Ian McEwan, in my opinion, makes superb airborne reading. Just the best. Jonathan Franzen, by contrast, reads better on trains. I have never found anyone who is fun to read on a bus. Certainly not Marcel Proust.
Joe Queenan / One for the Books
“Was not everything, after all, like this bewildering woodland, this dance of dark and light? Everything only a glimpse, the glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten.”
The Man Who Was Thursday / G.K. Chesterton
Talking Books with Bookrageous
The fantastic literary podcast Bookrageous just celebrated their two-year anniversary. For the occasion, and for our book blogger interview series, we spoke with hosts Jenn Northington, Josh Christie, and Rebecca Schinsky. Here they discuss how the show has changed how they read, what they read, and if social reading is possible. Follow them on Twitter and Facebook for all things bookish.
You live in different states, how did the three of you find out about each other? How did you then decide to co-host a podcast together?
Behold the magic of the interwebs! We knew each other from our blogs and Twitter and had started working on the Bookrageous calendar (for which a bunch of awesome folks posed and contributed photos), when the idea of doing a podcast came up.
How do your day jobs affect the podcast and how does the podcast affect your day jobs?
Jenn: My day job gets me all the books that I talk about on the podcast, and the podcast shapes the way I talk to customers about the books that I’ve read (and that Rebecca and Josh have read).
Josh: Working at a bookstore keeps me in a bookish head space, which means a lot of the “research” and brainstorming for the show happens almost by coincidence. Like Jenn, talking about books on the podcast helps make me a better bookseller in the real world.
Rebecca: My job at Book Riot has me paying attention to what people are reading and how they talk about books—I think about writing about books almost as much as I think about reading them now—and the podcast is a constant source of data and ideas. If I get stuck trying to write about a book, I think about how I would talk to Josh and Jenn about it, and that usually helps me get my voice back.
How have your reading habits changed since you began the podcast? Do you influence each other?
Dubliners / James Joyce
Introduction by John Banville
James Joyce was the singular figure of modernism, and to this day his grand vision looms large over contemporary literature and the entire Western canon. His stylistic innovations were revolutionary, yet nowhere is Joyce more accessible than in this volume of short stories, a brilliant collection that celebrates, critiques, and immortalizes the place that Joyce knew better than anyone else: Dublin. From the young boy encountering death in the opening story, “The Sisters,” to the middle-aged protagonist of its haunting finale, “The Dead,” considered one of the greatest short stories of all time, Dubliners is a vivid portrait of the city in all its glory and hardship, and a seminal work that redefined the short form. Featuring a new Introduction by acclaimed novelist John Banville, this edition is not only a breathless portal into Joyce’s “dear dirty Dublin” but a vital literary treasure from one of the great masters of all time.
At these last words, Pinocchio jumped up in a rage, grabbed a wooden mallet from the workbench, and flung it at the Talking Cricket.
Perhaps he didn’t mean to hit him at all, but unfortunately he hit him square on the head. With his last breath the poor Cricket cried cree-cree-cree and then died on the spot, stuck to the wall.
Pinocchio / Carlo Collodi (1881)
Another Friday, another great bunch of books from my fellow Picadorians.
Greetings Friday Reads Club!
The clouds are hovering over the Flatiron building but our staff picks for this week are looking terrific.
Gabrielle just finished an amazing parody of a Choose Your Own Adventure book called Love is Not Constantly Wondering If You Are Making the Biggest Mistake of Your Life written by an anonymous author in Portland, OR and started City Boy: My Life in New York by Edmund White.
In true Portland style, the book was originally self-published but after a rave review in Slate the author’s friend who runs a small press was enlisted to help out with the third printing. It’s the story of the author’s years long relationship with an alcoholic girlfriend. His dedication to an authentic Choose Your Own Adventure layout is amazing. I hope it becomes a cult classic.
I just started Edmund White’s memoir, City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s. I saw him in conversation with Ann Beattie last year at McNally Jackson and thought it was one of the best events I’d been to. Ever since then I’ve been meaning to read his work. This time period and White’s perspective (gay and literary) makes this one hard to put down. Can’t wait to head to a coffee shop with it later.
Elianna is falling deep into the world of Cormac McCarthy’s BLOOD MERIDIAN and when she needs a change of pace from gouged eyeballs and scalping, she’s been perusing the NEW YORK Magazine Sex Issue and learning all about throuples.
Daniel just started CLOUD ATLAS by David Mitchell and is trying to finish it before Tom Hanks and Halle Berry get to it.
Darin is looking forward to reading Peter Carey’s latest, THE CHEMISTRY OF TEARS.
James is reading Ian Hamilton’s THE WILD BEASTS OF WUHAN, the 2nd Ava Lee thriller we’ll publish in 2013.
Turns out Ava is a fan of Gong Li (and Zhang Yimou). While on a flight from Newark to Hong Kong she takes in both To Live and Raise the Red Lantern. A little heavy for a long flight (I tend more toward Rob Schneider movies when I’m stuck on a plane), but she’s got great taste.
Elizabeth is reading submissions, sushi menus, and the latest issue of One Story.
PJ just read the first story in SMUT by Alan Bennett. In it, a widower has some perverse fun with her two teenaged lodgers, and comes out of her shell via some patient/doctor role play.
Have a great weekend!
