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Literary Forebears of V.C. Andrews #1: The Book of Genesis

"Tamar and Judah," Arent de Gelder, 1667

When I was seven years old, an elderly deacon at Belvedere Baptist Church in West Palm Beach, Florida, challenged me to read the entire Bible start to finish, as he himself had done seven times. Being a reader and a baptized, you know, Baptist, I took him up on the challenge. After a few thrilling days in the early chapters of Genesis, in which I experienced two stories about the creation of the world, a worldwide flood (which one family survived by building a boat and filling it with all the animals of the world), and the invention of competing languages and subsequent dispersal of the nations at the Tower of Babel, (and here I know I’m leaving out all kinds of high-stakes trouble, none of it comparing to the serial genocides commanded by God in the Book of Exodus, but I digress), I came across the headscratching thirty-eighth chapter, which introduced me for the first time to such topics as coitus interruptus, legally-mandated sort-of incest (brother-in-law-on-sister-in-law and father-in-law-on-daughter-in-law), prostitution, extortion-by-prostitute, and threats-of-burning-to-death-as-a-result-of-unwanted-pregnancy (the extortion prevents the burning, thank god.) Here, by permission of King James I of England, in his commissioning proclamation of 1604 at the Hampton Court Conference, I bring you Genesis 38, for your entertainment and possible edification:

Genesis 38

¹And it came to pass at that time, that Judah went down from his brethren, and turned in to a certain Adullamite, whose name was Hirah.

²And Judah saw there a daughter of a certain Canaanite, whose name was Shuah; and he took her READ MORE >

Random / 19 Comments
December 20th, 2010 / 12:07 am

Sean Lovelace

season-o-giving

77. Is it ever a good idea to give your book away?

14. Relatives of writers really tussle with what to give them; who wants another giant book of 500 bad poems? If asked, what do you tell people?

1. What’s the highe$$$t you’ve ever given for a book, any book? Do tale.

9. You know what writers really need? Nothing but time. I once wrote a grant (a process about as fun as boiling gravel) and received that grant and it was worth several thousand dollars and what did I want, those grrrrrr-anters asked? Time. So they paid someone to teach my class that semester while I wrote (and played a smidgen of disc golf). Time. Capital T. (This an argument for the MFA, BTW, but I don’t wanna start that withered face of an apple turning over.)

111. Who gives a shit? (And he read Jest on tape while night-walking Maine highway shoulders)

018. Advice: Don’t give breached things. It’s general knowledge I’m addicted to hot sauce (a key aspect of nachos). Years ago, a student gave me a bottle of hot sauce (though post final grades in this case, the student gift thing is already weird/odd for me. I never know what to do except discourage). The bottle was open, half contents gone. Another time a friend gave me an expensive bottle of bourbon as congratulations for a life event. He then cracked it open, took a preternatural swig, and drank half the bottle his own self. Don’t.

Does the used book fall under this rule?

Random / 13 Comments
December 19th, 2010 / 8:26 pm

Kyle Minor

This Basque is Badass

Strangest novel I’ve ever read? Obabakoak, composed in Euskara (Basque) by Bernardo Axtaga, who, the jacket copy tells us, had to translate his own book into Spanish so that it might find a broad European readership. (It worked.)

Before we reach even the prologue, the book tells us about The Game of the Goose (el juego de la oca), which is played:

on a circular board of sixty-three squares, the sixty-third being occupied by Mother Goose. The first person to reach square sixty-three wins. Geese can also appear on the other squares and if you land on one of these, you jump forward to the next goose and get another throw of the dice. If you land on less fortunate squares such as the maze, the prison or the square symbolising death (a skull or skeleton) you must either wait for another player to take your place, go back several squares or return to square one.

The Game of the Goose is an apt stand-in for the structure of Obabakoak, which READ MORE >