If I ever inaugurate an unintentionally dirty-sounding e-review series called “Straight to the author’s inbox,” the first one will be to James Collins, and it will read, “Hey James, how’s it going? LOVED THE FIRST HALF OF YOUR NOVEL! xo talk soon L.” (Note to all the publications who’ve cut their book reviews of late: I will provide these under your institutional umbrella for a reasonable fee.) Because while Beginner’s Greek contains some of the most devastating, vivid characterizations (and character assassinations) I’ve read in the past few years, its lovely prose is marred by the fact that the central characters, Holly and Peter–who meet on a flight, lose contact, and spend the next few years (and remainder of the novel) seeking the lost soulmate–are, compared to the surrounding cast, relatively anodyne constructions. While a bullying husband speculates about his ex-wife, visualizing the clotted hairbrush left out for guests that sums up her pitiable circumstances, Peter chases a veritable ghost, a lovely cipher with whom everyone is immediately enchanted, although all we know about Holly is that when Peter met her, she was reading The Magic Mountain. (”She’s a dead ringer for Garbo. She always beats me at chess. She’s first on every punchline. Her drink is Absolut.”) One of the things I love about Larry McMurtry is that he’s one of the few male writers who can portray difficult, irritating women whom men still manage to like. Collins crushes the women in his novel admirably, but his satire can’t hold up against someone who only gives other people crushes. James: EVERYONE is worthy of crushing. Leave the bewitching, blank siren for Roth. He’s probably trademarked her by now, anyway.
Eat, Pray, Love
A sad truth for those of you out there seeking greater ones: Nothing is more boring than your epiphanies. (Even worse, sojourners–the more particular they are to you, the more they sound exactly like everyone else’s.) Such is the problem with Elizabeth Gilbert’s journey through the particulars of her digestive, spiritual and moral humors–located, for your corporeal information, in the regions of Italy, India and Indonesia, respectively. It’s a bit of a punt to say the book is self-aggrandizing–how could a book focused on one’s spiritual well-being not be?–but it’s the grand the Richard Bachian strokes that provoke the reader beyond speech: “Simply put, I got pulled through the wormhole of the Absolute, and in that rush I suddenly understood the workings of the universe completely.” (Simply put.) However, we’re a girl! Fish-in-barrel elements aside, of course we loved that someone would eat pasta, meditate and tool around Indonesia for a year to get over a broken heart. There’s a lot to be said for pasta in general. P.S. we leave the 16th.
Never Let Me Go
If all butlers from England sound robotic and all English clones sound like butlers, does Kazuo Ishiguro need to stop giving characters affects flatter than a freshly ironed newspaper? These and other points of information plagued me upon my “completion” — you’ll get it — of the author’s sixth novel, wherein a prep-school love triangle worthy of a great piece of teen chick-lit is inexplicably ruined by the fact that the characters all have to give up their organs afterwards. Much has been made of this great “secret” — and, oops, spoiler alert and all — but it’s no more a secret than the fact that, if a girl tells you her boyfriend thinks you’re a slut, it’s a sure bet he has a huge crush on you. HUGE, Kathy, HUGE. Even a butler could see it.
The Furies
It’s hard to know how to treat the work of Fernanda Eberstadt, whose gusty prose leaves the reader staggering back and forth like a pilgrim in a very high wind. The setting is Manhattan, the parties Gwen, a high-powered Russophile aiding in the democratization of the former USSR, and Gideon, an earthy puppeteer with a sanctimonious faith both in social activisim and Shabbos. The lovers crash, procreate, clash, and spin apart, their once-hot polarities suddenly reversed. Though the prose is more high-spirited — and high Mandarin — than the stuff of Diane Johnson or Louis Begley, the novel leaves the reader with the same feeling of being plunged into a dinner party of international sophisticates — an itchy mix of alienation and admiration. (The author herself? New Yorker and Vogue clips — check. Oxford-educated? Check. Lives in the French Pyrenees? Mais oui!) It’s all as cut-glass and sparkling as an inch-thick goblet — and it still leaves the reader wanting a drink.
The Position
Meg Wolitzer gets no respect, and we have no clue why*. Maybe it’s because her novels are…clever? …Funny? ….Delightful? The Wife
* Does she really get no respect or did someone just talk smack about her to us once? Well, it matters not — NO ONE MAY SPEAK ILL OF THE WOLITZER. Didn’t she date David Letterman and write for the much lamented New York Woman magazine? Hmmm, that was Merrill Markoe for that first one, there. Either way, respect.
The Interruption of Everything
One of our first jobs as an editorial assistant at the Book of the Month Club was to write flap copy for a reprint of Terry McMillan’s Mama
I’m Not The New Me
“If you’re a female and over 125 pounds, then you can have a fat girl story.” Lawd, ain’t that the truth. We’ve been terribly slow at getting Wendy McClure’s — aka Poundy’s — novel up here, mainly because we’re fat and lazy, or, at least, could find ten or twelve folks who’d tell you so. As you can guess by the title, McClure’s memoir is not a “Not only did I get thin, I got a book deal” memoir, but a meta-critique of the genre, an explosion of it, if you will. It’s also an explosion of the blogger-cum-memoir genre, since the book HAS stuff from the website but also talks about the process of BUILDING the website, so that if you look to your left for even a second, you might find that your ratty IKEA couch has been sucked into a black hole along with a cat and half the sandwich you were eating. (Wendy has been updating her blog with her book tour, too — this web stuff will BLOW YOUR MIND!!!!!) We realize we’re making it sound horrifying. It’s not; the book is FABULOUS. “We know how it happened,” McClure writes. “We get the ‘ate too much’ part. Now tell us the rest.” *
* Some of the rest includes the part about the boyfriend who steals the size-20 Lane Bryant Venezia bootcut jeans which turn out to look okay on him, which we know is on the website, but we can’t find it. Also these. You still have to buy the book, though.
