The Olive Reader

The Tournament of Books witnessed an upset of sorts yesterday, as our very own Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala squeaked by Zadie Smith’s On Beauty to get into the second round. I say “of sorts,” because Beasts won the 2005 Discover Award for Fiction, and is a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, so it’s not exactly a 90-pound weakling. That said, Zadie is Zadie, so we’re very proud. Congrats to Uzo, who takes on another heavyweight in round two: Ian McEwan’s Saturday.

The Elegant Variation is doing a week-long comparison of The Believer and n+1 as soon as the newest edition of the latter is available. This should be something.

So, some time ago we made some snotty comments about n+1 and we were challenged in the comments box to back them up. The timing wasn’t quite right but the announcement at the n+1 website that issue number four is about to go to press provides us with a sterling opportunity.
^{“via”:http://www.edrants.com/}

The full schedule for April’s PEN World Voice Festival is now available.

With the short 35-hour working week in France and a fall in the average retirement, increasing numbers of French men and women are turning pen to paper to write “their book”.
^{“via”:http://www.artsjournal.com/publishing/}

As a fan of the North Carolina Tar Heels, sadly vanquished last week by George Mason (which is not just one dude, but really, might as well be), I was thrilled to see Duke lose last night.

While we’re on the subject of brackets, The Morning News is through half of its first round in the Tournament of Books, and the winners so far are Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Sam Lipsyte. If my prediction of an ultimate victory for Home Land is to come true, though, Lipsyte will have to get more love than he did from judge Jessica Francis Kane, who seemed to barely vote him past the bloated goth of The Historian.

Keep up with the event by clicking here.

The Poetry Foundation has started a blog that will feature guests poets on a weekly basis, except they can’t bear to call it a blog so please think of it as a “live journal.”

This week’s journal-ist is poet and Farrar, Straus publisher Jonathan Galassi.

From the Better Late Than Never Department (as it pertains to this posting, not the Times’ reporting), Harper Perennial was featured in a New York Times piece yesterday about the surge in literary paperback publishing. And by “our name in lights,” I mean “CK’s name in lights.” She’s becoming quite the regular presence in the paper of record.

The decline of the Hapsburg Empire was long, and slow, and confusing, and it produced in the empire’s subjects that combination of desperation and indolence that results from staring down into a disaster one is powerless to avert. The years of secure prosperity were over, though many were prosperous still. Political and economic institutions—corrupted, and, it turned out, irreplaceable—careened out of control. In this late period of decline it began to seem possible, even if the idea was deplored, that collectivity had been a dream, that nothing existed but the individual, and so the people living in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire did what people do in such circumstances: They sought meaning and solace in life stories, in the successes of the illustrious and the tragedies of those understood to be ordinary. Perhaps this accounts in part for the fact that Stefan Zweig, born in 1881, became, in the period from 1910 until his suicide in 1942, one of Austria’s most popular writers by penning more than twenty biographical studies (on Erasmus, Balzac, Marie Antoinette, Magellan, Freud, Casanova, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and Mary Stuart, among others) and a number of fine, strange novellas, in which the characters very often tell the stories of their lives. Neither was Zweig’s popularity limited to the territories of the imploding empire. Translated during his lifetime into twenty-nine languages, his books were also best sellers in all the neighboring and chaotically restructuring European states.

I saw someone reading JT Leroy’s The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things on the 1 train last night. Over the past couple of months, I’ve seen more people reading James Frey and Mr./Ms. Leroy than ever before, and I don’t think it’s just because I’m paying more attention. If this doesn’t prove the maxim that serves as this post’s subject line, then I don’t know what does.

This year’s Tournament of Books has commenced over at The Morning News, with judge Choire Sicha choosing Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love over David Bergen’s The Time In Between. Sicha’s entertaining, rambling, not-very-judgmental judgment can be read here.

This sets up a possible match between Krauss and husband Jonathan Safran Foer in the second round. Madness!

On Sunday, I went to KGB to hear Uzodinma Iweala and Daniel Alarcon read and I was joined by the lovely and talented blogger from cruelestmonth.com. If you have the chance, do swing by KGB and you’ll enter a large room, painted red, high ceilings and sporadic Russian propaganda posters. Oh yes, and there’s a bar.

So drink up!

