A new edition of Huckleberry Finn will be released next month from NewSouth where all 219 instances of Twain’s use of the word “nigger” have been removed. “We recognized that some people would say that this was censorship of a kind,” says the publisher, “but our feeling is that there are plenty of other books out there—all of them, in fact—that faithfully replicate the text, and that this was simply an option for those who were increasingly uncomfortable, as he put it, insisting students read a text which was so incredibly hurtful.” Ugh. Really? Is this the beginning of a national clean-me-so-we-feel-better literature trend?
“N word” removed from Huck Finn
Blake Butler—
An exciting new monthly online journal of poetics founded by Joshua Marie Wilkinson: Evening Will Come. Debut month features an excellent long new work by C.D. Wright.
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“Internacionalista”
The Believer is running an excerpt from Deb Olin Unferth’s forthcoming Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War. An excerpt from the excerpt:
George and I had gotten nowhere with joining any revolution. It was August. We’d been fired from one job and hadn’t found another. We’d managed to throw up a wall between us, or at least some small obfuscating stones (a dot of diamond, two glints of red). And now we had to get out of El Salvador. Our visas were running out. We couldn’t wait around for people to figure out what they were going to do about the bridges that had been exploded on the road to the border—put them back up, explode somebody back, chart a little path through the river—no time for any of that, George said, because to be stuck in El Salvador with an expired visa was no joke. So we set out. The truck drove in loops, searching for bridges still standing. A few kilometers from the border, some guys with black-market gym shoes threw their duffel bags off the truck and jumped out, ran into the trees.
“Kill me outright with looks” : 139 Books I Read in 2010
MacGyver, that sexy-bellied genie show, and the show about California highway cops with the weirdly lowercase i—all of these television shows ran 139 episodes. In 2010, I read 139 books. I mean, I think I did. Most chapbooks I didn’t include in this list, even really good ones, so there’s that. Also there’s always an also, so who knows? Here are 139 books I probably read this year and what I spontaneously remember of them. As a bonus, I am sometimes unexpectedly or tangentially “mean-ish” in my notes, so if you have an idea of me as being “unable to be mean,” maybe this will change your mind (probably not): READ MORE >
The Good Men Fiction Project
The Good Men Project Magazine launched Weekend Fiction on January 1, 2011. Every Saturday, this section will feature original short fiction that speaks to the male experience, from award-winning, along with new and emerging, authors.
The debut features a new short story, “Yosemite,” from James Franco. Also featured in the debut is “Saint Roger of Fox Chase,” by Sean Ennis of Gotham Writer’s Workshop.
Weekend Fiction will be edited by Good Men Project Magazine contributor Matthew Salesses, author of Our Island of Epidemics. Future issues will include stories by accomplished authors George Singleton, Ben Greenman, Kim Chinquee, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Alexander Chee, Ryan Call, and others.
Submissions are welcome. They are looking for fiction in the range of 1200-10,000 words in some way touching on the “male experience.” Go here for guidelines and to submit.
On Self-Publishing, Prodigies, Loving Books, Memory, and Transcendence
More people are self publishing. Same story, different newspaper. One interesting line: “If you write a book, you are an expert,” says Dr. Martin, who spent roughly $40,000 to publish and market five books, including “Are Your Teeth Killing You?” and “This Won’t Hurt a Bit.”
More people are self publishing. Same story, different news outlet. One interesting line: “In today’s tight traditional publishing market, agents, editors, and publishers are now encouraging authors to test market their book by self-publishing.”
Child prodigies are terribly interesting to me so I quite enjoyed this fantastic essay about Barbara Rogers née Follett. One interesting line: “‘In a multitude of ways,” Wilson Follett reported, “we become more and more convinced of the expediency of letting the typewriter be, so far as a machine can, the center and genesis of the first processes.’”
Susan Orlean has a fine bit of an essay here about loving all manner of books and the battle between reading and, well, everything else. One interesting line: “I think the only real battle is between the challenge of getting people to read and the fact that many other pastimes are easier, quicker, and more passive than reading.”
Did you know there’s a memoir about a woman who loved Little House on the Prairie and started adopting some of the LHOP lifestyle? The book is called The Wilder Life and will be out in April 2011. Yes, I am all over this and will be reporting back, come April 11, 2011.
