The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton (a review)

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
4 out of 5: In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton presents a series of essays on working life, each one focused on a different industry or career. In his own words, de Botton is attempting "a hymn to the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the modern workplace and, not least, its extraordinary claim to be able to provide us, alongside love, with the principal source of life's meaning." De Botton’s essays, written in his satisfyingly dense and artful prose, are accompanied by haunting black-and-white photographs illustrating either the bleakness or the beauty, and sometimes both, of our modern work landscapes.

De Botton’s aim in examining our working lives is two-fold. In addition to exploring our motivations to work and the meaning we hope to draw from our jobs, de Botton seeks to pierce the superficiality of our material world. Instead of viewing a package of cookies on the grocery store shelf as a simple afternoon snack, de Botton exhorts us to get beyond the surface to consider the hundreds, if not thousands, of people working every day to ensure those cookies are available to us. In this way, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is striving “to mitigate the deadening, uniquely modern sense of dislocation between the things we so heedlessly consume in the run of our daily lives and their unknown origins and creators."

Occasionally, de Botton's focus on certain unsavory details (like the smell of "freshly boiled cabbage or swede" pervading the home office of a career counselor) comes close to condescension. More often, de Botton treats his subjects with empathy and sensitivity. This beautifully designed and produced book is a pleasure to read.

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

After the successful release of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Philadelphia-based publisher Quirk Books is following up with more of the same. Publishers Weekly reports that Quirk’s next project will be Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, scheduled for publication on September 15th. The concept: “the Dashwood sisters, evicted from their childhood home by their conniving stepmother, land on a mysterious island full of man-eating sea creatures, instead of a nearby, downgraded, English cottage.” S&S&S will be even further from the Jane Austen classic than P&P&Z was. While P&P&Z retained 85% of Austen’s writing, S&S&S will retain only 60%.

Translation Woes

The beginning of this story is a happy one. Travel writer Michael Luongo’s best-selling book, Gay Travels in the Muslim World, has been translated into Arabic. In a New York Post Page 6 report, Luongo comments, "This is the first-ever gay book to have been translated into Arabic after first having been printed in English, so I am very proud." Here’s where things go downhill. Luongo’s Arabic publisher translated “gay” as “pervert,” creating a big problem for Luongo: “[T]he new book has in huge words 'Michael Luongo -- Pervert Travels in the Muslim World' across the cover." Not an ideal situation for Luongo’s upcoming book tour to the Mideast, including stops in Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan. Luongo’s asked his publisher to change the offensive word to "a more modern and polite one," but there’s no word yet on whether Luongo’s request will be granted.

(Via MobyLives)

Thomas Pynchon Teaser

I’ve just received my copy of Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Inherent Vice, scheduled for release on August 4th. Although I’ve only read the first two chapters so far, this excerpt from the beginning of chapter two will give you a good sense of the world of the novel:

Doc took the freeway out. The eastbound lanes teemed with VW buses in jittering paisleys, primer-coated street hemis, woodies of authentic Dearborn pine, TV-star-piloted Porsches, Cadillacs carrying dentists to extramarital trysts, windowless vans with lurid teen dramas in progress inside, pickups with mattresses full of country cousins from the San Joaquin, all wheeling along together down into these great horizonless fields of housing, under the power transmission lines, everybody’s radios lasing on the same couple of AM stations, under a sky like watered milk, and the white bombardment of a sun smogged into only a smear of probability, out in whose light you began to wonder if anything you’d call psychedelic could ever happen, or if—bummer!—all this time it had really been going on up north.

The technicolor sets, quick-paced action, and slick prose crammed into the first two chapters hint at the wild ride ahead. Check back for a review in a week or two.

Frank McCourt Near Death

The Irish Echo reports that Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Frank McCourt (Angela’s Ashes) is “suffering from life threatening meningitis.” Over the last several months, 78-year-old McCourt has been battling melanoma with treatments “having beneficial effects.” Now, meningitis may undo those effects, and the outlook is “not good.” McCourt’s brother stated, “Frank was okay for a bit and we had hopes for a while after the treatment for melanoma, but the meningitis turned it all around, turned it topsy-turvy."

