Knopf 100--Day 26: This Is It! We Hit 100!

Whoa! We've made it to the end! I'll post the complete list tomorrow, but here are the last four picks of our Knopf 100, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Alfred A. Knopf. Despite Gianna's habit of choosing books I'd already selected, we're concluding this list knowing that there are pooty loads of excellent books that could have made this list. It's been a challenge, an adventure, and a daunting task.

97. Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson, originally published in 1993. When we first discussed this project, Gianna and I both immediately thought about Written on the Body as a perfect pick...and then proceeded not to pick it for 25 days for fear of stepping on each other's toes. This is a novel with a narrator who is never named nor assigned a gender. The narrator is caught up in an intense love affair with a married woman, and the book weaves around and within that relationship. Winterson's fluid wordplay makes it a remarkable read, but her gender play makes Written on the Body a masterpiece. We both love this book fiercely.

98. The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri, originally published in 2013. Jhumpa Lahiri has written four published books thus far (the fifth comes out in the spring of 2016), all of which have been terrific. She is a powerful and thoughtful writer whose work explores the idea of being an outsider within the society surrounding her characters. In The Lowland, a National Book Award and Man Booker Prize finalist, two brothers lead totally different lives. One finds love but is a revolutionary, stirring up trouble in the turbulent 60's. The other is the obedient son, immigrating to America. Between them, though, is the woman they both love, who is haunted by her past.

99. The News from Spain by Joan Wickersham, originally published in 2012. It kills me that The News from Spain isn't better known. If you take one "I've never even heard of that" book away from this list, let it be this one. This is a collection of seven short stories all relating to the theme of love--parent and child, husband and wife, friends, caregivers. All seven stories are titled "The News from Spain," and together they perform like a literary concert around the love theme. One that sticks in my memory involves a cantankerous old woman sparring with her in-home caretaker. Her hurts from the past are revealed, but also the love between two people thrust into a relationship because of a job. It's tender and heartbreaking, and Wickersham's writing is on a level with masters like Alice Munro.

100. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, originally published in 2014. How could I not include Station Eleven when I raved about it for months last year? Truth be told, I'd been holding it for the end for awhile, but then in the process of creating these posts and looking for books to feature, it had slipped my mind. Fortunately a friend following the blog reminded me yesterday. I would have hated myself if it had been excluded. Station Eleven is the novel that proves a book can be "literary" without being dull, that it can be "post-apocalyptic" within being a novel of despair. There are several narrative threads blending together in this book, all in some way connected to an actor who dies onstage during a production of King Lear. That same night, a mutant flu virus wipes out most of the world's population. Much of the book is set twenty years down the line from that point and follows a troupe of traveling performers. They move from settlement to settlement playing orchestral music and performing Shakespeare's plays, and their motto is "because survival is insufficient." I love that Emily St. John Mandel manages to talk about loss and all the things we take for granted in our modern lives, but also offers hope that culture--art, music, theater, words--live on and are what makes us human. On that note, this is an ideal book to round out our list.

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.

Things I Love, Things I Hate, Things in Between, Volume 2

Thing I Love Immature Humor.  Let's say that you're pals with Gianna, and let's say that the head of the CIA resigns due to an extramarital affair.  Even better, Book Land is involved because the woman of the night happens to be the good general's biographer.  And then you get an email from Gianna that asks if the lady's book about General Petraeus is really called All In.  And you know that Gianna is snorting as she reads the story in the Huffington Post.  It's a lovely way to end a busy work week.

Thing I Hate Contested election results.  Forget Florida.  How is it that Gianna is winning our Liz vs.Gianna poll on Facebook?  Well guess what?  Book Land is not a democracy, and the correct answer is always Liz.  Or at least the correct answer is always Liz as long as Gianna wants me to continue to correct her punctuation.

Thing I Hate Jellyfish.  I think I'm supposed to find them beautiful, but other than the amazing drawings by Ernst Haeckel from Art Forms in Nature, they just look like floating wounds to me.

Nasty.

Lovely.

Yes Jhumpa, you are allowed
to write books for me.

Thing I Love Fresh manuscripts.  Every Thursday, the Random House sales force receives an email listing all of the manuscripts posted in the last week.  Often these emails are the first hints the sales team sees of the books we will be selling months to a year from now.  And sure, we're surrounded by books and assigned reading all the time, but I never get tired of the possibility of new, great books that I'll have the opportunity to read and then share.  Here's the entire email I sent to a colleague last week:

Subject: manuscript                                        

Two words: Jhumpa Lahiri.
Squeeeeeeeeeeeee!!

It looks like there's a new Jhumpa Lahiri book for the fall of 2013.  That makes me happy.

Thing in Between. Cookbooks.  It's no secret that I don't like to cook.  Those people out there who read cookbooks for pleasure?  What the hell's wrong with you?  Do you need some reading recommendations?  Because we're here to help.  That said, I'm not averse to the joy of someone else cooking for me, which is why I'm giving copies of The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook to several friends.  One of my friends has been treating me to recipes from the SK blog for years, and my colleague Stacey has been making treats for her family and fellow telephone sales reps.  I'm pretty sure that she's going to send me cookies, and if you send me cash, I'll see if she'll cook for you too.  (No refunds.  No guarantees, and if you're Stacey reading this, no profit sharing.)

