Gapers Block published from April 22, 2003 to Jan. 1, 2016. The site will remain up in archive form. Please visit Third Coast Review, a new site by several GB alumni. ✶ Thank you for your readership and contributions. ✶
Robert Duffer of the Chicago Examiner posted a lovely little piece on the significance of moving and reorganizing one's books. The categories into which Duffer divides his books will be familiar to any bibliophile faced with gathering his or her collection and deciding what will go where on the shelves in the new digs. There are those books you keep because they meant something to you at some point, even if you're not sure you'd be able to read them again with the same zest; those books you keep because you conquered them and want proof of your feat; those books you keep because you're hoping that someday you will like them (when, too, will I read East of Eden? Before or after I reread Jane Eyre?)...etc., etc. Duffer's post is a wonderfully thoughtful look at one's life in books.
The Newberry Library thanks your for your Book Fair patronage, but not for ripping off the cover of the first volume of that Samuel Johnson biography or for donating your stereos, VCRS and adding machines.
The Guardian pans a musical on Ernest Hemingway that's closing four weeks early, saying it "doesn't even fall into the so-bad-it's-good category."
According to the Sun-Times, Amazon is offering a discount on pre-orders for Rod Blagojevich's book, The Governor. Or, you can always line up at the bookstores at midnight, à la Harry Potter.
More shameless author self-promotion, this time by Marcus Sakey, author of the upcoming The Amateurs who is offering prizes (signed hardcover books!) for people commenting, tweeting and...facebooking?...answers to his daily "Ready, Go" question. Full list of rules and prizes here.
Wendy McClure, author of our November 2005 selection I'm Not the New Me, writes for Penguin about the inhumanity of having your book analyzed by an introductory English college class and the perils of writing in the present tense. On the first subject, I can't even imagine, given how I'm prone to doling out harsh criticism myself in English classes (though I hope it's thoughtful harsh criticism I'm doling out and not simply ragging on the marginal), having my own book deconstructed by a group of first years. I think I'd run away and hide, so kudos to Wendy for having the guts to read what the kids wrote about her. And on the second subject...what a perfectly sweet ending to her ongoing story.
The National Book Awards remembers their 1971 winner, and the third and final win for Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet.
Says Craig Morgan Teicher, poet and member of the board of the National Book Critics Circle: "It's impossible not to see a bit of oneself in Artur Sammler, a Holocaust survivor living out the end of his life--he's in his 70s when we meet him--uptown in New York City, where the subways are intolerable and the buses only a bit better, until a confrontation with a pickpocket makes the buses impossible as well.He lives with his grown daughter, an eccentric, irresponsible, unmarried woman, and tries to find what good he can in a world that has more than proved its evil.
"It's impossible, too, not to recognize how alone Sammler is, and how his aloneness is something we all have in common. A book like this--and it's a narrow shelf indeed that can hold it and its small company--may be the only way we can share that deep solitude."
Few of us truly know the hardships and struggles that come with running away from home. Joon, the narrator of Nami Mun's Miles from Nowhere, is not one of us. Having left home by the age of thirteen to search for her father who had abandoned their family, Joon soon realizes that it is freedom she wants and, after failing in her search, doesn't so much as return home to say goodbye to her mother before she begins her new life on the streets. The experiences and the people Joon encounters from that point on serve to educate, confuse, lift up and tear down, but, fortunately, never break her.
The Man Booker Prize longlist was announced today and it includes JM Coetzee for Summertime. Coetzee previously won the prize in 1983 for Life & Times of Michael K and in 1999 for Disgrace, our November 2007 selection. Coetzee is one of only two novelists to have ever won the Booker Prize twice. See the full list of nominationed authors and their works here.
The latest issue of Chicago Magazine gives some love to local writers. Not only do they do a nice little write-up of Marcus Sakey, author of the recently published The Amateurs, they also name Nami Mun, author of Miles from Nowhere, as Best New Novelist and Sara Paretsky, author of our March 2008 selection Fire Sale, as Best Mystery Writer.
Not to be outdone, the U of C Press toots their own horn (not that there's anything wrong with that...horns are good) and points to some of their authors and publications that have recently been mentioned in the news.
Blair Kamin reports in the Tribune that Prairie Avenue Bookshop, purveyors of architecture related literature, will close on September 1st unless a buyer for the shop can be found. According to Kamin's article, the owners are blaming the 10.25% sales tax for contributing to their declining sales. Says owner Wilbert Hasbrouck: "People would come to the bookshop with their notepad, make notes of what they wanted and then go buy it somewhere else." But Kamin raises another question, crucial to the potential success of this and other independent shops like it: Can they survive in the digital age? Says Matt Stromberg of William Stout Architectural Books in San Francisco: "Fifty years ago, you couldn't find normal architectural books anywhere. Now you can find them everywhere--for a discount. ... Why would you buy that $200 book from us when you could get it almost 40 percent off, free shipping and no tax?"