A Changed Man
In 1998, Francine Prose wrote an article for Harper’s reflecting on the massive inferiority of “domestic” women’s fiction entitled Scent of a Woman’s Ink. We have held it against her ever since, to the extent that we a) never read any of her fiction and b) as a student, smirked at her from the back row as she guest-lectured (as we have since, sadly, been smirked upon ourselves, though at far less illustrious institutions and only because we are boring). In any case, we have since been forced to reflect on our own massive inanity, as A Changed Man is easily one of the most delightful novels of the past year. As Mel Brooks proved long ago, for sheer entertainment, you CANNOT beat a Nazi — or skinhead, in this case, especially if he is under the wing of a great Jewish humanitarian, living in the spare room of a sex-starved single mother of two, and allergic to nuts.
Misfortune
It’s unfortunate that a book centered on a hermaphrodite should also peter out halfway through, but that’s the case with the debut novel of Wesley Stace, a.k.a. musician John Wesley Harding, possessor of one of the most beautiful web sites in recent memory. A kind of Victorian Middlesex
* This is one of the reviews we did while inhaling way too many fumes from a very expensive hair gel, or something. Read the corrections here.
To the Power of Three
We have a problem with Laura Lippman. A few problems, in fact, the first of which is that NONE OF HER BOOKS HAS BEEN MADE INTO A MOVIE YET. C’mon, Hollywood: Teens, Murder, Mad Writing Skillz*. Second on our list of complaints is the title, which we could never have thought of and which, for a book about three teen girls and a mysterious shooting, IS THE BEST TITLE OF ALL TIME. Thirdly, we would like to object to this. Stasio, just because a book is longer than 180 pages does not make it “boring”. That is all.
* The fact that we have seen many a Lindsay Lohan movie with the author herself should not be taken as a vote of confidence for teen movies, mean girls, or Lindsay Lohan, but only the act of giving Laura Lippman more money in general. Let us just add that that goes double for Lindsay Lohan.
Citizen Girl
It’s not clear why Random House threw such a big hissy fit over publishing this novel. (Is it possible that publishing execs, a bit cash-strapped for nannies, felt this novel’s outing of rampant Xerox-and-memo abuse against lowly staffers hit a little too close to home?) The authors’ depiction of your average underutilized college grad’s first years out — first in a hemp-ish feminist nonprofit, then in a O-type startup that degenerates into a porn site — is un petit peu over-le-top, but that was the charm of Nanny Diaries, too. Like a teenage girl with her first tube of Maybelline, the authors color wildly — but charmingly — outside the lines. * **
* The REAL credibility problem with CG’S heroine is she’s a size 4 who “could be a model” who’s main concern with appearing in a bikini is her self-respect, not her cellulite. Let’s keep our character further than one bad hat away from Carrie Bradshaw, people.
** Unrelated: Why is one cover blue, one cover red? Can’t we leave that shit to Dave Eggers?
Aloft
One day, someone will discover why Chang-Rae Lee’s psyche is tuned exclusively to the “I’m pushing 50 and my family hates me even though I tried to be a good father except I never really talked to my kids and all” channel (is it all the golf?), but until then, luxuriate in the densely crafted and crotchety person of Jerry Battle, whose internal stream of irritation keeps the novel’s melodramatic plot from, shall we say, (No.– Ed) going into a tailspin.*
* On a personal note, we would like to thank Mr. Lee for making moving back in with your folks — kids in all — and then putting in a pool fashionable again. The “Battle” was a little obvious, but that pool’s metaphorical significance hit us like twenty-ton bag of fish (Stop. — Ed) at the end — not easy in the era of The Swimmer and all. Salud.
Point Of No Return 
Have you been looking for a book that combines an anthropological examination of a small New England town with the vaguaries of lost rich-girl love with a desperate, almost frantic crisis revolving around a promotion at a bank? Have you ever suspected that such a book could be the best book in the world, with a heart-stopping last line that rivals Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider closing (”Now, there would be time for everything”) with its simultaneous blast of redemption and cruel irony? Well, have you? Look no further.
The Easter Parade 
There are only a few characters in all of Richard Yates’ fiction: the tippling mother with the lipstick edging out around the lines of her mouth; the weak, sensitive boy who is a constant trial (most of all to himself); the brutal alpha male who preys upon a former beauty; the women whose love affairs spin them into orbits ranging farther and farther from happiness. The worst thing to be in Yates’ fiction is a liar, and nearly all his characters cannot live up their ideas — much less ideals — of themselves. This is especially true in the story of Sarah and Emily Grimes, who wind up, respectively, as the dowdy battered wife of a useless brute and a spinster who, at 50, “still understands nothing.” It’s more fun than it sounds. It also may be the only novel in which a character teaches — as Yates’did for many years — at the Iowa Writers’ workshop. I would give my left pinkie to know if Yates, like the unsuccessful poet Jack Flanders, was left behind by his small-breasted girlfriend after a long, nasty winter, or if he merely filled in the lines around an actual poet he detested. There’s something both lovely and terrible in the idea of Yates creating an entire narrative to house the memory of a lover who left him.
