Weighing in on the critics, in the New York Times

Isn't Charles McGrath a right voice in our time?

(Wait. Did that sound critical?)

This week the New York Times Book Review asked Charles McGrath and Adam Kirsch the question: Is Everyone Qualified to Be a Critic? It's a question I often ask myself. A question I've been asking myself for the past 20 years, in fact—throughout my reviews of many hundreds of books for print and online publications, my jottings on behalf of the competitions I've judged, and my meanderings on this blog.

What makes me qualified? Am I qualified? And do I do each book—whether or not I like it—justice?

I do know this: If my mind is dull, if I am distracted, if I feel rushed, if I've grown just a tad weary of this trend or that affect, I won't review a book, not even on this blog, where I own the real estate. Writers (typically) work too hard to be summarily summarized, falsely cheered, unhelpfully glossed. Reviews should only be treated as art (as compared, say, to screed or self-glorification). It's important, as McGrath notes, that we reviewers keep reviewing ourselves.

His words:

It’s surprising how much contemporary critical writing is a chore to get through, not just on blogs and in Amazon reviews but even in the printed paragraphs appearing below some prominent bylines, where you find too often the same clichés, the same tired vocabulary, the same humorless, joyless tone. How is it, you wonder, that people so alert to the flaws of others can be so tone deaf when it comes to their own prose? The answer may be the pressure of too many deadlines, or the unwritten law that requires bloggers and tweeters to comment practically around the clock. Or it may be that the innately critical streak of ours too frequently has a blind spot: ourselves.

Read more...

the importance of the imagination, in memoir (Jen Percy on Brian Turner)

Brian Turner's immaculate memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, is reviewed today in the New York Times Book Review by Jen Percy.

The book itself is so well worth reading. (My thoughts about it are here.)

But the review is also a glory, opening with this paragraph about the importance of the empathetic imagination in memoir. Empathy may be nearly impossible to teach. But it does differentiate the great memoirs from the merely articulate ones, the we stories from the me tales. It's what should matter most to the makers and readers of memoir.

Jen Percy speaks of all this with bright, crisp words. Her entire review can be found here.

There’s a persistent idea in our culture that what we experience is “true,” while what we imagine is “untrue.” But without exploring the possibility of imagination in nonfiction, we leave out a fundamental part of the human experience — digressive wanderings, the chaotic interior self and, most important, our empathy. Empathy, after all, starts as an act of fiction. We must think ourselves into the lives of others.

Read more...

Can Writers Still Make it New? (Benjamin Moser)

Something to contemplate as I stand, 162 pages in, with an odd, new, perhaps creation. A novel I have to keep setting aside, a novel I dream with, wake up to, put aside again (real work forever intervening). A novel that makes me ask myself daily, as I lose my battle with time:  Is all this private agony worth it? Should I succumb? Wouldn't it just be easier if.... ?

Writing, like life, can drive a person mad. The pages of literary history are stained with the blood of writers who dashed their brains out. They are soaked with the drink that promised temporary consolation — or are left entirely blank, when the writer despaired and gave up. To make a new thing out of no thing is excruciating, but any writer who seeks to cut corners ends as a plagiarist or a hack. Agonizing experiment is ­inescapable.

— Benjamin Moser, for the New York Times Book Review Question: Can Writers Still Make it New?

Read more...

That someone who could change your life—Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs/Joshua Wolf Shenk

This weekend's New York Times Book Review fills me with desire. I imagine a lake house. I imagine time. I imagine a week with nothing but books and a notebook into which I might record my favorite lines.

Alas.

That isn't here, or now. And so I find myself reading the first many chapters of the reviewed books instead, trying to narrow my choices for those days when I will have full reading time. In Joshua Wolf Shenk's Powers of Two, reviewed by Sarah Lewis, I find this bit of loveliness. I am, to be honest, a lone wolf much of the time—searching my limited brain for a next idea, having the conversation mostly in private, taking the long solo walk to breathe more substance in.

But there have been moments, projects, abbreviated eras when I've found myself in the midst of a heady collaboration. Someone who makes the small idea bigger or clearer than how it began.

Shenk captures the feeling of that here:

When the quickening comes. When the air between us feels less like a gap than a passage. When we don't know what to say because there is so much to say. Or, conversely, when we know just what to say because somehow, weirdly, all the billions of impulses around thought and language suddenly coalesce and find a direction home.

