John Ashbery Reads from Notes from the Air

Turkish Novelist Elif Shafak on Storytelling and the Politics of Fiction

Rat King Press Reading at Lovin Cup on Dec. 12!

Johnson's own indie publisher Rat King Press will present an evening of readings at the Lovin Cup Cafe on Monday, December 12 from 6:30 to 11:00pm.  There will be several fiction readings, followed by an open mic (poetry, prose, ranting -- all are welcome).

Rat King Press is still considering fiction submissions for the reading, which can be sent to ratkingpress@gmail.com.  This is a terrific opportunity for writers to share their work with a community of peers.

Rat King Press is also currently accepting submissions for their literary magazine The Rat Tail Detail, whose submission guidelines can be found here.

So come out and support Johnson's own independent publishers and writers!

WHAT:  Rat King Press Reading
WHERE:  The Lovin Cup Cafe
WHEN:  Mon., Dec. 12, 6:30pm - 11:00pm

How to Write a Statement of Purpose for M.F.A in Creative Writing Programs

Among the most daunting -- and critical -- tasks involved in applying for graduate creative writing programs is writing the dreaded Statement of Purpose, which serves as a cover letter and therefore your first impression to the strangers reviewing your (and often hundreds of others') application.  Along with your writing sample, the Statement of Purpose is arguably the most important document.

Because the Statement of Purpose is often required to be one page or less, most applicants spend several weeks or even months crafting an effective SOP.  The problem, however, is that hardly anyone can say what, exactly, makes an SOP effective.  What should you include?  What should you not include?  How much personality ("flair") should there be, and what writerly ambitions or childhood trauma's are best left unmentioned?

Luckily, author and writing professor Cathy Day lays down some essential Do's and Don't's about writing the SOP.  Any writer serious about applying to graduate creative writing programs will benefit from these tips -- provided, after all, by someone who reviews M.F.A. applications regularly.

So take note!

Come Celebrate Graduating B.F.A. Students Stephanie Girard and Dayton Shafer!

Fall Authors Series Concludes with Two of JSC'S Own . . .

This Thursday, November 10th, JSC proudly welcomes a visit by two of its own, authors Neil Shepard and Tony Whedon.  

Even though both Shepard and Whedon recently retired from JSC's Department of Writing and Literature, both have been very busy.  During their visit, they will be celebrating the release of two new books:  Things to Pray for in Vermont by Tony Whedon and (T)ravel/Un(T)ravel by Neil Shepard (both released by Mid-List Press).  Please come celebrate with them!

WHEN:  Thursday, December 10 / 4:00 pm
WHERE:  Stearns Performance Space

Tony Whedon is also the author of the excellent book of essays A Language Dark Enough (Mid-List, 2004), which, according to the publisher, "travels on four continents in search of a language that describes 'home.' From Port-au-Prince to Shanghai, from Ecuador's Andes to the Green Mountains of Vermont, many of those he meets—his students, colleagues, and fellow travelers—are displaced people, exiles in a global community."  Whedon is also a pioneer of PoJazz, a lively performance-based fusion of poetry and jazz that has gained an enthusiastic following among his former students at JSC.

Read here Whedon's lovely essay "Kindred Spirits," featured in Hunger Mountain.

And here is Whedon's poem "Impermanence," published in Blackbird.

Neil Shepard is the author of three previous poetry collections with Mid-List, Scavenging the Country for a Heartbeat, I'm Here Because I Lost My Way, This Far from the Source--all of which, according to the publisher, "take readers on a journey across emotional as well as physical distances."


Shepard is the Founding Editor of JSC's acclaimed literary journal Green Mountains Review, which this spring will celebrate its first 25 years with an all-poetry anniversary issue.  

Read here an interview with Neil Shepard featured in Hunger Mountain.  

