Steven G. Kellman -- winner of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing

Texas is lucky to have Steve Kellman. Were it not for academia's geography putting a twist in fate and making him a professor in the department of English, Classics and Philosophy at The University of Texas at San Antonio, the state wouldn’t be able to claim his practically regular-as-morning-coffee contributions to the Texas Observer and the San Antonio Current, or more occasionally, The Georgia Review and others. The selections he submitted for this year's Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing indicate how many innocent-looking citizens with access to the publication racks and newspaper-dispensing machines of his town are walking around dangerously armed with the literary zingers, intellectual asides and plumb wisdom they get when they read his reviews.

Nobody knows as well as a general interest reviewer, whose ranks the Balakian award was designed to honor, how hard it is to write democratically but not dumbly. Kellman can slip Milton into a review of Cormac McCarthy's The Road without seeming pretentious or reaching, and is just as solid relating the novel to, well, the rest of McCarthy's work. A good reviewer also distinguishes his or herself by writing memorably about books that everyone else has been assigned too -- "This is the way the world ends -- not with a bang, but two guys on the open road," begins his McCarthy piece, which sets it apart from the get-go in terms of the ideas and allusions it will go on to explore. On the other hand, not everybody would take on Walter Benn Michael's The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, or Michael Oren’s recent Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present or Consuming Silences: How We Read Authors Who Don’t Publish, by Myles Weber. (Kellman’s own biography of Henry Roth gives him a nice edge there.) It may not be as easy to be equally witty and profound about those books as Tom Lutz’s Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers and Bums in America, but he makes it look so. His is not niche reviewing. His range is open to the most extreme elements, in the writers he considers, but also in himself. That takes guts, and keeps reviewing fresh.

--Celia McGee, NBCC board member

Scott McLemee on Steven Kellman

In today's InsiderHigherEd.com, former Balakian winner Scott McLemee dedicates his column to Wilifred Sheed and tips his hat to our new Balakian winner, Steven G. Kellman, who he reminds is quietly amassing a gargantuan body of work:

The full bibliography of Kellman’s work runs to appalling length. The list of his scholarly works alone would be impressive. Once you count his pieces for newspapers and magazines, the question of whether he can somehow write in his sleep does come up. As another Balakian winner who saw the list told me, “He’s reviewed more books than I’ve ever read.”

Kellman tells McLemee the driving impetus for this torrent is not mania, but a love of the written word.

"What hooked me on bookery was the exhilaration of slinging words on the page and making them prance. The impulse is the same whether I am writing an academic monograph whose print run is in the low four figures or a guest column for Newsweek.”

He calls it “dispiriting” that “so many of those who profess literature, who have dedicated their lives to discovering and sharing the delicacies and intricacies of verbal art, display dull indifference to their own use of language.” The result, he says, is usually prose as succulent as a bowl of mashed turnips.

**

Around the World with Balakian winner Steven G. Kellman

In this review of Michael B. Oren's Power, Faith and Fantasy, Kellman points out that America's involvement with the Middle East is older than the U.S. itself.

Kellman cottons to Cormac McCarthy's NBCC finalist, "The Road."

He puts his finger on a theme running through Margaret Atwood's work in this review of "The Blind Assassin."

Kellman checks in on the life of NBCC lifetime achievement winner, Leslie Fielder, with this brief review of "Too Good to be True: The Life and Work of Leslie Fielder."

He sings the slacker aesthetic in this piece on Tom Lutz's "Doing Nothing."

NBCC member Michael Orthofer reviews Kellman's "Switching Languages" over at the Complete Review.

Jonathan Rosen admires Kellman's biography of Henry Roth in "The New Yorker," saying it "does an excellent job exploring Roth’s creative life, its grim cessation and its miraculous rebirth."

**

James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

Julie Phillip's "James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon" is a finalist for the 2006 NBCC Award in Biography.

SHE IS REMEMBERED, when she is remembered at all, as the eccentric woman who published marvelous, edgy science fiction stories in the 1960s and '70s under the name James Tiptree, Jr. -- a name she took off of a jam jar. And for this short, dazzling run alone, Alice B. Sheldon would merit a biography. But she was much more than just a fleeting sci-fi world sensation, as Julie Phillips makes clear in her splendid reconstruction of this brilliant and multifaceted woman's troubled life. Sheldon played many roles in her seven decades: the dutiful daugher of a glamorous, globe-trotting mother; flirtatious socialite; army officer; CIA agent; journalist; painter; devoted wife. But it was only in middle age, after she began writing in the guise of reclusive avuncular James Tiptree, Jr., that she found, all too briefly, an outlet for her prodigious talents and energies. The sexual, artisitc and intellectual contradictions Sheldon mostly failed to accommodate in her own stormy life, Phillips captures and contains -- in all their complexity -- in this deeply intelligent and generous biography.

Selected reviews: The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, January magazine, Salon (where NBCC Board Member Laura Miller finds "a rich exploration of the attractions and perils of writerly personas) and the Austin Chronicle.

-- Jennifer Reese, NBCC Board Member

Beyond Thunderdome

Today's posts will address former NBCC winner Cormac McCarthy's latest novel, "The Road," a finalist for the 2006 NBCC prize for fiction.

How cool is Cormac McCarthy (not to be confused with the folk-n-blues artist of the same name)? He's only slightly more press-friendly than Thomas Pynchon -- as far as I can tell he's given two interviews in the past 15 years, one to the New York Times ("'It's very interesting to see an animal out in the wild that can kill you graveyard dead,' he says with a smile") and one to Vanity Fair (for which I can't find a link). He's a writer of towering gravity and self-possession (my greatest fear for him is occasional over-earnestness) whose output consists almost exclusively of major works. And in his seventies (b. 1933) he's recalibrating the huge, precise machinery of his prose to produce something remarkably similiar to genre fiction: the serial killer thriller No Country for Old Men, and the Mad Max post-apocalypse The Road, which is a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle prize in fiction.

To repeat myself: in The Road McCarthy, a writer of near-infinite dignity – he's pretty much the last living Modernist novelist – took on a trash-movie genre, the post-apocalyptic nightmare, the stuff of which Kevin Costner's Waterworld was made. (Kazuo Ishiguro pulled off a similar feat, only with clones, in the equally crushing Never Let Me Go, also an NBCC finalist.) The heroes are a father and a son, trudging across earth out of which every living cell has been burnt, going nowhere, with nothing to hope for. McCarthy goes whole hog: cannibalistic marauders, blast victims left smoldering in their charred clothing, the works. He never condescends to his premise. He commits to it totally and unwinkingly. He makes damn sure you feel ever inch of what humanity lost when the bombs fell, and why we lost it, and what the slow ensuing death will be like, and why most of us didn't deserve what we had in the first place.

Of course, like all good science fiction, The Road isn't really about the future at all: it's about the present. I have the distinct impression that The Road is what the world looks like to McCarthy right now. To him the apocalypse has already occurred, and the rest of us are just beginning to figure it out.

-- Lev Grossman, NBCC board member

All Roads Lead to Cormac McCarthy

A few critical perspectives on "The Road:"

But first, whoops, I found another interview, this one given to Wired. Apparently McCarthy spends a lot of time hanging out with Nobel-prize winning physicists at the Santa Fe Institute.

