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The Daily Beast asked some writers — Donna Tartt, Junot Díaz, Chris Adrian, Geoff Dyer, Karen Russell, Sherman Alexie, Siri Hustvedt, Darin Strauss, Téa Obreht, Kathryn Stockett, Alexandra Fuller, Anne Enright, Elisabeth Kostova, Alexander McCall Smith, and me — about our favorite summer books.

Mine is John Colapinto’s first (and, so far, only) novel, About the Author. What I said:

I read John Colapinto’s hilarious, propulsive, and gorgeously written About the Author in a single day almost exactly eight years ago, before the rise, demise, and resurrection of James Frey, when I knew next to nothing about publishing but had great expertise in planning to write and not writing. The novel’s narrator, Cal Cunningham, has also perfected this skill. A supposed wordsmith, he spends his days shelving books at a big midtown bookstore, nights going from bar to bar picking up girls and getting laid, and Sunday mornings filling his dull law student roommate in on his escapades. Our hero’s sense of superiority is shattered when he discovers that the roommate hasn’t been locked in his room typing tedious legal briefs but working on a novel, one that’s actually good, one that sounds suspiciously like Cunningham’s own life, so much so that when the roommate dies unexpectedly… Well, I’ve already said too much, but it’s a remarkable book, a confessional literary thriller that makes you care about its plagiarist narrator even as it reveals him to be a coward and a liar and satirizes the publishing and media world that exalts him.

I’ve been blogging so long, I can point exactly to when I first read About the Author, a gift from Emma early in our friendship. (I didn’t know then that the novel took Colapinto thirteen years to write. No judgment here.)

Head over to the Daily Beast for the other picks.

My contribution to the “Why’s This So Good?” series — a collaboration between Longreads, Alexis Madrigal, and Nieman Storyboard’s Andrea Pitzer designed to explore “what makes classic narrative nonfiction stories worth reading” — is about Raymond Chandler’s 1945 “Writers in Hollywood,” a scathing attack on the motion picture industry.

Candler “brought to bear on his subject all the fury and surprising insights of the novelist who wrote ‘The Big Sleep,’ the gimlet-eyed practicality of the storyteller whose first publications were for pulp magazines, and the staggering self-absorption of the depressive alcoholic.” And the critique isn’t just a dusty object of curiosity from the vaults; it’s relevant now.

In the heyday of the Hollywood novelist-screenwriter, a slew of literary talents – Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker and Aldous Huxley, to name just a few – did time writing film scripts because they were easy money. Now, in the new narrative TV landscape, it’s cable companies that are signing novelists and memoirists in droves. Jonathan Ames, Jennifer Egan, Sam Lipsyte, Sloane Crosley, Salman Rushdie, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman are just a few recent hires. Given that fiction writers like Richard Price and George Pelacanos helped shape “The Wire,” arguably the most interesting story of our time, the focus on novelists makes a certain amount of sense. But how much creative control will they have? And will cable TV, too, eventually become too rigid to allow innovation?

You can read the rest, along with prior installments from Alexis Madrigal, Radhika Jones, Carl Zimmer, and Chris Jones, over at the Nieman Storyboard site.

Previously Ten novels and short stories that would make good movies (at IFC) and notes following The Wire season 5 premiere.

At the Awl, Kate Christensen and I discuss her latest novel, The Astral, and many other things, including cheating hearts, failed marriages, bad therapy, male muses, inner dicks, and (briefly) her next book, Gin on the Lanai.

“I write about people wrestling with various internal conflicts in ways that ripple outwards and cause more external conflicts,” she says. “Repressed, obedient, ‘good-citizen’ characters interest me very little because there’s little possibility for change in them. I’m a very old-fashioned writer. Change is what I’m after… Flux is exciting; struggle and discord and trouble fascinate me.”

Mark Armstrong of Longreads posts his top essays and articles over at Mother Jones each week, and this time around I’m his “Featured Longreader.” Here’s some of what I’ve been reading recently:

A Disney trip with kids meets lots of furtive weed smoking in John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Rough Guide to Disney World. “It was a double hallucination,” he says. “You were hallucinating inside of Walter Disney’s hallucination. That’s what he wanted.” Already an official #longreads pick, I know, but: it’s so, so good and only gets better as it goes.