Prarie Avenue Bookshop is located at 418 S. Wabash St. Visit them while you still can.
Open Books stayed up all night on Saturday, blogging every half hour to raise money for their Buddies program. They didn't make their goal of $2,500 in sponsorships, however you can always donate to their literacy causes here. Here are some of the highly amusing literary classics Mad Libs you may have missed:
The First Post, featuring A Tale of Two Cities: It was the best of SCISSORS, it was the worst of CAPES, it was the age of FRUIT FLIES, it was the age of PRETZELS, it was the epoch of ROLLER SKATES, it was the epoch of THIMBLES, it was the season of KITES, it was the season of PUNCHING BAGS, it was the spring of NEEDLES, it was the winter of CLOTHESPINS, we had SOCCER BALLS before us, we had CUPS before us, we were all going direct to ZANZIBAR, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present TEACHER, that some of its POINTY authorities RAN on its being CRIED, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
11:34am, featuring The Hound of the Baskervilles: "Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very GROTESQUE in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was BROKEN all night, was seated at the breakfast SPIKE."
2:32pm, featuring Jane Eyre: "There was no possibility of taking a PARAKEET that day. We had been CONVULSING, indeed, in the FUZZY PANTIES an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no BATHTUB, HARMONIZING early) the cold winter FLYING BUTTRESS had brought with it QTIPS so sombre, and a NINJA so BOISTEROUS, that further out-door CEMENTING was now out of the question."
4:32pm, featuring Dracula: "3 May. Bistritz. --SLEPT Munich at 8:35 P.M., on 1st May, POURING at Vienna early next morning; should have CLIMBED at 6:46, but COBB SALAD was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a SNARKY COCONUT, from the glimpse which I got of it from the LAMP and the little I could BITE through the MANATEES."
10:30pm, featuring Don Quixote: "In a village of La Mancha, the COCKPIT of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those GRIZZLY BEARS that keep a PAGODA in the lance-rack, an UNSINKABLE buckler, a FIERY GRAVEROBBER, and a BOTTLE for FISHING."
The Penultimate Post, featuring Ulysses: "FRIED, plump Buck Mulligan came from the LESBIAN, BRUSHING a KITTY of lather on which a PIGEON and a CASE lay crossed."
Check out their blog to read the rest of the Mad Libs and learn more about Open Books's programs. And if you've ever wondered why programs such as this and other literacy organizations are so important to our city, take a look at these harrowing statistics.
University of Chicago faculty member Thornton Wilder was awarded the National Book Award in 1969 for his novel The Eighth Day.
Here, the National Book Foundation's Executive Director, Harold Augenbraum, remembers the honored work: "Without revealing too much, I will tell you--as Wilder does in the first chapter, with that wonderfully American literary structure of historifying in which the writer relates the most exciting event first and then fades back into the past and then rushes past the first event toward the narrative's events that come afterwards--though everything, of course, is still in the past, you're made to feel as if you are reading about the future--faceless riders from Coaltown, including a cloudy-faced minister, rescue the murderer, Ashley. Is he a murderer? Read it and you tell me."
For the fifth year in a row, all of Chicago's print types are getting together to showcase their wares on Friday at the Printers' Ball. Come celebrate local magazines, books and broadsides and listen to readings, live music and live interviews. The list of scheduled organizations and guests is too great to list here, so take a look at the website and see if your favorite printmakers will be there (and, be assured, you'll find some new ones to enjoy as well). Word has it that some GB folk will be there as well. Admission is free and open to the public, 5pm-11pm at 1104 S. Wabash on the 1st and 8th floors. For more information, email editors[at]poetrymagazine[dot]org.
Last week, the University of Chicago Press announced that they are now offering over 700 titles in e-book format. The U of C is one of several universities pondering the e-book route. The cost for downloading the books varies depending on how long the purchaser intends to keep the book, which is kind of nice for students who know they won't need to hold onto their first year chemistry textbook for the rest of their lives. Although, I imagine there'd be far less satisfaction in finally trashing that copy of the Marx-Engels Reader that you were forced to carry around for multiple classes. Not that I, um, did that.
Also of note, love the portability of the e-book but miss that real book smell? Fret no longer.
Today in here's-why-we-still-need-Banned-Books-Week news: A school board member at a high school in New Hampshire wants short stories by Ernest Hemingway and David Sedaris, as well as two other stories by Stephen King and Laura Lippman, removed from the reading list of an upper-level English class. The school's principal removed the stories from the class reading list after a group of parents complained about the "mature themes," saying they were not appropriate "for developing minds that are very impressionable," only to have that decision protested by another group of parents and students and have the English Department head resign. The Hemingway story is, as you might guess as it's frequently targeted for its supposed impropriety, "Hills Like White Elephants." The story is thought to be about abortion, although the word appears nowhere in the very short text and, honestly, I never thought it was about abortion until it was suggested to me and I had to concede that, of the many things it could possibly be about, abortion might be one. The Sedaris story in question is "I Like Guys," which, as Book Club members might recall from our discussion of Naked, is not just about homosexuality, but about how, in dealing with our differences from the majority, we just might become the sort of oppressors from whom we are trying to escape. Both stories provide excellent teaching opportunities, so it's unfortunate, though not terribly surprising, that they would be challenged. After all, how horrible it would be for students who are at the age where they are struggling with things like sexuality to realize that others have gone through the same struggles as they. We can't have that happening.
