seeing you i thought again what i thought the other time---beth has such SHARP EDGES. in the very best way. your virtual presence is so much about generosity, encouragement, positive reinforcement--for other writers and artists, for your family, for your students. in person, the other side comes out. and it's equally compelling---it raises the stakes somehow, in the best way! it's still positive, lyrical, poetic Beth, but there's also a tension there--the sense of an oppositional pull. the bold, unexpected shoes to complement and subvert the elegant, basic black.Being seen. How simple that sounds. How great the journey.
I used to imagine she saw us as a train
she could ride at will,
instead of a station,
fixed, every day.
I wonder now if maybePeter Gardos's Fever at Dawn, sent to me by Lauren Wein, an editor you know I love. It's a story based on the real-life tale of the author's parents—Hungarians who, in 1945, find themselves in Swedish hospitals miles apart. They are not well. They have been seared by death camps, racism, horror. They allow the letters they write to one another become their most extravagant form of hope. Miklos sends a blurry photograph to Lili, so that she cannot see his metal teeth. Lili stashes the political book Miklos has sent—unread. They know nothing about each other, actually, until, increasingly, they are nothing without each other. They are seducing each other, even as Gardos, in a book that seems (but isn't) utterly simple, seduces us:
a family is neither of those things
but something stable,
yet always changing,
because the people inside it are.
That evening the men sat out in the courtyard with the radio on the long wooden table. The light bulb swung eerily in the wind. The men usually spent half an hour before bed in the open air. By now they had been playing the radio for six hours without a break. They had put on sweaters and coats and their pyjamas (stet) and wrapped blankets around themselves. They sat right up close to the radio. The green tuning light winked like the eye of an elf.Finally, Cynthia Kadohata's National Book Award winning The Thing About Luck, which wrapped me around its many fingers this weekend. Let's just say this: Anyone who thinks writing for teens is easy should spend some time in the company of this book, which has everything to teach about mosquitoes, wheat harvesting, combines, and dinners on the road—all within the frame of one of the most likable narrators yet written, a young girl named Summer, who discovers, over the course of many exotic bread-basket weeks (yes, I know what I just wrote), that luck is made, not found:
I don't know. I mean, maybe computers and cell phones and rocket ships are more magical, but to me, nothing beats the combine. That's just the way I see things. In a short time, the combine takes something humans can't use and then turns it into something that can feed us.Before I go, I extend Happy Book Launch greetings to Robin Black, whose collection of essays, Crash Course, debuts tomorrow in grand style. Robin will be taking the stage with grammar queen Mary Norris, at the Free Library of Philadelphia.
Nabokov said that there are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. More and more, my only goal in writing is to tell stories—tell stories and bring characters to life. If there’s enlightenment or enchantment to be had in what I write, I’ve come to believe that I can’t force it; it’ll show up or not show up on its own.Morton's new novel, Florence Gordon, is about an aging feminist who has just received an astronomical New York Times Book Review, her dangerously affable and endearingly well-read cop son, his perched-to-leave-him wife, and their feeling-guilty-to-grow-up-but-is-growing-up-and-how-we-like-her daughter who is, at the moment, between colleges and assisting her prickly grandmother with research. It's also, as Morton's books are, about New York, where those who master the Manhattan walk may just decide to call the place home.
But of course, patience is still the most necessary thing. Patience, tenacity, perseverance, stubbornness, devotion—in terms of the writing life, they’re all different words for the same thing. I think the only way to keep going as a writer is to find a way to love the writing process in its every aspect: to take pleasure not only in the moments when it’s going well, but to find pleasure even in the difficulties.
Vanessa was a psychotherapist who worked with people in the arts. She proceeded to give a few examples. A painter who, after selling one of his works to the Whitney, began to speak of himself in the third person. A writer who'd so long suppressed her desire for fame, so long suppressed the narcissism near the root of every creative life, that when she finally achieved a bit of recognition, all her hunger for it had come bursting out—a ferocity of hunger that no degree of success could satisfy—and she was plunged into a depression that took her months to recover. Another writer, a woman who'd always seemed a model of tolerance and tact, who, after finally writing a book that brought her a degree of acclaim, felt nothing but anger toward all the people who were celebrating her. Late recognition, Vanessa said, was the stage for the return of the repressed.Read more...
Alexandra too believed that success could make you crazy, and she too had a theory. Buried deep in the psyche, she thought, is a sort of lump, a creature that craves nothing except stability, and as far as the lump is concerned, change for the better is just as bad as change for the worse.
