Even the most dedicated fiction readers might have trouble naming contemporary authors from Macedonia, Liechtenstein or Slovenia. Dalkey Archive Press intends to change that with its new anthology of “Best European Fiction.”
The international project, the first in a planned annual series, compiles fiction from 32 countries. Apart from pieces from English-speaking countries, all were translated into English for the first time. “There’s a catastrophic shortage of translation in the United States,” says Bosnian-American novelist Aleksandar Hemon, who edited the anthology.
Assembling the collection, which involved finding and translating the stories, took about two years. Mr. Hemon chose pieces from more than 100 translated works. Arts Council England and other European cultural groups helped to fund the project, said Dalkey’s associate director Martin Riker. Dalkey, a nonprofit based at the University of Illinois, is printing 25,000 copies, and plans to expand the project to other continents, starting with Asia.
Mr. Riker hopes the anthologies will spur interest in foreign fiction. Newly translated works accounted for about 3% of all books for sale in the U.S. in 2004, according to Bowker, a company that tracks the publishing industry. Last year, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in literature, caused a stir when he chastised the American literary community for being “too insular.” (Read More)
Flatmancrooked’s First Annual Poetry Prize ended at the close of January. The response was enthusiastic and a bit overwhelming. The editors read thousands of poems, then reread, and read again, whittling them down to this list of semi-finalists that will be included in Flatmancrooked’s Slim Volume of Contemporary Poetry, due out this summer. And the semi-finalists are . . .
“Crush” by Marina Pruna
“i,eve” by Christy Delehanty
“I Remember” by Justin Alvarez
“hollow phrases” by Diego Baez
“Americanism” by Diego Baez
“Pre-Linguistic Bones” by Gleah Powers
“Akimbo” by Amy Bleu
“Zoology #1″ by Jilly Dreadful
“Two Dot, Montana” by Micah Ling
“How I Never Want to Have Coffee with You” by Anna Clarke
“Wormwood” by Marissa Bell Toffoli
“A Life in Piles and a Hundred Goodbyes” by A. Ruth Macaux
“O Time Thy Pyramids” by James Benton
“Oceanus Pacificus” by James Benton
“Petrichor” by Shideh Etaat
“The Fistulated Cow” by Katie Cappello
“Enlightenment” by Samuel Slaton
“Something Like Five to Seven Years On Average Give or Take …” by Zachary Hill
“When You Told me You were From Sierra Leone” by Sara Stripling
“Dorothy Comes Home From Work” by Rebecca van Laer
“Tracks” by Emily Pulfer-Terino
“LA Confidences” by Cami Park
“Cape Hatteras” by Ali Shapiro
“Editing out the Mistakes” by Kat Jahnigen
“Konstantin Wakes Up Fifty” by Ronald Jackson
“Tend” by Rebecca Keith
“September” by Caitlin Gildrien
“On the First Cold Morning in October, My Cat Kills Another Starling” by Heather Lynne Mercer
“WALDEN” by Will Dowd
“Bridges” by Theo Schell-Lambert
“Role Models” by Kimberly Olsen
“To My Daughter Grace, Nine Years Old” by Christopher Locke
“The Karloff Egg” by James O’Brien
“Post-Op Image, 1984″ by Francis DiClemente
“Recess Beyond the Old Equipment” by David Cooke
“Russian Caravan” by A. Ruth Macaux
“Boston Elizabeth” by Christine Smith
“For the Sun” by Julia Halprin Jackson
“To Sally Hemings, slave lover of Thomas Jefferson” by Khary Jackson
“Love’s Austere and Lonely Offices by Thomas” K ORourke
“Stories” by Sara Stripling
“The Replacement” by Megan Moriarty
“A Condensed History of Parachutes” by Megan Moriarty
“Aftermath” by Brian Adeloye
“Descent into Phoenix” by Kristen Kuczenski
“And Then” by Heather Judy
These poems will be available for your reading pleasure, along with work from poetry giants such as Eleni Sikelianos, Forest Gander, Mathew Dickman, Andy Jones, Christopher Erickson, and Kevin Prufer in Flatmancrooked’s Slim Volume of Contemporary Poetics, available Summer 2010.
