Jessica Hische recently asked design students to create updated covers for The Wizard of Oz.

I love the concept of Michael Olivo’s cover (at left), and the rest are elegant and worth checking out.

(Via the great Book Patrol, which also has a recent, charmingly illustrated post about Blinky Bill, a koala who’s the Australian equivalent of Curious George.)

At Reason, Andrew Potter reads Naomi Klein’s battle cry on the 10th anniversary of its publication:

What are we to make of No Logo a decade on? It remains a passionate and ambitious snapshot of the newly globalized youth and consumer culture at the end of the 20th century. It is also an often infuriating work of agitprop that marries old Marxist prejudices about the market economy to a paranoid and conspiratorial account of the business of advertising.

If that was all there was to the book, it would be enough to dismiss it as a period piece, the journalistic equivalent to a box of old Polaroids. Sweatshops, the McLibel trial, Brent Spar…weren’t those the days? But that would be a mistake, since it would miss the way in which, in its quest to undermine the branded economy and expose the capitalist propaganda that motivates all advertising, No Logo inadvertently served as the most influential marketing manual of the decade.

In a thoughtful piece at the Jewish Review of Books, Michael Weingrad wonders why, “I cannot think of a single major fantasy writer who is Jewish, and there are only a handful of minor ones of any note. To no other field of modern literature have Jews contributed so little. So why don’t Jews write more fantasy literature? And a different, deeper but related question: why are there no works of modern fantasy that are profoundly Jewish in the way that, say, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is Christian?”

The experience of wonder, of joy and delight on the part of the reader, has long been recognized as one of the defining characteristics of the genre. This wonder is connected with a world, with a place of magic, strangeness, danger, and charm; and whether it is called Perelandra, Earthsea, Amber, or Oz, this world must be a truly alien place. As Ursula K. Leguin says: “The point about Elfland is that you are not at home there. It’s not Poughkeepsie.”

To answer the question of why Jews do not write fantasy, we should begin by acknowledging that the conventional trappings of fantasy, with their feudal atmosphere and rootedness in rural Europe, are not especially welcoming to Jews, who were too often at the wrong end of the medieval sword. Ever since the Crusades, Jews have had good reasons to cast doubt upon the romance of knighthood, and this is an obstacle in a genre that takes medieval chivalry as its imaginative ideal.

It is not only that Jews are ambivalent about a return to an imaginary feudal past. It is even more accurate to say that most Jews have been deeply and passionately invested in modernity, and that history, rather than otherworldliness, has been the very ground of the radical and transformative projects of the modern Jewish experience. This goes some way towards explaining the Jewish enthusiasm for science fiction over fantasy (from Asimov to Silverberg to Weinbaum there is no dearth of Jewish science fiction writers).

Troy Patterson praises a novel about “a rusty little cog in the machine of New England crime”:

The first thing to know about George V. Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle is that it directly entered the crime-fiction canon upon its 1970 publication. The second thing to know is that it holds up as both a writer’s-writer thriller and as popular pulp, with Dennis Lehane introducing Picador’s new 40th-anniversary reissue of the novel by heralding it as “the game-changing crime novel of the last fifty years”—a moderate claim compared with that of Elmore Leonard, who hails it as the best crime novel, period.

I’ve had the movie version, starring Robert Mitchum, at home for a while from Netflix, and this has inspired me to finally watch it this weekend. Patterson calls it “an exemplar of the art of adaptation. Journeyman screenwriter Paul Monash faithfully mimeographed much of the novel’s dialogue while also streamlining the story for maximum speed and rebuilding the plot in a way that retains its tensions and increases its clarity.” (For some clips, check out A. O. Scott’s take.)

I really am still planning to review David Shields’ Reality Hunger, though it will likely be the last review of it to cross the finish line. For now, we know how Greil Marcus feels about the book, from an exchange during this interview:

Pop Matters: I was wondering what you thought of this influx of the memoir in its different forms over the past decade or two, or the blurring of lines between fiction and non-fiction. Have you read David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto?

