasingly polarized between the experimental and the traditional, the post-modern and whatever the post-modern’s opposite might be, the George Saunders/Aimee Bender/Ben Marcus fantastical aesthetic against the straightforward realism represented by writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Tobias Wolff or Richard Ford, Jones throws into chaos such distinctions. In particular, our reigning critic of record James Wood has drawn increasing ire for ostensibly favoring a more traditional aesthetic, however wrong-headed this reading of Wood’s perspicacious criticism may be; within a mostly formal, conventional narrative language and framework, Jones employs such unusual and precise narrative moves as to muddy any discussion that conforms to these kinds of reductionist dichotomies.

... and in The New Republic, Peter Green looks at the new Cavafy translations by Daniel Mendelsohn (about whih we promise, promise, promise to have more for you on soon):

Thus the recognition that Greece sought so long from the English-speaking West has been lavished on a poet who quietly opposed or undercut almost everything that Hellenizing propaganda stood for and continues to uphold today. Famous poets from Auden to Heaney have written about Cavafy, introduced his translations, and acknowledged his influence on their own work. The texts of Cavafy's unfinished poems, now translated by Mendelsohn for the first time, were pieced together from fragmentary successive drafts by the Italian scholar Renata Lavagnini, with the minute care--and the same technique--normally lavished only on the papyrus scraps of a major classical author, and their retrieval was hailed as a major literary discovery. If the Greeks, as is sometimes alleged, invented irony, this has to be an almost unrivalled example of it. What, we may well ask ourselves, has been the secret of this marginal Hellenist's astonishing and unprecedented success in the Anglo-American literary world?

I GET AROUND

My essay on the foolishness of writers who carp about the Kindle can now be found at the Huffington Post ...

At a panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, I watched with bewilderment as a novelist I admire declared, without apparent irony, that "The Kindle is evil." It should have been easy to ignore so foolish a statement, but this author was scarcely alone in expressing antipathy for Amazon's popular electronic book. A table in the Green Room, with a slightly forbidding "Reserved for Amazon Kindle" sign, sat unoccupied, and was the object of much free-floating scorn and fear.

... and Fictionaut, a terrific literary community online, subjects me to the Fictionaut Five.  My answers can be found here.

If you weren’t a writer, how would you spend your time?

I’d love to be a chessplayer. Or a professional cyclist. Or a busboy at the French Laundry.

WEDNESDAY MARGINALIA

This whole baby and blogging thing ... yikes ... not so easy ...

* From the Guardian Archive:  Mr. Charles Dickens has died at 58.

Mr Charles Dickens died last night at ten minutes past six o'clock, at Gadshill, near Rochester. He was seized with illness about the same hour on Wednesday afternoon, as he was about to sit down to dinner with his sister-in-law, Miss Hogarth. She observed something unusual in his appearance and became alarmed. She told him that he looked ill, and proposed to telegraph for medical assistance. Mr Dickens replied, "No, I have a toothache. I shall be better presently." Almost immediately he fell into unconsciousness, from which he never recovered up to the moment of his death.

* A conversation with the new editor of Granta, John Freeman.

* Another venerable independent falls: Shaman Drum Bookshop is set to close June 30.

* Maud Newton on Sarah Waters: " ... a master at stoking anticipation ... "

* The "Kindle Beater" sounds vaguely like something we'd find in a kitchen drawer ... or a specialty at the local S&M club.

* The new Murakami is an immediate bestseller in Japan.

The new novel by Japanese cult author Haruki Murakami has become an instant bestseller with its latest print run pushing it over half-a-million copies in less than two weeks, the publisher said on Tuesday.

* Germany's PEN center offers a home for exiled writers.

* Come and visit Tablet Magazine - the completely revamped version of Nextbook.  There's an introduction to the new venture here.

* Canongate has been named Publisher of the Year at the British Book Awards, and Jamie Byng is interviewed the next day.

* Margit Frenk has won this year’s Menendez Pelayo International Prize.

The prize, which recognizes authors for literary or scholarly achievement in the Spanish and Portuguese languages, is conferred by Menendez Pelayo International University in the northern Spanish city of Santander and includes a cash award of 48,000 euros ($66,000).

