Hard to Pronounce Literary Names Redux: the Definitive Edition

Lists Notable Articles
August 26, 2006 | 3 books mentioned 38 3 min read

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Thanks to some friendly advice from LanguageHat, and seeing competing pronunciations flying around in the comments of the previous pronunciation post, especially for that pesky Goethe, I decided to go to the library and to do a little more Internet research to try to get some definitive pronunciations for these names, specifically printed references where available.

At the library I took a look at Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature (EoL) – pronunciations aside, a very cool reference book – which was very helpful in giving me pronunciations for most of the names on our list. The problem is that the pronunciations are given using symbols that are not easily expressed in HTML, and thus are impossible to convey on this blog. Another problem is that the book was published in 1995, and thus leaves out some of the contemporary authors on this list.

However, with some further digging online, I was able to find some sources, including Merriam-Webster Online (M-W), which uses simplified, Internet friendly notation. You can refer to the M-W pronunciation guide for help if you need it. I also looked at the online version of the The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition (AH), whose pronunciations I’ve only linked to rather than copied because it uses images to convey pronunciation symbols, and I can’t easily replicate them here on the blog. Best of all, these two sources include audio pronunciations, as well. Very helpful. Finally I also looked at Pronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names (PD), some names from which somebody has posted here.

When none of those sufficed I used references from newspaper and magazine articles, hoping that their writers did the research and found out the correct pronunciations, ideally from the authors themselves.

  • J.M. Coetzee – kut-‘see, -‘see-uh (audio via M-W)
  • Paul Theroux – both PD and EoL have it as thuh-ROO
  • Henry David Thoreau – thaw-‘roh (audio via M-W, via AH). The “Pronouncing Thoreau” sidebar on this NPR story goes into some further detail.
  • John Le Carre – luh-ka-ray (audio via M-W, via AH)
  • Dan Chaon – I’m going to stick with my friend Edan’s pronunciation – “Shawn” – since she had him as a teacher.
  • Pulitzer – ‘PULL it sir’ (see #19 in the Pulitzer FAQ, audio via M-W and via AH, which also offers the “PEW” pronunciation as an alternative.)
  • Donald Barthelme – There seems to be some disagreement on this one. AH has it with a “th” sound – see pronunciation and audio – while the EoL has it with a hard “t” sound. Not sure which is right.
  • Michael Chabon – “Pronounced, as he says, ‘Shea as in Stadium, Bon as in Jovi,'” according to this profile, though other news sources pronounce the last syllable ranging from “bun” to “bawn” to “bin“
  • Thomas Pynchon – ‘pin-chuhn (audio via M-W, via AH)
  • Rainer Maria Rilke – ‘ry-nur Maria ‘ril-kuh, -kee (audio via M-W, via AH. AH does not offer the “long e” at the end as an alternative pronunciation, nor does EoL.)
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Unfortunately not much of a definitive answer here. M-W prefers saying it with more of an “r” sound ‘ge(r)-tuh (audio), but offers ‘g[oe]-tuh as an alternative. AH prefers the latter, note the the subtly different audio. EoL has both of those but it calls the “r” sound “Anglicized.” It also has a “long a” sound in the first syllable listed as Anglicized.
  • Ngugi wa Thiong’o – His first name is pronounced “Googy,” according to UC Irvine, where he teaches, while his last name is presumably pronounced phonetically.
  • Eoin Colfer – The Seattle PI and Guardian both say the first name is pronounced “Owen.” The last name is phonetic.
  • Seamus Heaney – ‘shay-mus ‘hee-nee (audio via M-W, via AH)
  • Jorge Luis Borges – ‘bor-“hays (audio via M-W, via AH)
  • Vladimir Nabokov – nuh-‘bo-kuff (audio via M-W, via AH. Both AH and EoL offer alternative pronunciations with a stress on the first syllable.)
  • P.G. Wodehouse – ‘wud-“haus (audio via M-W, via AH)
  • Chuck Palahniuk – Lots of sources, including USA Today, say “Paula-nik.”
  • Michel Houellebecq – LA Weekly and many other sources say “Wellbeck.”
  • Jeffrey Eugenides – “yu-GIN-e-dees” according to the Houston Chronicle.
  • Jack Kerouac – ‘ker-uh-“wak (audio via M-W, via AH)
  • Colm Toibin – most sources, like the SF Chron have it as “toe-bean,” but the Boston Globe says “Column to-BEAN.”

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created The Millions and is its publisher. He and his family live in New Jersey.