Here, courtesy of Mid-List Press, is an excerpt from Shepard's (T)ravel/Un(T)ravel:


AUBADE, WEST OF PARIS

(T)ravel/Un(T)ravel by Neil Shepard
(Mid-List Press, 2011)

(early spring)

throw open the doors --

almonds flowering
snow on trees, plums purpling
the black limbs of winter

flowering -- the ing is the thing
zing! -- dang if I ain't plain tame
this morning. I been dead
all winter, so tame is wild!
where I come from.

daffodils are yellow, not yellowed --
kids disappear in forsythia --
guardians on high alert, floating
over trees disguised as pink clouds --

throw open the doors! --

burble like a fool -- you've bungled enough
years -- burble, bungle, to hell
with the middle way, temper-
ance is our condition,
more than we admit -- not enough
heart epaulets -- not after thirty, no --

hereby decree all public men and women
shall sew hearts on sleeves or else --
shipped off to flower factories --

rough winds do shake
the darling buds -- how long
can these little courage-makers hang on?

Lydia Davis to Visit JSC on Halloween!

Lydia Davis

The JSC Fall Authors Series continues!

On Monday, October 31, fiction writer and translator Lydia Davis will visit JSC to read from her work.  Lydia Davis is the author the novel The End of the Story and the story collections Break It Down, Almost No Memory, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, and Varieties of Disturbance, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2007.  The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis was published in 2009 and, according to New Yorker book critic James Wood, "will in time be seen as one of the great, strange American literary contributions, distinct and crookedly personal, like the work of Flannery O'Connor, Donald Barthelme, or J. F. Powers."

Davis has received the MacArthur Foundation's "Genius Grant" for her fiction, and her accomplishments in translation are just as impressive.  Not only has she translated recent editions of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, but she has been named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government.  Whoa.

WHEN:  Monday, October 31 (5:30pm)
WHERE:  Johnson State College / Stearns Performance Space

Free and open to the public!

More on Lydia Davis:

Read an interview with Lydia Davis from The Believer.

Listen to three audio interviews with Lydia Davis at KCRW's Bookworm:
     in 1998 (discussing and reading from Almost No Memory);
     in 2002 (discussing and reading from Samuel Johnson Is Indignant);
     and in 2007 (discussing and reading from Varieties of Disturbance).

Read another interview with Lydia Davis by the National Book Foundation, conducted after she was selected as a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award.

And here is an interview with Davis at BOMB Magazine.

Read Davis's story "The Dreadful Mucamas" from the recent issue of Granta.

Read ten tiny stories by Davis, "Ten Stories from Flaubert," courtesy of The Paris Review.

Also from The Paris Review, here is Lydia Davis talking about translating the newest edition of Gustave Flaubert's novel of novels, Madame Bovary; and here is her follow-up.

And listen here to Davis's at-length discussion of translating Madame Bovary

PennSound presents here a trove of audio recordings of Lydia Davis's readings, interviews, and talks.

Read Davis's first-time translation of the Dutch (from The Mole and Other Very Short Animal Stories by A. L. Snijders) in Asymptote. 

Finally, below is a video inspired by a single sentence by Lydia Davis:

Writers Sign a Letter in Support of the Occupy Wall Street Movement

Check out Occupywriters.com for a list of (hundreds of?) writers who have signed a brief letter in support of the Occupy Wall Street Movement.  The list includes, to name but a few, John D'Agata, Robert Boswell, Jennifer Egan, Brian Evenson, Vivian Gornick, Mary Karr, Sam Lypsite, Bill McKibben, Rick Moody, Ann Patchett, Benjamin Percy, D. A. Powell, Francine Prose, George Sanders, Luc Sante, and many, many others.

Is your favorite writer on this list?  What does that mean? . . .

This Thursday at JSC: Poets David Lehman and Anna Maria Hong

The Johnson State College Authors Series is pleased host an evening of poetry with writers David Lehman and Anna Maria Hong this Thursday, Oct. 13, at 5:30 pm in the Stearns Performance Space.  This event is free and open to the public.

Read more about these authors below.