Janet Maslin, in a representative rave, called "The Road" "an exquisitely bleak incantation -- pure poetic brimstone."

Mark Holcomb concurs in the Village Voice. "It may be the saddest, most haunting book he's ever written, or that you'll ever read."

Writing in the Washington Post Ron Charles compares McCarthy's understanding of women unfavorably to that of "most middle school boys," but succumbs to the brute force of "The Road" anyway.

Alan Warner groups American writers into the Savants and the Tough Guys, with McCarthy in the latter crowd.

In this carefully balanced assessment (pegged to the last book but one, but essential nevertheless), James Wood questions whether a train can ever be "ribald."

In Seattle's "The Stranger," Chris McCann proposes a Cormac McCarthy drinking game: "wherein I took a drink for every occurence of terms like 'blasted landscape' or 'cauterized terrain' or 'a stark black burn" Whatever gets you through the end of the world, Chris.

-- Lev Grossman, NBCC board member

The Power of Art

We asked NBCC member Dan Barber what his favorite book of last year was and he sent us this painting inspired by (recent NBCC finalist) Simon Schama's other book of 2006, "The Power of Art."

The Brief Sunday Round-Up

Mary Ann Gwinn tells the inside story of how the NBCC arrived at its choices.

Board member Peder Zane adds his take, too.

The fun starts Monday. Former Balakian award-winner Scott McLemee will unveil Quick Study, his new blog for Artsjournal.com

AllAfrica.com touts Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's appearance on the NBCC fiction shortlist.

If you're in London, Alaa Al Aswany will be interviewed at Foyle's Charing Cross February 8th.

Amazon.com interviews Jimmy Carter on their site.

NBCC member Ron Antonucci wishes Robert Stone remembered a little bit more.

**

Critical Outtakes: Norman Mailer on Bush, Iraq and Fascism

Q: "The Castle in the Forest" is in many ways about the battle between God versus the Devil. Where do you think things stand in that battle now?

A: I don’t want to sound like a total ass in a newspaper interview, but I’m not too optimistic. Iraq is a perfect example. Wild open devilry. Look, if you want to talk about Iraq -- do you want to get into this?

Q: Yes

A: Well, the huge shock I felt when that war started was the willful blindness of people who were intelligent enough to know what they were getting into. And the idiocy of the people who didn’t know what they were getting into -- like our God-fearing president. You have a country that for 30 years -- leave out its tribal history, its 1300 years of religious divisions between Sunnis and Shia -- has been living under a monster. A minor monster. But what does it mean to live in a fascist dictatorship? It means that if you are interested in protecting your family, you may have to betray a friend. In other words, it's almost impossible to live in a fascist dictatorship without being filled with shame in one way or other. And if you're a person of any strength that shame is transmuted into anger. And so we are going to come in, with our blithe view, our young view, that you take democracy and inject it into a country? You liberate a country and inject it with democracy and all will be well. Whereas what they are looking for is not democracy but revenge. They are looking on life with fury. They are looking to rid themselves of shame, which they can't get by dipping their finger in a bottle of ink..

So that idiocy -- the willful blindness of the neocons -- was unforgiveable. And what it set loose --- Maureen Dowd had a very good remark the other day, you don’t attack a bee's nest with a baseball bat. And that was exactly what we did. And now what you’ve got is you’ve got a madness in the Middle East.

Q: When you were in the army, did you think of Hitler? Of getting revenge?

A: I thought it was good we were beating Hitler. But I was in the Pacific, so Hitler was really not at the forefront of one’s thoughts.

Q: It's often misrepresented in history that the U.S. entered the conflict to save the Jews from Hitler...

A: Well, they took their time about it. They didn’t get there in '33. And we may never have gone to war if it weren’t for Pearl Harbor and Germany declaring war on us. So yes, one of the things after the war that one could feel good about was that…

Q: What do you make of the comparison between this period and now?

A: To compare Saddam Hussein to Hitler is the kind of thinking you would do in an eighth grade civics class. You can absolutely quote me on this: I really think the level of intellectuality in George Bush's mind is comparable to the mind of some mediocre teacher who instructs eighth grade pupils in civics. He's a civics teacher at a middling level, at a dreary middling level.

Q: And we’re all paying for it.

A: And we’re all paying for it, thank you. Look, democracy depends -- it's very good when a democracy has a leader who speaks well. People really do take their cue from how well the leader speaks. FDR was able to turn the nation around because he spoke so beautifully. He had such command of language, such a love of language, such concern for it. The English were able to keep themselves together after losing the Empire because they had Shakespeare and they have a tradition of speaking well. And when you have a leader who speaks in dull slogans you are stupefying the mind of the country. That's his greatest sin -- even greater than Iraq. Is America is a dumber country now. The average person in America is dumber than they were in 2000.

Q: Did any of these thoughts enter your mind as you were writing this novel? As in, did you think, I should be writing a new novel, a "Why are We in Iraq?"

A: Well, I've written a lot about Bush, and I don’t think there's any need any more. He's not exactly popular any more. I was writing against him in the years he was pretty popular -- and I was totally offended -- but at this moment it looks like he’ll have to live with his sins.

**

The afterparty starts in the cab

....so after the NBCC finalists party I got in a cab to head back to my hotel. My girlfriend called and we spoke for a few minutes about the finalists, the Bawer dustup, etc. When I hung up, the cab driver turns around and says, "are you on the National Book Critics Circle?" I say, "yes. You've heard of it?" Oh, yes, he's heard of it and he wants to know why Tony Judt wasn't a finalist last year. And, while I'm at it, what do I think of the controversy surrounding him in the New York Review of Books? And did I read a bunch of reviews of books on Islam and Europe that he's been seeing in The London Review of Books and The New York Times. So we have this great conversation, and I tell him he's one of the most well-read people I've run into in a while. "I read all the time," he says, motioning to the passenger seat beside him where he keeps his periodicals.

And this reminded me of an earlier experience. Two years ago, when I was buying a jacket and a tie for the NBCC awards ceremony (I was wrongly 100% certain another poet would win, and I wanted to look good when I read my citation), the clerk who helped me pick out the tie asked what event I was going to. I told him. Turned out he always read the fiction finalists every year. If I remember correctly, he wasn't a big fan of CLOUD ATLAS. Couldn't get through it, he said.

--Kevin Prufer, NBCC board member

Why "The Occupation" isn't just another Iraq book

Until the November election last, it seemed like there was a new book about Iraq published every month, from Thomas E. Rick's "Fiasco" to the Iraq Study Group report. Fittingly, with so much informationa available, the best new books looked at the war through smaller prisms. Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" depcited the Green Zone as a metaphor for -- and literal reason why -- the way decision-making in Iraq happened within a bubble. T. Christian Miller's "Blood Money" examined how the Iraq War was a test-run for an idea that the US could outsource war, leaving the military wide-open to profiteering.

