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     |  What we’re up against is Alphaville, the deconstruction of the human which can’t be accomplished unless our everyday literary culture is dismantled first. That’s a world where no one can ask why only because. Where there can be no rebellion and words are systematically banned from the dictionary because they would encourage independent ideas. Continue reading Independent Bookstores and the Rise of the Zombie  Imagine that forming a home library was a kind of horticulture. Imagine books without writers. Here’s how it might work: You lay out for yourself a fine selection of bookshelves in a sunny room. You water the shelves appropriately and then leave time for the books to germinate and start to grow on their own! If you had a fine basement library like my good friend JC, then you could grow books like mushrooms, direct from the fungus! Continue reading When Robots Can Read, Will You Still Want To? 
I loved “The Odds”. Art is Continue reading The Odds by Stewart O’Nan  Tell me how you read and I’ll tell you who you are. It’s the most common type of readership that we want to avoid. But we are all guilty of engorging an enormous hunk of text into our brains and letting nothing come out. It’s like sitting down to a gourmet meal at a friend’s house and then when it comes time to clean up, refusing to join in. Continue reading Montaigne Reads A Book  “Media fawning is addictive,” Lionel Shriver writes in The Guardian, “but not very nutritious… The world is teeming with hungry has-beens snuffling around for public acclaim with all the unseemly desperation of heroine addicts. Snort a few hits, just don’t start main-lining.” Continue reading Dispatch from the Story Prize Underdog  Huey P. “The Kingfish” Long inspired numerous authors, though none of the resulting fictional characters entranced the public’s imagination like Warren’s Willie Stark. Stark bears the least resemblance to the politician, yet he’s the fictional character most associated with him. Continue reading Thinking and Feeling: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men  Someday, a graduate student will do a catalog of every cultural reference in the book: every Hollywood movie, every piece of music high or low, every pop culture reference, writer, philosophical and religious concept that Murakami has included and form a snapshot of Murakami’s brain. Continue reading On Murakami’s 1Q84 part 3  The opening of 1Q84 grabbed me immediately. A businesswoman is trapped in a taxi in gridlock on an elevated expressway. She will be late for an important appointment. We wonder what kind of an appointment it is. I have been tempted to ditch a gridlocked cab in the middle of the street to make my appointment. But I’ve never been tempted to climb down a service ladder to the street below. Continue reading On Murakami’s 1Q84  The Icelandic sagas were an ancient path that subsequent writers didn’t go down. I’m fascinated by lost versions of reality and thought I had found one in the still-born Icelandic sagas that seemed to dead-end their literature. Continue reading How to Write Like a Viking  It’s a special kind of reflection that Updike conjures, in which I alternately zoom in to see the scene as young Sammy, and pan out to proudly observe from the safety of my adulthood. It really doesn’t matter whether the girls pay Sammy any attention, or whether we know anything deep about him or any of the other characters – the moral to this short story is that standing up to fight the good fight is an unconditional action. Continue reading “A & P” by John Updike  Egan really nailed this hot literary device of writing characters that nobody likes – and it is effective: when not rooting for their personal hero, a reader is forced to really dig in and grasp the situation at hand. The device – does it have a name? – calls attention and respect to the writing, story structure, and consistency of character development. It’s a bold and potentially risky choice that makes me stand up and pay attention: this writer has something to say. Continue reading On Jennifer Egan  I was once told as a bookseller that I wasn’t allowed to write a negative review of a book. Let’s leave aside that I probably wouldn’t want to write about a book that I didn’t like. Or that I could like some aspects of a book but not others. That’s called a nuanced review for those philistines who don’t get it that opinions can be qualified. There are no philistines in publishing. Say that three times. Continue reading Can We Dare Admit That Some Books Are Better Than Others?  Where is the best place to run ads? Does USA Today work, or the NYT? Do the people who read those publications turn to their computer and buy the book in whatever format they desire? Or did the ads run in those places because publishers have targeted (acquired) their lists to people who read those publications? Continue reading Everyone Reads Danielle Steel  Like Steinbeck (and Dickens and Twain), O’Nan writes about “the little people.” He’s a bard for the blue collar, reporting on the quiet and sometimes desperate lives of decent folks who may not be making headlines with their heroism, but in whom we recognize ourselves with a clarity that is all too rare in modern literature Continue reading Emily Alone by Stewart O’Nan  Publicists want to focus the attention, and monetize the coverage. But if publicists were smart, they’d ask us to post this stuff three months BEFORE pub, because book blogs function best as places where the conversations starts–don’t you think? I feel like we (book bloggers) drive interest, not book sales–particularly because many of our readers (agents, editors, writers, booksellers, etc.) can get a galley (for free) of anything they want simply by asking the publisher. Continue reading What Blogs Can Do |  | ||
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JE: It’s no secret around here that I’ve long been a big fan of Stewart O’Nan. In his unassuming and workmanlike way, he may be the best American novelist of the past twenty years. Certainly, he’s the most underrated. I love his tiny apertures, his luminous details, and of course his range. Despite O’Nan’s obvious attention to craft, his writing never feels overworked.–it always serves the story,. He rarely draws attention to himself. I love that he’s not a show-off–because he could be if he wanted to. The bottom line is O’Nan doesn’t need to show off, because he knows the characters are the story, and he knows how to unfold them.
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