May 25, 2012 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Bejeweled Ostriches, Robot Dancers By The Paris Review I know it’s dumb to bet on which novels—which anything—will endure and which won’t. So why, reading Endless Love, Scott Spencer’s 1979 novel of romantic obsession, do I keep thinking, This will outlast us all? Maybe because it reminds me of other novels that have stayed fresh over the decades without the benefit of “classic”—or even cult classic—status: books like Victory, or Rebecca, or The Transit of Venus or The White Hotel or, in a funny way, Mating. You could make a much longer, even more random list, but there’s something they all have in common, something to do with technical sophistication, urgency, and shamelessness, as if the plot came welling up out of a nightmare. They are, you might say, too strong to be classics; they don’t need champions or explaining. People will just keep making each other read them. —Lorin Stein After my most recent binge at Westsider Books, I found myself holding a copy of something titled The Minikins of Yam. Maybe it’s all these rainy afternoons, but lately I’ve missed the middle school era of my reading life, when “guilty pleasure” was the only category. I freely admit that I chose this paperback by Thomas Burnett Swann, an almost entirely forgotten 1970s author of “neo-romantic fantasy,” solely on account of its awesome cover art, in which a horned lady sallies forth atop a bejeweled ostrich. But Yam delivers exactly what George Barr’s cover art promises: basilisks, subterfuge, and beast-headed gods. If you, too, are an adult human still coping with the end of Harry Potter, look for one of these gorgeous DAW paperbacks to help fill the void. —Allison Bulger Happy Memorial Day Weekend! If mysophobia (or better options) keep you from the opening of public pools this weekend, I suggest reading David Foster Wallace’s “Forever Overhead,” a story from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men in which a pubescent boy celebrates his thirteenth birthday at a local public pool. You get splash fights, diving-board lines, too-tight suits, Marco Polo—the stuff of poolside dreams—and the fierce awkwardness and exposed, liquid thoughts that public pools and puberty bring forth. Wallace tells the story with manic detail and emotional exactitude, and, as always with dear DFW, it’s at once playful and meditative, unlikely and perfect. —Elizabeth Nelson I’ve been home sick for the past two days and have found that Space Oddities: A Compilation of Rare European Library Grooves from 1977–1984 is the perfect sound track to a fever. Not a ringing endorsement? Well, you may just have to listen to this collection of carefully culled (by French DJs, naturally) clips from commercials, movies, and TV shows for yourself. I still have my ’08 CD, but good news: the whole album is on Spotify! Try “Robot Dancer.” —Sadie Stein My experience with Egyptian art is limited mostly to the blockbuster stuff—I remember seeing traveling shows in Texas, where the heavy eye makeup and big jewelry of the statuettes and masks seemed to make a certain kind of sense—and it’s impressive, to say the least. But now I’m finding myself wowed by the smaller, less overtly extraordinary objects in the Met’s “Dawn of Egyptian Art” show (I’ve spent a lot of time with the catalogue as well). The flash of gold and scale is replaced here with the innate beauty of natural materials and form, like a frog carved from a black stone flecked with white; a basket filled with tiny fish, all incised into a single piece of powdery steatite; and the head of a bovid chiseled from clay-hued flint. I’m also unduly impressed with the various hippopotamus-shaped objects—not surprising, since I’ve long been the proud owner of a tubby blue “William.” —Nicole Rudick
May 18, 2012 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Girls, Cribs, and Literary Detective Work By The Paris Review How often have you read a TV review by a writer of our generation and thought of Susan Sontag? It’s never happened to me—until this week, when I read Elaine Blair’s review of Girls in The New York Review of Books. By paying attention to one little sex scene, Blair makes deep arguments about sex scenes in general, the limits of romantic comedy, and the real meaning of sexual freedom. —Lorin Stein About a decade ago, my friend Mikey loaned me a book he thought I’d enjoy. I’ve only just got around to picking it up. Though I’m a bad friend, he isn’t: the book—Leonid Andreyev’s The Little Angel—is terrific, after a fashion. The stories are intriguing, especially “At the Roadside Station” and “The City,” but the translation is rather bad. I’d love to see it revisited by another publisher and translator. I’m looking at you, NYRB Books. And how about Natasha Randall? I loved her translations of We and A Hero of Our Time. —Nicole Rudick For those with a green thumb and a love of literature, look no further than Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation Across Two Centuries for an insightful glimpse into garden writing over the last two-hundred years. Lush illustrations color the pages and accompany extensive excerpts from the writings of influential figures of gardening’s past and present, such as Thomas Jefferson, Gertrude Jekyll, and Michael Pollan. Gain a little inspiration for your own beckoning plots, or simply get yourself excited for summer’s peak. —Elizabeth Nelson Read More