The Plot Against America 
SPOILER SPOILER * We’d put down a serious wad of long green on the hunch that the plot of “The Plot Against America” did not, as many suggested, originate in a flight of fancy about what would have happened if Charles Lindbergh had become President during Hitler’s rise to power, but rather in the child-inside-the-man Roth’s wish that the heroic aviator was not, as he assuredly was, a fascist sympathizer, but had actually been blackmailed by Nazis holding his supposedly kidnapped child through every horrendous concessionary speech. We only think that because it’s more fun to think so, but also because this thrillingly labyrinthine plot establishes that Professor Roth could definitely have a job writing for the TV series Alias, if he ever had a mind to.
B.F.’s Daughter 
We’re more than a little disappointed that we’ve reached the age of 31 without someone taking us aside, shaking us vigorously by the shoulders and hissing in our face, “You goddamn little fool, what are you doing walking around like an acceptable person when you haven’t read BF’s Daughter?” Like the souped-up Chevy that is John Cheever to Richard Yates’ Mercedes, B.F’s Daughter puts its wan shadow, Marjorie Morningstar, to shame. Though it takes place during WWII, it’s somehow indisputably modern. Also, it contains the line, “Nobody cares what happens to a girl if she’s on a yacht.”
“I think it’s clocks.” [The Bat Segundo Show, mp3]
“Has done just about everything you can and should do to remain gainfully employed” [WYPR’s The Signal, 88.1 in Baltimore, MP3]
“A very busy person” [MBToolbox]
“We do want to point out she is not, in fact, an old hag” [WYPR’s The Marc Steiner Show, 88.1 in Baltimore, MP3]
“One of the smartest bloggers on the Web” [Forbes.com]
“Who reads ‘blogs’?” [Telegraph]
“There’s no uniformity about the literary blogs and no editing either, which is sometimes painfully obvious.” [The Denver Post]
“Karaoke.” [New Yorker]
“Already I’m feeling betrayed — and a little bored.” [Washington Post]
“You will learn a lot about the drinking patterns of articulate twentysomethings.” [Village Voice]
We enjoy it. You can reach Old Hag for any good goddamn reason at all at theoldhag AT theoldhag DOT com.
Fine Lines [Jezebel.com]
Welcome to ‘Fine Lines’, the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children’s and YA books we loved in our youth.
The Late Show (The Lost Angeles Times, 11/11/2007)
“Mother is gone / only Things remain” reads the epigraph to “Classic Layer Cakes,” one of the central poems in David Trinidad’s confection-laced collection, “The Late Show” (Turtle Point Press: 110 pp., $16.95 paper). The Denise Levertov quote could easily serve as the epigraph to the entire work. Trinidad is a meticulous curator of pop-culture flotsam — silver-screen sirens, Barbie, ’60s-era lip gloss — and his autobiographical verse is a graceful, merry wink to gay culture. (In “A Poem Under the Influence,” he goes so far as to declare, “To this day, if I can fit ‘pink’ in a poem, I do.”) But “The Late Show” is an hommage to both Hollywood and Trinidad’s own ghosts flickering across the screen. Chief among these are his mother, dead of cancer, and his lover, poet and artist Joe Brainard, whose 1970 work “I Remember” used that phrase as a jumping-off point and spawned a poetry workshop standard. “The Late Show” is a kaleidoscopic “I Remember” where now-gone players from the poetry world — James Schuyler, Tim Dlugos and Rachel Sherwood — make apperances, bracketed by Trinidad’s usual ready referents: actress Thelma Ritter, the Lana Turner version of “Imitation of Life” and Water Wiggle. Trinidad uses a jumble of forms to evoke them all: sonnets, odes, sestinas, free verse, with nods to Neruda, Wilde, Dickinson and Plath. (At times, quotes from Trinidad’s friends rival the snappy patter of screenplays: “He’s been crossed off guest lists I didn’t know existed.”) It’s no accident that the forms at which Trinidad excels — pantoums, sestinas — do not propel a narrative forward but circle back, repeat, emphasize. “The Late Show” is less a monument to the past than a salvage. Like the adult narrator of “Classic Layer Cakes,” who scours flea markets to acquire the complete set for a Deluxe Reading Barbie Dream Kitchen, Trinidad scours his own past for each cracked, orphaned accessory.
TimesCouplets (New York Magazine’s Daily Intel)
Wherein we arrange Times headlines in verse to bring you secret messages from the paper of record.
Fiction Chronicle (The New York Times Book Review, 4/8/2007)
Take a young man, successful but lacking in experience. Add a woman, opaque and mysterious, her past a dark negative the narrator holds up to the light, finding only his own reflection. Throw in a war, a disillusioned journalist as the antagonist whose world-weary asides counter the young man’s tedious ignorance. It’s an old story, made fresh by the first-time novelist Michael FitzGerald….
Chick Lit, the Sequel: Yummy Mummy (New York Times, 12/17/2006)
EARLIER this year, an icon of youthful abandon — bubbly, blond, a perpetual adolescent — left the grove of girlhood and gave birth to a baby boy. No, not Britney Spears. The puckish heroine Bridget Jones, whose fictional diary of the urban dating life was a best seller a decade ago, and whose recent journey to the delivery room has been serialized in The Independent in Britain.
Confessions of a Memory Eater (The New York Times Book Review, 9/17/2006)
Is it a coincidence that an author who seemed to have reached the apex of her popularity a decade ago has come back on the scene with a novel in which a memory pill allows a professor to return to his own golden days? Possibly, though the literary chameleon Pagan Kennedy charges into the future with impressive dexterity, even as her latest character is sucked back into the past.
