The book that inspired the young Julia Alvarez

Julia Alvarez grew up in the Dominican Republic before emigrating to the United States at the age of 10. She is the award-winning author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, ¡Yo!, and the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, In the Time of the Butterflies.

She also wrote Finding Miracles as well as three other books for young readers, The Secret Footprints, a picture book; How Tía Lola Came to (Visit) Stay, a middle-grade novel; and Before We Were Free, a young adult novel. She is a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College and lives in Vermont.

In a Q & A (read the whole interview here), she talked about the book that inspired her when she was growing up:

I was not much of a reader growing up.... But my “old maid” aunt who was a reader did bring me back a book from a trip she took to the United States. It was The Arabian Nights, which is the story of a girl, Scheherazade, who lives in a kingdom where the sultan, who is full of hatred for women, takes a wife every night and then beheads her in the morning. Scheherazade’s father hides her in his library, where she reads all his books and learns thousands of stories! When she learns about what is happening to all the women in her kingdom, she decides she wants to help them. And so she begs her father to let her visit the sultan’s tent and see if she can change his mind. At first her father refuses, but finally he relents.

And so, that first night when Scheherazade (I always did wish she had an easier name to spell and pronounce!) is taken before the sultan, she asks him if he’d like to hear one of her wonderful stories. “Sure,” he says, “it’s a while before sunrise.” But wouldn’t you know it, just as the sun is coming up, Scheherazade is smack in the middle of an exciting tale. She laments the fact that the sultan is going to miss out on the satisfying ending, since it’s her time to die.

But no way is he going to let her die now. “You must finish your story tonight!” he commands. So Scheherazade is granted another day of life. The next night, she finishes her story, but it’s still not daylight, so she begins another one, which, of course, she is still telling when the sun comes up again. The sultan again grants her a dispensation–and this goes on for one thousand and one nights. By that time, the sultan has fallen in love with Scheherazade because of her wonderful stories, and his hatred has been transformed into love. He is a changed man. Scheherazade has not only saved the women in her kingdom and herself, but she has managed to change the sultan through the power of her stories.

I loved this story. I was spellbound by Scheherazade’s ability to spin tales: Ali Baba and the forty thieves; Sinbad the sailor; Aladdin and his magic lamp . . . These are just a few of the thousand and one stories Scheherazade tells the sultan to save her life. Back in the Dominican Republic, I had a tall fourposter bed. I used to love to sit on that bed under the mosquito net or crawl under the bed with the bedskirt all around me and pretend that I was in the sultan’s tent and I had to think up a great story, or else. No pressure I’ve ever experienced as a writer can match the pressure I felt as a young girl of nine or ten to tell a good story to save my life.

--Marshal Zeringue

August contributors

au-gust (ô-gst) Inspiring awe or admiration.
Au-gust (ôgst) The eighth month of the year in the Gregorian calendar.

My appreciation goes out to everyone who has offered comments and suggestions to the blog. Special thanks to the following individuals for taking the time and effort to contribute items to the blog last month:

The novelist Marcus Sakey for sharing some insights into his bookshelf.

Ray Taras for his review of Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide.

Eduardo Velásquez for essay on the aspects of philosophy in Fight Club.

Wayne Terwilliger for his thoughtful take on the Booker Prize wrongly decided.

Deborah Klosky for her contribution to the thread on what's at stake in the debate over habeas corpus.

Nathan and Nicholas for their insights on books for ages 8-12.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers"

Last year the Believer magazine published The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, edited by Vendela Vida.

I haven't actually laid eyes on the book, but here are a few "astonishing insights and profound quips" one should find in its pages:

George Saunders: "I see writing as part of an ongoing attempt to really, viscerally, believe that everything matters, suffering is real, and death is imminent."

Ian McEwan: "The dream, surely, that we all have, is to write this beautiful paragraph that actually is describing something but at the same time in another voice is writing a commentary on its own creation, without having to be a story about a writer."

Jamaica Kincaid: "All of these declarations of what writing ought to be, which I had myself--though, thank god I had never committed them to paper--I think are nonsense. You write what you write, and then either it holds up or it doesn't hold up. There are no rules or particular sensibilities. I don't believe in that at all anymore."

Janet Malcolm: "The narrator of my nonfiction pieces is not the same person I am--she is a lot more articulate and thinks of much cleverer things to say than I usually do."

