October 4, 2013 Windows on the World Taiye Selasi, Rome, Italy By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. This summer I wrote my first ever article in Italian, considering why the Eternal City lures so many expat authors. In my limited Italian, I proposed three reasons—the beauty, the warmth, the un-ambitiousness—all of which come to mind when gazing at this view. When the sun begins to slip behind the gilded greens of the Janiculum, I’ll stare at the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, breathless every time. The sheer beauty of this ancient city—the scale of its churches, the density of its trees, the pastels of its facades, the voluptuousness of its clouds—is on full display from here. My watch is the clock atop the Basilica of Our Lady in Trastevere, adding its chimes to the cheerful din of chatter, car horns, laughter. There’s never a dull moment in the Piazza of Santa Maria in Trastevere; one can sense as much as hear the joy of social gathering. But it is Rome’s imperfection that I find so beguiling, an invitation to play: seagulls squawking, nonne bickering, paint chipping from the walls. —Taiye Selasi
October 4, 2013 Bulletin Robyn Creswell Wins Shattuck Award By Sadie Stein We are delighted to report that our poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, has won the 2013 Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism. In addition to his work here at the Review, Robyn teaches comparative literature at Brown University. His critical work focuses on modernism and modernity in Arabic poetry. The other recipient is the accomplished critic Abigail Deutsch, whose work has graced these pages. Hearty congratulations to both!  
October 4, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Mysteries, Horror, Geography By The Paris Review The late Joachim Fest was famous as an historian of the Nazi era. Among other books, he wrote the first German-language biography of Hilter and a biography of Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer. Fest’s own account of the Nazi years, Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood, will be published in English next February by Other Press, and it tells a very different story: that of a strictly conservative, highly cultured family united in their opposition to the Nazi regime, then shattered by the war. The hero of Not I is Fest’s father, an educator who lost his job and brought the family under suspicion when he refused to join the Party, but Fest’s portraits of his brothers, his mother, and his cousins—and of himself as a teenage soldier and POW—are equally vivid and full of pathos. —Lorin Stein In his Art of Fiction interview, Russell Banks said, “With a novel it’s like entering a huge mansion—it doesn’t matter where you come in, as long as you get in.” I thought a lot about that statement as I read Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child, a mystery of a book presented as a novel, but one you could just as easily call a story collection. What begins as a standard detective novel—a man is shot from a vintage car—soon transforms into a puzzle of fractured characters and narrative: a couple not good with words writes intimately to each other in a notebook, a man disappears for a month only to reappear with a manuscript on wolves. How should a novel function as a form? How much work should be expected of the reader to put all the pieces together? (I suggest multiple readings.) In the story “Rothko Eggs,” a young woman describes Jackson Pollock’s paintings as “like the idea of having an idea, instead of having an idea.” She could just as easily be describing this book. —Justin Alvarez Read More
October 4, 2013 Arts & Culture Frost Papers Recovered, and Other News By Sadie Stein New York’s Center for Jewish History is opening the David Berg Rare Book Room, which will feature, amongst others, Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, and Emma Lazarus. A Vermont man has pleaded guilty to stealing (and selling) a number of Robert Frost’s personal papers, which he ran across when a desk containing the papers was donated to the nonprofit where he works. The fine is a whopping one hundred dollars. The French government approved a law yesterday that will prevent Amazon from shipping discounted books for free. The measure is designed to protect embattled independent bookstores. How to draw a hare.
October 3, 2013 Quote Unquote Ghostwriting Tom Clancy By Sadie Stein “I had to be more disciplined than ever about my work schedule; after the first book was turned in, I would have approximately ten months to plot, research, and write each novel. The deadline left no wiggle room—my publisher had pre-sold the books to retailers as holiday releases. Nor was there room for error when it came to the factual details of technology, ballistics, and geography. When I wrote Bio-Strike, for instance, I consulted with polymer engineers and geneticists to design a newfangled biological weapon that that would be scientifically feasible. And then there was the more routine stuff of which action thrillers are made. How does a human body react when hit with a bullet of a particular caliber, at a given distance, striking at a particular angle? I had to find out—call a cop, a forensic pathologist, or a trauma room doctor. Winging it wasn’t an option.” Read more from Jerome Preisler, who cowrote eight novels with Tom Clancy, here.
October 3, 2013 First Person I Found My Thrill By Ross Kenneth Urken Down among the counties that help earn New Jersey its Garden State moniker, there lies the hamlet of New Egypt. Within it is the sixty-acre blueberry patch my grandparents used to own. Drive down I-95 through Newark toward the shore to see the world flash from soot gray to Granny Smith green as you are surrounded by towering cornstalks. Four years ago, my wife, Tiffan, and I made the pilgrimage to Jersey from Manhattan in lieu of our usual fall foliage trip (long story short: I had seen a movie that dissed soi-disant leafers and felt suitably shamed). Plus, I had heard that from back-to-school time through Thanksgiving, Emery’s Farm offered seasonal activities—pumpkin picking, hay rides. Tiffan is from Oklahoma, and I seize any opportunity to conjure country trappings. But I did have some legitimate claim. This farm, after all, was whither the brand name “Ross da Boss Blueberries” sprang, emblazoned on the cellophane securing the fruit in its green cardboard cartons. When my grandfather, Danny Passoff, retired from running a successful tomato business, he bought the blueberry farm as a pet project with my grandmother, and during summers, my sister and I would work on the farm. Standing there on that fall day, I told Tiffan about those summers on the farm, about picking the choicest berries and dropping them into my pail—an old coffee canister—with tinny thuds. In the onomatopoeic language of Robert McCloskey’s classic children’s book Blueberries for Sal, this is described as “ku-plink, ku-plank, ku-plunk.” By July, the bushes are heavy with the luscious blue fatties, their puckered sepals folded back, mushy marbles that squish deliciously between the teeth. In my memory, that time in my life is, like Sal’s, rendered in the book’s distinctive navy-and-raincoat-yellow palette. In McCloskey’s book, a childhood favorite, little Sal goes with her mother to Blueberry Hill, only to get lost and temporarily switch mothers with a bear cub. Sal’s mother finds her wandering child by recognizing the cacophony of the berries—“ku-plink, ku-plank, ku-plunk”—she throws into her bucket. Read More