In a piece for Intelligent Life, Tom Shone argues that “sobering up is one of the more devastating acts of literary criticism an author can face.” Commenters spend most of their time taking Shone to task for dissing Richard Yates, ignoring drunk female writers and getting someone’s nationality wrong. But the essay is a breezy, dishy read:

n America William Faulkner and Scott Fitzgerald were the Paris and Britney of their day, caught in the funhouse mirror of fame, their careers a vivid tabloid mash-up of hospitalisations and electroshock therapies. “When I read Faulkner I can tell when he gets tired and does it on corn just as I used to be able to tell when Scott would hit it beginning with ‘Tender is the Night’,” said Hemingway, playing the Amy Winehouse role of denier-in-chief. He kept gloating track of his friends’ decline, all the while nervously checking out books on liver damage from the library; by the end, said George Plimpton, Hemingway’s liver protruded from his belly “like a long fat leech”.

Shone recently published a novel about the literary set and AA.

Speaking of Thomas Pynchon, Wired has posted an interactive map of Los Angeles, where readers can pinpoint landmarks in the city that played a role in Pynchon’s life (he lived there in the ’60s and ’70s) or in his new novel, which is set there. The post’s creator, Mark Horowitz, notes that “if you map the novel against Pynchon’s life in L.A., it really does tie the whole room together.”

One contributor to the map reminds us that Pynchon, the recluse of recluses, has made appearances on The Simpsons, including this one here.

Today marks the publication of Not That Kind of Girl, a memoir by Second Pass contributor Carlene Bauer. In it, she details her evangelical upbringing in southern New Jersey, her move away from the church in her 20s, her embrace of secular saints like Liz Phair, the Smiths and Sylvia Plath (among others), her late blooming, her brief conversion to Catholicism and her continuing struggle to reconcile her spiritual and worldly sides. She does all of this with humor and lovely prose.

Walter Kirn praised the book, writing, in part: “[Bauer] seems to lose her bearings at times, then find them again, then lose them once more. Her blessed center can’t seem to hold. What does hold, sentence by sentence and page by page, is Bauer’s sure grip on our sympathies. Her style is light but not trivial — the laughs she wrings from her moral dilemmas are shaded with melancholy longing.”

An excerpt from Not That Kind of Girl:

It wasn’t that I wanted to stop being a Christian. Peace had been promised to us, so I couldn’t give up. As Paul had told the Philippians: work out your own salvation. I had to keep on believing that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of by area congregations, and that I would one day find a congregation that believed this along with me.

Until then, my teenage soul — suspicious of cheerfulness, though still reflexively respectful of authority — would feel increasingly uncomfortable in the presence of the official soul. The official soul, as transmitted through church and Christian paraphernalia, was upbeat, incurious, happy with its lot. It did not have any heroes other than the ones who appeared in the Bible, and it was content to hear the same stories about these people over and over again. It described pain and suffering in such a way that a person might think alcoholism or the loss of a child were no more inconvenient than a tussle with the flu: after it passed, you could stand in front of the congregation on Sunday and testify that it was all better, and God was good. As far as I could tell, that was the only story told by the official soul, and the real and true sadnesses had been excised for a more mellifluous account. Which made it seem as if there were things you couldn’t talk about in church, or with people from church — what made you laugh, why you cried at a movie, what made you angry, or what books you read that hadn’t been written by C. S. Lewis, A. W. Tozer, or D. L. Moody. Church was supposed to be the most important thing in life, but so much of life was left out, because so much of its trouble was assumed to be conquered. My pastor mentioned Kierkegaard in a sermon only once, and it would be a long time before I discovered that there was a storied Christian who suffered from, and so in some way sanctioned, depression, rage, sarcasm, and despair — the diseases that took hold in adolescence, for which church offered no cure.

Over at the Amazon blog Omnivoracious, Daphne Durham recommends Pictorial Webster’s: A Visual Dictionary of Curiosities by John M. Carrera, “a gorgeous book devoted solely to Webster’s dictionary illustrations of the 19th century.” It does look gorgeous, and I’m eager to see a copy in real life.

In this video, Carrera explains the long process that led to publication. Like many videos from vimeo, for some reason, this one skips so much when I try to play it that I can’t get through it. But if your computer is friendlier to those clips, have at it.

A companion piece of sorts to yesterday’s post about misleading jackets: First-time novelist Sonya Chung wrote about the delicate process of cover design, especially in a case when “conveying the cultural elements of the novel in a jacket image could be tricky.”