Paul Auster: "In my own case, I certainly don't walk into my room and sit down at my desk feeling like a boxer ready to go ten rounds with Joe Louis. I tiptoe in. I procrastinate. I delay. I come in sideways, kind of sliding through the door. I don't burst into the saloon with my six-shooter ready. If I did, I'd probably shoot myself in the foot."

Tobias Wolff: "Each time out should be a swing for the fences. Don't do base-running drills. You can do those on your own time."

--Marshal Zeringue

Sofia Coppola's favorite books

I recently wrote a valentine to the director Sofia Coppola.

Back in 2001 she told The Week about her six favorite books. Here are two of them:

Music for Torching by A.M. Homes

Really hilarious and mean—a marriage in crisis, lots of unhinged characters, everyone’s out to lunch. A couple mired in their suburban life burns their house down to try to make it all go away, to start again—only to end up stuck repairing the building instead.

The Hawkline Monster by Richard Brautigan (a compilation of three books).

My brother’s the one who got me into Brautigan’s Gothic western. This story of cowboy hitmen assigned to kill a monster is crazy, weird, and funny.

Click here to read about Coppola's other four favorites.

Coppola's new film, Marie Antoinette, is due this fall--with Kirsten Dunst in the title role. The advance reviews are not promising...but I'll not be deterred.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top satires on despotism

Peter Millar, who reviews thrillers for the Times (London), named six favorite satires on despotism.

Here is half of his list:

The Comedians by Graham Greene
Underrated satire on Papa Doc’s Haiti. Avoid the Paul Theroux “spoiler” introduction.

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
A child’s response to growing Nazi brutality is to stop growing. Not diminished by recent revelations about Grass’s past.

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks
Galactic war between materialist culture and fanatically religious three-legged Idirans — a poignant take on the “clash of cultures.”

Click here to see Millar's other three choices. (I'll bet you'll have guessed one or two but perhaps not all three.)

--Marshal Zeringue

Was al-Qaeda born of boredom?

An earlier post included part of an excerpt from Lawrence Wright's new book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. That excerpt drew from the part of the book which discussed the intellectual inspiration provided to al-Qaeda by an Egpytian writer and educator named Sayyid Qutb.

Ideas and inspirations don't exist in a vacuum, of course, and it is important to understand the context in which the movement grew. In Saudi Arabia, one reviewer of Wright's book points out, that context was partly defined by...boredom.

I was an occasional visitor to Saudi Arabia in the 1980s. Its capital, Riyadh, was reminiscent of Houston with mosques and without the charm. A kind of consumerism had gripped the place, but with an Islamic flavour: the women in the shopping malls were mostly covered, and the stores closed for prayers. In shiny new office blocks, young men sat behind empty desks and transmitted an air of profound ennui.

Into this dreary society, made more cynical perhaps by the worldly excesses of many of its leaders, was launched a myth. The myth was of the Arab Afghans, of the doughty fighters from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries who repelled a superpower in Afghanistan.

Their leader, Osama bin Laden, son of a Saudi construction magnate, was hailed as a legendary figure. In fact, as this brilliant book by Lawrence Wright of The New Yorker makes clear, the Arab Afghans were a sideline in the fighting, occasionally a liability to their Afghan allies and set apart mainly by their obsession with dying.

When the fighters returned, the myth was amplified by the young Saudis who found in their intense religiosity a refuge from daily tedium. In a country of an austere state-sponsored religious puritanism, young men were left with very limited life choices. “Exposed to so few alternative ways of thinking even about Islam, they were trapped in a two-dimensional spiritual world; they could only become more extreme or less so,” he writes.

Click here to read more of this review. As the reviewer (Stephen Fidler) notes, Wright's book is about much more than Qutb's role or even Osama's.

[Another] part of Wright’s book describes the history of the few Americans who recognised early the threat posed by al-Qaeda. It is a story of missed opportunities, of bureaucratic and personal infighting, of orders that made it harder to share information among intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Even if everything had worked perfectly, there is no guarantee that 9/11 would have been thwarted. But Wright’s book reinforces the sense that, had things been different, it could have been.

