Guardian literary editor Robert McCrum has compiled an odd and rather subjective book list, collecting what he describes as “books that still speak volumes about the time in which they were written.” The list contains some obvious entries – we are taught in school that Nineteen Eighty-Four was not just a dystopian fantasy but a stark portrayal of the time’s prevailing years as well as some less well known (to me at least) selections like 1967’s The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris. But the list falls apart somewhat as it approaches the present day with McCrum anointing some of the last decade’s blockbuster bestsellers – Bridget Jones’s Diary, the first Harry Potter, and The Da Vinci Code – and falling prey to the notion that the deluge of press these books have received will amount to something in the eyes of future historians looking to view our time through the lens of literature.
Books of Our Times
The New Yorker cover that wasn’t
As emdashes recently pointed out, last week’s New Yorker cover was the second Bush/Cheney “gay joke” in recent memory. I gave a chuckle when I saw it, but, honestly, I expect New Yorker covers to be a little more, I don’t know, subtle than that. So I was sad to see what had been originally slated for last week’s cover – before Dick Cheney shot somebody – an elegy for New Orleans as Mardi Gras approaches. (via Jenny)
From the Newsstand: Lorrie Moore on Barthelme
One of the familiar knocks on the short story master Donald Barthelme is that his fiction is all artifice – that, to quote Saul Bellow, it “lack[s] an inner life.” Well, Lorrie Moore, having digested the new Barthelme biography, Hiding Man, is having none of it. “In a way,” she explains in the current New York Review of Books,Barthelme’s work was all inner life, partially concealed, partially displayed. His stories are a registration of a certain kind of churning mind, cerebral fragments stitched together in the bricolage fashion of beatnik poetry. The muzzled cool, the giddy play, the tossed salad of high and low…Here, ladies and gentlemen, is contrarian criticism at its very best: illuminating rather than annihilating. Similarly surprising, and revealing, is Moore’s decision to consider the Barthelme oeuvre alongside that of Raymond Carver, in many ways his stylistic opposite. Moore is no short-story slouch herself, and one suspects she’s learned a trick or two from the School of Don B. This might help account for her sure-handed handling of Barthelme’s life and work. At any rate, like Deborah Eisenberg and Zadie Smith, whose essays have also enlivened recent issues of the NYRB, she has the virtue not only of writing like a reader, but of reading like a writer. Check out her Barthelme essay, “How He Wrote His Songs.”
Amazon Spends Millions on Beedle the Bard
Amazon has locked down a rare piece of Harry Potter ephemera far a tidy sum.We’re incredibly excited to announce that Amazon has purchased J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard at an auction held by Sotheby’s in London. The book of five wizarding fairy tales, referenced in the last book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is one of only seven handmade copies in existence. The purchase price was £1,950,000 [$3.93 million], and Ms. Rowling is donating the proceeds to The Children’s Voice campaign, a charity she co-founded to help improve the lives of institutionalized children across Europe.The Tales of Beedle the Bard is extensively illustrated and handwritten by the bard herself–all 157 pages of it. It’s bound in brown Moroccan leather and embellished with five hand-chased hallmarked sterling silver ornaments and mounted moonstones.Since this is a particularly difficult volume to get one’s hands on, and since there are likely many curious Potter fans out there, Amazon has offered up a special review of the book, along with images from its pages. (Thanks, Laurie)Update: Yes, it turns out this happened in December. So: old news, but new to me, and perhaps to you too.
Media Madness in the City of Brotherly Love
It’s tough times for newspapers in many American cities and Philadelphia is no exception. The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News were bought by a group of investors under the name Philadelphia Media Holdings following the split up of the newspapers’ former parent Knight Ridder. Already in decline due both to the cuts of its corporate owners and the negative climate for newspapers, the pair of papers has struggled even further under their new owners.Earlier this month, Inquirer book editor Frank Wilson departed and described the machinations of newspaper management that led him to step down. The story is fairly familiar to anyone who has followed the industry over the last few years.While cost cutting and streamlining have become almost mundane at America’s newspapers, a new story emerging regarding one of Philadelphia’s most storied journalists is a bit more strange. As reported by Steve Volk for Philadelphia magazine, the newspaper company is now going after Pete Dexter, a one time Philadelphia journalist who has gone on to have a fruitful career as a novelist. Last year, he hearkened back to his days as a newspaper columnist in Philadelphia and elsewhere by publishing a collection of his old columns, Paper Trails.However, there must’ve been some miscommunication along the way because Philadelphia Media Holdings is now asking for a chunk of Dexter’s $60,000 advance, which Dexter gave to his editor Rob Fleder who did all the work of digging through the archives at compiling the collection. Meanwhile, the book’s paperback release has been delayed. In the above-linked article, it appears as though Dexter and Fleder acted in good faith, though the introduction to Paper Trails does describe the somewhat cavalier attitude with which Dexter and Fleder approached the book. In it, the reader is told that the 82 columns and articles we are about to read will lack dates and any indication as to where they first appeared because, basically, Dexter and Fleder didn’t want to dig them up. This adds to the collection’s charm but doesn’t exactly lend an aura of due diligence.Regardless, it’s hard to get behind what Philadelphia Media Holdings is doing here. By Philadelphia magazine’s account, the paper is attempting to intimidate Dexter and his agent, with little regard for the papers’ already bad reputation. One would think a compromise could have been reached over a relatively minor sum.As an aside, earlier this week, we looked at books for fans of HBO’s Deadwood. I would say that Paper Trails is a must read for fans of another HBO hit, The Wire. I posted my thoughts on Paper Trails early last year.
At the London Review of Books: Clancy Martin on Alcoholism
In the LRB this month, professor and novelist Clancy Martin offers a brutally candid account of his own attempts to get sober. The piece is affecting, horrifying, and enlightening:As a child I visited my older sister in a psychiatric hospital, but I hadn’t been inside one for 30 years. Then, on 1 January this year, at about 11 o’clock in the evening, my wife found me, feet kicking, dangling from an improvised rope – a twisted yellow sheet – about a metre off the ground in our bedroom closet. Our two-year-old daughter was in the bed, sleeping, just a few feet away. Somehow the proximity of a child to the parent’s suicide, as with Sylvia Plath’s little children in that lonely London flat, increases the suicide’s shame. I was at the end of a binge. I was also at the end of three years of secret drinking, of hiding bottles and sneaking away to bars while my wife thought I was living as I had promised her, as a sober man.Martin’s narrative of his own battle also considers the dominant theories of alcoholism (the possession theory; the tragic theory) and treatments for it, including a new treatment – some hail it as a magic bullet – the drug baclofen. Martin’s description of his conflicted feelings about Alcoholics Anonymous are particularly interesting, but it is the unsparing account of his own drinking that haunts me.See also: Garth’s recent review of Martin’s novel, How To Sell.
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On the anniversary of Khruschev’s speech
Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag, on the 50th anniversary of Nikita Khrushchev’s famous “secret speech”:Clearly there is a lesson here for those who would bring down totalitarian regimes, and it concerns timing: The death of a dictator or the toppling of his statues does not necessarily mean that a complete political transformation has occurred, or even that one will occur soon. On the contrary, it takes a very, very long time — more than a generation — for a political class to free itself of the authoritarian impulse. People do not easily give up the ideology that has brought them wealth and power. People do not quickly change the habits that they’ve incurred over a lifetime.Link