Books

From an interview Cat Rambo did with Nicola Griffith:

Q: Stay is a move into the mystery genre, as opposed to earlier science-fiction work, such as Ammonite and Slow River. Was that a deliberate choice for you? How did you figure out what genre the story you wanted to tell fit into?

NG: The Blue Place, then Stay, and now (well, okay, soon: April 2007) Always are often described as crime fiction–and they are–but I tend to think of them as novels about a woman becoming herself.

As a writer, the point of Slow River wasn’t the spiffy bioremediation, it was Lore’s growth and change. Similarly, the point of my last three novels is the growth of Aud Torvingen (the narrator). She journeys from being *this* close to sociopathy to understanding what it means to be a functioning human being, possibly even a hero. It’s been a blast to watch her blossom and grow (and kill people).

When I first start mulling a novel, I think about place, then about character, and then let the story evolve from the interaction between the two. It’s at that point that I realise, Oh, it’s SF. Or, Oh, it’s crime fiction. Or (a novel I’ve just started), Oh, it’s sword-swangin’, pony-riding, magic-wielding fantasy, yay! The genre is just the vehicle I pick–submarine or bicycle, kite or SUV–to cross the particular story terrain.

April 2007!

Definitely check out the whole interview; it touches on Griffith’s immigration case being used in the Wall Street Journal as an example of America’s going to hell in a handbasket, among other things.

The fine people of Cabinet magazine (which I je adore) have just published a book on Presidential Doodles with Basic Books (who do lots of interesting stuff).

You can see some examples at the book’s site; Warren Harding’s are sleek, decobeauties. (Via Austin Kleon.)

Two little pointers is all I have time for.

1. I have dipped my toe into the waters of MemeTherapy, answering a question about time travel, changing history and a manky towel in what I must admit is an evasive manner. Still, I stand by it. Do not fuck with history, time travelers! Unless you’re addicted to heartache and Charles Lindbergh.

2. Ed chronicles an appearance by Ms. Kelly D. Link in the Bay area, where she read the (superfantasticallybrilliant; seriously, it may be my favorite KDL story) YA story "The Wrong Grave." (Forthcoming in Deborah Noyes follow-up anthology to Gothic!)

Wow:

But Fitch didn’t plan it that way. Somewhere in her house is a box filled with hundreds of pages of a weighty historical novel that, in a fit of decisiveness following months of dread, she decided to abandon in the middle of a photo shoot for that book’s jacket cover.

"When you have success, people think you know what you’re doing, and you start to agree with them, you think you can conquer the world," she said. "But you go from grandiosity to panic. My editor would call and I’d say ‘It’s fine, going great,’ and I couldn’t bring myself to admit it wasn’t happening. It was an abortion."

Fitch was then forced to tearfully admit to her editors that, after having twice written the 300-page book using two different narrators, she still didn’t have anything that she was proud of. For a mid-list author with few expectations for big sales figures, that might not have mattered. But "White Oleander" was a blockbuster, one of the bestselling new works of literary fiction that year. It had been adapted as a movie starring Renée Zellweger and Michelle Pfeiffer. Janet Fitch was a bankable name. Michael Pietsch, who edited "White Oleander" for Little, Brown, had to adjust his time frame once again. "She sent the manuscript to us, and I think she arrived at the right decision," he said. "I was sad for Janet because all that time and work must have been a great loss. But I was very grateful that she had the maturity and self-assessment to put that aside. It’s the process that brought us ‘Paint It Black,’ and I’m glad it happened so that we have this book."

That takes some guts. (Via TEV.)

In honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day, the MacArthur Foundation has released its list of new geniuses.

I find it very interesting that as of this posting George Saunders is the only 2006 MacArthur Fellow with no photo on record.

George Saunders = The Invisible Man?

(ps – Superbusy at the moment; real posts later on?)

Le terror.

From photos of the Marc Jacobs show after-party, where Kim Gordon looks totally fab and Zooey Deschanel looks like crispy-bones. (Via Theresa Duncan.)

Andrea Seigel has done something not very many writers actually achieve: followed up an incredibly exciting first novel with an incredibly exciting second novel That Is Completely Different. If Like the Red Panda was a coming of age story (or a suicide valentine; pair it with Lynda Barry’s Cruddy), then To Feel Stuff is a ghost story about being alive.

Elodie, beset by malady after malady, lives in the college infirmary at Brown. Dr. Mark Kirschling becomes fixated on her as a phenomenon infinitely more fascinating than your typical case study. Chester, who has always been a golden boy, gets attacked and comes to stay in the infirmary; he and Elodie promptly fall in strange, believable love. The novel gracefully interleaves the viewpoints of the good doctor with those of the lovers. Fittingly, Elodie’s version is the richest, because only she truly understands herself and her place in the world. AND she starts to see ghosts, or maybe not exactly. Maybe she’s inherited her mother’s gift, maybe something different. Elodie’s story feels full of ghosts, of history and of what will never be.

And I can say without reservation that this book features two sequences that are undeniably the best of their type in all of fictionland, in the categories of journey in search of waffles and karaoke-gone-wrong. Which points up one of the things I loved about this book, and that’s its easy unexpectedness. Lots of times when books dabble in the kooky side character who brings her bird into work one day or try and achieve a truly off-kilter protagonist (that isn’t just annoying), it’s painfully obvious that making the oddness of life seem normal AND interesting in a way that also feels real is damn hard. Often, it comes across as trite. In trying to capture a more sideways snapshot of what life’s like, the quirky becomes the banal. But that is definitely not the case here. Here, Seigel makes it work in a way that reads as effortless and honest. An oddways reality bounded on all sides by how far the characters can, or can’t, go, outside those infirmary walls and outside themselves. And whether they are, ultimately, okay with where and who they happen to be.

The book’s distinctly distant yet completely absorbing view of the world, like Elodie’s from her own traitorous body, is unnerving in the best possible way.

Day to buy Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners in paperback from Harcourt. (As Gavin reminds us all.) Go see on magical realism mystery tour. Read the stories. Laugh. Cry. Be happy again.

Won’t you please read the title story just in time for the fall TV season? You should.

All of which I’ll say more about later. But if you want to have a three-book streak to envy:

1. To Feel Stuff by Andrea Seigel.
2. Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell.
3. Shriek by Jeff VanderMeer.

I’m already agonizing over what to read after I finish Shriek, so I’m trying to finish it slowwwly.

Now to walk the dog and write some new words.

James Morrow reviews Tim Powers’ latest in BookWorld, and he starts things off talking about one of my favorite short stories:

In 1990, Karen Joy Fowler published "Lieserl," a piquant and moving tribute to Albert Einstein’s daughter, a woman largely neglected by history and, sad to say, the great scientist himself. As the story unfolds, the young Einstein, ensconced in a space-time bubble, receives a series of letters from his first wife, Mileva Maric, recounting Lieserl’s birth, preschool years, adolescence and death. In the final scene, a quiet indictment of Einstein’s passive parenting, the scientist imagines sketching a valentine and then writing his daughter’s name within its borders: "He loved Lieserl. He cut the word in half, down the S with the stroke of his nail. The two halves of the heart opened and closed, beating against each other, faster and faster, like wings, until they split apart and vanished from his mind."

"Lieserl" is a tough act to follow, but in Three Days to Never Tim Powers has done so with brio, bravado and a salutary measure of lunacy.

Anyone read it yet? (Mr. McLaren?) Sounds like one for the TBR.