Mark Sarvas's Blog, page 46
April 22, 2009
L.A. EVENT TROIKA - JANE SMILEY, LAT FESTIVAL OF BOOKS, GRANTA PARTY
It's a busy literary week in the City of Angels, and we wanted to make sure our readers were all up to speed on what's what.
Of course, no literary Angeleno needs to be reminded about the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the nation's biggest event of its kind. It rolls into town for the weekend, and the full schedule can be found here. (And yes, we'll be covering it again this year for all those who can't make it.)
As a warm up, we encourage you to check out Jane Smiley's LAPL Aloud lecture
April 20, 2009
WHEN SMART PEOPLE SAY SILLY THINGS
Two surprising displays of foolishness from two normally smart and thoughtful sources. First, there's NPR's look at forgotten Pulitzer Prize winners of years gone by:
It's sure to win a bit of immortality for the author, right? Well, not necessarily.
We're going out on a limb to say there are a bunch of Pulitzer Prize-winning novels you've probably never heard of — unless you're some kind of literary wunderkind.
Were these books great in their time, but only in their time? Were the Pulitzer jurors
April 19, 2009
JG BALLARD DIES
The brilliantly bleak JG Ballard has died at 78.
Novels of disaster and experimentation, including 1962's The Drowned World and 1973's Crash, later made into a film by David Cronenberg, garnered him a growing reputation as an anti-establishment avant garde writer. Crash, in which a couple become sexually aroused through car crashes, was written as a motorway extension was being built past the end of his street in Shepperton, west London.
You can visit Ballard's website here. And if you're new to
April 16, 2009
THURSDAY MARGINALIA
* Regular TEV readers will recall my enthusiasm for Rob Riemen's Nobility of Spirit (which still sits atop our Recommended sidebar). The book has just been released in France, where it has been immediately taken up by Slate's Jacques Attali. If you have the French for it, it's worth taking a look.
D'abord, c'est le titre qui m'a attiré: «Noblesse de l'Esprit». Dans la pile des livres reçus ce matin, je choisis les brèves épreuves d'un texte d'un auteur inconnu pour moi, Rob Riemen, un professeu
April 15, 2009
AMAZONIAN ASSUMPTIONS
The Amazon Glitch-Snafu-Hack (depending on whom you read) has been much in the news the last few days, but this piece at the Washington Post - which speaks to the heart of the assumptions in Amazon's "algorithm" - is especially worth reading.
The issue with #AmazonFail isn't that a French Employee pressed the wrong button or could affect the system by changing "false" to "true" in filtering certain "adult" classified items, it's that Amazon's system has assumptions such as: sexual orientation is
April 14, 2009
NYC EVENT - CHRISTENSEN, NEWTON, SKURNICK **RECOMMENDED**
How much do we envy our NYC readers who get to forget their tax woes tomorrow night with this stellar lineup?
April 13, 2009
REQUIRED READING
Two superb longer pieces demand your attention this week. Continuing last week's "really, really smart" theme, you will want to print out and make time for both Wyatt Mason's NYT Magazine profile of TEV favorite Frederick Seidel ...
Seidel’s subjects became not those of his past reading or early living but of his present life or, if you like, his class. He became, to use his word, “unapologetic” — in taste, in tone, in everything. For if, as it turned out, Seidel was lucky; if he could exploit
April 10, 2009
L.A. EVENT - RUMPUS LAUNCH
Giveaways will resume next Friday. In the interim, we wanted to alert you to the L.A. launch party for The Rumpus. Updated ten to fifteen times a day, The Rumpus provides original reviews of books, music, and film, interviews with people like Malcolm Gladwell, The Twisted Monk, Bill Ayers, Bucky Sinister, Al Franken, and Michael Showalter, as well as original essays by Robin Romm, Michelle Tea, and others, and blogs by Rick Moody, Kaui Hart Hemmings, Bitchy Jones, Ryan Boudinot, and Jerry Stah
April 9, 2009
"THE RIGHT, THE EXACT, THE ONLY WORD"
John Banville is the 200th Art of Fiction interview at The Paris Review.
INTERVIEWER: Do you revise?
BANVILLE: When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it’s finished. A certain point comes at which you can’t do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence. The rhythm is set. The meaning is set. Occasionally I will leave behind a sentence that I know is missing a word, and I’ll go back to it later. I wrote a sentence like that yesterday. A man is talking about his wife, who’s
FROM THE HOME OFFICE IN WAHOO, NEBRASKA ...
The gang over at blogs.com ("the best in blogs") asked us to come up with a top ten list pertaining to book blogs, and we decided there were enough generic "top ten book blogs" lists out there already that tend to focus on the usual names. So we offered up a list of "Top 10 Really, Really Smart Literary Blogs" - the gallopingly unscientfic criterion for admission being that these are blogs about which we routinely find ourselves thinking, "That is one really, really smart writer." Curious? Yo
