One of the new books I’m most looking forward to this fall is Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs. It’s her first book of new material in 11 years, and her first novel since 1994’s excellent Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Moore has a short story in this week’s New Yorker, which may be an excerpt from the novel. I’m guessing yes. Here’s how it starts:

The cold came late that fall, and the songbirds were caught off guard. By the time the snow and wind began in earnest, too many had been suckered into staying, and instead of flying south, instead of already having flown south, they were huddled in people’s yards, their feathers puffed for some modicum of warmth. I was looking for a babysitting job. I was a student and needed money, so I would walk from interview to interview in these attractive but wintry neighborhoods, past the eerie multitudes of robins pecking at the frozen ground, dun gray and stricken—though what bird in the best of circumstances does not look a little stricken—until at last, late in my search, at the end of a week, startlingly, the birds had disappeared. I did not want to think about what had happened to them. Or, rather, that is an expression—of politeness, a false promise of delicacy—for in fact I wondered about them all the time: imagining them dead, in stunning heaps in some killing cornfield outside of town, or dropped from the sky in twos and threes for miles down along the Illinois state line.

My thanks to eagle-eyed reader (and Scrabble enthusiast) M.B., who pointed out that my IAICIZED in the post three below about Word Freak should be LAICIZED. (It’s been fixed in the original post, too.) In his book, Fatsis had the L at the front lowercase, which threw me off. I’m telling you, Scrabble people are serious. And so you know, “laicize” is a verb meaning “to remove the clerical character or nature of; secularize.” Don’t say this site never taught you anything.

Over at Granta, Maud Newton and Alexander Chee exchange thoughts about the novels that Jean Rhys and Ford Madox Ford wrote after their affair. It makes for a compelling companion to Newton’s review of the Jean Rhys bio above. A taste:

Ford probably saw Rhys as a (tainted) embodiment of the love interest of The Good Soldier. And honestly, I believe he was hot for Rhys very specifically even before they met. He’d read a lightly fictionalized version of her journals, been struck by her acute renderings of loneliness and poverty, fantasized about her exotic Dominican background, and decided (assuming she was pretty, of course) that he, finally, would be the man to save her.

Even the most depressive writers spin out happily-ever-after tales when they’re plotting their own life stories, and Ford was no exception. That’s what I think.

I finally read Stefan Fatsis’ Word Freak, a mixture of memoir and reportage about the competitive Scrabble world. Most of America read it several years ago. I almost did, too, but I’m glad I waited, because my last two years of obsessive online play prepared me to get a lot more out of it.

Fatsis correctly notes that the two most common expressions of casual players are “That’s a word?” and “That can’t be a word!” And then he writes, “To play competitive Scrabble, one has to get over the conceit of refusing to acknowledge certain words as real and accept that the game requires learning words that may not have any outside utility.”

A lot of those words are on display in Word Freak. To list just a handful: KAB, PANTOFLE, OUGUIYA, OQUASSA and LAICIZED. (There’s something childishly pleasing about the number of words in all caps throughout.) Many of these words are passed along without definition, since knowing what they mean isn’t really the point, but I did learn, for example, that “EXODOS” means “a concluding dramatic scene.”

If you haven’t read it, you should. You don’t need more than a minor interest in the game to enjoy it, since it revolves around larger-than-life characters. One of those characters is Matt Graham, a stand-up comedian who pops dozens of pills a day to (he thinks) maintain his energy and mental edge. I won a Scrabble board from Graham several years back at a comedy event downtown, where he offered the game to anyone in the audience who could stump him with an anagram. I believe he asked for 10 letters or more. I know from the book that my stumping him was dumb luck, because the letter clusters that he’s capable of anagramming are insane. The letters I gave him were:

AAACEILNORTU

Can you figure it out? Answer after the jump:

AERONAUTICAL

I never expected Harold Bloom to appear in The Onion outside of a headline like “Harold Bloom Exhumes Shakespeare, Eats Him” or “Harold Bloom’s Mother Barges Into Bathroom While He’s Reading Harry Potter” or “New Haven-Area Outback Steakhouse Offers Bloomin’ Onion With Real Bits of Harold Bloom.” That kind of thing. I did not expect the satirical paper to actually sit down with Bloom and discuss Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

But they did. Fear not — this being Bloom, there is a comedic element to the proceedings. Take this, for instance:

The Onion: You’ve been extremely critical of the politicization of teaching literature…

Bloom: Critical, young man, is hardly the word. I stand against it like Jeremiah prophesying in Jerusalem.