Greil Marcus: Yeah, I thought it was total bullshit. First of all, there’s a long history of people writing books about the death of the novel or the death of fiction and getting attention for doing that. There are a lot of people who would rather be at the funeral than at the birth, and this is one of those cases.

Usually when someone announces the death of the novel, it’s because they’re incapable of writing one and they feel inferior because of that. I tried to read his book, if only because it had so many blurbs on it from people I know or find interesting, and I couldn’t read more than half of it. It wasn’t really writing.

I mean, I’m a great believer in collage writing; I’ve written a couple of pieces that are entirely made up of quotations from other people, and I love the notion that you can absent yourself or that you can speak through other people in that way. You don’t have to add a single word of your own, you can tell a story, you can make an argument, you can dramatize a question.

But I also believe in attribution. (laughs) I think it’s much more fun and more interesting to say who’s speaking and even stress the absence of the author more that way, and it also lets the reader say “Oh, this is interesting, I want to investigate this more.” But in this book, I think it’s more than anything an attempt to get attention, and I don’t think it’s a serious argument at all.

My sister, who has a four-year-old son, recently asked me if I ever feature sites about children’s books on The Second Pass, and mentioned Curious Pages in particular. I don’t often point to books for children, but I did, in fact, write about Curious Pages earlier this year. And my sister’s question about it sent me back for a look around. It’s a terrific place, which I’m adding to the Links page, and it currently features a guest review by George Saunders, who writes about Kashtanka by Anton Chekhov and illustrated by Gennady Spirin:

The story is simple: a dog gets lost, adjusts to her new home, is found by her old owners, goes happily back home. Like so much of Chekhov’s best work, it has the pace and emotional range of real life: no great villains, no great heroes, everybody trying to do his or her best. Neither master is an abusive brute. The dog is a small but pleasant part of both their lives. The first master is a woodcarver. The second trains domestic animals for a small-time circus act. . . .

There is essentially no real drama. The dog will be fine either way, we sense. She is not traumatized by being lost — the way a dog would be in a lesser story, in which the writer would feel more compelled to anthropomorphize her — but adjusts quickly to the world in which she finds herself. Mostly, she smells things. There aren’t any bad smells, just less-interesting ones. Likewise, when her old owners come to the circus and reclaim her, she goes along happily, and by the time they reach home, she has all but forgotten her time with the circus, which “seemed no more than a long and confusing dream.”

Kashtanka is, it seems to me, the most accurately drawn dog in literature.

I made the very smart decision to smart my Wednesday by watching the slide show of The Band Genesis, Ward Sutton’s parody of R. Crumb’s take on the Book of Genesis. Sutton’s mock cover for the “Invisible Touch” single is brilliant and hysterical.

Phil Collins is playing Roseland Ballroom in New York soon, a relatively small place for a guy like him. A friend and I even considered going, because Phil’s had his great radio moments. Then we found out he’s playing all Motown covers. Pass. And this is not because I don’t love Motown; I do. It’s because the world already has one aging Rod Stewart, and that’s one too many.

Along with a very good friend of mine (a fellow fan of Cormac McCarthy), I’ve started a Twitter page called “Imaginary Cormac.” It looks like other people have reserved or started similar pages, but we’ll be dedicated to making ours the go-to account for people who want to read fake Twitter posts by the acclaimed author. One has to dream. You can find it here. We’d love if you followed along. To give you a sense of whether you’d like to or not, here are the first five entries:

A new horizon crackles along the edge of half-dark like the dream of a malevolent God. Twitter you think you are ready. You are not ready.

In the red gloaming a dwarf amanuensis crawls through the sagebrush kindling fire as he goes. Or Herb’s kid got ahold of some sparklers.

Polenta sticks to All-Clad pans like the afterbirth of some chthonic creature not yet named.

Impossible to capture the God-rapture of horses and thunder in 140 characters. Maybe 150.

Just finished a creosote and peyote omelette. I’ll be in the shed for a few hours.

