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

Eudaemonic reading

I recently purchased The Art of Happiness (by the Dalai Lama) at a tiny local used bookstore after watching an older man have an unemployment-related breakdown at the cash register because the manager would not give him a job application. It's a pretty insightful book-length conversation between His Holiness and a Western psychologist (though the psychologist is a little over the top in his lionization of the mystical lama).

Sticking with the Tibetan Buddhist theme, I also picked up No Time to Lose by Pema Chodron at the local library. The older lady working the checkout counter's eyes lit up when she saw this book in my pile. "You should come to the Shambala Center," she said. "We have FREE meditation for an hour every weeknight."

Yeah, isn't meditation supposed to be free?

The Chodron book isn't quite as compelling as The Art of Happiness, but it's a more analytical text.

I enjoy reading fiction from small presses, so this month I'm taking in Midnight Picnic by Nick Antosca (Word Riot Press) and Hymn California by Adam Gnade. Antosca's book was written entirely at night and therefore it's fitting that it sorta gives me nightmares; Gnade's work is Kerouacian and pretty fun to read.

My girlfriend recently gave me a copy of Ondaatje's The English Patient, so that's the next fiction coming up. I'm also looking forward to Marielitos, Balseros and Other Exiles by Cecilia Rodriguez Milanes.

For my current web design projects, I'm rereading Don't Make Me Think! by Steve Krug and Avinash Kaushik's Web Analytics: An Hour a Day.

Other good books I've recently read include The Four-Hour Workweek, Nickel and Dimed, and The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel.

-Matt Borondy, editor-in-chief