Author: bythefirelight

55 Year-Old Publishes First Novel After Years of Rejections

~ bythefirelight

I always enjoy these stories because they are, one so American–it is never too late to start; two give one hope that eventually you may get published; and three dispense with that tired notion of the best author under x. While I may never read his book, it is a nice success story, as is that of his teacher who got her PhD at 56.

Then, a few years ago, he tagged along to a college class with his daughter Katie (who wants to be  a writer, too) and enjoyed it so much that he decided to go back to school himself, and enrolled in an MFA program at Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y., not far from where he lives. “I didn’t care about the degree,” he says, “but I wanted to get some feedback on my writing other than, ‘Thanks, not for us.’ ” For an assignment in a novel-writing course, a character he based on a crotchety older neighbor gradually grew into Bill Warrington, who, when he realizes he’s losing his faculties, takes his 15-year-old granddaughter on a cross-country trip he hopes will force a family reconciliation before he loses the ability to remember it.

…
Sometimes, he recalls, when it felt like his dream would never be any more than that, he’d think about the dear friend we had in common — our college writing teacher, Elizabeth Christman, who when she was 52 quit her day job and went back to school to get her doctorate and begin a teaching career. She died this winter, at 96, and at her funeral in St. Louis, I learned that when she’d arrived at the University of Notre Dame, she was the same age as the professor whose retirement had created the opening she was filling.

Don’t Trust the Imagination? Maybe You Don’t Have One

~ bythefirelight

I was listening to Griel Marcus talk about his new book on Van Morrison (something I’ll never read) and he said he had little interest in the biographic details of an artist. He felt that there are too many people who what to explain a work by the experiences the author has had, as if that were the sum of her art. Then he quoted John Nichols who had told him, those who don’t trust the imagination, don’t have one (paraphrases all). When I heard that two thoughts came together, one revolving around those who take the biographic details as explanation, and those who, like David Shields, suggest fiction has died and there is nothing left to say. While these are two types of people the ideas they share are similar: namely, that we have exhausted or are incapable of imaginative ideas.

For the first group I’m lenient. They don’t trade in imagination and may not be accustomed to use it in the way a writer does. My favorite example was a conversation I’d had about Coleridge’s Kubla Kahan. My debating partner held that it was the laudanum that had made the poem possible, what with all of its mystical and exotic illusions. But that is a simplistic read, at best, and removes any agency from Coleridge. Moreover, it projects a fact, Laudanum, along with a myth that drug use creates fantastical experiences that translate into good writing, and rewrites his story using some stereotype from the 60s. The need to explain, and not appreciate the work for itself, creates a pat and unimaginative read that suggests no work of the imagination is really the imagination.Of course, there are plenty of cases where the writer’s work is full of the personal, but the expectation that the writer is always mirroring her own life is limiting.

On the other hand, we have David Shields whose Reality Hunger posits the decline of fiction and the modes of story telling that fiction has come to server. It is only through nonfiction can we address our world. While nonfiction is written with imagination, the idea that only nonfiction is possible is a little unimaginative. What it really suggest is David Shields is unable to imagine new stories. It is hard to write and can happen to the best of writers. Tto say that the naturalistic novel that used to be the home of social criticism has out lived its usefulness, is one thing, but to say there is no where to go suggests the same mistake my conversation partner made: fiction is just a copy of reality. The naturalistic novels may not work anymore, but that doesn’t mean game’s up. Culture is too fluid, and the novel (which is really Shields’ target) is too young, as is the mass culture we now know and has been growing for the last 150 years or so, almost following the life of the novel (as it is commonly thought of).

I don’t know what the new thing, but it will be imaginative, not just another memoir. I think Steven Moore’s book The Novel An Alternative History offers an interesting antidote to Shields. Moore who is a lover of the strange has put together a history of novels that don’t fit the naturalistic tradition. There have been many of them, as Moore tells it, starting with the Greeks and Romans and on up to Cervantes (where his current book ends). What I find intriguing about these books is they weren’t attempts to describe reality per say, but an opening of the imagination. And more importantly, they weren’t tied to a centuries long tradition. While Moore loves the strange, his book is a solid counterpoint to Shields: why does fiction have to be reality? To me, history, a form of reality, although one Shields should understand is constructed, is a great form, but it doesn’t substitute for other forms of thinking, of using the imagination.

Ultimately, it is tempting to find explanations in reality, because they make things seem approachable, manageable, even rational. However, questioning that reality, not addressing it can be just as important as digging deeper into it. Hopefully, I’ll never say the ludicrous nonsense that Henry Rollins did when I saw him once: there will never be another musical genius. He was referring to Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix, but all he was really doing was admitting is that he had given up. It is a sat fate.

Mis días en Shanghai – The Writings of the Late Aura Estrada

~ bythefirelight

Metapolitica (via @ezrafitz) has a beautiful review of the late Aura Estrada’s most recent book. Most of you probably don’t know who she is because she was killed while swimming on the Pacific coast of Mexico at the young age of 30. She was one of the authors in Zoetrope’s recent Latin American literature issue a while back that I really enjoyed and was interested in seeing more from, only to be shocked that she was no longer with us. Meapolitica has reviewed a collection of her unpublished work that she had been working on when she died and the review is good, if not sad. Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, it is in Spanish and I fear her work will never come to English, but I offer a Google Translate for you perusal.