He claims it took him three tries to get through McCarthy’s bloody western, so perhaps the third time will be the charm for me, too. And he offers this spot-on summary of Don DeLillo’s Underworld: “a little long for what it does but nevertheless [it’s] the culmination of what Don can do.”

(via Maud Newton)

Update: A reader writes in to let me know that Bloom was also interviewed not too long ago by Vice magazine, at greater length. An even weirder pairing…

Here’s a marriage of good ideas:

Last summer, Ed Park and Levi Stahl created The Invisible Library, an evolving list of books that have been mentioned in other works of art but don’t really exist.

Two of the better known “authors” represented are John Irving’s T.S. Garp and Kurt Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout (with the wonderfully titled Pan-Galactic Three-Day Pass). Trout’s author “photo” by Vonnegut can be seen at left. The library also includes work from movies, like Family of Geniuses by Etheline Tenenbaum from Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums.

Now, a literary foundation and an “illustration collective” in the UK are bringing some of these titles to life for an art exhibit. Up through July 12 at the Tenderpixel Gallery in London, the Invisible Library becomes partially visible. Forty of the book’s covers have been designed for display, and artists of various stripes have written opening or closing pages for them. The rest will be an interactive experience, like so:

The collaboration continues throughout the exhibition as gallery attendees and workshop participants are invited to temporarily ’sign out’ these library books and carry on writing the developing narratives within. Thus by the close of the exhibition, the once blank pages of each book will be enlivened with imaginative poly-vocal stories.

Here are some photos from the scene. I hope someone in the U.S. — preferably New York, for convenience’s sake — brings the exhibit here.

The Browser has been running a provocative series of interviews in which experts discuss the best books in their field.

This week, Jessica Pressman, who teaches at Yale, analyzes and recommends some electronic literature. The truly electronic side of the conversation is about online texts. Pressman acknowledges that some of these works, like those at Young-hae Chang’s Heavy Industries, are more properly called “a textual performance,” since they incorporate music and graphics and — most crucially, to me — play continuously like a movie. (For a funny example, see “Cunnilingus in North Korea.” If you watch a few of the site’s other works, I think you’ll agree with me that this “revolution” in literature will mostly be a boon to the corrective-vision industry. Good lord.)

Pressman also discusses more conventional work (you know, on paper) that is formally influenced by technology, like the novels of Mark Danielewski. (About his House of Leaves: “It’s a horror story in some ways. My husband started reading it when I was out of town and he had to put it in a drawer and hide it because he got so frightened of it. He wouldn’t read it without my being there.”)

My problem with this, if it’s a problem, is that approaching it as a radical development unique to the influence of technology on literature is misleading on two fronts. First, Pressman admits the influence can work the other way, that online works like Twelve Blue and The Jew’s Daughter owe a lot to the choose-your-own-adventure books that my generation grew up with. And she points out the “hypertextual” elements of works as old as Tristram Shandy and Pale Fire, meaning, to my mind, that Danielewski might have gotten around to his experiments with or without the dominance of Internet culture. Just as important to his work was the evolution of graphic design, printing techniques and their cost, etc.

I guess I would call some of what’s online — certainly what’s at Young-hae Chang’s Heavy Industries — visual art rather than literature. Maybe that’s splitting hairs. But when Yale’s English department is the one investigating these things, maybe not. If Nabokov eventually gets thrown over for Flash animation, that will be a sad day.

At the end of his essay about Cult Movies by Danny Peary (posted today on the Backlist; follow the stormtroopers), Andy Miller lists 61 movies to give Peary a start on a possible new volume. I’d heard of all the movie he lists but two, each with a doozy of a title — Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe And Find True Happiness? and Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains.

