Maria Tatar's Blog, page 15

Holiday Shopping at the Harvard Bookstore on Small Business Saturday!

 

I’ll be making book recommendations on Small Business Saturday (November 30) at the Harvard Bookstore (1256 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge), from 4-6pm.  Come in, say hello, and start your holiday shopping with me and a few other local authors.  

SHERMAN ALEXIE

September 1, 2013

Hello, hello, you gorgeous book nerds,

Now is the time to be a superhero for independent bookstores. I want all of us (you and you and especially you) to spend an amazing day hand-selling books at your local independent bookstore on Small Business Saturday (that’s the Saturday after Thanksgiving, November 30 this year, so you know it’s a huge weekend for everyone who, you know, wants to make a living).

Here’s the plan: We book nerds will become booksellers. We will make recommendations. We will practice nepotism and urge readers to buy multiple copies of our friends’ books. Maybe you’ll sign and sell books of your own in the process. I think the collective results could be mind-boggling (maybe even world-changing).

I was a bookseller-for-a-day at Seattle’s Queen Anne Book Company when it reopened this past April. Janis Segress, one of the new co-owners, came up with this brilliant idea. What could be better than spending a day hanging out in your favorite hometown indie, hand- selling books you love to people who will love them too and signing a stack of your own? Why not give it a try? Let’s call it Indies First.

Grassroots is my favorite kind of movement, and anyway there’s not a lot of work involved in this one. Just pick a bookstore, talk to the owner (or answer the phone when they call you) and reach an agreement about how to spend your time that day. You’d also need to agree to place that store’s buy button in a prominent place on your website, above the Amazon button if you have one. After all, this is Indies First, not Indies Only, and it’s designed to include Indies in our world but not to exclude anyone else.

This is a great way to fight for independents—one that will actually help them. It’ll help you as well; the Indies I’ve talked to have told me that last year Small Business Saturday was one of their biggest days of the year, in some cases the biggest after the Saturday before Christmas—and that means your books will get a huge boost, wherever you choose to be.

The most important thing is that we’ll all be helping Independent bookstores, and God knows they’ve helped us over the years. So join the Indie First Movement and help your favorite independent bookstore. Help all indie bookstores. Reach out to them and join the movement. Indies First!

Yours in Independence,

Sherman Alexie, An Absolutely True Part-Time Indie

“Little Red Riding Hood” Back on the Map

In Plos One, Jamshid Tehrani reports his findings about the geographical origins of Little Red Riding Hood.  Here’s the link to the full article:

 http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Ado…

Researchers have long been fascinated by the strong continuities evident in the oral traditions associated with different cultures. According to the ‘historic-geographic’ school, it is possible to classify similar tales into “international types” and trace them back to their original archetypes. However, critics argue that folktale traditions are fundamentally fluid, and that most international types are artificial constructs. Here, these issues are addressed using phylogenetic methods that were originally developed to reconstruct evolutionary relationships among biological species, and which have been recently applied to a range of cultural phenomena. The study focuses on one of the most debated international types in the literature: ATU 333, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. A number of variants of ATU 333 have been recorded in European oral traditions, and it has been suggested that the group may include tales from other regions, including Africa and East Asia. However, in many of these cases, it is difficult to differentiate ATU 333 from another widespread international folktale, ATU 123, ‘The Wolf and the Kids’. To shed more light on these relationships, data on 58 folktales were analysed using cladistic, Bayesian and phylogenetic network-based methods. The results demonstrate that, contrary to the claims made by critics of the historic-geographic approach, it is possible to identify ATU 333 and ATU 123 as distinct international types. They further suggest that most of the African tales can be classified as variants of ATU 123, while the East Asian tales probably evolved by blending together elements of both ATU 333 and ATU 123. These findings demonstrate that phylogenetic methods provide a powerful set of tools for testing hypotheses about cross-cultural relationships among folktales, and point towards exciting new directions for research into the transmission and evolution of oral narratives.

