Boldtype | September 2008


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September 2008:: issue 59

Books This Month
1.	Wild Nights! by Joyce Carol Oates
2.	What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
3.	What It Is by Lynda Barry
4.	The Red Leather Diary by Lily Koppel
5.	Fanon: A Novel by John Edgar Wideman
6.	How Fiction Works by James Wood
7.	Lawrence Weiner by Ann Goldstein and Donna De Salvo
	Feature: Horacio Castellanos Moya Cover Book News Credits/About Us

Writing
This month, Boldtype rounds up books that zero in on the act of writing. Haruki Murakami offers a tough-love take on running marathons and writing novels, and comics artist Lynda Barry jump-starts the creative process with an eye-popping guide to writing that's part collage and part memoir. For those who'd rather just read about writing, Joyce Carol Oates serves up fantasies about the last days of authors like Dickinson and Hemingway. And, finally, our profile of Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya spotlights an exciting and controversial writer who's set to break through in English.

- Toby Warner, Managing Editor

FICTION

Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway by Joyce Carol Oates


Published:	April 2008
Pages:	256
Publisher:	Ecco
Links: NY Times review Washington Times review NPR interview

“This experimental short-story collection is cohesive without being contrived — Oates conjures a different voice for each of her subjects, and each story seems to originate from a different impulse altogether.”

Review
Joyce Carol Oates posed as Emily Dickinson in the 1995 Halloween issue of the New York Times Magazine. No doubt, many an English teacher clipped the image, but, unsurprisingly, the contemporary author better embodies her muse with language. In Wild Nights!, Oates contemplates the immense task and the terrifying limitations of writing at the end of life on behalf of five American greats: Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and, of course, Dickinson. Her title appropriately comes from the same Dickinson verse — ""Wild Nights / Wild Nights! / Were I with thee..." — that Oates cited for the Times picture more than a dozen years ago.

This experimental short-story collection is cohesive without being contrived. Oates conjures a different voice for each of her subjects, and each story seems to originate from a different impulse altogether. "Poe Posthumous; or, The Light-House" is a fantastical diary chronicling a decent into madness — composed with the abundant ampersands and uneven italics that mark private prose. "EDickinsonRepliLuxe," a tale of a suburban couple that purchases a Dickinson android, is science fiction layered over domestic drama. "Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish, 1906" — a story in letters — reveals Twain to have a bit of a confused fetish for young girls. In "The Master at St. Bartholomew's," the dignified James opens himself up to the sensuality of Whitman's poetry in a World War I hospital ward. And the clipped, limited-third-person narration of "Papa at Ketchum" carries Hemingway's anger and perhaps lingering sadness, but never approaches tenderness.

Oates' husband died earlier this year, and it is tempting to speculate on her emotions, just as she interpolates from the minds of her subjects. And yet, Oates has never been an author confined to her own experiences. In her hands, Hemingway's confession that "the purpose of the female is cunt" is as honest as James gently ministering to the war wounded. Wild Nights! is as much about writing as it is about dying, and the single theme that unites the five stories is each writer's peculiar brand of isolation. "Thoroughly alone," says Poe; "So lonely!" exclaims Dickinson; "LONELY! SECRET PEN-PAL WANTED!" Twain advertises; "This loneliness!" thinks James; and Hemingway is "always alone."
- Emily Stone

MEMOIR

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami


Published:	July 2008
Pages:	179
Publisher:	Knopf
Links: Bookslut review LA Times review Telegraph review Herald Tribune review Author website

“Murakami stresses the importance of training in both disciplines, debunking misconceptions about the writerly life as he goes.”

Review
For acclaimed Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, the act of running and the act of writing are inextricably linked — like two sides of the same track-shaped Möbius strip. As his new memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, explains, one begat the other: with the start of his writing career at age 33, the sedentary nature of the activity necessitated an exercise regimen to stay fit. Thus, the book artfully marries two topics that many people don't often see as going together — sports and creativity. The result is a fantastic read with broad appeal; beyond just runners and writers, What I Talk About holds inspiration for anyone who's passionate about an athletic or creative endeavor.

As Murakami writes about the evolution of his running career — from his first marathon to his first ultramarathon (62 miles) to his first triathlon — he constantly circles back to how his athletic experiences have impacted his writing practice, and vice versa. Throughout, he stresses the importance of training in both disciplines, debunking misconceptions about the writerly life as he goes: "The whole process — sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the whole flow of the story on track — requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people ever imagine."

