After David Markson died earlier this year, many books from his personal collection started showing up in random places on the shelves of The Strand, New York’s great repository of used (and new) books. There was a bit of uproar at the time (if there can be a bit of uproar) from those who wondered how it could possibly happen that an acclaimed American writer’s books ended up in the hands of various Strand diggers rather than a protected home, perhaps in the academy. No one seemed interested in investigating whether this was simply Markson’s desire. But Craig Fehrman has:

In David Markson’s case, the easiest explanation for why his books ended up at The Strand is that he wanted them to. Markson, who lived near the bookstore, would stop by three or four times a week. The Strand, in turn, hosted his book signings and maintained a table of his books, and Markson’s daughter, Johanna, says he frequently told her in his final years to take his books to The Strand. “He said they’d take good care of us,” she says.

That comes from a broader piece Fehrman wrote about authors’ libraries for the Boston Globe, in which he considers the fate of personal collections when famous authors die:

Most people might imagine that authors’ libraries matter—that scholars and readers should care what books authors read, what they thought about them, what they scribbled in the margins. But far more libraries get dispersed than saved. In fact, David Markson can now take his place in a long and distinguished line of writers whose personal libraries were quickly, casually broken down. Herman Melville’s books? One bookstore bought an assortment for $120, then scrapped the theological titles for paper. Stephen Crane’s? His widow died a brothel madam, and her estate (and his books) were auctioned off on the steps of a Florida courthouse. Ernest Hemingway’s? To this day, all 9,000 titles remain trapped in his Cuban villa.

I’m not sure I agree that libraries are inherently interesting or revealing. I’m not a famous writer, but I’m a big reader, and my shelves are home to several books I didn’t love, many books I haven’t read, and a few books temporarily on loan from friends. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I’m not sure they are so interesting that an author like Markson shouldn’t be allowed to give them to his favorite shop down the block. Fehrman writes about the efforts—noble or crazy, depending on your perspective—of some scholars to retroactively compose a list of all the books an author owned: “The effort and ingenuity behind these lists can be astounding, as scholars will sift through diaries, receipts, even old library call slips. A good example is Alan Gribben’s Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction, which runs to two volumes and took nine years to complete.”

On his own blog, Fehrman expanded on his article with an interesting post about Melville, and about the strategies employed by university archivists looking for a big catch.

The four collections of Paris Review interviews published by Picador in recent years are beautiful books worth owning. (I wrote about the series and the fourth volume here. Oh, and actually wrote about earlier volumes at another venue, here and here and here.) Now, as part of new editor Lorin Stein’s regime, all of the Review’s interviews are available online.

Browsing through the subjects by last name, I get the distinct sense that I’ll be losing many, many hours to this archive, though the negative connotations of “losing” are not at all apt here. Just three that I will be diving into soon: Michiko Kakutani (and the magazine’s editors) interviewing Woody Allen. John Sullivan talking to Guy Davenport. And George Plimpton and the great John Gregory Dunne (pictured above), who waste no time getting started, beginning like this:

Plimpton: Your work is populated with the most extraordinary grotesqueries—nutty nuns, midgets, whores of the most breathtaking abilities and appetites. Do you know all these characters?

Dunne: Certainly I knew the nuns. You couldn’t go to a parochial school in the 1940s and not know them. They were like concentration-camp guards. They all seemed to have rulers and they hit you across the knuckles with them. The joke at St. Joseph’s Cathedral School in Hartford, Connecticut, where I grew up, was that the nuns would hit you until you bled and then hit you for bleeding. Having said that, I should also say they were great teachers. As a matter of fact, the best of my formal education came from the nuns at St. Joseph’s and from the monks at Portsmouth Priory, a Benedictine boarding school in Rhode Island where I spent my junior and senior years of high school. The nuns taught me basic reading, writing, and arithmetic; the monks taught me how to think, how to question, even to question Catholicism in order to better understand it. The nuns and the monks were far more valuable to me than my four years at Princeton. I’m not a practicing Catholic, but one thing you never lose from a Catholic education is a sense of sin and the conviction that the taint on the human condition is the natural order.

