I dropped my buddy Cem off at the airport today. I’m a little jealous because he is embarking on a world tour that is sure to be remarkable. He is starting out with a brief stop in Australia, followed by extended stays in Thailand and Vietnam. After this, he intends to live in Cairo for a few months with jaunts to Turkey and possibly some other Middle Eastern locations… maybe even Baghdad if the cards fall a certain way. He has assured me that he will be keeping track of his wanderings via his brand new blog, complete with a title inspired by Maqroll which I gave him to read. It’s the ultimate book for any traveller.
Seeing off
Cyborg Shoppers
Bookseller Chick describes what is currently the bane of booksellers everywhere: those Bluetooth cell phone headsets.In the past, once this formerly erratic behavior was observed the bookseller could then take extra caution or at least have an answer to give other customers if they came up and complained about the person talking to themselves, but now we are left wondering. Are they on the phone? Are the talking with aliens on the rock formerly known as the planet Pluto?When I worked at the bookstore in Los Angeles a few years back, the Bluetooth thing was starting to take hold (they're early adopters out there with all things cell phone), and all too often, thinking I was being summoned by a book buyer in need of assistance, I would find a patron chatting into his ear piece, as if insane. Worse yet, we would be subjected to half conversations of an all-too-often personal nature - discussions about cheating spouses, play-by-plays of recent therapist sessions, and the like. Makes me glad I don't work retail any more.
●
●
Operation Homecoming Hits PBS
Millions contributor Ben penned a post in February about a documentary called Operation Homecoming about the National Endowment of the Arts' (NEA) program of the same name which is designed to help soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan put their experiences into words. (One participant in the program was Brian Turner whose book of poetry Here, Bullet was reviewed here a few months back.)As was noted in a comment on the original post, Operation Homecoming is also going to be covered as part of a PBS package called America at a Crossroads. That series is set to air beginning this weekend. The 11-part, six-night series covers "the war on terrorism, conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan' the experience of American troops serving abroad, the struggle for balance within the Muslim world, and global perspectives on America's role overseas." The Operation Homecoming installment airs Monday at 10pm (check your local listings, of course.)
New Books
My dad's family is from New Jersey, and they are proud of it. I lived there for a couple of years when I was younger. Folks from Jersey tend to have chips on their shoulders because New Jersey is the butt of a lot of jokes. They will strenuously claim that the state consists of more than just the Turnpike. They will describe the beaches and the countryside. Now they don't have to bother with the arguments, they can just leave the Encyclopedia of New Jersey sitting out on the coffee table. With nearly 3,000 entries and lots of entertaining factual tidbits like "did you know that New Jersey was once divided into two parts -- East Jersey and West Jersey?" perhaps this book will help Jersey join its rightful place among the states. Fittingly, the project was inspired by a classic case of New York envy. As this FOX News article recounts, Marc Mappen, head of the New Jersey Historical Commission, was perusing a popular encyclopedia of New York City and decided that New Jersey ought to have its own reference book. He worked with co-editor Maxine N. Lurie for ten years, and now the book has arrived. You can check out some sample entries hereMy sources are telling me that The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler is turning out to be something of a surprise hit. Two largely positive reviews from the New York Times, one in the daily and one in the Sunday Book Review, are helping. This sort of meta-fiction has proven quite successful in recent years; The Hours by Michael Cunningham and Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair are two examples. And believe it or not, a book that centers on a book club is seen as perfect for book clubs.
●
●
Sifting through emails
We're back, and I'm sifting through my emails where a couple of friends have left some interesting tidbits and recommendations:Garth writes: "Europeana, by Patrik Ourednik, is one of the weirdest, funniest, most disturbing, and most wonderful books I've read in the last year. It's also, as a vacation bonus (depending on how one looks at it) a shorty: a two-hour read. I heartily recommend it to your readership. Description is difficult, but an interview with Ourednik is up on the Dalkey Archive website. These guys do amazing work finding and translating literature from around the world."And Millions contributor Andrew Saikali pointed out that Edward P. Jones was just awarded the $150,000 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his novel The Known World. Add that to his $500,000 MacArthur Grant from 2004 and Jones is doing pretty well for himself. I just hope he takes some time off from all of this award collecting to write another novel!
●
●
●
Portraits and illustrations
Two new books from Princeton Architectural Press crossed my desk recently. Jason Bitner is one of the guys behind Found Magazine, where bits of discarded ephemera are turned into art or maybe a decontextualized historical record of the present day. Bitner calls it "a show-and-tell project." When he found over 18,000 studio portraits from the 1950s and 60s in the back of a diner in a small, Midwestern town, they became the star of a new show-and-tell project. La Porte, Indiana is the name of the town where Bitner found the photos and the name of the book he made from them. As Bitner describes it in his introduction to the book, "we rifled through an entire town's population, as if it were a card catalog, a huge visual archive of Midwestern faces." As with looking at any of the FOUND crew's finds, flipping through this book leaves one with odd sensations. We're not used to seeing stuff like this so lovingly presented, so it makes us look a little harder. As I flip through the book, I enjoy the unintentional artistry of the black and white portraits, but more so I wonder who these people are or were. There's more about the book at this Web site.A Year in Japan by Kate T. Williamson is an illustrated travelogue. Williamson, an illustrator and filmmaker, spent a year in Japan, filling notebooks with her illustrations and observations. This book is like peering into those notebooks. Williamson's curly cursive elaborates on her rich, colorful drawings. Most of the illustrations are of details of every day life: foods and clothing, but they are exotic both in being from in Japan and in the care Williamson lavishes upon them, presenting them in close up on the page. But there are also portraits, collages and abstract compositions.
●
●
●
Michael Chabon’s update on The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
In September, I posted that Michael Chabon's next book, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, his first full-length adult novel since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, was to be released on April 11, 2006. Alas, the book has been delayed. Chabon's done with the manuscript, but there were scheduling problems with his publisher, HarperCollins. Chabon announced the delay on his Web site:HarperCollins had been sort of rushing the thing along, over a steady but polite murmur from the author that perhaps they were moving too quickly. The manuscript was complete. It was not impossible to make the April 11 pub date. But we didn't even have a finished jacket. Many people who were selling and marketing the book hadn't had the opportunity to read it. Everything just felt too rushed and when that sense of undue haste finally caught on at the publishing house, I was able to persuade them to see reason, and wait.The new date is now "Winter 2007."
●
●