Lists

Seven Reasons Why Alexandre Dumas Will Never Die

Lists
October 28, 2011 | 3 books mentioned 7 4 min read

Alexandre Dumas is once again — still, always, forever — with us. There he is in Umberto Eco’s new novel, The Prague Cemetery, aiding Giuseppe Garibaldi and his redshirts during the fight for Italian unification. And there he is up on the silver screen, for at least the 200th time, with a splashy new 3-D version of one of his most durable tales, The Three Musketeers, a voracious movie franchise that has drawn on talents ranging from Douglas Fairbanks to Christopher Walken and Charlie Sheen. Dumas has been dead for more than 140 years, but he refuses to go gentle into that good night. What’s his secret? How does he manage to continue to engage readers and moviegoers year after year after year? The answer, I believe, is that Dumas had the good sense (and the good fortune) to do the following seven things:

1.  He Came From Humble Origins

Perhaps the central fact of Dumas’s life was that he was of mixed race, a “quadroon.” His paternal grandparents were a French nobleman stationed in Haiti and a Creole woman of mixed French and African descent. Their son became a general in Napoleon’s army, but he fell out of favor and his own son, Alexandre, was born into poverty in 1802.

2.  He Worked Like a Galley Slave

No writer ever succeeded without hard work, and Dumas often put in 14-hour days producing more than 200 books, plus plays, stories, and a small mountain of journalism. Soon after arriving in Paris from his native Villers-Cotterêts, he was writing hit plays, followed by hit novels. After turning one of his plays into a serial novel, he opened a production studio with a team of writers who cranked out hundreds of stories. Dumas used many collaborators during his career, most notably Auguste Maquet, who helped him write dozens of plays and novels, including Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Maquet would later take Dumas to court seeking joint rights to their collaborations, but the court awarded him financial damages while Dumas retained the rights to the works. It was a case of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. After the court case, neither man, working alone, produced any memorable work.

3.  He Lived Large

Dumas was as colorful as any of the characters who populated his fiction. As his biographer André Maurois would later put it, “Dumas was a hero out of Dumas.” He amassed and spent several fortunes, ate and drank like a king, kept mistresses, fathered illegitimate children, ran a theater, built a mansion, and showed resourcefulness when it came to dodging creditors. He traveled to Belgium and later to Russia before arriving in Italy during the Risorgimento in 1860. Simone Simonini, Umberto Eco’s supremely unreliable narrator in The Prague Cemetery, winds up aboard the ship that is carrying Dumas to Sicily. “Dumas welcomed me with much cordiality,” the fictional Simonini reports:
He was wearing a pale brown lightweight coat and looked unmistakably like the half-caste he was — olive skin, protruding, fleshy, sensual lips and a head of frizzy hair like an African savage.  Otherwise he had a lively, wry expression, a pleasant smile and the rotund figure of a bon vivant… I remembered one of the many stories about him: some impudent young Parisian had made a malicious reference in his presence to the latest theories suggesting a link between primitive man and lower species.  Dumas replied: ‘Yes sir, I do indeed come from the monkey.  But you, sir, are returning to one!’
4.  He Was a Peerless Storyteller and Unapologetic Entertainer

Simonini disparages a couple of redshirts because they are “storytellers like Dumas, embellishing their recollections so that all their geese are swans.” Guilty as charged. Dumas did his historical research, but he had the good sense not to let facts get in the way of a good story. Unlike his contemporaries Balzac and Dickens, he shunned realism in favor of escapist entertainment, and so instead of taking his readers into the salons and slums of Paris, he took them back to the 17th century (The Three Musketeers and its sequels), back to the French Revolution, back to the aftermath of Napoleon’s downfall earlier in the 19th century (The Count of Monte Cristo), always back. Many critics dismissed him as a lightweight, but readers couldn’t get enough. Like Dickens, Dumas sold many of his novels as serials, which called for brisk action, constantly rising and falling fortunes, and titillating cliff-hangers. And, as with Dickens, you sometimes get the sense that Dumas had one eye on the meter — that is, that he was a little too well aware that he was getting paid by the word. But readers didn’t complain. They were too busy devouring Dumas’s tales of unjust imprisonment, stock market swindles, buried treasure, blackmail, back-stabbing, suicide, poisoning, kidnapping, forgiveness, revenge, and countless other human virtues.

5.  He Would Have Hated – and Loved – the New Three Musketeers Movie

Though Dumas surely would have recognized the new Musketeers movie for the dog it is, he just as surely would have appreciated it for keeping the franchise alive until the next adaptation comes along. The cast of this new 3-D version looks like it was culled from an L train full of hipsters headed for Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The shining exception is Christoph Waltz, who plays duplicitous Cardinal Richelieu. Waltz is such an interesting actor that I would pay money to watch him paint a door, but here he is given some wooden lines — “Evil is just a point of view” and “I am France” — that would have dismayed Dumas, a master at writing dialog.