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Charles Baxter reviews Jonathan Franzen’s latest. Finally, someone keeps this book from slipping under the radar. (”Freedom operates as a kind of morality play in which all the major players are drawn toward actions they should not perform and objects they either cannot or should not possess. . . . [Its] ambition is to be the sort of novel that sums up an age and that gets everything into it, a heroic and desperate project.”) . . . James Marcus reviews Robert Fox’s We Were There, which compiles firsthand accounts of how people experienced the 20th century. Marcus thinks the emphasis on World War II crowds out other events, but finds the book “valuable” in the end: “It vividly illustrates a general principle of such first-person testimonies: they are most interesting when they surprise us, when some element of human perversity creeps into the picture and messes with our expectations.” . . . “Told in a voice that echoes the magic cadences of Toni Morrison or the folk wisdom of Zora Neale Hurston’s collected oral histories,” Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns is, according to Lynell George, a “lush, expansive and harrowing history of the decades-long exodus of blacks, which became known as the Great Migration . . . when black people in the South disappeared, often under the cover of night, frequently leaving their sharecropper’s tools in the fields, their future plans and whereabouts a mystery to those they left behind.” . . . Susan Casey has written about great white sharks, and her new book returns to the ocean to look at surfers and extremely large waves. Matt Robinson says the book is “a sort of surfing safari, part educational (Ms. Casey interviews oceanographers, physicists, marine insurers) and part explorational—a search for something to gawp at.” . . . With Cultures of War, Pulitzer-winning historian John Dower has written a “thought-provoking, scholarly and deeply polemical book” about the lessons to be learned from Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9/11, and the Iraq war.

The Paris Review’s blog has a new look, to coincide with the first issue published under the guidance of Lorin Stein, and it also has a guest post by Lydia Davis, who will be writing on the site over the next two weeks about “the tasks and sins of the translator.” Davis’ new translation of Madame Bovary is out later this month.

Wise people like to say, wisely: Every generation needs a new translation. It sounds good, but I believe it isn’t necessarily so: If a translation is as fine as it can be, it may match the original in timelessness, too—it may deserve to endure. In fact, it may endure even if it is not all it should be in style and faithfulness. The C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation of most of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (which he called, to Proust’s distress, Remembrance of Things Past) was written in an Edwardian English more dated than Proust’s own prose, and it departed consistently from the French original. Yet it had such conviction, on its own terms, and was so well written, if you liked a certain florid style, that it prevailed without competition for eighty years. (There was also, of course, the problem of finding a single individual to do a new translation of a 3,000-page book—an individual who wouldn’t die before finishing it, as Scott Moncrieff had. This problem Penguin solved at last by appointing a group to do it.)

I keep reading things about Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom that make me extremely wary of it. Today’s wary-making fact: It features an indie rock band called Walnut Surprise. This is one of those small details that might actually mean a lot. Franzen has consciously positioned himself as the foremost chronicler of How We Live Now (and reaped significant rewards for the positioning), but I remain unconvinced that he knows How We Live Now. There are, of course, thousands of bands with terrible names out there. Whether any of those names are as uniquely terrible as Walnut Surprise is a debate for another time. From what I understand—and yes, I should just read the book, which I plan to do—the name and the band are not meant for purely satirical purposes. In other words, the band is taken seriously (up to a point), etc. The name Walnut Surprise, in my humble opinion, for a band that is hailed by almost anyone, is a minor indication that the person who came up with that name is Out of Touch.

This post was written by Jacob Silverman.

How do you like your irony? The answer may determine how you feel about Created Equal, Mark Laita’s book of 105 photographic diptychs. If you don’t mind irony that comes in the form of a wink, a knowing tilt of the head, a sly gesture tending toward the obvious, then you’ll probably appreciate the juxtapositions that Laita makes with these 210 portraits culled from a decade of photographing Americans throughout the lower 48 states.

