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It seems like only yesterday that it was Richard McCann Day here at the Happy Booker. Time flies when you’re totally engrossed in a good book . For those lucky enough to live in the DC area, Richard McCann will be reading this Saturday at Politics and Prose. This is one reading you're not going to want to miss!
A little friendly advice from the Happy Booker: Richard is a hometown favorite. Show up early if you want a good seat!
Liam Callanan, our old pal and a first time novelist, was honored with an Edgar nomination this year. Here's his inimitable tale of fast-paced life in the big city, the awards edition.
Liam "Always a Winner to Me" Callanan on the Edgars :
The great thing about the greatest city in the world—oh, stop it with your own nominations, you’re so not even in the running—is that New York is always ready to give you another chance. Didn’t win your first time around? Well, c’mon back and give it another shot. There’s an award here somewhere for you. Like last night. You thought prize season—Pulitzers, National Book Award, PEN, National Book Critics—was over? Oh, no, no, no. At the Grand Hyatt, smack in the middle of Manhattan, there were not one, but two glitzy giveaways going on: on the lobby floor, the Freddies —which, if you’re speed-dialing your agent right now to find out why your book didn’t win that prize, let me save you the trouble, it’s because you’re not a Frequent Flyer Program—and two levels up, occupying just about every ballroom available, the Edgars—and if you’re speed-dialing someone about that, one, you need to lay off the phone and do some more writing this morning and two, was your book a mystery? Because those are the only books who win Edgars.
Apparently, my book wasn’t quite enough of a mystery—my novel, The Cloud Atlas, was nominated for an Edgar in the category of “Best First Novel By An American Author”. And while I totally fulfilled almost every aspect of that—it was my first novel, I’m American—I fell short of best and the prize went to Don Lee’s Country of Origin. If you want the full scoop of who won what, see below. But if you want to see the blog-only report of awards they didn’t announce, read on.
Best dressed: Laura Lippman, whose By A Spider’s Thread was up for best novel, period. Stylish, cool, and bright, Laura could have owned the red carpet at the Oscars, Freddies, Edgars—wherever they hand out awards with boys’ first names boys don’t much use anymore, Laura would be a star. Also one of the most eloquent award presenters. A killer combination. And, not afraid of the direct question. Standing with me afterward, in the bar crowded with mystery writers: Laura (to random man between us and bar): “Hey don’t you think Liam’s Cloud Atlas should have won?” Random man: “Absolutely not.” We move on.
Best acceptance speech: Laurie Lynn Drummond, author of Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You, who won in the short story category, for "Something About a Scar". Laurie, a former police officer from Louisiana, thanked all those who needed thanking, and then reminded us all that there are some good cops still out there in the world. Damn straight. And some, like Laurie, who are very good.
Best mystery to occur at a mystery awards dinner, still unsolved: until well into the evening, every winner in every category turned out to be the first nominee listed in the program under each heading. Sure, they were alphabetical, sure, this is coincidence. Sure.
Most talked about people who made no appearance: the cast of the Sopranos. David Chase, the creator of the Sopranos won a special award, and he was there. But all the talk was of the previous year when the whole cast actually came to the dinner. Then someone mentioned that he’d seen the cast in the hotel earlier that day. The search was on! (Never found ‘em.)
Best agent and editor: those would be mine, whom I would have named in my speech had I won: Wendy Sherman and John Flicker.
Best mysterious woman (an essential part of any mystery): my date, Lisa Merman, budding mystery novelist and former Malice Domestic board member, whom my wife (winner in the best wife category), sent along in her stead when she could not attend. “Liam, so this is your friend?” “Liam,who is Lisa?Really?” I’ll never tell.
Best mystery to occur after a mystery awards dinner, still unsolved: who took my scroll? Winners get a lovely bust of Edgar Allan Poe, looking rather demure. But all nominees get an impressive scroll with their name, their book’s name, a gold seal and a rather fearsome looking Poe atop the whole business. In the Hyatt bar afterward, while being waylaid by a pair of Americans who run Japan’s version of the home shopping network—“no, no, no, you exchange business cards this way”—I turned around to find that my scroll was gone.