Pop manners, fantastic tales, told with a loose scenes prose and plain amazing detailed reliefs, reflections of an author that his teachers wanted in the way personal, sudden fictions that do not end in his few lines of length I think the main virtues that attracted me writing are, first, his prose. The writer did not give breaks or permits: each paragraph focuses at least a surprise and a reason to continue to share the observations of a witness sharp a narrator who does not waste his time nor the reader, and attacks: direct observation is smart, play seductive, mystery without falsifications “, capable of creating the need to follow the zigzag lines that prey on human experiences. The second is his sense of humor The narrative of our country dressed in black, navy blue, when the day is clearing. Aura ibargüengoitiana had a vein that would be wrong to conserve and value our letters. The author disarms social conventions, the currency of the commonplaces of life social rules, so familiar, prejudices, to introduce the thin side of our certainties: a smiling, laughing with his critical eye, the acid comments, jokes that complemented their stories illustrated, where no one goes unscathed tragicomedies This ability to lighten the solemn and bitter. His unique sense of humor.

Costumbrismo pop, relatos fantásticos, escenas sueltas narradas con una prosa de relieves sorprendentes y planicies detalladas, reflexiones de una autora que buscaba en sus maestros el camino personal, ficciones repentinas que no se agotan en sus escasas líneas de duración. Me parece que las principales virtudes con que esta escritura me sedujo son, en primer lugar, su prosa. La escritora no se daba descansos ni permisos: cada párrafo concentra al menos una sorpresa y un motivo para continuar compartiendo las observaciones de un testigo agudo, un narrador que no desperdicia su tiempo ni el del lector —y ataca: va directo a la observación inteligente, al juego seductor, al misterio sin falseos—, capaz de crear la necesidad de seguir los zigzag con que sus líneas apresan las experiencias humanas. La segunda es su sentido del humor. La narrativa de nuestro país viste de negro —de azul marino, cuando el día es claro—. Aura poseía una vena ibargüengoitiana que no le vendría mal a nuestras letras conservar y valorar. La autora desarma las convenciones sociales, la moneda corriente de los lugares comunes de la vida, las reglas sociales, lo consabido, los prejuicios, para presentarnos el lado más delgado de nuestras certidumbres: uno sonríe, se ríe con su mirada crítica, el comentario ácido, la burla ilustrada que contrapuntea sus historias, tragicomedias donde nadie sale ileso. Esa capacidad de aligerar lo solemne y lo amargo. Su sentido del humor único.

Seattle’s Fantagraphics and Rosebud Archives reclaim vintage comics Via Seattle Times

~ bythefirelight

The Seattle Times’ book blog has a good article about Fantagraphics new series of reprints of the Rosebud archives, which contains many early American works that helped define the genre. The drawings are beautiful and have an attention to detail that seemed to disappear during the golden age of comics. There is a reason I don’t go to the Fantagraphics shop too often, which is just down the road from me. I’d end up buying too many books. But a trip to their site is worth while.

Now Marschall’s company, Rosebud Archives, and Fantagraphics have formed a joint publishing enterprise that will draw from Marschall’s immense collection, reclaiming the work of the great 20th-century magazine and newspaper artists for the 21st-century public.

The Fantagraphics website is already a portal to Rosebud’s collection of prints, posters, framed art, books, and stationery. Later this year Fantagraphics will issue the first book in a new imprint, Marschall Books — forthcoming volumes include a compendium of cartoon advertising, a book devoted to Johnny Gruelle’s lost masterpiece Mr. Twee Deedle, a book on Krazy Kat and a volume devoted to Sherlock Holmes illustrations and art.

Michigan resident Marschall and his partner, preservation expert Jon Barli, have complete runs of newspapers and magazines to draw from (some rescued from the trash bin). An entire run of Vanity Fair magazine from 1913 to 1936; Harper’s Weeklies from the Civil War years; New York Herald Sunday Color comics 1894-1911; a mostly complete collection of Puck Magazine from 1877 to 1918.

Anis Shivani’s 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Authors: Has BR Myers Been Cloned?

~ bythefirelight

Anis Shivani published a piece this weekend in the Huffington Post on the most over rated contemporary American authors and considering the comments, retweets, and likes he has hit a nerve (although the internet is one big nerve so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised). He made some good points, and half his list was poetry, which is good to see since it gets so little play although I seldom read it, but like many lists it suffers from brevity and contextualessness, in other words, examples are pulled out of no where. I waiting for the examples of the good writing before I pass judgment, something the author has said is coming. He certainly is unwilling to pull his punches, although some of them are borrowed from other critics. What he keeps coming back to, though, is moral fiction. However, it isn’t quite clear what he means. Again, a positive example would help. Moral fiction so easily smacks of religious tracks, such as the Pilgrims Progress, or good-for-you works like To Kill a Mocking Bird. Sure there is Dostoevsky, but that was then when everyone was worried about morality. This is an anti-moral age, so how does moral fiction fit in there? I, of course agreed with his list of early 20th century quality (Anderson, Hemingway, Cather, Wharton, Okada), but is what I like. It still doesn’t get me to a moral fiction, what ever that is. I’m curious how My Antonia fits in there, too. For what ever his reasoning, his take downs, at least use better examples: Okada instead of Tan was one of my favorites. I didn’t agree with him on the Junot Diaz. I think he was a little to heavy handed. There is a difference between narrative voice and silly parroting of cliches, and I think Diaz avoided them.