Says a graduate from the school, in perhaps the best statement about any act of censorship in schools: "I'm ashamed this happened in my town. Sheltering people doesn't help anyone learn. It just dumbs down the school. It just sickens me that this can happen in my town." [via]
Lydia Kiesling of The Millions writes about her first failed and second successful attempts at reading Richard Wright's Native Son, the Book Club's September 2008 selection. She writes that she quit the novel early on the first time around because she felt "dispirited" and didn't want to read about the horrible acts Bigger Thomas commits with Mary Dalton's body after having accidentally murdered her. She later felt like a fraud at her ability to read other violent novels while letting this classic work offend her. Having successfully made it through the book the second time around, she realized that part of her discomfort stemmed from the fact that:
...Native Son is not a novel that wants to hold anybody's hand. Native Son does not want to tuck you into bed at night and reassure you that you are with it. Wright, starting as he did with a hugely unlovable character, dares you to face certain realities. Namely, that discussions of oppression are infinitely more comfortable when members of the oppressed race in question are doing things like passively resisting, writing monumental novels, and being elected president by a majority of the country so that one can say "My goodness, we've come a long way!" But that's stupid. The reason that institutionalized racism is despicable is because it takes away humanity. Obviously it makes the oppressor ugly; but it can make its victims ugly too. Ugliness breeds ugliness. Why should a book about something ugly be made palatable so that I, a white lady, can feel uplifted?
That's as true of an assessment of the book as I can imagine. The book does not want to hold your hand. It is not about reassuring you that racism and oppression is past us, but forcing you to understand how horribly present it is, both in Wright's time and today. What's shocking about this novel, which the Book Club members at that meeting commented on and which I realize each time I read the book, is that it is just as relevant today as it was the more-than-half a century ago that it was written.
Kiesling points out another irony -- that of reading the book during the hubbub surrounding the racially toned arrest of African-American scholar and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. My, what a long way we've come, indeed.
Aleksandar Hemon talks to the New York Times about music and how it's inextricably linked to his writing. He provides a 10-piece soundtrack to his work, revealing that although he did listen to a lot of Beatles music while writing Nowhere Man, he actually didn't listen to the eponymous song. Says Hemon:
I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction. A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls. Once I'm done and the piece is published, I often have a hard time remembering what piece of music is inscribed (or, indeed, transcribed) in it, as there are no visible, let alone obvious, connections, apart from an occasional embedded line. I think that is because the music and writing become indistinguishable to the aforementioned dormant parts, which constitute the majority of my brain mass. So the playlist that would provide a soundtrack for my work would have to be insanely long.
Today the National Book Awards remembers their 1965 winner, Herzog by Saul Bellow.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, a 2008 National Book Awards fiction judge, writes of Bellow and his book: "Bellow is often cited as a hero of narrative realism, as having single-handedly, through the heft of his technique, held back the postmodern, meta-fictional, experiments-in-naval-gazing onslaught. But Saul Bellow's relationship with reality was as complicated and adversarial as any writer's before and after. He was not going to be the one to submit. Let reality submit. What a fighter the man was, a conquistador with dreamy Jewish eyes.
"It's extraordinary how many times Bellow calls out to his mighty antagonist by name: Reality. He uses the word more times than Kant and Hegel put together. That's what he was up against, the thing he was out to master and possess. His boot, cleated with metaphors, is planted smack on its exposed bulging neck. His famous style--the zealousness of his figurative language, the mixing of milky thought and bloody-raw meat--is never an end in itself but a means of taking possession."
Want to know more about Frank Lloyd Wright, both the truth and the fiction? Booklist's Book Group blogger Neil Hollands, having spent some time in the city for the ALA conference, was inspired to find out more about one of our most notable architects. Here are his recommendations for anyone wishing to read up on Wright.
American Fiction Notes is excited to read Richard Power's Generosity: An Enhancement, one of the status galleys of the year. Here he points to a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign literay journal that produced short films on Powers's novels, all except for one featuring the author's own narration. Be sure to check out the beautifully done video for The Echo Maker, the Book Club's September selection. Also of note -- the final video in the series features Audrey Niffenegger talking about her visual art.
The progression from high school to college is purported to be a natural one in our culture. The junior and senior years fill mail boxes with evocative brochures displaying young adults studying with books under fully bloomed trees and laughing in ethnically diverse groups; the years fly by with visits to campuses and interviews with students and faculty; they are some of the most trying times - filling out applications, taking SATs - and yet some of the most relaxing - that wonderful knowledge that high school will soon be over. For most of us, that next step into college is a certain one, but what about those for whom it is not? That's the question Claire Zulkey explores in An Off Year, a young adult novel about a girl on the brink of entering that first hallowed year of undergraduate life, only to turn around and say "no."
