It looks like Jonathan Safran Foer will be publishing his first novel in eleven years next fall. The book, tentatively titled Here I Am, is the story of an American Jewish family, set against a background of traumatic events in the Middle East including earthquakes and an invasion of Israel. Foer’s last novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, enjoyed tremendous critical and commercial success. Here’s a piece on JSF’s crazy, confusing, die-cut book Tree of Codes.
Extremely Patient and Incredibly Careful
Interview With a Bookseller
“We have a customer who eats Bibles. She’s very nice, but she will walk up to a section, rip out a page, and eat it. She much prefers Catholic versions—she won’t touch King James Bibles.” This interview with the owner of Brattle Book Shop in Boston illustrates the peculiar idiosyncrasies of daily bookstore life. For all you romantics out there, here is a love letter to the brick-and-mortar bookstore.
An Issue of Perspective
Sure, male journalists are generally not the best when it comes to writing about women, but things have gotten better in the last few years, right? Maybe not.
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Yankee Spinach Foxtrot
Wilco appeared in a Popeye comic strip, and they also released an animated music video featuring the sailor, Olive Oyl, and Bluto.
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Short Story Shop Talk
Robert Birnbaum and Tobias Wolff talk short stories and other topics at The Morning News. Wolff: “Somebody once described the novel as a prose narrative of a certain length that has something wrong with it. I can think of a few novels that seem to have nothing wrong with them at all, but I can think of a lot more short stories that seem to me to be perfect.”
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Advice From The Hoary
“Me? He wants me to give him advice? But why? I still have no idea what I am doing. Then I realized that I did, at least, have eight more years of a writing practice that had run in tandem with a life of odd jobs, graduate school, starting a business, traveling, etc. I thought about an anecdote my friend Daniel once told me about what happened when Ian McEwan was asked to give advice to a young writer just starting out. He simply said, ‘Be successful.’” Catherine Lacey gives advice to a not-much-younger writer.
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Charlie Sheen’s Poetry
It was probably inevitable that someone would turn the ravings of Charlie Sheen into found poetry. But unlike similar collections “by” Donald Rumsfeld and Rod Blagojevich, this one offers us the opportunity to compare it to the real thing – Sheen’s early ’90s chef d’oeuvre, A Peace of My Mind.
Our most insufferable novelist strikes again! Apparently he is taking a break from crafting masterpieces on the side of fast food cups and lecture-shaming people who like burgers to focus on his first love: pretentious, preposterous fiction. Hey, perhaps he will figure out a way to reduce the long bloody history of the Middle East into a cutesy flip book like he did for 9/11! That would be so precious.
Seriously, why do sites like the Millions prop up writers like this? “Tremendous critical success”? That book was excoriated. It’s perhaps the worst book of the millennium. I repeat: It ends with a fucking flip book depicting someone falling from the towers on 9/11. The polite, whitewashed lit culture of today is really wreaking havoc on the quality of our literature. I suppose, like anything, it’s about money: J4 sells, so the Millions covers him so it can sell ads. Sigh. Quality is an afterthought these days; first and foremost concern is keeping the machine well-oiled and profitable.
The Millions used to be good but now it’s barely more than a PR extension of the buttoned-up corporate publishing industry. Another one bites the dust…see ya!
I dunno, I really like Everything is Illuminated, scenes from which stay with me years later. Haven’t read the others so can’t speak to them, but I found him to be funny, touching, and very readable in my o book sampling. Different strokes, I guess.