* David Ulin profiles Frances Kroll Ring, F. Scott Fitzgerald's last typist ...

"She's the last real witness," Berg points out, "along with Budd Schulberg" (the 95-year-old author of the classic 1941 Hollywood novel "What Makes Sammy Run?") "to Fitzgerald as a working writer. She had a front row seat for a year-and-a-half." Novelist Steve Erickson calls her "a living connection to an American culture that cared about writing and literacy . . . She is the keeper of a literary flame in a city that has always had more literature than it gets credit for."

* Kate Christensen's guilty pleasure?  Janet Evanovich.

* Dave Rosenthal worries about men who don't read novels.

* And, finally, many thanks to the superb Opera Chic for alerting us to this profile in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Serra ... Ciao!

CHAPTER 11 FOR ARCADE

Sad news - and no, we're not referring to the use of "impact" as a verb in the subhead.  Arcade, publishers of Andrei Makine in this country, has filed for bankruptcy.

The couple founded Arcade in 1988. Its list of authors includes the renowned Mexican poet Octavio Paz and the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, winner of the Man Booker Prize.

Mr. Seaver, who died in January at the age of 82, began his career at Grove Press, where he championed the work of Samuel Beckett and helped bring books by Henry Miller and Jean Genet to the United States.

MENDELSOHN ON NPR

One of the items caught up in baby whirl but still coming soon is a planned chat with Daniel Mendelsohn on his new translation of the poems of C.P. Cavafy.  Until we get our act together, though, you can check out this discussion on NPR of same.

OH MUSTN'T WE?

The Guardian reports on the latest digital development: A Twitter book club.

Not exactly Cyril Connolly, but we mustn't mock. A little research on the Amazon site shows that some people are obeying Ross's eclecticism. Some customers who bought Ronson also bought his other suggestions - four of them even bought Leaves of Grass. It may be Ross's biggest contribution so far to our cultural welfare, and perhaps no more mysterious in its process than David Beckham endorsing Gillette (Beckham knowing no more about shaving than the rest of us and Ross knowing no more about books). If he'd stood behind the counter at my old public library Esther Waters might have found many more sympathetic readers, impressed that they could exchange a greeting with him in no more than 140 characters.

(Incidentally, while I'm flattered that a handful of you continue to subscribe to my Twitter feed or friend me on Facebook, please remember - I'm not actively using those sites, merely saving my name from squatters.  I already have a lovely social network, it's called The Elegant Variation ... )

REASONS TO GO TO PARIS # 847*

Peter Jackson's Tintin movie will be released abroad eight weeks before hitting American shores.  (Thanks to FOTEV C-)

* Oh, like we really need another one ...

PERSISTENCE

 

Today's mail - eight loaves of Harry's Brioche Tranchée, delivered fresh from Paris via London.

Nearly two years ago, I wrote about my love for a certain variety of French supermarket bread - Harry's brioche tranchée - and bemoaned the impossiblity of having it shipped overseas in an age when you can buy everything from prescription drugs to diapers online.  I am, however, nothing if not dogged ... or compulsive, depending on whom you ask.  Either way, they are handy traits for bloggers and novelists alike.  (Incidentally, the name of the bread has no bearing whatsoever on my protagonist - happy coincidence.)

With the arrival of my lovely daughter, I realized there'd be no Paris trip this year, and so the lack of Harry's became a matter of critical importance, and I returned for another search of the web.  My years of efforts were finally rewarded when I stumbled on to French Click, a UK concern that exists primarily to provide French supermarket treats to Francophile Brits.  For a truly exorbitant shipping fee, however, they will ship to the United States, and as of today my freezer is happily filled with eight loaves of the stuff.  I have, however, hidden the invoice from Mrs. TEV, telling her only that it's cheaper than a trip to Paris.

Of course, as with the end of all great quests, I'm now left feeling vaguely adrift - but I'm sure it won't be long before another quixotic obsession presents itself.  Until then, the Bonne Maman Sables Tout Chocolat are looking pretty good ...

(Friday giveaway will return next week.)

