Aptly, we may begin with the title. The dust jacket has it as The Original of Laura: A novel in fragments, while the title page varies this to The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun). However, the author himself, at the top of the first of the 138 file cards on which the novel—let us call it a novel, for now—is composed, calls the book merely The Original of Laura. The subtitle A novel in fragments is easily accepted as an editor's addendum, since the book is published posthumously, but where did (Dying Is Fun) come from? Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd tells us that The Original of Laura: Dying Is Fun was "a first tentative title" that Nabokov noted in his diary in December 1974, three years before his death. Dying Is Fun has an appropriately jaunty, Nabokovian ring to it, but did the author himself, or his son, decide that it should be part of the finished title? The book comes to us out of a nebulous region, and any clear glimpse through the mist would be welcome.

Michelle Huneven is the author of three novels including her most recent, Blame (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which has already garnered raves including a Starred Review from Publishers Weekly. Her nonfiction writings include restaurant reviews for the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Weekly, other food journalism and, with Bernadette Murphy, the Tao Gals Guide to Real Estate (Bloomsbury). She has received a General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers and a Whiting Writers’ Award for fiction. Michelle lives in Altadena, California with her husband, Jim Potter. Michelle kindly agreed to take time out of her rather hectic book tour to chat with TEV about her new novel.

DANIEL OLIVAS: When you’re asked to explain what Blame is about, what do you say?

MICHELLE HUNEVEN: I say it’s the story of a smart young history professor named Patsy MacLemoore who is also a terrible chronic alcoholic, who wakes up from a blackout to discover that she’s hit and killed two people, and then spends the rest of her life dealing with it. She goes to prison and lives through the next few decades atoning and trying to be a good person, then learns more about the accident, which makes her rethink everything

And then I say, But it’s also funny.

Or maybe you want a more abstract take, in which case I might say that Blame is about a character who leads a life based on a desire to be good, to atone, to be of service to others only to discover that maybe she didn’t really HAVE to live that way. Blame asks the question: Is a life based on goodness, service, and humility worth living, even if the trigger for living such a life was misbegotten?

But it’s also funny!

OLIVAS: Choosing a title for a novel can be both exhilarating and exasperating. The one word title of your novel is unflinching, almost accusatory. How did you decide upon it? Can you share with us some titles that didn’t make it?

HUNEVEN: This was the hardest title to find!

I started writing the book thinking that one of the key characters would have a part time job giving scrapbooking workshops and selling scrapbooking supplies—such people are sometimes called “memory consultants.” So the original title was, The Memory Consultant. But then the character never became a scrapbooker, and I didn’t have a title.

When I finished the draft I sent to my agent, I had the most spineless title—After All, I think. I don’t really remember. I knew it was terrible, but wanted something on the title page. My agent, who has since retired, suggested Patsy’s Fault, which had resonance, but I found a little too jaunty for the book. A close friend, also a novelist, suggested Blame, and that’s how the book went out to publishers. After she bought the book, my editor Sarah Crichton wanted a title that was a little less thematically pointed. We looked long and hard for something else. I had all my friends helping, or trying to. For All She Knew was one contender, but I could never remember it, and if I couldn’t remember the title of my own book, how would other people recall it long enough to get to the bookstore? Another contender was Patsy MacLemoore, but to me it was a little too Olive Kitteridge-ish—same syllabic count. Blame was memorable. It may not be the very best title for this book, but after months of searching (and I paged through the Bible, most of Shakespeare, not to mention Yeats, Stevens, Bishop, and Rumi...) and boring my friends to death, I came up empty handed. By then, my editor had decided that Blame was the best and only title for the book.

OLIVAS: You do a bit of a head-fake in the first chapter focusing on high school girl named Joey who ends up in the drunken care of her handsome uncle, Brice, and Brice’s girlfriend, Patsy MacLemoore. It isn’t until the next section of the novel that you focus on the true protagonist, Patsy. The effect is wonderfully disconcerting. Why did you begin the novel in this way?

HUNEVEN: The first part of the book was written a long time ago as a short story. Years later, when I decided to write about a young female blackout drinker who runs down two people, I knew exactly who she was: Brice’s girlfriend, Patsy, from that story. Then, it turned out that the story was an interesting oblique first glimpse of Patsy in action.

I know it’s odd that I start the novel from Joey’s point of view and then, after 18 pages, shift over to Patsy’s for the remaining 286 pages. I tried many ways to ease that transition, adjust the point of view, but nothing I tried worked. And that’s been the story with this book: stubborn flaws. Better title? No luck. Better beginning? None to be had.

I’m glad you find the effect wonderful in a disconcerting way. To my mind, it allows the reader to meet many of the book’s main characters in a tight little side narrative, thus finessing any need for big hunks of back story in the main narrative.

OLIVAS: Altadena, Pasadena and other parts of Southern California are almost characters in the novel. Are you a native? Do you have favorite authors who have been able to capture the complex and ever-shifting So Cal milieu?

HUNEVEN: I am a native. Here in Altadena, I live one mile due east of the house where I grew up. As a kid, I always thought I’d live far, far away, Brasilia or Mumbai. But then, I was unaware of the deep pleasure of feeling deeply at home to a geography, of belonging. Altadena is a funkathon, a hoot, a beautiful messy little scrap of rustic suburbia and it suits me to a T. I aspire someday to write the great Altadena novel.

I think nobody captures the complex and ever-shifting milieu of So Cal better than Jonathan Gold, restaurant writer at the LA Weekly.

OLIVAS: Patsy’s experiences in California’s correctional system ring true. How did you research this?

HUNEVEN: I once worked on a long investigative article about the California Youth Authority system, and the children’s prisons—er, detention centers—sunk a deep root in my imagination. The filth, the institutional lack of any nicety, the noise, the lack of privacy, the burnt out guards—all these factored into the punishment. I also read up on women in prisons—I read Jean Harris and Wally Lamb and Jennifer Gonnerman and a how-to guide entitled, You’re Going to Prison. I looked at all the rules for visitors on line, and descriptions of all the prisons, the photographs. I also talked to all the people I knew who had spent nights in jail or time in prison. One idea came crystal clear: I never want to go to prison, and neither do you.