Well, I tell you what, Manhattan. You can take my iPod, but you can’t take my scroll. As soon as I finish typing this, I will set out into the big city in search of my Edgar. No, first, I will finish taking the aspirin I’ve promised myself. And then I shall go searching. And I shall not rest until I find him, my Edgar.
This I vow.
PS. And a special shout out to my Japanese friends (Hey, Fuyuki, you coming to the reunion ?): if you see an Edgar Allan Poe scroll up for sale on Japanese TV today, buy it! I'll totally pay you back.
PPS: If you see my book for sale in the next few months, buy that, too —it'll be published in Japanese in the near future.
Scenes from Pindeldyboz 5 West Coast tour
Jami Attenberg, our new cyberpal, emails from the road, as a member of the Pindeldyboz 5 West Coast tour. Celebrating its fifth anniversary and release of volume 5, the literary magazine's editors and contributors headed west for a memorable reading series featuring new authors, hot music and cold beer.
For you East Coasties who are feeling left out (and you will, after you read Jami's account!), there will be another opportunity to share the love, p'boz style, when the tour bus rolls into Williamsburg, Brooklyn for a blow out literary event—with a promise of a "the only punk-rock pirate puppet show on the planet."
Info on Pindeldyboz 5 and its contributors can be found here.
Here's Jami, filling us in on what we missed on the opposite coast:
We're in Seattle right now, sitting on my friend's deck on Capitol Hill, staring at the omnipresent Space Needle, and we are recovering, gently, from the last night of readings. The kind people of Seattle
sure do know how to show a girl a good time. But I'll get to that in a second.
We're promoting the release of Pindeldyboz 5, a literary magazine from Queens, by touring the West Coast. We started out in San Francisco last Wednesday at the Makeout Room, a well-attended event featuring the likes of Stephen Elliott, Suzanne Kleid, Shauna McKenna, Keith Knight (my personal favorite - he did a reading with a slide show of his comic strips and talked a bit about censorship), and Jimmy Chen. Rounding out the night were my tourmates Pboz Executive Editor Whitney Pastorek and Associate Editor Sarah Balcomb, performing their world famous Phil Collins Operetta. It was nice to see such an enthusiastic audience, because sometimes readings can be pretty dull, I'm the first to admit that. And as with all of the stops on the tour, all of the readers brought their A-game. So thanks San Francisco literati, you rule.
The next night Whitney headed to Oakland for another reading at some vegan cafe and Sarah and I stayed in San Francisco and had really awesome sushi. Man, I love sushi. Why don't people ever have
readings in sushi restaurants?
We headed up toward Portland next, pulling into Eureka for the night. As it turns out two folks from the Perpetual Motion Roadshow - Todd Dills from The 2nd Hand and Liisa Ladouceur (Sign Poetry) - were
coming down from Portland on their tour and had stopped in Eureka as well, so we met up for a beer or two. They told us ghost stories about a house they had stayed in, and we learned about Liisa'sproject, which involves her taking pictures of signs in towns the day she arrives there, and then creating a new slide show presentation and poem for that very night. Isn't that awesome? She reminded me you can always be upping the stakes in your performance.
The next day was a loooong drive to Portland. The first part of the day was lovely (sticking our feet into the Pacific, stopping at the huge Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox statues), but the last three hours in the driving rain really sucked.
But then Portland saved us. Portland we love you! We love Kevin Sampsell (Future Tense) and Frayn Masters (who got my personal favorite award for the night with her story about a guy who dates
donuts) and Emily Bliquez (Tin House) and the kind folks at the Urban Grind. It was the first night I got to read, as well, so I enjoyed it more than the previous event. Afterwards Kevin and Frayn and local
ingenue Maggie Powers hosted us, taking us to a dive bar/restaurant the name of which currently eludes me in my hungover state, and then to Voodoo Donuts, where the following conversation took place:
Whitney (who has her guitar with her and often does lovely 80s covers renditions): Hey, I wonder how much money I could make if I started busking.
