I first heard Franklin Bruno when I picked up an album from his band Nothing Painted Blue (ØPB). I'm not sure what led me to the purchase; perhaps a good review in a fanzine or simply the visual appeal of the album cover, but it was a fortuitous purchase. A Baby, A Blanket, a Packet of Seeds started what has been a 20-year streak of dependably outstanding releases.

My look back was precipitated by Bruno's own. He just released a collection of his solo odds and ends from 1992-98, dubbed Local Currency. Listening to all of these songs in one place rather than on the scattered pieces of vinyl or compilation albums, I'm struck not by the consistency, but rather by the variety. While there are plenty of pop gems like those Bruno has sprinkled throughout his career, I had forgotten the noisy, more obtuse experiments. Just when you think you have a guy pegged, he surprises you.

This trip down memory lane had me pulling out a lot of Bruno's back catalog, and I was glad for the excuse. Too long had elapsed since I had spun some of the earliest ØPB releases, and they deserve to be back in rotation. The band broke no new ground musically, but the territory it traversed it did very well, melding a very slight punk attitude (though more in the "let's make our own records" vein than anything sonically) with pop smarts and the most erudite lyrics around. Bruno cites the Go-Betweens as an influence, and I'd bet that Stephen Malkmus would cite Bruno and ØPB as one, too.

It has been difficult to keep up with Bruno's output, released as it has been on albums, 7" singles, cassettes (long live Shrimper!) and various compilations. Thankfully, Local Currency helps to fill in some gaps and makes listening to some of his less readily available work note quite so arduous. In addition to his work with ØPB and his solo recordings, he has worked with the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle as the Extra Glenns (whose lone disc, Martial Arts Weekend is superb) and with Jenny Toomey (of Tsunami, et al) on the disc Tempting. A new group, Human Hearts issued the disc Civics on Chicago's Tight Ship Records a couple of years back as well.

In addition to the music, Bruno is an accomplished academic and an insightful music critic. He has kept a handful of blogs, Nervous Unto Thirst being the latest (his recent look at Brad Paisley's "American Saturday Night" shows you how entertaining the reports from an enlightened critical ear can be). He has written for many publications, including the Believer, which in its November/December 2009 issue published a great interview Bruno conducted with musician/artist Peter Blegvad. He wrote a book on Elvis Costello's Armed Forces for Continuum's 33 1/3 series and, in the first thing I read that showed me his talents beyond music, he wrote a scathingly funny (and spot-on) review of the horrid indie rock novel Our Noise that ran in Matador Record's shortlived newsletter, Escandalo!

Bruno reports below that there is more in the works. So, catch up with Local Currency, then get ready to dive back in.

TIRBD: Any surprises or revelations when you heard all of the material gathered on Local Currency?

FB: I always had in my head that that group of songs -- especially the one on my first 3 7"s -- were a kind of album-by-other-means. (That's part of the reason there were four or five short songs per single/EP.) So I knew that they would hang together, somehow. That said, on going back to the original recordings, I was surprised that so many of them include some "experimental" element, whether it be low-rent sound collage or some kind of noisy intrusion (or alongside) these formally tidy little songs. I guess my ideas about recording were a little stranger than I realized at the time. Beyond that, I'm pleasantly surprised that some of my guitar playing still seems interesting, to me at least, and less happy to find that I could have taken more care over the vocals. I shouldn't apologize too much -- that diffident attitude towards getting certain things "right" could also be heard as a kind of immediacy. Either way, that approach was part and parcel of the '90s indie scene. Also, since I've been playing some of these songs live again for the first time in many years, I'm relieved that some of them stand up -- with a rhythm section, "Cat-Scratch Fever" (not a Nugent cover) has turned into a full-on Smiths pastiche.

Any thought of putting out more of your hard-to-find material on CD or digitally? Your Shrimper cassettes and the first Nothing Painted Blue LP in particular...

I'm more interested in my current projects (see your later question), so it isn't a priority. There are also practical problems: I've never been a good archivist, and there may not be "master" versions of the material from the Shrimper tapes, in particular, that would merit digital release without a lot of clean-up work. We still have the half-inch masters and multi-track tapes for the first ØPB album (all-analog as matter of necessity, not ideology), but that record was pretty under-realized owing to our lack of studio experience. It's a document of where we, and I, started, but I'm not sure I'd make people spend money to hear it. (The other side of this is that I don't object if that material is distributed, ahem, unofficially.) All that said, there's probably a CDs worth of post-Emotional Discipline ØPB singles/compilation tracks/unmixed songs dropped from other records that I wouldn't mind assembling at some point -- we were fairly prolific in out day, and there are some buried songs that (perhaps) deserve a wider hearing.

I've always found your music criticism and analysis fascinating but I wonder, does the penchant for thinking so deeply about music have an adverse effect on your ability to listen for pleasure? Can you turn it off?

I don't find that it's a matter of "turning it off." I don't experience myself as having any trouble marveling at the music that I love, whether that's realized in composition (songwriting) or performance or both, and I think it's possible that my analytical side opens me to an appreciation of craft and structure, which I think have as much aesthetic potential as, say, "intensity." (I suppose I'm often looking for the place where mere craft and skill transcend themselves, if that makes any sense.) Generally, I've never held with the idea that critical analysis "destroys" what's valuable in aesthetic experience. First of all, I'm not sure what the metaphor is supposed to convey. I mean, what's there is still there whether someone purports to account for it or not, so I don't see what's actually "destroyed." And also, if you truly believe that there's something genuinely ineffable or inexpressible about how a piece of music (or poetry or film or what have you) works, then all the language in the world won't touch that. (I'm sorry if this is the kind of "intellectual" sounding answer that people might expect from me, but there you go. Trust me, this answer could be longer.) On the other hand, having been around for a while does probably make it harder for me to be enthusiastic about some new bands -- a revival of some style (neo-psych-folk or angular dance-rock or whatever) is less exciting when you were around for what's being revived. (Though there are always individual remarkable exceptions.) None of that is a function of being a critic as such -- it's just a matter of age.

Do you put the same thought into your own music, or rather, do you become your own harshest critic? Does that ever limit what you are willing to release?

These are tough questions, John. Given some of what I've seen written about myself, I'm pretty sure I'm not my own harshest critic! And, while I'm certainly aware of the failures of craft or execution on just about everything I've released, I can't believe that most artists don't feel the same way, and what I find dissatisfying in my own work is probably not the same as what outside listeners, critically inclined or not, might find lacking. As for "thought," I do sometimes have critical or mildly theoretical ideas that guide a particular recording. For example, on the Human Hearts album I'm working on now, I've decided not to use any strings (even though I'm friends with some wonderful players and arrangers), as a kind of push-back against the tendency in indiedom to use "orchestral" instruments as a signal that something is to be taken more seriously than a "mere" rock band. (I find the implied hierarchy here a bit undemocratic, or undemotic -- even though I have this rep as "brainy" or "quirky" or whatever, I'm still much more interested in music that retains some tie to vernacular traditions.) I could go on (I'm more interested in horns), but it's just an example.

I do think that being a critic, or at least trying to be a widely-informed listener, does make it harder to be a "true believer" about one's own music. When you're, say, 20 and involved in a tight-knit local scene, as I was, it's easy to have the conviction that you and your friends have found the way, and to reject other possibilities out of hand. (Consider the asceticism of Fugazi, which wouldn't really be possible if they had been "open-minded.")

Lastly, while I certainly drop songs or recordings for various reasons (like, they suck, or they're too evidently derivative), I'm not a perfectionist -- no one working in any artistic medium who actually intends to put something into the world more than once a decade can afford to be. (Okay, I'm a perfectionist, or nearly so, about one thing -- though it works when the Minutemen or Stereolab do it, I mostly can't abide lyrics that violently distort the conventional syllabic stress of a word in order to fit a melody, and avoid this at all costs.)

Are the people in the academia side of your life aware of your musical career (and vice versa) and what is the reaction from those who are?

My sense is that the criticism and journalism puzzles academics more than the music does. And I suspect other musicians may not care one way or another what I do outside of that realm. But, ultimately, you'd have to ask them.

Your entry in Continuum's 33 1/3 series is on Elvis Costello's Armed Forces. Could you imagine a book-length look at one of your own releases, and if so, what might be the approach?

It would be flattering, but I'm too close to the records to imagine how (or why) someone would do this. What made it possible for me to do the EC book was my interest in connecting the record to the political context of its moment (Rock Against Racism, the National Front, the run-up to Thatcherism) and some of its deeper roots in earlier British fascist movements, and also as a way of working through - though not to any kind of final conclusion - some of the thorny issues around, well, rock and race, using the so-called "Columbus incident" and EC's subsequent career as a case study. I hope all that gives the book a richness that wouldn't be there if it were all just formal commentary on the song-structures and performances. It's not clear that any of my records could be convincingly tied to their social context in a similar way -- but then again, it's not clear that they couldn't. From my own perspective, the second Nothing Painted Blue album, Power Trips Down Lovers Lane, was very much affected by being in Southern California at the time of the uprising following the Rodney King case, and by reading Situationist polemic (especially Raoul Vaneigem on the earlier Watts riots -- he's quoted on the back of the "Swivelchair" sleeve) while watching the riots go down. (I recognize that it's perverse to filter all that through a musical vocabulary that rests more on the dB's and the Go-Betweens than on, say, Public Enemy.) And then those concerns were connected in vaguer ways to ideas about architecture, the suburbs, and my own experiences doing white-collar temp work. (And, yes, all of these things recur on later records.) But how someone should go about writing about these connections, or how they relate to their musical realizations, isn't for me to say.

What is the status of your various projects (Nothing Painted Blue, Extra Glenns, Human Hearts and your solo work)?

Nothing Painted Blue: We're all still friends, so there's never been an official breakup, but we're geographically dispersed, so there's nothing on the horizon. I've played with both Kyle and Peter separately in the last few months -- Peter is on the Human Hearts album-in-progress, and I played a duo show with Kyle in L.A. last November. Never say never.

The Human Hearts: I'm playing under this name around New York, usually with drummer Matt Houser, and whoever I can rope in for a few songs for a given show. (We've also gone to Boston and D.C.) I wouldn't mind finding a more permanent bass player, but it's intended to be more of a fluid "project" than a stable band. There will be a 7" on Fayettenam later this year, and I'm about halfway through recording a new album with various guests, which will be done when it's done. I'd say the next record after that is at least half-written already.

The Extra Glenns: John Darnielle and I have changed the name to The Extra Lens (for private reasons I won't go into), and we've finished a new album that should come out late 2010/2011. That will probably be the next thing to see the light of day. Pretty sure we'll tour a bit -- possibly just John, myself, and Peter Hughes (who's releasing his first solo record in years soon). I'm excited -- John and I sometimes manage to be more than the sum of our parts.

Solo -- Well, I still play under my own name when it's genuinely just me and a guitar, but I don't really plan to release new material "as" Franklin Bruno anymore. As much as I admire many artists who use "bandonyms" for their one-person projects, I've always felt uncomfortable with the practice, probably because I don't attempt to construct a performing persona distinct from the one I project in day-to-day life.

I should also mention two other projects: My partner/spousal equivalent/squeeze Bree Benton performs a cabaret/theater act as "Poor Baby Bree," doing vaudeville and parlor songs from the late 19th c. through the 30s, and I'm the pianist/arranger ("musical director," in theater parlance) for that. We just did our first shows with additional musicians, a fantastic violist and trombonist, and we should be doing more later in the year. Also, Jenny Toomey and I have just started talking about doing something new in the vein of Tempting -- that record had her covering some old and new songs of mine, but this one we'll probably co-write.

Labels: books, Monday Interview, music

For any number of reasons, I'm not a big fan of memoirs. Take your pick: too much information about childhood, too little insight to leaven the recounting of exploits or tales simply too tall to be true. In the case of Patti Smith, add in the flake factor, as well as my lack of knowledge (or, I'll admit, interest) in Robert Mapplethorpe and his work, and the result is a curious but reluctant reader.

All of this is by way of saying that Smith had a considerable barrier to scale when it came to winning over this reader. But win she did. Just Kids is a fantastic, fascinating book. While the hook for most will be the recounting of Smith's relationship with Mapplethorpe -- it began as a romance and then, after Mapplethorpe discovered he was gay, an intense friendship and artistic partnership -- the way she chronicles the creation, nearly from the ground up, of two of the late-20th century's most enduring artists, is the real draw.

Smith's fans likely know some of the story already, and anyone who watched the illuminating documentary Dream of Life, has seen Smith tell some of these stories. But the bulk of this was new to me, and it was conveyed in such a clear-eyed, detailed and passionate way that it inspired at the same time it informed. Smith and Mapplethorpe were ambitious kids who had the fortune to run into each other in 1967 New York, and the tenacity to hook up with and cultivate the right people to push their dreams forward. Each ended up somewhere they didn't expect -- Smith as a rock 'n' roll star and Mapplethorpe as a revered photographer -- and without each other, it's unlikely either would have been more than a footnote.

The reader has the value of hindsight, knowing that Smith would be a star, that Mapplethorpe would die before his time from AIDS, that some of those they rubbed shoulders with would soar and others would fade. Smith knows this too, of course, but it rarely intrudes on her story. It's clear that the William Burroughs in the book is the William Burroughs, for example, but elsewhere, casually mentioned acquaintances like Janis Joplin or Sam Shepherd are rendered contemporaneously, their eventual starpower not overshadowing their pre-stardom selves.

While the focus is on Mapplethorpe, a thread running through the book is how Smith aligns herself with men that help propel her forward. There is never the sense that she is an Eliza Doolittle with a series of Henry Higginses, but rather that each man teases out something within and sends her further along her journey. It begins with Mapplethorpe, but Shepherd, Blue Oyster Cult's Allen Lanier, Todd Rundgren and others each seem to give Smith a valuable nudge.

Speaking of the men in her life, it's fitting, given that Smith writes often in the book about his influence, that her's is the best book about the creation of art since Bob Dylan's Chronicles vol. 1. Writing about the debut of the Patti Smith Group with drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, she says of learning that Dylan was at the show, "It seemed for me a night of initiation, where I had to become fully myself in the presence of the one I had modeled myself after."

In the end, the book made me want to listen to all of Smith's music, read all of her poems, look at all of her sketches and watch ever frame of film taken of her. The same goes for others in the book. I long to read Burroughs and Gregory Corso, thumb through Mapplethorpe's work and even listen to Joplin. For what Smith has done with Just Kids is to make art come alive, to give it a pulse. Hers was a life lived immersed in art. Late in the book, she writes about Mapplethorpe on his deathbed, asking, "'Patti, did art get us?' I looked away, not wanting to think about it. 'I don't know, Robert. I don't know.' Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that. Only a fool would regret being had by art."

Labels: books, music

Joshua Ferris seemed poised to take up the mantle as the best of the country's young literary satirists. His debut novel, Then We Came to the End, was a critical hit and a National Book Award finalist. It was the rare modern novel that was funny and spot-on in its depictions of the workplace. It even took stylistic chances thanks to Ferris' use of a first person plural narrator (the book opens with the wonderful lines, “We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise.”).

Instead of following that path, however, Ferris has gone in a completely different direction. His new book, The Unnamed, is a much darker tale. It tells of Tim Farnsworth, a successful, hard-charging New York attorney, who suffers a peculiar affliction: He is compelled to walk, with no seeming provocation, until he can walk no more. He will get up from a hearing, excuse himself if his body is pointed in the right direction, and head out of the courtroom and onto the street, stopping only when his body is no longer able to carry him. He'll then drop and sleep, waking in any number of situations. A call placed to his wife, Jane, alerts her to his location, and she drives to retrieve him.

All of this has a predictably negative affect on everything in Tim's life: his career, his marriage, his relationship with his daughter and his health, both mental and physical. Ferris offers a fascinating look at that impact, but that evidence doesn't add up to a diagnosis. Ferris leaves much to the reader's interpretation. Is Tim suffering from a mental illness? Some unknown physical ailment? The jury is still out (and a look at the many reviews of the book reveal an emerging spirited discussion on the topic as well as about whether the book is an allegory for something else).

If nothing else, the Unnamed shows that there is much more to Ferris than a gift for satire. He mentions below that he has no interest in repeating himself, which, based on his first two books, means we're in for quite a ride. His third novel, he says, is well under way.

Ferris, who earned an undergrad degree from the University of Iowa and an MFA from the University of California at Irvine, reads from the Unnamed Tuesday at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City. I'll be hosting the event, which will include ample time for a Q&A with the in-house audience. Ferris granted me the opportunity for a dry run below. To hear the reading live, Listen online at 7 p.m. CST.

TIRBD: There is a lot of speculation among reviewers and readers about whether Tim’s affliction is mental, physical or spiritual, and whether it is an allegory for something larger. Are you surprised by any interpretations, or has your own view of the work been altered by any of them?

JF: My view of the book hasn't changed. "Interpreting" it, I think, is a generous way of describing what some reviewers do (I had one review, for instance, which read in its entirety: "Joshua Ferris' WTF tale of a successful man who walks out on his wife, kid, and career." Not a lot of care there). I didn't write it as an allegory -- allegories don't interest me as a reader, far less as a writer. Speculation is certainly part of the book -- a mental disease? or physical? and what might answers to those questions imply for what it means to be human? Reviewers kind to the book -- those that have read it with sympathy and sophistication -- have touched upon them.

I have seen mention of Emily Dickinson poems, a Poe short story, John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” Forrest Gump, White Noise and other works as being precedents/influences. Regardless of whether they’re right, it puts you in good company. Were you aware of similarities between these works and your own, and did that knowledge steer the story in any particular direction?

Never consciously aware. How what a writer reads and assimilates might affect what he or she writes is an alchemy no one will ever fully diagnose or understand. Cheever, Dickinson, DeLillo, Poe -- these writers have all been important to me at various times.

The direction of the story, however, was always in my hands.

Was there any actual shoe leather research done on the book so you could bring some verisimilitude to the sections where you describe what happens to Tim on his long walks?

Yes, with a couple of trusting and intelligent doctors, as well as some old-fashioned reading. My conversations with friend/doctors were particularly helpful. They have all the hard facts about the body, about sickness, about death -- and when I asked them to start dreaming, all that knowledge opened up into fantasy. It was a rewarding experience.

You were seen as daring with the publication is Then We Came to the End. Now, you’re seen as daring (or to some, foolhardy) for not following the path suggested by your debut. Was there a conscious decision on your part to not do the same thing twice?

No, not conscious, if you mean by conscious "calculating" or "shrewd" or "career-centric." I'm not nearly as interested in how my books are received as I am in writing them. I write what's next down a long line of preoccupations and obsessions. What might be seen as daring or foolhardy is a momentary referendum that quickly passes and luckily happens long after I've started on the next thing.

That said, I do think I'm constitutionally incapable of doing the same thing twice. Part of a writer's thrill -- and duty, too -- is to throw the gauntlet down every time, and give yourself no excuse for phoned-in, half-hearted measures.

The Unnamed is one of the first books on your editor’s new imprint, Reagan Arthur Books. Does this put an added burden on your shoulders?

Oh no, no burden. Only pride, happiness, and hope for the beginning of a successful imprint for a loving and important editor.

You sold film rights to the book well before you were finished, after just 120 pages. The book takes some curious turns after that point. Did you worry about delivering on what was promised in those earlier pages when writing the rest? Did you think about the book cinematically as you were writing given the knowledge that it was destined for the screen someday?

If I don't write for critics, or even those who might constitute a readership, I'm not going to write for a producer whose desire for how the book concludes is out of my grasp. If I had, I would have certainly written a more straightforward story, to increase the odds of production, which is always a long shot. In fact, it's part of the reason, that long shot, never to write with a film in mind.

You now have a young son, so I’ll ask a two part question: Are you at work on your third book, and has the writing life changed for you because of this new addition either in terms of your schedule or your worldview?

I'm at work, and -- with the exception of promoting The Unnamed -- pretty steadily, despite the little guy. The worldview changes, of course, but it'd take forever to describe all the ways. Perhaps it's sufficient to say he's lying on the bed right now making farting noises with his hand in his mouth. That's a lot of fun.

Labels: books, Joshua Ferris, Monday Interview

I started reading Ed Gorman because I felt I should; I keep reading him because his books are always entertaining and captivating, and I love his voice.

As an arts & entertainment writer for five years with the daily newspaper in Gorman's hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, I somehow never read Gorman's work. I'm a mystery and crime fiction fan, but there was another guy on staff who was a Gorman fan who snapped up his books to review. Practicing the same snobbish conceit that I find so distasteful in others, I decided that someone from Cedar Rapids probably wasn't worth following, and dismissed the glowing reviews as little more than fealty to a local author.

I left that job for another a few years ago. Later, I helped to set up a (still pending) event in support of the Iowa City library featuring Gorman and fellow Iowa mystery writer Max Allan Collins of Muscatine. I'm slated to moderate a discussion between the two at some point, and figured that I had better familiarize myself with Gorman's work (I've already read a lot of Collins). That was 18 months ago. In the time since, I've read a dozen or so of Gorman's books, including a smattering of the Sam McCain novels and at least one each of his other series. A couple of his excellent stand-alones, including Cage of Night and The Midnight Room also made the list. I can't include Sleeping Dogs in that list of excellent stand-alones, because Gorman just announced that a follow-up to that political thriller, Stranglehold, is due in November.

The discovery of this new favorite author is bittersweet: While I now have dozens of books I know I'll like that I can pick up whenever I need a good mystery to read, I kick myself for ignoring what was under my nose for so long. If asked to describe what I like about Gorman's work, I might be hard-pressed. The closest I can come is that his books are always real. Even with the most fantastic of the stories he spins, I can imagine them unfolding in exactly the way he describes. These are no-nonsense tales with just the right mix of grit, intrigue and humor.

And he keeps getting better. While I found the first McCain book a bit precious thanks to its 1950s sock hop-era setting, the character was compelling enough to hook me. In the latest McCain novel, Ticket to Ride, we're now in the 1960s, and race relations (and their violent underpinnings at the time) drive much of the plot. McCain is a deeper, richer character thanks to the story that Gorman has developed over the books that bridge the gap, and Gorman's voice, always a key draw for me, is deeper and richer as well.

You can learn a little about Gorman and a lot about authors of mystery and western fiction on Gorman's blog. He's not only a chief purveyor of both genres, but something of an amateur historian as well. He does all of this while battling multiple myeloma, a cancer that, while treatable, is not curable. He is candid about that on the blog, occasionally taking a break to deal with treatments.

Some have reported that Ticket to Ride is the last McCain novel, but despite all that Gorman is dealing with, he assures us below that more will follow. That's good. While it will be years before I catch up with all of his output, it's nice to know that list will continue to grow.

TIRBD: From all indications, Ticket to Ride is the last Sam McCain novel. If true, did you set out to tell a story with this particular arc of books, or are there other reasons behind drawing things to a close?

EG: Originally, my first editor on the series wanted me to take McCain into the Seventies. I had some doubts about that, but one night at dinner with Max and Barb Collins Max came up with an idea for a final McCain. I liked it and told my current editor about it. Then the editor and I started kicking around ideas for a few more books to do before the final one. So there’ll be a few more.

You have written very candidly about your cancer and its treatment on your blog. Beyond the obvious affect on your energy and ability to spend time on it, how has it effected your writing?

The first time I was diagnosed with cancer I took it on as an experience.The prognosis was very good and I wasn't unduly afraid. People thought I was in denial, in fact. But the second time when the prognosis was a cancer that was treatable but incurable, that made me more insular and introspective than I've ever been. I'm not sure how this has effected my writing. I think the characters in my darker stories have always been fatalistic. I suppose they're more than way now.

Most of your books are set here in Eastern Iowa. Has that ever felt constraining? Do you ever feel as if your work is judged differently because of that setting?

Well, even though the McCains constitute my longest series, they’re a small part of my resume. I don’t find them constraining because I know that after I finish one I’ll do a very different kind of book. For instance in July a very dark thriller called The Midnight Room came out. Completely different from the McCains. As for the Iowa stigma, oh yeah it’s still operational. I once spoke to a very hoity-toity critic who said that he’d looked at a McCain but he just couldn’t imagine reading a book set in Iowa. It’s stupid snobbery but just part of the flyover country joke. And yes I'm sure there are readers who share his bias. Who the hell would want to read about Iowa?

Through your blog, your work with magazines and your general efforts to support the work of other writers, it seems safe to say you're among a handful of the most-beloved crime fiction writers out there. What is it about the genre that appeals to you so that makes you give so much toward nurturing and sustaining it?

Well, I don’t know how beloved I am but I have tried to help new writers because so many writers — especially Max Collins — helped me when I shifted from short stories to novels. I know a number of established writers who lend a hand when they feel there’s something they can actually do. But the New York publishing scene is in such disarray that even most established writers are scrambling so helping new writers gets more and more problematic.

In your conversations with other writers, do you mull over problems in stories, spitball ideas or collaborate informally on projects?

Not very often. If I do it’s usually with Max or our friend Bob Randisi or the agent all three of us share.

I know you have an incredible grasp on the history of crime fiction and Westerns. What are a few books that you wish you had written and why?

Wow. That would be a long, long list if I put any thought to it. Off the top of my head I'd say Axe by Donald Westlake, The Chill by Ross Macdonald, How Like An Angel by Margaret Millar (Ross' wife), A Key To The Suite by John D. MacDonald, just about any of Simenon's psychological suspense novels. As for westerns, True Grit by Charles Portis, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, Valdez is Coming by Elmore Leonard, A Partnership with Death by Clifton Adams and the short stories of H.R. De Rosso.

You came out of the advertising world when you began writing. At what point did you see yourself more as a novelist than an ad man? Did that experience give you anything that gave you a leg up as you transitioned to that new role?

I’ve been asked this many times. I worked for five agencies by the time I was done and I was a terrible employee at each. A champion slacker. I divided my time by trying to figure out how I could get out of anything that resembled work and working out plots for the downscale men’s magazines I was secretly selling to. I just sort of passed through without leaving anything behind or taking anything along.

Labels: books, crime fiction, Monday Interview

2009 was a very good year to be a Big Star fan. Rhino graced us with a boxed set that gathered up seemingly every stray sound recorded by the band, while a limited-edition two-CD version of Chris Bell's lone solo album (the posthumous I Am the Cosmos) rescued every scrap he laid down.

But, strangely enough, the best Big Star-related thing wasn't something you could listen to, but rather something you read. Bruce Eaton's entry in Continuum's excellent 33 1/3 book series dealt with Big Star's Radio City, the band's sophomore outing. In the book, Eaton offers not only the most complete history of Big Star during that period, but he actually gets the notoriously difficult Alex Chilton to talk about that era. He places the album in its proper context both in terms of the work of the musicians involved and its place on the music continuum in general. In doing so, he does what the best 33 1/3 books do: He gives new life to an album that rabid fans likely thought they had completely absorbed. I came away with a much better understanding and appreciation of a favorite album, hearing it in a completely different -- and superior -- way.

Eaton knows of what he writes. He backed Chilton on some concert dates in 1979, has promoted concerts and written about music. All of this experience is brought to bear on his subject. Any Big Star fan worthy of the name has or soon will acquire the boxed set and the Bell release. But to really appreciate what you're hearing, getting a copy of Eaton's book is essential.

By the way, that's Eaton in the photo above, performing with Chilton on June 23, 1979, at McVan's nightclub in Buffalo, N.Y. Eaton keeps a great blog where he writes about the book, the band and his other experiences in the world of music.

TIRBD: Why Radio City and not #1 Record or Third?

BE: A few reasons. It's the Big Star record I heard first and spent about six months absorbing it before I could track down a copy of #1 Record. Also, given that I could only write about one record, Radio City encompasses the range of Big Star the most of the three records. You can relate #1 Record to Radio City and Radio City to Third, but Third doesn't really connect to #1 Record unless you're familiar with Radio City. I thought it would provide the broadest platform for the living central members to discuss. It would be hard to write about #1 Record without Chris, and Third wouldn't include John Fry much, let alone Andy Hummel (or even promo man John King). So it was the best of the three to explore Big Star and tell a good tale in the process.

You spend a lot of time with John Fry, which was illuminating. Why do you think other analyses of Big Star's sound have given him short shrift, and how important is he to that sound?

John was everything to the classic power pop Big Star sound. He built the studio, chose the equipment, taught everyone how to use it, gave them the time and space to experiment, and laid down the standards for how things were recorded at Ardent. And he by all accounts was an exacting genius at recording and mixing. Listen to a Raspberries album back to back with Radio City. The difference is 99% Fry. And as Richard Rosebrough said, Radio City was his zenith.

I think John has been overlooked for a few reasons. First off, he retired from working behind the board fairly soon after Big Star so he didn't really build up a significant body of work over decades. A lot of what he did wasn't really high profile in terms of big credits on albums (Stax) or big hit records. You really have to read the fine print on albums to pull together his resume. It happened over a relatively short period of time over 35 years ago. Also, John doesn't fit the image of a rock and roll guy. He looks and dresses like an engineer working in the business world. He's a fascinating, down-to-earth guy. I thought his personal story was really fascinating. Those teens in the 50s doing all those grown-up things -- recording, broadcasting, setting up businesses, flying planes... really amazing. Getting to know him a bit was for me a major highlight in writing the book.

Listening to #1 Record, Radio City, Third and some early Chilton albums, I'm struck by how clear the evolutionary line of his sound is. Why is the common story that he radically changed, and why is Radio City seen as being of a piece with #1 Record when it's clearly a transitional record between chiming power pop and atmospheric oddity?

I think the main reason for this is the change in producer/engineer from Radio City to Third. I've sometimes tried to listen to Third imagining what it would have sounded like with Fry behind the board and doing the mix I think then that the three albums would have seemed more to be part of continuum rather than Third being a sharp left turn.

You got more out of Chilton than anyone else in a long time. Do you think you understand his motivations and goals for Radio City now in a way you perhaps didn't before?

Great question and, yes, I do see it all a bit differently. I think that Radio City represented at the time a natural progression for him. He had been in the Box Tops, a band over which he had little creative control, if any. He had fooled around with solo material and recordings but probably realized he had a way to go. He had joined Big Star as an already existing artistic platform and a step up from the Box Tops as they were a "real rock band" and he would be allowed to contribute freely. So when the suggestion was made to make another record (Radio City), my guess would be it seemed like a natural and easy progression. When he joined Big Star, he was a co-pilot to Chris's vision. Now he would be the pilot more or less and free to follow his muse in terms of experimenting with song structures and recording. I think he probably saw it as yet another way to grow as an artist within a band and environment that he felt comfortable with. He liked all the people involved, it's all right around the corner from where you live: why not give it another try?

I also think it was probably the last time he allowed himself to be optimistic about the commercial potential for a project in any serious way. After the failure of Radio City, I think he makes records as musical statements and moves on. I doubt he's ever looked at a copy of Billboard or any sales chart for any record he's made since then.

There have been a lot of bands over the past couple of decades that are compared to Big Star or cite the band as an influence. Is there anyone who really captures Big Star, either in sound, attitude, songwriting or in some other way?

I think there are bands who are reminiscent of Big Star (or obviously imitative) but, as with any great band or artist, there isn't anyone who really captures them because that's really close to impossible. Everyone has influences. But the great bands are able to transcend their influences and become something unique, usually fairly early in their careers. When someone tells me that a band sounds like "X meets Y with a little bit of Z" I'm not really that intrigued. I'm far more interested in bands that sound totally like themselves (if that makes any sense). Think of any number of great bands from the 60s or early 70s. Whether it's the Stooges or Santana (and you could spend all evening making a list), they started almost right off with a fully formed sound that transcended their influences. So while there are a number of really good bands that are influenced by Big Star that I can appreciate and who can even make for enjoyable listen or night out hearing live music, in the end I don't think anyone captures the band. And I think that's sort of the nature of the beast...

