Books

In the OUCH! department, Michael Dirda turns in an extremely entertaining review of Patrick French’s new biography of V.S. Naipaul, The World Is What It Is. One of the money quotes:

As Patrick French’s nuanced and generous but often dispiriting biography shows, there’s not much to like or praise about V.S. Naipaul as a human being. He starts life as a twerp, then fairly quickly becomes a jerk and ends up an old sourpuss. The best overall epithet for him is infantile — though one shouldn’t neglect the claims of such adjectives as whiney, narcissistic, insulting, needy, callous, impolite, cruel, vengeful, indecisive, miserly, exploitative, snobbish, sadistic, self-pitying and ungrateful. Of course, his is, to some extent, the modern artistic sensibility writ very, very large. But even our favorite monsters and divas — Picasso, Waugh, Callas, Brando — are never as smarmy and nasty as Naipaul. He can make a spoiled 3-year-old look mature.

Seeing as Naipaul’s still with us, and Dirda goes on to (let’s face it, aptly) characterize him as "increasingly blimpish, less a cultural scourge than a mean-spirited, intolerant crank," I’m not answering anything without a recognized caller ID for a few days if I’m the critic in question.

World Fantasy Award winners, that is:

Novel: Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kay (Viking Canada/Penguin Roc)
Novella: Illyria, Elizabeth Hand (PS Publishing)
Short Story: “Singing of Mount Abora”, Theodora Goss (Logorrhea, Bantam Spectra)
Anthology: Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Ellen Datlow, Editor (Tor)
Collection: Tiny Deaths, Robert Shearman (Comma Press)
Artist: Edward Miller
Special Award, Professional: Peter Crowther for PS Publishing
Special Award, Non-Professional: Midori Snyder and Terri Windling for Endicott Studios Website

Via Niall at Torque Control.

Yay for all the winners, and most especially for Ellen, Dora, Liz, Midori and Terri! Woo!

Sarah Rees Brennan has an excellent, lengthy post about why female characters in fiction so often fell short in ye olden days, why they still often do, and some strategies to consider when writing them. Plus, it’s funny:

PETER THE MAGNIFICENT: My brother Edmund is no longer a friend to Narnia.
ASLAN: Oh that’s a pity.
PETER THE MAGNIFICENT: All he thinks about parading around in nylons and lipstick!
ASLAN: … Say what?
PETER THE MAGNIFICENT: DON’T ASK ME TO TALK ABOUT IT!      

Male villains tend to be much less sexualised. It was never suggested, for instance, that Sauron or Saruman was sexy. (If you just got an image of a big flamey eye doing a booty dance, I am truly sorry.)

We won’t discuss the movie visual of Sauron in this context, among, y’know, polite company.

Or, at least, my own most anticipated book of 2009 and ::drumroll:: the lovely people at Penguin Press sent along an advance copy:

The Manual of Detection, a debut novel by one Jedediah Berry.

The publisher describes it thus: "In this tightly plotted yet mind-expanding debut novel, an unlikely detective, armed only with an umbrella and a singular handbook, must untangle a string of crimes committed in and through people’s dreams."

But wait!

Here’s a little more from them: "The Manual of Detection will draw comparison to every work of imaginative fiction that ever blew a reader’s mind—from Carlos Ruiz Zafón to Jorge Luis Borges, from The Big Sleep to The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. But, ultimately, it defies comparison; it is a brilliantly conceived, meticulously realized novel that will change what you think about how you think."

You know, there’s always a nervousness reading a book that sounds exactly like your specific most perfect kind of book. You can’t escape the underlying fear that it’ll be a disappointment, fail to live up to expectations, just not be odd and beautiful enough. This feeling is even stronger when the author is a friend, since a possible lack of awesome could make for some awkward.

This is why it pleases me no end to report that Jed’s book is EXACTLY AS AWESOME as promised. Available February 2009 in fine bookshops everywhere and through the worldwide electrodes. Yay.

(Photo note: Excellent whiskey ad-infused box on Christopher’s desk designed by Barb.)

There’s an interesting interview with Stephen King by John Marks over at Salon. It’s inspired by the 30th anniversary of The Stand this year, which Marks says was a hugely influential book for him, and so they talk a lot about that, and a lot about doom and religion. Here’s a snippet of King on a possible afterlife:

Think of it this way. I think of the brain as this great, big, crenelated library with many rooms, billions and billions of books, rooms without number, but at the very end of all those rooms, there’s a little tiny box that says "pull lever in case of emergency,"  because that’s the door out, and when you go out, you get pretty much what you expected, because some chemical in your brain is programmed to give you that particular dream at the very end. If you’re expecting [H.P. Lovecraft’s] Yogg Sothoth, there he’ll be, along with the 900 blind fiddlers, or whatever it is.

