Craig Fehrman, knowing I’m an admirer of historian and New Yorker contributor Jill Lepore, kindly passed along this interview with her. It’s from last fall. In it, Lepore responds to a question about when she decided to become a historian:

I went to college, but I didn’t want to go; I wasn’t sure what college was for, and we didn’t have any money. I went because I won an ROTC scholarship—and I really liked ROTC, actually, except I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in the military. Loved boot camp; hated SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative. So, freshman year, there I was, in ROTC, playing sports, failing all my classes, when I got a letter in the mail. Or, well, my mother got it, and she forwarded it to me. It was from me.

In high school, I had an English teacher who was that once-in-a-lifetime teacher who shapes everything that ever happens to you. He had given us an assignment to write a letter to ourselves five years in the future, or four years into the future, whatever it was. And he was not going to read it. We had to give him money for stamps, adjusted, I thought somewhat suspiciously, for inflation. I mean, good for him, but he charged us like fifty cents. Anyway, we addressed the letters to our parents’ houses. I had completely forgotten about that letter because—did I mention?—I have a terrible memory.

Turns out, it was a very scary letter. It said, more or less, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ and it went on like that, scolding, berating: ‘If you’re not actually doing what you’re supposed to be doing, quit everything and figure out your life for God’s sake. Get on with it!’ Apparently, I was a very difficult fourteen-year-old, but not altogether lacking in foresight. It was as if I had known that I would still be the jock who was reading in the dark. So I quit. I quit ROTC. I quit sports. I had been a math major; I switched to English.

This didn’t make me ‘become a historian.’ But later, when I thought about what I did want to do, I remembered that letter, that time capsule, and I wondered what it would be like to read old letters all day, other people’s letters, to listen to the past, and I knew I wanted to do that.

In his review of Martin Amis’ new novel for this site, John Davidson wrote, “Amis may be in the process of becoming our foremost contemporary chronicler of what it is to grow old.” From a recent interview with Amis in the Globe & Mail:

Amis turned 60 last summer. So how was it – balloons, bubbly, joyous celebrations? He levels a gaze that is only tepidly amused. “It was … not great.” When he recently became a grandfather – he has two grown sons from a previous marriage and an adult daughter – “it was like a telegram from the mortuary.”

In the same piece, we also learn this: “Unusually, for him, [Amis] has already completed his next novel, a satire about modern England in which a young thug wins £100-million in the lottery.”

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of publishing Bryan Charles’ debut novel, Grab On to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way. That novel took its title from a Pavement song, so it’s unsurprising that Bryan’s new book is Wowee Zowee, the latest in the 33 1/3 series, which pairs writers with records. Wowee Zowee was Pavement’s third record, a bit more experimental than its first two. I recently saw Bryan mark the book’s publication at a lovely store in Greenpoint, where he read a few pages and then discussed the band with Matthew Perpetua of the music site Fluxblog.

Without giving away too much, Bryan disclosed one of the book’s themes, which is a contrasting of Pavement front man Stephen Malkmus with Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan, who apparently refused to share the Lollapalooza bill with Pavement one year after Malkmus had made a cheeky reference to the Pumpkins in a song lyric. In the same song (“Range Life”), Malkmus refers to Stone Temple Pilots as “elegant bachelors.” This spurred Bryan to say that Stone Temple Pilots were “a thousand times better than The Hold Steady.” Not to turn this into a music blog, but: ahem. I teased him about that judgment afterward, and he hilariously signed my book with one brief comment: “STP Rules.”

I just posted about Ben Macintyre’s Operation Mincemeat on The Shelf. It’s been getting enthusiastic reviews, and I’m eager to read it. Via Clive Crook, I also found that Macintyre recently spoke to The Browser’s Five Books about his favorite books about spies and spying. Of Ian Fleming’s works, he chose Casino Royale. Here’s why:

I think it’s the best of them, and it’s wonderful because it reveals what I think is the essential Bond. The film Bond is very, very different from the character that Ian Fleming invented. The real character was unknowable. There’s something rather creepy and peculiar about the original James Bond and you get that in buckets in Casino Royale. . . .

