Shaken & Stirred

It's a Wiki-World and

...we just live in it.

I wrote this week's cover story for Publishers Weekly, about the impact of Wikipedia (and other online sources) on the reference book market. I hope it's as fun to read as it was to write.

Wild Reviews

The New York Times Book Review has a slew of children's book reviews this week, by all sorts of excellent reviewers (Sarah Ellis! Leonard Marcus!). I am beyond happy to see Pat Murphy's The Wild Girls get some much-deserved love.

Packet due on Monday, and so off I am to sit outside with my Neo and write some fiction. At least I have a shiny ARC of Octavian Nothing II to be my reward. w00t as they say!

Classics & Stuff

I'm beginning to feel like a Renaissance Learning pimp (they're the parent company of the AlphaSmart Neo), but they've sponsored an interesting, in-depth look at kids' reading habits, and I'm going to link to it anyway. The Washington Post has a summary article on the findings:

Children have welcomed the Harry Potter books in recent years like free ice cream in the cafeteria, but the largest survey ever of youthful reading in the United States will reveal today that none of J.K. Rowling's phenomenally popular books has been able to dislodge the works of longtime favorites Dr. Seuss, E.B. White, Judy Blume, S.E. Hinton and Harper Lee as the most read.

Books by the five well-known U.S. authors, plus lesser-known Laura Numeroff, Katherine Paterson and Gary Paulsen, drew the most readers at every grade level in a study of 78.5 million books read by more than 3 million children who logged on to the Renaissance Learning Web site to take quizzes on books they read last year. Many works from Rowling's Potter series turned up in the top 20, but other authors also ranked high and are likely to get more attention as a result.

I don't know that I find this terribly surprising, and I'm curious what people think about. It seems to me that the big flaw is it's based on accelerated reader quiz data--which tells you what kids are reading for credit, off I'm assuming lists of acceptable books, but not what they choose themselves outside school. (If I'm wrong about how that works, someone please let me know.)

Bonus: reflections on reading are included in the full report from Daniel Handler, S.E. Hinton, and Christopher Paul Curtis.

Addition: Just skimming through the findings, especially in the top 10 percent numbers, there are more and more genre titles the older the kids get.

Remixed

Also, this cracks me up -- Arthur Levine senior editor Cheryl Klein rewrites "Baby Got Back" in a more literary style:

My homeboys tried to warn me
But that book you got makes me so horny
Ooh, Tolkien - elves!
You say you wanna get in my shelves?

Via.

Dr. Nice

In all the crazy of last week, I missed publication day for John Kessel's new collection, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories.

John is one of my very favorite writers--his novel Corrupting Dr. Nice (first chapter here) is on my all-time top five. He's also one of my very favorite people in the world; he was part of the small coterie that attended my and C's nuptials, and I keep a polaroid of me, Karen, Kelly, and Barb posing next to a toga-clad John* at Wiscon 2004 on the filing cabinet next to my desk. In fact, something that still makes me insanely happy is this little snippet of "It's All True," which you can read in the collection:

The wall of my apartment faded into a vision of Gwenda, my PDA. I had Gwenda programmed to look like Louise Brooks. "You've got a call from Vannicom, Ltd.," she said. "Rosethrush Vannice wants to speak with you."

My Mac is named Lulu.

Anyway, all this by way of saying that you need a copy of John's book. Stat. And Small Beer is even offering it for free download. I guarantee you'll end up wanting to own your own copy**.

*It's not every writer who would wear a toga to promote someone else's book launch!
**Some of the content has even been the center of a bona fide censorship controversy!

Elsewhere!

Over at Amazon's Omnivoracious, the indefatigable Jeff VanderMeer has kindly posted a recent interview he did with me about YA books I love--oldish, newer, and forthcoming.

As you may have noticed, I'm a bit MIA this week. We're busy and also dealing with family illness and the like, so that may be the case for a few more days. Back with posts about recent fabulous reads soon, though. Have a good weekend, everybody. I leave you with a link to a truly stupendous fan art gallery (Snape! House! Spock! Elvis!), courtesy of RLB.

Tiptree'd

Needless to say, I am VERY happy with the work we jurors did this year. Go us!

PRESS RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE PUBLICATION – 2008.04.14

JAMES TIPTREE JR. AWARD WINNER ANNOUNCED

A gender-exploring science fiction award is presented to Sarah Hall for The Carhullan Army (Daughters of the North)

The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2007 Tiptree Award is The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall (published in the United States as Daughters of the North). The British edition was published in 2007 by Faber & Faber; the American edition in 2008 by HarperCollins.

The Tiptree Award will be celebrated on May 25, 2008 at WisCon (www.wiscon.info) in Madison, Wisconsin. The winner of the Tiptree Award receives $1000 in prize money, an original artwork created specifically for the winning novel or story, and (as always) chocolate.

Each year, a panel of five jurors selects the Tiptree Award winners and compiles an Honor List of other works that they find interesting, relevant to the award, and worthy of note.  The 2007 jurors were Charlie Anders, Gwenda Bond (chair), Meghan McCarron, Geoff Ryman, and Sheree Renee Thomas.

The Carhullan Army elicited strong praise from the jurors. Gwenda Bond said, “Hall does so many things well in this book – writing female aggression in a believable way, dealing with real bodies in a way that makes sense, and getting right to the heart of the contradictions that violence brings out in people, but particularly in women in ways we still don't see explored that often. I found the writing entrancing and exactly what it needed to be for the story; lean, but well-turned.” Geoff Ryman said, “It faces up to our current grim future (something too few SF novels have done) and seems to go harder and darker into war, violence, and revolution.” Meghan McCarron said, “I found the book to be subtle and ambiguous in terms of its portrayal of the Army, and its utopia….The book became, ultimately, an examination of what it means to attain physical, violent power as defined by a male-dominated world. And it asserted that it could be claimed by anyone, regardless of physical sex, provided they were willing to pay the price.”

The book, which is Hall’s third novel, also won the 2007 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best work of literature (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama) from Britain or the Commonwealth written by an author of 35 or under.