Sometimes you meet someone who could change your life. Sometimes you feel that possibility. The sense that, in the presence of this celestial body, you fall into a new orbit; that the ground beneath you is more like a trampoline; that you may be able—with this new person—to create things more beautiful and useful, more fantastic and more real, than you ever could before.

How does this happen? What conditions of circumstance and temperament foster creative connection? In other words: Where and how does it begin? And which combinations of people make it most likely?

Read more...

the Jen Doll/Hairpin/Handling conversation and (wow) First Person Arts

If you're looking for a new entertainment channel, you can't do much better than Jen Doll, whose essays, opinions, and reviews appear in all the most important places (New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, Village Voice, The Atlantic, Vulture) and whose Twitter Feed is my personal go-to late night/early morning/any time of day First Aid Kit. Jen made my last year when she reviewed Small Damages for the NYTBR. She made my 2013 BEA when we met for the first time. And she made my yesterday train ride when she sent word that a conversation we'd had about memoir (Jen has her own due out next year and it sounds a — Ma — Zing) was now up and running at The Hairpin.

I am not an inherently cool dude-ess, but chilling with Jen makes me feel as if I am. And either she was typing uber fast when we were having our phone conversation a few weeks ago, or she has perfect handwriting/perfect recall, because I've never seen my own words transcribed with such precision.

So here. Meet Jen Doll, if you haven't already, by following this link to our conversation.

You'll find that she's a tad addictive.

And on another topic entirely: Did my fellow WXPNers/First Person Arts performers knock it out of the park at Kelly Writers House last night, or what? We'd gathered to give Philadelphia a taste of what is to come at the First Person Arts Festival, which launches November 6 and features an incredible line-up of storytellers, humorists, performance artists, and writers (Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez, Rita Dove, Ana Castillo, and Dani Shapiro among them). Supremely seductive stories got told. I encourage you to tune in on November 4, 8 PM at WXPN 88.5 to hear these hip hopping storytellers for yourself.

(And another round of hugs to Angela and Chang, for being my personal cheering section.)

Thanks to Karina Kacala, who organized the event, and thanks to Becca Jennings and Alli Katz, for holding our hands, and thanks to Andrew Panebianco, Katie Samson, Raphael Xavier, Yaba Blay, fellow artists, and thanks to Michaela Majoun and her inimitable radio ways. And come see us at First Person Arts. I'm on stage with Dani Shapiro on November 10 at 4 o'clock at Christ Church Neighborhood House. And then I return on November 16, 11 o'clock, for a two-hour memoir workshop called The Spices of Life. Registration is required.

See you then?

Say yes.

Read more...

Transatlantic/Colum McCann: Reflections

Art. Yes. That's what Colum McCann produces, every single time. Read all his work. Read his short stories. You'll run out of ink underlining the extraordinary images, the soul-giant gestures, the coined terms, the Irishisms. You'll feel as if the clock of time just wedged itself apart, showed you its gears.

Transatlantic, the new novel, is no different. In fact, I feel this book transcends McCann's National Book Award winner, Let the Great World Spin. There is greater structural integrity, more generational reverb. Most reviewers seem to be talking about the elements of the book—the distinct chapters and historic characters that wend their way through the pages. A 1919 airplane flight. A glimpse of Frederick Douglass, the freeman, in 1845 Ireland. George Mitchell at the height of the Good Friday peace talks in 1998. I believe, however, that the genius lies in the seaming—in all that these chapters actually share, which is to say the generations of women who bind these historic crossings and events. Real people and imagined people populate this book in nearly equal measure. Both have been deeply imagined.

Look, for example, at these three paragraphs. The first two describe an historic character, one of the 1919 pilots. The second describes a McCann creation. History and possibility don't collide here, stiffly. They need one another:

At night Brown spends a lot of his time downstairs in the lobby of the hotel, sending messages to Kathleen. He is timid with the telegraph, aware that others may read his words. There's a formality to him. A tightness.

He is slow on the stairs for a man in his thirties, the walking stick striking hard against the wood floor. Three brandies rolling through him.

An odd disturbance of light falls across the bannister and he catches sight of Lottie Ehrlich in the ornate wooden mirror at the top of the stairs. The young girl is, for a moment, ghostly, her figure emerging into the mirror, then growing clearer, taller, redheaded. She wears a dressing gown and nightdress and slippers. They are both a little startled by the other.