Fresh off a buzz-generating appearance at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the enterprise and consumer electronics firm DMC Worldwide is in New York City showing off Copia, a new Web site offering a reading social network platform and e-commerce that includes a suite of linked digital reading devices set to hit the market this spring. DMC stopped by the Publishers Weekly offices to demo its social reading platform in advance of its presentation at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference set to open next week.
DMC is a 50-year-old private firm looking to invest in, produce, and market new consumer technologies. DMC Worldwide senior v-p Anthony Antolino said that Copia is the result of the company’s long-term examination of “emerging markets, content consumption, and what makes consumers tick.” Antolino described Copia as a “social reading platform that combines all kinds of content—books, movies, comics, music—and collaborative tools that let people read and enjoy books together, and, of course, it offers commerce.”
The hub of the Copia network/device venture is the social network, a Web-based platform that is free to consumers. It will launch a limited beta in March and a public beta by the summer. Antolino said that Copia offers a distinctive online graphical display as well as a search infrastructure that allows readers to discuss and compare books, but that also attempts to visually recreate book browsing. While Copia offers the usual social networking functionally—connections with like-minded readers; title and subject-focused discussion groups; the ability to compare book lists—the site offers its own nifty and intuitive ways to do so. (read more)
I love genre, because genres are basically conventions. They’re expectations that both authors and readers (and editors, and sales people) bring to a text—suggestions as to what should be inside, and how it should be arranged. And I dearly love conventions, because they’re the very stuff of communication, and of artistic structure—whether we’re obeying them, or departing from them.
I’ve never really understood what some people mean when they talk about “exploding genres” and “writing between genres,” and so forth, because I myself can think of very little writing that is pure genre. Most literature that I read—even the more conventional things—already exist between multiple genres.
Consider The Lord of the Rings.
On the one hand, it’s a “pure” example of contemporary fantasy fiction. Right? Hell, it’s the cornerstone of contemporary fantasy fiction. And it definitely is fantasy fiction:
Sorrowfully, they cast loose the funeral boat: there Boromir lay, restful, peaceful, gliding upon the bosom of the flowing water.The stream took him while they held their own boat back with their paddles. He floated by them, and slowly his boat departed, waning to a dark spot against the golden light; and then suddenly it vanished. Rauros roared on unchanging. The River had taken Boromir son of Denethor, and he was not seen again in Minas Tirith, standing as he used to stand upon the White Tower in the morning. But in Gondor in after-days it long was said that the elven-boat rode the falls and the foaming pool, and bore him down through Osgiliath, and past the many mouths of Anduin, out into the Great Sea at night under the stars. (The Two Towers, Book V, Chapter 1, “The Departure of Boromir”)
But when we look even more closely, we find that Tolkien’s writing contains traces of other genres. It’s contemporary fantasy, to be sure, but it’s also heavily inspired by Norse mythology, Old English and Middle English literature, German Romanticism, and Victorian children’s literature. Tolkien synthesized these various interests to craft a new kind of fantasy literature that differs from, say, fairy tales.
“Throughout the history of literature, writers have plundered modes, approaches, styles, forms, genres [...] practically every work of fiction you can name has borrowed liberally from history, biography, science, travel, philosophy, other fictions, and so on (and conversely, every work of history, biography, philosophy and such has borrowed liberally from other fictions and the rest). In other words, if interstitial fiction exists, then it is indistinguishable from fiction as a whole.”
And if we look closer, we can find places in The Lord of the Rings where Tolkien didn’t completely blend those disparate genres into a homogeneous fantasy paste. There’s more than one spot where one genre sticks out more than the others, like an undissolved lump of brown sugar waiting inside a cookie. As we read, we find the different genres receding and dominating, their conventions stepping forward at different times to control different aspects of the fiction.
For example, a friend of mine delights in pointing out the following section in Chapter 3 of Book I of the first book, The Fellowship of the Rings:
Just over the top of the hill they [the hobbits] came on the patch of fir-wood. Leaving the road they went into the deep resin-scented darkness of the trees. Soon they had a merry crackle of flame at the foot of a large fir-tree and they sat round it for a while, until they began to nod. Then, each in an angle of the great tree’s roots, they curled up in their cloaks and blankets, and were soon fast asleep. They set no watch; even Frodo feared no danger yet, for they were still in the heart of the Shire. A few creatures came and looked at them when the fire had died away. A fox passing through the wood on business of his own stopped several minutes and sniffed.