But while this war has been written about ad nauseum, reading "The Occupation" makes you feel as if one huge, obvious angle has been overlooked: the reality of life on the ground in Iraq before the invasion. Cockburn has been visiting Iraq since 1978, and he has witnessed, up close, the steady impoverishment of the nation from years of war-making (with the Kurds, Iran, Kuwait, and the US), mismanagement, sanctions, and out-of-control inflation. He knew that unemployment at the start of the war was running 70 percent; that doctors were being paid $5 to $10 a month. That Saddam Hussein didn't even control his own country, with parts of the south possessing so many heavy arms Hussein had to institute a buyback plan to keep them from using them against his own troops.

As Cockburn describes it, the US made an idiotic assumption when it assumed this desperation would unify Iraq's different sects. Instead, as they had before against the British, Iraq's various groups and sects unified against the US as an invading force before turning against each other. "The Occupation" tells the grim, powerful, illuminating story of how this happened. It is bravely reported, and a true addition to the knowledge about this war. Would that this "necessary book," as the Guardian called the book, wasn't so necessary.

**

The Sounds of Freedom

Here's a short passage from "The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq," a finalist for the 2006 NBCC award in nonfiction:

My favorite military spokesman was Brigadier General Mark Kimmit, who specialized in steely-eyed determination. He liked to illustrate his answers with homilies drawn from the home life of the Kimmit family. One day, during the first year of the occupation, an Iraqi journalist complained that US helicopters were scaring children in Baghdad by roaring low and fast over the rooftops. In fact, the pilots had started flying so low to make it more difficult for guerillas to shoot them down after several had been hit, mostly around the town of Fallujah, by shoulder-fired heat-seeking ground-to-air missiles. But in answering the Iraqi's question General Kimmit wanted to draw a deeper moral. The general said he had spent most of his adult life 'either in or near military bases, married to a woman who teaches in the schools,' and that on these bases 'You often hear the sounds of tanks firing. You often hear the sound of artillery rounds going off.' Yet Mrs Kimmit, the general continued proudly, had been able to keep her pupils calm despite the constant thundering of the guns by 'letting them understand that those booms and those guns were simply the sounds of freedom.' General Kimmit urged the Iraqi journalist to go home and explain to his children that it was only thanks to the thundering guns, those sounds of freedom, that they were able to enjoy a free life

-- from "The Occupation," by Patrick Cockburn

Six Things You May Not Know About Patrick Cockburn

He has two brothers who are also reporters-- Andrew and Alexander. He cowrote a book about Saddam Hussein with Andrew called "Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession."

His father is the famous journalist Claud Cockburn, publisher and editor of The Week.

He contracted polio as a child growing up in Ireland and still has a limp as a result. He wrote a book about it The Broken Boy (published by Cape in the UK - not available in the US).

He was the Financial Times Middle East correspondent before moving to the same post at The Independent.

He was one of the few journalists to remain in Baghdad during the first Gulf War.

He is currently writing a book on the Shi-ite leader Muqtada al Sadr, which will be published in the Fall of 2008 by Scribner.

**

Vote Today

A reminder to NBCC members: Today is the deadline for casting your votes in the 2007 NBCC board elections. So get thee to a computer and email your votes to Peder Zane. The ballot and voting instructions were included in the most recent newsletter. If you have any questions, contact Peder Zane.

Patrick Cockburn on Iraq

Patrick Cockburn is a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for his book, "The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq." (Verso) Here are some recent dispatches from him, as they appeared in the London Review of Books, The Independent, and a collection of interviews.

Two days ago, Amy Goodman at Democracy Now interviewed Cockburn after the State of the Union address to talk about realities on the ground in Baghdad.

Yesterday, in the Independent, Cockburn described a city paralyzed by fear.

Back in December, the New Left Review interviewed Cockburn about his background as a reporter.

That same month Cockburn wrote the Baker-Hamilton report was too cautious.

In October, Cockburn pondered how the U.S. went awry in this editorial.

Back in April, in the LRB, Cockburn reported on how Iraq was tipping headlong into civil war.

The Occupation got some brief in review treatment from The Guardian, which calls it "a necessary book," The New York Times, which remarked that Cockburn's "eye for the telling detail" lifted "The Occupation" "above the usual journalist's account of the Iraq War."

**

Lia Purpura's "On Looking"

Today's posts will focus on Lia Purpura's "On Looking," a finalist for the 2006 NBCC Award in criticism.

ON LOOKING IS A HARD BOOK TO CATEGORIZE. Lia Purpura's sense of the intricate rhythms of language, her carefully constructed imagery, her leaps of association and symbols all recall the language of a poet. Her seductive, confessional voice, her need to be plain about her own experiences as a mother, a writer, and an observer of the world call to mind the works of the memoirist. And her finely tuned critical mind, her need to dissect and understand both the world and the world rendered in art suggest the work of the critic and aesthetic philosopher.

In fact, Lia Purpura is all of these, employing the tools of multiple genres to examine, through a series of eighteen linked lyric essays, what it means to observe and to write. For her, choosing to look is often an ethical decision, a decision complicated by the act of interpretation, of writing it down, of knowing and, thus, bearing the responsibility for that knowledge. What does it mean to observe in an autopsy room a disquieting beauty? "[T]he jacket's wet collar. Soaked black with blood, his stiffening sleeve. And, where the bullets passed neatly through, the pattern when his shirt's uncrumpled: four or five holes like ragged stars, or a child's cut-out snowflake?"

Does observing another's suffering bring with it the responsibility of action? Does the carnival freak show inspire in us merely complicity? Is being observed as a sexualized object by an anonymous other cause for indignation? Pride? What happens when an artist transforms an everyday object into art -- when Chinese lanterns become "orange, papery pods gone lacy in fall, each with a dim, silver berry burninginside?" In these essays, Lia Purpura brings a nuanced, highly intelligent, critical eye to our most casual moments of perception.

http://thediagram.com/6_6/rev_purpura.html

http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~hbr/issues/fall06/articles/onlooking.shtml

-- Kevin Prufer, NBCC board member

The Savage Genius of Frederick Seidel

OVER THE WEEKEND I stopped into my corner coffee shop to get out of the cold and ran into a poet who was in attendance at the National Book Critics Circle Awards announcement party the night before. We got to talking about politics and then the war, and he began to talk about how impossible it is to live in America and write poetry without addressing the killing that is done within and on behalf of our nation. "I believe in the independence of the work," he said, "but you can't avoid the killing," he said, "the killing that's in our ecology. Pound did it! Whitman did it! Melville and Dickinson! And Stevens, too!"

I think this year we can easily add Frederick Seidel to this illustrious group. I don't mean to claim "Ooga-Booga" as an anti-war book -- it's not -- or say that Seidel has an agenda. He himself has written, perhaps facetiously, "My own poetry I find incomprehensible" But better than almost every poet alive, Seidel has taken on the revolutions of American life, and the passive part we take in them -- the casual violence of our public and private lives -- and turned them into wild and beautiful, and often wonderfully inscrutable verse.

It's possible to miss the dread and death lurking in his work. As many critics have commented, Seidel's poems are so very stylish, so funny, so mysterious. He is knowledgeable of films and of foreign cities and the pleasure of good company. He clearly also knows his Ducattis, too. Reading his poems can be like sliding into a plush banquet at a dimly lit, extremely posh restaurant. The world and all its tumult can feel so very far away.