6.  He Died Broke and Happy

If every smart person’s goal in life is to die broke, then Dumas was an unqualified success. But while a lesser man would have bemoaned the cruelties of fate that left him penniless on his deathbed, Dumas had this to say about death as it approached him in 1870: “I shall tell her a story, and she will be kind to me.”

7.  He Figured Out How to Stay in the News

Dumas was still making news more than a century after his death. He was buried in the town of his birth and remained there until Nov. 30, 2002, when French President Jacques Chirac ordered the body transported in solemn procession to its rightful resting place in the Panthéon in Paris, where Voltaire, Rousseau, Émile Zola, Victor Hugo, and other French immortals are entombed. Dumas would have loved the spectacle. During a televised ceremony, the coffin was flanked by four Republican Guards dressed as the Musketeers Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and their sidekick D’Artagnan. Chirac said France was “repaying an injustice which marked Dumas from childhood, just as it marked the skin of his slave ancestors.” Two centuries after his birth, Dumas had finally overcome his humble origins.

The critic Jules Machelet has called him “an inextinguishable volcano.” Don’t expect the lava to stop flowing anytime soon.

Image Credit: Bill Morris/[email protected]

Lists
| 3 books mentioned 7 4 min read
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Lists Screening Room

May-December (In July)

Lists Screening Room
July 11, 2008 | 3 books mentioned 3 2 min read

In 1699, at the age of 32, Jonathan Swift wrote a list of resolutions for himself that he titled “When I come to be old.” The first of these was, “Not to marry a young Woman.” Improbably, reading this Swiftian direction set me compiling a list of movies in which men and women disregard his advice. I can’t say it’s in any way particularly timely, or suited to the season – unless nothing says “summer” to you like a nymphet in a bikini and heart-shaped sunglasses or Dustin Hoffman in full diving gear at the bottom of a pool.The GraduateManhattan – oh, beauty and the beast: Mariel Hemingway in bed with Woody Allen. A great movie, and a beautiful movie (even if you find WA occasionally repulsive).Kubrick’s Lolita (1962)Lolita (1997) The Kubrick Lolita goes in more for the “humor” of Nabokov’s novel – a lot of slap-stick-y scenes with Peter Sellars as Clare Quilty. I prefer the remake because it goes in more for the tragedy. Jeremy Irons walks the monstrous/charming line superbly and Dominique Swain is more convincing that Sue Lyon as Lolita.Pretty Baby – Louis Malle’s beautiful and creepy film about the daughter of a prostitute in a New Orleans whore house. A too young Brooke Shields, with Keith Carradine and Susan Sarandon.The Professional – remember Natalie Portman singing “Like a Virgin” to a flabbergasted Jean Reno?Beautiful Girls – Portman again, reprising her “old-soul” girl-woman vibe from The Professional opposite Timothy Hutton. (not that surprising that Portman was offered the Lolita role for 1997 remake)Lawn Dogs – highly recommended: Young Sam Rockwell and very young Mischa Barton. The solace and dangers of friendship in a deeply creepy suburbia.Harold and Maud – for the series of staged suicide scenes and Cat Stevens soundtrack alone, this is worth a watch, but there’s so much more…Venus – The great Peter O’Toole playing, as far as I can tell, himself. And he is charming. Plus the enormously fat actor now of Harry Potter/Uncle Vernon fame (once of Withnail/Uncle Monty fame) as one of O’Toole’s pals (Richard Griffiths).Last Tango In Paris – Really old Marlon Brando and really young French hottie: borderline porn – kinda gross (not recommended to the faint of heart, or really anyone at all)Shopgirl – Steve Martin, Clare Danes, Jason Schwartzman, and Pete Sampras’ babe wifeLost in Translation – another former goofball (Bill Murray) makes good as a serious leading man opposite Scarlett JohanssonY Tu Mama Tambien – not the rollicking good time the previews suggested it to be: brace yourself.Notes on a Scandal – Judy Dench and Cate Blanchett at their finest.American Pie – the movie that brought us “milf”The Good Girl – Jennifer Aniston playing a downtrodden housewife and Jake Gyllenhall (whose character renames himself Holden Caulfield) as her co-worker paramour at the Retail Rodeo.Laurel Canyon – Francis McDormand and Alessandro Nivola are the May-December pair, ably supported by Kate Beckinsale, Christian Bale, and Natasha McElhone. A good movie for repressed graduate students.