OLIVAS: Now that you’ve made book appearances for Blame, have you gathered any unusual or interesting responses to your novel?

HUNEVEN: A few people have said that Blame has helped them rethink and/or come to terms with a dark incident in their pasts.

Some people seem really FURIOUS and OFFENDED that I didn’t use punctuation marks. One woman sent me an email saying that after a few pages, she took my book right back to the library because it had no quotation marks! She was going to try my other books, she said, but if they didn’t have quotation marks, she’d take them back too!

Daniel A. Olivas is the author of five books including the newly released short story collection, Anywhere But L.A. (Bilingual Press). His writing has been widely anthologized including in the forthcoming Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America (W. W. Norton, 2010). Olivas has written for the Los Angeles Times, The Jewish Journal, the El Paso Times, and shares blogging duties on La Bloga.

Booker-prize winner Michael Ondaatje's preferred medium is 8½-by-11-inch Muji brand lined notebooks. He completes the first three or four drafts by hand, sometimes literally cutting and pasting passages and whole chapters with scissors and tape. Some of his notebooks have pages with four layers underneath.

Anyway, my piece has gone up today and I’m matching whatever it finally sells for and donating the proceeds to the Literacy Network of Los Angeles (or blowing it on booze, not sure yet). Either way, I’m pleased with the way it turned out – I’ve never done a short fiction to order like this before. So check out the site and the listing, and if you dig what I wrote at all, perhaps you’ll bid a buck or two for a yo-yo.   Here's how the story begins:

When I was seventeen, I was expelled from high school. My father, reasonably enough, gave me a choice: Get a job or get out. The only job for a 30-mile radius was the night shift behind the counter at an Amoco station on a deserted back road off the interstate. Scott, the owner, told me I probably wouldn’t see a customer most nights. He was chubby, hairy and, at 26, overly proud of himself for owning a gas station.

Back then, gas stations had no mini marts, no hot dogs, not even Gatorade. It was mostly candy bars and smokes, if you weren’t picky about your brand. Gas fumes mingled with the scent of cleaning fluid used to wipe down tools. I had an AM radio with lousy reception and, on his way out the door, Scott tossed me an Amoco yo-yo for entertainment.  Ahead of his time, he was branching out into branded swag.

Four nights into the job, Scott’s prediction had held up. I was fiddling with the yo-yo, which had become an obsession. There was something soothing about the bouncing repetition, and it helped pass the time. I was watching it travel up and down the string when I heard a girl’s voice.

The books he has produced since then, as he entered his 70s, can only be called late late Roth—or better still, endgame Roth, since they are a series of meditations on last things. In Everyman and Indignation, Roth’s protagonists are actually dead, looking back on their lives from beyond the grave. In Exit Ghost, his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman is impotent, which for a Rothian hero is a fate worse than death.

Now comes The Humbling, the latest installment in this wan series. The title could have been used for any of those three books, especially Exit Ghost, for Roth is once again dwelling on impotence—in this case, not just sexual but artistic, too. “He’d lost his magic. The impulse was spent,” read the first lines of the book, and they tell us everything we need to know—in fact, just about everything we ever learn—about Simon Axler, Roth’s latest avatar. Just as Saul Bellow used to make his alter egos professors or journalists, but wrote about them as if they were really novelists—that is, as if they were himself—so Roth makes Axler an actor, a calling that can easily be translated back into its writerly original.

We haven't read The Humbling yet, though we plan to, and we're interested to see how it compares to Eclipse, John Banville's story of a stage actor who loses his gift.  Would make an interesting Compare and Contrast.  (Not too make too much of names but Banville's actor is Alex Cleave, and the proagonist of Shroud, his next book which involves Cleave's daughter, is Axel.  And now Roth gives us Axler.)

Week 1. Introductions & Beginnings
Week 2. Reading Like A Writer
Week 3. Characterization
Week 4. Voice, Language and Point of View
Week 5. Structure, Setting and Theme
Week 6. Work-shopping
Week 7. Dialogue
Week 8. Scene and Conflict
Week 9. Revising
Week 10. The Business of Publishing and Where We Go Next

A splendid time is guaranteed for all.  You can check my instructor statement here.  You can sign up for the class here.

With the release of the latest installment, The Paris Review Interviews IV - which features the likes of Philip Roth, Ezra Pound, Haruki Murakami, and Marilynne Robinson, our friends at Picador have very generously offered up two complete boxed sets for a pair of lucky TEV readers.  Here's Roth:

INTERVIEWER: You spoke of the last phase of writing a novel being a “crisis” in which you turn against the material and hate the work. Is there always this crisis, with every book?

ROTH: Always. Months of looking at the manuscript and saying, “This is wrong—but what’s wrong?” I ask myself, “If this book were a dream, it would be a dream of what?” But when I’m asking this I’m also trying to believe in what I’ve written, to forget that it’s writing and to say, “This has taken place,” even if it hasn’t. The idea is to perceive your invention as a reality that can be understood as a dream. The idea is to turn flesh and blood into literary characters and literary characters; into flesh and blood.

And here's a sample manuscript page from The Anatomy Lesson:

The rules remain the same: Drop us an email, subject line: "WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS".  You must, must, must include your full mailing address to qualify.  We will take all entrants until 6 p.m. PST on Sunday, November 1, at which point the Random Number Generator will shine its light on two very fortunate TEV readers.  Until then.

UPDATE: Congratulations to the winners of our most popular giveaway to date, Mike Fisher and Kerry Hubers.  (And for those who get frustrated at the lack of RNG love, you should know Kerry is a TEV Giveaway long timer whose number finally came up!)

