The Perfect Man

by Naeem Murr (Random House) - Reviewed by Robert Birnbaum

Legendary American xenophobia (or possibly indifference) to the world that exists beyond American shores is, with all deliberate speed, being eroded by the rise of a kind of hyphenate American literature. This has long been the case for writers with bonds below the Rio Grande and more recently with émigré Africans (Chris Albani, Chinanda Ngozi Adiche, Uzodinma Iweala'), and Southeast Asians and sub continentals (too numerous to mention), and now there is a rise in Middle Eastern surnames being published (Azar Nafisi, Mohja Kahf, Laila Lalami, Elmaz Abinader, Khaled Mattawa).

Naeem Murr (of Lebanese and Irish parentage) was born and raised in London and is the author of three novels: The Boy, The Genius of the Sea and now The Perfect Man, which, if these things mean anything to you, was awarded The Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Best Book of Europe/South Asia, and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Murr, who teaches at Northwestern University, has also received, in addition to various and sundry awards, the imprimatur of the literary establishment, garnering a Stegner Fellowship, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In The Perfect Man, Murr places young Rajiv Travers in Pishgah, Missouri in the 1950's. Rajiv was born in England, where he was left with an uncle and a fairytaleishly evil aunt. He is sent to stay with a second uncle in Pishgah, who commits suicide on the night of his arrival. Ruth Winter, the uncle's mistress, who writes romance novels and phlegmatic asides about her neighbors in her private journals and is a bit of a cipher, elects to care for Rajiv. Smalltown America is a fine lens with which to view the strangeness that Rajiv encounters as well as that which he embodies. Rajiv, who is a sweet, alert and good-natured child, is soon befriended by four of his new-found peers--each of whom is clearly flawed, in an unintentional parody of Southern stereotypes. Nonetheless, this is an enchanting story, both coming of age and cultural barometer finely told.

Purchase The Perfect Man at Powell's.

Thank You and OK! An American Zen Failure in Japan

Shambhala Press has republished David Chadwick's Thank You and OK! An American Zen Failure in Japan, originally put out by Penguin in 1994. As you might surmise from the title, Thank You and OK! details American Zen student David Chadwick's journey to study Zen in the more "authentic" setting of Japan.

Followers of Zen literature should know the Texas-born Chadwick from Crooked Cucumber, his insightful, even-handed biography of Shunryu Suzuki, the great American Buddhist priest under whom he studied at the San Francisco Zen Center (Chadwick was actually a cook at SFZC).

In fact, David Chadwick has provided many valuable resources on the life and teachings of SFZC founder Shunryu Suzuki, whose Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind is the first book I would recommend to anyone interested in any sort of spiritual practice. Chadwick maintains the website cuke.com, which contains obscure talks and biographical information on Suzuki, and in addition to Crooked Cucumber, he has published To Shine One Corner of the World: Moments with Shunryu Suzuki.

Thank You and OK! is the one work of Chadwick's I haven't read, and I'm glad to see it's once again been made available by the fine folks at Shambhala.

Purchase Thank You and OK! at Powell's.

Soft Skull Press Gets Bought and Transmogrified

Last week it was announced that Soft Skull Press is being purchased by Winton, Shoemaker LLC, the same company that just bought Counterpoint from Perseus. Soft Skull will become an imprint of Counterpoint, and Richard Nash will serve as Executive Editor. The rest of the Soft Skull staff is not being retained, which makes us sad because we have enjoyed working with them over the years.

Richard Nash posted a statement on the Soft Skull website:

I beg the readers of this blog to not indulge in apocalyptic thinking about independent publishing. The process of consolidation is, yes, relentless, but it is not eternal.

True, it is hard, in some respect, not to feel elegiac. As I've been preparing materials for a process known to those who buy and sell companies as "due diligence," it became clear how many people have contributed to allowing Soft Skull to publish the truly important books it has published over the years--my thanks to you now, my thanks to you eternally.

Yet Soft Skull is not over. As our wonderful author Sparrow said when he heard the news: "Soft Skull is dead. Long live Soft Skull." Soft Skull continues as an imprint. Soft Skull is not no longer independent. Had I won the lottery and bought Counterpoint from Perseus, instead of Charlie Winton buying Counterpoint and then Soft Skull, we would not have ceased to be independent.