McCourt is in a hospice in New York with his family.

Anxiety Reading

Publishers Weekly recently interviewed George Dawes Green, the author of Ravens, a novel that will be released by Grand Central Publishing on July 15th. Green had this to say about changes in the publishing industry:

PW: In that intervening time [14 years between novels], what changes did you notice in the publishing industry?

GDG: People aren’t reading books so much. They text and Twitter and Google a lot—anxiety reading—but they’re too jumpy for books.

I think the phrase “anxiety reading” is a good descriptor for what we do on the internet and our various mobile devices. We check e-mail, send a text, read a favorite blog, look up a topic on Wikipedia, check a friend’s status on Facebook, send a quick tweet, read a news story, go back to e-mail, and on and on and on. For many of us, our internet agility borders on obsessive-compulsive behavior. In Green’s words, it’s “jumpy.”Instead of the relaxing, transporting experience of reading a good book, internet reading feeds and produces anxiety. Not only is its pace frenetic and its quality unfocused, but its substance is often unsatisfying, requiring more clicking to follow-up on loose ends. To combat internet fatigue, I try to keep my internet reading limited to specific times of the day, reserving other times for the focused reading of books (including e-books).

New Words

It’s time for a new update of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, which means official recognition for some new words. The 2009 update of the 11th edition adds words like “staycation: a vacation spent at home or nearby” and “locovore: one who eats foods grown locally whenever possible.” Other new entries include waterboarding, carbon footprint, and fan fiction. Check out the list of new words and their definitions.

Book Giveaway: The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist

Other Press has generously offered to send two copies of Swedish author Ninni Holmqvist's The Unit to readers of Literary License. The Unit, Holmqvist's first novel (translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy), is described in a Washington Post review as "a haunting, deadpan tale."

Book description: One day in early spring, Dorrit Weger is checked into the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material. She is promised a nicely furnished apartment inside the Unit, where she will make new friends, enjoy the state of the art recreation facilities, and live the few remaining days of her life in comfort with people who are just like her. Here, women over the age of fifty and men over sixty–single, childless, and without jobs in progressive industries–are sequestered for their final few years; they are considered outsiders. In the Unit they are expected to contribute themselves for drug and psychological testing, and ultimately donate their organs, little by little, until the final donation. Despite the ruthless nature of this practice, the ethos of this near-future society and the Unit is to take care of others, and Dorrit finds herself living under very pleasant conditions: well-housed, well-fed, and well-attended. She is resigned to her fate and discovers her days there to be rather consoling and peaceful. But when she meets a man inside the Unit and falls in love, the extraordinary becomes a reality and life suddenly turns unbearable. Dorrit is faced with compliance or escape, and…well, then what? The Unit is a gripping exploration of a society in the throes of an experiment, in which the “dispensable” ones are convinced under gentle coercion of the importance of sacrificing for the “necessary” ones. Ninni Holmqvist has created a debut novel of humor, sorrow, and rage about love, the close bonds of friendship, and about a cynical, utilitarian way of thinking disguised as care.

If this sounds interesting to you, please e-mail me (litlicense AT gmail DOT com) with your name and address by this Friday, July 17th. I'll select two winners at random from the qualifying entrants. Sorry, but the quagmire that is international publishing rights limits this giveaway to those living in the U.S. Good luck!

(I'm just about finished with this novel and I can't put it down. It's a quick and disturbing read. Look for my review here at Literary License sometime later this month.)

Edited to note this giveaway has concluded. Thanks to everyone who participated!

Avoiding Dan Brown

The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown's first new novel since international bestseller The Da Vinci Code, hits stores on September 15th. To avoid Brown mania, publishers are moving up the fall release dates of some of their highly-anticipated books, including books by William Trevor and Nick Hornby. The Guardian reports the comments of a senior executive at Penguin:

When we heard that Dan Brown's book was due out on September 15 there was a fair bit of reshuffling. William [Trevor]'s book was originally down for release in early September, and Nick [Hornby]'s book was initially due for publication at the end of September, but if you're fighting for the dearth of space on supermarket shelves and on best-seller lists when Brown is out, you've clearly got no chance of getting a book to number one, so we decided to go early. It has very much been a case of dominoes falling around Dan Brown.