Labels: Big Star, books, Monday Interview, music

The folks at Algonquin Books generously provided me with three copies of Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records to give away to TIRBD readers. To enter, leave a comment on this post sharing your favorite Merge release and why you like it. Do so by midnight, Friday, Sept. 25 to be eligible. Three commenters selected at random will receive a copy of the book.

I finished my copy of Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records (Algonquin, $18.95, 294 p.) weeks ago, but haven't found a way to jump into a review. It's a massive book full of interesting information, surprises, fond reminiscences and a true indie rock vibe, and I kept waiting for divine inspiration. Barring that, I realized I just needed to dive in. That's fitting, I suppose. Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance did just that 20 years ago when they started the label to put out 7" singles from their own and other bands.

The book, written by Gawker writer John Cook with McCaughan and Ballance, seemed at first blush like the kind of thing I would skim. I left Superchunk behind many albums ago, and never picked up the likes of Pipe, Breadwinner, Butterglory and the like. I was interested in how the label formed, how it grew and how it worked its way into what is without question the best indie label in the country. But did I need to know everything?

Turns out, I did. Casual flipping through the first chapter led to more intense reading of the next which led to my picking it up at every spare moment, sad when I finished. Credit goes to Cook, of course, for assembling a coherent narrative from the disparate bits of oral history gathered from nearly every major player in the label's history (only Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Magnum, unsurprisingly, declines to participate), but the real credit goes to the label and everyone behind it for creating such a compelling story over the past two decades.

The book can be read any number of ways. I found it to be several books in one: A Superchunk bio, a label history, a treatise on the state of indie rock and indie distribution as the 1990s gave way to the 2000s, and a collection of short profiles of Neutral Milk Hotel, Arcade Fire, Magnetic Fields, Spoon and Lambchop. Perhaps the best testament to Cook's skill is that I read chapters about acts I'd never heard a note of (Butterglory/Matt Suggs) or admire much more than I like (Lambchop, Magnetic Fields).

The book, the label's 20th anniversary and all of the attendant hoopla surrounding both make it a great time to be an indie music fan. Mac and Laura have done several interviews, and you can see them perform at some in store appearances, including here and here. Converse.com has some videos from the label's XX Merge 20th anniversary concert series. Lastly, Merge has a second book forthcoming, the Merge Companion, a limited-edition, 350-page book that features every album, CD, single and DVD cover released by the label over the past two decades.

The takeaway here is that the label survived because it put out music that it liked. Sometimes (often) that meant small sales or losses, but occasionally its tastes and that of the masses aligned and it ended up with something like Arcade Fire's Neon Bible, which debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard charts.

"Whatever the future holds for the music business, Mac and Laura aren't too occupied with trying to figure it out," Cook writes. "Merge didn't get where it is by planning for the future, or concocting growth strategies, or trying to get out ahead of its competitors. It simply tried to find music that Mac and Laura loved, and sell it to people who also loved it."

Labels: anniversaries, books, contests, Merge Records, music

For some reason, we seem to be suspect of the efforts of an artist that fall outside his chosen field. Actually, we do that with anyone. Remember Michael Jordan's attempt at baseball? But for artists, the judgment can be particularly harsh. You're a good writer? Then don't try to indulge your talents as a songwriter, Mr. Moody. Are you a cinema star? Then keep that novel on the shelf, Ethan.

Even for those with a lower profile, seeing a favorite artist move into another area can be nerve wracking. This new book doesn't mean we'll hear less music, does it? No fear of that, according to Joe Pernice, the latest artist to make the successful crossover from one discipline to the other. Though the success of It Feels So Good When I Stop will surely raise his profile as a fiction writer, he assures us that he plans to continue making music for a long time.

That's a good thing, for Pernice is one of the country's best songwriters. He began in a country vein with the Scud Mountain Boys. Seeming to chafe at the limitations of the genre, he left after three albums, forming the Pernice Brothers, a name under which he has issued five albums of intricately arranged pop songs.

It Feels So Good When I Stop is his first novel, but not his first book. He put his UMass MFA in poetry to work with his first, the 2001 poetry collection Two Blind Pigeons, and was among the first to pen a book in Continuum's 33 1/3 series about albums, with the 2003 novella related to the Smith's Meat is Murder. The success of the latter led to his contract for the new novel.

The book is set in Cape Cod in 1996, and follows the exploits (though that's really too strong a word) of the unnamed narrator, an unsuccessful musician/waiter who bolts from his day-old marriage and heads to the home his sister abandoned when she left her own marriage. There, he interacts with his strange brother-in-law, his two-year-old nephew and a handful of other colorful characters.

He agrees to take care of his nephew, Roy, and that coupled with his attempts to bring a bit of order to his life and the home (which has been stripped of anything of value by his brother-in-law), give him some perspective on his life and what he has done with it. Pernice has created a clutch of damaged, often off-putting characters, but writes them with such a deft touch that you still care about what happens to them. The wit and eye for detail found in his songs is here in spades, along with a real knack for drawing the reader in.

He recorded a soundtrack of sorts for the book that includes covers of songs mentioned in the book, including work from Plush, the Dream Syndicate, Sebadoh and Del Shannon. He also has a new Pernice Brothers album in the offing, which means it's an awfully good time to be a Pernice fan. The

TIRBD: You have an MFA in poetry, but beyond your song lyrics and the Two Blind Pigeons collection, you haven't published much poetry. Does it feel odd to have published a novella (Meat is Murder) and this new novel given what you trained for at school?

Not at all. It’s been over 10 years since I took my MFA, and in those years I have written very little poetry. (Songwriting was just too much fun and I was making a little bread.) Graduate school was a lot less about “training” than it was just affording me time and a small amount of money to do little else than write poetry. Once I stopped doing it (writing poetry all day) it kind of left my system. I got out of shape, so to speak.

Was there an aspect of confidence building from the success of Meat is Murder that played into your decision to write the novel?

Sure. After I wrote the novella, I had a much stronger belief that I could actually pull it (a novel) off. If I had in the past ever thought of writing a novel, the size of the endeavor scared me off.

Do you have a drawer full of other attempted novels, or was this your first?

This was my first.

Will there be others?


I hope so. I’m sure going to give it a go. I really loved writing this book, and I plan on starting another this fall.


Songwriting and novel writing are obviously two very different things. That said, do they intersect at all for you?

Not a lot. As you can imagine, the processes and the time it takes to do each are vary greatly. But momentary flashes of inspiration happen (hopefully) when I’m doing both things. So in that way they are similar. Songwriting has an almost immediate payoff because I respond positively to the sound of music. Holding an acoustic guitar and bashing out a G chord simply feels great. Tapping a computer keyboard does not.

For me, writing a book is to sustain a glow whereas writing a song is like watching a quick, hot-burning fire.

You recorded an album of covers to accompany the book, your first covers, if I recall correctly, since the Scud Mountain Boys' Pine Box. (Ed note: I did not recall correctly. Dance The Night Away does as well) Do you enjoy putting your stamp on the songs of others, and if so, why haven't you done more of that before now?

I do enjoy playing covers while sitting around at home. I never thought about doing a covers album because I always — right or wrong — looked at artists who did covers albums a bit negatively. Releasing a covers record always said to me, “Okay, I need some money and I’ve run out of ideas.” A silly assumption? Maybe yes, maybe no.

I do know that if I hadn’t written this novel, there’s no way this covers record would have come to light. Also, if I did not have a new album of original tunes just about finished, I never would have released a cover record. It’s like I’m smothering it (the cover record) with original work. Not saying that’s right or even healthy….



You left Sub Pop several years ago and have been releasing your own music for longer than you were associated with a label. I know you don't do it alone, but how is it different being more intimately familiar with and involved in the business side of things?

Well, even when I wasn’t involved in the business side of things (because Sub Pop did all the business), I wanted to be. It interested me. I wouldn’t say I’m a control freak, but I sure like to know how my stuff is being handled and sold. I also knew I wanted to make records for a long, long time. I knew doing that would require me to start a label and be intimately involved in its machinations.

I don’t think being a “record company guy” affects the art. I think I’m pretty good at separating the art from the commerce. If anything, owning my label has been liberating for me as an artist. When you sell records or license a song to a TV show or something, and you own your own publishing rights and your master recordings, putting that bread in your own bank account instead of some other label’s sure makes you feel good about your future as an artist. If you make eight-to-10 times as much per record sold, you feel that much more okay about your artistic freedom and smaller sales numbers.

Has becoming a family man had any affect on your songwriting?

It might actually be a bit darker, I’m afraid to say. Babies break much more easily than adult men.

I definitely have to be more disciplined with my time. And luckily I have been able to rise to the occasion. I think I’m actually doing more work than when I had zero responsibility and all the time in the world. There’s an expression: The goldfish grows to the size of the bowl.

Is it a coincidence that you've shifted into books, a vocation that requires much less time away from home?

It is a coincidence, but it’s a nice one. I’m certainly not quitting music, but I sure enjoyed being home every day. My wife and my son are my two favorite people, so…

Labels: books, Joe Pernice, Monday Interview, music

Ten years ago today, the June 21 & 28, 1999 issue of the New Yorker hit the mailbox (yes, we get it late out here in flyover country). It was the fiction issue, though this one came with a twist: It identified 20 writers who were dubbed "The Future of American Fiction."

The list: Sherman Alexie, Donald Antrim, Ethan Canin, Michael Chabon, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz, Tony Earley, Nathan Englander, Jeffrey Eugenidies, Jonathan Franzen, Allegra Goodman, A.M. Homes, Matthew Klam, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-Rae Lee, Rick Moody, Antonya Nelson, George Saunders, William T. Vollmann and David Foster Wallace.

With 10 years of hindsight, how did they do? Pretty well. There is one bona fied star in Chabon, several winners of prestigious prizes who also have bestsellers to their names (Eugenidies, Diaz and Lahiri) and plenty of critically acclaimed authors like Moody and Saunders. The late Wallace seems to deserve his own place as someone who, at one time or another, fit all three of those categories.

What is most striking, however, are the names that at one time seemed to guarantee excitement but which today sent me to Wikipedia to determine when their last publication occurred. Could Klam really not have published anything since 2000's Sam the Cat? Whatever happened to Englander? Or Antrim?

My own biases/myopia/limited tastes play a part to be sure. I know Goodman is a big name, but have never read a word beyond the story included here. I'm completely unfamiliar with the work of Nelson or Danticat, but know each has legions of fans.

As with all such lists, the most interesting thing is to look at who made it and who didn't. In the opening Talk of the Town essay in the issue, "Reading Ahead," then Fiction Editor Bill Buford writes that the magazine "set out to answer the question, 'Who are the 20 best young fiction writers in America today?' Does best mean 'most promising' or 'most accomplished'? We settled on a definition that includes both senses, and tried to accommodate the obvious names and the not-so-obvious."

They did limit themselves by considering only American authors age 40 and under. Even at the outset there was hedging, or at least a healthy caveat that admits such lists are dubious exercises. Such a list in 1899, Buford writes, would not have included Willa Cather or Edith Warton or Theodore Dreiser or Jack London or... you get the point.

Anyone could make a compelling argument for or against nearly all of the picks on the list, though one omission did strike me as odd. Tellingly, there is an ad for Stewart O'Nan's Prayers for the Dying on the bio page that lists the 20 who made the cut. O'Nan's output since would certainly merit strong consideration, as would that of a couple dozen other authors who were not selected.

A close look at the list shows that the magazine wasn't exactly taking chances with its choices. By 1999, Chabon had already published Wonder Boys and was at work on The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; Moody had penned three novels, incluing The Ice Storm and Purple America; and Vollmann had published nine works of fiction. Then again, Diaz had published just one story collection, and Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, had just been published.

There was precedent, too. Granta published its own list of the Best Young American Novelists in 1996, with six overlapping with the New Yorker list (Alexie, Canin, Danticat, Earley, Eugenidies and Franzen). Some obvious omissions from the New Yorker list, including O'Nan and Lorrie Moore, are present here.

Hindsight offers some comedy. Buford writes about the novel being "Oprahed," something selectee Franzen would learn about firsthand more than a year later when his book, The Corrections was selected for the TV star's vaunted book club. He expressed misgivings, she rescinded the invitation, and the book club's relationship with modern literary fiction (and, it seems, the populace's view of it) was never the same.

It was clearly a different time. The Talk of the Town piece that follows Buford's looks at Karl Rove, already being called "Bush's Brain," and the machinations he had under way that seemed to point to a presidential bid by the then-Texas governor. The Internet was nowhere near the force it is now, (there are actual ads without URLs at the bottom) and publishers still paid large advances and sent their authors on long book tours.

A good story is a good story, regardless of the time or contest, and many here are are top notch, making the issue a very compelling read. The only vexing thing is that five authors' stories are only teased, and appeared in each of the next five issues of the magazine. Actually, that's not the only vexing thing. As is too often the case with the New Yorker, at least five of these so-called short stories are actually novel excepts (such as Chabon's "The Hofzinser Club") though not billed as such.

In the end, the issue provides an interesting lens through which to view the turn of the century literary fiction landscape, capturing, fairly effectively, the consensus critical picks for success. Not all of those selected would be included on a list that sought to gather the best writers of the past decade, but all 20 moved forward from this point with significant work. We can be disappointed that Franzen has yet to follow up his 2001 novel, or that Earley has managed just one post-Jim the Boy novel this decade, but prolific folks like Alexie and Chabon somewhat make up for it.

Summing up his Talk of the Town piece, Buford seems to foresee the divergent futures of the chosen ones. "What is the future of American fiction We can't know. But the Polaroid of this generation, snapped as the century turns, offers a satisfying picture of a highly accomplished group of writers robustly taking on the stories of their Americanness."

Below is a list of the included stories along with their eventual home under the author's name. Those listed as "uncollected" may have appeared in anthologies, but have not been issued in a book by the author to the best of my knowledge.

"I Can Speak!TM" George Saunders, In Persuasion Nation
"Asset," David Foster Wallace, uncollected
"The Toughest Indian in the World" by Sherman Alexie, The Toughest Indian in the World
"Hawaiian Night," Rick Moody, Demonology
"Raft in Water, Floating," A.M. Homes, Things You Should Know
"The Local Production of Cinderella," Allegra Goodman, uncollected
"The Saviors," William T. Vollmann, part of the novel Europe Central
"Party of One," Antonya Nelson, Nothing Right
"The Volunteers," Chang-Rae Lee, uncollected
"The Hofzinser Club," Michael Chabon, excerpt from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
"Vins Fins," Ethan Canin, uncollected
"An Actor Prepares," Donald Antrim, uncollected
"The Wide Sea," Tony Early, excerpt from Jim the Boy
"The Oracular Vulva," Jeffrey Eugenidies, excerpt from Middlesex
"OtraVida, OtraVez," Junot Diaz, uncollected
"The Failure," Jonathan Franzen, excerpt from The Corrections
"The Book of the Dead," Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker
"The Third and Final Continent," Jhumpa Lahiri, The Interpreter of Maladies
"Peep Show," Nathan Englander, uncollected
"Issues I Dealt With in Therapy," Matthew Klam, Sam the Cat

Labels: books, criticism, magazines

J. Robert Lennon has a new novel out, and it's about time. About time that someone finally stepped up to publish him, that is. You see, he has written books since 2003's Mailman. Four of them, in fact. But for those of us in the U.S. -- you know, his home country -- it has been difficult to read any of it.

First came Pieces for the Left Hand, a brilliant collection of 100 very short stories, each written while his child took a 45-minute nap. Granta in the UK saw fit to publish it in 2005, and those of us lucky enough at the time to score an imported copy reveled in its incisive, hilarious prose. Next came Happyland, a novel deemed too dangerous by Lennon's publisher due to the similarity between its subject and the founder of the American Girl doll company. That was shortened and serialized in Harper's magazine. I've yet to read it, because I want to read the entire book when someone wises up and puts it out. After that came a crime novel that Lennon had yet to publish. Finally, he brought forth Castle, officially his fifth novel, published this spring by Graywolf Press. Graywolf also brought out a U.S. edition of Pieces for the Left Hand, which brings us up to date.

I interviewed Lennon for a piece on CorridorBuzz.com to preview his reading in Iowa City on Tuesday. As usual, I asked about more than could possibly fit in the piece, and planned to run the rest here. But I love Lennon's work, and wanted to give him as much publicity as possible, so I sent a few more questions his way and turned this into a full-blown Monday Interview.

Before we get to that, however, a bit more from the original interview. We touch on many of these points more fully in the Q&A that follows. For example, I asked him about the idea of self-publishing, particularly the crime novel. He said he has considered it, even considered putting it out as an ebook only. But he said he wants to hold out for the possibility of it coming out in physical form from a real publisher.

"I really like working with a publisher," he said. "There's probably some kind of taint to self publishing, if you do that you have succumbed and are perceived as a low-class operation. However, I don’t think most readers give a crap where the book is coming from. They just want it to be good. Still, I want to stay in the good graces of the people I work with in publishing."

We also talked about politics. His novel, Castle, makes reference to the Iraq war, and he has said that Happyland was his take on "Rovian" politics. I asked if the Obama administration would cool the fires that fueled these works. He said politics isn't obsessing him the way it once was, but added that "it's a danger to thinking that the Obama administration is going to be a cure-all. I haven’t totally approved of everything Obama has done, but when I disagreed with Bush, I felt there was a maliciousness, I felt like they were sticking it to me, felt there was malicious intent. With Obama, I really do think he's trying to act in the best interest of the citizens he’s serving."

Castle is set in upstate New York, where Lennon lives. So was Mailman. Other of his books were set in Montana, where he earned his MFA. I asked if setting books in the places he has lived was a matter of convenience, or if the stories he wanted to tell needed to be set there.

"It's not so much a convenience, but I enjoy finding inspiration in the place that I’m at. Upstate New York is not not remote, but it is fairly isolated. If you go for a walk in the woods and you feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere, but you'll find the remains of a barn foundation. There was someone there before you."

That led to a discussion of the way he proscribes a world for his stories, and whether that makes it easier or more difficult to then tell the tale. He said he loves to create worlds in his work, and mentioned the subculture he created in The Funnies. His second novel was about the son of a famous cartoonist who inherits his father's strip after his death. Lennon said he did some research, but the subculture he writes about was largely invented. "I kind of like that. You narrow the possibilities. It's like writing a sonnet. The fact that you’ve hemmed yourself in a little, you’re free in that space."

Lastly, I asked a question I've never seen asked of Lennon. His name, as it is probably not too difficult to guess is John, meaning he grew up with the name of one of pop culture's most revered artists. I asked if it was difficult to be an artist (and, as we talk about below, a musician) with such an iconic name.

"Not anymore really. The worst thing was that I really liked him and liked the Beatles. I used to have little round glasses. I told myself it had nothing to do with John Lennon, I just liked the glasses." he said. "For the most part I just caught a lot of crap from other kids when I was growing up. I don't think it's made any difference at all."

I asked if his parents every talked about giving him such a charged name. He was born in 1970, at the height of Lennon's fame. He was named, he said, for his grandfather, also named John Lennon. Another grandfather was Robert, which means his pen name allows him to honor that grandfather in the same way the name everyone calls him, John, does.

"Later they told me they thought it might be kind of fun for me, which was a sad miscalculation," he said. "But I’m proud to be named after my grandfather."

On to the Q&A...

TIRBD: We talked a bit about self-publishing before. You have self-released a handful of CDs of your music. Has that experience made you more or less likely to do the same with your writing at some point?

JRL: Perhaps someday, but I prefer working with a publisher. Promotion and distribution are hard, and I would rather spend my time writing. I did put a bunch of obscure writing up on my website recently -- quite a lot of articles and stories, few of which are likely to ever find their way into book form. Maybe I should gin up an e-book. But the last thing I need right now is another geeky project.

You said that you were not very politically active before the Bush administration, but that you’ve since addressed it, however obliquely at times, in your writing. How else has that activism manifested itself?

The usual ways - -donating money, complaining on the Internet, getting into tense conversations with relatives. I've had to find a way to channel my anger and dismay into useful activities, and writing has been the main thing. I'm a little more comfortable now that Obama's at the helm, though, so perhaps I can relax a bit.

You wrote the pieces in Pieces for the Left Hand during your child’s short naps, a lemonade-from-lemons endeavor if ever there was one. Now that your kids are older and presumably have indentured you, how has that affected your writing schedule? Does having kids affect the way you look at the world through your writing?

Oh, sure, the world is very different once you've had kids, or gone through any major life change, for that matter. My kids don't disrupt my writing schedule at all anymore -- they go to school, and are pretty self-sufficient, and have their own interests to work on. Luckily we share some interests, otherwise we'd never see each other! Our family is rather preoccupied most of the time.

How has it been working with a smaller publisher like Graywolf Press as opposed to a larger publisher like W.W. Norton?

Great! They publish fewer books and so have the luxury of caring more about each. Graywolf has been extremely attentive to me, my editor is a superb reader, and the books have gotten more attention than anything I've written in years -- I like this situation a lot.

You clearly get into music recording on a micro level, from creating your own instruments to writing about recording techniques in Tape Op magazine. Is there a parallel between that and the micro level of looking at writing afforded by the teaching you do at Cornell?

Absolutely -- I am a major nerd in all respects, both in my hobbies and of course my writing and teaching. I love getting a new stack of manuscripts and digging in, discovering what kind of conversations I'm going to get to have the next day. I can be a little too proscriptive with my advice, though, as a result -- I have to learn to hint! There aren't many bad student stories that can't be turned into something good; it's like trying to solve a puzzle with the class.

Do you write short fiction at the same time you’re immersed in a novel, or do you need to complete one thing before starting another?

Usually I keep them separate, but sometimes I get a story idea when I'm in novel mode and I have to put everything aside and go for it. This just happened recently. It's a good feeling, actually finishing something when you're in the middle of a two-year project... I should probably do it more often.

Labels: books, Monday Interview, music

So, it's starting to feel like Lawrence Block week around here, but it isn't every day that your favorite author stops in your area with a brand new book, so I think it's justified.

Block appeared at the Out Loud! Author Series in Cedar Rapids last night, and drew about 60 people who came to hear him talk about his new book, Step by Step. He spoke about the book's genesis, read a couple of passages and then spent about 40 minutes answering questions from the crowd.

He displayed his wit from the outset with this self-introduction: "I feel a lot like Madonna's most recent boyfriend. I know what to do, but I'm not sure how to make it interesting for you." He then went on to discuss Step by Step, recounting, as he does in the book, his first attempt at a memoir. Writing one flies in the face of his reasons for writing fiction: "to avoid telling the world who I was." Still, he found both memoir writing experiences rewarding. He said the first attempt, which resulted in 50,000 words written in one week and then set aside, was "the most intense writing experience I've ever had."

With Step by Step, he set out to write a book about one year in the life of an aging racewalker, and said, fittingly enough, that he "wandered far afield, much to my surprise."

Before the Q&A session began, he answered a couple of questions that are always asked of him. No, he doesn't know when the next Scudder, Rhodenbarr, Tanner or Keller book will be written, if ever. And he also declined to mention favorite living authors, because every time he does so those omitted become former friends. Instead, he listed three deceased authors -- Ross Thomas, Evan Hunter and Donald Westlake -- and said all any offended living authors needed to do to make the list was to die.

Asked about the impetus for John Keller, the hit man who starred in four of Block's most recent books, the author shared that fellow novelist Peter Straub said Keller, in his interior monologues, is the Block character most like his creator. "Our vocational paths have been very different, I assure you," Block quipped. "He's not much of a writer."

He spoke some about his earliest writing days, as he does in the book, discussing his decision to leave Antioch College after his junior year to take up writing full time. He said Antioch sent him a letter saying that given his academic performance, he would likely be happier elsewhere. "It didn't occur to me to resent it. I just though how remarkably perspicacious of them to spot that."

More about Block here and here.

Labels: books, Lawrence Block

Funny how the web-based news cycle works. I'd heard months ago that Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse planned to collaborate on an album. Then, just a few days ago, word of that project was everywhere. Credit a controversy of the sort that sets blogs, Twitter feeds and message boards afire: A major record label was somehow blocking release of a shadowy project featuring the work of some enigmatic, critically adored artists. Whether it's a brilliant marketing ploy or a true case of corporate stupidity, it put the resulting album on the radar of anyone with even a faint interest in non-mainstream music.

That album, Dark Night of the Soul, is a collaboration between Danger Mouse (the producer behind the Jay-Z/Beatles mashup The Grey Album) and Sparklehorse (Mark Linkous). The two created music and then recruited 10 singers to record vocals. They include the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne, Jason Lytle from Grandaddy; Nina Persson from the Cardigans, Suzanne Vega, the Strokes' Julian Casablancas and Iggy Pop. They also somehow hooked up with filmmaker David Lynch, whose photographs make up a 100-page book to be released with the disc. He also provided vocals to two tracks. The result is a cohesive yet varied collection of tracks that sounds pretty much like what you'd expect from all involved. It's also quite good.

Details about the project, along with streams of the music on NPR.org, debuted simultaneously with word that it might not ever see release. According to the project's web site, "Due to an ongoing dispute with EMI, Danger Mouse is unable to release the recorded music for Dark Night of the Soul without fear of being sued by EMI. Danger Mouse remains hugely proud of Dark Night of the Soul and hopes that people lucky enough to hear the music, by whatever means, are as excited by it as he is."

Further compounding confusion, the set is still for sale, but the book now includes a blank CD-R. One assumes that Danger Mouse, whose The Grey Album project was (and is) widely available on the web, wants fans to seek out downloads and torrents of the project to burn on the included disc. Those purchasing the $50 package are warned, "Due to an ongoing dispute with EMI, Danger Mouse is unable to include music on the CD without fear of legal entanglement. Therefore, he has included a blank CD-R as an artifact to use however you see fit."

Lynch fans will surely seek this out; the rest of us can probably save about $49.95, pick up a blank disc at Staples and have this downloaded and burned before lunch today. It's certainly worth that effort. It's a strong album full of lush, glitchy music and hazy vocals that push these singers in somewhat surprising directions. Each track feels like a slightly out-of-focus tune from the artist's day job, yet Danger Mouse has found a way to make them cohere as an album. (Spin has a nice track-by-track look here.)

Labels: books, controversy, music

I read my first Lawrence Block book in 1994. I was living in Ottumwa, a small, dying town in Southern Iowa. I came to work for the newspaper there. My goal was to be gone in a year; I turned in my two-week notice somewhere around my first anniversary. There was little to recommend the town, but if nothing else, I took away a love affair with Block’s work. I found that first book, A Ticket to the Boneyard, on the shelves of the library there. Over the course of the rest of the year, I read 12 more Block books, found at that library, back at the Iowa City library (where I kept a card because my visits occurred just often enough to justify it) and bookstores. Since, I’ve read several Block books every year – only twice have I only read one – and have read at least 60 to date.

The latest on my list is a bittersweet affair. Step By Step, his memoir about his years racewalking, may also be his last. In a wide-ranging interview done for a story to preview an appearance he’ll make Thursday in Cedar Rapids, we talked about the book, prospects for more, his early days and much more. We talked so much that I've split things in two, with the more general discussion about the book over at CorridorBuzz.com, and the more specific information about writing over here. I've spoken with Block a few times, most recently for TIRBD in 2007.

In this most recent interview, I asked about the general malaise he mentions in Step by Step regarding writing.

“I may really not write another book,” he said. “I don’t know. It wouldn’t surprise me if I’m done writing novels. I may have tapped out that well.”

If that’s the case, Block leaves most of us die-hard fans with a full bookshelf of great books. Step by Step is a worthy addition to that list. It’s a fascinating look at a part of Block’s life that most of us knew little about. Anyone who has followed his newsletter for a while knew about his racewalking, but certainly not the extent – or success – of his efforts.

Of course, it’s not all about racewalking. He spends considerable time talking about his early days, both as a kid and as a young novelist. This is his second stab at a memoir, and if the parts about his earliest stabs at writing are any indication, a true writing memoir would be a goldmine for fans. He tried once, but set it aside in part because he didn’t think he had reached a point where he wanted to rehash his career.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” he said about revisiting the project. “I was a little young to be writing a memoir, but now, if I’m every going to do it, I’d better do it while I still have some brain cells. The reaction to (Step by Step) may dictate that.”

Block has made it clear on many occasions that he doesn’t go back and re-read his own work. “I have no trouble reading other people’s very early work, while they may,” he said. “A look at one’s early efforts means also a look at an earlier self that I may not welcome a view of. But the simple fact that I didn’t want to read the stuff didn’t mean others shouldn’t.”

That’s one way of explaining why, after years of seeming to shrug off overtures to do so, he has embraced Charles Ardai’s Hard Case Crime imprint, allowing Ardai to reissue five of his early, long out-of-print titles to date.

Block said he has received better reviews for these reprints than for his own work: “ ‘It’s Block at the top of his form before the slow heartbreaking decline of his later years,’” he joked.

He said that may come to an end, however, because he doesn’t think the other early books he might republish fit Ardai’s imprint.

“There’s various early work that isn’t really crime fiction or noir by any stretch,” he said. “I did over the years seven books under the pen name Jill Emerson. A couple of them were lesbian fiction. One of them was serialized in Redbook. My agent is trying to find a home for those to be reissued by the same publisher. Some of that was work I’m very proud of.”

It’s hard enough keeping up with Block’s output, but anyone who wants to read every word he has written has their work cut out for them. He said in his early writing years he contracted with a publisher to crank out a book a month, and wrote at least 20 books a year for a couple of years. Most of those were under pseudonyms. He might not remember all of them, but he said he can usually figure out if a pseudonymous title is really his.

“I shared my pen names on the earliest work,” he said. “As a result, a lot more books published under some pen names of mine than I actually wrote. With those, I may not have recollections of the book, but can read a couple of pages and know that I wrote it. There are others that even
after a stroke I couldn’t have written.”

I told him that while Step by Step was nonfiction, it was still very clearly his because the voice and tone were so distinctly Block-like.

“Well, I certainly wasn’t trying to write in a voice other than my own,” he said. That wasn’t always the case. “I completed an unfinished Cornell Woolrich novel. Doing that, I purposely was trying to write in Woolrich’s style. A little choppier than my own. I found myself just going into that voice. Yes, I can believe that it might be recognizable, because I can remember very early on when Ross Thomas published his first Oliver Bleeck novel. It was said it was a pseudonym of another writer. I was a chapter into that and just knew it was Ross Thomas.”

There likely are many reasons that Block writes a lot, but one of them is simply because it is his job. He mentions finances a lot in Step by Step, usually in terms of having to finish a book to make sure money keeps coming in the door. I asked him if there is a disconnect between perception and reality in the minds of readers who assume that New York Times bestselling author Lawrence Block is surely rolling in dough.

“I once had a conversation with Evan Hunter about the way we’re perceived,” he said. “Evan did quite well as a writer, but he got a letter from some joker at a college somewhere that for a donation of $10 million they’d put his name on a building somewhere. He asked me, ‘How much do they think we make?’

