The Guardian‘s Books Blog is hosting a tournament to determine “The Great American Novelist,” and the list of the final 32 seeded contenders, as voted by the site’s readers, is enough to raise some eyebrows—not as much for who did make the cut as for who didn’t. Guardian readers, haven’t you heard of Richard Yates?
The Great American Novelist
Bent Relics of Adolescence
Don DeLillo has a new short story in The New Yorker, about a teenage boy in the midst of his parents’ divorce. Delillo spoke with Deborah Treisman about the character’s obsession with words and how he sees his identity in light of his parents’.
NowTrends Now Digital
Karl Taro Greenfeld‘s story collection, NowTrends, is out this week. For a sample of Greenfeld’s writing, I recommend checking out “Tincture — Part One” at Five Chapters. It’s also worth noting that several other Short Flight / Long Drive books, such as Adam Novy‘s excellent Avian Gospels, are now available as e-books for the first time.
Matt Steinglass Contra Katie Roiphe
According to the title of Matt Steinglass‘ new essay (a qualified rebuttal of Katie Roiphe‘s recent piece “The Naked and the Conflicted“), “Today’s Male Novelists Do Write Exuberant Sex Scenes, But Mostly Lesbian Ones“
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“My name is Geoff Dyer and I endorse this.”
Geoff Dyer endorses Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station , John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead –our own Bill Morris loves it too!–and a generalized aversion toward seafood in his interview with Morten Høi Jensen for Book Forum. While they ostensibly met to talk about Zona–reviewed on The Millions here–it’s perhaps unsurprising that they managed to digress so liberally: “we chatted about his review of Richard Bradford’s Martin Amis: the Biography, and by the end he was giving me advice about which David Markson book I should read first. Our interview, in other words, assumed the shape of a Geoff Dyer book.”
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The 80-page Rule
How do you know if the book you’re writing is going to fly or flop? Try writing the first 80 pages without worrying about the outcome as Meg Wolitzer does. “Eighty pages is enough pages for a writer to feel she’s accomplished something, but it’s not so many pages that, if she decides to put aside the book, she’ll feel as if she’s wasted her life,” she told the Daily Beast for its “How I Write” series. It must work because we loved The Interestings.
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Hayao Miyazaki Retires
Renowned filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki recently announced his retirement, and noted that his forthcoming film The Wind Rises will be his last. In honor of his storytelling legacy, TheLittlePrince.com dug up an old list of the animator’s 50 favorite books.
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Just to be clear – the 32 shortlisted authors were chosen by the guy running the “tournament”. Readers are supposed to vote on the match-ups he has created. There was a discussion about who should be in the 32 but he made the final call.
Yes, the omission of Yates strikes me as egregious as well, but then the whole idea is pretty silly. Writer matchups (see also: Tournament of Books) are even more ridiculous then prize shortlists.
What, No Mailer?!!!!!!
No Fitzgerald, either.
Mailer (and Capote) were excluded on the basis that their non-fiction is inadmissable. Hence neither has the tournament creator’s required “4 strong novels” to compete thru all the proposed rounds.
I did say already that it’s a ridiculous exercise….
Fitzgerald is there, but he’s not a “seed” for some reason.