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Tag Archives: publishers weekly

Always Apprentices

28 Saturday Dec 2013

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publishers weekly

From Publishers Weekly, Week of January 21, 2013

Always Apprentices: Twenty-Two Conversations Between Writers for the Believer Magazine

Edited by Vendela Vida, Sheila Heti and Ross Simonini

This enthralling collection contains 22 conversations between novelists, memoirists, poets, journalists, screenwriters, and combinations thereof about the craft of writing and the rewards (and torments) that it offers. The interviews, previously published in the Believer, tend to focus on idiosyncratic processes and each author’s career trajectory, as well as on how authors understand their work and its relationship to the world. The “conversations” here are more like interviews, with younger authors asking questions of established figures, including Mary Gaitskill, Michael Ondaatje, Victor LaValle, Pankaj Mishra, and Joan Didion. The book’s pieces de resistance include a muted exchange between Bret Easton Ellis and Don DeLillo about their respective careers, a high-minded discussion between Aleksander Hemon and Colum McCann on the ethics of novel writing, and a dialogue between Alain Mabanckou and Dany Laferriere on the emergence in literature of African and Caribbean voices. From the troubled state of literature and today’s narrowly commercial publishing world to the exasperation of working with Hollywood, the interviews both inspire and charm with their blend of urgency and irony.

always apprentices

Maya’s Notebook

27 Wednesday Nov 2013

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isabel allende, publishers weekly

I’m a big fan of Isabel Allende, and I think her latest offering sounds very interesting, despite the review.

Maya’s Notebook

by Isabel Allende

From Publishers Weekly, week of February 4, 2013

Allende (The House of the Spirits) moves away from her usual magical realist historical fiction into a contemporary setting, and the result is a chaotic hodge-podge. The story, told through 19-year-old Maya Vidal’s journals, alternates between Maya’s dismal past and uncertain present, which finds her in hiding on an isolated island off Chile’s coast, where her grandmother, Nidia, has taken her. Maya’s diary relates a journey into self-destruction that begins, after her beloved step-grandfather Popi’s death, with dangerous forays into sex, drugs, and delinquency, but ends up in a darkly cartoonish crime caper, as she becomes involved with gangsters in Las Vegas. Maya describes her present surroundings, meanwhile, with a bland detachment that would be more believable coming from an anthropologist than a teenager. Allende’s trademark passion for Chile is as strong as ever, and her clever writing lends buoyancy to the narrative’s deadweight, but this novel is unlikely to entrance fans old or new.

Image from amazon.ca

Destiny, Rewritten

23 Wednesday Oct 2013

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kathryn fitzmaurice, publishers weekly

Destiny, Rewritten

by Kathryn Fitzmaurice

From Publishers Weekly, week of February 4, 2013

Fitzmaurice (A Diamond in the Desert) explores fate and destiny with a light yet thoughtful touch in this novel about sixth-grader Emily, named by her free-spirit mother after Emily Dickinson. Emily’s mother is sure that her daughter’s destiny is tied to the famous writer’s and that she will be a great poet (she even commemorates the important moments of Emily’s life in a first edition of Dickinson’s poetry). Emily, however, thrives on predictability and order, and has no feel for poetry – though she is obsessed with romantic novels’ happy endings, since she is searching for one: finding her unknown father, whose identity her mother has never disclosed. Just as Emily learns his name is hidden in the Dickinson book, it is accidentally taken and Emily sets out to find it, challenging her mother’s belief that things should “unfold in their natural course.” Aptly set amid the hippie ambiance of Berkeley, Calif., and peopled by offbeat, but believable characters, Fitzmaurice’s story deftly mingles Dickinson, Danielle Steel, a budding crush, and protesting tree sitters while maintaining suspense that leads to a satisfying ending. Ages 9-12.

Green Notebook, Winter Road

21 Sunday Jul 2013

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books, jane cooper, publishers weekly

Came across this book review on Publishers Weekly. Great title. And I’m intrigued by the quote:

It seems I am on the edge

of discovering the green notebook containing all the poems of my life

I mean the ones I never wrote.

I will definitely have to look for this at the library or at my local bookstore. And if their of those efforts fail, amazon.com has it.

