We're moving this summer. I'm already dreading the packing, loading, moving, unpacking part, but other than that, I'm pretty excited. In July we'll be departing for temporary digs in the Washington, DC area as we figure out our final destination. One thing's for sure, though, our short stint in the Midwest is coming to an end. I never quite fell for Chicago, not the way I did
for LA, anyway, but I have come to see why this place has a particular hold on people. I think part of it is the way the city wears its history on its sleeve. The city also has a rich literary history that is still very much being added to.
All of this brings me, in a roundabout fashion, to the Riverhead catalog, which is next in the stack that I got from Penguin not too long ago. A couple of books in there - paperbacks of hardcovers that are already out - are worth sharing, one of which is a worthy addition to Chicago's literature. Adam Langer's
The Washington Story brings readers back to West Rogers Park, a thickly multicultural neighborhood not far from where I live. The book is named after Harold Washington, who was mayor of Chicago during the 1980s, when the book takes place. The Washington Story is the sequel to
Crossing California, Langer's much praised debut (which is in the queue). The hardcover has been out since last August and the paperback comes out in September.
Also coming out in September is the hilarious
The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman. Hodgeman is now a regular on the Daily Show, where he does a nerdy expert shtick that is pitch-perfect, and he also appears in the
new Mac commercials. The book - a compendium of fake facts, essentially - is perhaps most famous for the 700 hobo names contained within. You can hear Hodgman
read the hobo names to music, and you can look at
illustrations people have done of some of the hobos. Hodgman also has
a blog. He ends all posts with "That is all." The hardcover came out last October.
Extras: From Penguin's New American Library imprint comes
The Sinner's Guide to the Evangelical Right. The book is by Robert Lanham creator/editor of
freewilliamsburg.com, and author of the
Hipster Handbook. This time, Lanham turns his "anthropological eye" on conservative evangelical culture. The book comes out in September and would go well - or not - with this forthcoming
"Compete Idiot's" title. Finally, as if to prove that we're all just one silly idea away from a book deal, the
International Talk Like A Pirate Day guys have
a book (which is already out, but I guess the publisher wants to remind booksellers to stock up each year in preparation for the lucrative Talk Like A Pirate Day shopping season).
I don't want to burst anyone's bubble, but Mr. Wallace was working on a novel back in 2000 when he spoke to a few of us at Illinois State.
I'll be the first to offer an over/under: A new novel from wallace = +/- 2014?
Mr. Wallace got 250 pages into that novel and then, deciding that it wasn't working, stripped it for parts–his words, ca. 2003, also at ISU, where I was a student of his in a couple of grad classes. I'm as eager as anyone to see another long-form thing, but whatever he was working on in 2000, I don't think this is it.
"The Suffering Channel," in Oblivion, felt like it might have been a novel that didn't work out. I can only imagine the difficulty of trying to follow up Infinite Jest – witness, e.g., the ontological self-laceration of "Octet," from Brief Interviews (some kind of line's end's end indeed.) What I liked about the Harper's excerpt this month is how relaxed it seemed. Wallace seemed to have found room to breathe again. Interestingly, one of the core competencies returned to here – one that I had never really thought about – was meticulous, journalistic inhabitation of a subcultural milieu. In IJ, it was AA; here, it was the IRS. Maybe the time doing the essay books has really been nurturing some of the fiction muscles. More optimistic than zk, I'm remembering that Wallace wrote IJ in something like 3 years. Once he catches the right wave…
The clip in Harper's was so wonderful not only because of signature control of language (check out the two sentence paragraph just before the child speaks) but also because of how many metaphors one can draw from this element: a child taking on the characteristics of his father's govermental agency.
William Gaddis let twenty years slip by between Recognitions and JR. If we have to wait until 2014 for DFW's next novel, that's just fine with me.