The Tiptree Award Honor List is a strong part of the award’s identity and is used by many readers as a recommended reading list for the rest of the year. The 2007 Honor List is:

• "Dangerous Space" by Kelley Eskridge, in the author’s collection Dangerous Space (Aqueduct Press, 2007)
• Water Logic by Laurie Marks (Small Beer Press, 2007)
• Empress of Mijak and The Riven Kingdom by Karen Miller (HarperCollins, Australia, 2007)
• The Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu (Hyperion, 2007)
• Interfictions, edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (Interstitial Arts Foundation/Small Beer Press, 2007)
• Glasshouse by Charles Stross (Ace, 2006)
• The Margarets by Sheri S. Tepper (Harper Collins 2007)
• Y: The Last Man, written by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Pia Guerra (available in 60 issues or 10 volumes from DC/Vertigo Comics, 2002-2008)
• Flora Segunda by Ysabeau Wilce (Harcourt, 2007)

The James Tiptree Jr. Award is presented annually to a work or works that explore and expand gender roles in science fiction and fantasy. The award seeks out work that is thought-provoking, imaginative, and perhaps even infuriating. The Tiptree Award is intended to reward those women and men who are bold enough to contemplate shifts and changes in gender roles, a fundamental aspect of any society.

The James Tiptree Jr. Award was created in 1991 to honor Alice Sheldon, who wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr. By her choice of a masculine pen name, Sheldon helped break down the imaginary barrier between “women’s writing” and “men’s writing.” Her insightful short stories were notable for their thoughtful examination of the roles of men and women in our society.

Since its inception, the Tiptree Award has been an award with an attitude. As a political statement, as a means of involving people at the grassroots level, as an excuse to eat cookies, and as an attempt to strike the proper ironic note, the award has been financed through bake sales held at science fiction conventions across the United States, as well as in England and Australia. Fundraising efforts have included auctions conducted by stand-up comic and award-winning writer Ellen Klages, the sale of t-shirts and aprons created by collage artist and silk screener Freddie Baer, and the publication of four anthologies of award winners and honor-listed stories. Three of the anthologies are in print and available from Tachyon Publications (www.tachyonpublications.com). The award has also published two cookbooks featuring recipes and anecdotes by science fiction writers and fans, available through www.tiptree.org.

In addition to presenting the Tiptree Award annually, the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council occasionally presents the Fairy Godmother Award, a special award in honor of Angela Carter. Described as a “mini, mini, mini, mini MacArthur award,” the Fairy Godmother Award strikes without warning, providing a financial boost to a deserving writer in need of assistance to continue creating material that matches the goals of the Tiptree Award.

Reading for the 2008 Tiptree Award will soon begin, with jurors K. Tempest Bradford, Gavin Grant (chair), Leslie Howle, Roz Kaveney, and Catherynne M. Valente. As always, the Tiptree Award invites all to recommend works for the award. Please submit recommendations via the Tiptree Award website at www.tiptree.org.

For more information, visit the Tiptree Award website at www.tiptree.org.

Monsters of Academia (Updated)

To a greater or lesser extent, John Gardner's ideas about writing are just one of those things you eventually have to deal with in MFA school. For my critical thesis topic--the omniscient point of view--The Art of Fiction became one of my primary source books (he was a big fan), and On Becoming a Novelist worked its way in there too, since I had a point to make about the oft-misinterpreted fictive dream concept.

I won't bore you with talk about that. But running down some things, I came across a couple of links that might be of interest. (Jeff Ford, you studied with Gardner, right?*)

Anyway, I like this passage from Stewart O'Nan's "Notes from the Underground," on how seeing the various drafts of Grendel taught him to revise:

I'd heard how hard writers worked at revising, but here was concrete and heartening proof.  I'd been impatient with my work because my early drafts lacked depth and precision; now I realized I had completely misjudged them, and misjudged the effort required to write well.  It was not brilliance or facility that was necessary, but the determination to bear and even enjoy the dull process of wading into one's own bad prose again, one more time, and then once again, with the utmost concentration and taste, looking for opportunities to mine deeper, clues to what these people wanted and needed. I went back to my desk, applied myself with this in mind, and discovered that I was again writing on another level, a level that even now I'm happy to reach.

More fun is a Baltimore City Paper piece about Gardner's infamous feud with John Barth:

As the class proceeds, Gardner proceeds to take the gloves off. Suddenly he is attacking his host, Barth, whom he tags as a "secondary" writer--someone who writes fiction about fiction. And chief among Barth's offenses, just in case the students were thinking of buying it, is Giles Goat-Boy, which Gardner tells them is "arch, extravagantly self-indulgent, clumsily allegorical, pedantic, tiresomely and pretentiously advance-guard, and like much of our 'new fiction', puerilely obscene."

A few days later, the argument is recounted in The Sun, in an article portentously titled "Two Literary Lions Tangle." Barth fires off a letter to The Sun, acknowledging that he "registered, very briefly, some of my objections to [Gardner's] eloquently expressed literary opinions because that is what seminars--indeed universities--are for." But as the letter proceeds, it sounds as though Barth believes he's entitled to a rebuttal. What follows is a biting, if somewhat tongue-in-cheek, evaluation of his colleague's recently published On Moral Fiction as "an intellectually immoral, self-serving, finally demalogical attack on his contemporaries, many of whom (in my opinion) are immensely more talented than himself."

It's hard to disagree with the take of Liz Rosenberg (caught between them at the time):

When asked how significant, in the end, she thought this battle was, Rosenberg thinks carefully before answering. "I don't know," she says finally. "There was an experimental phase in writing, which has died down to some degree, but maybe that battle untethered the way for greater freedom in writing." She does express some regret for the passing of an era when two major writers cared passionately enough to fight about the principles of their art. "Since then, battles have become purely personal and a lot less ideological," she says.

More high-minded feuds, please.

*Updated: Jeff reminds me why I was thinking that -- well, besides that it's true. A couple of years ago, he posted his introduction to the Fantasy Masterwords edition of Grendel:

I got to see first hand how he approached the craft of fiction. I'd bring him my short stories, and he would go to work on them, spending as much time as was necessary to show me the gaffs, what repairs were possible, where the fatal flaws lay, and discuss writing strategies that would help me to circumvent the same problems in the future. A meeting could take up to two hours. Rehabilitating a single awkward sentence was as important as understanding the entire structure of a story, and a story's structure was discussed as if it were a kind of music. If there was a line of students waiting to see him outside his door, they would have to wait until he was finished, but they always waited, because they knew that when it was their turn, he would do the same for each of them.