Lists Screening Room
| 3 books mentioned 3 2 min read
Notable Articles Year in Reading

A Year in Reading 2009

Notable Articles Year in Reading
December 1, 2009 | 3 books mentioned 21 3 min read

The end of another year (and decade) offers many amusements and diversions, chief among them the inevitable, retrospective lists. We made our own attempt in September, with our Best of the Millennium (So Far) series, which proved to be an instructive and contentious exercise. Among the chief arguments leveled against such “best of” lists is the way they posit an illusory pinnacle of achievement and quality. By means of a grand consensus, the list smooths over natural and exciting variations in individual taste. But true discoveries are often made not by finding out what everybody liked, but by getting from one trusted fellow reader a recommendation that strikes a nerve or piques an interest.

It’s also true that the reader who reflects on a year will find a thread of reading experiences to parallel the real-life ones…and particularly sublime moments alone (even in a crowd, alone) when a book has taken the reader out of her world and into its own. This experience transcends the cold qualitative accounting that names one book better than another.

And so amid all the lists (even our own), to round out the year, we offer a new installment of our annual “Year in Reading” series – an anti-list, as it were. Acknowledging that few readers, if any, read exclusively newly published books, we’ve asked our regular contributors and distinguished guests to name, from all the books they read this year, the one(s) that meant the most to them, regardless of publication date. Grouped together, these considerations, squibs, and essays will be a chronicle of reading and good books from every era. We hope you find in them seeds that will help your year in reading in 2010 be a fruitful one.

As we have in prior years, the names of our 2009 “Year in Reading” contributors will be unveiled one at a time throughout the month as we post their contributions. You can bookmark this post and follow the series from here, or load up the main page for more new Year in Reading posts appearing at the top every day, or you can subscribe to our RSS feed and follow along in your favorite feed reader.

Hari Kunzru, author of My Revolutions
Julie Klam, author of Please Excuse My Daughter
Phillip Lopate, author of Notes on Sontag
Stephen Dodson, coauthor of Uglier Than a Monkey’s Armpit, proprietor of Languagehat.
Mark Sarvas, author of Harry, Revised, proprietor of The Elegant Variation.
Diane Williams, author of It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature, editor of NOON
Jonathan Lethem, author of Chronic City
David Gutowski, proprietor of Largehearted Boy
Jesse Ball, author of The Way Through Doors
Deb Olin Unferth, author of Vacation
Edan Lepucki of The Millions
Michelle Huneven, author of Blame
Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End
William H. Gass, author of The Tunnel
Reif Larsen, author of The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet
Victor LaValle, author of Big Machine
Dana Goodyear, author of Honey & Junk, New Yorker staff writer
Rosecrans Baldwin, founding editor of The Morning News and author of You Lost Me There
Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
David Shields, author of Reality Hunger
Stephen Elliott, editor of The Rumpus and author of The Adderall Diaries
Brady Udall, author of The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint
Rick Moody, author of The Black Veil
Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man
Marco Roth, a founding editor of N+1
Maud Newton, proprietor of maudnewton.com
Patrick Brown of The Millions
Hamilton Leithauser of The Walkmen
Scott Esposito editor of The Quarterly Conversation and of Conversational Reading
Ben Fountain, author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara
Joe Meno, author of The Great Perhaps
Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian
Emily St. John Mandel, author of Last Night In Montreal
Jennifer Egan, author of The Invisible Circus
Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances
Samantha Peale, author of The American Painter Emma Dial
Lan Samantha Chang, author of Inheritance
David L. Ulin, book editor of the Los Angeles Times
Jerome Charyn, author of The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson
Jon Raymond, author of The Half-Life
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of Ms. Hempel Chronicles
Ken Chen, author of Juvenilia
Mark Haskell Smith, author of Moist
Brad Watson, author of Last Days of the Dog-Men
John Williams, editor of The Second Pass
Carolyn Kellogg, of Jacket Copy and www.carolynkellogg.com
Anne K. Yoder, of The Millions
Tim W. Brown, author of American Renaissance
Traver Kauffman, of Rake’s Progress
Jeff Martin, author of My Dog Ate My Nobel Prize
Ed Park, author of Personal Days
Cristina Henríquez, author of The World in Half
Garth Risk Hallberg, author of A Field Guide to the North American Family: An Illustrated Novella, contributor to The Millions
Motoyuki Shibata, author of American Narcissus
Robert Lopez, author of Kamby Bolongo Mean River
Masatsugu Ono, author of Graves Buried in Water
Roland Kelts, author of Japanamerica
Dan Kois, author of Facing Future
Michael Fusco, of Michael Fusco Design

Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 | Support The Millions

Notable Articles Year in Reading
| 3 books mentioned 21 3 min read
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38 comments:

  1. Hate to be pedantic ( well, actually, I don't) but it's Houellebecq. It's because of that e that it's pronounced well…, otherwise it would be hool…

  2. After all that trouble, I'm felled by a lousy spelling error… Thanks for pointing it out. I've fixed it.

  3. How about Dai Sijie? First name's pretty obvious, but I can't figure out the last.

  7. hi. i'm a bit embarrassed to ask this coz i'm not as intellectual as all the other bloggers posting comments on your page but my friend and i have been debating on how to properly pronounce the name Johann if given for a guy's name. one says it with a yo-han and the other says it with a jo-han. which is the correct one?

