I came across Narrative Magazine this weekend, which, if you register, offers a free online subscription. The magazine comes out twice a year and includes several short stories and novel excerpts as well as interviews, non-fiction, and classics. Under classics, the magazine has published work by Jean Stafford, Peter Taylor, and Ivan Turgenev. Recently they have also published a sizable chunk of the Rick Bass book I mentioned yesterday, The Diezmo. Once you’ve registered, go to the Archive page to see all the stuff they’ve got online.
Narrative Magazine: Lots of fiction online
The British Best of the Last 25 Years
Not wanting to be left out of the fun and controversy generated by the New York Times list of the top books of the last 25 years, the Guardian has rounded up 150 celebrity judges of its own (120 agreed to particpate), like Monica Ali, Rick Moody, and Jonathan Safran Foer, to vote for the best British, Irish or Commonwealth novel from 1980 to 2005. “How they defined ‘best’ was up to them” is the caveat the Guardian gives us.After the votes were tallied, they bestowed the honor on Booker winner Disgrace by Nobel Laureate J.M Coetzee. Money by Martin Amis was runner up, while Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess, Atonement by Ian McEwan, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald, The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie all shared third place. Will this list generate as much fevered dicussion as the Times list? I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.
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Parched? Use my Canteen.
“Is starting a literary magazine a gamble?” editor Sean Finney asked a crowd of inebriated sophisticates and sophisticated inebriates at the NYC launch party for Canteen. The answer was lost in a wash of drink orders. Even if it turns out to be “yes,” though, Canteen seems well positioned to walk away with a few chips. I’m not just saying that because publisher Stephen Pierson is funding this operation with his winnings as a poker pro, or because I contributed a story to the debut issue. Or okay, probably I am, at least partly. Still, Canteen offers readers an unusual mix of personal essays, fiction, poetry, and contemporary art.Andrew Sean Greer’s remembrance of failed novels past and chef Dennis Leary’s truly weird manifesto about the Restaurant of the Future are both funny and original. But careful attention to the visual is what strikes me as most promising about Canteen. Few literary magazines lavish such attention on full-color photography, painting, and illustration. Often, this is because editors want to focus attention on the text… and more power to them. But visual art and literature should have as much to say to one another today as they did in the heyday of Gertrude Stein. Finlay Printing, which used to print the late, lamented Grand Street, has produced a handsome successor. For more information, check out www.canteenmag.com.
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Fiction is the New Non-Fiction
If con artists were smarter, they’d let people forget previous deeds first. Little more than two years after the James Frey debacle, the literature world is once again awash in breaking news stories of fabricated memoirs.The New York Times reported Monday that Misha Defonseca’s Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years is complete bogus. This must be cardinal sin considering that, according to the AP, Defonseca is not even Jewish – real name: Monique De Wael. So, never mind that the “memoir” was translated to 18 languages and made into a feature film, exploiting people’s shock and disgust for a handsome profit. The defense? “The story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality,” says Defonseca.Today, the NYT reports that Margaret Seltzer’s gang memoir, published under the name Margaret B. Jones Love and Consequences – where the author purports to be a half-Native American, half-white girl dealing drugs for the Bloods in Los Angeles – is also, ahem, a fake.Add to it the revelations about self-knighted chef Robert Irvine of the Food Network – author of Mission: Cook! – who beefed up his resume to include fictional positions as White House Chef and personal friend of Prince Charles (who picks Charles as a mate anyway?) and you might think non-fiction these days is only as real as Frank Abagnale’s Harvard Law degree (Remember Catch Me If You Can?).What is most shocking in Seltzer and Irvine’s cases is the lack of fact-checking. If it were not for Seltzer’s sister – who alerted the publisher, Riverhead Books, after reading a profile of Seltzer in the NYT – Love and Consequences could have enjoyed some success. Look at Irvine, he even had a TV show.Finding out if the Queen knighted someone should be fairly simple. Finding out the heritage of a person, where they attended school, how many siblings they have and so forth is extremely easy. One would think that after Frey, publishers would take a closer look to the facts in memoirs and make sure that readers don’t end up paging through imaginary non-fiction.On the plus side, Seltzer must be quite a writer and actress – after all, she managed to keep up the guise of truth for three years while working on her, err, novel.
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Deeper into the Quicksand
Today’s Elliot Spitzer scandal sent me back to the New Yorker archives, to revisit Nick Paumgarten’s excellent profile, from December 10. This time around, I was struck less by the “what you see is what you get” thesis of some Spitzer intimates, than by this proposition, from an unnamed source: “Spitzer lunges. He seems not to be a person of strategy. He slipped on a banana peel, or six, and once down has thrashed around.” It remains to be seen if, amid the thrashing, his newfound talent for “extracting oneself from an intractable position” holds up.
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Narrative Magazine (www.narrativemagazine.com) has easily become my favorite literary magazine – it is super accessible, and publishes lots of new voices as well as those of the well-known variety. Narrative's mission resounds: to bring great literature to the world, for free. It doesn't get much better than that, readers.