Digging to America (Baltimore’s WYPR, Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast, 8/02/2006) 
Is it going too far to suggest that Anne Tyler is Baltimore’s literary equivalent of the Domino sign? A bona fide Baltimore institution, she is both kitschy and strangely beautiful—a beacon of sheer endurance, if nothing else. Such omnipresence is great for fans: we’ve only got to reach the last page of one Tyler installment before we turn around to find the next one on the shelf. But it’s bad for Tyler: after a while, we stop expecting anything new of her.
Hot, Hot, Hot (Baltimore’s WYPR, Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast, 7/21/2006)
Face it, cold is overrated.
Sure, if all this heat abated
We’d retain the polar regions,
And those other pesky seasons…
Wiretapping (Baltimore’s WYPR, Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast, 7/06/2006)
Since it’s, at best, a minor sin
To cock your ear and listen in
Should we condemn the NSA
For simply caring what we say?…
Talk Talk (The Baltimore Sun, 7/23/2006)
What’s the cost of being 20 minutes late for a dentist’s appointment? Running a stop sign? Having a cross word with your boss? In the real world, maybe an extra hour in the waiting room; a $40 ticket; getting the fish-eye for a week at work. But in T.C. Boyle’s new novel, Talk Talk, these inconsequential events do not pass into the realm of the quickly forgotten. Instead, they are the small jagged snips that unravel three people’s lives.
The Whole World Over (The Baltimore Sun, 6/11/2006)
One might think that a novel spanning the art of cookery and Sept. 11 (or, as the Library of Congress has it, “1. Women cooks-Fiction. 2. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001-Fiction.”) might take its title with a decent pinch of salt as well. But Julia Glass’ The Whole World Over, the follow-up to the National Book Award-winning Three Junes, means to live up to its title, double connotation and all.
Carry Me Down (The Baltimore Sun, 4/9/2006)
If we got rid of the child narrator, would anybody miss him? Surely his characteristics have gone from enduring to inuring. First and most foremost, there’s his fractured family, usually in the form of a drunken father and an ineffectual mother - one overly close to her charge, mourning a great and fragile beauty. His parents have often produced an alternately raging and principled older brother, already dead or soon to die, and a preternaturally innocent young sister, who utters gnomic statements and, if the older brother lives, is not long for this world herself.
Rust and Bone (The New York Times Book Review, 12/25/2005)
It may, as the conventional wisdom goes, be harder to write comedy than tragedy–but it’s also easy for a writer to shoot for the second and hit the first. That’s what happens in Craig Davidson’s short-story collection, where the author plunges a child under the ice and into a permanent coma, rips the face off a dog, lets a killer whale bite off his trainer’s leg and finally snaps a character’s manhood in two in a series of unsuccessful attempts to win the reader’s sympathy that are equal parts amusing, appalling and just plain gross.
The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming (The Baltimore Sun, 12/25/2005)
At these times Perlman often attempts to save himself with a poetical flourish. The widow in “Manslaughter” lies down among dusty salad leaves in a supermarket after the jury renders a not-guilty verdict, her “life marked down, drastically reduced.” In “The Hong Kong Fir Doctrine,” the narrator, a lawyer, intones that the “terms of the contract” with his ex-love were “partly oral, partly implied and partly imagined. It has been breached in a way that makes its further performance impossible. I am entitled to treat it as an end, but I am unable. There is damage.”
On Beauty (The Baltimore Sun, 9/18/2005)
When an established author updates a classic, it’s generally considered bad form to spend the great majority of your reading sniffing out salient “Aha!” moments. But On Beauty, Zadie Smith’s third novel, a vigorous homage to Forster’s Howards End, not only invites, but demands, such sniffing. The author — whose debut, White Teeth, catapulted her into the kind of galactic literary orbit of which lesser authors, crashing and burning through unearned advances, can only dream — has transposed her countryman’s novel of love and class in turn-of-the-century England into a treatise on race and class in current day America.
An Atomic Romance (The Baltimore Sun, 8/28/2005)
When we begin Bobbie Ann Mason’s An Atomic Romance — the author’s first book in a decade — the life of hero Reed Futrell, ladies’ man, chemistry buff, and outdoor enthusiast, is, both metaphorically and literally, up in the air. The self-dubbed “Atomic Man,” a longtime employee of a uranium-enrichment plan, has just found out that his workplace may or may not have stockpiled its own employees with neptunium and plutonium. His girlfriend Julia, an amateur biologist, may or may not have completely called it quits with him, peeved not only at Reed’s blind trust in his superiors at the plant, but at his choice of a contaminated camping ground for their recent romantic excursion.
Lunar Park (The Baltimore Sun, 8/21/2005) 
Bret Easton Ellis needs no introduction. Not because his first novel, Less Than Zero, was a “zeitgeist touchstone,” or because he has been profiled in “every magazine and newspaper that existed,” or because his name is as “recognizable as most movie stars’ or athletes’.” No, it is because, for those of you who may not be aware of these facts, the author notes all of the above and more in his handy 30-page preface to Lunar Park, which constitutes his sixth novel, or, if you will, a gathering of “controlled, cinematic haiku.”
We’re in Trouble (The Baltimore Sun, 5/1/2005)
In the sizable acknowledgments section of this debut short story collection, it is safe to say that only the dentist has been cast out of the warm circle of the author’s gratitude. Christopher Coake gives the ubiquitous nod not only to current and former partners, his family, his agent, and his editor, but also to the entire writing faculty of two MFA programs, all of his fellow workshop participants in each…
I Got Somebody in Staunton (New York Times Book Review, 4/10/2005) 
A story that rides on its own melting also runs the risk of dissolving entirely. In William Henry Lewis’s second collection of short fiction — his first, ”In the Arms of Our Elders,” was published by Carolina Wren Press a decade ago — the slow, lyric stories of love, loss and longing have a sensuous appeal, but they often threaten to disappear into the ether before they get off the ground.
