Month: May 2005
I quite enjoyed Chris Lehman’s essay over at Maudnewton.com. The essay was originally commissioned by the NY Times, but was never published, until today. It begins thus:
Superlatives are an unofficial American birthright. Bestness, like bigness, is the turbo-charged engine propelling not just the American advertising world, but the literary one. Almost since there has been a self-conscious American literary culture, it has been busily investing itself with outsize claims for its stature, a reflex that feels very much of a piece with the foundational hubris of conquering an inhabited continent and proclaiming it, and all the new Anglo arrivistes governing it, a “New World.”
Hence an annual ritual, as reassuring in its own way as the return of the swallows to Capistrano: Houghton-Mifflin issues collections of writing that a stable of star subeditors hired for the occasion deems the best in its field.
Lehman looks at the Best Of franchise, including Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Best American Essays, and I found his criticism, particularly of this year’s edition of BASS to be fair and well-grounded.
The Gangster We Are All Looking For is poetry stretched long to tell a tale of immigration, heartache, and a touch of dysfunction,” Halaby writes. “Narrated by a young Vietnamese girl working herself into American culture, living in San Diego, this is the story of a family coming to grips with its past and present. Le thi diem thuy’s language is graceful, lyrical, and honest, (especially toward the second half of this short book) and you are left with a picture of a family, perhaps what is now a typical California family.”
Laila Halaby is the author of the novel West of the Jordan, which won the PEN Beyond Margins Award and a silver medal for literary fiction from Foreword Magazine.
Over at Backstory, Roxana Robinson, whose latest book is the short story collection A Perfect Stranger, shares the process of writing her short stories.
There’s a certain convention that holds in this country, concerning fiction writers. By its terms, they’re more or less expected to write short stories while they’re learning their craft, and then, later, they’re expected to write novels when they’ve become accomplished. Underlying this convention is the premise that the short story is the easier form of the two, and one suitable only for beginners.
In fact, I’d argue that the short story form is the much more demanding of the two.
In the essay, Robinson talks specifically about her story “The Face Lift,” which was published in The Atlantic in 2000.
Writer and blogger Michael Standaert’s investigative book on the Left Behind series will be released by Soft Skull Press in the fall, PW reports.
“The Left Behind books are functioning not just like a Christian John Grisham but as a highly organized effective tool for evangelizing and generating a great deal of money to support a network of organizations that are doing a lot of things the booksellers wouldn’t like,” says Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash. “We want to be able to let independent bookstores know what is going on behind these books that they’re selling.”
Asked whether the booksellers who stock the book aren’t already aware of, and have come to terms with, the contents of the book, Nash says that it will sway others with new facts about LaHaye, such as his connections to Jerry Falwell as well as with an organization to build a third temple at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
The book is called Skipping Toward Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Novels and the LaHaye Empire.
As TEV reported late yesterday, Andrew Sean Greer has just won the Young Lions Award, awarded by the New York Public Library to an emerging author under the age of 35. Greer won for his wonderful book, The Confessions of Max Tivoli. The finalists were Marc Bojanowski for The Dog Fighter, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum for Madeleine Is Sleeping, Stephen Elliott for Happy Baby, and Aaron Gwyn for Dog on the Cross.
Over at Beatrice, Diana Abu-Jaber recaps her recent book tour for the promotion of her food memoir, The Language of Baklava. (Part 2 of the recap is here.)
April 24th: I’m in Los Angeles and about to go to the LA Times Festival of Books, but first I must take an opportunity to squawk about how I’m always getting ripped on by the Arab critics. Today, the Washington Post ran a review of The Language of Baklava. So that’s great! But darn it all, they gave it to an apparently Arab reviewer who openly admits that she didn’t like my second novel, Crescent. (So why did she agree to review my new book?) Thus ensues the usual disparaging review in which I’m generally accused of inauthenticity. Depressing on too many levels to ennumerate. Ugh. I hope the Angelenos are nice to me today!
The review in question, by food writer Anissa Helou is available here, and while I can’t comment on the recipes (I can’t cook to save my life), it does seem that Helou is so focused on minute details that she’s missing the larger point of the memoir, which is really about the stories that are told around the meals.