But it would be a mistake to focus on the pleasure-mongering alone. In fact, the scissoring of Seidel's irony began to pierce through the panache in "Sunrise," his somewhat ironically titled 1980 volume, which won the NBCC award. The poem "1968" begins with this arresting image:

A football spirals through the oyster glow
Of dawn dope and fog in L.A's
Bel Air, punted perfectly. The foot
That punted it is absolutely stoned.

All the extravaganza and bloodshed of that pivotal year is then woven into a poem that, on the surface, is about a rockstar and his posse lazily kicking a football back and forth on a California afternoon.

This fin de siecle sensibility also animates "Ooga-Booga," which pulses with cheek and with finery and more than a little decadence, but then never allows us to forget the way that the killing corrodes the purity of beauty. In "A White Tiger," he writes:

You are in your bed and you are weeping
For no reason.
It is because it is tiger season.
The big-game hunters' guns are banging.
The corpse of real beauty is hanging
From a tree in darkness, waiting.
Of course, the Palestinians and the Jews are exaggerating!
The building is not a million stories high.
The moonlight is not going to die.
The Israelis and the Palestinians are by no means exaggerating.
The carcass is hanging from the darkness waiting.

Seidel uses repetition brilliantly -- layering unusual phrases and images, then relayering them in a way that's reminiscent of James Fenton's great poem, "Jerusalem." As in Fenton's work, there is an almost chant-like rhythm to Seidel's poems which propels you on and through, it's secret meaning working almost unconsciously.

I think Seidel even tops Fenton here, though, with "Kill Poem," an absolute masterpiece. In the opening few lines, Seidel literally dices his poem into little chopped up pieces, the word cut appearing and appearing and appearing again (inside of other words). You can listen to Seidel read it here and hear the "k" slicing through the poem's expensive skein:

Huntsman indeed is gone from Savile Row,
And Mr. Hall, the head cutter.
The red hunt coat Hall cut for me was utter
Red melon cloth thick as a carpet, cut just so.
One time I wore it riding my red Ducati race -- what a show! --
Matched exotics like a pair of lovely red egrets.
London once seemed the epitome of no regrets
And the old excellence one used to know
Of the chased-down fox bleeding its stink across the snow.

It's hard to describe the associative leaps made here without resorting to overstatement -- but the fleshliness of these lines is just so profound and visceral. The melon and the birds, the dead fox on the snow, the cut of the clothes and then the cut of the fur later cut to wear. This imagery perfectly sets up the rest of the book, which plays at the violence of lust, the appeal of decadence, the cackling truth that you can even dance like Astaire and still not live forever, especially in an age of killing.

**

Around the World with Fred Seidel

In honor of Frederick Seidel, today's round-up will focus on his 2006 NBCC finalist volume, "Ooga-Booga."

After reading "Oooga-Booga," Adam Kirsch believes Seidel might just be the best living American poet.

Click here to hear Seidel read from his poems.

New York magazine sits down with the delightful and debonair Seidel -- poet, Ducatti daredevil, and hotel bar afficianado.

Biker dudes like Seidel.

In New Zealand, Seidel is known as the Darth Vader of contemporary poetry. (scroll to bottom of page) --

NBCC member Joel Brouwer says "these new poems are as beguiling and magisterial as anything the septuagenarian jet-setter has written."

Barbara Berman finds in "Ooga-Booga" a poet who wraps brittleness around tenderness better than any other in America.

**

This book belongs to...

I usually think of myself as immune to the collecting bug, but even minimalist bibliophiles can be charmed by the idiosyncratic art form of the bookplate, as celebrated on the Bookplate Junkie blog. Lewis Jaffe posts images of the personalized bookplates of regular readers and such luminaries as Charles Baudelaire, Vachel Lindsay and Hart Crane. And he designs new ones himself, the latest featuring Animal Planet superstars, the meerkats.

30 books in the 30 days

Between now and March 7th and 8th, when the National Book Critics Circle Awards take place at the New School in New York, there are almost exactly 30 business days. So starting tomorrow the NBCC will be dedicating a day of the week to each of our 30 finalists. The blog will be guest edited by various board members, who will provide links, commentary, and a jumping off point for some discussion.

Things kick off tomorrow with a day dedicated to Frederick Seidel's irreverent and lovely new volume "Ooga-Booga," a finalist in the poetry category. We'll also soon be posting a link to our website, where you will find the full details for our March awards, including the topic of our panels, the location and time of the reading, the time for the awards, and a place to buy tickets to our gala post-awards party.

We hope you stay tuned -- we read hundreds and hundreds of books to get to this list and believe out of this group we'll find the books that will, as four-time William Gass so aptly put it, stand the tests of time.

**

Scott McLemee Invokes Wilfrid Sheed at NBCC Finalists Announcement Party

Scott McLemee, no slouch of a critic (winner of the NBCC's Nona Balakian award for excellence in reviewing) invoked Wilfrid Sheed, book critic, novelist, memoirist, as he announced the winner of the 2007 Balakian award, Steven G. Kellman, and the finalists, Ron Charles, Donna Rifkind, Gideon Lewis-Kraus and Kathryn Harrison. McLemee quoted a few lines from Sheed's "The Politics of Reviewing:" "No occupation designed for dim younger sons was easier to enter than book reviewing; or, once entered, easier to rise in. You go immediately to the top, it is the least you can ask.... So whatever politics a microscope may turn up in this game can have little to do with upward mobility. Since there is absolutely no way of not reaching the top -- and since the top proves to be so close to the bottom -- the satisfaction must be sought crabwise, foraging side to side, magazine to magazine; passing on the way other reviewers of similar, sometimes almost interchangable sensibility, who are lurching counterclockwise."

Sheed, who recently turned 76, tossed off memorable lines like this, on E.B. White's style:"White's notes to the milkman achieve effects that the others sat up all night for." And this: "The first extravagant praise kills writers like frost. Whom the gods would destroy, they first oversell." And finally, this: 'Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail,' is how Sam Johnson, blues singer, described the writer's life."

More News on The 2006 NBCC Awards

Now that I'm no longer posting from a borrowed computer in the back office of Housing Works Used Book Cafe, which graciously hosted our event last night, here's more news about yesterday's 2006 NBCC finalists announcement:

As we've mentioned before, the NBCC membership plays a vital role in the book selection process: The NBCC board chooses finalists from a long list we carefully build throughout the year, but each January, our voting members -- book critics from around the country -- nominate titles they'd like the board to name as finalists. If 20% of the voting membership names a certain title, it automatically becomes a finalist for the award. Many books over the years have been added by the membership, including most recently The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen. This year, for perhaps the first time in history, the NBCC membership successfully voted two titles onto the finalist list: Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, and Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home, two books the NBCC board had included in its long list as well. Nicely done. (For a detailed description of how we choose books for the awards, click here.)

We were thrilled so many of you turned out in what felt like sub-zero weather to celebrate our finalists announcement last night. From the photo above, a small sampling of the crowd: NBCC board members Jane Ciabattari, Mary Ann Gwinn, and Celia McGee, former NBCC winner Frances Du Plessix Gray, Lizzie Skurnick of Old Hag fame, the Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar, Gallycat's Sarah Weinman, Doug Diesenhaus of Poets and Writers Magazine, and many others (if you recognize a face I didn't name, let me know).