Most of the photos are black-and-white, a dark muslin backdrop and diffuse lighting allowing for a full view of the subjects, most of whom face the camera directly, usually bearing an expression just this side of angry or bemused. Below each photograph are the subject’s name, a descriptive label (usually his or her profession), and a date and location. There are some recurring types: sex workers, pimps, cops, convicts, priests and nuns, gamblers, models and bodybuilders, the mentally disabled (including several identified as inbred). Taken on their own, the photos are aesthetically interesting and well composed, but Laita’s project is more provocative for how he labels and arranges his subjects.

The title of the book begs us to draw equivalences between those depicted. The captions help us along, recasting subjects as something entirely different from what they appear. The man in a space suit is obviously an astronaut (confirmed by the underlying descriptor), yet we have no idea who the casually dressed, middle-aged woman on the adjacent page is until we read that she’s an alien abductee (self-proclaimed, I assume). It’s a clever juxtaposition on Laita’s part, but it also points to a limitation of his scheme: appreciating these diptychs often hinges on the reductive labels applied to them.

Laita’s approach is one of enforced harmony. The juggler and the air traffic controller, presumably paired because both keep track of complicated patterns in the air. A ballerina and a boxer, telling us something about physical grace. The stock traders and the demolition derby crew, varieties of destruction. In a few inspired cases, the labels are almost irrelevant. The stripper who occupies both sides of a diptych—naked in one, clothed and holding a grocery bag in the other—is striking because she’s almost unrecognizable from one photograph to the next but both images reflect fundamental aspects of her identity. In another set, a boy holding a jar of fireflies is paired with a moonshiner, each grasping a glass jar that holds something precious to its owner.

Many of these diptychs, though, are screamingly obvious—a real estate agent and a homeless woman, a bank robber and sheriff’s deputies, a black Baptist minister and Ku Klux Klan members—while others are too insistent on their connections, like the bug-eyed man with his mail-order wife set against a movie producer with his much younger wife. There’s a sense of abridgment here, of too much interpretation being done for us. The man wearing a “warden” badge is called an “executioner,” but he could, of course, be identified as a prison warden—a label that’s probably more accurate and certainly less political. (He, by the way, is paired with a fortuneteller.)

While Created Equal’s introduction, written by Ingrid Sischy, tells us that Laita spent less than 10 minutes with some of his subjects, the notes section at the end of the book provides some illuminating details. One of the pimps was shot and killed a week after his photograph was taken; one male cross-dresser was new to the lifestyle and felt “excited about interacting with someone as a woman;” the “only thing that bothers” the executioner “is that [his work] doesn’t bother” him; the Latino dishwasher, wearing a hairnet and appearing close to tears, works in a “small 24-hour deli in Manhattan, where none of the employees speak the same language and everyone seems to hate each other, including the customers.” There are such endnotes for perhaps a third of the photographs, and they’re fascinating. They indicate that Laita, when he takes the time to listen to his subjects, is able to craft deceptively emotive scenes that gesture at something larger than themselves–like an Amy Hempel story visualized. I appreciate the humanistic spirit of a book that attempts to call us all equal (especially when many of these people are culled from society’s margins), and that doesn’t glamorize its subjects, but it also seems restricted by the form Laita has chosen. I look forward to a future work that builds on his demonstrated ability to capture compelling subjects, while presenting them through a less constricted lens.

Jacob Silverman is a contributing online editor for the Virginia Quarterly Review. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The National, The Daily Beast, and many other publications.

A belated congratulations to Michael Schaub and Jessa Crispin at Bookslut, who published the site’s 100th issue earlier this week. A remarkable achievement.

Quieter than I expected around here this week, for personal reasons (nothing bad). Full speed next week: new reviews in Circulating, the return of regular blogging, and a general shaking off of summer and full embrace of a busy fall.

New on the Backlist this week, Tim Crimmins writes at length about America’s Founding Fathers, Britain’s radical Whigs, and the Tea Party. He begins the piece by citing Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” an essay that first appeared in the November 1964 issue of Harper’s. The entire thing is available online. It begins:

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.