Audrey Niffenegger was interviewed at Book Expo about her upcoming novel Her Fearful Symmetry. Borders has a video of that interview, which you can see here.
What's a Blogathon, you ask? Essentially, it's a marathon of blogging during which time bloggers will update their websites every 30 minutes for 24 hours straight. For this effort, sponsorships are collected and the money goes to the charity or organization of each blogger's choice. It's not just blogging for fun, but blogging for a cause. This year the local non-profit Open Books is joining in the race on July 25 and asking your help to get them to their goal of $2,500. You can simply be one of their readers, checking in throughout the day, you can sign up to offer your blogging talents, or you can offer monetary aid and be a sponsor. During the blogathon, Open Books looks forward to presenting their readers with Mad Libs drawn from classic fiction pieces, a contest, jokes, quotes and prizes. All of the hard work is going toward providing a class of elementary school students with an entire semester of Open Books Buddies. All of Open Books's effort go to increasing literacy in our city and this is a fun way to support their cause. I can't wait to tune in to their blog on Saturday and see what they come up with.
The weekend all us used-book-lovers wait for in rapt anticipation is upon us -- that of the Newberry Library Book Fair. With four days and 110,000 donated used books in 70 categories to go through, it'll be a task not to come home with arms sore from carrying loads of cheaply priced books (most are under $2!). The Fair will run Thursday-Sunday with varying hours; check the website for hours on the specific day you'd like to visit. On Saturday there will also be a round of Bughouse Square debates in the nearby Washington Square Park where you can celerate the city's long history of promoting free speech. And don't overlook that Sunday is Half Price Day, so if you can stand to wait until then your patience will likely be rewarded. The Newberry Library is located at 60 W. Walton and admission is free. Call 312-255-3510 for questions and information.
The National Book Award blog continues their reminiscences of past winners with the 1960 winner Goodbye, Columbus, by University of Chicago grad student Philip Roth.
Writes Liz Rosenberg, a National Book Awards judge and author of Home Repair: "I am always struck by the perfection of Goodbye, Columbus, however many times I read and teach it. It is the perfect Jewish American novel--perfect in its pacing; plotting; its metaphors (the librarian's 'behind barging against his suit jacket like a hoop'); its fruitful Edens: 'There were greengage plums, black plums, red plums, apricots, nectarines, peaches, long horns of grapes, black, yellow, red, and cherries, cherries flowing out of boxes and staining everything scarlet...and on the top shelf, half of a huge watermelon, a thin sheet of wax paper clinging to its bare red face like a wet lip. Oh Patimkin! Fruit grew in their refrigerators and sporting goods dropped from their trees!' One could die happy after writing a passage like that."
Jacket Copy ponders what makes a book postmodern, then lists the 61 essential postmodern reads, annotating each title with the attributes it contains, such as "author is a character", "comments on its own bookishness" and "more than 1,000 pages." The list includes Chicago-related authors Philip K. Dick, Dave Eggers (no postmodern list would be complete without good ol' Dave), Aleksandar Hemon, Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut.
Salon talks to Dave Eggers about his newly published book Zeitoun, how the Bush administration has affected America's acceptance of literature and the future of print journalism. On the latter topic, Eggers had this to say:
I think there's a future where the Web and print coexist and they each do things uniquely and complement each other, and we have what could be the ultimate and best-yet array of journalistic venues. I think right now everyone's assuming it's a zero-sum situation, and I just don't see it that way...I think newspapers shouldn't try to compete directly with the Web, and should do what they can do better, which may be long-form journalism and using photos and art, and making connections with large-form graphics and really enhancing the tactile experience of paper...I think there will always be -- if not the same audience and not as wide an audience -- a dedicated audience that can keep print journalism alive.
The Tribune reviews local author Billy Lombardo's How to Hold a Woman, calling it "beautifully written, replete with small, perfect details of family life in the wake of tragedy."
The Independent takes a look at Steven J. Zipperstein's Rosenfeld's Lives, a study on the Chicago native, New York intellectual and close friend of Saul Bellow, Isaac Rosenfeld, who died at 38 and only published one novel.
Is Aleksandar Hemon the new Vladimir Nabokov? Open Letters Monthly thinks not, but finds plenty enough to love about Hemon's prose as it is. Over at Pop Matters, Hemon answers 20 Questions.
The Second Pass points us to a 1955 interview with Nelson Algren in the Paris Review.
Okay, not the real Neil Gaiman, per se. Fueling his ongoing "feud" with the award-winning author, local author James Kennedy (The Order of Odd-Fish) donned pirate garb, complete with missing tooth, to challenge a faux-Gaiman at the American Library Association Conference. James forgoes the usual conference speech to assert himself as the rightful winner of the Newbery Award he lost to Gaiman earlier this year. Insanity - complete with grown men rolling around on the ground, the Cube of Trials and human sacrifice - ensues. The results, as you might imagine if you've ever seen James in action, must be seen to be believed. The video below is just the beginning of the Kennedy-Gaiman Challenge; find the rest of the hilarious scuffle on James's website.
