Laila Lalami, author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and Chris Castellani, author of The Saint of Lost Things, read at my store last night and I’ve got the whole thing on tape. Well, not tape. On my digital recorder, which I have edited into 3 15 minute podcasts.
Laila Lalami (approx. 2MB, 17 min.)
Chris Castellani (approx. 2MB, 15 min.)
Question and Answers (approx. 2MB, 15 min.)
It was a great reading and I thoroughly enjoyed catching up with Laila afterward.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Laila Lalami’s appearance at my store tomorrow evening at 6:30. She will be reading from her debut Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits with Chris Castellani author of The Saint of Lost Things. It’s hard to be objective as I consider Laila a friend, but I really enjoyed her book and am looking forward to hearing her read from it.
2 good links for y’all:
Number 12 of the Bat Segundo Show is available for your listening pleasure. This session features Lydia Millet.
Robert Birnbaum spoke to Ron Rash recently about all sorts of southernly things. Check it out.
Several authors have appeared in the area that I just didn’t have the energy to attend. Luckily, Jenny Davidson attended the Jonathan Lethem lecture at MIT and posted about it.
Plus Haruki Murakami, who is at Harvard for the year, has been getting around. He gave a lecture at MIT in the same series as Jonathan Lethem, and recently spoke at Tufts, where he was a professor. The Tufts Daily News has the beans. Murakami will be speaking again at the First Parish Church, sponsored by the Reischauer Institute with the cooperation of my store. Unfortunately, the tickets sold out very quickly, though there may be some overflow seats. Fortunately, yours truly will be in attendance. I will do what I can to record the lecture.
Just so you don’t think I’m going to be constantly dumping links on you, I’ll tell you about 2 books I’ve recently read.
The first, a paperback original from the new Harper Perennial line, is a memoir called I Am Not Myself These Days by Josh Kilmer-Purcell. Josh lived a double life—by day, he was a successful advertising executive and at night, he transformed into Aquadisiac, a successful drag queen. This is all on the back of the galley. They even got a blurb from James Frey, so you know it’s going to be full of drugs, if not a bit trashy (sorry, I didn’t think much of Frey’s book). It’s not as all tawdry as they would have you believe. The other executives at his firm know about his night life, mainly because he shows up at work either hung over or still slightly drunk and won’t shut up about it. I found him sympathetic though. The book mostly focuses on a relationship he had with Jack, a hot rich male escort who also has a crack habit. Josh, only several months in NYC, moves into Jack’s clean white penthouse and they settle into a sort of hybrid domesticity. The funniest parts are when Josh comes home to find some of Jack’s S&M clients tied up on the floor. It ends sadly of course, as Jack gets more dependent on crack and Josh realizes his lifestyle (the up all night wasted, spending 2 or more hours getting into his drag costume lifestyle, not the being gay part) no longer suits him. If this tells you anything about the book, there’s a note from the executive editor of HarperCollins that let’s you know the film rights have already been bought by Clive Barker.
The other book to appear on my desk this week is a fantastic smaller hardcover from the great David Godine. Bibliotopia or, Mr. Gilbar’s Book of Books & Catch-All of Literary Facts & Curiosities clearly is cashing in on the popularity of small trivia books such as Schott’s Original Miscellany. But this one is classier and looks better. The cover and binding alone make the book worth a look. The endpapers have fonts illustrating them. The book begins with the beginning of books. There are no chapters, rather the whole thing is bulleted with a heading and the facts. It’s all literary trivia, such as ‘Some Authors With Medical Degrees’, ‘Genius Award Novelists’, and ‘French Authors Pronunciation Guide’. Throughout the book are wonderful illustrations of authors by Elliott Banfield. I thought they were woodcuts or something, but it turns out he used a Mac G5 and some Adobe software. I am fascinated with this book. Everyday I’ve been coming into my office, grabbing Bibliotopia, and opening it to a random page. It’s marvelous.
The November Boldtype is up. They are calling this month’s ‘The Kinship Issue’.
I liked this interview with John Banville. He makes a lot of sense:
“He’s a wonderful writer, and I think he made a mistake,” he said of Mr. McEwan. “I just felt he was offering a completely spurious and unbelievable version of life. His protagonist was still in love with his wife after all those years, can never have been unfaithful to her; both his children loved each other. It’s just not life as we know it. Many people would say: ‘Oh, well, that’s just Banville. You’re sick. What do you know about life?’ It’s possible. This is just a book review. I didn’t mean it to be a grand statement.”
I like the last bit about it just being a book review. We all make such big deals about them–the article itself even references Kakutani’s negative review of Banville from yesterday–but really they are just opinions in the end. Banville seemed to expect better from McEwan and was disappointed when the book failed to deliver for him.
Read here for an interesting discussion on chick lit. Are you pro or against? I haven’t made up my mind. On the one hand, I find some of the stories too simplistic, not to mention the pastel theme that publishers seem to be pushing. A pink cover with a martini glass/shoe/lipstick immediately turns me off. But on the other hand, there’s probably a wide variety of books deemed chick lit out there. It feels too snobby to dismiss an entire genre of books. An while I might not be as vehement as Maud Newton or Jessa Crispin, but I still haven’t found my experience accurately reflected in any of these books. I don’t have any deep desire to settle down and have kids. And I don’t want to climb the corporate ladder sacrificing my chances of having marrying and having kids, which again I don’t want. Yes, I am simplifying. But let’s not pretend that chick lit is an accurate representation for all women. I don’t know where I fit into this argument. It doesn’t represent me and I wouldn’t call it “literary” in the same way that Murakami is “literary”, but still….
Robert Birnbaum has posted another wonderful interview, this time with author Adam Nicolson. Nicolson wrote God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, which I have on good authority, namely my boyfriend’s grandmother, is a wonderful book and most recently he has published Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of Trafalgar.
Have I mentioned the Soft Skull Press blog? It’s colorful and fun. Today Richard Nash posted about publishing a book about Iranian bloggers.
And speaking of Soft Skull Press, one of their books, the memoir of cultural icon Lisa Carver, got a great review from the Boston Globe of all places (I was shocked too).
And trying to prove me wrong about them, the Globe also has an article about NaNoWriMo, that is National Novel Writing Month, wherein people try to write 50,000 words (about 175 pages) by the end of November.
Bookdwarf 