Margaret Atwood’s account of discovering and learning to love Twitter is charming. A bit:

The Twittersphere is an odd and uncanny place. It’s something like having fairies at the bottom of your garden. How do you know anyone is who he/she says he is, especially when they put up pictures of themselves that might be their feet, or a cat, or a Mardi Gras mask, or a tin of Spam?

But despite their sometimes strange appearances, I’m well pleased with my followers. . . . They’re a playful but also a helpful group. . . . They’ve sent me many interesting items pertaining to artificially-grown pig flesh, unusual slugs, and the like. (They deduce my interests.) Some of them have appeared at tour events bearing small packages of organic shade-grown fair-trade coffee. . . . And they really shone when, during the Olympics, I said that “Own the podium” was too brash to be Canadian, and suggested “A podium might be nice.” Their own variations poured on to a feed tagged #cpodium: “A podium! For me?” “Rent the podium, see if we like it.” “Mind if I squeeze by you to get onto that podium?” I was so proud of them! It was like having 33,000 precocious grandchildren!

The Oxford American recently hosted its first annual “Best of the South” Awards Gala in Little Rock, Arkansas. The night’s honorees were Morgan Freeman and Charles Portis, a reclusive novelist with a cult following and the author of True Grit, which is currently being remade for the screen (the original starred John Wayne) by the Coen brothers. A reporter from the Arkansas Times captured Portis’ attempts to remain reclusive while being the center of attention:

There were other fleeting Portis sightings throughout the night. Later, while the crowd milled around over Southern-themed appetizers before dinner, a photographer returning from the hordes announced: “Charles Portis does not like to have his picture taken.” The photographer had followed him around the room, trying desperately to get one good photo of the author, only to be rebuffed at every attempt. “That son of a bitch took off every time he saw a camera. I got about a dozen shots of the side of his head.”

Just before the ceremony began, Portis was surrounded by a group of women:

One of the ladies asked him about the remake of True Grit: Did he like it? “I’m all for it,” he said, “as long as the checks don’t bounce.” Then another asked the author if he’d like to be on the cover of a local society magazine. To which he said, “I don’t think it would be a big seller for you.”

(Via Maud Newton)

Time to dust off the baseball books. The Yankees haven’t won and the Mets haven’t lost, so you know it’s very early days. But they’re playing ball and all is right with the world. As usual, the season brings several new books on the subject. First among them might be Fifty-Nine in ‘84 by Edward Achorn, about a pitcher named Old Hoss Radbourn who won 59 games for the Providence Grays in 1884. That record is literally unbreakable, as pitchers only start 32 or 33 games a year now. Achorn tells the story of Radbourn’s remarkable, grueling feat, but the book is really about the strange, violent (for one thing, it was played barehanded) sport that baseball was in the decades after the Civil War. Like any good account of the game’s early days, Achorn’s focuses on several eccentricities, like the existence of two strike zones, “one between the shoulders and belt, and one between the belt and knees. A batter stated his preference when he came to the plate — the zone that played to his strengths as a hitter — and the umpire adjusted accordingly.” Or the scheme that color-coded uniforms by position, to make players more easily identifiable to fans.

Other new releases include James Hirsch’s new biography of Willie Mays and Billy Lombardo’s The Man With Two Arms, a novel about an ambidextrous pitcher (a concept not quite as crazy as it sounds). The Austin American-Statesman rounds up a few other new titles.

If you’re looking for backlist material, there’s plenty I can recommend, though I don’t go for in the faux-profound bloviating done by many baseball writers. I prefer journalistic narratives, and the two best of recent years are Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, which everyone probably knows, and Cait Murphy’s Crazy ‘08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History, which everyone should know (I shared an excerpt from it here). If you’re in the mood for a sampler, there’s Baseball: A Literary Anthology edited by Nicholas Dawidoff or .

For true baseball nerds, though, there’s nothing better than reference books. My three favorites: The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract; Peter Morris’ A Game of Inches, a two-volume look at the sport’s history that I wrote about here; and Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Lineups.

Last but not least, one of my favorites novels, The Brothers K by David James Duncan, is the story of an American family whose patriarch is a minor league pitcher making an extraordinary comeback from a severe thumb injury. It’s a long novel that covers family, religion, politics, and other subjects, but baseball is one of its load-bearing walls.

