From a review of a biography of William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies:

Carey tells of a drunken assault on a Bob Dylan puppet belonging to the writer Andrew Sinclair and kept in his house, in a bedroom used by the Goldings. Waking in the night, Golding mistook the puppet for Satan, attacked it and buried it in the garden.

I’m a sucker for projects like this, even though I would have to rob a bank to buy a copy and then move into a bigger apartment to house that copy. In March (in the U.S.), Oxford University Press is publishing The Oxford Companion to the Book:

The two-volume set . . . holds 51 extended essays and 5,160 A–Z entries written by nearly 400 scholars from around the world. Subjects covered by the book include the history of printing, editorial theory and practice, textual criticism, book collecting, libraries, the history of the book, and the electronic book. It also considers the book “around the world.”

It only took “an editorial team of 30 seven years to produce.” It retails for a neat $275.

It’s been a relatively quiet week around here because of the holiday, and now it goes entirely mute. Posting will resume on Monday, and next week promises to be a good one on the site. There’s a very smart, provocative Backlist essay in the hopper, as well as a review of a new book about letter-writing through the years — and to accompany it, lots of letters from famous writers will be published on the blog. Should be a fun, active week. In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving everybody.

The Guardian asked a fairly long list of people for their favorite books of 2009. There were some votes for Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín, The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, and A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore. And this, from Nick Hornby:

Wells Tower’s superb collection of short stories, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, is dark and funny, and in Tower’s case, the former quality does not negate the latter. When, in one of the stories, a woman finds out that her husband is having an affair because the footprint on the car windscreen does not match her own, you know you’re reading somebody who doesn’t come along very often. My favorite work of non-fiction this year was written by the Observer’s art critic – I’m sorry, but there we are. Laura Cumming’s brilliant book about self-portraits, A Face to the World, positively fizzes with ideas; just about every single paragraph contains a fresh observation, not just about art but about human nature. The author has got me running around galleries I haven’t been to in years.

Having just published their latest effort, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, the brilliant husband-wife translating team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky sit down with the Wall Street Journal to discuss what they’re currently working on (Doctor Zhivago) and their process more generally:

WSJ: How do you resolve your differences over the work, and do disagreements ever spill over into your personal life?

Ms. Volokhonsky: Richard is a native speaker of English. I’m a native speaker of Russian. My task is to explain to Richard what is happening in the Russian text. Then it is up to him to do what he can. The final word is always his. I can say this is not quite what the Russian says. Either he finds something that satisfies me or he says no, this is how we’re going to do it. We discuss endlessly and sometimes it becomes a nuisance because we return to it again and again even after the manuscript goes off. But we really don’t quarrel. It would be much more interesting if we did.

(Photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

(Via The Millions)

The New York State Writers Institute asked 25 notable writers to choose a favorite book of theirs about New York (“state or city”) to come up with a “distinctive and slightly unconventional guide to reading more deeply into the spirit of the Empire State.” The first 10 books are revealed here, and I’m not sure about “unconventional.” Most of these books and authors (Edith Wharton, John Cheever, Allen Ginsberg, etc.) are very well known. One exception — to me, anyway — is Bronx Primitive by Kate Simon. It was chosen by Le Anne Schreiber, who says this:

New York would not be New York without Ellis Island, and the immigrant millions who disembarked there to remake the city and themselves. Of the many classic accounts of life straight off the boat, my favorite is Bronx Primitive, Kate Simon’s rigorously unsentimental memoir of her 1920s girlhood. Its reigning virtues are clarity and candor about the physical and emotional environment that surrounded a young girl, transplanted to the Bronx from the Warsaw ghetto, a girl so lethally observant and renegade in spirit that she took pride in her tyrannical father’s epithet for her — “the silent white snake.”

The finalists for this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award have been announced. Auberon Waugh started the award to “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.” We can only hope that Philip Roth will be discouraged, but that doesn’t seem likely. He is nominated for a scene in The Humbling, which evidently includes this sentence: “It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be.” How could he possibly not win?

Other candidates are thrilled, or at least have people thrilled on their behalf. Singer Nick Cave was nominated for a scene in his novel The Death of Bunny Munro, about a door-to-door lotion salesman. “Frankly we would have been offended if he wasn’t shortlisted,” said Anna Frame of Canongate, Cave’s publisher.

Richard Milward, 23, was selected for a scene in his novel Ten Storey Love Song:

Comprising just one paragraph and replete with graphic sex scenes, Milward’s second novel follows the story of Bobby the Artist as he becomes a star and then sinks into drug-induced psychosis.

Milward, who accepted the prize in 2007 on behalf of the late Norman Mailer, said he “would have been upset” if he hadn’t been shortlisted this year. “I’ve been there before and I’ll be there again . . . There’s so much bad sex in my book that this is a nice accolade,” he said.

