Mike Riggs writes about going to find J. D. Salinger’s house with a couple of friends. A piece:

A different man, with a bagpipe on his hip and a black lab at his side, had taunted us for nearly six hours, alternately giving us clues as to which house belonged to Salinger and insulting us. “You think you’re the first people to come looking for Mr. Salinger?” He said when we pulled alongside him in his driveway. “Go home.” The next time around the bend, “You can’t see his house from the road.” Then, “If you admire him so much, respect his desire for privacy;” followed by, “I can comfortably walk the distance between our two houses;” and, “Long drive back to Florida. Better get started now.”

Eventually, the bagpiper stopped responding to our questions about Salinger. And because we were lost, yet still committed to the hunt, we agreed to talk about other things in between bouts of goose-chasing. The black flies. The weather. The efficiency of the Cornish fire department. But never about Salinger. When we pulled up to the bagpiper’s yard for the last time, he simply pointed to the barn across the dirt road. “I raised that barn myself,” he said, then put the bagpipe reed back in his mouth and honked his way through his front door.

This list at Life of “literary drunks & addicts” casts a wide and somewhat ungenerous net. (It includes Louisa May Alcott because she got hooked on morphine after contracting typhoid fever as a nurse during the Civil War.) But it was worth scrolling through for some choice quotes about the drinking habit.

For instance, Brendan Behan: “I only take a drink on two occasions: when I’m thirsty and when I’m not.”

And one of Dorothy Parker’s famous lines: “One more drink and I’ll be under the host.”

But if pith isn’t your thing, there’s the far more blunt Charles Baudelaire (pictured above, looking just as you’d expect the person who issued this quote to look): “Always be drunk. . . . Get drunk militantly. Just get drunk.”

The full Salinger obituary is up at the New York Times.

And the Paris Review points to an interview in its archives, in which famed publisher Robert Giroux talks about the handshake agreement he had with Salinger to publish The Catcher in the Rye, and how he quit when those above him wouldn’t honor it:

Gene said, “The kid is disturbed.” I said, “Well, that’s all right. He is, but it’s a great novel.” He said, “Well, I felt that I had to show it to the textbook department.” “The textbook department?” He said, “Well, it’s about a kid in prep school isn’t it? I’m waiting for their reply.” I said, “It doesn’t matter what their reply is, Gene. We have a contract for the book.” I felt like saying, “You son of a bitch, this is the greatest insult to me that could ever be.” The textbook people’s report came back, and it said, “This book is not for us, try Random House.”

A commenter at the New York Times, echoing others, is already asking for his children to “do the right thing and publish much of the material he has been hoarding away for the last 4 decades.” And we thought the debate over Nabokov’s Laura created a stir.

Did Thomas Edison predict the Kindle and iPad?

“Nickel will absorb printer’s ink,” [Edison said.] “A sheet of nickel one twenty-thousandth of an inch thick is cheaper, tougher, and more flexible than an ordinary sheet of book-paper. A nickel book, two inches thick, would contain 40,000 pages. Such a book would weigh only a pound. I can make a pound of nickel sheets for a dollar and a quarter.”

There is virtually no evidence that Thomas Edison ever followed up on this idea. He probably thought it through and realized that it would be impractical and cause injury: Imagine flipping through a steel-covered book with leaves of nickel to page 14,237. Next, visualize the bloody mess now passing for the tip of your thumb or index finger. Then consider, as with the compact edition of the O.E.D., that you’ll require a high-power magnifying glass to read the print.

It’s not, however, all bad. A one-pound, two-inch thick all-metal book is well-nigh indestructible. Drop it from the roof of a building and it may dent but remain functional. Try that with a Kindle or iPad.

I’m planning to publish more reviews of translated books on the site this year. A couple are already in the pipeline. Translation may be a small percentage of the American market, but it’s one of those subjects for which the Internet has been a blessing.