The Professor’s Daughter (The Baltimore Sun, 2/13/2005)
The author whose biography nearly mirrors that of her protagonist plays a dangerous game. Memories have as good a chance as imaginings to bloom into a successful piece of fiction, but a novel in which circumstances and characters are readily identified can seem like a half-hearted memoir. In Emily Raboteau’s The Professor’s Daughter, the sections that diverge from the author’s life are by far the most absorbing, and the specter of the author - who, like Emma Boudreaux, was raised in Princeton, attended Yale and, as the product of a black father and a white mother, looks neither white nor black - rises so frequently, one wonders why one genre won out over the other.
Home Land (New York Times Book Review, 1/30/2005)
Few activities are as likely to bring on a fit of depressive jealousy as leafing through the back pages of one’s alumni magazine. While you molder in a studio apartment, stuck in a dead-end job, your former classmates are founding clinics in Thailand, cranking out best sellers and unveiling major new paintings — as well as bearing exceptional children. You thought you’d be a success, or at least have a chance to make a decent stab at it while you were still young. Sorry.
In Praise of Slowness (Urbanite, Feb/March 2005)
It’s not the junk food that’s killing you. Not the ozone layer. Not that you don’t jog three miles a day, take enough vitamins, or know what your Qi is, much less how to balance it. Nope. According to Carl Honoré, author of the recent “In Praise of Slowness,” the cause of your dissatisfactions and those of the industrialized world at large is the same thing responsible for its strength and success: Speed.
Check-In (Caketrain Books, 2005)
Winner of Caketrain Journal’s 2004 Poetry Chapbook Competition. Forthcoming in August 2005 from Caketrain Books. Check website for updates and ordering information.
Shadowed
SOPHOMORE YEAR. HARDER classes. Nicer dorms. Stronger friendships. And Sydney Bristow’s biggest mission yet: retrieve top-secret KGB research in Berlin. But someone else is on the job. Someone people keep confusing with Sydney.
Unlubricated (New York Times Book Review, 10/24/2004)
It might not seem possible — to say nothing of advisable — to write a comic novel about Sept. 11 and its aftermath, but that’s what Arthur Nersesian has given us with ”Unlubricated,” his sixth novel, an urban caper about a would-be actress…
Runaway (New York Magazine, 10/23/2004)
No one would ever mistake Alice Munro for an author of delicate sensibilities. (In “Carried Away,” from 1994’s Open Secrets, a man plucks a recently decapitated head off a factory floor.) Still, a grim streak runs through Munro’s new collection, Runaway, greater than the physical carnage of her earlier work…
The Summer Guest (Washington Post Book World, 8/22/2004) 
The telling moment in Justin Cronin’s debut novel, the 2002 PEN/Hemingway award-winning Mary and O’Neil, occurs when the female half of the title heads out to terminate an unplanned pregnancy.
Old Hag is the work of Lizzie Skurnick, a writer, editor and current reluctant resident of perhaps the greatest failed industrial city of all time...more...
Tired of us talking about teen novels? Allow us to switch into nepotistic mode! The third segment of Pale Force, painstakingly constructed by cartoonist Paul Noth and Hot Pocket-hater Jim Gaffigan, airs tonight (Thursday) on Conan.
Posted by altehaggen in General @ Thursday, April 27, 2006 9:24 am | | Comments (0)
Whew! Just to break in, because….uh…..whew! Hot damn.
Apparently we are neither for Kaavya Viswanathan or against her—but we are TOTALLY against teen writers.
Again, whoops. Because we thought we were being called in for one tertiary quote, there, not an ars teenetica. Still, it’s totally the reporter’s prerogative to slant us a little — and WELL done, young man, no offense taken. But to clarify:
1. We didn’t work for 17th street; we worked for GLC, jointly owned by the publisher of 17th Street and the publisher of another successful packager–they were college buddies. (We’re not going to list their names here because we’re sure they’re being bugged enough already; you can Google it and find out pretty easily, if you care.) We were in the offices of 17th Street and did pretty much the same thing they did with different series and projects, took part in editorial meetings, thought up this series title (which everyone HATED and the client LOVED), and unsuccessfully tried to get “Surface Tension” into an SVU title.
2. “A packager basically serves as both the writer and editor of a book,” Skurnick said in a phone interview. “The advantage for a publishing house is they don’t have to do anything — they don’t have to design the book, they don’t have to think about a concept…. They can just say, ‘Here’s $80,000 for twelve of these books.’ They don’t have to do any of the work.” We meant that in a win-win way, not a GODDAMN THOSE FUCKING PUBLISHERS ARE LAZY way.
3. “The picture Skurnick paints of 17th Street and similar packaging firms suggests a contemporary publishing world that has more in common with market-driven, assembly-line industrial production than any traditional notions of the tortured, solitary artist.” Again, not really packager’s fault–or something packagers have exactly, uh, captured the market on, so to speak. Also, tortured artists suck.
4. “How Sweet Valley High came into being,” Skurnick explained to the Indy, “was Francine Pascal came to them with a concept for probably six books, and what was 17th Street Productions at the time — they might have had a different name — sold all six to Random House, and the books took off. What happens to a tremendously popular series like that is that a publisher will renew it, and they’ll renew it for, let’s say, 12 books for that year. But they’ll say, ‘Oh, we want to change it’ — ‘Now they’re in high school,’ or ‘Now they’re going to be witches.’ All sorts of things; whatever keeps them selling.” This is, like, the most haphazard and rambling and semi-incomplete description of packaging, like, ever. Glosses and corrections welcome. And we blame ourselves. And we LIKE things, by the way, that keep selling. And witches.