May the worst perv win.

The phrase “it’s like watching a car crash” is overused, but I’m telling you, this is a lot like watching a car crash. Sarah Palin is on Oprah at the moment, complaining that her interview with Katie Couric was supposed to be “fun.” That’s a real shame for her. She’s also already used the phrase “speak my heart, [speak] my values” and talked about “haters.” Her complaint about the way the McCain campaign dressed her seems particularly ungrateful, given the fact that she showed up wearing just a red fleece for the cover of her excruciatingly popular book. It looks less like a memoir than an Old Navy ad.

Oh, now they’re showing a clip from the Couric interview and I have to change the channel. That’s too much.

The blog at the Book Cover Archive names its best cover design (and a runner-up) for every year of the first decade of the 21st century.

Ilan Stavans, editor of Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing — which includes 85 writers from 45 countries and spans from 1623 to 2003 — is interviewed about the project:

Q: Almost every selection grapples with what you call the “verbal dilemma,” the immigrant’s struggle with learning a new language and preserving or losing her native tongue. . . . Do you think that the complex feelings involved in dealing with this language crisis was what drove so many of the volume’s contributors to become writers?

A: My own experience is perhaps emblematic. As I wrote in my memoir On Borrowed Words, I arrived in New York City in 1985 with a lexicon of approximately a hundred words. My acquisition of English ran parallel to my Americanization: the more I understood, the less awkward I felt in this land. Yet the English I encountered wasn’t uncontaminated. What I heard most often was Spanglish, a mix of English and Spanish. And while I was able to distinguish between high-brow and popular parlance, these two spheres made me understand that the real immigrant experience isn’t told in a pure, unadulterated style. The immigrants’ voices, their goals, and their achievements vary considerably. Nabokov, for instance, is a stylistic craftsman, so is [Felipe] Alfau. They hope to write as if they are native English writers, although their degree of foreignness obviously betrays their origins; in other words, they write as if in translation. In contrast, Jamaica Kincaid is perfectly natural in her English as is Edwidge Danticat, perhaps because the two arrived in the U.S. as children. Every immigrant reinvents the language anew. In fact, I’m convinced that it is thanks to immigrants that English remains vital.

John Jurgensen at the Wall Street Journal recently sat down for a chat with Cormac McCarthy and John Hillcoat, who directed the adaptation of McCarthy’s The Road. Among many other subjects, McCarthy discusses the novel he’s working on now:

I’m not very good at talking about this stuff. It’s mostly set in New Orleans around 1980. It has to do with a brother and sister. When the book opens she’s already committed suicide, and it’s about how he deals with it. She’s an interesting girl. . . . This long book is largely about a young woman. There are interesting scenes that cut in throughout the book, all dealing with the past. She’s committed suicide about seven years before. I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.

Jurgensen also asked the 76-year-old author about his research for The Road:

WSJ: For novels such as Blood Meridian, you did extensive historical research. What kind of research did you do for The Road?

CM: I don’t know. Just talking to people about what things might look like under various catastrophic situations, but not a lot of research. I have these conversations on the phone with my brother Dennis, and quite often we get around to some sort of hideous end-of-the-world scenario and we always wind up just laughing. Anyone listening to this would say, “Why don’t you just go home and get into a warm tub and open a vein.”

WSJ: Brotherly conversation just turns to the apocalypse?

CM: More often than we can justify.

A link I missed yesterday for Veterans Day: AbeBooks has a fascinating roundup of “trench literature,” the things that were read by everyday soldiers in World War I:

Soldiers had such an appetite for reading that both sides resorted to publishing at the front. The best known British trench magazine was The Wipers Times produced by the 12th Battalion Sherwood Foresters of the Nottingham & Derbyshire Regiment. Stationed in Ypres, Belgium, the Foresters found an abandoned printing press and put it to good use between 1916 and 1918. The Wipers Times featured poems, jokes and satire on military life.

Several books have been written about The Wipers Times, including a 1930 edition that reprinted the magazines. There is also Suffering from Cheerfulness: Poems and Parodies from the Wipers Times by Malcolm Brown. The French produced a trench magazine called Le Poilu – poilu (which translates as hairy) was a nickname for their bearded soldiers - while the German soldiers published Der Drahtverhau.

(Via Books, Inq.)

Via Vol. 1 Brooklyn, video of a conversation between Studs Terkel and Nelson Algren at a Chicago party in 1975. At the time of the chat, Algren has recently moved to Paterson, New Jersey, a town he fell for while working on an article about boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. Algren also published, posthumously, a novel based on the life of Carter called The Devil’s Stocking.

When you’re done watching, read Terkel’s tender tribute to Algren. It includes a terrific scene in which Algren and Terkel meet Billie Holiday backstage. The piece is a loving, rich description of a friend: “His appearance was that of a horse player, who, this moment, got the news: he had bet her across the board and she came in a strong fourth. Yet, strangely, his was not a mournful mien. He was chuckling to himself.”