It was 1953 and it was very remarkable for the time, because Bond was so cruel. He’s horribly tortured in the book and there are some very grim moments in it. But I also think it’s Fleming’s best writing. It wings along—it’s very hard to stop reading. It’s also brilliant at place. He manages to summon up the smoky stench of a casino in a way that no one else has ever managed to do. And it was incredibly glamorous. Here was Britain emerging from the depredations of war in a time of great austerity and here was a character on an apparently limitless expense account, having guilt-free sex and ordering dry martinis in the most glamorous places. It was a wonderful bit of escapism for the time. It’s a tour de force and by far his best novel.

He also explained why he thinks the British are better at writing about spies—and at spying itself:

Now all these books are about British spies. Is there an equivalent catalogue of great American spy books?

I don’t think the Americans do it nearly as well as we do. Yes, there are lots, but they’re all fairly derivative and I don’t think they have the same psychological depth. The British are particularly good not just at spying but at writing about spying. I think it’s to do with the natural theatricality of the British character and also a public-school system that for many generations encouraged a covering-up of what you really felt and thought. Hidden homosexuality, hidden feelings about loneliness. The British class system encouraged a certain amount of subterfuge.

Ben Segal and Erinrose Mager are soliciting submissions for a new project, The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature. The idea is to write a blurb or short description of a book that doesn’t exist. More details below (and full details here). Please don’t confuse this project with the excellent Invisible Library, maintained by Levi Stahl and Ed Park, which catalogs “books that exist only between the covers of other books — as descriptions, occasionally as brief excerpts, often simply as titles.” All clear?

We are very excited to announce the coming existence of The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature. The Catalog is to consist of a series of blurbs/short descriptions of books that do not exist. In order to compile that Catalog, we have asked many of the writers, theorists, and text-makers we most admire to imagine that they’ve just read the most amazing book they’ve ever encountered and then write a brief blurb about the imagined text.

As many of you know, The phrase ‘potential literature’ is highly associated with the Oulipo group. We choose to use the phrase here because, as the Oulipo says, their project, properly, is to conceptualize forms and potential works: not necessarily to bring them into being. Literature is potential literature when it is that shimmering non-work of total possibility. Though Official only by way of titular hyperbole (itself, like the blurbs contained within, a kind of unfulfilled and unfulfillable promise), the Catalog will evoke a library of wonderful–maybe even impossible–books; books that, in spite or even because of their non-existence, excite and fascinate. Each paragraph will be the promise of the unopened book in the moment before reading.

Over at The Barnes & Noble Review, I review Brady Udall’s new novel, about a man with four wives and 28 children. Here’s how it starts:

In Reality Hunger, a self-described manifesto recently published to much chatter, David Shields argues that the conventional novel, with its contrived plot points and all-seeing authorial voice, is dying, and deserves its fate. David Shields, meet Brady Udall. In the tradition of John Irving and Richard Russo and dozens of other novelists whose work appeals to something in people that Shields either can’t or doesn’t want to understand, Udall writes unabashedly old-fashioned fiction. It’s stuffed, in the present case, with fallout from A-bomb tests, a frisky ostrich, births and deaths, and a family, “like so many overextended empires before it, coming apart along the seams.”

Read the rest here.

At the Daily Beast, Sarah Weinman lists her favorite true crime books. Some are classics (In Cold Blood, Helter Skelter) and others are more obscure, like an out-of-print book about forensic techniques that “may now seem quaint in the age of DNA and CSI-style glamorization,” and an 800-page book about “one of the most troubling criminal chapters in [Canada’s] history.”

In a recent feature here, Matt Weiland recommended Calvin Trillin’s Killings, an out-of-print collection of his true-crime pieces for The New Yorker. Weiland said the book is “true to the raw, messy drama of the living as well as the dead.” Trillin is still at it, with a very good piece in this week’s New Yorker called “Incident in Dodge City.” It’s available to subscribers online. If you don’t subscribe, of course, you should.

Brady Udall’s The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint was one of my favorite books of the century’s first decade. His second, just out, is The Lonely Polygamist, and I’ll have a review of it up soon at another fine online establishment. For now, Jill Owens interviews Udall at Powell’s, and I’m glad she asked him about a character in the book named Ted Leo, which is also the name of a famous (in certain circles) indie rock singer, pictured at left:

Jill: This is a somewhat tangential question. Do you know the band Ted Leo and the Pharmacists?

