Beth Kephart's Blog, page 241

On the making of a young editor: my interview with Alison Weiss of Egmont USA

In this brief chapter from my morning at the BEA, I spend some time with Alison Weiss, the youngest of the Egmont USA editors. She talks about her evolution as a lover of books to a maker of them.

2011 BEA: An Interview with Egmont USA Marketeer Rob Guzman

I'll be posting a few videos from my travels to the BEA today. Here we meet the terrific Rob Guzman, an integral member of the Egmont USA marketing team.[image error]

This utterly and completely made my pre-BEA day

I strive, always, to give as much space as I can on this blog to the work of others; it's a community out here, and I'm privileged to share in it, don't ever want this blog to be too much about me.



But for this moment, on this day before I head off to the BEA, I revel in the generosity of There's A Book, which has called You Are My Only one of the most anticipated books of 2011, along with some other fine titles.



Check in later in the week at There's a Book for a YAMO giveaway.



And picture me dancing. Don't let any writer tell you any different: We do care, enormously, what our readers think, especially readers who have been as generous to our work as 1st Daughter has always been to mine.[image error]

Caleb's Crossing/Geraldine Brooks: Reflections

Several years ago I had the privilege of reviewing March, the book that ultimately won Geraldine Brooks the Pulitzer Prize, for the Chicago Tribune. I hadn't yet attempted to write historical fiction. I did not know the perils. I merely found my way inside Brooks' story and emerged with this impression:

It is harder, sometimes, to review a glorious book — to convey its power and influence without relying on suspicious adjectives.  Good books can be slotted, characterized, explained; great books often cannot.  I believe Geraldine Brooks' new novel, March, is a very great book.  I believe it breathes new life into the historical fiction genre, the borrowing-a-character-from-the-deep-past phenomenon, the old I-shall-tell-you-a-story-through-letters tradition.  I believe it honors the best of the imagination.  I give it a hero's welcome.  And that should be enough, somehow, but let me try to explain it....

In time, I would write my own history-indebted books. I would come to an earned understanding of how difficult it is to both honor the past and make it relevant and pressing for modern readers. One has to make decisions about authenticity, completeness, recorded truth, the shaping of language, the admission of now to then. One has to yield to the novelist's first obligation, which is to craft a moving, timeless story.



With Caleb's Crossing, Brooks' newest book, this far-ranging author finds her inspiration in a spare record concerning the first Native American graduate of Harvard College. We meet this young man in the wilds of mid-seventeenth-century Martha's Vineyard. We follow him through his troubled negotiation with two religions and languages. We come to know him, most of all, through Bethia, a Puritan minister's daughter, who discovers Caleb along the beach and dares to continue to meet him there—privately and at great risk to her fortunes and reputation. Ultimately the two travel to an early version of Harvard University, where the air is fetid and the quarters are close and racism and inequity are present evils.



The story is told by Bethia herself, in notes she sets down throughout the years. Our view of Caleb's life is restricted by Bethia's own necessarily limited encounters, but Bethia herself is a magnificent creation—fully alive to her times, utterly capable of capturing the mist along the shore, on the one hand, and the fetid, close quarters of mostly male instruction in early Massachusetts, on the other. Brooks gives us the language of the time, the odd chores, the strange antecedents. We believe we are there, but we are glad we are here, turning Brooks' care-invested pages.



A quieting passage. Bethia lies by the shore:

I lay down again and closed my eyes against the glare, listening to the sound of the surf as it arced all around me, the thrumming fall of breakers, the shush of the receding waves. Every now and then I felt my skin cool slightly as a cloud passed across the sun. From time to time a gull would voice a rich cry, high and urgent.

Month 2 of iPad2: A review of books and apps; a chronicle of experiences

I'm well into my second month of cohabiting with the iPad2, and I'm frankly still getting used to the creature. Still learning how to navigate and sync. Still trying to discover how to make it work for me.



Some reporting, then, from the field.



I have found the iBooks (I bought Bossypants and a guidebook to Croatia) to offer a more alluring read than the Kindle books, thanks to the preview capability, the extras, the ease of navigation, and the more generous simulation of actual-book reading. And yet, I have leaned more heavily toward Kindle books because the titles I have wanted—In Zanesville, A Visit From The Goon Squad, Please Look After Mom, When We Danced on Water—have been either more readily or more cost-effectively Kindle available. During these past six weeks I have continued to go into bookstores and to buy books proper, continued to hold proper paper-and-spine books such as Cleopatra, Caleb's Crossing, Sweet Dreams, and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius on my lap. I don't think I will ever willingly give up on my old book-buying habit.