On this Veterans Day, a trio of literary lists . . . Christopher Hitchens on the best British novels about 20th-century warfare: “[T]he best of our wartime fiction preserves a certain stubborn and understated verisimilitude that is sometimes superior to what is taught (and even worse untaught) in our schools.” Victor Davis Hanson on another five books, also about the 20th century, including the book that “introduced the young military historian John Keegan to the wider American public.” And Thomas Ricks’ list of ten books that “anyone interested in U.S. military history should read.”

Speaking of Thomas Edison (see Bud Parr’s review of the Lydia Millet collection published today in Circulating), Carolyn Kellogg at Jacket Copy asks if this is the best book title of the year:

Edison’s Concrete Piano: Flying Tanks, Six-Nippled Sheep, Walk-on-Water Shoes, and 12 Other Flops from Great Inventors

That crazy Edison — not only did he imagine a concrete piano but also thought poured concrete houses could be the answer to the wooden firetraps that housed the poor at the turn of the last century. The concrete piano would have simply been one musical accessory — like the concrete gramophone he also imagined — in his all-concrete houses. And 10 of the 11 concrete homes built in the early 1900s — which, while priced below the market rate in 1917, went unsold long enough for the project to be abandoned — are still being lived in on Ingersoll Terrace in Union, N.J. . . . presumably with conventional furniture.

Screenwriting guru Robert McKee’s Story, about the structural principles of the craft, is owned by something like a trillion aspiring TV and movie writers. (McKee was famously portrayed by a ranting Brian Cox in Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation. A clip of said ranting can be seen here, with language decidedly not safe for work.)

Second Pass contributor Jason Zinoman recently attended one of McKee’s one-day seminars — this one on how to write a thriller — and has now brilliantly recounted the experience for Vanity Fair:

By the end of the day, I had learned some valuable lessons about show business, the art of persuasion, and the tricky relationship between truth and fiction. I’d also learned that Robert McKee often has no idea what he’s talking about. Some people believe that no course can teach you how to write a screenplay, that it just comes out of you, but in my opinion that’s not true. A good teacher can really help writers, and McKee surely has had some success. He’s been criticized for turning the creative process into a series of rules, but this misses the real problem with his course, namely that the rules themselves are often banal and arbitrary.

Zinoman’s piece includes some fine comedy — like McKee oddly insisting that there’s no word for “yes” in Japanese — and you should read the whole thing.

At Slate, Aleksandar Hemon offers his searing opinion about the posthumous publication of Nabokov. It begins:

Back when I was a young viewer of Sarajevo TV, there was a cult show along the lines of Monty Python that once featured a skit with a poem presumably found in the papers of a deceased genius poet. An actor ponderously declaimed the newly discovered verse—“Bread/ Milk /Cooking oil . . .”—as it became clear that the masterpiece was in fact a grocery list. The last, crushing line was: “And some fish, if you can find any.”

Nabokov’s The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun) is far from being a grocery list, but it is just as far from being a novel. The master began it in 1975 and was working on it in 1977 when he fell ill and died, leaving instructions that the manuscript be destroyed. A few decades later, the would-be novel has been resurrected by a crafty agent-publisher alliance that has orchestrated a high drama around it . . .

He goes on to offer a smart reading of what might have made the finished novel a compelling addition to Nabokov’s canon, and to articulate some more disdain for that “craft alliance.” Read the whole thing. I think an author’s wishes can be intriguingly debated when talking about a finished (or very close to finished) work. But publishing notes on index cards as a “novel” does seem pretty exploitative — not to mention silly.

On Wednesday, Nov. 18, comedian Patrick Borelli is putting on a show called “You Should Judge a Book By Its Cover” at the UCB Theatre in New York. Borelli will be sharing and discussing (making fun of) 30 of the craziest book covers he’s come across. (You can make reservations here.) He also interviewed a trio of terrific designers — Steven Heller, Chip Kidd and Rodrigo Corral — and videos of those conversations will be shown throughout the night. Here’s one of them (semi-safe for work, depending on your workplace’s policy about scatological humor):

In The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert plays skeptic to a controversial bestseller (how could one be skeptical about anything with a dignified name like “superfreakonomics”?):

[W]hat’s most troubling about SuperFreakonomics isn’t the authors’ many blunders; it’s the whole spirit of the enterprise. Though climate change is a grave problem, Levitt and Dubner treat it mainly as an opportunity to show how clever they are. Leaving aside the question of whether geoengineering, as it is known in scientific circles, is even possible—have you ever tried sending an eighteen-mile-long hose into the stratosphere?—their analysis is terrifyingly cavalier. A world whose atmosphere is loaded with carbon dioxide, on the one hand, and sulfur dioxide, on the other, would be a fundamentally different place from the earth as we know it.