Udall: [Laughter] You are now the third person to ask me that! No! Well, now I do. After I was told about them, I listened to some of their music. But as far as his name and most of the characters’ names, like I was describing about all the kids’ names, there are dozens of them. I don’t settle on one until near the end of the book. So, the character was called all kinds of things throughout the book, and then it settled there on Ted Leo, and suddenly it belongs to some musician.

Jill: I thought maybe you really didn’t like their music, since the Ted Leo in your book is such an evil character.

Udall: [Laughter] Actually, I really do. That’s what’s crazy; I really like the music.

I’ve always been a fan of Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column in The Believer, a casual, smart, funny enterprise that has even led me to some books that I’ve enjoyed. In 2008, Hornby left the column behind, but now he’s back: “It’s never easy, returning home after failing to make one’s way out in the world. When I left these pages in 2008, it was very much in the spirit of ‘Good-bye, nerdy losers! I’m not wasting any more time ploughing through books on your behalf! I have things to do, places to go, people to see!’ Ah, well.”

This is a welcome development. Only the first three paragraphs are available online, so I need to pick up the magazine, because one of the books Hornby’s been reading is one that I just started:

David Kynaston’s superlative Austerity Britain is more than six hundred pages long and deals with just six years, 1945–51, in the life of my country. The second volume in the series, Family Britain, 1951–57, has already been published, so I plan to move on to that next; Kynaston is going to take us through to Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, and I’m warning you now that I plan to read every single word, and write about them in great detail in this column.

Jessica Hische recently asked design students to create updated covers for The Wizard of Oz.

I love the concept of Michael Olivo’s cover (at left), and the rest are elegant and worth checking out.

(Via the great Book Patrol, which also has a recent, charmingly illustrated post about Blinky Bill, a koala who’s the Australian equivalent of Curious George.)

At Reason, Andrew Potter reads Naomi Klein’s battle cry on the 10th anniversary of its publication:

What are we to make of No Logo a decade on? It remains a passionate and ambitious snapshot of the newly globalized youth and consumer culture at the end of the 20th century. It is also an often infuriating work of agitprop that marries old Marxist prejudices about the market economy to a paranoid and conspiratorial account of the business of advertising.

If that was all there was to the book, it would be enough to dismiss it as a period piece, the journalistic equivalent to a box of old Polaroids. Sweatshops, the McLibel trial, Brent Spar…weren’t those the days? But that would be a mistake, since it would miss the way in which, in its quest to undermine the branded economy and expose the capitalist propaganda that motivates all advertising, No Logo inadvertently served as the most influential marketing manual of the decade.

In a thoughtful piece at the Jewish Review of Books, Michael Weingrad wonders why, “I cannot think of a single major fantasy writer who is Jewish, and there are only a handful of minor ones of any note. To no other field of modern literature have Jews contributed so little. So why don’t Jews write more fantasy literature? And a different, deeper but related question: why are there no works of modern fantasy that are profoundly Jewish in the way that, say, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is Christian?”

The experience of wonder, of joy and delight on the part of the reader, has long been recognized as one of the defining characteristics of the genre. This wonder is connected with a world, with a place of magic, strangeness, danger, and charm; and whether it is called Perelandra, Earthsea, Amber, or Oz, this world must be a truly alien place. As Ursula K. Leguin says: “The point about Elfland is that you are not at home there. It’s not Poughkeepsie.”

To answer the question of why Jews do not write fantasy, we should begin by acknowledging that the conventional trappings of fantasy, with their feudal atmosphere and rootedness in rural Europe, are not especially welcoming to Jews, who were too often at the wrong end of the medieval sword. Ever since the Crusades, Jews have had good reasons to cast doubt upon the romance of knighthood, and this is an obstacle in a genre that takes medieval chivalry as its imaginative ideal.

It is not only that Jews are ambivalent about a return to an imaginary feudal past. It is even more accurate to say that most Jews have been deeply and passionately invested in modernity, and that history, rather than otherworldliness, has been the very ground of the radical and transformative projects of the modern Jewish experience. This goes some way towards explaining the Jewish enthusiasm for science fiction over fantasy (from Asimov to Silverberg to Weinbaum there is no dearth of Jewish science fiction writers).