Language left him gradually, a bit at a time. One would expect words to depart predictably, in reverse order—the way a row of knitting disappears, stitch by stitch, when the strand of working yarn is tugged off by the needle—but that was not the case.Look for it next June.
It's a stormy day in our smudge on the map. I'm impressed you visited, since getting here involves a series of ever-smaller planes—jets, turboprops, hamster-powered Cessnas—topped off with a spiraling drive up to my door. Even you commented on West Virginia's low status, its reputation maligned thanks in part to industrialists, Johnny Carson, and Virginians—our Siamese twins still fuming over that nervy Civil War split.I can't wait to finish this book. You shouldn't wait to order it. It's due out on June 17th from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Editor: the one and only Lauren Wein.
My mom sat on the edge of my bed and smoothed my hair as the doctor talked quietly with my dad. She pushed her thumb into the space between my eyebrows, and I recognized that gesture, too. It was something she'd done my whole life, wordlessly telling me not to worry so much. I still didn't have my memory, but now I had an outline of myself, like a tin form waiting for batter.
After we'd made ourselves a quick cup of tea from a little tray, we set out. By then dusk had turned into an empty-handed magician who kept a few paces ahead of us, snuffing out the streets seconds before we reached them, robbing us of the sights we'd come to see. One by one, the lights in shop windows were switched off, cafe tables and chairs brought in, postcard racks folded up.Look, I loved this book. What more can I say?
I'm not a complainer, I wouldn't have said anything, except that I was concerned I wasn't going to be getting enough rest, that over the course of several nights the lack of rest would add up to a general fatigue, it had happened to me before, it had happened to me in Madera, when I had broken my arm, or rather my arm had gotten broken while playing Smear the Queer with the Alvarez brothers, I had fallen in an awkward way, and because of the cast and the way it was situated I could not roll over freely in my sleep, and as a result I suffered from what your grandfather called general fatigue, which he said was quite noticeable with me, what happened was that in addition to having less energy I was less interested in everything and less friendly, too, I wasn't myself. At the time I did not know the root cause of the general fatigue but I have since come to realize that without sleep the head gets clogged with other people's words. The head needs sleep to make everyone else's words into our own words again, it is a conversion process.One final thing. Panorama City is a Lauren Wein (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) book. Lauren, whom I am proud to say is a friend, continues to produce some of the most interesting books around. Read Shards, if you can. Read Book of Clouds. Read Say Her Name. Read Kamchatka. And read this interview with Lauren herself, who keeps daring to do different in literature, and who keeps proving that different works. Read more...
Movies don't do it justice—that's all I'm going to say about the thought-collapsing, breath-stealing sound a spinning shell makes as it pierces the air on the way down toward the center of your town, in between three of the busiest cafes and a little bit to the right of the popcorn vendor in the midst of hundreds of citizens who are pretending that everything is okay, that the war is winding down. But I didn't know that yet.
The novel is constructed of fragments — shards — seemingly written by its main character, Ismet Prcic. Ismet grows up in Tuzla and manages to flee shortly before his induction into the “meat grinder” of the Bosnian infantry. He has survived and made his way to America, but is fractured by what he left behind. The novel comprises mostly segments from his therapist- ordered memoir (or memoirs) and excerpts from his diary. These shards employ several narrative strategies. There are asterisked footnotes, italicized interruptions and self-reflexive comments about unreliability. There are first-, second- and third-person narrations, sometimes switching back and forth within a paragraph. This is a novel about struggling to find form for a chaotic experience. It pushes against convention, logic, chronology. But its disruptions are necessary. How do you write about war and the complications of memory? How do you write about dislocation, profound loneliness, terror? How does a human persevere?Truth is, I'd been eager to read Ismet Prcic's debut novel ever since I sat in the office of Lauren Wein, the book's editor, and listened to her read aloud from the opening passage. The book had only recently been released as advance reading copies and, judging from the number of brilliantly hued sticky notes attached to many of the pages, Lauren was still giving this book her extraordinary editorial attentions. I loved the sound of what she had read to me. I could not wait to read more. And then, caught up in the crazy swirl of my own life, I did wait, not buying the book until just recently.
I love a girl, Melissa. Her hair oozes like honey. It's orange in the sun. She loves me, mati. She's American. She goes to church. She wears a cross right where her freckles disappear into her cleavage. She volunteers. She takes forty minutes to scramble eggs over really low heat, but when they're done they explode in your mouth like fireworks, bursts of fatty yolk and coarse salt and cracked pepper and sharp melted cheddar and something called thyme. She's sharp. She drives like a lunatic. She's capable of both warmth and coldness, and just hanging around her to see what it will be that day is worth it.
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