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If, like most people these days, you take as much notice (perhaps more) of the books you don’t have time to read as the ones you are reading, you’ve probably heard of Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick. The book, a slow-burning cult classic since its first publication in 1997, has recently been the focus of renewed attention. In 2015, the novel was republished in a hardback edition, and had its first release in the UK. This sparked reviews and op-eds in the Guardian. Kraus—who writes lovingly of the New York scene of the 1980s—also finally received attention from The New Yorker last year.

The post Why everyone loves I Love Dick appeared first on OUPblog.

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The Society of Women Writers and Journalists have launched an international life writing competition.
length - 3000 words
deadline - September 30 2011
entry fee £7
prizes: there are two age categories (which is unusual in an adult competition): 20 to 40 year old and over 40s and three very decent cash prizes for each category: 1st - £3,000, 2nd - £1,000, 3rd - £500.
Judges are Katie Fforde and Sophie King - both big in romantic novelist association. 

(ps  Open to men too - check out all the conditions by clicking on the title of this post.)

 

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At Granta (and online only)

The writer Thomas Mann, responding by letter to a young James Lord, wrote that he possessed ‘the gift of admiration’ which ‘above all enables a talented person to learn’.

And learn he did, from Picasso and Dora Maar no less, going on to write a famous memoir that stifled the success of his fiction:

Lord’s fiction was cursed by the perception that his own life contained a cast of characters more compelling than any he could compose. And yet paradoxically, it was his ability to render these illuminating figures in prose with both autobiographical precision and virtuosic flair to which Lord, in part, owes his reputation as a writer.

This profile of James Lord by Ted Hodgkinson is at Granta Online, where an extract from Lord's memoir (which is also printed in Granta 110:Sex) will be up on Friday.

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These days when I wake, inexplicably, between 4 and 5, which is most mornings, I read, I worry, but if that does not work, I bake. The kitchen is a changed place in the wee hours, its clicks and hummings are louder, the pots and pans make a deafening clatter when I pull them out of the cupboard. But, as before, I am relaxed, my sense of smell is sharper. As I measure and weigh, I am more patient than during waking hours. I’ve always turned to flour and butter when I can’t sleep.

Looking further into the insomnia blog All-Nighters at the New York Times, after reading a post by John Williams at The Second Pass recently, I found this lovely piece of writing by Leanne Shapton, who still wakes at the hour she went to swimming training as a child (that's 4.25 a.m., bright and early enough for you?). Instead of worrying or reading, she often bakes. There's a recipe or two, and an ending to test any sleep doctor.

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It can't possibly be almost the end of the year, can it? Christmas shopping is in progress.In that spirit there's a list of top reads from the past year after the jump, in no particular order other than abecedarian, arranged by type.

If you're still hungry for selections and suggestions after trawling through mine, there are other lists, by other people, covering all five (six?) Readings stores and beyond. And there's a very comprehensive US/international roundup at The Millions, of course. I might not be back for a little while, as there's plenty of good book news around - follow the blogs here (scroll down for the feeds) and you won't be bored.

What I want for Christmas: Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier, Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs, botanical prints I've had framed, which will be ready to pick up next Friday, a bottle of brandy and a month's supply of Zero lemonade.

AND...safe holidays for everyone.

Novels
Auster, Paul. The Book Of Illusions
Castro, Brian. The Bath Fugues
Conte, Steve. The Zookeeper's War
Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace
Fitzgerald, Penelope. The Blue Flower
Hyland, M. J. This Is How
Kennedy, Cate. The World Beneath
Lalami, Laila. Secret Son
Leigh, Julia. The Hunter
__________. Disquiet
Malouf, David. An Imaginary Life
Mills, Jennifer. The Diamond Anchor
Murnane, Gerald. The Plains (preferred this, on the whole, to Barley Patch, which was nonetheless also intriguing.)
Nowra, Louis. Ice
Perkins, Emily. Novel About My Wife
Roth, Philip. Indignation
Toibin, Colm. Brooklyn
Valmorbida, Elise. The TV President

Short Stories (individual authors, discontinuous narratives and anthologies)