Those original sketches and typescripts, on worn pieces of exercise book paper, can now be seen, along with other pieces of early work, and Goscinny's Keystone Royal typewriter, at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. In the atmospheric setting of the third-century Gallo-Roman baths of the museum of the middle ages, the exhibition brings together the plates and manuscripts the pair created for the first edition of Pilote magazine, where the comic strip was unleashed on a France that had just seen Charles de Gaulle become president, and traces the evolution of the cartoon through the 33 albums of work since. The 34th, Asterix and Obelix's Birthday: The Golden Book, has been released this week, a collection of comic vignettes that revisit some of the 400 characters that have appeared over the 50 years.

Really, who could blame Eve for eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil when she just wanted to be wise? I suppose walking naked with the Lord and Adam, surrounded by plants and animals, was pretty idyllic, but let’s be real. One of her companions was omniscient and omnipotent, and had created the whole world in a week. Why should she have been fulfilled playing the naïf every single day, for her entire life? Maybe it’s me, but the Garden of Eden sounds so boring — almost as tedious as heaven.

The initial idea, finance, and title came from The New York Review of Books, itself founded during The New York Times printing strike of 1963. And, for its first six months, issues of the LRB were folded, “marsupially”, as the joke went, inside imported copies of the NYRB. The British pages were under the control of Karl Miller, a Cambridge-educated Scot in his mid-40s who had previously edited the literary pages of The Spectator, the New Statesman, and The Listener (of which he was editor-in-chief). Nothing was more important to him than the quality of the reviews he commissioned and toothcombingly revised. “When you delivered the copy,” Philip Larkin once wearily recalled, “he would ring you up no matter where you were. I was once hauled out of a conference in Aberystwyth, to go through it, Leavis-wise.” The fearsome FR Leavis, the academic and literary critic, had been Miller’s mentor at Cambridge. Leavis despised literary London. Miller’s mission was to make it conform to Leavisian standards.

(Preston Sturges, image provenance unknown.)

Via Antoine Wilson’s blog, I belatedly discovered David Ulin’s recent L.A. Times essay on his newfound difficulties reading. It is, in reliable Ulin fashion, thoughtful, generous and astute. Since the piece (broadly summarized) is about how the internet has fractured our attention spans, it seems against the spirit of thing to excerpt it here, but I will, if you promise to go read it in its entirety. The gravamen:

Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.

It’s easy, I think, to pooh-pooh such perspectives as the dying cry of the Luddites. (Ben Yagoda’s nuance-free review of John Freeman’s book The Tyranny of E-mail – which trawls similar waters – is a model of the sort of sneering pooh I mean.) But – as one who has contributed more than his share to this “over-networked culture” -  I was particularly struck by this passage:

For many years, I have read, like E.I. Lonoff in Philip Roth's "The Ghost Writer," primarily at night -- a few hours every evening once my wife and kids have gone to bed. These days, however, after spending hours reading e-mails and fielding phone calls in the office, tracking stories across countless websites, I find it difficult to quiet down. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page. Or I want to do these things but don't. I force myself to remain still, to follow whatever I'm reading until the inevitable moment I give myself over to the flow. Eventually I get there, but some nights it takes 20 pages to settle down. What I'm struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it's mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age.

I have been grappling with precisely this problem myself, have wanted to write about it here for some weeks now. I have become conscious of how severely my reading has degraded, how deformed my capacity for sustained focus has become. I keep nearly a dozen books on my desk, in various states of examination, and all too often pick one up in the wee hours only to find that, three pages in, I have no real memory of the words that have just passed before my eyes.

I plead a certain amount of New Daddy Symdrome, but I share the anxiety Ulin describes, and I find it’s instilled all sorts of bad habits. The endless skimming, getting the gist through RSS and Google Alerts, has become a substitute for real knowledge and I find I am desperate to arrest the slide, to recover what was once a formidable capacity for focus.

At the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Pico Iyer talked about combating the relentless internet-bite flow using what Hollywood types call counter-programming; immersing himself in things like Proust, things that demanded that he show up. That sounds like a marvelous response, if one has the discipline and fortitude.

As for me, I feel understandably divided – I am, in many ways, a habitué of the internet, a creation of it, and have offered up regular and frequent distractions for my readers. And I thrive on the interactions that emerge from it all, so unlike some internet attention seekers, I make no public resignations here – this blog will soldier on.

But I do note a number of the prescriptions contained in Freeman’s book that seem like great starting points: among them, drastically reducing the amount of time spent checking email (he proposes twice a day), opting for other forms of communication and, above all, maintaining “media-free” time in one’s day. Because Ulin is right when he asks “How do we ruminate when we are constantly expected to respond? How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect?”

So if it takes a bit longer than usual to get an email reply from me, or they are briefer than you are accustomed to when they do arrive, and if the posts here seem to come with less manic urgency, I hope you’ll understand. Me, I’m off to crack open some nice fat reading, maybe Proust at last, although George Szrites’ New & Collected Poems beckons. And if I start to get antsy, there’s always Lydia Davis – gotta walk before we can run, right?  I am mindful of my days training as a cyclist – bad habits can be reprogrammed, and atrophied muscles can be coaxed back to life.

If you’ve struggled one way or another with the internet and reading – or you think I’m just the latest Luddite convert, an internet turncoat – feel free to weigh in below.

UPDATE:  This just in from the Department of Great Minds Think Alike:  Over at About Last Night, our pal CAAF frets about the very same thing.

Philip Roth on Writing 'The Humbling' from The Daily Beast Video on Vimeo.

The other parts of the interview can be found here at The Daily Beast.

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write this book?

Padgett Powell: Let us say I received workplace emails exclusively in the interrogative, like this: "Is it time for our esteemed Director [I was the Director] to have a chat with the Provost about our autonomy? Are we remembering what was promised us last spring by the Dean? Will we be content, again, to let History repeat itself?" and let us say I started wanting to have some ready answers: How do you stand in relation to the potato? Do you love the velvet ant as much as I?

And could not stop, for 140 pages.

* It's been extensively reported elsewhere by now, but Vroman's has stepped in to buy Book Soup.

* We love it when our friends do well in the world:  Carolyn Kellogg has been announced as one of the judges of the 2009 Story Prize.

* Alice Munro is among the finalists for the 2009 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction.  Also, widely noted already, the National Book Award finalists have been announced.