Among recent chatter, Lewis Manalo, the buyer for Idlewild Books, a terrific store in New York, writes about the shortage of good stories from even English-language origins making it to the U.S.:

Groups such as Words Without Borders encourage works in translation. Small presses such as Archipelago and Open Letter specialize in printing literature from other languages. But as a bookseller, to concentrate on translation misses the point: readers like a good story. And many of those stories unavailable in the United States are already in English.

For example, the author I have always gotten the most requests for whose work is unavailable in the United States is the Australian Bryce Courtenay. Despite Courtenay being one of the bestselling authors in the English-reading world, until Idlewild began selling imports from the U.K., the only title of his I could offer customers was The Power of One. That book certainly deserves to be read, but why are American readers denied Courtenay’s historical novel Jessica or his latest bestseller, The Story of Danny Dunn?

Chad Post, of Open Letter (and Three Percent, the publisher’s blog), wrote three recent posts about translation “having a moment”: Part one, part two, and part three.

Jessa Crispin recently reviewed a new anthology of European fiction, and I think she’s right to temper the criticism of American readers, typified by Nobel Prize judge Horace Engdahl, who famously said Americans were “too insular”:

[Engdahl] made a true statement, but not a profound one. It presupposes that other cultures are not insular. Are the Nigerians really that interested in the literature coming out of Denmark? The Latvians in Filipino poetry? No. Each culture is primarily interested in its own subject, plus whatever is coming out of America. With that arithmetic, we are even with everyone else. We just don’t have a market larger than our own to aspire to.

Again, not an argument against translation. Just some tempering. Now we can go expand our horizons back at Three Percent, which is writing a post a day about the longlist of finalists for this year’s Best Translated Book Award.

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Peter Lopatin says that Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God is “a captivating, original, and at times riotously funny novel” that “does justice to the depth of the problem of reconciling a scientific worldview with the insistent yearning for transcendence.” . . . Julian Baggini surveys four new books about happiness. . . . Paul Mason reviews two books about the financial crisis, one by Joseph Stiglitz and the other by John Lanchester. . . . Tom Shone says that a new book about James Cameron is “less a biography proper than a set visit by someone who got carried away with access to the great and mighty Oz.” . . . Blake Morrison recommends Antonia Fraser’s new memoir about her marriage to Harold Pinter. (“Those hoping for bedroom tattle will be disappointed. The book is intimate without being confessional, and on certain subjects [Fraser] prefers to say nothing. But she’s not so discreet as to be dull, and there’s a lot of humor.”) . . . Ludovic Hunter-Tilney says that Nick Flynn’s second memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb, melds the political and the personal in a way that is “profoundly unconvincing,” not to mention “banal”: “Strip away the highbrow references to Paradise Lost and so on, and the book’s message is essentially that of a Batman movie: we all have a dark side.”

Judith Gurewich, Publisher of Other Press, writes about why she no longer publishes psychoanalytic books:

Today, the most meaningful and revealing “analysis” takes place in good fiction and creative non-fiction. We have moved into a new era, when the old psychological insights have begun to feel like those antibiotics that become ineffectual because of bacterial resistance. On the other hand, literature, by the nature of its calling, is continually forced to harbor elements of surprise, which in the best case grant it the power to transform its readers, leading them to new levels of enlightenment. The shift from psychoanalysis to literature was therefore a logical one to make. Freud himself would have agreed, since he believed that literature is always ahead of its time when it ponders the mysteries of the human soul. However, I don’t forget my analytic training when I edit my authors. I have found that goading them to be bolder and to the point, and face head-on what they may be afraid to confront, allows them to produce pithier works, deeper and more absorbing to read.

I’m not sure the shift “from psychoanalysis to literature,” if it’s happening, isn’t a shift back to literature, but in any case, food for thought.

Kevin Wilson wonders what happened to a writer named Cynthia Schad. In 1988, Wilson read a short story of hers (“Close to Autumn”) in Ploughshares. Schad was 21 at the time. Wilson’s post has been passed around (I found it via Maud Newton), but to this point there are no responses shedding light on the mystery. Here’s Wilson:

Having spent a good portion of my life feeling like I am a failure if I don’t write, that if I don’t produce stories then I’m just this lazy guy who reads comic books and argues about different kinds of barbecue, I feel a strange joy at the idea of someone, twenty-one years old, writing a nearly perfect story and moving on, doing something else. If there will never be any other stories by Cynthia Schad, there is “Close to Autumn,” and I am happy for that.