Frayn: Four dollars.
Whitney: OK, let's see.
And so she did and it was brilliant. When you can get a skate punk to give you a dollar, that's some talent. If she had only done it every event, we would have had some serious gas money.
The next day we visited Powell's (oh my god the best book store EVER), and stopped by Portland's annual literary festival Wordstock for a minute but then we were off again, up and away to Seattle. Our reading was at the Rendezvous, a former junkie bar transformed into merely a dive bar now. I had thrown a performance event years ago there when I used to live in Seattle, so it was nice to see everything came full circle. Sean Carman, Shya Scanlon, Louisa Peck (personal favorite award winner with her story about the theft of a fish), and Ryan Boudinot read, as did I, and Whitney and Sarah of course. Then some homeless superhero performed, but I have to admit by then I was well on my way to getting drunk, so I cannot report on that particular part of the night.
And then: more drinking and bar hopping and really it was the first night we didn't have to get up early the next day and it was so nice to be in Seattle and there was so much talking and laughing and storytelling but now my head really hurts. We don't want to go back, but alas we will return tomorrow, with memories of the kind people of the Northwest to take with us. We'll do it all again in one more week in New York City at Galapagos in Williamsburg on 5/5/5. New Yorkers, come help us celebrate Pindeldyboz's 5th Annniversary!
The Happy Booker would not be happy to reveal the contents of her writing desk right now, if she could find her writing desk under the piles of books, rough (and rougher) first drafts, shopping lists, and the random strange assortment of imperative notes with capitalized urgency—Field Trip PERMISSION SLIP!—currently residing amid the staggeringly high stacks of paper and other school supply-ish detritus (paperclip bracelets, chewed pencils and bookishly themed paperweights) around here. Yeah, it’s a mess. But it’s an organized mess, as we like to tell visitors who look shocked and appalled when they get a gander at the space.
If you came looking for more aesthetically pleasing writing desks, try these arresting images by Eder Chiodetto, who has photographed an amazing collection of well-known Brazilian authors and their desks here. Click on the main image to get started. (via Carrie, at TingleAlley).
If you came here looking for some good writing about writing spaces, you’ve come to the right place. It’s Roxana Robinson day at THB, and since Randy Cohen and his legal team have not stepped forward to stop us, and since we’ve had a blizzard of emails about this essay, we’re going to run with it. (If we end up spending time in the pen, please start perfecting your cake-baking-with-file-filling skills now.)
Roxana Robinson is the author of three novels , three short story collections, and a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Her writing has been compared to John Cheever’s, by The New York Times, and to Edith Wharton’s, by Time Magazine. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Atlantic. Her stories have appeared often in Best American Short Stories, and have been broadcast on National Public Radio. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review and Travel Section.
Her latest book, A Perfect Stranger: And Other Stories , has earned raves from Alice Munro (..."you'll come out of it feeling grateful, deeply stirred, seriously happy") and Joyce Carol Oates ("heartrending and illuminating"). And today she’s appearing on The Happy Booker. Yeah, I know, don’t say it. And for the record, this wonderful essay makes me want to be a better housekeeper.
Writing Spaces, By Roxana Robinson
When I began to write full-time, I set myself up in the narrow guest room on the third floor. I sat at the small desk my husband had used as a child, and, leaning over my typewriter – it was that long ago – I had to be careful not to bump my head against the eaves, which came down quite sharply. There was no phone in that room, and, since it was a guest room, a bed and bureau took up most of the space.
When I began writing the biography of Georgia O’Keeffe, my husband gave me, as a birthday present, a renovation of the top of the garage, as my study, and a copy of “A Room of One’s Own.”