Other significant names releasing books this fall ahead of Brown (in the UK) include JM Coetzee, Iain Banks, Fay Weldon, Rachel Cusk, and Margaret Atwood.

The Last Bridge by Teri Coyne (a review)

The Last Bridge: A Novel
3.5 out of 5: Teri Coyne’s latest novel, The Last Bridge, begins: “Two days after my father had a massive stroke, my mother shot herself in the head.” And, in terms of depressing plot elements, it’s downhill from there. Told from the perspective of an unlikable (but very believable) alcoholic, nicknamed “Cat” by her siblings, The Last Bridge alternates between the present and the past. As the three siblings converge on their childhood home for their mother’s funeral, the horrors of living with an abusive father are resurrected in flashbacks.

The Last Bridge is a soap opera with literary ambitions. The quick-moving plot, while always engaging, is often melodramatic. At times, Cat’s unmitigated negativity becomes tedious, and the plot device of her mother’s suicide note plays too central a role, breaking up the flow of the narrative. Also, certain “savior” characters that come into Cat’s life at convenient moments are completely unbelievable in their generosity. In spite of these significant issues, however, The Last Bridge is a gripping and well-paced novel. Darkly entertaining.

Shakespeare & Company

If you've never had the chance to visit Shakespeare & Company, that legendary bookstore in Paris, now you can take the virtual tour.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (a review)

The White Tiger: A Novel
4 out of 5: This novel masquerades as a series of letters written by an Indian man, Balram Halwai, to the Premier of China explaining what it is to be an “entrepreneur.” For Balram, the term “entrepreneur” is a euphemism for someone who has managed to rise above his caste, or social class, using whatever means required. In his persistent climb to the top, Balram takes advantage of the fluidity of identity offered by an unstable society in a state of transition. He assumes whatever position and character is most useful as he transforms himself from an uneducated village boy into a successful businessman in Bangalore.

Despite his upbeat entrepreneurial message, Balram’s narrative is filled with evidence of deep fissures in Indian society: between the high castes and the low castes, between those living in the Darkness (the rural, poor areas) and those living in the Light (the big cities), and between the rich masters and their poor servants. For Balram, these divisions reside within the body and are a kind of physical (and thus inescapable) marker:

A rich man's body is like a premium cotton pillow, white and soft and blank. Ours are different. My father's spine was a knotted rope, the kind that women use in villages to pull water from wells; the clavicle curved around his neck in high relief, like a dog's collar …. The story of a poor man's life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.

Balram’s letters are darkly humorous and written with a savage directness in consonance with the violence and immorality underlying his success. The epistolary format feels like a clumsy literary device rather than a natural platform for Balram’s story, but his story is engaging enough to overcome its inelegant construction. Overall, The White Tiger is an interesting glimpse into a complicated society in transition.

Best of the National Book Awards Fiction Prize

Taking a cue from the Best of the Booker Prize, the National Book Foundation will be awarding the Best of the National Book Awards Fiction Prize this year in honor of the 60th anniversary of the National Book Awards. A panel of 600 writers will choose 6 books for the shortlist, and, beginning September 21, the public will vote on the winner.

Libation, A Bitter Alchemy by Deirdre Heekin (a review)

Libation, A Bitter Alchemy
3.5 out of 5: In this collection of linked essays, Deirdre Heekin describes her growing appreciation for wine and the land from which it comes. Her musings range from her travels to the small winemaking villages in Italy to her life at home in Vermont where she and her husband own and manage an Italian restaurant that uses locally grown ingredients. In her own words, Heekin describes Libation as a book “about soil, vines, fruit, history, scent, taste, chemistry, and memory.”

The breadth of the topics covered—from high-end perfumery in Paris to a casual family meal in Tuscany—ensures something to interest just about any reader. The lack of a central focus, however, renders Libation a bit disjointed. Heekin is knowledgeable and passionate about the subjects she discusses. Her writing is mostly charming but occasionally overloaded with technical detail. Winemakers and restaurateurs will appreciate the rigorous treatment, but armchair tourists will be left wanting more whimsy and less technique.