That last post inspired me to take a quick look around my own bookshelves. I’d say the apartment currently houses between 800 and 900 books (his and hers), and I have a few hundred more in storage. I’m always adding to that number, and not always in ways that make a ton of sense. For instance, I will very occasionally—maybe once every few years—buy a sci-fi book, despite the fact that the last sci-fi book I finished was probably something by Isaac Asimov when I was something like 13 years old. This is not to impugn sci-fi, but just to say I never had much of a natural taste for it. A few years back, I bought Ender’s Game, widely considered a classic of the genre. It remains perched on a bottom shelf.

Last night, I bought a copy of Marsbound by Joe Haldeman, having recently read a review that piqued my interest. Perhaps after I collect a few more titles—and there are plenty of guides for help—I’ll get around to reading them.

Scott David Herman notes that his book collection has passed a milestone:

As of last week, it grieves me to say, our book collection has finally broken a thousand. The tally as of this writing is one thousand and three. Some are hers, some are mine, some are ours. Regarding the mine-and-ours: Don’t ask me how many of them I’ve read or will read or will even ever crack open and flip through in search of something, I beg you. Don’t ask me how well I remember or understand the ones I have read. Just don’t go there. The answers will reflect poorly on all involved. The shame of the high books-bought-to-books-read ratio is of course comfortingly widespread among us of the book-nerd persuasion. Let’s just round down and say I haven’t read any of them. I don’t want to read them. I just want them around. I require them in my home. And I must have more.

(Via Levi Stahl)

At the magazine of Wabash College, Jason Boog writes about losing his job and finding some measure of solace in the work of 1930s novelists. It begins:

I lost my job in December 2008, unemployed at the beginning of the longest, coldest winter I can remember in New York City.

Up until then, everything had been going swimmingly: I was a staff writer at an investigative reporting publication, taught an undergraduate journalism class, and proposed to my girlfriend in a fairytale forest along the Hudson River. Suddenly, I had to tell my friends, relatives, and students how I had failed.

Out of everything I read during those gloomy months, I found the most comfort in Maxwell Bodenheim—an author who lost everything during the Great Depression. In 1934, he wrote: “There’s something wrong with this world all right, but I can’t put my finger on it. . . . Something must be wrong when a fellow can’t get a decent wage, can’t tell when he’s going to be fired, can’t look forward to any promise of happiness. Something is rotten somewhere.”

(Via Macy Halford at The Book Bench)

Congratulations to readers Merlin Brittenham and Dan (who blogs at Imagined Icebergs), who, respectively, won a copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience and The Heart of William James.

There will be more giveaways soon, probably related to the idea of older favorites. Stay tuned.

William James Week was scheduled to end on Friday, but then I received a guest post from Robert D. Richardson, and since Richardson’s biography of James is one of my all-time favorite books, it gives me a thrill to extend the week to today. Richardson’s contribution is the post immediately below this one.

I’ll be traveling back to Brooklyn today from an annual visit to Saratoga Springs, and non-James-related activity will resume in full tomorrow. Lots of things are planned for the fall. In the meantime, a reminder that I’m still accepting entries for two book giveaways, here and here.

Lisa Levy is a writer in Brooklyn, New York. Her book on modernism and biography, We Are All Modern, is forthcoming from FSG.

Three incidents serve to illustrate the contentious nature of Henry James’ relationship with his older brother William.

Both were members of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, which established the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1905. Fifty initial members were chosen by ballot. Henry was chosen in the second ballot, William in the fourth. When William found out, he declined to join, citing several reasons but most crucially writing the Academy’s secretary, “I am the more encouraged to this course by the fact that my younger and shallower and vainer brother is already in the Academy and that if I were there too, the other families represented might think the James influence too rank and strong.” Henry knew nothing about this.

