Fiction: Going Ashore by Mavis Gallant

To say that Going Ashore (Douglas Gibson Books/McClelland & Stewart) may well be the most important work of fiction that will be published in Canada in 2009 sounds like hyperbole of the highest order. And, actually, it pretty much is. Yet immerse yourself in Mavis Gallant’s world. Read these 31 stories -- some of them never before published intact in book form -- and try to imagine anything finer.

This is the writer that Fran Lebowitz has called the “irrefutable master of the short story in English,” and whom Michael Ondaatje said was one of “the great short story writers of our time.” Even the uninitiated won’t find it difficult to understand the praise. For the passionate reader, Going Ashore is pure pleasure. For the writer, it is that and education, as well. This is some of the very best work of a writer whose career spans over 50 years.

Douglas Gibson, who has published Gallant in Canada since 1978, tells us that Going Ashore began to take shape when Gallant let him know that not all of her short stories were still in print.

“Intrigued,” he writes, “I encouraged her to compile a list of the ‘missing’ stories, and promised to publish them. She was delighted, and asked me -- in a typically direct way -- if I could bring the book out before she died. We are such old friends that I felt able to answer with another question: ‘What are your plans in this regard, Mavis?’ She laughed, and started to make research enquiries.”

And so it is that, in Gibson’s words, he was able to publish a collection “that will delight [Gallant’s] admirers, who will find that, at eighty-six, she is able to bring out a book of distinctive yet unfamiliar stories that are full of surprises.”

Non-Fiction: The Pursuit of Perfect by Tal Ben-Shahar

If, in the course of reading a towering stack of books intended to make you perform better, faster and stronger you discover you have pushed yourself too close to perfection, then The Pursuit of Perfect (McGraw Hill) may well be the book for you.

After a decade of teaching Happiness classes at Harvard (one gets the idea of a class of grad students sitting around blowing bubbles, but I don’t think that’s it) author, philosopher and psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar came to understand that most people aspire to more than mere happiness. Whether or not they realized it, people wanted perfection in their lives.

The result should be obvious (but does not seem to be until it is pointed out). If you crave and search for perfection, you will inevitably be disappointed -- both in yourself and the world around you. If you need perfection in your life, you’ve failed before you get out of the gate. The Pursuit of Perfect is the answer to that discovery, with Ben-Shahar guiding you through the idea of looking for attainable self-fulfillment rather than setting unrealistic goals that can’t fail to do anything but disappoint.

In addition to teaching the topic at Harvard, Ben Shahar is the author of the bestselling Happiness, so he knows this topic from many angles. He writes engagingly and is an accomplished thinker who says much that is worthy of attention. The Pursuit of Perfect is a must-read for the overachiever in your life.

New Today: Children of the Waters by Carleen Brice

In 2008, Carleen Brice was named Breakout Author of the Year at the African American Literary Awards Show. The book under discussion at that time was her debut novel, Orange Mint and Honey (which has, incidentally, been optioned for film by the Lifetime Movie Network).

Though Orange Mint and Honey was Brice’s debut novel, that well-received work was not her first book. She is also the author of the non-fiction works Lead Me Home: An African American’s Guide Through the Grief Journey; Walk Tall: Affirmations for People of Color and she edited Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number: Black Women Explore Midlife. As can be gleaned from the title of those books, Brice is deeply concerned with issues of race and how those issues manifest themselves in contemporary America.

That concern shows again in her most recent book, Children of the Waters (One World). Here Brice introduces us to Trish Taylor, a white woman married to a black man with whom she is raising a child. When Trish’s marriage ends, she returns to her family home in Denver where she begins to unlock a series of secrets spiraling out from one that is central to her understanding of her family. Trish had been told her mother and baby sister, Billie, died in a car crash many years before. But Trish discovers that her sister didn’t die. Billie was put up for adoption because her mother’s parents didn’t want to raise a biracial child. There are other secrets. And deep misunderstandings and a lot of ground to cover before those misunderstandings and hurts decades old can be put to rest.

Children of the Waters is, for the most part, an enjoyable journey. Are there times when it seems that Brice’s concern for issues of race overtakes her story? Perhaps. But it’s a good story and Brice is a wonderful writer. How can one fault passion when that passion is part of what makes the tale exactly what it is?

Children’s Books: Ghost with A Message by Mary K. Pershall

Ruby Clair is a girl who sees dead people. Well, the ghost of her cousin Nicola, anyway, plus any ghosts Nicola sends her way. Because she can see ghosts, Ruby can help them adjust. Ghost With A Message (Penguin Books Australia) is the second book in the Ruby Clair series. The ghost is a small child who has a message for her family, but can’t speak any better than any other three year old.