What is ethnicity? What is nationality? And where do the two intersect and diverge? These are some of the questions Jessica Abel explores in her graphic novel La Perdida, the story of Carla, a young woman who travels to Mexico to delve into her paternal roots and find someplace where she feels she truly belongs. After crashing in the apartment of her sometime-lover Harry, a fellow expatriate intent on living out the dreams set forth by beat writer William S. Burroughs, Carla is immediately put on the defense when her stereotypical love of Frida Kahlo, her shaky grasp on the Spanish language and her inability to eat a taco without spilling the contents out of the backside of her tortilla relentlessly pegs her as an American.
For Carla, Frida Kahlo serves as a defining mark of what it means to be Mexican. "She was more than my ideal of an artist," Carla expounds. "All I wanted was to be more like her. But I was faced with a lot of obstacles. Not being able to draw, for one. Not being Mexican, for another. Not really. Sure, she was half-Mexican, half-German like me, but she grew up there, and that's what counts." It is this desperation to convince herself and those around her of her natural fit in Mexico that drives Carla's through the story and leads her to naively put her trust in less-than-exemplary "natives." The cast of characters is undoubtedly colorful: from Memo, the Marxist enthusiast who spouts diatribes attacking the American elite, to Oscar, the hanger-on and would-be DJ who is more than content to live off of Carla's meager salary once they embark on a questionable relationship, to Liana, Carla's one-time roommate and co-teacher at school where they both teach English, to El Gordo, the drug lord who takes an unseemly interest in Carla, Abel imbues her story with a wide range of characters who convey the idea of what it means to be Mexican to varying degrees.
Carla's dependence on the suspicious individuals she meets on her own and her rejection of the American friends to whom she's introduced through Harry work to complicate her character and make us question her motivations. At times it is possible to understand this desire to leave one's identity behind and at other times it is impossible not to look upon her naiveté with scorn, sure that we would never put such blind trust in those who are, essentially, strangers, but it is these complications and shifts in beliefs that keep Carla from simply being an ignorant American and make her a believable person struggling with the implications of her father's last name. Who are strangers and who are our countrymen? Which of the two has our best interests at heart and which will pursue the chance to take advantage of our willingness to belong? Those are the questions Carla struggles with in La Perdida, and though the answers may not always be so clear, Carla is fortunate to come out of her excursion a little bit wiser, a little bit more worldly and, perhaps, knowing who she really is just a little bit more.
* * *
Jessica Abel grew up in Chicago and started making comics during her time at the University of Chicago. She lived in the city until leaving it for a two-year stay in Mexico with her now husband. La Perdida is not, however, autobiographical. Abel has won the Harvey and Lulu awards for "Best New Talent" and a "Best New Series" Harvey Award for La Perdida. To learn more about Abel, visit her website and be sure to check out her Mexico diaries for more background information on her graphic novel.
File this one under "things that make Veronica incredibly jealous": novelist and screenwriter Steven Paul Leiva has been spending a lot of time with Ray Bradbury for a video he's working on for the Buffalo International Film Festival. Here he composes an essay about the "world's greatest science fiction writer," exploring where the writer came from and how he came to embody that title. Great essay, but, man, I want to spend time with Ray Bradbury! [via]
Two of our past Book Club selections will soon come to a television set near you (provided you have HBO): Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End as a movie and Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex as a series. Mentioned in the Gawker-related post below, this New York Entertainment post confirms it with Ferris himself. Meanwhile, The Millions wonders feverishly how Middlesex will translate to the small screen: "How will they pace it? How many seasons?...What of Lina, and Jimmy Zizmo, and Marius Wyxzewizard Challouehliczilczese Grimes? Who will play the Obscure Object? Will she have freckles and heavy thighs? Who will play Apollonian Calliope? And then Dionysian Calliope? And who will play Cal?" I'm curious about the Middlesex series, myself. Done right it could be as amazing a contribution to TV as it is to literature. Done wrong, well, that would just be heartbreaking.
Listed as one of the top anticipated books to be published, Joshua Ferris's The Unnamed gets critiqued over at Gawker's Status Galley Book Club. After judging industry hype, movie potential, the book's status symbol and first sentence, they give the book a final grade of B- saying "The book is great! But it gets downgraded for its mainstream appeal (makes it less cool to the publishing crowd), availability (having it doesn't denote much exclusivity), and the lack of a proven track record beyond his debut novel [Then We Came to the End] to please the New York Publishing Elite."
