September 22, 2021 On Books Bezos as Novelist By Mark McGurl The first thing that needs to be noted about the collected works of MacKenzie Bezos, novelist, currently consisting of two titles, is how impressive they are. Will either survive the great winnowing that gives us our standard literary histories? Surely not. Precious few novels do. Neither even managed, in its initial moment of publication, to achieve the more transitory status of buzzy must-read. But this was not for want of an obvious success in achieving the aims of works of their kind—that kind being literary fiction, so called to distinguish it from more generic varieties. In Bezos’s hands it is a fiction of close observation, deliberate pacing, credible plotting, believable characters and meticulous craft. The Testing of Luther Albright (2005) and Traps (2013) are perfectly good novels if one has a taste for it. The second thing that needs to be noted about them is that, after her divorce from Jeff Bezos, founder and controlling shareholder of Amazon, their author is the richest woman in the world, or close enough, worth in excess (as I write these words) of $60 billion, mostly from her holdings of Amazon stock. She is no doubt the wealthiest published novelist of all time by a factor of … whatever, a high number. Compared to her, J. K. Rowling is still poor. Read More
June 15, 2018 On Books Need a Father’s Day Gift? A Novel Proposal By David McGlynn If Black Friday is the busiest shopping day of the year, Father’s Day is surely the hardest. What do you get for the member of the family—at least if your dad is anything like mine—who claims to never want anything? Peruse the mall in early June and the choices appear to fall into three categories: 1. yawningly boring shirt-and-tie combos, 2. assorted World’s Greatest Dad paraphernalia, and 3. gadgets. So many gadgets. Bluetooth-enabled titanium-alloy grilling spatulas. Bottle openers made from machine-gun rounds. Star Wars waffle makers. There are, of course, messages encoded in each category. A shirt and tie says, Keep working, Pops. Anything labeled World’s Greatest Dad is an overcompensation, either on your part or his. And the gadgets, no matter how futuristic or flashy, tell Dad he’s basically a child in want of a toy. For the last several years, my own father and I have sent each other cards with a one-dollar bill inside (basically a handshake by mail) and called it even. But the best Father’s Day gifts might be the most novel. I’m not talking about the Apple Watch or robot vacuum cleaners. I’m talking about actual novels. Books. Read More
May 9, 2018 On Books Selected Sentences from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi By Anthony Madrid A few words about an underappreciated piece of reading technology. Talking about underlining in books. Nobody shows you how to do this, and it’s a pity. You find out quick that if you do it wrong, you ruin the book. If you do it right, though, you create a precious heirloom. How do you do it right? Use a ruler, for starters. They make little stubby ones for this purpose. Then there’s the question of where exactly the line should go. Should it touch the bottom of the letters on the line, or should you give it a little space there? Depends. And then there’s the ink. When I was first underlining, I didn’t understand. You can’t use inks that are gonna show through. Also, you probably don’t want the ink’s color to dominate the page. Bloodred ballpoints are usually too much. The effect can be as bad as that of a highlighter. And you can’t use pens with runny noses that are gonna form solid droplets at their tips. You can’t, unless you like big ol’ gobs and smears of ink at the end of each stroke. Heaven knows not every book asks to be underlined. But heaven is founded on the idea that some books really do demand it. Reading any of these nineteenth-century supremo-supremo novelists without marking the best bits is insanity. You’re going to need those sentences later. Read More
April 9, 2018 On Books The Strange Magic of Libraries By Stuart Kells Carl Spitzweg, The Bookworm (detail), 1850. Our era is a digital one, to be sure, but libraries of physical books are still holding on defiantly, even triumphantly. According to the Library Map of the World, there are over two million public and school libraries on planet Earth. Of these, 103,325 are in the U.S. and 12,570 in my native Australia. Globally, the number of private libraries is much larger still—because who’s to say that even a humble shelf of Penguin or Pocket paperbacks doesn’t qualify as a private library? The census of American libraries spans a wonderful diversity of institutions, from modest municipal book rooms and mobile libraries to the grand collections of such hallowed places as the Morgan, the Folger, the Huntington, and the Smithsonian. Surveys of library users reveal a passionate attachment to these institutions, one that is voiced in very human terms. The word love is an emotion often expressed toward libraries, and not just for National Library Week. Libraries are places in which people are born—as authors, readers, scholars, and activists. (Think Eudora Welty, Zadie Smith, John Updike, and Ian Rankin.) Read More
November 22, 2017 On Books The Questionable Category of “Native American Literature” By Ben Pfeiffer “The object is beautiful in itself, worthy of appreciation as a whole and for its own sake.” … “And the single deep voice of the singers lay upon the dance, lay even upon the valley and the earth, whole and inscrutable, everlasting.” —N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn Dividing what’s indivisible leads to heartache. That’s true for people, and it’s true for books. At their best, categories in literature function as identities authors appreciate, as badges of honor they’re seeking or creating, or as marketing tools for publishers. But at their worst, they’re shorthand for critical dismissal, dog whistles used to hold a work apart from white ideas about “the universal human experience,” or instruments of systemic oppression and cultural fetishism. However you see them, categories, including terms used in literary criticism, are never impartial. That’s not to say they’re bad. But they’re not neutral. They complicate rather than clarify. Read More