Ruby wants to help, but it makes things awkward for her with her friends and family, to whom she can’t explain what’s going on. Somehow, she manages to work out what the ghost child is trying to tell her, help the ghost’s family and make a new friend.

This is a gentle story with both humor and serious elements. It is a book that girls in middle to late primary school should enjoy.

Edwards Aide to Ink Tell-All

There’s something really awful in this item from Muckety:

A man who was one of former Senator John Edwards’s closest aides has a deal to write a tell-all book about Edwards’ affair with Rielle Hunter that among other things repudiates his earlier claim that he is the father of Hunter’s baby.

The aide, Andrew A. Young (not to be confused with politician and diplomat Andrew J. Young), reportedly signed a contract with St. Martin’s Press for an undisclosed price to tell his story about the former presidential candidate.

‘Nuff said about this one, I think. We’ll file it under Books You Just Don’t Want to Know About and call it done, done, done like dinner.

Review: Tuck by Stephen R. Lawhead

Today in January Magazine’s SF/F section, Iain Emsley reviews Tuck by Stephen R. Lawhead.

Setting the native British mythology against the conquering Norman stories, Lawhead echoes Philip Reeve’s Here Lies Arthur in trying to recover the real person behind the legend. Says Emsley:

Stephen Lawhead's Tuck is the final installment of the King Raven trilogy. A retelling of the Robin Hood stories, Lawhead moves away from the Middle Eastern settings in his previous novels to the Marches, the borderlands between England and Wales, after the Norman conquest.

The full review is here.

New in Paperback: The Oxford Companion to Italian Food by Gillian Riley

If you were to ask cookbook aficionados for a list of the ten most influential cookbooks of all time, I’m betting that most all of them would include Larousse Gastronomique somewhere on that list. First published in 1938, that book is much more than a cookbook. It is an encyclopedia of gastronomy from the French perspective. You don’t necessarily read Larousse, you graze it, browsing at various entries as your make your way, in leisurely fashion, from back to front, or however else you want to enjoy it. You’re safe in knowing that, every time you go in, you’re going to take something new out. It’s not so much a cookbook, then, as an amazing, never-ending literary lunch.

In many ways, all of these things also describe The Oxford Companion to Italian Food (Oxford) very well. In many ways, it’s set up just like Larousse, with two columns per page of smallish type with the entries arranged alphabetically. And so we learn about Burrida, (“… a Sardinian way of serving fish like skate…”) Burrino, (“a kind of butter of ghee”) and Butter all on a single page.

Those accustomed to glossy cookbooks featuring fashionably out-of-focus photos of food and pride in the few words required to share a recipe might take some time becoming acclimated to The Oxford Companion to Italian Food. Because this is more than a cookbook: it is, as Chef Mario Batali says in the foreword, a tour of “Italy’s rich culinary history.”

If you want to know how to make pasta, other books will likely get you there more directly. But if you also want to know how pasta came into the vernacular, how it was invented, developed and how it can variously be prepared, then The Oxford Companion to Italian Food will be the book for you.

Conrad V. Conrad

Joseph Conrad’s masterwork, Heart of Darkness, first published in book form in 1902, is one of the best known works of fiction in the English language. It was the inspiration -- and more -- for Francis Ford Coppola’s amazing 1979, Apocalypse Now starring a brilliant but off-kilter Marlon Brando and a beautifully sweaty Martin Sheen. The book itself is at once darkly luminous and disturbing. An unforgettable novel that has left an indelible mark on the literature of this language.

Though he died in 1924, Conrad’s line has gone on. And on. One of the better known of his descendants is Lauren Conrad, whose own dark heart appears to beat for fashion. Twenty-three-year-old Lauren’s life is being documented on the MTV hit reality series The Hills. The Hills follows Lauren through her fashion-focused world. It’s not a world that invites literary expectations. Using the word “literary” in the same sentence as Lauren’s debut novel, L.A. Candy (HarperCollins), is probably pushing things a bit. (Well, they both do have words, after all.) But stir in the pedigree and -- voila! -- if nothing else, the publication of the novel calls up the potential for satire. Here The Daily Beast answers that call with a quiz that challenges the reader to take a stab at telling the difference between the work of Conrads, old and new. In some cases, making the determination would demand an expert eye:

A. The place was beautiful, all vintage ivory wallpaper and polished oak floors. In the center of the room, a circular glass table displayed a single white orchid.

B. The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her forehead.

With others, it’s a little easier to tell.