Many special thanks the past NBCC finalists and winners who came to announce this year's selections. Pictured here, from left to right: Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (biography), Amy Bloom (fiction), Mark Doty (poetry), John Freeman (NBCC president), Scott McLemee (Balakian), Eliot Weinberger (criticism), Francine Du Plessix Gray (autobiography), Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (nonfiction).

And the Finalists Are ...

Live, from Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in Manhattan, we're pleased to announce the finalists for the 33rd Annual National Book Critics Circle Awards, and the winners of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and the Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement:

The Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing
Winner: Steven G. Kellman

Finalists:
Ron Charles
Donna Rifkind
Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Kathryn Harrison

The Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement
John Leonard

Nonfiction:
Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso)
Anne Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade (Penguin Press)
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin Press)
Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Ecco)
Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury)

Fiction
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf)
Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic)
Dave Eggers, What is the What (McSweeney’s)
Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land (Knopf)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Knopf)

Memoir/Autobiography
Donald Antrim, The Afterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (Houghton Mifflin)
Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards (Delacorte)
Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins)
Terri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry
Daisy Fried, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again. (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Troy Jollimore, Tom Thomson in Purgatory. (Margie/Intuit House)
Miltos Sachtouris, Poems (1945-1971) (Archipelego Books)
Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
W.D. Snodgrass, Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions)

Criticism
Bruce Bawer: While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the WestFrom Within (Doubleday)
Frederick Crews, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (Shoemaker & Hoard)
Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon(Viking)
Lia Purpura, On Looking: Essays (Sarabande Books)
Lawrence Weschler, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences(McSweeney's)

Biography
Debby Applegate: The Most Famous Man in Amerca: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday)
Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968 (Simon& Schuster)
Frederick Brown, Flaubert: A Biography (Little, Brown)
Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (St.Martin's Press)
Jason Roberts, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler (HarperCollins)

What Are You Reading in Lefkes, Greece?

I was given a 3 month residency at The House of Literature in Lefkes, a small mountain town on the island of Paros in Greece. It's winter, and except for a bakery and a mini-mart, the town is shut down—no tavernas, no museums, no other foreigners, as far as I can tell, but me. I am in fact the only resident of The House of Literature! This is both boring and blissful. I am presently revising a collection of short stories, and I work every day until I am cross-eyed, then bolt down the marble stairs. Sometimes I wander through the narrow cobblestoned streets of the blue and white village but mostly I hike up to the hills. Yesterday I found a narrow path lined with Byzantine paving stones that threaded through low stone walls overlooking a valley below where farmers were building bonfires of last winter's dead boughs. Fruit trees are beginning to flower here and the hills are green with oxalis and studded with narcissus, wild thyme, and purple anemones. There is a pie slice of Aegean off in the distance and ancient churches and stone shepherd's huts at every turn.

Of course I wish I'd brought Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles with me but I was reluctant to overpack, so aside from a Greek phrasebook, a Lonely Planet and a Let’s Go, I only brought three books, LITTLE CHILDREN by Tom Perrotta, CORPUS CHRISTI by Bret Anthony Johnston, and Robert Fagles' new translation of THE ODYSSEY.

LITTLE CHILDREN is being billed as a comic novel but it's neither funny nor truly sad, just a story about two limited people who fall and fail in love. I left it in the hotel room in Athens, but I liked Perrotta's clean style and generous heart. CORPUS CHRISTI is a favorite among my MFA writing students at the U. of Arkansas and, for all the wrong reasons, I can see why: it's graceful and sensitive and dreary and hopeless and made me so grateful for this sabbatical from teaching that I almost kissed it as I left it behind on the ferry to Paros. THE ODYSSEY, of course, is gorgeous, and I read a little every night. This is a book that has entered my dreams. I will bring it home with me.

The library at The House of Literature contains few English books (this is a residency primarily for European translators; I suspect they let me in by accident because my first collection is titled ROUGH TRANSLATIONS) (I never look a Trojan horse in the mouth), but one of the books here is a treasure. This is WORDS OF MERCURY, by Patrick Leigh Fermor, a collection of some of the most spirited and charming travel writing I have ever read. I'm in love with the dashing Patrick Leigh, and will look for more of his books back in the States. I also found AN ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN GREEK POETRY, edited by two professors I knew from San Francisco State, Nanos Valaoritis and Thanasis Maskaleris, and this book has also been a treasure. Both Kavafis and Seferis are new to me, and they are amazing.

To find other books in English, I have to take the bus to the town of Parikia, and there I bought Nick Hornby's HOW TO BE GOOD, another non-comedy billed as a comedy, sort of a British version of LITTLE CHILDREN. The book sparkles when Hornby does lists and when he does dialogue and I was touched by some of its insights into marriage (you don't want to know), but essentially it's plotless and seems written as a vehicle for Emma Thompson.

I am grateful for all these books; they have been good companions and each in its way has taught me something I needed to know. But now…back to THE ODYSSEY! Athena racing around doing all the work (talk about a role for Emma Thompson) and
the bright busy tacking of the story line as it sails from cove to cove and that admirable hunk Ulysses; I'm hooked.--Molly Giles, former NBCC Balakian Award Winner

January 18 Roundup

NBCC member Craig Seligman's bottom line on Norman Mailer's new novel, The Castle in the Forest: "I'm sure there are novels that have triumphed over equally harebrained ideas. This one doesn't."

NBCC member Ruth Davis Konigsberg reviews the works of The Believer cofounders Vendela Vida and Heidi Julivits, but does not find an Aesthetica Julavita. She also has an essay in the anthology Money Changes Everything, just out.

There’s a petition circulating to move memoirst and New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg's Washington Post review from Amazon’s Jimmy Carter page. The petitioners complain that it's unbalanced to run a 1600 word attack by Goldberg, whose recent book described his experience as a guard in an Israeli prison, in a space normally reserved for capsule reviews. Complaints of this nature have succeeded in the past, but the review remains. Meanwhile, the petition has about 15,000 signatures and counting.

Travis Nichols wonders if Dave Eggers is stripping Valentino Achak Deng of his "Otherness" in What Is the What.

Michelle Nijhuis helps a stranger on skis.

NBCC member Mark Sarvas begins to reveal his votes for this year’s NBCC book awards.

NBCC member.Jen Miller read Caroline Knapp's Pack of Two before buying her own Jack Russell terrior mix.

Joshua Cohen reads from his novel Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto and Ellis Avery reads from her novel Teahouse Tree Fire in the Sunday Night Fiction Reading Series at KGB Bar on Sunday night at 7 pm.

NBCC member Laila Lalami examines the reasons to live in Iran in her review of the graphic memoir Chicken with Plums.

Reinventing the Serialized Novel for the Blogosphere

The serialized novel was a fixture in the nineteenth century.
As Duke scholar Cathy Davidson puts it, "The novel was the video game, the television, the radio of the day. Some were published inexpensively in what were called 'story papers' or 'penny papers. Novels and newspapers were seen as popular forms of entertainment that diluted the interest in the serious: the Bible, the essay or the poem."

Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins published serialized novels in Harper's Weekly, Robert Louis Stevenson in Scribner's, Henry James in The Atlantic. Julia C. Collins' novel "The Curse or Caste; or The Slave Bride" one of the first novels in a literary tradition developed by newly freed people after the Civil War, was serialized in the Christian Reader, the national newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The tradition has been revived in recent years, with a serialized thriller running weekly in the New York Times magazine and short stories published regularly by The Guardian. This week we saw the launch of a serialized novel on The Washington Post's website. It is Jezebel's Tomb, a 412-page novel by WashPost business reporter David Hilzenrath. And some blogs are making original fiction available online, as well. See here to read "Kid in a Well" by Willie Davis, who teaches at the University of Maryland. The story was awarded the Willesden Herald blog's short story prize by judge Zadie Smith. Willesden Herald is a long-running group blog from the streets of Willesden in London. Smith also chose last year's winner, "Secure" by part-time writer and part-time tiler Mikey Delgado, which you can read here. If you know of other original fiction out there in the blogosphere, let us know.

Ian McEwan's New Big Brother

There's a fascinating story in today's Guardian about a bricklayer who's traced his roots only to find he's Ian McEwan's secret brother: McEwan's mother, Rose, conceived a son through an extramarital affair while her husband was away at war. In order to give the son away before her husband came home, she placed this ad in the local paper: "Wanted, home for baby boy, aged one month: complete surrender." Soon, the boy's adoptive parents, Rose and Percy Sharp, picked him up at a train station in Berkshire. Full story here. I imagine this will give McEwan, an NBCC winner, plenty of fodder for future writing.

NBCC finalists to be announced

In just three days, the National Book Critics Circle will announce the finalists of our 33rd annual book awards. The member votes are being tallied as we speak, and this Saturday the board will meet at the offices of Library Journal on Park Avenue South in New York City to deliberate. Icestorms or not, 22 of the 24 board members are driving, training and flying in. (that blip you see in consumer spending will be the massive influx of dollars this brings to New York's economy) We'll start in the morning, and, hopefully, finish by 6PM. If all works out, the finalists will be posted here, on this blog, at 6:45 PM (EST) live as they are read out at the announcement party at Housing Works Bookstore in SoHo, by Mark Doty (and others). We may even get our act together enough to post a video of the proceedings. Stay tuned!

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January 16 Roundup

NBCC board member Celia McGee's interview with Amiri Baraka, whose incendiary 1964 play"Dutchman" (written when he was still Leroi Jones) is being revived by the Cherry Lane Theater, doesn't flinch from controversy. And her piece on bygone literary star Harold Humes, aka "Doc," the Third Man of the Paris Review founders, points out that Humes's daughter Immy's documentary, "Doc," reveals a C.I.A. connection to the history of The Paris Review: "In the film, Mr. Matthiessen, best known as a novelist, environmental activist and advocate of American Indian rights, admits publicly for the first time that he was a young C.I.A. recruit at the time he helped start the magazine, and used it as his cover. “Immy cajoled me into talking about it,” Mr. Matthiessen said.

Jeff Baker wonders if Gary Fisketjohn, who was raised on a mink farm in Salem, Oregon, is the best editor in America (and quotes Richard Ford, who introduced his longtime editor Gary F at a recent Park Avenue dinner in his honor, as saying "At heart, he believes books belong to and get written only by their authors"). (Listen to Ford urging on the New Orleans Saints in this clip from this weekend's NPR's "All Things Considered.")

Meanwhile, the Christian Science Monitor absolutely loved Sacred Games. Luis Garcia has a different take on Tariq Ali's take on Hugo Chavez, one of Ali's new "Pirates of the Caribbean."

Robert Fisk decries the "sex-speak" of the Pentagon. And NBCC member Elissa Schappell worries that Neal Pollack's baby son might grow up to be the "reincarnation of Wayne Newton."

The Monday Roundup

NBCC member Katherine Powers begins her New Year by celebrating Barbara Pym--and panning Rachel Cusk's new novel, "Arlington Park." Writes Powers: "But, golly, how I did dislike this novel and the creatures who tenant it."

NBCC member Carlo Wolff likes Yasmin Crowther's "rich debut" novel, "The Saffron Kitchen," for bringing "new resonance to the tired concept of domestic fiction."

And NBCC Board member Steve Weinberg admires Zev Chafets' "A Match Made in Heaven," about the sometimes uneasy relationship between Jews and evangelical Christians.

In Salon, NBCC Board member Laura Miller praises "American Islam" by Paul Barrett, who "has done a nearly miraculous job of writing thoughtfully, clearly and sensibly about a subject that usually stirs up a viper's nest of prejudice, defensiveness and paranoia."

Also in Salon: NBCC member and past Balakian candidate Allen Barra lets Gore Vidal have it!



NBCC president John Freeman reviews "Sacred Games" by Vikram Chandra: "If you can lift this tremendous story into your shopping cart and fetch it home to read, you'll probably wonder how you got by so long without it."
NBCC member Karen Long mostly agrees, though feels that the novel "becomes boggy around the 600th page."




"Let's not mince words: literary lists are basically an obscenity," begins NBCC Board member Lev Grossman's review of NBCC Board Member Peder Zane's "The Top Ten," which collects famous authors' lists of favorite books. Fighting words? Actually, Grossman likes the book a lot. Among the surveyed authors' thought-provoking picks: David Foster Wallace puts C.S. Lewis' "Screwtape Letters" at the top of his list, while Douglas Coupland goes with Truman Capote's unfinished "Answered Prayers."

Reviewing Anthony Swofford's new novel "Exit A," NBCC Board member Art Winslow says Swofford "has a great eye for detail and cultural kitsch, which imbues "Exit A" with a lot of incidental humor despite its weightier themes." NBCC member Andrea Hoag thinks Swofford "tramps deep into Updike's terrain" with his descriptions of a failing marriage.

In Entertainment Weekly, Greg Kirschling talks to Norman Mailer about Philip Roth, boozing, and his new novel "The Castle in the Forest." To NBCC member Bob Minzesheimer, Mailer confides: "I'm never going to be revered for the intricacy and beauty of my plots."

The Story Prize announces its finalists. And on Fresh Air Terry Gross interviews historian Michael Honey about his book on Martin Luther King, Jr., "Going Down Jericho Road."

Tom Stoppard on Literary Criticism

Tom Stoppard's dying literary critic, Vissarion Belinsky, has this to say about his--and our--chosen calling, in "Shipwreck," Part II of "The Coast of Utopia" trilogy:

"I fell in love with literature and stayed lovesick all my life. No woman had a more fervent or steadfast adorer. I picked up every handkerchief she let fall, lace, linen, snot rag, it made no difference. Every writer dead or alive was writing for me personally, to transport me, insult me, make me shout for joy or tear my hair out, and I wasn't fooled often."

That's a loftier view of the profession than that of his philosopher Nicholas Stankevich, who in Part I, "Voyage," calls literary criticism "a job for people whose second book didn't come up to expectations."

