Mark Sarvas's Blog, page 31

WHAT GAVE YOU THAT IDEA?

From an actual publicist email I received today:

"I am looking for reviewers for a nonfiction historical novel and I thought you might be interested."

I am not, as regular readers know, a publicist basher; quite the contrary, in fact.  Most of the publicists I deal with are thoughtful and thorough people.  But when I read something like this, I do despair. I mean, seriously - come on.  Some poor writer is paying for this service. 

So, to my hapless correspondent, when you've figured out what...

UNPACKING MY LIBRARY

A little more than a year ago, my wife and I were forced to decamp our digs in Pacific Palisades when our idiot landlady decided that she wanted to list our unit for sale smack in the middle of housing slump. (It sold last week, after 15 months of sitting empty.) We needed to make a quick move and we settled on a small place in Brentwood that was charming but, in hindsight, far too small for us. And so my library remained in the garage in boxes for the year that we lived there.

We returned...

NOBEL REACTIONS

We were indisposed yesterday and unable to comment on the Herta Müller Nobel Prize in real time, and by the time we got back online, the Literary Saloon had, as expected, covered it more thoroughly and knowledgeably than we could have, and so we direct you there.  (The Guardian piece is particularly worth your while.)

Incidentally, Orthofer is right to castigate the predictably silly coverage from the Washington Post's Mary Jordan, who seems to operate under the narrow-minded belief that only ...

WOLF HALL WINS BOOKER

Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, the odds-on favorite to win the Booker, did so last night.  We imagine Maud Newton is rejoicing.

Wolf Hall is set in the 1520s and tells the story of Thomas Cromwell's rise to prominence in the Tudor court.  Hilary Mantel has been praised by critics for writing 'a rich, absorbingly readable historical novel; she has made a significant shift in the way any of her readers interested in English history will henceforward think about Thomas Cromwell.'

GUEST INTERVIEW: LESLIE SCHWARTZ

INTERVIEW BY DANIEL A. OLIVAS

Leslie Schwartz's first novel, Jumping the Green (Simon & Schuster 1999), won the James Jones Literary Society Award for Best First Novel. Her second novel, Angels Crest (Doubleday 2004), was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, translated into nine languages, and optioned for film. In 2004, she was named Kalliope Magazine's Woman Writer of the Year.

Schwartz teaches creative writing at Juvenile Hall, in under-served middle and high school communities, and at Homeboy...

MORNING WOOD

James Wood on Richard Powers's Generosity.   (Cheers, Niall.)

"Generosity" is subtitled not "A Novel," but "An Enhancement," perhaps Powers's way of demoting the book a rank or two, as with Graham Greene's "Entertainments." It is also, we are led to infer, the book that Russell Stone will begin to write about his former student, and, as Stone is himself a failed writer, perhaps Powers thought that mimetic fidelity compelled him to compose a failure, too. A less postmodern explanation might be...

GUEST ESSAY: THE EXUBERANT SELF

Tin House Books has just published The Story About the Story , which collects lively discussions of great literature by some of the most prominent authors of all time. With over thirty essays written by authors as diverse as Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf to Cynthia Ozick and Salman Rushdie, this collection proposes a new "Creative Criticism," a form of critical essay that involves a personal perspective.

Anthology editor J. C. Hallman is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the...

SIGNS OF THE APOCALYPSE # 43

Sweet fucking McJesus.

TO MY IFOA CORRESPONDENT

I regret I can't seem to locate your recent email to me and am thus unable to reply.  Perhaps you'd drop me a quick line if you see this ...

(My new lot as a parent.  Sigh.)

TEV GIVEAWAY (MONDAY EDITION): LOVE AND SUMMER

I recently received an awfully kind email from one of my readers, John Dunbar, who advised me that he wanted to make a contribution to a TEV giveaway.  A devoted William Trevor fan, he'd recently received a gift copy of Trevor's latest, Love and Summer.  Being the diehard that he is, however, he'd already done what I do with John Banville - he'd ordered the earlier UK release.  As a result, he asked if I wanted to use his spare for a TEV giveaway.  (For those who are wondering, Dunbar has...