May 11, 2012 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Janácek, Cooke, and Literary Booze By The Paris Review My brother-in-law described First Position as Spellbound without the hard words. He meant that in a good way. This story of six kids in training for an international ballet competition is just as touching and absorbing—and almost as funny—as Jeffrey Blitz’s 2002 documentary about the national spelling bee. —Lorin Stein I saw Janáček’s The Makropulos Case on Saturday, and three-plus hours standing has never gone by so quickly. Based on Karel Čapek’s popular 1922 play of the same name (sidenote: Čapek gave us the word robot as we know it), it’s the tragicomic tale of a labyrinthian legal case, a man-eating diva, and the elixir of life. (Intimations of the decline of European aristocracy are in there, too.) The score—and the chatty libretto, for that matter—stand alone, but Karita Mattila’s performance (in what is considered one of the toughest soprano showcases) is worth seeing. —Sadie Stein Hemingway & Bailey’s Bartending Guide to Great American Writers not only instructs us on how to get tipsy (or rip-roaring drunk) on William Faulkner’s favorite mintjuleps or Raymond Chandler’s companion gimlet, it also offers us whimsical fodder for our perfect boozy daydreams: “Imagine a warm summer evening out on the shore of Long Island—say a party at Gatsby’s house, the bartenders serving up light, refreshing Gin Rickeys as the jazz band swings.” Yes, please! (Drinking stories and famous imbibing passages included.) —Elizabeth Nelson For fans of Soviet-era sci-fi, Olena Bormashenko’s new translation of Russian classic Roadside Picnic is being published this month. The book was originally written by brothers Arkady and Boris Stugatsky in the 1970s, but took eight years to get past Soviet censors unscathed and has been out of print in the English for three decades. Now it’s finally back on the shelves, and judging by the praise Bormashenko has received for her work, it’s in excellent shape. The hero of Picnic is a “stalker,” or a go-to guy in the black market of alien technologies that appeared on Earth after the perplexing and ancient “Visit.” And yes, it is the “stalker” of Roadside Picnic that served as inspiration for the spellbinding film by Andrei Tarkovsky. —Allison Bulger Sam Cooke—Greatest Hits: Here is a singer too often overlooked in the great expanse of pop classics. You can have your ol’ blue eyes, I’ve got nothing against him. You can have your Bing and your Brown. All I need is a little bit o’ Cooke. I’ve been listening to this CD every minute of every day. Though blatantly missing “(Ain’t That) Good News,” it makes up for it in the lounge jazz beats of “Win Your Love” and the eerily foreboding “Frankie and Johnny.” The song ends with Frankie shooting Johnny over a misunderstanding. Cooke died at thirty-three under similar circumstances. —Noah Wunsch
May 4, 2012 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Sake Bars, Met Balls, and Rhubarb By The Paris Review I’m hooked on The Briefcase, by Hiromi Kawakami, a sentimental novel about the friendship, formed over late nights at a sake bar, between a Tokyo woman in her late thirties and her old high school teacher. It’s interesting enough to read about an aging woman drawn to an older man; when this attraction comes wrapped up in Japanese nostalgia for old fashioned inns, mushroom hunting, refined manners, and Basho, how can a person resist? I can only imagine what wizardry must have gone into Allison Markin Powell’s translation. —Lorin Stein There are so many intriguing events associated with the PEN World Voices Festival this week. One I’ll be catching for sure is this little-seen documentary on Diane Arbus, actually a taping of the photographer discussing a slide show of her work in 1970. The viewing will be followed by readings from Diane Arbus: A Chronology by Francine Prose, Michael Cunningham, and Arbus’s daughter, Doon. —Sadie Stein The PULSE Contemporary Art Fair is here! Today through Sunday at the Metropolitan Pavilion, galleries from around the world are exhibiting the best of contemporary art. Whether your interest and pockets are shallow or deep, you could easily be held captive for hours, lost in the endless spectacles and hidden nooks. It’s an adventure, so may I suggest comfortable shoes? —Elizabeth Nelson Two years ago I started reading (and devouring) the Smitten Kitchen blog. I have since made more than thirty of her recipes and have been waiting for her forthcoming first cookbook. This week she posted a sneak peek, so time to start some seasonal cooking—especially as farmer’s markets everywhere have the first spring produce, like asparagus and rhubarb! —Emily Cole-Kelly Most people will eat fifteen hundred PB&Js before graduating high school. I’ve easily consumed twice that since then. I love peanut butter. I love the taste of it mixed with a good jam. Statistics about the sandwich are always fascinating: women prefer creamy and men crunchy (I only eat crunchy); the vast majority of people put the peanut butter on first (I do, too, but it just makes sense, right?). Leave it to Ruth Reichl to make a great thing even better. Who knew that a little salt and heat could improve upon perfection. —Nicole Rudick My invitation to the Met’s Costume Institute Ball seems to have been mysteriously lost in the mail, but reading through the gorgeous companion volume to the Schiaparelli and Prada exhibition is (I’m sure) every bit as interesting, and nearly as glamorous. —S.S.