I have also made use of the PDF Reader to read both my own adult novel-in-progress (I wanted to approximate the feel of the read before the book was sent out to editors for review) and Dana Spiotta's magnificent Stone Arabia. I'm clearly not a skilled PDF Reader user. I am not thrilled with, and could never look past, the floating nature of those pages, the inability to truly mark the text, the sense that I was reading a mere facsimile. I'm buying Spiotta's book when it comes out in July because I want to own it, have it on my shelves, pick it up with ease, flip to a favorite page. And certainly I am hoping that my own adult novel will move past the PDF Reader stage.



On the other hand, I have loved—loved—reading The New York Times on the iPad2. I still retrieve the weekend edition from the end of my driveway, still settle in with the paper version of the magazine. But I find the overall newspaper to be easier to handle on the iPad2—more alluring, more easily reviewed, more packed with the bright lights of videos and links.  I don't annoy my husband with the crinkle and snap of the paper while he sits on the other end of the couch watching his monster river fish and World War II shows, and I am more connected to the news than I was, and that, alone, is worth the price of this machine. The New Yorker still arrives via the old mangled mailbox each Tuesday. I'm not quite sure that I want to go digital with that particular publication just yet.



Since I am soon bound for London and Berlin, I've also bought some travel apps and played with these.  I'll be honest: I'm still going out to buy a travel guide or two. Call me old-fashioned. I like to dog ear my instructions to foreign places. The Berlin app, for the record, was far superior to the London app.



Last night I spent about four hours searching for new apps—reviewed several but remained unconvinced and finally went on over to Salon.com to get the kind of reading I was hungry for. In the midst of it all, I studied those increasingly famous Kindle Singles, feeling just a little amazed that Susan Orleans earned an entire NYT article for a piece called "Animalish" that appears to be the length of a single New Yorker magazine story. What, I wondered, would happen if all magazine stories got NYT reviewed?  And while I absolutely adore Tim Gunn, I was surprised to discover that his Kindle Single "memoir" is but 15 pages long. Maybe I'll buy it anyway, to help mitigate the long flight to those foreign places.



I'm headed to the BEA on Wednesday and I think I'll likely be carrying a regular old book in my bag—perhaps a classic like Mary Karr's Liars' Club. I hope to come home with a regular old galley or two as well. I'm on the hunt for Michael Ondaatje's forthcoming The Cat's Table and I'll be stopping by the Grove Atlantic/Black Cat and Graywolf booths to see what these two fantastic imprints are up to. 



All in all, I guess I'm saying, I am making my way. I'd love to hear from others on this journey.

Remembering my mother on her birthday

Today I remember my mother on her birthday. Her love of fine fabrics and fashion. Her kitchen artistry. Her green-flecked eyes.



Here she is, outside one of her favorite stores on Walnut Street. My father waits in the reflected glass. I lift my camera to my face.



It is the serenity of this photograph—her serenity—that so appeals to me.

Stone Arabia/Dana Spiotta: The Book of This Year?

Let me call this one as I think it rightly is: You may be headed to the BEA next week in search of the Book of the Year, the Big One, the Ultimate Prize Winner. You may imagine yourself wending down and through those Javits Center aisles, your shoulder a book-bag-burdened sloop, your ears somewhere between burn and buzz, the whole of your senses gone hyperkinetic as you pile on the galleys and pack in the giveaways and assure yourself that somewhere, inside all that brilliant literary mayhem, is the Best Book of This Year.



But unless you somehow find yourself a copy of Dana Spiotta's Stone Arabia (and at the moment copies are scarce) you are (I am sorry to report) not in possession of this year's best. You may just have to wait until July 12, when this slender volume sets sail.



Because maybe Jennifer Egan and her music-saturated, technically daring Goon Squad captured our imaginations in 2010. But Dana Spiotta, with her own lyric-besotted, indie-spirited Stone Arabia (Scribner), does something different, something more. It's a book about losing, fudging, and outfoxing memory. It's about a brother and a sister in their reeling mid-lives—that brother's life as an almost-musician, that sister's lonesome, fated love.  It's about the anomie of living right now—when the news affronts and hallows, and the tragedies of perfect strangers make us cry, and we lose ourselves within the portals of internet knowing and emerge merely more lost and a lot less knowing. (It's also, in small part, a calibrated riff on our blogging culture, but I only smiled, took no offense.)



We are a half step from forgetting, Spiotta reminds us, and we are a half step from being forgotten, but we are not vanished yet. We still have it in our power to live beyond the authoritative record, to tinker with our own legacies. The brilliance of Stone Arabia is matched by its beauty, which is to say that this is a fiercely intelligent book and also (importantly) an utterly humane one.



A personal note: I found Lightning Field, Dana Spiotta's gorgeous first novel, in a bookstore and brought it home a decade ago. Soon enough, Spiotta's second novel, Eat the Document, was nominated for the National Book Award. From time to time, then, in conversations with other writers, I would hear about Spiotta's graces as a person—her unshowy intelligence and big heart noted by writers like Rick Moody and Ken Kalfus.  Her university workshop students seem to love her, too; I've heard a fine tale or two about that.



