British paper The Times hired artist Matthew Cook to do illustrations of the action in Iraq. The resulting drawings and paintings provide a different look at what’s going on over there. An online gallery shows him at work along with a bunch of the illustrations, and an article tells his story. He’s also got a gallery show coming up in London apparently.
British artist illustrates the war
Short Story Week at The Millions: A Brief Introduction
Recently, the innovative literary magazine One-Story launched a campaign to “Save the Short Story.” As the essay below suggests, we at The Millions found this effort admirable, and also puzzling. Is “the short story” even a single thing? And, if so, does it need saving? On both questions, the evidence seems mixed. We can agree, however, that short stories seem to have lost some of their prominence in the popular imagination. Mainstream book coverage tends to track the agendas of the publishing industry; those agendas, in turn, tend to be driven by coverage. With our “Short Story Week,” we aim to subvert the cycle. Between now and Friday, we hopeto revisit the work of living masters,to celebrate the writers who paved their way,to talk a bit about teaching the short story, and writing it,to link to interesting short-story sites and periodicalsto provide a selective bibliography of our favorite story collections,and, as always, to hear from you.In short: we hope you enjoy it. We’ll be linking to the week’s installments below.Inter Alia #8: Whither the Short Story?On BrevityExpat Laureate: Paul Bowles’s Too Far From HomeThe Elusive Thread of Memory: The Displaced World of Mavis GallantAdventures in Consciousness: A Review of Deborah Eisenberg’s Under the 82nd AirborneSome Recommended Short FictionAnthologies EvolvedAnd May We Also RecommendShort Story Week LinksOn Our Shelves: 45 Favorite Short Story Collections
The Week in books
The big sellers around my neck of the woods this week were: The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown was the big seller in hardcover fiction. This book is no big surpise as it has already taken the New York Times bestseller list by storm. This looks like a pretty exciting read, definitely one for the summer. It’s got a real Indiana Jones vibe to it, full of puzzles and unravelling the mysteries of the past, in this case the source material is the Mona Lisa. In hardcover non-fiction there’s Reefer Madness by Eric Schlosser, who wrote the book that blew the lid off McDonalds and the rest of the burger slingers: Fast Food Nation. Now, I found Fast Food Nation to be a bit preachy and I felt that sometimes he went over the top trying to get his point across, but at the same time I was impressed by his feats of investigative journalism. So when I first heard about Reefer Madness, ostensibly an expose on the illegal drug industry, I was looking forward to reading it. The reviews I have read have tempered my enthusiasm, however. Michiko Kakutani wasn’t very impressed, and I was especially disappointed to find that the book consists of three distinct essays cobbled together to represent a discussion of “the underground economy,” in this case pornography, the plight of illegal migrant workers, and the domestic marijuana industry. After the book came out, I realized that I had already read most of the section on pornography when it appeared in the New Yorker a few months ago. I hadn’t really been that into it at the time. So, unfortunately, it seems like Schlosser, instead of attacking a new subject with the zeal he displayed in his attack on fast food, has thrown together a follow up and slapped a catchy title on it, knowing that his name will sell the book. For now, at least, it seems to be working. In the realm of paperback fiction, Life of Pi by Yann Martel and The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis were the big sellers. I have already talked about both of these books, but it is good to see more and more people coming around to old Maqroll the Gaviero.My trip to EuropeNext week, I am travelling to Barcelona and then to Ireland. I have some serious airplane time ahead of me so I am packing several books. I had a thought that it might be a fun idea to read a novel that takes place in Barcelona while flying over there. I did a little research and found myself an intriguing little book: The Lonely Hearts Club by Raul Nunez. Apparently it is about a lonely man in Barcelona, who joins “a lonely hearts club” to alleviate his solitude. Instead, it throws him into contact with the most eccentric characters in an eccentric city. Sounds like fun.
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Andrei Codrescu and the hurricane
I noticed that in the past few days several people have come to this blog after searching Andrei Codrescu and hurricane. Codrescu, a Romanian poet, writer and NPR commentator, is a favorite of mine and when I realized that he makes his home in New Orleans, I became worried that he might be missing. I’m guessing that those searching for him on Google are worried, too. In an interview a little more than a year ago Codrescu, like so many others, dismissed the threat to New Orleans:Standaert: You live in New Orleans, which could be submerged in a matter of a few short hours if a ‘category five’ hurricane hits the city full bore. Does this frighten you? Sorry if I brought it to mind! I’ve heard other residents say with a devil may care wave of the hand that it would be appropriate if New Orleans was Pompeii-ed, Atlantis-ed, or otherwise Sodom and Gomorra-ed. Are these people nuts? Or does living in New Orleans breed a laissez faire attitude toward eminent apocalypse? Is it the decadent caramelized, sugar powdered, steaming apple beignets?Codrescu: So what’s living in San Francisco like? Or L.A.? Or New York? Or anywhere on the path of Comet from Hell? Be serious, Mike. This just ain’t a safe universe. People in New Orleans get great pleasure out of possible disaster just like Venetians do: they are in a hurry to make beauty because they are so close to the elemental (fury) gods. But anyone who decided to be boring because they live on a rock under the desert, is either crazy or hasn’t taken enough LSD. Or they may just be boring, which is incurable. There is nothing sicker than a bunker.I was relieved to hear that Codrescu is safe and in Baton Rouge. Yesterday he mourned on NPR. Like so many others he is both chastened by the wrath of Mother Nature and angry that his beloved city has been destroyed.
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Attention Menand Fans
Louis Menand is one of my favorite regular contributors to the New Yorker, so I was excited to discover a Web site devoted to “the foremost modern scholar of American studies.” The Essential Menand includes commentary by three contributors as well as a handy collection of links to dozens of Menand essays in the New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and Slate.
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A New New Yorker Web Site
The New Yorker has unveiled a new version of its Web site, and while I applaud its clean look, the addition of much more content accessible from the front page, and RSS feeds, there is one major problem: links to much of the site’s content from the years the magazine has been online are, as of this writing, broken. This means the many, many links to New Yorker articles and stories in The Millions archives no longer work, rendering posts like my roundup of the magazine’s fiction in 2005 much less useful. On the other hand, perhaps they used the redesign as an opportunity to clear out the archives so that more folks would buy the Complete New Yorker.See also: Kottke takes a more in depth look at the redesign.
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New John McPhee book
I’d noticed that over the last few months, John McPhee’s articles in the New Yorker have been somewhat thematically linked, and it occurred to me that his next book would probably be about that theme, transportation. Based on the contributor’s notes from last weeks issue, it appears as though this is indeed the case: “This piece” – about coal trains – “is part of a series about freight transportation that will be published as a book, Uncommon Carriers, in May.” None of those articles are available online, but off-hand I recall ones about river barges, UPS’s gargantuan shipping operation and riding along in a tanker truck. In an interview at the New Yorker site, McPhee talks a little bit more about the book, which he says grew out of his work on Looking for a Ship – which Emre and I both read recently. He also discusses the enormity of his twenty year undertaking, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book about American geology, Annals of the Former World.
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