The second incident concerned William’s critique of Henry’s 1904 novel The Golden Bowl, which Henry considered his finest work. William pleaded with his brother to write a book “with no twilight or mustiness in the plot.” Henry, long used to his brother’s complaints about his indirect style, replied that he would be “humiliated to write such a thing that you like it!!!” This bantering continued in The American Scene, Henry’s 1907 account of his travels, including a long visit with William’s family. William remarked that Henry was on the verge of becoming “a curiosity of literature.” Henry coolly inscribed a copy of the book, “To William James, his incoherent, admiring, affectionate Brother, Henry James, Lamb House, August 21st 1907.”

Incoherent, admiring, affectionate: these adjectives describe the brothers’ relationship in its milder form. It was also intense, cantankerous, rivalrous, and petty. William once said of the expatriate Henry, “He is really a native of the James Family, and has no other country.” The James family was a nation with a small, itinerant population: William (born 1842), Henry (1843), Garth Wilkinson (called Wilky, 1845), Robertson (called Bob, 1846) and Alice (1848). As children, the dominant William monopolized the attention of their mercurial philosopher father, Henry James, Sr., who frequently uprooted his family in a grand experiment to give his children a “sensuous education,” while the milder Henry was the favored child of their stern mother, Mary. As young men, the brothers seemed to trade off periods of invalidism (both suffered from bad backs and stomach ailments, and later in life, heart problems), as if one of them had to be the object of parental attention while the other exercised the free will that Henry Senior often preached but his children found difficult to practice. Henry Senior was so intent on his boys being that both had trouble figuring out what they ought to be doing until well into their 20s; the elder boys, that is—the younger ones were sent to fight in the Civil War and make their own way in the world.

Maybe all sons of rich fathers without the cushion of wealth themselves suffer from such problems establishing themselves, and in William and Henry James we just see a version of those problems with a certain metaphysical bent. If, as Rebecca West famously wrote in her study of Henry James, one boy grew up to write philosophy as if it were fiction and the other to write fiction as if it were philosophy, then the brothers have more in common than William’s petulance and Henry’s gentle mocking in the incidents described above. There are general and specific moments of shared values in their work, as in William’s experiments in psychology and Henry’s development of the free indirect discourse technique, which delves into the consciousness of his characters. Henry’s biographer Leon Edel points out the thematic conjunction of William’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and Henry’s “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903): both deal with finding one’s place in the world, and the ways in which people use one another. What Edel does not say is how utterly Jamesian these ideas are—they are all over the brothers’ writing, from Henry’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881) to William’s Pragmatism (1907). The obsession with finding one’s place in the world was the legacy Henry Senior left his sons. How people use one another fascinated both of them, but they responded in different ways. In his personal life, William tried to rise above it, though it is key to pragmatism. Henry, however, knew it was a necessary part of life, and could be benign or malicious: he was a compulsively social man, and wrote with unmatched nuance about the connections between people, about friendships, love affairs, parents and children, even siblings.

In 1916 during his final illness, Henry told his favorite niece, William’s daughter, Peggy, several times: “I should so like to have William with me.”

From A Pluralistic Universe by William James:

Souls have worn out both themselves and their welcome, that is the plain truth. Philosophy ought to get the manifolds of experience unified on principles less empty. Like the word ’cause,’ the word ’soul’ is but a theoretic stop-gap—it marks a place and claims it for a future explanation to occupy.

This being our post-humian and post-kantian state of mind, I will ask your permission to leave the soul wholly out of the present discussion and to consider only the residual dilemma. Some day, indeed, souls my get their innings again in philosophy—I am quite ready to admit that possibility—they form a category of thought too natural to the human mind to expire without prolonged resistance. But if the belief in the soul ever does come to life after the many funeral-discourses which humian and kantian criticism have preached over it, I am sure it will be only when some one has found in the term a pragmatic significance that has hitherto eluded observation. When that champion speaks, as he well may speak some day, it will be time to consider souls more seriously.

On August 26, 1910, William James died at the age of 68. To mark the centenary of his death, this week on The Second Pass will be devoted to James.