April 27, 2012 This Week’s Reading Things We Love: Vallejo, Factory Records, and ‘The Lonely Doll’ By The Paris Review Trilce, by the Peruvian modernist César Vallejo, is a book of poems I’ve read (the verb is probably too strong) with much enjoyment and little comprehension. Vallejo’s Spanish has almost nothing in common with the language I learned at school, but its obscurity is addictive: I keep going back to the poems. So far as we know, Vallejo gave only one interview; it has now been translated, for the first time, into English by Kent Johnson. Vallejo’s repartee isn’t as baffling as his poems, but it’s almost as enjoyable. —Robyn Creswell The lost César Vallejo interview should be paired with Paul Muldoon’s translation of “Piedra negra sobre una Piedra blanca,” which is probably the best English version of Vallejo’s most famous poem. Muldoon calls it “Testimony”: I will die in Paris, on a day the rain’s been coming down hard, a day I can even now recall. I will die in Paris—I try not to take this too much to heart— on a Thursday, probably, in the Fall. It’ll be like today, a Thursday: a Thursday on which, as I make and remake this poem, the very bones in my forearms ache. Never before, along the road, have I felt more alone. César Vallejo is dead: everyone used to knock him about, they’ll say, though he’d done no harm; they hit him hard with a rod and, also, a length of rope; this will be borne out by Thursdays, by the bones in his forearms, by loneliness, by heavy rain, by the aforementioned roads. —John Jeremiah Sullivan Read More
April 20, 2012 This Week’s Reading Things We Love: Apollinaire, Office Chairs, Flabbergasting Vulgarity By The Paris Review On the newly redesigned Los Angeles Review of Books, Hua Hsu’s review of a rather fascinating microhistory of office chairs has me wondering whether Charles Darwin invented the wheeled version. It seems he “replaced the legs of his armchair with ‘cast-iron bed legs mounted on casters’ so that he could glide freely throughout his office.” He’s known to have taken daily walks along his “thinking path.” Could it be that the chair’s motion likewise aided him in formulating the theory of natural selection? —Nicole Rudick I’ve been on an Apollinaire kick, starting with Francis Steegmuller’s chatty 1963 biography, plus the new translation of Apollinaire’s love letters from the trenches and Louis Zukofsky’s strange bilingual homage, Le Style Apollinaire. —Lorin Stein “The Bible is, for the first time, being translated into Jamaican patois. It’s a move welcomed by those Jamaicans who want their mother tongue enshrined as the national language,” reported the BBC in December. Led by the Bible Society of the West Indies, the translation initiative began with the Gospel of Luke and is scheduled for completion in August of this year. The patois translation has many excited followers, including me, and, though I can’t understand a word, I’m moved by a truth revealed at the heart of this effort: that language shapes and solidifies a people’s identity and sense of belonging. It’s kind of as real as it gets. —Elizabeth Nelson “There’s one thing I want to make clear right off: my baby was a virgin the day she met Errol Flynn.” I’ve been wanting to read 1961’s The Big Love (Mrs. Florence Aadland as told to Tedd Thomey) ever since I saw Patricia Marx recommend it years ago. You can imagine my delight when I opened my mailbox to find my copy, and I devoured the story—a bizarre tell-all by the mother of the fifteen-year-old who had an affair with the middle-aged actor—within a day. Even to connoisseurs of the lurid, this is jaw-dropping stuff: “When the time came she told me everything she did with Errol Flynn … Everything. And in detail, because she and I love details and get a kick out of sharing things like that.” (It’s all like that.) After Flynn’s death, the liaison came to light, and Mrs. Aadland, convicted of contributing to the corruption of a minor, lost custody of seventeen-year-old Beverly. But she regrets nothing; the tone is as resolutely defiant as it is inappropriate. William Styron called the book “flabbergastingly vulgar.” —Sadie Stein