A. To tell you the truth, I was morbidly anxious to change my shoes and socks.

B. “You look pretty in that dress. And those peep-hole shoes are hot.”

Either way, it’s a fun exercise that invites us to laugh at our own pretensions. (And I’m still not going to watch The Hills.)

So can Conrad fille write? I don’t know: HarperCollins -- probably wisely -- didn’t send us a copy. The reviews I’ve seen have mostly been more about the fashionista author than they have about what’s actually in the book, though the cover and the publisher’s promotional material both paint an astonishingly empty picture. (“Los Angeles is all about the sweet life: hot clubs, cute guys, designer ... everything. Nineteen-year-old Jane Roberts can’t wait to start living it up. She may be in L.A. for an internship, but Jane plans to play as hard as she works, and has enlisted her BFF Scarlett to join in the fun.”) But as Sherryl Connelly points out in her review for The New York Daily News, “what the heck. No reality stars were harmed in the making of this novel. And Conrad has a future to forge. With two more books to come, she has at least one iron in the fire.”

UK Indie Rushing Michael Jackson Biography to Press

They’re probably not the only ones rushing a biography of pop prince Michael Jackson to press. However U.K. independent publisher, John Blake, is getting some ink just days after the pop star died in Los Angeles on Thursday. From The Bookseller:

Michael Jackson -- King of Pop: 1958-2009 is being written by Emily Herbert, a long-time fan of Jackson, who has interviewed him “on several occasions” in the past. It is scheduled for release on 24th August and will be a B-format paperback, priced £7.99.

Blake said he had not intended to publish a book on the star, and that his decision to do so came in light of widespread requests from retailers. “The trade asked us to do it,” he said. The publisher is now planning an initial print run of 100,000 copies, and making the author available for “all forms of publicity” including radio and newspaper interviews.

Author Snapshot: Clea Simon

We engage with the work of the authors we love on many levels. In the case of fiction, that engagement is often about a careful blend of passion and voice. In non-fiction, it seems to me it’s about heart and sincere understanding of the material under study. It’s why the authors who excel at both fiction and non are rare. Those four things -- passion, skill, heart and research -- are unlikely to surface in a single person. When it does crop up, more often than not, the writer in question is a journalist.

Clea Simon is not the exception to the rule. A respected journalist whose credits include The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, Ms. and Salon, Simon wrote three critically acclaimed works of non-fiction before penning her first novel, 2005’s Mew is for Murder, the first in a series of popular mysteries featuring Boston rock journalist, Theda Krakow and her well loved cat, Musetta. The fourth book in the series, Probable Claws (Poisoned Pen Press), was published in April. Despite the punny titles and the strong cat connections, Simon points out that the cats in her books don’t talk. In fact, Simon has referred to the books featuring Theda and Musetta as “kitty noir,” something she says with a smile but is only half-joking about. And she’s right: there is a whiff of the darkness at the edges of the tales she’s chosen to tell here. Murder, mystery and music via the Boston club scene that Simon herself knows very well. A strong core of animal rights and welfare run through Simon’s books, though never in a self-righteous way. Readers knowledgeable about animal protection issues will find themselves nodding in agreement, those who aren’t will find knowledge shared in an interesting way.

Mystery, music, nightclubs, animals in danger: on a certain level, it’s an unlikely combination, yet, somehow, it works very well. And why? That special blend, I think: passion, heart, understanding and voice, voice, voice. Simon’s is as strong and clear as the passion she brings to the stories she tells.


A snapshot of... Clea Simon
Most recent book: Probable Claws
Born: East Meadow, NY
Reside: Cambridge, MA
Birthday: July 27 (I’m a Leo!)
Web site: www.cleasimon.com



What’s your favorite city?
Well, I adore Cambridge, where I live, but I’d have to say New Orleans. Not sure I could live there, but I need regular fixes, for sure.

You only have six hours to spend there. What do you do?
Eat oysters at Acme, browse the “early novel” shelves at Beckham’s Books (where I have found many wonderful, sentimental turn-of-the-20th century finds), stop in at Louisiana Music Factory, and then head out to Tipitina’s, where through some marvelous happenstance Rebirth is opening for, oh, let’s say Dr. John. If there’s any time left, I’d end up at Coop’s or Clover Grill before the celestial ride home.

What food do you love?
Easier to say what I don’t... um, all seafood? Pheasant, quail, and andouille gumbo? Spicy boiled crawfish? (Can you tell I’m recently back from the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Fest?)

What food have you vowed never to touch again?
The pre-cooked crawfish that a dear friend had shipped to me as a present. Very well intentioned. Very scary.