This new publication of A Moveable Feast sure has raised the occurrence of Hemingway news, e.g., this Tribune article by biographer Gioia Diliberto about receiving a set of taped conversations with Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway's first wife. Says Diliberto on her impression of Richardson upon listening to the tapes:
I expected Hadley, who died in 1979, to be bitter toward Hemingway; instead, on the tapes she is full of gratitude to him for giving her "the key to the world." When she met him in 1920, she had been a timid spinster, who lived for years under the control of her dominating mother in a state of nervous collapse. Meeting Hemingway at a party in Chicago, she told Sokoloff, was a great "explosion into life." He was the first person to see deeply into her true nature, and in a rueful irony, he helped her find the strong sense of self that sustained her through their break-up.
Also, check out this essay at Powell's written by Hemingway's grandson Sean, offering his thoughts on his work editing the new A Moveable Feast:
I think that my grandfather would be happier with the text presented in A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition. Lovers of literature the world over will find much of interest from a new text for Feast to a wealth of supplementary material, including a personal foreword by Patrick Hemingway and a selection of facsimile manuscript pages that enhance our understanding of this critical period in the author's life and how he wrote.
If you're at all partial to getting good books for ridiculously cheap, I would highly recommend getting yourself to the Burnham Park Powell's as soon as you can. I went this weekend and there was still a great selection of books priced around $5-$6, which means, with their 50% off sale, I came away with a full bag of books for less than two regular priced paperbacks. While there I learned that this isn't the only Powell's that's closing - the Lincoln Ave. location is slated for closure in the future as well. Word on the street (or, at least, from the guy who rang up my purchases) is that there's no set date yet, but it'll happen in the next two to three years and the only store that will remain will be the one on 57th St. So, enjoy your multiple Powell's stores while you can...and, in the meantime, start familiarizing yourself with the #6 bus route.
This USA Today article takes a look at the academic study of romance novels. Yep, romance novels. It seems that romance novels are gaining ground in academia, as Princeton University held a conference titled "Love as the Practice of Freedom? Romance Fiction and American Culture" this past April. Here they talk to, among other authors, DePaul University English professor Eric Selinger, the organizer of the conference. Says Selinger on the ease of being a man in the romance world, "Nobody thinks I'm a spinster or trapped in a bad marriage, or I'm betraying feminism...People don't judge me as much." I'm not a fan of romance novels myself and I would, in all likelihood, scoff heartily at the idea of a conference on the genre, but, as a student at DePaul, I've heard nothing but positively glowing reviews of Selinger's romance novels course from classmates who would consider themselves as disinclined to the literature as I am. So maybe there's something to it.
In their continuing celebration of their past 77 winners, the National Book Award blog offers thoughts on the 1953 winner, University of Chicago visiting professor Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and the 1954 winner, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March.
Writes Charles Johnson, past National Book Award winner and chair of the National Book Awards Fiction Panel, on the continuing relevance of Invisible Man: "As our understanding of liberty, equality, and this nation's ideals grows and evolves, our experience of Invisible Man deepens, achieving ever greater subtlety, nuance, and prescience...While black Americans are certainly more 'visible' today, especially after Barack Obama became this nation's first African American president, it is nevertheless true that so many other groups--- Hispanics, Asians, Pacific Islanders, new African immigrants to America, and native Americans to name just a few---can make a case for still being 'invisible' men and women in contemporary America. Well might they argue that 'on the lower frequencies,' Invisible Man speaks to their daily, lived experience."
On The Adventures of Augie March, The Paris Review editor National Rich says of Bellow's prose : "The Adventures of Augie March is for me the great creation myth of twentieth century American literature. It marks the emergence of a new literary hero, the working-class Jewish quester; a new novelistic form, one based entirely on character instead of, and even to the expense of, plot; and most significantly, a new language. An urban Jewish Midwestern argot that is both vividly realistic yet completely of Bellow's own invention. It is a language that one must learn by immersion, as in a Berlitz course. Some readers complain that the first forty or fifty pages are slow. The truth is that it takes time to get used to the arrhythmic canter and the slingshot energy of Bellow's prose."
Book Club selection author Achy Obejas (Memory Mambo) makes two appearances this week. The first is at the Harold Washington Library on Friday where she will present the keynote address, "Writing and Responsibility," for DePaul's Summer Writing Conference. The address is free and occurs at 12pm in the Cindy Pritzker Auditorium, 400 S. State St. Call 312-362-8916 for information.
Obejas's second appearance will be at the Book Cellar on Saturday, where she will be joined by authors Derek McCormack (The Show That Smells) and Patrick Somerville (The Cradle) for a reading and discussion of their work. Free at 7pm at 4736-38 N. Lincoln Ave. Call 773-293-2665 for more information.
Exciting news from Open Books: The non-profit literacy organization has announced the location of their used bookstore and literacy community center as 213 W. Institute Pl., the 100-year-old building that currently houses their office. Opening in the Fall, the store and center will hold over 40,000 used books for sale, three full classrooms and a mobile computer lab, offices and community event space, and space specifically for online book sales, rare and fine books, book processing and other bibliophilic needs. Check their blog to keep up to date on store happenings and find out how you can contribute to its success. Don't forget that you can also check their events and volunteer opportunities lists to see where they'll be next and how you can get involved in promoting literacy throughout the city.