John Zuarino over at Bookslut has more to say about the situation.

Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet

Denise Caruso, a legendary NY Times technology columnist from the 80s and 90s (who recently started a new column at the paper called RE:Framing) and founder of the Hybrid Vigor Institute, isn't so sure about this whole genetic engineering thing. Are industry players moving ahead too quickly, without proper risk assessments? Is something amiss in the way funding is handed out and approved for biotech projects? How should we go about assessing the risks involved in new technologies?

These questions and more are discussed in Denise's book, Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet, which she successfully self-published in November after refusing to make the book more Crichton-esque for her original publisher. The content, she said, was scary enough without any hype.

She told Salon: "We need to train our culture to understand that there are things we don't know. And we need to build learning into the process of doing these assessments, so that you don't have to undo a regulation when you find out that something has turned out to be risky. You need a way to accept input while you're moving along. The [analytical deliberative] process makes risk assessment very -- porous..."

"It's very difficult to train people to go into the places where it's dark. But people like us, who have to eat and drink and breathe these products -- I'm happy to sail into those dark places."

Visit the Hybrid Vigor Institute.

Purchase Intervention at Powell's.

Untold Stories

Untold Stories is the collected memoirs, diaries, and notes of Alan Bennett, best known as the writer of The Madness of King George and a long-time presence in British theater. Though he rubbed elbows with his fair share of celebrities (Maggie Smith makes many fond appearances), Bennett has led a comparatively unremarkable life of work and travel. What is remarkable are his insights into art and history, his clever asides and misty remembrances. Bennett narrates his family's kindness and courage in the midst of illness; his shy, reclusive childhood; and a thousand careful details of growing up in wartime Britain in working class Leeds, proving that the life of the mind is just as interesting to read as the life of the rock star. In an age of florid memoirs that read like laundry lists of every kind of trauma and deprivation, Bennett's gentile observations are refreshingly smart and sane. -Summer Block

Purchase Untold Stories at Powell's.

Jesus Land

When it comes to memoirs of abuse and juvenile "behavior modification programs," Julia Scheeres' Jesus Land is the antithesis of Mia Fontaine's Come Back.

Mia's memoir has a happy-ending feel to it and provides a mostly positive view of the intensive recovery program she endured as a youth at Spring Creek Lodge and Morava Academy. It's the sort of book that made me feel good to be alive after reading it. Julia's memoir, on the other hand, paints a horrible view of her experience at a similiar program in the Dominican Republic, and it made me feel terribly depressed afterwards. But that's not a bad thing, because the truth is supposed to hurt, right?

Jesus Land describes a nightmarish situation in which Julia's abusive, hyperreligious, Midwestern parents unjustly send their adopted African American child, David, to a reform program in the Carribean. Julia soon follows David there, and they end up suffering greatly at the hands of the program's administrators, whom Julia portays as heartless fundamentalist psychopaths (much like Julia's parents).

Basically, if you're looking for a reason to despise religion, this book may be even more effective than Hitchens' God is Not Great.

Julia grew up to become a reporter for the Los Angeles Times (and she recently reviewed Lynn Stegner's new book for the NY Times), but her adopted brother David died young. This memoir covers her tight relationship with David and their struggle to overcome ignorance and oppression veiled as religious conviction.

I'm not in a position to say whether or not these high-priced and controversial "behavior modification programs" are inherently good or bad, or, perhaps more relevantly, whether Christianity is good or bad, but my impression after reading these two excellent books is that, like pretty much everything else in life, it depends on the situation.

Purchase Jesus Land at Powell's.

Later, at the Bar

by Rebecca Barry (Simon & Schuster, 240 pages) - Review by Robert Birnbaum

The American tavern, the English pub, and the Parisian bistro all appeal as fertile settings for fiction, having, not surprisingly, the potential for varying degrees of havoc and pathos and an array of socially acceptable psychoses. Rebecca Barry, an Ohio State University MFA who has published both fiction and nonfiction in many of the right places, debuts with a "novel in stories," ten to be exact, chronicling the machinations, high-wire gymnastics, pratfalls and other alcohol-fueled (though this is no Bukowskian homage to the drinking life) neural twitchings of the denizens of Lucy's Tavern.