What’s on your nightstand?
Lens cleaner, a glowing squirt frog to squirt water at the cat when she gets rambunctious at four a.m. (the fact that it’s a glowing squirt frog helps), the books from the pile up the side of the nightstand that are leaning onto it for support. Clock radio set on the local college station.

What inspires you?
Talking with friends about making art (music, painting, writing).

What are you working on now?
I have just sent the sequel to Shades of Grey off to my agent. I’m sure she’ll suggest more revisions before we send it to my editor, but right now, I’m catching up on a lot of freelance and other things that had been pushed aside. Shades of Grey is the first in a new series, slightly paranormal, that Severn House will publish in September, but the sequel, tentatively titled “Grey Matters,” is due on May 31. It’s very odd to be finishing up the sequel before having any real-world feedback on the first book, but I’m grateful for Severn’s interest! At some point, I want to start revising my tongue-in-cheek pet noir, find a publisher for that...

Tell us about your process, please.
Although I try to write mornings, these days I find myself needing to get the money work (editing, mostly) done first and the creative stuff really kicks in mid-afternoon. I usually write to a word count (i.e., 1,000 words a day), five days a week. And although I have a basic idea of the book’s direction and a white board with sticky notes all over it of ideas I’ve had that often make little sense within 24 hours (such as “He has green eyes!” Or “Lloyd shows up at Bullock’s”) I tend to need to write the book out, then revise it to make sense.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
My iPod recharging, my various cat fetishes. A wilting daffodil and the cereal bowl from my breakfast.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I always knew that’s what I wanted. It just took a few years (as a journalist, an editor and in various other publishing jobs) before I realized it was feasible.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
Pulling my hair out? I don’t know. Probably just cooking a lot more, or maybe studying zoology. I always wanted to be a herpetologist. But that’s because I love frogs and toads. I hated having to dissect them.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
This one changes. But I still have saved, on my answering machine, my agent singing “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas...” from December, when we got the Severn House offer.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
The dress code. Right now, I’m wearing sweats and big fuzzy socks. Several years ago, I gave away all the suits I had from my days working as a magazine editor.

What’s the most difficult?
The waiting. I don’t even mind the rejections so much as the waiting. When someone rejects something, you can revise it and send it out again. But not knowing? The worst.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
Where do I get my ideas? To which I don’t have a good answer. Also, if my heroines are me. To which I can only say, all my characters are part of me.

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
I’d like to be asked about specific plot or character developments in the book -- why did this character do that? More generally, how do your stories/characters develop?

What question would like never to be asked again?
“Why don’t you send a copy to Oprah?”

Please tell us about Probable Claws.
It’s the fourth, and I suspect maybe the last, Theda Krakow mystery. Theda has reached a turning point in her life. Her friends’ lives have all changed: Bill, her boyfriend, has retired from the police and is managing a jazz club, a job that takes a lot of his time. Bunny is about to become a mother. Violet is fully ensconced in her own relationship and her shelter work. The newspaper business is changing. Theda has to figure out where she stands in this new world, and there are no easy answers. It’s funny, because my editor thought it should be obvious that the next step for Theda is to get married. I don’t think it’s obvious. I think that things cannot stay the way they have, but that she has legitimate concerns and interests pushing her various ways.

This is all set against a backdrop of a very real, and possibly unresolvable conflict in animal welfare: the issue of euthanasia. Nobody wants to kill healthy animals, but there are too many cats, dogs, etc., for shelters to care for. So lots of places are trying innovative campaigns to reduce the necessity of euthanasia -- better matching people and pets, fostering animals, etc. -- but it’s an asymptotic approach to the absolute of eliminating the practice. And there is a lot of tension between shelters with different philosophies, a tension ratcheted up by the struggle for funds. Well, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that in this conflict, you might have a murder. A “no kill” murder, if you will.

Because, oh yeah, there’s also a murder!

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
I was about to type, “I’m very lazy at heart and only write out of fear of deadline.” But a lot of people know that. So, um, I’ll have to come up with something else. But then I’d have to kill you.

“The Day the 70s Died”

Will June 25th be remembered as the day the 70s died? That’s what some social-media mavens were asking yesterday when two 1970s pop-culture icons passed away within hours of each other.

Former Charlie’s Angels star Farrah Fawcett, 62, died of complications resulting from the cancer she had been publicly battling for some time, while 1970s child star -- and publicly off-kilter adult -- Michael Jackson, 50, died of cardiac arrest, the direct result of an intentionally lethal drug overdose.