  8. I wouldn't bet on Anonymous ever coming back to see this reply after two months, but Johann in German is pronounced "yo-han."

  10. One of my thesis advisors at UCLA once told me as a child Donald Barthelme spent the night at his house. He couldn't remember the circumstances or tell me how his father had known DB, but he did remember that his name was definitely pronounced "BAR-tuhl-mee" with a hard T. This particular professor is not hard of memory, well under the age of 50, and exercises regularly.

  11. I remember embarrassing myself once when I pronounced Albert Camus (Kam-oo) as Albert Kam-ah-s, infront of a group of philosophy buffs. Oh how my face turned red when I found out…

  12. Does anyone know how to pronounce Paule Marshall's name? She was born Valenza Pauline Burke. I'm not sure if Paule is short for Pauline and should be Paul-lay, simply Paul. Any ideas?

  14. Did the late Americanized intellectual historian George Mosse pronounce his name MOSS or the Germanic MOSS-UH? (And the first name?)

    I went to a slightly snobby undergrad university and although most people gave Walter Benjamin's name an English first name pronunciation but did the vaguely Germanic Ben-yuh-meen for the last. I am returning to grad school and wondering what the current thing is?

    Tom [email protected] (let me know at that address also if you don't mind — I tend to forget where I post things)

  15. Anyone know how to pronounce Des Esseintes, the name of the main character in 'Against Nature' or 'Against the Grain' by Huysmans?

  16. I don't know the Huysmans work but a standard French pronunciation would be close to dez-es-sent or des-es-sant. There are exceptions but usually you do pronounce the S before a vowel (unlike the way we say Des Moines, Iowa.)
    Now, how do you pronounce Huysman?

    By the way, I finally asked (by e-mail) the chairman of the history department where Mosse last worked before his death and he said Mosse used an Americanized "Mossy".amkunstwerk

  17. I may be repeating others, but here are my contributions:

    Huysmans is apparently "H'WEES'maan." At least I somehow feel comfortable saying it that way.

    Cioran is TCHAW-rahn (according to the Times obit), but I will never feel comfortable pronouncing his name.

    Walser is Valser, and I pronounce his book "Jakob von Gunten" as "YAH-cub von GOO-tin" — please correct me in the comments if I'm wrong because this is my favorite novel!

    I picked up "Ben-ya-MEAN" as an underground but still use the "W" in "Walter."

    I always pronounce Bataille "Buh-TIE" and Blanchot "BLAN-show," hopefully correctly.

    I hear Musil is M'EEOO-zil.

    I've heard "ZAY-bald" for W.G.Sebald (from people who know German). Presumably I don't have to pronounce the "W" and "G" in anything other than my annoying Philly ACK-sent.

  20. If we don’t mind diving into genre, China Mieville might be a good addition to the list? Wikipedia has a pronunciation in IPA, but I’m not sure what its source was.

  21. Pingback: Library News and Literary Links « Nicole, Worcester
  23. Pingback: Things Like Other Things « Odd Lots
  24. Pingback: put the well in houellebecq « a sisyphean task

  26. I am so glad someone else wants to know how to pronounce China Mieville’s name. That was my first thought when I saw the headline. I even speak french, but those sounds don’t want to come out right for me!

  28. Pingback: How Do You Pronounce That Writer’s Name? « BIG OTHER

  29. Borges has no long-A sound. It’s Bor’ hess – with a short e as in let. The long vowels of English have no counterparts in Spanish except long e which corresponds roughly to the Spanish i as in lindo – leen’ doh. So, Quesadilla is not Kay sah dee yah, it’s keh sah dee’ yah – impress your latino friends.

  31. Anonymous:
    It is ok to pronounce Albert Camus’ last name as “Kah-mahs”, or “Ca-moose”.
    Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant and I will slap them down in any knowledge or IQ test in existence.
    They are mediocre pieces of rubbish who try to bolster themselves culturally by learning the original pronounciation of a few words or names, but have no more knowledge than that.
    People who correct you on Camus’ last name will generally be cultural backwater. Try it out. Be a prick and mispronounce his name in front of an a-hole on purpose and if he corrects you, say something like: “Ah, you must be someone of learning and refinement, someone who must also know about art history, literature, the humanities and the sciences. Let’s talk about them now since I want to learn and you seem to imply by such a refined correction that you are knowledgeable. I cannot wait to be enlightened”.
    Or, say something similar but less of a mouthful.
    People who correct Camus’ pronounciation also eat with chopsticks but don’t know of the conventions of the Japanese woodcuts that influenced Van Gogh.
    Just ignorant rubbish. Sad, really.
    Sorry, but it really irritates me to hear of mediocre ignorant people hanging onto one correct pronounciation as if it makes them cultured. Useless.

  33. Pingback: Cherries and Clay » Blog Archive » Michael Chabon Hits Town

  34. Contrary to the version given above (which as how I was pronouncing it before hand) the actual pronunciation of Huysmans is ‘OUS-mans’ with a completely silent H.

    This is according to a friend of mine who is fluent in French.

  35. ok, I am bilingual in French and English, and in English, Huysmans is pronounced something like “weess-MAWSS.” That’s the closest I can get.

  36. Just ran across your query about how to pronounce R. G. Vliet’s name. Since I’m his widow let me reassure you that his mother pronounced it 5 different ways and that hardly anyone gets it right. The name is Dutch, was Van Vliet, so that Van Fleet was the correct pronunciation. Dropping the Van made it difficult to believe, but the voiced F (v) is the accepted Americanized way, hence the one-syllable, long e, Vleet. Most people try to insert a vowel between the V and L or use a French pronunciation or variants thereof–absolutely wrong. Vleet. is your best bet, but you probably know that by now.

  37. Hi Ann,

    Russel was my great uncle and everyone in my family tells me how much we would have gotten along / how I remind them of him. I am the son of John Vliet, who is the son of my estranged grandfather, Ron. If by some chance you get this I would love to email you sometime about his career as a writer / know some other things about him. His writing has always resonated with me in a very odd, spiritual like way, as if him and I have some strange, esoteric sort of characteristics in common somehow. I am also intrigued by your explanation of how to pronounce Vliet- as I have been raised to pronounce it “Vuh-leet,” whereas you are saying the most accurate pronunciation is “Fleet”? Very interested in anything you have to say about any of this as I have long been curious of my Dutch origins, the otherside of my family lineage being Finnish. Cheers!

    Josh

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Lists

The Notables

Lists
November 24, 2007 | 3 books mentioned 1

This year’s New York Times Notable Books of the Year is out. At 100 titles, the list is more of a catalog of the noteworthy than a distinction. Looking at the fiction, it appears that some of these books crossed our radar as well:The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perotta: A most anticipated book.After Dark by Haruki Murakami: Ben’s review.Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo: A most anticipated book.The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz: A most anticipated book.Exit Ghost by Philip Roth: A most anticipated book.Falling Man by Don Delillo: Tempering Expectations for the Great 9/11 NovelThe Gathering by Anne Enright: Underdog Enright Lands the 2007 BookerHarry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling: Harry Potter is Dead, Long Live Harry Potter; Top Potter Town Gets Prize, Boy-Wizard Bragging Rights; Professor Trelawney Examines Her Tea Leaves; A Potter Post Mortem; A History of MagicHouse of Meetings by Martin Amis: A most anticipated book.In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar: The Booker shortlistKnots by Nuruddin Farah: A most anticipated book.Like You’d Understand, Anyway by Jim Shepard: National Book Award FinalistOn Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan: Booker shortlistThe Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid: Booker shortlistRemainder by Tom McCarthy: Andrew’s reviewSavage Detectives by Roberto Bolano: A most anticipated book; Why Bolano MattersThen We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris: A most anticipated bookTree of Smoke by Denis Johnson: Garth’s reviewTwenty Grand by Rebecca Curtis: Emily’s reviewVarieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis: National Book Award FinalistWhat is the What by Dave Eggers: Garth’s review.The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon: Max’s review; Garth’s review.

Lists
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Lists Notable Articles Sport

The Best Sports Journalism Ever (According to Bill Simmons)