If I learn from one of you that Cynthia Schad got married, took her husband’s last name, and subsequently published dozens of books, I am going to feel very happy that I have the chance to read more of her work and, also, very stupid that I wrote this entry.

One of my 2010 reading resolutions (success rate of such resolutions: approximately 27%), which I’ve mentioned before and won’t again until and unless I fulfill it (I promise), is to read Robert Walser. Over at Two Words, Scott Esposito interviews Susan Bernofsky, a Walser translator who is also at work on a biography of him. She talks about why his work appeals to her:

He has a way of describing the universe that walks a fine line between the maudlin and the trivially playful–and somehow he always manages to stay right in the middle, in that sweet spot where he achieves a sort of guileless profundity that takes the reader by surprise again and again. His literary fireworks are so controlled, so sly, so knowing, and all the while he’s got such an innocent look on his face.

She goes on to discuss the “microscripts” that Walser produced (the interview includes an image of these scripts, which really are something):

SE: I’d also like to ask you about a work of Walser’s called The Microscripts that is forthcoming from New Directions in your translation. As I understand it, these were writings that Walser made in such a tiny script that for a long time people simply couldn’t decipher them and thought they were some personal language that Walser had invented. . . . When translating these, did you ever work directly from the microscripts, or did you rely more on a fair copy that was easier to read?

SB: We decided to reproduce full-size facsimiles of the microscripts in this collection, and when you see them, you’ll understand why there are no more than half a dozen people in the world who can read them at all (and after many months of study). It took two devoted scholars twelve years to transcribe the six volumes of these texts. That’s two years per volume! In the late ’80s I watched them at work, peering through tiny magnifying lenses and discussing each word at length. These published transcriptions are what I based the translations on. I think of Walser’s miniature writing as a sort of shorthand he developed for his rough drafts, and he wrote like this for many years. There’s been a lot of speculation about why and when he developed this technique. The writing is an enormously reduced Kurrent script–that’s an old form of German handwriting people stopped using around WWII.

In April, famed science writer Edward O. Wilson will publish his first novel, Anthill. There’s an excerpt of the novel in this week’s issue of The New Yorker. The magazine’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, interviewed Wilson about the project, which includes “ a novella within the novel, which is told entirely from the point of view of ants.”

I tried to develop the full picture, a fuller picture of the whole ecosystem—that is, exactly what is there—and then center the action on a group of ant colonies. Which might sound as though I’m descending into the trivial, but in fact what I’ve done is take the reader into the most advanced social system that exists on Earth outside of human beings, and describe life within an ant colony. [. . .] And I can do that because I’ve spent much of a career working on how ants communicate, how they learn, what they know, how they orient, and so on. And it’s as though I were describing, I think many will see, as though I were describing in that novella—as you say correctly, it takes about a quarter of the book—as though I were describing accurately how life might have evolved up to a high social level on another planet.

Miles Corwin has a very good piece in Columbia Journalism Review about how Gabriel García Márquez’s career as a newspaper reporter influenced the later work that would make him world-famous. A piece:

In 1955, eight crew members of a Colombian naval destroyer in the Caribbean were swept overboard by a giant wave. Luis Alejandro Velasco, a sailor who spent ten days on a life raft without food or water, was the only survivor. The editor of the Colombian newspaper El Espectador assigned the story to a twenty-seven-year-old reporter who had been dabbling in fiction and had a reputation as a gifted feature writer: Gabriel García Márquez.