Sure, such advice can sound a little self-congratulatory at times, but Murakami's tough-love take on writing seems bracing in the context of an unending stream of "craft"-oriented tomes. Whereas a classic writer's book like Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird deals in trade-based tips — "The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth" — Murakami jettisons such undeniable (but not particularly helpful) truisms in favor of stressing the importance of elbow grease. Or, writing as sport.

If you're resting on your laurels — or worse yet, your daydreams — What I Talk About will come as a rousing reminder that there's no substitute for hard work. Indeed, practice makes perfect.
- J.K. Glei

ART

What It Is by Lynda Barry


Published:	May 2008
Pages:	209
Publisher:	Drawn & Quarterly
Links: NY Times profile "Writing the Unthinkable" MySpace Author bio

“To the would-be artist, Barry explains: 'The difference between lying and pretending is that when you pretend no one gets hurt.'”

Review
Lynda Barry is the queen of hermits. A Wisconsin neo-Buddha, she lives on a remote farm with a wood-burning stove and only her husband around for company. Who better, then, to talk artists out of self-effacing holes than someone who has forged a warm home at the very heart of solitude? Barry studied under Marilyn Frasca at Evergreen College, where she befriended Simpsons creator Matt Groening. Her career burgeoned soon thereafter with the creation of Ernie Pook's Comeek, but her later decline in popularity prompted a period of total withdrawal. That is, until boutique Montreal publishing house Drawn & Quarterly rediscovered her and released What It Is.

In this book, Barry chronicles the methods she employs to combat her looming depression. She offers it as an artistic-therapy guide called "Writing the Unthinkable." To the would-be artist, Barry explains: "The difference between lying and pretending is that when you pretend no one gets hurt." Invoking childhood imaginary friends, she instructs readers to find an image from the past and then follow it — believe in memories and honor the mundane, because, as she says, "the little things are what we remember when someone dies." In other words, follow that flavorful memory of chocolate ice cream from when your father took you to celebrate a good report card, then gaze at the image, look around you, and write down everything you see. This type of immersive practice helps writers to begin.

What It Is also records confessions from an artist nearly undone by the trials of assumed normalcy. The book's autobiographical sections evoke an acute sensation of pain, but this desperation serves as a catalyst for expression. The "guide to writing" activity section helps students revisit painful childhood memories and mine them for wisdom, encouraging the discovery of self as a means of transcendence. Halfway between an art book and a self-help guide, this graphic novel will empower anyone who has ever contemplated a creative future. Barry simply reminds us that art is not good or bad; it's just what it is.
- Robyn Hillman-Harrigan

NONFICTION

The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal by Lily Koppel


Published:	April 2008
Pages:	336
Publisher:	Harper
Links: Book website NY Times article Author articles

“The Red Leather Diary has all the makings of a Fitzgeraldian saga: upper-class ennui, tempestuous rendezvous, literary salons, and death.”

Review
New York is a city of transplants, immigrants and Americans alike, who arrive with hopes of fame and success. Once cleaved from the connective tissue of family heritage, however, these transplants are forced to fabricate histories. It is this need to root oneself that drives Chicago-born, New York-based writer Lily Koppel's The Red Leather Diary. This decade-spanning tale of memory and identity chronicles Koppel's discovery of a 75-year-old diary and the relationship she develops with the diarist, the now 90-year-old Florence Wolfson, who Koppel adopts as her New York grandmother.

The account begins on Wolfson's 14th birthday, in 1929, and ends five years later, on her 19th birthday. Every day for those intervening years, Wolfson recorded her hopes, dreams, travails, and escapades in lilting poetic vignettes heavily peppered with ellipses. As the daughter of Jewish immigrants raised on the Upper East Side, her story has all the makings of a Fitzgeraldian saga: upper-class ennui, tumultuous rendezvous, literary salons, and death. Wolfson is a young woman in love with everything that New York of the '30s had to offer; she spends her days watching Eva Le Gallienne star in Hedda Gabler, her evenings cavorting with friends, and her nights living out her fantasies on her Remington typewriter.

