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.

Good and Cheap (Books)! Day 15

The world is a messy place. I think this week has underscored this statement. I've seen posts online about how things are worse now than they were decades ago, or how we've lost our innocence, or how we should be afraid. I don't really buy that. The world is a messy place, the whole world, and as citizens of the world, we find ways to comfort each other and move forward.

Here's why I like Outcasts United by Warren St. John. The book is about doing what's difficult. It's about sports, but not in the sense of winning a game or season. It's about a community with problems, a messy blending of cultures, and it's about trying to make sense of change and find hope.

Clarkston, Georgia, is a town on the outskirts of Atlanta that became a center for refugees from around the world. People fleeing from war zones--Sudan, Afghanistan, Liberia, Sierra Leon, Iraq--found themselves in an old Southern town. Some of the town residents adapt to the changes; a local supermarket was facing bankruptcy until the owner embraced the imported spices and foods that the new arrivals craved. Some resist change. It's a complicated world.

Luma Mufleh.

Enter Jordanian Luma Mufleh. Luma embraces the messiness of the changes, but also recognizes that for the teenagers of Clarkston who've seen the horrors of war and now find themselves in a new town with few resources, these are at risk kids. And these are kids who love to play soccer. Luma organizes a special youth soccer team to play in the town's league, and the players name their team The Fugees. Journalist Warren St. John follows a season of youth soccer with Luma and the Fugees, and Outcasts United is a book about bigger issues than scoring goals. Luma and her team aren't saints, and they aren't perfect, and they struggle. It's a messy world, and yet they press on and take action and find hope.

The Fugees have continued to support refugee kids and the team
has grown since the publication of Outcasts United.
Check out their incredible work here. 

Good and Cheap (Books)! Day 14

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn is a book I find myself recommending to readers who are looking for a light, fun, and somewhat thought-provoking book. Personally, I think of this book as pure fun and would actually use the word ‘delightful,’ and you know, I don’t ever really use that word, except to describe Liz.

The novel takes place on Nollop, an island of the coast of California. Nollop is the hometown to the man who created the famous pangram, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” and those very words are inscribed on a statue in the center of town. (A pangram is a sentence containing all twenty-six letters of the alphabet.) This little country is very serious about their claim to fame, so when letters begin falling off the statue, the government thinks that it must be a sign that those particular letters should not be used. They in fact outlaw each letter that falls from the statue. Citizens are not permitted to speak or write outlawed letters. As government digs its heels in and begins handing out penalties for citizens found using outlawed letters, citizens scramble to find a way to appease the government by finding a new pangram.

While that’s a great plot for a novel in and of itself, Mark Dunn does something cool and for me, was the selling point hands down. As each letter is outlawed, he omits the letter from the novel. So when the letter J falls off for example, you won’t see it in the letters again. Toward the end of the book only a few letters remain….

The book is fun start to finish. 

Good and Cheap (Books)! Day 13

The Pulitzer Prizes are announced tomorrow, crowning a new book (or not, should they repeat last year's crazy insulting ridiculous interesting decision not to give a prize for fiction). Want to place bets on a winner? I think an odds favorite could be Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, but I also relish the dark horse winners that spring from nowhere. No doubt a Pulitzer Prize makes a career. Unless you're already dead, John Kennedy Toole, you overrated hack. (Please send your outraged "I loved Confederacy of Dunces" messages to Gianna. She loves the attention.)

Today I'd like to call out the youngest person (thus far) to win a Pulitzer Prize, Jhumpa Lahiri. It's hard to believe that she won 13 years ago for The Interpreter of Maladies, a collection of short stories about the lives of Indians moving to America. She followed up Interpreter with a novel, The Namesake, and she has a new novel coming this fall, The Lowland. It's really good.

The book I like best, though, is another story collection, Unaccustomed Earth. These aren't just stories dealing with the cultural differences between India and the United States. Lahiri also writes about the gulf between generations, of children and parents trying to communicate from vastly different locations and eras. In the title story, an adult daughter, Ruma, has moved from Brooklyn to Seattle, and she's stressed out about the presumed obligation that she bring her elderly father to live in her home, as is customary in India. The final three stories in the collection follow two people, a boy and a girl, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood in Italy, to the horror of the tsunami.

What Lahiri does best is capture the subtleties of relationships and emotions. Her characters feel like real people living real lives and facing real difficulties and experiencing real joys, and yet she manages to pull off these portraits in just a few pages. I will read everything Jhumpa Lahiri writes.

Good and Cheap (Books)! Day 12

800 pages of girls, girls, girls

 It's no secret that generally speaking, women’s writing doesn’t get reviewed nearly as much as male writers.  The website VIDA  has an interesting set of images you might want to look through.  Although we haven’t officially looked at the male vs. female reviews on our blog, I would bet that we tilt toward more female reviews simply because I write about Gail Caldwell every three days. It would be interesting to see how Liz and I are fairing in comparison to say, The Paris Review. That’s right, we are going up against The Paris Review!