We wish Open Books all the best as they see their dreams of the past three years come to fruition!
Women and Children First's annual used book sale and inventory are coming up next month and they're asking for help from volunteers to get both done successfully. The used book sale will be on Saturday and Sunday, August 1st and 2nd, and the inventory will occur on the following day, Monday, August 3rd. The store will offer a gift certificate to those who help and, I'd imagine, you'd get first crack at the books on either of the sale days. Shifts for the book sale are 8am-1pm and 1pm-6pm; shifts for the inventory are 8:30am-12:30pm and 1pm-6pm. If you're interested, email the store at wcfbooks[at]gmail[dot]com or call them at 773-769-9299.
In other news, here's your chance to contribute to Chicago history. The Chicago Area Women's History Council is recording the store's history and an archive has already been started at Loyola. If you have any memorabilia from the store and their many events - photos, program schedules, newspaper articles, video footage, etc. - and would like to donate it to the archive, bring it in or email it to the above address.
Our July meeting is this Monday, July 13. We will be getting together to talk about Every Crooked Pot by Renee Rosen. I will be using the following questions for our discussion guide. Questions followed by an asterisk (*) are from the reading group guide on author Renee Rosen's website.
1. How would you describe Nina?*
2. How would you describe Nina's relationship with her father? Do you think Artie was too hard on Nina while she was growing up? Do you approve or disapprove of his brand of tough love?*
3. Why do you think Nina's father plays such a huge role in this story? Who is the dominate character in the book: Nina or Artie?
4. How does Nina's birthmark affect her self-perception? Could you relate to her feelings?
5. Nina also exhibits some extreme behavior in her attempts to fit in with her peers at school. Were her actions realistic? Could you relate to her behavior from your own experiences growing up?
6. The story is set in Akron, Ohio, from the late 1960s through the 1970s. How important in the setting and period to the story?
7. At the end of the book, Nina comes to the realization that the childhood she thought she'd had was not the one she'd actually lived. Why do some people tend to block the good experiences while growing up and focus only on the negative ones?*
8. Do you believe "every crooked pot has a crooked cover"?*
The Three Little...Architects? UnBeige reports that Steven Guarnaccia has rewritten The Three Little Pigs, basing the main characters on Frank Gehry, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron" is being adapted for a film titled 2081. Watch the trailer here.
The Book Bench directs us to an interview with Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida in Interview Magazine about their joint screenplay for Away We Go.
...since reading The Time Traveler's Wife. With the success of Audrey Niffenegger's novel, the good people at the Newberry Library seem to have gotten a lot of questions about what in the story is fact and what is fiction. Here they offer some answers to some of the more pressing questions posed by the book, like "Does the Newberry really own a book bound in human skin?" (The answer is...um...not definitively "no.")
The National Book Foundation is looking back at their past 77 National Book Award winners over the last 60 years and blogging about one book per day. They started yesterday with the 1950 winner, Nelson Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm, and will run through September at which point readers will have the opportunity to select "The Best of the National Book Awards Fiction" and win two tickets to the 2009 National Book Awards. The site points out that this is the first time the Awards will be open to public voting, so that's a nice little twist on the usual process.
Of particular interest to Book Club members will be that first winner, which we read in July of 2006, three titles by Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March, our January 2006 read, Herzog and Mr. Sammler's Planet), a smattering of University of Chicago folk (Ralph Ellison with Invisible Man, Thornton Wilder with The Eighth Day, Philip Roth with Sabbath's Theater and Susan Sontag with In America), and our upcoming September read, The Echo Maker by Richard Powers. Keep checking the site as they add commentary on the winners each day. [via]
Bill Ott has been Editor and Publisher of Booklist for 25 years and his Back Page column has been a great source of literary humor, anecdotes, stories, quizzes and much more. Those columns have been compiled into a book, aptly titled The Back Page, and on Sunday there will be a release party celebrating Ott's work. The party is free from 5pm-7pm at Pritzker Park, just north of the Harold Washington Library at State and Van Buren. You'll get to see Ott interviewed by Frank Sennett, Editor-in-Chief of Time Out Chicago, and he'll also sign copies of his book which will be available for purchase at the party at a discounted price. It'll be a great way to celebrate both the book's release and bibliophilia in general.
The Illinois Arts Council recently announced the recipients of its 2009 Literary Awards. Only new writing by Illinois writers in Illinois published in Illinois not-profit literary magazines qualify for the award. This year the winners include:
• Stuart Dybek for his story "Bait", which appeared in Tri-Quarterly
• Carolyn Alessio for her creative nonfiction story "Meet Marisol" in Ninth Letter, and
• Robert McDonald for his poem "Postcard Written at 'The Perfect Cup'" published in the Columbia Poetry Review
The LA Times reports that Ray Bradbury will hold his 89th birthday celebration at the Memorial Branch Library in LA where he won't charge admission to the party, but will put the sales of his books toward helping the library. Bradbury will also sign those books that are purchased at the party. If I weren't convinced that planes could just randomly fall out of the sky (and recent events haven't helped to persuade me otherwise), I might seriously consider making a little trip out to the west coast for this shindig.