-Heller McAlpin, NBCC member and current board candidate

Eliot Weinberger on Iraq

Last year, Eliot Weinberger was named a finalist for the NBCC prize in criticism for his collection of essays, "What Happened Here," a provocative and perceptive chronicle of the period between 9/11 and the start of the Iraq War. We recently asked Weinberger what he thought of President Bush's announcement of a troop surge in Iraq. Here's what he had to say:

I began to wonder if Our President had become truly delusional a few days after the midterm elections when, in a radio address, he said: "Whatever your opinion of the outcome, all Americans can take pride in the example our democracy sets for the world by holding elections even in a time of war." We know he surrounds himself with people who tell him he’s Churchill, but did he really believe the citizens were braving the Blitz to exercise their voting rights?

In any event, it barely mattered what the People said. According to the polls, there are now more supporters of gay marriage and the legalization of marijuana than the war in Iraq. Although television news persists in portraying opposition to the latest escalation as largely coming from the Democrats, it is clear that Bush is acting against nearly everyone’s better judgment: not only the vaunted and quickly forgotten Iraq Study Group; not only the Iraqi people, who almost unanimously want us out; not only the Iraqi government, such as it is (now weirdly being spun as having devised the plan when it is exactly the opposite of what al-Maliki proposed); not only many hardcore conservatives, but also much of the US military. These days, the most passionate antiwar editorials are appearing in places like the Army Times and military.com. They should know: they’re the ones dying, losing their limbs, and facing lifelong health crises from depleted uranium because of a bunch of nerds at the American Enterprise Institute playing Master of the Universe and a president who has unresolved issues with Dad.

At a private meeting with members of Congress before his speech, Bush was asked why this plan would succeed when the others had failed. "Because it has to," he snapped. "Snapped" may be the operative word. The speech was unusually threatening toward Iran and Syria, and today the US raided an Iranian consulate in Iraq, seized the files and computers and arrested the workers -- an unprecedented breach of diplomacy. No one seems to have noticed that we are now also bombing Somalia.

Throughout the war, the escalation of American troops in any given place has unsurprisingly led to a sharp escalation of violence against civilians. In Iraq, we have only been warmakers, not peacekeepers in a civil strife. The devastation is far worse than anything under Saddam. When do we say enough is enough? We need an intervention at the White House before -- as Condi used to say, in the buildup to the war -- the smoking gun turns into a mushroom cloud.

--Eliot Weinberger

The Thursday Roundup

Not everyone has climbed aboard the "House of Meetings" bullet train. NBCC member Adam Begley thinks "it's time Martin Amis left Russia to the Russians."

John Summers digs Robert Stone's stoner memoir "Prime Green," and Entertainment Weekly's Ken Tucker shares his enthusiasm.

NBCC Member Adam Kirsch reviews David Bell's "The New Total War" which argues "that it was the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars that first showed the world what total war really meant."

Hegel admired Napoleon. But what would have made of our own George W. Bush? Marking the bicentennial of Hegel's "grand and profoundly confusing" book "Phenomenology of Spirit," past Balakian winner Scott McLemee speculates.

Size isn't everything. At The Stranger, Tom Nissley gleefully ditches Thomas Pynchon's "Against The Day" for Douglas Wolk's "Live at the Apollo." Writes Nissley: "One day I opened my book bag and with one hand hauled out my copy of Against the Day, a giant slab of pages that I could never set down on a table without imagining the creaking strain of delicatessen scales underneath. With the other, I fished out a tiny book I had been carrying around for weeks and already knew to be delicious."

NBCC member Steve Kellman takes a look at Harry Frankfurt's "On Truth" in the San Antonio Current.

U.S. Poet Laureate (2004-2006) Ted Kooser features a sonnet by NBCC member Floyd Skloot in his American Life in Poetry column.

On the radio, Roz Chast talks about her work on the Leonard Lopate Show; and Valentino Deng, subject of Dave Eggers' novel "What is the What," speaks his mind on Salt Lake City's KCPW.

Scout's Report: What to look for in 2007

Here is the first of an occasional feature we'll publish from New York book scout, Maria Campbell:

The book that I am most looking forward to rereading in 2007 is Don DeLillo's tour de force FALLING MAN. I read the manuscript in one breathless sitting with my heart in my mouth. Scribner will publish in May or June.

The book is a meditation through time, following a family as they attempt to right themselves in the few years after 9/11. The book represents an important articulation of the current American state of mind, giving narrative form to the process of dealing with our doubts, our fears, and the idea of existing in a new, shifting world. DeLillo takes on all the big questions and brilliantly reflects the personal process that his characters struggle through as a document and testament to the current moment in American history.

A fascinating feature of DeLillo's writing is his capacity to communicate the process of the creation of a narrative. The images, sounds and descriptions that define his style, especially at the outset of the book. are analgous to the way the mind processes the world around us. The astonishing power of this book derives from the way it forces the reader to construct the stories of the main characters, and in so doing, relive and rediscover the personal meaning of the attacks for themselves. Everything is story. Everything is narrative that we construct to make sense of our place in the world. The novel depicts the compulsion to tell stories as our most basic and powerful impulse. It is a tour de force.

Maria Campbell

Maria B. Campbell Associates

January 9 Roundup

Aaron Hambuger rediscovers the great Yiddish writer Sholem Asch.

Michiko Kakutani finds Martin Amis's new novel House of Meetings "a bullet train of a novel that barrels deep into the heart of darkness that was the Soviet gulag," while Richard Eder is underwhelmed by Colum McCann's Zoli, a novel about an Eastern European gypsy who is ostracized for revealing her culture's secrets in her poetry.

NBCC member Jen Miller writes about how to get on the radar of literary journalists (like NBCC members).

Crawford Kilian speculates that Mark Twain may be the Father of the Internet.

The Alaska bookstore owner who won the City Lights 50th anniversary of "Howl" contest was treated to a basket of Ginsberg first editions, but not Howl. Find out why.

Monday Roundup

John Sledge relishes NBCC member Jason Berry's novel about New Orleans politics, "Last of the Red Hot Poppas": "If it were a bowl of gumbo it would be one-quarter John Kennedy Toole and three-quarters Elmore Leonard, seasoned by Berry's journalistic-style reportage and insights."

"Real women can have penises." So begins NBCC member Julie Foster's review of Cris Beam's nonfiction "Transgender" in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Also in the Chronicle, NBCC member Michael O'Donnell reviews Tristram Stuart's "Bloodless Revolution," "a beautifully written work of impressive scholarship, perhaps the most erudite yet to appear on the subject of vegetarian history."

And Sheerly Avni interviews Vikram Chandra about his mighty "Sacred Games." Says Chandra: "I've spent the past seven years in a cave!"

The reviews of "Sacred Games" are flooding in. Pankaj Mishra reflects on the book in the New Yorker, and NBCC member Jerome Weeks calls it "a landmark work, a novel so ambitious and fully achieved it makes most American crime novelists -- the Lehanes, the Pelecanos, even the Ellroys -- seem naive and timid by comparison." While at the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley has a somewhat different response.

NBCC member Fritz Lanham chatted with last year's NBCC finalist Joan Didion before an appearance in Houston recently: "It was necessary for me to come to terms with what had happened, but I couldn't come to terms with it unless I wrote it down," she told him. "I don't really think unless I write something down."

Victoria Brownworth likes NBBC member Heidi Julavits' "Uses of Enchantment," as it "weaves yet another enticing thread of Julavits' oeuvre."