The tragedy is epitomised in the life and death of John O’Neill, the FBI executive described here as “an adulterer, a philanderer, a liar, an egotist and a materialist”, but whose ultimately fruitless battle against al-Qaeda came to dominate his life. Retired from the bureau, disillusioned and seeking his own form of spiritual solace, he died when the Twin Towers collapsed on September 11.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chuck Palahniuk's latest top 10 favorite books

Can't get enough of Chuck Palahniuk?

Click here for a list of Palahniuk's latest top 10 favorite books from Blackbook magazine.

Two titles from the list:

Death In Yellowstone by Lee Whittlesey and The Brutal Language Of Love by Alicia Erian

Brian McCombie covered Death in Yellowstone for Booklist:

Whittlesey believes that far too many people enter our national parks with "a false sense of security." He then goes on to chronicle the deaths in Yellowstone National Park of more than 250 people. Most of the deaths, Whittlesey argues, occurred because of human mistakes and "negligence." In this sense, the book is meant to teach and warn about the many dangers that exist in Yellowstone itself, and wild areas in general. The catalog of deaths includes all manner of dying at the hands of nature (hot springs, bears, bison, avalanches, exposure, and forest fires top the list), as well as deaths strictly caused by human actions (murders, suicides, carbon monoxide poisoning, car and plane accidents, and so forth). A little morbid, but strangely fascinating.

About The Brutal Language Of Love, from the publisher:

From the first sentences of these nine stunning stories, Alicia Erian has you firmly in her grasp. In “Alcatraz” we meet a middle-school spelling champion who spends her afternoons taking baths with the boy next door. In “Almonds and Cherries,” a young woman turns an unexpectedly arousing bra-shopping experience into a short film, with ramifications for everyone around her. In “Lass,” a new wife with a history of bad decisions finds herself powerfully drawn to another man—her father-in-law.

Alicia Erian explores that peculiar part of the psyche and the complications of the heart that make you do things when you know better. The powerful, unsettling, deeply resonant stories in The Brutal Language of Love mark the emergence of a major new talent.

Click here to read an excerpt from the collection, and click here for a Q & A with the author.

--Marshal Zeringue

The greatest letter-writer in English

"If I had to nominate someone as the greatest letter-writer in English--I would rather not, since the choice is so wide, but if I had to--my vote would go to John Keats," writes John Gross, a former editor of the Times Literary Supplement and the author of The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters.

His letters are superb literature in their own right. The most famous of them are closely related to his poetry. You can watch him teasing out what it means to be a poet and coming up with memorable formulations. But his intuitions go beyond art. They bear on life, too, on his vision of the world as "a vale of soul-making." And if that makes him sound unduly solemn, one should add that his insights are embedded in the soil of everyday existence. Given his illness and his early death, the letters can hardly help being ultimately tragic, but they are also remarkable for warmth, openness and spirited observation. They are cheerful as well as profound.

Gross nominates four other great letter writers from history; click here to see who he came up with.

A selection of Keats' letters is available online here.

A brief profile of Keats, available here, includes this nugget:

Keats was only just over five feet tall, and very sensitive about his stature. Upon reading a favourable review of arch-rival Lord Byron's work, he is said to have exclaimed: "You see what it is to be six foot tall and a Lord!"

--Marshal Zeringue

"Vampires are the imaginary numbers of modern literature"

The screenwriter-director John August runs a pretty interesting blog which offers, as he puts it, "a ton of useful information about screenwriting."

Using a casual review of Barry Mazur’s book, Imagining Numbers--it's "only okay"--as his take-off point, August riffs on how vampires are the imaginary numbers of modern literature:

Neither vampires nor imaginary numbers exist, yet we treat them like they do, simply because it suits our purposes. Imaginary numbers let us posit hypothetical mathematical scenarios; vampires let us imagine hypothetical human scenarios. Want an addiction analogy? Vampires. Epidemic? Vampires. Alienation? Vampires. Need to have your protagonist exist both now and two hundred years in the past? Just make him a vampire.

Modern literature has substituted vampires into every conceivable genre. And I don’t think it’s any accident that our bitey friends have become the go-to supernatural beings. Werewolves are only part-time monsters. Ghosts lack a consistent mythology. Vampires, well, they’re just like us.

But different. They’re imaginary numbers, who can’t be reduced beyond their glamorous other-ness.

There's more here.

Aside from his actual movies, perhaps John's greatest contribution to contemporary storytelling is to get a long list of scribblers (see #113) to commit to never having one of their characters crawl through an air vent.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Even the longest novel has to begin with a single line"

"Even the longest novel has to begin with a single line," writes John Sutherland, "and that line sets the narrative on the path to its destination."