Though the memoir falls victim to a nostalgic image of a Depression-era New York that has only ever existed in artistic retellings, the narrative is grounded by the story of Koppel, a frustrated and lonely young woman who turns to the diary for solace. In a noir-inspired move, Koppel hires a private detective who helps her track down Wolfson, who is by then a great-grandmother living in Connecticut. As Wolfson fills Koppel in on everything that happened after her last entry on August 10, 1934, we learn that her youthful creativity gave way to adult normalcy. Everything, it seems, gives way to the erosive passage of time — everything except that which is written.
- Adda Birnir

FICTION

Fanon: A Novel by John Edgar Wideman


Published:	February 2008
Pages:	229
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin
Links: SF Chronicle review NPR interview Author bio

“Anyone who's followed Wideman's (MacArthur-winning) career shouldn't be surprised that this is no dry biography — the amount of empathy, rage, and fluid prose packed between the covers is simply astonishing.”

Review
In the opening pages of his latest novel, John Edgar Wideman directly addresses writer and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), whose brief life took him from Martinique and the crucible of French racism to colonial Algeria, where he worked as a military psychiatrist before joining the Algerian revolution. Best-known today for his damning indictment of the psychological effects of racism, Black Skin, White Masks, and his anti-colonial manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon remains a powerful and complicated black intellectual icon. But just as Wideman gets started with his book, he finds himself digressing. Unable to continue, he imagines an alter ego — an African-American creative-writing professor like himself, who, one fine day, receives a severed head in the mail. It's an ominous beginning, and a symbol of everything a "Fanon project" has come to mean for him.

This surreal scene is the first stop in a narrative that braids together places and people, both real and fictional. Wideman's own ailing mother encounters Fanon in a Maryland hospital. There's also a pitch session with Jean-Luc Godard for a film about Fanon's life and a moving conversation with the author's incarcerated brother. Anyone who's followed Wideman's (MacArthur-winning) career shouldn't be surprised that this is no dry biography — the amount of empathy, rage, and fluid prose packed between the covers is simply astonishing. Haunting every page, of course, is Fanon himself. Wideman constantly invokes him, but the enigmatic Antillean always seems just out of reach.

Wideman pays tribute to Fanon's own self-referential style in his willingness to immerse this story in so many others. Fanon was famous for transforming personal anecdotes, case studies, and literature into modern parables of race and identity — he disdained tidy debates in favor of passionately messy essays. Perhaps that's why Wideman constantly refers to this as his "Fanon project." A book might sound like something you could just up and be done with, but the questions that swirl throughout Fanon are as real and persistent as that head on the doorstep.
- Toby Warner

NONFICTION

How Fiction Works by James Wood


Published:	July 2008
Pages:	288
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Links: New York review LA Times review Slate review Kenyon Review interview

“You can do much in fiction as long, as you do it well.”

Review
James Wood is one of today's pre-eminent literary critics. In How Fiction Works, however, the New Yorker writer and Harvard professor is anything but a critic, instead presenting himself as a humble and ardent reader who wants to share a few things he's learned along the way. The book is as inspiring as it is erudite — a concise, elegant memorandum on the craft and history of fiction.

Wood begins with a discussion of free indirect style, a kind of third-person narrative that allows the author and the character to speak simultaneously through the text. According to Wood, Flaubert laid the foundation for modern realist storytelling through characters who exist at once on their own and as surrogates for their creator — the resulting tension between creator and creation giving birth to dramatic irony. Throughout the book, Wood traces exemplary instances of detail, character development, and dialogue to this early development in the novel, playfully noting that, "novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring."

Wood's arguments are most effective because he delivers them as observations rather than as doctrine. Sure, he reveres realism, but he also suggests that all good writers are realists — even contemporary stylists like Nabokov, Bellow, and Roth. As such, the trick to writing good fiction is not to dismiss realism as conventional, but to "search for the irreducible... the element in a style [realism] which cannot be easily reproduced and reduced." In this way, How Fiction Works looks ahead to the achievements of future novelists, reminding us that you can do much with fiction, as long as you do it well.
- Adam Lefton

ART

Lawrence Weiner: AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE by Ann Goldstein and Donna De Salvo


Published:	2007
Pages:	411
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Links: Exhibition website Dia Center essay Artkrush interview

“What might sound like a wearisomely arid approach is rescued by Weiner's subtle wit and deadpan poetics.”

Review
The endpapers of Lawrence Weiner: AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE depict a pair of workmen lowering a manhole cover into place on a rain-soaked city street. But this is no ordinary piece of civic hardware, as subsequent images make clear. The distinctly ambiguous phrase "IN DIRECT LINE WITH ANOTHER & THE NEXT" is picked out in raised letters on the lid's forged-metal surface. What we are looking at is photographic documentation of an installation produced by New York's Public Art Fund in 2000, representing just one example of the dizzying variety of forms taken by Weiner's art over the course of his long and prolific career.

