- Quakeland
- Published: Jul 08, 2008
Los Angeles residents: they really are different than you and me. If you've ever had to choose a surgeon to repair a botched rhinoplasty, and you settle on one because you did a visualization exercise in which one surgeon appeared as "light and the other man was a shadow" -- please take a vacation outside the Thirty Mile Zone for a little while.
- The Book Expo America Advance Review Copy Freebie Haul
- Published: Jun 17, 2008
So I spent Thursday, May 30 through Sunday, June 1, 2008 at a big ol' crazy trade show called the Book Expo America. This year, the BEA was held at the Los Angeles Convention Center, and in the very scant little bits of media attention the show received this year, the running theme has been: "Yawn."
- The Needles & Pens Twenty-Three Dollar Adventure
- Published: May 19, 2008
I decided to try something a little different this week. I'm dedicating this post to work put out by the smallest presses of all: individuals who publish their own writing by stapling it together on their kitchen tables. These people are of course also known as zinesters.
- Erick Lyle: On The Lower Frequencies
- Published: May 05, 2008
Most Bay Area residents will only ever encounter the underground world of the traveling punk in one way. When visiting San Francisco's Haight Street or Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue, you will likely step over at least one group of unwashed kids in black hoodies, usually with a dog, usually holding up a snarky cardboard sign requesting change for beer or a bus ticket.
- Mikita Brottman: The Solitary Vice
- Published: Mar 25, 2008
Are you miserable when stuck somewhere, like on a train or an airplane, without a book? Does the idea that our nation is full of non-readers fill you with nameless dread? Do you have obsessive habits that dictate how you select and care for your reading material?
- Laura Flynn: Swallow the Ocean
- Published: Mar 10, 2008
There is a sub-genre of memoir that I never really get tired of. And judging by the publishing trends of the last decade or so, I must not be alone. It's not the addiction autobiography -- those get repetitive and boring. It's the "my childhood with crazy parents" narrative that gets me every time.
- Charles Baxter: The Soul Thief
- Published: Mar 01, 2008
In the current issue of the Believer magazine, there's an essay called "The Chaos Machine," co-written by author Charles Baxter and his son Daniel. The elder Baxter narrates a story about picking his son up from college and the car trip that followed. Daniel provides footnotes to his dad's reportage, adding refutations, clarifications, corrections. In the center of this sweet and normal-sounding story is a very strange little anecdote.
- Samantha Hunt: The Invention of Everything Else
- Published: Feb 17, 2008
Nikola Tesla is best remembered for inventing engines that produced alternating current (AC) electricity. AC, developed by Tesla and sold by his partner George Westinghouse, was a superior alternative to Thomas Edison's direct current (DC). Edison, fearful that the comptetition would drive him out of business, staged a number of grisly experiments to "prove" that AC current was too dangerous for everyday use. Dogs, cats, horses, and eventually, heartbreakingly, a condemned rogue elephant named Topsy were all forced to stand on an electrified plate and "Westinghoused" to death. The sadistic PR campaign couldn't stop a better technology, however, and eventually AC current became the standard.
- Nicola Barker: Darkmans
- Published: Jan 23, 2008
A useful new word (and concept) I learned from the internet is "griefing." Normally used to decribe a video game opponent who doesn't play fair, a real-world griefer is someone who plays nasty tricks on other people, to the point of ruin, humiliation, or death, in the guise of "humor." Recent noteworthy examples include a suburban mom who allegedly helped several teenagers invent a fake online persona they used to taunt a neighbor girl until she committed suicide. Then there's the person or persons known as the Filipino Monkey, who nearly started World War 3 by playing a little radio-prank on an American warship in the Straits of Hormuz. Ha ha.
- The National Books Critics Circle Does San Francisco
- Published: Jan 08, 2008
I was talking to an editor of a major literary quarterly at a party recently. She was getting annoyed, she said, at the number of times she has been asked to publicly comment on the "death" of the American short story and give quotes for newspaper articles on why "nobody" reads short stories anymore. She spends sixty hours a week thinking about the American short story, she said. Why would they ask HER why "nobody" cares about the very thing she has made her career? How would she know?