My new study was a long airy room – though still with sloping eaves. It had a big dormer window, where my desk was, and low bookshelves on three walls, interrupted by file cabinets. I had, it seemed, an infinite amount of space. My books and manuscripts and articles fit into the shelves, my stories and articles and novel drafts and correspondence were in the files. I had a big soft club chair, dark red plush, to drop into when I needed to read. I had a CD player, and a stack of elegant tapes. Against one wall was a small sturdy wooden chair, painted green, like the bookshelves.
My dog Lacey slept on the rug while I wrote, and when I was concentrating she was utterly silent. At first, in my elegant new study, I used to play classical music as I wrote. I soon stopped, though, because I learned that as soon as I began to write the music faded from my consciousness. Later, I only knew that it had been on at all when I noticed the red point of light on the CD player, and I’d realize that the whole of Tosca had been pouring out its passionate soul and carrying itself out to its heartbreaking conclusion while I’d been living inside chapter six.
But during the times when I was restless and distracted, and could not write, then I left the desk, and put on an Emmylou Harris tape. I laid the wooden chair down on the floor, on its side, and pushed the book boxes into a course, and I made Lacey gallop round it, jumping over the obstacles. Lacey was a great and gallant jumper, and a very good-natured dog, but she hated jumping my courses. She thought the whole thing was insane, though to please me she hurtled wildly over the jumps, her eyes rolling, her mouth open, deliberately jumping sloppily and off-centered, as Emmylou crooned “Blue Kentucky Girl.” It made her a little crazy, and at the end she’d whirl and bounce, wagging and manic. I thought the whole thing was wonderful. It was stupid, but it was exciting, and it was a good way to get through the times I couldn’t write.
The desk in my new study came from the barn. When my husband’s parents died, a lot of their furniture had come to us. Much of it had been stored in the hayloft, which was huge, and full of shadows and the soft murmur of bats. When I took over my study, I went out to the barn and chose, from the huddled mass of furniture, a big partner’s desk. I had it brought over during the renovation, and it was so big that it just barely went up the staircase. Once in, though, it fit perfectly in the long dormer window which overlooked the willow trees, and the driveway. The desk was oak, with a long flat top, and drawers on either side. I set up my computer on it, put my paper clips in the drawers, and felt like a real writer.
When I proudly showed the new study to a friend, pointing out the spiffy painted bookshelves, the built-in file cabinets and the handsome carpeting, she looked at the desk and said, “You know that’s ours.”
Stunned, I said, “It is?”
“Yes. You know, we’re storing some of our furniture in your barn. That desk belonged to my uncle.”
It was too late to do anything. By then the desk couldn’t be removed without either destroying it or the staircase. So for years I’ve sat at the uncle’s desk, leaning my elbow on his sliding shelf, spreading my papers across his surface, feeling slightly guilty whenever I think of my theft.
The desk has become more of an issue now, because I’m leaving it.
The house has been sold, and now the study, and the tall willows outside my window, with their soft, graceful, pale chartreuse tresses, all belong to someone else. The study will probably become an exercise room – the new owners aren’t writers. I don’t know what they’ll do about the desk, and I don’t want to learn. I hope they don’t cut it up with a chain saw.
My dog Lacey died in February. She’ll never race around the stupid course to Emmylou Harris again, wild, wagging, silly. I won’t hear the familiar opening movements of Tosca - the only ones I know - as I open up chapter eight, in that room, at that desk.
I’ll have another study, somewhere else. I’ll start other books there. It will be serene and airy, I hope. I won’t mind if there are sloping eaves. I’ll buy a desk. And wherever it is, when I’m in it I’ll sink down into that place – silent, interior, private – which is the real, the only place you need to be to write.
Richard McCann. Richard McCann. Richard McCann.
Color us excited. It's Richard McCann day over at the Happy Booker and we can barely contain ourselves.