You don’t need to go far to find news stories on either icon. Or both. Of all the ones we saw, though, the most relevant to January’s readership (aside, of course, from J. Kingston Pierce’s delicate send-off of Fawcett, “An Angel Gets Her Wings”) was Amy Wallace’s piece on Fawcett for The Daily Beast. Wallace’s piece illustrates Fawcett’s little known “brainy side” as well as the star’s friendship with the writer Ayn Rand.

A recent e-mail exchange with the late Farrah Fawcett reveals the unlikely friendship between the Charlie's Angels star and the novelist Ayn Rand, who helped the actress understand her place in culture -- and longed to cast her in a TV version of Atlas Shrugged.

Wallace tells us several things “almost no one knew about Fawcett”:

1) Fawcett and the writer Ayn Rand shared a birthday, February 2.

2) Rand, the inventor of the philosophical system called Objectivism, never missed an episode of Charlie’s Angels. She was such a Fawcett fan, in fact, that she sought to cast the actress as the lead in a planned TV miniseries version of her best-known work, the gargantuan novel Atlas Shrugged. (NBC later scrapped the project).

3) Rand, perhaps better than anyone else, helped Fawcett understand her place in American culture.

Holden Losing His Hold?

We have been keeping track on this page (see here, here, and here) of efforts to publish 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, a takeoff on J.D. Salinger’s best-selling novel, Catcher in the Rye. But as The New York Times observes, Salinger’s teenage protagonist, Holden Caulfield, “may have bigger problems than the insults of irreverent parodists and other ‘phonies,’ as Holden would put it.” Writes Jennifer Schuessler:

Even as Mr. Salinger, who is 90 and in ailing health, seeks to keep control of his most famous creation, there are signs that Holden may be losing his grip on the kids.

“The Catcher in the Rye,” published in 1951, is still a staple of the high school curriculum, beloved by many teachers who read and reread it in their own youth. The trouble is today’s teenagers. Teachers say young readers just don’t like Holden as much as they used to. What once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many of them as “weird,” “whiny” and “immature.”

The alienated teenager has lost much of his novelty, said Ariel Levenson, an English teacher at the Dalton School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Holden’s home turf. She added that even the students who liked the book tend to find the language--“phony,” “her hands were lousy with rocks,” the relentless “goddams”--grating and dated.

“Holden Caulfield is supposed to be this paradigmatic teenager we can all relate to, but we don’t really speak this way or talk about these things,” Ms. Levenson said, summarizing a typical response. At the public charter school where she used to teach, she said, “I had a lot of students comment, ‘I can’t really feel bad for this rich kid with a weekend free in New York City.’ ”

The full Times article can be found here.

READ MORE: “Oh, Holden. Life Is Still So Hard for You,”
by John Green.

Review: A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, Diane Leach looks at A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert. Says Leach:

Dorothy Trevor Townsend is starving herself to death. Her cause is not anorexia, but suffrage. The year is 1914, and though a war is on, the brilliant Townsend is doing her best to make a statement, to be heard of above the horrible din of war. She is willing to die for her cause, heedless of her children, Evelyn and Thomas, of her lover, William Crawford, of her mother, who will be stuck with her orphaned children. Dorothy dies for her cause, and is immortalized on a commerative postage stamp, a burden or honorific to be borne by her descendants.

Author Kate Walbert has created an interleaved narrative of five generations of Townsend women, moving across time from England to San Francisco to New York City. In each era another Townsend finds herself fighting for her place among men.

The full review is here.

New in Paperback: Close by Martina Cole

It seems to me that there is almost no chance that North American readers will cotton to Close (Grand Central), UK megaseller Martina Cole’s official U.S. debut. It’s not that Close is bad. In fact, it isn’t. It’s just very, very different.

On this side of the pond, we are used to a certain amount of polish and finish. If we encounter a run-on sentence or a dropped semicolon, we head to a writing forum and bemoan the fact that editors no longer edit. We have a certain -- I’ll just say it -- expectation of gloss. It was one of the things that struck me last year about the much ballyhooed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I remember thinking that book would never have been published in the United States as it was. There were raw edges, sometimes odd jumps. The book was artful -- late author Stieg Larsson was a journalist, after all. But I think a lot of what was good and raw about that book would have been sanded away if it had been published first in the United States.