Yesterday I wrote about the sound of McCann's sentences, the legacy he shares with Michael Ondaatje. Today I want to answer the NYTBR reviewer, Erica Wagner, who, in her very lovely review of the book asks why the final chapter of Transatlantic must be written in first person. I suggest (though I'll never actually know) that it all has to do with the book's final sentence. Which could not have been written any other way, and which left me weeping early this morning.

Read more...

Paul Elie on Faith in Fiction

In 2004, I led the PEN/Martha Albrand Award jury for First Nonfiction—a responsibility that filled my home with books both large and small, historical and personal.  I read about presidents and war.  I read about tattoos.  I read about doctors under siege.  I read about landscapes.  I shared my thoughts with four other jury members and ultimately traveled to Lincoln Center in New York City to introduce our winner, Paul Elie, whose The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage had won us all over.  At the ceremony, I put our affection for his work this way:

Ingeniously conceived and elegantly crafted, Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own shines an amber light on four twentieth-century Catholic storytellers who dared to believe in the power of literature and in the ultimate integrity of readers.  Choosing to focus on the lives and works of Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Dorothy Day, Elie deftly moves among his illustrious characters —reflecting on influences, unveiling connections, tying one to the other in often unexpected ways. Elie transitions between the personal and the political, the literary and the lived, with enviable ease.  Most of all, he does supreme justice to his subjects with vivid, lithe, and never once pretentious prose.

I've been watching Elie's career unfold ever since—grateful for his continuing presence as a mold breaker and deep thinker.  This weekend, Elie has a long essay in The New York Times Book Review titled "Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?" If you have time on this holiday weekend, take a careful look.

Read more...

Small Damages: a book, and a cover, blessed

And so, in this week of breathtaking kindness, I want to thank some special people for throwing light my way.

Ed Nawotka, for inviting me to give the keynote address at the Publishing Perspectives conference and for subsequently running the talk today on the Publishing Perspectives site.  To all of you have retweeted the talk, thank you.

Jen Doll, for including Small Damages as one of the top 25 book covers here, on the Atlantic Wire, and for making this the year to remember with her New York Times Book Review thoughts about the book last July.

The YALSA folks for naming Small Damages to the BFYA list.

CMRLS Teen Scene for putting Small Damages on the Printz watch.

A.A. Omer, for giving Small Damages this glorious five-star review.

My friends, old and new, for being there.  My agent, Amy Rennert, for her enthusiasm.  And while this has absolutely nothing to do with Small Damages, a huge thanks to the Gotham team for being so wholly supportive of Handling the Truth, a book due out next August.  I will do everything in my power to earn your faith in me.

My father, for buying a copy of Small Damages, and making a go of reading it, even though it's not exactly this history lover's kind of book.

I have been in the book business a very long time.  I will hold onto these gifts, in memory, for the rest of my life.

Read more...

In the New York Times Book Review: reviewing Joyce Carol Oates and James Preller

I am honored to be reviewing new young adult novels by Joyce Carol Oates (Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You) and James Preller (Before You Go) in this weekend's digital edition of the New York Times Book Review, as part of the Back to School issue.

My thoughts can be found here.

Read more...

David Eagleman reviews The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall

Have I ever mentioned (oh, yes, I know I have) how much I love the book section of the Gray Lady?  I start looking for the online version of the coming Sunday's edition on Thursday, even though it's most often not posted until late Friday afternoon.  I scan the headlines on my computer once the edition is posted, then take my pink-covered iPad to a safe place and tap in.

Often I return to the old Mac to shout out a favorite couple of passages.  Last week I was talking about Judith Warner's review of Madeline Levine's Teach Your Children Well.  Today I'm sharing two passages from David Eagleman's review of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make us Human, a Jonathan Gottschall book.  We readers and writers like to talk about these things.  We like to agree or not agree.  

 

I rather like, here, that stories have been declared as important as genes.  I like that they aren't time wasters.  And you?

But not all stories are created equal. Gottschall points out that for a story to work, it has to possess a particular morality. To capture and influence, it can’t be plagued with moral repugnance — involving, say, a sexual love story between a mother and her son, or a good guy who becomes crippled and a bad guy who profits handsomely. If the narrative doesn’t contain the suitable kind of virtue, brains don’t absorb it. The story torpedo misses the exposed brain vent. (There are exceptions, Gottschall allows, but they only prove the rule.) 