True story: The Happy Booker recently ran into Richard McCann at a local gathering of writers. We didn't know him well, other than the fact that he wrote one of our favorite short stories, "My Mothers Clothes: The School of Beauty and Shame." We hadn't seen him in almost six years, but he was just as warm and welcoming as ever, and we fell into an easy conversation about blogs. He informed us that he had just found a wonderful literary blog and had been discussing it with his friends over lunch that afternoon in Dupont Circle. He was pleased with his discovery and thoughtful enough to make a recommendation. "It's called the Happy Booker," he said. "I really think you'd like it."
Yes, we have a mutual thing going on. But I am not alone in my appreciation of Richard's work.
This Sunday, The Washington Post ran a glowing review of Mother of Sorrows, the book McCann has been working on for the past eighteen years. The review describes McCann's prose as "full of achingly sensual detail and imagery". Amen to that. The Post , clearly impressed with McCann's vivid evocation of life in postwar years suburbia, a time of " languid, chain-smoking, highball-drinking mothers driving welcome wagons while their angst-ridden children converted laundry rooms into bomb shelters," called the book "combustible."
The LA Times, not to be outdone by our local paper, described McCann's writing as "Proustian." And Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, has revealed that his copy of Mother of Sorrows " immediately joined the small body of books I keep close by, for the times I need reminding of the heights we can attain using only ink and paper."
That's right. And now he's here today on the blog. Yes, we're very happy. And for those who haven't yet had the pleasure of reading Richard McCann , or those who need a little background on his work, his fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared The Atlantic, Esquire, Ploughshares, Tin House, and in numerous anthologies, including Best American Essays 2000.
Today Mother of Sorrows is finally available! While we're busy over here futzing with Amazon and trying to order copies for our friends, please settle in, make yourself comfortable, and take a look at the interview we did with Richard McCann.
A few Q's and A's with Richard McCann
It's no secret that I am a huge fan of your short story, "My Mothers Clothes: The School of Beauty and Shame". The first time I read it gave me chills—that hair rising on the back of the neck feeling when you know you're reading something that is extraordinary. (I had similar feeling when I first read Michael Cunningham's White Angel, which later became part of A Home at the End of the World.) When did the idea come to you to build and expand on this story and these characters, and was it this story that inspired you to write Mother of Sorrows?
"My Mother's Clothes" is one of the first stories I ever wrote, after having written and published only poetry for some years. I began writing it shortly after I returned to Washington, D.C., where I grew up, after having lived abroad for some years, in Germany, Spain, and Sweden. It was the act of moving back to my hometown, to the place I'd left behind willfully and abruptly when I was seventeen, that made it important to me to write prose: I needed to explore my relationship to my own mother and to understand the difficult narrative I'd had come to live within. And then, not long after I moved back, one of my brothers died; and his death, too, made the writing important.
Can you talk about the structure of Mother of Sorrows. We have 10 beautifully rendered and connected stories. What makes this a novel and not a story cycle?
I don't have a clue! I don't know that I would call it a "novel," though that's how others sometimes see it--I think of Mother of Sorrows as interwoven stories that fit together into something like a novel, in that we see the lives of recurring characters as they're revealed over thirty years. In my mind, it's a narrative mosaic--a book assembled from smaller pieces that are brought together by juxtaposition . What matters to me, however, is not whether the book is seen as a novel or as a collection of stories; what matters to me is that the stories accumulate force and momentum as they go along, in the way a novel does.
Many writers take some time off between books: Steve Goodwin recently released Breaking her Fall, after almost two decades of fiction silence. Marilynne Robinson took 24 years between Housekeeping and Gilead. Your fiction readers have waited 18 years for this novel, can you tell us a little bit about the writing process and why it took so long?
I write prose the same way I write poetryword by word, revising obsessively as I go along; I'm also interested in working only with materials that feel quite difficult to me, in personal ways, so that while I am writing, I often feel quite as though I'm poised on the edge of what Peter Handke once termed "extreme speechlessness." But I wasn't in fact speechless for 18 years: While working (and not working) on Mother of Sorrows, I also published a book of poems and edited an anthology.