Elaine Showalter

What we do, though, is consciously try to encourage people to read more women authors, and certainly seek out under appreciated women writers.  That’s why The Vintage Book of American Women Writers, edited by Elaine Showalter, is one of my favorite books from the past few years. More than just another anthology, it’s a treasure trove of celebrated writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O’Connor, Phillis Wheatley, and Maxine Hong Kingston. But that’s not the reason to buy this book, and it’s certainly not the reason you will pick it up time and time again. It’s the lesser-known writers that Showalter has included that made me fall in love with this book.

Fanny Fern

Included in the anthology is Mary Rowlandson (1637-1711), who wrote the novel Charlotte Temple, a bestseller for about twenty years (until Uncle Tom’s Cabin knocked her out of the top spot); she was unknown to me before I read this book. Feminist sisters Alice and Phoebe Cary often wrote and published poetry together, and what a find for me! Phoebe wrote feminist versions of classic poetry from the likes of Shakespeare and Longfellow; what nerve! She and her sister died only months apart in 1871. Frances Miriam Berry Whitcher was the first American female humorist. She was very good at pissing off New Yorkers and her piece called “The Widow Essays Poetry” is worth the price of this book.

Mary Wilkins Freeman

We get caught up waiting for the next blockbuster memoir or new big novel from our favorite authors. I am completely guilty of it. Meanwhile, the true joy of reading is discovering new writers, finding out who we’ve missed.  You won’t just find a new story, poem, or essay from a woman you’ve never heard of in here, you will put the book down, go to your computer and try to learn everything possible about fascinating women like Fanny Fern and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. I promise.

Good and Cheap (Books)! Day 11

Some countries capture my imagination. I make no apologies for my love of Canada, and if Random House decided that I needed to relocate to Vancouver, Zorro and I would be packing within the hour. I think that my Canadian obsession started because it was the first foreign country I'd ever visited, and I am a sucker for old growth forests, maple sugar candy, and brilliant writers. I love Russia, but I think that fascination comes from its incredible history. Russia was the enemy when I was a kid, and yet, amid this land of what we were taught was an oppressive, backward political system, there stood St. Basil's Cathedral, and some of the greatest writers the world has known, and mysterious lands like Siberia. And then there's North Korea.

Even before 'Lil Kim decided that Austin should be on the missile strike list, and before 'Lil Bush declared the country a member of the Axis of Evil, I was intrigued by North Korea. (Actually, I have a thing for totalitarian regimes. I admit it. I have a problem.) Here is a country who, technically, has been at war with the United States for the last seventy years. It's a country full of paranoia and cultural brainwashing and mass delusion, where the leader is basically a god. If Kim says that unicorns live in a cave under a parking lot, that's truth. I've already written about my love for Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son (which was vindicated when it recently won The Morning News' annual Tournament of Books). But, with so little information coming out of North Korea and so much propaganda, what the hell is it like to just, you know, be a normal person there?

Enter Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy. This book is journalism at its finest. Demick follows six "ordinary" North Korean citizens over the course of fifteen years. These are people who fall in love, go to work, want families. If these people lived in the US, they'd be my neighbors (not the ones with the Christmas lights still up in freaking April, but the less annoying ones). In North Korea, though, expressions of affection are forbidden (heck yes!), Orwellian informing is rewarded (dude, PLEASE TAKE DOWN YOUR CHRISTMAS LIGHTS), and the Kim family is always right (instead of Zorro as supreme leader. That's just wrong). They are willingly not on the Internet. In the fifteen years that Demick chronicles, these people witness the death of Kim Il Sung and the rise of his craziness Kim Jong Il, and they suffered through a famine that killed 20% of the population. Eventually, faced with the reality of being a doctor who cannot care for patients, for example, the people profiled come to the painful realizations that North Korea is a country on the brink. The emperor has no clothes.

North Korea at night (the dark spot)

With the recent saber-rattling and threats coming from the dark part of the Korean Peninsula, Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy provides insight and a human element to North Korea.

Good and Cheap (Books)! Day 10

Every year the partnership of Seven Stories Press, Sonoma State University Foundation, and Project Censored publishes a list of censored or underreported stories from that year.  I only came to learn of Project Censored last year when I read an excerpt from Censored 2012 entitled, “More US Soldiers Committed Suicide than Died in Combat.” I now own three books, Censored 2010, Censored 2011, and Censored 2012.

Project Censored not only complies lists of underreported stories by tracking published news, but also will update previously published stories and offer many sources. Yes, that’s right, sources!  Regular features include cartoons by Tom Tomorrow and a section called "Junk Food News" (mostly a criticism of mass media), such as our obsessive need for celebrity gossip. I know, I am part of the problem...

If you want a taste of the books, check out their website. It will be sure to piss you off. I mentioned the story above, but a few more stories that really blew me away are “Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Worse than Anticipated” from 2013, a really interesting story called “Secret Control of the Presidential Debates” from 2010 (I think), “Nanotech Particles Pose Serious DNA Risks to Humans and the Environments” from 2011, and also from 2011 “Cuba Provided the Greatest Medical Aid to Haiti after the Earthquake.”

Those are just a few stories that piqued my interest on various subjects, but there are hundreds available from the Project Censored website and printed material.