The ascent of creative writing programs means that few with critical ability have any incentive to rock the boat–awards and jobs may be held back in retaliation. The writing programs embody a philosophy of neutered multiculturalism/political correctness; as long as writers play by the rules (no threatening history or politics), there’s no incentive to call them out. (A politically fecund multiculturalism–very desirable in this time of xenophobia–is the farthest thing from the minds of the official arbiters: such writing would be deemed “dangerous,” and never have a chance against the mediocrities.)

The MFA writing system, with its mechanisms of circulating popularity and fashionableness, leans heavily on the easily imitable. Cloying writers like Denis Johnson, Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, Aimee Bender, and Charles D’Ambrosio are held up as models of good writing, because they’re easy enough to copy. And copied they are, in tens of thousands of stories manufactured in workshops. Others hide behind a smokescreen of unreadable inimitability–Marilynne Robinson, for example–to maintain a necessary barrier between the masses and the overlords. Since grants, awards, and residencies are controlled by the same inbreeding group, it’s difficult to see how the designated heavies can be displaced.

As for conglomerate publishing, the decision-makers wouldn’t know great literature if it hit them in the face. Their new alliance with the MFA writing system is bringing at least a minimum of readership for mediocre books, and they’re happy with that. And the mainstream reviewing establishment (which is crumbling by the minute) validates their choices with fatuous accolades, recruiting mediocre writers to blurb (review) them.

If we don’t understand bad writing, we can’t understand good writing. Bad writing is characterized by obfuscation, showboating, narcissism, lack of a moral core, and style over substance. Good writing is exactly the opposite. Bad writing draws attention to the writer himself. These writers have betrayed the legacy of modernism, not to mention postmodernism. They are uneasy with mortality. On the great issues of the day they are silent (especially when they seem to address them, like William T. Vollmann). They desire to be politically irrelevant, and they have succeeded. They are the unreadable Booth Tarkingtons, Joseph Hergesheimers, and John Herseys of our time, earnestly bringing up the rear.

I love the last sentence because it is so obscure. If it wasn’t for Hollywood’s late 30s early 40s obsession for Tarkington I’d have no idea who he was (Magnificent Ambersons, Pen Rod, Treasure of the Sierra Madre).

Lit Podcasts for 8/8/10 – Henry Roth, Steven Moore, Henry Green, Rick Moody

~ bythefirelight

And a couple from Scott at Conversational Reading:

Little by little over the past few months I’ve been listening to the 45C English classes of UC Berkeley professors John Bishop and Charles Altieri. They’re quite good and you too can listen to them on iTunes U via the links.

The classes deal with modernism in English literature, starting with the poets (Dickinson, Hardy, Pound, Yeats, etc) and moving on to the novelists (James, Hemingway, Conrad, Woolf, etc), and they’re extremely entertaining and informative. So much so, in fact, that I was disappointed to see that as I’ve now moved on to 45B it appears that Cal is only offering Altieri’s lectures and not Bishop’s as well.

Someone should attempt to rectify that, as the two men are ideal foils for one another. Altieri delivers with a lovable Woody Allen, schizoid New Yorker style (although I see no reason to believe he’d treat the young ladies in his class as Allen would), whereas Bishop utilizes an incredibly dense stream of monotone. (Indeed, you have not lived until you hear the latter ironically quip, “If you know what I mean and I think you do.”) And of course, given that this is modernism and a good 2/3 of the authors have stifled sex lives that are all over their works, the virtues of each’s delivery are only more pronounced.

But to be serious for a moment, these are great lectures. Download them to your iPod and enjoy them on your commute to and from work.

Controversy: Isabel Allende and the National Prize for Literature

~ bythefirelight

Perhaps it wouldn’t be much of a surprise to anyone who follows Latin American literature that there would be some controversy about Isabel Allende and Chile’s National Prize for Literature. I haven’t heard a kind word for her in a while, usually it is wrapped up in criticisms of popularity, but none of her recent books have really interested me. She doesn’t have to spend all her time writing magical realism, but I just don’t trust her when she writes about the US. Global Voices has a quick run down on some of the chatter that is accompanying her nomination. You can decide if it is petty or warranted.

Isabel Allende, author of The House of Spirits and the recently published Island Beneath the Sea, among other novels, is one of the best-known and most-read Latin American writers. This year, she is a candidate for the Chilean National Prize for Literature, a prize given by the government, the Ministry of Education, and the National Council of Culture and the Arts. Her candidacy has sparked debate among literature critics, writers, and average Chilean citizens.