Now, don’t misunderstand: this is absolutely not meant to be a comparison of the work of Larsson and Cole. In fact, I feel safe in saying there is no planet on which these two should be considered comparable books. Neither of them are American books, certainly. But in very different ways. In fact, were I to compare Cole’s work in Close with anyone at all it would be the films of Guy Ritchie. I wouldn’t even be surprised if someone were to tell me that Ritchie is a fan of Cole’s and admires her work. There is the same sort of breathless abandon in Close that there is in, say, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. The same sort of gritty hyper-reality. The England of both Ritchie and Cole has less in common with Austen and Eliot than it does with -- just say -- the moon. Inhale deeply on a summer Saturday evening and you will not smell the English countryside. No flowers, no forest, nothing growing at all. Instead you’ll get the slightly rancid hit from the dodgy chip shop down the way and the pong of the cheap perfume worn by the scantily clad young tarts who are still desperately trying to meet the young men who will ruin their lives.

For both Ritchie and Cole, the London underworld is culture as well as community. Sure, there are cops... somewhere. But, mostly, law enforcement doesn’t figure in: more occasional nuisance -- and perhaps plot device -- than any real threat.

On-screen, however, the lack of cohesion in a Ritchie film comes off as artful, whereas in Close, it sometimes just seems like a mess. I spent a lot of time going backwards, especially at first, before I caught Cole’s rhythm. She jumps us ruthlessly and relentlessly from scene to scene. Quite often the jumps seem pointless. There is no sense of bringing readers carefully to one place so they can then savor the next. Rather, you feel as though Cole simply had enough talking about that bit, and wanted to move onto something else.

Cole is not a writer’s writer. There is little craftsmanship in what she does here and in some ways, that isn’t a criticism. As she moves us through the misspent lives and careers of the Brodie family and those whose lives touch theirs, she spends more time belaboring the contents of their skulls than she ever does the exciting ways in which those contents are sometimes released. If you’ve ever heard that writers should show a thing, not tell it, and you wanted to know exactly what was meant, read Close: I’ve never been told so much all in one go.

All of that said, one never doubts that Cole knows her stuff and, for whatever reason, she seems to understand this world. More importantly for the reader: despite all the things she does “wrong,” Close is a very tough book to put down. Cole is, after all, one of the United Kingdom’s top-selling authors and all 15 of her books to date have been bestsellers. A television adaptation of an earlier novel, The Take, made headlines in the UK earlier this month. With that kind of success, it’s clear Cole is doing something right. I’m just not sure North American audiences will be able to see past Cole’s ham-fisted prose in order to glean what those things are.

New This Month: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton is, first and foremost, a philosopher. Just a few months shy of his 40th birthday, de Botton is perhaps one of the most important philosophers alive today. Arguably, of course. But then, that’s part of the point of philosophy, is it not? Everything we see isn’t always what it seems and where we look is not necessarily where what is searched for will be found. Things like that. Philosophy is intended to help us not only answer questions, but -- perhaps more importantly -- to help us work up the right answers. It’s a field that is too often ignored or overlooked in our busy world.

Case in point: the word “philosophy” comes up not once in de Botton’s bio for his new book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. He’s called “a bestselling author.” This is, of course, not inaccurate: de Botton’s books sell very, very well. But it is interesting that the word at the core of his work -- the word that drives it, if you will -- has been, as much as possible, struck from conversations about his writing. This can’t be unintentional. For some reason I still can’t comprehend, the word “philosophy” strikes terror into the hearts of many people. And it should not, which is why I belabor it here. Once again. (The first time I did so in this space was in a review of an earlier de Botton work, The Consolations of Philosophy, way back in 2000.)

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is another enjoyable foray into serious thought with a witty, knowledgeable and considerate guide. As much as anything, de Botton is a keen and practiced observer and through his eyes we see what is delightful and horrible and defeating and satisfying about how we put bread on our tables.

More than any of his previous books, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is as much art project as powerful social statement. In many ways, it is a deeply personal book, one that I suspect will be interpreted differently -- personally -- by each reader. As he journeys, de Botton asks and leads us to answer: why do we work? What makes work joyous? Is it meaningful? In the larger picture for our planet, is work worth it?

Excerpt: Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton

Horse Soldiers (Scribner) is the dramatic account of a small band of Special Forces soldiers who secretly entered Afghanistan following 9/11 and rode to war on horses against the Taliban:

Trouble came in the night, riding out of the dust and the darkness. Trouble rolled past the refugee camp, past the tattered tents shuddering in the moonlight, the lone cry of a baby driving high into the sky, like a nail. Sunrise was no better; at sunrise, trouble was still there, bristling with AKs and RPGs, engines idling, waiting to roll into the city. Waiting.

These were the baddest of the bad, the real masters of mayhem, the death dealers with God stamped firmly in their minds. The city groaned and shook to life. Soon everyone knew trouble had arrived at the gates of the city.