Troy Patterson praises a novel about “a rusty little cog in the machine of New England crime”:

The first thing to know about George V. Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle is that it directly entered the crime-fiction canon upon its 1970 publication. The second thing to know is that it holds up as both a writer’s-writer thriller and as popular pulp, with Dennis Lehane introducing Picador’s new 40th-anniversary reissue of the novel by heralding it as “the game-changing crime novel of the last fifty years”—a moderate claim compared with that of Elmore Leonard, who hails it as the best crime novel, period.

I’ve had the movie version, starring Robert Mitchum, at home for a while from Netflix, and this has inspired me to finally watch it this weekend. Patterson calls it “an exemplar of the art of adaptation. Journeyman screenwriter Paul Monash faithfully mimeographed much of the novel’s dialogue while also streamlining the story for maximum speed and rebuilding the plot in a way that retains its tensions and increases its clarity.” (For some clips, check out A. O. Scott’s take.)

I really am still planning to review David Shields’ Reality Hunger, though it will likely be the last review of it to cross the finish line. For now, we know how Greil Marcus feels about the book, from an exchange during this interview:

Pop Matters: I was wondering what you thought of this influx of the memoir in its different forms over the past decade or two, or the blurring of lines between fiction and non-fiction. Have you read David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto?

Greil Marcus: Yeah, I thought it was total bullshit. First of all, there’s a long history of people writing books about the death of the novel or the death of fiction and getting attention for doing that. There are a lot of people who would rather be at the funeral than at the birth, and this is one of those cases.

Usually when someone announces the death of the novel, it’s because they’re incapable of writing one and they feel inferior because of that. I tried to read his book, if only because it had so many blurbs on it from people I know or find interesting, and I couldn’t read more than half of it. It wasn’t really writing.

I mean, I’m a great believer in collage writing; I’ve written a couple of pieces that are entirely made up of quotations from other people, and I love the notion that you can absent yourself or that you can speak through other people in that way. You don’t have to add a single word of your own, you can tell a story, you can make an argument, you can dramatize a question.

But I also believe in attribution. (laughs) I think it’s much more fun and more interesting to say who’s speaking and even stress the absence of the author more that way, and it also lets the reader say “Oh, this is interesting, I want to investigate this more.” But in this book, I think it’s more than anything an attempt to get attention, and I don’t think it’s a serious argument at all.

My sister, who has a four-year-old son, recently asked me if I ever feature sites about children’s books on The Second Pass, and mentioned Curious Pages in particular. I don’t often point to books for children, but I did, in fact, write about Curious Pages earlier this year. And my sister’s question about it sent me back for a look around. It’s a terrific place, which I’m adding to the Links page, and it currently features a guest review by George Saunders, who writes about Kashtanka by Anton Chekhov and illustrated by Gennady Spirin:

The story is simple: a dog gets lost, adjusts to her new home, is found by her old owners, goes happily back home. Like so much of Chekhov’s best work, it has the pace and emotional range of real life: no great villains, no great heroes, everybody trying to do his or her best. Neither master is an abusive brute. The dog is a small but pleasant part of both their lives. The first master is a woodcarver. The second trains domestic animals for a small-time circus act. . . .

There is essentially no real drama. The dog will be fine either way, we sense. She is not traumatized by being lost — the way a dog would be in a lesser story, in which the writer would feel more compelled to anthropomorphize her — but adjusts quickly to the world in which she finds herself. Mostly, she smells things. There aren’t any bad smells, just less-interesting ones. Likewise, when her old owners come to the circus and reclaim her, she goes along happily, and by the time they reach home, she has all but forgotten her time with the circus, which “seemed no more than a long and confusing dream.”

Kashtanka is, it seems to me, the most accurately drawn dog in literature.

I made the very smart decision to smart my Wednesday by watching the slide show of The Band Genesis, Ward Sutton’s parody of R. Crumb’s take on the Book of Genesis. Sutton’s mock cover for the “Invisible Touch” single is brilliant and hysterical.

Phil Collins is playing Roseland Ballroom in New York soon, a relatively small place for a guy like him. A friend and I even considered going, because Phil’s had his great radio moments. Then we found out he’s playing all Motown covers. Pass. And this is not because I don’t love Motown; I do. It’s because the world already has one aging Rod Stewart, and that’s one too many.

