What We're Reading

The Invention of Everything Else

2009-05-08T06:46:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-20T19:48:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-14T10:51:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-02T07:35:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-01T09:58:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-30T10:47:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-23T07:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-20T05:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-02-25T13:12:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-17T11:41:00.000-08:00

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

This Is Your Brain on Music

2009-02-17T11:07:00.000-08:00

I recently read This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin, The Man Who Owns the News by Michael Wolff, Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin, and The Snowball by Alice Schroeder. (If you are wondering why so work-related, I interviewed Colvin and Schroeder for a business journal in NY.)

-Sherry Saturno, interviews editor

Midnight Picnic

2009-02-16T09:42:00.000-08:00

Midnight Picnic by Nick Antosca (a book trailer) from brothercyst on Vimeo.

Just finished Midnight Picnic by Nick Antosca (my review forthcoming at PopMatters.com) -- in the middle of Walt Disney: Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler (fascinating tale about one ambitious fellow...unfortunately, the story's often about business, with many numbers crunched) -- just read Pinter's The Homecoming: what an odd little tale told in beautiful language; favorite line: "You'll drown in your own blood"...how's that for assonance -- just finished reviewing Scorsese by Ebert (pub. TBD) -- all this within a boatload of reading for my graduate course in the History of Childhood: the latest, Children and Childhood in Western Society by Hugh Cunningham -- also going through Flashback: a Brief History of Film by Gianetti and Eyman with my Honors Sem. in Film Crit. at Rutgers-Camden, and am about to teach Fast Food Nation to my freshmen at Camden County College (day job).

-Matt Sorrento, film editor

The Graveyard Book

2009-02-15T14:57:00.000-08:00

As a teacher, I reserve the right to read great kiddie and YA literature, so...

Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book (just received a well-deserved Newberry Medal). The Happy Prince and Other Tales (Oscar Wilde) and on my adult bookshelf, Hardboiled and Hard Luck (Banana Yoshimoto - her writing is just so clean!)

-Sarah Weissman, assistant fiction editor

Notes from No Man's Land

2009-02-13T09:24:00.000-08:00

"The world was not waiting for a telephone," begins Eula Biss in her striking essay "Time and Distance Overcome." I started her new book, Notes from No Man's Land (Graywolf Press 2009), last night and I cannot put it down--mostly because I keep rereading this eight-page essay. I've been trying to figure it out. I mean, how did one slim essay about telephone poles make me gasp? Maybe it's her deft weaving of tidbits like, "Mark Twain was among the first Americans to own a telephone" (how fitting is that?) with an account of the obscure "War on Telephones." Or maybe it's how she maneuvers the quotidian of telephone poles into a brutal, illuminating discussion about lynching. Or maybe it's how she is not afraid to talk straight--her writing looks you dead in the eye and speaks--but that she does so with an empathy so tangible, a hope so strong, that you arrive at the end sure that you've read something honest and sad and necessary. These are feats to be admired over and over again.

-Amy Lee Scott, assistant editor

The White Tiger

2009-02-12T13:08:00.000-08:00

Some books I read recently are The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance by Matthew Kneale, and A Winter Marriage by Kerry Hardie.

-James Warner, assistant fiction editor

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and Recommended V-Day Reading

2009-02-11T06:26:00.000-08:00

I just finished Daniel Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and now I'm finishing up My Mistress' Sparrow is Dead, a love story anthology edited by Jeffrey Eugenides (in time for Valentine's Day) -- great collection and the proceeds go to benefit 826 Chicago. Plus What to Expect When You're Expecting, which I read in weekly installments. I'm also starting to read the work of Leon Bloy, I'm hoping to translate some of his short stories into English.

-Summer Block Kumar, contributing editor

Sloths, comics, and The Lagoon

2009-02-10T08:20:00.000-08:00

A couple of months ago I read a pretty great graphic novel called The Lagoon, by Lilli Carre. It's kind of hard to explain what it's about--there's a thing living in a lagoon, and weird stuff happens when it sings. The drawings are perfect. It's actually a perfect book, or almost. Then, for Christmas, I got a beautiful box set of Tintin comics, so I've been reading through those as a treat. I've also been skimming portions of light zoology texts, trying to learn about sloths. Though some of its research has since become obsolete, the most informative thing I've read on the subject is S.W. Britton's 1941 article 'Form and Function in the Sloth,' which is all about what kinds of environmental shifts caused sloths to evolve in the funny ways they did. I can tell you all about it if you want.