Ron Charles Reviews Laurie Sheck’s Debut

Generally, I don’t post about other reviews, particularly those appearing in the major papers, because I know you’ll find them on your own if you’re interested. Ron Charles’s recent review in the Washington Post of Laurie Sheck’s debut novel, A Monster’s Notes, is so compelling, however, that I feel an unusual need to cite to it. Charles describes A Monster’s Notes as “a baffling 500-page book” composed of “thousands of little scraps stitched together: bits of letters, journal entries, newspaper clippings, marginalia, interviews, dreams, lists, Web pages, lesson plans and translated passages, full of additions and words x'd out.”

It sounds like a challenging read:

[A Monster’s Notes is] a fire hose of erudition that sprays out allusions to 3,000 years of history, science, philosophy and literature, the kind of novel that keeps you chained to Wikipedia unless you're on a first-name basis with Boethius, Cao Xuequin, Dante, Marco Polo, Locke, Diogenes, Maimonides and especially the Romantic poets, along with their parents, lovers, children and pets. I'm sure somewhere there's a reader smart enough (or dishonest enough) to enjoy this novel in all its rich allusiveness, but I spent the entire ordeal lurching along about 50 IQ points behind.

The rest of the review is equally entertaining. I’m almost tempted to read the book.

The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer (a review)

The Story of a Marriage: A Novel
4.5 out of 5: The Story of a Marriage examines the marriage of Pearlie and Holland Cook during a brief period of time in 1953. In many ways, the Cook’s marriage is superficially ordinary, but, like most marriages, it’s internally complicated and weighty: “like those giant heavenly bodies invisible to the human eye, it can only be charted by its gravity, its pull on everything around it.”

This quiet novel is full of self-awareness. The story is remarkably controlled, each detail playing a critical role. In precise and well-crafted prose, Greer reveals the flaws in our assumptions. Just when you think you’ve got the story figured out, Greer shows just how wrong you’ve been all along. The book begins with an appropriate warning:

We think we know the ones we love. Our husbands, our wives. We know them—we are them, sometimes …. But what we love turns out to be a poor translation, a translation we ourselves have made, from a language we barely know. We try to get past it to the original, but we never can.

The Story of a Marriage is about the things we do to construct our view of another person. Ultimately, the person we think we know is nothing more than our own mind’s reconciliation of the mysteries that make up another being:

[A] lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we’ve married him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled in by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be.

The Story of a Marriage is a masterpiece of the nuances of marriage. It’s poignant and beautiful and well worth reading.

Amazon's Best Books of 2009 (so far)

If you haven’t had enough lists, check out Amazon’s list of “the top 10 must-reads of the year so far.” And if that’s not enough, Amazon has additional top ten lists for fiction, non-fiction, young readers, and a category described as “hidden gems.” All in all, the lists are fairly interesting and diverse (particularly the fiction list).

Book Club for the Homeless

Every Tuesday morning, a group of homeless men meet at a church in Boston to discuss literature. As reported in the Boston Globe, the story of the club’s origin reads like a fairy tale, but it’s all the more touching because it’s true:

The story of the book club, now in its 10th month, is a tale of ordinary city life upended. It began with a stunningly unlikely friendship, between two men from different worlds: Peter Resnik, a high-powered lawyer on his way to work, and Rob, a homeless man guarding a friend’s shopping cart on Boston Common. Through months of daily conversations, that began with jokes and sports talk and gradually delved deeper, they found a common interest: literature. And when they saw the bridge that they had built, they recognized its potential for others.

Read the full article if you have the time. It reaffirms the status of literature as a basic human need.

A Few Good Mysteries

If you’re looking for something light and entertaining to read this summer, consider one of these mysteries. While these novels may not be on the top of the literary heap (I’d give each of them a 3 out of 5), they’re all well-written page-turners—just the thing when you need to keep one eye on the kids playing in the waves.