In the Los Angeles Times, David Ulin writes on how we can make the most of both books and e-books. One interesting line: “Their physicality is part of their function; they are meant to be held as well as read.”
The editors of the New York Times Sunday Book Review introduce why criticism matters, then give the platform over to six “accomplished” critics: Stephen Burn, Katie Roiphe, Pankaj Mishra, Adam Kirsch, Sam Anderson, and Elif Batuman.One interesting line, from Batuman’s essay, “Negative criticism is particularly exciting, not only because of schadenfreude, but because once limitations are identified, we glimpse how to transcend them.”
2010 has been recapped for our benefit and here is a megalist of “Best of 2010” lists. Happy New Year, everyone!
2010: the books I didn’t read
Yeah, I read some books in 2010. I wish I had read more. These are my favorite 2010 releases I didn’t read.
The What-If Game
One of Stephen Dixon’s favorite strategies is telling the same story repeatedly, but changing a variable in the cause-and-effect chain with each telling — having fate deal a slightly different event, for example, or causing a key agent to make a different choice — and then exploring how time rings the changes differently in the lives of the characters. Sometimes we seem to be reading a study in worry — what will happen to me and the people I love if I don’t rightly account for all the possible permutations of even the smallest choices I make? — and sometimes we seem to be reading a study in the futility of trying to fight the forces of fate, since maybe there’s no accounting for the consequences of our choices as they play out along the cause-and-effect chain when so many things are so far beyond our control. Agency is everything and/or there is no agency.
The most focused of Dixon’s fictions that employ this strategy can be found in his novel Interstate (which was a National Book Award Finalist in 1995, and yet is now, sadly, out of print, and ripe for reprinting by an outfit like Dalkey Archive Press or New York Review Books — whichever wises up first.) Interstate tells the same story eight times. A guy is driving a car on the interstate, his two daughters with him, and some rough-looking guys in another car show a gun. In each of the tellings READ MORE >
Rabbit Light Movies 12
Winter ’11 issue 12 of Rabbit Light Movies is up now an overflowing with excellence in videos by Emily Kendal Frey, Sommer Browning, C.D. Wright, Noah Eli Gordon, Laynie Browne, Alice Notley, Michael Earl Craig, Arielle Greenberg, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Rachel Zolf, Michelle Taransky, and a preview of Asteroid, a feature length tour film by Zach Schomburg.
Here’s Alice Notley:
Spinning, Spanning, Spun
I have the antibodies for an autoimmune disorder called Hashimoto’s Disease, which is the precursor to hypothyroidism. It’s not so bad when kept under control, but occasionally my thyroid gets sluggish, poor guy, and the great world spins. It fucking spins. This morning, amidst wrinkled-sheets depression, difficultly swallowing, extreme cold, racing heartbeat, and some vertigo, I finished reading the 2009 National Book Award Winner, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.
I think maybe I’ve been reading this book since 2009, with my own world spinning much more viscerally around me, with seemingly more interesting books finding their way into my view. I wasn’t happy about this book for a while, and I couldn’t make myself finish it. The shifting voices wrenched me out of “the zone.” (Even though I loved, for instance, Olsen’s Calendar of Regrets, the characters of which had much more tenuous connections.) Many of said voices, particularly McCann’s take on a black hooker, seemed inauthentic and weird.
The book centers around one real-life event, Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the Twin Towers, but it’s about much more: the interconnectedness of the fictional people surrounding the event. So I sat down this morning, feeling all thyroid-y and spinny and fatty, and I finished the book. Maybe it’s because my world’s spinning at the moment, but I finished that last page and I cried. I thought back to all the beautiful parts of the book, and I realized that I could probably forgive some of its missteps simply for the way it weaves the changed and changing lives of strangers together–from a hippie Irish monk to bald circuit court judge to a group of mothers who’ve lost their sons in Vietnam to a mother-daughter prostitute team–for the beauty of chance, how chance dangles like a tightrope walker above us, in Ferlinghetti’s words, “constantly risking absurdity and death.” I don’t know. The jury’s still out, I guess, until I get my thyroid levels back in order. Days like these, I can’t handle it, reader, that you and I could be connected by the invisible wire of something we both experienced separately many years ago, or something we both missed altogether, the absence of which has shaped us.
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December 30th, 2010 / 1:17 pm
December 30th, 2010 / 1:17 pm