Amsterdam, Steve. Things We Didn't See Coming

Cho, Tom. Look Who's Morphing

Cotter, Jason and Michael Williams, eds. Readings and Writings: Forty Years In Books
Ford, Richard. Rock Springs
Le, Nam. The Boat

Poetry
Aitken, Adam. Eighth Habitation
Beveridge, Judith. Storm and Honey
Clemens, Justin. Villain
Curnow, Nathan. The Ghost Poetry Project
Middleton, Kate. Fire Season
Porter, Dorothy. Akhenaten
____________The Bee Hut

Literary biography
Boey, Kim Cheng. Between Stations
Juers, Evelyn. House Of Exile
Kefala, Antigone. Sydney Journals


Biography and travel
Andrews, Julie. Home
Cummings, Stephe

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Ralph at Currajah was very quick off the mark last weekend! picking up the news of Beverley Farmer being awarded the Patrick White prize, and spreading the love, along with her misgivings (see Susan Wyndham's report, here).

(If you cannot read that bio on Austlit because you are not a subscriber, you should be able to join using a public library card, or a State Library one. Or you can read this older bio by Laurie Clancy, with some good notes on her books, which does not include her latest publication, The Bone House.)

One of my favourite books is Farmer's collection of diary extracts and short stories, collected mainly around their writing, A Body Of Water. There is a story about a Buddhist retreat in that volume, complete with a diary account of the retreat, that provides a magnificent study in how to render fiction out of memory.

Farmer is a prose poet in many ways - from her notes from October in that book comes this account of reading at Mietta's, a fine restaurant with literary leanings, at some time in the eighties:

Heat and sun for the first day of daylight saving. I read a story in the "Readings with Readings" program in the Lounge at Mietta's, among the fringed lamps, clustered gold bubbles of light overhead, black statues bearing flowers - heat and smoke drifting. The dappled grey marble of the round tables, bright with the light of wineglasses.

At seven o'clock tall buildings still reached up into the sun.

In the livid night sky - never black in Carlton - a crescent moon lay on its back holding a smaller moon clasped, a dim full one. (On top of a stupa they have an orb in a cusp.)

Further up that page, she writes of a house she had rented by the coast, somewhere near Lorne:

Skirting the full frog pond with a chilly scud across it, over the road and dunes you go down onto the surf beach. The tea-trees up there in the dune-folds are whiskery knuckles, leafless and lichen-splattered, scraping the sand. Though the sea is so near, there's not a whisper of it, as if this really were another time.

I liked living back there, deep in the tea-tree. Glaneuse Road: after the French barque Glaneuse, wrecked off the surf beach in 1886 with her bottles of contraband cognac. (And Glaneuse, gleaner: what I was and am.) For those six months I was suspended out of time in a glass lantern, not swinging - still, somewhere between two seasons. An old life, a new.

From A Body Of Water, UQP: 1990, p.188 (the one with the Matisse painting on the cover, yesss. Iss mine, preciousss.) A volume of Farmer's longer, meditative essays on art and life, The Bone House, is available from Giramondo. I don't know how many of her other books are in print - her Collected Stories have been on school reading lists from time to time. She spoke with Clive Hamilton and Alfred Yuson on Radio National's Book Show on the art of the essay in 2006 and a podcast is still available, here. I have also found an essay in Island from 2005, 'The Dog Of The Work', in my travels...Enjoy.

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I promised James Bradley I would post this when he twittered in disbelief earlier this week that there are Twitter novels.  I'm quoting from the first chapter of Alexandra Johnson's Leaving A Trace: On Keeping A Journal, the first chapter of which can be found here.

This is the excerpt I've printed out and stuck in a commonplace book - James, N.B. the bolded section, which for some reason made me think of your raised eyebrows. I also like Mansfield's quoted remark at the end.

Ten million blank journals are sold annually in stationery stores alone. Two million in specialty stores. Thanks to secret passwords and specialized software, an estimated four million scribblers keep some form of journal on a computer. If the information age has spawned a hunger for connection (and privacy), so, too, a need for the quickest way to access interior life. Web sites pop up daily. Our accelerated global age has left little time to slow down and reflect. In Japan, for example, those too busy to keep journals phone in their entries. At the end of the month, a company sends a bound transcript.