Heretical Amazon Hacking

Paul Witcover over at the inferior 4+1 (inferior to no one!) pointed to this Reuters story about a survey looking at Americans favorite books. The findings:

"While the Bible is number one among each of the different demographic groups, there is a large difference in the number two favorite book," Harris said in a statement announcing the results.

Men chose J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and women selected Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" as their second-favorite book, according to the online poll.

But the second choice for 18- to 31-year-olds was J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, while 32- to 43-year-olds named Stephen King's "The Stand" and Dan Brown's "Angels and Demons".

Picks for second-favorite book also varied according to region. "Gone With the Wind" was number two in the southern and midwestern United States while easterners chose "The Lord of the Rings" and westerners opted for "The Stand".

In the comments, a clever commenter named Kit suggests the following diabolical scheme for authors:

You know that you can use the bible to make your amazon #s zoom, right? Make all your friends order your book and the cheapest possible edition of the bible simultaneously. Pretty soon people who click on the most-clicked-on amazon title will see:

readers who bought this also liked YOUR TITLE HERE

So obvious, it just might work...

Discovery

I've now read Kalpana's Dream and One Whole and Perfect Day by Judith Clarke, and want desperately to read everything she's ever written. Sadly, our library seems to have only a short story collection. Woe.

Anyway, if you're looking for strange, beautifully written books that wrap you up like an embrace, books full of joy and hope in the best way and not the sappy one... One Whole and Perfect makes me feel much the same way that Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle does.

Sweet Valley Huh (updated)

Gawker had the goods yesterday on the relaunch of the Sweet Valley High series, complete with new covers featuring some soap star I've never heard of. I don't hate the new covers. As much as I now feel a strange affection for the old ones (those pennants!) for purely nostalgic reasons, I remember hating that particular dorky drawing style of cover even as a kid.

And, yeah, I read all the SVH books I could get my hands on when I was a pre-teen, and I'm kind of sad that I don't recall very much about them other than the bad girl/good girl, don't-we-all-want-to-be-a-twin* thing. I read lots of pretty disposable tween/teen fiction, and about the only things that stick in my mind from that particular milieu are Christopher Pike books**. (I count Judy Blume and the Ramonas and stuff like that as things I read when I was younger, and not in the category of "pretty disposable tween/teen fiction" -- The Baby-Sitters Club books would be another example and certainly of the series style stuff, though now that I'm thinking about this I remember adoring Betsy Haynes' The Against Taffy Sinclair Club, which always seemed kind of an ode to meanness, and the later books in that spin-off series. Those books weren't afraid to get their hands dirty. Anyway, before you judge, remember that I was also reading a lot of Shakespeare. It was a balanced fictional diet.)

Still, like Jenny Han over at the Longstockings, some of the text changes involved in the SVH repackaging trouble me. I could care less about the Fiat becoming a Jeep Wrangler, but as Han says:

So apparently a size 6 is no longer "perfect." The Wakefields are now a perfect size four, according to the press release. I'm surprised they didn't go so far as saying, perfect size 2. Or zero for that matter! I mean, yes, clothing sizes are getting bigger (ie a 1950s size 8 is NOT a modern day size 8, it's like a 4) as we are getting bigger, but it's obvs not just that-- today's standard of beauty is basically anorexia. Just look at the runways! Look at Hollywood's big stars! Nicole Kidman, Renee Zellweger, Sarah Michelle Gellar--all tiny.

Disgusting--why not obliterate references to the twins' sizes at all, to *update* them? How far we've come, baby.

The often-hilarious SVH-focused Dairi Burger blog was created to "reread the entire series to relive my tween years, and also to get really angry at how SVH gave me a false and misguided view of high school life. And life in general. In fact, I blame all my insecurities, problems and worries on these books." She has even harsher words on the revamp, and wonders why the whole thing is necessary (or if it's even possible):

Why? Trying to cash in? Will tweens of this generation appreciate it? I don't think so. It’s so ridiculous and not like anything today. And think about how cellphone, internet and myspace would have affected the SVH kids. I don’t know if it would be better or worse. Plus, the Gossip Girl series is kind of the SVH of today.

Anyway, this is also a great excuse to link Lizzie Skurnick's awesome 2002 Baltimore City Paper piece "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun: Confessions of a Sweet Valley Scribe":

 First of all, for those of you who think this piece serves as some nice free advertising for a certain hack, think again. There are no royalties in the world of Sweet Valley. There is also no author credit. That invariably goes to the ghostly Laurie John (who, according to some girls on Amazon.com, my lone source of public critical analysis, is "losing her touch") and to the creator, Francine Pascal (please don't sue me), who lives it up in Paris off the skin of all of our typing fingers but is also the author of the completely awesome '80s Y.A. masterpiece Hangin' Out With Ceci, so I don't care.

Writing for Sweet Valley does not, as many of my highfalutin academic colleagues seem to think, involve simply dumbing down "normal" writing or being shallow (although that serves as a good illustration of how we actually think of teenage girls). Teenagers are notoriously tough customers, and they can sniff out a snob or a suck-up very quickly: When I started using brand names in Jessica and Elizabeth's bathroom, I was immediately admonished for commercialism on Amazon, and the reader reviews for my most recent book sent me quivering off with my tale between my legs ("This book should never have been written.").

Successful teen writing is about sound, as in sounding right. Neve Campbell changed the rhythm, and Buffy changed it a little more, but it all still depends on evoking that palpable sense of Sweet Valley, of biology class and beach parties in a camp-free environment, one as recognizable as Raymond Chandler's L.A. but sometimes as elusive (again, case in point, "This book was OK but not good").

Reality bites, as they say (while we're revisiting dated chesnuts). (Thanks to Micol for the heads up on the Gawker post.)

*Submitted as evidence: Brandon and Brenda. And there are rumors Rob Thomas may bring back some of the original cast members in his revamp, which frightens me. I think Brian Austin Green on The Sarah Connor Chronicles may be as much of that as I can handle.