I read The Varieties of Religious Experience for the first time about four years ago, and I quickly became a James fanatic. In short order, I read several other books by or about him, some of which will be mentioned on the site throughout the week. Also in store: an excerpt from one of James’ best-known works will go up on the Backlist momentarily; a review of a biography of James’ wife will be published in Circulating; the Shelf will fill up with books related to James; and there will be guest posts on the blog by several very smart people who, like me, hold James dear. I’ve found since discovering his work for myself that fellow fans share my affection for him, my sense that he is almost a real friend — a remarkable feeling to have for any author, much less one who has been gone for a century. If you’re unacquainted with James, I hope that this week on the site will give you a sense of why that affection exists, and will motivate you to learn more about him. If you are acquainted, I hope you get something new from this effort and find it an appropriate tribute.

As always, thanks for reading.

This list at Forbes of the 10 highest-paid authors over the past year is unsurprising. James Patterson, Stephenie Meyer, John Grisham, etc. JK Rowling is just getting by on the residual wizardry ($10 million), but she better write something else soon.

What’s shocking is the following: “One out of every 17 novels bought in the U.S. are authored by Patterson.” Wow. That’s almost more dispiriting than straight-up illiteracy stats. Plus, this: Stephen King is working on a musical with John Mellencamp.

But as Sarah Crown pointed out on Twitter, the “real news” is Dean Koontz’s hair, which gives Blagojevich a run for his money.

Preeminent literary critic, essayist, and academic Frank Kermode has died at 90. In a thorough obituary for the Guardian, John Mullan writes, “His fusing of scholarly disinterestedness and live intellectual curiosity was hard and rare. It made him the leading literary critic of his generation.” From the same obituary:

The title of another collection of essays from his post-Cambridge period, An Appetite for Poetry (1989), reflected a new emphasis in Kermode’s thinking about literary criticism and the teaching of literature. He had become surer and surer that literary theory, which he had once invited into the seminar room, was strangling the understanding and love of literature. He had come to think that many university teachers and leading critics of literature, particularly in America, had no “appetite for poetry.” Earlier works from the 80s, Forms of Attention (1985) and History and Value (1988), had explored the need for a literary canon – a core of especially valuable works of the imagination to which we can keep returning. Now he believed that theory, frozen into formula, was the addiction of academic critics “who seem largely to have lost interest in literature as such.” Thus, a final irony: a man who had been one of the country’s leading literary theorists became a scathing critic – sometimes satirist – of literary theory’s self-importance.

(Photo of Kermode by Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian)

This Missouri Review interview with George Saunders is evidently from back in 2001, but it’s full of timeless humor, general good nature, and thoughts about the writing (and teaching-of-writing) process. Two tidbits here, but make time for the whole thing:

In my work, and in my psyche, there’s this very sentimental, traditional, conventional side that’s always in argument with a more radical, sarcastic side. Some of my stories are really sentimental, but they’re layered over with weird, satirical stuff. For example, “Sea Oak” is a very straightforward story about the haves and the have-nots, about one of the have-nots saying, “Why didn’t I get anything?” To get away with what could be a saccharine, sentimental arc, I cover it with all this dark, perverse stuff that makes the reader mistake me for a scatological cynic.

And:

Any mastery you can achieve in writing is totally personal and incredibly nuanced. It’s a sort of antimastery, feeling comfortable with being unsure. After fifteen years of doing this, what I know about writing is nothing I could actually say to you. It’s like boxing, maybe. A good boxer could tell you, “Always keep your hands up,” or “It’s important to be a good counterpuncher.” But the reason the boxer is a good boxer is not that he can articulate those things but because he can do them instantaneously—and also of course because he has great abs and can jump rope for three hours straight.

Wendy Lesser re-reads Henry James’ The Bostonians:

I even treasure the loathsome Tarrants — Verena’s father, a “mesmeric healer,” and her mother, the pathetic, social-climbing daughter of a well-known abolitionist — for their near-Dickensian vividness and ludicrousness. This is a novel in which no one is spared but in which everyone earns at least a grain of James’s sympathy, and sometimes (as in Olive’s and Basil’s case) much more than that.