“Hobbits!” he thought. “Well, what next? I have heard of strange doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a tree. Three of them! There’s something mighty queer behind this.” He was quite right, but he never found out any more about it.
This is the only place in the entire Lord of the Rings epic where the POV switches to a passing, talking fox. My friend argued that this was a trace of an earlier draft of the book, when The Fellowship of the Ring was still The Hobbit Part 2.
(As is widely known, when Tolkien found that he had no interest in writing The Hobbit sequel that his publisher wanted, and was instead writing The Lord of the Rings, he went back and revised even The Hobbit. The later, darker tale that he found himself really wanting to tell altered its more childlike forebear, which became a prequel—just as The Lord of the Rings later became a prequel to The Silmarillion.) (Or so I’ve heard. I’m afraid I haven’t quite finished The Silmarillion.)
Bakhtin tells us that all novels are shaggy monsters—some more than others, to be sure. But all bear traces of their construction, and obey influences from competing literary conventions that may prove difficult to reconcile. All writing inhabits a history, usually multiple histories, and it finds its place(s) within those histories as best as it is able.
Tolkien had other influences as well, some of which came later. Today, we read certain sections of LOTR biographically, looking at it through the lens J.R.R.’s experiences in WWII. Peter Jackson’s film adaptations (and thereby the conventions of 2000s Hollywood cinema) have influenced how many people read (or don’t read) the books. Before that, various sections were appropriated by the hippies; it’s hard to read the Tom Bombadil sections, and some of the Gandalf parts, and a tremendous amount of the hobbit/Shire/pipe-weed stuff, as anything other than 60s psychedelia.
Or vice versa. Allow me to point out one of my favorite parts of The Lord of the Rings. It was originally pointed out to me in grad school by my above-mentioned friend (hi, friend!) and by my Milton professor.
You’ll recall that in Book VI of Paradise Lost, Raphael relates to Adam what happened when Satan led his followers against God. Both sides, being immortal, found their wounds closing up as soon as they were formed (just like Wolverine’s healing factor!). Yet all of the combatants felt pain, and the thought of endless painful battle put everyone into a funk.
That night, the opposing sides made their camps, and Satan knew he needed to devise some edge:
Deep under ground, materials dark and crude,
Of spiritous and fierie spume, till toucht
With Heav’ns ray, and temperd they shoot forth [ 480 ]
So beauteous, op’ning to the ambient light.
These in thir dark Nativitie the Deep
Shall yield us pregnant with infernal flame,
Which into hallow Engins long and round
Thick-rammd, at th’ other bore with touch of fire [ 485 ]
Dilated and infuriate shall send forth
From far with thundring noise among our foes
Such implements of mischief as shall dash
To pieces, and orewhelm whatever stands
Adverse, that they shall fear we have disarmd [ 490 ]
The Thunderer of his only dreaded bolt.
And so, foreshadowing their imminent fall:
Forthwith from Councel to the work they flew,
None arguing stood, innumerable hands
Were ready, in a moment up they turnd
Wide the Celestial soile, and saw beneath [ 510 ]
Th’ originals of Nature in thir crude
Conception; Sulphurous and Nitrous Foame
They found, they mingl’d, and with suttle Art,
Concocted and adusted they reduc’d
To blackest grain, and into store convey’d: [ 515 ]
Part hidd’n veins diggd up (nor hath this Earth
Entrails unlike) of Mineral and Stone,
Whereof to found thir Engins and thir Balls
Of missive ruin; part incentive reed
Provide, pernicious with one touch to fire. [ 520 ]
And the next day, when the battle resumed:
From those deep throated Engins belcht, whose roar
Emboweld with outragious noise the Air,
And all her entrails tore, disgorging foule
Thir devilish glut, chaind Thunderbolts and Hail
Of Iron Globes, which on the Victor Host [ 590 ]
Level’d, with such impetuous furie smote,
That whom they hit, none on thir feet might stand,
Though standing else as Rocks, but down they fell
The battle turns truly desparate then; both sides even begin throwing mountains at one another. (It’s like The Thing battling The Hulk!)
Tolkien, a tremendous Milton fan, pays homage to this in Book V, Chapter 7 of The Two Towers, “Helm’s Deep.” The plot, briefly: the good guys are holed up in a fortress that’s under seige, but that has never fallen:
‘Nevertheless day will bring hope to me,’ said Aragorn. ‘Is it not said that no foe has ever taken the Hornburg, if men defended it?’