**I've been considering rereading some of these for grins. I have a stack plucked from my childhood bookshelves on the corner of my desk Right Now.

Updated to add: Micol also sends along a timely and really sharp article on repackaging and YA from Print Magazine (about visual culture and design), which contains a decent basic overview of the genre's history (at least in marketing and design terms) and an interesting discussion of trends in book design for teens. A snippet:

The hero or heroine of a typical YA novel is trying to make sense of the world and his or her own place within it, but the physical book is a clearly defined object unto itself. Indeed, it’s an accessory, explains Marc Aronson, author of Race and a longtime YA writer and editor. "It has to sit comfortably next to all the other objects in the reader's world, their magazines and clothes and music. It's all about a sense of coolness and intelligence. It’s a style—it's saying, 'We are exactly who you are. This is the world you'll feel comfortable with. Nothing about this book is going to make you feel awkward to carry it and wear it. It's as sleek and cool and as with-it as you are.'" That might explain YA author and feminist Paula Danziger's seemingly incongruous bias against picturing the main character of The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, a girl struggling with her weight, on the original cover.

O Canada Day

It's One Shot World Tour: Canada Day, with a whole bunch of bloggers giving shout-outs to literary Canada. Colleen has the full list of links.

I had big plans, but the overwhelmingness of the overwhelming has impacted my capacity. Instead, I'm just going to highlight two incredibly wonderful writers from Canada who should be getting more attention (and who teach at my MFA program). And because time is short, I'm more or less just going to say that I love their books, and you should too, rather than offering compelling arguments. (But, seriously, you should too.)

Tim Wynne-Jones is a rock star. Maybe not quite yet in the U.S., but I'm thinking it's a done deal after his next couple of books come out. Rex Zero and the End of the World was rightly acclaimed and praised by critics, and was named a 2007 Boston Globe-Horn Book honor book. It's a hilarious, smart, wonderful book. The sequel, Rex Zero, King of Nothing, is due out in April, and I can't wait. Candlewick signed him up for a two-book deal back in the summer--the first book is called The Children of the Snye, and what I've heard him read from it was smashing. And, of course, he's published a lot of other books, for a whole host of age groups, any of which I'd wager are worth checking out. And Cynthia Leitich Smith did a great interview with him about A Thief in the House of Memory (the first thing I ever read of his; highly recommended).

I may be a bit biased, but only a bit--Tim was my first semester advisor and is a genius writing teacher. Really. If you ever get the chance to work with him, take it.

Sarah Ellis looks good in a hat, something you can see firsthand if you click that link and visit her site. Like Tim, she's also written for a whole range of age groups. Her picture book The Queen's Feet is absolutely charming, and I adored her slipstreamy, deliciously creepy short story collection Back of Beyond. Her most recent novel, the quirky* coming of age story Odd Man Out, should be a break-out book. It won the prestigious TD Canadian Children's Literature Prize (for which Rex Zero was shortlisted, I might add) and the Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize in 2007. (Side note: Can we all agree that prize sounds more exciting than award?) On her site, she describes the book's genesis:

Once I was visiting a school and a grade seven boy asked me to consider writing a book about espionage. I'm not that interested in espionage (although I like the gadgets and the mysterious secrecy of it all) but I did find myself thinking a lot about a boy who was, himself, interested in espionage and spies. That boy turned into Kip. The other thing that is behind this book is my love for stories that have a group of kids in them, like Cheaper by the Dozen or the Casson family stories by Hilary McKay and I wanted to try such a book myself. A gang of five girl cousins is the result. I also like island stories so I put them all on an island.

I've also heard that she's no slouch in the genius writing teacher department herself.

*Not in the bad way.

This Is Not Modern Art

In a discussion elsewhere, I was reminded of British artist and critic (or perhaps, more accurately, artist critic) Matthew Collings, whose BBC series and accompanying book This is Modern Art from the late '90s helped me immensely in developing the ability to appreciate contemporary nonrepresentational art.

He did a 2003 follow-up series called Matt's Old Masters, which I haven't seen (though now that I'm reminded I'll order the book version), but I remembered a fascinating little essay he wrote about the general thrust of it that ran in the New Statesman. Turns out the piece is still available online:

The key to Rubens is something that is before our eyes when we're looking at his work, but which we're not necessarily aware that we're seeing. It's not fat, sentimental nudity. We're not interested in that any more. And if we are interested in royalty, it's not because we believe the royals' power comes from heaven, but because we suspect that they don't deserve power at all and we want to see them cut down to size. Old mythological stories are of no interest to us, either, unless they've been recycled by Hollywood into science-fiction movies. Fatties, royals and mythology - they're all dead to us. But there is something we do always want which Rubens supplies, and that's pleasure. The form for it is painting itself, its capacity to be a language of pure feeling.

Imagine you're in the Prado now, in front of Rubens's The Three Graces: three life-size nude women. Now I'm going to tell you something about those outrageously big bottoms that I hope will simultaneously illuminate them and make them disappear. The pleasure isn't in what you think is before you: an artificial, distant and slightly tedious scene. You recognise what the painting is of, but you don't realise that it is also doing something mysterious. You believe in the illusion so much that you don't see that it's constructed out of melting paint. Focus on this. This is the bit that's for you. It's the bit that's still alive, that's connected to Rubens's own nervous system. What he felt as he painted those brush strokes is the feeling that you're now having: he wanted pleasure and so do you. And now you're both getting it.

It's worth reading the whole thing.

An Interview with Joshua Henkin

So, yes, I'm late to this party*. I've been intending to interview Matrimony author Joshua Henkin on the site for, oh, AGES, and he's been entirely gracious during an extended period when I've been so busy that pretty much all optional commitments have gotten continually pushed aside. But: We finally managed to get the interview done, and talk about all sorts of interesting things--writing workshops, craft and process (of course), recommendations--so I think you'll agree it was worth the wait. If you've somehow missed the book, check out this review in the New York Times by Jennifer Egan. And now, without further ado...

GB: I usually start out by asking people about their work process and how it changes (or doesn't) between projects? Can you tell me a little about what yours looked like for Matrimony?