And then there is this: Although I'm by nature a slow writer, I was also slowed—and sometimes stopped dead—by Life Itself. In 1990, for instance, I was diagnosed with life-threatening liver disease; in 1996, I underwent a liver transplant, which is almost as much an evisceration as it is a restoration. So I was quite busy, for some years, with the work of dying and then being resurrected. When I finally rose from the sickbed, I wasn't struck first by the urge to pick up a pencil: I was struck first by the urge to go canoeing and to get a suntan.
I'm now writing about this experience of illness, in a memoir I'm calling The Resurrectionist, portions of which have already appeared in the Washington Post Magazine, Tin House , and Best American Essays 2000.
I have read that this book touches on some autobiographical facts of your life, yet you decided to write this as fiction, not memoir. Where do you draw the line? And is it necessary for the reader to draw the line? Have you deliberately blurred this line and should there even be a line?
I never really "decided" between fiction and memoir. I started, as I always do, with facts; eventually, I saw I had deviated far enough from the starting points as to have made a work of fiction. There was a cartoon in The New Yorker a couple of years ago that I loved: a man is standing in a bookstore in which the sections are marked with titles like "Memoirish" and "Fictionish," as opposed to "Memoir" and "Fiction." That's a bookstore, I suspect, in which my work belongs.
I am reading this book slowly, savoring the whiff of Shalimar and the beautiful lyricism. Mother love, brother love, bitter disappointment, loss, anger and longing, its all here already and I can tell this book is going to break my heart. Can you talk a little bit about the impossibility of a happy ending.
It used to be—or so I've heard— that a "happy ending" meant that a story ended with a kiss or a wedding. But the love story in Mother of Sorrows is really between the mother and her youngest son, who worships her, so it seems, in this case, that a wedding wouldn't be a happy ending. Think: Oedipus Rex.
That said, I should add that Mother of Sorrows is a book about loss, and it therefore seems to me important that it ends on an image of two close friends performing Kaddish at night in a rowboat—the narrator, who is sick, and his best friend, who has suffered the twin woes of having lost her son in an auto accident not long after she herself was diagnosed with breast cancer. They're a battered pair, these two, but they're survivors, at least provisionally, which is all that anyone really is.
Want to know my idea of a happy ending? It's the last sentence of Beverly Lowry's brilliant Crossed Over: A Murder, A Memoir, in which Lowry chronicles, among other things, what she has learned about coping with loss from her friendship with death row inmate Karla Faye Tucker: "You bump up against the final, most unacceptable thing, you see what you can come up with."
Richard, thanks for stopping by the blog for a visit. The welcome mat is always out if you want to come back again! Before you go, can you tell us what you're reading these days?
This afternoon I read, with great pleasure, Marjane Satrapi's Embroideries I'm a huge fan of her graphic memoirs, Persepolis and Persepolis 2. I've just read Victoria Redel's beautiful novel Loverboy, which I recommend; and I just recently reread Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World, a novel I've loved over time, in order to stave off my hunger for his soon-to-be-published Specimen Days. As it happens, I love rereading thingsonce a year, I reread Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight, always with utter admiration.
The other thing I seem to be reading is The Happy Booker (heard of it?), to which I've grown rather addicted. Before I became a Happy Booker junkie, I just used blogs "recreationally," as they say.
It’s been a whirlwind weekend over at the blog. We had a lovely martini party to welcome bloggers and fellow litblog co-op members Ron Hogan and Sam Jones to the ‘hood. The intrepid travelers made their way beyond the beltway for an evening of drinks and general revelry with the Happy Booker and her writing group (wonderful details of our evening can be found over at Beatrice). We also met up with Reb Livingston, poet, blogger and the editrix of No-Tell Motel (currently seeking submissions for an upcoming anthology—go check it out, poets!), who is sure to become our new best friend. A very fun night—perhaps too fun!— was had by all.