A great crowd spilling out onto the hallway, Uzo lead the evening with a reading from is debut novel Beasts of No Nation. Uzo is a smartly dressed, tall gentleman – young (22? 23? Heartbreaking) – Harvard educated, the whole bit. A guy who, for sure, got straight As. His novel is unexpected. Short, small trim size – but packs such a punch – and is written in a Nigerian dialect. A novel once read, is not soon forgotten. He read with such a voice – completely in character – that if he had the time, I’d ask him to read the entire novel out loud to me. Incredible. The entire bar was silent. In a good way.

Then more drinks! Cheers!

Daniel’s debut collection of short stories goes on-sale today (happy on-sale day!). War By Candlelight is another powerful book that pacts a wallop. I thought Daniel and Uzo made a great pair. Perfect side-by-side readings. But instead of reading a story from his collection, he surprised us by reading from a yet-unpublished story he (later told me) had just written. Entitled “Abraham Lincoln is dead”, I expected something dated 1815…but what I got was completely unexpected! Gaybraham Lincoln! The basic plot, and I’m doing it no justice, goes something like this “set in quasi-modern times, Abe Lincoln appears as a modern candidate and President, who has a love affair with the male narrator”. The delivery, style, and tone dead-on. I laughed.

And then more drinks.

There is a tantalizing gap between our increasingly detailed knowledge of Kafka’s life and our imperfect understanding of his achievement as a writer. His work seems to cry out for biographical readings and has often been subjected to them, characteristically along psychoanalytic lines. Yet the obvious connections between life and work have not explained much about the work. Kafka’s tormented relationship with his father, for example, disturbingly etched in that strangest of autobiographical documents, “The Letter to His Father,” would seem to be directly reflected in his story “The Judgment”; but the hypnotic power of the story, a breakthrough for Kafka in 1912, resists reduction to the writer’s all-too-evident sense of guilt and inadequacy.

Kafka abundantly documented his own life in his diaries and in his voluminous correspondence, and many of those who knew him have left testimonies of various sorts. As a result, a great deal is known in purely factual terms about the circumstances of his life, from early adulthood until his death of tuberculosis in 1924 at the age of forty-one — his work as a mid-level legal bureaucrat in the Prague office of the Hapsburg state insurance company; his circle of literary friends; his flirtation with Zionism and with the culture of East European Jewry; his on-again, off-again engagement to Felice Bauer; his maniacal pursuit of health at sanatoria and through vegetarian diets, exercise regimens, occasional nudism, and much else; his asceticism; his nocturnal schedule as a writer. And yet no satisfying general biography of Kafka has appeared, until now.
^{“via”:http://www.briansholis.com/insearch/archives/2006/03/around_the_web_14.html}

What Books to Read

Via metafilter. The comment thread has some nice links as well.

An interview with Gabriel Josipovici, one of my favorite writers, on ReadySteadyBook:

Gabriel Josipovici: I wrote Only Joking immediately after Goldberg: Variations (2000). That book had cost me a lot of effort. It had taken longer than any of my other books to bring to completion – there were moments when I felt my head was splitting in two. So when it was done I felt I wanted to do something fairly light, something that would amuse me. It was also personally a very bad time for me, and one way of coping with quite severe mental anguish was to write something purely comic. I’d been carrying in my wallet for a while a newspaper cutting about a court case, in which the much younger wife of a rich businessman was accused of hiring a contract killer to do away with her stepson and his family, who would be inheriting when the husband died. The man she hired turned out to be an ex-clown, whose professional name was Banjo, who got cold feet and went to the police. From the moment I read the piece I thought it would be nice to write a novel round that, and this is what I eventually did in Only Joking.

I wish they’d explain exactly what the new style amounted to, but…

“We have a national affliction, and it’s called cacography – that means ‘illegible handwriting,’ “ says Barbara Getty, handwriting expert, former elementary-school teacher and co-creator of a method she believes can solve the problem. “That’s why we’re a ‘Please print’ nation. Nobody says, ‘Please write in your lovely cursive handwriting.’ “

At a time when the computer is king and toddlers type, some educators believe it’s even more imperative to teach a speedy handwriting technique that others can read.

Enter italic, a zippy hybrid of print and cursive that Getty and fellow Oregon calligrapher Inga Dubay consider a simple, elegant solution to the massive modern handwriting malaise.
^{“via”:http://www.coudal.com/}