-Sumanth Prabhaker, assistant fiction editor

David Foster Wallace and a Quiet Purging

2009-02-09T09:27:00.000-08:00

Last we blogged I bragged. "I'll read a slew of women and one man," I wrote. Big talk.

I started off well--beautifully, sadly, amazingly, actually--with Yiyun Li's A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Jennifer Pashley's States.

I had intended then to fold back the cover of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, but before I got to it, I was sucker punched--we all were--by David Foster Wallace's death. In that dark and magnetic immediacy, that feeling-knowing-thinking he will never write another word, I sank into "Incarnations of Burned Children." I kept the Harper's Magazine link of his essays open on my laptop for a week, barely sleeping so I could read it all, afraid, I guess, that his words would disappear, too. My recommendation: start here--and have your dictionary handy. Then read his Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

After that it's felt like a quiet purging. I moved on, forgetting about gender, to those works that enticed me with darkness, thoughtfulness, more beauty and sadness. Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, David Mura's "A Male Grief: Notes on pornography and addiction": an essay, and, for a dash of wildly, sickly funny in the dark, Rick Moody's The Ice Storm.

And here we are. Next is (for the first time) Miquel de Cervantes Saavedra's Don Quixote, and (for the second time) Richard Selzer's Notes on the Art of Surgery.

A little healing, imaginary or otherwise, never hurt anybody.

-Stacy Muszynski, copy editor

Roberto Bolano, Jim Harrison, and more

2009-02-06T06:40:00.000-08:00

In no particular order: 2666 by Roberto Bolano, The Romantic Dogs by Roberto Bolano (poems), Saving Daylight by Jim Harrison (poems), Just Before Dark by Jim Harrison (non fiction), Flying by Eric Kraft, Runner by Thomas Perry, Waltzing with Bashir (graphic novel), Angels and Ages by Adam Gopnik, The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano, Life Sentences by Laura Lippman, Fidel's Last Days by Rolando Merullo, Open City #26, A Public Space 007, New Yorker/Book Bench/Writer Tributes to Updike...

-Robert Birnbaum, editor-at-large

The Way Through Doors, The Elephant Vanishes

2009-02-05T12:33:00.000-08:00

I just picked up the new Jesse Ball novel The Way Through Doors at Powell's the other day, and I've brought it with me to Marfa, TX where I'm spending the month of February. That and The Elephant Vanishes by Murakami.

-Anna-Lynne Williams, music editor

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle + War and Peace

2009-02-05T12:17:00.000-08:00

When not enjoying LSAT review books, I'm reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, and I'm in year 2 of my quest to read War and Peace (made it to page 857 thus far).

-Alexandra Tursi, visual arts editor

Thelonious Monk, Neil Gaiman, Neal Stephenson

2009-02-05T08:01:00.000-08:00

I've been taking my time through the Thelonious Monk Reader. Took it out from the MIT library and realized, hey, why would I ever buy old books again?

I'm also reading Smoke and Mirrors, Neil Gaiman's short story collection. And also Neal Stephenson's ginormous book Anathem, which honestly I can't imagine finishing--turns out I'm not so much a fan of 900-page novels with 70-page glossaries.

-Andrew Whitacre, fiction editor

When Sonny Bravo Met Holden Caulfield

2008-04-30T22:16:00.000-07:00

Spurred by what one critic said of Dagoberto Gilb's The Flowers (that its narrator Sonny Bravo could be Holden Caulfield), I read The Flowers then reread Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. The narrators do share the word "phony," it's true. Rather than interchange them, I'd like to see them meet.

Finished a novel that debuted in 2005, The Professor's Daughter by Emily Raboteau. Lyrical and exacting, the author hits a lot of nerves, one that especially twangs: growing up gray in a black and white United States.

In the middle of Voltaire's Candide. What took me so long? It's hilarious. No wonder it's been around since 1759.

On my to-do list: Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow. And another by authors that hail from or otherwise beholden to the Motor City: Detroit Noir, an anthology of edited by E.J. Olsen and John C. Hocking.

Following that will be Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End, one of those books that hasn't stopped talking since it was released.

Next time, a slew of women and one man.

-Stacy Muszynski, copy editor

Rereading Steinbeck

2008-04-30T22:13:00.000-07:00

I'm rereading everything Steinbeck for my 11th grade English class (The Pearl, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath).

For fun I've got Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs and Veronica by Mary Gaitskill (I adore her).

-Sarah Presite, assistant fiction editor

The Omnivore's Dilemma

2008-04-30T22:10:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading, Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, and Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex. On deck is Carl Bernstein's A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

-Jesslyn Roebuck, contributing editor