I’ve also been revisiting Eudora Welty’s fiction in preparation for a Granta event [held at the New School last night]. “Why I Live at the P.O.” and “Petrified Man” are two of her most beloved stories, and with good reason: they’re funny and relentless and so accurately and minutely observed. Returning to them, I realized what an influence she must have had on Dorothy Allison (whose Bastard Out of Carolina, a #longlongread, I also recommend). Then I confirmed it. “I was seduced by Eudora Welty,” Allison wrote in 2005, though “I had every reason to distrust her, as I had distrusted Faulkner—both of them products of the middle-class South I disdained.”

To round out this unexpectedly southern round-up, for anyone who missed it last week, I recommend my friend Anna Holmes’ essay on the female Freedom Riders of the Civil Rights movement. One, a factory worker and mother of two traveling after a miscarriage, refused to give up her seat to a white couple and kicked a deputy in the groin when he tried to make her.

I spend so little time around here these days, I forgot to mention my inclusion in Paper Magazine’s Lit It Crowd. I love the photo; all my companions — Thessaly LaForce, Sadie Stein, Emma Straub, and Hamish Robertson — look dead sexy (which they are), while I’m off to the side, hands folded, gazing skyward and seemingly clucking like a delighted schoolmarm/auntie.

It’s a group, Lorin Stein said, “lousy with Parisians”: Thessaly and Sadie are editors and writers at The Paris Review Daily, and Emma and I are contributors. News of Thessaly’s upcoming departure for the Iowa Writers Workshop and that The New Yorker’s Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn will be taking over prompted The New York Observer’s Kat Stoeffel to note the Paper feature, in “Les Filles du Blog,” and to observe that “Although many intellectual and literary magazines have come under scrutiny lately for a lack of female bylines,&rd

Salon chose eight novel excerpts for its first Good Sex in Fiction Contest, and asked Louis Bayard, Walter Kirn, Laura Miller, and me to judge and discuss them. I ranked the Franzen highest, and also outed myself as a total pervert.

The problem with these excerpts is — and I didn’t entirely realize this until I started reading for the contest — that the sex I respond to most in fiction is really fucked-up. It’s definitely not that I want to experience the anonymous sexual assaults of Nicholson Baker’s The Fermata (though I confess, I did think that book was hot, in its autistic way), or get involved with a porn-obsessed televangelist as in A.L. Kennedy’s Original Bliss, or abduct a man and use him as my sex slave, as in Rupert Thomson’s The Book of Revelation, but those stories stay with me because they reveal something incredibly dark and twisted and, to me, true about desire and obsession. I like fiction, whatever the subject, that exposes the surprising longings its characters harbor in their heart of hearts. Mary Gaitskill’s “The Other Place,” in the latest New Yorker, is a perfect example, though it’s not actually about sex at all.

You can read the contenders, the winner (from my pal James Hynes’ Next), and our discussion over at Salon. For more distorted sexuality in fiction recommendations, see The Paris Review Daily’s latest advice column. I also love my friend Alexander Chee’s fabulously disturbing and complex Edinburgh. And finally, I re-recommend James Hynes’ piece on “The Dreamlife of Rupert Thomson.”

My friend Misha Angrist, a former geneticist and the author of Here is a Human Being At the Dawn of Personal Genomics, answers some of my questions about DNA research at The Awl.

Holy crap, Misha, you’re making your entire genome public! Are you nervous?

It’s already done. All of my data are here. Frankly I don’t think anything in my DNA could be as embarrassing as this kelly green shirt that continues to taunt me from the interwebs.

I spend a lot of time worrying about the long-term consequences of opening the Pandora’s box just by joining 23andMe.

Hmmm. What is it you’re worried about exactly?