Bleeding Heart Squareby Andrew Taylor
In this historical mystery, a woman married to a wealthy but brutal politician gives up her marriage and comfortable lifestyle to live with her drunken and penniless father. She soon uncovers a series of inexplicable coincidences and, in putting together the pieces, discovers a horrific crime. The strong protagonist is likeable, and the constantly shifting point of view keeps the action lively.

The Physick Book of Deliverance Daneby Katherine Howe
A graduate student working to renovate her grandmother's house uncovers a clue tying her family to the historic Salem witch trials of 1692. Her ensuing quest to understand her family's dark history becomes linked to her need to find a source document to support her graduate thesis. Alternating between 1991 and 1692, this book is historical fiction combined with a contemporary mystery along with a bit of romance and magic.

Gold of Kings: A Novelby Davis Bunn
When her grandfather dies under mysterious circumstances, a young art and antiquities dealer must decipher the cryptic clues he left behind. Her investigation leads her on a dangerous treasure hunt around the world in the company of a professional treasure hunter and a federal agent. This international thriller will appeal to those interested in the treasures of antiquity and the exotic locations in which they're found.

The Great Experiment

The Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vermont is the first independent bookstore in the US to install the Espresso Book Machine, a “print on demand’’ device that creates books for customers while they wait. If successful, the Boston Globe reports that this experiment "could streamline the traditional book supply chain, with much less need for space in warehouses, inventory on hand, shipping expenses, or management of returns."

Manager Chris Morrow views his store's Espresso Book Machine, nicknamed "Lurch," as an “ATM for books.’’ Interestingly, Lurch is not drawing customers seeking near-instantaneous access to millions of books but, rather, is attracting "a lively customer base of local authors" interested in self-publishing their works. Morrow comments that Lurch has "been great for building community.’’

Updated Translation Database

If you're interested in translated works, you'll want to check out the latest update of Three Percent's translation database. Unfortunately, the data suggests the number of never-before-translated works of fiction and poetry distributed in the U.S. "is down significantly in 2009."

More on the "Author-Critic Feud"

In an article at Salon.com, Mary Elizabeth Williams reminds us that, while author "tweet tantrums" may be the new trend, they're really nothing more than the old sport of critic bashing appearing in a new format. Williams reminds us of the time Dave Eggers called NYT reporter David Kirkpatrick's profile of him "a snippety little thing full of sneering and suspicion." There's also the time Stanley Crouch slapped critic Dale Peck in the face after Peck gave Crouch's Don't the Moon Look Lonesome a negative review. If actual violence is the alternative, perhaps tweet tantrums aren't so bad after all.

Alain de Botton is Contrite

To recab what happened last week for those of you who haven't heard, Caleb Crain wrote a mostly negative reivew of Alain de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work in the June 28th NYT Book Review. After de Botton responded to the review with angry comments left on Crain's blog, the dispute went viral. After the fallout, Edward Champion interviewed de Botton, who says he "felt very bad about his outburst."

Apparently, de Botton was caught off guard by the public attention given to his comments on Crain's blog. He has since learned an important lesson on how the internet works:

I think that a writer should respond to a critic within a relatively private arena. I don’t believe in writing letters to the newspaper. I do believe in writing, on occasion, to the critics directly. I used to believe that posting a message on a writer’s website counted as part of this kind of semi-private communication. I have learnt it doesn’t, it is akin to starting your own television station in terms of the numbers who might end up attending.

De Botton's comments on the "quasi moral responsibility" of book critics are also interesting:

Books will sink without review coverage, which is why authors and publishers care so acutely about them — and why there is a quasi moral responsibility on reviewers to exercise good judgement and fairness in what they say.

The entire interview is worth reading. Also, look for a review of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work here at Literary License in the next week or two.

Upcoming in 2009

The second half of 2009 will be filled with plenty of good books by notable authors. Check out what The Millions is looking forward to reading, and start filling up your wishlist.