The prospective reader has, then, a number of initial "encounters" with the novel before reading it. Reviews and word of mouth may form a distant introduction. The first sight of the cover and the title, a quick-read scan of the blurb and shoutlines on the jacket form another. But the first "close" encounter will be the first line of the text. This is the moment of coupling. The following are two of the more famous first lines, or sentences, in fiction: they are much quoted and will be found in all self-respecting anthologies of quotation as stand-alone statements about the human condition.

"All happy families are alike. All unhappy families are unhappy in their own way."

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

The first is from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the second from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Neither assertion is at all plausible, outside the socially artificial world which the novelist has created and into which the sentences usher us. They are, in more than one sense, fictional. It is not, even in the little world of Longbourn, true that every single man in possession of a fortune, etc, must be in search of a wife. Bingley may be; Darcy certainly is not. He seems, if anything, to be infused with misogynistic Byronism. What is his first comment on Miss Bennet at the Meryton ball? "She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men." (Swine.) These are scarcely the words of a man with a fortune in search of a wife. They indicate, rather, a rich man well aware that the mothers of England are stalking him. What the apparently universal truth at the opening of the novel lays down are the distorted parameters within which a free spirit like Elizabeth Bennet is obliged to operate - and a wholly mercenary spirit like Mrs Bennet is all too happy to operate.

So, too, with the Tolstoy. It is manifestly not true that there is only one kind of family happiness. Is the happiness of the Vicar of Wakefield's domestic circle the same as that tentative happiness reached by the hero and heroine at the conclusion of Ian McEwan's 1997 novel Enduring Love? What Tolstoy's pseudo-pontifical "truism" sets up is the large question hovering over the life choices that Anna makes. Would she have been happier had she accepted her bourgeois, limited existence and the compromised happiness it guaranteed? Or is she justified in yearning, and reaching for, something larger, with all the attendant risks? Would it really have been a happy ever-after had she never returned to Moscow and Vronsky? Had she, that is, embraced the destiny of a respectable wife and mother? Is not "happy family", in Tolstoy's world, as created in Anna Karenina, a contradiction in terms? Within the novels these over-arching statements - which echo, more or less ironically, until the last page - create a climate, or rule of life, within which the narrative operates. They put the reader on the track. They are not, to echo Austen, universal truths.

Click here to read the rest of Sutherland's ruminations on first lines, including another famous first sentence: "Call me Ishmael."

--Marshal Zeringue

Indie bookstores

What's going on with the fortunes of independent bookstores? I noticed seemingly conflicting reports on the sector--particularly in Chicago--on two Chicago-based blogs this week.

Wednesday, Pete Lit eulogized the soon-to-be shuttered Brent Books here.

Then yesterday, at The Outfit, Sara Paretsky remarked on various indications of vitality in the business.

These reports aren't necessarily contradictory: Pete points out that Brent Books was not adequately serving those who wanted to shop there, while Sara indicates that her favored indies are more energetic and attentive.

Still, the contrast caught my eye.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books on pilot pioneers

Midge Gillies recently named six top books on pilot pioneers. Here is half of her list:

Lindbergh by A. Scott Berg
A thrilling biography of the all-American hero whose life was marred by his son’s kidnapping.

West With the Night by Beryl Markham
Lyrical evocation of flying over Africa and alone across the Atlantic.

The Wild Blue Yonder: The Picador Book of Aviation, ed. Graham Coster
A wide-ranging anthology that includes Alcock and Brown’s daredevil Atlantic crossing.

Click here to see the other three titles to make Gillies's list.

Midge Gillies is the author of Amy Johnson: Queen of the Air.

Want to know more about Amy Johnson but aren't really interested in reading Gillies's book? Click here to read John Preston's admiring review of the book.

--Marshal Zeringue

The page 69 test

Marshall McLuhan suggested that you should choose your reading by turning to page 69 of a book and, if you like it, read it.

To test this notion I reached for the closest book at hand. It was Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale, not the sort of thing that usually dominates my reading time but it happened to be at my side.

It is fascinating stuff. Much of the material is (way) over my head and, after an initial surge of straight-on reading past the hundred-page (or so) mark, I've slowed down and now dip into it between novels.