 

This leads to the suggestion that story’s role is “intensely moralistic.” Stories serve the biological function of encouraging pro-social behavior. Across cultures, stories instruct a version of the following: If we are honest and play by the social rules, we reap the rewards of the protagonist; if we break the rules, we earn the punishment accorded to the bad guy. The theory is that this urge to produce and consume moralistic stories is hard-wired into us, and this helps bind society together. It’s a group-level adaptation. As such, stories are as important as genes. They’re not time wasters; they’re evolutionary innovations.

Read more...

parenting for authentic success

My friend Judith Warner has reviewed an important-sounding book in today's New York Times Book Review, on a topic forever close to my heart.  Titled Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success and authored by Madeline Levine, the book is about teens pushed toward false ideals of success, and the consequences. It's about the teens with whom Levine, a therapist, works—"depleted, angry, and sad as they compete for admission to a handful of big-name colleges" and about the parents "who can't steady or guide them, so lost are they in the pursuit of goals that have drained their lives of pleasure, contentment, and connection."  It's about a society that has, in Warner's words, "reached a tipping point, in which the long-dawning awareness that there's something not quite right about our parenting is strengthened into a real desire for change."

The review closes with this paragraph:

After all, as Levine notes, the inconvenient truth remains that not every child can be shaped and accelerated into Harvard material. But all kids can have their spirits broken, depression induced and anxiety stoked by too much stress, too little downtime and too much attention given to external factors that make them look good to an audience of appraising eyes but leave them feeling rotten inside. 

I read this review at this early hour and my mind returns to George William Shaw, whose funeral earlier this week was deeply moving.  Geordie, George's son, spoke eloquently.  Describing his father as an extraordinary ordinary man, Geordie went on to list George's greatest achievements:  He never put himself first.  He was a quiet provider.  He made all who knew him comfortable.  He made us laugh.  He loved his wife and let her know, every single day.  He bought his daughter roses every birthday.  He taught the neighborhood kids how to pitch.  He never missed a sporting or school event when his children, or their friends, were involved.  He treated his daughter-in-law like a daughter.  He was proud of his roots.

These achievements seemed to me to be of the very highest order.  These achievements, in the long run, mattered.  Vacationing neighbors chartered a plane back to my neighborhood to attend the funeral of this man. A former neighbor flew in from Steamboat Springs.  The friends of George's children came.  Every neighbor in these parts stopped whatever they had planned for Thursday and gathered in memory of George.  This was because of who George was and not because of George's resume.

George's life is proof of the power of goodness, plain and simple.  George's achievements are, perhaps, the kind that we parents can dedicate ourselves to teaching, the kind that Warner and Levine are suggesting we must.  The what will come for our teens.  The who is long and tender in the making.

Read more...

genuine happiness is genuine gold

I have mentioned her previously here—ageless, gorgeous, a knock-out, smart, funny, perpetually a Kindle in her hand (she not only reads great books, she once owned a bookstore).  We dance Zumba together, when I'm very lucky.  She shows up all blonde and coiffed, I show up all frizzy haired and old eyelinered, and we do it up.  She goes crazy for the Charleston.  I'll give her that if she'll dance my tango.

Her name is Joy, and I flat out love her.  I refuse to believe the things she tells me about how old she is.  Not even close.  Not for a minute.

Today I barely got to Zumba on time.  I didn't think, in fact, that I'd make it, but I finished a client call with seconds to spare and made a mad dash for the gym.  Looking back, imagining myself a no-shower for Zumba, imagining that client call gone just five minutes longer, I feel bereft.  For I would never have seen Joy in her joyful frenzy, plastering Xeroxes of The New York Times review of Small Damages all over the club town.  When she saw me she ran for a hug, Xeroxes in hand, then orchestrated a round of applause among the gathered dancers, then went about telling all the ladies I Zumba with that I'm an author in disguise.

I watched her with awe.  I listened to what she said.  I caught a glimpse of the mess of me in the mirror and tried to reconcile my image of myself with the beauty of her.  Not possible.  She rushed by as the music was getting started and said,

"I'm as proud as if I were your own mother."

Genuine happiness is genuine gold.

Read more...

Hoping to find you at the BEA

My friends:  I'll be at the BEA on Tuesday, June 5, 2012, working for Publishing Perspectives, the fabulous book news pub for which I have written about Pamela Paul (New York Times Book Review children's book editor), Jennifer Brown (Shelf Awareness children's book editor), Lauren Wein (Harcourt Houghton Mifflin editor), Alane Mason (WW Norton editor, not to mention my first editor), and others.  I'll be getting the inside scoop on some important stories.  But I'll also be looking for you.

