What We're Reading: August

I'm getting ready to get into The Amateur American by high school classmate J Saunders Elmore, Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, and hopefully I'll get my hands on a copy of idt copyeditor Stephanie Johnson's new story collection, One of These Things is Not Like the Others.

-Matt Borondy

I've got the latest issues of American Short Fiction and One Story next to me on my couch, alongside James Hannaham's God Says No and the new Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor by Brad Gooch (the latter two by Little, Brown).

-Stacy Muszynski

* The Two Kinds of Decay, by Sarah Manguso. I can't decide whether I love it or hate it, but I can't stop reading it.
* Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler. An undamaged copy.
* Picking Bones from Ash by Marie Mutsuki Mockett. Multi-generational saga re Japanese women. Not my usual fare, but enjoying.
* The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris. Just a few pages in, but methinks it's very ready-for-filming - intentionally or not, I don't know. Also: one of those "I could have written that" books, even though I probably couldn't have written it. (At least, the first few pages.)
* Booklife by Jeff VanderMeer. The sort of book that, 99% of the time, is outdated two months after it hits shelves. I think this may fall into that 1% category, though. Flipping through it, some interesting considerations of writing &/vs. maintaining an "online presence."

-Matthew Tiffany

I'm continuing my binge-reading habits. The current binge comes in response to my best friend's wedding a couple weeks ago. The wedding was on the Georgetown campus, and it had me missing both Jesuit education (we went to a Jesuit high school and I played/sang a classic Jesuit hymn for the wedding ceremony) and also everything Irish (among other Irish things, he and the groomsmen wore bright green bow ties). So I'm reading A Jesuit Education Reader to sate one fix, and for the other, I picked up a 600-page collection of Irish music called Songs of the People. It's an amazing book, despite chapter 23, entitled "Cruel was my father".

-Andrew Whitacre

I just finished Andre Dubus III's The Garden of Last Days, and now I'm reading Steve Martin's memoir Born Standing Up and a slew of geeky Batman comics. I know, I know...

-Matt Okie

I'm reading Wild Nights by Joyce Carol Oates, then Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk. Recently finished Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver and The View From Castle Rock by Alice Munro. Both great reads.

-Alexandra Tursi

More or less here is my recent reading...

The Tragedy of American Foreign Policy, William Appleton Williams
Four Freedoms, John Crowley
Laura Ryders Masterpiece, Jane Hamilton
Ravens, George Dawes Green
Rain Gods, Jame Lee Burke
You or Someone Like You, Chandler Burr
That Old Cape Magic, Richard Russo
Wanting, Richard Flanagan
Midnight Picnic, Nick Antosca
Home Game, Michael Lewis
Nobody Move, Denis Johnson
The Winter Vault, Anne Michaels
Road Dogs, Elmore Leonard
Mirrors, Eduardo Galeano
The Dangerous Life and Times of Warren Zevon, Crystal Zevon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHDdqubE7zQ

-Robert Birnbaum

Right now I'm reading What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist - the Facts of Daily Life in 19th-Century England - a garage sale find that's actually a really fun read, providing context for Victorian literary allusions to things like money, medicine, or the peerage.

-Summer Block Kumar

I'm knee deep in graphic novels for the upcoming school year. Rereading Persepolis, Maus and newest Buffy comic season.

On a less graphic note Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as well.

-Sarah Presite

i am reading jesus' son by denis johnson, because i seem to have a short attention span lately...

-Anna-Lynne Williams

Am currently rereading Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Alasdair Gray's The Ends of Our Tethers, and am also reading Hugh Kenner's Mazes and Virginia Woolf's Flush. A somewhat random assortment of texts, maybe because I'm on vacation...

-James Warner

The Invention of Everything Else

Hi fellow bookworms :)

Things I've read lately: The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt, which is a terrific, imaginative story of the great inventor Tessla and a chambermaid at the Hotel New Yorker. It makes me have a new appreciation for the pigeons that hang out on the sidewalks of Manhattan. There's also something Jonathan Safran Foerish about her writing.

The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry is the best mixture of entertaining and highly intelligent at the same time. Think Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy but more literary. It's a ton of fun.

-Michele Filgate, book reviews editor

And Then We Set His Hair on Fire

I recently finished Enchantments, a charming Italian novella by Linda Ferri. I picked it up serendipitously at the Harvard Book Shop on trip to Boston last month and loved it. Ferri co-wrote the script to the Cannes-prize-winning film The Son's Room.

In other news, I've made it to page 970 of War & Peace.

I'm currently enjoying And Then We Set His Hair On Fire: Insights and Accidents from a Hall-of-Fame Career in Advertising, a funny, delightful read by Phil Dusenberry, former chairman of BBDO North America. It's not your typical business read--it's actually quite fun, and, as the title suggests, insightful!

For a local book club of which I'm a member, I'm also reading Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond.