Isabel Allende was born in Peru while her father worked there as a diplomat; her father’s cousin was Salvador Allende, the president who was ousted by a coup d’état led by Augusto Pinochet in 1973. Isabel Allende now lives in California. As reported by the Latin American Herald Tribune, “Her books have been translated into more than two-dozen languages and 51 million copies of her novels have been sold.” However, some critics, and even some readers, think her popularity is not enough reason to give her the prize.

Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Peron Books Reviewed at Book Slut

~ bythefirelight

Jesse Tangen-Mills has a review of three of  Tomás Eloy Martínez’s books, Saint Evita, The Novel of Peron, and the Tango Singer at Book Slut. He gives a good overview of the books, ones I should have read some time ago, especially since I own a copy of the Novel of Peron in Spanish. Both of the Peron novels are intriguing approaches to story telling. He gave an interesting interview here where he discussed some of what he wanted to do with the books.

His first attempt, The Perón Novel, took him thirty years to complete, and took me nearly six months to find. Big Spanish-language publishing houses have bases in more than one country, certainly in the biggies like Mexico and Argentina. The really big publishing houses have a base in every country in South America, and publish roughly a dozen autóctonos novels in each country, that will only be sold within that nation. The Argentine novelist, and contemporary of Martínez, Ricardo Piglia recently described it as “the Balkanization of literature in Spanish.” A less brilliant mind might just say it sucks. Every bookseller I spoke to in Colombia had read the novel, but didn’t have it. The translation was much easier to get used. In the end, I decided to read a bootleg version first (bootleg PDFs abound in Spanish) on my grime-covered laptop, before turning to the translation.

I didn’t mind starting The Perón Novel on a laptop because it was as good as I had expected, although I should warn the the reader that despite the straightforward prose with which the novel is written, without a good foundation in Argentine history, the book’s plot — and its many unbelievable characters — will be confusing. So before I get into the novel, I need to provide some background. Perón was what no American president has ever been, but always promises to be: bipartisan. He’s a Fascist-socialist-dictator-populist. And depending on who you ask, he is all or none of those labels. He’s Mussolini, an orator he greatly admired; he’s Lenin. His second wife was Evita, Miss “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” until her death in 1952 (Martínez devotes another novel, Santa Evita, to her). Then in 1955, Pedro Eugenio Aramburu led a coup, and Perón was forced into exile for nearly twenty years. And then one day he came back. That’s where this novel begins.

It should be said that Martínez never intended these books to be nonfiction. He was adamant about that. He said it was fiction correcting the so-called “truth.” The entire book, in fact, reconstructs the arrival of Perón to Argentina and the mayhem that followed. The whole historical cast is here: José López Rega, astrologist, maniac, the Iago to Perón’s Othello; Isabel Martínez de Perón, who is also a star-reader; the dictator Aramburu’s guerrilla assassins for whom Perón is like Trotsky; the counter-insurgent Archangel, a poor boy trained in the art of taking abuse. I’m not sure if that last one is real, and all of them appear to be fictional. Astrology? Really? Yes? It’s all quite unbelievable.

The State of the Argentinean E-book Market at Publishing Perspectives

~ bythefirelight

Publishing Perspectives has an overview of the Argentine e-book market which even if you don’t care much about e-books explains why Latin America can tire of Spain’s imprint in its culture. You would think it would be easy to get Spanish language books from any Spanish speaking author in Latin America, but it is far from the reality. This exists some what between the US and the UK, but no where near this level.  It is over stating the issue to say the Spanish Empire still exists, but for some it can feel that way.

In spite of this sorry situation, publishers have started to realize, mainly because of the news coming from the U.S. and Europe, that e-books will eventually rule their business. That is one of the reasons why in late 2009 the Argentinean Book Chamber commissioned a piece of research with the goal of putting forward solutions for the digitization challenge. Although the final report was very inspiring, to date there has been no further collective initiatives, and the publishing sector has remained pretty much in the same spot where it was last year.

Truth be told, we could say that publishers in Argentina seem to envisage the digital age more with panic than with eagerness, which explains why no traditional company has made any real effort to take advantage of this new era. As a matter of fact, this attitude is not imprudent at all, since, in my view, migration from analog to digital in the Argentinean book market will be far from simple. Let’s first think of the typical family business, run by a senior publisher who is helped by his sons and even by his grandsons. Who will be able to talk the old man into getting rid of the warehouse, hiring programmers, buying software licenses and so on? And who, once again, will persuade him of the importance of digitizing, converting to EPUB and distributing the whole backlist online, when there are other more pressing matters, such as paying the rent, salaries and other expenses?

Apart from small and medium sized companies managed like family businesses, we also find resistance among big publishing houses. So far, their refusal to fully embrace the digital age stems from their fear against piracy: how would they protect their titles if PDFs start to wander around the web with no control whatsoever? On the other hand, big Argentinean publishing companies generally are the local branch of a much bigger corporation whose headquarters are located in the U.S. or in Europe, mainly in Spain. And because of their particular structure, major publishing houses in Argentina willing to experiment with new technologies are forced to wait until the head office abroad allows them to do so, a process that can be slow and thus discouraging. Recently, the main Spanish publishing companies decided to launch their own site together with their branches all over Latin America, a move that has fueled fierce debates and which, in my view, is not going to be successful.

Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco a Review

~ bythefirelight ~ 2 Comments

Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado is at heart a first novel, one that for its complexity and style, is still a personal novel that is both a search for the author’s past and his future in literary and personal terms. While the book is not an autobiographical novel as such and the Miguel Syjuco character is not really Miguel Syjuco the author, from his interviews and in a book presentation I saw, it is obvious that Miguel Syjuco the author has added a strong autobiographic element. Even for a reader who doesn’t know much about Syjuco it is obvious he hasn’t let go of the first novel elements: the tendency to justify one’s self; the need to explain one’s passions as if they’d occurred to just you. In Ilustrado this shows itself in conversations about the nature of Philippine writing. In a recent interview he said he wanted to move away from the topical writing that talks of nouns the color of tamrind or mango. It is a laudable goal, but in practice the conversation the characters have about writing, the nature of being a writer, how one survives on writing, are the same ones all writers have. He achieves some of these goals in his writing and it is unfortunate he had to articulate them in such an overt manner since it distracts from the rest of the book.

Despite its fragmentary nature, though, Ilustrado does hold together well. Ostensibly, Ilustrado is the search for an explanation to Philippine author Crispen Salvador’s death. What the book really is, is an examination of modern Philippine life, from serious in its political unrest and corruption to the light with its jokes, all of it mixed with history, both real and imagined, that paints the a picture of a dysfunctional country always on the edge of revolution, unable to free itself from corruption and colonial history. Syjuco is particularly hard on the upper classes who buy and sell elected office as if it were a birthright. Miguel Syjuco the character has attempted to escape from them to New York and the tension he feels between their democratic statements and their authoritarian tactics give the book an undercurrent of anger. In Crispen Salvador, Syjuco creates a character that is a nationalist, but also anti-establishment, which gives him an opportunity to delve into the recent past and show some of the movements against the Marcos regime. On the face of it Salvador would be a great hero, but he is also a writer and he makes the continual mistake, at least in the eyes of many in the Philippines, of pointing out the flaws with the Philippines. Yet both characters are unable to escape the need to return, whether physically or in writing, to the Philippines and they find themselves as both frustrated by the long history of corruption and still hoping they can change things. The tension between the expatriate intellectual and those in the home country is what Syjuco does best and the novel opens up Philippine history to new readers. It is only when he mixes in the autobiographical that the book slows down.

Much has been made of his technique, a pastiche of narrative, jokes, history, and excerpts from Salvador’s writing. Taken in its totality it is effective in giving readers a sense of the country, but the experience of reading it can be a little exasperating. You need to have faith that all the elements will tie together, even if some seem completely out of context. At times, the structure seems more a trick than a fully developed element, especially as the story comes to a conclusion and  Miguel Syjuco’s sections grow in length as his story begins to unfold.

Regardless of these problems, Ilustrado is a good first novel and one that, despite its annoyances, suggests good things to come.

Listen to an interview with him at the World Books podcast.

Interview with Borges Translator Suzanne Jill Levine

~ bythefirelight

3 Quarks Daily has the transcript of an interview with Suzanne Jill Levine about Jorge Luis Borges. It is a lengthy interview and worth a look. It goes beyond his stories and talks about his non fiction works, something that he is not necessarily well known for in the US. You can also listen to the interview here.

In the nonfiction in these collections, are these a different Borges than you see in the fictions, or is it all of a piece, to your mind?

Both are true. In some ways, in order to understand, truly, his fictions, you have to look at his nonfiction work as well as his poetry to see where this language is coming from, where these ideas are coming from. What we wanted to do was bring forth to the reader not only the Borges they already know, but also expand their concept of who Borges is. For example, On Argentina is an aspect completely missing from the Selected Nonfictions, which is a wonderful volume. It’s just that that volume wanted to capture, let’s say, a more universal, international, and maybe more Anglo-oriented Borges.

But On Argentina shows you how Argentine Borges was. This really is a revelation. You understand how committed he was, politically, socially, culturally, to his particular country. That’s a part that many people aren’t aware of. It gives them insights they wouldn’t otherwise have about his fictions.

It is kind of, I don’t know if “fraught relationship” is the right term, he has with Argentina. It’s one that develops. You can flip through this book and see change: he’s come more to terms with Argentina. What was the process of his point of view on his country? He didn’t seem to like it very much early on, and at the end he’s still saying, “Here are the things we can’t do in Argentina,” but he’s matured.

It’s a very complex relationship. For me to sum up the history of Argentina and Borges’ ideas on it would be very ambitious, and probably wouldn’t work as well as the reader just picking up this lovely volume and reading the brilliant introduction by Alfred MacAdam, which does tell the story very well, as well as the essays themselves. He loved this culture, but was very pained by limitations, by a sense of a a lack of civic-mindedness, of a lack of, let’s say, political development. In other words, he saw it as a culture that was very rich, but, unfortunately, a country that was in the hands of, as he said, “gangsters.”