Acclaimed biographer Hermione Lee (Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton) is currently at work on the life of Penelope Fitzgerald (pictured at left). In the Guardian, Lee has a long piece about materials to which she was given access by Fitzgerald’s family:

What I am looking at is a biographer’s dream. There are boxes, shelves and drawers-full of photograph albums, family documents, fragments of early drafts much crossed out and scribbled over, fascinating plot summaries and sketches for stories and novels that never came to fruition, research notes for an unwritten biography of her friend L. P. Hartley and everything from birthday cards and bills to invitations and vaccination certificates.

Fitzgerald’s heavily annotated book collection gets most of the attention in the rest of the essay. Lee is interested, in part, in what it says about the development of a writer who famously started publishing late in life, when she was nearly 60:

Fitzgerald was an evasive character, extremely private, deliberately oblique in interviews. So there are a number of mysteries in her life, areas of silence and obscurity. One of these has to do with “lateness.” How much of a late starter, really, was she? She always said in interviews that she started writing her first novel (The Golden Child) to entertain her husband, Desmond Fitzgerald, when he was ill. But, like many of the things she told interviewers, there is something a little too simple about this. At least one story was published before that first novel, and her archive reveals how much was going on in her interior life before she started publishing.

This year’s Tournament of Books has wrapped up with the closest final in the event’s history. Seventeen judges weighed in on Barbara Kingsolver vs. Hilary Mantel, and the margin of victory was 9-8. Head over there to see who held on for the win. Possible spoiler hint: Back on January 12, I accurately predicted the winner on this blog.

Maybe the key to raising and refining literacy is to treat it like blue jeans or beer and have beautiful people promote it. That’s the idea in China, anyway, according to this article (via PD_Smith), which focuses mostly on a 21-year-old beauty named Kang Di:

Kang was found during a campaign titled “finding the most beautiful book model on Beijing subway,” organized by the World Book Publishing Company and qq.com. So far, according to marketing department campaign organizer Xiao Kai, they’ve had over 100 successful applicants. Ten finalists will be culled from those on April 16, and of those, one “book ambassador” will be chosen on April 23 after a rigorous talent show, complete with a history and literature quiz.

Wu Hesong, director of the marketing department of World Book Publishing Company, told Lifestyle that the whole campaign is non-profit and aims to help “cultivate Beijingers’ good reading habits” by recruiting and presenting pretty women caught in the act of reading.

And how does Kang — who’s currently leading the competition — feel about the prospect of winning?

“I didn’t take it very seriously at first, but of course I’d like to win, because it’s an elegant and down-to-earth way to get famous and might be another window for a new career,” Kang said, laughing before she explained, “I mean, the image of a book model is healthy and quiet. It suits me and is also acceptable to my parents.”

Mark Athitakis recently posted an interview with David Lipsky, whose book, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, will be published in two weeks. Lipsky had been assigned by Rolling Stone to interview Wallace just after Infinite Jest had cannonballed into the cultural pool, and the two Davids spent five days together. The original piece never ran. Lipsky recounts to Athitakis some of the most entertaining, productive, and disappointing moments of the weeklong interview. In this funny (and, depending on your politics, disturbing or very disturbing) section, Lipsky talks about Wallace’s feelings for a certain Prime Minister:

And he was very funny about music (“I have the musical tastes of a thirteen year-old girl… I am a bonehead who listens to the radio”) and sharp about movies (“Tarantino is such a schmuck 90 percent of the time, but ten percent of the time, I’ve seen genius shining off the guy”), even about a pop star like Alanis Morissette: “She’s pretty, but she’s pretty in a sloppy, very human way. A lot of women in magazines are pretty in a way that isn’t erotic because they don’t look like anybody you know. You can’t imagine them putting a quarter in a parking meter or eating a bologna sandwich.”

And then the music talk led to this ministerial surprise. “The Alanis Morissette obsession followed the Melanie Griffith obsession. It was preceded by something that I will tell you that I got teased a lot for, which was a terrible Margaret Thatcher obsession. All through college: posters of Margaret Thatcher, and ruminations on Margaret Thatcher.” I asked if it was sexual. “Sensuous, perhaps. It more involved—having tea with Margaret Thatcher. Having her really enjoy something I said, lean forward, and cover my hand with hers.” It was such an extraordinary conversation I was happy to follow anyplace he wanted to go.