* Reports from the Frankfurt Book Fair all seem variations on the "subdued" theme.

Orion deputy c.e.o. Malcolm Edwards agreed. "It has been very quiet on the editorial side—not many have come from the States," he said. Scout Louise Allen-Jones said there was "definitely . . . less material around than usual and there are definitely far fewer Americans than there have ever been, and fewer editors".

* Big news for the Big Read: TEV favorite Cynthia Ozick kicks off the New Rochelle Big Read.

* Another TEV hero, Los Angeles' literary Rabbi David Wolpe, has unveiled The Sacred Word, a column on sacred writings for the Huffington Post.

* The Center for the Art of Translation posts Natasha Wimmer's discussion of 2666.

* Lethem v. Chabon: Two of contemporary fiction's heavyweights battle it out for media attention.  We will not link to every single mention, but here's a thoughtful look (and corrective to Kakutani's predictable juvenalia) at Lethem's Chronic City; and here's Carolyn Kellogg's Q&A with Chabon over at Jacket Copy.

* Philip Roth makes a surprise appearance in Newark:  “As you get older, you get closer to home.”

* The Seattle Times considers The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard.

The marvel of most of these tales is how instantly comprehensible their alternate realities are when so little is explained — and how believable they are, too, thanks to Ballard's unflappable narrative voice. With unerring instinct, he finds the ordinariness in the most preposterous scenarios, thus connecting them in detail and tone to our own reality.

* Booker winner Hilary Mantel interviewed at the Globe.

* Maud Newton- who recently won the 2009 Narrative Prize - vehemently disagrees with James Wood's assessment of A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book.

* Robert McCrum states the obvious - but it's worth stating, nevertheless.

* Salman Rushdie receives the Carl Sandburg Literary Award.

Rushdie isn't concerned with reviews.  "The things people who like a book like about it, are exactly the same things people who didn't like a book didn't like about it. The exact same sentence! At this point, I just don't care." But what he does care about is that written literature endures. "The beauty of reading a book by yourself," he said, "is how the author's imagination interacts with your own, in a way it doesn't if you're watching a movie. There's that curious intimacy of strangers. That's why I think this genre will survive."

* A pundit's guide to the Giller Prize.

* A profile of Ingo Schulze, whose New Lives has been in our To Read Pile for an absurdly long time.

* Some wonderful forthcoming Penguin Classics covers out of Central Europe - designed by gray318, the genius behind the cover of Harry, Revised.  (Thanks, EG)

* The latest issue of Hamish Hamilton's excellent Five Dials - the Paris Issue - includes Lauren Elkin on French bookstores.  Highly recommended.

* From the sublime to the ridiiculous - Bloomberg's list of "Top Five Literary Novels" includes John Banville and Richard Russo.

* Mr. Darcy takes it on the chin: Jane Eyre's Rochester has been voted most romantic literary character.

* Daniel Mendelsohn's Cavafy translation - which we remain doggedly determined to attend to on this site before the end of the year - is noted over at Bloomberg.

* The excellent independent press, Unbridled Books, ventures into non-fiction.

* We extend our belated congratulations to John Freeman, who has been named the permanent editor of Granta.

* Terry Jones remember Douglas Adams, and his days with the Pythons.

During that fourth series of Monty Python Douglas came out filming with us and that was how he came to play the occasional small role. Since Douglas wasn’t so busy acting, he took it on himself to drive Mike Palin, Eric Idle, Graham and myself around in his minivan. One night, after we had all been to dinner at some remote country restaurant and had imbibed a fair amount of real ale and wine (Douglas included), Douglas drove us back to the hotel. He took us up a deserted bit of road that fed on to the main highway, and we drove for about a mile before we saw another car. It was driving in the opposite direction.

* And, finally, if you're reading this from anywhere within or near the 310 area code, please come out tomorrow night to the Hammer Museum, where we'll be sharing a preview of the novel-in-progress ...

At nine pages, “Glenn Gould,” a monologue by Lydia Davis, is longer than most of her work, which are typically between three and four; many are as brief as a paragraph, or a sentence. Most of them are not conventional “stories”—they usually feature people who are unnamed, are often set in unnamed towns or states, and lack the formal comportment of a story that opens, rises, and closes. There is no gratuitous bulk, no “realistic” wadding. Davis’s pieces, often narrated by a woman, sometimes apparently by the writer, are closer to soliloquy than to the story; they are essayist poems—small curiosity boxes rather than large canvasses. One can read a large portion of Davis’s work, and a grand cumulative achievement comes into view—a body of work probably unique in American writing, in its combination of lucidity, aphoristic brevity, formal originality, sly comedy, metaphysical bleakness, philosophical pressure, and human wisdom. “The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30) will in time be seen as one of the great, strange American literary contributions, distinct and crookedly personal. Davis’s tone is dancelike, insouciant, and often very funny. Her work contains many piquant details. The smallest pieces are sometimes sweet jeux d’esprit, and are like the captions you might encounter at a contemporary art installation. What deepens the work, and moves it from game to drama, is that this brisk, almost naïve tone is often revealed to be a mask, a public fiction, behind which a person is flinching. What is omitted or suppressed becomes highly charged, and the hunger strike of the spare, lucid words on the page can take on a desperate aspect. Selfishness, in every sense of the word, is Davis’s real theme. Her work raises the interesting question of how much a fictional story about a fictional self can shed, and still remain a story about a vivid self. The answer is almost everything. The stories assemble an intellectual and emotional autobiography; a sensibility is strongly confessed. “We know we are very special,” Davis writes in “Special”: “Yet we keep trying to find out in what way: not this way, not that way, then what way?” This restless business of “trying to find out” is precisely what constitutes the specialty of this writer.

Davis has never quite rung our bell but we're now inspired to take a new look.

Now that it's over, I can ask - am I the only who immediately thought of the stomach churning opening of Enduring Love?

(True story.  I found a copy of the McEwan novel in a second hand bookstore in London, took it back to my hotel and started reading at 9 p.m.  It was nearly 2 a.m. before I finally was able to set it down.)