Naturally, at the time he was writing, regionalism was a very big movement. It really was a continuation of good old-fashioned European naturalism and realism. He wanted Argentina to find its own voice. He didn’t want writers to feel they had to write about certain subjects in a certain way. The fact of being Argentine was, whatever they wrote, it would be Argentine. This concept of identity was shocking, refreshing, and makes total sense.

Lit Podcasts for 7/29/10: Hans Fallada, Suzzane Jill Levine, Sefi Atta

~ bythefirelight

New Edition of Classic /Beer in the Snooker Club

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Arabic Literature (In English) reports that a new edition of Beer in the Snooker Club is coming out in December. What little I know about it sounds interesting.

I was surprised to see Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club on Kotob Khan’s June bestseller list. After all, the book was originally published in 1964, and I hadn’t heard anything about Ghali in the news that might cause a run on this classic book.

Other books on the bestseller list are more easily explicable: Bilal Fadl’s hot A Chagrined Laugh, the Arabic Booker-winning Azazeel as well as the Response to Azazeel. Alaa el-Aswany’s latest nonfiction.

But Karam Youssef, owner of Kotob Khan, explained that her staff often suggests classics, such as Beer in the Snooker Club, to book-browsers. Beer in the Snooker Club, she said, is a perennial seller.

Get Ready to Reread Kafka: Lost Kafka Documents to Reemerge

~ bythefirelight

Before the lost documents of Kafka are released and absorbed (see the Independent‘s article), I want to take a minute and think about what that actually means, or more accurately, have my Borgesian moment of rereading and recreating the texts and the man, before I have actually come across the work. Does just the existence, even if I never see these papers, make his works different? Whereas Borges posited other works or played with the existence on a book through time (Pierre Menard, for example) , for myself, I only have the idea of the work. In a gluttonously optimistic way I find myself hoping these papers with reflect on his other works. No, I don’t think they will be the let down that the recent Raymond Carver stories were, but an insistence of his brilliance. My insistence, though, is the rereading that will now color all his works for me, even if the papers turn out to be uninteresting. The excitement is doing the rereading for me. Now when I turn to his works I will always have the idea that there is something else just off page, even though I am very text centric. The desire for more is always a problem, because who Kafka is and who he will be will change, but having more of his work may not matter. Completion is rewarding to a scholar, but not always a reader.

Juan Jose Saer, Mercè Rodored, Mathias Enard’s Zone Winter 2010 from Open Letter

~ bythefirelight

Open Letter Press has released its fall catalog and it has some pretty exciting items in it. Of particular interest to me are Mercè Rodored’s short stories. I read her Death in Spring last summer and thought it was great. I don’t know much about Juan Jose Saer, but the description sounds interesting. And Mathias Enard’s Zone is one of those stylistic works that is too tempting not to read.You can down load the catalog which contains samples and bios from Open Letter.

The Selected Stories of Merce Rodoreda. Translated from the Catalan by Martha Tennent. (Catalonia) Collected here are thirty-one of Mercè Rodoreda’s most moving and challenging stories, presented in chronological order of their publication from three of Rodoreda’s most beloved short story collections: Twenty-Two Stories, It Seemed Like Silk and Other Stories, and My Christina and Other Stories. These stories capture Rodoreda’s full range of expression, from quiet literary realism to fragmentary impressionism to dark symbolism. Few writers have captured so clearly, or explored so deeply, the lives of women who are stuck somewhere between senseless modernity and suffocating tradition—Rodoreda’s “women are notable for their almost pathological lack of volition, but also for their acute sensitivity, a nearly painful awareness of beauty” (Natasha Wimmer).

The Sixty-Five Years of Washington by Juan Jose Saer. Translated from the Spanish by Steve Dolph (Argentina)

It’s October 1960, say, or 1961, in a seaside Argentinian city named Santa Fe, and The Mathematician—wealthy, elegant, educated, dressed from head to toe in white—is just back from a grand tour of Europe. He’s on his way to drop off a press release about the trip to the papers when he runs into Ángel Leto, a relative newcomer to Rosario who does some accounting, but who this morning has decided to wander the town rather than go to work.

One day soon, The Mathematician will disappear into exile after his wife’s assassination, and Leto will vanish into the guerrilla underground, clutching his suicide pill like a talisman. But for now, they settle into a long conversation about the events of Washington Noriega’s sixty-fifth birthday—a party neither of them attended.

Saer’s The Sixty-Five Years of Washington is simultaneously a brilliant comedy about memory, narrative, time, and death and a moving narrative about the lost generations of an Argentina that was perpetually on the verge of collapse.

Zone by Mathias Enard. Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell. (France)

Francis Servain Mirkovic, a French-born Croat who has been working for the French Intelligence Services for fifteen years, is traveling by train from Milan to Rome. He’s carrying a briefcase whose contents he’s selling to a representative from the Vatican; the briefcase contains a wealth of information about the violent history of the Zone—the lands of the Mediterranean basin, Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, Italy, that have become Mirkovic’s specialty.

Over the course of a single night, Mirkovic visits the sites of these tragedies in his memory and recalls the damage that his own participation in that violence—as a soldier fighting for Croatia during the Balkan Wars—has wreaked in his own life. Mirkovic hopes that this night will be his last in the Zone, that this journey will expiate his sins, and that he can disappear with Sashka, the only woman he hasn’t abandoned, forever . . .

