Pete Dexter has been in the news around here lately, and keeping that ball rolling, I’ve contributed a piece to The Rumpus series “The Last Book I Loved” about Dexter’s collection of columns, Paper Trails. Technically, it’s not the last book I’ve loved (more recently there’s been Waiting for the Barbarians, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Shadow Country, A Mercy, and a few others), so let’s just call it “One of the Last Books I Loved.”
Appearing Elsewhere
Spring Training
As the baseball season gets underway, it looks like this summer’s big off-the-field story will be steroid use. (More serious allegations are beginning to surface as the San Francisco Chronicle reports that federal investigators were told Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, and Gary Sheffield all received performance enhancing drugs from a lab that is currently under investigation.) But last year’s story, the fallout from Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, still has legs. The March 1st issue of Sports Illustrated (on newsstands last week) contains a vociferous epilogue to Moneyball in which Lewis catalogs some of the more outrageous responses that his book received from baseball insiders. He takes to task particularly egregious offenders, like Joe Morgan, for continuing to dismiss the book out of hand. It’s a must read for anyone who was swept up in last summer’s Moneyball furor.
Tonight on 4th Avenue: Samantha Hunt and Alex Rose
Tonight’s installment of the Pacific Standard Fiction Series here in Brooklyn features Samantha Hunt, author of The Invention of Everything Else, and Alex Rose, author of The Musical Illusionist. Both books feature inventors working at the turn of the last century, and so “invention” is the night’s theme. Books will be for sale on-site, and drink specials will be chosen by dartboard. The reading starts at 7 p.m. Hope to see you there! (For more information, see Time Out.)
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List envy
The New York Times whipped bloggers and readers into a frenzy with its linkbait list of the best books of the last 25 years along with A.O. Scott’s voluminous essay on the “great American novel.” The reasons why this list is silly and flawed have been discussed on a number of blogs – the panel of judges skewed male and boring, the timeframe and criteria are arbitrary, etc. What amused me about the list was that the Times made such a big production of it – with a panel at BEA, a press release, and, of course, Scott’s giant essay. It’s like the Times didn’t realize that such lists are standard filler at glossy magazines. Was the Times’ best fiction list all that different from People Magazine’s annual “Most Beautiful People” list? No, not really.The Austin American-Statesman was similarly bemused by the Times list and so it put together its own list using the Times list as fodder. It asked academics and critics to name the “most overrated” books on the Times list. The resulting comments from their judges are both thoughtful and funny. And for those of you scoring at home, the most overrated books on the Times list are A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole and Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.
The Artist’s Exit: A Postscript to Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present
Abramović has spoken many times about how her duration pieces have the capacity transform both herself and the viewer. But I also wonder if the interactive and ever-changing nature of the piece influenced the popularity of the performance, which by the end had become a media phenomenon.
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Harry Potter Mania Flickers On
J.K. Rowling’s slow, inexorable slide out of retirement continues. As we noted a couple of months ago, “For someone who’s not writing any more books about Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling sure is doing a lot of dabbling.”Earlier this year, we wrote about one of Rowling’s post-retirement dabblings, the production of seven handmade copies of Beedle the Bard, a book of “wizarding fairy tales” referred to in the Harry Potter series. Amazon spent $4 million on a copy, and then used it to market a writing contest. Part of the prize, incidentally, was the opportunity “to spend a weekend with the rare and delightful book of fairy tales (security guards included, of course).”Now that prize doesn’t look quite so exclusive, as Bloomsbury and Scholastic have made an edition the book available for the masses for just $7.59 and arriving in early December, just in time for the holidays. Amazon is going one further, offering up to 100,000 pricier facsimile “collector’s editions,” with “a reproduction of J.K. Rowling’s handwritten introduction, metalwork and clasp, and replica gemstones,” as well as various other accouterments.All net proceeds go to a charity co-founded by Rowling.
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Public Radio Roundup
I listen to a lot of Public Radio, perhaps too much. And while I probably shouldn’t be scheduling my days around radio shows devoted to cooking or news quizzes, there are some Public Radio personalities that do deserve my devotion (and you probably yours too.) One of these is Ira Glass, host of This American Life. Glass was recently in the news for his vocal protests of FCC crackdowns. In this essay from the New York Times Magazine he takes up for Howard Stern and criticizes the absurdity at the center of the decency battle. And the Houston Chronicle explains that Glass isn’t just a public radio host, he’s also a sex symbol. Often considered one of the funniest voices on radio, David Sedaris is a frequent contributor to This American Life. His fans are already clamoring for his latest book due out this June. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, another of Sedaris’ collections of humorous, autobiographical essays, is previewed here in the Sydney Star Observer. And then there is Terry Gross, master interviewer and host of the long running show Fresh Air. A collection of Gross’ famous interviews will be coming out this fall, titled All I Did Was Ask. Here’s an interview with the queen of interviewers at the Detroit Free Press.
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Those early Coetzee novels are just amazing. "The Life and Times of Michael K." also devastating.