- 32nd Annual Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses
- Published: Dec 22, 2007
In the land of American Idol and endless "favorite 100 kid stars of the 80's" countdowns on VH1, there's nothing that entertains better than a) contests, and b) best-of lists, compiled for our covenience. Both lend themselves well to the real fun, which is betting on who the chosen ones will be, and arguing for favorites who were unfairly passed over. The literary world doesn't shy away from this. Pick up any issue of Poets and Writers magazine and the listings of contest finalists wlll be the thickest part of the whole publication. The Nobel, Booker, and National Book Award finalists are endlessly discussed. And there's a whole host of annual best-of publications that come out every year, some of them so highly specific as to be redundant. The Best American series publishes annual books of sports writing, science writing, essays, and magazine writing. If you wrote an essay about, say, the physics of sports, and it was published in a magazine, which book would they put you in? All four?
- Clane Hayward: The Hypocrisy Of Disco
- Published: Nov 13, 2007
Whether it's a rainy redwood forest, a red-clay desert, or a shiny subdivision outside of Las Vegas, the American West is the place you go in order to become someone else. A new name, a new life. Clane Hayward's parents did this. They ended up in the Upper Haight in the year Clane was born, during the Summer Of Love, in search of a new kind of world. At the opening of Hayward's beautiful and heartbreaking memoir of her childhood, The Hypocrisy of Disco, she is eleven. She is living with her mother H'lane and two of her younger siblings, Haud and Ki, in a tumble-down house on the Russian River. Hayward writes from a child's perspective, partly misunderstanding and partly ultra-perceptive, angry and rebellious but wanting to be cared for and loved more than anything. Her descriptions of the small joys of a wild childhood are achingly beautiful.
- After the (Lit)Quake 2007
- Published: Oct 20, 2007
So think about the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival for a minute. Five stages, fifty-odd performers, half a million spectators, great fun had by all. Now imagine that, instead of five stages, there were thirty-five. And instead of fifty-odd performers, there were three hundred. Instead of having to choose between five acts performing simultaneously, you had to choose between twelve. And imagine if each of those acts -- no matter if it was Hazel Dickens or Bill Callahan or Jeff Tweedy or John Doe -- was allowed to perform one, single, solitary song, no more than five minutes in length. THEN you'll start to get a sense of how head-spinningly jampacked Litquake was this year. Battling a cold that never quite took hold yet never quite went away, I valiantly attended as many Litquake events as humanly possible, all for the benefit of you, dear readers. I'll tell you as much as I remember.
- Litquake 2007: Your Guide to SF's Literary Festival
- Published: Oct 06, 2007
Litquake. Oh, Litquake! One of my favorite weeks of the whole entire year and becoming more favorite each time. Who cares what fun-haters like Ted Rall say about literary festivals? I for one, would pay good money to hang out with crowd-surfing letterpress compositors.
- Millard Kaufman: Bowl of Cherries
- Published: Sep 24, 2007
I can hear the detractors rolling their eyes already: leave it to the cutesy tongue-in-cheekers at McSweeney's to publish a debut novel by a 90-year-old man. You can put it on the shelf next to the book by Amy Fusselman that won a contest allegedly looking for a book about "electrical engineering on boats," The novel Lemon which had 10,000 unique hand-drawn front covers, and the issue of the quarterly designed to look like a pile of junk mail. Either this outside-the-box thing is terribly exciting or painfully precious, depending on how cynical you've become and how long it's been since your college graduation.
- Jim Shepard: Like You'd Understand, Anyway
- Published: Sep 17, 2007
Ask a writer who their favorite living writer is. There's a good chance they'll throw out the name Jim Shepard. (The other correct answers are Alice Munro and/or Charles Baxter.) If you're a regular New Yorker or Harper's reader you've probably encountered him. If you've attended an MFA program or a summer writer's conference, you may have taken a class from him. If you have had the good fortune to see him read, perhaps as an "opening act" for a more famous friend, you most likely roared with laughter, applauded loudly, and then lined up to buy his book, thinking, "why haven't I heard of this guy before?"