UPDATE: By the way, if you're a fan of things Parisian, you'll want to check out Vanina Marsot's Skylight reading this Wednesday.  Her nove, Foreign Tongue, hits so many of our favorite Paris locales ...

NY EVENT: PRINCETON AT THE VIRGINIA WOOLF CONFERENCE

We thought our readers might be interested in checking out the band Princeton, whose music draws inspiration from interesting literary sources.  The details are below:

The Stephen Pelton Dance Theater in collaboration with the band Princeton on an evening of dance and music. Friday, June 5th, 8:00, Pope Auditorium, Lincoln Center 113 W. 60th St. Tickets are $20.

Princeton, the Los Angeles-based trio, join forces with San Francisco’s Stephen Pelton Dance Theater in it was this: it was this: an evening of songs and dances inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group. Princeton will perform all of the songs from their recent EP Bloomsbury, each lyrically focused upon a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Portraits of Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes are each presented in a different musical framework with lush orchestral arrangements.

The band is comprised of twin brothers Jesse and Matt Kivel and Ben Usen. The band will be joined by 8 additional musicians in recreating their frolicsome, exuberant take on the cast of Bloomsbury characters. Stephen Pelton Dance Theater, known for known its intimate theatricality and emotional intensity, may be familiar to audiences from previous Woolf conferences.

This year the company will perform several new works including the premiere of it was this: it was this: a choreographic study of Woolf’s punctuation. Using a single paragraph from To the Lighthouse, the company dances their way from the first word to the last, pausing briefly for every comma, parentheses and semicolon in-between. The company also performs a revised version of The Death of the Moth, first seen at the Plymouth State Conference in 1997. The artists will combine forces for the premiere of Lytton/Carrington, a portrait-in-miniature of this most original of love stories.

Other Princeton tour dates:

June 5th Lincoln Center (Pope Auditorium) Virginia Woolf Conference NYC, NY
June 6th Piano's NYC, NY
June 11th El Rey w/ Au Revoir Simone LA, CA
June 12th Velvet Jones w/ Au Revoir Simone, SB, CA
June 17th Slims w/ Ben Kweller SF, CA

MUST READ: SHOW OR TELL

You will want to check out Louis Menand's fine New Yorker essay on the explosive growth of the MFA and its ramifications:

Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers. People who take creative-writing workshops get course credit and can, ultimately, receive an academic degree in the subject; but a workshop is not a course in the normal sense—a scene of instruction in which some body of knowledge is transmitted by means of a curricular script. The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart. There is one person in the room, the instructor, who has (usually) published a poem. But workshop protocol requires the instructor to shepherd the discussion, not to lead it, and in any case the instructor is either a product of the same process—a person with an academic degree in creative writing—or a successful writer who has had no training as a teacher of anything, and who is probably grimly or jovially skeptical of the premise on which the whole enterprise is based: that creative writing is something that can be taught.

MONDAY MARGINALIA

 

New fatherhood sleep deprivation has pushed our Joseph O'Neill interview back a week but in the interim, some worthy links for your morning coffee:

* Comprehensive BEA coverage can be found at PW.  Among blogs, you'll find the most worthwhile BEA coverage at Jacket Copy and Galleycat.

* Echoing our own thoughts from last year, Alain de Botton calls for "an ambitious new literature of the office."

It used to be a central ambition of novelists to capture the experience of working life. From Balzac to Zola, Dickens to Kafka, they evoked the dynamism and the beauty, the horror and the tedium of the workplace. Their books covered the same territory as is today featured at copious length in the financial pages of newspapers or in the breathless commentaries of the 24-hour newscasters, but their interest was not primarily financial. The goal was to convey the human side of commerce, where money is only one actor in a complex drama about our ambitions and reversals.

* As fans of both Sherlock Holmes and Robert Downey Jr, we're midly curious to see what he makes of the great sleuth.

* Oscar Wilde's original, handwritten love letters are among the 600,000 pages of manuscripts made available in a new online resource called British Literary Manuscripts Online c1660-1900 (which the Telegraph appears unable to link to).

* Note to self: Get daughter set of Nancy Drew books.