I didn’t know the New York Times has a blog entirely devoted to insomnia. It’s called All-Nighters.

The most recent post is by Gordon Marino, who explores the subject of sleeplessness in literature, especially in the work of E. M. Cioran (at left), the cheery, aphoristic philosopher who wrote books like The Trouble With Being Born, A Short History of Decay, and On the Heights of Despair. Marino:

Hordes of artists throw their arms around their melancholy as though it were the very taproot of their creativity. Kierkegaard, for instance, referred to his melancholy as his best and most loyal friend. Cioran felt a similar attachment to his insomnia. While he cursed his nocturnal suffering and used morphine, among other things, to try and knock himself out, he ultimately understood his long journeys into the sickly morning light as both crushing him and yet shaping his sensibilities. After all, isn’t wakefulness good? And sleeplessness a sort of wakefulness? “What rich or strange idea,” asks Cioran, “was ever the work of a sleeper?”

In a case of there being a first for everything, I recently purchased a book in exchange for fantasy baseball tips. The offer came from Jason Mulgrew, author of Everything Is Wrong with Me, a memoir that grew out of his blog. Mulgrew was raised in a rough Irish section of Philadelphia, and much of the book details the exploits of his father, Dennis, a blue-collar, hard-drinking guy with a penchant for living out tall tales. After relating one of them, Mulgrew writes, “Stories like this one are the kind of stories I grew up with. Many of them started with ‘I remember one time when we found this box of horse tranquilizers . . .’ and ended with ‘And that’s when I learned that it’s good to know Spanish in jail.’ ”

Mulgrew’s mother first saw Dennis at the famous Mummers Parade in Philly, where he was continuing to march and laugh and drink with friends despite having been stabbed in a fight and bleeding from the shoulder. She didn’t realize she married the same man until a few years later. Here I will yield to a blurb, this one from John Hodgman: “Jason Mulgrew’s wild, boozy, joyfully reckless, working-class Philadelphia of the 1980s and ’90s doesn’t just come to life; it is the sort of autobiographical landscape that would get up and walk across the country just to punch Lake Wobegon in the face.”

Mulgrew revels in the scatological and sexual (well, sex-fantastical; he’s self-excoriating about the details of his real-life experiences), but he mostly avoids a juvenile tone in relating his family’s shenanigans. (The book is not The Paris Review, but it’s not exactly Maxim either. At its best, something like Esquire, I guess. And OK, sometimes Maxim-ish.) The book is conspicuously built from a blog, padded with comparatively soulless chapters on Mulgrew’s favorites songs or the rituals of the Catholic Church, and it has an abrupt, pretty creepy epilogue. But Dennis is an unforgettable character, and Mulgrew manages to convey warmth and affection for people who left him with not a few psychological hiccups. The book is decorated with hilarious photos, many of which will bring back strong memories for anyone raised in a 1980s suburb. Examples of them can be found here and here, and Mulgrew is holding a contest to find similar gems from readers.

Oh, the fantasy baseball. Mulgrew is also a baseball nut, and he creates annual rankings for fantasy players. After his “Fantasy Baseball Super Sheet” was popular at $5 last year, he decided to sell it for $10 this year. Or, he’ll send it to you for free if you can prove you bought the book.

Lots of vintage book covers to explore at Alexander Budnitz’s site, including the deeply strange one at left. It’s from 1963 and was designed by George Giusti.

Speaking of book covers, my friend Patrick Borelli will be hosting his show “You Should Judge a Book By Its Cover,” during which he mocks terrible designs, in Brooklyn on April 13. He’ll be joined this time by the very funny Dan Kennedy and Julie Klausner, as well as award-winning designer Evan Gaffney. (It’s likely that Gaffney is also funny, but I can’t say for sure.)

A list idea has been flying around: 10 books that influenced you most. The contributions so far have mostly been coming from political/economics bloggers, like Will Wilkinson, Matt Yglesias, and Tyler Cowen, who started it. But Jenny Davidson at Light Reading has chimed in (the top book on her list has been added to my wish list), and I think it would be fun to see other book bloggers tackle it. Plus, I’ve been trying to think of how to introduce more of my personal voice and experience to the blog here, and this seems like a decent step in that direction. My caveat is that “influence” is used broadly here. For political bloggers, I guess that verb makes more sense. So it’s inexact, but I have tried to use it as a rough guide; this is not simply my 10 favorite books, though a few of them would show up on that list. With that throat-clearing out of the way:

1. The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden
I don’t remember much about this one except that I cherished it, and I thought it was appropriate to start off with a book that influenced me to love reading in the first place.

2. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
I read this for English class during my junior year of high school, and up to that point I don’t think I had fully made the transition from enthusiastic young reader to adult reader. As much as anyone, Vonnegut spurred that transition, as I’m sure he’s done (and will continue to do) for many.

3. The Brothers K by David James Duncan
I read this novel about a family in the Pacific Northwest of the 1960s when I was 19. It deals with baseball, religion, Vietnam, family. It’s shaggier than most of what I read now, but in a good way, and I’ve never had a deeper emotional investment in a novel. Being 19 will do that to you, but Duncan also earned it. I wrote about it at greater length here.

4. The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
The best thing I’ve ever read, and a book that can be considered a classic across several disciplines — psychology, philosophy, religion, and (weirdly but truly) self-help. There’s just no way to read James’ thoughts about the human condition — his sympathy for its trials and his faith in its consolations — without feeling profoundly comforted. This also sent me to the rest of James’ work, which is now, collectively, among my favorite things in the world.

5. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
I’m a functional atheist (aspiring agnostic?), but like James, Robinson is a tonic for anyone, like me, who believes not only that spiritual experience can be investigated without recourse to personal or political strong-arming, but that it’s a necessary, rewarding investigation. Plus, Robinson is a lovely, exact writer, and anyone who writes can only hope to be influenced by her on that level.

6. Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky
This might be the least “influential” book on the list, reading it well after I had discovered existentialism. (Speaking of which, The Myth of Sisyphus should have made this list.) Sure, I’d like to write like Dostoevsky, but I’d also like to sing like Otis Redding and hit clean-up for the Yankees. This is just a great, timeless book.

7. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
No, this is the least influential. It’s just a rare novel that I’ve re-read, and even rarer, enjoyed and appreciated just as much each time. So maybe the influence part will become clear at some point. Perhaps I’m meant to live an ascetic, noble cowboy existence. But probably not.

8. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel Dennett
I’ve always liked the construction of a good argument, and Dennett’s argument for evolution is beautiful to behold. That’s the first half of this book’s influence (not that I wouldn’t believe in evolution without it). The second half was unintended. In trying to strictly apply evolutionary theory to everything, including cultural artifacts like the arts, Dennett proved to me (again) that there are limits to any theory, and that sometimes rationalists can lapse into their own kind of religious, illogical fervor.

9. Losers by Michael Lewis
When I read it, this book was called Trail Fever. In it, Lewis tracked some of the fringier candidates during the 1996 presidential campaign. Lewis’ book influenced my nonfiction reading, in that it confirmed for me that I enjoyed: a) a sense of humor about things, even (especially?) serious issues, and b) an eye for telling, entertaining details, no matter how far off the beaten path. It also, more simply, turned me into a Michael Lewis fan.

10. The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract
Don’t judge.

I find this hilarious, and pretty cool. In the most recent round of commentary at the Tournament of Books, John Warner takes up the question of how we choose what to read:

I think it’s an important and interesting question because of how limited we are in the number of books we can read in a lifetime. . . . The last two books I finished were Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask and Next by James Hynes. I read those because I loved their previous books. Their current ones delivered much the same pleasures as their last efforts. They were every bit as good as I hoped and expected, but I’d already tasted those flavors. Should I be forcing myself to be a bit more adventurous, to turn toward the unexplored territory, to occasionally pick pistachio over mint chocolate chip at Baskin-Robbins? . . . Sometimes I think we (meaning me) might be better off leaving the choice of what to read with someone or something else.

Which is why I’m thinking of starting a new free service for readers. I will choose your next book for you. In the comments, all you have to do is list the last five books you’ve read and I will tell you what to read next.

The hilarious (and cool) part is that he actually does this. Dozens of people have left comments with the last five books they’ve read, and he’s told every one of them what to read next. It’s like the literary equivalent of palm reading, except, you know, accurate. Head on over there and enjoy the fun.