Richard Urquhart concludes that "The Echo Maker" is another "solid achievement" for past NBCC finalist Richard Powers, but "with a hint that with tighter editing he could produce something even better."

Finally, NBCC member Bob Hoover wants to see some action at the NEA, and NBCC board member Carlin Romano takes on a batch of Ann Coulter bashers.

January 7 roundup

NBCC finalist in nonfiction Robert Fisk weighs in on the execution of Saddam Hussein, calling it a "lynching."

NBCC member Scott Donaldson finds "a genuine idealism lurked behind all those surface" of the sixties in multiple NBCC fiction finalist Robert Stone's new memoir, Prime Green.

Austin Considine praises Barbara Ehrenreich's boldness and persuasiveness in her analysis of collective joy, Dancing in the Streets.

NBCC member Ken Foster is one of the organizers of a march on city hall in New Orleans in response to a week of homocides in the city.

Saturday Roundup

NBCC President John Freeman talks to Vikram Chandra, author of this month's big, burly novel. Freeman calls Sacred Games: "a terrific, earthmover of a book, Crime and Punishment crossed with The Godfather, with some Sopranos-inspired irony thrown in to boot."

Meanwhile, Paul Gray finds it "immense, demanding," and the volume reminds Tom Beer of a "passport to an alien world and, like life, you imagine it could go on forever."

At Newsday, Claire Dederer says that Rachel Cusk "seems to be calling upon the ghost of Virginia Woolf" in Arlington Park, her novel about exceedingly tense contemporary mothers.

At the Contra Costa Times, Lynn Carey interviews native San Franciscan Vendela Vida about Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. Says Vida: "Whenever you're going to write a book, be 100 times more passionate about it than you think you have to be."

Vida cofounded the magazine The Believer with NBCC member Heidi Julavits, whose recent novel, The Uses of Enchantment, Tamara Titus finds "captivating."

Past NBCC award finalist Craig Seligman reviews Hitler's Beneficiaries, in which German historian Gotz Aly suggests that the Third Reich is "the immediate precursor of the modern welfare state."

And NBCC Board member Steve Weinberg admires Harold K. Bush, Jr.'s new book about Mark Twain's relationship to religious faith. Writes Weinberg: "That sounds like a short book. Instead, for more than 300 pages Bush mines a rich lode of material and keeps it interesting . . ."

NBCC Board member Jane Ciabattari takes a look at Alice Hoffman's novel Skylight Confessions, which she describes as "a fairy tale imbued with the intense emotional undercurrents of adolescence and haunted by loss and failures of love."

Gail Pennington and Anna Shapiro also consider Hoffman's latest. Concludes Shapiro: "it's a gentle, literary entertainment, considerably more pleasing than channel-surfing."


-- Jennifer Reese, NBCC Board Member

Pages Magazine Files Chapter 11

A bit of important news for the freelancers in our ranks: Advanced Marketing Services -- custom publisher, book wholesaler, and owner of Pages Magazine -- filed Chapter 11. They also borrowed $75 million to keep their operations running while they straighten out their financial problems.

Their press release says: "Chapter 11 protection will enable the Company to continue to conduct business in the normal course, make payments to vendors going forward and continue delivering quality service and products to customers."

I do hope that's true, for the sake of the freelancers writing for them, and the book world in general -- the last thing we need is for Pages to join the the ranks of great defunct book magazines.

[Update: For info on how this news could impact small publishing houses and the publishing world in general, see GalleyCat's coverage here and here]

Tugboating

I've been reading Jonathan Lethem, and this passage on "tugboating" from "Motherless Brooklyn" caught my eye. It's something critics (often accused of Tourette's-like behavior) and writers, never mind Lethem's Tourettian "Terminal Tugboater," are prone to:

"Any time you pushed your luck, said too much, overstayed a welcome, or overestimated the usefulness of a given method or apporach, you were guilty of having tugged the boat. Tugboating was most of all a dysfunction of wits and storytellers, and a universal one: Anybody who thought himself funny would likely tug a boat here or there. Knowing when a joke or verbal gambit was right at its limit, quitting before the boat had been tugged, that was art (and it was a given that you wanted to push it as near as possible--missing an opportunity to score a laugh was deeply lame, an act undeserving of a special name)."

Heller McAlpin, NBCC Member and current board candidate

More OJ

Just in case you thought the new year meant the end of the whole OJ book scandal: Here's a reality check. The latest: A judge has frozen the money OJ was paid for the book until the court decides whether it should be given to the family of murder victim Ron Goldman, not OJ.

Gery Shteyngart and Sigrid Nunez Event

For those in New York next week: Gary Shteyngart (who the NBCC BEA panel named as one of the best and brightest writers under 40) and Sigrid Nunez will be appearing together at the Tenement Museum on January 10th at 6pm:

"The classic immigrant narrative has entered the 21st Century, led by two of New York's brightest literary stars, Gary Shteyngart and Sigrid Nunez. Shteyngart, whose novel Absurdistan was named one of the New York Times "Ten Best Books of 2006," will be joined by Nunez, his former teacher and author of The Last of Her Kind and A Feather on the Breath of God, in a conversation on how the oft-told story of immigrant dislocation has been rewritten with a modern sense, infused with the irony and idioms of our age. In this rare opportunity to see these two writers together, they will discuss the current renaissance of the genre and its future at a time when the debate on immigration has reached new heights." Event is free and open to the public, but RSVP is required because space is limited.

End of Year Losses

Several sad passings and closings marked the New Year:

Tillie Olsen, Feminist Writer, Dies at 94

And 3 independent bookstore closings:

Princeton's wonderful Micawber Books: "Succumbs to a Cultural Shift"

RIP, Ivy's Books and Murder Ink

And Coliseum Books

(Links from Heller McAlpin)

East End Poets and Writers Say Adios to East Hampton Star's Arts Editor

On New Year's Day 2007 the poets and writers of the East End of Long Island dropped by to say bon voyage to Sheridan Sansegundo, the beloved arts editor of East Hampton Star, who has just wrapped up 18 years of presiding over the literary life of the Hamptons. She has written profiles of hundreds of literary and artistic luminaries, assigned and written book reviews and fiction as well as restaurant reviews--collected in Sheridan Says and Great Restaurants of the Hamptons --and the Star's crosswords (also collected as The Hamptons Crossword Puzzle Book, which contains 12 puzzles, each focusing on a particular town or theme). Among those gathered: NBCC Sandrof Award winner Bill Henderson, editor of the Pushcart Prize anthology and author of multiple memoirs; novelist Genie Chipps Henderson, Anthony Brandt, Mark Ciabattari, Lorraine Dusky, Mac Griswold, as well as poets Star Black, Fran Castan , Kathryn Levy, Harvey Shapiro,and Phil Schultz and Galen Williams, founder of Poets & Writers. Sansegundo, who was born and raised in England and has lived in France and Spain, is headed to San Miguel Allende to join other East End expats. Rumor has it she will continue to pen the Star's crossword puzzles.

Holidays

As you may have noticed, Critical Mass has slowed through the holidays as our members travel and rest and recover. We'll be back online in early January with our usual coverage of the book world. In the meantime, happy new year!