When it comes down to it, stories about life and love are available to us from likely and unlikely places, and as such, Barry's world is viewed through a lens of wit and compassion that brings to mind the characters and small-town life that Richard Russo so masterfully paints. Read "Lucy's Last Hurrah" and see if you don't agree. Lee K Abbott enthuses on his former student:

Those down-and-out and never-were, those bushwhacked by want, those haunted by hooch, those pining for an imagined past and about to charge into public square to howl at heaven, these are the men and women who people Later, At the Bar, Rebecca Barry's movingly splendid first novel, a book as much about what mends as what rends. Clearly, Ms. Barry loves our crooked kind, for she's given us story-telling to hope with, page after page of our analogues taking punch after punch at what cheapens and trivializes and corrupts. Here's a novel to press on your pals, your neighbors, even the strangers you bump into on your own way to paradise.

Read a chapter from Later, at the Bar.

Purchase Later, at the Bar online.

Don't Make Me Think!

Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability is to web design what Strunk & White's Elements of Style is to formal writing.

Here's a sample from Chapter Two, "How We REALLY Use the Web," that exemplifies the theme quite nicely:

When we're creating sites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading our finely crafted text, figuring out how we've organized things, and weighing their options before deciding which link to click.

What they actually do most of the time (if we're lucky) is glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they're looking for. There are usually large parts of the page that they don't even look at.

We're thinking "great literature" (or at least "product brochure"), while the user's reality is much closer to "billboard going by at 60 miles an hour."

After tearing through this book in about two hours, that last sentence is the one that sticks out the most. The implications of that statement, for an editor responsible for a site that attempts to publish and promote "great literature," are rather significant.

As we continue to see print publications rely more heavily on their online presences, the challenges of getting people to read longer features will become more relevant. Since necessity is (allegedly) the mother of invention, it would stand to reason that advances in technology (and the adaptations of future generations of web users) will make people more comfortable devoting the time to stop at a website, read some "great literature," and--as much as it might hurt--think.

This book is an essential tool in nudging that process along and, at the very least, helping people create smarter, more user-friendly websites.

Visit Steve Krug online.

Purchase Don't Make Me Think! at Powells.

Edward Hopper

by Carol Troyen, Judith Barter, and Elliot Davis (MFA Publications, 288 pages) - Reviewed by Robert Birnbaum

Other than Grant Wood's American Gothic and Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers, there is no American painter whose work is as embedded in this nation's iconography as Edward Hopper. "Nighthawks," "Early Sunday Morning," "Automat" and "New York Movie" are synonymous with the look and feel of mid-Twentieth Century America.

Hopper's watercolors of Gloucester, lighthouses in Maine, and Cape Cod scenes suggest an austerity and isolation that have misleadingly led to Edward Hopper being taken as an artist of alienation--a view that scholars of American painting Carole Troyen and Elliot Davis effectively balance in a new, splendidly printed and designed monograph, Edward Hopper, that serves as the catalogue for the traveling exhibition organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Art, Washington; and The Art Institute of Chicago. Additionally, they make claims for Hopper's significant influence on literature and film as well as painting.

The book contains over 200 images from the entirety of Hopper's career and nine chapters of thematic biography, a detailed chronology and an extensive bibliography, making it--and the recent publication of an updated version of Edward Hopper specialist Gail Levin's seminal biography of Hopper--an embarrassment of Hopperiana riches. By the way, I have seen the Boston museum's exhibition, and the 100 oil paintings and 50-minutemovie produced by the National Gallery of Art along with Hopper's sketchbooks, portraits and self-portraits left me with an eerie familiarity with this complicated artist whom I had so long taken for granted. A good thing, methinks.

Learn more about Edward Hopper on Wikipedia.

Order Edward Hopper online.

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

NPR interviewed author-surgeon Atul Gawande about his latest medical essay collection, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance.

The essential premise of the twelve essays in this volume (some of which previously appeared in places like the New Yorker and the New England Journal of Medicine) is that good enough is not, in fact, good enough, and health-care providers have significant room for improvement.