At Powell’s, novelist James Hynes has a brief essay titled “In Defense of Unlikable Characters.” I have to agree with Hynes that the very idea of defending them seems a little strange, given how common they are in great literature.

I’m always a little taken aback and (I’ll admit it) a little defensive when readers of my books say that they find my protagonists “unlikable,” like it’s a bad thing. My usual response comes in one of two forms, which are mutually contradictory. The response I usually actually make is, “So what?” After which I proceed to make the same argument I’ve just made above: Is Macbeth likable? Is Ahab? Is Tony Soprano? (Well, actually, Tony sometimes is, but let’s not complicate things.) Literary characters aren’t necessarily meant to be role models, I argue, but truthful representations of lifelike people in all their warty glory. Not to mention that bad behavior is usually the hot little engine at the heart of every narrative. As Charles Baxter puts it, hell is story friendly. Who wants to read about Emma Bovary staying faithful to her husband?

I would add to Hynes’ argument that unlikable central characters can be especially welcome as engines for comedy. The first three examples that spring to mind are Lewis “Teabag” Miner in Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land, John Self in Martin Amis’ Money, and Ignatius J. Reilly in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.

As David Shields’ promotional work for Reality Hunger continues unabated, something dawned on me. In a recent interview on the Bat Segundo Show, Shields disparages a forthcoming novel by Myla Goldberg based on no more, he admits, than seeing the book in the publisher’s catalog. “[N]o offense to her; I haven’t read her work,” he says. “Well, I’ve read her earlier — I’ve read in and around her earlier books. And it seemed the way — frankly, the way in which the book can be entirely summarized as a narrative machine — seemed to me a very, that very fact meant it was, by definition, for me, a dead text.” There’s more, just as bad. And what dawned on me was that I can’t believe some interviewer of Shields hasn’t adopted the strategy of Elaine Stritch in a particular episode of 30 Rock. In the dialogue below, Colleen Donaghy (played by Stritch) is talking to Phoebe (played by Emily Mortimer):

Phoebe: I always thought it would be lovely to get married in the spring, just as the petunias start to bloom.
Colleen: Sorry, Phoebe, what?
Phoebe: I always wanted to marry in the spring, just as the petunias bloom.
Colleen: Just when the what?
Phoebe: Oh dear, is she hard of hearing?
Colleen: No, no, no. I can hear you. I just wanted to make sure you could hear you.

Every so often, someone will leave a comment about the “Fired from the Canon” feature that ran last summer. The latest two give a sense of the variety. The first person berated the site for its take on On the Road, and concluded: “Lists like this only further the destruction of literature.” I hope you agree that’s overstating the case. The second wondered why Tess of the D’Urbervilles (”slobbering piece of misogynistic soap opera crap”) and The Portrait of a Lady (”like dry toast with sawdust jam”) hadn’t made the list.

Jacob Silverman kindly asked me a few questions about The Second Pass—and online book culture generally—and the results have been posted at the Virginia Quarterly Review’s blog.

Michiko Kakutani has written a wide-ranging piece about “the contentious issues of copyright, intellectual property and plagiarism.” For her foundational texts, she uses two recent books, both of which take “A Manifesto” as their subtitle. She begins with David Shields’ Reality Hunger (I’m working on a review of that one, but it might take a while to itemize all the ways it irritated me), and moves on to Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget. I’m in a particularly cranky mood about the culture lately, so Kakutani’s depressing take appealed to me:

For his part Mr. Lanier says that because the Internet is a kind of “pseudoworld” without the qualities of a physical world, it encourages the Peter Pan fantasy of being an entitled child forever, without the responsibilities of adulthood. While this has the virtues of playfulness and optimism, he argues, it can also devolve into a Lord of the Flies-like nastiness, with lots of “bullying, voracious irritability and selfishness” — qualities enhanced, he says, by the anonymity, peer pressure and mob rule that thrive online.

Digital culture, he writes in You Are Not a Gadget, “is comprised of wave after wave of juvenilia,” with rooms of “M.I.T. Ph.D. engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks.”

This post by designer Craig Mod about the future of printed books vs. digitized books is visually pleasing, and reasonably stated:

I want to look at where printed books stand in respect to digital publishing, why we historically haven’t read long-form text on screens and how the iPad is wedging itself in the middle of everything. In doing so I think we can find the line in the sand to define when content should be printed or digitized.