* Wired's Bruce Sterling offers a list of Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature, some of which are sensible, others of which - like this one - are, well ... Step away from the computer, Bruce.

Algorithms and social media replacing work of editors and publishing houses ...

* The lineup for the Brooklyn Book Festival has been announced.

* Milan Kundera blows off a Czech conference in his honor.

Kundera sent good-humoured thanks for the "necrophile party" in a letter to the organisers of the three-day event, which drew scholars and translators from as far away as Chicago, Paris, Reykjavik, Rome and Warsaw.

* Mavis Gallant in celebrated on WNYC's Selected Shorts.

* Marilynne Robinson: "If I know where an idea's from, I don't use it."

* Maud Newton continues her entertaining series of "literary quips, observations, and warnings."

* Brandon Wenerd makes the argument that Aspen belongs on our American Literary Map.

Though literary tradition may not be as apparent to the rest of the world as tourist pursuits like skiing and gourmet dining, this once-Wild West mining town retains an atmosphere of intellectual curiosity and boheme idiosyncrasy, making for an idyllic hideaway for literature to flourish. The Aspen Writers’ Foundation – the oldest literary center in Colorado – wines, dines, and host lectures for eminent authors like Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ishmael Beah, and David Davidar during its five-day summer literary festival, writing retreat, and popular Winter Words lecture series, dubbed “après ski for the mind.” In the 70s, a literary journal titled “The Aspen Anthology” published book excerpts, poems, and short stories by locals. It boasted a circulation of 1000. The nearest Barnes and Noble may be nearly 95 miles away in Grand Junction, but the cozy Explore Bookstore on Main Street keeps independent bookstore tradition alive in an era when homegrown sellers are becoming either an anomaly or a nostalgic relic of the past. Even a casual browser at the Aspen Thrift Shop will discover a highbrow and sophisticated collection of used volumes ranging from Sylvia Plath to Edward Abbey between the pulpy stacks of Janet Evanovich mystery thrillers and John Grisham bestsellers.

* Geoff Dyer has won the Wodehouse Prize for Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. He also spends some time chatting with the New Yorker.

* Wexford is to literary novelists as Liverpool is to songwriters ...

* Boyd Tonkin on Anne Michaels's The Winter Vault.

To put it mildly, The Winter Vault does not build, or grow, like a conventional novel. Each main character slips or swerves into a mode of rapt soliloquy that, for all the breadth of their references to science, art and history, often sounds alike. Motifs and metaphors drift like spores from one mind to another: dams, seeds, stones, tombs, the endless traffic between the organic and inorganic worlds. Read this book like poetry, or rather hear it like music, but stay if you can with Michaels' gorgeous melancholia even when the waters of her rhetoric rise to the very lip of absurdity.

* And, finally, a unique literary quiz: judging a book by its "improbable phrases".

TEV GIVEAWAY: THE WRITER'S NOTEBOOK

Well, you've had a chance to see for yourself this week what sort of essays you'll find in Tin House's The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House.  In addition to Susan Bell's memorable essay on The Great Gatsby, you can check out Dorothy Allison, Jim Shepard, Aimee Bender, D. A. Powell, and others break down elements of craft and share insights into their own writing. With how-tos, close readings, and personal anecdotes, The Writer's Notebook offers all writers useful advice and inspiration. Included is a CD of workshop discussions and panels.

Some of the other terrific writers in this collection include Rick Bass, Kate Bernheimer, Lucy Corin, Tom Grimes, Matthea Harvey, Anna Keesey, Jim Krusoe, Margot Livesey, Antonya Nelson, Chris Offutt, and Peter Rock.

We're very pleased to be able to offer a copy of The Writer's Notebook, courtesy of Tin House, to a lucky TEV reader.  Everyone knows the drill - drop an email, subject line "I'M CRAFTY", and include your full mailing address, please.  We'll take all entries until Sunday, May 31 at 7 p.m. PST, at which time the Random Number Generator will break all hearts but one.  Until then ...

UPDATE: Congratulations to Ned Resnikoff, winner of one of our most contested giveaways to date!