A Quartet of Fairy-tale Picture Books

Some great new fairy-tale picture books, including one from Lisbeth Zwerger, along with Fairy-Tale Comics!  I’m spending the afternoon reading the entire Children’s Books Section of the NYTBR, but first a walk while there is still light to brighten the fading beauty of autumn leaves.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/books/…

In adult reworkings of fairy tales, almost anything goes, and in a creative flash, the girl in red can turn into Red Hot Riding Hood. When it comes to versions for children, the urge to preach becomes almost irresistible. We put tight constraints on improvisation, insisting on morals, even when they do not square with the facts of the story. MacDonald turns the audacious Jack into a repentant rogue who “knew he shouldn’t have risked his life like that.” Adventurous and beauty-loving Little Red Riding Hood is portrayed as disobedient (for talking to the wolf) and wayward (for picking flowers). In the end, she promises “never to stray from the path again,” just as her mother had told her in the beginning. All versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” in these collections make the same point, even though staying on the path would not have changed a thing. In “Fairy Tale Comics,” Little Red Riding Hood vows never to talk to strangers again, an update to the story, making it about stranger danger but ignoring the fact that conversation was never the real problem.

Pullman’s translation of the Grimms translated back into German and illustrated by Shaun Tan!

Shaun Tan’s witch has to be the scariest ever used to illustrate Hansel and Gretel.

 It is almost too odd for words, a German translation of Philip Pullman’s retellings of the Grimms’ fairy tales.  When I reviewed Pullman’s Fairy Tales from the Brothers for Page-Turner at the New Yorker, I worried that the author of His Dark Materials had remained too faithful to the letter of the stories–I had been hoping that he would actually reinvent the fairy tales for our own time, taking them in zany new directions.  Since Pullman did not deviate greatly from the letter and spirit of the Grimms, it feels odd to read a German version of “Der Froschkoenig” that strays ever so slightly from what the Grimms wrote.  ”Als das Wuenschen noch geholfen hatte,” for example, becomes “als das Wuenschen noch gewirkt hatte.”  Still, any opportunity to have Shaun Tan illustrate the tales is more than welcome.  Not surprisingly, he delivers on every count, and I can’t wait to see the entire set of images.  That the translation exists at all is a marvel.  And German readers will appreciate the straightforward profundities of Pullman’s introduction and commentary.

And thanks to Philip Nel for calling the volume to my attention!

Here’s Shaun Tan’s description of the volume’s origins: http://www.shauntan.net/books/Grimm%2...

Totem and Taboo!

Tomorrow night I will be defending Freud’s Totem and Taboo at the Boston Public Library in their annual retroactive book award event.  What would we do without the witch doctor from Vienna (that’s Nabokov), the man who gave us the horror of incest, the primal horde, the omnipotence of thought, as well as the Wolfman and the Ratman?  Any interesting encounters with the volume?

 http://www.bpl.org/general/associates/ev…

The Annual Meeting and Hundred-Year Retroactive Book Award of 1913
Wednesday, November 6, 2013, 6 pm – 8 pm

Abbey Room, Boston Public Library

 

Following a brief Annual Meeting, the Associates of the Boston Public Library will conduct a Hundred-Year Retroactive Book Award competition, weighing the enduring literary merits of best sellers published in 1913. Contenders for the prize are Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo, defended by Harvard professor Maria Tatar; Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, presented by TR’s great-grandson Tweed Roosevelt; and Scott’s Last Expedition (edited by Leonard Huxley), championed by mountaineer and author David Roberts. Radio Open Source host Christopher Lydon will moderate the irreverent debate, after which the audience will voted to determine the winner of the Book Award of 1913. A reception with the panelists will follow.

Sleeping Beauty in Hanover, New Hampshire

I’m looking forward to a day at Dartmouth, talking about Sleeping Beauty in a public lecture and about Little Red Riding Hood in Nancy Canepas’s class on fairy tales.

Show and Tell: Sleeping Beauty as Verbal Icon and Seductive Story
 Tuesday, October 29, 2013

4:30pm-5:30pm
Room 003, Rockefeller Center


Sponsored by: French and Italian Department
Intended Audience(s): Public

A Second Look at the Big, Bad Wolf

NPR’s 100 Must-Reads for Kids 9-14

 http://www.npr.org/2013/08/05/207315023/…

Scenes from Sondheim’s Into the Woods

Meryl Streep, Jenny Depp, Anna Kendrick, Chris Pine, and Emily Blunt head up the all-star cast of Disney’s adaptation of the classic Stephen Sondheim Broadway musical ”Into the Woods,” which has begun shooting in England.

 http://movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-talk…

“The Book Thief” Premiers in November

Click the link below for the trailer!

The Book Thief