This is a conversation for books-makers, web-heads, content-creators, authors and designers. For people who love beautifully made things. And for the storytellers who are willing to take risks and want to consider the most appropriate shape and media for their yarns.

And it has drawn many responses. I still can’t help but think that the most impassioned e-book advocates are getting ahead of themselves. Not because I’m a Luddite, or not just because of that. Mostly because I lived through the tech revolution in music, and it was much more seamless and less contested than this at every stage. Cassettes replaced LPs quickly when I was a kid. And CDs, though they shared space with cassettes for a few years, weren’t welcomed with a lot of hand-wringing about wanting to preserve cassettes. The reason for this seems obvious—when you listen to music, the delivery system is invisible. It only matters in so far as it produces good sound. The benefits of, say, breadth of accessibility on an iPod doesn’t have a corresponding disadvantage. It sounds like many people understand the pleasures of holding and interacting with a book, but the tech parade (the lucrative tech parade) keeps beating the drum, hoping that the louder it gets the more inevitable all these changes will be. And they may be right. I just don’t think it’s at all clear that in this case technology represents a significant improvement.

After publishing Alexander Nazaryan’s interview with Donald Pease, whose new book is a look at the life and work of Dr. Seuss, I became curious. I wondered if any Seuss book had gotten one-star reviews on Amazon. The vast majority of people love him, but surely there are souls out there who can’t stand him? Well, there are a few, but most are simply the conspiratorial type, like the person who says Horton Hears a Who is really about abortion, or the over-parenting type, like the person who argues that Oh, the Places You’ll Go! has “no sense of family, love, or other type of support.” But the blue-ribbon review is for Green Eggs and Ham. It’s impossible to tell if it’s in earnest or not, but it’s pretty great either way. The headline is “I shudder at the message this story sends to our children.” And the review:

If you’re searching for a literary example of peer pressure, look no further than Dr. Seuss’s subtly horrifying Green Eggs and Ham. The “hero” of this tale, Sam-I-Am, spends the entirety of the book trying to force green eggs and ham upon a nameless skeptic. The “villain” turns down the offer several times, but Sam-I-Am persists, going so far as to follow him home in order to make him try the green eggs and ham. He uses several textbook methods of peer pressure, including the famous, “You’ll never know that you don’t like it if you don’t try it.” He refuses to respect the man’s right to say no, and badgers him incessantly until he caves under the pressure.

What disgusts me most about the end of the story is that once the man tries the green eggs and ham, he loves them and is simply another addition to a pool of addicts. Dr. Seuss’s tragic allegory for the rising drug use among young people that plagued his time period is brilliant, but certainly not appropriate for young children. Sam-I-Am is too easily twisted to become a hero, opening the antagonist’s mind to new things, rather than a metaphor for Satan as I believe was originally intended.

In conclusion, do not read this book to your children unless you are willing to explain to them that people like Sam-I-Am should be avoided at all costs, and that they should never follow the path of the story’s antagonist.

If, like me, you’ve been waiting with not much patience for Nicholas Sparks and Miley Cyrus to find a project worth working on together, wait no longer. That project is the movie The Last Song, an adaptation of a Sparks novel that hits screens later this month. This article started my day with a good laugh. Sparks bristles at his books being called romances. Then Cyrus calls The Last Song “melodramatic.” And then it gets really good:

Sparks says: “I’m going to interrupt you there. There’s a difference between drama and melodrama; evoking genuine emotion, or manipulating emotion. It’s a very fine eye-of-the-needle to thread. And it’s very rare that it works. That’s why I tend to dominate this particular genre. There is this fine line. And I do not verge into melodrama. It’s all drama. I try to generate authentic emotional power.”

But, well, he always does kill someone by the end of his tales, usually to maximum handkerchief effect.

“Of course!” Sparks says. “I write in a genre that was not defined by me. The examples were not set out by me. They were set out 2,000 years ago by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. They were called the Greek tragedies. A thriller is supposed to thrill. A horror novel is supposed to scare you. A mystery is supposed to keep you turning the pages, guessing ‘whodunit?’

“A romance novel is supposed to make you escape into a fantasy of romance. What is the purpose of what I do? These are love stories. They went from (Greek tragedies), to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, then Jane Austen did it, put a new human twist on it. Hemingway did it with A Farewell to Arms.”