“A fan wrote in and said, ‘If you’re doing these book tours regularly you really should investigate this thing where you can be a part owner of a private plane. So, yes, people get a skewed idea. There are people who have high seven and eight figure writing incomes annually. Because the nature of the business is such that what draws the headlines is indeed money, most of the story in the press about writers is what they make, it’s the numbers in the deal that get the ink. But the figure that’s announced is not always the figure that you get.”

So, he said he will continue to write. That might not mean new novels, he said, but a recent satisfying project to write a screenplay for his Matthew Scudder novel A Ticket to the Boneyard was “demanding and gratifying,” and he’d like to do more of that kind of work.

He hasn’t used those words to describe the films that have been made of his books to date (he writes quite amusingly in Step by Step about seeing a Spanish-dubbed version of “Eight Million Ways to Die” while hiking in Spain. A new language did nothing to improve it.), but is willing to keep trying.

“When I finish writing a book I can do so with the fairly strong expectation that it will be published and that it will find whatever audience it will find,” he said. “A screenplay is not a finished work. On the one hand, I’ve been unhappy with the three films that have been made of books of mine, but on the other hand, so has everybody else. It’s not the author being peckish here. I’ve never been sorry they were made. I’ve been decently paid for my participation in that.
It’s remarkable enough that any project gets off the ground and gets shot.”

Perhaps Step by Step will garner some publicity and help in that regard. Ironically enough, the book is raising his profile in a way his mystery novels have not. Though he is a bestselling novelist, he usually gets a fraction of the ink devoted to folks like John Grisham or Michael Connelly.

“It seems to me I’m getting more interview requests than usual for a book of mine. I did an interview with somebody at the sports department at USA Today, and one with the book department at USA Today,” he says. “The sports department has never had occasion to contact me, and the book department usually finds ways to ignore me.”

Labels: books, Lawrence Block

When Paul Ingram from Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City places a book in my hands and says, "This is one of the best things I read last year," I usually walk from there to the counter, exchange money for the book, head home and crack it open. He did so a couple of weeks ago with Castle Freeman Jr.'s third novel, Go With Me, recommending Freeman's new novel, All That I Have in the process.

Reading both books in quick succession, I was struck by a sentiment felt too infrequently when it comes to literature: Castle Freeman Jr., where have you been all my life? It's as if Freeman and I had discussed books for an hour and he then went off to write something that would particularly appeal to me.

The books, like all of Freeman's work, take place in rural Vermont. Unlike his two previous novels, however, they are very short and spare. In story and tone, they call to mind Southern writers like Cormac McCarthy, Larry Brown and Daniel Woodrell. Go With Me tells of Lorraine, a young woman tormented by the town black sheep. She goes to the sheriff, who suggests she look to an old mill owner for relief. The miller, Whizzer, in turn suggests that two people who work for him, the old Lester and the young'un Nate the Great, take on the task. All of the action takes place in a day, with Freeman putting just enough words on the page to get his story across.

All That I Have is more involved, though it, too, is a short novel. Here, another sheriff, Lucien Wing, deals with a seemingly simple situation: One of the county's misguided young men (nicknamed Superboy) has broken into a home and stolen something. But the home is owned by Russian mobsters who are eager to get this item back and make the offender pay. Wing's deputy seems to want to wade into the mess with guns blazing, but Wing's philosophy is to hang back and let things develop. Better to give someone a little line and let them find their way back onto the path than to lock them up and send them down another, likely unswerving path.

Freeman is a typical overnight sensation, one who has been toiling away for decades. His first book was 1987's short story collection, The Bride of Ambrose (based on the stories I've read so far, this is also highly recommended). That was followed by two novels: 1997's Judgment Hill and 2002's My Life and Adventures. Freeman has been an essaying for The Old Farmer's Almanac since 1982 and contributes to other magazines.

Unfortunately, it seems the quick pace that might promise more books about Sheriff Wing and the other folks in this fictional nook of Vermont was a fluke. Freeman says he doesn't expect -- or want -- to keep such a schedule. Here's hoping the warm reception to these books will lead him to revisit this fertile storytelling ground, no matter how long we're made to wait.

TIRBD: After just three books between 1987 and 2002, you suddenly have books in back to back years. What changed to allow this more rapid pace, and does the difference in tone and book length have anything to do with it?

CF: The quick succession of All That I Have and Go With Me is mainly from chance. I started writing All That I Have a couple of months after finishing Go With Me, partly so I wouldn't be making myself nuts by waiting by the phone as my agent tried to find a publisher for the latter, a process I expected to be difficult and prolonged. Then in fact, Go With Me was taken by Steerforth Press in fairly short order. By the time it was published, All That I Have was finished, hence the fast pace of their appearance, which is uncharacteristic of me, to say the least.

Given the quick turnaround between these two most recent books, do you anticipate continuing that pace or was that just a quirk of scheduling and perhaps some unique motivation?

No, that pace was an anomaly. I don't want to get into a spot where I'm expected, by myself or anybody else, to publish a new book every year or two. Certainly, I hope to write more novels, but I don't have one in the works at present, and I don't expect to in the near future.

You had a big publisher for the paperback version of Go With Me, but are back with Steerforth for All That I Have. Was that because you had a multiple-book contract with Steerforth? Did you see greater exposure from the Harper edition?

I didn't have a multibook deal with Steerforth. They did a superb job with Go With Me and accepted All That I Have, planning to publish it as a hardcover book and then to seek a paperback deal, just as with the first title. Then the economy went south, however, taking the hardcover fiction market with it; so it was decided to publish All That I Have as a paperback original. Certainly Harper Perennial have done very well in promoting their paperback edition.

Much has been made about the length of these two most recent books, and you've said that you essentially wrote them until they were done. Still, you obviously tackled stories that took less to tell. Was that a conscious decision, to get closer to the end of the story before you started?

I was looking for clear, simple, highly focused narratives in both cases, not because I had made up my mind to write short, but more because I wanted to attract and hold the reader without adding a lot of fictive baggage about the characters' histories and motivations. For me, the big interest is always in the narrative: what information does the reader need to know to follow and understand the story, and how does the author give the reader that information? But also, I have always been mainly a writer of short stories and essays (see below), and so I guess it is natural with me to keep written work concise.

You have some interesting thoughts about the role of a sheriff in All That I Have. Are those your own, the results of research or perhaps a hybrid?

All made up. The extent of my real knowledge of rural law enforcement is a couple of parking tickets. To be sure, I have read a lifetime's worth of books and watched a lifetime's worth of movies and TV shows about characters more or less like these and so imbibed a good deal that way -- but that's experience, not research.

I never got a sense that we weren't in the present with Go With Me, yet its clear from All That I Have that we were in the past given that Sheriff Wingate has been retired for some time when the events of All That I Have take place. Were you trying for a sort of timelessness with that book? By extension, All That I Have does feel more fixed in one place timewise. Was your approach to these two different in that regard?

You could say both books are set in a kind of "timeless present." I never thought of the second book as a follow-up to the first. You're right that if we look at what All That I Have says of Sheriff Wingate's career, some years must have elapsed between the two books, but I didn't pay much attention to that. Wingate functions very differently in the two books, which for me are independent stories except for him.

Reading Go With Me and All That I Have back to back, I got the feeling that Nate the Great and Superboy could be considered two sides of the same coin, their stories a commentary on the way a certain type of young American male can turn out depending on nature and nurture. Thoughts?

In my mind, these two kind of represent the physical, impulsive, aggressive side of life in contrast with the reflective and experienced side. I have written about similar figures in other fiction, going back years. Clearly, I have disorderly, rebellious, born-to-hang young men on the brain. Why that should be I have no idea; probably it's from some deep, dark psychopathology of my own -- but what the hell?

You have done considerable non-fiction writing for magazines and The Old Farmer's Almanac. Does that inform your fiction in any way, either good or bad?

Well, as I said above, I suppose it predisposes me to brevity; but beyond that, because my subject matter has always been rural Vermont in one way or another, writing nonfiction on that topic has required me to immerse myself in that setting, which is also of the first importance to me as a fiction writer. So there's a certain amount of cross-fertilization, I guess.

Your last two books could easily be shelved as crime fiction, though they are not. Do you read much or anything from that genre? What about Southern Gothic authors like Cormac McCarthy, Larry Brown or Daniel Woodrell to whom you have been (or ought to be) compared?

I haven't read a lot of crime fiction -- none, really, apart from classics like Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Elmore Leonard. For the Southerners, I like Cormac McCarthy a lot and have read him attentively and always with pleasure, but the other two you name I know nothing about.

Labels: books, Monday Interview

I first came across Wondermark thanks to a link from the Perry Bible Fellowship site, one great webcomic linking to another. I then spent several minutes perusing the many wonderful strips created by David Malki ! (he requires the space and exclamation point, and I'll indulge him here on first reference) that involve images from Victorian-era publications scanned, rejuxtaposed and captioned for maximum comedic effect.

What I stumbled upon was a one-man assault on our collective free time. While the main thrust of Wondermark is the twice-weekly comic strip, Malki also offers videos, greeting cards, spoof Victorian novels, incisive analysis of the comics medium and more. You could spend hours - if not days - at Malki's web site.

For those of us who spend too much time in front of a computer screen already, Malki has branched out. The third print collection of his strips, Clever Tricks to Stave Off Death, begins shipping this week. It follows Beards of Our Forefathers and Annotated Wondermark onto bookshelves.

The creator of all of this hilarity and mayhem was a professional film trailer editor before deciding that he could fully jump into the world of webcomics. The film world's loss is our gain.

New to Wondermark? Check out Malki's favorite strips here.
Curious about his process? Watch it here.
Want to read the longest, most jam-packed interview in TIRBD history? Scroll down for much more Malki.

TIRBD: Assuming you characterize yourself as such, at what point did you consider yourself a comic artist rather than a movie trailer editor, and what marked that defining moment?

DM !: Oh man, this is a tough question to answer,because I was still calling myself a movie trailer editor even when I was spending 85 percent of my time working on comics.It's such a fun thing to call oneself!

I think it was late 2007 or early 2008 when I realized that more often than not, I was turning down work in trailers to work on comics. In the "webcomics community" or whatever, I think there is a subtle pressure to go full-time -- it's almost a status symbol to be a Professional Webcomics Person. So I was trying to make that work, but then taking a two-month gig working on TV spots for a horrible movie and getting totally demoralized.

For a while I tried to build a makeshift career out of doing both -- earning money at trailer work that I could use to delegate some tasks in my Comics Empire, so both could progress simultaneously. But that was hard to maintain, because working in advertising can be very draining -- you're asked to be very creative and to manufacture an interest or an investment in a product that you usually do not have a legitimate interest in, and which in many cases is not deserving of that interest. And I found that the more I worked on comics and found some measure of success, the less and less I wanted to go back to work for someone else and submit my creative energy to their agenda.

It all came to a head earlier this year at the first New England Webcomics Weekend, which was a wonderfully fun and invigorating gathering of friends, colleagues and fans in western Massachusetts. NEWW provided me with the golden moments that everything else was intended to enable. Any purely mercenary work I had done was to finance experiences like NEWW. It was the payoff!

So I knew that I had to make a choice. Coincidentally, I was working a trailer gig at the time (I took a few days off in the middle to go to NEWW) and to be honest, it was a great gig -- nice people, an interesting movie to work on, a fun environment. But when I got back to work the day after NEWW, I knew it wasn't for me anymore.

It sounds a bit silly, but I'm getting older. I spent years racing from hare-brained scheme to hare-brained scheme, and in the process I discovered what pays, what doesn't, what I enjoy, and what I don't. It was the week of Wondermark's sixth anniversary when I told my producer at the ad agency that while I enjoyed working for him, I was done with trailers and that he should take me out of his Rolodex.

That specific moment was just a few months ago -- though it was a long time coming, and a long time building to the point where it was possible financially. Since then, I've taken on new responsibilities as the director of marketing and business development for TopatoCo, the company that handles merchandise production and fulfillment for Wondermark and several dozen other webcomics and fine artists. In the coming year I hope to be able to help many other artists find their ability to become financially secure through their art. That is a cause I am personally invested in, and have no problem being passionate about.

I should also mention, at the end of this long-winded spiel, that for some, trailer editing is a wonderfully fulfilling artform. I have many, many good friends in the business, all smart and creative people, some of whom tried many other things before landing on trailers as the art that they wanted to perfect. But for me, I'd sort of fallen into it by accident -- my first job out of film school was at an ad agency, and I just worked my way up -- and I knew I never wanted to be a career trailer editor.

Still, it was a really fun thing to brag about at parties. But I've found that "cartoonist" is just as good.

From the sketches on your web site, it's clear you have talent as an artist. Why not follow more traditional formats and draw cartoons yourself rather than use clip art?

I find myself asking the same question every time it's three in the morning and I still haven't found the perfect image to match some concept in my head! The short answer is that when I started the strip, I didn't have the patience or, I felt, the skill to draw cartoons. I've always been a doodler, but have had trouble sitting down and drawing consistently for long periods. (That's actually why I went to film school -- because you could tell stories with REAL PEOPLE instead of having to draw every single danged panel.) And Wondermark really started as a lark, and only became something more complicated over a long period of time.

Over the past few years, thanks to encouragement (and some peer pressure) from colleagues in comics whose work I greatly respect, I've been doing more drawing and getting closer to a place where I feel confident with my skill level. So there may be more hand-drawn stuff forthcoming. But I also like Wondermark as it is, because any cartoon strip I do will only ever be the millionth-best cartoon strip in the world, whereas I can be the absolute best at my own little (highly distinctive) artform.

What is your process like? Do you scan old images into a computer and manipulate from there?

That's exactly right. I have a huge collection of books from the late 19th century, and I'll scan in the woodcuts and engravings that they contain. I use entire images, backgrounds, props, characters or sometimes even just shapes or textures as building blocks to assemble each comic in Photoshop. I try to keep each comic looking stylistically consistent (there are a lot of different art styles among the eras and volumes in my collection) as if it could actually be a Victorian illustration -- the verisimilitude is part of the fun.

Sometimes I'll think of a concept and find (or build) images to match it; other times I start by building the image and then see what scenario it suggests. I've found that this "write it as (or after) you do it" technique is pretty unusual among comic artists, and maybe that's why I never had the patience for drawing traditional comics that usually have to be scripted out beforehand. With most projects I find I never know quite what I'm doing until I'm half done, so I usually just barge in, start messing around and almost passively watch what happens.

More often than not I end up figuring something out, and to be honest the hardest part of the whole process isn't the actual work by a long shot -- it's getting up the courage to sit down and start working on something even if you have no idea what it's going to be, what it'll look like or how it'll turn out.

Do you have a file full of great art just waiting for the right strip? Do some strips yield numerous gags that leave you questioning which one to use?

There's lots of stuff I've scanned that I haven't worked into anything yet. Usually if I happen across something particularly weird or interesting I'm able to incorporate it into something without much difficulty, because those strips usually write themselves! And while I do a lot of revision to each strip in the writing process, I'll usually keep going until I'm happy, then stop and be done with it. The only times I've waffled over multiple versions have been when there are questions about the best way to make the story clear, or something pushes possibly beyond the comic's established bounds of taste (which are admittedly a bit flexible).

But I am often surprised by what certain illustrations yield. Sergei Eisenstein did a famous experiment in the early days of cinema where he edited the exact same footage of an actor's neutral expression into sequences involving food, people, spaces, etc. Viewers were asked to describe the character's feelings, and depending on the context, they said he was hungry, lonely, awestruck, etc.

So what I am saying is that who knew that angry-looking soldier in an 1887 engraving was actually mad at a tiny mischievous triceratops that only he could see?

There is a democratizing, punk rock element to webcomics, but the quality and care you put into the products you sell seems to run counter to that. I'd guess, however, that the freedom allowed by web publishing actually makes that quality control easier. Thoughts?

Hmm. Well, there are a few things at work here. First is the idea that on the web, because it is more or less a level playing field, work lives or dies on its quality. So, punk rock or no, it still has to be good work.

I'm also really, really picky about the things I make. It's ballsy to ask strangers to care about anything you do, much less actually hand over their hard-earned money, and the only way it's palatable for me to do so is to ensure that every product is absolutely as good as it can be. I can only be an enthusiastic seller if I have 100% confidence in the product.

That's a rule that's sort of drawn a circle around the all the various things that I produce and sell. I don't sell "information products" like a lot of people who make a lot of money on the Internet, I don't offer "free reports" as a means to collect email addresses that I can hit with a concussive sales pitch later. I only want to sell products to people who appreciate the specific thing that I do, and once I have that relatively intelligent, relatively literate audience's attention, the standard to meet is things that they will like. So it forces me to stay on top of my game.

As far as the freedom of webcomics, sure. I am my own editor, which means my own standards are the only standards I have to meet. Luckily Dark Horse (who's published my last few strip collections) has seen things my way, and has sat back and allowed me to micromanage every element of my books, down to the finish of the specialty ink on the cover, down to making sure a single period in a block of text was in the correct font size. There are few better feelings than being proud of one's work.

Are we nearing a point where the distinction between comic strip and webcomic is unnecessary? Other than delivery method, is there a fundamental difference between what you and folks like Nicholas Gurewitch are doing and what Stephan Pastis and Darby Conley are doing?

I think I sense the kernel of your question, but let me digress on a semantic note. To me, a "comic strip" is a creative product but the word "webcomic" is a weird way of talking about a delivery medium. Sort of like saying "sitcom" and "TV channel." Sitcoms can be on more than one channel -- or on Hulu, etc -- and TV channels can have more than just sitcoms on them. So I see them as apples-to-kumquats.

I think that distinction is important is because the traits common to "webcomics" -- i.e. what makes a webcomic a webcomic -- are mechanical characteristics, not content or style or appearance. Webcomics are, first and foremost, web sites -- a breed of entertainment website just like a blog or any site. And that influences everything: the subject matter, the relationship of the author to the audience, the nuts-and-bolts of how the strip is posted online and shared and promoted, the business model that the artist adopts. These things all come from the essential nature of a webcomic as an entertainment website -- most webcomics, even those that look just like newspaper comics or graphic novels, typically do not share business models with comic book companies or newspaper syndicates. And thank goodness!

Insofar as those considerations affect the content of the comic, there can be distinctions drawn between a strip like mine or Nick's (which is a very traditional newspaper-style strip) and Stephan's or Darby's. At a level of craft, there's certainly a lot of similarities, but to be honest I think we're talking about car radios vs. iPods. Both play music, you know?

Finally, "webcomic" is probably not a great word because it encompasses my strip, Nick's, and also Aaron Diaz's Dresden Codak. You can draw lines connecting The Perry Bible Fellowship with Get Fuzzy if you want to discuss the similarities between syndicated comics and webcomics, but then when you swap out the "webcomic" in the expression with Dresden Codak (as much of a webcomic, and arguably more, than PBF) the equation doesn't balance anymore. The word "webcomic" says next to nothing about content.

This didn't start as a business for you, but it has evolved into one. Do you approach the work differently as a result? Is the (non-monetary) reward for you different now?

I think the growth of the business has been directly geared to my ability to take the whole endeavor more and more seriously. In other words, approaching the work like a professional has made it into a profession -- the attitude always comes first. In that way I think I approach the work on whatever terms I'm able or feel is appropriate for the time, and the business concerns sort of rise or fall to match that level.

There is a lot of inherent business potential in webcomics, depending on the merits of the comic itself of course, and I think it's always incumbent upon the artist to figure out what's possible at whatever level they're comfortable with. Webcomics that are wildly popular can never develop into businesses if the artist doesn't choose to go that route. No artist will make a dollar until they create their first product, unveil their first ad space or request their first donation. And some artists prefer it that way! Their comic is a fun exercise and nothing more, and God bless 'em.

But as far as the reward goes -- the reward is always doing good work and having people enjoy it. Money can be one measure of how effective that is (book sales = people liking the book) as well as the means that allows an artist to spend time working on their art. And a comic that is a well-oiled business machine will usually have a lot of promotion, reader participation, and activity surrounding it -- so a monetarily successful comic can definitely reach more people by virtue of the business considerations.

But money is always only a tool. The non-monetary reward is the only reward that matters.

You've said you're 'interested in making things that people enjoy,' and have branched into various areas such as greeting cards and film in pursuit of that goal. What other formats might you explore in the future with that goal in mind, and what will that mean for things you're already doing?

As I said before about getting older, I've started to narrow down what exactly it is I'm good at and interested in. I think I'll probably be making fewer films, for example, but whatever skill and experience I have in that field will surely inform other projects in the future. I've written a series of parody Victorian novels (the 'Dispatches from Wondermark Manor' trilogy) and those have proved both fun and popular, so I'll definitely be doing more prose writing and storytelling in that vein. I'll be experimenting with audiobooks this year, as well as issuing new editions of some books that have fallen into the public domain, and I'm interested to see how those ventures go -- a certain amount of experimentation I think is always necessary to keep things fresh. With Ryan North and Matthew Bennardo, I've edited an anthology of illustrated short stories that we hope to bring out soon (Machine of Death). And I'm working closely with TopatoCo to develop new products and new creative concepts both for Wondermark and also other artists. So there are always new and exciting ventures.

I think you hit on a good point when you ask, what will that mean for the things that're already going on? There are only so many hours in the day. I'm thankful that my greeting card line, for example, has been quite popular, but there comes a point where it becomes a hindrance to spend all day fulfilling orders. So the process has to adapt -- how can the mechanics of that be delegated or outsourced? Or should we take a closer look at whether the whole thing is worthwhile considering the labor involved? Everything has to evolve over time; we have to continually recalibrate our goals and our priorities in response to what's working, what isn't, and how we feel.

That's another great thing about doing this oneself -- You're the boss. No idea is too crazy if you think it's cool, and no idea is too precious if you think it's run its course. It's tough work, because when the inevitable failures arrive, they're YOUR fault. But that means you get to claim the successes too.

Labels: books, comics, Monday Interview

33 1/3 series editor David Barker has announced the 11 books that will be the next batch published in the series, each covering one album. Thus brings to a close a six-month process during which Barker narrowed the initial list of 597 to 170 (of which, my proposal for a book about the Police's Synchronicity, was one), then to 27 and now to 11.

The books will be published in 2010 or 2011. And they are:

Portishead's Dummy, by RJ Wheaton
Johnny Cash's American Recordings, by Tony Tost
Television's Marquee Moon, by Bryan Waterman
Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville, by Gina Arnold
AC/DC's Highway to Hell, by Joe Bonomo
Ween's Chocolate and Cheese, by Hank Shteamer
Radiohead's Kid A, by Marvin Lin
Dinosaur Jr.'s You're Living All Over Me, by Nick Attfield
Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace, by Aaron Cohen
Slint's Spiderland, by Scott Tennent
The Rolling Stones' Some Girls, by Cyrus Patell

That's a solid list of books. It's hard to argue with the marketability of the Rolling Stones, AC/DC or Radiohead, though I do wonder how many copies of You're Living All Over Me they'll move. I know of at least one, however, as I'll be curious to see if Nick Attfield can get more than the grunts and long pauses out of J Mascis that he has frustrated me with in interviews.

For those paying close attention, Barker reports that the Portishead proposal was not on the last shortlist: "I changed my mind on that one, late in the day."

Congrats to Barker and all of the selected authors. A lot of great writing about music is on the way.

Labels: 33 1/3, books, music

Having just finished Lawrence Block's great new memoir, Step by Step, (much more about this later), I'm finally able to crack the spine of Harlan Coben's new thriller, Long Lost. Now comes word that there is more Coben to come, this time on the silver screen.

Much as American Jimi Hendrix had to make it big in Europe before U.S. audiences finally embraced him, Coben will finally make it to U.S. movie theaters thanks to the success of a European adaptation of one of his novels. Miramax and Focus Features announced this week that they have secured English language remake rights to "Ne Le Dis A Personne (Tell No One)," the award-winning adaptation of Coben's wildly successful first stand-alone novel.

According to Variety.com, "no director or cast have been attached although a start date of spring 2010 has been tentatively set for principal photography."

The French version did very well in the U.S. as measured by the foreign film yardstick, grossing $6 million. Variety reports that the film grossed $22 million in France and $2.3 million in the U.K.

The original version of the film hit DVD here in March. See the trailer here.

Labels: books, crime fiction, movies

Finding Robert Goolrick's debut novel, A Reliable Wife, was serendipitous. I was fairly new to Twitter, found a feed for Algonquin Books, and decided to follow it. The person updating the feed offered free ARCs of the book to anyone who responded. I did, he sent it, and I put it on my shelf. Several weeks later, looking for something new to read, I picked it up. Save for sleeping and working, I didn't put it down until I was done.

It's a fantastic, a turn of the (last) century tale of lust, longing, deceit and abuse set in the brutal winter of rural Wisconsin. It's the kind of book you recommend to a friend. Little did I know that my discovery was already widely known as one of the best books of the young year, a well-reviewed debut from a bestselling memoirist.

Much as the characters in A Reliable Wife learn more about each other as the story progresses, so, too, did I learn more about Goolrick. He was a long-time ad man in New York. He was abused as a boy, and told the tale of that abuse in his first book, The End of the World As We Know It. He actually wrote the memoir second, but sold it first.

There wasn't as much intrigue to be found as I unraveled that tale as there is in A Reliable Wife. There, Ralph Truitt, the scion of a rich Wisconsin family awaits arrival of a mail-order bride, Catherine Land. She had responded to his ad for "a reliable wife." She arrives, but is not what he expected. As the two dance around each other, slowly revealing themselves -- intentionally and not -- to one another, what began as a quaint tale of chaste love in the upper Midwest quickly escalates into a gripping story about the abandon and oppression wrought by privilege told against the backdrop of a bitter cold winter that leads to desperation and despair.

Added to the mix is Antonio, Truitt's estranged son; Truitt dispatches Catherine to lure him home, with surprising results. To describe any more is to give too much away. In short, read this book.

TIRBD: This is your first novel after 2007's memoir, The End of the World as We Know It, which was your first book. Have you dabbled with fiction for very long, and if so, did the experience of completing the memoir give you the push you needed to realize you could write a novel?

RG: Actually the novel was written first. I wrote a novel in my twenties, another in my thirties, neither one published. I had been thinking of this one for years, even started it two or three times. I had just been fired from my job, and I had infinite time in which I was constantly being told what an over-the-hill loser I was, and I needed something to take myself out of my own torpor, a vivid, sensual fiction to replace the rather grim realities of my life. The memoir was an afterthought. I thought, if I was going to attempt to create a truthful fiction, I should go ahead and tell a truthful truth, like writing a long, honest letter to a trusted friend. It just happened that the memoir was sold first. It seems it's easier now to sell a book about child rape than it is to sell a first novel; this one was rejected by over 25 five publishers, some of whom, I hope, are feeling a slight twinge of remorse these days.

You worked in advertising for 30 years, and are certainly not alone in having made the jump from that to fiction. Why does that seem to be such a fertile training ground?

Advertising is a trivial but very compelling profession. A co-worker of mine said, "All my friends in advertising want to be artists, but all my artist friends want to be in advertising." It's extraordinarily powerful and subtle in its manipulations of the culture, and you reach millions of people in 30 seconds. And it does teach you to write a decent short sentence, to pack a lot into a little, to take massive amounts of information and reduce it to a single paragraph or the 65 words that make up a normal commercial. And it teaches you to write very, very quickly and revise without getting all imperialistic about it. The difference is in the product. In advertising, you tend to enjoy the process of writing, you get off on your own infinite cleverness, but you don't feel much respect for the final product. A novel, when you write THE END, gives you a sense of real satisfaction. You don't get grossly overpaid the way you do in advertising, but you don't feel dirty at the end of the day.

I've read that the novel's setting was inspired by the book Wisconsin Death Trip. To capture the bleakness and despair of the Wisconsin winter, did you do further research? Did you visit Wisconsin and experience the winters there firsthand?

Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip is an overwhelmingly brilliant book. It has also inspired a heavy metal band and a movie. There's something about the agony of everyday life in a bleak climate that fires up your brain and your heart. Everybody should read it. I used to have a client in Wisconsin, and I visited there a lot. My client was a man named Kohler, he owned the company of the same name, and there was something intriguing about his position, living in a town named after him, owning all its businesses, employing nearly all its citizens, just like Ralph Truitt in my novel. Truitt in no way resembles Kohler, about whom I know very little, but that position of omniscience and power in the frozen middle of frozen nowhere, certainly helped form Ralph's character.

The reaction to your memoir was strong, and I would imagine you continue to hear from abuse victims who want to connect with you. Do you find you must set that aside in some ways to move on with your novel and whatever else your writing career may hold in store? Is that difficult to do?

Child rape is something that can never be set aside, never. It affects everything that happens to you the rest of your life. It infects everything I write. In A Reliable Wife, although it is not a novel about child abuse, each of the characters has, in fact, been abused as a child, and lives with the scars. There is an epidemic of child abuse in this country. I recently read a study that estimated that 30 percent of all men have been sexually abused by the time they're 16. That's a lot of people, and that's just men. I hear from them. I hear their stories. They go on, but they do not recover. Their voices and their stories haunt me all the time. I believe the rape of a child should carry the same penalty as first degree murder, since the effect is the same, except the victim has to live with it forever. Psychiatrists call it "soul murder."

The secrets people keep are a key component of the novel, but you've made it so the secrets these characters keep from themselves are just as powerful, if not more so. That's a delicate balance to walk as a writer. How did that work for you as you plotted the story and chose what to reveal and when?

Most of life is a complete mystery to me. There is very little I understand. I thought that if I could set this story in a remote, frozen landscape and distance the characters both in space and in time, maybe I could reach some clarity about what makes even the most damaged and enraged of us yearn for goodness as plants lean toward the light. I get letters from men and women in which they tell me their secrets, many of which they've never told to anyone else. Generally, they have little or no grasp on what the meaning of the secrets is; all they can do is try to cope with the effects. The characters in my novel are just trying blindly to cope with the effects of the past, and create some life for themselves in which love and simplicity and comfort are possible. Some sense of worth, of goodness and redemption and forgiveness. It doesn't always work, but when it does, even temporarily, it's like getting into clean, crisp, white sheets on a freshly made bed.

Thanks to the occasional noir tone of the book, an open-minded clerk could find reason to shelve this with crime fiction or thrillers in the book store. Are you a fan of those genres? If so, what are some favorites?

I'm not a fan of thrillers or murder mysteries; I'm a lover of good writing and good stories. Raymond Chandler wrote fantastic prose uniquely pitched to deal with darkness and murder. Graham Greene put words together in such a way that he brought clarity out of murk, and even the structure of his sentences, ambiguous, enthralling, create real suspense. The Heart of the Matter, while not exactly a thriller, is a brilliant and compelling book by Greene. I've read it over and over. And Chandler wrote this sentence, about the malevolent Santa Ana wind, "It was the kind of wind that made men look at the carving knife and contemplate their wives' throats." It doesn't get any more chilling than that.

You're now working on a second novel. Is there any urgency there? Do you feel like you're making up for lost time, or did it simply take this long to be ready to tell these stories?

I couldn't have written these books 20 or 30 years ago. I was too distracted by the hustle of it all -- advertising, power, business class, cocaine and Armani, money -- the whole madness of the late 20th century. I now enjoy a tiny piece, just enough, of the tranquility to recollect the passion, to transpose Coleridge's phrase. The new novel is an exact retelling of true story I heard 30 years ago, a story which has haunted me ever since. It begins, "It was a small town in which no crime had ever been committed." I don't have anything I'm trying to prove, there are no records to break, but, yes, there is tremendous urgency. I think we need, now, to be told good stories that fire out minds and touch our hearts. I'm 60 years old. Not old. Not young. I'm a late starter. I better be a good closer.