I read The Bostonians (for the first time) earlier this year. I loved it, and shared a brief passage here.

(Via Mark Athitakis)

When the Caustic Cover Critic, who has a great eye for the bizarre and grotesque in book design (as well as the sublime), titles a post “Not Safe for Work, or Sane Humans,” I sit up and pay attention. The covers underneath the headline belong to the books of Harry Stephen Keeler (b. 1890). One site devoted to him says: “Today, if you’ve heard of him at all, it’s as the Ed Wood of mystery novelists, a writer reputed to be so bad he’s good.”

I hadn’t heard of him even as that, but further investigation was well worth it. First, plot synopses of two of his dozens of books:

A man is found strangled to death in the middle of a lawn, yet there are no footprints other than his own. Police suspect the “Flying Strangler-Baby,” a killer midget who disguises himself as a baby and stalks victims by helicopter. (X. Jones of Scotland Yard, 1936)

A disgruntled phone company employee calls every man in Minneapolis, telling him the morning papers will name him as the secret husband of convicted murderess Jemimah Cobb, who runs a whorehouse specializing in women with physical abnormalities. (The Man With the Magic Eardrums, 1939)

The Harry Stephen Keeler Society, based at Xavier University, maintains an informative web site. It also has a Twitter page dedicated, it seems, to showcasing Keeler’s sentences. (“Having no televisic gifts for seeing into the future, Penn Harding allowed his complex to be titillated.”; “To hell with all shirt salesmen!”) The site also has several examples of the original artwork and jacket copy for Keeler’s books, the best rabbit hole I’ve discovered in a while.

According to William Poundstone, Keeler, who wrote more than 70 novels, was committed to an insane asylum by his mother when he was a child. But, “Keeler cannot easily be pigeonholed as an ‘outsider.’ He was published by big houses internationally, and he was a pulp magazine editor as well.”

From a quick perusal of the evidence, it seems reading Keeler at any length would be a form of punishment. (McSweeney’s did reissue one of his books five years ago.) But reading about Keeler is a joy.

Back to the Caustic Cover Critic:

In learning more about Keeler, I came across Ramble House, a (then, at least) one-man operation dedicated to bringing all of Keeler’s works back into print. The owner, Fender Tucker, printed the books individually and then bound them in his kitchen with a hot glue gun and an iron.

God’s work.

Rosecrans Baldwin’s debut novel, You Lost Me There, about a neuroscientist, his recently deceased wife, and the different ways in which people remember, went on sale today. To mark the moment, Baldwin, co-founder of The Morning News, has published a pre-publication diary that he kept for The Millions, tracking the excitement and anxiety that leads up to having a book in the world. Three highlights below. When you have some time today, read the whole thing.

March 13, 2010
I’ve never kept a diary before. My wife and I live in the woods on the rural fringe of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We moved here after stints in New York and Paris because we wanted to be around nature again. We have blueberry bushes, a gigantic fig tree, and thousands of ticks. Behind our house is an acre of forest. On its back side, there’s a guy with a lumber business who wields a much bigger, louder gun than I do. Mine is my wife’s dead grandfather’s BB gun, which we use to frighten away deer, whereas the neighbor’s gun is a shoulder-mounted cannon that he fires whenever he likes.

April 2, 2010
Panic about the novel is set to low simmer. The next novel and the non-fiction book proposal aren’t flying, they’re flunking. Anxiety is causing my fingernails to reverse course and grow inward. What if You Lost Me There is perceived to be a bomb, would it be so bad? Playing around today, I figured out that Michiko Kakutani is an anagram for “Atomic Haiku Kink.” Michiko alone becomes, “Hi I Mock.”

