Who I Was Supposed To Be

This is Susan Perabo's first work. Her short stories are quirky and totally engaging.
An aging actor invites his father to visit and finds out that he is a jewel thief. A couple of kids kill the school bully and have to live with it. A woman spends her inheritance on one of Princess Diana's dresses. When Diana dies the woman has to make a decision about whether to sell it. Perabo's style is clear and spare and this collection is comprised of strong stories. I enjoyed reading them.

The Platzhalter Bookshelf

This stretchy bookshelf was designed by a young German duo Nina Farsen and Isabel Schöllhammer - When you’re running out of bookshelf space, just stretch your bookshelf and voila!

I am in desperate need of this item!

Pimp My Bookcart Winners

This year's Pimp my Bookcart contest had nearly a hundred submissions from all around the world. They came from schools, libraries, a book store, and a jail. There were carts made by kids, teenagers, and adults. They were higher-quality than ever, which made judging extremely difficult. We're not exaggerating when we say that our shortlist was in the dozens. We finally hunkered down in an undisclosed location in Indianapolis and argued well into the night. In the end we followed our hearts.

Via

Books of the year 2008

The New Statesman's round up of the best books of 2008 as suggested by critics and contributors including David Marquand, Tahmima Anam, Fatima Bhutto and Anthony Howard.

The Life And Death Of Yukio Mishima

The Life And Death Of Yukio Mishima
Via Nag on the Lake

Winners of 2008 Governor General’s Literary Awards Announced

Two four-time winners are among the list of winners of the 2008 Governor General’s Literary Awards announced today by the Canada Council for the Arts. The awards are given in the categories of fiction, poetry, drama, non-fiction, children’s literature (text and illustration) and translation, in English and in French.

Top 10 Best Literary Insults

Found these at Incurable Insomniac

#10 - GORE VIDAL ON TRUMAN CAPOTE
"He's a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices."

#09 - TRUMAN CAPOTE ON JACK KEROUAC
"That's not writing, that's typing."

#08 - ERNEST HEMINGWAY VS. WILLIAM FAULKNER
Faulkner: "[Hemingway] has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
Hemingway: "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"

#07 - EDMUND WILSON ON CARL SANDBURG
"The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg."

#06 - RALPH WALDO EMERSON ON JANE AUSTEN
"Miss Austen's novels . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer . . . is marriageableness."

#05 - VIRGINIA WOOLF ON ULYSSES
"[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples."

#04 - D. H. LAWRENCE ON JAMES JOYCE
"My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness—what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new!"

#03 - ELIZABETH BISHOP ON THE CATCHER IN THE RYE
"I HATED the Salinger story. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?"

#02 - CHARLES DARWIN ON SHAKESPEARE
"I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me."

#01 - GORE VIDAL VS. WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY
Vidal: "As far as I am concerned, the only crypto Nazi I can think of is yourself."
Buckley: “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in you goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”
—Democratic National Convention, 1968

On this day in literature

On this day in 1928, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, regarded by most as the first lesbian novel, was judged by the British courts to be obscene. Many of the notable writers asked to defend the book excused themselves -- 'for reasons you might guess,' Virginia Woolf wrote, though 'they generally put it down to the weak heart of a father or a cousin who is about to have twins.'

Londonstani

I tried. I really, really did. I just couldn't finish this novel. I'm not usually a quitter but this time I said to myself, "Just say no."
The narrator of the novel is Jas who, it seems, was a bit of nerd. He becomes involved with an Asian youth gang of "desis" who act tough but still live at home with their mummies and daddies. They beat people they don't like to a bloody stew, steal and reprogram cell phones and drive around in parental souped up BMWs. They are narcissistic, misogynistic and superficial. I just didn't care what happened to any of them. In fact I found myself hoping they'd all get what they deserved. In the end it was their incessant dopey chatter in bastardized patois that got to me. I guess I'm not the target audience and life is too short to read stuff that doesn't speak to me. Straight to the charity bin for this one.

One Hundred Photographs

In 1996 Bruce Bernard was commissioned to create a collection of photographs for an eminent private collector. After several years of trawling through galleries, art fairs and auction houses he settled on 100 images that 'truly stimulated and satisfied' him. One Hundred Photographs is a wonderful book of those images. I found it yesterday among the zillions of books at The Book Depot and couldn't put it down. It was tough to choose which of the hundred photos I'd scan and post. They're all so good. Bernard's insights on the photographs are fascinating but you'll have to buy the book to see them.

Detroit Photographic Co.
Mississippi Cotton Gin at Dahomey (1899)

Felice Beato (c.1834-c.1905)
A Yokahama Beauty in the Snow (c.1868)

Eve Arnold (b. 1912)
Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable on the Set of The Misfits (1960)

Nabokov and the moment of truth

Starts in French but persevere, it switches to English in short order.
Via

Sartre's Sink

Sartre’s Sink: An Interview with Mark Crick from Granta magazine
Via 3quarksdaily

Poets of the first world war

Ninety years after the war to end all wars came to a close, we've collected together portraits and sketches of Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, Isaac Rosenberg and Edward Thomas along with early drafts of some of their greatest poems.

The Book Design Review

The Book Design Review posts covers of books reviewed in the New York Times. Like these:

Harlot's Ghost Plot Chart

Plot chart for Norman Mailer's book Harlot's Ghost, undated.


Via Uncertain Times who traced it back here. It's cool, don't you think? So complex.

When Madeline Was Young

Madeline Maciver crashes her bicycle shortly after her wedding and suffers brain damage that leaves her with severe cognitive disabilities. This event changes the lives of all the characters of this novel forever. Her husband, Aaron, divorces her and marries Julia, a family friend, who assumes (with enthusiasm) the care of Madeline. Aaron and Julia have children of their own who grow up around Madeline and consider her to be at first an older sister and then, as they surpass her intellectually, a younger sister. She remains tragically forever young. It is, to say the least, a complicated family dynamic.
The novel is narrated by Aaron's son, Mac, a doctor with his own family. It flashes from past to present and back again. Buddy is Mac's cousin, a bit of a bad boy, who taught Mac a lot about girls in their days at the family summer home in Wisconsin. The cousins' relationship is exemplified by Mac's awe of Buddy but also by a rivalry. Buddy may be a tough guy who is loved by all but Mac is intelligent (Buddy calls him "Brains") while Buddy fails miserably at school and has narrowed options as a result. The families of Mac and Buddy became estranged ostensibly because of constant and intense disagreement about the Vietnam War but also because Aaron's sister, Figgy, disagrees with Julia's infantilization of Madeline.
In the present Mac, along with his wife and one of his daughters, attends the funeral of Buddy's son who was killed in Iraq.
Hamilton has given us another novel that introduces us to people we feel we already know and feel comfortable with. I love all her novels and this one didn't disappoint.

Rushdie's Midnight's Children heads for silver screen

Rushdie's 'unfilmable' Midnight's Children heads for silver screen . Booker-winning author to work with director Deepa Mehta in a collaboration hatched over dinner.

Forty Acres

A poem for Barack Obama from Nobel winner Derek Walcott

Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving —

a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,

an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd

dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed,

parting for their president: a field of snow-flecked

cotton

forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens

that the young ploughman ignores for his unforgotten

cotton-haired ancestors, while lined on one branch, is

a tense

court of bespectacled owls and, on the field's

receding rim —

a gesticulating scarecrow stamping with rage at him.

The small plough continues on this lined page

beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado's

black vengeance,

and the young ploughman feels the change in his veins,

heart, muscles, tendons,

till the land lies open like a flag as dawn's sure

light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower.

Via Nag on the Lake

Writer's voices

Listen to rare recordings from the British Library Audio Book Review

"To hear Florence Nightingale pronounce her own name with such precise, emphatic enunciation — “Florence [dramatic pause] Nightingale” — takes you straight into her living presence and tells you in an instant what a powerfully self-possessed character she must have been. The speech she is giving, In Aid of the Light Brigade Relief Fund, recorded in 1890, is just one among the British Library’s unrivalled sound archives, running to a mind-boggling 1m discs and 200,000 tapes. The library has released two new three-CD sets, one of British and one of American writers, talking about life, literature and their work. They include EM Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Harold Pinter, Tennessee Williams, F Scott Fitzgerald, and a whisky-sozzled Raymond Chandler talking to Ian Fleming, and breaking into frequent snuffly giggles."

The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace

He was the greatest writer of his generation - and also its most tormented. In the wake of his tragic suicide, his friends and family reveal the lifelong struggle of a beautiful mind. Read the article