One of Weiner's central credos — famously articulated in his "Statement of Intent" in 1969 — is that, once conceived, an artwork exists whether it is actually fabricated or not. Weiner repeatedly employs the written word (varying its look, scale, and placement according to the context at hand) in order to communicate his ideas, which often betray a traditional sculptor's concern with the behavior and interaction of physical materials. Unsurprisingly, this has often led to his work taking the form of books and other kinds of printed publications. Fortunately, what might sound like a wearisomely arid approach is rescued by Weiner's subtle wit (one text reads: "AN OBJECT TOSSED FROM ONE COUNTRY TO ANOTHER") and deadpan poetics (another says: "SLOW CORROSION LEADING TO A LOSS OF INHERENT DIGNITY OF THE OBJECT AT HAND").

Published to coincide with a major traveling retrospective that opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in November 2007, AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE constitutes an exhaustive survey of Weiner's chameleonic oeuvre. Kathryn Chiong, Liam Gillick, Ed Leffingwell, Dieter Schwarz, Gregor Stemmrich, and the show's organizers, Ann Goldstein and Donna De Salvo, all contribute tough-minded essays that interrogate different aspects of this highly flexible (yet ultimately durable) practice. The book also features numerous photographs of the veteran conceptualist's projects, taken at public sites, private homes, and commercial premises — as well as at galleries, museums, and other "official" exhibition sites — throughout the world.
- Michael Wilson

FEATURE Horacio Castellanos Moya		To get an idea of Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya, you can simply read the titles of his books: She-Devil in the Mirror, The Great Masturbator, The Well in My Chest. These titles imply isolation, self-struggle, and intense inner turmoil that's more than a little grotesque — all of which you'll find in Moya's sharp, monologic novels. If personal struggle is Moya's great interest as a writer, it's probably because he's no stranger to it. Moya counts as his first memory the explosion of a leftist radical's bomb on his grandparents' porch. As he has written, the bomb went off because Moya's "grandfather was the president of a nationalist party and was conspiring to oust a liberal government." Moya later participated in the brutal, US-fanned civil war that engulfed El Salvador from 1980 to 1992, as a manager of the guerrillas' propaganda. After three years at war, however, he became disenchanted with El Salvador's leftist guerrillas — perhaps with thoughts of his grandfather in mind — and rode out the remainder of the conflict in Mexico. And yet, after Moya returned to El Salvador and published Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in El Salvador in 1997, he found that the country could be dangerous even when at peace. Revulsion is a meditation on how the legendarily caustic Austrian misanthrope-cum-novelist (a major influence on Moya) might have condemned present-day El Salvador if given the opportunity. The bitter narrative prompted so many death threats that Moya was soon forced to decamp for Europe. As literary controversies often are, the furor over Revulsion was off base — in Moya's words, he wrote the book primarily to "rid myself of that style [Thomas Bernhard's] that was infecting me," not to denounce a nation. It's not difficult to imagine how Moya earned the enmity of his countrymen with descriptions that, for instance, liken El Salvador's university system to a "turd expelled from the rectum of the militaries and the communists," but readers who stop at Moya's often-inflammatory statements are missing the point. Style, not message, is paramount. What's more, Moya's novels thrive on the instability of angry, self-contradictory narrators; it's hard enough figuring out what the narrator believes, much less figuring out how the narrator's statements trace back to the author. Moya himself explains that "the challenge is to enter inside the characters and become one of them, to see the world like they see it and to dispose of my thoughts and emotions just as they would dispose of theirs." After fleeing El Salvador, Moya eventually ended up in Guatemala in 2003, and his stay there inspired his only novel that is currently available in English, Senselessness. This passionate, sexual, paranoid rant is the story of a writer gradually driven insane as he edits a 1,100-page report documenting atrocities committed during Guatemala's 36-year civil war. As with most of Moya's work, Senselessness is short overall, while its sentences are long and sinuous. It is a book that gapes in horror at the brutalities people inflict upon one another, but, at the same time, it also indicts the audience for craving art about the darkest incidents of the 20th and 21st centuries. Moya places these thoughts on the page in the form of lengthy, clause-ridden sentences; they are so complex that to pull a few sample phrases would reveal almost nothing about the ideas they articulate. Moya's sentences run on for pages at a time, and they have a tendency to draw the reader forward like an electric current pulling a subway train, making his short, fervid novels an intense reading experience. This is an ideal format for an author whose books deal with characters struggling for their minds and souls, who wrestle their subconscious urges to a stalemate as they fight to find some measure of peace. It's also an ideal format for Moya; he is an expert at using punctuation to rein in his pullulating sentences, which, when combined with his feel for the rhythms of thought, makes his prose both engaging and easy to read. Senselessness was translated into English by Katherine Silver and published by New Directions earlier this year. The novel has received a modest but enthusiastic reception, which is no easy task for a challenging book by a Central American writer — especially in a book market generally acknowledged as translation-phobic. New Directions has plans to publish an English translation of a second Moya book in the near future, and it seems likely that more are on the way. It doesn't hurt that late Latin American star author Roberto Bolaño was Moya's friend and a great admirer of his work, but Moya is poised to break into the mainstream on the merit of his own undeniable talent — and there are few other authors who are quite so deserving. - Scott Esposito