Thing I Love Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan.  The newest Ian McEwan novel goes on sale this Tuesday, and it's one of my favorites of the year.  Here is the Booker Prize winner and author of Atonement playing with the classic spy genre.  During the tedious part of the Cold War, 1973, a young woman is recruited by MI6 to join Operation Sweet Tooth.  Her mission: find susceptible writers and convince them to write pro-capitalist literature, thus combating Soviet pop culture propaganda.  Serena, our protagonist, finds an aspiring writer and convinces him that he's won a literary prize that will allow him to quit teaching and write full time.  She acts as his contact with the fictitious foundation, and eventually they fall in love.  Of course, their whole relationship is based on lies.  This is what McEwan does best--twisting characters through impossible scenarios and betrayals.  Good stuff.

Thing in Between Movie adaptations.  It's a bit cliche at this point to say that the book is better than the movie, even if there are instances when it's not true.  (The movie of Terms of Endearment was better than the book.)  This fall there's a movie version of my favorite book, Cloud Atlas.  I haven't decided if or when I'll see the movie, but regardless of the movie's quality, the publicity surrounding it has moved the brilliant novel onto the bestseller lists.  Here's a novel that takes some work--it's no young adult book masquerading as adult fiction, and structurally it's a challenge--and here it is selling all over the country.  That's something to celebrate.

30 More Days Book Challenge: Day 2

Day 2: Favorite Short Story

We're fans of the short form.

Gianna:

Short stories are my favorite format. Not because I am lazy (well…not only because I am lazy), but because I am completely mesmerized by the art. I want to spend a little bit of time talking about some of my favorite story writers and some of the first stories I read before I get to what will surely be an obvious choice for me.

When I was thinking about the first collection of short stories I bought and read on my own, it was – brace yourselves literary snobs - Steve Martin’s Cruel Shoes. Still have it, still love it. Deal with it. But the two stories that really got me hooked on the “stuff” were "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and "Where are You Going ,Where Have You Been?" by HRH Joyce Carol Oates. After reading the Oates, I went oh, so … and forgive me if you aren’t a literary person for using a pretentious book biz term…but I went “ape shit.” Then I read every JCO story I could find. From there it was done. James Joyce’s "The Dead," Raymond Carver (I went through a major Carver phase; shut up), "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" by Marquez broadened the stories that I read, Alice Munro remains one of my favorite writers (is she under-read or is that my imagination?), the oh, oh so beautiful The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (this book takes my breath away – I will forever read whatever he writes – write it down - I am a sucka for Tim). Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri is a favorite. Amy Bloom, though I loved the novel Away, I will always prefer her stories – amazing story writer. Miranda July is insane – so sick with talent – her collection No One Belongs Here More Than You makes this list because she truly reignited my love of stories when I hadn’t read an amazing collection in a couple of years. She made me a believer again. July’s book would make my list of top 20 ss collections. Period. Lorrie Moore is a master and Birds of America is a work of art to the highest degree. If you have not read Birds of America, go buy it. If you have never read short stories, of if you think you don’t like short stories, or if you tried stories and didn’t love them, or if you think you don’t like me [I'm doubting my like at the moment], Birds of America is going to change ALL of that…MOST of that. It’s perfect. It is.

After all that it’s a little, well, awkward to now mention my actual favorite short story is not by Lorrie Moore; it is by Flannery O’Connor. Listen, it’s not easy to pick one O’Connor story, so I may change my mind later. "Good Country People." The thing about this story is you’ve got a woman who you sort of want to feel bad for because she has a prosthetic leg from a childhood accident, but she really is not very likable because she feels and acts pretty superior to everyone around her. She has a PhD and the country folk just aren’t up to her standards. Well, she meets a Bible salesman and she wants to uh… spend some time with him in the barn as the kids say. [They really do say that in my podunk hometown.  The auction barn was the place to party when I was in high school.  And more than one girl lost her virginity behind an auto repair garage.  I'm surprised more babies are named Ford or Mercedes in classy Woodville.  I digress....] Classic ending. Not one of the more gory O’Connor stories, but I would say it's actually her sexiest story. And by sexy there is a barn in the story….how’s that?

PS: Second favorite O’Connor story: "The River" which will break your heart (actually this may be my favorite...see it's hard to pick one. I hate this.)

Liz:

GREAT book.
You should read it.

Many of my favorites overlap with Gianna's.  I've already written of my love for "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" here, and I also think that Amy Bloom is a story genius, particularly with "Silver Water."  There's a chilling, Gothic story called "How Far She Went" by Mary Hood that will make you hold your breath at the end.  Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily" is required reading; I mean, Miss Emily's been sleeping with the corpse of her boyfriend for years.  You can't really beat that.  I love Annie Proulx's collection Close Range, which gave us "Brokeback Mountain."  Nam Le's The Boat and Andrew Porter's The Theory of Light and Matter are two amazing debut collections that declared two major talents emerging on the literary horizon.  Jhumpa Lahiri and Alice Munro are genre masters.

My favorite short story, though, is "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  A story with Gothic tendencies, a woman's increasing insanity, and feminist relevance?  Yes, please.  (For the record, "feminist," contrary to the current backlash with women who seem afraid they won't land a man, is not a dirty word.  Neither is "liberal."  Moving on....)  A young married woman, struggling with hysteria (depression), is taken to the country for a rest cure.  Her husband positions her in an upstairs room in a house.  The room is decorated with a distinctive, ugly, yellow wallpaper.  As the woman's isolation becomes more and more extreme, she slips further into madness and the wallpaper becomes her fixation.  It's a creepy, compelling, perpetually relevant story.  It's also one that I heard read to me by my mother's students when I was a kid.  Yes, my childhood was screwed up.