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Latest Grossman Novel Out Today in the U.S.

by Erika Dreifus on
2

Today, September 21, is the official publication date for To the End of the Land, by Israeli author David Grossman (translation by Jessica Cohen).

Just in time, M.A. Orthofer has posted his review over on The Complete Review (plus his take on Grossman’s essay collection, Writing in the Dark, which I’ve reviewed as well).

And there’s plenty more Grossman coverage appearing this week. For starters, although I have not yet had the time to read it, the current New Yorker includes a profile of Grossman penned by George Packer. (Packer will participate in a live chat and answer readers’ questions tomorrow, September 22, at 3 p.m.)

As for me, my pre-ordered copy of To the End of the Land arrived late yesterday, though there are a few titles competing with it for “next-read” status. Any of you have this novel on your TBR list?

Quotation of the Week: Adam Langer

by Erika Dreifus on
4

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.)

Quotation of the Week: Peter Carey, Interviewed by Gabriel Packard

by Erika Dreifus on
4

As a fiction writer, I’ve never been especially inspired by characters. I know that that sounds awful. I simply don’t write “character-driven” fiction, and, much to my discontent, I don’t ever find myself “possessed” by a character who simply begs to have his or her story told. When I’m lucky enough to find inspiration for a story, it generally comes from ideas and/or circumstances.

Which is one reason why I was captivated by Gabriel Packard’s interview with Peter Carey in the new (March) issue of The Writer. Here’s some of Carey’s response to Packard’s question, “What is the process of writing a novel like for you?”:

“When I’ve finished a novel, I always feel so empty I think I’ll never have another idea. So when I have an idea, a single idea, I feel blessed….I’ll never ever start with characters. They are there to be discovered. Indeed the greatest pleasure, at the end of the novel, is to have made characters who are multidimensional and complicated.”

Ah, there’s the rub. You still need to come up with characters who are multidimensional and complicated! The ideas alone can’t sustain the fiction!

P.S. Carey’s new novel, Parrot & Olivier in America, sounds fantastic (and I’m not just saying that because I have a doctoral degree in modern French history and once took an entire class on Alexis de Tocqueville!). It goes to the top of my tbr list.

The Wednesday Web Browser: NYT Edition

by Erika Dreifus on
2

As usual, the NYT After Deadline blog provides useful reminders on grammar, usage, and style.
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How wonderful it was to open the paper a few days ago and see a big, fat article about Open Letter Books, “a small, year-old press here affiliated with the University of Rochester that publishes nothing but literature in translation.”
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Like many of you, I suspect, I was caught up for several days this summer following the coverage of Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s passing. I’ve been meaning to read his memoir, True Compass (and I’ll do so in 2010). All of which made this piece by Jonathan Karp, the memoir’s editor/publisher, compelling reading.
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Adam Begley’s travel article on Stendhal’s Parma was also quite relevant to me!
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Finally: The NYT asked six prominent authors to name (and read from) books they could never discard.

TBR: Five Titles On My Nightstand

by Erika Dreifus on
8

Literally, these five books are stacked on my nightstand. I’d love to say that sometime in the near future I’ll have read them all, and will be able to blog about each one, but let’s face it: I have no clue when I’ll have read them, let alone reflected sufficiently to write about them.

So, as dubious a substitute as it may be, here’s a photo of the fab five. I don’t know what to think of the fact that this group represents an all-fiction feast. On the other hand, let’s celebrate the presence of independent/small press titles, as well as fiction in translation (you can’t see the translators’ names, but the de Winter book was translated by Jeanette K. Ringold, and Rasskazy [the title means “stories” in Russian] features the work of many translators, including Keith Gessen, Ellen Litman, and Douglas Robinson).

Care to share your own current tbr list?