I did some research: Hieronymus Merkin (1969) was the bawdy brainchild (emphasis on child, it seems) of British singer and actor Anthony Newley. He plays a self-centered artist who reenacts his life — on a beach. With musical numbers. It features, among others, Milton Berle and Newley’s then-wife Joan Collins. Vincent Canby wrote that Newley “so over extends and overexposes himself that the movie comes to look like an act of professional suicide.” Another reviewer called the movie “a laughably bizarre bomb,” and wrote, “Newley leaves no psychedelic/art film cliché unturned, and circus sets, Sgt. Pepper costumes, obtrusive symbols, gratuitous nudity, and, of course, stock footage, all make their requisite appearances. He also treats his audience to multiple metafictional interruptions, which increase in frequency as the film progresses.” The original trailer can be seen here, and a clip here. I think I need to see this movie.

Fabulous Stains was an early ’80s production about an all-girl punk band, starring a teenage Diane Lane. Here’s the trailer, and this one’s going on my list, too.

About six years ago, I got an e-mail from my friend Bill Wasik telling me (and others who got the note, all of us asked to forward it to as many people as we could, without betraying a connection to Bill) to show up at Claire’s Accessories, a small, somewhat shabby establishment at Broadway and Astor Place offering “an assortment of products geared toward teen girls.” The purpose of crowding into Claire’s was . . . nonexistent. I got there a few minutes early, at which time I saw several police milling around and a police wagon parked outside the store. Someone had squealed. As Bill has said, “[The police] made it look as if a terrorist had threatened to wage jihad against Claire’s Accessories.” (A funny idea, and I can see the talking heads now: “They hate us for our barrettes.”)

So the first “flash mob” was dispersed before it ever gathered, but Bill, nothing if not smart and resourceful, got around the problem. Flash mobs then thrived at various locations throughout that summer. And like the UK version of “The Office” or Barry Sanders, they retired while still on top. And now there’s this: Bill’s book, And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, which includes details about the flash mob project but also takes a much broader look at how Internet culture and viral sensations (see: Susan Boyle, the “Yes, We Can” video, et al.) are changing the way we think about and react to the world around us. Throughout the book, Bill also writes about other projects he’s undertaken to better understand what goes into culture-stirring circa 2009, including a web site that showed how the New York Times might look to a rabid conservative and an online campaign to protest a trendy indie-rock band.

And Then There’s This is a smart, lively examination of the way that almost all of us are spending our time these days, for better or worse. If you’re in New York, Bill will be reading on June 23 at the Barnes & Noble in Tribeca. Additional tour dates can be found on his official site.

It seems you can use Google and a barcode scanner to create a personal, searchable library of all your books. The details are here. I’m not sure how I feel about this (as if my uncertainty matters to the ceaselessly attacking future), but I do find it depressing that the guy in the brief instructional video is importing Google Apps books. Hey, let’s use computers to create databases of computer books and then search for computer information! 010001001!!

(Via Books, Inq.)

Given that there’s a new movie based on her work being released just about every Friday and she’s been paired with zombies to hit the bestseller list, you’re probably not worried about the depth of affection out there for Jane Austen. But just in case, here’s Jane Austen Today, a blog that includes lists of favorite sequels to Austen novels, questions as to the whereabouts of actors who have appeared in Austen adaptations, and character “throwdowns,” in which readers are asked to vote on which actor or actress better played a particular character.

Speaking of Austen-inspired movies, I liked this, from a recent letter to the London Review of Books written by Kate Brayshay:

It is sad to think that there is a generation who, when they try to conjure Lizzy Bennet from the page, will have to fight back images of Keira Knightley pouting and pretending not to be beautiful in a mud-hemmed dress.