Well, in addition to being an enthusiastic neurotic, I’m a hypochondriac with health problems, and I guess I’m anxious that I won’t be able to get insurance coverage in my old age, and I’ll end up being yelled at and bossed around in some grannies’ ward with rows and rows of beds, like in Memento Mori

True, although I suspect that those types of stories are rare. But even if they’re not, I believe that one way of combating/preempting that sort of behavior is by having a cohort of people putting it all out there and seeing what happens. I am fairly well convinced that if an insurer or employer used a Personal Genome Project participant’s data to discriminate against him/her, the personal genomics hive would raise holy hell and quickly create a PR nightmare for the perpetrator.

Ah, so participation is actually a kind of insurance of its own! Where do I sign up?

Yeah, if you fuck with me, then you fuck with all of the public genomes and arguably the entire biomedical research enterprise.

More here, and we continue the conversation at McNally Jackson tonight, at 7 p.m. Join us if you’re free.

My favorite “new” book of the year will surprise no one. It’s the Autobiography of Mark Twain, and I wrote about it for Salon, where there are also best of 2010 contributions from my friends Laura Miller and Laura Lippman, and from other writers, including David Grann, Ted Conover, George Pelecanos, Dave Eggers, Elizabeth Kolbert, Anthony Shadid, James Fallows, and Rebecca Traister.

I’ve also written about favorite books — particularly an old one I discovered this year — for The Millions’ always-outstanding Year in Reading. I’ll add the link when that piece goes up.

While I’m aggregating things from other places: recently I’ve started making more use of Tumblr; I really like the feeling of community and all the pretty pictures. And not long ago I talked with Kate Donnelly about the incredibly exciting spot where I’ve spent most of my free time for the past twelve months: my desk. That’s a photo above and if you’re interested you can read more about it and its contents at From Your Desks.
 

This year I also kept a Paris Review Culture Diary (part two), wrote an ode to the (enchanted) Biltmore Hotel for Oxford American, reviewed the new Muriel Spark biography, and now worship her and her writing. I also fell in love with E.B. White’s One Man’s Meat and Kingsley Amis’ Everyday Drinking. I curated the Girls Write Now series featuring the talented Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Nami Mun, Marie Mockett, Lizzie Skurnick, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi, and I interviewed Rosecrans Baldwin about his accomplished first novel.

I realized I was writing two books rather than one, and focused on the first one, and read a previously-unheard excerpt from it. I started writing for The Awl about my obsession with Sarah Palin and far-out evangelicals generally, and I watched the first episode of Palin’s Alaska with my pal D.E. Rasso and we recapped it for your amusement. And though I haven’t written about this in any detail, I joined 23andme, found out more about my grandfather’s (alleg

I took a hiatus from my reviewing hiatus to write about Adam Levin’s The Instructions for B&N Review. The book runs a little over a thousand pages; by the end, I would gladly have signed on for another thousand. Here’s an excerpt:

Adam Levin’s dark, funny, and deeply provocative first novel, The Instructions, comprises the scriptures of one Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, an impossibly articulate ten-year old who might or might not be the messiah. When I say “impossibly,” I do mean impossibly, but Gurion is no cutesy child hero. He shares with Oskar Snell — the young, tambourine-playing pacifist vegan of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close — a fixation on the horrors of the past, and like Snell’s his story is propelled by a series of unlikely, seemingly symbolic coincidences. Here, though, there is no redemption, only confusion and violence — an indictment of tribe mentality, and of the concept of being “chosen.”

Gurion’s scholarly erudition is so staggering, so monumentally over-the-top, that the accusation of its implausibility is embedded in the book itself. A footnote excerpts a letter from Philip Roth (his fictional counterpart, anyway), who misreads fan mail from Gurion as an adult’s “terrifically cruel and on point” mimicry of “recent so-called Jewish wunderkind authors.” Roth urges him to stop “writing from the unconvincing POV of a boy-genius whose name suggests a messianic fate” and instead to adopt the more realistic perspective of a man remembering his childhood “as a time when he, like so many of us, suspected that he was the messiah.”