In Better, Gawande writes: "At bottom, success comes out of a constant struggle between the details of how the world works and the character and ability of the people in it--out of the human struggle to do better. That is the subject of my book."

Purchase Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance at Powell's.

God is Not Great?

Christopher Hitchens' new one, god is not Great, or however you capitalize it, is, according to the LA Times, "An atheistic rant that is, well, just preaching to the choir."

The Washington Post called it "an unrelenting enumeration of religion's sins and wickedness, written with much of the rhetorical pomp and all of the imperial condescension of a Vatican encyclical" and went on to state that "Hitchens... writes about religious people the way northern racists used to talk about 'Negroes' -- with feigned knowing and a sneer. God Is Not Great assumes a childish definition of religion and then criticizes religious people for believing such foolery."

Despite these not-so-positive reviews, the book seems to be selling well, due to Hitchens' being, well, Hitchens.

Here's Hitch describing the dangers of Islam in a New York magazine interview:

"If you ask specifically what is wrong with Islam, it makes the same mistakes as the preceding religions, but it makes another mistake, which is that it's unalterable. You notice how liberals keep saying, 'If only Islam would have a Reformation'--it can't have one. It says it can't. It's extremely dangerous in that way."

And, when asked if he's ever prayed before:

"I probably once did pray for an erection, but not addressed to anyone in particular. Nor completely addressed to my cock."

See, we're all religious in our own ways.

Read some excerpts from God is Not Great at Slate.

Read Hitchens' 2002 interview at Identity Theory.

Purchase God is Not Great at Powell's.

PEN World Voices Audio

Audio from the recent PEN World Voices Festival is now available online...

April 24 | Green Thoughts: Writers on the Environment: A reading with Billy Collins, Jonathan Franzen, Moses Isegawa, Pico Iyer, Geert Mak, Marilynne Robinson, Roxana Robinson, Salman Rushdie, Gary Shteyngart, Janne Teller, Colson Whitehead.

April 25 | Town Hall Readings: Writing Home: With Don DeLillo, Kiran Desai, Neil Gaiman, Nadine Gordimer, Alain Mabanckou, Steve Martin, Salman Rushdie, Pia Tafdrup, Tatyana Tolstaya, and Saadi Youssef

April 26 | Dirty Wars: Readings Against Torture, Arbitrary Detention, Kidnapping, and Rendition: With Lisa Appignanesi, Antoine Audouard, Breyten Breytenbach, Mark Danner, Dorothea Dieckmann, Alex Gibney, Nadine Gordimer, Arnon Grunberg, Daniel Oreskes, Francine Prose, Gloria Reuben, Rose Styron, and others.

April 27 | Conversation: Guillermo Arriaga & Paul Auster: Discussed: accidental directorhood; filmmaking 101; relating to a literary tradition; the moment when you have nothing left to say; the heavy soul vs. the light soul; "the worst thing you can do with pain is to not use it"; inevitable endings; and cheating death.

April 28 | The PEN Cabaret: Readings and performances by Guillermo Arriaga, Oliver Lake, Victoria Roberts, Sam Shepard, Patti Smith, Saul Williams, and Huang Xiang.

April 29 | The Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture with David Grossman: Including an introduction by PEN President Francine Prose, a conversation with Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer, and a concluding statement by Salman Rushdie.

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon

by Crystal Zevon (Ecco, 452 pages) -- Reviewed by Robert Birnbaum

As with sports biographies (see my comments on a recent Jackie Robinson book), most music biographies are useful to fans and devotees but frequently are barely more than hagiographic efforts. The few exceptions that come to mind are David Hajdu's two books, one on Billy Strayhorn and the other on the Bob Dylan nexus, Nick Tosches on Dean Martin and Jerry Lee Lewis, and Peter Guralnick on Elvis Presley and Sam Cooke.

