Mark Sarvas's Blog, page 35

LIBRARY SALE SERENDIPITY ... BOOK SHOPPING TRIP ... GALLEY OF THE WEEK ... TAKING THE PISS

(Messing around with some new and different post formats to liven things up a bit around here.  File these random thoughts under "Works in Progress")

1)  On style: It's a sickness, really, but even with all the books that show up here every week, with all the shelves of unread material demanding my attention, with all the favorites I'd like time to reread, I still can't pass up a library sale when I see one.  Saturday was the Pacific Palisades branch book sale, and I was running errands nearby, s

ANXIOUS HORROR

Daniel Mendelsohn turns his infallibly sensitive eye to Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds.

But these bad guys were real, this history was real, and the feelings we have about them and what they did are real and have real-world consequences and implications. Do you really want audiences cheering for a revenge that turns Jews into carboncopies of Nazis, that makes Jews into "sickening" perpetrators? I'm not so sure. An alternative, and morally superior, form of "revenge" for Jews would be to

THE LIVIN' IS EASY

A 26-minute podcast of J.M. Coetzee reading from Summertime.  (Thanks, Andie.)

The delivery, it's safe to say, will transport Coetzee fans into raptures.

RECOMMENDED: FILLET OF MOCKINGBIRD

Garth Risk Hallberg on Macolm Gladwell on To Kill a Mockingbird.

Well, obviously. Otherwise Harper Lee would have named him Thurgood Marshall, or Shmurgood Shmarshall, and would have made him a heroic civil-rights reformer. But in addition to not being Thurgood Marshall, Atticus Finch is also a fictional character. This is not a trivial observation. Contradictions, blemishes, and blind spots are to be cherished in characters (and, some would say, in real people). Indeed, one way of reading the en

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LITERARY SALOON

As we continue to struggle to get onto a reasonable schedule again (soon, people, soon  - we have quite the posting backlog), we would be remiss if we did not stop everything to wish a very happy seventh birthday to the indispensible Literary Saloon.  They grow up so fast, don't they?

LDM TAKES L.A.

Friday giveaways will finally return in full force next week.  Things are still a bit hectic around here - it takes a lot longer to unpack moving boxes when you have diaper changes and feedings, so I hope you'll bear with me just a little longer.

In the meantime, Opium Magazine's legendary Literary Death March is coming to L.A. on Tuesday evening and I will be making a rare public appearance, having been given permission by Mrs. TEV to abandon her for the night.  I'm one of the three judges, assi

MUST READ

We're terrible about updating our blogroll (it doesn't help that the software we use is hellishly unreliable), but we have meaning to alert you for ages to our current essential blog - George Szirtes, the wonderful Hungarian poet and translator has filled a gap for us that opened up when Wyatt Mason hung up his spurs.  Make it part of your daily read.  You'll thank us for it ...

THURSDAY MARGINALIA

* Dept. of Dog Bites Man:  Authors flock to Twitter, sez USA Today.  Even Chicago is all a-tweet.

* An independent bookseller predicts the death of Amazon.

The Kindle masks the fact that selling shares and peddling bogus sales numbers to dodge billions of dollars in taxes always has the same ending in America, punishing the poorest of people, who never bought into the scheme in the first place. The argument has nothing to do with whether or not your Kindle is pretty or the technology great. We are

NEWSWEEK GOES LOW

Nice to see that the mainstream can now tar reputations as cavalierly as the blogosphere.  Newsweek launches the sort of shrill, sensationalist sally that is usually the speciality of the more abusive blogs around town.  Richard Russo is a misogynist!  

Russo's novels and stories contain multitudes, yet only two types of women: perfect bitches and perfect angels. Either way, these women are like smooth, shiny ball bearings, their interiors impenetrable and unknowable. None of them seems at all co

A LEGEND DIES

Budd Schulberg, one of the true giants, has died.

For "On the Waterfront," Mr. Schulberg won the Academy Award for best screenplay in 1954.
The son of a powerful movie executive, B. P. Schulberg, Mr. Schulberg wrote about Hollywood moguls, political ideologues and mob bosses who took advantage of ordinary people. "It's the writer's responsibility to stand up against that power," he said in an interview with The New York Times in July 2006. "The writers are really almost the only ones, except for v