David Lehman

"David Lehman was born in New York City. He is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Yeshiva Boys( Scribner, 2009) and When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005). Among his nonfiction books are A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs  (Nextbook / Schocken, 2009), The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Anchor, 1999), The Perfect Murder ( Michigan, 2000), and Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991). He edited Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present and The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present, which appeared from Scribner in 2003 and 2008, respectively. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006), a one-volume comprehensive anthology of poems from Anne Bradstreet to the present. Lehman teaches writing and literature in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City. He initiated The Best American Poetry series in 1988 and continues as the annual anthology's general editor. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989 and an Academy Award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1990. He lives in New York City and in Ithaca, New York."  -- David Lehman's Web site

Poet John Hollander has said this about Lehman:  "This increasingly impressive poet keeps reminding us that putting aside childish things can be done only wisely and well by keeping in touch with them, and that American life is best understood and celebrated by those who are, with Whitman, both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it."   

Here is a video of Lehman reading his "Poem for Obama."
Here is Lehman discussing and reading from his recent book Yeshiva Boys.

Here is Lehman discussing his Best American Poetry series.
Here is an interview with David Lehman on NPR's Morning Edition, in which he discusses updating The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006).

Here is Lehman's amusing "The Questions of Postmodernsim." 

Anna Maria Hong

From Anna Maria Hong's Institute Fellows page at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study:

Anna Maria Hong writes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and texts for collaborative works. Since 2005, she has been writing a series of sonnets in traditional English and Italian forms as well as more experimental hybrids and departures. Hong is interested in how rigorous form shapes expression and how language pushes back against constraints to create strange, unexpected content. To date, she has written about 60 sonnets, comprising the first of two collections, The Red Box. 



At Radcliffe, Hong will be working on her second volume of sonnets. The Glass Age is informed by two primary images: the hourglass and the glass ceiling/coffin. The first entails notions of linear and cyclical time, while the second concerns the sensing and shattering of invisible, but oddly durable, barriers. A third strand in the collection responds to glass artworks by artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Niki de Saint Phalle.



Hong has published her work in the American Book Review, CUE, Exquisite Corpse, Fairy Tale Review, Gargoyle Magazine, the International Examiner,jubilat, New Orleans Review, Poets & Writers, POOL, Quarterly West, theStranger, and other publications. She is the editor of Growing Up Asian American: An Anthology (William Morrow, 1993) and the recipient of residencies from Djerassi Resident Artists Program and Yaddo. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas and a BA in philosophy from Yale University. She has taught creative writing at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and at the University of Washington Bothell.

Here is an interview with Anna Maria Hong by The Harvard Gazette.
Here is a poem by Anna Maria Hong called "Medea I / Device."

Read more about the Johnson State College Authors Series here.

The Death of Literature?

Over at Lapham's Quarterly, Curtis White explores how the divergence between literature as art and literature as commodity has contributed to the imminent death of both:

As far as I’m concerned, the book business deserves to die if for no other reason than that its business model is something out of the 1930s: send a bunch of loser Willy Loman’s out as “reps,” people who don’t read and don’t understand the books they sell, and have them place the books on consignment, just as if they were old chairs that you were trying to unload at the local consignment store. As far as the bookstores were concerned, they were mostly purchasing decoration for their stores, so that it at least looked like a place to buy books. The few books that actually made money—celebrity memoirs, confessions of failed politicians, moronic self-help tomes, and jokey piss-jobs about not running with scissors—were profitably located on a few tables at the front of the store. Everything else was just ambience.

Bad as this was and remains, the really fatal flaw in this system is that it allows stores to buy new titles not with money but with the return of all the books you sent them months ago that they never sold, and never really had much interest in selling. How could they sell them? No one working in the store read books, and they were no more capable of recommending a challenging literary title than they were of shaping your investment portfolio or diagnosing a kidney complaint. Every few years in the ‘80s and ‘90s, B&N would take some sort of national warehouse purgative and back would come books you thought you’d sold months and years earlier. (I once watched in appalled amazement as two-hundred copies of a backlist title that had only sold maybe five-hundred to begin with was returned by Barnes and Noble five years after it was first released. I had to wonder, did we ever sell any copies of this book?) The best that most of our books could hope for was a short shelf life of four to six months, a single lonely spine out in an acre of shelves and books.