-Alexandra Tursi, visuals editor

The Vagrants

I enjoyed Yiyun Li's The Vagrants, and am now tackling Benjamin Rosenbaum's The Ant King & Other Stories. I also recently read Samuel Johnson: The Struggle by Jeffrey Meyers, and am now onto Duncan Wu's William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man, since I personally can never read enough Johnson or Hazlitt biographies.

-James Warner, assistant fiction editor

Birnbaum's reading list: Blake Bailey's bios, Canadian writer Joseph Boyden, and more

Comrade biblioistas,

I have read neither Richard Yates nor John Cheever's writings, but I have enjoyed Blake Bailey's bios--first of Yates and now John Cheever. I am reading a wonderful novel by Canadian writer Joseph Boyden, Through Black Spruce--which caused me to ponder whether I have ever read a bad novel by a Canadian writer--I don't think I have (I could elaborate, but I'll save that for another time). Also, I am easing through Cheever's Falconer and an amusing book by Alexander Waugh entitled the House of Wittgenstein, which is quite literal--it centers around a house Ludwig designed and built for his sister. Naturally, details of this nutsy and tragic (two siblings committed suicide) family abound. Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save, Lawrence Weschler's Shapinsky's Karma and Bogg's Bills and some David Foster Wallace essays round off my current reading. Galleys of forthcoming books by Eva Hoffman, Eduardo Galeano and Colum McCann are on the TBR pile.

-Robert Birnbaum, editor-at-large

Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

I'm currently reading Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, translated by Anne Carson, and thinking about theater and playwriting. I'm also working on translating some of Leon Bloy's short stories from French into English.

I also just finished Husband-Coached Childbirth, by Robert Bradley. My feeling is that the Bradley childbirth method is great, but the book is far less great. Repetitive, digressive, indifferently edited, and weirdly anachronistic - better to stick with a class.

-Summer Block Kumar, contributing editor

Slowly, Slowly, Slowly Said the Sloth

More sloth stuff this month, including a very sweet picture book by Eric Carle called Slowly, Slowly, Slowly Said the Sloth. I bought Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans, and will be reading that over the next few weeks. Sometimes I wish I could take his brain and put it inside my head. Then I could walk around sighing all the time, thinking about the past and feeling brilliant.

Mostly, though, I'll be biding my time until Jonathan Goldstein's retelling of the Bible (appropriately titled Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bible!) is released.

-Sumanth Prabhaker, assistant fiction editor

American Short Fiction

Wake-up Call!

All the books on my nightstand have had it with my lackadaisical attitude. It's spring, they say, and time to finish what I've started. Which means one and three-fifths issues of American Short Fiction (Spring 2009, with Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Yoon, Smith Henderson, Rachel B. Glazer, Amelia Gray, Kim Chinquee, Joe Wenderoth, Desmond Hogan and Evan Rehill; and for kicks Spring/Summer 08's "Peripatetic Coffin" by Ethan Rutherford, and Karl Taro Greenfield's "Now Trends"--both ASF pieces having been nominated for Best American Short Fiction 2009. A third piece in that issue I've been holding off for too long: Scott Blackwood's "It Will Pass Though Us," an excerpt from his We Agreed to Meet Just Here, which snagged the 2007 AWP Prize for the novel.)

Also there in the pile: Delia Falconer's Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, which Jim Harrison has called in 2006 "[a] splendid and absorbing novel" and which Los Angeles Times assures me will be "the lushest, most daringly poetic book [I] will read this year." Suh-weet, I say. Bring it.

There's also Percival Everett's Erasure, which, if that crystal ball, the AP wire, is correct, Angela Bassett is currently filming for her directorial debut.

To the side of that newly dusted, welcoming foursome sits the rumpled mother of all spring projects, Anna Karenina (The Modern Library Classics edition translated by Constance Garnett, and revised-translated by Loenard J. Kent and Nina Berborova). Tolstoy's first line gets me every time: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Oh mid-March. Thank Ides you've arrived.

-Stacy Muszynski, copy editor

Style: Towards Clarity and Grace

I'm reading Style: Towards Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams. It shows you how to almost unconsciously edit this:

The point I want to make here is that we can see the American policy in regard to foreign countries as the State Department in Washington and the White House have put it together and made it public to the world has given material and moral support to too many foreign factions in other countries that have controlled power and have then had to give up the power to other factions that have defeated them.

Into this:

Our foreign policy has backed too many losers.

I've also kept busy making loldogs with my Boston Terrier.

-Andrew Whitacre, fiction editor

"The Flu Season" + Drown

I'm still mulling over the bravery of Will Eno's play "The Flu Season," which I read a few weeks ago. It has flitted about the edges of my mind since. Currently I'm reading Junot Diaz's short story collection Drown, in part because I loved his novel and in part because you rarely see central New Jersey get any literary love, and rereading Anthony Doerr's collection The Shell Collector, because I finally found my copy. I'm also rereading Mikhal Gilmore's Shot In The Heart--but then, I am always rereading that, and will keep on re- and re- and rereading it until I figure out how the heck he managed to write it.

-Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, assistant editor