JH: Well, it took me ten years to write Matrimony, and I threw out more than three thousand pages, so I sometimes think that my work process should be an object lesson in how not to do things. But actually, the book needed to brew as long as it did. My first novel, Swimming Across the Hudson, is told in first-person and is set over the course of approximately a year, whereas Matrimony is told from more than one point of view and covers about twenty years. So pretty early on I knew this was going to be a more ambitious novel and that I would need to approach it differently. Part of what I was doing was figuring out how to write a novel, since I was trained as a short-story writer, and though Swimming Across the Hudson didn’t literally grow out of a short story, it has the sensibility of a long short story--say, in the same way that Richard Ford’s early novel Wildlife does. So I was learning how to operate on a bigger canvas.

One interesting thing that happened early on was that my computer broke down, and while it was in the shop I was forced to write by hand. This turned out to be a real blessing. I’m an absolutely compulsive rewriter and reviser, and my natural inclination is to revise as I go along--to try, on the sentence level, to make everything perfect before I move on to the next scene. This approach is possible (though perhaps not particularly advisable) when it comes to a short story because with a story you can potentially see the whole in advance. But with a novel, you can’t see the forest for the trees, and you need to just write for a couple of years without really knowing what you’re doing or where you’re going. If you revise too early, it’s like building a house and working on the ornamentation on the doorpost before you’ve laid the foundation. You may end up with a beautiful doorpost, but it doesn’t belong in the house. Well, writing by hand helped me combat my tendency to revise too soon. There’s something about writing on computer that, in my case at least, makes me feel compelled to try to make things beautiful--probably because the words look neat on the screen and so I’m drawn to trying to make them neat in deeper, more important ways. But because my handwriting is so bad I had no illusion looking at the page that what I was writing was anything but rough, and this allowed me to plow forward without looking back. So even when my computer came back from the shop, I continued to write much of the first draft by hand.

One other process struggle was the simple fact that I was a different person when I finished Matrimony from who I was when I started it. When I began the book, I was single, living in Ann Arbor, and when I finished it, I was married, living in Brooklyn with my wife and two daughters. I’d gone from my early thirties to my early forties, which is a time of significant change for most people, and no matter what age you are, a lot happens over the course of ten years; your preoccupations and obsessions shift. So one of the struggles for any writer, but particularly for a writer whose book took as long to write as mine did, is to keep the voice consistent over narrative time, to make the novel’s themes and concerns part of a seamless whole. A writer wants to make his or her novel feel as if it was written in one sitting, and the farther away the book is from having been written in one sitting the greater the challenge is to make it appear that way.

Dear Mr. Itzkoff

Please STOP:

To my mind, perhaps the most unusual example of a well-known genre author crossing over into YA turf is a long out-of-print relic called “Nick and the Glimmung,” written by none other than Philip K. Dick. Published in 1988, six years after his death, and never released in the United States, “Nick and the Glimmung” has the gentle pacing and simplified vocabulary of a young-adult novel, but its sensibility and subject matter are unmistakably Dickian.

Gentle pacing? Simplified vocabulary? Huh? (Hat tip to Carrie!)

Dept. of Gimme a F*&!ing Break

Oh, Dave Itzkoff:

As someone whose subway rides tend to resemble scenes from an “Evil Dead” movie, in which I am Bruce Campbell dodging zombies who have had all traces of their humanity sucked out of them by a sinister book — not the “Necronomicon,” but “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” — I sometimes wonder how any self-respecting author of speculative fiction can find fulfillment in writing novels for young readers. I suppose J. K. Rowling could give me 1.12 billion reasons in favor of it: get your formula just right and you can enjoy worldwide sales, film and television options, vibrating-toy-broom licensing fees, Chinese-language bootlegs of your work, a kind of limited immortality (L. Frank Baum who?) and — finally — genuine grown-up readers. But where’s the artistic satisfaction? Where’s the dignity?

Trust me when I say that many of us think that zombies of the brain-sucking variety have long since shown up on your subway ride.

I realize that he's probably just trying to be cute here. Sadly, the only real counterargument offered in the review itself is basically that you can put all kinds of crazy stuff in books for kids. I'm also pretty curious as to whether he's read enough YA to declare something "one of the most imaginative young adult novels of the post-Potter era."

Though, in this case, I actually agree and am glad to see Un Lun Dun getting some love.

And this is interesting -- a plug for Nine Hundred Grandmothers is always a good thing. (Via Scott Edelman.)

Cocktail Hour

We couldn't swing AWP this year, sadly -- sometimes it feels as if we will never make it back to NYC (this year! I vow!). Too much other recent travel, too many other obligations, etc. But my school is throwing a little party, and y'all that are going should stop by and rub shoulders with some of my classmates and faculty:

Vermont College Gathering at the Pig & Whistle
Friday, February 1, 2008, at 7:00
The Pig & Whistle
Times Square
165 West 47th Street
Vermont College welcomes all alumni, students, faculty, friends, staff, prospective students and curious passers-by to a social gathering at The Pig & Whistle. Hunger Mountain contributors and subscribers are also welcome to attend. The gathering will be upstairs; we will have exclusive service so that food and drinks will be readily available for attendees to purchase from the restaurant. The Pig & Whistle is in Times Square, approximately 1/3 mi. walking distance from the Rockefeller Center Hilton. To walk there, head south on 6th Ave (against traffic), and take a right on W 47th St. The Pig & Whistle is at 165 West 47th Street across from the Quality Inn.

Trust me, they know how to throw a to do.

Desecrated Spaces

The NYT has the story of an illicit party gone wrong at the Robert Frost farmhouse:

Over the next several hours, more than 30 teenagers and young adults toasted their post-adolescence with liquor carrying the added kick of illicitness. By early morning they were gone, leaving a wounded house watched over by winter-stripped birches and sugar maples.
...
Imagining still, as all poets invite us to, you can almost see Frost observing the vandalism and aftermath from that cabin above, wondering briefly whether these youths were, say, acolytes of Carl Sandburg, exacting revenge because Frost considered their hero poet second-rate. Sipping his tea, he rummages through his mind’s deep storehouse for the metaphors that would provide context, that would find renewal in this destruction.