Now even that stupid and insidious racket seems to be failing.

With the death of each new generation of booksellers, each failed “business model,” the independent literary writer/poet/publisher wants to say, “Good riddance, they had it coming,” only to be mortified by how much worse the thing is that takes its place.¹ In ten years, for people raised by computers (and by that I mean everyone), buying a book will mean buying an ebook from Amazon, Google, or maybe Barnes and Noble, if it survives. I asked John O’Brien, the legendary publisher of Dalkey Archive Press, what he thought, and he said this:

The greatest threat to book publishing in the United States right now is Amazon. Through various spin-offs, they have become a publisher, and this means that they are moving towards becoming both a distributor of books and a publisher, and no book publisher will be able to compete. In the future (and I am sure this is the plan) Amazon wants to control all distribution and all publishing. This is a very scary prospect: that a single company will have such power to determine what will be published and on what terms. Once the ‘Amazon plan’ is realized, they will be able to charge whatever they want to charge and will of course be able to decide what the best-sellers will be. They will have gotten themselves into the position of making such decisions because they will be the only game in town.

Even a year ago, O’Brien would have sounded paranoid to most people, but then came this article in the August 17, 2011 edition of the New York Timesbusiness section,“Amazon Set to Publish Pop Author.” 

Amazon moved aggressively Tuesday to fulfill its new ambition to publish books as well as sell them, announcing that it had signed Timothy Ferriss, the wildly popular self-help guru for young men.

Amazon has been publishing books for several years, but its efforts went up several notches in visibility when it brought in the longtime New York editor and agent Laurence Kirshbaum three months ago as head of Amazon Publishing.

To read the rest of White's article, click here . . .

Writers on Their Last Supper

Check out the The New York Times Magazine "Food & Drink Issue," where Bill Buford writes about eating warm pig's blood:

"My task was to keep it moving with my hand. I stirred, and a hundred pieces of string thickened against my fingers. I stirred and stirred and seemed to become aware of everything at once. The blood up to my armpit, the smell of the animal, the low wheezes of its last breath, the clear winter light, the color of the sky, the dirt under my knees, the smoke from a fire that had been made to heat water in an old-fashioned cast-iron stove for cooking the boudin noir. That's what the blood was for, blood sausages that would be cooked to a weightless custard.

The strings dissolved, the blood was ready. A friend gave me a ladle, and I dipped into the bucket, and drank it, a little sloppily, aware that I now had a red moustache."

Also, lit blogger Maud Newton discusses rattlesnake:

"Many compare it with chicken, some say it's like alligator and campers in the Southwest, where it's most often eaten, call it desert whitefish. In fact, rattlesnake tastes, at least when breaded and fried, like a sinewy, half-starved tilapia."

And Leslie Robarge asks chefs and writers, "What Would You Order for Your Last Supper?"  Here are a few of the responses:

"A piece of bluefin tuna sashimi, some Argentinian beef, chocolate from Bernachon in Lyon, half a dozen local oysters and clams. A P.B.R. in a can (for the clams and oysters), white and red burgundy wine with everything else."
DAVE PASTERNACK, chef and co-owner, Esca

"Cheeseburger with a fried egg. My wife's homemade chocolate- chip cookies. Copious amounts of red wine. Enjoyed in the company of family and friends and accompanied by the Grateful Dead played very loud."
WYLIE DUFRESNE, chef and co-owner, WD-50

"New England clam chowder from the Seafood Shoppe in Wainscott, N.Y.; foie gras with toast from La Grenouille; Nate 'n Al's hot dog; strip steak from SW Steakhouse; duck from the Four Seasons; fried chicken from The Dutch; corn on the cob, hearts of lettuce with Roquefort, onion rings, Bubby's cherry pie, the unbelievable grapefruit dessert from Boulud Sud."
NORA EPHRON, author