5. “In my case, I was a former editor at the [17th Street] office where books are farmed out to. But there’s a whole network of writers who mostly do this kind of book,” Skurnick said, referring to scribes who churn out new installments long after a series’ original author has dropped out of the picture. As “work-for-hire” employees with usually no royalty or copyright claims on their output, many of these writers labor with the hopes of gaining the connections that might land them a project of their own. Skurnick explained, “They write books that already exist in series, they pitch series themselves, they pitch standalones, they sort of exist in this netherworld in which they have a relationship with the packager and then, maybe eventually, they’ll have a relationship with the publisher…” Again, we’re not sure this netherworld was a netherworld in a bad way. For some people (=us), writing various books in a series as a side job is HANDY. Working on many levels in the publishing industry simultaneously is handy. Series scribes and series pitchers aren’t pathetic, they’re scrappy. Also, it can be incredibly lucrative. (We have actually always wondered if Ziegesar pitched this series as an employee and, if so, how she managed to retain the damn rights. Anyone with that story, please step forward.)
6. “Because, as Skurnick continued, publishers seeking to maximize earnings on their properties (such as the book rights to television shows like Alias) know exactly where to turn. “The publisher [goes to the packager] and says, ‘You do this, because it’s faster…’ A place like 17th Street really knows what they’re doing with series.”” If we’re not mistaken, we were actually just trying to clarify who had gone to whom in this case, something we don’t know. Packagers sell to publishers, not the other way around. But an agent would certainly be psyched to place a teen book with 17th street, we imagine. There is no way the publisher went to 17th and said “fix this.” But a publisher would conceivably be happy to see a manuscript PITCHED by 17th, starmakers as they are.
Also, the Alias books didn’t have anything to do with 17th–but the editor who worked on other series with 17th got some writers’ names for the series from that connection.
7. “But what about a work like Opal Mehta — a first novel that cannot be openly farmed out to ghostwriters…” So nothing that would ever happen. If a publisher/packager thought the writing was so bad, they’d either work with the author or the book wouldn’t happen. We have rewritten books for series, but that’s ghostwriter writing over ghostwriter—akin to one editor writing over another at a mag in the editing process. Also, it’s completely done openly—as is “ghostwriting”, for that matter. Hence the good old “created by Francine Pascal.”
8. “For her part, Skurnick thinks that the realities of the market, not any malicious plagiarism by Viswanathan, may account for the similarities with Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings. “They seem like very brief and stupid phrases to copy,” Skurnick said after reading the passages in question. “I’m sure the same phrases are in like 20 teen novels…I think in the case of teen fiction, obviously there are stock characters, there’s a stock plot often, there’s sort of these stock areas — the boy, the body, the family, the friend.”” Again, we haven’t read these books. (Such a red flag! Damn! We never wanted to be this person!) But the phrases seem like unlikely ones to rip. Also, if you gave us these scenes, we would write them the same way, and, as an editor at a teen girls’ mag, we do see so much of the same phrasing all the time in the fiction submissions and in the books that come in over the transom–the equivalent of rhyming “rain” and “pain” in a rock song.
Our point: Has anyone read the 2,000 OTHER teen novels published that year? Any critic of the author should read at least 20, then get back to us.
9. “Skurnick continued, “The impulse at a place like the 17th Street is to have a house voice. There are just reams and reams of stuff that’s written… It’s unavoidable that certain phrases will be recycled or said in a certain way… Often what you’ll find is that, it’s not that anyone is copying, it’s just that [these phrases] are the first things a mediocre writer would reach for.”” Mediocre was harsh. In any case, we include ourselves. Let’s massage that to ‘any writer writing for the genre‘, which is more what we meant. And yes, though we don’t have Naomi’s issues with the genre, no one is writing any teenage lesbos like they used to.
10. “It sounds like the market is geared to a certain type of book, and [17th Street] just worked on that with her, and some stuff slipped though — God knows why… But I have to say, [as a] teen editor, you just see the same shit over and over again.” ….Mmmkay, yeah. Well, you do.
In any case, we’re sorry 17th Street is catching any shit for this. Packaging does not, apparent conventional wisdom aside, involve taking a budding author and having her sit down in a room and copy 40 awesome scenes from bestsellers of yore. Nor is it a mind-warp scheme that yields $500,000 checks from those poor dupes at Little, Brown and other major houses on a monthly basis. It’s all anyone there can do to stay drunk until 3. Seriously.
UPDATE: Apparently, boys work at 17th Street. When we were there, there was only one, and he was named “Leslie”. Way to scoop it, Slate.
DOUBLE UPDATE: We forgot. Our own reminiscences.
Posted by altehaggen in Lit-ish @ Wednesday, April 26, 2006 1:04 pm | | Comments (1)
NO, not because I’ve been posting my bedtime reading suggestions well after bedtime, but because I didn’t post about this saving-the-world essay contest (scroll down, and thanks, Daily Show, for the tip) before the deadline. Sorry. Next time, OK? In the meantime, you were looking for a new market for your work, right? Well, get cracking.