‘So the minstrels say,’ said Éomer.
‘Then let us defend it, and hope!’ said Aragorn.
And at first they successfully hold off the bad guys (Saruman’s forces). But then:
Even as they spoke there came a blare of trumpets. Then there was a crash of flame and smoke. The waters of the Deeping Stream poured out hissing and foaming: they were choked no longer, a gaping hole was blasted in the wall. A host of dark shapes poured in.
‘Devilry of Saruman!’ cried Aragorn. ‘They have crept in the calvert again, while we talked, and they have lit the fire of Orthanc beneath our feet. Elendil, Elendil!’ he shouted, as he leapt down into the breach; but even as he did so a hundred ladders were raised against the battlements. Over the wall and under the wall the last assault came sweeping like a dark wave upon a hill of sand. The defense was swept away.
Two pages later, Aragorn reports:
‘[T]he Orcs have brought a devilry from Orthanc [...] They have a blasting fire, and with it they took the Wall.’
Devilry indeed. Saruman has copied Satan’s solution: to dig into the earth, and to devise gunpowder.
…Ultimately, it does him no good, because just as God sent forth the Messiah in his Chariot to defeat Satan, the chief good guys ride forth in their own Glorie, their “count’nance too severe to be beheld”:
And with that shout the king came. His horse was white as snow, golden was his shield, and his spear was long. At his right hand was Aragorn, Elendil’s heir, behind him rode the lords of the Houise of Eorl the Young. Light sprang in the sky. Night departed.
‘Forth Eorlingas!’ With a great cry and a great noise they charged. Down from the gates they roared, over the causeway they swept, and they drove through the hosts of Isengard as a wind among grass.
The orcs, we’re told, “cast themselves on their faces and covered their ears with their claws.” No doubt, like Satan’s followers,
they astonisht all resistance lost,
All courage; down thir idle weapons drop’d;
O’re Shields and Helmes, and helmed heads he rode [ 840 ]
Of Thrones and mighty Seraphim prostrate,
That wisht the Mountains now might be again
Thrown on them as a shelter from his ire.
To say that I’ve had a checkered history in publishing would be like saying Elizabeth Taylor had a checkered history in marriage. In the past decade, I’ve churned through three houses, and twice as many editors. I’ve pissed off half the agents in New York City, and told the other half (with unreasonable glee) to fuck off. At one point, I actually had to be physically separated from one of my publishers.
It would be easy to blame all this on my unique temperament, with its charming blend of acerbic superiority and righteous indignation. But the truth is, most of my writer friends are filled with similar feelings of despair and disgust when it comes to putting books in the world. They just have the good sense to keep it to themselves.
The saddest thing about all this, of course, is that the publishing industry is not trying to piss us off. No, the industry (and the folks who populate it) are the ones trying to help us. It’s not their fault that reading has been shoved to the margins of the culture, or that a typical American teenager now spends 95 percent of her time staring at a tiny screen and frantically thumbing shopping updates to her social network. (read more here)
“Perhaps we should talk about fucking. Fucking and writing, fucking and talking, fucking and thinking, fucking and whatever else it is that fucking goes with…”
Jami Attenberg’s third book, The Melting Season, will be published soon by Riverhead books. It’s the trenchant, frank, poignant, tender, and, dare I say, heartwarming (one of my favorite qualities) story of a Nebraskan woman nicknamed Moonie who leaves her husband, takes a bag full of his money and drives away, heading west, toward a series of adventures, both decadent and wholesome, that surprise the reader as much as Moonie herself.
Fittingly, Jami is about to drive cross-country on a self-generated book tour, with boxes of books in the backseat instead of a suitcase full of money, and lots of fans and friends along the way to host, support, and toast her. You can find her tour dates here.
So, on the brink of her departure, I was glad to have an opportunity to ask Jami some questions. Stephen Elliott challenged us to come up with some topics not usually covered in writer interviews, so we did our best to perk things up with some bookish sex talk. (more here)
An exceptional article by former Flatmancrooked editor, James Kaelan. The child pictured is an exceptionally enthusiastic soccer fan.