LITERATURE'S LOSERS

In honor of my protagonist Harry Rent, I've contributed a list of "Literature's Losers" to Bookforum's revamped website.  It begins thus:

Long before Amazon.com reviewers tyrannically demanded sympathetic and likable protagonists, literature was reliably populated by leading men of a less bland stripe. It’s hard for me to understand why someone would want to spend their reading hours in the company of the virtuous, the accomplished, and the capable, when failure is so much more interesting—and, sadly, altogether more common. Today, we call them antiheroes (it’s more polite), but to me, they will always be literature’s losers—tormented, feckless, sometimes lovable, sometimes not, but almost always heartbreaking.

To find out whom I selected, pop on over and have a look ...

GUEST ESSAY: REVISIONING "THE GREAT GATSBY" (IV)

Herewith, the conclusion of Susan Bell's marvelous essay "Revisioning The Great Gatsby," which can be found, along with a number of other superb essays on craft, in The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House, and is reprinted here courtesy of Bell and Tin House.  Bell is the author of The Artful Edit and a considerably expanded version of this essay can also be found in her book.

Perkins’s influence was more or less limited to the macro-edit. Unlike his editing of Thomas Wolfe’s work, Perkins didn’t mark up Fitzgerald’s text word for word, didn’t roll up his shirtsleeves, dig in, and reposition the prose. The micro-edits of Gatsby were a solitary endeavor. Fitzgerald was a prose techie who could not merely polish but power up a weak passage, raise the ram of a slow sentence. Take this early one: “The part of his life he told me about began when he was sixteen, when the popular songs of those days began to assume for him a melancholy and romantic beauty.” This sentence may seem all right, but I dare any reader to argue its elegance or gravity. Fitzgerald would delete it altogether. In its place, he wrote:

It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody—told it to me because “Jay Gatsby” had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played out.

Fitzgerald was driven to edit a sentence silly until it punched.

Inclined to clarity when he wrote, Fitzgerald’s first forays onto the page were at times—as for most mortal writers—blurred with ambiguity. As Somerset Maugham writes in The Summing Up:

[A cause] of obscurity is that the writer is himself not quite sure of his meaning. He has a vague impression of what he wants to say, but has not . . . exactly formulated it in his mind, and it is natural enough that he should not find a precise expression for a confused idea.

Sure enough, Fitzgerald seems unclear of his meaning in an early draft of the crucial scene at the Plaza Hotel. As Nick listens to Daisy, Tom, and Gatsby bicker, he tells the reader:

I was thirty. Beside that realization their importunities were dim and far away. Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a new decade.

A few paragraphs later, as he rides home with Jordan in a taxi, Nick adds:

I was thirty—a decade of loneliness opened up suddenly before me and what had hovered between us was said at last in the pressure of a hand.

Nick’s thoughts are opaque. A threat looms, but he does not say what it is. Fitzgerald is trying to conjure up the narrator, reveal his deepest concerns, but Nick remains hazy. The writer blankets the insufficiency with three multisyllabic words—realization, importunities, portentous—that sound smart and say little.

Now look at the final version of this same passage, after Fitzgerald dramatically reworked it:

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

That’s all. He deleted the rest of the paragraph to aim at one point. In the next paragraph, Nick is in the taxi as before, but this time Fitzgerald picks up the line he had held back—the undefined threat—and casts it:

Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, the thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.

Fitzgerald took a couple of wordy, imprecise sentences and transformed them into a limpid exposé of a single idea: the loss of youth. The danger of turning thirty is defined: “the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.” The theme of aging underscores the character descriptions and is not a coarse intellectual aside: “But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.” The final sentence was a detached commentary on a detached relationship; now it is a commitment to human tenderness, however flawed: “the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.” By changing “a hand” to “her hand,” Fitzgerald created a truer intimacy that offers the poignant conclusion that human affection alone can compensate for the indignities of growing old.

Fitzgerald, Berg writes, “is generally regarded as having been his own best editor, as having had the patience and objectivity to read his words over and over again, eliminating flaws and perfecting his prose.” But The Great Gatsby would be a different book, and very possibly a lesser one, without Perkins’s counsel. Many consider editing as either the correction of punctuation (copyediting) or the overhaul of a book such as Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel. The editing of The Great Gatsby sits between these extremes—a testimony to a writer’s discipline to edit himself and his wisdom to let himself be edited by someone worthy: that is how he crossed the gulf.

(Return tomorrow when we'll be giving away a copy of The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House.)

GUEST ESSAY: REVISIONING "THE GREAT GATSBY" (III)

Herewith, Part Three of Susan Bell's essay "Revisioning The Great Gatsby," which can be found in The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House, and is reprinted here courtest of Bell and Tin House.  Bell is the author of The Artful Edit.

Fitzgerald edited his way out of this clump once Perkins pointed it out to him. He broke up the thick block of data into smaller pieces he judiciously distributed throughout the text and enmeshed in the dialogue and drama. The improvement can be seen in the confrontation between Gatsby and Tom. In the manuscript, this scene carried no reference to Gatsby’s Oxford claim or his army career; in the revised proof, Fitzgerald fully explains and seamlessly weaves the Oxford and army stories into the drama. The final version reads:

Gatsby’s foot beat a short restless tattoo and Tom eyed him suddenly.

“By the way, Mr. Gatsby, I understand you’re an Oxford man.”

“Not exactly.”

“Oh, yes, I understand you went to Oxford.”

“Yes—I went there.”

A pause. Then Tom’s voice, incredulous and insulting:

“You must have gone there about the time Biloxi [a poseur who’d falsely claimed he’d gone to Yale] went to New Haven.”

Another pause. A waiter knocked and came in with crushed mint and ice, but the silence was unbroken by his “thank you” and the soft closing of the door. This tremendous detail was to be cleared up at last.

“I told you I went there.”

“I heard you, but I’d like to know when.”

“It was in nineteen-nineteen. I only stayed five months. That’s why I can’t really call myself an Oxford man.”

Tom glanced around to see if we mirrored his unbelief. But we were all looking at Gatsby.

“It was an opportunity they gave to some of the officers after the Armistice,” he continued. “We could go to any of the universities in England or France.”

I wanted to get up and slap him on the back. I had one of those renewals of complete faith in him that I’d experienced before.

The editor had helped the writer reconceive the information as dramatic.

Fitzgerald obliged his editor with no hint of defensiveness or anger. The writer had gone very far on his own with Gatsby and was ready for the last editorial push—one he freely admitted he was incapable of envisioning alone. He wrote to Perkins, “Max, it amuses me when praise comes in on the ‘structure’ of the book—because it was you who fixed up the structure, not me. And don’t think I’m not grateful for all that sane and helpful advice about it.” In fact, it was Fitzgerald who did the fixing, but the writer needed his editor to point the way and was not embarrassed to say it.

It helped to have an editor as astute and courtly as Perkins and one who knew how to balance general commentary with specific suggestions. It was Perkins who pointed out the importance of the character-defining phrase “old sport,” when in a letter he wrote: “Couldn’t you add one or two characteristics like the use of that phrase ‘old sport’?” Fitzgerald had used the phrase only four times; now he ran with it. In the revised proof, Jay Gatsby says “old sport” incessantly and through it displays an absurd yet endearing self-consciousness. The phrase eventually becomes a spoil of war for Tom and Gatsby:

“That’s a great expression of yours, isn’t it?” said Tom sharply.

“What is?”

“All this ‘old sport’ business. Where’d you pick it up?”

And a few pages later, Tom shouts, “Don’t you call me ‘old sport’!” Fitzgerald, then, edited an ornamental detail so that even as it remained ornamental, it would matter. “Old Sport” had been a cute effect: now it was Gatsby’s weapon, armor, and Achilles’ heel in one.

(Essay concludes tomorrow.)

MUNRO WINS MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL

Another worthy intrusion - Alice Munro has won the Man Booker Internation Prize.

Judge Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer prize-winning American novelist, admitted that selecting a winner from the 14 longlisted authors – who are assessed on their bodies of work and the contribution they have made to "fiction on the world stage" – had been a challenge, but that Munro "just won us over".

"Her work is practically perfect. Any writer has to gawk when reading her because her work is very subtle and precise," said Smiley. "Her thoughtfulness about every subject is so concentrated."