Familiar with the statistics, I also know how hard it is for many to keep journals. Yet when I ask people, as I often do, who they wish had kept a diary, a torrent of names is unleashed — my mother, my husband, my sister, the uncle whom I'm named after, the father I never knew. Why then the resistance to keeping them ourselves? Virginia Woolf put her finger on it best perhaps, when she asked her own diary: "Whom do I tell when I tell a blank page?"; Whom does one write for? Oneself, of course. "True to oneself — which self" asked Woolf's friend and archrival, Katherine Mansfield. (In her journal, she confessed that a single day's "thousands of selves" made her feel like a hotel clerk busy handing keys to the psyche's "willful guests.")

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School days are looming so we are engaged in a general room toss and scouring of Entling no. 3's room this week. As we began to wade through the morass, I noticed her stack of Harry Potter books. As I looked at the battered and beloved condition of the books, I was overwhelmed by a rush of affection for Jo Rowling. I think these books and their condition speak for themselves, they are a testament to love and a tribute to an amazing reader, Entling no. 3

They made me ponder the recent NYTimes article, "Is Junie B. Jones Talking Trash?" which discussed the familiar story of some parents dislike of Junie B. and Junie-speak.

I have fielded my share of sniffy "well-I-don't-care-for-her-language" comments from parents in my role as school librarian.

As a parent and an educator, I am always flummoxed when folks think their child cannot discern between fiction and reality and will absorb an attitude and a dialect from an early reader. Please folks! Do parents who read murder mysteries or watch CSI: insert-city-name-here on television become inspired to go on crime sprees?

If books had THAT much power then there would never be another diet book published in this country. We would all be skinny pictures of health.

Do parents themselves ALWAYS use perfect grammar? When they do not, do they instigate a discussion with their child to make sure that they understand the scope of the grammatical tragedy and that they are not scarred for life?

Parent: Darling, I'm afraid I just committed a grammatical faux-pas and left a modifier dangling in the run-on sentence I just uttered. I think I may have also employed a double negative while trying to correct to my misuse of a possessive before a gerund.

Now we need to talk about this so you don't think this is proper and begin to split your infinitives too.

When confronted by a parent about Miss Junie, I always voice my support for this wonderful series (if children love them and flock to them, I think they are wonderful) but usually end up with a prosaic comment about other choices and if this one does not fit, try another.

Just looking at my daughter's books though (and there are many many other books in similar re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-read condition on her shelves) made me rethink my answer.

Dear Parents,
As this school year begins anew, you and your children are about to embark on an adventure of a life time. There are math problems to be computed, scientific principles to be acquired and history to be absorbed. A school year passes quickly. There is no time to waste.

The ability to read is essential to your child's success in acquiring all this knowledge. Learning to read means your child can successfully decode printed symbols on a page and comprehend the story or read for information with fluency. Your child needs background knowledge of syntax, semantics, phoneme awareness and other abilities to proceed.

Like any skill, reading is improved with practice. Michael Jordan did not get to be a basketball all-star by practicing just once a week. The more words that pass below your child's eyes, the stronger and more comfortable he or she will become as a reader. We want your child to read books the way you eat popcorn at the movies, continuously and by the handful. Surely, you do not just eat one kernel every fifteen minutes or so?

I know you want your son or daughter to succeed. I have never heard a parent despair, "I wish my child was not such a excellent reader. I wish they did not read above grade level. I wish they did not enjoy reading books."

With so many non-print media sources vying for your child's attention, you should drop to your knees and make offerings of thanksgiving if he or she finds a series of books they are passionate about.

Remember, popcorn!

If they love a certain book, you will not have to "schedule" reading time. They will seek it out on their own. If they love a book, they will beg to read the next one in the series or another one like it. If they love a book, you are not going to have to bribe them to finish it.

Please be tolerant of your child's reading choices. Certainly as a parent it is fun to guide, suggest, offer--but in the end, it is THEIR reading life. Do you really want to get in the way and ruin the experience for them?

When children love what they read, they love reading.

May the school year ahead go smoothly for school librarians who are working so earnestly and fervently to answer that perennial question, "Where are the good books?"

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