It's a great venue, a great series, and I unworthily follow in the footsteps of the likes of Joseph O'Neill.  As a bonus, I will actually be reading a short excerpt from my new novel in progress for the first time, and the event is free with plenty of parking, so what's not to like?  I invite my LA-based readers to come make a nice Tuesday evening of it in Westwood.  Hope to see you there.

"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 you're actually representing, let me know.

We returned to the Palisades in July, to a place big enough to unpack a library (and raise a baby), and I’ve finally started the business of restoring my books to the shelves. The first step – and Mrs. TEV’s insistence – was the have the shelves secured against earthquakes, and that finally happened last weekend, courtesy of a very friendly Craigslist handyman. (When I suggested to Mrs. TEV I could do the job, she laughed. Robustly. Belly laughs.)

 
So now the arduous task of refilling the books begins. First, we need to douse the whole collection to protect against silverfish (also at Mrs. TEV’s insistence). Then I need to incorporate new additions to my library into the boxes packed more than a year ago, and figure out exactly how to order the whole thing. (The previous arrangement could politely be described as half-assed, though I could always find anything.)

Finally, the actual placement on the shelves, which is always delayed by the very pleasant act of browsing through beloved titles. I wrote about personal libraries and their legacies a few months ago, and I’m even more mindful of this now that my daughter has been born.

I mention all this shelving marginalia because, as it happens, in a lovely bit of good timing, I received a beautiful book from the Yale University Press called Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books. The book is comprised of wonderful photographs of these libraries, including the specifications and materials of these custom designed shelves. In each library, a few shelves are singled out for photographic close up. And if, like me, you enjoy perusing the shelves of a smart person’s library, you will be fascinated by these selections, more heavy on novels than you might guess.

Additionally, each architect includes a list of his or her Top Ten Books, and the choices will surprise you: There’s plenty of Pynchon, Proust, Melville, Celan, Kafka and more. The collection begins with Walter Benjamin’s apt essay, "Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting," the opening of which I reproduce here:

I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing davlight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood - it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation - which these books arouse in a genuine collector. For such a man is speaking to you, and on closer scrutiny he proves to be speaking only about himself. Would it not be presumptuous of me if, in order to appear convincingly objective and down-to-earth, I enumerated for you the main sections or prize pieces of a library, if I presented you with their history or even their usefulness to a writer? I, for one, have in mind something less obscure, something more palpable than that; what I am really concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection. If I do this by elaborating on the various ways of acquiring books, this is something entirely arbitrary. This or any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? You have all heard of people whom the loss of their books has turned into invalids, or of those who in order to acquire them became criminals. These are the very areas in which any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness. "The only exact knowledge there is," said Anatole France, "is the knowledge of the date of publication and the format of books." And indeed, if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue.

I can't wait to be reunited with my library.  And so, back to work I go, unboxing the A’s ...

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 authors with widespread recognition and acceptance merit the Nobel.  It's precisely the kind of American insularity and anti-intellectualism that Horace Engdahl decried last year - whom Jordan quotes apparently without irony.

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.'

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 Industries, an employment referral center and economic development program for at-risk and gang-involved youth. Schwartz is editor-in-chief of The Homeboy Review, a new literary journal published by Homeboy Industries. The first issue of the review, which is Schwartz's brainchild, was published this spring. Schwartz kindly agreed to chat with me about her involvement with Homeboy Industries and its literary journal.

DANIEL OLIVAS: How did you get involved with Homeboy Industries in the first place?

LESLIE SCHWARTZ: In early 2006, when I was president of PEN USA, we received a grant from the California Council for the Humanities to do an oral histories project at Homeboy Industries. I was hired through the auspices of the grant to teach a ten-week creative writing class while my colleague, Celeste Freemon, taught a journalism class. The homeboys and homegirls who were part of the program interviewed each other on their life stories, and the poetry that came out of my class, as well as some of these “oral histories,” were collected in a small anthology. After the class culminated, I asked Fr. Greg Boyle [founder of Homeboy Industries] if I could stay on as a volunteer to continue teaching creative writing to the clients of Homeboy Industries. I have been there ever since.

DO: Why did you think that a literary journal would be a good fit for Homeboy Industries?

LS: At the culmination of the Oral Histories program, the homeboys and homegirls were given a chance to perform their poetry out loud at a public reading. Most of the poets from the class could not stop crying as they read their work. Later in the evening, one of the homies, now a good friend of mine named Agustin Lizama, stood up to read his poem. The problem was he had to hold a mic and the poetry anthology but he's missing an arm from a driveby shooting that occurred when he was twelve. For a few moments, he struggled and juggled the book and the mic and then very quietly and graciously, another poet named Hector Verdugo got up and held the magazine open so Agustin could hold the mic and read his poem. On the streets, these guys might well have been rivals, but here under the community of peace engendered by poetry, they were friends and partners. At the end of the evening, Agustin said that poetry gave him back his soul. It was at that moment that the idea came to me that Homeboy Industries should begin publishing literature.

DO: Does your work on The Homeboy Review relate to how you view your Judaism?

LS: You know my sense of my Judaism comes from my dad who had this really otherworldy sense of justice and fairness. He could get along with anybody regardless of their ideology, their creed or color. And he taught me that through compassion and understanding it is possible to mend the wounds of prejudice and injustice. And not in some phony liberal way, but in a deep God-centered way that transcends politics. To me the idea of justice is a very Jewish, Talmudic idea and I do believe that all of my creative endeavors, whether they be my own writing or the creation of this journal (or raising my children) is deeply embedded in this God-centered ideal of justice.

DO: What did you learn from putting together this first issue?

LS: I learned first of all, patience, patience, patience. Because of the particular clientele at Homeboy Industries (many of our employees really need second, third, tenth chances), I lost one of my staff to a probation violation arrest. This happened right in the middle of the rush and deadline and it was pretty challenging. So I’ve learned to have some back up staffers for sure. But I also learned that we are going to make mistakes. On some level you have to trust in that mysterious thing that happens above and beyond your own earthly efforts.