I’ve rarely seen a book get reviewed over such a long period of time as Brad Gooch’s recent biography of Flannery O’Connor. (I’d put Carlene Bauer’s review of it for this site up against anybody.) Now comes a look from The New Republic, including this, which made me smile:

Perhaps she shared the skepticism of Zola, whose novel Lourdes she was given on the trip, and who famously quipped that he saw a lot of abandoned crutches on the road from Lourdes but no artificial legs. Or perhaps she disliked the vulgarity of miracles on demand. In any case, it was not physical health that O’Connor was after, at Lourdes or anywhere else. “I prayed there for the novel I was working on, not for my bones, which I care about less,” she wrote.

And this, about O’Connor’s religion:

Like others before him, Gooch overestimates O’Connor’s theological sophistication. . . . The truth is that O’Connor liked the Catholic Church because she didn’t have to think about it. Just as she once claimed that she wanted to remain twelve forever, with none of the complications of puberty, she thought the Church was most trustworthy around the thirteenth century.

“J.D. Salinger hasn’t published much fiction in the last half-century, but the guy can still crank out a lawsuit when he needs to.” This from the Wall Street Journal’s law blog, which analyzes the merits of the author’s suit against a forthcoming “sequel” to The Catcher in the Rye.

I spent a few hours last week at Book Expo America in New York, but I won’t bore you with the details. (Any details would be boring, I’m afraid; picture a medical supplies convention, but with books.) While there, though, I discovered that there are an awful lot of promising titles coming this fall, which should mean good things for this site. One thing I missed but would have liked to catch in person was a conversation with John Irving and Richard Russo, moderated by Chip McGrath. Irving (Last Night in Twisted River) and Russo (That Old Cape Magic) both have new novels due out before long. Irving talked about his process, and I thought this was interesting:

Melville also said something that struck me when I was a young writer. He said, ‘Woe to him who seeks to please rather than appall.’ To appall is good. My fellow New Englander Stephen King would agree. . . . I think before I begin a novel, something about the story has to terrify me. Something about it has to be in that category of accident or tragedy that I never want to happen to myself or to anyone I love. And until I’m frightened about something, until I can’t stop thinking about something I would rather not think about, I don’t feel I have a story that I want to spend the next four or five years writing. . . . There’s a degree of repetition in most novelists I think of as serious, because we don’t so much get to choose our subjects as our obsessions choose us. There you are in what feels like the early phase of a totally new book before you realize, ‘Oh, there’s another dead child. There’s another missing parent. Oh, it’s that story again.’ And it’s not conscious. It’s obsessive.

If you were trying to think of Marilynne Robinson’s influences, I’d bet it would take a while to get to Edgar Allan Poe. But here is Robinson (found via Maud Newton) discussing the impact Poe had on her as a young reader:

Poe at his best is not imaginable without the excesses for which he must be forgiven. I think I have always loved him because to love him requires loyalty. Those gothic dreams of his are the sort of thing a pre-adolescent girl might be enthralled by, and I did notice that brilliance and learning were among the glories of his perishing damsels. But I had to defend him and myself together from the idea that the tales were simply lurid or morbid. I knew better because I could not stop memorizing his poems. To say them and hear them taught me to feel the deeper coherences of language, as if words ordered by their sounds and suggestions were a charm that opened more meaning than words contain. And I learned from him that an ancient or an alien language had the intimate sound of a whisper at my ear.

Having only sisters (three of them) myself, I’m still interested in Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry, partly because I figure the sibling experience has plenty of resonance across genders, and partly because the lineup in the book is formidable. It includes Richard Ford, Ethan Canin, Mikal Gilmore, Tobias Wolff and Second Pass contributor (among many other, more illustrious things) Daniel Menaker.

The collection also includes a piece by David Kaczynski, who, like Gilmore, has a notorious brother. He writes: “I’ll start with the premise that a brother shows you who you are — and also who you are not. He’s an image of the self, at one remove . . . You are a ‘we’ with your brother before you are a ‘we’ with any other.”

The New Yorker just published its Summer Fiction issue, some of which is available online. It includes stories by Jonathan Franzen, Aleksandar Hemon, Yiyun Li and others.

The issue also features an essay by Louis Menand about a very old question (can creative writing be taught?), taken up with Menand’s usual style and intelligence. It begins:

Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem.