Roy Miller's Blog, page 201
May 3, 2017
Jean Stein, Who Chronicled Wealth, Fame and Influence, Dies at 83
This content was originally published by RICHARD SANDOMIR on 3 May 2017 | 1:05 am.
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Ms. Stein, who knew Ms. Sedgwick — and let her stay in her daughter Wendy’s bedroom after a hotel fire — was aware by 1967 of her dissolution. “She was the quintessential poor little rich girl,” Ms. Stein told WBAI. “She’d be wearing fur, but underneath it she was skeletal and wearing leotards and had anorexia.”
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Ms. Stein in 1966 attending a benefit party for The Paris Review at the Village Gate.
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Larry C. Morris/The New York Times
For her most recent book, “West of Eden: An American Place” (2016), Ms. Stein spent parts of more than 20 years interviewing people about the influence of Hollywood (through her own family, the Warner brothers and the actress Jennifer Jones), oil exploration (through the Doheny family) and real estate (through the Garlands, especially Jane, a schizophrenic heiress) on Los Angeles.
“All the while, there are the voices you can’t stop listening to,” Maria Russo wrote in The New York Times Book Review. “As Stein’s people rummage through their faulty memories, they talk the way human beings actually talk — heavy on score-settling, gossip and hearsay. It’s at times almost unbelievable what they are willing to say.”
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Jean Babette Stein was born in Chicago on Feb. 9, 1934, the daughter of Jules Stein, who was an ophthalmologist before starting what became MCA, and the former Doris Jones. At the family estate in Beverly Hills, Misty Mountain, Ms. Stein would hear coyotes howling at night, she said in “West of Eden.” During World War II, her father built a secret room — a sort of bunker — behind the bar in case the Nazis attacked.
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At a home where Hollywood stars were frequent guests, she and her sister, Susan, were “brought down to curtsy like little dolls in our dressing gowns,” Ms. Stein said. When she was 16, her father’s lawyer tried to set her up on a date with a young lawyer, Roy Cohn, who was part of the team prosecuting an economist, William Remington, for espionage and who would go on to notoriety as counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Ms. Stein went to watch Mr. Cohn in court, she said, “and within minutes my sympathies were with the victim.” They never went out.
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She attended Wellesley College and the Sorbonne but did not graduate. Gore Vidal, a close friend who was interviewed in “West of Eden,” said that she had been “somewhat unfocused, not terribly interested in the academic world” of Wellesley, and he took her to literary events where she would meet interesting people.
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“I didn’t see her for six months,” he said, “and the next time I did, she was with Faulkner.”
Indeed, in 1955, while she was in France, Ms. Stein interviewed William Faulkner for The Paris Review. When she asked if there was a formula to be a successful novelist, Faulkner told her it was 99 percent talent, 99 percent discipline and 99 percent work.
“An artist,” he said in the lengthy interview, “is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they choose him, and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.”
Stein: “Do you mean the writer should be completely ruthless?”
Faulkner: “The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one.”
Ms. Stein worked for several years at The Paris Review for its editor, George Plimpton, before moving to New York City to be an assistant to Clay Felker, then the features editor of Esquire magazine. Later, her marriage to William vanden Heuvel, a lawyer who had been a special assistant to Robert Kennedy when he was the United States attorney general, helped give her entree to the train that bore Kennedy’s body from New York to Washington after his assassination in 1968.
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The journey inspired the structure of her book, “American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy” (1970), an oral history edited by Mr. Plimpton.
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In Life magazine, Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of The Washington Post, described Ms. Stein as a “brilliant, non-obtrusive interviewer,” writing that there was “new vital history in these pages, more than any review can hold.” A review in The New Yorker said the book “mortalizes” Kennedy “by bringing his complex and contradictory character most vividly to life.”
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Shy and with a fluttery voice, Ms. Stein turned her former apartment on Central Park West into a salon for writers, artists, politicians and academics.
“She loved to gather people of all kinds,” Katrina vanden Heuvel said in an interview on Tuesday. “She always had the most interesting writers mixed up with troublemakers. She had Daniel Ellsberg with Adlai Stevenson, or an ex-general with war protesters. Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer had a fistfight there.”
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Ms. Stein sought a similarly eclectic mix when she was the editor and publisher of Grand Street, a quarterly literary journal, from around 1990 to 2004.
“I am very interested in these different worlds coming together, so you’re not only writing, you’re not only art, you’re not only science, you’re bringing them all together,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1990. “And, in a way, I’ve lived my life in New York that way.”
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In addition to her daughters, Katrina and Wendy vanden Heuvel, Ms. Stein is survived by two granddaughters. Her marriages — to Mr. vanden Heuvel, a former American diplomat, and Torsten Wiesel, a Swedish neurobiologist who was a co-recipient of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine — ended in divorce.
Ms. Stein explained her embrace of the oral history form when she discussed “Edie,” which Mr. Plimpton also edited.
“Each person is speaking directly to you,” she told WBAI. “It’s like you have 25 people in the room talking to you, just as if you were in a conversation. Nobody is ever telling you, the reader, what you should think.”
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Let's Take This Outside: BBQ Books for Spring 2017
This content was originally published by on 1 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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With the spring thaw officially underway, we've gathered
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May 2, 2017
New Tor Imprint to Focus on Experimental Genre Publishing
This content was originally published by on 2 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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Tor Labs will launch this summer with a 14-episode podcast called ‘Steal the Stars’ about two government employees guarding a crashed UFO.
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Westchester Publishing Services Adds New Unit
This content was originally published by on 2 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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Westchester Publishing Services has formed a new division to reach the K-12 educational publishing market, naming industry veteran Kevin J. Gray to head the unit. Before joining WPS, Gray held executive posts at Cenveo Publisher Services, Mazr, Element, and MPS.
WPS currently provides product development services for clients in the trade, academic and university press categories. According to WPS president Paul Crecca, the company has been investing in new products and technologies since it became an ESOP company in 2014.
The new division, Westchester K-12 Publishing Services, will provide educational publishers support on their ELA, math, science, and social studies products. WPS will provide services such as content creation for student books, teacher guides, photo research, page design and layout, and pre-press production.
Commenting on his new role, Gray said: "As we move forward into the K-12 educational market, Westchester will draw upon the solid foundation of publishing fundamentals which have been successful in a variety of markets, allowing the company to grow and further meet the needs of our diverse customer base."
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Finish This Sentence #5 – You Never Expected a Call From Me
This content was originally published by Brian A. Klems on 2 May 2017 | 4:00 pm.
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“Hello,” said the voice on the phone. “My name is __________. I know you never expected a call from me, as famous as I am, but I’ve been given your name as someone who can help me _______.” (Write a story that follows this line.)
Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.
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Proposed Spending Bill Would Up NEA, NEH Budgets
This content was originally published by on 2 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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Following months of fears that President Donald Trump would attempt to eliminate the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities and a consequent White House budget proposal calling for just that, an omnibus spending bill released yesterday by both houses of the U.S. Congress rejected slashing arts and humanities funding by proposing increases of $1.9 million to the NEA and NEH budgets in a budgetary bill that would cost $1 trillion. The president is expected to sign the bill.
The funding, which would last through the end of September 2017, would up the budgets of both groups from roughly $148 million in fiscal year 2016 to just under $150 million each for FY 2017. The move is sure to please arts groups, who have rallied around the endowments during a time when many fear that a Trump presidency directly opposes free speech and artistic expression. But the move is a temporary one, mostly in order to delay the threat of government shutdown; both endowments would again face potential budget cuts or even elimination come fall should Trump decide to cut the agencies in his next budget proposal.
The budget deal also also spares libraries—for now. It includes just under $184 million in federal library funding, including the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a $1 million increase over 2016 levels. Trump had proposed zeroing out the IMLS. The good news came just as more than 500 librarians are gathering in Washington D.C. to meet with lawmakers as part of the American Library Association’s annual National Library Legislative Day. But ALA officials told librarians that the budget battle for libraries is far from over, and that the battle for full funding in the 2018 budget is already underway.
Previous Republican presidents have called for major cutbacks at the NEA and NEH as well, but as in this case, congressional compromises kept the agencies alive. As PW previously reported, the NEH had an operating budget of $146,021,000 in FY 2015, and requested a $147,942,000 budget for FY 2016. The NEA budget, in FY 2015, was $146,021,000, which was increased to $147,949,000 in 2016. Within a projected federal budget, according to the Congressional Budget Office, of $3.9 trillion for the fiscal year 2016, the NEH and NEA’s budgets combined total less than 0.0075% of federal costs.
In a statement on the new deal, the NEA said: “In December 2016, in response to overwhelmingly positive results at Walter Reed and Ft. Belvoir, the President and Congress recommended a $1.9 million budget increase for the National Endowment for the Arts. The increase was specifically earmarked for our creative arts therapy program and last month the NEA announced the implementation of Creative Forces: NEA Military Healing Arts Network.”
The program, the NEA said, funds creative arts therapies for patient-centered care at 11 clinical sites throughout the country, plus a telephone health program, and increases access to therapeutic arts activities in local communities for military members, veterans, and their families, specifically for military patients who have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury and psychological health conditions. The organization has allocated $2.6 million in FY 2017 funds towards the program.
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The Story Behind the ‘Waitress’ Cookbook
This content was originally published by on 2 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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A year after its Broadway debut, Waitress has racked up four Tony nominations and continued commercial success. At the end of March, the show's producers announced that songwriter Sara Bareilles, who scored the musical, would take on the lead role. The show is also entering new territory with the publication of the official tie-in cookbook, Sugar, Butter, Flour, due out from Pam Krauss/Avery on May 23.
Pam Krauss, v-p and publisher at her eponymous imprint, described the book’s genesis as one of those “small world stories”—in a very New York sense. The restaurateur Danny Meyer introduced David Black, the literary agent, to the show’s producer, Barry Weissler. “I’d been a big fan of the movie, so when David told me he’d been talking to Barry about putting together a tie-in cookbook I immediately had an idea in my head of how it could [work] very naturally,” said Krauss.
The musical, based on the 2007 movie of the same name, follows Jenna Hunterson, a waitress and pie maker stuck in an unhappy marriage. Hunterson serves as the cookbook’s “author.” Krauss turned to the script for the recipes in the book (which draws its name from a refrain sung throughout the musical), crafting recipes alongside Southern baker and recipe developer, Sheri Castle
“[Jenna] uses pies as metaphors for expressing her hopes and fears, her dreams and frustrations, and some of the recipes were actually written right into the script,” said Krauss. “It was just a question of adding quantities for the ingredients and directions for assembling it.”
With some recipes--like those for Love, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness Pie and Lonely Chicago Pie--the script didn’t offer too many clues, so Avery was a bit more “playful” in its interpretation. “But when you have a pie named My Husband’s a Jerk Chicken Pot Pie, the recipe kind of writes itself,” said Krauss. Other recipes include Old Joe’s Horny Past Pie, the Key (Lime) to Happiness Pie, and Wake Up and Smell the Coffee pie.
While Krauss believes you can “make a cookbook out of just about anything,” this book was an organic extension of the Broadway show. “From the minute you walk into the theater and see the curtain, which is a big old lattice-crust cherry pie, you’ve got baking on the brain,” said Krauss. “It even smells like baking in the theater, with vendors selling adorable jar pies at intermission.” The musical also brought on a “pie consultant,” who bakes the pies that appear onstage.
When asked about the difficulties of promoting a book without a real author, Krauss acknowledged that with certain titles, it can be a challenge. “But in this case the recipes literally speak for themselves,” said Krauss. “These days there aren’t as many opportunities for authors to travel doing cooking demos in any event. Evocative recipes like these are perfect for sharing on social media, and for authorless in-store events. They just get people giggling and talking.”
The book will be sold at the merchandise table at the musical’s home at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, and the musical itself will be promoting and selling the title through its website, in addition to pre-order campaigns through its social media channels.
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A Fantastic, Fantastical Book for the New, Cool Woman in My Life
This content was originally published by NICOLE LAMY on 2 May 2017 | 9:02 am.
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Joon Mo Kang
Dear Match Book,
I’m a queer, mixed-race Latina living in Nashville, Tenn . I’m an introvert who never fits in anywhere I go. I’m an atheist who works at a church and a woman who works in a tech department.
I’ve just recently begun dating an awesome woman from New York City. She loves to read George Saunders and Octavia E. Butler and watch “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Game of Thrones” (she’s also read the books by George R. R. Martin). Can you help me think of a book I could recommend for her that would knock her adorable socks off?
LAURIE STEVENS
NASHVILLE, TENN.
Dear Laurie,
Your letter sparked a burst of gleeful nostalgia between an old friend and me: People are still wooing each other with books! Mixtapes may be virtually obsolete, my friend noted, but seduction through books — another courting method left over from the analog age — lives on.
It was during the heyday of mixtapes that I first read “Geek Love” (1989) by Katherine Dunn. Before I picked up Dunn’s novel about the Binewskis, a family of self-styled carnival freaks, I had been semi-estranged from fantastical fiction since childhood. But Dunn’s daring spectacular — told in a torrent of sharp, detailed language — about family and love and belonging pulled me back into the realm of fantasy.
Plenty of contemporary fiction flirts with fantasy — a superpower here, a portal there — but Nnedi Okorafor’s 2010 novel “Who Fears Death” is an ambitious, sprawling true science fiction novel that grapples with race and gender. Set in a post-apocalyptic African world, the book tells the story of a shape-shifting sorceress named Onyesonwu with a heroic, tragic destiny. Her fully imagined emotional and physical life connects with vivid sensory details (this book describes such intense smells!) and an emphasis on the power of stories to create a world that feels very real, despite the novel’s wild, speculative elements.
The connections made in “The Passion,” Jeanette Winterson’s historical fairy tale published in 1987, are erotic and semi-supernatural. Set in Europe (mainly Venice) during the Napoleonic Wars, the book alternates between the narration of Henri, who wants to be a drummer in Napoleon’s army, but ends up a cook, and Villanelle, the cross-dressing daughter of a Venetian boatman, born with webbed feet during a solar eclipse. Their narratives eventually weave together, passing in and out of magic and revealing how both characters are driven by lust and undone by love.
Intertwining narratives also underpin Samantha Hunt’s 2016 novel “Mr. Splitfoot.” And spooky elements — including spiritualism — imbue the story about two women, Ruth and Cora, whose lives and missions overlap. But what sets this moving and mysterious novel apart is Hunt’s understanding of children and outcasts and those unfortunate characters who are both. The children in “Mr. Splitfoot” — Ruth and her tormentor/savior, Nat — meet in a group home where, “new arrivals carve filthy words into their dry skin, aching for their absent mothers.” Mothers, even absent ones, are the glue that fuses the two narratives into one journey.
Contrary to the dictates of their nature, vampires have thrived during their recent time in the sun. Their proliferation throughout popular culture takes nothing away from the magic of Karen Russell’s short story collection “Vampires in the Lemon Grove.” Not all of her stories feature the undead, though the weary fanged one in the title story has abundant charm and “a tan that won’t fade until I die (which I never will).” Russell’s command of the conventions of supernatural storytelling — which allows her to tweak the immortal and other supernatural forces — makes all her stories funny, poignant and profound.
In Kelly Link’s short fiction anything is possible. A raucous birthday party on a spaceship, a child born without a shadow, and in “Origin Story” — my favorite story in her collection “Get in Trouble” — there’s even a defunct George Saunders-esque theme park based on “The Wizard of Oz” and a reference to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” In each of her fantastical tales, Link creates a new universe from scratch, complete with different laws of physics. From story to story, the styles and environments vary so widely that it takes me a page or two to adjust to each new atmosphere. The supernatural results are disorienting and dazzling, but Link’s characters are so familiar and human — even when they are not — that it’s easy to fall in love.
Yours truly,
Match Book
Need something to read? Write to matchbook@nytimes.com.
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The Great Vietnam War Novel Was Not Written by an American
This content was originally published by VIET THANH NGUYEN on 2 May 2017 | 4:48 pm.
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Thinking back to Tran Van Dinh, I wonder if he was lonely as the only Vietnamese novelist in America of his time. Now we have no shortage of Vietnamese Americans writing in English, as well as translations of Vietnamese-language literature into English. But a lack of knowledge that this literature even exists continues. For most Americans and the world, “Vietnam” means the “Vietnam War,” and the Vietnam War means the American war, with novels written by American men about American soldiers. While their experiences are important, they are hardly representative of the Vietnam War, much less Vietnam.