I also recently learned that Fahrenheit 451, the classic book about book-burning, has been adapted into a graphic novel. Tim Hamilton is the artist who did the adaptation with Bradbury's full approval and cooperation. Publisher's Weekly talks about the new graphic novel here.
It has long been speculated that another author, frequently thought to be Francis Bacon, wrote a number of Shakespeare's plays and now Barack Obama undergoes the same suspicions. Conservative author Jack Cashill posits that it was not Obama but Bill Ayers (wtf?) that penned his memoir Dreams from My Father. For his stunning proof, Cashill compared Ayers's writing with Obama's to produce a list of similarities that, taken completely out of context, could be quite convincing. Taken in context, however, these similarities mean almost nothing and English PhD and blogger Scott Eric Kaufman hilariously refutes the claim. (Personally, I would love to hear what my style and rhetoric professor would have to say about this.) It seems that this argument has been ongoing since September of last year. Fortunately, it doesn't sound like too many people are convinced of Cashill's claim. Or even really care. [via]
The Chicago Public Library has chosen The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City as their Fall 2009 One Book, One Chicago selection. Publisher U of C Press talks briefly about the book and provides a link to their Plan of Chicago Facebook page where you can follow the upcoming events and discussions. The events will also be posted on Slowdown, so be sure to check our calendar once the discussions get started next month.
Dan Gross of the New York Times takes former University of Chicago professor Thorstein Veblen to task for his study of the American elite in the classic The Theory of the Leisure Class. Though the book was published in 1899, Gross applies Veblen's theories to our current economy and finds "while Veblen frequently reads as still 100 percent right on the foibles of the rich, when it comes to an actual theory of the contemporary leisure class, he now comes off as about 90 percent wrong." Gross finds that Veblen's assessment of the leisure class as needing to spend on others, in the form of expensive presents, entertainment, private education, etc., after they've spent all they can on themselves and their mimicry of European nobility to still ring true, however, whereas Veblen defined leisure as the "nonproductive consumption of time" and, therefore, wasteful, Gross points out that today, many members of this upper class continue work though they need not, that "to be at leisure, to be idle, is to be irrelevant." The fact that Veblen's theories still apply at all is interesting to learn and Gross does a fair job of explicating where Veblen succeeds and fails in modern times.
The New Yorker's books blog recently pointed readers to a 2002 article in which author Malcolm Gladwell remembered the heat wave that tore through Chicago in 1995. Gladwell, appropriately, turns to sociologist Eric Klinenberg's study, Heat Wave, to discuss that deadly week. The Book Club read Heat Wave in August (when else?) of 2005.
I'm dismayed to learn that Powell's is closing their Burnham Park location at 828 S. Wabash. In truth, I've only visited that location once, but mainly that's because for the first five years of my time in Chicago I had easy access to the Hyde Park location and since then I've been close to the Lincoln Ave. location. I visited Burnham Park simply because I was curious to see what the third Powell's was like and, though the Hyde Park location remains my favorite (I'm told that the first Powell's you visit is the one you fall in love with), it was nice knowing that this great purveyor of used books could be found in multiple places throughout the city. Though the closing of this location is sad, the one bright spot is that they're offering 50% off everything in the store. I don't know about you, but I'm fairly certain I'll find myself making one final trip down to S. Wabash in the very near future.
Two of our brightest literary stars are meeting at Quimby's on Friday. James Kennedy, author of The Order of Odd-Fish, and Jonathan Messinger, of Time Out Chicago and Featherproof Books, join forces for what will surely be an entertaining and enlightening discussion of their works. Free at 7pm at 1854 W. North Ave. Call 773-342-0910 for more information.
It's funny. I had an interviewer ask me, "Are you writing chick books?" I said, "Chick books? What's a chick book?" "You keep writing about women," he said. I said, "What's wrong with writing about women?" I don't know. I guess it's because of Hummingbird, in part. But part of the process of Hummingbird was being accepted by the women's healing community in the indigenous world. I didn't really understand the world of medicine, or curanderas. I had some access to that through men, because I have all these brothers who are Oglalas (adoptive brothers, in the loose term of brother), and I have relatives who are Apache, and so forth.
When I was accepted by a couple of communities of women, I was taken in to learn the women's stuff. One of those women said this very simple thing. It was so simple it was brilliant. She said, "You goddamned men. When you want to know something about women, why don't you just ask?" I had this idiotic Western writer's response; I was writing down notes: "Hmm, ask women!" [Laughter] Her follow-up was, "And when we tell you, why don't you listen?" It became really important to me if I was going to write Hummingbird's Daughter to try to do honor to women.
