New York’s NPR affiliate, WNYC, has posted downloadable audio of last weekend’s 75th Birthday celebration for Philip Roth. Featured speakers include Jonathan Lethem, Charles D’Ambrosio, and Hermione Lee. Alvin Pepler, unfortunately, had a prior engagement…
When He Was Good…
Book Critic Brouhaha
The NBCC hand wringing over the nomination of Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept in the Criticism category for the NBCC Awards has jumped from the blogs to the New York Times.
Stomping Acorns
Ian Frazier’s piece in last week’s New Yorker is one of the oddest, funniest essays I’ve read in a long time. I laughed to myself as I read it the other day while sitting on the steps of the Art Institute in downtown Chicago (following an edifying meetup with fellow book bloggers Deep and Sam). The essay, “Pensees D’Automne,” is about a grown man’s passion for stomping acorns in the fall, and it contains many asides about things like health insurance and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. Frazier, who has long written odd and funny things like this, has a new book out this week called Gone to New York: Adventures in the City. The book collects thirty years of Frazier’s journalism about New York. From a review in the Sun-Times:The non-linear way Frazier’s mind works is a delight to follow on the page. And don’t let the emphasis on New York City fool you. Frazier is one of us. In the introduction to Gone to New York, Jamaica Kincaid gets it right when she calls her pal “the authentic American,” whose work “is meant to form an arc, an arc that has not yet begun its curve.”Kincaid and Frazier are also involved in another recently released book, this year’s edition of The Best American Travel Writing. Kincaid is the editor this year and Frazier is joined as a contributor by luminaries like John McPhee, William T. Vollmann, and William Least-Heat Moon.
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Laura Ingalls Wilder Revisited
Though the Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley isn’t the most “sexy” of critics (Pete Dexter’s comments notwithstanding), I’ve always enjoyed his columns. He will champion anything he believes is worth reading, even naming a book by John Grisham as one of the “best” of the year in 2005. He also clearly loves to read, and it shows in his writing, as opposed to, say, Michiko who I’d imagine dreads every book that crosses her threshold. Yardley also has a wonderful column called “Second Reading” that does away with the tyranny of the new and allows him to select and ruminate over any title from the vast trove of books he’s read. This week revisits a classic that I remember warmly from my childhood, Little House in the Big Woods, the first book in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s well-known series about life on the frontier.Yardley offers some tidbits that were new to me: Wilder didn’t start writing the books until she was in her early 60s, and her daughter, a popular journalist and novelist, co-wrote, or at least heavily edited, the books. In revisiting the book, Yardley doesn’t succumb to nostalgia, but he does acknowledge why the books have had such staying power:Some of the readers who’ve urged me to include one of Wilder’s books in Second Reading have said that they can be as satisfying for adult readers as for younger ones. In the sense that I had a pleasant time rereading Little House in the Big Woods, I guess that I agree, but it’s not exactly an adult pleasure. Wilder’s prose is clean, her people are immensely appealing and the details she provides of frontier domestic life are fascinating, but we shouldn’t try to persuade ourselves that these books are more than what they are: very good books for children that — as I realize far more keenly now than when I was a boy — paint a rather idealized picture of the American past. Wilder herself never seems to have pretended that she wrote for any except young readers, so let’s take her word for it.If you’ve read the books, you’ll enjoy the essay.Bonus Links: The Home-Schooling Book Boom, The Little Men Who Love Little House
The Risks of Fiction: On The New Yorker Writers Under 40 List
The rewards of fiction can be greater than that of nonfiction—the ecstatic feeling of transport when you’re pulled into the world of a story, given a new window into human experience—but you can also come away from a story angry that the writer has just wasted 45 minutes of your life.
Flying Blind: Truth, Journalism, and the Digital Age
Without that truth-seeking ecosystem of healthy small- and mid-size daily newspapers to explain national news in terms local readers can understand, Americans are left stewing in separate echo chambers, one urban, educated, and liberal, the other working-class, rural, and spoiling for a fight.