Note to self: Do not think about Yogg Sothoth during the for-good lights out. Also, I’ve never actually read The Stand, though I read a lot lot lot of King growing up. Should I read it?

p.s. I’m currently reading Majorie Liu’s The Iron Hunt, and enjoying it greatly. I’m pretty sure I’m only reading mass markets where good vanquishes evil until the election’s over. And sometime after that I’m going to do a round-up of which of the urban fantasy/paranormal romance stuff I’ve liked best… I definitely don’t feel that the best of these books are getting their due. Feel free to leave your own recs along those lines in the comments.

The NYT has an excellent story about Columbia’s self-appointed people’s librarian, Luis Soriano, and his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto:

"I started out with 70 books, and now I have a collection of more than 4,800," said Mr. Soriano, 36, a primary school teacher who lives in a small house here with his wife and three children, with books piled to the ceilings.

"This began as a necessity; then it became an obligation; and after that a custom," he explained, squinting at the hills undulating into the horizon. "Now," he said, "it is an institution."

Viva la biblioburro!

• Cybils nominees announced! (Because I have been too busy to breathe lately, I didn’t get over to make nominations, but am very, very happy to see all the books I’d have nominated on the lists anyway. This year’s first-round judges have a tough time ahead.)
• Help YA author Kris Reisz launch a writing program for teens in Decatur, Alabama. (Via Guys Lit Wire.)
• Humanity Plus claims billionaires are funding science fiction. Who do we need to give our address to, again, for the check?
• Oh, and as for Meghan, she’s been filling her brain with sparkly vampires. It may not have been fun to read, but her ranting about Twilight? So worth it.
• Gavin’s been blogging over at Bookslut and posting all sorts of interesting stuff, like an interview with Tobin Anderson about Octavian Nothing 2 (or, as I like to call it, The Most Brilliant Book of the Year) and an imaginary interview with Margo Lanagan and Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert (the imaginary part, but in a just world! I’m just reading Tender Morsels now and it is full of the weird and the insanely genius writing). For more M.T. Anderson, see Julie Larios’s eagle eye picking out a tres appropriate photo of the author.
• Geoff Ryman spends the week at Omnivoracious. Much as I love Geoff and his writing, I must disagree with the view that: "Self-expression is art, but self-promotion is an agenda that curdles art into advertising. The blog becomes an online publicity, the comments a way to draw attention, marking territory." I’m not saying this isn’t true, but I think it’s wrong as a sweeping generalization. The best blogs simply aren’t about online publicity. At least, not primarly and not the ones I read. But then, I believe that the best blogs function largely as part of an elaborate gift economy, with any benefits coming because they aren’t the endgame. Because the endgame is just to share stuff. Still, it’s guaranteed to be a provocative week, and you should all run out and buy The King’s Last Song.
• Also at Omnivoracious, an interview with Jeff Ford on the occasion of the Well-Built City trilogy being reissued by Golden Gryphon Press.
• The election translated D&D style.

So I’m out of pocket and have only lobby-level access to a computer, so I will be brief to say that: YAY! The National Book Award nominations have been announced! Yay!

The hugest congratulations ever to fabulous and lovely fellow Southerner Kathi Appelt (a senior faculty member at my MFA program) for her nod for The Underneath* and to E. Lockhart for her wonderful novel, The Disreputable History of Frankie Laundau Banks. See the sidebar to the right for my take on each of these very deserving books, two of my favorites of this year or any other, to be sure. And I can’t wait to check out the other young readers finalists. Well done, judging types (who included the inscrutable Holly Black and Daniel Handler).

OOOOh-kay, I now return you to my previously scheduled silence, with one last YAY!

*If she don’t win the Newbery, there is no justice. And you know what they say about no justice, right? No peace!

Kelly Link’s supremely fabulous new YA collection Pretty Monsters, a beautiful object that reads even nicer, officially publishes today. The details from Gavin, including dates for upcoming appearances.

I’ll have an interview with Kelly all about the YA and things related during the upcoming Winter Blog Blast Tour, but that’s no reason to dally on your purchase.

(Also, yeah, Christopher and I did get a little choked up at the new Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror being dedicated to the two of us.)

Let the literary fisticuffs over the Nobel Prize begin:

As the Swedish Academy enters final deliberations for this year’s award, permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said it’s no coincidence that most winners are European.

"Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world . . . not the United States," he said yesterday. "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining."

His comments were met with fierce reactions from literary officials across the Atlantic. "You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures," said David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker.

"And if he looked harder at the American scene that he dwells on, he would see the vitality in the generation of Roth, Updike and DeLillo, as well as in many younger writers, some of them sons and daughters of immigrants writing in their adopted English. None of these poor souls, old or young, seem ravaged by the horrors of Coca-Cola."

Oh, snap!