One of the truly original books of the decade—and written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence—Mathias Énard’s Zone provides an extraordinary and panoramic view of the turmoil that has long deviled the shores of the Mediterranean.

Comics and Graphic Novels Emerge in the Middle East

~ bythefirelight

Publishing perspectives has an article called Undiscovered Art: Comics and Graphic Novels Emerge in the Middle East. It is interesting overview of graphic novels in the middle east, few of which make it into English.

While comics have long been popular among children in the Arab world (two of the biggest series are the venerable “Mickey Mouse” and the Egyptian-based “Aladdin” comics), there is a new spark of interest in adult comics in the region. “In the last two years, there’s been a kind of synchronicity in Egypt, Lebanon, and Emirates for graphic novels,” says artist and writer Magdy El Shafee. In March, for example, the young Emirati author, Qais Sedki, won the prestigious Shaykh Zayed Book Award for his graphic novel Siwar al-Dhahab (Gold Ring), the first Arabic-language manga comic.

Samandal Inspires Others

Also participating in the Cairo workshop was one of the leaders of Lebanon’s growing field of comics authors, Fadi Baki (who goes by the moniker “the fdz”.) He is one of the publishers of the Beirut-based Samandal, which bills itself as “a multilingual comics magazine” with the aim of “produc[ing] a comic book revolution that will herald a new era of peace and understanding between cultures in the Middle East and the rest of the world.” On a more practical level, Baki and his co-editors see Samandal as “a showcase for comics we find interesting…We hope that this gallery will coalesce into a distinctive identity with serialized stories and returning artists and thus become a conduit between them and a wider public thirsty for comics that speak their realities.”

Baki cheekily describes himself as a product of “a childhood rife with comics, telly, and Nutella,” and like his co-editors, he is a graduate of the American University of Beirut. Samandal publishes comics in Arabic, French and English in each issue: with sections switching between left-to-right and right-to-left scripts, they hit upon the innovation of what they call a “flippy page” — a page instructing the reader to flip the magazine upside-down to continue reading the next section.

Gioconda Belli Wins the Premio La Otra Orilla

~ bythefirelight

MOLESKINE ® LITERARIO notes that Gioconda Belli has won the La Otra Orilla prize. I haven’t read her fiction, but her auto biography about her time with the Sandanistas was interesting, funny and insightful. In person she is quite interesting and I’m curious what her novels are like. It is quite the prize, too.

El éxito que tuvo la poeta y narradora nicaragüense Gioconda Belli en el Festival de la Palabra en Puerto Rico fue, para mí, inédito. Sabía de su prestigio, sabía de sus premios (de hecho, yo la presenté como Premio Seix Barral en la Feria Internacional del Libro hace unos años) pero no sabía que su carisma arrastraba multitudes en Puerto Rico. Ahora que ha ganado el premio La Otra Orilla, de la editorial Norma, me imagino que esas multitudes estarán felices.

Dice la nota:

La poeta y novelista nicaragüense Gioconda Belli fue galardonada hoy con el premio La Otra Orilla -dotado con 100.000 dólares y la publicación de su novela en toda América y España- por su libro “Crónicas de la izquierda erótica”, informaron voceros de la casa local del Grupo editorial Norma. Entre los 615 manuscritos recibidos se encontraba la obra de Belli, la primera mujer elegida para recibir este galardón, cuyo jurado estuvo integrado por los escritores Santiago Roncagliolo (Perú), Mario Mendoza (Colombia) y Pere Sureda (España). El jurado expresó que en la novela “se destaca el humorismo de su sátira política, la notable inventiva de la trama y la destreza de la autora para mantener la tensión narrativa contando una historia desde múltiples puntos de vista sin perder la sencillez”. Y agrega: “En el panorama de la novela política latinoamericana, ampliamente dominado por figuras masculinas, esta novela es una divertida e inesperada provocación”.

Tags

Peruvian Author Alfredo Bryce Echenique On His Writing and Drinking

~ bythefirelight

Alfredo Bryce Echenique has published his most recent book, La esposa del rey de las curvas. It is his first book in a few years and he was in Bolivia recently talking about it and his reputation for drinking. Many of his books have been translated into English, so if you are curious you can give him a try. The following is from mexico.americaenews.com and rads as if it was run through Google Translate.

