So we leave town tomorrow and, after a brief stopover in the Bay Area to spend New Year’s Eve at my sister’s (and help her celebrate her birthday), we arrive in Portland by the weekend. If you have a book group or a writers’ group and wouldn’t mind an extra member, I’d love to join.
A few writers signed with Berkeley publisher Creative Books only to find out that their books had minuscule print runs, no marketing, and no promotion.
Tom Tomorrow riffs on the notion that Dean Can’t Win. See the cartoon here.
I didn’t much care for some of what’s been written about 9/11 (no, not even by You Know Who’s story in the New Yorker), but “Good to Hear You” came as a refreshing surprise. Holiday Reinhorn’s opening paragraph pulled me in and I left my dinner to burn while I finished reading the essay.
On the morning two commercial airliners crash into the Twin Towers of The World Trade Center in New York City, my father wakes up in his bed in Memphis, Tennessee. Unaware of the disaster now in progress, he turns on the shower in the adjoining bathroom to awaken Laurie, his second wife who is still asleep, then shuffles into the kitchen to turn on the coffee machine and feed the cat. In the kitchen alone, my father lights his first cigarette and watches the cat, a skinny stray he found hiding in the barbecue recently, systematically wolf her food. It looks more like backwards vomiting than eating, he thinks, but my father watches the meatballs he has prepared for Littleslip (whom he also calls Lovebird sometimes, or Ki Ki) disappear with rapt appreciation. If he could, my father imagines, he would live with thousands of cats–thousands, if Laurie wasn’t allergic, but it is nice enough of her to even put up with this one, he reminds himself. Laurie (and it almost brings tears to his eyes to think of it) is a very generous young person.
Just after 9:30, Laurie appears in the kitchen in her business suit and the two leave their house at 7095 Ivy Leaf Circle. They step over the newspaper lying on the doormat and get into my father’s 1989 Honda two-door coupe. My father is behind the wheel in Bermuda shorts, T-shirt and Italian dress shoes. Laurie is beside him with her open briefcase in her lap, paging through computer forms that will become vitally necessary to her life in the hours ahead.
LCGR continues to impress me with the kind of stories its editors publish. It’ll be at the top of my list of subscription renewals this year.
The Guardian‘s Justine Jordan has an article about the year ahead in fiction. It seems that Hari Kunzru will have a new novel coming out in the Spring:
Impressionist author and scourge of the Mail on Sunday Hari Kunzru adopts a global canvas for Transmission (Hamish Hamilton, May), in which an Indian man who forsakes Bombay for an IT job in Washington, only to get fired, unleashes a computer virus on the world in revenge. The novel roams through Bollywood, London and the Scottish Highlands as well as cyberspace.
But that’s just the beginning. There’s plenty more to expect in 2004, including new books by Orhan Pamuk, Haruki Murakami, VS Naipaul, etc. It’s kind of fun to compare the Guardian‘s selections with these, from the Scotsman.
As the year draws to a close, everyone’s offering their notable books of the year. In honor of the upcoming move to Portland, here is a list of the top ten Northwest books. It’s unclear whether they mean best, or best-selling, and they mix fiction and non-fiction pell-mell. Then there’s this list of the forty notable books of the year. I liked that they included three collections of short stories (ZZ Packer, Julie Orringer, Sherman Alexie). Or there’s also this rundown of books about Asia or by Asians. It lists one of my favorites this year, Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine, but misses Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, even though the novel is set in Afghanistan.