Labels: books, Monday Interview

Charles Ardai was wrong. Thank God.

When he and his partners launched the modern-day pulp fiction imprint Hard Case Crime in September 2004 with two books -- Lawrence Block's Grifter's Game and Max Phillips' Fade to Blonde -- he expected to put out a half dozen books or so. Instead, E. Howard Hunt's House Dick, which came out this month, was the 54th, and there are another eight in the pipeline that take the imprint through the end of this year.

The list is impressive. The imprint has issued lost classics from the likes of Block, Robert Bloch and Donald Westlake, and the work of hard-hitting newer names to the genre like Allan Guthrie, Christa Faust and Jason Starr. Ardai himself has penned three of the books, two as Richard Aleas (Little Girl Lost and Songs of Innocence), and one under his own name, Fifty-to-One. The latter is a fantastic bit of meta-fiction, telling the story of a guy named Charles who publishes a line of pulpy crime fiction books. Each chapter title takes its name from one of the 50 books in the series up to that point, with the action somehow incorporating that title. It is clever, funny and very well written.

In March, Hard Case Crime issued what will likely be the last book from Westlake, The Cutie. Oddly enough, it was also his first. The book was originally published nearly 50 years ago as The Mercenaries. It shows that Westlake had it from the very beginning, and is further evidence that Hard Case Crime is doing a real public service for fans of this kind of fiction by unearthing things we wouldn't otherwise have the chance to read.

As if that wasn't enough, Ardai is set to introduce a new series, the Adventures of Gabriel Hunt. The books will follow the titular hero through a number of fanciful adventures. "Backed by the resources of the $100 million Hunt Foundation and armed with his trusty Colt revolver, Gabriel Hunt has always been ready for anything—but is he prepared for the adventures that lie in wait for him?" The first, Hunt at the Well of Eternity, was a ripping read penned by James Reasoner that takes Hunt into the wilds of South America. Future titles will come quarterly, written by Ardai, Faust, Nicholas Kaufmann, David J. Schow and Raymond Benson.

TIRBD: Writing Fifty-to-One gave you the opportunity to go back and look at Hard Case Crime's back catalog. Any thoughts about what you've been able to put out, particularly when weighed against your initial expectations?

CA: Well, our initial expectations were that we might only do a half dozen books and then stop; since we're now closing in rapidly on our 60th title, clearly our expectations were too modest. Now, bigger is not always better (I'd rather eat a half-pound tomato than one of those 50-pound monstrosities you see trotted out to promote one weed killer or another), but in this case I'm proud of having delivered not just a handful of good reading experiences but a steady stream over the course of what's now (rather to my astonishment) half a decade. It's not as though there was no hardboiled crime fiction for people to read and enjoy before we came along, but I know that as a reader I felt starved for a good, old-fashioned Gold Medal-style series that reliably delivered something new I'd enjoy reading every month or two. That's what I'm proudest of having brought back.

In terms of the individual books, I'm glad to see cases where we reprinted one book by a largely forgotten author and then other publishers picked up the reins and brought out other work from his catalogue. This happened with Richard Powell, for instance, and Gil Brewer and Wade Miller, and even to some extent Richard Stark -- the reissuing of the Parker books might not have happened, or not the way it did, if it hadn't been for our bringing some of Donald Westlake's other early work back into print.

How did you plan out Fifty-to-One? Was the plot entirely dictated by the chapter titles, which were taken from the 50 books published up to that point?

Yes, the titles really were the key. We had a book called Blackmailer, so I knew there needed to be a blackmailer in the book -- and since that was our 32nd title out of 50, the blackmailer had to show up (or be revealed as such, or something) roughly at the two-thirds mark in the story. We had a book called Home is the Sailor, so boats had to figure into the story somehow. Chapter 30 would be called The Vengeful Virgin, so I'd damn well better have established that some character was a virgin before that, and I'd also have to give her something to be vengeful about. And so on. I tried not to plan too much too early, just to preserve the fun of improvisation -- I like working without a net and thought the feeling of seat-of-the-pants invention would add to the comic tone of the book. But I did try to keep all the titles in mind as I went and did always have a sense of where the story would ultimately end.

You wrote this under your own name rather than your pseudonym, Richard Aleas. Any reason for that? Is there a different approach or mindset between the two?

Richard Aleas wrote two very bleak, very sad, basically tragic stories. It didn't seem right, somehow, for him to turn around and author a frothy comedy, any more than it would have for Richard Stark to write Somebody Owes Me Money or The Hot Rock. Also, Fifty-to-One was about a guy named Charles who edits a line of books called Hard Case Crime, so it seemed appropriate -- in keeping with the hall-of-mirrors spirit of the enterprise -- for the book also to be written by a guy named Charles who edits a line of books called Hard Case Crime.

You have found success bringing out older work from legendary authors. Are others now beating down your door hoping for a chance to do the same? Anyone in particular you're still working to land?

The sad thing about legendary authors who published older work is that most of them are no longer alive to beat down doors, mine or anyone else's. This is one of the problems, actually, and one of the reasons I feel it's so important that there be some publishers out there who are working to keep their names alive. Fifty years ago, everyone knew Richard Prather's name; today, only hardcore aficionados do. Will it be the same in a few decades for giants like McBain and Spillane and Westlake? I hope not. But it's not enough to hope. You have to do something to keep their work in front of people's eyes.

That said, there are certainly living authors who have contacted us, including some fairly well known ones, and we receive such inquiries with great enthusiasm. It's hard to know in advance which ones will bear fruit and which will not -- the more legendary an author is, the more demands there are on his her or her time -- but hopefully we'll have some fun surprises to serve up for readers each year.

What about newer authors -- how many submissions do you receive in a year and how many of those receive serious consideration? Do you commission work from authors or seek out specific writers to contribute to the imprint?

The volume of submissions varies -- some days we get none, but some days we get a dozen. On average it's about two or three submissions per day, which adds up to more than 1,000 per year. Since we only publish four or five original novels each year (at most), we have to say no to well over 99% of the books we see, including some very good ones. But the positive side of all this rejection is that it gives us the opportunity to be exceptionally selective, not just in terms of quality, but in terms of maintaining a consistent tone and flavor for the series. There have been cases where a book has been excellent but just didn't feel like a Hard Case Crime book; if we had to buy two or three every month, we'd have had to buy it, but since we only buy maybe one every other or every third month, we could hold out for a book that was just as good but a better fit.

We do sometimes approach authors to see whether they might be interested in submitting something to us, but with very, very rare exceptions we don't actually commission books, just because if you do that, you're pretty much stuck publishing the result even if you're not crazy about it. Better to just put out an open call and then take the best of the best, rather than asking a specific author to write a specific book for you.

January brought the last book from Donald Westlake, which coincidentally enough was also his first. What was it like to work with him, and what have we lost with his passing?

Don was a pleasure in every way. Really. He was gracious and funny and responsive and game to let us bring his most obscure books back into print, and willing to re-edit the books when something didn't make as much sense to a modern reader as it would have to a reader 40 or 50 years ago. He took genuine pleasure in how our books looked -- he loved the art, and it was so much fun to make him happy. I miss exchanging e-mail with him, and I miss having new Westlake books to read. At his recent memorial service in New York, Peter Straub read the last thing Don ever wrote, two chapters of a new Dortmunder novel, and it was wonderful. A last bit of Don's voice, making us laugh one more time.

What those of us who knew him lost is a friend. What all of us who treasure crime fiction lost is a great, great writer.

In May, you'll introduce a new line of books with the Gabriel Hunt adventure series. How did that come about and what is in store for readers who pick up these new titles?

I'm a passionate fan of crime fiction, obviously, but it's not the only genre I love; another is adventure fiction. I grew up reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and Dumas and H. Rider Haggard and Sax Rohmer (my father's copies) and Edgar Wallace (my mother's), and watching old Buster Crabbe serials whenever they were shown on PBS. Then when I was eleven and a half, my love of the genre was galvanized -- as it was for so many of my generation -- when "Raiders of the Lost Ark" hit theaters. I had no idea what it was when my parents dragged me to see it; I figured it was something about Noah's Ark, maybe in the vein of the cheesy occult TV series of the time, "In Search Of..." But, oh boy. I left that movie theater trembling. Literally: trembling. It took an hour just for my pulse to return to its normal pace. And ever since that day I've been telling myself that one day I'd try my hand at telling an adventure story that would make someone else feel the way I felt when I walked out of that theater. Gabriel Hunt is my chance to do that.

On the flip side, I have to admit I was disappointed in the last Indiana Jones film -- with 19 years to work on the script, it felt like they should have been able to come up with something better. In some sense, each Gabriel Hunt book is my attempt to give readers the experience that the fourth Indiana Jones film should have been, but wasn't. Pure, exhilarating popcorn entertainment, with thrills and chills and spills, men trading blows on the back of a speeding truck, explorers delving into dangerous tunnels lit by flickering torches, beautiful women imperiled and imperiling...all the stuff that makes your heart beat faster and your palms sweat. I want to excite a physical response from readers. I want them genuinely to be short of breath when they put the books down. That's what the Gabriel Hunt series is all about, and I'm having a blast working on it.

With several different writers tackling the same character, does each subsequent author need to be aware of what came before, or are they simply given a character sketch and other details and set loose?

Actually, I wrote a fairly detailed bible for the series before we started, and all the writers worked from that when coming up with their stories. (Much the way you would if you were writing a new TV series.) The writers pitched their stories to me, and I worked with them to tweak them. Then we all sat down to write our own manuscripts in isolation, though some of the writers would occasionally toss a question my way: Does Gabriel know how to fly a plane? Does he smoke? What does he like to drink? And so on. Eventually, the manuscripts started flowing in, and then I went to work editing them, and that editing process smooths out any rough edges and inconsistencies, either of plot or voice. In the end, even though each book is written by a different "ghost," we want Gabriel's voice and personality to come through the same in every book...and that's my job. Not a bad job, either.

Labels: books, crime fiction, Monday Interview

Frequent readers of Things I'd Rather Be Doing know that I came late to Laura Lippman's work, but have been spending considerable time since catching up.

The last year, then, has been a blessing and a curse. The author has graced us with a lot of work in a number of different formats, but that just means more for me to add to the to-be-read list. I've done a better job of late keeping up with her new work to the expense of that back catalog, but I'll head back to catch up with the exploits of Baltimore news reporter-turned-P.I. Tess Monaghan soon.

In the last year, Lippman has published a Tess novel (Another Thing to Fall), a short story collection (Hardly Knew Her) a serialized story in the New York Times Magazine ("The Girl in the Green Raincoat") and a stand-alone novel (Life Sentences). That's a career for some, but for Lippman it was simply a very frazzled 12 months.

I have had the pleasure of speaking with Lippman before. She did her first Monday Interview here in July 2007 after What the Dead Know was released, and we talked again to promote a tour stop here in Iowa City for Another Thing to Fall. Part of that interview appeared on CorridorBuzz.com (my company's excellent online arts & entertainment magazine), and the rest here on TIRBD.

We talk again here today about Life Sentences, a great new novel that tells the story of Cassandara Fallows, a successful memoirist who hopes to write again about her own life after a failed attempt at fiction. That quest leads her to look into the life of Calliope, a grade school classmate who served time after being accused of killing her baby son. Looking into the case, however, leads her to question her own memories. Along the way, Lippman deftly explores the way people drift apart over time.

TIRBD: In the past year you've published a Tess Monaghan novel, a book of short stories, a new stand-alone novel and a serialized story in the New York Times. Do they inform one another somehow? Did the constraints of the serial teach you anything about pacing your other work, for example, or do the demands of a short story liberate you when you tackle a novel?

LL: For me, everything informs everything. Even tossed-off blog entries can inform a novel, so, yes, all the work complements the other work.

The odd thing about the serial is that each section had to be roughly the same length, which reminded me how much I play with length within a novel, for the sake of pacing. I also decided that, even though no one should be reading a serial at random, that each section should have a story within the story, that each chapter required a payoff. I don't think that's a bad idea to carry back into a novel, that each scene should be rewarding in its own way.

Meanwhile, short stories allow me to give vent to a third voice, if you will, one that's very dark and yet comic.

The structure of Life Sentences was different in that you interspersed segments from the protagonist's memoir throughout the story. Did you write those sections as you needed them for context, or did you essentially write an abbreviated memoir and use parts as they worked with the contemporary story?

IIRC (if I recall correctly) -- and that's pretty much my motto -- I wrote the memoir sections in "real time" concocting Cassandra's memoir as it cropped up. But I knew it. I knew her whole story before I started the novel.

Knowing that you can be understandably guarded about details of your own life, was it difficult to inhabit the head of a character whose instincts and impulses are so different from your own?

As a stealthily private person, I loved writing about someone like Cassandra, who is truly shameless. I know a lot of Cassandras and I find them fascinating. Fascinating, charismatic, entertaining and exhausting. She wore me out at times, but I enjoyed her company.

Do you read many memoirs? Do you have a few favorites?

I adore memoirs! My favorites include Kitchen Confidential, About Alice, Truth and Beauty, Great with Child and Leap Days. I prefer what I call "quotidian" memoirs, about recognizably normal lives.

The aspect of memoirs aside, was it difficult to write about a writer?
The book was done before I even stopped to think -- Omigod! I'm writing about a writer! I was so focused on the differences between Cassandra and me, I didn't see all we shared.

Your Tess books have a different tone than your standalones. Do you need both outlets to fully indulge your writing desires? Do they offer relief from one another?

I need both and the short stories and blogging and Facebook and e-mails and texts and writing for my web site... I need to write.

While there are certainly elements of mystery and suspense in Life Sentences, it could easily be shelved away from your other work in the crime or mystery sections of a bookstore. Are you consciously expanding your horizons a bit?

I started writing crime novels because I enjoyed reading them. But, as someone who reads them, I also recognize that the emphasis on answers sometimes doesn't satisfy. Why are we so focused on answers? And are we even focused on the right answers? Cassandra Fallows sets off on a quest to find the answer to a mystery, a crime. But once she has it, she doesn't feel fulfilled. The quest has been distracting her from the story of her own life. Isn't that the truth of being a reader?

Labels: books, crime fiction, Monday Interview

So, word came down Friday night that my Synchronicity proposal for Continuum's 33 1/3 series had been passed over. It made the first cut, one of 170 out of the original 597, but is not part of the next list of 27 from which the final selections will be made. I'm disappointed, but not surprised. The odds were still against me (and everyone else) with 20 picks expected from that very long shortlist.

I did think that commerce was in my favor, however. When series editor David Barker reported earlier this month that "economy related goings-on" at Continuum meant the selection process was on hold, I figured having a proposal about a band that had the highest-grossing tour in the country two years ago -- selling $350 million in tickets -- might be particularly appealing at a time when it's hard to pry money from people.

Alas, it was not to be. Instead, we have these 27 proposals from which who knows how many books will be selected:

AC/DC - Highway to Hell
Aretha Franklin - Amazing Grace
The Beatles - The Beatles
Bob Dylan - Time Out of Mind
The Cramps - Songs the Lord Taught Us
David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust
Devo - Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo
Dinosaur Jr: You're Living All Over Me
ELO - Out of the Blue
Grateful Dead - Closing of Winterland
Johnny Cash - American Recordings
Kiss - Destroyer
Leonard Cohen - Songs of Leonard Cohen
Lil' Wayne - Da Drought 3
Liz Phair - Exile in Guyville
Lou Reed - Metal Music Machine
Neil Young - Tonight's the Night
Operation Ivy - Energy
Paul Simon - Graceland
Radiohead - Kid A
Rolling Stones - Some Girls
Slint - Spiderland
Television - Marquee Moon
Violent Femmes - Violent Femmes
Ween - Chocolate and Cheese
White Stripes - White Blood Cells
Young Marble Giants - Colossal Youth

I could certainly make a case for most of these, though I do wonder about how many people would buy books about Operation Ivy or Young Marble Giants. I'm sure both proposals are stellar -- Barker hasn't really gone wrong yet on his picks -- but knowing the marketplace is a consideration, they are surprising. Regardless, I see a dozen books I'd buy tonight if they were on the shelf, so I look forward to the eventual publication of those selected.

Barker reports that the final selections will be announced by the end of April. So, those who did make the cut have a few more weeks to stew, while those of us who missed out can wait and watch without pressure.

I've read a lot of blog posts about these books and this process, and most folks seem to want to read proposals. So, since mine isn't doing any good any more, you can download it here. I haven't included my bio, but it at least gives you a sense of what I had hoped to do, and gives future prospective writers a look at an idea that made the first cut. Perhaps I'll do something with it someday, but in the very least the research, writing and anticipation were enough of a blast to make the entire process worthwhile.

Labels: 33 1/3, books, music

Carl Wilson, author of the 33 1/3 series entry on Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love, acquitted himself well last night on "The Colbert Report." Wilson's book deals with issues of musical taste, and Colbert actually engages him somewhat on that topic. Of course, he cracks wise, but the focus remains very much on Wilson's work. It's a great bit of publicity for the book and for the series. View it here.

Labels: 33 1/3, books, music

Word came tonight that my 33 1/3 book proposal for the Police's Synchronicity is on the shortlist under consideration. The original 597 proposals have been whittled to 170. That means my odds have dropped from about 3.3 percent (how fitting) to about 1 in 8. Series Editor David Barker writes that this next step of winnowing the long list to create this round's slate of selections will take six to eight more weeks. So, while it's a relief to make it this far, the pressure remains.

Parsing the list -- which includes many albums that I'd love to read about -- I'd say I'm really competing against 150 or so proposals. I stripped 20 out because there were either two for the same album or for the same group, and they'll obviously not pick two proposals about the same book and aren't likely, given the limited number of books they can put out, to do two by the same artist in the same batch. All just speculation, of course, but it makes me feel better.

In the next few weeks I plan to approach the camps of Andy Summers, Stewart Copeland and Sting to see if I can gauge their interest in participating. If they don't, there still is a wealth of information out there to fuel a book.

I have been Twittering about the band and the proposal process over the past few weeks and will continue to do so. To follow me, go here.

Labels: 33 1/3, books, music

I read two short books recently that while linked in no one's mind but my own, neatly complement one another. The first is David Denby's Snark. The book has been earning more than its fair share of coverage, likely because it is a) short, b) easy to parse and c) sure to rile a large swath of its audience.

In the book, Denby, the New Yorker's film critic, addresses snark, something that is, well, see the thing is, he never really defines it. He spends plenty of time telling the reader what snark is not -- a definition that boils down to any social or political commentary with which he agrees -- but surprisingly little time telling us what it is. It's a sort of dangerous "I know it when I see it" argument that, as a good liberal, Denby ought to be above.

Contest interlude: Because Denby doesn't define snark, I'd like you to. The comment offering the best definition of snark by midnight Sunday wins a free copy of Snark. Let the games begin.

That's not to say the book isn't interesting. He fashions it as a sort of modern day answer to Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark," a tangentially related poem that was told in eight "fits," an early term for a canto. Denby adopts that conceit, if not its form, calling his "a polemic in seven fits." Of course, his fits are more, well, fitting with today's term, for they read at times like a child throwing a tantrum. He reserves particular vitriol for bloggers, online commenters and sites like Gawker. These arguments -- which, if the subjects are to be believed, are wrong as often as not -- center on the notion that any critique without a larger motivation, usually political, is snark.

One bit of wrongheadedness comes at the expense of an acquaintance of mine, Patrick Beach, a writer with the Austin American-Statesmen. In a piece about Nancy Pelosi that he calls "hapless," Denby recounts that Beach wrote she was "arguably so left leaning that her parenthetical should be D-Beijing." "China is certain authoritarian, a nationalist-capitalist hybrid nightmare, but does it make much sense to see it as "left" any more?" he writes. "Moss is growing on Beach's keyboard."

Now, ignore the fact that his parting shot is, of course, snarky, and think of this: could it be a joke of geography, asserting that someone in California (Pelosi's home state) leaning very far to the left might find herself in China? Maybe. Or maybe Beach used a well-known trope to make a point, kind of like using moss as an antiquated indication of being out of touch. Whether I'm write or Denby is, he is clearly the one looking for offense and finding it all too easily.

And the other book, the one that complements Snark? It's Unpacking the Boxes, "a memoir of a life in poetry," by form Poet Laureate Donald Hall. In it, Hall wanders a meandering path through his writing past. If a book can have gravitas, this has it. It was a pleasure to join Hall as he recollected and recounted stories from his life that shaped him as a poet. In lesser hands it would be the offputting work of a name dropper, but Hall's reminiscence's are fond, rarely bitter. Someone with his life and career could surely find things to be snarky about if he so chose, but he doesn't, and the result is a book that made me eager to carve out a moment so I could return to my visit in Hall's world.

What does this have to do with Denby? He could learn a lesson or two from Hall. Denby misreads situations, overanalyzes and is quick to look for a slight. It's everything Hall, at least as indicated by Unpacking the Boxes, is not. And while one is posited as an important book -- that would be the one subtitled "It's Mean, It's Person and It's Ruining Our Conversation" -- the other is the one that tackles weighty topics with grace and humility. It is Hall that will stick with me, making me want to persevere and make the best of bad situations, and Denby who appeals to my baser self, all but urging me with his whining prose to call him dirty names.

Labels: books, criticism

I'm working my way through Charles Bock's Beautiful Children, having picked it up in preparation for an interview with him on CorridorBuzz.com to promote a reading he'll do here in Iowa City on Tuesday, and find myself captivated. I'm not alone; it was a New York Times notable book and it earned dozens of rave reviews. I'm most impressed with his ability to capture a world few have thought about, let alone seen, that being the underworld in which runaways reside.

Bock talked a lot about the decade-long gestation of the book. He says he grew as a writer, both in terms of skill and emotional maturity, and that allowed him to write a book whose ambitious reach initially exceeded his grasp. Without the benefit of having read his first draft, I assume that it focused more on the feelings Newell Ewing, the 12-year-old at the center of the book, and others have for Las Vegas. Subsequent drafts clearly brought in other perspectives, allowing a more fleshed-out, well-rounded view of the city.

"When I was able for it to not be an angry book, when I was able to get out of myself and not be like, 'I’m going to show you what I can do;' when I was able to move from angry young man novel to a kid leaves home and what happens to his parents… to feel for them to tap into those feelings. That’s what makes the title non-ironic. That empathy and that desire for some sort of connection or understanding."

Bock indulged a dumb question and gave it a thoughtful answer. I didn't have room for it in the CorridorBuzz.com piece, so I present it here:

Beyond the obvious, how would this story be different set somewhere else?

It would have to be… it depends on where… where would you put it and what adjustments would you make? (Denis Johnson’s) Jesus’ Son takes place mostly in Iowa, and that’s a damn dark book. Could it take place somewhere else? I don’t know. There’s no shortage of runaway narrative. I think the book could have taken place somewhere else; I needed to write about Las Vegas.Nathanael West could have written about anywhere, but Day of the Locust has to take place in Hollywood.

We also talked about how the success of the book has changed him. He said he's pretty sure he'll have the chance to write another book, by which he means the book he's working on now (which is not set in Las Vegas) will have a good shot at being published, and that he is exploring other avenues for his writing.

"I spent a couple of months dancing with some people in Hollywood about some things," he said. "Who knows what will happen there. If you hold your breath waiting for Hollywood, you’ll have a giant brain hemorrhage and die."

And for those who maybe found -- like I did -- that the beginning can be a bit of a challenge as Bock introduces us to numerous characters and plays with time and structure, know that it gets easier.

"My hope always was that the first half would be… it’s a serious book, and it’s not ha ha, happy happy joy joy… but that there is a lot of space to get to know people and it would be an enjoyable reading experience," he said. "In a big book, in the second half, you don’t want people to be slogging.You want them to be in it and want to know how it ends."

As someone now plowing through that latter half, rest assured, you do.

UPDATE: I've been asked to host Bock's reading at Prairie Lights tonight at 7 p.m. CST. Listen in live here or check the University of Iowa's Writing University site soon for an archived file.

Labels: books

Many things passed through my mind just now when I read a New York Times alert that John Updike had died of lung cancer at age 76. I thought of the books of his that I've read, those I haven't yet and those I'll undoubtedly get the chance to once his papers are sorted. I thought of how glad I am that I got to see him read and lecture. I recalled discussing with friends recently an essay by David Foster Wallace lambasting Updike's work. Ultimately, what I came away with is that Updike was one of the last giants of American letters, and that regardless of what one thinks of his work, he will be sorely missed.

I came to Updike late, picking up Rabbit, Run as a way to prepare for seeing the author lecture at the 150th anniversary of Coe College in Cedar Rapids while I was a newspaper reporter in town. I liked it, and made a perhaps foolish vow to read each Rabbit book as I passed the commensurate time in my life (I'm overdue to dive into Rabbit Redux, I believe). It's still the only of his novels I've read, though I've since read a considerable amount of his criticism (both in the New Yorker and in collections) and his poetry. I reviewed Americana, his last collection of new poems, in 2001, and have since gone back to read much of his verse as well. I'm amazed at his facility with language, the way he crafted sentences and chose words. That might seem a strange thing to say about a writer, but few possessed his talents.

He certainly divided the literary world. There are folks like Nicholson Baker, who spun a full length book, U and I, from his appreciation of Updike's work, and others like Wallace, who's "Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think," a review of Updike's Toward the End of Time republished in his Consider the Lobster collection, picks apart the author's work: "Toward the End of Time is also, of the let's say two dozen Updike books I've read, far and away the worst, a novel so clunky and self-indulgent that it's hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape."

At that 2001 appearance in Cedar Rapids, a member of the audience asked Updike if he wrote as a child. He said he fell in love with books early on, and his impulse was to do something creative with pencil and paper.

"The world has been kind and allowed me to continue to play as children do," he said.

His work, hardly child's play, fills 50-plus volumes and leaves us a lot to digest. His critics may be at least partly right when they say he spent much of his life writing about thinly veiled versions of himself, but few have done so as eloquently -- or compulsively -- and the world of books is richer for his place in it.

Labels: books

Lots of news from Joe Pernice this week, including word that he has completed his forthcoming novel and has two albums in the works.

The novel, It Feels So Good When I Stop, is due in September from Riverhead. Pernice writes in his occasional newsletter that "It’s not a book for kids, which is a general way of saying it’s not for anyone offended by raw language and sex. I sent an email to my family telling them that my book should not be read by anyone under twenty-one, anyone over fifty-five and Judy (my sister)." No word on a plot, but given the author, I'm guessing there is some melancholic heartbreak to be found in its pages. It will be Pernice's third book, following his self-published poetry collection Two Blind Pigeons and the 33 1/3 book about the Smiths' Meat is Murder.

Pernice reports there are "quite a few incidental musical references throughout," which led him to what sounds like a covers album/soundtrack of sorts. Tracks include James and Bobby Purify’s "I’m Your Puppet," the Chills "Rolling Moon," Tom T. Hall's "That’s How I Got to Memphis and Sebadoh's "Soul and Fire." His label, Ashmont Records, will release the disc around the time of the novel's publication.

The true follow up to 2006's Live a Little from the Pernice Brothers also is in the works. Pernice has been recording tracks for the disc for quite some time with Ric Menck, James Walbourne and his brother, Bob Pernice. It is due sometime in 2009 under the name Murphy Bed. (Here is Pernice's amusing story about the title: "I was planning on calling it Light, Sweet, Crude (in my mind, all three words are adjectives), but some other band beat me to the punch. It’s just as well, I suppose. I’ve decided to call the album Murphy Bed. (If that name is taken, I’m shelving the album for all time.)").

He explains the gap between albums with an excuse: He decided to put everything on hold until the book was done because "Riverhead/Penguin was paying me real money. If you think Ashmont Records Inc. would do in kind, you need to get your wiring checked out. And anyway—the international financial crisis and a handful of bloody conflicts aside—the world has done just fine in my absence from releasing albums."

Labels: books, music, Pernice

Two short-fiction heavyweights and an upstart who wrote one of the best books I read last year are the three finalists for the fifth annual Story Prize.

The annual award for short fiction has announced that Jhumpa Lahiri, Tobias Wolff and Joe Meno are the finalists for the 2008 award. They were selected from among 73 collections published by 56 different publishers or imprints.

Lahiri is nominated for Unaccustomed Earth, he second short story collection and her third book. Wolff's Our Story Begins is a new and selected collection that gathered 16 stories from previous collections and 10 new stories. Meno's Demons in the Spring is this innovative young writer's latest.

While I haven't read either Lahiri's or Wolff's books, I can highly recommend their work. Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies was masterful, and Wolff's three story collections that lend some of their pieces to Our Story Begins are uniformly excellent. Meno's book, my first -- but not last -- experience with his work, was fantastic. I must admit that I was turned off of his work without reading a word thanks to his early promotion and seemingly ridiculous titles like Hairstyles of the Damned. My loss. Demons in the Spring is the work of an assured writer, each of its 20 stories each creating a world that feels perfectly lived in completely different from the others. For added appeal, each is illustrated by a different comic or graphic artist, adding a pleasing dimension to the work.

Prize founder Julie Lindsey and director Larry Dark selected the finalists, and three judges will select the winner: Daniel Menaker,former executive editor-in-chief of Random House, fiction editor at The New Yorker, and an author; Rick Simonson of Seattle’s Elliott Bay Books who founded and directs the store’s reading series; and Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief and Animal Crackers and the editor of literary magazine One Story.

The winner will be announced at a March 4 event in New York. The winner will be presented with $20,000 and an engraved silver bowl; the two runners-up will each receive $5,000.

Past Story Prize winners are The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat (2005), The Hill Road by Patrick O’Keeffe (2006), The Stories of Mary Gordon by Mary Gordon (2007), and Like You’d Understand, Anyway by Jim Shepard (2008).

Labels: books, criticism

That image there is just wishful thinking, but I have a 1 in 597 shot of seeing something like it on bookshelves one day. I filed a proposal during the latest open call for 33 1/3 submissions from Continuum Books in December, punching up and significantly expanding my plan for a book about The Police's Synchronicity.

I felt good about the proposal last time out, but feel exponentially better about this one. Again, if chosen I plan to explore the animosity in the band as it reached its end, but I've come to realize that this is not only a tired angle, but one that misses the mark. Seeing the band on its reunion tour and hearing subsequent live recordings, I'm struck by how simpatico these three musicians are and how what each brings to the table meshes with that offered by the others to create something unreplicated in pop.

I'm glad my proposal improved, for the competition is even more fierce. Last time, there were 449 proposals for 380 different albums.This time? The just-published longlist includes 597 proposals for 490 albums! I'm happy to report mine is the only Police submission, so there's no competition there, but based on the fact that I'd love to read books about many of these proposed albums, I know decisions facing series editor David Barker are tough. As usual, the proposals range from the head-scratching (Dag Nasty?) to the obvious (Liz Phair, Radiohead, etc.). One surprise: seven proposals for Slint's Spiderland.

Barker says 20 to 25 books are likely to be contracted from this batch, so the odds are about as tough as getting into the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop down the road from me here.

Labels: 33 1/3, books, music

For the first time since 1982 when the National Endowment for the Arts began surveying Americans about their reading habits, the number of adults who said they read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous year has risen.

Two stats jump out as positives beyond that: the biggest increases were among those 18 to 24, and here were 16.6 million more adult readers of literature in 2008.

Signaling the change, the NEA’s report – which in the past has been called “Reading at Risk” and “To Read or Not To Read” – is called “Reading on the Rise.”