Seems a bit of a stretch, but then the whole piece has that tone. And in the end justice was served. I used to know someone who had done a stint working at one of the Laura Ingalls Wilder houses, and she swore the staff routinely found underwear and beer bottles on Monday mornings. I wonder what Robert Frost would have thought of that.

Goodies

Julie Phillips, the brilliant biographer behind last year's NBCC winner James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon, has been busy writing fabulous reviews and essays, but mostly they've been published in Dutch translation in a daily newspaper there. Lucky for us, she's now put versions in English up at her site:

• "Mothers and Daughters on the Circle Line" (a review of Jeannette Winterson's Stone Gods, Doris Lessing's The Cleft, and Ninni Holmqvist's The Unit: Almost any serious literary writer with a little fantasy is liable, at one time or another, to stray into genre territory. To scorn science fiction for its supposed lack of literary qualities is to ignore what it can do better than any other literature: explore alternatives, rethink relationships. Women especially need it. Women have reasons to want political change, while in space there’s plenty of room to start over.
• "Explorer, Archeologist, Librarian, Spy" (an essay about The Dangerous Book for Boys and The Daring Book for Girls): In fact, almost any of these activities could have been in the boys’ book, or vice versa. And that, it seems to me, is the real trouble: to put a fence around one set of things and mark it "boys," and another fence around "girls," may be restful for a while—and it will certainly sell more books. But there's always going to be someone who doesn't fit. And then what? "It’s not bad to say girls and boys are different," my husband commented. "But if you glorify or wallow in those differences, you’re in danger of undoing 40 years of feminist work."
• "Out of Milk? Live With It" (a review of Harvey Mansfield's Manliness): It’s a sign of the need for a book like this that it’s been so popular, because there’s not much enlightenment to be gained from actually reading it. Between the brief definition of manliness at the beginning (aloofness, authority, “confidence in the face of risk.”) and its defense at the end, there lies, like the meat of an unappetizing sandwich, a long discussion of philosophy and literature that is vague, tedious, self-contradictory and occasionally wrong.
• "Beyond the Ball and Chain" (a review of Germaine Greer's Shakespeare's Wife): The roles of gadfly and Shakespeare scholar might seem difficult to combine, but the resourceful Greer has found a way. The wives of famous men, she points out, do not always receive kind treatment from posterity. Biographers prefer stories about an artist whose brilliance went unappreciated by a difficult or foolish spouse. So Greer—who is the kind of writer who thinks in disagreements—has decided to write a biography of her own. Her goal in “Shakespeare’s Wife” is to rehabilitate the much-maligned Ann Hathaway.
• "Jewish Detective Stories" (an interview with Michael Chabon and Daniel Mendelsohn -- which yielded a shorter interview with Chabon for The Washington Post): What constitutes a cultural identity? Is it connected to home, to language, to being part of a group, to being on TV? Is it tied to history? Can history be rewritten? Novelist Michael Chabon and culture critic Daniel Mendelsohn have both published books in which they look at identity and its representation through the lens of an Eastern European Jewish heritage. In Amsterdam last week, the two friends agreed to a joint interview.

Happy reading!

Fuming Thrillers

I love this story (although I can't remember where I spotted it!):

A prize-winning novelist has won a settlement of more than £100,000 after she claimed to have become so intoxicated by fumes from a nearby shoe factory that she was reduced to writing thrillers.

Joan Brady, who beat Andrew Motion and Carol Anne Duffy to win the Whitbread Prize in 1993 with her book The Theory of War, has received £115,000 in an out-of-court settlement after she suffered numbness in her hands and legs allegedly caused by solvents used by Conker, a cobbler based next to her home in Totnes, Devon.

She told The Times that the fumes were so bad that she was unable to concentrate on writing her highbrow novel, Cool Wind from the Future, and instead wrote a brutal crime story, Bleedout, which she found easier. The violent plot of the book also allowed her to vent her frustrations on the factory and South Hams District Council, which failed initially to detect the smells. According to Nielsen Book-scan, Bleedout has sold a respectable 10,000 copies.

If only some similar theory could be used to explain the quality of my first drafts...

Future Books

Colleen had the idea of putting up our lists of books we're looking forward to today. Because I am away and already in the overdrive exhaustion that a residency induces, this list will be nowhere near complete. I've forgotten things. Even more: I know there are tons of books coming out this year I would be looking forward to if I knew about them. I haven't been through any of the stack of catalogs on the corner of my desk, so... And I'm largely blanking on children's books, mostly because several of the adult authors I obsessively read seem to have books this year. See below:

• Justine Larbalestier's The Ultimate Fairy Book - Okay, so mostly I just want to read it again, because it was so amazing. Also, J has done so much revision, I'm excited to read the final version. This is SUCH a lovely book; you will all love it. (Not on Amazon yet, I don't believe, but here's the blog entry I'm taking the pub date from.)
• Karen Joy Fowler's Wit's End - I don't think I need to explain this one.
• Jeff Ford''s The Shadow Year - Ditto.
• Jincy Willett's The Writing Class - Everything about this looks wonderful, including the fabulous cover. It doesn't get much better than Jincy Willett.
• Samantha Hunt's The Invention of Everything Else - I adored The Seas.
• Ysabeau Wilce's Flora Redux (compleat (sub)title not available) - No Amazon link yet, but I believe it's out in spring? I can't WAIT.
• Jenny Davidson's The Explosionist - Like Colleen, I'm unbelievably excited about this one. Jenny has the best taste in YA since, well, ever, and that can be nothing but a good sign. Plus, with a title like that, you really can't go wrong.

I know I'm going to think of a dozen titles as soon as I post this, but must dash. Anyone know when the second volume of Octavian Nothing's due out? Anyone (I'm looking at you Mr. McLaren) have any others to suggest?

YAY!

For all the ALA awards (and honors!). Seriously, I can't remember the last time I was this happy with award results.

The Horn Book has a good round-up with links to the relevant reviews, etc. (Dreamquake gets an honor! The White Darkness wins! Does Laura Amy Schlitz winning the Newbery for Good Masters mean more people will discover the wonderful A Drowned Maiden's Hair: A Melodrama? Book as silent film! And I just read Repossessed--but can say no more because it's a Cybils finalist! So very, very pleased with these results.)

