Choire Sicha is writing a book!

Thank you, publishing world, for this gift. I told you you'd have my money the day you found a way for me to give back to Choire Sicha. Now I have something to daydream about during my night job.

"It used to be, you came to New York and you got a job as an assistant, and sooner or later you got to have part of your boss’s job and you moved up," Mr. Sicha said. "There was sort of a continuum. There was a thing called a career in New York."

Not anymore.

Finally!

YES YES YES! Congrats to Joseph O'Neill, winner of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award! A well-deserved victory.

Some of the branches of this tree produce lemons, others oranges

Image via Old Roads.

Tayeb Salih, author of Season of Migration to the North, has passed away. His prose is elegantly translated into English by Denys Johnson-Davies, and is an absolute treat. You can read Season of Migration in just an hour or two - I highly recommend it. More on Salih is available at Laila Lalami.

It's a long story, but I won't tell you everything. Some details won't be of great interest to you, but others...

Books I Read in 2008

I am missing a book list, but here are the ones I have been able to think of:

Gone Tomorrow by P.F. Kluge
Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Magic For Beginners by Kelly Link
Demons In Spring by Joe Meno
The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno
Astroturf by M.G. Lord
Haroun and Other Stories by Salman Rushdie
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
Bottomless Bellybutton by Dash Shaw
Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman
Animal Crackers by Hannah Tinti
The Last Life by Claire Messud
The 13 Clocks by James Thurber
The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff
The Goldbeater's Skin by G.C. Waldrep
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
Don't Bump the Glump by Shel Silverstein
The Pick-Up by Nadine Gordimer
The Implacable Order of Things by Jose Luis Peixoto
A Simple Heart by Gustav Flaubert
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Oroonoko by Aphra Behn
The Wanderer, The Seafarer
Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Paradise Lost by John Milton
The Collected Poems of John Milton
The Collected Poems of John Donne
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
Sula by Toni Morrison
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
As You Like It by Shakespeare
Hamlet by Shakespeare
In Defense of Posey by Philip Sidney
Opened Ground by Seamus Heaney
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
Max Makes Millions by Maira Kalman
Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso
The Maytrees by Annie Dillard
The Branch Will Not Break by James Wright
Big Machine by Victor LaValle
Last Night At The Lobster by Stewart O'Nan
How To Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen
My Antonia by Willa Cather
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
Tooth and Claw by T.C. Boyle
The Human Fly and Other Stories by T.C. Boyle
New Sudden Fiction edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas
Flash Fiction Forward edited by James Thomas and Robert Shapard (their names are listed in different orders - perhaps to make things even?)

Books I am still only halfway through, but have not abandoned (in fact, some I only treat myself to on special occasions):
The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor
Timbuktu by Paul Auster
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
The Portable Dorothy Parker
Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
Demonology by Rick Moody
Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
Alma Mater by P.F. Kluge
Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

This week I am working through Not-Knowing by Donald Barthelme. More on this soon.

Networking books

I want a social networking site for books, please.

Internet Gods, are you listening?

I want to create a profile with my favorite authors, titles, and excerpts. I want to gush about my favorite editions. I want strangers who love Amy Hempel to write on my wall and tell me about one of Hempel's former students who has just published a collection of short stories. I want to know when an author I'm reading is participating in a panel in the city. I want to read reviews and comments from other users and other publications. I want to be able to read excerpts from literary magazines or brand-new novels. I want to read the first two pages so I get excited to rush to the bookstore after a long day at work and a long commute on the crowded subway. I want to be so excited to open that new book that I can't even take the time to take my gloves off. I want to peek at the book in the bag as I walk out of the store - no, I don't even want a bag, I want to carry it so I can open it as I walk.

I will happily list my location and photographs of my bookshelves if this is granted to me. I will happily receive advertisements from publishing houses. I will happily buy a drink at a bar where my new favorite author is reading, and I will pay full price for the hardcover. If it's good, I'll buy multiple copies as gifts.

Facebook will not suffice. I want something more specialized. I want to judge other people by their favorite writers. If authors want to participate, I would be happy to send little messages with flattering notes or constructive criticism, whichever they need more.

I want to make more connections with people on the internet that read. Blogs do not put this content together in a perfect form. Perhaps the social networking world could do better.

This Tuesday

On our drive back from Ohio, I read an issue of Tuesday: An Art Project. I happen to have a weakness for postcards in general, but there was something lovely about having a series of postcards printed on fine, thick paper with both poetry and images.

This may be my favorite new little literary magazine. (Indubitably I've professed love for Ninth Letter on this blog before, and you know how I feel about the Kenyon Review.) Tyler Meier recommended these to me, because the outside of the journal folds out to be a poster and the inside is full of things you can mail.

There is something about the presence of a crowd of poems settled into your lap that quietly demands your attention. I highly recommend a back issue for a long drive, if you have one coming up in the next few weeks.

Things to read

1) Jonathan Lethem's review of 2666.

2) The women who took care of Marc Chagall and the way they changed his art. (I'll admit I wish I could look at his art without knowing he left his 19-year-old girlfriend for his best friend, and that he cut his daughter out of his life because of his last wife.)

3) The Golden Notebook. I think I've mentioned our project, but Barack Obama liked it, and perhaps you trust his taste.

Commercial publishing

Didn't expect the media to come down so hard on Samuel J. Wurtzelbacher, but these stories should pass within a short period of time. It's kind of boring - I didn't mean to add to the media onslaught. So to make it up to you, here are some highlights from Bookninja's book cover contest.










Happy Friday.

Miniature Elephants Are Popular

(Illustration by Paul Hornschemeier.)

Sometimes I just really love a book and have to tell everyone I know about it. And maybe some people I don't know.

The thing getting me through the job search this month is a new book by Joe Meno titled Demons in Spring. I picked it up in an independent bookstore in Williamsburg, Spoonbill & Sugartown, and read two short stories that broke my heart. The editors who lectured at Columbia often said, "You cry, you buy," and that's how I felt setting down $27 of my grocery money at the counter. (Profits from this book are going to a writing/tutoring nonprofit called 826Chicago.)

It's absolutely worth it. My favorites so far are "Miniature Elephants are Popular," about a friendship between an old man and his tiny pet with charming illustrations by Todd Baxter, and "An Apple Could Make You Laugh," a story of an offbeat office romance illustrated by Geoff McFetridge. You can sense that this is a writer from the McSweeney's generation, but he's certainly the best of the bunch. You can read an interview with him by Bookslut from 2005. The stories are silly and a little post-modern, but he has a deep respect and reverence for each of his characters, which sets his writing above the rest and is a testament to his imagination.
Akashic Books did a fantastic job with the production also; the cover is beautiful, the inside cover is beautiful, the illustrations are beautiful - really, I applaud them!

Joe Meno's got a reading coming up in Park Slope on September 12th, and you can bet I'll be there.