As the writer Le Thi Diem Thuy and so many others have said, time and again, Vietnam is a country, not a war. One need only read the short story collection “The General Retires,” by the masterful Nguyen Huy Thiep, to understand this. His stories reveal the complexities of postwar life in a disillusioned Vietnam, struggling to rebuild itself and to reconcile the hypocrisies and failures of Vietnamese people and the Vietnamese state with the noble wartime rhetoric of the Communist Party. At the same time, war defined a generation, and its consequences have shaped the generation after, as Ms. Thuy reveals in “The Gangster We Are All Looking For.”
This lyrical novel tells the story of a young refugee girl in San Diego whose family is haunted by the soldier father’s trauma and the death of her brother, lost in the refugee flight. Like much of Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American literature dealing with the war, her novel shows that war affects more than soldiers or men. The Vietnam War was not remarkable in killing more civilians than soldiers, and in turning millions of civilians into refugees whose experiences were much more traumatic than those of the many American soldiers who never actually saw combat. Vietnamese-American literature forces its readers to acknowledge that a narrow definition of war that features only soldiers is inaccurate.
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Over and over, Vietnamese-American literature shows the war’s traumatic effect on civilians and refugees (Vu Tran’s gangster noir, “Dragonfish,” or Aimee Phan’s “We Should Never Meet,” about Vietnamese and Amerasian orphans, or Lan Cao’s “The Lotus and the Storm,” which connects the Vietnam War to the Iraq War, or Nguyen Qui Duc’s “Where the Ashes Are,” about the imprisonment of the author’s father, a South Vietnamese governor); its devastating reshaping of postwar Vietnamese life (Andrew X. Pham’s memoir about biking through the country, “Catfish and Mandala”; or Linh Dinh’s scabrous satire of economic corruption in Saigon, “Love Like Hate”; or Quan Barry’s “She Weeps Each Time You’re Born,” about a seer’s remarkable talent to feel the pain of survivors); its haunting presence in the diaspora’s second generation (Thi Bui’s powerful illustrated memoir, “The Best We Could Do”; or Dao Strom’s novel “Grass Roof, Tin Roof,” about a Vietnamese woman who marries an American man and the impact of the marriage on their children; or Bich Minh Nguyen’s memoir of growing up in the Midwest, “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner”; or Andrew Lam’s “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora”); or its foreshadowing in the Vietnamese past (Monique Truong’s “The Book of Salt,” about the Vietnamese cook of Gertrude Stein and his encounter with Ho Chi Minh; or Duong Van Mai Elliott’s “The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family”).
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The list goes on. The literature by Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Americans is out there for anyone who knows how to use Google. But so many here and abroad would rather not know, or when a new Vietnamese author is published, would prefer to say, “At last! A voice for the Vietnamese!” In fact, there are so many voices, for the Vietnamese people are very loud. They just often aren’t heard by those who don’t understand Vietnamese, or those who would prefer to think of Americans when they hear the word “Vietnam,” or those who have room in their course syllabuses for only one Vietnamese book, as is still the case in too many college classes on the Vietnam War, even if that one book is as worthy as Bao Ninh’s novel “The Sorrow of War.” This book is not just a North Vietnamese war classic — it is a classic war novel of any time and any place.
As for the Communist Party of Vietnam, it, too, would rather not hear certain voices. Even Bao Ninh is silenced now, as is his great compatriot, Duong Thu Huong, the disillusioned northern veteran who was exiled for her disturbing postwar anti-Communist novels, books like “Novel Without a Name” and “Paradise of the Blind.” As for Vietnamese-American voices, while we are occasionally heard here — and then often forgotten — we are rarely heard in Vietnam. We are the losers, the traitors, the dissidents or simply the outsiders who see the nothingness behind a party that praises Communism while running the country as a capitalist dictatorship.
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Like Le Ly Hayslip, we are caught between sides, Vietnam and America, Vietnamese and English, Communism and capitalism. As difficult as such a situation is, it is good for writers. The discomfort makes us write our stories, again and again, in the hope that we can change what people think of when they hear “Vietnam.”
Correction: May 2, 2017
An earlier version of this essay omitted a word from the title of a novel by Le Thi Diem Thuy. It is “The Gangster We Are All Looking For,” not “The Gangster We Are Looking For.”
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Bookstore News: May 2, 2017
This content was originally published by on 2 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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Books Are Magic's first weekend; Oklahoma City pop-up goes permanent; Spanish-language bookseller on her inspiration; and more.
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