Feb 08 2010
Throwing common sense aside, the Gist Street Reading crew went ahead with its Friday night program with fiction writer Josh Weil and poet Douglas Kearney.
The show did go on, with about 70 Gist regulars perservering, either for the readings or the full tables of free food.
Sherri Flick, cofounder, reported:
"I love our audience. Two people BICYCLED in. Think about that. Both women. So cool. There was a line forming at 6:45. It was magical. . . . Probably one of the best Gist Streets ever."
Jan 25 2010
The awards season is now in full swing, making dozens of dress designers start the year off with fat bank accounts,
But, there were no fashion photographers in sight when the National Book Critics Circle announced its nominees for its best-book prizes in a New York ceremony Jan. 23.
Winners will be announced March 11. Here are the nominees:
Fiction:
Bonnie Jo Campbell, "American Salvage;" Marlon James, "The Book of Night Women;" Michelle Huneven, "Blame;" Hilary Mantel, "Wolf Hall;" and Jayne Anne Phillips, "Lark and Termite."
Nonfiction:
Wendy Doniger, "The Hindus: An Alternative History;" Greg Grandin, "Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City;" Richard Holmes, "The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science;" Tracy Kidder, "Strength in What Remains;" and William T. Vollmann, "Imperial."
Poetry
Rae Armantrout, "Versed;" Louise Glück, "A Village Life;" D.A. Powell, "Chronic;" Eleanor Ross Taylor, "Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2008;" and Rachel Zucker, "Museum of Accidents."
Autobiography:
Diana Athill, "Somewhere Towards the End;" Debra Gwartney, "Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love;" Mary Karr, "Lit;" Kati Marton, "Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America;" and Edmund White, "City Boy."
Biography
Blake Bailey, "Cheever: A Life;" Brad Gooch, "Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor;" Benjamin Moser, "Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector;" Stanislao G. Pugliese, "Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone; Martha A. Sandweiss, "Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line."
Criticism
Eula Biss, "Notes From No Man's Land: American Essays;" Stephen Burt, "Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry;" Morris Dickstein, "Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression;" David Hajdu, "Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture;" and Greg Milner, "Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music."
Jan 04 2010
My reflections on the 2000-2009 era in books, publishing, book-selling, authors and all that that entails consciously omitted the death of playwright August Wilson. Several writers were upset that I seemed to forget about his remarkable career.
I will never forget August, whom I first met in 1987 after he won the Pulitzer for "Fences." I spent a few days with him in his former home of St. Paul, Minn., saw the Penumbra production of "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" and discovered the quiet power and resolution of this Pittsburgh native to write about the African-American life as it played out in the Hill District. My subsequent Post-Gazette story was the first discussion of Wilson's relationship to his city told by someone who was growing up here at the same time, but obviously not with the same heavy burden of prejudice.
Wilson welcomed me into his home with the respect and kindness that he showed everyone, a legacy of his mother's "old-school" upbringing. I also came to meet his family here who were just as welcoming and hospitable.
August Wilson deserves an appreciation of his own. Including him in the literary decade roundup, I think, would have downplayed his stature. I focused on book authors instead.
Dec 23 2009
Quietly, as it sometimes happens in Washington, the National Endowment for the Arts has given its literature director David Kipen a one-ticket back to Southern California.
Fellow Californian Dana Gioia, NEA chairman under George W. Bush, hired Kipen in 2005 following the death of the arts agency's original literature director. It was a comfortable life preserver for the San Francisco Chronicle book reviewer as his newspaper grew so poor it could no longer support that luxury position.
Gioia put Kipen to work shining up the chairman's Big Read Program, a copy of the one book, one community programs in America, including Allegheny County and Great Britain. Without serious follow-up programs in the various towns that won Big Read Funding, the initiative seemed to be largely a PR effort to make Gioia look good, hence my prediction made in 2005:
"Encouraging reading with bookmarks, banners and TV ads misses the point. But this is a government that won't expand support for public education, is considering cutting college-loan funding and refuses to address the Patriot Act's threat to libraries and book buyers. We probably couldn't expect more."
When I attempted to engage Gioia, Kipen and others at the NEA to discuss my concerns, the response was silence. Phone calls, e-mails and old-fashioned letters were never answered. I finally cornered the sheepish Kipen at a BEA party in Los Angeles several years ago and he admitted he was ordered not to respond to me. Your tax dollars at work.
New NEA chairman Rocco Landesman has yet to speak about the Big Read and Gioia's other flashy, superficial "literary" project, Poetry Out Loud that ironically recognizes acting talents over insights into verse. Let's see what Landesman thinks of literature in 2010. Hint: the liiterature director position isn't listed on the agency's employment opportunities Web page.
Dec 10 2009
It's no mystery why Mystery Lovers Bookshop in Oakmont keeps going as its fellow independent booksellers fade - owners Mary Alice Gorman and Richard Goldman hustle like mad. The store's schedule is filled with author visits, special programs and the annual Festival of Mystery that draws hundreds of fans to the Allegheny River town.
The Mystery Writers of America this week showed their appreciation by honoring Gorman and Goldman with the Raven Award in recognition of the constant support and dedication they have shown to the mystery community.