But none of what I thought I knew prepared me for the power of Stone Arabia.  I hate that it's late May and that you'll therefore have to wait until mid-July to read it.



Read it, though, as soon as you can.

It stopped raining.

The sun came out.



I took a walk.



With my son.



The iris bloomed through the rain, but held on.



This is the news, where I live.



Also news: I am hosting another special meal, this time for my dad and in honor of The Boy Who Goes to London (Much Too) Soon.



The kitchen awaits me.

The Dangerous Neighbors Sequel: Writing William's Story

When I started writing the book that became Dangerous Neighbors, I gave the story over to three interlocking, first-person voices—that of Katherine, the privileged nineteen-year old who has lost her twin sister in Philadelphia's Centennial year, that of the fire that threatened to bring the Centennial grounds to a charred halt, and that of William, from the city's poorer side, who becomes Katherine's companion and, ultimately, friend during one terrifying day.



Over the course of reworking and transforming the book, the story remade itself (or, I should say, I remade it) into a single third-person, present tense voice.  The fire became a scene instead of a personality, and William became an important but secondary character.  One hundred full pages of William's tale never made it into the slender book that became Dangerous Neighbors (Laura Geringer Books/Egmont USA).



But I always missed William and his story, always wished that the narrative structure and the themes I'd finally settled on could have made more room for him, and in fact many dear readers wondered out loud (either to me or in their reviews) why we didn't see more of this young man. I wrote, often, of wanting to write the sequel. This summer I am doing just that—returning to William, writing into and through his story, and committing to the sequel I had always planned to write.



Publishing is changing. Opportunities to share stories are changing with it. Dangerous Neighbors was kindly received by so many of you and now has a life as a Scholastic selection.  I have spoken with my agent, and on this I'm very clear: One way or the other, William's story will get told.



Thanks to all of you whose words, one way or the other, finally brought me to this.

When We Danced on Water/Evan Fallenberg: Reflections

I can't remember the last time I read a book just and only for its story. Call it a professional hazard or supreme nerdism, toss it out there as a liability (I often think it is), but I'm as interested in how a book gets made—its structure and seams, its leaps of technical faith—as I am in the tale being told, the characters that have been brought to the page.



I am interested, for example, in the choices authors make when writing a novel whose primary action and secrets lie in the characters' distance pasts. Here, in these chapters, are the characters remembering. Here, in these, are the many things remembered. What binds the two? How are the now and the then kept equally suspenseful, alive? How does the author negotiate the need to make it all feel as real and messy as life itself is...and also equally cohering? How does he avoid sentimentalism, overt plotting, distracting coincidences while still building a moving, seamless whole?



Those questions are particularly relevant in Evan Fallenberg's new novel, When We Danced on Water, the story of a friendship between Teo, an elderly choreographer, and Vivi, a waitress half his age. Present time is Tel Aviv, and the burgeoning, surprising friendship between Teo and Vivi. Then is Teo's harrowing past as a Jewish dancer during Berlin's worst years, on the one hand, and Vivi's forsaken love affair with a Christian man among the ghosts of Berlin, on the other.  Present time is told in the present tense.  The past is rendered in the past tense. Readers are taken back and forth, between what was and what is, sometimes through long and perhaps not always entirely realistic passages of dialogue/monologue, and sometimes through private reminisce.



I read the book in two sittings; I was, in many ways, intrigued. By Fallenberg's exceptional descriptions of ballet. By Tel Aviv itself, so well rendered. By the Berlin Fallenberg resurrects, not just during Hitler's rule but later, in the aftermath. The research is here. The precision. Fallenberg's clear desire to get the details just right.



Sometimes the language of When We Danced strikes just the right tone, especially in those early present tense scenes, when Teo and Vivi are just commencing their friendship and things are curt and clipped between them. How simple, direct, and telling, for example, are these opening lines:

He said, "Where's Rona."

She said, "Who's Rona."

At other times, though, I felt the language straining, the painting and the pitching notched too grand-scale big. For example:

... he wanted to find another human being who knew how it felt to have the stars cheer him on each time he stepped into ballet slippers, how the planets shook themselves out of their slumber and the galaxies flicked their sparkling tails and the sun shot great bolts of heat and light through the cold universe each time he pirouetted across the floor.

I felt the story itself straining in places, too—the drama at times hinting at melodrama, the characters too conveniently equipped with certain skills or histories, the big gestures (especially on Vivi's part, when she seeks to honor Teo's career) a little too programmed or pre-determined, perhaps not entirely believable.



And yet I read with great interest and great respect for Fallenberg's impulses as a novelist, his clear affection for his characters, his absolute commitment to researching both the history of Berlin and the ineffable qualities of dance. There are, in the end, no perfect novels (or very few of them), but there are novelists who are working from within a respecting, respectful, enormously humane place. Fallenberg is one of them, and I am quite glad that I read When We Danced.