It’s a startling reversal, given the slide the survey has documented since its inception. Still things are not as rosy as this might lead one to expect. When the survey debuted in 1982, it reported that 56. 9 percent of adults were readers. Even with a significant rise since 2002, that number now stands at 50.2.

Surprisingly, fiction accounts for the new growth in adult literary readers, according to the report. Unsurprisingly, reading of poetry and drama continues to decline. And in a sign that points to the future, “nearly 15 percent of all U.S. adults read literature online in 2008.”

Interestingly, at a time when we often talk of two Americas from a political perspective with shades of red and blue, the NEA reports its own “two Americas,” with half of the country identified as readers and the other half not. It would be interesting to see an overlay map to determine how closely these two versions of the two Americas align.

Labels: books

As I looked forward to 2009 and the prospect of spending more time with this blog, one of the things I have done is put together a Monday Interview list. I have a few feelers out here and there, and at the top of the list sat Donald Westlake. Westlake, under the name Richard Stark, wrote one of the best crime fiction series in existence, the Parker novels. The University of Chicago Press this fall began an ambitious reissue program that will bring three of the Parker novels back into print each year. The series began with The Hunter, The Man with the Getaway Face and The Outfit. The editions are clean, crisp and good as ever. Having devoured all three in a weekend, I was eager to correspond with Westlake about that early work and his continued success.

Alas, I'll never have the chance. Westlake died on New Year's Eve. Luckily, there will be plenty more Westlake/Stark. The U of C Press already has announced the next three in the Parker series: Mourner, The Score and The Jugger, while his obituary reports that his last book, Get Real, is due in April. Meanwhile, Hard Case Crime will reissue his first novel, 1960's The Mercenaries, in February as The Cutie.

If there is one bright spot in all of this, it's that Westlake is receiving a lot of attention right now. Perhaps all of the Barnes & Noble giftcards that changed hands this holiday season will be put to good use. And anyone seeking more information about Westlake can surely find it in the links being posted with pieces just like this one all across the web today. They include praise from novelist John Banville a 2006 interview with Ed Gorman (in which he discusses The Cutie) and a recent interview with the folks at the U of C Press.

Labels: books, crime fiction

I don't remember when I first picked up a copy of Chunklet. It was definitely several years ago, probably around the time of the first "Overrated" issue. I was amazed; here was a zine that didn't fawn over favorite acts, but rather slagged off those it hated (and event slung a few arrows at ones it liked). There was precedent for this, of course, in early mags like Answer Me! and Motorbooty. But no one had done this so long, or so professionally.

Henry O. Owings (H20, for short) is the man behind Chunklet. What started as a small zine has 15 years later become a tidy little multi-media empire. He puts out the magazine (no. 20 just out), has published two books, released CDs and vinyl and promotes shows. It's all built, it seems on promoting things Owings likes. That means CDs from bands like Harvey Milk, comedy albums from Patton Oswalt and books about things wrong with the state of rock 'n' roll.

Owings latest endeavor is his second book, The Rock Bible (from the great Quirk Books imprint). Promising "Unholy Scriptures for Fans & Bands," it gathers wisdom from scads of Chunklet writers, offering an indispensable guide for the budding rock star. Follow these tenants and you might just avoid pissing off Owings and his crew. Then again, what's the fun in that?

TIRBD: 15 years later, Chunklet has become quite the media empire, with books, music releases, concert promotion and 20 issues of the magazine. How does that jibe with the way you envisioned things progressing when you started?

HO: I had no idea what I wanted to do when I started. Seriously. I got out of school in '91, the middle of the last (great) recession and couldn't find a job. I just thought, "Shit, if I'm unemployed, I might as well be happy." I moved to Athens and just got interested in things that interested me. That's it. So all of it just comes from that point. The book spawned from the magazine. Graphic design spawns from the mag. Ditto concert promotion, records, etc., etc. There was certainly no long-term marketing plan that I drew up, but I'm genuinely excited about all the projects I've been able to get done in the last 15 years. No doubt about it.

Do all of these efforts pay the rent, or do you do other things to pay the bills, thus allowing time for things like this?

I do graphic design, album production, concert promotion and writing for a living. The mag has never been something I derive money from. It pays for itself, and that's it. I think it's great that it's a self-sustaining enterprise. In 2008, that's saying something.

Do you see the magazine as the main thrust of things, or has that become just one of the many things you do?

Seriously, I have no idea what my main thrust is. I just do what makes me happy.

Has your outlook as a magazine publisher and as a music fan changed over the past 15 years?

I think I'm more involved with and excited by music now than I was in 1993.

Is your excitement driven by your involvement (you know more therefore it's easier to be into it), or is there more to be excited about today?

Not to sound fatalistic, but I'd rather do everything that interests and excites me instead of leaving it to somebody else. Life is for the living and people that sit on the sidelines aren't rewarded. My goal was to get involved, and I am. Period.

It has been said that tough times yield the best art, because artists have something visceral against which to react. Are we in for some of the best art of our lifetimes?

It's easy to say that good art will come out of America's loins in the next few years, but that's not for me to say. All I know is that the last creative explosion was when Reagan and Bush left office in the late 80s and early 90's. Before that was after Nixon. So yeah, I think we can anticipate greatness spawning from some suburban garage in the not too distant future.

You've said that unlike people who launch anonymous tirades online, you have always been upfront, standing behind even your most caustic criticism. Has that had an impact on the relationships you have with artists? Do your musician friends live in fear of the day you'll turn your pen on them?

Nah, I'm not a chickenshit. Regrettably, I've lost a few friends, but none directly from something in the magazine. I've never held back though. I remember when people like Death Cab or The Shins started getting "big" and I pretty much told them I'd lay into them and they were totally excited about it. I don't know, getting knocked on in Chunklet is a badge of honor to many. To those who don't think it is, I just say "go get fucked."

The alternative (for lack of a better term) comedy artists you've championed for years are coming into the mainstream these days. What kind of world is it when H2O is a tastemaker?

Beats me. I still approach everything like I did when I was 15. But tastemaking? Give me a break. I just like that what I like. If others dig it, great. Otherwise, I'll be happy knowing I'm right and that's all.

Labels: books, magazines, Monday Interview, music

With most authors, you can summarize their work in a line or two. They write dometic dramas, travelogues, crime fiction or thrillers. Not so Craig Holden. All of the above and more make the list, depending on which of his six books you're discussing.

That is good for Holden's readers, who never know what to expect, but is perhaps less good for Holden's bank account, which would surely be bursting at the seams if someone with his talent decided to write a conventional series character. Instead, he seems to follow his muse wherever she leads. That means stories of 1927 bootleggers, psychosexual mind games and country-hopping grifters, just over his last three novels. It's as if he took the path of folks like George Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane, who wrote series before diving into deeper, social novels, but without taking that first step.

Holden two latest books came onto the shelves at the same time. His most-recent book, Matala, is the story of a con, with a Europe-traveling American teen who is latched onto by a couple of grifters. No one in the story is what they seem at first, however, and Holden ratchets up the suspense as the story unfolds. His previous book, The Narcissist's Daughter, was issued at the same time in trade paperback, as was the book before that, The Jazz Bird. His publisher was clearly trying to raise his profile, and few authors have three recent books of such high quality with which this could be done.

He's not wildly prolific -- his debut, The River Sorrow, arrived in 1994, and he's managed just five more novels in the 14 years since -- but each is so good you forgive him the time between. Below, Holden talks about time spent this summer teaching writing in Guatemala, staying in the home of fellow writer Joyce Maynard. "I'd love to go back down there just to live in Joyce's treehouse and write," he said. Sounds like a great idea.

TIRBD: All of your books have been stand-alones that seem to straddle the imaginary lines between thrillers and literary fiction. Have you given any though to where you might be commercially if you stood more firmly on one side of that line or the other, or if you pursued the idea of a series?

CH: I have. I think there's no question that if I'd stayed more on the commercial side I'd be much more successful financially. I was even pretty conscious of coming to that crossroads, when I was writing Four Corners and The Jazz Bird, which both really turned toward the literary. I had a chance at one point to drop The Jazz Bird and sign a contract with a more commercial publisher, to do bigger commercial books, and turned it down. I don't regret it. If it was just about making money, I'd be doing something else anyway.

Your novels are set in various locales and at many different periods. What drives you to explore such variety in your writing, and what goes into ensuring that you have accurately captured each place and time?

The variety, I don't know, I just go where I'm interested, and I'm usually not interested in going over the same turf more than once. To stay with a story long enough to make a successful novel of it, you have to love where it's going. At least I do. If not, I couldn't stay with it. And that means not being bored, not contriving something just to sell books. As for capturing a place and time, it depends on the project really. For The Jazz Bird obviously I had to do loads of research not only into the story itself, but into the period as well. I remember thinking, "How did you turn a light on in 1927? How did a woman dress? What did you eat in a restaurant?" So I had to go out and find out all those things, either through interviews or book research or something else. I was visiting the Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich., and found in the gift shop a reprint of a woman's clothing catalogue from 1924, so I bought it and went shopping. Other books are different. For Four Corners of Night I rode around with detectives, went to a morgue, interviewed a crime scene investigator, and so on. For the last two books, The Narcissist's Daughter and Matala, I drew on experiences I went through as a young man. Not so much on a character or plot level, but physical locations, jobs, vehicles, that kind of thing. So there wasn't as much hard research involved. The next project is something different again, and I've started researching that.

In both Matala and The Narcissist’s Daughter, the reader’s view of the protagonist shifts significantly over the course of the book. Beyond telling a good story, what was your intent in terms of forcing the reader to reorient as the pages turn?

Well, as I said above, these two books were less research oriented, and so, in a way, I think, more character oriented. I was really interested in the subtleties of character, of the way people are perceived versus the way they really are. That's what good fiction does, I think. And without having the heavy research requirement I think I was able to spend more time really thinking about these subtleties, about shifts in perception or awareness.

Simon & Schuster reissued The Jazz Bird and The Narcissist’s Daughter this summer. Did you experience any boost from that? Do you have any preferences about where in your back catalog readers discover your work?

I assume you mean a boost in sales. I don't really know yet. Nothing spectacular, but I know the new trade paperbacks are selling somewhat in Amazon. And Matala comes out in trade paper January, I think. No, I don't have preferences really about where or when people discover me. What I've learned is that, because my books vary so much, they strike different people very differently. Readers usually have a strong preference for one or two of the books over the others. So when I'm recommending one for someone to start on, I'll consider that -- are they more of a Jazz Bird sort, or a Narcissist's Daughter sort? I just care that they like what they read so they'll come back for more.

You are a visiting faculty member at New Mexico State University this year. Do you enjoy teaching? What do you take away from that experience that affects your writing?

Yes, I'm teaching here this year, and was here last year as well. I enjoy it very much, and am considering teaching on a permanent or semi-permanent basis, at least for the next few years. We'll see. It's really invigorating, and what's best, besides working with good student writers, is that it has me going back to classic literature in a way I haven't in a long time. I think I was neglecting my own reading, and now I'm buried in it. I've read so much great stuff in the last year. I taught a seminar on classic noir last spring, but included novels that aren't typically considered noir, such as Deliverance or The Power and the Glory. It was great. This semester I'm teaching Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, and The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick. Fabulous stuff. The problem with teaching of course is that it leaves less time for writing. So I'm finding I have to go back to a more rigid schedule in terms of my own work – giving over a certain number of set hours a week to it. I'm still sorting this out, and haven't really written much in the past year. But I think it was time for me to take a break anyway. I feel fresh again.

You taught writing in Guatemala this summer. How did that opportunity come about and what was that experience like?

It was pretty surreal. I joke that I discovered the true roots of magical realism. But it kind of felt like that. My friend, the novelist and essayist Joyce Maynard, has a house on Lake Atitlan in western Guatemala, a place so beautiful you can hardly believe it's real. The village, San Marcos, is peopled by native Mayans, and by American and Euro ex-pats who run restaurants, saunas, massage parlors, Internet cafes, things like that. So it's kind of a bizarre mix. And the town is literally carved into the jungle, and it mostly just dirt paths in this dense canopy of trees. Very disorienting. Plus I got some intestinal bug, which added to the surreality of it. I loved it. Most of the students were older, mostly non-fiction, but some story writers and novelists too. Joyce and I and the novelist and non-fiction writer Ann Hood were the faculty. I'd love to go back down there just to live in Joyce's treehouse and write.

Labels: books, Monday Interview

Every time I let the Silos fall of my radar, I regret it. I've been a fan for decades, having picked up the band's sophomore outing, Cuba, after reading a few rave reviews. I went back and got the debut, About Her Steps, and leader Walter Salas-Humara's solo debut, Lagartija, shortly thereafter. The band's self-titled major label debut and swan song followed. Then, my interest led me elsewhere for a time.

Three albums were released that I didn't get, and then I picked up The Laser Beam Next Door and was again knocked back. This was a leaner, meaner Silos, and it led me to fill in the gaps in my collection, wondering why I had let things slide in the first place. I bought but didn't fully absorb the next two Silos discs and kind of forgot about Salas-Humara and the band for a while. When the band's longtime bass player, Drew Glackin, died from complications of an overactive thyroid in January, I feared that might be all we'd hear from Salas-Humara and his band.

Then came word a few months back of an interesting collaboration between Salas-Humara and author Jonathan Lethem. As a big fan of both, I was intrigued. The result was an album by the band I'm Not Jim, You Are All My People. It sounds like the Silos only in that Salas-Humara's voice by now is an instant signifier. But the lyrics are Lethem's, and they're as offbeat, strange and detailed as fans of his books (Motherless Brooklyn, the Fortress of Solitude) would expect.

Musically and sonically, things are different thanks to the Elegant Too, the production team of Chris Maxwell and Phil Hernandez, who completely reworked Salas-Humara's basic tracks to create something new and unique.

Now, the best possible news for fans of Salas-Humara and the Silos: He sees a future for I'm Not Jim and also is working on a new Silos record. Rather than lose him, we get him twofold.

TIRBD: Were the songs you wrote for this project musically different than your past work? Did you approach the songwriting differently from your own where you write most of the lyrics as well?

WSH: Definitely. Mainly because we collaborated on everything. We would speak about a subject that we were trying to write about. He would start cranking out words. And we’d talk about them and I’d make a suggestion. Then we’d talk about what the music should sound like, and he would make suggestions. Of course, he doesn’t play an instrument, and he’s a far more talented writer than I am. I was trying to do something different, far less sort of rock than the Silos.

It was such an incredible experience. I’ve never written with someone so facile, so quick on his feet. How quick he can crank out articulate lyrics, with internal rhymes and rhythms. I’ve gotta work so hard to do that. What takes me five hours he can do in five minutes.

We wanted it to be a different voice than the Silos. We didn’t want it compared to the Silos. In terms of the production, I didn’t want to be involved at all.

What did the songs sound like before they were given to the Elegant Too? Like Silos demos? Did you write and record knowing they would become involved or did that come later?

I recorded the songs just with the simple guitar and a drum loop for the tempo. And spoke the spoken word stuff. Then I gave it to Chris and Phil and they basically just used the vocals. Sometimes they used the same chords I played. Other times they substituted other chords and beats. It sounds very different. We were really excited. I love their work anyway. They did a remix of an old Silos tune from an album we did called Heater, where we did a remix album called Cooler.

What role has Lethem filled live, and what role might he fill in the future?

He’s been doing the spoken word stuff. Initially we weren’t sure how it was going to come out, or if there was going to be a tour and if there was a tour that he wouldn’t be able to be a part of it (which was why Salas-Humara did the spoken word bits on the album). It’s turned into more of a band thing, so he did the spoken word. I kind of wish he’d done the spoken word stuff on the album. Now that we’re a band, I don’t see me doing it without everyone else.

If you do the project again, would you do it the same way or change anything about it?

We’re hoping to involve more people in the collective, have a collective approach. We’ll hopefully find a theater director to make it more of a theatrical production. We’ve already started working on it. We’ve really only finished one track. That was something… it relates (to You Are All My People). What we’re thinking is doing much longer pieces that come back to some kind of thematic, that circle around to a thematic concept. I’m imagining some kind of circular thing, Velvet Underground meets Phillip Glass.

The one song we created so far, we did it in the same manner. But the plan is to have Chris and Phil more involved, as well as Mike Duclos, the bass player in the live band.

In doing this, you obviously put your energies toward something other than a Silos record for the first time in a long time. How did that change your day-to-day existence, if at all?

We’re right in the middle of making a new Silos record. We’re playing CMJ. Since Drew died, it’s been a little of a rethinking the whole thing. And so, it’s no longer a trio type project. It’s a much bigger group now. A couple other guitar players and a keyboard player. Some of the live shows have more people. Don’t want it compared to what we accomplished with those records that Drew, Konrad and I did.

The I’m Not Jim thing was so incredibly liberating for me to be able to step back. Normally I’m so involved in the Silos records. But I’m letting Rod and Konrad do things on this one.

Given this collaboration, do you think the next Silos record will be different, either because of a new way of working or because working with Lethem’s lyrics might give you a different perspective on your own?

That’s been something I’ve been doing a lot more of, writing with more people. Might be only one or two songs that are wholly mine on the new album, with four or five other writers on it. I do it more out of the social fun thing for me. Songwriting can be a very solitary process. You can play it for other people, but ultimately it’s your thing, you have to make all of the decisions. When you write with other people you’ve got an instant backboard there. It’s just more fun. The strength of two minds. Different people have different strengths.

You brought Lethem over to the world of music for this project; will his influence draw you into his world at some point to write fiction?

I’ve done some screenplay writing. I was asked to do a poetry book by the Zoo Press, and I submitted a bunch of stuff... and I don’t know what happened with them. Still, that was a pretty great experience. I think that’s the dream of every writer. When I started writing songs in my teens and 20s, I thought, “I’ll do this in my 20s and then in my 30s do some screenplays, and then in my 40s I’ll maybe have the patience and ability to write a novel." But you get so wrapped up in a career and it just takes off on you.

It has now been more than 20 years since Rolling Stone declared the Silos the Best New American Band. How has your career unfolded over that time compared to how you might have envisioned it at the time?

Honestly, I can say there’s really no way to change anything. Honestly I feel very lucky that all those years I was able to make a living doing the thing that I really enjoy doing. Very few people can really say that. Obviously I’m not a celebrity or anything like that, but I’ve been able to keep it going. I’ve never had to make any compromises. When you get to the point that you’re a pop celebrity and you have a lot of people on the payroll, I’ve never had to do that. I would never change that. Really, back when that Rolling Stone thing happened no one had heard of us, so nothing has really changed.

Sticking to your artistic predilections over the course of your career continually leads to new and interesting opportunities on so many different levels.

Labels: books, Monday Interview, music

Bob Dylan has two poems in this week's issue of the New Yorker. The first, "17," is longer, with the closing line, "

I really have nothing
against
marlon brando.

The second, "21," is short, just 23 words over eight lines. Being here in the Midwest, we don't get our copy of the magazine until later in the week, so I'm left with the online version as a source. There is no supporting information I can find, but I assume these somewhat anachronistic verses are taken from Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript, the book coming in November that joins Hollywood photos of Barry Feinstein with 23 prose poems written by Dylan. Further evidence comes from the Brando reference, and the fact that "21" begins with the line "death silenced her pool," and the description of the book from Simon & Schuster mentions a photo of "Marilyn Monroe's swimming pool on the day she died."

Feinstein has taken several iconic photos of Dylan, having chronicled his 1966 and 1974 tours, but the subject of this book is other people, with Dylan providing the commentary rather than the object being studied.

These poems divorced as they are from the photos (online, anyway), lack the context that gives them their narrative pop, but they certainly feel of a piece with Dylan's mid-60s writings.

Labels: Bob Dylan, books, music, poetry

There is a lot going on in the world of Robert Pollard these days, and I'll start with the most self-promoting news first. My other blog, My Impression Now: GBV Song-by-Song, has hit another milestone. I've posted my 200th song analysis, surely putting me in the upper reaches among catablogs in terms of output. Then again, I chose an artist who has recorded more songs than any other, so my eventual dominance in that category is built in. Last time I counted, Pollard had more than 1,200 songs on record, so I have a long way to go.

He adds to that total on a seemingly continual basis. It has been a while since he has done so behind the veil of secrecy, so it's nice to see him try some different things like his latest release, an EP by Carbon Whales. According to his web site, this is a Bob-sponsored release by "an obscure band from the late '70s that actor Paddy Considine turned Bob on to. The 4 songs on this EP are apparently the only things they ever recorded. It was never released. Bob really loved it so we tracked the band down and asked if we could release it. The singer sounds EXACTLY like Bob." Um, that's because it is. A few rumors are floating around about the backing band, but suffice to say, that's Pollard on vocals. It's a good EP full of straight-ahead rock like "The Jeep."

One new group whose membership is not open for debate is Boston Spaceships, whose debut LP, Brown Submarine, is due Sept. 9. The trio features Chris Slusarenko on bass and John Moen on drums. Slusarenko was the last GBV bassist and Pollard's partner in the Takeovers; Moen is the Decemberists drummer. The two MP3 available thus far -- "Winston's Atomic Bird" and "Go For the Exit" -- seem to support the self-proclamation that "Pollard is penning fantastic pop songs in a style no longer fashionable." It's just nice to see Pollard acknowledge that working with a band from time to time can be a nice change of pace from Todd Tobias' one-man-band act on Pollard's solo discs.

The next two Pollard releases are in book form. First up, vol. 5 of Eat, his annual-ish journal of art, band names, lyrics and poems. This time out, "the Dogshit Chronicles" offers 46 pages of Pollardiana, including stories new and old. It's as if you've grabbed a space on the rug in front of Uncle Bob's rocking chair as he spins a few tales for you and the rest of the kids... or read his blog, which is perhaps where these truly belong. Hard to charge $10 for a blog, though, so that's out. Regardless, it's funny, and one imagines that Pollard could turn out dozens of these filled with stories from his early days in Dayton, teaching, playing shows and partying at the Monument Club.

Lastly, but most expensively, is Town of Mirrors, Pollard's stab at legitimizing his collages as fine art. His gallery showings and four-figure sales last years were the start; this is the mass market feather in the cap. It's a 144-page hardbound book from Fantagraphics gathering more than 175 of his collages. Fans are familiar with many of these (particularly those of us who ponied up for earlier volumes of Eat), but this presentation promises to be the best yet for these works. Pollard adds to his starpower fan base with this one, as author Rick Moody pens the introduction (filmmaker and Pollard collaborator Steven Soderbergh had that honor in Jim Greer's GBV book). "The visual art of Robert Pollard is uncanny, moving, strange, and it summons a dark melancholy at the same time; an austere beauty is forged in what is degraded and worthless in the image repertoire of culture itself," he writes.

Labels: books, music, Robert Pollard

Charles Ardai is set to do for the pulp adventure novel what he has already done for the pulp crime novel. Ardai, whose Hard Case Crime imprint will celebrate its 50th title later this year (his own Fifty to One), has announced a new imprint, the Adventures of Gabriel Hunt. The series, which will launch next summer, will “chronicle the travels and travails of modern-day explorer Gabriel Hunt, who scours the globe in pursuit of precious artifacts, lost civilizations, and secrets that could save the world…or destroy it."

Much like the Hard Case books, the covers will be original paintings in the classic style (the image at right will adorn the first).

“These books are for anyone who grew up reading H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs or watching Harrison Ford wield his bullwhip at the movies,” said Ardai. “We’re talking classic adventure fiction, complete with horses, snakes, shovels, pickaxes, torches, traps, bottomless pits, barroom brawls, jungles, jewels and just about everything else that’s ever made your heart beat faster.”

In a neat twist, each book will be credited to Gabriel Hunt, though some familiar Hard Case Crime authors will actually pen the works. They’ll take him to Borneo, Guatemala, Turkey, Egypt, Antarctica and the Kalahari Desert, according to Ardai.

The series will debut in May, with a new book due every other month after that. If Hard Case Crime is any indication, these will be well worth reading.

Labels: books

It's funny how, if you wait long enough, people who have been seen as cult acts and a marginal mainstream presence begin to take on the patina of classicism. To wit, Dexter Romweber, the singer and guitarist behind Flat Duo Jets, recently signed a deal with Bloodshot Records. There are those who loved FDJ -- I was ambivalent at best -- but the band was largely ignored. Want proof? What was the band's last album? If you said 1998's Lucky Eye, please show your FDJ fan club card. Regardless, Romweber is back (where's drummer Crow?) as a solo artist. First up, the near-requisite comeback vehicle, a duets album, this one featuring Cat power, Neko Case and Exene Cervenka. He also is joined by his sister, Sara, whose more-impressive pedigree includes stints with Let's Active and Snatches of Pink.

Bloodshot also will issue a new project from author Jonathan Lethem and songwriter Walter Salas-Humara is scheduled for September. You Are All My People from I'm Not Jim. According to Bloodshot, the two met at a Silos show. Lethem wanted to give Salas-Humara some of his books as a thank you for two decades of great music. A friendship ensued, as did a songwriting project that led to an album's worth of music. Salas-Humara said Lethem wrote very quickly:

"We would discuss the framework for a tune and he would be writing while we were talking. Then minutes later he would have several verses with internal rhymes, a chorus and a bridge. I was completely on the spot -- I now had to come up with melodies just as fast. We ended up with 11 songs at the end of day two." The production team The Elegant Too --Philip Hernandez and Chris Maxwell -- then rebuilt Salas-Humara's tracks, sometimes replacing everything but his vocal.

Hard Case Crime will celebrate the release of its 50th book with a party July 8 in New York.That milestone publication -- Fifty-to-One by Hard Case editor Charles Ardai (who wrote two previous HCC books under the name Richard Aleas) -- actually won't come until November, but it's worth celebrating. The idea behind the book is a good one: it's split into 50 chapters, each named after one of the 50 books in the series. "The novel tells the story of how Hard Case Crime was founded in 1958 by a scoundrel who (among other things) thought it might be fun to publish a gangster's memoir -- only to find himself in hot water with both the Mob and the police after learning that the memoir was not quite the true story he'd thought..." Ardai writes.

Several of the people behind the now-defunct music magazine Harp have moved operations online with a new product, Blurt. From the looks of things, it hews very closely to the editorial and design style of Harp, which is certainly not a bad thing. The site

It’s an interesting project: The actual digital magazine is exactly that – a magazine-like publication where the pages are flipped with a click of a button. It feels very much like an issue of Harp online. The content is similar is well, with features on Joan As Policewoman, My Morning Jacket, Ray Davies, My Brightest Diamond, and Alejandro Escovedo, among many others. It also includes CD reviews, as well as those of books, DVDs and merchandise.

Publisher Scott Crawford lauds its “green-minded, digital only format.” A cynic, of course, would remind Crawford that Harp wasn’t worried about the non-greenness of paper until the bottom fell out financially. That said, it’s a nice presentation despite the fact that I’ll miss having a paper copy to cart around.

Blurt also will include a daily-updated web site that offers additional features and interactive content.

Labels: books, crime fiction, magazines, music

When I worked for my college newspaper years and years ago, I had the idea of tagging along when a friend’s band went on tour. I’d ride in the van, help them load in and out and generally see what it’s like to be a touring musician. As the date of the tour approached, my friend worked to convince me that this wasn’t a good idea. I don’t recall his specific argument, but it amounted to “you’ll be bored out of your mind.”

He was probably right; his argument was strong enough that I decided not to go. But now I have Dean Wareham’s memoir, Black Postcards in hand, and it makes me wish I’d gone. Sure, you don’t populate a book with the boring parts, so his account of his years with Galaxie 500 and Luna is a bit skewed in favor of the exciting bits, but it still captures the romance of the road, and makes me wish I’d been a bit more adventurous in my youth.

For fans of what evolved from college rock to alternative to indie to whatever it’s called today, the book is a mother lode of information and backstage gossip. Wareham is most focused on his own bands, of course, but the two groups came into contact with a wide swath of the indie-rock world, and Wareham doesn’t hold back when sharing his thoughts – good and bad – about his peers.

For those of us who were fans of his bands, the book serves as the dream liner notes to a career. Why did Galaxie 500 split? Why was this song on this album? Why did this member quit? It’s all here, and in surprisingly crisp detail. Wareham is a smart guy who obviously has thought about his vocation to a high degree, and his thoughts are amusing, illuminating and somewhat sobering in spots.

The hook for the book – as evidenced by the subtitle, “A Rock ’n’ Roll Romance” – is the fact that Wareham fell in love with his bass player, left his wife and toddler son, broke up his band and embarked on a new personal and professional relationship. It’s a sad story that could probably be applied to hundreds of touring musicians with only an altered detail or two, but one with a hopeful ending in the form of a creative rebirth with Dean & Britta. It gives what could have been a standard rock memoir and/or tour diary a bit of emotional heft. This isn’t exactly “Behind the Music,” but it does make the story more worthy of publication by a big house than it might have otherwise.

Wareham took the time to answer a few questions about the book, his bands and the future.

TIRBD: Do you find it strange that a major reason Luna broke up was the inability to ever move to the next level careerwise, yet a major publisher is willing to sink money into publishing and promoting a book that is at least partially about that lack of commercial success?

DW: The publishing world is new to me, but I have to think they know what they are doing. As for the record business, on one level you could argue that Luna suffered from a lack of commercial success, because we never had a multi-platinum hit album, and that is what all major labels are looking for. But if you broke down the numbers from our years at Elektra, you would find that even as the band sank slowly into a pit of "debt,” we were selling hundreds of thousands of compact discs, and with licensing money on top of that the Warner Music Group did just fine with Luna. But the expectations are so different in the music business than in book publishing. 100,000 books would make your book a bestseller, but 100,000 copies of our second CD was considered promising, but not exactly a success.

Given the level of detail in some of your tour recollections, I assume you kept a pretty detailed tour journal. What was the motivation for that, and if at any time that motivation involved a project like this, did that have an affect on what you chose to record?

I kept a detailed journal in my late teens and early twenties, from my years at Harvard through the time in Galaxie 500. I'm not sure why I was did that (because I was lonely?), but I was sure glad to find those diaries in a box when I started writing the book. Then there was a period of five years, covering the first three Luna albums, where I didn't keep a regular journal -- all I had was tour itineraries and the music, and my own recollections. So I skipped through those years pretty quickly (to the chagrin of certain fans who have complained that I don't talk enough about the making of the second Luna album, or what it was like to meet Tom Verlaine). With the advent of the Internet revolution we launched a Luna website, fuzzywuzzy.com, and I started posting tour diaries on the site - I was writing again. But the official tour diaries were sanitized - there were incidents that were not fit for public consumption, indeed, things that I wouldn't even mention in my own private journal.

I kept waiting for the moment when you put down the drugs and talked about getting clean and sober and healthy (just like seemingly every other performer with a tale like this to tell), but it never came. Any thoughts about that, or better yet, second thoughts about that thread being simply one of many that make up the fabric of the story rather than a sort of through-line cautionary tale?

Maybe it appears from the book that I was ingesting vast quantities of drugs, because those nights made for some funny stories. Sure, I might have done a line or two of cocaine if someone offered it to me after a show (a fan perhaps, or someone from the record company, or management), and I certainly had a few drinks every night while on tour, but we didn't not travel around the country with a bus full of liquor and drugs, nor did we take drugs while we were in the studio -- we were there to make music, not to party.

So I don't feel like I have to apologize for having a good time once in a while (though certainly I saw other people very close to me whose lives were derailed by drug use). For the cautionary drug stories, I recommend the recent rock memoirs by Slash, Nikki Sixx, and Eric Clapton -- former junkies all. I was a mere dabbler.