Along with a very good friend of mine (a fellow fan of Cormac McCarthy), I’ve started a Twitter page called “Imaginary Cormac.” It looks like other people have reserved or started similar pages, but we’ll be dedicated to making ours the go-to account for people who want to read fake Twitter posts by the acclaimed author. One has to dream. You can find it here. We’d love if you followed along. To give you a sense of whether you’d like to or not, here are the first five entries:

A new horizon crackles along the edge of half-dark like the dream of a malevolent God. Twitter you think you are ready. You are not ready.

In the red gloaming a dwarf amanuensis crawls through the sagebrush kindling fire as he goes. Or Herb’s kid got ahold of some sparklers.

Polenta sticks to All-Clad pans like the afterbirth of some chthonic creature not yet named.

Impossible to capture the God-rapture of horses and thunder in 140 characters. Maybe 150.

Just finished a creosote and peyote omelette. I’ll be in the shed for a few hours.

In the TLS, Ruth Scurr has an essay about Thomas Carlyle’s three-volume history of the French Revolution. It’s a great, grueling story, particularly when Carlyle’s friend John Stuart Mill offered to help:

In February 1835, when Carlyle reached the end of his first volume, The Bastille, Mill offered to read it for him. All along, Mill had been supplying Carlyle with books on the Revolution, and he offered to make notes on the manuscript that might be included as footnotes. On the night of March 6, Mill arrived on the Carlyles’ doorstep, semi-coherent and deeply distraught. There had been a domestic accident and Carlyle’s “poor manuscript, all except some four tattered leaves, was annihilated!” Allegedly, a servant, either at Mill’s house, or at his mistress Harriet Taylor’s, had mistaken The Bastille for waste paper and put it into the fire. That night in bed Carlyle suffered the symptoms of a heart attack, feeling “something cutting or hard grasping me round the heart.” He dreamt of death and graves, but in the morning he wrote to his publisher Fraser to explain what had happened and resolved to try again. The labour of five steadfast months had “vanished irrecoverably; worse than if it had never been!”. With astonishing resignation, Carlyle wrote,

“I can be angry with no one; for they that were concerned in it have a far deeper sorrow than mine: it is purely the hand of Providence; and, by the blessing of Providence, I must struggle to take it as such . . . . That first volume (which pleased me better than anything I had ever done) cannot be written anew, for the spirit that animated it is past: but another first volume I will try, and shall make it, if not better or equal, all that I can. This only is clear to me: that I can write a Book on the French Revolution; and that, if I am spared long enough alive I will do it.”

The site is closing in on 300 followers on Twitter, so if you haven’t signed up yet, please do. I’m busy with several other things today, but this week’s Beat should be up by the end of the day, and there’s another Twitter project I might have news about as well.

Stop Smiling, the Chicago-based culture magazine, recently switched gears to begin publishing books in partnership with Melville House. [Disclosure: I wrote a couple of pieces for Stop Smiling in 2008.] The imprint’s first book is How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop by Dave Tompkins, a history of the Pentagon-created speech-scrambling device that went on to widespread use in pop music. (The title comes from a misinterpretation of a Vocoder-issued phrase: “how to recognize speech.”) I recently asked Stop Smiling publisher and editor J. C. Gabel a few questions about his new business:

Can you tell me a little bit about what spurred the transition from an eclectic culture magazine to a books imprint, and how you came to work with Melville House?

While we worked on the magazine, we were always thinking about publishing books. We just never could find the time and opportunity. Several years ago, Kelly Burdick, now the Senior Editor at Melville House, contacted me about repackaging and republishing some long-form interviews from the magazine’s vast archives. The idea of a Stop Smiling Books imprint grew from there, but it took almost five years to come to fruition.

In 2008, it was clear to most of the staff of both Stop Smiling and Runner Collective (the design collective that art-directs our books, magazines, and web site) that independent print media, in general, was in trouble, and we would have to change gears in order to continue publishing. In some ways, we grew too large: As an independent full-color bimonthly magazine, we always struggled to carve out the right niche for our audience and advertisers while at the same time keeping costs under control.

With the advent of the Kindle and now the iPad, it wasn’t hard to see the writing on the wall: print magazines, in all their excess and wastefulness, were going to become extinct. Of course there were other, more practical developments, too, like the United States Postal Service eliminating the form of bulk mail we used to distribute copies inexpensively to subscribers, or the fact that advertisers started to pour their money and support into online initiatives and sponsored signature events. These factors were things outside our control. Eventually, books just seemed to make more sense on every level. Beyond that, we are all print junkies and wanted to continue publishing a product that people would save and collect.

