Good and Cheap (Books)! Day 16

Best Young Novelists

My favorite literary magazine is Granta and I am going to talk you into a subscription. Well, I am going to talk you into at least buying one copy. Baby steps.  Granta recently announced their list of Best Young British Novelists, something they do once a decade.  Now, before we get to that, you may ask "Well, what kind of track record do these clowns at Granta have in picking great writers?"  And to you I say two things: 1.Calm down 2. Why so negative all the time? Why not just trust that Granta is going to hand you a list of truly promising talent; why do you need proof? You’re that jaded?

Have you ever heard of William Faulkner? Is that impressive enough for you?  Granta didn’t discover him, of course, but I sort of just want to gauge what impresses you. Since you’re not easily impressed, I will start off with a writer that will send you running for your checkbook: A.A. Milne. That’s right, Winnie the Pooh. Let me throw some other names at you: Sylvia Plath (who, you know, could have benefited from a bit of Winnie the Pooh in her life), Stevie Smith (who I was obsessed with at one point), and Ted Hughes (did he not go anywhere without Sylvia?).

You want recent names, don’t you? You’re bored with the past? Well the past ain’t bored with you. Salman Rushdie, A.L. Kennedy, Jeanette Winterson, Zadie Smith,  Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes, Martin damn Amis, and Will Self. You need a minute to take all that in. I understand.

 

You could be reading these guys before anyone else in your house does. Unless you're at Lizzy's house, where it's just Liz and Zorro. So sad. Do you know how good it's going to feel when you are sitting around the dinner table discussing the Man Booker Prize (like most American families are prone to do) and someone says, “Oh I was so surprised that David Mitchell was long listed for the Booker?” And that’s where you bust in and say, “What? The man is pure genius! I first read him when Granta published him years ago, you dummy! I want a divorce!” Uh, and you can finally get a divorce from a man who doesn’t appreciate David Mitchell the way he should be. Or you know, you can just work it out; it's your marriage, I’m just laying out options.

Here are your 2013 Best Young British Writers (and yes Zadie Smith is on here, but it's not her fault she is still so young): Evie Wyld [I love her], David Szalay, Adam Thirlwell, Kamila Shamsie, Naomi Alderman, Tahmima Anam, Ned Beauman, Jenni Fagan, Adam Foulds, Xiaolu Guo (call Liz for a correct pronunciation), Sarah Hall (call Gianna for a correct pronunciation), Steven Hall, Joanna Kavenna, Benjamin Markovits, Nadifa Mohamed, Helen Oyeyemi, Ross Raisin, Sunjeev Sahota, Taiye Selsi, and the great Zadie Smith.

I know it’s pretty annoying that over half are women and the list is incredibly diverse. Sigh, what can you do, progress.

Who are some American writers that Granta helped get started? Glad you asked. Mona Simpson, Edwidge Danticat, Ethan Canin, Sherman Alexie, Jeffrey Eugenides, Lorrie Moore, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Karen Russell.  Also, Jonathan Franzen, you know it’s hard to keep the riff raff out.

So there you have it.  If you want to be ahead of the curve on the very best writing and art in the world, subscribe to Granta. If not, don’t, but I think you’re going to look like a dumb dumb at the dinner table. Unless you're Liz and eat all of your meals on the couch because she's just sad.

Reach Out and Touch (the Essence of) Someone

This Tuesday David Grossman's new novel, TO THE END OF THE LAND, goes on sale in the United States, published by Knopf. Grossman is a writer of worldwide critical acclaim and deserves a wider readership in this country (he's a bestseller in Israel, where he lives).

I sold this book to my bookstores months ago, and even though Knopf offered a special promotional allowance to encourage booksellers to take a chance on a long novel from a writer with slow sales in this country (his books were previously published by Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux), it was a struggle to convince stores that this book was something special, a book among books during the busy fall publishing season. And then Nicole Krauss, author of THE HISTORY OF LOVE and the upcoming GREAT HOUSE, supplied a blurb for Grossman's novel.

I myself am not much of a blurb reader. Publishers go to great lengths to secure praise-filled quotes from other established authors and supposedly these endorsements sway booksellers and the public to read a book they might otherwise have overlooked. I almost never read the blurbs myself and barely pay them any attention at all, except that they have become so ubiquitous that I do notice the emptiness of book jackets lacking quotes; they seem naked without the blurb. So for several weeks during the late spring/early summer, a stack of advance reading copies (ARCs) of TO THE END OF THE LAND sat in a stack in my office and I never even noticed the author blurb on the front cover. Then the book media did take note of the blurb.

“Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before. To the End of the Land is a book of this magnitude. David Grossman may be the most gifted writer I've ever read; gifted not just because of his imagination, his energy, his originality, but because he has access to the unutterable, because he can look inside a person and discover the unique essence of her humanity. For twenty-six years he has been writing novels about what it means to defend this essence, this unique light, against a world designed to extinguish it. To the End of the Land is his most powerful, shattering, and unflinching story of this defense. To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.”

Krauss was mocked for her ridiculous rave, with some book industry folks even questioning whether such an over-the-top endorsement would ultimately hurt review and media attention--not to mention readers'--for an otherwise worthy novel. I don't know about the rest of the country, but I can say that in poking fun at the Krauss quote, suddenly my booksellers paid attention to what is a long, literary work dealing with tough subjects in a country Americans seem to typically avoid (at least in literature). So thank you, Nicole Krauss, for letting a book touch at the place of your own essence; while I've never allowed a book to take such liberties with my essence, I admire your courage in admitting how TO THE END OF THE LAND changed your life.

Is this book as good as Krauss suggests? YES. It is a powerful odyssey of family, loss, sacrifice, and war, set in a country that has seen nothing but conflict since its founding. TO THE END OF THE LAND is the story of Ora, a woman estranged from her husband Ilan and the mother of Ofer, a son who unexpectedly re-enlists in the Israeli army when violence erupts between Israel and Palestine. Convinced that she will lose Ofer too, she flees her home, the constant media updates about the violence, and her chatty neighbors, and decides to take a pilgrimage through Galilee. She is not entirely alone on her journey, though; she convinces an old friend, Avram, to join her. Avram, a former POW of the Yom Kippur War who struggles with post-traumatic stress after he was tortured, is not the most obvious--or stable--walking companion, but as they walk across the countryside, Ora tells Avram the story of her family and her son Ofer. She is convinced that Ofer will die while standing guard at his checkpoint, but in telling his story to Avram, she is able to keep her imagined terror in check.

TO THE END OF THE LAND is indeed an incredibly moving book, one that has stuck in my head for months after reading it. Like all Israelis of a certain age, too, Grossman's own children served their stint in the military, and this real-life parallel will increase the media attention for this worthy novel. Indeed, the New York Times Book Review will give TO THE END OF THE LAND its coveted cover review slot next week. I can only hope that readers discover this wonderful novel themselves and possibly even allow it to change their lives...or even write semi-vulgar blurbs praising its essence.