August 4, 2011 Books Catch-18 By Erica Heller A manuscript page from Catch-22. Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department, Brandeis University. When Dad started Catch-22 in 1953, it was called Catch-18. Later, he and his young editor, Robert Gottlieb, changed the title because Leon Uris’s novel had usurped the number with Mila 18. I can remember nights at the dinner table with my parents tossing out different numbers. “Catch-27?” Nah, my father shook his head. “Catch-539?” Too long, too lumbering. I had no idea what they were talking about. Thank goodness for Bob, Dad’s übereditor at Simon & Schuster; he was the one to come up with the unremarkably remarkable number 22. Along with Dad’s redoubtable agent, Candida Donadio, and Nina Bourne, who plotted the clever, quirky promotional campaign for Catch-22, these were the book’s earliest disciples. Without them, not only wouldn’t there have been a number, there wouldn’t have been a book. To hear Bob talk about it, this modest, soft-spoken fellow who eventually ran Simon & Schuster and then Alfred A. Knopf, and succeeded William Shawn as editor of The New Yorker, one might think that Catch-22 had just tumbled from the skies one day fully formed, and that he had merely been there to catch it. In print he has said more than once that for an editor to call attention to himself and his contributions in an edited book is not only unseemly but irrelevant, but he’s not doing it here, I am. My father and Bob had real camaraderie and shared an almost mystical respect. No ego was involved, regardless of where Bob’s pencil flew or what he suggested deleting, moving, rewriting. To Dad, every word or stroke of this editor’s pencil was sacrosanct. Read More
July 12, 2011 Books The Secret Bookstore By Thessaly La Force Watch this beautiful video about Brazenhead Books, a secret bookstore that’s been tucked away in Michael Seidenberg’s apartment on the Upper East Side ever since the rent for his original retail space in Brooklyn was quadrupled. (Jonathan Lethem used to work there.) “This would have not been my ideal,” he says. “I wouldn’t have thought I want to have a bookshop in a location no one knows about.” But Brazen says it’s a continuation of being the kind of bookseller he wants to be—not on the street, not at book fairs, but inside, the shelves lined with first editions, knickknacks, and, one hopes, a cat. “I don’t know if it’s my familiarity with failure,” he adds. “I find ways to survive without it making enough money to be what you would call a successful business. If it’s all about money, there’s just better things to sell.” And how do those of us who’ve never been find him? He’s in the phone book, he says with a smile. Hiding in plain sight. There’s No Place Like Here: Brazenhead Books from Etsy on Vimeo.
July 8, 2011 Books In Defense of Wanderlust By Miranda Popkey Elisabeth Eaves.When you’re young—a child, a teenager, a twenty-something—it seems, as Elisabeth Eaves says, “like it will never end. You can do anything because time is limitless, it’s infinite.” You can move to a different state or a different country. You can buy a one-way plane ticket. You can go to graduate school. You can move in with your boyfriend and get engaged and buy a house; and then you can move out. You can sublet indefinitely. In her new book, Wanderlust, Eaves—a journalist and author who has worked for Forbes and previously published Bare: The Naked Truth About Stripping, about her time as an exotic dancer—does all of these things. Instead of making choices that follow neatly, one from the next—the job that brings you to a city where you meet the person you marry—the Eaves of Wanderlust makes decisions that consciously, thrillingly refuse to build on one another. She travels to Cairo as a twenty-year-old college student. At twenty-three, she hikes the notoriously difficult Kokoda trail in Papua New Guinea. Fleeing the rekindling of her relationship with her ex-fiancé, Stu, she joins a husband and wife sailing from Whangarei to Tonga and nearly dies when their vessel is caught in a vicious storm on the open ocean. In person, Eaves may be slender and fair-haired, but she carries herself with a graceful, noticeable composure that makes it easy to imagine her haggling, at dusk, with a Jeep driver in Pakistan, trying to get him to lower the price of a ride she and her boyfriend desperately need. She maintains eye contact. She exudes competence. And Wanderlust, though on the surface concerned with Eaves’s love of travel—a celebration of years spent indulging that love, moving from one town, one country to the next with little notice, living abroad for months and years at a time, cut off, in the days before e-mail, from family and friends—is also about the process by which she became the adult she is now. She doesn’t have regrets, though she would tell her twenty-year-old self to “spend more time trying to figure out what you want to do on your own. It’s easy to fall back on what somebody else wants to do.” Read More
November 23, 2010 Books Fifteen Minutes with Ann Beattie By Kate Waldman It’s been a long book tour for Ann Beattie’s collected New Yorker stories, and the tour hasn’t even begun yet. “Is this my first stop?” she asks, pressing a hand to her forehead. “I don’t remember.” We are sitting downstairs at McNally Jackson Books, about an hour before her reading is scheduled to start. Her publisher approaches with an update about the Miami Book Fair on Saturday (destination number two on the tour): Beattie can arrive at 10:45, not a problem, but could she make sure to drop by the hospitality tent? Also, in fifteen minutes, her friend will be upstairs, ready to meet her for tea. “I’ll have to change into my high heels at some point,” the author sighs. She’s spent the day on her feet, but she looks poised and fresh in a floral-patterned skirt, deep green blouse, and pale green sweater. Cabled gold glitters at her wrists and neck. Like Ellen, the protagonist in “A Platonic Relationship”—the first story in the collection, from which she will read tonight—she wears her hair loose, “falling free.” When I admire her nails, which are long, tapered, and crimson, she smiles almost apologetically. “I have insomnia,” she explains. Applying nail polish is one of the few ways she can occupy herself at night without waking her husband. She adds that the age of the word processor has been kinder to her hands than that of the typewriter: Returning the carriage while at work on a story, she once snapped off four-fifths of her manicure. Most readers would consider the sacrifice worthwhile. Over four decades, fiction by Beattie has appeared forty-eight times in The New Yorker’s pages, making the D.C.