There seems to be no love lost between you and dozens of your peers. I lost count of the number of people who are dismissed with a cutting remark, from bandmates to tourmates to casual acquaintances. It's one thing to feel this way, it's another to express those feelings so publicly and permanently. Any trepidation about that? Any backlash?

With respect to my peers, perhaps I was opinionated, but it's just music we're talking about -- and I don't have to pretend that I liked Lenny Kravitz or Bono. I don't imagine they would care too much what I think anyway. I was more concerned about my ex-bandmates. But being in a rock and roll band is about conflict. You push and shove, and argue about small things and large ones - that is an essential part of the experience. I made an effort be as fair and objective as I could, but I wanted to go into the conflict in some detail, to bring out the humor and the drama, not just gloss over it while citing the standard "musical and personal differences." At any rate, if I made cutting remarks, I made them about myself also.

Looking back on your career like this, do you see any points at which you wonder about the path not taken and where you might be otherwise? If so, where did these occur and what do you imagine might have been the ultimate destination of those alternate paths?

I could spend days trying to answer this question. I guess I could have taken a job working in the trading department at Chase Manhattan Bank in 1986, and my life might have turned out very differently indeed. But I didn't.

Spending this much time analyzing your own songwriting, recording and performing, will you approach future endeavors in all three arenas any differently?

Since I'm not in a rock band anymore, and I am no longer signed to a seven-record deal, I can take my time making records. I am no longer on an annual cycle of writing songs, making a new record, touring to support it, and then starting all over again. And with the changes in technology, I do more of the recording at home, on my own time. Songwriting does not get any easier, but with the two Dean & Britta albums I've chosen to record half original material and half covers, and it is easier to write six new songs than twelve, so I think I may stick with this formula - which is what everyone did before the Beatles started writing all their own material.

It isn't clear from your recounting of your earliest days as a musician whether you always wanted to be a professional musician or if it just became what you did because other people responded to it. What that your career goal coming out of high school or college, or did you have other plans? Was there ever a real long-term fall-back position?

I thought about going to grad school after graduating college, studying anthropology - but when I read Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss, and he talked about bees crawling up his nose while he slept by the banks of the Amazon, I changed my mind. I didn't dare to think that I could be a professional musician - this notion would have seemed absurd in America in 1986 (though perhaps not so ridiculous in England). And anyway, I could barely play the guitar at that point, how could I be a professional musician? But then you learn (and perhaps this is the lesson of punk rock) that you don't have to be amazing players to cook up something beautiful. Still, I think in Galaxie 500 we were surprised every step of the way: surprised that we recorded a seven-inch single that sounded so perfect, and an album that we were really proud of, surprised when the record was played on college radio, amazed that Slash Records and Rough Trade wanted to sign the band.

Do you have a favorite rock 'n' roll and/or tour memoir other than your own?

I really liked Dee Dee Ramone's memoir, Lobotomy, and Dylan's Chronicles. And White Bicycles by folk producer Joe Boyd. But my favorite book about a rock star is Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo, which is of course a work of fiction.

Labels: books, Monday Interview, music

I've been saving up a lot of book-related news to share, so forgive me for this hodge-podge of news about a lot of forthcoming books from some of my favorite crime fiction authors.

Busted Flush Press will issue the U.S. debut of Ken Bruen’s novel London Boulevard. The book dates to 2001, right in the thick of – but separate from -- Bruen’s White Trilogy. This is a stand-alone that has a slightly different feel to me from his other books, but it’s no less visceral and rewarding than the rest. This edition, which comes from the same folks who rescued Bruen’s early work in the A Fifth of Bruen omnibus, includes a new introduction by Academy Award-winning screenwriter William Monahan (“The Departed”) and other “additional bonus material.” Pay particular attention to the cover by artist Jeff Wong, which depicts Bruen and his Hard Case Crime collaborator Jason Starr acting out a scene from the book’s opening. The book is due in July.

Harlan Coben has a lot of news to report. First up, his forthcoming novel, Hold Tight, is being promoted with an online video trailer. It looks like a pretty standard Coben story from this angle, which means to say, I’ll be picking it up early and buzzing through it quickly. The book is due April 15. Meanwhile, for those wanting more Coben, he reports that “Hart Hanson, the creator and executive producer of the TV series ‘Bones,’ is writing a pilot for Twentieth Century Fox studios and Fox network to bring Myron and the gang to a TV near you. The working title -- and this could very easily change -- is ‘Promises And Lies.’” Coben is soliciting suggestions for casting; e-mail him at casting@harlancoben.com. Lastly, the French movie version of his novel Tell No One will finally see U.S. theatrical release in June with English subtitles.

Proving that an old dog can learn new tricks Lawrence Block has adapted two of his short stories for the stage. The one-act plays – “"How Far It Could Go," (shorted to “How Far” for the play) and “One Day I'll Plant More Walnut Trees” – are being performed at the Henry Lawson Theatre in Werrington, New South Wales, Australia, as part of a four-play evening. As Block reports in his newsletter, this stemmed from a theatrical producer in LA wanting to adapt “How Far.” Block offered to do it himself, and while it wasn’t ever staged, further conversations with an Australian friend about it led to the Lawson production. Both stories can be found in Enough Rope, and Block writes that anyone wanting to take a crack at the plays should contact him at LB@lawrenceblock.com. Meanwhile, his next Keller book, Hit and Run, is due June 24. He promises as “special philatelic edition.”

UPDATE: Block just released more info about this edition: "The Philatelic Edition of Hit and Run will consist of a copy of the hardcover first edition, bearing on the flyleaf or title page (I haven't decided yet) an imprint identifying it as such. All copies will be serially numbered and hand-signed by the author -- that's me -- and each will also bear a special genuine US personalized postage stamp showing the cover of the book, tied to the page with a hand-applied cancellation bearing the book's official publication date (June 24, 2008, my 70th birthday, and how's that for timing?) and the city (that'd be New York, duh). And there may be some further philatelic enhancement elsewhere in the book."

Michael Connelly was the author of the month at the Rara-Avis crime fiction e-mail list, and he was kind enough to log on and weigh in on the discussion. Reading through his responses to comments and queries, I was able to cobble together some interesting and new (to me) information. He was asked a lot about Harry Bosch and whether he plans to continue that series. He said that he enjoys writing the books in real time, letting Harry age with each book, but added that he has “planted many seeds about Harry in Vietnam, about Harry as a street cop during the Patty Hearst and SLA period, etc… I have gathered string on these times and events. I've done the research so that I could write the book. It’s just a matter of getting to them.”

He said he feels like he “stumbled onto the right ingredients of character” that sustained his interest through the Bosch series, and doesn’t feel like the newer Mickey Haller series – despite liking it “all right” – could sustain 10 or 12 titles.

Then again, he reports he was ready to give up on Bosch at least once (twice if you count the early arc that finished before his first stand-alone, The Poet. Phenomenal sales for that and subsequent books gave him the clout to pretty much write what he wanted, he said). That came in City of Bones, where Bosch walks out the door having quit the police force. “It was around this time that I made some dramatic shifts in my personal life as well and lo and behold, it was Harry who was one of the only things constant in my life. So I clung to him, re-energized the creativity associated with him and continued to write about him… Any day I get to write about Harry Bosch remains a good day for me.”

Connelly has had some good days lately, then. He follows his shortest book, The Overlook (which evolved from a serial in The New York Times), with his longest, the forthcoming 525-page The Brass Verdict. That one brings Bosch and Haller together. It’s due Oct. 14.

Labels: books, crime fiction

I had the pleasure of speaking with author Charles Baxter this week to discuss his new novel, The Soul Thief. I did so for my company’s new endeavor, CorridorBUZZ.com, an online arts & entertainment magazine for the Cedar Rapids-Iowa City area.

The piece I wrote previews a reading he will do tonight at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City. Despite the limitless nature of the web, there was plenty from our discussion that I had to leave out. Not wanting to waste it, I thought I would offer it here as either an addendum or a teaser, depending on which direction you’re traveling on the old info superhighway.

The book, Baxter’s ninth and his fifth novel, tells of Nathaniel Mason’s time as a graduate student in Buffalo, N.Y., where he, according to Baxter's web site, "is drawn into a tangle of relationships with people who seem to hover just beyond his grasp. As love interests there is the alluring Theresa and the lesbian artist Jamie. Jerome Coolberg is the strangest, a young man who openly flaunts that nothing he says seems to be his own, and who tells Nathaniel soon after meeting him that he knows everything about him. He appropriates parts of Nathaniel's past, a practice that leads to Nathaniel's breakdown. The story returns 30 years later to find Nathaniel having reconstructed his life in a world of normalcy, a situation that is threatened by the return of Jerome, now a radio talk show host.

It's a daring, challenging book that didn't always satisfy me as a reader, but which has stayed with me much longer than most thanks to the twists and turns of Baxter's plot and prose.

TIRBD: You leave a lot of clues in this book as to what is really going on, and the more reviews I read written by people much better versed in literature than me, the more I grew to appreciate what you had done..

CB: You certainly don’t have to come to my book with a Ph.D in your hand. If you’ve read some of the other literature of doubles or identity switching, you may be prepared for what happens in this book. I hope it’s a good yarn. If you have read, say Conrad, or Dostoyevsky or Patricia Highsmith -- who wrote thrillers with doubles in them – you might notice some things.

You use Highsmith’s name, and others, incidentally in the book…

That’s not an inside joke. I needed some names at this point and thought that since Patricia Highsmith had written books about doubles that it was fitting.

Not everything is as we thought it is. It’s not meant as a trick.

What is the role of music in your work? I was particularly moved by your description of your characters listening to the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows,” which, on most days, is my favorite song.

Mine too. I don’t listen to music when I’m actually writing. I have a writing studio that’s about two miles away from here, and I listen to music when I’m walking down there and after I’m done, when I’m walking back. Who was it that said, “Life would be unbearable without music”? I believe that. It’s a great stimulus and solace.

You’re especially successful integrating music into your prose. Many times it seems like a lazy way for a writer to tell us something about their character – he listens to Springsteen, so he’s a contemplative working man, for example. How do you make it work?

When it doesn’t work, it feels like you’ve brought it in as a kind of brand name.

Those characters (in The Soul Thief)are listening to “God Only Knows” when they’re heading back from Niagara Falls… it’s about losing your soul.

How did the film of Feast of Love change things for you?

The film didn’t do very well, so it didn’t expand my audience very much. There were honorable people involved in the film, but there were so many stories in that novel, when they tried to get them all into an hour and a half movie, all of the relationships started to seem superficial.

A lot has been made in past weeks about free digital distribution of books. What do you think, as an author who has weathered numerous changes in the publishing industry, of such plans?

My own feeling as a writer who hopes to make some income from my work, it’s not OK with me if anyone can download my book at any time. I work for years on these, and I hope that people will be willing to shell out a little bit of cash for what I’ve done. I like books as objects. I like them better than screens. I like going to bookstores and buying books. Certainly there has been a change during my lifetime about it… I don’t know if it’s for the better.

Labels: books

I'm not sure how prestigious this is given that I've never heard of it before, but the Story Prize has been awarded to Jim Shepard for his short story collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway. The prize includes a $20,000 cash award, which is a nice little boost for a great writer who doesn't sell a lot of books. Oh, and he received an engraved silver bowl, too.

It's certainly a worthy book, an adventurous and ambitious collection that was among the best books I read in 2007. In my Monday Interview with Shepard in December, we talked about his stories, and I noted that they seemed like the result of challenges he had issued to himself.

"I think they are challenges to myself -- that's a nice way of putting it -- nearly always in terms of stretching the capacities of my empathetic imagination," he said. Going on to talk about a story in his previous collection, Love and Hydrogen, he continued, "A story narrated by John Ashcroft began with my fulminating about yet another one of his inconceivably bad decisions as attorney general, for example, and then asking myself, ‘How does he do something like that, and live with himself?’ And then asking myself the question more seriously, and deciding that I would read all about him and try to find out."

The Story Prize itself is a bit of a mystery. Information about its provenance on its web site states that it is "an annual book award honoring the author of an outstanding collection of short fiction with a $20,000 cash award. Each of two runners-up will receive $5,000. Eligible books must be written in English and first published in the United States during a calendar year."

Past winners are Edwidge Danticat in 2004 for The Dew Breaker, Patrick O'Keeffe in 2005 for The Hill Road and Mary Gordon in 2006 for The Stories of Mary Gordon.

There is some credibility behind the effort, however. Shepard was up against Tessa Hadley's Sunstroke and Other Stories and Vincent Lam's Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, while the contest was judged by author and critic David Gates, librarian Patricia Groh and editor and poet Meghan O'Rourke.

Labels: books, criticism

"It was Clockers that allowed me to go into that territory that made me feel that I could go that way, that I could write crime novels that were entertaining on one side of the equation but on the other side were about something else."

That's George Pelecanos talking to the National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass about Richard Price's novel and its impact on him as a writer. The post is part of the blog's "In Retrospect" series, which is taking a look at Price's book this week. It's a fitting appetite-whetter for Price's forthcoming novel, Lush Life, due next month. As I wrote back in December, Price gave a reading here in Iowa City from the book that made me wish it was available at that moment. It was gritty, funny, incisive and spot-on. The passage he read is actually available as the short story "Night Fishing on the Delancey" in the Fall 2007 issue of The Paris Review.

The Critical Mass blog also features a talk with Dennis Lehane about Clockers, who calls it "one of the few Great American Novels in the American canon."

Both Lehane and Pelecanos write with Price for HBO's "The Wire," and Pelecanos is quick to say that without Clockers, there would be no "Wire."

An in-depth interview with Price is promised later this week on Critical Mass. Stay tuned.

Labels: books

The Morning News Tournament of Books is back, with 16 books set to square off bracket-style starting March 7.

There is an honest-to-God crime fiction novel among the picks, though I guarantee Laura Lippman's fine novel, What the Dead Know, will be tagged with the phrase "transcends the genre."

Who will win? My money is on National Book Award winner Denis Johnson. I haven't waded through his tome yet, but plan to the next time I have several days of uninterrupted reading time ahead of me... or after my sons graduate high school, whichever comes first.

I've read four of this year's picks thus far, and in addition to Lippman's gripping read, I can attest that Joshua Ferris's book is good but not a book of the year contender, Ian McEwan's book was perfectly fine but far from perfect, and Jonathan Lethem's book was a dreadful stumble by an otherwise wildly talented writer.

The tournament is fairly simple. Books are paired up in brackets, with a different judge for each pairing. The judge picks a winner, and that book moves on until there is only one. The three previous winners are David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Ali Smith’s The Accidental and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

This year's contenders are:

Run by Ann Patchett
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
Petropolis by Anya Ulinich
Ovenman by Jeff Parker
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
You Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem
New England White by Stephen L. Carter
Remainder by Tom McCarthy
The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida
Shining at the Bottom of the Sea by Stephen Marche
What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman
An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England by Brock Clarke

Labels: books, criticism

It's an understatement to say the stories of Elizabeth Crane are interesting. The Chicago writer has filled three short-story collections to date with tales that seem spun from the idea notebooks of dozens of writers. "What if a person took the back off their TV and found people living there?" one idea might read. "What if a woman who turned into a zombie was conflicted over the fact that she subsisted on human flesh?" might read another.

Hearing that such situations populate the stories in her new book, You Must Be This Happy to Enter, might turn off some, and with good reason. The world has more than enough "too-clever-by-half" stories to last until the end of time, with more produced daily. But these are not those. Crane's stories also have that other important ingredient: People you care about. Betty the zombie may seem like one of those too-clever characters until you actually read "Betty the Zombie," and then you see how Crane has skillfully grafted the woes of a flesh-eating zombie onto a real, three-dimensional character, and used that odd juxtaposition as a muscular vehicle to propel her fiction.

Crane debuted in 2003 with When the Messenger is Hot, then offered the linked story collection/novel in stories/insert new classification here All This Heavenly Glory, which offered episodes in the life of Charlotte Ann Byers. With You Must Be This Happy to Enter, Crane has moved from major publisher Little, Brown, to indie upstart Akashic (in a partnership, in this case, with Punk Planet Books). It's a move that might be seen on the surface as a step back careerwise, but as the pleasantly aggressive publicity push she's been getting would suggest, her reasons for making the leap are sound and already bearing out.

She took the time to answer a few questions about switching publishers, the way promotion has changed since her debut and the genesis and evolution of her stories.

TIRBD: You're with Akashic Books now after two books with a larger publisher. Was this a conscious decision to go with a smaller house? What can Akashic do that someone else maybe could not?

EC: It was of course, a very considered decision. Without going into long stories, I had been disappointed in the way a few things went with my second book (yet I always want to add the disclaimer that I adore my previous editor Reagan Arthur and always will), and at the same time, the people at Punk Planet/Akashic actually sought me out before they even knew I had anything in the works. I had known about the huge success they'd had with Joe Meno, who had nothing but good things to say about them and who had also been ultimately disappointed with larger publishing houses. Basically, what a smaller press potentially has to offer, which has completely been bearing itself out in terms of what I know Akashic has been doing to promote the book, is to give me a focused attention that you're just not guaranteed at a large house unless you're already a superstar.

It seems as if most short story writers place all of the stories in a collection with magazines and journals before collecting them in a book, but you always have a healthy dose that were not. What is behind that difference, and do you ever worry about the stories that weren't given that extra seal of approval?

Hm, I didn't worry about it until now! I'm not convinced that's universally true, anyway, and in my case, it's not anything that's super thought out; in fact, unlike when I was starting out, I don't submit stories too extensively these days. In fact, mostly I only send them to publications that request stories from me. So actually, I would have no problem publishing a book of stories where none of them had been previously published. We all want approval, but it's my own confidence that is what allows me to put them out into the world anywhere, whether in a collection or a journal.

In reading the bios in each of your three books, you went from being someone who "lives in Chicago," to someone who lives in Chicago, teaches at Northwestern and has won awards, to, with this new book, someone who does all that but now does so "with her husband, Ben." Just from this bit of information, it's clear your life has changed from book to book. Is that reflected in your writing in a way that is noticeable to you, and more to the point, in a way that you think could be noticed by close readers?

I think the changes in my life reflect in my writing, sure, just as surely as they would if circumstances had gotten worse instead of better. I have had a great deal of joy and sorrow in the last 10 years, and one of the things that really interests me in life is the way those things are not at all mutually exclusive. I'm pretty sure that folks will notice that many of these stories are way more out there than ever. I don't know that that has anything to do with anything, though.

Though your first book came out just five years ago, what we're able to glean about authors now, thanks to the Internet, is considerably different from what we could then. We're no longer limited to the brief bio in the back of the book. You blog and have a web presence. What affect does that have on you as a writer, if at all? Does having a greater public profile -- with the potential of greater interaction with your audience – affect you?

Ah, I don't think I have a super huge blog readership, and I've had less and less time to keep it up. I'm also much more guarded about what I put on there, personally speaking, being very aware of the nature of the Internet. I will say that it is fantastic to be able to be easily contacted by readers, whether it's via my blog, web site, MySpace, Facebook or Goodreads. But you know, even the most well-known writers, I suspect, walk down the street, as I do, unrecognized. So in more respects than not, my simple life (style) is not very different than it ever was.

Your stories read at times like experiments: "What would happen if..." situations brought to life. Do they start that way? At the same time, they end in surprising ways, not necessarily reaching the place the reader might expect. I found that exhilarating as a reader, but I wonder as a writer if it's difficult to rein yourself in, to not take things to what might seem their logical conclusion.

Yes, actually sometimes they do start that way! I'm glad to hear that they end in surprising ways; it's usually a surprise to me. I generally start with just a notion of what a story might be, or who a character is, and then see what happens. But as you say, yes, if I start with a zombie, I think, what if she was a remorseful zombie? Which is how she ended up on a reality show. (Because isn't that the next logical step?)

Religion is a common topic through these stories, something that a lot of other writers tend to shy away from. Was there something in particular you were trying to get at with regard to religion? Do you have any worries about losing readers who might not want to read about it one way or the other?

Oh, I'll try not to go on for too long on this because it's so interesting to me. I tend to think of “god” as being the theme more than religion, but yes, I think that there are a few things that interest me about the subject. One is that I think there's such a negative association with religion, among many people I know anyway, and yet, I think that it can be a misconception to think that completely defines a person. You hear “Christian” and if you're not a Christian yourself, chances are you think “right-wing.” But in fact, I don't think anyone is just one thing, and knowing some very politically liberal Christians, I think it's unfortunate that that is the general idea of that religion. And that's just one religion. Also, it's a subject that interests me on a personal level. I seem to have a history now of constant tweaking, if you will, of what seems reasonable to me on the subject of god, and I don't expect that will change anytime soon.

As for losing readers, I don't concern myself with that too much at all, whatever the subject – that's out of my hands. I just write what interests me and hope it'll interest someone else too.

Labels: books, Monday Interview

While the oral history form has its charms, it's a flawed method of recording events in book form. The writer steps back, letting his or her subjects tell the entire tale, the hand on the rudder a light one, steering the narrative by the choice of who says what and when. It worked to a certain extent on Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me, an oral history of the New York punk scene. As each of the musicians, critics and fans weighed in, they accomplished a sort of safety-pinned version of the blind men describing the elephant, the various tangents somehow a fitting way to describe such a strange movement.

I picked up Jim Walsh's The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting, with trepidation. How much could I possibly learn anything new what was my favorite band for well over a decade, a band for which I unashamedly still keep a file folder full of magazine and newspaper articles ripped from publications in my teens on the off chance I might need to refer to them again someday? Still, the prospect of hearing the words of those who were there in the early days -- my hippest friend turned me on to the band when I was a sophomore in high school, the year Tim came out -- was appealing. While there are moments of personal reportage that offer interesting tidbits, the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

I knew to be worried in the preface when Walsh was recounting the reasons the Replacements were the best band in the world. After many passages that start "Because..." he starts one like this: "Because one night in 1989 the 'Mats were booked on something called The International Rock Awards on ABC..." Ah, here we go, I thought. Having watched the band's performance on that show at least 25 times in my life, I knew what was coming. Or so I thought. He gets it right that the announcer says, "We apologize, here they are -- the Replacements," and recounts some of what happened in the performance, but misses two key moments. The first he alludes to when he reports that censors bleeped Paul Westerberg's reference to "We're feeling good from the pills we took," writing that "Paul rolls his eyes, finishes the lyric and plows ahead."

I nearly put the book down right there, knowing that if it wasn't going to get this right, the whole thing might be flawed. Yes, Westerberg rolled his eyes, but more than that, at the end of the song when on the recording he sings, "It's too late to turn back, here we go," he instead sings "It's too late to take pills, here we go" again and again, smirking all the while. Walsh is trying here to write about the band's eternal status as out-of-step misfits unwilling to play the game, and misses a perfect chance to make the point. The other funny moment came during the song's brief breakdown. On the recording there's the sound of bottles clinking and Tommy Stinson saying something inaudible. Here, Stinson steps to the microphone and says, "The Elvis? Ha ha ha ha...!" mocking the statuette being given by this one-and-done awards show. The band doesn't just bite the hand that feeds; it pisses on it for good measure.

All that in a section where Walsh was doing his own reporting, not relying on others. If a guy who had been there from the very beginning could miss a softball like that, how good could the rest of the book be? Answer: It's about as spotty as that missed opportunity would indicate. Once gets a sense of the band and its members, but it's a flawed sense made more confusing by Walsh's decision to intercut fresh interview fodder from observers with old interview snippets from the band. Two-decade-old reminiscences are mixed with contemporaneous proclamations, and rather than illuminate things, the practice just makes things muddier.

It doesn't help that Westerberg and Stinson didn't participate, that drummer Chris Mars responded with an e-mailed paragraph or that guitarist Bob Stinson is dead. In fact, the only Replacements who truly contributed -- latter day guitarist Slim Dunlap and drummer Steve Foley -- offer the best dirt here, recounting what it was like to join a band full of promise as it climbed into its own coffin.

Then again, perhaps this is more fitting a tribute to the 'Mats than I've been willing to admit. The band subverted possible success at every turn, frustrating fans who knew there was better to be had if only Westerberg would let himself loose. In the same way, there is a better Replacements book out there for the writer willing to do more than cobble together quotes from magazine interviews and the nostalgic reverie of fans, confidantes and hangers-on.

Labels: books, music

Like every other sensible blogger out there, I plan to take a few days away from this to enjoy the holidays. In the meantime, I decided today's post, which will likely be the last of '07, should include all the little tidbits I've been saving for possible longer posts over the past few weeks. Here goes:

Shearwater plans a new album in early '08. Rook, if the photos on the band's web site of the recording session are any indication, will include strings and woodwinds, meaning Jonathan Meiburg's creative muse should be fully engaged yet again. Meiburg told me in an interview earlier this year that he has been excited by the range and ability of the band. "Sometimes it feels like every time we play, the whole thing opens up just a little bit more. We got together and rehearsed a few weeks ago and I was just delighted at the way this group of people works together musically – it's very special."

Harlan Coben's next book will be another stand-alone thriller, Hold Tight, due in April. As he describes it: "In a quiet suburb, the lives of five families collide in surprising, tragic and even violent ways." He also shares that Cope, the lead character in The Woods, has a "small part" here, so the ending of that book might make a bit more sense after you read Hold Tight.

Cover art and a publication date have been posted for the forthcoming third collaboration between Ken Bruen and Jason Starr, The Max, from Hard Case Crime. The book, which follows Bust and Slide, is due in September.

The Hard Case folks also share that they'll kick off 2009 with yet another Lawrence Block reprint, promising that "not even seriously dedicated Block fanatics, know about this book; and it is quite possibly the single most audacious book we'll ever publish."

Michael Connelly's next book will be a follow-up to The Lincoln Lawyer featuring attorney Micky Haller. That novel, tentatively scheduled for October, finds Haller taking over the law practice of a colleague who is murdered. Continuing Connelly's engaging way of crossing the paths of his key characters, Harry Bosch catches the case.

The ever-prolific Robert Pollard can't stop won't stop in 2008, with three releases already on the schedule. First comes a solo mini-CD, Superman Was A Rocker in late January, followed by a second Psycho and the Birds album in late February, We've Moved. Finally, he also plans another Circus Devils disc with the Tobias brothers, Ataxia, to be released sometime later in the year.

Nick Lowe's back catalog has been ripe for reissue for a long time, and his current label, Yep Roc, will start things off with a reissue of his first album, Jesus of Cool. The disc was issued as Pure Pop for Now People here in the U.S., but will come out under its original name with the February reissue (marking its 30th anniversary!). Press about the reissue claims it contains 10 rare bonus tracks, but any fans of the Basher have long since heard these still-worthy tracks.

Labels: books, music

I trekked out in the snow tonight to hear Richard Price read, and while it was worth the effort, the result was bittersweet, because now I must wait three months to read his forthcoming novel.

Price, best known for Clockers and Freedomland -- as well as for the films based on those books and for his work as a writer on HBO's excellent series, The Wire -- read from Lush Life, his latest novel, due in March. It's still far enough in the future that one link on the web page of his publisher, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, for the book takes you to information about David Hadju's similarly titled biography of jazz composer Billy Strayhorn. Another, luckily, sends you here.

That low-profile won't last long. The book, which Price said tonight is about the contemporary Lower East Side of New York -- a place populated by those who streamed in as they left Ellis Island, and then immediately tried to escape from, he added -- is told through the eyes of two young men who face a life-changing experience. According to FSG's promotional copy, the book "tears the shiny veneer off the 'new' New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour." Few authors could live up to that description, but Price can and, if the passages he read tonight are any indication, does.

I didn't get a Wire fix tonight -- Price read from his book but didn't really talk much beyond that -- but did get one thanks to Amazon.com, which has three short "prequel" video clips on the page selling the fourth season DVD of The Wire. They're interesting looks at Proposition Joe and Omar as kids, as well as a peek at the day McNulty and Bunk became partners in the homicide unit. The fifth and final season of the show starts in January.

Labels: books

Jim Shepard popped onto my radar in 2004 when I received simultaneous review copies of his short story collection, Love and Hydrogen, and his novel, Project X, while working as a reviewer at a daily newspaper. I hadn’t heard of Shepard, but the books sounded interesting, so I took them home and added them to the stack.

A year later, I went to hear Shepard read in Iowa City when he was on campus as a finalist for the director’s position at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He read from Project X, a novel about a young man drawn into a Columbine-type incident, and it was hilarious, terrifying and heartbreaking. I went home, pulled the book out of the stack and read it. I followed with Love and Hydrogen, and have counted myself a fan ever since.

His new story collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway, is another gem. Some fan I am; I had to learn about it by reading a small blurb/review in a magazine two months after its publication. Such is the fate of writers with Shepard’s talent. It is admittedly daunting to pick up a book of stories that tell stories about excursions through Tibet and Australia, follow the first female Russian cosmonaut and tell of the conflicted nature of France’s Revolution-era executioner. Feel-good lit this ain’t. But it’s a bravura performance that finds Shepard fully inhabiting each of these protagonists in his prose, and easily one of the best books of the year.

I was disappointed when Shepard didn’t land the position at Iowa, if for no other reason than that I was looking forward to hearing him read more often. But, as he mentions below, not getting the job meant there was one less demand on his time, time that ought to be spent writing more stories like these.

TIRBD: Your career seemed to get a kick-start in 2004 with the simultaneous publication of the story collection Love and Hydrogen and the novel Project X, your first books in at least six years. Was it a conscious move on your part to re-enter publishing after a break, a publisher's marketing ploy or perhaps a combination?

JS: Very little that happens to me represents a conscious move on my part. It was mostly a publisher's marketing ploy -- or a better way to put it might be a publisher's despairing attempt to find something that worked, when it came to trying to sell my work. I'd finished Love and Hydrogen earlier than that, but Knopf had conceived of the idea of publishing it together with a novel, and trying to make the publication more of an event in that way. Their plan worked to some extent, I guess.

Is it at all safe to say that thanks to the presence of publications like McSweeney's and the success of writers like George Saunders that there is a sensibility on the rise that is more accepting of your work than you've enjoyed in the past?

I'm not sure. I know that my work does seem to be considered too weird -- too boyish, too childish, too something -- for some markets, so I'm glad for magazines like Tin House and McSweeney's that offer readers -- and writers -- an alternative that's more out of the mainstream. They also seem less bound up with literary celebrity than some magazines. Or maybe they just conceive of celebrity in a different way, given their demographic.

Your short stories seem almost like challenges to yourself, with you inhabiting the heads of a staggeringly disparate cast of characters. The acknowledgment pages of your collections, meanwhile, look like the citation section from a thick academic book. Do you do research on topics that interest you and then decide to write stories based on that information, or do you conceive of the story and then do research to help with the writing?

I think they are challenges to myself -- that's a nice way of putting it -- nearly always in terms of stretching the capacities of my empathetic imagination. A story narrated by John Ashcroft began with my fulminating about yet another one of his inconceivably bad decisions as attorney general, for example, and then asking myself, ‘How does he do something like that, and live with himself?’ And then asking myself the question more seriously, and deciding that I would read all about him and try to find out. As for research, I read on subjects that interest me, first. Sometimes that sets off something that begins to feel like a story -- almost always because of some mysterious or elusive emotional resonance that I begin to register (as opposed to because I feel like the elements in front of me would make a good story.) Once I've begun to feel that what I've been reading might generate a story, my reading changes, and I begin to do more focused research.