Wednesday, July 7, 6:55 PM La Paz, July 7 (EFE) .- The Peruvian writer Alfredo Bryce Echenique (Lima, 1939) said Thursday that despite his reputation as a life of “debauchery” is a writer “uncluttered” , which has led him to be able to publish over 25 books. At the opening of the VI Meeting of Latin American writers to be held in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba (center), said Bryce Echenique accompanying a reputation as “anti (Mario) Vargas Llosa, for his alleged life “bohemian, casual and untimely.” He said he recently asked “how having led a dissolute life” has been written 25 books, to which he replied that in reality is “uncluttered”. ” I’ll take my house and I will not invite or a drink to see what I ordered, “he joked to his audience. It added that it considered” that has been able to consume the largest amount of alcohol in history of humanity, the drunkest of all Latin American writers. “Peruvian writer explained that never flaunted his order because” it is easier to “live with a bad reputation. In turn, said the key to his success has been “much work, much order, discipline and a lot of silence” as you type. The author of “A World for Julius” (1970) also took the opportunity to talk about the new novel in the works, whose title is “Giving sorrow to sorrow” . Bryce Echenique explained that the name of his new book comes from a conversation he had with that was his carer as a child, “Mama Rosa”, who replied with this phrase to a phone call, more than 40 years. ” It is a very violent novel, even I got scared. (…) It is a novel about the utter decadence, crime and the subnormal family, “he said, while saying that this is a book completely antagonistic “to” A World for Julius. “Peruvian writer added that his visit to Bolivia will be a” great opportunity to catch up “literature of the country, which professed to know” nothing, very little, “if well said however, does know the history of Bolivian social reforms. The meeting of Latin American writers, who has the 2002 Metro Award winner for “The garden of my beloved” headlining, will last until Friday 9 participation will also Peruvian and Argentine Diego Trelles Juan Newfoundland. will be joined by local writers Edward Scott, Jesus Urzagasti, Manuel Vargas and Ramon Rocha Monroy. In previous editions of this meeting, held since 2000, and involved great names of Latin American literature as the Peruvian Vargas Llosa, Antonio Skarmeta Chilean, Argentine Pablo de Santis and Jorge Volpi. Average (Not Rated)

Mexican Author and Twice Hammett Prize Winner Juan Hernandez Luna Dies

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

I don’t read much crime fiction so I’ll probably not read Juan Hernandez Luna’s work but it sounds like he was a good writer. The Latin American Herald Tribune has the full obit.

Hernandez Luna, born in Mexico City on Aug. 19, 1962, was an “outstanding author of the noir genre,” the INBA communique said, noting that his books have been translated into French and Italian.

He won a number of awards, including the National Book of Short Stories prize in 1988, the Latin American Short Story prize in 1992, the National Science Fiction prize in 1995, and the Dashiell Hammett prize in 1997 and 2007 for the detective novels “Tabaco para el Puma” (Tobacco for the Puma) and “Cadaver de Ciudad” (City Corpse).

His published works include the biographies “Se Llamaba Emiliano” (He Was Called Emiliano) on the life of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata – written under the pen name Ivan Degollado – and “No Hay Virtud en el Servilismo” (There’s No Virtue in Servility) about the ideologue Ricardo Flores Magon.

Among his best-known novels are “Unico Territorio” (The Only Territory), “Naufragio” (Shipwreck), “Quizas Otros Labios” (Perhaps Other Lips), “Tijuana Dream”, “Yodo” (Iodine) and “Las Mentiras de la Luz” (Lies of the Light).

In Defense of Writers Who Don’t Read So Much; or Here’s to You Tin House

~ bythefirelight

Tin House recently instituted a new policy for accepting submissions that requires writers to submit a copy of a receipt from a local bookstore purchase. While it is a laudable goal and I buy as much as I can from mine (Elliot Bay Books), the problem is when you write you don’t have time to read. It is one of those disappointing facts of authorship that you only have so much time and if you don’t live off your writing, in other words have a day job, what little time that could go into reading, goes into writing. I agree it is inexcusable for writers not to read. Writing is one long continuum of writers influencing each other and I’ve read more than enough bad writing to know a studying a few more authors would do some a world of good. But having to buy a book at the local bookstore just to submit is too much. I can’t buy any more, I’ve just got too many books already and at 20-30 a year (not counting technical tomes) I’m never going to finish. It also feels like a pay to play  or a literary contest with an entrance fee and I don’t like that. It is a fools bet and I prefer to make those bets with the state lottery: the pay off is so much better. Perhaps, when I read the two copies of Tin House that I bought in May and have been sitting on my coffee table ever since, I’ll change my mind. Until then, though, I’m just going to let other hopefuls play this game.

The full text:

PORTLAND, OREGON (JUNE 30, 2010) In the spirit of discovering new talent as well as supporting established authors and the bookstores who support them, Tin House Books will accept unsolicited manuscripts dated between August 1 and November 30, 2010, as long as each submission is accompanied by a receipt for a book from a bookstore. Tin House magazine will require the same for unsolicited submissions sent between September 1 and December 30, 2010.
Writers who cannot afford to buy a book or cannot get to an actual bookstore are encouraged to explain why in haiku or one sentence (100 words or fewer). Tin House Books and Tin House magazine will consider the purchase of e-books as a substitute only if the writer explains: why he or she cannot go to his or her neighborhood bookstore, why he or she prefers digital reads, what device, and why.

Writers are invited to videotape, film, paint, photograph, animate, twitter, or memorialize in any way (that is logical and/or decipherable) the process of stepping into a bookstore and buying a book to send along for our possible amusement and/or use on our Web site.

Tin House Books will not accept electronic submissions. Tin House magazine will accept manuscripts by mail or digitally. The magazine will accept scans of bookstore receipts.

ALL MANUSCRIPTS WITHOUT RECEIPT OR EXPLANATION
WILL BE RETURNED UNREAD IN SASE.