And now I must sleep. It's snowing here.

Yay!

For Christopher Barzak and One for Sorrow for winning this year's Crawford Award for best first book by a fantasy writer. Yay!

Here's a guest post on process that Chris did when the book came out, and here's my interview with him during the WBBT.

The shortlist can also be found at the Locus link.

Ink

This Abe article on tattooed authors makes me want to get one:

The inspiration for this article is a Maine-based writer called Elizabeth Hand – the author of Generation Loss - who was interviewed by AbeBooks.com several months ago. Flick open Generation Loss and there's her publicity shot on the dust wrapper – she's leaning against a white wooden post with her hands in the pockets of her jeans and tattoos clearly visible on her bare arms.

And, yet, I've never been able to settle on anything. Also, I'm a wimp, especially when it involves the kind of pain you know is coming again and again and again. (Via the inspirational author.)

Playing Favorites

It's the end of the year and I'm feeling somewhat listy and I know y'all are flush with gift card moolah so here are my 15 favorite books published in 2007 (for a complete look at what these are culled from you can browse the Reading List 2007 sidebar down and to the right). Note that I'm not saying best, I'm saying favorite. This list was done in a very cursory way, and I know I'll be kicking myself over stuff not on here that should be . . . and, and, and yet I choose to resist the effort to be completist. I will, however, mark which ones are YA, to ease the finding of them in bookshops.

Dreamquake (Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet), Elizabeth Knox (YA)
Always and And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer's Early Life, Nicola Griffith
Bad Monkeys, Matt Ruff
How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time, Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer
Generation Loss, Elizabeth Hand
The Off Season, Catherine Murdock (YA)
The Red Shoe, Ursula Dubosarsky (YA/Middle Grade)
The Arrival, Shaun Tan (YA, etc.)
The Hearts of Horses, Molly Gloss
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, Peter Cameron (YA)
Ironside, Holly Black (YA)
The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick (YA/Middle Grade)
Beige, Cecil Castellucci (YA)
Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog, Ysabeau Wilce (YA/Middle Grade)

And bonus: My favorite short story is, hands down, Kij Johnson's "The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change" from the Coyote Road anthology (YA). You people who can do such things need to start recommending this for awards, stat.

Finally

I've been a bit disappointed that the very good reviews for Molly Gloss's latest thrillingly great novel, The Hearts of Horses, haven't seemed to recognize the full achievement of the book. I feel it is being marginalized a bit as a Western--which it is--when it's also deserving of a much broader audience.

In this week's Washington Post Book World, Ron Charles nails my feelings about this novel in a lovely, insightful review that winds up thus:

That sounds corny, but there isn't a false move in this poignant novel, which demonstrates as much insight into the hearts of men and women as into the hearts of horses. Books like this are easy to overlook, but there's someone on your holiday list who will feel blessed by Gloss's gentle story.

Read the whole review and then seek out this wonderful book.

Tiptree-Worthy

A report on the lovely (& exhausting) time at Turkey City to come tomorrow, but for now I want to remind and ask you all to pleeease nominate works you feel might be worthy for this year's Tiptree award* in the next couple of weeks. It's very easy; just go here and/or send an e-mail to:

nominate07ATtiptreeDOTorg

Nominate now, nominate as much as you want. (And if you work for a publisher or magazine, please don't forget to send us your books by the end of the year.) My fellow jurors and I thank you.

*If you don't know the drill that's "a science fiction or fantasy story or novel that expands or explores our understanding of gender."

Lost in the Woods

The New Yorker's hosting online images of some of the striking art work that's being exhibited at the Metropolitan Opera House's gallery in honor of a new "Hansel and Gretel" production. I'm not a huge Wegman fan (or at all, actually), but this one is just creepy enough to drag me in.

Link via the lovely Betsy at Fuse, who also has a review today of Tim Wynne-Jones' wonderful novel, Rex Zero and the End of the World. And now back to researching Pie Town, N.M.

Questions Worth Answering

So, whether you buy the arguments in the latest NEA report about the state of reading or not, I find this question by Dana Gioia as posed in the relevant Washington Post article to be a good one:

"What we're trying to do is say: These are the facts. This is a framework to understand the issues. Let's talk about it," Gioia said. And the key question is: What are the consequences if America becomes "a nation in which reading is a minority activity?"

My answer in a word would be: BAD. But that's only because I'm too busy to rattle on. What do you guys think?

Hot Fiction

Oh, happy day redux. Subterranean has announced that they're going to put all Lew Shiner's work back in print AND start with his new novel, Black & White, which sounds abso-mo-lutely brill. Here's the description from the announcement:

When Michael follows his dying father to North Carolina, a lifetime of lies begins to unravel. His pursuit of his father’s past–haunted by voodoo, adultery and murder–takes him to a place called Hayti, once the most prosperous black community in the South. Now the mysteries of Michael’s own heritage become a matter of life and death, as racial conflicts barely restrained since the 1960s erupt again.

Rooted in the true story of the US government’s urban renewal policy and its disastrous aftermath, Black & White is a literary thriller, a family saga, and a searing portrait of institutionalized hatred.

Jonathan Lethem compares it to the work of George Pelecanos and Richard Price in a blurb.

In the meantime, don't forget about Shiner's Fiction Liberation Front site, where you can read lots of free, wonderful stories by this wholly underrated writer.

So What

If she hasn't updated in awhile, Jincy Willett has a blog. Oh, happy day.

(Psst: Check out the Novel Hybrids post, which begins with a description of Gentle Ben Hur.)

(And ooooh: The prologue for her next novel, The Writing Class, which appears to be AWESOME and coming out in June 2008 from Thomas Dunne Books.)

Shiny Magazine Love

I should have subscribed to The Horn Book ages ago. The November/December issue has Richard Peck's thoughtful, provocative Zena Sutherland Lecture, "And Still the Story." This part kills me (in the good way, the Southern way):

But revolutions always create new literatures--as well as fewer freedoms than before--and that one created the young adult novel. Robert Cormier wrote The Chocolate War, and I quit my job. But then, the only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.