Image from amazon.com

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather

06 Monday May 2013

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publishers weekly, willa cather

I love reading books of letters. But this one makes me uneasy; Ms Cather left strict instructions to never publish her correspondence and here they are, all 3,000 of them, apparently. Are we fortunate as the article suggests, or merely curious and anxious to publish every last scrap we can find of a famous person’s bibliography? Is Ms Cather fuming from the grave? Perhaps.

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather

Edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout

From Publishers Weekly, week of February 4, 2013

By all rights, this excellent volume of Willa Cather’s letters should not be: in her will, the celebrated American writer specified that none of her correspondence was to be published, ever. Fortunately for general readers and scholars alike, that demand has not been heeded. The letters in this collection have been gathered from the 3,000 that survive in nearly 75 archives across the country. This prodigious editorial feat gives readers a glimpse for the first time into the life and mind of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of O Pioneers! Beginning with a witty missive written in 1888 when she was only 14, the volume continues through her early years as a successful magazine editor for McLure’s, into the 1910s and ’20s, when she experienced success as a novelist, all the way through to her death in 1947. In addition to exchanges with her family and close friends, the volume contains correspondence with significant literary and artistic figures of the time, including Alfred Knopf, Robert Frost, Yehudi Menuhin, and Thornton Wilder. The editors, meanwhile, have copiously annotated the volume, adding biographical details to flesh out ellipses, as well as providing a useful directory of Cather’s correspondents. Throughout, Cather emerges as a humorous, profound, and difficult personality whose cosmopolitan life and commitment to crafting a successful public persona should challenge misconceptions.

from amazon.ca

Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets

29 Monday Apr 2013

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evan roskos, publishers weekly

From Publishers Weekly, week of February 4, 2013

Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets

Evan Roskos

This sensitive first novel portrays the struggle of 16-year-old James Whit-man to overcome anxiety and depression. James blames himself for his older sister’s expulsion from their home and estrangement from their bullying parents. Roskos effectively sketches James as a boy who is far more comfortable inside his own head than in connecting with others (case in point, he hugs trees to make himself feel better and seeks advice from Dr. Bird, an imaginary pigeon therapist). Throughout, James takes comfort in the poetry of Walt Whitman, often co-opting the writer’s literary techniques in his narration (“I sound my morning yawp! I blast out my inner glow at the sunshine to try to shout it down. To have it lift me up. For someone, somewhere, to see me”). Friendships old and new, along with James’s growing interest in his own poetry and photography, help him gain confidence and understanding, especially as he discovers unsettling secrets about his sister. Bravely facing real sorrow, James confronts his problems with grace and courage. Ages 14-up.

Image from amazon.ca.

The Matchbox Diary

01 Monday Apr 2013

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From Publisher’s Weekly, week of December 24, 2012.

The Matchbox Diary

by Paul Fleischman, illus. by Bagram Ibatoulline

If you can’t read or write, how do you remember the important moments of your life? An elderly man explains to his great-granddaughter that he created a diary of objects, each saved in a matchbox. One matchbox holds an olive pit from his native Italy, given to him by his mother to suck on when the family has no food. A fish bone reminds him of grueling work in canneries (“always a man watching to make sure we weren’t slowing down”). But there are also matchboxes that hold a ticket to a baseball game, as well as pieces of coal and moveable type that represent how the man finally achieved literacy and a comfortable life. Fleischman’s voice for the girl’s great-grandfather is instantly engrossing, free of self-pity and resonant with resilience and gratitude. Ibatoulline, who previously worked with Fleischman on The Animal Hedge, is in equally fine form: his characters’ emotionally vivid faces speak of hard lives and fervent dreams, and his sepia-toned scenes never lapse into sentimentality. A powerful introduction to the American immigrant story, and fine inspiration for a classroom project. Ages 6-10.

Image from Amazon.ca.

Too Much Information

18 Monday Mar 2013

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publishers weekly, writing

Article from Publishers Weekly, week of Oct 29, 2012

Too Much Information

An author contemplates the role of research and when too much is just too much

by Andrew Rosenheim

An old adage says the role of literature is to delight and to instruct, but contemporary novels often seem more intent on instruction than pleasure. It’s a confusion of veracity with authenticity, a reluctance to let a novelist’s research stay where it belongs – in the background of the book, if it’s in the book at all.