Anyway, is page 69 a good place to get a sense of the book?

Amazingly enough, it is. The page is in a section of the book headed "ergasts" (for Homo erectus or Homo ergaster or, for those who studied dinosaurs when they still walked the planet, Java Man or Peking Man). Homo ergaster is the first fossil ancestor we have who is unequivocally of a different species from ourselves.

Page 69 begins:

Even I, however, have no hope that we shall ever know what they [ie, Homo ergaster] said to each other, or the language in which they said it. Did it begin with pure words and no grammar: the equivalent of an infant babbling nounspeak? Or did grammar come early and--which is not impossible and not even silly--suddenly? Perhaps the capacity for grammar was already deep in the brain, being used for something else like mental planning. Is it even possible that grammar, as applied to communication at least, was the sudden invention of a genius? I doubt it, but in this field I wouldn’t rule anything out with confidence.

I'm familiar (or at least used to be superficially familiar) enough with the debate over whether language is innate or learned to be intrigued by this stuff, and the book is chock full of discussions of this sort.

Then, still on page 69, Dawkins gets into how some new research using genetic data from a family with an unusual hereditary defect might be used to identify certain parts of the brain involved in language development. At which point I find myself at sea.

And all that is reasonably indicative of what the book has so far held in store for me: a few amazing insights and speculation, followed by some science I don't really understand but would like to.

McLuhan's test holds up for Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale, surprisingly enough.

--Marshal Zeringue

The Washington read

Washington read -- n. The perusal of a book in a bookstore that consists of checking the index for references to oneself and reading only those parts of the book.

The power elite in Washington openly and gleefully admit to the practice of "the Washington read": it is as if it's a sign of one's power that he (1) has no time to read books but (2) has reason to suspect that he's important enough to be written about and (3) is powerful enough to mock those who might care about what words mean.

Owning up to the practice may be honest, but bragging about the Washington read is churlishness masquerading as sophistication.

Yet it's not the greatest sin committed by politicians and pundits when it comes to the world of books. Far more cynical is the practice of taking a work of nonfiction and pretending it supports a given policy preference (though it's not as bad as using a work of fiction for support of one's policy).

It happens too often, and too infrequently do the media call the politicians--and themselves--on it. I take a closer look at the practice--with actual cases of the abuse--here.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jodie Foster's bookshelf

Last year Jodie Foster shared some of her favorite books with Oprah's magazine.

A few of her favorites:

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

I wrote my senior essay in college on this book, specifically Morrison's relationship to the African oral-narrative tradition. My favorite passage describes a water stain on a wood table—how that stain takes on new life and meaning with the passage of time and family history. I think Morrison has the most deeply poetic voice in contemporary American fiction, and I have never missed reading anything she's written.

The Complete Greek Tragedies by Euripides

When I was about 13, I became very interested in classic Greek tragedies, and I think these represent the best of them. They combine what we'd identify as modern psychology with the concept of destiny. It's impossible to forget these characters—Medea, for instance, who kills her own beloved children when faced with her husband's betrayal. These are stories of such passion.

Naked by David Sedaris

In this collection of autobiographical essays, humanity's wicked little details are seen through the eyes of a truly strange man. Sedaris's observations are sometimes weirdly funny and unexpectedly moving—including his trip of self-discovery to a nudist camp. I read Naked in one sitting and then bought five copies to give to friends.

Click here to read about her other favorites.

Foster on reading:

Books have always been my escape—where I go to bury my nose, hone my senses, or play the emotional tourist in a world of my own choosing. I'm a "head first" person, really. Words are my best expressive tool, my favorite shield, my point of entry. One of my first memories? Hunching in the car with Chariots of the Gods, waiting for my mother to drive me to school.

When I was growing up, books took me away from my life to a solitary place that didn't feel lonely. They celebrated the outcasts, people who sat on the margins of society contemplating their interiors. When adolescence got scary, I turned to books addictively: Franny and Zooey, The Magus, The Idiot—just 50 more pages and I'll call it a day; just 20 more pages and I can have dessert. Books were my cure for a romanticized unhappiness, for the anxiety of impending adulthood. They were all mine, private islands with secret passwords only the worthy could utter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Listomania

John Sutherland has come up with a list of the best books about listing:

Nick Hornby's High Fidelity (the classic anatomy of listomania);

Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet (also up there with Don Q[uixote], in the great unread-but-should-be list);

Philip Hensher's The Fit;

Kingsley Amis's Girl, 20;

Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (after nuclear holocaust, a Jewish husband's shopping list becomes a sacred text).