If you'll be there, let me know?

Read more...

Reviewer Envy: Jennifer B. McDonald on The Lifespan of a Fact

Jennifer B. McDonald delivers such a compelling, interesting, forceful review in the New York Times Book Review this weekend that a) I have a severe case of reviewer envy and b) I wish I could quote the whole for you here.

I'll give you the link instead.

It's a front-page review of a book called The Lifespan of a Fact, authored (if that's the word) by John D'Agata and Jim Fingal.  The book is the biography, in a sense, of an article D'Agata had written about a suicide in 2002.  D'Agata's piece—nonfiction, for The Believer—was apparently riddled with made-up stuff, inaccuracies, small and large fictions, and the fact checker (Fingal) had called D'Agata on each one.  D'Agata's response, we're told, devolved into self-defense and bullying, a blatant, often preposterous insistence that his version of the "truth" was superior to the actual facts. 

D'Agata's arguments strike me as bluster, silliness, big-headed wrongness, and perhaps it wouldn't matter that much if, for example, he wasn't a writing teacher at the University of Iowa, churning out the next contingent of truth slayers.  Throughout her review, McDonald gives him no room, offering paragraph after paragraph of such beautifully argued stuff that I'll be reading the bulk of it to my memoir students this Tuesday.  (NOTE: I have not yet read the book myself, but McDonald quotes so freely from it that it is possible to form some early opinions.)

I'll quote here from the core of the piece and hope you'll read the whole for your self:

Superb literary artists have managed to do their work while remaining precise about details D’Agata would dismiss as frivolous. What of Updike’s criticism and E. B. White’s essays and Joan Didion’s sociopolitical dispatches? More recently, what of the narrative journalism of Katherine Boo, Elif Batuman and Philip Gourevitch, or the essays and criticism of Jonathan Franzen, Pankaj Mishra and Zadie Smith? What of John McPhee, who three years ago in The New Yorker went so far as to write a lengthy ode to his fact checkers? Would D’Agata claim that these writers’ adherence to fact diminishes their art? That when working in “nonfiction,” they don’t weigh the same ingredients he does — structure, theme, resonance, rhythm — in order to wring something wondrous from the ordinary? 

No text is sacred. The best writers know this. Fiction or nonfiction, poetry or reportage, it can all be endlessly tinkered with, buffed, polished, reshaped, rearranged. To create art out of fact, to be flexible and canny enough to elicit something sublime from an inconvenient detail, is itself an art. For D’Agata to argue otherwise — to insist that fact impedes the possibilities of literature, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is “unsophisticated” — betrays his limitations as a researcher and a writer, not our limitations as readers.

Read more...

yes, and this is brilliant: the short story defined

"A short story is by definition an odder, more eccentric creature than a novel: a trailer, a fling, a warm-up act, a bouillon cube, a championship game in one inning. Irresolution and ambiguity become it; it’s a first date rather than a marriage. When is it mightier than the novel? When its elisions speak as loudly as its lines." — Stacy Schiff in the New York Times Book Review review of Nathan Englander's story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.

Read more...

a brief appreciation of William Gass: Prague, years ago

Years ago, as I have sometimes written, I set off to Prague with my family for a writer's workshop.  It was my second experience among writers; my first had taken place the year before in Spoleto.  This is how it was, then—me sneaking my literary education into a family vacation.

Jayne Anne Phillips led my workshop, and when Jayne Anne announced the names of two writers selected for an individual consultation with William Gass, I found myself among them. 

I was working on a novel that took place in El Salvador.  I had brought twenty pages with me.  This was duly submitted to Mr. Gass in advance of my consultation, and as I climbed the many stairs to our meeting room, my heart was (as they say) in my throat.  I did not know the language of literature then.  I hardly knew what I was doing.  The stairs were narrow.  The room, in memory, was empty but for him—such a head of white hair—and a spill of yellow sun.  I sat across from him—I must have sat, though I can't recall a second chair—and waited for word.

I waited.  And I waited for word.

It seemed that an hour passed before Mr. Gass spoke.  When he did, he said (and about this I'm certain):  "There is a typo on the top of page 13."

I nodded, duly.  Waited for more.

"Otherwise," he finally said, "this is very good."