Posted by liam callanan in General @ 9:50 am | | Comments (0)
A turnoff: the plagiarizing Harvard novelist (LOVE that she’s called the “Harvard novelist”); a revelation: TOH herself and I disagree on this point; she’s sympathetic to the hapless author, or at least more so than I. We’ll monitor this divide shortly and let you know just how soon it will be that your otherwise genial guestblogger gets kicked to the curb.
(Late Tuesday update: Foodfight! And here I was wondering why the plagiaree was taking this all so mildly. (Full disclosure: I’m a Random House author myself, though from a completely different part of their world. (Do you get fussy like this on blogs, btw? “Full disclosure”? I mean, if so, then: full disclosure: I went to Yale, the arch-enemy of plagiarizing Harvard sophomore novelists everywhere. And so did TOH. Go to Yale, I mean. And neither of us has ever been given a $500,000 advance for anything. So we have axes to grind.)))
But no, this is TV Turnoff Week, so we’re sticking to our knitting and continuing to cough up a children’s book a night for you to oppress your children with.
(And you say: you’re late, my kids are already in bed!)
(To which I say: wake ‘em up! It’s never too late for literature.)
Today’s book is Music for Alice, by the breathtaking Allen Say. Say’s books are beautiful, beautiful, and–if the word isn’t disturbing, then maybe unsettling will do. They’re unsettling largely because they look like children’s books, picture books, but Say’s books always take on complex, even ugly topics, and examine them unflinchingly.
For the most part, Music for Alice is a gentle read, though it, too, has its surprises — not least that it’s based on a true story. HM’s site says it’s grade 5-8, but that didn’t keep my 6-year-old from grabbing it off the shelf at the library. As for me, I’m just relieved/thrilled for once to read a picture book where the last page involves the central character dancing, instead of going to sleep (however emulatively helpful a plot device that may be).
(You were disappointed with the ax-grinding link, weren’t you? Ok, fine.)
Posted by liam callanan in General @ Tuesday, April 25, 2006 9:34 pm | | Comments (0)
Wherein we list one turnoff per day? Hmm. Interesting idea. But we’ll leave that for the lesser blogs.
Here at The Old Hag, we are still stoking the fires, tending the sheep, killing the calves and darning socks and whatever else you’re supposed to do while the master is out. YES, SHE’S STILL GONE. And: YES, SHE’S LEFT CARE OF THIS BEAUTIFUL BLOG in my insufficient hands. But, here’s a new innovation for week 20 of our mutual exile: I will stop apologizing for my guest-bloggery and just get on with it.
Fly High, Fly Low: It’s TV turnoff week, folks, and that means we’re doing a children’s book a day. (And look, you kidfree hipsters, if that’s too low-brow or no-brow for you, then go ahead and submit a 1500-word story to L Magazine’s fiction contest/barfest, and then let us know how it goes. The event is Thursday night, in Manhattan, and all us married writer-’rents know the dirty little secret of you young and singlers: if you’d not read this post, you’d have absolutely nothing to do Thursday night.)
Where were we? Ah. Tonight, in honor of TV turnoff week, read Don Freeman’s Fly High, Fly Low with your kids. You know Freeman because you’ve read Corduroy to your kids, and you had it read to you back in the day. But if you’ve not read FHFL, you’re in for a treat. I found it at City Lights in San Francisco, which makes sense, because it’s a paean to San Francisco — a decades-old San Francisco, anyway — and parenthood.
Sweet dreams.
PS It’s worth tracking down Freeman’s autobiography — Come One, Come All — an orphan, he came to New York to be a musician, lost his trumpet on a subway, got his start in children’s books from…William Saroyan?
Posted by liam callanan in General @ Monday, April 24, 2006 8:52 pm | | Comments (0)
Is the best question I’ve ever received after a reading. It was at Washington, DC’s Ballou High School, whose students also asked me to autograph my books on the jacket flap, over my picture. One of my favorite readings ever.
And another favorite reading — and another reason why this FoTOH has been silent for going on 48 hours — was in Richmond, Virginia Wednesday night. I Know — i should have posted word here so all you TOHagians could have gotten in your cars and driven to see me, but I am too HUMBLE. In any case, the New Virginia Review’s incomparable Mary Flinn invited me to town to cap off their Poetic Principles series, which consists of Pulitzer Prize winning poets and…me.
I read at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ Pauley Center — better known as –yes, there was such a thing — the former Confederate Widows Home — which still housed such as recently as a decade ago.
Q. Did Alan Gurganus ever do a reading of The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All here?
A. Why aren’t you asking questions about me? About my car?
More about Richmond, Washington, DC — where FoTOHOTR — Friend of Old Hag on the Road — is now — and points inbetween to follow soon enough.
In the meantime, thanks to Avis, I am driving a sky-blue Buick LeSabre, the choice of poets and grandparents everywhere.
Posted by liam callanan in General @ Friday, April 21, 2006 8:58 am | | Comments (0)
Don’t get your hopes up with this post’s suggestively poetic title. TOH is ill–not gravely, folks, just laid low, don’t send flowers, just buy her book and cheer her up!–and so I shall continue my daily task of making you miss her all the more.
“Brooklyn Sestina” is the title of of a short story in Alice Mattison’s latest, lovely intersecting story collection, In Case We’re Separated. I’ve been a fan of hers ever since “We Two Grown-ups” (whose first paragraph I’ve been using for a decade as a writing prompt with students) appeared in The New Yorker (it was later collected in Men Giving Money, Women Yelling).
But what’s cool–and maybe I’m just being a totally nerdy English major here–is the author’s note at the end:
“This book’s thirteen stories imitate in prose the thirteen stanzas of a double sestina, using repeated topics or tropes in something like the way a sestina…uses repeated words. In the changing order prescribed by the sestina pattern, each story includes a glass of water, a sharp point, a cord, a mouth, an exchange, and a map that may be wrong.”