The young journalist quickly uncovered a military scandal. As his fourteen-part series revealed, the sailors owed their deaths not to a storm, as Colombia’s military dictatorship had claimed, but to naval negligence. [. . .] By the time the series ended, El Espectador’s circulation had almost doubled. The public always likes an exposé, but what made the stories so popular was not simply the explosive revelations of military incompetence. García Márquez had managed to transform Velasco’s account into a narrative so dramatic and compelling that readers lined up in front of the newspaper’s offices, waiting to buy copies.

I strongly suggest reading the whole thing.

(Via The Browser)

In the latest issue of The Believer, Chris Bachelder has a brief but potent piece about how “the vivid surprises of child-rearing seem so similar to the vivid surprises of good literature.” A taste:

One of my daughter’s favorite books is called Neighborhood Animals. I wish the book had a counter in it, like a website, so that I could see how many hundreds of times we’ve read it. I know this book. Certainly it must be among the least surprising objects in my home. When my daughter chooses Neighborhood Animals, I have the impulse to flee the house and check into a rental cabin under an assumed name. I mention this simply so that you will not presume that I am at all vigilant or attuned. I am no sensitive instrument of detection. . . . One Saturday morning a few weeks ago my daughter brought me Neighborhood Animals, and she opened it to the first page (“Is that a dog in the park?”). My pulse slowed to hibernatory rate and I struggled to remain conscious. “A dog has an amazing sense of smell,” I mumbled. “It can tell what people and dogs have been here even after they’re gone.” My daughter sat up straight, held her hand on the page so that I could not turn it. She faced me, her wide eyes filled with a question I wasn’t equipped to answer.

(Via Chip Brantley)

I was hoping to be named a judge for this year’s Tournament of Books over at The Morning News. Alas. I’ll have to enjoy the fun through the window, as I do every year. The shortlist of books has been announced, along with this year’s judges, a stellar crew.

For those of you who don’t know, the ToB chooses 16 of the previous year’s best novels, sets up a bracket like the NCAA basketball tournament, and stops only when one book is left standing. This is the sixth installment of the tourney, which kicks off in March. Last year’s winner was A Mercy by Toni Morrison. Winners before that were The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, The Accidental by Ali Smith, and Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

For this year, I’m going to make the safe prediction that Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel will take home the Rooster (the tournament’s prize).

Eric Rohmer, the legendary French filmmaker who died at 89 on Monday, was a writer before he got into movies. In addition to writing a novel (Elisabeth) under the pseudonym Gilbert Cordier, he wrote six stories that would later be turned into his famous series of films, Six Moral Tales.

The box set of those six DVDs comes with a book of the original stories, which Rohmer says were written “when I did not yet know whether I was going to be a filmmaker.” The most famous of those movies at the time in the U.S. (nominated for two Oscars) may have been My Night at Maud’s. (The original trailer for it can be seen here.) Early on in the original story, the narrator writes:

I was living in Clermont-Ferrand, an industrial city in south-central France, where for two months I had been working as an engineer at the Michelin tire complex. Prior to that, I had worked for a subsidiary of Standard Oil in Vancouver, before moving on to Valparaíso. Not that I had ever considered myself an expatriot. An involvement that I won’t go into had kept me away from France longer than I had intended. Now I was free, and beginning to think about marriage.

I think we can all agree that it’s never too early in the week to share some gems from the Twitter stream of personal ads from the London Review of Books:

By placing this ad I’ve lowered my expectations considerably. Now even you’re in with a chance. Don’t blow it by mentioning your mum. F, 46.

My animal passions would satisfy any F but for the filibustering of this damned colon. Write to M, 83, for list of approved solids.

I’ve created an Excel spreadsheet to document all the lovers I’ve had in my life. I’d like you to be cell A2. IT consultant (M, 34).

Respondents to my last ad: this time meet the real me. Now alcohol-free, medicated, and wearing trousers. M, 41.

For a while, I’ve been hearing about the New Republic’s imminent foray into online book criticism. The site, simply titled The Book, has now launched. Executive editor Isaac Chotiner explains its ambitious aims in an introductory letter. The Book has been added to the LInks page, and I’m sure to be sending you over there with some frequency.