Swedish Poet Tomas Tranströmer Awarded Nobel Prize

Tomas Tranströmer

The 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature went to Tomas Tranströmer, a Swedish poet who is credited as one of Sweden's most important post-World War II writers.  Below, courtesy of Bookforum (and via the publishers New Directions) are three poems selected from Tranströmer's The Great Enigma:

Translated by Robin Fulton

Two Cities

Each on its side of a strait, two cities
the one blacked out, occupied by the enemy.
In the other the lamps are burning.
The bright shore hypnotizes the dark one.

I swim out in a trance
on the glittering dark waters.
A dull tuba-blast penetrates.
It’s a friend’s voice, take up your grave and walk.

The Light Streams In

Outside the window, the long beast of spring
the transparent dragon of sunlight
rushes past like an endless
suburban train—we never got a glimpse of its head.

The shoreline villas shuffle sideways
they are proud as crabs.
The sun makes the statues blink.

The raging sea of fire out in space
is transformed to a caress.
The countdown has begun.

Night Journey

Thronging under us. The trains.
Hotel Astoria trembles.
A glass of water at the bedside
shines in the tunnels.

He dreamt he was a prisoner on Svalbard.
The planet turned rumbling.
Glittering eyes walked over the ice fields.
The beauty of miracles existed.

Who Will Win the Next Nobel Prize in Literature?

Syrian Poet Adonis, seen as a front-runner for the the next Nobel,
was also featured in the Fall 2010 issue of JSC's Green Mountains Review  

The Los Angeles Times offers a guide to "Handicapping the Nobel Prize in Literature," providing odds and possible criteria for the next winner of what is unquestionably the highest literary honor in the world.  Here are some of some of the L.A. Times' picks:


 1. Adonis - 81 year-old Syrian poet.


2. Thomas Tranströmer: An 80-year-old Swedish poet, writer and translator. His poetry has been      published in the U.S. by independent presses Greywolf and New Directions.


3. Thomas Pynchon: The 74-year-old American author was awarded the National Book Award in 1974 for his novel "Gravity's Rainbow," a book that failed to be awarded the Pulitzer in a judging controversy. Known as a major figure in postmodern American fiction, the famously reclusive Pynchon mixes sometimes grim, sometimes slapstick humor with heady concepts and rocket science. His other works include  "Mason & Dixon," "V.," "Against the Day," "Inherent Vice" and "The Crying of Lot 49."


4-5. Assia Djebar: The 75-year-old Algerian native was an activist for Algerian independence and remains a strong feminist advocate. She has moved between Algeria and France, taking academic appointments in both countries, and in the last decade has been on the faculty at New York University in the U.S. In 2005, she was named the first North African member of the French Academy. She has written more than a dozen novels in French; translations include "Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade" (1993), "So Vast the Prison" (1999) and "The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry" (2010).


4-5. Péter Nádas: Nadas, who will turn 69 on Oct. 14, is a Hungarian novelist and essayist who has lived in Germany. In early years, when he was working as a journalist and some of his work was held under ban, secret police offered to approve a travel application he'd made if he became an informant; he declined. Nádas' novel "A Book of Memories," published in English in 1997, was hailed by Susan Sontag as postwar Europe's greatest novel. His next novel, "Parallel Stories," which clocks in at more than 1,000 pages, will be published in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in late October.


6. Ko Un: The 78-year-old Korean poet spent 10 years as a Buddhist monk, although The Nation notes that he was also a "drunkard, teacher, political activist." In the '70s and '80s he was imprisoned for his activism against South Korea's military regime. He is said by some to be Korea's greatest living poet. He has written many works; "Ten Thousand Lives" and "Songs for Tomorrow," published by Green Integer Press, are among those that appear in English.