So that’s your writing assignment today. Write a book. In sestina format. Or give us 7 items and I’ll have Lizzie write it. Or read the Best American-winning title story of the collection. Or read this fave Elizabeth Bishop sestina. Or nominate other collections of “intersecting stories” for the TOH bookshelf.
(Where’s the usual wacky Milwaukee/midwest navel-gazing you’ve come to expect from your pinch-hitter? Look, it’s Severe Weather Awareness Week here, so we’re kind of busy, AND I was sequestered in a monastery all weekend, so — well, I guess there’s your wacky Milwaukee dose right there. More to follow.)
Posted by liam callanan in General @ Monday, April 17, 2006 2:03 pm | | Comments (0)
Like I said, fair’s fair, and the challenge put out was to ignore the SF Chronicle Magazine’s admonition — “Topics we’re not so interested in include bouts with illness, death of a parent or loved one (unless you’re Dave Eggers), childhood memories of Playland-at-the-Beach, children’s charming antics, special pet stories and childhood sports memories” — and instead, write a piece that included bouts with illness, the death of a parent, childhood memories of Playland-at-the-Beach, charming antics, childhood sports memories and Dave Eggers. Because I believe in setting the bar very low, I thought I’d go first and give my essay a lousy title (see post headline).
(Note to coffee breakers: this ain’t a quick one.)
(Note to TOH true fans: again, I’m just the guest-blogger, Ms. Liz will be back before you know it, just as soon as she extracts herself from yet another messy situation, of the sort that constantly plagues world class lit-bloggers.)
*
My wife’s grandmother lived on the same street as Des Moines’ leading afternoon drivetime DJ, who came on just after Rush Limbaugh and shared with Grandmother Wood a love of all things Republican, and tomatoes.
We had that much in common, then. I loved garden-grown tomatoes, too. My wife, the granddaughter, not so much. When she was a toddler, she’d turned up her nose at some tomatoes – she turned up her nose at most food during childhood, apparently – and Grandmother Wood, in this case and all others, a force to be reckoned with, force-fed her a good-sized portion of some raw, red, fleshy, height-of-summer tomatoes. To this day, my wife will not eat tomatoes unless someone else has bravely gone ahead and smashed and cooked them beyond recognition.
The thing is, Grandmother Wood was right about those tomatoes. I mean, if you’ve ever tasted a tomato straight from the garden, mid-July, you know how extraordinary they are. I’m not sure I’d go the force-feeding route; I’d sooner eat them all myself. But I can see why someone would be so incredulous that her own genes weren’t correctly manifesting themselves in a young child’s palate.
And Grandmother Wood was right about everything else, too. She left Iowa to get a degree from Wellesley in the 1920s, returning with a degree and education that took her around the state, around the world. A woman with knowledge could do anything, and this is something she exemplified, and inculcated in her granddaughters. One of the ways she put her education to use was by including reading and “correcting” the manuscript of my first novel.
Because I was a thoroughgoing Catholic, because I was Irish (a drunkard), because I spent much of my childhood at Playland-at-the-Beach, or its successor, the entire State of California, because I knew as much about baseball—one of her passions—as I did the surface of Pluto, and especially because I’d proposed to her oldest son’s oldest daughter without asking the oldest son for permission first, I had a lot to overcome to win her approval.
[C’mon, click that “more…” — there’s a weird cemetery scene and everything still to come!]
Posted by liam callanan in General @ Thursday, April 13, 2006 1:42 pm | | Comments (0)
1. Yes, I posted yesterday (Wednesday). I take this guest-blogging thing very seriously.
2. No, I won’t be posting this weekend. At the recommendation of fellow, finer dairyland author Dean Bakopoulos, I’m retreating to a monastery to finish-finish the next novel, All Saints. (What, I was supposed to go to Vegas?)
2a. Yes, Lizzie does have a weird predilection for us way-too-Catholic guest-bloggers.
2b. Yes, the monastery has a website.
2c. No, I’m not linking to it. Go stalk Garrison Keillor instead!
3. What’s with this post’s headline? I’ve got my own entry to the “nobody but Dave Eggers” essay contest, and it’s designed to tide you over until I, or, one hopes, the artful Old Hag herself, returns. I’ll post it in a bit.
Say hi to the Easter Bunny this weekend for me, all you animists!
* * *
Posted by liam callanan in General @ 10:11 am | | Comments (1)
Blogs, anyway, at least when you’re pinch-hitting like me.
A long day in the classroom, so only time to link to birthday greetings to Tom, Scott & Bev, all of whom are feted today (Weds.) at Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac, but only Scott gets the good quote :
Dislike Mr. Keillor for whatever private reasons you may like (I cannot, because I know his secret: sure, he broadcasts from Minnesota, but he lives here in America’s promised land, Wisconsin [Don’t believe me? It’s not like he’s unlisted, folks. And no, I didn’t call.]) — but you must admire him for that “a writing program at Stanford” business. To paraphrase WC Williams: so much depends on an indefinite article. Anyway, the place has been headed straight downhill since James Joyce graduated.
(Note to stalwarts: I know, linking to Garrison Keillor is not exactly going to polish TOH’s iconoclastic reputation. But I’ll be back tomorrow. In the meantime, get back to Googlefighting. (But before you click, guess who wins: Garrison Keillor vs. Scott Turow?)
Posted by liam callanan in General @ Wednesday, April 12, 2006 10:40 pm | | Comments (1)