Chung’s novel features a protagonist who’s “an American of Korean descent.” The woman featured on the cover is Korean, but she’s seen from behind, and about half the people to whom Chung sent the cover identified her as white (”one person even used the word ‘WASPy’”). This left the author with some thinking to do…

Author Justine Larbalestier shares some thoughts about a bad jacket-design experience. Her YA novel, Liar, features a protagonist named Micah, who is black. The girl on the cover, as you can see, is white. Larbalestier addresses why that is, why she’s upset about it and why she didn’t keep it from happening. Given that the book doesn’t publish until late September, something tells me they’ll find a way to change the cover before it hits the shelves… I hope so.

One excerpt from Larbalestier’s post:

Liar is a book about a compulsive (possibly pathological) liar who is determined to stop lying but finds it much harder than she supposed. I worked very hard to make sure that the fundamentals of who Micah is were believable: that she’s a girl, that she’s a teenager, that she’s black [. . .] One of the most upsetting impacts of the cover is that it’s led readers to question everything about Micah: If she doesn’t look anything like the girl on the cover maybe nothing she says is true. At which point the entire book, and all my hard work, crumbles.

(Via Light Reading)

Padgett Powell’s forthcoming novel, The Interrogative Mood, is made up entirely of questions. The Complete Review calls it “oddly seductive” and concludes: “Bizzare but entertaining stuff.”

Ron Silliman used the same structure in the 1970s for a shorter work called Sunset Debris. I’ve been trying to think of other novels that aren’t just experimental, like those by Calvino, Markson or Barthelme, but that put such a formal constraint on the author.

The first that comes to mind is George Perec’s A Void, which he wrote without using a single “e.” The book was originally written in French and, just as remarkably if not more, translated into English also without use of an “e.” (The first two sentences: “Incurably insomniac, Anton Vowl turns on a light. According to his watch it’s only 12:20.”)

Allowing for vast differences of intent, there’s also this, which was very popular in the 1980s. Presumably, Powell and Silliman don’t expect people to answer all their questions, though at least one person has gone to such trouble in Silliman’s case.

In its new fiction issue, The Atlantic has an alternately charming and frustrating essay by Tim O’Brien about the role of imagination in writing stories.

Charming because O’Brien builds the piece around his two young sons, and the fact that they’ve recently taken to wearing tails fashioned out of belts, clotheslines, phone cords and whatever else might be at hand. O’Brien and his wife play along (while writing one day, he answers the front door still wearing his), and he wonders if things can go too far:

I’ve tried, God knows, to reason with the boys. I’ve used guile and bribery and shameless deceit. (Santa Claus hates tails.) Last night I tried again. “Pretending can be a good thing,” I told the boys at bedtime, “but sometimes it can get you in trouble. It can be dangerous.” [. . .] “But I thought make-believe was supposed to be fun,” Timmy said.

“Yes, of course it is,” I told him, and then a crucial question occurred to me. “Do you know what pretending is?”

For what seemed a long while, I listened to the whir of a 5-year-old’s mind in motion. “Well, actually,” Timmy finally said, using his favorite (and only) four-syllable word, “actually I guess it’s like when you go away on trips. Sometimes I dream about you. I dream about how you’ll come home from the airport and bring me surprises and play with me. I get sad when you go away, and so I pretend you’re not gone. Is that bad?”

I told him no, it wasn’t bad.

The frustrating part is when O’Brien addresses examples of classic fiction writing. He says:

Although by temperament I’m disposed to what is called “magical realism,” I admire and love the fiction of Dubus and Chekhov and Munro and Cheever and Hemingway and Fitzgerald and many, many other masters of realism.

And then:

Even if one’s goal is to depict ordinary human beings in ordinary human settings, a story must find striking, dramatic, and unexpected ways to accomplish this. . . . Certainly in the work of those masterful realists I listed a moment ago, you will find on virtually every page examples of what I mean by extraordinary human behavior, incidents that surprise and delight.

He goes on to analyze a lengthy paragraph by Borges that is lovely but completely unrealistic. I would have been interested to see O’Brien delve a bit further into the work of those “masters of realism” instead, to illustrate examples of how one turns everyday material into something both recognizable and charged with imagination.

Two interviews to share, neither a traditional Q&A. The first, via Jessa Crispin, is Walter Cronkite talking to Gertrude Stein in 1935 when Cronkite was working for the Daily Texan newspaper at the University of Texas and Stein was in town to give a talk. Cronkite sets the scene:

Dressed in a mannish blouse, a tweed skirt, a peculiar but attractive vest affair, and comfortable looking shoes, Miss Stein appeared much more of the woman than do the pictures that currently circulate. She strokes her close cropped hair with a continuous back to front movement. Even this nervous gesture is easily accepted by her present company.

