The finalists for the 33rd annual Los Angeles Times Book Prize have been revealed, and we’ve collected free samples of all their books below–some of the best books released in 2012. Here’s more about the awards:
“The winners of the L.A. Times book prizes will be announced at an awards ceremony April 19, the evening before the L.A. Times Festival of Books, April 20-21. Held on USC’s campus in Bovard Auditorium, the awards are open to the public; tickets will be made available in late March.”
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Book editors have had a rough time in recent years–layoffs, uncertain roles, and crazy workloads. To celebrate National Novel Editing Month and help aspiring writers connect with editors, we’ve updated our directory of the Best Book Editors on Twitter (collected below).
This list is not comprehensive, yet. Add your favorite editor (or yourself) to our growing list–because the digital future needs editors and we need to stay connected.
If you are looking for more people to follow, check out our Best Literary Agents on Twitter directory, our Best Book Reviewers on Twitter list, our Best Book Publicity and Marketing Twitter Feeds directory, our Best eBook News on Twitter list, our Best Library People on Twitter directory, and our Women in Publishing Twitter List.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
LibriVox founder Hugh McGuire launched a new audiobook company today. Iambik Audio unveiled 11 new literary fiction audiobooks from indie publishers in the U.S. and Canada, including audiobooks for Gordon Lish and Lydia Millet.
The complete list of new audiobooks follows below. Prices range between $5 and $10 for the individual titles. Iambik Audio titles can be purchased on the website or through distribution partners like Audible, Overdrive, and eMusic.
Here’s more from the release: “Iambik aims to change the way commercial audiobooks are made. For audiobook listeners, Iambik will offer hand-picked collections of audiobooks … with no digital rights management—meaning they can be played on any computer or mobile device. For publishers and authors, Iambik approaches everything as a partnership, by promoting print and ebooks, as well as selling audiobooks, and by giving healthy royalties on all sales.”
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
The latest issue of BOMB magazine includes a conversation between Jonathan Lethem and Lydia Millet -- it's unfortunately not online, but it's so good that it's really worth the price of the magazine to read it. One of the best interviews I've read in a while. Here's a sample:
Jonathan Lethem: I was recently reading an essay by Mary McCarthy, a quite brilliant, free-ranging one that she first gave as a lecture in Europe, called "The Fact in Fiction." At the outset she defines the novel in quite exclusive terms, terms that of course made me very nervous: "...if you find birds and beasts talking in a book you are reading you can be sure it is not a novel." Well, as the author of at least one and arguably two or three novels with talking animals in them, I felt disgruntled. McCarthy is one of those critics whose brilliance dedicates itself often to saying what artists shouldn't do -- like the equally celebrated and brilliant James Wood, with whom I disagree constantly. For me, the novel is by its nature impure, omnivorous, inconsistent, and paradoxical -- it is most itself when it is doing impossible things, straddling modes, gobbling contradiction. But anyway, when I lived with McCarthy's declaration for a while, I found myself replying, "But in the very best novels the animals want to talk, or the humans wish the animals could talk, or both." [...]
Lydia Millet: [...]The animals that want to talk, the people that want them to...exactly. But to the critics -- it's so easy, and so exhilarating, to denounce things. Isn't it? But prohibitions like that -- "It's not a novel if it has talking animals in it," "It's not a novel if it has philosophy in it" -- besides being snobbish and condescending, serve more to elevate the critic than to advance or innovate the form. In fact, I think it's a sign of an art form losing power in culture when its arbiters try to define it by its limitations, what it can't or isn't allowed to do. Shoring up the borders of the form, in other words, to isolate it and make it puny. Novels should do anything and everything they can pull off. The pulling off is the hard part, of course, but my feeling is if you don't walk a line where you're struggling to make things work, struggling with the ideas and shape and tone, you're not doing art. Art is the struggle to get beyond yourself. And if you want to use talking animals to do that, and you can make them beautiful, nothing is verboten. [...] Once you exclude you're calcifying. You're well into middle age and headed for death.
I've tried to write about Lydia Millet's new novel, How the Dead Dream
, a few times now, but I've never been able to get too far. It is one of those books that, for me at least, is so entirely what it is that writing about it feels inadequate, because I can provide little more than summary or illustration, and if that is all there is, then I might as well keep this short and say no more than I liked this book. But I'm going to risk saying a bit more than that.
As anyone on whom I foisted it knows, Millet's previous novel, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, was one of my favorites of recent years. I had no trouble saying lots about that book; if anything, I had trouble shutting up. How the Dead Dream is an entirely different sort of book, though. It is less vast, less epic: the novelistic equivalent of a lyric poem or a cello suite.
What amazes me about How the Dead Dream is that it is a determinedly political book and yet not a particularly didactic one. (I say "particularly" because a few moments seemed heavy-handed to me; I suspect every reader's tolerance level is different.) Or, rather, it is a sometimes-didactic novel but not an insistently-didactic novel, a novel that does want us to think about such things as the extinction of species and the moralities of capitalism and the relationships between humans and animals, but that does not insist we come up with action plans. It is more elegy than agit-prop.
Much of what makes the book effective both as a novel and an outcry is its language, the particular turns that the sentences take, and the mix of humor and pathos. There are elements of satire and caricature within Millet's portrait of T., a real estate developer and ultra-capitalist who in childhood was so obsessed with money that he sometimes filled his mouth with coins, but the satire and caricature here are more focused and less baroque than in Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, which is appropriate to the new novel's scale. Even when the satire is at its height, it is not alienating -- T. remains quite sympathetic, a lost soul rather than a Randian ubermensch, and the clang of the absurd is tempered with mournful grace notes.