Click here to read the brief article for Sutherland's spur to invention as well as to learn why Schindler's List did not make the list list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Günter Grass' "Cat and Mouse"

Signandsight summarizes the latest on the Günter Grass affair from Die Tageszeitung:

Markus Joch has read Günter Grass' novel Cat and Mouse in an attempt to glean "new information about Grass' relationship" to this part of the Danzig trilogy, written 1961, and to show how the author fictionally encoded the "insane machismo of his young years" in it. The fact that Grass tried to make his hero Joachim Mahlke "ridiculous, to shove his heroes' outlook away from his own, reflects the creative principle of the entire story. The author gave his character a series of not-identical features, estranged him, in order to make the almost identical non-threatening – the alienation effect with security measures."

Click here for more "arts, essays, and ideas from Germany," in translation.

Previously on the blog: Günter Grass shocks Germany; John Irving on Günter Grass.

--Marshal Zeringue

How to choose a novel: the page 69 test

From an excerpt from John Sutherland's How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide:

For the reader of novels the question is: where to start? Is there any point in starting, or shaping one's reading experiences? How can one organise a curriculum? Ours is not, like the 1940s, an age of austerity: it is not money - expensive as new hardback novels, quite irrationally, seem - but time that is in short supply. How, then, to find the novels that you do have the time to invest in? As the science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon (the original for Kurt Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout) observed: "Ninety per cent of science fiction is crap. But 90 per cent of everything is crap." How can we identify the 10 per cent, or less, of fiction available that is not crap?

Sutherland says to not judge a book by its cover.

Dust jackets, blurbs, shoutlines, critics' commendations ("quote whores", as they are called in the video/DVD business) all jostle for the browser's attention. But I recommend ignoring the hucksters' shouts and applying instead the McLuhan test.
Marshall McLuhan, the guru of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), recommends that the browser turn to page 69 of any book and read it. If you like that page, buy the book. It works. Rule One, then: browse powerfully and read page 69.

I've never tried that approach. [UPDATE: But hundreds of authors now have.]

To read more of the Sutherland excerpt, click here.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nick Hornby's favorite novel of the past year

Macleans recently canvassed a few writers for some late summer reading recommendations.

One of the more enticing entries:

Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity and A Long Way Down, offers his favourite novel of the past year or so: "Jess Walter's Citizen Vince. It's funny, dark and ingenious; it convinces you that it knows what it's talking about. And it's actually talking about quite a lot, in an attractively unassuming way. Vince has been relocated from N.Y.C. to Spokane, Wash., under a witness-protection program, and he has to work two things out. The first is why someone's trying to kill him; the second is who he should vote for in the 1980 presidential election. One problem is obviously more pressing, but they are given equal consideration. Jess Walter is, I suspect, a novelist to watch."

Click here for some other writers' suggestions if you haven't already left for the bookstore.

Citizen Vince also earned a nice recommendation from Maureen Corrigan in the Washington Post Book World: "Maybe if Aaron Copland had written the score for a film noir starring the Marx Brothers there would be some prototype for Walter's fusion fiction, but he didn't and there isn't."

The book won the 2006 Edgar for Best Novel.

Also see yesterday's post at "Pete Lit" about the new Nick Hornby book.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Ellroy -- "I'm having a blast"

From the Guardian's mini-profile of James Ellroy:

Ellroy's own summary of his life runs thus: "Boy's mother murdered. Boy's life shattered. Boy grows up homeless alcoholic jailbird. Jailbird cleans up and writes his way to salvation. Jailbird becomes the Mad Dog of American Crime Fiction." Ellroy's fiction is raw, fetid, bloody, brutal and peopled with every type of human scum; it also crackles and zips with a sort of virtual reality glare, the shocking degeneration of his characters matched only by the mesmerising power of his excoriating style. He complains that "French interviewers all insist that I must be in terrible pain to write these dark, awful books. I say no, you don't get it, Froggy, I'm having a blast."

Is there a bigger fan of Ellroy's work than this guy?

"The Rap Sheet" is ready for Brian De Palma's big screen version of The Black Dahlia.

--Marshal Zeringue