Your first book, How to Wreck a Nice Beach, is a history of the vocoder, the speech scrambling machine originally created for military purposes and now ubiquitous in pop music. How did you find the book, and what makes it the right one to launch your imprint?

The vocoder book was grandfathered in as the first Stop Smiling book. James Hughes, my good friend, co-publisher and editor at Stop Smiling, had been working one-on-one with the author, Dave Tompkins, on this project for more than eight years. Over the years, this bugged-out mystique developed around it. (This lore has been tastefully singled out in several early reviews of the book.) [Ed. note: In his review of the book for New York, Sam Anderson wrote: “How to Wreck a Nice Beach is much more than a labor of love: It’s an intergalactic vision quest fueled by several thousand gallons of high-octane spiritual-intellectual lust. Outside of, say, William Vollmann, it’s hard to think of an author so ravished by his subject.”]

What eventually became How to Wreck a Nice Beach was originally going to be published by Broken Wrist Project, a small press James was running with mutual friends in Los Angeles. But as Dave and James accumulated more artwork and the word count continued to mount, it grew beyond something that Broken Wrist Project could reasonably execute. When we partnered with Melville House to launch Stop Smiling Books, we were able to take advantage of the shared costs of production, and we also benefited from Melville House’s partnership with Random House, which oversees their distribution. So, like some of our favorite themed issues of the magazine, a certain amount of serendipity played a role in the end result.

How many future releases do you already have planned? Can you tell us a little bit about a few of them? And do you have an idea of how many books you’ll be publishing annually?

It looks as if we’ll be releasing two to three titles a year, including at least one original title and one repackaged collection. We have seven or eight books we’re currently working on through 2012. Originally, we envisioned a multi-volume collection of long-form interview books by subject (conversations with film directors, authors, and musicians) in the tradition of The Paris Review or Playboy collections. These three repackaged books will be among our first releases, starting with the directors installment, which will be out early next year. Each volume will also include a few book-exclusive interviews we never had the chance to run in the print magazine during its 15-year run.

In the pipeline, besides the three interview books, is a collection of interviews with Ray Bradbury, Listen to the Echoes by Bradbury biographer/scholar Sam Weller; the book companion to Thom Andersen’s video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself; and what was supposed to be the last issue of the print magazine (an issue devoted to Stanley Kubrick) will be adapted into a book of some form.

In what ways do you think the spirit of Stop Smiling the magazine will influence Stop Smiling the book publisher?

We’re still operating with the same mentality on the editorial front, but have adopted a Less Is More mindset — and a production schedule to match. It does feel nice to know that what we spend months or years working on is now being released in a permanent format. We’re really trying to reinvent the DIY aesthetic of the magazine to apply it to editing, publishing, and promoting books. The book-making process itself, of course, is much slower and drawn out, which is refreshing as we all get older.

What excites you most — and what scares you most — about starting a books imprint in 2010?

What excites us the most is working with and publishing work by some of our most talented friends. What scares us? The possibility that the majority of readers worldwide will one day stop buying physical books.

The Wall Street Journal details the strange but great news that a tiny press published this year’s Pulitzer winner for fiction:

To call it a surprise that Bellevue published a Pulitzer-winning novel — the first small press to do so since Louisiana State University Press published A Confederacy of Dunces in 1981 — is a vast understatement. The imprint, which was founded in 2005, is part of New York University’s School of Medicine and specializes in books that explore the convergence of science and the arts. One of Bellevue’s recent titles was Water, Ice & Stone: Science and Memory on the Antarctic Lakes.

Indeed, Bellevue is the very definition of a small, specialized press. According to [Editorial Director Erika] Goldman, the publishing schedule consists of eight books per year, or four a season, three being non-fiction and one a novel. Author advances, she said, are “symbolic” — publishing industry code for miniscule. The full-time staff, meanwhile, consists of Goldman, a veteran editor who’s worked at Scribner and Simon & Schuster, and an assistant.