Lists Notable Articles Sport
October 12, 2008 | 3 books mentioned 13 2 min read

I’m still fairly new to reading ESPN’s Bill Simmons (and despite his relentless Boston boosterism, I get a kick out of his columns). One reason is that he has some interests beyond the ballfield, quite rare for folks who make a living in sports punditry, and contained within his columns, you’ll sometimes find gems like the list of “best sports pieces ever written” that he dropped into his “Mailbag” this week.The list is really terrific, and, as much because I want to remember it as I do share it with you, I decided to try to find links to some of these pieces online (or at least to the books that contain them).Simmons put the list together after a fan asked him whether his recent footnote-adorned column on Manny Ramirez was in tribute to David Foster Wallace. Simmons said no, but that it was a meaningful coincidence. The reader mentioned Wallace’s famous “Federer as Religious Experience” as an exemplary piece of sports writing. Simmons agreed, but said that it is in fact superseded by Wallace’s “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm for Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness,” (from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) which Simmons calls “one of the single best sports pieces ever written.” He then shares his list of the rest of the best (with the first seven joining “Joyce” as the best ever):”Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” (about Ted Williams) by John Updike“Gone for Good” (about Steve Blass) by Roger Angell (appears in Five Seasons and Once More around the Park)”What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” by Richard Ben Cramer (also in book form)”Lawdy, Lawdy, He’s Great” (about the “Thrilla in Manila”) by Mark Kram“The Silent Season of a Hero (about Joe DiMaggio) by Gay Talese (appears in The Gay Talese Reader)”Ego” (about Muhammad Ali) by Norman Mailer (appears in The Best American Sports Writing of the Century)”Pure Heart” by William Nack (appears in My Turf: Horses, Boxers, Blood Money, And The Sporting Life, Secretariat: The Making of a Champion, and The Greatest Horse Stories Ever Told: Thirty Unforgettable Horse Tales.”The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” by Hunter S. Thompson (appears in The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time)”Medora Goes to a Game” by George Plimpton (appears in George Plimpton on Sports)”Agincourt and After” by Roger Angell appears in Five Seasons)”Distance” (about Bob Gibson) by Roger Angell (appears in Once More around the Park and Game Time: A Baseball Companion“Magic Act” (about Magic Johnson) by Charles P. Pierce (appears in Sports Guy: In Search of Corkball, Warroad Hockey, Hooters Golf, Tiger Woods, and the Big, Big Game)”Holy Ground” by Wright Thompson“Centre Court” (about Wimbledon) by John McPhee (appears in Pieces of the Frame)”Raised By Women To Conquer Men” (about Jimmy Connors) by Frank Deford“The Loser” (about Floyd Patterson) by Gay Talese (appears in The Gay Talese Reader)”A Voice Crying In The Wilderness” by Tony Kornheiser (about Rick Barry)Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made by David Halberstam (excerpt)”The Mourning Anchor” (about Bryant Gumbel) by Rick Reilly“Ali and His Entourage” and “As Time Runs Out” (about Jim Valvano) by Garry Smith (both appear in Beyond the Game)So, literary sports fans, do you have any you want to add to this list? Share in the comments below.See Also: The New New Journalists, Football Books: A Best Sports Writing Addendum

Lists Notable Articles Sport
| 3 books mentioned 13 2 min read
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What We Call What Women Write

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April 25, 2011 | 3 books mentioned 71 5 min read

Last week, when it was announced that Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, I’m guessing I felt something like a football fan does when his team wins the Superbowl. I loved the book, pushing it hard on my bookish friends and even harder on the unbookish ones, certain that this was one of the most broadly appealing works of fiction to have come out in a long time. After the announcement, I wanted nothing more than to high-five all my Egan-loving friends posting the link on Facebook. It was heartening to see that the sentiment seemed widespread and magnanimous. Surely the celebration had to do with the brilliance of the book, but also the fact that a woman won in a year of several lively discussions regarding gender inequality in publishing (see the VIDA report on publication statistics and the backlash to Jonathan Franzen in general.)

Alas, the feeling of deserved recognition was short-lived. In a Wall Street Journal interview that Egan gave shortly after receiving the news, her advice to young writers ruffled some feathers:

My focus is less on the need for women to trumpet their own achievements than to shoot high and achieve a lot. What I want to see is young, ambitious writers. And there are tons of them. Look at The Tiger’s Wife. There was that scandal with the Harvard student who was found to have plagiarized. But she had plagiarized very derivative, banal stuff. This is your big first move? These are your models?…My advice for young female writers would be to shoot high and not cower.

The Harvard student Egan is referring to is Kaavya Viswanathan, whose novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life was much lauded until it was discovered that large sections had been lifted from other books; among the plagiarized authors were Meg Cabot (The Princess Diaries), Sophie Kinsella (Confessions of a Shopaholic) and Megan McCafferty (the Jessica Darling series), all of whom are best-selling authors of the “chick-lit” genre.

Chief among the offended was the oft-outspoken author Jennifer Weiner (In Her Shoes), who was also a prominent voice of the aforementioned Franzen backlash. A tweet from Weiner shortly after the WSJ piece ran: “And there goes my chance to be happy that a lady won the big prize. Thanks, Jenny Egan. You’re a model of graciousness.” Following Weiner’s lead, devout fans of chick-lit sounded off; over at The Frisky, in an essay titled “In Defense of Chick Lit,” Jamie Beckman, who opens her essay declaring that Egan was “one of her favorite authors of all time,” expresses doubt that she’ll ever recommend Egan’s work to a friend again.