Read the full excerpt here.

Cookbooks: Dad’s Awesome Grilling Book by Bob Sloan

Why has our culture seemingly gone out of its way to link cooking outdoors over flaming coals with men? When looked at very carefully what, truly, does one have to do with the other? Something primal, perhaps? Something hunter to a woman’s gatherer? In his reasonably impressive new Dad’s Awesome Grilling Book (Chronicle Books) award-winning food writer Bob Sloan tries to sum things up.

Like so many Dads, I love to grill. Perhaps it’s being so close to the fire that harkens back to an earlier, simpler time -- before, say, income tax or Jerry Springer. The grill is, after all, just a man, a pair of tongs, and heat.

What could be simpler? And Dad’s Awesome Grilling Book is simple but it’s also, in some ways, quite beyond simple. Do you really think, for instance, you can dismiss “Lamb Picadillo,” “Scallops & Prosciutto on Rosemary Skewers” or “Grilled Halibut Reggio Emilia Style” as simple? They might be easy, but we’re several layers beyond grilled weenies and reheated beans.

The recipes here are uniformly terrific: well-planned, creative, original and -- based on both tests and observations -- all quite do-able. Sloan’s descriptions of the grilling experience is lucid and recommendations on necessary equipment and “must-have” materials are right on target.

Dad’s Awesome Grilling Book joins a very long line of excellent outdoor cooking books, including 2008’s excellent Patio Daddy-O at the Grill and Weber’s Way to Grill, which I talked about in this space a few weeks ago.

Biography: We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals by Gillian Gill

When a biography is very good and is also big and muscular, it’s common to compare the book to a novel. And what makes such a comparison valid? Certainly not -- or hopefully not -- a strong element of fabrication. Rather, how the book impacts the reader draws compare. A very good biography -- well researched, written with passion and competence, on a subject worthy of close examination -- will sweep the reader away. Take him or her to the special place in the imagination that good books inhabit. The characters -- or in the case of biography, the subject -- seem emotionally to leap off the page. They become real.

If, in fact, this is what is necessary for a biography to be crooned over as novel-like, then We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals (Ballantine Books) will be. Author Gillian Gill is that rarest of combinations: an academic (she’s taught at Northeastern, Wellesley, Yale and Harvard) who knows just how to spin a tale. She demonstrated same with earlier biographies of Florence Nightingale, Agatha Christie and Mary Baker Eddy. In We Too she tells the complicated story of one history’s most important and complicated royal couples: Queen Victoria and her Prince Consort, Albert.

Gill reveals a relationship much more complex than has popularly been thought. A passionate marriage, but one fraught with power struggles as well as a family trying to find its way through the confounding corridors of a life lived on center stage.

“At a distance,” Gill writes, “Queen Victoria and Prince Albert can look like charming tapestry figures, unicorns among flowering meadows, irrelevant to our modern world. But if we listen to their voices up close, we find to our surprise a forerunner of today’s power couple -- a husband and wife, each with a different personal agenda, but lovers as well as partners in a great enterprise, both leading meticulously scheduled, constantly monitored, minutely recorded, and carefully screened lives.”

Gill brings us their voices. It’s impossible to imagine a better biography of this deeply interesting and historically important pair or a more vivid picture of the times in which they lived.

Fiction: Fishing for Bacon by Michael Davie

I’m beginning to think that 2009 might well be remembered as the year that potential Canadian YA masterworks got lost in the waterfall of mainstream fiction.

First there was Alan Bradley’s lively but clearly juvenile The Sweetness of the Bottom the Pie (Doubleday Canada). Now comes Calgarian Michael Davies’ cheerfully abrupt Fishing for Bacon (Newest Press). The book features fresh-from-high school lost youth, Bacon Sobelowski who claims, almost from the very first, that he has bad timing. He gets stuck with the name “Bacon” during his birth, when his mother can think of nothing but her breakfast.

Afterward, when a nurse informed my mother that I was a boy, she curled around her pillow and sighed, “Bacon.” When the nurse asked her if she had a name for Baby Boy Sobelowski, my mother starred at the cold, grey wall and sniveled, “Bacon.”

The writing is crisp and sharp and though the story is somewhat thin, so is the book. While some of the theme’s are clearly adult, Bacon’s youthful verve would have been much tougher to resist in a slightly refocused package.

Fast Takes…

Here are some of the things we’ve been microblogging about over the last week or so.