From the archives of The New Republic comes this piece about Henry and William James by Alfred Kazin, originally published in February 1943:

There is always an obtrusive irony in honoring the Jameses together: they could never fully honor or, after a certain point, really understand each other. This was something that both recognized and that William almost enjoyed. They were always seeking to ratify each other, “as Brother,” for the Jameses loved each other as passionately as they debated their differences, and delighted in each other’s careers. Never as in the James family indeed, was so little envy or indifference brought to so many conflicting intellectual ambitions, and never was so much fraternity brought to so little mutual understanding. . . . [T]hough their devotion to each other was profound, their essential antipathy of spirit went deeper still. But antipathy is not the word: there was only a kind of loving non-recognition. Similar as they were in their studies of human consciousness, in raising to an ideal end the operative supremacy and moral serenity of an individual “center of revelation,” they could only smile to each other across the grooves in which each had his temperament.

The Atlantic has made its 2010 Fiction issue available online. It includes several short stories and three other features: an interview with Paul Theroux titled “Fiction in the Age of E-Books,” an essay by Joyce Carol Oates on returning to teaching after the death of her husband, and Richard Bausch on the massive industry of “how to” writing books:

My quarrel is with the implication in the how-to books market that one can merely read them to find the magic secret for writing well enough to publish. Recently, at a college where I was lecturing, a student told me, with great pride, that he had “over a hundred books” in his library—I could see that I was meant to be impressed by the number, and that he considered himself a vastly well-read type of guy. He went on to say that many in his collection are how-to books. This person wants to be a writer, but he doesn’t want to do the work. Being a writer is a stance he wants to take. He did not come to writing from reading books, good or bad. He came to it from deciding it might be cool to walk around in that role. I meet this kind of “writer” far too often now in my travels around the country—even, occasionally, in the writing programs.

I can hear the argument coming back: “Yeah, well, what about the writing programs? Don’t they promise the same thing? Don’t they encourage the same kind of thinking?” And the answer to that is quite simple: no, they do not. All of the writing programs, and most of the writers’ conferences—I have taught at Bread Loaf and Sewanee, and elsewhere—read manuscripts in advance before accepting students. A person has to demonstrate talent to be accepted into a program of study. And while at times one wonders how this or that student got by the screening, in all instances the emphasis is on reading, and the workshops are not about writing as something like steam-fitting or the construction of an engine, but about the matters of craft that can be discussed as they come up, story by story.

This year’s Pulitzer Prizes were just announced. Surely, the book everyone will be talking about is the winner of the Fiction award, a debut novel called Tinkers by Paul Harding from Bellevue Literary Press, which had been publishing books for less than two years when it released Tinkers in January 2009. (The New York Time profiled the press in its early days.) Tinkers centers on an old man, a repairer of clocks, dying in New England and reminiscing about his childhood as the son of a traveling salesman. I have to admit, I hadn’t heard of it until this afternoon. I imagine I’m not alone. Congratulations to all the winners:

Fiction: Tinkers by Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press)

General Nonfiction: The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy by David E. Hoffman (Doubleday)

History: Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed (The Penguin Press)

Biography: The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles (Alfred A. Knopf)

Poetry: Versed by Rae Armantrout (Wesleyan University Press)

Jessa Crispin at Bookslut points to “Evenings at Home,” a story included in the forthcoming The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick. It’s about a woman visiting her home in Kentucky after years in New York, and from sources online it’s hard to tell if it’s memoir or fiction. The first two paragraphs:

I am here in Kentucky with my family for the first time in a number of years and, naturally, I am quite uncomfortable, but not in the way I had anticipated before leaving New York. The thing that startles me is that I am completely free and can do and say exactly what I wish. This freedom leads me to the bewildering conclusion that the notions I have entertained about my family are fantastic manias, complicated, willful distortions which are so clearly contrary to the facts that I might have taken them from some bloody romance, or, to be more specific, from one of those childhood stories in which the heroine, ragged and castoff, roams the cold streets begging alms which go into the eager hands of a tyrannical stepmother.

I staggered a bit when I actually came face to face with my own mother: she carries no whips, gives no evidence of cannibalism. At night everyone sleeps peacefully. So far as I can judge they accuse me of no crimes, make no demands upon me; they neither praise nor criticize me excessively. My uneasiness and defensiveness are quite beside the point, like those flamboyant but unnecessary gestures of our old elocution teacher. My family situation is distinguished by only one eccentricity — it is entirely healthy and normal.

Read the whole thing.