The store opened on Halloween, 1990, and has prevailed through good and bad times. The address is 514 Allegheny River Blvd.
Dec 09 2009
George Packer's long career as a journalist includes a sterling book on the Iraq mess, "Assassin's Gate," as well as a hard-edged endorsement of liberalism in American politics, "The Blood of Liberals." For several years, he's been reporting on national security and war issues for the New Yorker. A collection of that work has just been published, "Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade."
This week, he was the guest of City of Asylum Pittsburgh, the five-year effort by Ralph Henry Reese and Diane Samuels to shelter exiled writers in renovated workers' houses on Sampsonia Way in the Mexican War Streets.
Right now, El Salvadoran journalist and novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya and Burmese activist and writer Khet Mar are in residence there, near the Reese-Samuels home, the headquarters of the organization.
Moya was the subject of a glowing piece in the Nation recently.
Packer was also glowing in his New Yorker blog about the trip here and the work being done on Sampsonia Way.
City of Asylum also learned this week that the National Endowment for the Arts has awarded it $10,000 for its Jazz Poetry Concert. Here's the citation:
"To support the Jazz-Poetry Concert. The sixth-annual concert will bring together world-renowned jazz musicians, poets, and writers selected to participate in the event by an established selection committee. Previous guest artists have included jazz pianist Gerri Allen, the World Saxophone Quartet, and poets Gerald Stern and Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Soyinka."
Dec 08 2009
While the debate raged at the lunch counter on whether Elin Woods used a 50-degree or 56-degree wedge on her husband's car, President Obama sent another 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan, historic black hole of Western empires.
The fact is that we are at war and have been since 2003. Hollywood and to some degree, nonfiction writers have responded to this state of affairs, but, aside from the Sam Hamill-orchestrated Poets Against the War in that year, where have our poets, including the reticent Poet Laureate of the United States - quick, can you name her? (See answer below) - been?
I thought about this question the other night at a packed poetry reading. The audience of largely students showed up for free food (mostly) and a young poet whose work often addressed his failures at attracting women, the usual self-referential pablum. I suggest he call Tiger.
It could be that I was disappointed after reading some great poetry, "Satires of Circumstance" by Thomas Hardy, poems that presage the outbreak of World War I. The poems are in a remarkable book by Paul Fussell called "The Great War and Modern Memory (Sterling, $29.95).
It's the illustrated version of the book that won the National Book Award in 1975. Its observations on war are as relevant now as they were then, shortly after the Vietnam War ended. It's recommended reading in these days of ongoing conflict.
Answer: Kay Ryan
Nov 30 2009
The world returned from Thanksgiving to learn of these literary milestones:
Duke University Press is releasing "Surviving Against The Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia" Thursday with some hoopla at the American Anthropological Association's conference in Philadelphia. Why?
The author is the late S. Ann Dunham, mother of President Obama, who died 15 years ago. It's her doctoral dissertation about a blacksmithing village in Java. It earned her a Ph.D in anthropology from the University of Hawaii.
Suzanne Steele of the Victoria, British Columbia, area, is Canada's first official War Poet, planning to join Canadian forces in Afghanistan early next year. She'll be part of something called the Canadian Forces Artists Program which send artists into the field to portray the life of soldiers. (Holy crap, that's amazing!)
The position of war artist is unpaid, the military providing access to bases and transportation to Afghanistan, plus food, lodging and protection when she's there, but exerting no control over what she writes. "I have to be careful not to drink the Kool-Aid," she says. "I'm not a propagandist. They're not choosing a safe artist," she told The Tyee, a B.C.-based cultural Web site.
She'll be blogging from Afghanistan later next year.
Nov 16 2009
Folks, I have looked around the Pittsburgh bookstores, made a few calls and, no, Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" is not available here, as of today (Nov. 16). Not that I was disappointed.
Yet, without surprise, the NYTimes and WashPost got copies, did some quick page turning, and posted their reviews today. Their reviews indicated that Palin isn't about to replace Ayn Rand in the hearts of America's über conservatives as a writer and thinker.
A veteran bookseller explained that Pittsburgh isn't No. 1 on the publisher's distribution list, unlike Manhattan and D.C.
With those reviews and an eager electronic medium headed by Ms. O. Winfrey, the former Alaska governor will sell enough books to make back her $5 million advance.
Media Matters today systematically challenged a pile of statements by the former governor. No matter, the big sales are a sure thing.
Nov 13 2009
Who's the source in New York for those "embargoed" books that are given to the media several days early? It never fails to occur. A publisher clamps the distribution lid on a hot new release, then a newspaper gets the book ahead of time and writes a story.
The latest is "Going Rogue," Sarah Palin's writer-assisted memoir, planned for release Nov. 17.Associated Press in New York said it "found and bought" a copy and wrote a story that hit the wires Thursday night.
I don't exactly know what to make of the fact that both the NYTimes and WashPost simply rewrote the AP story rather than scooping up a copy themselves, then leafing through it. They had to leaf because it doesn't have an index.
When you're out and about this weekend and spot "Going Rogue" at a store, say one that sells hunting licenses or a bigbox retailer, let me know at bhoover@post-gazette.com. I'm thinking a few store clerks may have "gone rogue" and put the book out for sale early.
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