7-8. Haruki Murakami: The 62-year-old Japanese author published his first novel in 1979; he is one of Japan's favorite living writers. Considered a significant postmodernist, he has won a number of major international writing awards, including the Kafka Prize from the Czech Republic, Israel's Jerusalem Prize, Japan's Asahi Prize and the Frank O'Connor Short Story Prize from Ireland. His novels include "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World," "Kafka on the Shore" and the memoir "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running." His new book, the 1,000-plus-page "1Q84," will be published in the U.S. in October.


7-8. Les Murray: Australian poet, critic, translator and editor Les Murray will turn 73 on Oct. 17. Considered a leading poet of the Commonwealth, he has sometimes taken critical and political positions that go against the grain. He has won major international poetry prizes, including the European Petrarch Prize, the T.S. Eliot Award and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. His recent works include the poetry collections "Taller When Prone," "The Biplane Houses," and "Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression," all published in the U.S. by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.


9. Mircea Cărtărescu: The 55-year-old Romanian poet is considered one of that country's leading literary figures. He writes and teaches in Bucharest and is a member of the European Cultural Parliament. He has published many books but just a few have found a home in the U.S. His short-story collection "Nostalgia" was published in the U.S. by New Directions in 2005; another collection, and a poetry trilogy, "Blinding (Orbitor)" will be published by Archipelago in 2012.


Time permitting between now and the Nobel, [The Los Angeles Times will] get to those farther down on the list, including the eight writers tied for 10th place: Antonio Lobo Antunes, John Banville, Don Delillo, Cormac McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, K. Satchidanandan and Colm Toibin.


What about the rest of you?  Who's your choice for the next Nobel?

JSC Authors Series Returns!

Burlington Book Festival: 9/23 - 9/25

The 7th Annual Burlington Book Festival takes place this coming Friday, Saturday, and Sunday throughout downtown Burlington.  This celebration of writing and writers will feature readings, signings, workshops, panels, music, and more.   The event is free and will feature readings and talks by writers such as the recently appointed U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine, as well as Yannick Murphy, Elinor Lipman, David Macaulay, children's author Tanya Lee Stone, and many others.

Below, PBS talks with Philip Levine in August, shortly after his appointment as the new U.S. Poet Laureate.

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.

Things We Never Told You: Ode to a Bookstore Death

"Happy Endings": Stephen Colbert on Plot

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Happy Endings
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

Gallery of Antique Typewriters

Check out Slate.com's "Fantastic Typing Machines," a "gallery of old typewriters that look more like sewing machines, phonographs, and torture devices."

Writers Look Back on 9/11

In its piece "Introducing 9/11 Stories," U.K.'s The Guardian asked six writers to reflect back on the changes and conflict that have occurred in the last ten years since 9/11.  The Guardian's selection of writers is especially remarkable for its global diversity:  The series kicks off with the short story "Temple of Tears" by the brilliant and funny Geoff Dyer, and also includes work by Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsti, Nigerian novelist Helon Habila, Moroccan-born novelist Laila Lalami, British-American fiction writer Rob Magnuson Smith, and British fiction writer Will Self.

Magic Trip

From the Magic Trip official movie site:

"In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, set off on a legendary, LSD-fuelled cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair. He was joined by “The Merry Band of Pranksters,” a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers, including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac’s On the Road, and the driver and painter of the psychedelic Magic Bus. Kesey and the Pranksters intended to make a documentary about their trip, shooting footage on 16MM, but the film was never finished and the footage has remained virtually unseen. With MAGIC TRIP, Gibney and Ellwood were given unprecedented access to this raw footage by the Kesey family. They worked with the Film Foundation, HISTORY and the UCLA Film Archives to restore over 100 hours of film and audiotape, and have shaped an invaluable document of this extraordinary piece of American history."

Agatha Christie on a Surf Board, Jack Kerouac Playing Football . . .

"Jack Kerouac, high school football star, scoring a touchdown" 

Check out the "Strangely Intriguing Photos of Famous Authors Playing Sports" over at Flavorwire.