May 24, 2010
Three days in New York with my sister. My sister lives in Brooklyn and we spent the weekend eating and drinking. Deviled eggs, I discovered, are in vogue in Manhattan right now, and now there’s a hatchery in my lower intestine. Diary note from the return flight, “New York is an office-park with a very good food court.” First gunshots this morning at 8:28 a.m. Good to be home.

Today in Circulating, my friend Jon Fasman and I discuss a recently published book by Josh Wilker about his childhood and his baseball card collection. One of the book’s funniest moments involves pitcher Dock Ellis. And believe it or not, it’s not the time Ellis threw a no-hitter while still under the lingering influence of LSD. To commemorate that moment, please enjoy this fantastic animated video (with narration by Ellis himself):

Congratulations to reader Joseph Benincase, who has won a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

And thanks to the many other readers who entered the contest, and who very kindly responded to my call for site feedback and baseball prognostication.

I’m formulating a regular giveaway plan, and the next opportunity will be announced on Monday, August 23 — which will also be the first day of a special, nerdy week around here. More soon…

Caitlin Roper interviews John Waters at the Paris Review blog. You learn, among other things, that when he was 17 he lived in Provincetown for two weeks, in a tree fort:

A guy named Prescott Townsend owned it. The first gay radical I had ever met. He was from a wealthy family from Cambridge and he seemed completely insane, in a great way. Part of the tree fort was a submarine. He had to like you to let you live there and it was free and he gave you free hot dogs and eventually the town burned it and then they cut the tree down.

And that when he says “cut and paste,” he means cut and paste:

My other ritual is that I write in longhand. On this one kind of legal pad called AMPAD Evidence. I like BIC pens, the clear black ones. And I have to use an exact kind of scotch tape when I cut things up—Scotch Magic Finish Tape. And I have to use the same style scissors.

So you use the scissors and the tape to take what you’ve written in longhand and rearrange it?

Yes. When I’m re-writing rather than copy the whole thing over and over, I’ll cut out three sentences and put ’em in. It’s a word processor, old fashioned, by hand. Then, when I get it back from my assistant typed, I cut it up again. Then there’s less and less writing the closer and closer it is until we start copyediting and proofreading and all that.

Read the whole entertaining thing.

Gaby Wood writes in the Telegraph about Eunice Frost, an editor at Penguin starting in the late 1930s who went on to become the house’s first female director. Frost is now largely forgotten, and Wood goes through heaps of her old files to paint a full, tender portrait (pardon the backwards quotation marks; WordPress stubbornly wants them to look that way for some reason):

In making up for men who were at the Front, Frost developed a career she probably wouldn’t have had without the war. Perhaps as a result, she sacrificed her life to hard work and assisted in the birth of a publishing house of great idealism and zeal. Much of the paperwork found in the archive was administrative – rights bought from agents, photographs requested and returned.

But she certainly had more than her fair share of eminent correspondents. There are letters here from Edith Sitwell (”Dear Miss Frost, What a very charming woman you must be – if I may say so.”); Dorothy L Sayers (”Dear Miss Frost, If you must write me up, for God’s sake keep off the personal. This concupiscence for intimate details about people is rotting away the brains of our civilisation…”); Graham Greene (”What I’d like to see you publish is one of my travel books”); Evelyn Waugh (”I saw the photograph your informant thought ‘wistful.’ It made me look like an ill-tempered publican. I expect that is a characteristic aspect but I don’t think it likely to excite the sympathy of your readers”). There are invitations to the memorial services of TS Eliot, Winston Churchill and Henry Moore. But by far the most interesting character to emerge from these boxes is Frost herself.

The second half of the piece, spurred by the more personal writings of Frost, is awfully sad but beautifully done:

Among Frost’s boxes is a set of 11 pages written in pencil, in a hand characteristic of something produced at great speed. It was obvious to me that the piece was some sort of autobiographical sketch, but the writing was so unclear I wanted to give up on it. I was just about to set it aside when I finally deciphered the first sentence, and knew I couldn’t let it go: “I was born the fourth, last, and unwanted child of parents who should never have had children at all.”