Alain de Botton Gets Mad in Public

After receiving a bad review from Caleb Crain in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review for his latest book (The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work), Alain de Botton left this vitriolic comment on Crain’s blog:

Caleb, you make it sound on your blog that your review is somehow a sane and fair assessment. In my eyes, and all those who have read it with anything like impartiality, it is a review driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value. The accusations you level at me are simply extraordinary. I genuinely hope that you will find yourself on the receiving end of such a daft review some time very soon - so that you can grow up and start to take some responsibility for your work as a reviewer. You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that's two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review. You present yourself as 'nice' in this blog (so much talk about your boyfriend, the dog etc). It's only fair for your readers (nice people like Joe Linker and trusting souls like PAB) to get a whiff that the truth may be more complex. I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.

The comment by David Jones immediately following de Botton’s screed says it all: “oh dear …”

(Via MobyLives)

A Ghanaian Mystery

In an interesting guest post at Publishing Perspectives, Kwei Quartey talks about his debut novel, Wife of the Gods, a murder mystery set in a rural area of Ghana. Quartey, born in Ghana and now a practicing doctor in California, encountered resistance when he first tried to publish his novel. An agent who declined to accept the manuscript explained, “There are two places on earth that no one has the slightest interest in reading about: Afghanistan and Africa.” Now, a decade later, all that’s changed.

For Quartey, Ghana “provides a compelling background to any crime.” There’s more mystery in Wife of the Gods than the murder committed in a rural area of Ghana:

[E]ven if you put aside the murder, there is intrinsic mystery in the nation’s belief systems alone; for some Ghanaians, the physical world coexists with another realm of gods and their magical powers. These beliefs can considerably complicate a murder investigation.

Wife of the Gods will be published in the US on July 14th.

Little Fingers by Filip Florian (a review)

Little Fingers
4 out of 5: The discovery of a mass grave filled with human skeletons in a small Romanian town is the animating event behind Little Fingers, Filip Florian's first novel and also his first work available in English. Is the grave evidence of a brutal genocide carried out by the former regime, or is it nothing more than a centuries-old collection of plague victims? This mystery serves as a rather feeble framing device and is quickly overshadowed by this novel's riotous and quirky assortment of stories and characters. There's a photographer with a camel, an aunt with prophetic dreams, a monk with hair that grows eight inches every four hours, an old man who fishes for pigeons from the top of a tower, Bolivian musicians, Roman ruins, Argentinean archeologists, and much more—all in about 200 pages. Little Fingers is messy and filled with loose ends, but it's also wonderfully imaginative. Ultimately, Little Fingers makes the point that we see only what we want to see, conforming our realties to our imaginations.

Florian's playful prose is masterfully translated by Alistair Ian Blyth, providing the perfect accompaniment to these inventive stories. This description of the mellowing effect of aging illustrates Florian's eclectic style:

The little girl no longer chases after lambs, not because she is not in good physical shape—she is, she does aerobics a number of times a week—but the little girl has known too much: love, mathematics, Easter lamb pudding, high and flat heels, the throes of labor, driving, divorce.

In many cases, such as in this description of the villagers' first impression of the team of Argentinean archeologists, Florian makes good use of humor:

Four of the Argentineans were wearing jeans and a fifth Bermuda shorts, the T-shirt of one had sleeves shredded with a pair of scissors, the vest of another was imprinted with the face of the Pope, at the throat of the tallest swung a crucifix as big as a communion-wafer stamp. In short, they looked different from the way men of science usually appear in the popular imagination and were younger than they ought to have been.

If you embrace whimsy and disorder, you'll love Little Fingers, but if you prefer a coherent plot and an organized structure, look elsewhere.

Book Deal for Food Porn

Jessica Amason is the co-founder of the "junk-food porn" website ThisisWhyYoureFat.com. (Warning: Do not look at this site if you havn't eaten your breakfast, or you'll lose your appetite.) In a recent interview with Fishbowl LA, Amason discusses the site and her upcoming book about "the junkfood lovers, haters and creators [] that have made This is Why You're Fat what it is." The book is scheduled for publication by HarperStudio on October 27th. Despite the website's provocative title, Amason insists it's not "message-driven" but "simply highlighting a web trend that was already in existence."