100 Greatest Nonfiction Books Ever...?

The British Museum Reading Room

The U.K.'s Guardian just released their editors' list of the best 100 nonfiction books ever.  They've broken the list down into multiple categories (Art, Biography, Culture, Environment, History, Journalism, Literature, Mathematics (only one book in this category), Memoir, Philosophy, etc.).

What books are missing from this list?

Interview with George Saunders

The folks over at BOMBblog (the blog site for BOMB Magazine) recently posted this two-part interview with fiction writer George Saunders, who will visit JSC in April of 2012 to read from his work.  In the interview, conducted by Patrick Darcey, Saunders discusses "growth as a writer, the place of the writing workshop (including a visit from a drunken Hemingway), and whether man can ever experience true happiness without an icicle impaling him through the head."

Below is an excerpt from the interview that was also reprinted in the new issue of Harper's Magazine.

PD You mentioned earlier about things you keep attempting to do, to see that you can’t do them, though feel compelled to keep trying. And I doubt you’re alone. Are there specific instances of this that loom large?

GS Well, it’s funny—you sent me this question yesterday and I’ve been wrestling with it ever since. It isn’t the case that I have this 300-page sincere novel off to the side. Rather, I think it’s more of a tendency I have to swerve away from certain material or ideas or notions, year after year, and then occasionally look back at the body of work that’s built up, and think: Huh, you still haven’t started on the Big Stuff yet. (I feel especially remiss when I think in terms of scale: where is my epic? Why all of this obsessing on small canvases? This is probably the expected midlife crisis for someone who learned early that if my writing was going to have any power, I was going to have to radically concern myself with the lapidary.) Now, in some cases, this swerving is a good thing. I don’t know how many times I’ve thought: “You know, what I’d like to do, is write a really big book about some really big city, and my themes would be, just, you know everything, and my main idea stylistically would be, uh, like: All is Allowed!” That has the feeling of something that, in order to avoid becoming a sinkhole, might benefit from a little more, uh. . . .specificity.

But let me tell you a little anecdote, and with apologies, because I’ve been telling this one on the road a bit lately—but it’s somehow central (in a way I haven’t quite figured out yet) to this whole issue for me.

A few years ago I was cutting through Rockefeller Center, and I glanced up and found myself in front of that really nice chocolate shop down there—can’t remember the name of it. But it was early December and they had the window all X-mas-tricked-out, and I got this involuntary thrill of the exact variety I used to get as a kid when I realized X-mas vacation was looming: kind of this presents-are-coming, freedom-is-approaching, life-is-so-beautiful leaping of the heart that felt both totally familiar and entirely fresh. It was corny, it was all Currier & Ives—but the feeling was as real as the pigeons over there on Fifth or that scrap of paper right there, you know? Just a little split-second thrill, really, with that kind of associated imagistic mind-nostalgia burst (pinesmellgoldenpapercookiesnowman) that, again, is as real as more familiar mind-states, like, say, anxiety, or dizziness. So as I was walking away I thought, as us writers are wont to do: “Hey, I wonder if I could use that in a story?” I felt that, yes, I probably could use it—that is, I could probably find a way to generate some text that would convey that sense, make it real, or some pleasure-giving exaggerated version of it—and that was exciting. But then I felt this blowback sense of discomfort, almost dread, that had to do with this feeling of: Well, O.K. butthen what? Or, put more precisely: I was feeling a little insecure with the notion of letting that moment of positive energy just stand there, without some sort of ironic caveat. My first instinct, having written this little vignette (middle-aged man has a mini-burst of happiness), would be, you know, to make an icicle come down and impale him through the head. Or, maybe if I could locate him in some ironic place (a theme park, say (!)) I’d be able to “get away with it.” Which was weird: Dickens would have let it stand. Ditto Tolstoy. If they had to complicate it (i.e., show that this feeling might have repercussions, or might be just part of who this man was, i.e., was not him in his totality) they would have had have the confidence to wait a few hundred pages to do so.