And that was it.  That was the consultation.  That was all I had and everything I had as I continued to work on that book.

Later that night, Mr. Gass would read at a bar in the center of Prague—a long passage about a candy shop.  My son, seven or so at the time, was sitting on my lap in well-behaved silence.  When the story stopped, and before the applause could begin, my son announced to the jam-packed room:  "That was waaaaaaaaaay too long."  Mr. Gass looked our way through the dark and slightly smiled.  My son, the young critic.

My Salvador novel was never published, by the way.  After 15 years of work I stripped away the fiction and wrote the Salvador memoir that became Still Love in Strange Places (W.W. Norton).  Sometimes very good is simply not good enough.

I write all of this today in honor of Mr. Gass, whose new book, Life Sentences, about language and style, is so intelligently reviewed by Adam Kirsch in the New York Times Book Review.  Mr. Gass cares about sentences, and so, frankly, do I, as I indicate in my own Chicago Tribune Review today of American Dervish.

Call it a bad habit, this caring about sentences. But it's not one easily shrugged away.

Read more...

Shards/Ismet Prcic: Early Reflections

Ever since Dana Spiotta reviewed Shards in the The New York Times Book Review a few weeks ago, I have been eager to get a copy for myself. Consider, here, what Dana says:

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 am only into the early pages at this point. I am not, as I thought I might be, intimidated by the hybrid of forms, techniques, approaches.  The word "propulsive" has been attached to this book, and that it is, but the book is remarkably resonant, too, often funny, surprisingly accessible, despite all that is original and new.  Here is an early-in example:

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.

Read more...

The remarkable My Friend Amy writes about small moments

and why they matter in works of art.  I was thinking, as I read, that the New York Times Book Review should hire Amy as a weekly essayist.  She is just that good.  I was thinking, too, about how lucky I am to count Amy as a faithful reader and so entirely generous friend.

Thank you, Amy, for these words.  Thank you, indeed, for everything.

Read more...

Melissa Walker Earns Her Place in New York Times Book Review

Melissa Walker is adorable.  She's the author of five YA books, a sometimes guest on big TV shows, a name you'll find in the Times Style section, a magazine writer, a voice on NPR, and an observer of our times.  She is also out there on a daily basis telling the stories of how other writers' novels came to be, how they settled in with their jacket art.  A few years ago, when I knew few souls out here in the Land of Blog, Melissa made a video log after she read my second young adult book, House of Dance.  It made me cry.  Later, she gave me room to tell the cover art stories of several of my novels.  Melissa, moreover, is part of the reason that I had the good fortune to serve as the Readergirlz inaugural author in residence.  Melissa reaches out, is what I'm saying.  She reaches out all the time, even as her own career and fame and family grow.

For many reasons, then, I am here today celebrating Melissa's debut in the pages of the New York Times Book Review—a Carlene Bauer review of Small Town Sinners, Melissa's fifth book, debuting Tuesday.  It's a glowing review, noting, among other things:

Walker has written a credible and tender evocation of the moment when a young person’s beliefs begin to emerge and potentially diverge from the teachings of a family’s religion. Lacey’s blind faith may not be entirely understandable to those who have never believed as she does. But for teenagers raised in more evangelical homes, as I was, the character’s spiritual life will ring absolutely true. 

"YOU SO ROCK!!!!!" I wrote to Melissa, when I saw the review at 4:30 this morning.  And that's because she does.  A big blue ribbon to Melissa, then, on this happy day.

Read more...

Dana Spiotta. Stone Arabia. (Read it.)

Back on May 21st I made the audacious announcement that I had just read the book of the year, which is to say that I'd just finished Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta.  Audacious because I'd already been singing some pretty sweet blog tunes about many a fine read this year.  Audacious because I've not yet read the forthcoming Ondaatje or Otsuka, or, indeed, the entire fall line-up.  Audacious because, well, who am I, anyway?

But if one must stand on a cliff, why not stand on Stone Arabia?  This brother-sister story is original, foundational, heartbreakingly sad and heartbreakingly funny, and I don't need to repeat myself, because I called it back in May.

But, hey.  It's nice to have some company in that assessment, and so I give you here Kate Christensen's words, published today, on behalf of the New York Times Book Review.  Christensen calls Stone Arabia "a work of visceral honesty and real beauty."  See what else she has to say.

And if you want to know what big question lies at the heart of this novel, listen to Dana herself, live from YouTube.

Read more...