(The above image is described on ThisisWhyYoureFat.com as a "Deep Fried Peanut Butter And Banana Sandwich.")

Penguin Design Award

With this design, Peter Adlington took first prize in a contest put on by Penguin UK for the best cover design for Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. The charge: “design a fresh and bold new look for this cult classic in order to bring it to a new generation of readers.” The judges think Adlington’s design is “a bold, beautiful and distinctive cover that mirrored the themes of the book in an imaginative and succinct way.” I think it looks like something you’d see on a mass market series mystery published in the 1970s.

Curiosities of Literature by John Sutherland (a review)

Curiosities of Literature: A Feast for Book Lovers
2 out of 5: Curiosities of Literature is a collection of short musings on literary miscellany, including such topics as “The First Typewriter-Writer,” “The Worst Novelist Ever,” and “Most Misquoted.” I like to read about books, so I was looking forward to this one. Unfortunately, I found Sutherland’s prose, loaded with self-indulgent complexity, to be almost incomprehensible.

Here’s an example from “The Ultra-Literary Biscuit”:

Paterson Arran’s ‘Brontë’ shortbread (so called for entirely inscrutable reasons) is reported to be the top-selling brand among MPs at Westminster’ Portcullis House. Cheering news for the Scottish Nationalists (the maker Paterson Arran is as Caledonian as their product). The biscuit that takes the literary biscuit, so to speak, is Proust’s madeleine, the redolent taste of which inspires the long ruminations of Remembrance of Things Past.

Another example from “Adjectivals”:

The epithets ‘Brontean’ and Thackerayan’ are common in critical and general discourse. I frequently use them myself and very useful they are. But, curiously, some authors’ lives, lifestyles, reputations, and literary works distil conveniently into adjectivality, and others inconveniently resist conversion. Peter Conradi, for example, gets through 500 pages of his authorized life of the novelist without once using ‘Murdochian’. Having read those pages, however, one has a precise idea of what the uncouth term would mean, if anyone, less stylistically scrupulous than Professor Conradi, cared to invent it.

Sutherland’s witty pomposity will either entertain you or drive you mad. Unfortunately, I found myself in the latter category. Consider which camp you belong to before reading this one.

The Last War by Ana Menéndez (a review)

The Last War: A Novel
4 out of 5: In this slim novel, Margarita Anastasia Morales (nicknamed “Flash”) is a photojournalist in her late twenties, living alone in Istanbul while her husband, a war-correspondent, covers the war in Iraq. Flash is planning to join her husband in Iraq until she receives an anonymous letter accusing him of adultery while abroad. The letter knocks Flash’s life off its prior path. Spiraling into a state of self-reflection and loneliness (with the help of plenty of red wine), Flash realizes “that something essential had begun to give way in [her] marriage” and “that the disillusion we had so long been running from had finally come for us.”

The Last War is an introspective meditation on marriage and identity. As Flash meanders around, both literally through the beautiful streets of Istanbul and figuratively through her memories of her husband, she considers whether she was ever happy in her marriage. Very little action in this novel touches Flash, who seems to be trapped in one of life’s out-of-the-way eddies, but Menéndez’s cutting prose, striped of all pretension, keeps a quick pace. The Last War is a masterful tone piece on love and commitment in the face of war.

Books + Dating

Like books? Need a date? Live in the UK? Try Penguin's new online service: Penguin Dating (where book lovers meet). An interesting concept. (Via Publishing Perspectives)

Jonathan Littell on Privacy

Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones (his big French novel about a former SS officer) recently won the Athens Prize for Literature. In lieu of accepting the prize in person, Littell sent a letter addressed "To the Jury of the Athens Prize for Literature." Here's an excerpt (in an English translation):

It has always been my view that literature is a very private matter now, and that what takes place between a writer and his work belongs to a sphere utterly separate from the interaction of that work with those who read it, comment it, praise it or damn it. Privacy, for me, is a fundamental condition of creation, of work. It was so before my book was published, and must remain so now. It is in this spirit that I express my hope that my inability to join you today will be taken for what it is, an expression of our common love for literature.

Read the full letter in English at Literary Saloon.