The shape of the sentences is what kept me reading How the Dead Dream with real pleasure. Their rhythms and pacing are exquisite (a fact made all the clearer when I heard Lydia read the opening scenes at her McNally Robinson appearance last month), and they move along briskly, but richly, the words precisely crafted:
And it became clear to him that his early mentors -- the founders, the dead sages of the judiciary -- did not have modern counterparts in government. The great roofs that had sheltered them were raised now not over heads of state but over the motile geniuses of corporate novelty; these men now wore the mantles formerly worn by the fathers of the nation-state. They held up economies and reshaped them at will. After the robber barons had come the technophile visionaries, the practical philosophers of earning, and they, not the government men, were the new kingmakers.
He read their bestsellers.
In the second half of the novel, after various calamities devalue the bits of meaning his life has accrued, T. starts visiting zoos. Then he breaks into the cages at night and climbs in with the rarest of the animals and goes to sleep. He doesn't entirely understand why, but this is his only source of solace. Later, once he has move away from civilization altogether, he begins to understand that he finds comfort with animals and in wild nature because they allow him to think of something other than himself:
He had left the settlements now, all the old geographies. For so many years they had been the only thing; you did what you did and whatever it was consumed you, as though your actions were the heart of experience. As though without a series of actions there would be no story of your life.
Those who loved stories also loved the human, to live in cities where there was nothing but men and their actions as far as the eye could see. Once it had been believed that the sun revolved around the earth; now this was ridiculed as myopic, yet almost the same belief persisted. The sun might be the center of the planets and then the sun might be only one star among galaxies of them: but when it came to meaning, when it came to being, in fact, all the constellations still revolved around men.
He had been drawn to cities, had considered no alternatives -- cities and buildings, buildings and institutions. The lights across the continent. But what if, from his childhood on, he had imagined not the lights but the spaces between them? He would do so now, to make up for all the years behind him.
I'm quoting some of the most openly philosophical passages in the book, passages that occur in its final pages, when T. has emerged from various crises only to enter a fully metaphysical one, and so I am risking giving a false impression of the whole -- this is a book rich with incident, a book that covers a lot of ground in a relatively short space. The ending fascinates me, though, partly because I didn't know what to make of it on a first reading: it felt unresolved, even hasty, and yet somehow also transcendant. I read it a few more times and decided it was not hasty at all, and that impression had been created in my mind purely from my own expectations of a more traditional sort of knot-tying at the end. The last paragraphs, in fact, gained power on rereading, because when I first read them their emotional effect was blunted by my expectation of something else. Keep your mind open, don't expect a familiar template, and the effect of the final pages will be a powerful one. I suppose the same could be said for the whole book. Part satire, part meditation, part fugue, part exhortation ... read
How the Dead Dream not as a "novel" but as a thing of its own, and you are likely to find much to give you pleasure and thought.
First, just a reminder that Lydia Millet will be reading tonight at McNally Robinson in Manhattan in support of her new novel How the Dead Dream, which is very much worth reading. I'm planning on being there, though will probably arrive a few minutes late.
Second, there are suddenly a bunch of free books available for download via their publishers and authors:
- As many people have noted, Tor Books is giving away a free ebook each week to people who register with them. The current book is Spin by Robert Charles Wilson, which I happen to know is a book Lydia Millet is a fan of...
- Nightshade Books has a few downloads available, including Richard Kadrey's Butcher Bird, which looks like it could be marvelous.
- Wired.com's Geekdad blog has an interview with Jeff & Ann VanderMeer from which you can download Jeff's novella The Situation (coming soon from PS Publishing).
Life has been busy with the grading of piles of student papers and tests that I unwisely let build up (in ten years of teaching, you'd think I'd know better...) and work on a short story that I promised a certain anthology's editor I would have done by March (and yet it keeps wanting more and different words!), and so I haven't had much to write here. I did get some reading some done this weekend, finishing Lydia Millet's marvelous new novel, How the Dead Dream, which I'll be reviewing for somebody or other eventually. (Briefly: In some ways it's about capitalism and extinction, but it's more an affecting character study, though it's also a laugh-out-loud funny satire, yet really by the end it's a lyrical and heartbreaking look at-- Well, you'll just have to read it. And if you're in the NYC area, stop by the McNally Robinson bookstore on Weds, March 5 for a reading.)
All of which is just me popping up here to say, Nope, still don't really have anything to say. Will you accept a photograph instead?
(That's a picture of a pot made by Hideaki Miyamura and owned by my friends Rick and Beth Elkin. I took the picture on a brief recent trip to visit them in New Mexico -- the morning sun on the glaze was mesmerizing.)
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This is a great excerpt. I'll be looking for the issue this week. Thanks for the lead.
This is great, except for sleeping assumption that writing novels is a young man's game, evident in the parallel worship of experimentation.
Only young people like innovation in writing? Somehow I find that hard to believe, and plenty of lively, innovative novels have been written by people who have gained the wisdom of years.
The kangaroo goon in GUN, WITH OCCASIONAL MUSIC is an obvious talking animal, but I'm trying to figure out which other ones "arguably" have talking animals...