Even at five years old, we are told, the boy asked scriptural questions so complex that his mentor, a rabbinical scholar, was moved to transcribe their conversations. No doubt the allegorical touchstone is different for Jewish readers, but for this fundamentalist-raised gentile the obvious echo is of Jesus’ three-day debate, at age twelve, that left Jerusalem’s temple elders astonished. (Luke 2:46-47) At times, like the fictional Roth, I struggled with Gurion’s voice — with the high diction, and the essaylets and other postmodern flourishes — but Levin has an uncanny facility for blending sympathy and satire, for making us care about his charming but dubious hero and for infusing life into this alternate, slightly fantastical reality that’s very much like our own. The Instructions recalls both the real Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, in which aviation hero and Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindberg defeats FDR on an isolationist platform and winds up in the White House, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slapstick, in which members of the Church of Jesus Christ, Kidnapped are required to “spend every waking hour” trying to find their savior, who was “kidnapped by the Forces of Evil” at the second coming. And, like Roth’s and Vonnegut’s, Levin’s flights of fancy are placed in service of a deadly serious project. Not only is he, as he recently told The Chicago Tribune, having “a conversation with Jewish literature,” he’s illustrating, in a wholly original way, exactly what sort of catastrophe results when fervent religious conviction meets brute force.

You can read the rest here. See also

My review of Martin Stannard’s Muriel Spark biography appears at Barnes & Noble Review today. One of the things that struck me while reading is just how easily Spark — one of the finest and funniest novelists of the last century, or of any century — could have continued to write poetry and criticism and not tried her hand at fiction at all.

She wrote her first story at thirty-three, almost by accident; she needed money and the Observer was sponsoring a contest. After publishing her first novel at thirty-nine, though, she completed the next few books astonishingly quickly, at half-year intervals, as though some part of her mind had been readying itself for the challenge.

Despite its sprawl, Stannard’s biography is a fascinating read for Spark fans. And if you haven’t read Spark yet, please get cracking. I recommend starting with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, or my personal favorite, Memento Mori. Or maybe with her first book, The Comforters, or her last, The Finishing School… Just plunge in; it’s hard to go wrong.

Now that my thoughts are in the can, I look forward to reading The New Yorker’s recent Spark appreciation, and Dwight Garner’s review for yesterday’s New York Times. Also worth a read: James Wood on Spark’s omniscience, Brock Clarke on her ruthless authorial manipulation.

My appreciation of Brian Dillon’s The Hypochondriacs is up at NPR. If you have health problems, or worry that you have health problems, or both, you should read this book.

People who never get sick might enjoy it, too — if only for the opportunity to feel superior while jogging around the park in the snow — but I wouldn’t know about that.

An excerpt of my reaction:

I spent so much of my childhood sick, worried about getting sick, or pretending to be sick that these three states of being blurred together in my mind. The confusion persists; now a documented sufferer of autoimmune disease — and an undocumented sufferer of a no-doubt-fatal disorder currently manifesting as side pain — I am uncertain when to take a sick day or visit the doctor, and whatever course I decide on is almost always wrong. Yes, I belong to that most exasperating class of neurotics: hypochondriacs with health problems, the subject of Brian Dillon’s sympathetic, perceptive and often absurdly funny The Hypochondriacs.

Until the 19th century, morbid fear of illness was seen as only one symptom of hypochondria, which doctors treated as an organic disease, although scientific explanations varied. In one era, it was a digestive problem, in another an abdominal issue, and later a disorder linked with melancholia and distributed through the entire body. More importantly for Dillon’s purposes, hypochondria, which often has a physical component, provides a reason for those with intellectual or creative temperaments to sequester themselves from the world and pursue their thinking or their art.

Dillon is an unusually dexterous writer. Each of his slim chapters focuses on a different artist or thinker, and each fully evokes the subject’s fears and afflictions, showing how they’re reflected in his or her life’s work.

You can read the rest here, and an excerpt from the book here.

See also Daphne Merkin’s review for Bookforum and Laura Miller’s for Salon, Hermione Lee on bed rest and Virginia Woolf, Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay (and her rejection of the idea that suffering begets art), Brian Dillon’s Book Notes for Largehearted Boy, and an old post of mine about being a hypochondriac with health issues.