DO: Has your work with Homeboy Industries influenced or otherwise affected your own writing?

LS: You know, I’m just never going to write about gangs and violence and stuff that I have no business writing about. I am a white girl from the suburbs and my frame of reference just doesn’t include that and I am very testy about co-opting other people’s experiences. However, and this is a big however, I would say that working at Homeboy Industries has completely changed me as writer, in so far as it has opened my heart. Being around people who have had to be, in some ways, fearless all their lives, but who also have learned to reveal their vulnerabilities has been a life-changing experience for me. It has taught me to become more comfortable with the vulnerability that comes with writing and more equipped to approach it without fear. I can tell you not many people get to say this and really mean it.

To purchase a copy of The Homeboy Review, visit www.homeboy-industries.org.

Daniel A. Olivas is the author of four books and editor of Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature (Bilingual Press/Arizona State University, 2008). His new collection of short stories, Anywhere But L.A. will be published this fall. Olivas’s first full-length novel, The Book of Want, will be published in 2011 by the University of Arizona Press. He shares blogging duties on the Chicano/Latino lit blog, La Bloga. By day, Olivas is an attorney with the California Department of Justice in Los Angeles.

“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 the now reasonably well-known fact that Powers has for some time been writing fiction by dictation, with the help of speech-recognition software. Not enough help, alas: on the current evidence, he also needs bullshit-recognition software. The prose, dictated or otherwise, reads as if it had been written by an Orientalist Tom Wolfe. Thassa is, it seems, as old as epochs: “She’s twenty-three . . . give or take an era,” Powers declaims. She brings sweetmeats to class: “They nibble at Thassa’s timche-poucht, which tastes of ancient oases.” Later, she cooks for Russell and Candace; he can smell “the travelogue aromas issuing from down the hall.” Travelogue aromas! This is travelogue writing, and it’s anything but fragrant. Everything in this book is exaggerated and primary-colored: “A shudder crests across Russell’s skull.” “His heart tries to kickbox its way through his sternum.” “His soul stretched as taut as shrink-wrap.” An English medical ethicist who is an old foe of Thomas Kurton’s scientific triumphalism is described as having “sad bloodhound eyes”: “Her face is lined by a lifetime spent gate-guarding science’s worst excesses.” (In Powers’s novelistic phrenology, just as scientists always sound like scientists, watchful ethicists look watchful and ethical.) Thomas Kurton is sketched journalistically, as David Brooks might glance at him in an Op-Ed column: Kurton, we are told, “showed all the signs” in childhood of early scientific brilliance—“the model rocketry, the ham radios, the long afternoons gazing into tidal pools, the complete Herbert S. Zim Golden Guides.” As a teen-ager, he read the great British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, and got his first microscope. A full scholarship took him to Cornell. “In short,” Powers concludes, “Kurton’s genes might have led him to genomics, no matter what environment threw at him. But environment pulled all the right triggers, at just the right times. All the right teachers, the right toys, the right texts in the right order.” Powers is scientifically literate—he switched his major from physics to literature, and for a time worked as a computer programmer—but his reverence for the autistic “genius” of his fictional scientists has a certain fanboy ingenuousness.

Tin House Books has just published

Anthology editor J. C. Hallman is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Chess Artist and The Devil is a Gentleman. A collection of his short fiction, The Hospital for Bad Poets, will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2009. His work has appeared in GQ, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, and a number of other journals and anthologies. He is working on a book about modern expressions of utopian thought, and he contributed the following guest essay about the new collection.

THE EXUBERANT SELF
by J.C. Hallman

Editing an anthology that hopes to launch a new school of critical response is a way of looking for trouble, so I suppose I should just admit it: when I wrote the introduction to The Story About the Story I was picking a fight. An age-old debate among writers and critics (I happily characterized it as a “pissing match”) had lain dormant for far too long, I thought. In the years since, the stale strategies and techniques of literary criticism had continued their downward creep into five-paragraph high school essays prohibiting all use of the “I.” Indeed, this insidious infection has spread so well the whole business of teaching literature beyond secondary school now seems to be primarily a task of de-brainwashing. I’d grown tired of explaining to students that there was, in fact, another way to write about reading, and that essays that were both “critical” and personal, exuberant and smart, could find reputable venues. Even better, these pieces were fun—both to read and to write. So, long (and I mean long) story short, I put together The Story About the Story.

Realistically, I figured it would go something like this: the anthology would appear, it would receive modest praise, and maybe a few people would rethink the business of lit crit. I had no idea that a whole new pissing match would flare even before the publication date arrived. Worse, I found myself among the combatants, taking careful aim and squirting away as hard as I could.

Here’s what happened: the blog at Tin House Books published a few observations I made about the anthology in advance of its appearance (the official pub date was Oct. 1). Naturally these caught the attention of critics. Individuals at a few websites (one describing itself as a “literary organ”—a bladder, one presumes) staked out positions in opposition to my own. I took the bait and responded, a few others chimed in, and before long the “argument” had descended not only into thinly-veiled name-calling (the sort of nuggets lobbed politely at scholarly conferences), but also into precisely the kind of debate I was hoping to inspire people to transcend. In other words, I was pissing on (at least part of) my intended audience!

Did anything good come of the match? Not really—and certainly not a winner. The manager of the thread eventually shut it down, and we all went home with laundry to do. But I did learn a couple things. A fair number of critics still believe that their own subjective sense of things is outside that which they are supposed to consider (apparently, they want to strive for a perspective that is neither that of the writer, nor the reader, nor the text—thus, to understand literature you should avoid thinking about people and books), and they view good prose about good writing as something they cannot always “afford” (though they appear unwilling to “unpack” this term).

Anyway, once my pantaloons were cleaned and again in place it occurred to me that these two things—the importance of self as context, and exuberant prose, were really what bonded the essays in The Story About the Story. The book is full of personal, passionate odes to books. Everyone is quite impressed by the table of contents (they better be—I’ll be paying off the credit card for years to come), but what matters more is the collective message delivered by as fine a set of writers as you’ll ever see: the self is maybe the only important context to consider when assessing the effect of a book, and the whole point of writing about books should be to write well about that which we care about deeply.