- born author something of an institution. Her blend of acuity and flattened affect now defines a genre, with its own adjective: Beattiesque. Beattie herself sees more similarities between her stories than differences. She calls them permutations of a single voice, though reviewers tend to emphasize evolutions in her style. An older Beattie, goes the conventional wisdom, has mellowed into lyricism. Her sentences have filled out and deepened; a sense of mastery stands in for the original sense of discovery. But Beattie denies that more than the surface has changed. Continuity and consistency are words that keep coming up, along with the descriptor “tongue in cheek.” Also: dogs. In her stories, the dogs often seem as complex as the human characters. Is Beattie herself a dog person? Read More
September 13, 2010 Books Allegra Goodman’s Five Favorite Cookbooks By Allegra Goodman Allegra Goodman’s latest novel is the Cookbook Collector, a story about two radically different sisters, Emily and Jessamyn Bach, both living in California during the dot-com boom at the turn of the century. Jessamyn, a graduate student studying philosophy, works for an antique book store in Berkeley, owned by a retired Microsoft millionaire named George. One day, George discovers a cookbook collection of unparalleled quality, and with the aide of Jessamyn, attempts to acquire it for himself. Goodman’s novel is littered with references to heirloom cookbooks, some I had heard of (The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook), some I hadn’t, but wished I could read. Craving more, I asked Goodman to provide The Daily with a modest list of her favorite five. —Thessaly La Force 1. Ruth Graves Wakefield, Toll House: Tried and True Recipes. This cookbook from the 1930s contains a primer for brides with instructions on how to brew coffee, bake a potato, roast a chicken and bake an apple pie. Even I—scarcely a cook at all—can bake Johnnycake (Corn Bread). This book is truly useful. 2. At the other end of the spectrum—Barbara Tropp’s China Moon Cookbook is my fantasy cookbook, full of recipes I love to read. I bought this book in graduate school and I’ve never tried to a single recipe. They look delicious. I love Chinese food. But you see, you have to start by making your own Ten-Spice and Cayenne Pepper Oil. You have to roll out and cut your own soba noodles. Yikes. China Moon inspired my novel The Cookbook Collector with its motif of cookbook collectors who do not cook. 3. Jennie Grossinger’s The Art of Jewish Cooking is a down to earth and sensible book. My mother gave it to me when I got married, and her inscription reads: “This book contains some of my favorite recipes—Enjoy, enjoy—Mommy P.S. Try Chinese meatballs on p. 15.” 4. Bruce Aidells and Denis Kelly: The Complete Meat Cookbook a superb guide to roasts and chops for carnivores living in an all too vegetarian world. I mean really—who can survive on dandelions and ruffled kale? What, as my eight year old daughter says, is the “main chorus”? 5. My mother, Madeleine Goodman, was a superb and supremely unfussy cook. She liked her recipes simple, and her flavors clear and clean. I’ve come to see the difference between occasional cooks who like projects, and serious cooks who are there for you every night with a good healthy dinner. (How I miss her!) Well, my mother adored The I Hate to Cook Book by Peg Bracken. I see that this one is just now back in print, and I need to buy myself a copy, and one for my sister too. It’s very funny and also very good. Try the recipe for three bean salad. Delicious and perfectly balanced. Not too tart, like the bean salads you find at the salad bar.
July 20, 2010 Books Five Essential Books for The Critic By Thessaly La Force Over on the National Book Critics Circle blog, Lorin Stein has shared five books that he believes belong in any reviewer’s library. Here, Lorin explains the charisma of Susan Sontag: If you are (or want to be) a critic, then sometimes I think it’s good to ask what criticism is for. The first book that made me do that was Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation. “We need an erotics, not a hermeneutics, of art.” I was sitting after school in a Swensen’s ice cream parlor when I read that. I had to go home and look up the word hermeneutics. But the reviews gave one the gist. This was criticism as seduction. Sontag could make a semi-literate fifteen-year-old want to read Michel Leiris or Samuel Beckett or see a Godard film. She made it all seem both glamorous and accessible—which are things I still feel art should be. And here, how Vivian Gornick shaped his own writing: My favorite contemporary book of criticism is Vivian Gornick’s collection The End of the Novel of Love. To me that book and Studies make a diptych—both are basically concerned with what Gornick calls “love as metaphor.” I read The End of the Novel of Love in my twenties—twice, in the space of a day. Since then I have never written an essay that wasn’t, deeply and superficially, indebted to Gornick. For years I tried to model my sentences on hers. My sense of criticism—that it must tell a story, that the story must be true, that the story must unlock a secret in the critic’s own inner life—I owe entirely to her example. Whenever a reader points out the similarity of my approach (and my prose) to hers, it is the praise that pleases me most.