I’m impressed with our friday reads
Welcome to the first Friday of August. As summer starts to wind down, our team has recommendations on how to make the most of these last weeks of summer reading.
On her last Friday in the Picador offices, intern Anya has just started Little Century, Anna Keesey’s debut, recently released from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Both Daniel and P.J. have Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station as their read this week. P.J. recently finished it, and describes it as, “a book about a young American a’ramblin’ and a’wanderin’ around Madrid, sort of writing an epic poem.” Daniel is only 100 pages in, but this passage in particular struck him:
And yet when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I’d participated in that evening, then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and when I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills.
Alaina just finished Blame by Michelle Huneven, on Jennifer Weiner’s recommendation. She is just getting around to some of her galleys from BookExpo of America, and has plans to pick up One Last Thing Before I Go by Jonathan Tropper next.
Darin is enthralled by FSG’s All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen, a group biography of Esther Murphy, Merceds de Acosta, and Madge Garland.
High society, fashion, and old school lesbianism: these are a few of my favorite things.
Justin is working on Philip K. Dick’s Ubik.
Gabrielle just finished Christopher Beha’s debut novel What Happened to Sophie Wilder. She says:
It was enjoyable to read not only for its excellent writing but also because it made me think about life’s big issues: family, death, and faith. Christopher will be in conversation with Picador author Garret Keizer on Tuesday, August 21st at McNally Jackson to discuss Garret’s his latest book, Privacy. All in the area are invited. It’s going to be great—and lots of us Picadorians will be there. We’re fun.
This morning, I started Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. I have a serious blind spot when it comes to noir and need to correct it ASAP. I foresee lots of cigarettes, whiskey, and gunshot wounds in my future.
Stephen called Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins the “perfect summer read: absorbing, funny, stylish.”
And lastly, James recommends the “uncommonly honest” interview of Bret Easton Ellis in the Spring 2012 edition of The Paris Review.
BookStalked: Gabrielle Gantz of The Contextual Life and David Gutowski of Largehearted Boy
David and I were bookstalked by our favorite bookstalker! Check out what we have to say about author events …
Gabrielle and David are two high-profile bloggers who exemplify the best of the NYC lit scene. Their friendliness, enthusiasm, and knowledge was a total inspiration to me in the early days of BookStalker. A book publicist by day, Gabrielle writes about lit events and reviews books at The Contextual Life in her off-hours. David started his popular lit and music blog Largehearted Boy OVER TEN YEARS AGO (which is like decades in blog-years) and also runs the related reading series Largehearted Lit. As if they weren’t busy enough, the two friends recently combined forces to start BookBoroughing, a literary event calendar. This month, they are also starting a BookBoroughing reading series pairing friends, starting with Matthew Dojny and John Wray next Wednesday at WORD.
After the jump, both share their favorite events, surprising experiences and which one of them was just a liiiittle bit wary about their newest endeavor.
We have every right and should adapt tales because society changes. But the Grimms would flip over if they were alive today. They were better known during their time as scholarly writers; they were in the pursuit of the essence of story telling. By collecting different versions of every tale they published, they hoped to resuscitate the linguistic cultural tradition that keeps people together—stories that were shared with the common people.
—Jack Zipes, fairy tale scholar
Read his full interview about fairy tale adaptations with Smithsonian Magazine’s Reel Culture blog
[Illustrations: Hansel and Gretel: Kay Rasmus Nielsen / Little Red Riding Hood: Walter Crane]
For all you literature in translation fans, limited edition poster featuring the integrated covers for the four new Clarice Lispector titles available on the New Directions website.
20th Century Brazilian Writer
Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) was Brazilian journalist, translator and author of fiction. Born in Western Ukraine into a Jewish family who suffered greatly during the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, she was still an infant when her family fled the disastrous post-World War I situation for Rio de Janiero. At twenty-three, she became famous for her novel, Near to the Wild Heart, and married a Brazilian diplomat. She spent much of the forties and fifties in Europe and the United States, helping soldiers in a military hospital in Naples during World War II and writing, before leaving her husband and returning to Rio in 1959. Back home, she completed several novels including The Passion According to G.H. and The Hour of the Star before her death in 1977.
New in Paperback for June
These forthcoming paperbacks, a mixture of originals and reprints, are sure to keep your June a busy one.
[Follow the link for more info about the books and interviews with the authors]
Continuing our series celebrating National Short Story Month, my pick is The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis.
Rick Moody once called Lydia Davis “The best prose stylist in America.” Dave Eggers says Davis “Blows the roof off of so many of our assumptions about what constitutes short fiction.” What I love about Lydia Davis’s writing is her ability to pack a punch in a few sentences. Her stories are concise but never frivolous. Her observations, subtle, are often unsettling and her wit, sharp. This collection is perfect for a commute to work, those moments in between, or a gloomy Sunday on the couch.
The Thirteenth Woman
In a town of twelve women there was a thirteenth. No one admitted she lived there, no mail came for her, no one spoke of her, no one asked after her, no one sold bread to her, no one bought anything from her, no one returned her glance, no one knocked on her door; the rain did not fall on her, the sun never shone on her, the day never dawned on her, the night never fell for her; for her the weeks did not pass, the years did not roll by; her house was unnumbered, her garden untended, her path not trod upon, her bed not slept in, her food not eaten, her clothes not worn; and yet in spite of all this she continued to live in the town without resenting what it did to her.
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, pg. 155 (Picador 2010)