That we should emphasize the self when we write about literature is a thing the book’s contributors discuss openly:

Charles D’Ambrosio (“Salinger and Sobs”) connects tragic dots between his own life that of the Glass family:

As is always, perhaps inevitably, the case, the unbalanced weight my own life brought to the material gave the work this off-center, wobbly orbit, and even now I can’t seem to read the stuff any differently.

Seamus Heaney (“Learning from Eliot”) describes the initial effect of literature as happening inside the self:

Whatever happened within my reader’s skin was the equivalent of what happens in an otherwise warm and well-wrapped body once a cold wind gets at its ankles.

And Vladimir Nabokov (“‘The Metamorphosis’”) reminds us that no matter how many critical contortions we go on to execute, it is our selves, perhaps even our physiology, that is the essential feature that will determine our reactions:

We can take the story apart, we can find out how the bits fit, how one part of the pattern responds to the other; but you have to have in you some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answer to sensations that you can neither define, nor dismiss.

Of course, each of these quotes do more than simply state that the self is important. Each contain the passion, the personality, of the author—you can feel their passion for the work, feel from the good writing whatever it is they are stating. What struck me about the pissing match was that critics deeply embedded in a paradigm of argument appear to have forgotten that writing well is part of what makes you persuasive. Indeed, one critic argued that it was simply impossible to write about why you like a book—so why even try?

The essays in The Story About the Story disagree—as do all writers (and not a few critics, by the way…they’re not all drones, as one of them claimed). That one can and should write from simple exuberance is implied eponymously by Susan Sontag (“Loving Dostoevsky”) and Edward Hirsch (an excerpt from How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry). Others gleefully execute their exuberance:

Dagoberto Gilb (“The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy”) digs deep for language that rises to the occasion of Blood Meridian:

Homeric in both historical scope and literary convention, it was an aorta splash of prose, finely elegiac and gaudily ornate, sumptuous, its blood-and-viscera subject chapping the southwestern-desert frontier, riding hard, surviving implausibly from one end of the West to the other.

Randall Jarrell (“The Humble Animal”) can’t stop the metaphors from crowding into a description of his passion for, and his interpretation of, Marianne Moore:

Miss Moore’s forms have the lazy, mathematical extravagance of snowflakes, seem as arbitrary as the prohibitions in fairy tales; but they work as those work—disregard them and everything goes to pieces. Her forms, tricks and all, are like the aria of the Queen of the Night: the intricate and artificial elaboration not only does not conflict with the emotion but is its vehicle.

And E.B. White (“A Slight Sound at Evening”) lets a somber mood prevail so as to express his final take on Walden:

Now, in the perpetual overcast in which our days are spent, we hear with extra perception and deep gratitude that song, tying century to century.

So why is it (at least some) critics devalue the self and deny the possibility of exuberance when writers have emphasized exactly those things for as long as anyone can remember? Who knows. What concerns me is what effect the resulting strategies have as they trickle down the food chain and become the model we offer to those encountering literature for the first time. I will forever be baffled by talk of “different kinds of writing” for “different kinds of audiences.” What I believe is what these writers chant in concert: there is one kind of writing (good), and one audience (everyone).

One essay in The Story About the Story strikes a meta-note—and perhaps offers something by way of conclusion. Oscar Wilde (“Mr. Pater’s Last Volume”) considers a book of essays by Walter Pater, one of which is about William Wordsworth. Wilde quotes an exuberant passage from Pater, about the poet:

To witness this spectacle with appropriate emotions is the aim of all culture; and of these emotions poetry like Wordsworth’s is a great nourisher and stimulant.

Wilde is exuberant in turn, and calls out to the future—to all those who have forgotten what this business is really about:

After having read and re-read Mr. Pater’s essay—for it requires re-reading—one returns to [Wordsworth’s] work with a new sense of joy and wonder, and with something of eager and impassioned expectation. And perhaps this might be roughly taken as the test or touchstone of the finest criticism.”

(My new lot as a parent.  Sigh.)

It's worth mentioning, by the way, that Dunbar, a songwriter, has actually worked to turn a number of Trevor short stories into pop songs.  The result is Excursions in Trevorland.  There are some warm reviews here, and he talks about the project's genesis here.  (He also cites another TEV favorite, the band Squeeze, as an influence.)

Anyway, back to the book, I've been a Trevor fan since the wrenching The Story of Lucy Gault, and look forward to reading this new book, about which the New York Times called 'a thrilling work of art."

For more than half a century, the 81-year-old Trevor has written of the passions churning beneath the surface of a world where the parlor clock endlessly ticks and the fat on the plates is always congealing. In book after book, he has somehow turned the nondescript and the habitual into the exceptionally vivid and particular: “Farmers brought in livestock on the first Monday of every month, and borrowed money from one of Rathmoye’s two banks. They had their teeth drawn by the dentist who practiced in the Square.” The real dramas in this world go largely unspoken; they reach the reader in thought balloons of suppressed desire that the author launches, stealthily, above the idle chatter and run-of-the-mill action. Trevor doesn’t even need to start a new paragraph when shifting from one to the other, when showing us that the hand putting on makeup or threading a needle is being operated by a nervous system aflame with anger or shame or longing: “In the crab-apple orchard she scattered grain and the hens came rushing to her. She hadn’t been aware that she didn’t love her husband.”

So, thanks to John Dunbar, we're happy to offer a copy of Love and Summer to one lucky TEV reader.  Y'all know the rules - send an email, subject line "THANKS, JOHN!" and make sure you include your mailing address.  Entries will be accepted until 10 p.m. PST on Wednesday, October 7 (since I got a late start), and then the Random Number Generator will speak its mind.  Until then ...

Thanks, John.

BELATED UPDATE: Congratulations to winner Clara Boza!