______________
The great English broadcaster Ray Hudson once said of the great Argentine footballer Juan Román Riquelme, “Look at him, so languid, look at him walking. He’s like a big, beautiful zombie, Riquelme. He just strolls around…like smoke off a cigarette.” Hudson values hyperbole over precision—or at least succumbs to the former—for he suffers from a sort of fanatic epilepsy when he works. Hudson told me, “When that spotlight’s on you, and you’re calling a game, you’re in the moment, instantaneous, and the selection of words, phrases, and anecdotes are improvised. There’s very little time for actual thought. There’s very little time for reflection on what you’re actually going to say.” And Hudson’s quips, spontaneous and unedited, have gained him a reputation as one of the most notorious announcers in all of sports.
Hudson made his career first as a soccer player—for Newcastle United in England, and later for various teams in the defunct North American Soccer League. But he is best known for announcing the modern game for GolTV. Commentary for a soccer match, more so than in any other sport, is like the musical accompaniment to ballet. Therefore as a broadcaster, Hudson is comparable to the conductor of an orchestra playing in the pit beneath a stage of dancers; he adds context and emotion to the drama. No wonder, then, that he often likens footballers to beautiful women. “I’m telling you man,” Hudson once said of FC Barcelona’s seventeen-year-old striker, Bojan Krkic, “this kid could be the best thing on two legs since Sophia Loren.” (read more here)
It’s rare that one is able to solve two profoundly troubling societal problems with one quick fix, but I feel I’ve done it! Well, in a metaphorical, Swiftian, satirical “Modest Proposal” way. I suspect that most Slate readers will be aware that Jonathan Swift’s 18th-century “Modest Proposal” to solve the Irish famine by encouraging starving parents to eat their children was meant as satire, right? Because when I ran my own modest
proposal by a journalist friend, she took it a little too seriously, and heatedly informed me, “That’s the worst idea I ever heard!” That’s sort of the point! When things are bad, the only way to make the situation crystal-clear is to show how difficult it would be to come up with an idea that is ludicrously worse.
On the other hand, as they say in cheesy movies, “Sounds crazy, but it just might work!”
So: My modest proposal to solve America’s “intelligence” failures is to fire the entire CIA and our other many tragically inept intelligence agencies and outsource all intelligence operations to investigative reporters downsized by the collapse of the newspaper business. Thereby improving our “intelligence capability” (it can’t possibly get worse!) and giving a paycheck to some worthy and skilled investigative types—yes, some sketchy, crazed, paranoid (but in a colorful, obsessive, yet often highly effective way) reporters who once made the journalism profession proud, exciting, and useful, not boring stenography for the power elites.
How bad are things in U.S. intelligence? I refer you to a Jan. 20 Reuters report on the Congressional investigation into the failure to “connect the dots” on the Christmas bomber: the guy who—as just about everybody in the world except U.S. intelligence knew—was trying to blow up a plane. Why? (read more here)
Today is a good day to remember that in Haiti, nobody ever really dies. The many thousands who’ve had the breath crushed out of their bodies in the earthquake, and the thousands more who will not physically survive the aftermath, will undergo instead a translation of state, according to the precepts of Haitian Vodou, some form of which is practiced by much of the population. Spirits of the Haitian dead — sa nou pa we yo, those we don’t see — do not depart as in other religions but remain extremely close to the living, invisible but tangible, inhabiting a parallel universe on the other side of any mirror, beneath the surface of all water, just behind the veil that divides us from our dreams.
That extraordinary spiritual reservoir is the source of the Haitian religious view of the world — as powerful as any today. As often as it is misunderstood and misrepresented, Haitian Vodou, with all it carries out of the cradle of humankind’s birth in Africa and combines with Roman Catholicism, has enabled Haitians to laugh at death, as they have too often needed to do. (read more here)
SURE, Dan Brown and Sarah Palin are topping the best-seller charts, but the breakout of the holiday book-buying season just may have been an elaborate, richly illustrated tome that records the dreams and spiritual questing of an author who has been dead for nearly half a century. The list price for this 9-pound, 416-page volume? $195.
As online and big-box retailers hustle to outdo themselves in discounts, “The Red Book” by Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, has surprised booksellers and its publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, by bucking the economy and becoming difficult, and in some cases impossible, to find in bookstores around the country. On Amazon.com, the book — which is not available in a Kindle e-book edition — “usually ships . . . . (read more here)