Of course American fiction has always had a keen eye for detail, often intellectually demanding – think of Saul Bellow’s eponymous hero Herzog writing imaginary letters to Spinoza, or John Updike’s Reverend Marshfield in A Month of Sundays, whose sermons split theological hairs with the likes of Karl Barth and Paul Tillich. But it’s not intellectualism that’s the problem; it’s the recent tendency of writers to succumb to information overload.

It’s hard to say where the rot set in. Some point as far back as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, a fantastic compendium of erudition, full of parabolic trajectories and Poisson Distributions, which has even spawned two editions of A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion. But it doesn’t seem fair to blame Pynchon’s masterpiece for a host of imitators, who seem to have soaked up their mentor’s capacity for recondite explanations without any of his flair for language – or for memorable characters.

I blame Google instead, and its capacity for unearthing information in a nanosecond where once it would take days, if not months. Sebastian Faulks, author of the classic WWI novel Birdsong, has described how, when writing the novel, he would spend the morning deep in an archive of first-person accounts of life in the trenches, then hotfoot it home to write down what this had triggered in his imagination. The research was a springboard, not an end in itself.

Today there’s no need to leave your study, when Google can reply to a query such as “tunnels and World War One” with 9.51 million hits. And the problems come when authors fall in love with the ease of this research and put the fruits of this amour, largely undigested, straight onto the page. This loses sight of a simple point: you don’t teach people how to graft an apple sapling; you make them think they know instead.

Writers used to understand this, realizing that their priority was the emotional understanding they instilled in readers, not the points they added to their IQ. Take Hemingway: he loved to have his heroes doing things – from lighting a camp fire to catching a marlin – but actual technical detail is thin on the ground. It’s a rhetorical trick exemplified by the famous opening of To Have and Have Not: “You know how it is there early in the morning in Havana with the bums still asleep against the walls of the buildings; before even the ice wagons come by with ice for the bars?”

Even those who’ve never got closer to Cuba than a Cubano sandwich read this and think, of course I do. But today a writer would give us the number of sleeping bums, the names of the streets, and the cubic capacity of the ice wagons.

The trend is even worse in historical fiction. Granted, obvious errors of fact shatter the illusion of reality that historical novels depend upon; as the novelist Ian McEwan says, there’s always someone ready to point out that you’ve put the wrong beret on somebody’s head on the beaches of Dunkirk. But the critical difference is between wanting to get the historical details right, and having too many details, right or not. The English spy writer Alan Judd remarks of Casino Royale, “Bond never simply lights a cigarette: he lights a Morland with the triple gold band.” The casual dropping of the brand name tells us something – both about Bond’s taste for the high life, and the author’s evocation of the period. But note that Fleming doesn’t tell us what brand anyone else is smoking.

The new fad for historical detail has become literature’s equivalent of the Method in acting. For books, however, this immersion rarely works because it gets in the way of what it’s trying to promote – a feeling of authenticity. The authenticity of a novel is inherently bogus – it’s not called fiction for nothing – and the successful novelist understands that, unless transformed, reality is paradoxically less than credible in fiction. When we read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall we don’t feel we’re in Tudor London because she’s put the right kind of buttons on a servant’s coat, but because we are so gripped by her story. The trend for what critic James Wood has scathingly labeled “the properly stamped sociological receipt” of imparted information is a new one, and not to be commended. In fiction, less isn’t always more, but more is always too much.

Literary Rogues: A Scandalous History of Wayward Authors

18 Monday Feb 2013

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publishers weekly, writers

Review from Publishers Weekly, week of November 5, 2012

Literary Rogues: A Scandalous History of Wayward Authors

by Andrew Shaffer

In this rollicking romp through a gallery of writers whose genius came with a price (alcoholism, drug addiction, depression, and other troubles), Shaffer (Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love) offers a terrific blend of literary history, biography, and witty commentary. With a breezy style full of pithy asides, Shaffer profiles a wide range of writers including the Marquis de Sade, Samuel Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Dorothy Parker, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Wurtzel, and James Frey, exposing both the exuberant and the dark sides of their notorious lives. Shaffer may playfully acknowledge an early romanticized admiration for his rock star writers and their decadent lifestyles, but he does, emphatically, not the grim aspects of their lives (early death, debilitating depression, crippling drug and alcohol dependency, dysfunctional relationships). The protagonists may have been self-destructive, but their exploits are always wildly entertaining, and their output is all the more miraculous for what they survived. As Shaffer observes, that these writers achieved anything in their addled states is remarkable.

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