In the TLS, Ruth Scurr has an essay about Thomas Carlyle’s three-volume history of the French Revolution. It’s a great, grueling story, particularly when Carlyle’s friend John Stuart Mill offered to help:

In February 1835, when Carlyle reached the end of his first volume, The Bastille, Mill offered to read it for him. All along, Mill had been supplying Carlyle with books on the Revolution, and he offered to make notes on the manuscript that might be included as footnotes. On the night of March 6, Mill arrived on the Carlyles’ doorstep, semi-coherent and deeply distraught. There had been a domestic accident and Carlyle’s “poor manuscript, all except some four tattered leaves, was annihilated!” Allegedly, a servant, either at Mill’s house, or at his mistress Harriet Taylor’s, had mistaken The Bastille for waste paper and put it into the fire. That night in bed Carlyle suffered the symptoms of a heart attack, feeling “something cutting or hard grasping me round the heart.” He dreamt of death and graves, but in the morning he wrote to his publisher Fraser to explain what had happened and resolved to try again. The labour of five steadfast months had “vanished irrecoverably; worse than if it had never been!”. With astonishing resignation, Carlyle wrote,

“I can be angry with no one; for they that were concerned in it have a far deeper sorrow than mine: it is purely the hand of Providence; and, by the blessing of Providence, I must struggle to take it as such . . . . That first volume (which pleased me better than anything I had ever done) cannot be written anew, for the spirit that animated it is past: but another first volume I will try, and shall make it, if not better or equal, all that I can. This only is clear to me: that I can write a Book on the French Revolution; and that, if I am spared long enough alive I will do it.”

The site is closing in on 300 followers on Twitter, so if you haven’t signed up yet, please do. I’m busy with several other things today, but this week’s Beat should be up by the end of the day, and there’s another Twitter project I might have news about as well.

Stop Smiling, the Chicago-based culture magazine, recently switched gears to begin publishing books in partnership with Melville House. [Disclosure: I wrote a couple of pieces for Stop Smiling in 2008.] The imprint’s first book is How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop by Dave Tompkins, a history of the Pentagon-created speech-scrambling device that went on to widespread use in pop music. (The title comes from a misinterpretation of a Vocoder-issued phrase: “how to recognize speech.”) I recently asked Stop Smiling publisher and editor J. C. Gabel a few questions about his new business:

Can you tell me a little bit about what spurred the transition from an eclectic culture magazine to a books imprint, and how you came to work with Melville House?

While we worked on the magazine, we were always thinking about publishing books. We just never could find the time and opportunity. Several years ago, Kelly Burdick, now the Senior Editor at Melville House, contacted me about repackaging and republishing some long-form interviews from the magazine’s vast archives. The idea of a Stop Smiling Books imprint grew from there, but it took almost five years to come to fruition.

In 2008, it was clear to most of the staff of both Stop Smiling and Runner Collective (the design collective that art-directs our books, magazines, and web site) that independent print media, in general, was in trouble, and we would have to change gears in order to continue publishing. In some ways, we grew too large: As an independent full-color bimonthly magazine, we always struggled to carve out the right niche for our audience and advertisers while at the same time keeping costs under control.

With the advent of the Kindle and now the iPad, it wasn’t hard to see the writing on the wall: print magazines, in all their excess and wastefulness, were going to become extinct. Of course there were other, more practical developments, too, like the United States Postal Service eliminating the form of bulk mail we used to distribute copies inexpensively to subscribers, or the fact that advertisers started to pour their money and support into online initiatives and sponsored signature events. These factors were things outside our control. Eventually, books just seemed to make more sense on every level. Beyond that, we are all print junkies and wanted to continue publishing a product that people would save and collect.

Your first book, How to Wreck a Nice Beach, is a history of the vocoder, the speech scrambling machine originally created for military purposes and now ubiquitous in pop music. How did you find the book, and what makes it the right one to launch your imprint?