The whole thing is not long, and well worth reading. Hard to imagine anything like it in a college newspaper today.

The second, via Nigel Beale, is the National Post catching up with Martin Amis to talk about teaching creative writing, which Amis was doing at the Humber School for Writers’ Summer Workshop. The reporter had two 15-minute sessions with Amis, during which not much seemed to be said, but he also sat in on a class, where he got material:

Now, he said, he wrote using a combination of long-hand and the computer (”I use about six fingers for typing, with an average of one mistake per word,” he said). The benefits of long-hand, he said, were that when you scratch out a word, it still exists there on the page. On the computer, however, when you delete a word it disappears forever. This is important, Amis stressed, because usually your first instinct is the right one.

Michael Cooper, ex-husband of Elizabeth Gilbert — she of the gazillion-selling Eat, Pray, Love, about her post-divorce global journey — has sold his own book. Displaced will tell his side of the story, which, it turns out, is also global: “According to [publisher] Hyperion, [Cooper] goes on a ’search for purpose’ that leads him through the Middle East and other developing countries.”

Whatever happened to getting over a relationship by “searching for purpose” at the end of a bar with plenty of Otis Redding on the jukebox? You know, something like: Cirrhosis and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”: A Memoir.

(Via Galleycat)

If you’re looking for a gag gift for any readers in your life (or an earnest gift for the semiliterate in your life), I point you in the direction of a series of NASCAR-based romance novels. The titles are what you might expect: Running on Empty, One Track Mind, Speed Dating, etc. The subtitles aren’t much more creative: “Trouble never looked so good,” “The chase is on,” etc., though there is one curveball: “Can he move from racetrack to dad track?”

The books include lovely physical description (“a masculine chin, one that was really, truly square”) and keen psychology (“When she stomped her foot, his gaze was drawn, by no more than force of habit, to her cleavage”).

I think my favorite cover is this one. You can really see them searching for her family. (A gallery of all the covers is available here.)

(Via The Morning News)

Jacket Copy, the L.A. Times books blog, offers an annotated list of “61 essential postmodern reads.” The annotations are clever — 12 symbols for things like “self-contradicting plot” and “author is a character.” The most any book could possibly have is 11, since two of the traits (“fat” and “thin”) cancel each other out, and the most any book does have is seven: House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski and Tours of the Black Clock by Steve Erickson.

Mark Athitakis ponders the list: “At the risk of invoking some ungainly term like ‘post-postmodern,’ it may be that the postmodern novel is just something that happened, not something that’s happening — a method of wrestling with an increasingly mediated existence in the years before mediated existences became commonplace, before a ten-year-old kid could embed video and songs on a MySpace page and make virtual friends with some stranger in Bali.”

I’ve only read 12 of the books listed, so it seems my postmodern education needs some work…

There’s a big biography of Muriel Spark being published in the UK next week. The Guardian has what I assume is an excerpt, and it chronicles a busy time in Spark’s life: heartbreak, conversion to Catholicism, madness, and the beginning of her life as a fiction writer, which would eventually yield 22 novels and many short stories.

At a pivotal moment in the excerpt, Spark goes to Edinburgh to review “The Confidential Clerk,” a play by T.S. Eliot:

The play became an obsession. “It has,” she wrote, “to do with faithfulness and idolatry, security and rootlessness, vague desires and precise fulfilments, parents and children, art and craft, success and failure.” It had, in short, to do with all the theological, aesthetic and domestic paradoxes that were pulling her apart. Her analysis was so acute that Eliot himself was astonished. It struck him “as one of the two or three most intelligent reviews I had read. It seemed to me remarkable that anyone who could only have seen the play once, and certainly not have read it, should have grasped so much of its intention.”

But thanks in part to a reliance on Dexedrine (“then readily available from chemist shops to assist dieting”), the play turned into a nightmare for her:

Then, shortly after she began [Catholic] instruction, in January 1954, something went wrong. Her friends noticed the trouble before she did: Eliot, she insisted, was sending her threatening messages. His play was full of them. Some were in the theatre programme. Obsessively, she began to seek them out — covering sheet after sheet of paper with anagrams and cryptographic experiments.