- Irvine Welsh: If you Liked School, You'll Love Work
- Published: Sep 04, 2007
Right off the bat, yes the title is brilliant: It both makes me laugh and makes me feel like a right ponce (because I DID love school! And I DO love work!). Welsh's breakout novel Trainspotting holds a dear place in my heart. The way Welsh used various levels of Scottish dialect for different characters, in places it was like a foreign language, forced you to slow down and feel the sound of the words in your mouth. Only Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange has done a better job of rendering the contents of a drugged-up young man's mind as vicious and beautiful poetry. Trainspotting, and the hit movie spawned from it, made Irvine Welsh rich and famous. He spends a lot of time here in the Bay Area: I once spied him at a party at the Bambuddha Lounge, where every time I glanced at him he was scribbling on a slip of paper -- signing autographs, he was -- for anyone who asked, all night long. If you're an Edinburgh Castle regular, you may have also seen him give a reading there, and if you're like me you may have just nodded and laughed at random intervals because ye didnae ken a feckin word but ye hud a grand oul piss-up ennywey, ha hoor sor.
- Daniel Johnston at Bimbo's
- Published: Aug 24, 2007
Probably the most commonly asked small-talk question on the shiny dance floor of the always-classy Bimbo's 365 Club Wednesday (August 22, 2007) night was, "Have you seen the movie?" The Devil And Daniel Johnston, the 2004 documentary, has done for Johnston's career what the "Pink Moon" Volkswagen ad did for Nick Drake. It turned him from a cult figure into a universally beloved one, it turned your secret favorite undiscovered genius into everyone's favorite undiscovered genius. Johnston's name used to be like the password that gained you access to the secret club. Either you knew the words to every song, or you'd never heard of him. Luckily for Daniel, he didn't die at age 24 like Nick Drake did. He is alive and (more or less) well, kept stable with medication, obese and gray and living with his parents in suburban Waller, Texas.
- Kiara Brinkman: Up High in the Trees
- Published: Aug 10, 2007
Sebastian Lane is 7 years old and everyone keeps asking him if he's okay. His mother used to ask, and now it's his sister Cass, his dad, his teacher Mrs. Lambert, constantly asking. When not asking, they're telling him that everything is going to be all right. It's supposed to seem comforting, maybe, but young Sebby doesn't seem to notice or care whether things are all right or not. He's a little kid, a strange one at that, and his mom is dead. She's been hit and killed by car. How could it possibly be helpful for any adult to ask him if he's okay?
- Austin Grossman: Soon I Will Be Invincible
- Published: Jul 23, 2007
A while ago, a friend introduced me to the concept of Mr. Exposition Man. Mr. Exposition man is a superhero with only one power -- the ability to summarize backstory at blinding speed. Mr. Exposition Man can appear at any time and take on the guise of any character: wherever there is a sloppily plotted film, comic book, or novel, wherever a bad guy has struck and the local officials are baffled and an author didn't feel like taking the time to set up the scene, someone will say, "Who would do such a thing?" At this signal, Mr. Exposition Man will step out of a shadowy corner, saying, "It all started back in 1987..."
- Bay Area Poetry Marathon
- Published: Jul 03, 2007
On a warm Saturday night in the Mission District, poetry is being celebrated. The LAB on 16th street hosted the second of four installments in husband-and-wife team Donna de la Perriere and Joseph Lease's Bay Area Poetry Marathon. Incredibly, not only was it NOT the only Saturday-night poetry game in town, it wasn't even the only poetry game in a five-block radius. Over at New College of California, on Valencia, a tribute to the late John Wieners was underway, celebrating the release of a newly-discovered journal, A Book of Prophecies. Readers over there included current San Francisco poet laurate Jack Hirschman, New College poetry instructor Micah Ballard, and San Francisco Art Institute professor Bill Berkson, among many others. Back at the LAB, de la Perriere and Lease both teach in the California College of the Arts creative writing program, and three of the readers (Camille Dungy, Brian Strang, and Paul Hoover) teach at San Francisco State University. This means the audience for poetry in the Mission that night was divided among no less than four MFA programs on two opposing axes: NCOC-SFAI at the Wieners tribute, CCA-SFSU at the Marathon. It's too bad. Both readings would have had double the audience, had they been on separate nights.
- Jack Pendarvis: Your Body Is Changing
- Published: Jun 30, 2007
During my college years I interned at various litmags, sorting through slush piles in search of gold. I must have read hundreds of stories, and skimmed several hundred more. One of the very few that affected me deeply was called "The Pipe." It involved a security guard and a paramedic, hired to watch over a pipe sticking out of the ground. Six feet beneath the pipe is a radio DJ, attempting to break some sort of record for being buried alive, a la David Blaine. The paramedic and guard are there in case the DJ rings his distress bell and wants to come up. But the bell never rings, and so the two men have plenty of time to get stoned and drunk, have sex with transsexual women in the back of the ambulance, trade insults, and attempt to poison each other. Things go so far off the deep end that you start to wonder, what if the DJ's distress bell isn't hooked up properly, and he's been ringing it all this time? Is there even a DJ buried down there at all? And if there is, wouldn't he be dead by now?
- Kaui Hart Hemmings: The Descendants
- Published: Jun 19, 2007
Joan Didion once wrote, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." I agree. Little kids love to hear violent fairy tales of children lost in the woods, to remind themselves just how safe and cozy in bed they are. It's a way to vicariously experience, and maybe somehow prevent, the most horrific aspects of human misfortune. That need doesn't go away with the onset of adulthood. Otherwise there wouldn't be such huge markets for books about murderers, deadly mountaineering accidents, or soul-crushing child abuse. None of those things happen in The Descendants, a first novel from local author Kaui Hart Hemmings. The tragedies are a bit more subtle and a lot more commonplace. And they even happen in the insulated world of old-money Hawaii, so protected from the kind of problems that most people have. The fact that tragedy strikes, even in this place, makes it all the more terrifying.
- David Markson: The Last Novel
- Published: May 29, 2007
I work in a bookstore. Not too long ago, a tiny, frail, elderly man was helped out of a cab and into the shop by two young men, who shuffled him up to the counter. "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM!" the guy yelled at me. I admitted that I didn't, and when he told me his name, I recognized it, but I've never read any of his work. He is someone highly regarded in certain literary circles, although he didn't make much money from it, nor has he achieved fame, despite more than half a century of exquisitely crafted literary output. He shouted a couple more questions at me ("I want to speak with the owner! The OWN-ER!") and his attendant shot me a sympathetic look. They took him to visit his books. After they left, I saw that he had taken all of his works (dusty and rarely purchased) from the low shelf where they were displayed, and moved them to eye-level, pointedly placing them next to and on top of some books by a far more famous, less talented, and long-dead contemporary.
- Susanna Moore: The Big Girls
- Published: May 08, 2007
"Being around women whose opinions don't count for anything makes you lazy," says Ike Bradshaw, a prison guard whose voice is one of the four that narrate Susanna Moore's newest novel. He's talking about the inmates, of course, the women of Sloatsburg Correctional Institution who taunt, yell, fight and flirt with him, day in and day out. The context is left a little ambiguous, though, so he could be referring to the wife who recently left him. He could also be talking about Louise Forrest, the prison psychiatrist who is also his sometime lover and the main protagonist of this dark tale. Moore's books straddle a line between the "popular" and the "literary," for want of better terms. (The best known of them, In The Cut, was made into a recent film starring Meg Ryan.) She deals in the pop-fiction crime universe of killers and victims, but comes at it from an angle that makes genre distinctions feel totally arbitrary.
- Willy Vlautin: The Motel Life
- Published: May 01, 2007
There's this short little book, written in the 1990s by a not-so-young-anymore young guy, narrated by a protagonist who's done a lot of hard living, who sort of wanders aimlessly but retains his sense of childlike wonder about the world and the things that are in it. It's an absolutely flawless piece of poetry, the kind of thing that makes me weep, actually weep, when no one is looking. The book begins with a car crash, the inevitability of which is rendered thusly: "My jaw ached. I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened. I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop for me even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside I knew we'd have an accident in the storm."
- Ann Cummins: Yellowcake
- Published: Apr 09, 2007
You read enough books and you get real familiar, real quick, with a few things. One of these is the pervasive habit of underestimating an audience's intelligence. Many authors seem to think that no plot point will be noticed, no emotional moment will make an impact, unless it is banged into the reader's head with a sledgehammer and then lit with a giant flashing neon sign. Thankfully, from the first time I ever read an Ann Cummins short story, I knew she was not one of those. That was "Red Ant House," it ran in a 2001 issue of McSweeney's, and I was immediately struck by the scrubbed raw, stark beauty of her prose. "Red Ant House" went on to appear in Best American Short Stories 2002, and lent its title to her first book, a story collection. Now Ann Cummins has followed it up with Yellowcake, a novel just as scrubbed raw and spare band beautiful as her shorter works, with nary a sledgehammer or neon sign in sight.
- Elif Shafak: The Bastard of Istanbul
- Published: Mar 27, 2007
If you're an NPR fan (which I'm betting you are, otherwise why are you reading this blog?), you may have already heard about Turkish author Elif Shafak and the firestorm surrounding her novel The Bastard of Istanbul. Like Nobel winner Orhan Pamuk and scores of other prominent Turkish authors, Shafak was charged under the now-infamous Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which states that it is a crime to insult "Turkishness." While recovering from childbirth in a hospital, she was acquitted in absentia. Not long after, her friend and colleague, the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was murdered by an ultranationalist.
- Anthony Siegel: All Will Be Revealed
- Published: Mar 20, 2007
New York City, 1896. A new century is about to dawn, and all sorts of newly invented machines are changing the rhythms of everyday life. The telephone, the telegraph, the typewriting machine (operated by a person called, naturally, a "typewriter"), and perhaps above all, the camera. Intrepid explorers were reporting back on wonders from the farthest reaches of the planet, bringing back bizarre animals mounted and stuffed, as well as tales of harrowing escapes. Robert Anthony Siegel chose a fascinating cultural moment in which to set his second novel, All Will Be Revealed. The book begins with an epigraph from Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida. Barthes noted that the early cameras were precision machines, "clocks for seeing." It's a perfect way to introduce the themes of this book: all the characters, in one way or another, are attempting to fix a moment in time, and stay in it, like a photograph, long after the moment has passed.
- Lost City Radio
- Published: Feb 28, 2007
I got a few odd sidelong glances from my fellow coffee shop patrons the other morning. But I couldn't blame them. I was, after all, hunched over a book and alternately biting my lip, putting a hand over my mouth, and even, in the final few pages, wiping stray tears from the corners of my eyes. I am not usually such an emotionally demonstrative reader, but then again, not every novel is Daniel Alarcón's Lost City Radio, a book so insanely good that I've been forcing it on everyone I know.
- Sarah Walker: Really, You've Done Enough
- Published: Dec 11, 2006
Sarah Walker is a sketch-comedy actress, half of a performing duo called Walker and Cantrell. She is currently a writer for The Daily Show, and has worked for both David Letterman AND Conan O'Brien. (She has thus hit the trifecta of popular nightly TV shows that are actually good. Way to go Sarah!) Walker kicks off the TOW Books imprint with a perfect holiday read: Really, You've Done Enough: A Parent's Guide to Stop Parenting Their Adult Child Who Still Needs Their Money But Not Their Advice. In the introduction, Walker notes that she wanted to title the book You Can Stop F@#king Me Up Now. It purports to be a self-help book -- a guide to teach parents how to back off and stop "helicoptering" over their almost-30-year-old offspring. But it quickly becomes way weirder than that.