How difficult is it to weave in the parts you have to create from thin air with the details you've learned from your research? Do you ever find yourself having to pull back from injecting unnecessary details simply because you went to the trouble to learn them?

Making stuff up is always the fun part. And it's hard, sometimes, to let go of researched details that are amazing, but part of the revision process involves going over and over the narrative with a ruthlessness towards anything that's thematically redundant or that seems to be retarding the narrative drive.

To that end, have you ever done so much research for a work of fiction that you considered pursuing the story in non-fiction form instead?

Every so often I've considered that. But a non-fiction piece like that, coming from me, would be a kind of an odd thing. I usually don't have enough of a thesis to shape something like that as an essay. Maybe my interest in the material is more visceral, and emotional.

Three of the stories in Like You'd Understand, Anyway – “Proto-Scorpions of the Silurian,” “Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak” and “Courtesy for Beginners” -- seem different because they're not based around historical figures or events. Did you give any thought to how they would fit with the rest?

No. I was actually happy that they helped vary the collection somewhat. And they're still all about weird people in extremis.

You were a finalist for the director's post at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a position eventually given to Lan Samantha Chang instead. What might such a high-profile teaching position have done for your career, good or bad, and how much did that weigh on your decision to pursue it in the first place?

I pursued the position, once I was invited to do so, because I thought if I was ever going to consider leaving my current job, I should at least consider Iowa. It's a chance to be a part of a program that's central to modern American literature. As for the issue of a raised profile, well, that seemed like both a good and a bad thing. And certainly the responsibilities involved in running a program were daunting, to say the least. I feel like I have little enough time to write as it is. And it's one thing to lose writing time to teaching; it's another to lose it to administrating.

Labels: books, Monday Interview

The New York Times issued its list of the 10 best books of the year today, and if good intentions count, I have four of them covered.

Truth told, I've read only one of the 10, Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End. I interviewed Ferris about his debut novel earlier this year. The Times and I aren't alone in our praise for the book; it was nominated for a National Book Award this fall.

The second of the fiction books I plan to read is Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, which won the National Book Award for fiction this year. The book has been in my possession, but I let it go for the time being because I doubt I'll be able to carve out the time to dedicate to its 600+ pages anytime soon. Someday...

The two nonfiction books on the list that I hope to get to soon are Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise, an overview and analysis of music in the 20th century, and Little Heathens by Mildred Armstrong Kalish, a book that promises a look at the "Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression." My grandparents lived that life, and I'm curious to learn more about it.

The best-of season is now in full swing, and it will be interesting to see if any consensus is reached.

Labels: books, criticism

I don’t recall where I came across Bob Hicok’s poetry, only that it immediately struck me as something I wanted to more fully explore. I had the chance to hear Hicok read a couple of years ago, around the time of the publication of his collection, Insomnia Diary. What I loved about Hicok’s poetry was that it was funny while making a point. There was wry social commentary going on here, the humor a bit of sugar to help the medicine go down.

As an untrained writer of poetry and fiction, I also appreciated Hicok’s background. He was a laborer who wrote poetry. He had no MFA, no academic pedigree. He proved that a guy with talent and wit and a way with words could succeed in a world dominated by academics.

When I picked up his latest collection, This Clumsy Living, I learned that some things had changed. Hicok now has degrees and teaches at Virginia Tech University. Though he initially came from the outside, he has been taken into the fold somewhat. The other thing that I noticed is that humor is not the first thing I detect about these poems. There is wit here; it seems to come too naturally to Hicok for him to simply turn it off. But there is a depth and seriousness to these poems; the wit seems incidental, or tactical – pulled out to drive a point home with a subversive laugh.

It is clear that at least one major factor in this change is the war in Iraq. Hicok seems fed up and has found inventive ways to convey his disgust, dismay and disappointment with the effort. “Happy Anniversary,” with the date noted as “March 19, 2006, the third anniversary of the beginning of the war, begins with the lines

There is a war.

This is a brand of minimalism: there are many wars.

Whenever you are reading this, this is the case:

people running and screaming and sharp things and dull pains.

In “A letter: the Genesis poem,” Hicok offers a short personal essay about the book, writing “We’re at war as I write. In Iraq, in case we’ve moved on to Iran by the time you read this. Most of the talk right now is about gas prices and illegal immigrants. Many people here don’t want elsewhere people to become here people.”

Elsewhere, however, Hicok seems to be coming to grips with the shift in his own life, from working guy who wrote poems to poet who used to be a working guy. “My last factory job” is a poem that details his job “pushing a rod. Steel rod/in a v-channel with a stick.” In “Beasts,” he writes a meeting with a former co-worker where he finds himself trying to explain tenure, “to convince him that the six weeks I have to myself/ between semesters isn’t a layoff. ‘I gotta get me some of that,’/ he says again, lighting a smoke with a smoke.” Later, “I long ago gave up/ trying to explain poetry to people like Carl,/ and have recently given up trying to explain people like Carl/to professors.”

At the same time, life just seems to have given Hicok a kick in the pants in the past few years, and he is challenging himself to find new ways to express these new feelings and sentiments and thoughts, unwilling to let the same old tactics express these new subjects. It makes for a book that was different than I expected – and I’ll admit, differed from what I initially wanted – but one that is obviously Hicok’s best.

Labels: books, poetry

Describe the opening premise of Antoine Wilson's debut novel, The Interloper, in a sentence or two, and you get the feel of a great short story: Relative newlywed Owen Patterson is frustrated at his wife's inability to deal with the grief she feels after the murder of her brother. Paging John Updike, right?

Wrong, for Wilson uses that as a springboard into a compelling, disturbing novel that finds him deftly walking a tightrope as he keeps Owen on an internal even keel at the same time the reactions of those around him reveal that he might be the one who is listing dangerously.

Owen decides that the best way to help his wife and her parents deal with the murder of their brother and son, C.J., is to inflict pain on the man who killed him, Henry Raven. He decides the best way to do this is to create a fictional lonely woman to write letters to Raven in prison. Thus, Lily Hazelton is born. Wilson allows all of this to unfold methodically, dropping in details as needed to expand our understanding of Owen at the same time Owen is trying to flesh out Lily. Things spiral out of control, as one might expect, but not in predictable ways. The result is a strange psychological ride that blends the typical suburban strife novel that the outset promised with some near crime/thriller elements to create an interesting, highly readable hybrid. Wilson earned a blurb from Jess Walter, whose novels -- particularly the great Citizen Vince and The Zero -- traverse similar ground.

Wilson is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop and currently teaches creative writing from time to time at the UCLA Extension Writing Program. He has a diverse background, though has called California home more often than not. In an interview/reading done at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City in September, he said three books made him want to be a writer: ' Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, James Baldwin's Another Country and V by Thomas Pynchon. Hear the interview here. Meanwhile, Wilson was kind enough to answer a few of my questions for the Monday Interview, which follow.

TIRBD: I could see this starting as either an idea of a husband avenging his brother-in-law's death or one that involves corresponding with a killer in prison. Was that the case, with the story then evolving to include both strands, or did you have the full idea from the outset?

AW: Actually, the idea for Owen’s plan, writing to the murderer in order to avenge the brother-in-law’s death, pretty much came to me as it does to Owen in the book. It dropped into my head whole and egg-like. At first I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I recognized in it the potential for engaging questions about how we obtain justice, not to mention an opportunity to create a character who would create a character of his own. I wasn’t 100 percent confident about the idea at first. I called a writer friend of mine to ask whether he thought Owen’s cockamamie scheme would make a better novel, short story, paragraph or doodle. He said “novel,” so I set about trying to find a voice, a situation, etc., that would take what seemed to me like a fairly high-concept idea and bring it to life.

You've mentioned elsewhere that your older half-brother was murdered, which gave you an interesting perspective on the grief of others. That's obviously an important undercurrent of this book. Could you have written this without that experience? If so, how might it have been different?

I wouldn’t have written the book without that experience, but for the sake of argument, I’d guess that had my half-brother not been murdered, I would have been more conventionally minded about the ways in which tragedy and humor aren’t supposed to mix.

In the story, you must balance the reality of your protagonist as related to the way he perceives everyone else reacting to him, conveying others' points of view through his interpretations. That's tricky business – practically fighting against your own unreliable narrator – that you handle very deftly. Was it difficult to pull that off or as easy as you make it look?

I made it look easy? That’s nice to hear. It was as difficult as anything else. Mainly it had to do with taking stabs at things, stepping back to look at them, panicking, mulling, and revising – the same old story. There’s an old saw, attributed to everyone from Hemingway to Dick Francis: “I don’t like writing, I like having written.” That’s not my point of view per se, I mean I like writing well enough. But let’s just say that some days… I appreciate the sentiment.

You're living proof that not everyone comes out of the Iowa Writers' Workshop with the same style of prose. Is that because you approached things differently, or is that notion just sour grapes from those who didn't get in?

The homogenization bugbear is alive and well, I see. All I can say is that while I was at the workshop, I saw lots of different kinds of writing. Of course, there was a while there when a bunch of people were peeing their pants over Alice Munro (and justifiably so). That resulted in a few Munro-ish stories on the worksheet. But imitation is part of a writer’s apprenticeship anywhere; Iowa’s no different in that respect. Proust was a master at pastiche before he was a master at being Proust. As far as my approach went, let’s just say I knew I was a young writer with a lot to learn. I set out to make each story different from the previous one, in technique, tone, approach, etc. I wanted to stretch my muscles, get some chops. It served me well enough, but I didn’t exactly leave the program with a collection to sell.

You teach and help edit A Public Space. Do these endeavors have any impact on your own writing in terms of seeing things to either try or avoid? Does your own writing provide you with fodder for teaching?

A Public Space is based in Brooklyn, and I’m out in L.A., so I’m not involved in the day-to-day running of it. In other words, I’m not reading manuscripts out of the slush pile. It’s been rewarding in the opportunity to help publish a few writers I really admire. (In the past, I have read slush piles, contest entries and fellowship applications – a practice I highly recommend to anyone interested in writing short fiction. You quickly see what works and what doesn’t, what turns you on and what turns you off. If you’re lucky, it can turn into a crash course in your own nascent aesthetics.)

Balancing teaching and writing is a tricky – there’s always a subtle pressure pushing the two apart. I’m constantly trying to bridge the gap between my daily experience as a writer and what I can impart to my students about “Creative Writing.” My first semester at Iowa I took a seminar with Stuart Dybek, who was visiting at the time, and he seemed to be able to teach stuff he was currently thinking about – it kind of blew all of our minds. Of course, that was at the MFA level. It’s different when you’re teaching an intro to fiction writing course at the local university extension. Still, I try to connect the teaching and the writing. Otherwise, you end up spouting a bunch of guidelines and rules that you yourself have long ago abandoned. It turns into a kind of fake thing, a hackneyed version of teaching. Beginning writers deserve better than that, especially if they’re motivated enough to show up and talk fiction for three hours after being at work all day… and pay for the privilege, no less.

You've now published short stories and a novel. Do you prefer one form over the other, or find one more satisfying than the other? Now that you know you can write a novel-length work, does that change your willingness to spend the time and ideas on short fiction?

I love writing short stories, but since switching over to novels, I can’t seem to remember how to write them. I’ve always wanted to write novels, and at the outset, at least, I considered short story writing a way to practice as I geared up for longer forms. Now I’m in love with short stories. I’d like nothing more than to stop writing this novel I’m working on and go back to stories for a while. Plus, since The Interloper came out, people have been asking me for stories. But I can’t seem to find my way back in to the short form right now. I don’t tend to work on a bunch of different things at the same time. I like writing one thing at a time. Reading is the opposite. Twenty books is not out of the question. I read them all as if they’re part of the same big book. It’s a problem.

You mention on your web site that you are "deep in the woods of a new novel." Any more hints than that? Has your experience with The Interloper, both in terms of bringing it to completion and the reaction to it once it went out into the world, affected the writing of this second work?

I’d love to give more hints, but that’s the thing about being deep in the woods – you have no idea where you are. It’s cold, it’s uncomfortable, night is falling and when you walk you tend to walk in circles. So all I can say with any certainty is that I’m surrounded by trees. Also, first person, ostensibly comic, no magic realism. My experience with The Interloper has for the most part been fantastic. Other Press has been very supportive about the book, and the publicity squad over there has done wonders. I threw parties in L.A. and New York, and returned to Iowa and Wisconsin for readings. Lots of good reviews. What more could I ask for, other than a healthier environment for literary fiction and for independent bookstores? It’s funny, some days I’ll be obsessing over my Amazon.com ranking and thinking numbers, numbers, numbers, and then I’ll get a random e-mail from a random reader about how much they enjoyed the book. I’m reminded that it’s not a numbers game at all, but a secret little connection between my words and other people’s brains. Which makes me want to retreat back under my rock and get to work.

Labels: books, Monday Interview

Maybe now someone will bother to actually read it.

Angry parents in Cumberland, R.I., convinced officials there to ban an essay originally assigned in a high school class. The essay, "How to Kill a Boy That Nobody Likes," was written by author Will Clarke and is featured in the anthology When I Was a Loser, edited by John McNally.

The mother of a 14-year-old girl who had received the assignment led the charge. She claimed that Clarke's essay was pornographic, and said that it wasn't enough that the teacher quickly agreed that her daughter could complete the assignment by reading something else. She thus appointed herself the school district's morality police.

"I'm not willing to lower my morals to prove a point," she told the Pawtucket Times. "I feel it is my duty to ensure that not just my child is never handed this kind of vulgar material, but (that) your children never receive it as well."

I wonder if she or any of the other detractors has actually bothered to read the essay. Probably not, since most keep referring to it as a "story" as opposed to an essay, and never seem to mention details beyond the satiric title and a few key juicy bits. Thing is, the piece, in which Clarke tells of his early school days as someone mercilessly picked on before he applied a lesson about subliminal advertising and used it to win a life-changing student body office, is just the kind of thing high school students should be reading.

McNally has risen to the defense of his book and Clarke, pointing out that many classic literary works -- including those by Shakespeare, Chaucer and Salinger -- contain bawdy language and questionable passages that can be taken out of context to prove a similar point. Here's hoping that argument doesn't backfire with this populace that seems unable to understand irony, satire or literary allusion, driving them to move to ban the work of those and others right along with Clarke. The hope of course, is that just as with everything else people ban "for the good of the children," it will spur those kids to seek it out all the more.

Labels: books, criticism, Idiocracy

The capacity of people to misread satire is alive and well. Author John McNally reports on his blog that When I Was a Loser, a collection of essays about high school and adolescence that he edited, has raised the hackles of some overly literal parents in Rhode Island.

The essay in question, "How to Kill a Boy That Nobody Likes," might sound provocative and unfit for high school reading, but if you bother to read beyond the title, it becomes clear that it is exactly the kind of thing high school kids should be reading. In the essay, Will Clarke writes about a how, as a high school student, he realized that the language of marketing can change people's perceptions. He uses that new skill to run for class office, a move to "kill" the boy nobody likes, namely, himself (not-so-affectionally referred to as "Will-tard").

A teacher had assigned the essay, it seems, causing some parents to balk, calling the piece "pornographic," and demand that it be removed from the lesson.

While the reactions are perfect examples of knee-jerk political posturing at its best, it does give McNally's book some well-deserved exposure.

Clarke weighs in on his blog, offering tongue-in-cheek support to the would-be book banners: "String up that teacher and the principal, too. They're just trying to get them kids to love reading and who needs that? That might actually get them to thinking, and we all know where thinking leads you....straight to hell or Harvard."

Labels: books, criticism

Maybe I'm making too much of this, but I've been reading a lot of crime fiction this year, and reading a lot about crime fiction, and I've found that not everyone sees eye-to-eye on the genre. Most highbrow types -- those who read literary magazines, for instance -- dismiss it. Fans are understandably defensive, and seem content to spend most of their time reading only in that small subsection of the world. Both are clearly missing out.

So it was a pleasant surprise to come across Richard Lange. Most of the stories in his debut collection, Dead Boys, were first published in those small literary journals, yet most of the blurbs he landed for the book come from some of my favorite crime writers, such as Michael Connelly and George Pelecanos. The other names under quotes on the dust jacket are perhaps most revelatory, because they come from people who, in my estimation anyway, have bridged the gap between those two worlds, weaving tales that are so well-written that few could sneer at the fact that crimes are committed and bad people do bad things: Chris Offutt, Daniel Woodrell and others.

What does all of this have to do with Lange? Simply that his book, no matter where you put it on the shelf, stands alongside the works of all of those mentioned above. There certainly are crime elements -- one story, about a bank robber with a conscience was selected for the Best American Mystery Stories 2004 -- but anyone who dismisses the book because of that is a fool, for this is one of the best books of 2007, regardless of genre.

Lange is a graduate of the USC film school, but fiction classes with T.C. Boyle seem have had a greater impact on him. His professional background is in edgy magazines and book editing, pursuits that, as he says below, left him the time and the willingness to write.

The people who populate his books aren't people I'd want to spend much time with, but I'm glad Lange was willing to stick with them long enough to tell their stories. He also took the time recently to answer a few questions about his work. Do yourself a favor, read this interview, then head to the bookstore and get Dead Boys. You won't be disappointed.

TIRBD: These dozen protagonists are a pretty depressing bunch. How did you steel yourself to want to spend this much time with them? Did you get attached enough to any of them that you felt bad about the fate that befell them?

RL: I actually enjoyed writing these characters quite a bit. They have extreme personalities and go through some pretty intense experiences, but at their cores they are all sensitive men trying to cope with the chaos that surrounds and permeates them. A trick of the light can elate them or throw them into deepest despair. A disapproving glance from a loved one can break their hearts for good. They walk through the world with raw nerves and wide open eyes, furiously alive.

As for the second part of your question, it wasn’t so much that I grew attached to the narrators as it was that I became them for a while. I had to embed myself in their minds in order to create them, and so I felt their dread when things weren’t going well and their joy when they were. A pretty intense emotional experience at times.

You're championed by some heavy hitters in the crime fiction world, though all of these stories were published in pretty traditional short story journals. Is genre a consideration for you? Do you identify with crime writers or mystery writers?

I didn’t think about genre when writing these stories. That the book is considered by some to be a work of crime fiction is fine by me, but I wouldn’t call it that. I do admit, however, to co-opting the language of crime fiction, particularly the hard-boiled stuff, and injecting it into stories that might have been fairly quiet “relationship” pieces without it in order to heighten the tension and describe the violence being done to the characters’ psyches.

I don’t read a ton of crime fiction – a lot of detective books have too many scenes of people talking in offices for my taste, or they’re tough-talking iterations of Chandler or Ross MacDonald. I love Elmore Leonard, though, Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, and Clockers was great.

While short stories don't always have a tidy ending, many of those in Dead Boys are very open ended; much more so than most. Was that an organic development of these stories, a conscious choice to try something different or perhaps a bit of both?

One of my intentions with these stories was to see how little actual plot I could get away with and still make readers feel like they’d had some sort of experience with the narrators. People who consume media are such experts in narrative nowadays that it’s possible to discard a lot of the old machinery and jump straight to the emotional core of a story, trusting that readers will be able to fill in the blanks. The open-ended endings are an extension of that. Do you really need me to tell you what happened next? And does it even matter?

People often say that place is an important character in their work, but for you, to say Los Angeles is absolutely integral to the stories is no stretch. Have you written stories based elsewhere? Assuming you don't spend all your time in the city's seediest parts, do you explore areas in search of settings for your stories?

I haven’t written any stories set elsewhere because there’s still plenty to write about here. L.A. continues to fascinate me and provide me with a wealth of characters and images to fuel my fiction. I’ve lived here since I was 17, on the east side, south side and in Hollywood, so I know the turf pretty well. The stories in Dead Boys are all set on streets I’ve walked and in apartments and houses I’ve lived in or visited and establishments where I’ve worked or done business. I could point most of them out on a map or drive you past them. I used these various real sites as stage settings for the fictional events that transpire there.

Did you always have fiction writing in mind, or was that a detour while in film school? How did your work for magazines impact your writing, if at all?

Film school was the detour, I guess. Shortly after I started, I realized that I didn’t enjoy the collaboration involved in the process. Too many cooks. I took some fiction writing classes from T.C. Boyle and found my niche. The screenwriting classes I took were helpful, however. They got me thinking about pace and structure and how to manipulate them. I learned a few important rules so I could break them later. I do love film though. Certain movies have been as important in my artistic development as any book I ever read.

As for the magazine work, I never took a job that required me to write, preferring to save that energy for my stories. I worked as an editor for years, and the skills I developed definitely improved my fiction. I’m absolutely merciless about cutting out the fat.

The second book of your deal with Hachette is reported to be a novel. Anything you can share about that project? Beyond the obvious, how is the writing process different with a book-length work as opposed to crafting a short story?

I’m almost finished with the novel. This time I’m actually trying to write crime fiction, so it’ll be interesting to see if I’m successful. It’s called The Kissproof World, and it’s set in L.A.

The writing process for the novel has been much different than it was for the stories. I’ve found that I have to be much more direct and explain things a lot more than I’m used to. I also had to open up my style, because the kind of compression I used in the stories would exhaust a reader (and me) over the course of a novel. In a short story you only need the most important scenes. There’s a lot more connective tissue in a novel.

For more, check out Lange's "Book Notes" post at Largehearted Boy.

Labels: books, Monday Interview

A hearty congratulations to Joshua Ferris for his National Book Award nomination for his debut novel, Then We Came to the End. I don't want to take anything away from his efforts, of course, but I can't help but think his Monday Interview here in April helped to put him over the top. Of course, the other 19 nominees in the various categories somehow managed without the TIRBD MI imprimatur of cool, but that's beside the point. Should any of the other nominees want to increase their chances, feel free to get in touch and I'll see what I can do.

FICTION

Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown & Company)
Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Jim Shepard, Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Alfred A. Knopf)

Fiction judges: Francine Prose (chair), Andrew Sean Greer, Walter Kirn, David Means and Joy Williams

NONFICTION

Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Alfred A. Knopf)
Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA)
Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf)
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday)

Nonfiction judges: David Shields (chair), Deborah Blum, Caroline Elkins, Annette Gordon-Reed and James Shapiro

POETRY

Linda Gregerson, Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin Co.)
Robert Hass, Time and Materials (Ecco/HarperCollins)
David Kirby, The House on Boulevard St. (Louisiana State University Press)
Stanley Plumly, Old Heart (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Ellen Bryant Voigt, Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (W.W. Norton & Co.)

Poetry Judges: Charles Simic (chair), Linda Bierds, David St. John, Vijay Seshadri and Natasha Trethewey

YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown & Co.)
Kathleen Duey, Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
M. Sindy Felin, Touching Snow (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic Press)
Sara Zarr, Story of a Girl (Little, Brown & Co.)

Young People’s Literature Judges: Elizabeth Partridge (chair),
Pete Hautman, James Howe, Patricia McCormick and Scott Westerfeld

Labels: books, criticism

Posting has been light here lately, and while it would be easy to blame life getting in the way, it also stems from the fact that I've been spending a lot of time plowing through books and listening to a lot of music.

First and foremost, the new Bruce Springsteen disc, Magic. It's a fantastic listen that seems to have polarized critics a bit. Most acknowledge that it is his most spirited record in a couple of decades, the first to come close to recapturing the bombastic majesty of his best work with the E Street Band. While some say it's his best since The River -- which is their shorthand way of bolstering their cred by not even acknowledging Born in the U.S.A., the flawed but still pretty amazing album that made Springsteen a superstar -- others say it is an ultimately overproduced disappointment. It isn't perfect, to be sure, but it sure is a heck of a lot of fun. "Radio Nowhere," the opening track and first single, may well be a rip of Tommy Tutone (something the local critic here in town noted but which I hadn't even recognized), but if any other guy creeping up on 60 made a song this fiery, it would make headlines. "Girls in Their Summer Clothes," a song that came out about three months too late, is often cited as being Springsteen's homage to Brian Wilson. It's really a tribute to Wilson's favorite producer, Phil Spector; the emphasis is on the wall of sound, not harmonies. Either way, it's a gorgeous track, and shows that Springsteen, even at this late date, is still willing to toy with his sound.

The new Steve Earle disc is a bit of a disappointment in comparison. While Washington Street Serenade has a good story behind it -- he married country hottie Alison Moorer, moved to New York City and hooked up with the Dust Brothers -- it doesn't feel so very different from his last non-polemic disc. Discounting the expired-before-it-was-released The Revolutions Starts... Now (a more accurate title would squeeze the words "any day" in after that ellipsis), this is a fairly natural sounding follow up to Jerusalem. There are a few strange beats here, and songs like "Satellite Radio" do feel different from much of the rest of his work, but it's still a Steve Earle record. The biggest disappointment is his take on Tom Waits' "Way Down in the Hole," a song used in various incarnations as the theme for HBO's great crime drama "The Wire." Assuming this take by Earle will be used in the upcoming fifth season (Earle appears occasionally as a drug dealer), it will easily be the most hamfisted version used. Where the other artists who have tackled it -- from the Blind Boys of Alabama to Waits himself -- have conveyed the menace in the track, Earle simply shouts the vocal with no inflection or soul. It's as if he was too worried about applying his usual grit to the performance, and ended up with something stale instead.

I've also been reading a ton, and some Monday Interviews ought to result. Richard Lange's Dead Boys was one of the best short story collections I've read in years, and one of the best books of 2007. Antoine Wilson's The Interloper, which I'm finding hard to put down now, is a startlingly original story that takes on complexity and nuance as it progresses. I also just started listening to Seth Harwood's first Jack Palms book-by-podcast, Jack Wakes Up. There has been a lot of buzz about the sequel, Jack Palms II: This is Life, so I thought I'd better check it out from the beginning.

Interestingly enough, Harwood and Wilson are University of Iowa Writers' Workshop grads. Just goes to show that the typical knock against the workshop -- that it turns out writers whose prose all sounds the same and who write books about how tough life is after college -- is flat out wrong. They aren't the first -- Max Allan Collins and William Lashner are other successful crime writers with a workshop diploma on the wall -- and surely not the last.

Labels: books, music

If a good novel based on rock 'n' roll has been written, I've yet to read it. That includes Jonathan Lethem's latest, You Don't Love Me Yet, a slim volume that tells the tale of an unnamed alt-rock band and the troubles its four members undergo. I was hesitant to dive in, despite being a fan of Lethem's work. The book earned some fairly savage reviews and I've had no luck with rock novels in the past. Reading Lethem's book, I think I've finally figured out why.

Music is something that must be experienced to be appreciated. That might seem obvious, but bear me out. Writing about a song that no one has heard is nearly impossible. You can describe things as sounding a certain way, but even then you usually fall on the crutch of comparing it with other bands and other songs. Plus, the performance of music simply isn't that interesting. That's why the light show was invented. People playing music, or worse, rehearsing, aren't really doing anything. It's like writing about someone doing their taxes or washing the dishes. Long ago in my college days, I proposed to some friends in a touring band that I would ride along on a weekend of shows and play roadie, writing about the results. They essentially told me that I could sit in a small room with the windows and doors closed so that it became unbearably stuffy and smelly, then sit around for a while longer, then carry some heavy boxes around, then eat bad food, then hear live music for about an hour, and then go back in the room before falling asleep on the floor. That closely approximates riding in a band all day, loading in, playing and then doing it all over again, and that's why rock bands simply aren't good subjects for a novel.

Related to that is the fact that rock lyrics and song titles often sound ridiculous in print. It's difficult to divorce the words and titles of your favorite songs from the music and experience of listening, but try to do so and you'll see what I mean. One of my all-time favorite songs is R.E.M.'s "Fall on Me," and that title and the songs lyrics -- regardless of how poignant lines like " Feathers hit the ground before the weight can leave the air" might sound -- don't do much without the music and everything associated with hearing the song again and again.

So when someone like Lethem pens a passage like this:

"They hadn't practiced in 10 days. So, the four shrugged halfway through their set list: 'Shitty Citizen,' 'Temporary Feeling,' 'The Houseguest,' and 'Hell is for Buildings.' Then worked a few times over the ending to 'Canary in a Coke Machine,' struggling with the elusive full-stop timing."

It only sounds silly. The reader knows there is no song called "Canary in a Coke Machine," so there is no "elusive full-stop timing" with which to struggle. That might not seem fair; there is no Tourette's-afflicted private eye as depicted in Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, either, but that book is fantastic whereas this one falls flat. What gives?

Again, it's the fact that discussion of music must be grounded in actual music. It is perhaps the only art form to suffer such fate. Novelists can paint a non-existent picture, recreate a made-up dance or direct a fictional scene, because all of these things are visual. They cannot, except only in the most general, unsatisfying terms, adequately describe music that does not exist. Or rather, no one has yet to my knowledge.

Further proof comes from the fact that the best so-called rock novels are written about fictional fans who like real music. Nick Hornby's High Fidelity is an oft-cited example. Hornby's characters, while involved with bands, listen to and talk about real songs. The reader either already knows this music or can seek it out. Either way, the reference point is tangible.

Lethem is far from alone. Bad rock novels seem a rite of passage, everyone from the wildly talented Don DeLillo (Great Jones Street) to Jeff Gomez on the other end of the spectrum (his Our Noise, a look at mid-90s indie rock, was one of the worst novels I've read, rock or otherwise) has tried and failed. It's like an unavoidable challenge that any and all music-loving novelists must attempt. Who knows; maybe one day someone will get it right. Believe me, as a fan who keeps coming back for more punishment, I'd love to be wrong.

Labels: books, criticism, music

It can be easy -- too easy -- to demonize the other side when it comes to political discourse. Take a few broad characterizations, some basic generalities and a healthy dose of stereotypes, and presto! You've created a straw man against which to rail.

But that ignores, willfully, it seems, the fact that those on the other side are just regular people. They have kids and jobs, they pay taxes and they have habits and tendencies that make them human, unique and perhaps even vulnerable.

David Mizner knows this well, and has crafted a novel that does as good a job as I've ever seen of finding the humanity in the political process. His second book, Hartsburg, USA, tells of a school board race in Hartsburg, Ohio, a fictional town once used as a bellwether to predict national races. As goes Hartsburg, so goes the country. But things have changed, with a mega church helping to turn this once-balanced town into one with a factional divide. There are the evangelicals on one side, and everyone else on the other. These two sides are personified by two candidates in the race for a school board seat that is Mizner's tale.

Bevy Baer, a member of that church, is running as a Christian conservative who preaches prayer in the school and swift discipline for those who step out of line. Wallace Cromier is her opponent, a failed Hollywood screenwriter turned small-town newspaper columnist who is running as a died-in-the-wool liberal. Such protagonists could easily become caricature, but Mizner takes pains to present each as a complete person. Baer's desire to see all five of her children walk the straight-and-narrow is something those of all political stripes can appreciate, while Cromier's doubts about the direction his career has taken are surely shared by liberals and conservatives alike.

To this mix Mizner adds a wealth of supporting players, including a friend whose best days were on the high school football field, the eccentric old man who holds the board seat the two candidates seek, a woman dying of cancer, another with a deformity that seems to bother everyone but her and many more. The easy blending of these characters is another testament to Mizner's skill. No one feels superfluous here; these aren't one-dimensional tropes who pop up now and again to drive the plot, but rather real people who brighten the corners of the story, showing there is nothing black and white about real life, popular political discourse to the contrary.

The result is a funny, illuminating and thought-provoking novel that ought to be read by anyone who thinks they know what makes those on the other side of the political divide tick.