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BOOK NEWS A few notable bits of recent book news.
Self-plagiarism in the blurb factory (Portfolio)
The Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington is caught reusing the same praise for two separate book blurbs.
Kafka's porn stash (Times)
A new biography delves into the author's private collection.
Bad spelling is bad news (Scotsman)
In the wake of a university professor's proposal for misspelling amnesty, the Scotsman's Ruth Walker argues why proper spelling is essential.
Library fines under fire (Guardian)
Librarians and literary directors debate the fate of the late fee on borrowed books.
Penguin wins rights to Steinbeck (Yahoo!)
Following a property dispute with the heirs of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck, Penguin has been granted publishing rights over ten of the author's early works.
Milton turns 400 (Slate)
On the 400th anniversary of John Milton's birth, Slate examines the British writer's combined contribution to poetry and speech.
Literary forger writes tell-all (NY Post)
Lee Israel, a once-acclaimed biographer who forged and stole hundreds of letters by famous authors, has just published Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Letters of a Literary Forger.
Oddest-book-title contest opens (Guardian)
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, Bookseller magazine has opened a public poll to select the most peculiar title of the last 30 years.
US publishers scrap religiously controversial novel (BBC)
Random House announced that it has abandoned plans to publish The Jewel of Medina, a book about the prophet Muhammad's young bride A'isha, out of concern for violent repercussions.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dies at 89 (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the formerly exiled Russian novelist and historian famous for his outspoken writings, passed away on August 3.
Orwell blogs (Time)
Many of George Orwell's diary entries will be published as a blog, each corresponding to the day he wrote them 70 years ago.


CREDITS Managing Editor Toby Warner Deputy Editor Chelsea Bauch Contributing Editors Jennifer Chen Chris Parris-Lamb Paul Laster Doug Levy Editors-at-Large Larry Weissman Sean McDonald Contributors Adda Birnir Scott Esposito J.K. Glei Robyn Hillman-Harrigan Adam Lefton Emily Stone Michael Wilson Production & Design Jessica Bauer-Greene Tom Starkweather Andrew Steinmetz Daphne Yang Publishers Sascha Lewis Mark Mangan Cover Art Lawrence Weiner AS LONG AS IT LASTS, 1992 Language and the materials referred to Dimensions variable Installation at Trimestriel D'art Contemporain, Liege, Belgium, 2001 Courtesy of the artist All Rights Reserved		ABOUT US Boldtype is a monthly, email-based review of books published by Flavorpill Productions. Our mission is to cover five to seven books each month that are worth reading. No money is accepted from any publishers, writers, reviewers, or marketing or PR companies. In addition to this monthly review of books, Flavorpill publishes a series of online magazines, covering ART, NEWS, MUSIC, and cultural events in NEW YORK, LOS ANGELES, SAN FRANCISCO, CHICAGO, and LONDON. Coming soon: STYLE/DESIGN and FILM. Subscribe now. ADVERTISING PARTNERS Every month, Boldtype presents one exclusive advertising partner. Click for more information about advertising opportunities on Boldtype and across all Flavorpill publications. FEEDBACK We welcome any and all feedback — comments, criticism, and even effusive praise. To reach the staff at Boldtype, please email us at editor. SUBMISSIONS If you have a book that you would like us to consider for review, please send an email to books or mail a copy here: Boldtype c/o Flavorpill Productions 594 Broadway, Suite 1212 New York, NY 10012

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