She also throws into the bargain a swipe at scientist Freeman Dyson:

“Carbon-eating trees” certainly sound nice. But how, exactly, would they work? Dyson has never elaborated, and neither the Times nor The Atlantic seems to have asked. Would the trees take up CO2 while they’re alive, and release it back into the atmosphere only slowly, once they’re dead? If so, the world already has those sorts of trees. They are called, well, trees. Or would the trees absorb carbon dioxide from the air and convert it, as Dyson once vaguely suggested, into “liquid fuels,” so that instead of at gas stations we could fill up our cars at orchards? In that case, the idea seems not so much “brave” as off the wall. (Dyson, it should be noted, has also proposed genetically engineering plants made of silicon and trees that could be grown on Mars.)

(Illustration by Laurent Cilluffo for The New Yorker)

If you don’t know the web comic xkcd, you’re not a big enough nerd. Now, its creator, Randall Munroe, has released a book of his work. Jacket Copy takes a look at how this “former NASA contractor who left to pursue stick-figure cartooning full-time” (try explaining that one to the parents) chose an unconventional publishing route. He also used the project to bring about some unconventional and admirable things. He pledged part of the book’s profits would be used to build a school in Laos, and “the school . . . whose $32,000 goal was reached shortly after the first two book signings in San Francisco and New York, is almost constructed.”

Three funny examples of Munroe’s work over the years here and here and here. Countless more at the site.

Since the beginning, I’ve thought of McSweeney’s first and foremost as a great design company. Eggers, Inc. is now releasing a massive one-time newspaper called the San Francisco Panorama. It looks stunning. Not sure how it’s supposed to make the newspaper business feel any better, though. Not exactly a feasible model . . .

The November issue of Harper’s includes an excerpt from a 1971 interview between Jean-Paul Sartre and John Gerassi. It’s taken from the forthcoming Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates. Here’s a part, condensed by me, in which Sartre discusses a relationship with some interesting imaginary friends:

Sartre: . . . when we decided to experiment with drugs, I ended up having a nervous breakdown.

Gerassi: You mean the crabs?

Sartre: Yeah, after I took the mescaline, I started seeing crabs around me all the time. They followed me in the streets, into class. I got used to them. I would wake up in the morning and say, “Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?” I would talk to them all the time. I would say, “Okay, guys, we’re going into class now, so we have to be still and quiet,” and they would be there, around my desk, absolutely still, until the bell rang. . . . The crabs stayed with me until the day I simply decided that they bored me and that I just wouldn’t pay attention to them. . . . I would have liked my crabs to come back. The crabs were mine. I had gotten used to them. They kept reminding me that my life was absurd, yes, nauseating, but without challenging my immortality. Despite their mocking, my crabs never said that my books would not be on the shelf, or that if they were, so what? You have to realize that my psychosis was literature. . . . My crabs had considered me important, or else why bother me? De Gaulle, the ridiculousness of the Cold War, America’s drive to conquer and control, all that made me realize that I was not and would never be significant.

Gerassi: From the end of the war until de Gaulle’s coup d’état in 1958, you were haunted by neither crabs nor depression?

Sartre: We keep calling them crabs because of my play The Condemned of Altona, but they were really lobsters.

Gerassi: Anyway, they were gone then?

Sartre: Oh, yes, they left me during the war. You know, I’ve never said this before, but sometimes I miss them — when I’m lonely, or rather when I’m alone. When I go to a movie that ends up boring, or not very gripping, and I remember how they used to sit there on my leg. Of course I always knew that they weren’t there, that they didn’t exist, but they served an important purpose. They were a warning that I wasn’t thinking correctly or focusing on what was important, or that I was heading up the wrong track, all the while telling me that my life was not right, not what it should be. Well, no one tells me that anymore.

I’m always looking for good collections of letters, and it sounds like another is on the horizon:

Most of Tocqueville’s letters from America, which were written between the spring of 1831 and February 1832, when he sailed for home, have never been published in English, but Frederick Brown, a biographer of Flaubert and Zola, has collected and translated them for a volume that Yale University Press is to release next year. A sample of the letters, roughly 20 percent of the whole, appears in the current issue of The Hudson Review, and they reveal a Tocqueville different from the one we know, or think we know, from Democracy in America.

The difference is, in part, “a boyish ebullience” that stems from the fact that Tocqueville was only 25 when he wrote the letters:

“The letters are written with a kind of concision you don’t find in Democracy in America,” [Brown] said. “The vocabulary is relatively small, and not romantic. Chateaubriand was one of Tocqueville’s relatives, and there was plenty of romanticism in Tocqueville’s soul, but not here.”

Yet if the letters aren’t romantic, they’re often exuberant, and this quality, Mr. Brown guessed, came both from Tocqueville’s youthfulness and from his feeling of liberation.