It is hard enough, though not for the Booker judges, to like the historical novel nowadays, but harder still when that novel’s conception of characterisation seems itself antiquarian, as if Woolf and Proust and Chekhov, not to mention Muriel Spark and Penelope Fitzgerald, had never existed. Byatt’s formidable research commands respect, but it is hard fully to respect a novel in which Rodin, Oscar Wilde, Emma Goldman and Marie Stopes have walk-on parts, or that delivers itself of lines like: ‘All sorts of institutions were coming to life. The Tate Gallery opened on Millbank in 1896,’ or ‘The rich acquired motor cars and telephones, chauffeurs and switchboard operators. The poor were a menacing phantom, to be helped charitably, or exterminated expeditiously.’ Such moments, abundant here, necessarily have the air of what Kierkegaard called ‘playing the game of marvelling at world history’. Again and again, Byatt makes explicit and overdetermined what might have been more lightly suggested. The loss of childish innocence is the great subject of her novel, but does that mean that everyone in the book has to have some relation to fairy tales or children’s stories – write them, or study them, or present dramatic performances of them, or put representations of them on pots? The Wellwoods’ Kentish house is named Todefright; August Steyning’s Nutcracker Cottage ‘was not named out of English whimsy so much as for Hoffmann’s sinister tale of the Nutcracker and the Mouse King’. Byatt burns both ends of her thematic candle at once, for clearer illumination.

September 30, 7:30 - 9:00 p.m.
Helen's Cycles
2501 Broadway Ave.
Santa Monica, CA 90404

October 1, 6:30 - 8:00 a.m. (ride & coffee stop)
Helen's Cycles
2501 Broadway Ave.
Santa Monica, CA 90404

October 3-4, all day MS150 Ride
San Buenaventura Park
Ventura, CA

Carmichael is the personal cycling coach to Lance Armstrong and the founder of Carmichael Training Systems.  Worth your while, if you're a cyclist.

I’ve just begun (and am enjoying) Rob Riemen’s Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal. The book has just been released in an attractive paperback edition by Yale University Press, and its back cover presents blurbs from the geographically dispersed but uniformly respected literary intellectuals Azar Nafisi, Mario Vargas Llosa, Adam Zagajewski, and Ivan Klima. The front cover’s spare design features only one quotation from a review, by Mark Sarvas of the blog The Elegant Variation. This is the first time I have seen a quote from a blog on the front cover of a paperback. The blog’s title is italicized, a characteristic most style guides reserve for book and play titles, the names of periodicals and newspapers, and other such entities. Without denigrating Sarvas’s endeavor, which I read and respect, I wonder if this latter development—a typographical designation for an unedited online venue that places it on par with an entirely different range of publications—doesn’t do more harm than good, and potentially confuse readers unfamiliar with the online literary world. Am I simply being curmudgeonly or conservative?

Now, I've been accused of being curmudgeonly and conservative, too, so I relate to the impulse and the attendant questions.  And setting aside my obvious personal interest and involvement, my response hinges on Sholis's reliance on the word "unedited."  (Though "online" is a close second.)  First, the blurbs on the back are not from publications, they are classic blurbs, so they are no more edited than my copy.  (And they don't exist in any form, other than a letter to a publisher.)  Second, although all sorts of sloppiness can creep in here on a daily basis, the contents of my Recommended sidebar are approached with the same care I bring to my paid reviewing work.  So I am generally confident that what you find there does not represent a slide in quality of standards over my print work.

But I think fundamentally, there's the ongoing question of the imprimatur of a print publication versus the contents of blog and its relevance to critical authority.  I'd imagined the question somewhat settled by now but, as I said, I respect Brian and so if it gives him pause, I pause as well to consider it.  I've come to believe that "authority" is, ultimately, earned over time as one provides readers with a voice and perspective they feel they can come to rely on.  And clearly, in the six years I've been here, TEV has managed to do that, at least for some readers.

In the end, I wrote to Riemen's editor at Yale to inquire why my blurb had been selected for the cover.  Here is what she said:

"To my mind, our reason for putting your quote on the cover speaks for itself. It was the most concise and eloquent evocation of the book's significance!"

I'm not sure there's a better answer to Brian's question than that, but I am interested in what my readers think about this.  Do you feel a blog review does not belong on the cover of a book?  Is it somehow less valuable than a review in other media? Does it do more harm than good?   Let me know what you think.

From his book-lined apartment (no kidding, even in the kitchen cupboards—and all alphabetized), Michael tells me: "I believe in the elaborate taking care of others. And we live in a culture where 'I'm not my brother's keeper,' 'That's your responsibility,' 'Get a life' have become bywords, code phrases, anthems for elaborate indifference, selfishness, greediness, and the failure of empathetic acceptance. In the same way that we need to repair the economy, we need to repair the effects of an economy of selfishness. And that isn't just the filling in of the big bucks that have fallen out of the system. The rescue that we need is emotional rescue, communicative, large-hearted. I've always dreamed that people listening to the show would hear that readers and writers are expanders of feeling centers, of the global ability to imagine other lives. And I want people listening to the show, yes, of course, to grasp its intelligence, but to also hear that it wants to show the feeling that reading and imagination inspire in writers and readers. We want to share those things with listeners. There are all sorts of other things that you get on radio and television, but I wanted listeners of Bookworm to hear words, ideas, but particularly emotions that don't get discussed in public if at all elsewhere. That is to say, for one reason or another, the show is a crusade that's much larger than the subject of books."

Labyrinth Books presents Daniel Mendelsohn, translator, in a discussion of C.P. Cavafy’s Collected Poems and the first-ever English translation of the poet’s 30 Unfinished Poems, both featuring the fullest literary commentaries available in English. 5:30 p.m. Free. Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau St., Princeton.

We've learned, by the way, that Harry, Revised will be released in France on January as HARRY, REVU ET CORRIGE.  More details as we have them ...

“I was going to quit after this book, but now it turns out I’m mid-career,” said Hemon in his short, modest and humorous acceptance speech. “Thank you all for coming tonight and exposing me to this embarrassing pleasure. I will keep writing, I guess I have no other choice.”