The vocoder book was grandfathered in as the first Stop Smiling book. James Hughes, my good friend, co-publisher and editor at Stop Smiling, had been working one-on-one with the author, Dave Tompkins, on this project for more than eight years. Over the years, this bugged-out mystique developed around it. (This lore has been tastefully singled out in several early reviews of the book.) [Ed. note: In his review of the book for New York, Sam Anderson wrote: “How to Wreck a Nice Beach is much more than a labor of love: It’s an intergalactic vision quest fueled by several thousand gallons of high-octane spiritual-intellectual lust. Outside of, say, William Vollmann, it’s hard to think of an author so ravished by his subject.”]

What eventually became How to Wreck a Nice Beach was originally going to be published by Broken Wrist Project, a small press James was running with mutual friends in Los Angeles. But as Dave and James accumulated more artwork and the word count continued to mount, it grew beyond something that Broken Wrist Project could reasonably execute. When we partnered with Melville House to launch Stop Smiling Books, we were able to take advantage of the shared costs of production, and we also benefited from Melville House’s partnership with Random House, which oversees their distribution. So, like some of our favorite themed issues of the magazine, a certain amount of serendipity played a role in the end result.

How many future releases do you already have planned? Can you tell us a little bit about a few of them? And do you have an idea of how many books you’ll be publishing annually?

It looks as if we’ll be releasing two to three titles a year, including at least one original title and one repackaged collection. We have seven or eight books we’re currently working on through 2012. Originally, we envisioned a multi-volume collection of long-form interview books by subject (conversations with film directors, authors, and musicians) in the tradition of The Paris Review or Playboy collections. These three repackaged books will be among our first releases, starting with the directors installment, which will be out early next year. Each volume will also include a few book-exclusive interviews we never had the chance to run in the print magazine during its 15-year run.

In the pipeline, besides the three interview books, is a collection of interviews with Ray Bradbury, Listen to the Echoes by Bradbury biographer/scholar Sam Weller; the book companion to Thom Andersen’s video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself; and what was supposed to be the last issue of the print magazine (an issue devoted to Stanley Kubrick) will be adapted into a book of some form.

In what ways do you think the spirit of Stop Smiling the magazine will influence Stop Smiling the book publisher?

We’re still operating with the same mentality on the editorial front, but have adopted a Less Is More mindset — and a production schedule to match. It does feel nice to know that what we spend months or years working on is now being released in a permanent format. We’re really trying to reinvent the DIY aesthetic of the magazine to apply it to editing, publishing, and promoting books. The book-making process itself, of course, is much slower and drawn out, which is refreshing as we all get older.

What excites you most — and what scares you most — about starting a books imprint in 2010?

What excites us the most is working with and publishing work by some of our most talented friends. What scares us? The possibility that the majority of readers worldwide will one day stop buying physical books.

The Wall Street Journal details the strange but great news that a tiny press published this year’s Pulitzer winner for fiction:

To call it a surprise that Bellevue published a Pulitzer-winning novel — the first small press to do so since Louisiana State University Press published A Confederacy of Dunces in 1981 — is a vast understatement. The imprint, which was founded in 2005, is part of New York University’s School of Medicine and specializes in books that explore the convergence of science and the arts. One of Bellevue’s recent titles was Water, Ice & Stone: Science and Memory on the Antarctic Lakes.

Indeed, Bellevue is the very definition of a small, specialized press. According to [Editorial Director Erika] Goldman, the publishing schedule consists of eight books per year, or four a season, three being non-fiction and one a novel. Author advances, she said, are “symbolic” — publishing industry code for miniscule. The full-time staff, meanwhile, consists of Goldman, a veteran editor who’s worked at Scribner and Simon & Schuster, and an assistant.

From the archives of The New Republic comes this piece about Henry and William James by Alfred Kazin, originally published in February 1943:

There is always an obtrusive irony in honoring the Jameses together: they could never fully honor or, after a certain point, really understand each other. This was something that both recognized and that William almost enjoyed. They were always seeking to ratify each other, “as Brother,” for the Jameses loved each other as passionately as they debated their differences, and delighted in each other’s careers. Never as in the James family indeed, was so little envy or indifference brought to so many conflicting intellectual ambitions, and never was so much fraternity brought to so little mutual understanding. . . . [T]hough their devotion to each other was profound, their essential antipathy of spirit went deeper still. But antipathy is not the word: there was only a kind of loving non-recognition. Similar as they were in their studies of human consciousness, in raising to an ideal end the operative supremacy and moral serenity of an individual “center of revelation,” they could only smile to each other across the grooves in which each had his temperament.