Thanks to The Morning News, I’ve just discovered Curious Pages: Recommended inappropriate books for kids. At the bottom of the home page is this disclaimer:

Looking for books about teddy bears or rainbows or feelings? You’re at the wrong place. Here we celebrate the offbeat, the abstract, the unusual, the surreal, the macabre, the inappropriate, the subversive and the funky.

But the site is a lot more welcoming than that makes it sound. And the gems it has found are something special, like One Thousand Christmas Beards by Roger Duvoisin (1955), in which Santa Claus goes on a spree to rip the beard off anyone impersonating him. Sample text:

There were more, many more false Santas!
When Santa had pulled all their false beards,
and frightened them all into hiding,
he was ready to ride back home.

Santa stomps a dude when he has to.

Also over the holiday, the site put together a fantastically charming collection of wintry images from children’s books. Enjoy.

Shalom Auslander, author of the very funny, caustic memoir Foreskin’s Lament, is writing a “comic novel about genocide.” You read that right. And he’s blogging about the project. I’m not sure he convinces me how he’s going to make it funny, but there’s something cathartic in the purity of his poison, as in this section, which concerns a seven-year-old bully named Brian who’s been bullying Auslander’s four-year-old son:

I look at Brian—almost half my height and damn near double my weight, his barely-fitting XL “Transformers” t-shirt covered with bits of cake and ice cream, his fat little legs already starting to splay out in the manner of the morbidly obese, the cursed beams of his insufficient structure already too weak to cope with the oversized load they are being asked to support, his hollow, heavy-lidded eyes blinking out at the world in the sort of dumb, mouth-breathing incomprehension you see in mall kids and SS men and Glenn Beck—and I think about the genocide books I’ve been reading. They all wonder why. They all seem to think there’s a reason, and that if they can identify that reason, these horrible crimes will never happen again. The reason, they say, is poverty. The reason is racism, the West, the East, religion, atheism, capitalism, communism. But it isn’t.

The reason is Brian.

There is no reason for Brian. I’d like there to be. But there isn’t. Brian just is. Brian happens. Is Brian going to lead Hutus to slaughter Tutsis? I don’t know. Perhaps he’s not that ambitious. But if Brian were a Hutu, Brian would hack a Tutsi, no question about it. Brian would hack a lot of Tutsis. Brian would be the Hutu in that news footage, dancing around the mangled corpse of a young Tutsi with his bloody machete raised triumphantly overhead. Only fatter. And eating a Twinkie.

(Via Mark Athitakis)

Chad Post at Three Percent has announced the longlist of 25 nominees for the third annual Best Translated Book Award. Starting Monday, Post and his colleagues will feature one of the books selected every day leading up to February 16, when the short list of finalists will be announced.

Three Percent is the blog arm of Open Letter Books, which was profiled in the New York Times over the holidays.

Hilary Mantel writes about what Cinderella’s life may have been like after 20 years of marriage. This spurs Maud Newton to link to an old Carol Burnett sketch about an aging Snow White. And not-entirely-unrelated, news of a possible Wizard of Oz sequel about Dorothy’s granddaughter, potentially written by Todd McFarlane, famous for comic books, action figures, and video games, who said a few years ago: “My pitch was ‘How do we get people who went to Lord of the Rings to embrace this?’ I want to create [an interpretation] that has a 2007 ‘wow’ factor.” Yes, how could you possibly get people to embrace The Wizard of Oz? I wish we could make a culture-wide resolution in 2010 to leave the sacred past alone — no Dorothy descendant inspired by Lara Croft, no Great Expectations “rewritten” to make Pip a zombie, vampire, or avatar. Just to see how it feels to go a whole year with dignity.

Open Letters has started the year with a striking redesign and a bigger tent. The new January issue shows off the new look and includes a review of a new history of the Vikings (not the football team).

The site has also brought under its aegis three worthwhile blogs: Lisa Peet’s Like Fire, Steve Donoghue’s Stevereads, and a daily dose of Walt Whitman. Best wishes to all of them at their new, renovated home.