This experience became part of the inspiration for Spark’s first novel, The Comforters. I think Evelyn Waugh summarized that novel well when he wrote, “The first half, up to the motor accident, is brilliant. The second half rather diffuse.” If you’re looking for other Spark to read, James Wood has called The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie “as perfect as a novel can ever be.” And if you want an eerie read, you can do a lot worse than The Driver’s Seat.

(Via Maud Newton)

The response to “Fired from the Canon” has been great. Thanks to everyone who’s stopped by because of it. I hope you’ll make the site a part of your regular surfing.

At the American Scene, the post inspired a thoughtful reply from Noah Millman, and some spirited action in the comments section. One visitor recommended not reading The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. I have a soft spot for that one. (Turnabout is fair play.) I was reminded of this passage, in particular, which comes after Chuck Yeager has broken the sound barrier:

A top security lid was was being put on the morning’s events. That the press was not to be informed went without saying. But neither was anyone else, anyone at all, to be told. Word of the flight was not to go beyond the flight line. And even among the people directly involved — who were there and knew about it, anyway — there was to be no celebrating. Just what was on the minds of the brass at Wright is hard to say. Much of it, no doubt, was a simple holdover from wartime, when every breakthrough of possible strategic importance was kept under wraps. . . .

In any case, by mid-afternoon Yeager’s tremendous feat had become a piece of thunder with no reverberation. A strange and implausible stillness settled over the event. Well . . . there was not supposed to be any celebration, but come nightfall . . . Yeager and Ridley and some of the others ambled over to Pancho’s. After all, it was the end of the day, and they were pilots. So they knocked back a few. And they had to let Pancho in on the secret, because Pancho had said she’d serve a free steak dinner to any pilot who could fly supersonic and walk in here to tell about it, and they had to see the look on her face. So Pancho served Yeager a big steak dinner and said they were a buncha miserable peckerwoods all the same, and the desert cooled off and the wind came up and the screen doors banged and they drank some more and bawled some songs over the cackling dry piano and the stars and the moon came out and Pancho screamed oaths no one had ever heard before and Yeager and Ridley roared and the old weatherbeaten bar boomed and the autographed pictures of a hundred dead pilots shook and clattered on the frame wires and the faces of the living fell apart in the reflections, and by and by they all left and stumbled and staggered and yelped and bayed for glory before the arthritic silhouettes of the Joshua trees.

Today marks the beginning of an experiment in 21st-century publishing. A little while ago, writer Shya Scanlon, frustrated by his attempts to find a mainstream book publisher for his work, had posted his novel, Forecast, on his web site. But after a few weeks, Scanlon wanted to find a “more dramatic” way to present his work, not least “because it seemed unreasonable to ask people to read 105,000 words straight-through online.” Indeed.

Starting today, the novel will be serialized on 42 different literary sites, with a new installment appearing every Monday and Thursday. Scanlon calls the participating sites “a fine mixture of well-established literary journals, avid bloggers, and otherwise supportive literary-minded folk.” The first chapter is up now over at Juked.

The idea of serialization, which Henry James and Charles Dickens would understand perfectly, even though the web might spook them, doesn’t mean Scanlon has given up on the idea of seeing a bound book. “[I]t’s impossible not to yearn for that lucrative book contract,” Scanlon said. “[But] my main concern is to get my work read.” In a blurb for Forecast, Brian Evenson compares it to the work of Jonathan Lethem and describes it as “part [science fiction], part noir, part road narrative and part love story.”

You can follow the novel’s progress as it goes up on this page.

The Guardian reports that Quirk Books, the marketing gurus behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies are set to release Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, which will be “60% Austen and 40% tentacled chaos.”

Quirk is so sure of the book’s appeal that it is going head-to-head with Dan Brown’s much-anticipated new novel The Lost Symbol, publishing Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters in the UK and the US on the same day: 15 September.

So will September 15th finally be the day that the literary gods strike everyone simultaneously blind for their sins? Stay tuned.

There are things that are dumb but understandable (like Dan Brown’s career, for instance), but I don’t understand this trend. Here’s the editorial director of Quirk on his process:

“I made a list of classic novels and a second list of elements that could enhance these novels—pirates, robots, ninjas, monkeys and so forth. When I drew a line between Pride and Prejudice and zombies, I knew I had my title and it was easy to envision how the book would work.”

Yes, the books really write themselves. I’ll allow them to read themselves, too.

