Stephen Schenkenberg, recently returned from a blogging hiatus, has put together a site devoted to William H. Gass. It’s a useful resource for bibliographies and the like.
It’s a Gass
Truth in Advertising
Though we try to pass over blog-bait, we can’t resist directing your attention to the print ad campaign for the paperback version of Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone. “From the acclaimed memoir by the author of The Corrections” runs the copy, above several blurbs:”Funny, masterfully composed” – Gregory Kirschling, Entertainment Weekly“[A] total lack of humor…perverse” – Daniel Mendelsohn, The New York Times Book Review“Luminous, essential reading” – Tim Adams, The Observer (London)”Odious…incredibly annoying” – Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesThis is postmodern advertising at its best: honest, funny, provocative… and almost enough to reconsider our decision not to read the book.[Editor’s note: We wish we could find a version of this ad online, but Harper’s readers can find it on page 51 of the November issue]
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TV book club goes farther afield
As TV book clubs fall by the wayside in terms of the public’s interest, the “Today Show” club appears willing to make some more off-beat, interesting selections. The most recent pick, chosen for the club by Walter Mosley, is Graceland by the Nigerian Chris Abani. The book, about a Nigerian Elvis impersonator trying to survive in the urban desolation of Lagos, has been out nearly a year – it was well-reviewed but not a big seller – yet it will get a second life thanks to this selection. Here’s an excerpt.
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Holiday loot
Unlike in recent years, I didn’t get a ton of books this year for Christmas nor did I give any – and, no, this had nothing to do with Joe Queenan’s recent screed in the New York Times against giving books as gifts – though I can see where he’s coming from. Nonetheless, I did get a couple of pretty cool items. The one that I’m most thrilled about is the shiny, new Complete New Yorker that my parents – who know me well – gave me. When I first heard about this back in June, I said this: “My fear is that once I got my hands on this set, I would be compelled to consume every word of it at the expense of school and work and everything else, possibly even eating and sleeping. I may have to put myself into forced hibernation starting in October in order to keep those DVDs from falling into my hands.” But now that I actually own it, I’m willing to take the risk. In fact, I can’t wait to get back to Chicago so I can start digging into this thing. I’ll let you know how it goes.My brother gave me another cool “complete” set, the National Geographic Maps collection which contains every single map supplement published in the magazine from 1889 through 1999 on CD-ROM.From my parents, I also received a collection of interviews with writers like Thomas McGuane and William Styron called Story Story Story. Mrs. Millions, meanwhile, received a weighty tome called The World’s Greatest Architecture: Past and Present from her folks.My favorite non-book gift, though, would have to be the XM Radio that Mrs. Millions gave me. I actually can’t wait for our 14 hour drive back to Chicago so I can soak in all that satellite radio goodness.
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More author troubles
It’s a bad time to be an author. A Kirkus reviewer discovered that “renowned children’s-book author and publisher” Harriet Ziefert borrowed from a 1983 book by Judi Barrett. One tip-off, both books have the same name: A Snake is Totally Tail. Barrett’s version appears to be out of print, meanwhile Ziefert’s publisher, Blue Apple, is pulling Ziefert’s version from publication. According to the article, Ziefert’s claim is that it’s just a coincidence, but the evidence seems damning: “Comparing the advance readers’ copy of Ziefert’s book to Barrett’s, it’s obvious right away that 12 of the 23 lines in Barrett’s version are repeated in Ziefert’s, including identical concluding lines: ‘A dinosaur is entirely extinct. This book is finally finished.'”
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Oprah and the Recluse
You’ve got to hand it to Oprah. After a public snub from Jonathan Franzen, an abrupt switch to focusing on classic books, and a return to the contemporary with a confessional memoir that turns out to plagiarized – resulting in the very public humiliation of its author on her show – one would think that Oprah would have run out of opportunities to grab big headlines with her book club. And yet, by selecting Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and convincing the famously reclusive author to appear on her show, she has done it yet again.I had a couple of thoughts about this pick. In the early days of the club, Oprah selected quite a few emotionally challenging books, often with female protagonists in some sort of peril. With her selection of Franzen’s The Corrections, however, the club broke out of its shell and then traversed the various ups and downs noted above. Still, it is fascinating to me that this unabashedly mass market phenomenon, the TV show book club, would pick a book that is by all accounts harrowing and devastatingly serious and not an easy read in any sense. It’s not the first time Oprah has selected a formally “difficult” book. Recall the “Summer of Faulkner.” Still, to take a book that is all of the above and also contemporary seems rather incredible. It will also be interesting, if The Road goes on to win a Pulitizer or National Book Award, to have had Oprah “anoint” a book before our more formal institutions have.Secondly, I couldn’t help but think about poor Franzen as I read the news that McCarthy would appear on Oprah’s show. Franzen, of course, famously feuded with Oprah after she selected his book and he was publicly ambivalent about being an “Oprah author.” This led to plenty of comments like this one from an independent bookstore owner at the time of the controversy, saying that she felt “that good literature cannot be an Oprah selection.” With McCarthy appearing on the show for his “first television interview ever,” it’s hard to make that argument any more. We’re talking about a legitimate Nobel Prize candidate here (and somehow this is different from Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s classic One Hundred Years of Solitude being selected a while back). And poor Franzen, taking a public stand for his art and facing plenty of ridicule at the time, has had his legs cut out from under him by a literary giant – a famously reclusive one at that – eschewing the hand-wringing and taking the Oprah honor in stride.Update: It’s been pointed out to me that The Road missed its chance to win the National Book Award – it went to The Echo Maker, as you’ll recall. The Road is still in the running for the Pulitzer, but as it is far from the typical Pulitzer candidate, I’d guess its chances there are slim. So McCarthy will have to be satisfied with the unlikely duo of an Oprah Pick and a TMN Tournament of Books win (which the book appears likely to snag).
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