A few hours later it was the next morning, and Ron, Reb and THB had to be on a panel at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda. Ron and Reb both have wonderful accounts here and here. THB moderated the panel, which was nicely attended for an early morning event, though we are now aware that we shouldn’t be wielding a microphone before noon. Conference guests also included writers Richard Peabody, Barbara Esstman, Robert Bausch, and Alice McDermott.
Then Passover. And then Monday—oh, it’s Tuesday? Yeah, well, we’re a little tired over here. Check back in a bit, when THB will be serving up a riveting helping of Richard McCann as our special lunch hour visitor! We have waited a long time for this interview and we’re very excited—it's worth waking up for!
Dear Randy Cohen, professional ethicist:
Help! I recently aquired a beautiful and amazing essay about writing spaces by Roxana Robinson.
Ms. Robinson, in all the excitement and flurry of her new book, must have been confused and somehow thought she was submitting this essay to the editor of the Lives Column (in your magazine), or that THB was a high quality literary magazine of the glossy-paged variety, complete with perfumed ad inserts and those annoying fluttery subscription cards.
Do I have to clarify to Ms. Robinson that THB is a lowly blog, the online ramblings of one writer in the outermost corner of the net, far from the mainstream literary media? Or can I just run the essay with impunity? (And while we’re on the topic of small, not-for-profit literary blogs and impunity: I am sure you’ll agree that using your logo is not something your legal department, with its exorbitant hourly rates—let’s look at the ethics there!— need worry about, right? )
My friends say that since the email was addressed to THB, that it’s perfectly cool to run it in its entirety.
Ms. Robinson’s newest collection, A Perfect Stranger: And other stories, has Alice Munro, queen goddess of the short story, raving, claiming the book will leave you feeling " grateful, deeply stirred, seriously happy"— with praise like that, could it be possible that what Robinson really wants to do is blog? If that's true, then it wouldn't be right to stop her from guest blogging, would it? Running the essay would be actually using my blogging powers for good, right?
Please advise.
xxx, THB
According to the New York Daily News , Oprah Winfrey has recommended Edward P. Jones' 2003 novel The Known World to those who "need a book right away for your reading groups."
The Daily News suggests that Oprah "may be hinting that she'll pick other modern novels eventually."
Over on Oprah's site , the inimitable Ms. Winfrey calls The Known World, "a masterfully written gem."
The Pulitzer-committee and the Happy Booker couldn't agree more.
Winfrey's site also promises that it's upcoming "summer book club choice is a big one," assuring readers that it will be "worth the wait."
Could this be a sign that Oprah's summer reading selection will come from the contemporary fiction shelf? Stay tuned!
For more information on Ed Jones, a DC-based writer and favorite of THB, check out this recent article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (found by our pal, Max, at The Millions).
What is it about Passover that just brings out the Rap music?
This musical Passover Greeting is actually a video cartoon promo for Sam Apple's new book, Schlepping Through the Alps: My Search for Austria's Jewish Past with Its Last Wandering Shepherd . You gotta’ love that hip hop "Who Let the Jews Out" soundtrack (vidlit folks, watch out!).
No books to sell (yet) but those Jib Jab folks are at it again with a rap-sodic paean to matzah.
And the animated Shabot6000 has its own Passover hip hop crossover, with Seda’ Club, a 50 Cent-ric riff intended for mature audiences, please.
For traditional take on sedar songs—a rousing rendition of Dayeinu anyone?—this site will you get humming in no time. (Thanks to Lizzie, the altehaggen)
By the time you’re on your third verse of Chad Gadya, pop over to the Forward and read "Every Jew Must Have a Goat", a new short story by Pearl Abraham. (Thanks to our friend, Ron Hogan).
Still in the mood for some Passover-themed lit? There’s always the dioramatic rendering of Exodus, Lego-style.
Next year in Jerusalem, baby. Peace out.