Like many other kids (and adults, I would guess), I was overwhelmed by the 94-foot blue whale hanging in New York’s Museum of Natural History. I was already obsessed with dinosaurs at the time — I cried when we finished the unit on them in first grade — and the whale added giant oceanic life to my childhood list of wonderment. I’ve never really outgrown my fascination. Now, I’m learning (a few months late) of Philip Hoare’s Leviathan, or The Whale. Published in the UK last September (it’s yet to be published in the U.S.), it won that country’s Samuel Johnson Prize.

Some relevant links: The book’s gorgeous hardcover jacket; a Second Pass contributor raved about the work in the UK; a mixed review of the book (“The hugeness of [Hoare’s] subject seems to have encouraged him into portentous overstatement.”); Hoare recommends 10 other books about whales; an interesting piece that wonders if the Samuel Johnson Prize for Hoare signals that “formal biography is now a dying art”; and earlier on the Second Pass, Levi Stahl wrote about another book to read beside Moby-Dick.

(Via Bookslut)

At long last, The Second Pass blog now features a comments function. (For now, you have to be on the blog page to see it and use it, as opposed to the homepage.) So this post is the place to express any opinions you might have about the feature that went up on the Backlist today. I’ve gotten a few direct responses already. One reader who “slogged through” D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow in college wrote: “I had banished it from my mind, and now…it comes horribly horribly back.” Another defended William Faulkner, writing that “Absalom, Absalom isn’t purple, it’s deep purple, and, like the band, transcends its own absurdity. But it’s a lot better than ‘Smoke on the Water.’”

So, thoughts? Is White Noise your favorite novel and you think we’re crazy? Did you find On the Road as disappointing a guide to living as we did? And most importantly, what acclaimed books would you add to the list?

Thanks to a friend, I’ve discovered the blog Awful Library Books. In addition to the elegantly designed volume at left, it features a post about Moving Through Pregnancy, Elisabeth Bing’s 1975 work about staying active while carrying a baby. It includes this firecracker of a paragraph, opposite a photo of a very pregnant woman vacuuming:

With all due respect for the liberation of women, someone has to clean the house and do all kinds of boring chores. Actually those jobs don’t take too long, and this photo shows Judith with the vacuum cleaner. Look at her closely and see the excellent posture she maintains as she walks around the room, pushing the machine on the carpet. Her shoulders are relaxed, her head is high, and in doing this rather boring but occasionally necessary job, she is aware of watching her posture and supporting her baby well with her abdominal muscles.

Speaking of Nelson Algren (in the post below), here’s an interview with him from the Paris Review in 1955. In this excerpt, he’s been asked about the heroin users he hung out with while writing The Man with the Golden Arm, and whether they were bothered by his “eavesdropping”:

. . . they were mostly amused by it. Oh, they thought it was a pretty funny way to make a living, but — well, one time, after the book came out, I was sitting in this place, and there were a couple of junkies sitting there, and this one guy was real proud of the book; he was trying to get this other guy to read it, and finally the other guy said he had read it, but he said, “You know it ain’t so, it ain’t like that.” There’s a part in the book where this guy takes a shot, and then he’s talking for about four pages. This guy says, “You know it ain’t like that, a guy takes a fix and he goes on the nod, I mean, you know that.” And the other guy says, “Well, on the other hand, if he really knew what he was talking about, he couldn’t write the book, he’d be out in the can.” So the other guy says, “Well, if you mean, is [the book] all right for squares, sure, it’s all right for squares.” So, I mean, you have to compromise.

To celebrate its 60th anniversary, the National Book Awards will pick an all-time National Book Award champion in the Fiction category. (The Booker Prize has already done this: Midnight’s Children won.)

In the NBA contest, writers will narrow down the candidates to six, and then the public will vote. So, who should be the morning-line favorite? There are some serious heavyweights involved. To wit: Invisible Man, The Adventures of Augie March, Gravity’s Rainbow, The Collected Stories of Flannery O’Connor and All the Pretty Horses. Given that the public votes on the winner, it’s possible that a more contemporary popular writer will take the crown: John Irving (The World According to Garp) or Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections) or — egad — Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain).

I’m going to guess the initial committee won’t name any of those books in the final six, and I’ll predict that Invisible Man wins it. But with such a tough field, I can’t make it any better than 5-1. On the NBA site, they’re blogging about each of the candidates, one per day, here. If the cover’s lit up, there’s a post about it. They start with Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm.

(Via Omnivoracious)

Good news: I’ve found a house band for the site.

Jacket Copy reports:

Two Chinese writers locked themselves up with coffee and cigarettes, no cellphones and no sleep for 48 hours [. . .]

The result of this seclusion? A 130,000-word biography of Michael Jackson that’s already available.