Yes, it’s a pretty straight line from Sophocles to Austen to Hemingway to Sparks. If by “pretty straight” you mean “crooked beyond comprehension.” Today’s song is dedicated to Mr. Sparks:

The new issue of the lovely Lapham’s Quarterly is out, and the subject is Arts & Letters. Included on the web site is a letter from Norman Maclean to an editor at Knopf that ends with this:

I can now only weakly say this: if the situation ever arose when Alfred A. Knopf was the only publishing house remaining in the world and I was the sole remaining author, that would mark the end of the world of books.

The site also features a chart detailing the day jobs of writers like Kafka and Trollope. Which brought to mind the conclusion of this recently read blog post:

Let’s be frank. Freeing authors of fiction from the bonds of real-world drudgery has had some negative consequences. It’s allowed too many to take themselves more seriously than they deserve. It’s provided opportunities for gross self-indulgence and solipsism. It’s sharpened authorial susceptibility to flattery that weakens the writer’s ability to see and hear the world everyone else still inhabits. And it’s encouraged the cultivation of personal eccentricities that might have added charm and savor to their work if nurtured in open air and clean soil, but which turn the hot house of writerly isolation into a little shop of horrors. Maybe it’s better to remove entirely the temptation to write for a living. Maybe it’s better to write for pleasure, or out of compulsion. If dear old Updike, for example, had been required to teach forty hours a week at a school for underprivileged boys, he might only have written half as many books as he did. But, after all, there were some we could have done without.

Just a few impressions from last night’s NBCC awards ceremony: The Oscars could learn a thing or two from this event. Every year, it’s quickly paced, full of charming speeches, and quickly paced. Scheduled to start at 6, this year’s festivities got going a little later than that and were over by 7.

Joan Acocella accepted the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and ended her brief remarks with, “If you think your situation [reviewing books] is tough, consider dance reviewing, which is the other thing I do.” Joyce Carol Oates, introduced by her Princeton colleague Edmund White, was gracious and funny in accepting the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. I imagine she would make a terrific dinner guest.

Three of the six category winners were not on hand, but Autobiography winner Diana Athill, 92, managed to make a memorable appearance even while absent. Her editor at Norton, Tom Mayer, read some of the delightful e-mails he received from her in the days leading up to the ceremony.

Blake Bailey, winner for Biography, emphasized the cooperation he received from John Cheever’s family, and how they spoke of Cheever with both “deep affection and withering objectivity,” an ideal combination for a biographer.

Hilary Mantel was not there to accept the latest accolade for Wolf Hall, but she sent prepared remarks that included the news that a sequel to the novel is “underway.”

I just left the ceremony for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, and the winners were:

General Nonfiction: The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes
Autobiography: Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill
Biography: Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey
Criticism: Notes from No Man’s Land by Eula Biss
Poetry: Versed by Rae Armantrout
Fiction: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

More thoughts on the proceedings tomorrow.

John Eklund, a field rep based in Milwaukee for three university presses (Harvard, MIT, Yale), recently wrote a wandering blog post that’s right up my alley. He begins by wondering where the Midwest technically (and spiritually) begins and ends; makes a stop in one of my favorite towns, Ithaca, and pauses for a mention of the great Collegetown Bagels; and ends with a consideration of Buffalo and the book culture there. Reading it made me want to visit smallish Northeastern (or Midwestern) towns, which I’m always sort of in the mood for anyway, and browse through a bunch of bookstores I’ve never seen.

Eklund share this moment from a dinner with the owners of Talking Leaves, a store in Buffalo:

Mention of a customer who had died recently reminded me of stories I’ve heard all over the place–the reliable art book customer, or Churchill customer, or hardcover fiction reader who first retired to Arizona but continued to faithfully order books, but then eventually, inevitably, left the scene. There’s fear that these serious book buyers which every store needs to survive are not being replaced in sufficient numbers.

(A sad ironic twist on a Milwaukee version of this story I’m familiar with: a bookaholic customer with great taste and deep pockets shopped the store daily for years. When she died, her daughter sold back her library, and now her cherished collection is back on the bookstore shelves, disaggregated and marked down, but at least with a shot at a second life.)

I’ve added his blog, Paper Over Board, to the Links page.