So I’ve seen doing a lot of thinking about that: why do I always feel the need for what we might call the obligatory-edgy.

Now, this gets complicated. Because I first discovered the obligatory-edgy (and the happy effect it had on the energy of my prose) when my work was dying of complete boredom for want of it. So excising this thing (if it is, in fact, “a thing”), at least in theory, can feel like a step backwards. (And I’ve done this a few times over the years, in individual stories that then didn’t fly, at which time I learned the whole lesson over again—I remember one in particular, set in an Episcopal church, that included all sorts of straightforward, precisely rendered, internal monologue bits that represented exactly the theological questions that were tormenting me at the time, and this story was a very nice, sincere, smiling bird, sans wings.)

So edginess can be a way of introducing energy, and/or an appropriate overtone of skepticism, a way of enlarging the frame, of accounting for the complications of real life. Are there fields of beautiful tulips in the world, through which two well-matched lovers stroll? You bet. But is the world an endless sequence of such fields? Ha. So, to underscore this, maybe we have a crop-duster fly over the tulip-field, and the pilot is listening to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

In terms of the above (Rockefeller Center) example, that falling icicle has the effect of saying: yes, well, this dude is happy, but there are others out there who are not, and this kind of “I am happy, therefore life must be good and fair” mentality that he is enjoying is not without consequences for the rest of the world, etc., etc., and furthermore, his feeling of happiness is not permanent, since, for example, any minute now something bad might—oops. Icicle. That is, there’s a reason to have that icicle come down through that guy’s head, and that’s to puncture his smugness. (Although that can devolve into, God help us, Moral Fiction—preachy, joyless, over-determined, unhinged from the very real pleasures of living.) But I think one of the problems with the obligatory-edgy is that it is a little impatient: it fails to account for the fact that this is an individual guy, not an emblem of something—there’s time and space in his life for him to be a lot of things. So maybe, today, he’s happy. . .

Also, the obligatory edgy component can also be just that: obligatory, i.e., a tic.

Sometimes when I read new fiction, I feel that the writers of it, myself included, have a somewhat dysfunctional relationship with our own culture. I don’t mean we disapprove of it. I mean that we have absorbed so much habitual disapproval of it that we are no longer able to see it, and therefore are unable to disapprove of it properly. How can you disapprove (or approve) of something you no longer see? If your palette of possible modes of representation has been habitually narrowed and restricted (to the edgy, the snarky, the hip, etc., etc.), if that palette has been shorn of, say, the spiritual, the ineffable, the earnest, the mysterious—of awe, wonder, humility, the truly unanswerable questions—then there isn’t much hope of any real newness there. Are the very real pleasures of being an American in 2011 underrepresented in our fiction? Are the very real terrors of living in other, less functional cultures, adequately taken into account when we critique our own? If America is sick, what is the exact nature of the illness? Beyond that, are we taking as much pleasure in the sensual as we should be: in, for example, the weird ways our towns and cities have accreted, the endless interesting American geographies (a line of U-Hauls 20 feet away from the pioneer graveyard, etc., etc)? Is there joy enough in what we’re doing, because God knows, life is short, and if we don’t learn, by the end, to regard all of this mess with joy, it seems to me we haven’t done our work properly.

Well, speaking of things “devolving,” this is now devolving into the literary equivalent of some middle-aged uncle at a party, ranting about how disappointing all of Creation has become, just in the last few years, especially that a-hole down at the parking garage. And I really don’t mean the above to be anything more than a representation of the kinds of swamp I find myself wallowing in, in order to keep my writing interesting, to me and hopefully to others—more of a gut-check than a manifesto.

And of course, in the end, all of the talk notwithstanding, you go in there and write the scene, and if the icicle version is more interesting than the sincere non-icicle version, you better go with it. Our hero strides away from the Rockefeller Center chocolate shop, visions of sugar-plums dancing in his head—and then you, the writer, look to see where that earlier-mentioned Frisbee is coming from, and do your best to catch it.


Read the rest of the interview here. . . .