It’s not hard to see how Egan’s statements offended—“very derivative and banal” isn’t exactly timid diction, and it’s a real downer to have someone you respect make you feel like you’ve got bad taste. But before anyone accuses anyone of “step[ping] on other women as [she] makes [her] way to the podium,” as Beckman puts it, we should consider a couple of things.

First: the offended parties lay claim to a genre ubiquitously referred to as “chick-lit”, a term used to describe fiction that relays, as Beckman puts it, “thoughtful, funny, relatable voices for the everywoman who’s looking for her personal pieces of life’s pie, including the career, the apartment, and the guy.” I don’t aim to scrutinize the content of the genre so much as the fact that the chick lit demographic has fully embraced the term. Ladies, it’s 2011. Who refers to women as “chicks” aside from Ed Hardy-wearing man-children? Uninspired as it may be, detractors calling the work “fluffy” can’t really be blamed—it’s built into the name, for god’s sake. It’s difficult to move forward in an argument about the sexist climate in publishing when a group that is supposedly trying to push for more equality has accepted and even defended a derogatory label. Granted, the term was probably coined by some marketing department somewhere, but authors of the genre stand by it unflinchingly (see Michele Gorman’s article in The Guardian). It’s no secret that the chick lit authors are outselling their literary fiction counterparts by far. What’s alarming is that the tremendous success of the genre is largely because it’s marketed to women who identify themselves “chicks.”

Perhaps the bigger issue at hand, though, is the severity of the backlash to Egan’s comments and the reasoning behind it. Bloggers at the The Signature Thing declared it “majorly ugly girl-on-girl crime,” and numerous commenters declared a boycott of everything Egan from this point forward. Another blogger at NerdGirlTalking was utterly perplexed: “Jennifer Egan, have you even MET Meg?.. Because how could you meet Meg and then call her work banal or derivative? I don’t care if you think those things, Meg is so nice that saying those things are almost like kicking a puppy.”

These former Egan fans are uniting under the notion that in addition to being a meanie, Egan is setting feminists back 50 years. How could she? In the male hegemony of publishing, us gals are supposed to stick together. Which is all well and good, in theory. But to suggest that a woman writer should not be critical of other women writers is counter to progress. It reminds me a little bit of the 2008 election. There was a certain kind of Hillary supporter that believed all women should be in support of our potential first woman president mostly on the basis that this could be our first woman president! Which is all well and good, in theory. But to express any sort of dissent guaranteed you a look of pity mingled with disgust: Poor thing. She must secretly hate her vagina.

This kind of mindless unity is counterintuitive. What kind of feminist movement condones a suppression of opinion on the basis that we should all be nice and stick together, because we’re girls? What Egan said wasn’t nice. It was honest. It reflected her opinion of a certain type of fiction. Publishing should strive to be a meritocracy (though whether it succeeds is a whole other issue,) and Egan’s comments are an acknowledgment of that. On the other hand, in the chick lit realm, amid the outrage and demand for more respect, there is, in fact cowering: observe Weiner selling herself short (and acknowledging a literary hierarchy) in an interview she gave to the Huffington Post: “Do I think I should be getting all of the attention that Jonathan “Genius” Franzen gets? Nope. Would I like to be taken at least as seriously as a Jonathan Tropper or a Nick Hornby? Absolutely.”

In 1971, Gore Vidal compared Norman Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex to “three days of menstrual flow.” Mailer then proceeded to head-butt Vidal before they appeared on the Dick Cavett Show, and six years later at a party, he threw his drink in Vidal’s face and started a fistfight. While I’m not suggesting that this is admirable behavior (though it is pretty funny,) it does nothing for leveling the playing field if every time a woman author remarks on the quality of a work of fiction, hysteria ensues, she’s thought of as a catty bitch, and there’s a concerted effort to rally the troops against her.

In a year when a male author (Franzen), appeared on the cover of Time for the first time since the last male author (Stephen King,) appeared on the cover ten years ago, the significant success of Goon Squad shouldn’t be drowned out by bitterness because Egan encouraged young writers to aim higher than a genre whose very name degrades its creators. What we should be concerned about is that glaring inequities exist in publishing. So, ladies, one more time, in case you didn’t hear Egan over Weiner’s whining: shoot high and don’t cower. We can’t very well get much done with the kid gloves on.

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| 3 books mentioned 71 5 min read
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