The Atlantic has made its 2010 Fiction issue available online. It includes several short stories and three other features: an interview with Paul Theroux titled “Fiction in the Age of E-Books,” an essay by Joyce Carol Oates on returning to teaching after the death of her husband, and Richard Bausch on the massive industry of “how to” writing books:

My quarrel is with the implication in the how-to books market that one can merely read them to find the magic secret for writing well enough to publish. Recently, at a college where I was lecturing, a student told me, with great pride, that he had “over a hundred books” in his library—I could see that I was meant to be impressed by the number, and that he considered himself a vastly well-read type of guy. He went on to say that many in his collection are how-to books. This person wants to be a writer, but he doesn’t want to do the work. Being a writer is a stance he wants to take. He did not come to writing from reading books, good or bad. He came to it from deciding it might be cool to walk around in that role. I meet this kind of “writer” far too often now in my travels around the country—even, occasionally, in the writing programs.

I can hear the argument coming back: “Yeah, well, what about the writing programs? Don’t they promise the same thing? Don’t they encourage the same kind of thinking?” And the answer to that is quite simple: no, they do not. All of the writing programs, and most of the writers’ conferences—I have taught at Bread Loaf and Sewanee, and elsewhere—read manuscripts in advance before accepting students. A person has to demonstrate talent to be accepted into a program of study. And while at times one wonders how this or that student got by the screening, in all instances the emphasis is on reading, and the workshops are not about writing as something like steam-fitting or the construction of an engine, but about the matters of craft that can be discussed as they come up, story by story.

This year’s Pulitzer Prizes were just announced. Surely, the book everyone will be talking about is the winner of the Fiction award, a debut novel called Tinkers by Paul Harding from Bellevue Literary Press, which had been publishing books for less than two years when it released Tinkers in January 2009. (The New York Time profiled the press in its early days.) Tinkers centers on an old man, a repairer of clocks, dying in New England and reminiscing about his childhood as the son of a traveling salesman. I have to admit, I hadn’t heard of it until this afternoon. I imagine I’m not alone. Congratulations to all the winners:

Fiction: Tinkers by Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press)

General Nonfiction: The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy by David E. Hoffman (Doubleday)

History: Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed (The Penguin Press)

Biography: The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles (Alfred A. Knopf)

Poetry: Versed by Rae Armantrout (Wesleyan University Press)

Jessa Crispin at Bookslut points to “Evenings at Home,” a story included in the forthcoming The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick. It’s about a woman visiting her home in Kentucky after years in New York, and from sources online it’s hard to tell if it’s memoir or fiction. The first two paragraphs:

I am here in Kentucky with my family for the first time in a number of years and, naturally, I am quite uncomfortable, but not in the way I had anticipated before leaving New York. The thing that startles me is that I am completely free and can do and say exactly what I wish. This freedom leads me to the bewildering conclusion that the notions I have entertained about my family are fantastic manias, complicated, willful distortions which are so clearly contrary to the facts that I might have taken them from some bloody romance, or, to be more specific, from one of those childhood stories in which the heroine, ragged and castoff, roams the cold streets begging alms which go into the eager hands of a tyrannical stepmother.

I staggered a bit when I actually came face to face with my own mother: she carries no whips, gives no evidence of cannibalism. At night everyone sleeps peacefully. So far as I can judge they accuse me of no crimes, make no demands upon me; they neither praise nor criticize me excessively. My uneasiness and defensiveness are quite beside the point, like those flamboyant but unnecessary gestures of our old elocution teacher. My family situation is distinguished by only one eccentricity — it is entirely healthy and normal.

Read the whole thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Via Maud Newton)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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