Pulitzer winner Junot Díaz talks with his fellow “Year in Reading” contributor Meghan O’Rourke in the debut episode of the online video series Open Book, co-sponsored by Slate and my alma mater. I’m thrilled that the producers elected to keep the same zany voice-over guy who reads Slate’s audio podcasts. Future interviews, we’re told, will include John Ashbery, Charles Simic, and Jonathan Safran Foer.
Oscar Wao Author Helps Inaugurate New Online Series
A Brief Interruption
Probably won't be able to post for the next day or two since I'll be in New York at the Kingsland Tavern celebrating the Realistic Records release of the Recoys album. Have I mentioned this? Should be a blast. But don't worry, I'll be back with many more books to talk about, and hopefully some added features for this little blog of mine. Bye for now.
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The Results Are In
Last night the winners of this year's National Book Awards were announced:Fiction: The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard (I've got this book lying around somewhere, and I've been somewhat interested in reading it... and I'm still somewhat interested in reading it.)Non-Fiction: Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy by Carlos Eire (I was hoping that Gulag by Anne Applebaum would win. Of course, in these situations, I always want the book that I've read to win. It's more fun that way.)Poetry: The Singing by C.K. Williams (This is exciting. C.K. Williams has been one of my favorite poets for a very long time. Here's an anti-war poem of his called "The Hearth.")Young People's Literature: The Canning Season by Polly Horvath (I'm no expert on kid's books, but I'm actually pretty familiar with Horvath. A few years back I worked at an agency that repped the film and TV rights for a huge catalog of books. Polly Horvath's books were among them, and they were favorites around the office.)Additional info: Past National Book Award WinnersDexter SpeaksI found this great mini-profile of author Pete Dexter yesterday. It helps illuminate the qualities of his character that I was unable to quite describe in a post a while back about seeing him read. He is a very old-fashioned hard-nosed guy, a newspaper man. He's got a great sense of humor too. They sort of gloss over it in the article, but I think it's pretty remarkable that he's driving himself around the country for this book tour. He clearly enjoys doing that sort of thing. I do, however, happen to disagree with the remarks he makes about Stephen King and the American reading public. King himself admits that he has written several clunkers along the way, but he has also written some astoundingly good books that, given a little perspective years from now, will be thought of as some of the best books of our era. I know it's a bold statement, but think about how good The Stand, It, and The Shining are (just to pick a few of the many good books he's written). Just because he sells as many or more books than Tom Clancy or John Grisham doesn't mean he writes at their level. I also disagree with this: "The winner of a National Book Award argued that the reason John Grisham and James Patterson novels are so popular 'has something to do with our lack of attention span.'" Dexter mentioned this at the reading I attended with unironic and grave concern. It's true that millions of people read books by those authors, but I don't think that it's due to a lack of attention span. My theory is that people read the same types of formulaic books over and over again because it is comfortable. The vast majority of the people out there lead busy, stressful lives and they read for fun and for an escape. They don't have time to browse endlessly at bookstores seeking out a hidden gem. They don't want to risk buying a book that is unknown to them and that might not serve their needs, when there is a shelf full of books that they know with certainty will give them what they need. A lot of these same people would gladly be more adventurous readers if their lives permitted it, they just don't have the time or the money to support it. This is why all those polemical right-wing and left-wing books do so well even though they bring no new discussions to the table. This is why Jerry Bruckheimer movies do so well. It is an unfortunate fact that our modern lives do not typically leave room for the adventurous consumption of creativity, and to say that people consume all this stuff that is "bad" because they are deficient in some way misses the point entirely. (I know I made essentially the same point in a post last week, but I've had this idea on my mind a lot lately).
New from Michael Cunningham
Michael Cunningham's follow up to his wildly popular novel, The Hours will be out this June. The trilogy of long short stories is called Specimen Days. Though set in different historical eras, each of the stories, according to publisher FSG, centers around "a young boy, an older man, and a young woman." As with The Hours, Scott Rudin is already signed on to bring the book to the silver screen.
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Pynchon by Way of ‘Sally Forth’
Readers of the Sunday funnies may have spotted an odd juxtaposition somewhere between "Garfield" and "Beetle Bailey" this morning. "Sally Forth" writer Ces Marciuliano has reimagined the opening lines of Pynchon's postmodern classic Gravity's Rainbow as a baseball-themed essay by grade-schooler Hilary. We will be running an essay here on literary mashups tomorrow, but this has to be one of the stranger intersections - the banality of the comics page, crossed with one of the more famously challenging novels in history. What a goofy, subversive thing to do.See Also: Pynchon fans, Inherent Vice drops in just a week.[Image and link via Ces Marciuliano]
Animated Jonathans
The Simpsons will feature some literary heavyweights this season: "Upcoming guest voices include famed authors Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal, Michael Chabon and Jonathan Franzen." (via Emdashes)
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