The Olive Reader

An author bemoans lukewarm reviews from the industry in this essay on Salon. It’s fine, but it’s the title that really got me: Kirkus Shrugged. That’s great.

Apologies if someone here has posted about this already (we’re very busy and don’t always have time to check in with each other, so we’re bound to overlap at some point). Anyway, this profile of David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, is charming, if a bit over-the-top in its He’s Some Type of God tone. Not that he isn’t the cream of the crop, but you know; it seems like all the piece is missing is a quote from his dermatologist talking about the blinding shine of his flawless skin.

I found this paragraph funny:

The magazine’s editorial director, Henry Finder, says drily that Remnick “has something very scarce in this city: an aura of sanity. He exudes a sort of calm that most New Yorkers get to experience only with prescription medication. As an editor, I think that aura of equipoise turns out to be very helpful, because you have so many people here who are professional neurotics, always acting out, drama queens, who have one form of craziness or another. And I think he sees it as his job to be… sane.”

Put those paychecks to work. Play the odds on who will win the Nobel Prize.

Joyce Carol Oates is at 6/1. I like those odds…

The Sportswriter and Independence Day are two of my favorite novels, so I’m greatly looking forward to The Lay of the Land, which completes the Frank Bascombe trilogy. This piece in the Guardian profiles Richard Ford as the book’s publication approaches, and in it one finds an important lesson: Be extremely careful when approaching Ford for blurbs:

We go up and see his 1300cc Harley-Davidson… While he tinkers, I ask him about a story I heard — that a publisher once sent him a novel to read in the hope of an endorsement and that he’d sent it back with a bullet hole through it. He laughs. ‘They sent me a book by a writer who had reviewed The Sportswriter rather negatively. It was my wife who took the book out to the backyard and shot it with a pistol. Then by some coincidence, someone else sent a copy. It was so satisfying to watch her that I went out and shot the other one. The book is now on an editor’s shelf at Knopf in New York, big hole blown in one side and blown out the other.’

Smiling, he says he can’t remember the name of the book. ‘But a .38 slug makes quite an impression.’

(via Critical Mass)

Louis Bayard, author of the novels Mr. Timothy and The Pale Blue Eye — both of which we proudly publish — writes in Salon about his time as a contestant on Jeopardy. He turns the experience into a meditation on knowledge-gathering as a form of play, and he also casts an eye toward Ken Jennings’ recent book.

The content of any given piece of knowledge is not necessarily what drives your average brainiac. He doesn’t learn the name of Superman’s father or the capital of Somalia or the author of “Daniel Deronda” because he wants to read George Eliot or fly to Mogadishu or ponder the implications of extraterrestrial life. He is acquiring facts in roughly the same way that Wilt Chamberlain acquired sex partners — and from roughly the same pleasure principle. Jennings speaks of “the endorphin rush, the I’m-smart feeling we get from unexpectedly producing an answer we had no idea we knew.” I remember the giddiness that shook my frame when I dredged up the name “Olof Palme” from deep in the well of my cultural memory. In moments like these, the knowledge is nowhere near as important as the sensation of knowing: the buzzing of axons and dendrites as they carry their precious cargo to its docking station.

The demise of print looks as if it will be a long, drawn-out affair. John Sutherland, the chairman of last year’s Man Booker Prize Committee, offers an arresting statistic: Today more novels are published in one week than Samuel Johnson had to deal with in a decade. As he calculates it in “How to Read a Novel,” it would take approximately 163 lifetimes to read the fiction currently available, at the click of a mouse, from Amazon.com.

In today’s New York Times, William Grimes discusses a few books that have recently come out about “reading” – including our own (bestseller, may I say) Reading Like a Writer (link ) by the amazing Francine Prose.

I, too, would very much like to read slowly.

Out here I feel more helpless
with you than without you

One of my favorite poets, Adrienne Rich, will receive the honorary National Book Award medal.

Click here to Poets.Org to learn more about Adrienne Rich, and find links to interviews, biography, etc etc.

Tonight. On ESPN2. Get Ready. HarperCollins Editor David Hirshey appears in a documentary about the world he once, and still, loves — the world of Pele, Beckenbauer, and the New York Cosmos. Once In A Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos has generated a heady buzz in more athletically enlightened circles. Having premiered this summer, it now makes its way into the very domiciles you once thought safe. So switch your dial to the deuce.

TV Guide Review

This guy really doesn’t like how our industry advertises itself. Does he kiss his mother with that mouth?

(Via Gawker)

This invaluable site turns the articles from each week’s issue of The New Yorker into haikus. What a time-saver! My favorite this week:

A Critic At Large: War and Remembrance
By Ian Buruma

Grass’s great memoir:
Boy lost in heroic myths.
(Is the man as well?)

(Via Bookslut)

My recent shuffling of books has split hardcovers and paperbacks. (Though, I keep old hardcovers together. It just looks classy.) I then divide the bisected parts into nonfiction, fiction, lit maggy things, and reference. Within these division I group books related by time of publication. To a significant degree, time groups them thematically as well.

Want to know more? My number is 555-DEL-UDED.

Others have already noted this, but Jay Parini has an essay in the Chronicle of Education about other people’s bookshelves.

I recently moved into an apartment and realized, not for the first time, that if I only got rid of my books, I could essentially move from place to place with only a duffel bag full of clothing. But despite weighing me down, I love them, and yes, I occasionally obsess about how to organize them. One of those fits is imminent, in fact, because now that they’ve been transported and are out of the boxes, haphazardly strewn around the new digs, I’m free to redo the whole shebang. They’d fallen into a pretty random pattern in the old place, so I think it’s time to go back to a system. By genre, maybe.

So, if it’s not too personal: How do you organize your books?

This year’s MacArthur Fellows have been announced. The program has always struck me as one of the best things going — a variety of artists and scientists, each granted $500,000 with no strings attached, chosen by an anonymous process so that “nominators can’t be lobbied.” Brilliant.

This year’s winners include the writers Adrian LeBlanc, George Saunders, and, one of my favorites, Atul Gawande.

Our very own Francine Prose is interviewed at The Atlantic Monthly’s site, talking about her latest, Reading Like a Writer. A lot of time is spent on the many frustrations and occasional joys of teaching, the benefits and perils of MFA programs, and the state of the literary culture:

I will say one thing. For one reason or another, I get sent a lot of new books. I don’t know what they’re hoping—reviews or blurbs I guess. So I see a lot of what’s being published. And plenty of it is pretty dull. But quite a bit of it is actually really interesting. Every so often you hear these gloomy predictions about the death of the novel or the death of fiction and the end of literary culture, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, my friend the novelist Richard Price said the novel will be around at our funeral. And I think he’s right; it’s alive and well.

John Simon reviews Ron Rosenbaum’s latest in The New York Sun:

My sporadic disagreements with this book should not make it seem less than something everyone seriously interested in Shakespeare must read, and anyone even mildly interested should. Mr. Rosenbaum possesses some first-rate tools: a restlessly inquiring mind, a vivid style, a welcome sense of humor, and an impressive knowledge of not only Shakespeareana but also much else besides.