Zevon wrote some great, great songs -- "Excitable Boy," "Lawyers Guns & Money," "Werewolves of London," "Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead." "Life'll Kill You" to name a very few. As my son Cuba and I are long-time Zevon fan boys (Cuba's favorite song is "Gorilla You're a Desperado"), critical judgment will be suspended on this oral biography by Zevon's long-time companion. Crystal Zevon uses over 80 interviews including ones with Bruce Springsteen, Stephen King, Billy Bob Thornton, Jackson Browne, and Bonnie Raitt to unpack the life and times of Zevon, who died in 2003. ("Enjoy Every Sandwich" is a wonderful tribute recording that includes Springsteen and Thorton, Adam Sandler, Bob Dylan, Ry Cooder--you get the picture.) Carl Hiaasen, who was a Zevon pal, writes in the book's foreword:

Strangers were sometimes unnerved by Warren's growl and acid wit, but to me the most intimidating thing about him was the breadth of his intellect. A prodigious reader, he could talk knowledgeably about Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann or Mickey Spillane, all in the same conversation. Likewise a casual chat about music could carom from Radiohead to Brian Wilson to Shostakovich at which point all I could do was nod and pretend I understood what the hell he was talking about...Any one of a dozen of Warren's song titles would serve as a fitting epitath, but I'm partial to the simple farewell printed in stately script on a wallet card that his road manager handed to fans who gathered outside his tour bus...

"Mr. Zevon has gone with the Great Beaver."

By the way, I don't think that whatever Mr Zevon's molecules are doing, that they are sleeping.

Purchase I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon at Powell's.

Thursday Roundup: McCann, Pamuk, and Saving Atlanta's Book Review

Birnbaum and Colum McCann sat in a ragtop by the Charles River and talked about McCann's new book, Zoli. McCann said: "The older you get and the more you get into writing, it's really interesting how terrifying each new novel becomes."

'Protect Atlanta's Book Review': The city of Atlanta wants a robust, reader-friendly, intelligent book review, not just a section run on auto-pilot from above.

Orhan Pamuk interviewed about his Turkish roots: "No One Drives me into Exile"

McSweeney's #23 (Spring 2007)

(McSweeney's, 181 pages) - Reviewed by Robert Birnbaum

In 1998, Dave Eggers, having published about 30 issues of the now legendary Might magazine, spent some time at stodgy (meaning no longer vital) Esquire magazine and having published his bestselling, earth-shattering memoir, HeartBreaking Work etc. launched his assault on literary convention with McSweeney's, both as a hard-copy quarterly and as a website.

At that time, for obvious reasons, McSweeney's offered readers a lifetime subscription for $100, including two McSweeney's T-shirts and (in true McSweeney's fashion) a xeroxed letter of appreciation. No fool I, I bought into it, and that turned out to be the only shrewd investment in my life. Clearly, someone crunched the numbers and finally figured out that this was a dollar drain, and thus recently McSweeney's offered a reasonable buyout, which included a signed copy of Eggers' latest opus, What is the What. All of which is a long-winded way of pointing out the slim prospects for success and the frailty of existence for so-called literary journals.

After the first few editions, the magazine continuously experimented with a variety of formats and designs--kind of a literary Visionaire--and this latest issue is a relatively straightforward cloth binding, with a dust jacket that is also a poster and has dozens of very short stories by Dave Eggers printed on the inner side and wait, there's more--a special trial-sized introductory edition of Comedy by The Numbers by Professor Eric Hoffman and Dr. Gary Rudoren.

And by the way, Number 23 contains ten stories with an usual blend of known and well published authors--Ann Beattie, Chris Bachelder, Roddy Doyle and not-so-well-known names such as Wells Tower, Shawn Vestal, Deb Olin Unferth, Christopher Stokes, April Wilder, Clancy Martin and Caren Beilin.

Purchase McSweeney's #23 at Powell's.

Odds and Ends

ComeBack by Claire and Mia Fontaine, whom I interviewed last year, is out on paperback and is the Target Bookmarked Club Pick for Winter 2007.

Though it's been blogged about many times and many ways, Miranda July has the coolest book site ever.

Also not exactly a secret: Lethem has a new novel, You Don't Love Me Yet. It's about art-rockers. (See Birnbaum interview with JL.)

And: New Yorker fiction editor Ben Greenman's A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both looks like a good one.

Last but not least, the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh always has enlightening stuff to say. His For a Future to be Possible: Buddhist Ethics for Everyday Life, published in February, is worth checking out.