Unrelatedly:

(Via Maureen.)

Reading Not Weeping

Some brief notes on recent good reading, in the interest of catch-up.

I admit to the slightest trepidation going into Pat Murphy's new middle grade novel The Wild Girls after the little dust-up (which Colleen sums up best here, if you missed it); I was afraid it would disappoint. I need not have worried. Heartwarming isn't usually a positive descriptor--coming from me, anyway--but this novel is the good kind of heartwarming. It's about two girls becoming friends and the identities they take on in the forest--Sarah aka Fox, Queen of the Foxes, and Joan aka Newt--and the ones they forge in the larger world. Over a summer together in 1972 California, the girls grapple with their respective family troubles (Fox's mother abandoned her and her science fiction writer father several years ago; Joan's mother and father are seemingly en route to divorce) and discover their creative writing voices. Murphy effortlessly conjures the period, including the changing roles of women in the household during this period and the scene in Berkeley when the girls travel to their writing classes. While there's no shortage of conflict, it's perhaps a bit light in terms of how easily certain things are resolved, and the essential goodness of the two girls--but that's okay. It's refreshing, actually, to see so little angst, and the young voices struck me as true. Murphy manages to capture the dynamics of real famililial upheaval and its impact on kids, without ever leaning on cliches. While this is a solidly realistic novel, there are flourishes and sidenotes that may appeal to genre readers as well--I particularly enjoyed the type of writing that Fox and Newt do together, the fantasy stories they base on their real lives, and the reaction they get from the adults around them as a result. And there's a beautiful recurring metaphor involving Fox's vanished mother having turned into a fox. A gentle, delightful novel. See also: Colleen's more detailed take here.

Laura Ruby's The Wall and the Wing--could it be a standalone fantasy novel, that rarest of beasts? Well, it turns out no, there's a sequel that came out last May (which sounds great, actually), but the key thing is that it can be read that way. This is a self-contained, quirky, charming story of a world where most people can fly (but not very well) and one girl, a forgotten orphan in a miserable orphanage (is there any other kind?), discovers she can turn invisible. There's a heavy who can unzip his face, a boy with a mysterious past who can fly really well (sometimes), mobsters,  and a mad professor with a bazillion cats. You get the picture. The world is extremely well-developed and I loved the sense of fun. Check it out if you like light but not shallow fantasy. See also: The SBBT featured some very good interviews with Ruby.

My favorite read of the month has to be Deborah Noyes' One Kingdom: Our Lives With Animals: The Human-Animal Bond in Myth, History, Science and Story. It's a mix of photos and creative nonfiction, the type of book that would be at home in that catch-all the sociology section but thankfully isn't consigned to that purgatory. It's for kids, but would definitely have cross-over adult appeal, and I'd even put it at the older age range for kids. The text is thoughtful and the prose finely tuned. The mix of myth with science and personal essay on the practically endless subject of the relationship between humans and animals is just right. This is really an example of my favorite type of nonfiction book, a sort of focused miscellany or catch-all meditation, and I hope she does another like it. See also: Cynthia Leitich Smith's interview with Noyes.

Pretty Pictures

The NYT selects the best illustrated children's books of the year, and there's a pretty slideshow to go along. (Thanks to Julie for the heads up!)

There's lots more in the fall children's NYTBR issue as well -- including a gushing James Hynes review of Scott's Uglies trilogy and Extras.

WBBT Stop: Jane Yolen & Adam Stemple

Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple published their first collaborative novel, Pay the Piper: A Rock 'N' Roll Fairy Tale, a couple of years ago and followed that up with a sequel, Troll Bridge: A Rock 'N' Roll Fairy Tale, which released in paperback over the summer. Jane is known far and wide and probably even in outer space as the "American Hans Christian Anderson," having written nearly 300 books and won pretty much every award you can win. Adam is a well-known musician (aka rock and roll star), poker player, and all around good guy; his debut novel Singer of Souls came out in 2005 and a sequel is in the pipeline from Tor as we speak. Oh, and in case you didn't know already, Jane is Adam's mother. They were nice enough to take the time to answer some questions about their collaborative efforts, so let's get to the good part.

GB: First question is always process porn for the writers out there, so tell me about how you write solo. You can start at whatever part of the process you want--when an idea occurs to you, when you actually start writing, when the deadline's looming, outlining/not outlining, etcetera. Does this change depending on the project or are your work habits fairly consistent?

JY: Every project is different for me. Let me tell you a story.

I once heard Norton Juster tell a group of  third graders--my daughter among them--that he got his ideas from a postbox in Poughkeepsie. Some of the students thought he meant it. One boy even raised his hand and asked how far away Poughkeepsie was.

My daughter knew better. She knew from having lived with me all of her eight years. She knew that I got my ideas from everywhere: newspaper articles, other people's books, magazines, rock lyrics, folk songs, overheard conversations, dreams, her life, her brothers' lives, her father's life, her great grandparents...oh, and gossip. Gossip is often the beginning of stories.

There is nothing a writer will refuse in the making of story. Here are a few of the places I have gotten ideas.

*Reading the local newspaper, I was riveted by a photo of a boy with his prize-winning frog named “Star Warts”. The  boy's smile was enormous, his frog-well--even more enormous. But I knew that it wasn't frogs  that were supposed to give you warts, it was toads. (Well, they don't actually. It's just a superstition.) But suddenly Commander Toad in Space was born, the idea of a ship called the Star Warts carrying a crew of amphibians was too funny to resist. I eventually did seven Commander Toad books and loads of reluctant readers began their reading with the Commander, Mr. Hop, Lieutenant Lily, and the rest.

*An editor friend called me up and said, “My son is three and hates to go to bed and he loves dinosaurs. Can you do anything for him?” Now Adam and his brother Jason had been the same at that age, so much so, that even though I'm a lousy seamstress and can't sew a straight hem,  I actually embroidered dino pillows for each of them. So for my editor's son, instead of an embroidered pillow, I wrote How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? The opening rhymes simply tumbled out and the book practically wrote itself.

*Because my husband took all our children birding, and staying out late at night owling was a pa