TIRBD: What was it about a school board race in particular that appealed to you as a venue for exploring the political and social issues you deal with in the novel? Is it better suited than a city council or county supervisor race?

DM: A school board race, of all local races, seemed the most logical venue for examining the so-called culture war. Schools are often where the hot buttons gets pushed: homosexuality, sex-ed, religion, race. Schools are also a target of intense fear and focus: our children are there. The anxiety hovering over our children lends itself to drama. And ridiculousness. When I started writing the novel, I thought the candidates’ children would play a bigger role in the novel than they ended up playing. In fact, it becomes a joke in the book: a school board race from which young people and their interests are absent.

Reviewers have pointed out that you have written one of the most well-balanced books about the so-called red/blue split, offering well-rounded portraits of both sides. Being a liberal, which did you find harder to do: write about the warts of your own side or to look for the positives in the other?

It was definitely more of a challenge to write Bevy and her friends and family, simply because I’m less familiar with conservatives. I’m glad reviewers thought I was fair to both Wally and Bevy -- the book would be a disaster if there wasn’t something like

Balance -- although the people who reviewed the book are probably liberals themselves. I’m hoping to get reactions from conservatives, especially religious conservatives. To the extent that I managed to be fair to Bevy, it was because I like and relate to her. I'm similar to Bevy in some ways. We’re both disorganized and are always struggling to hold back disorder. And when I wrote the book, I was living on an island in Maine, isolated, and I couldn’t help but infuse Bevy with my loneliness -- that happened by accident. I guess it's a cliché that all your characters are you, but it’s true for me. To write a believable book, I knew -- or, I guess, figured out along the way -- that Bevy needed to be just as much me as Wally.

Having spent so much time with (albeit fictional) people on both sides of the divide when writing the book, do you have any deeper thoughts about whether we'll ever find common ground, or if we should try?

Yikes, big question. The short answer is no, there will always be conservatives and liberals and they will never find common ground. The medium-short answer is, it’s possible for us to better relate to each other as fellow humans and travelers to the grave, and we should be able to unite around our common economic interests. The medium answer is there aren’t really two sides, there are a hundred sides, and the culture war is a construct devised by the ruling class to divide the working class. The medium-long answer is, I can imagine a country in which the cultural divisions are less damaging and less harmful to the country, in which people, their material needs better met, are less fearful of progress. The long answer is it’s possible that the culture war, which is fought over sexuality and religion, will be replaced by a culture war fought over ethnicity and nationalism. The culture war, the sex-based one, exists in part because it serves the GOP and its corporate benefactors. With the younger generation of Americans supportive of homosexual marriage and abortion rights, the GOP might want and need to reinvent itself as a nationalist party less dependent on corporations and more reliant on the working class, a party that preaches an isolationist foreign policy, fair trade, and closed borders. In the GOP primary, with the furor over illegal immigration and the popularity of Ron Paul, I can see the potential fracture of the GOP and the birth of a new culture war.

Did you always have in mind that you would balance journalism with fiction writing? What appeals to you about each?

I’ve always liked the idea of journalism more than the actuality. I went to journalism school and discovered that I don’t like to call people on the phone. Then for a few years I tried to make it as a freelancer and could barely get responses to my queries. My dad got sick in ’98 and I move home to help care of him, to help him die, and wanted a big project, so I started writing my first novel, Political Animal. That’s one great thing about fiction: all you have to do is do it. Just open up a file. It suits me: I don’t have to bother people, and you have to deal with agents and editors -- the game -- only once every few years. And who knows? Maybe if I get big enough as a novelist, magazine editors will return my emails.

Wait, did I answer your question? Writing fiction, that’s my thing. I love it, I love the crap out of it, I love its bottomlessness, its depth. It’s a much-needed receptacle for my compulsions and emotions. I love the control it gives the writer. I see it as a way to craft out of the chaos of the world a modicum of order, a pleasing dense rectangle of order between two covers. I love doing it, thinking about it, reading it. I feel very lucky because it’s clear now that I’ll manage to keep doing it. I probably wouldn’t turn down a chance to write journalism, but I doubt there’s any form I’d enjoy as much as fiction. These days blogging is my second favorite.

You write for a couple of political blogs (and your own blog), which obviously gives you the chance to immediately comment on issues. Novels, both because of their long gestation and, hopefully, long shelf life, don't offer that. What do they offer for someone wanting to make a political statement, and how must that statement be made differently from a quick blog post?

A novel obviously allows you to make political arguments in depth. You convey a point or idea, and then keep saying “but” until you have something like the kind of ambiguity and contradictions that exist in the real world. Sometimes you’ll hear a writer say that a novel shouldn’t have a political message, but that’s silly. I’m of the belief that everything is political, and that every work of art has a political message. Often, good novels have political messages that are elusive, but not always. Some novels have a message no more ambiguous than a blog post’s. “The powerful abuse their power” is the message of many good novels. You probably don’t want to treat characters as mouthpieces giving speeches you’d give if only you had the chance, but then again maybe you do. That seems like a good rule to break.

We can't turn around here in Iowa these days without running into a presidential candidate. Ron Paul might be washing my car right now. We here like to think we offer a reasonable start to the campaign by forcing candidates to talk one-on-one with regular folks. Does anyone else buy that?

Ha! I think most people believe that it’s good to go state by state. I do. Otherwise candidates without tons money wouldn’t stand a chance. The question is whether Iowa should host every time. If and when Obama loses in Iowa and New Hampshire, as I think he will, there’ll be a loud call for a more racially diverse state to host the first primary.

The caucuses seem like perfect fodder for a political novel. Why hasn't anyone tackled that? If you decide to, will you name a character after me?

Great idea. I’ll write it if you don’t. I'd probably use your last name as a first name, Kenyon Carr, the blogger-critic who spots a presidential candidate masturbating in his car. Does he blog it or not? I was in Iowa for the 1996 caucuses, when it was just the Republicans. I was working for People for the American Way, helping to run a question-asking campaign. We got a nose-ringed lesbian to stand up at the Pork Congress and ask Bob Dole a question about homosexuality. And I had a long drunken conversation with Bob Dornan, who’s quite insane. And I remember walking through a high school alongside Lamar Alexander, and we got lost, just the two of us and one of his aides. We ended up walking outside in the snow around to the front of the school, and the whole time Lamar pretended he’d meant to take this route. He had no ability or willingness to break out of his role of man-who-has-everything-under-control. As if to acknowledge that he were lost would render him unfit to be commander-in-chief. It was sad.

Labels: books, Monday Interview

I usually steer clear of anything labeled "science fiction." I'm not a big fan of robots, aliens or time travel in my fiction, as I've always held that there is enough material as yet unmined here in good old reality to populate more great books than I'll ever have time to read.

But when I heard about Greg Bear's latest book, Quantico, it felt like something I would want to read; perhaps something I should read. The book follows a group of young graduates from the titular FBI training center who deal with various threats, both domestic and foreign. It is set midway through the next decade, so while this qualifies as science fiction because it is set in the future, there are no robots, aliens or time travelers to confront. Just terrorists who are a few more years advanced technologically than those we face today.

What first hooked me was the fact that this is a taut, well-plotted thriller. What kept me going, and frankly, what scared the bejeezus out of me, was Bear's depiction of the threats we'll soon face from terrorists. This may be fictional at the moment, but he supports his suppositions with science, and that makes the book all the more real.

Bear, who is better known for more traditional science fiction fare, said he came up with the idea behind Quantico when attending a 2000 conference on the future of law enforcement at Quantico. That, coupled with the increased awareness of terrorist threats after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, led him to contemplate the next step and wonder at the country's ability to respond to it. The resulting book is as much a wake-up call as it is a beach read, and the fact that Bear is able to straddle that line is testament to his talents.

He took the time to answer a few questions about the book for the Monday Interview.

TIRBD: The book was published in the UK in 2005, but not until 2007 here in the U.S. Was it caught up in worries about Americans' responses to terror-related work? Does it being pushed back affect anything in terms of the plausibility of things you've predicted?

GB: The book was set far enough down the current political road to survive this kind of delay – and in fact looks more prescient than ever now, as our current political season rolls on. And with the book’s great reviews and current success, it seems now was the right time to publish after all.

You wrote the book more than two years ago and alluded at the time to the Iraq war dragging on and on without resolution. Are you surprised how prescient that turned out to be, this far along?

Actually, I began plotting the book back in 2003, so it’s been almost four years. Several trips to attend strategy and threat analysis sessions in Washington D.C. and elsewhere let me pick the brains of a number of foreign service and military experts, and listen to their opinions – and by and large, what I heard was cautious or pretty glum. I also observed a lot of government professionals retiring or quitting to move on, rather like birds fleeing a big storm. In 2003, my own opinions about the Iraq invasion were very mixed – whatever the motives, I strongly felt the leadership was not up to this task. Had I been in charge, I would not have invaded. That set the tone for Quantico’s near-future post-quagmire situation in the Middle East.

You've said that the idea for the threats in your book came from work you've done with government agencies to brainstorm about possible events they could face. How did that work help with the other side of things, in crafting the response to these threats?

I learned a lot about how we respond to disasters at both the local and the federal levels, and how such efforts – in good times – can be successfully coordinated. In bad times, under highly partisan leadership, those ties get broken down, and efficient response becomes much more difficult. I think we’re still in a time of crisis with regard to leadership and response, though there are encouraging signs in some areas. When the political landscape changes again in Washington D.C., it may take a couple of decades to correct our situation, both domestically and overseas.

You write in a Q&A on your web site that you were asked by law enforcement officials to omit various details from the book for fear they might aid someone trying to carry out an attack. Did these omissions cause you to change the plot to compensate, or were you able to write around it?

Actually, nobody asked me to remove certain details – I did it myself. A few experts who listened to my ideas showed some alarm. I took that into account.

Do you ever scare yourself with the scenarios you create?

Like most of us, I kind of live in a bubble of false immortality – I don’t actually believe anything bad is going to happen to me. That said, I have a continuing and constant concern about our nation’s ability to struggle through another major attack without turning more xenophobic and self-destructive. The effectiveness of terrorism is that the damage is disproportional to the result – and sometimes the damage is self-induced. Our current crackdown on illegal immigration seems to me the last gasp of the right wing looking for someone or something to demonize and blame for our woes – a direct if somewhat delayed psychological result of 9-11, I think.

But when I’m in the line at the airport, submitting to a bag search, or being asked to put my liquids in a plastic pouch, I do not complain. These threats are real. Humans prepare and respond as best they can. I try to cooperate and help them out – but I still feel very sad, watching elderly brown-skinned people be pulled aside for additional checks. We need to do all of this better. That starts with a leadership that unites – and that the majority of us will be willing to trust.

In the afterword of the book, you write, "Sober judgment, selfless, nonpartisan planning and sanity are the only solutions" to the problems we face. Are these attainable, or will it take subsequent attacks to bring that focus?

We need that leadership now. With better leaders in place, we might not go quite so far off the deep end as the result of another attack. And I do agree with the consensus that such an attack is very likely, perhaps inevitable.

You also write, “The bullet you don't hear is the one that gets you. I wrote Quantico, in part, to make that bullet report loud and clear to everybody.” It's a few months after the book's stateside release. Has that report been heard?

In some respects, yes. I hear the under-secretary of Homeland Security expressing concerns about how biological terror might be planned by amateurs working in America’s basements – I paraphrase. I read in science magazines about how scientists and journals need to be more careful about publishing so-called “dual-use” lab protocols, and salient details about growing and modifying pathogens. The message is getting around – and I continue to spread that message, most recently at a talk at the Googleplex in Santa Clara, before a fair number of prominent scientists and thinkers. If we aren’t cautious, and we aren’t better prepared and more vigilant, we could watch some of our most important scientific revolutions be sidetracked by sudden security concerns. I don’t want that.

Labels: books, Monday Interview

Mark Jude Poirier quotes Susan Sontag in the introduction to a new collection of short fiction, The Worst Years of Your Life, and neatly states the reason why adolescence is such a heavily mined topic for fiction in the process: "The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread."

As he goes on to say, the "awkward years" of 11 to 15 are those where these feelings are at their peak. Looking back on those years has allowed scores of writers to navigate emotional mine fields with the result being a lot of great short stories and novels.

Poirier sensed this and put together this anthology, which collects 20 previously published stories from writers like George Saunders, John Barth, Jim Shepard, A.M. Homes and Julie Orringer. It's a fine selection, but I was disappointed to learn that everything here has already seen print. I love (and sometimes love/hate) Saunders' work, and was excited at the prospect of a new story. Instead, I'm treated to "Bohemians," a good story from a 2004 New Yorker. As a matter of fact, though I would consider myself moderately well read at best, I've already read five or six of the stories in the collection. It's interesting to see them all together and to think about each of them in the larger context of adolescent angst, but even a few new stories would certainly have sweetened the pot.

Adolescence is always a hot topic for writers, as discussed above, but now seems to be a time particularly suited to the over-the-shoulder glance at the past. Perhaps it's simply a sign of the times, as those of us easing into middle age look back at the relative safe haven of our teens. While those in Poirier's book looked back fictionally, a recent collection edited by writer John McNally finds 25 writers weighing in on their own high school years with heartbreakingly touching and funny essays. When I Was a Loser will conjure memories for everyone, be they geeks, jocks, nerds, stoners, cool kids or something in between.

While both collections are great reading, I'll give the edge to McNally's simply for the fact that it features new and original work. Poirier's book is certainly worthy competition, for it serves as a nice sampler, allowing people to check out writers they've heard of but never read (something I plan to dive in and use it for immediately).

Labels: books, criticism

In an interesting bid to sell classic novels to young people at times other than when they're needed for school reports, Penguin's UK division has teamed with a handful of rockers to create covers for its "My Penguin" series. It's a very UK-centric effort, with the likes of Razorlight, Goldspot, Dragonette, Johnny Flynn and Mr. Hudson & The Library (isn't it cute how the Brits have their own pop bands?) joining Beck and Ryan Adams to design covers.

Beck designed the cover for The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) by Alain-Fournier, while Adams painted a strange-looking cover for Bram Stoker's Dracula. Asked by Penguin why he chose the vampire's tale, Adams said, " Dracula is a vampire, and in order to better understand myself, and my fellow werewolves, it's important to embrace the enemy. The grass is always greener." Um, OK.

The true idea behind the Penguin series, which also includes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Animal Farm, among others, is that the covers are "naked" as seen above, and the reader is encouraged to design their own cover. Apparently these musician-designed covers are nor for sale, but rather are simply promotional.

Labels: books, music

It was only a matter of time before someone figured out that Joe Pernice had more to offer than his annual disc of literate pop-rock songs. Word from Pernice's Ashmont Records camp today has it that the songwrite has inked a deal with Penguin imprint Riverhead Books for a novel.

According to Ashmont, Pernice is about one-third done with the book: "If you ask him when he'll finish his face turns all red, and he yells, 'When I finish!'... If you ask Joe what the book is about, he sticks his fingers in his ears and sings 'la la la la la, etc.'"

It's not Pernice's first foray into the written word. He started the Scud Mountain Boys while working toward his MFA at UMass, and he has a self-published book of poetry and the 33 1/3 book about the Smiths' Meat is Murder under his belt. The latter was one of the few fiction-based 33 1/3 books, so there is precedent for the media hop from music to literature.

According to Ashmont, Pernice's response to signing with Riverhead was thus: "I am really excited to join the Penguin family, where I get to be label mates with writers like Homer."

Labels: books, music

Most people, if they know him at all, know Louis Theroux as the host of the show "Louis Theroux's Wild Weekend," which aired on BBC America. On the show, a clear successor to Theroux's work on Michael Moore's shortlived show "TV Nation," Theroux would shadow someone in the U.S. with an off-beat hobby or profession, capturing a good deal of the person's personality in the process. It was an entertaining and enlightening show, and when Da Capo books announced earlier this year that Theroux was publishing a book along those same lines, it seemed like a must-read.

The Call of the Weird doesn't disappoint. In it, Theroux catches up with many of the subjects from his shows, and the result is not only an update -- one need not have seen the shows to appreciate these tales, as Theroux offers the right amount of backstory -- but an interesting look at the way the lives and interests of the mainstream's fringe-dwellers evolve.

The book collects 10 stories, essentially Theroux's recounting of his reunions with white supremacists, anti-government survivalists, prostitutes and, strangely enough, musician Ike Turner. He details his attempts to reconnect -- many of which are surprisingly difficult -- and updates the reader about where the subject is now relative to where they were a few years ago when he followed them for the television program. Many have changed significantly, moving away from practices and beliefs that defined them at one time. Others have strengthened their resolve. While the stories individually offer insight into specific left field pursuits, in aggregate they tell the tale of a country whose crazy quilt make up (or, if you'd rather, melting pot) contains a lot of very strange pieces yet is able to subsume it all.

Theroux is clearly moved by these people, and his motivation for embarking on the journey was as much about reconnecting with people he'd grown to like as it was about coming up with a new project. The most incisive commentary about his work, fittingly enough, comes from the exotic dancer, Haley, who questions his ability to deal with the negativity that surrounds many of his subjects. His response: "This surprised me. I don't think of the stories I cover as particularly dark or negative. But later, i wondered if she might be right, and whether I was a little detached. It suggested sensitivity on her part that she picked up on it... at the same time, how strange, I thought, that she would regard doing stories on subjects like prostitution as requiring more mental strength than actually being a prostitute."

Theroux took time out from working on his latest project, a series of short documentary films for the BBC, to answer a few questions about The Call of the Weird.

TIRBD: You have spent a lot of time professionally with fringe-dwellers. What is it about them that leads them to be defined by their interests relative to others? Is it more than the simple fact that their tastes are outside the mainstream?

LT: Many of the people I cover in the book – porn performers, gangsta rappers, militia guys – define themselves by their beliefs and what they do. So it's not simply a case of the mainstream putting an identity on them; if anything, it's more true to say that these people have sought out an arena in which they can assume a new identity and reinvent themselves. It's noteworthy that in many of these subcultures part of getting involved is adopting a new name... like a cult name in Heaven's Gate, or a porn name, or a rap name...

More generally, I suppose these are worlds which offend conventional sensibilities: they're perceived as weird. And because of that, they're more worthy of note, and therefore they lend themselves to labels.

What makes people willing to share so much about themselves with you, particularly for this book, when they know there is the distinct possibility that you or your readers will make light of them?

They want to share their passion with the world. They feel misunderstood, or they feel they're onto something that other people need to hear about. By and large, people like to be paid attention to; they like to have a sympathetic ear. And they take a chance when they talk to a journalist that he's going to give them a fair hearing. I've also found that being based in Britain helps. Perhaps they assume that, coming from another country, I have less of a vested interest... And in terms of the shows I've made, being from the

BBC means the stakes are lower for the subjects, since if the story doesn't go the way they'd like it to, at least it's airing thousand of miles away.

It feels as if this book was as much about you wanting to catch up with people you'd grown to like as it was about simply writing a book. Was that obvious to you at the outset, or did it surprise you?

The book began as an emotional impulse rather than as an idea for a book, so it wasn't a surprise. I wanted to catch up with some of the most intriguing people I'd interviewed over the years to see how their lives had turned out and how they felt about me and I about them. If anything, the surprising thing was how much work it was to turn a personal exercise into a readable product. I think I may have been a bit naïve to assume that because I had this urge, the technical stuff – pacing, scene setting, characterization – would sort itself out. It was a lot more work than I expected.

What did these essays allow you to do in terms of storytelling that the TV show did not, or vice versa?

The book allowed me to explore my own feelings and motivation a lot more. On TV, in the shows, I'm kind of a journalistic cipher – eliciting information, finding my way through these strange worlds... But for the book, there was an onus on me to own up to how I really felt. It's also the nature of writing generally that you have to put more of yourself into it... and of course part of going back involved thinking about the nature of journalism and the relationship between interviewer and subject...

How would you come across if someone looked at your life like this? What would be their focus?

In a way my life has been looked at in this way. I've certainly been the subject of my fair share of profiles. But there is also an important difference between myself and most of the people I cover, since most of them are proud of adhering to some code or practice that puts them at odds with society, whereas whatever oddities I have I prefer to keep hidden away. You could argue that my job – specializing in human-interest reporting on offbeat subjects – is unusual, but not to the degree that most of the worlds I cover are.

Have you become interested in any pursuits you detailed in the TV show or book with which you were previously unfamiliar?

Every story leaves its mark on me. I recently did a documentary on high-stakes gambling in Vegas and surprised myself by developing a taste for gambling. A story I did on the Phelps family of Topeka, Kan., (infamous for holding up placards that say "God Hates Fags") led me to read the Bible more, especially Paul's epistles. Writing the book, one of the chapters is about spending time with Ike Turner, which turned me on to music of his that I hadn't known before... But by and large, what I take away from these worlds is the human connection of having met and got to know believers and eccentrics of different types, and that's mainly what it's about for me, and also what the book's about.

Labels: books, Monday Interview

Usually, the fact that an author has some tie to Iowa City or the University of Iowa is enough to make me interested in his or her work. That was professionally dictated to me for a few years when I was an arts writer for an area newspaper, but it is something that has stuck with me because the quality of writing from those associated with this town is often quite high.

For some reason, that never carried over to the work of David Morrell. That was my loss as it turns out. Actually, it's a bit disingenuous to say "for some reason," for I can sum up the reason in one word: Rambo. That's not even accurate, I suppose. Stallone is a better word. I equated Morrell with a big, dumb, macho guy who spoke with the business end of a machine gun, and that was not anything with which I wished to spend time. I was wrong on many counts. Morrell's first novel, First Blood, is a lauded work that was among the first to tackle the psychological scars carried by those returning from the Vietnam War (it was published in 1972), and was the first in a long string of thrillers from Morrell that have sold well, earned solid reviews and entertained millions.

So, even though Morrell lived in Iowa City and taught at the UI -- he left just a couple of years before I arrived in town to go to school -- I came on board terribly late, with his most recent book, in fact. But Scavenger hooked me. It's tale of Frank Balenger, a former military man, and his girlfriend, Amanda Evert, looking for a 100-year-old time capsule was riveting from the first page. It sent me in search of its prequel of sorts, Creepers, which explains how Frank and Amanda came together in the fictional Paragon Hotel in New Jersey. For personal reasons, I also picked up his creative non-fiction book, Fireflies, the account of his son's unsuccessful fight against cancer. It was a touching, thought-provoking account that showed Morrell to be a writer whose talents offer a breadth and depth unfairly overlooked in thriller writers.

So, while I may kick myself for ignoring Morrell for so long, the upside is that I have a lot of pleasurable catching up to do. Scavenger was his 25th novel and his 29th book overall. He obviously writes at a quick pace, but he took time out to respond to a few questions about his research, the business of writing and how geography impacts his work.

TIRBD: You are able to fairly seamlessly weave a lot of research into your books. Is that a natural process, or do you find yourself needing to strip details out as you go through the revision process?

DM: I love telling people about things that interest me. If I get excited about a topic, I can’t wait to spread the word. Sometimes I write a novel specifically because I want to learn about its non-fiction subject — photography in Double Image, for example. Photographs have always fascinated me. They give me chills because so many people in them are long dead. I wanted to understand that reaction in me, so I took photography classes and spent time with photographers, etc. It gave me great pleasure to put what I learned into the book.

For Creepers, I had that same fascination with urban explorers: history and architecture enthusiasts who infiltrate old buildings that have been sealed and abandoned for decades. With Scavenger, time capsules hooked me. That led to research about geocaching, letterboxing and the virtual reality of video games. The non-fiction subjects in my novels are trademarks, I suppose. In my first drafts, I usually include too much and impede the flow of the story. But by the third draft, I believe I have the correct proportion of drama and information.

It feels as if Frank Balenger could anchor a series of books where he is sucked into fringe groups and uses his wits and skills to persevere. Are you headed in that direction, or was it more a case of Frank being a good fit for Scavenger after Creepers?

Balenger definitely could be the basis for a series. In fact, I know of a further fascinating fringe group that he could cross paths with, resulting in another harrowing experience. But at the moment, I’m not inclined to go in that direction. I needed to use him in Scavenger because his ability to survive the nightmare of the Paragon Hotel in Creepers proved that he was a world-class survivor, and that made him a candidate for being forcibly conscripted into the search for the 100-year-old time capsule. What I enjoy about him is his determination to avoid the traumas of the present by retreating into the past. He reads only history books or novels that take him into a long ago time. That’s why he was perfect for Creepers and Scavenger – because the abandoned Paragon Hotel was a gateway into the past as was the lost time capsule. Unfortunately, he discovered that sometimes the past is buried for a reason. For now, I think he’s been knocked around sufficiently and deserves a rest.

On the other hand, you have successfully avoided the trap of having to write a series character – a notable achievement given the popularity of Rambo – which leaves you free to explore different styles and genres. Have there been times you've wished for the safety net of a series character, or is that freedom a worthy trade off?

The closest I came to a series were the espionage thrillers, The Brotherhood of the Rose, The Fraternity of the Stone and The League of Night and Fog. The first two books had independent characters, but in the third, the main characters of Brotherhood and Fraternity joined forces. It was a double sequel in what amounted to an unusual trilogy. I never pursued the series because my 15-year-old son, Matthew, died from a rare form of bone cancer when The League of Night and Fog was published in 1987. The series is about orphans searching for father figures. I couldn’t identify with it after Matt died – because I was a father in search of a son.

In general, I suspect there’s something reassuring about a series because the author doesn’t need to invent a new main character with each book. Thus, part of the creative challenge is taken care of. But I also suspect that, after a series continues for a while, it becomes harder to find new fresh things for the character to do. I’ve been a published author for 35 years. I think one of the reasons I lasted so long is that I kept looking for new directions. The thriller format is a marvelously creative one, with all sorts of possibilities. All my novels have action and suspense, but after that, I like to go in new directions. Creepers and Scavenger, for example, are experiments in what I call “eerie thrillers,” novels that have the moody atmosphere of a ghost story but that don’t actually have anything supernatural in them. But now, to prove my perversity, I’m returning to the spy genre, something I haven’t done since 1996. As always, there’s a difference. The next book is called The Spy Who Came for Christmas. It’s an intense contemporary espionage story that takes place on Christmas Eve, Santa Fe, N.M., where I now live. Santa Fe is ski area that’s a top tourist destination during the holidays. In the midst of the action, the reader will learn the spy’s version of the traditional Nativity story.

While many people associated with the University of Iowa Writers Workshop have experienced critical success, few have enjoyed the commercial success you do? Is that simply a matter of genre, or is there something these other writers are missing?

Actually, I was never associated with the Iowa Writers Workshop. My doctorate from Penn State is in American literature. I was a professor in the University of Iowa English department from 1970 to 1986: Hemingway, Faulkner, Wharton, Steinbeck, etc. The Workshop has its share of commercially successful writers, but for the most part, Workshop graduates tend to be concerned if the phrase “commercially successful” is associated with them. They seem to worry that it taints their artistic reputations.

I’m reminded of when James Michener came to the University of Iowa in the early 1980s. He donated $1 million to the Writers Workshop, with the idea that the interest would be used for scholarships. I made a point of going to the presentation and was struck that only the director of the Workshop attended. No writing student was there, even though they would benefit from the bequest. Michener began his presentation by saying, “Good morning. My name is James Michener. I’m a professional writer and proud of that. All my life, I’ve taken money out of the system. Now I’m here to put money back into it.” His use of the expression “professional writer” is not something that would have been considered a plus.

The Workshop’s attitude might have changed since then. I don’t know. But before I left in 1986, I offered to teach a course in the “Business of Writing,” how to read a contract, how to publicize a book, how to manage a career. The then-director didn’t see the need for such a course. For him, “business” and “writing” didn’t go together. At the same time, Workshop students were constantly asking me to advise them about contracts they’d received. What I’m getting at is that if an author believes that financial success will taint her or his reputation as an artist, maybe that author will tend toward topics and approaches that are intended for a small audience. In my own case, I love thrillers. In Europe, no one makes a fuss if someone like Graham Greene writes This Gun for Hire or The Third Man, but in the United States, critics disparage thriller writers out of hand. I attribute this to the Calvinistic basis of our culture. Traditionally, having fun is considered to be bad for us. A “good” book is one that requires work. My own view is that thrillers offer unlimited opportunities for communication and experimentation. Their thematic potential is huge, especially given the current state of the world. That’s one reason Gayle Lynds and I co-founded the International Thriller Writers organization: to spread the word.

Has moving from Iowa to New Mexico changed you as a writer in any way? What about getting away from teaching?

I still teach, but now my subject is fiction writing rather than the novels of Hemingway and Faulkner, etc. I’m frequently asked to go to various schools and writers’ groups, where I deliver a six-hour workshop about various elements of fiction writing. I do perhaps 20 a year. It’s great fun to be in the classroom again, and it’s a joy to be with creative people. As for my change of locale, my wife and I left Iowa City five years after Matt’s death. It was necessary. So much of the city reminded us of him. We needed to make a break and live somewhere totally different. Later, we learned that Sante Fe is known as the City Different. It’s at 7,000 feet in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Parts of it feel like Mexico. Psychologically, it was healthy. My wife called it the beginning of act three. I don’t know if the move changed me. Certainly Matt’s death did. With each book, I try to change a little.

For a guy who started with a doctoral thesis about John Barth, you've veered a considerable distance away from the kind of writing he did (and away, for the most part, from non-fiction). Any long-percolating projects that depart from the thriller genre that might one day see the light of day?

I wrote a non-fiction book, Fireflies, about my son’s death. That book has been of benefit to a lot of other parents in grief. I did a writing book, Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing, which will soon be re-published in a revised edition and with a new title, The Successful Novelist: A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing. I’m co-editing a collection Thrillers: 100 Must Reads, in which 100 contemporary thriller writers each contribute a one-thousand word essay about their favorite thriller. It’s a project for the International Thriller Writers, and its purpose is to educate readers about the wonderful breadth and depth of the genre.

As far as novels are concerned, it’s not as if I have a choice about writing thrillers. They choose me more than I choose them. In my youth, they gave me sanctuary from a very unhappy home life. As an adult, those are the stories that grip me, and they provide a sanctuary for others. The fan letters I most treasure are those in which troubled readers thank me for helping them get through the night.

Labels: books, Monday Interview

After 25 straight Monday Interviews, I'm taking a break this week. Last week's Larry Brown Week wore me out. The interviews will resume next week with novelist David Morrell.

In the meantime, here are links to the first 25:

George Pelecanos, author of The Night Gardener
Mark Anderson of Andertoons
James Sallis, author of Drive
Richard Edwards of Margot & the Nuclear So and Sos
Steve Berlin of Los Lobos
Craig McDonald, author of Art in the Blood
Mark Moskowitz, filmmaker of "The Stone Reader"
Matthew Ryan, singer-songwriter
Steve Hamilton, author of A Stolen Season
John McNally, author of America's Report card
Jess Walter, author of The Zero
Ken Bruen, author of American Skin
Sean Moeller of Daytrotter.com
Lawrence Block, author of Lucky at Cards
Ross Flournoy of the Broken West
Duane Swierczynski, author of The Blonde
John Sellers, author of Perfect from Now On
Matthew Grimm, singer-songwriter
Charles Ardai, editor of Hard Case Crime
William Gay, author of Twilight
Jonathan Meiburg of Shearwater
Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End
Harlan Coben, author of The Woods
Tony Millionaire,creator of "The Drinky Crow Show"
Shannon Ravenel, editor of Larry Brown's A Miracle of Catfish

Labels: books, crime fiction, Monday Interview,