Quotation of the Week: Adam Langer

by Erika Dreifus on
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In an interview occasioned by the recent publication of his latest book, The Thieves of Manhattan (on my tbr list), Adam Langer was asked the following:

“Did you meet with early success, in terms of getting your first novel accepted for publication, or was it a long, hard road for you?”

Langer’s response offers this week’s “Quotation of the Week”:

“If I pretended that my first published novel, Crossing California, was actually the first novel I wrote, I’d say that it was easy. I’d say, yup, I finished the book, got an agent, got a contract, and started work on Book #2. But in saying that, I’d be ignoring the fact that my first novel, Making Tracks, a teen detective story written when I was in high school, is still in a drawer. And so is my second novel, It Takes All Kinds, a 300-page long screed about my first week at Vassar. Also, my third novel, A Rogue in the Limelight, a picaresque journey modeled on Huck Finn and The Confederacy of Dunces, never found the right agent, even though some people (well, my mother) have called it my best novel. One of my earliest agents said that my fourth novel, Indie Jones, a slacker comedy set in Chicago’s independent film world, would easily find a home at Doubleday, but that didn’t happen. And I stopped looking for an agent for my fifth novel, an existential thriller called American Soil, when I realized there was too much personal shit in it and I really didn’t want to deal with having it published. But yeah, once I finished Book #6, it was smooth sailing.”

Source: The Huffington Post

(Hat tip to Josh Lambert for the interview link.)

Recent Reads: Grace Schulman’s First Loves and Other Adventures

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Now that I’ve joined Goodreads, I’ve been chronicling most of my “recent reads” over there. Hence, today’s My Machberet post is actually a cross-posting of the write-up I gave earlier this month to Grace Schulman’s First Loves and Other Adventures, a recent release from the University of Michigan Press’s Poets on Poetry series.

Grace Schulman has to be one of the most generous writers out there. I had the privilege of meeting her for a profile I wrote not too long after I began working at The City University of New York, where she is a Distinguished Professor at Baruch College. I left our first meeting with an armful of books, and when we met again a few months back, she asked if she might send me her latest: First Loves and Other Adventures.

I probably can’t be completely unbiased, but having had the opportunity to get to know this author a bit, I find the opening and closing essays in this collection most striking. They are also, arguably, the most personal.

In the first, “Helen,” Schulman describes family history, the experience of growing up Jewish in New York while the Holocaust unfolded across the ocean, and the connections she sensed from an early age with her father’s sister, Helena (“my parents Anglicized it”), who died in the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. The closing piece, “An Uncommon Friend,” recounts the relationship Schulman and her husband had with author Richard Yates. I was in the room at the 2008 conference in New York where Schulman presented this text on a panel honoring Yates’s life and work; I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to revisit it.

In the introduction to this volume, Schulman describes the essays within as being “of two kinds: first, about becoming a writer; second, about some of the books I love.” The book encompasses reflections on May Swenson, Marianne Moore, Octavio Paz, and others. And anything Schulman writes is worth reading. Still, the first and last essays are the ones I’ll remember the longest.

Friday Find: Sarah Manguso’s Thirteen Sieves

by Erika Dreifus on
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You know how just the other day I alluded just the other day to my friend Deonne Kahler’s recent participation in the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference? Well, DK is now sharing revision tips that she gleaned directly from her workshop leader, Sarah Manguso (apparently, Ms. Manguso calls them “The Thirteen Sieves”).

DK will be sharing one tip per post. She began yesterday with this one. And it’s good.

Follow along, won’t you? I know that I will!

Have a great weekend, and see you back here on Monday!

Thursday’s Pre-Publication Post: Behind the Screens

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Thanks so much to all of you who took the time to comment last week when I presented the cover of my forthcoming story collection, Quiet Americans. I’m so glad that you agree with me: The cover designer has done an wonderful job.

Since last week, lots of behind-the-scenes (or, should I say, behind-the-screens) work has been taking place to build up my brand-new website. I’ve mentioned before that the impending book publication has motivated me to try to consolidate my various online locations/projects/identities. A couple of days ago, the talented web designer I’m working with unveiled a mockup of the homepage. All I’ll reveal for now is this: If you like the book cover, you’ll love the homepage!

The cover is also appearing on the Facebook page I’ve just created to help share information about the book (and hold contests/giveaways). I hope that you’ll “like” that page, too–in all respects! (But please forgive me in advance if I keep my personal Facebook goings-on more or less limited to family members and those of you I’ve met/worked with/studied with/etc. in “real life.” For now, at least.)

Thanks again for the enthusiasm about the cover. It really means a lot to me!

Bay Area Screenings of "Grace Paley: Collected Shorts"

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Bay Area fans of author/activist Grace Paley have at least two opportunities to see Lily Rivlin’s documentary, Grace Paley: Collected Shorts.

From the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival description:

Lily Rivlin’s (Gimme a Kiss, SFJFF 2002) intimate documentary is a rich, inspiring portrait of Jewish writer and activist Grace Paley, who passed away in 2007. Paley’s acclaimed first short story collection, The Little Disturbances of Man, established her reputation with its brilliantly sad and funny chronicles of Jewish American urban females much like herself. Paley’s New York tales, filled with an emotional and sexual frankness especially bold at the tail end of the frightened 1950s, soon became classics of the short fiction form. Not content to rest on her laurels, however, Paley combined her evolving literary career with passionate pursuit of her political concerns through the 1960s, 70s and 80s. “Art is too long and life is too short,”wrote the outspoken Paley, “There’s a lot more to do in life than writing.” Indeed, she spent the rest of her life on the front lines of the anti-war and women’s movements, where she endured being arrested time and again. Rivlin’s film confidently juggles all aspects of Paley’s extraordinary story, told in candid recollections and passionate readings by Paley herself, along with fond remembrances by literary critics, family and writer-friends Allan Gurganus and Alice Walker. Throughout, Grace Paley: Collected Shorts casts an important and penetrating light on a brilliant and highly principled woman who constantly reinvented both her life and art.

You can catch the film on July 25th at The Castro Theatre in San Francisco, or on August 1st at The Roda Theatre in Berkeley.