• Today is Salman Rushdie’s birthday. Here’s the interview we did with him back in 2002. An interesting side note: January art director, David Middleton, did a photo shoot with Rushdie with predictably smashing results. And one of the unexpected results: Middleton’s Rushdie images continue to be among the top stolen from January’s pages since the piece was initially published. Other favorites: Middleton’s portraits of Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, The Given Day) and überchef Emeril Lagasse.

• RIP poet David Bromige (via @globebooks )

• From Gawker: Che’s Granddaughter Just Like Che: Naked, Covered in Produce

• Unreality Magazine brings us the 10 most polarizing movies of the past decade. (via Largehearted Boy.)

• Does language shape our thinking? (Maybe yes. Maybe no.)

• Stuart Woods in named new editor of Quill & Quire. (Bookishly awesome.)

• The Times Online talks about how Stephen King’s inner demons have shaped his writing career.

• NPR on the Dictionary of Regional English and the fact that Art Creation is Up and Attendance Down. (Implications are vast, when you think about it.)

• National Geographic on what “Persian” means to Iranians.

• LifeDev looks at eight ways that reading makes you better at life.

• And is it getting to be 3-Day Novel writing time again already? Well, time to think about it, anyway. (If thinking about it is what you’re planning.)

Art & Culture: The Artist’s Mother, introduction by Judith Thurman

Like exhibitions loosely grouped around a theme, books with a themed core seem to come in one of two categories. They’re either lame excuses to connect that which probably shouldn’t have been connected in the first place, or wonderful triumphs that have us looking at the topic in a new way.

In almost every regard, The Artist’s Mother (Overlook) falls into the latter camp. “Maternal love takes many forms,” author and journalist Judith Thurman writes in her introduction, “not all of them benign, but one of the most essential is to provide an experience of attunement.”

We don’t experience that attunement in all of the work collected here, but one does get a glimmer of what Thurman means as well, in some cases, the connections some painters maintain with where they’ve been as well as how they’re getting where they’re going.

The book opens on a fantastic portrait of Albrecht Dürer’s mother, Barbara. Painted when the artist was just 19, it is a masterwork that clearly lays the groundwork for the genius still being developed. For a later glimpse of that genius, a charcoal sketch of Dürer’s mother done just months before her death captures the woman as she was, not idealized as was dictated by the fashions of the time. Both works are remarkable, but it’s terrific to see them almost side-by-side.

Delivered chronologically, the book ends on Andy Warhol’s 1974 portrait of his mother, Julia Warhola. In between is a history of art in maternal form: John Constable, Rossetti, Paul Cézanne, Mary Cassatt, Frida Kahlo and that most famous mother-painter of all James Abbott MacNeill Whistler whose “Portrait in Gray and Black” has come to be known as “Whistler’s Mother.”

The Artist’s Mother is a wonderful short course in art history as well a terrific tribute to one of humankind’s most lasting bond.

Doctorow’s Little Brother Optioned for film

Author Cory Doctorow has announced that his vastly entertaining young adult novel Little Brother (Tor Teen) has been optioned for film.

Early this morning, Doctorow blogged that “Don Murphy, producer of such films as Natural Born Killers and From Hell, has bought a film option on Little Brother. I’ve talked it over with Don and feel confident that if he makes the movie that he’ll do it justice -- I’m guaranteed a spot as a consultant to ensure that it all comes out right, too!”

Little Brother was among January Magazine’s picks for best children’s book of 2008. Here’s what January contributing editor Iain Emsley said about the book at that time:

Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother is a timely book which teases out the implications of the war on terror and comes in a year which Neal Shusterman’s Unwind was published in the United Kingdom. Both novels challenge us to ask “what type of world are we now living in?” Doctorow asks us to continue questioning the underlying logic of the post 9/11 world which has been presented to us. Marcus, a teen hacker, is caught up by the security services in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. His treatment leads him to start using technology to subvert the increasingly authoritarian environment and to link together with his friends and acquaintances. It is a call to arms but it does consider the implications of technology in a social context rather than just seeing it as a panacea. It is quite possibly his most thought-provoking novel to date.

Non-Fiction: Squirrels of North America by Tamara Eder

At first blush, Squirrels of North America (Lone Pine) sounds almost ridiculously esoteric. Squirrels. In North America. Super specific and about a topic that -- let’s face it -- most of us give little thought. (ie: squirrels.) However, not long after my initial scoff, I spent an enchanted hour or so lost in the pages of what is essentially a field guide. That fascination is understandable and to be encouraged, especially in the young. As author Tamara Eder points out, for most of us, there is not a lot of nature that can be observed right in your own backyard:

In this time when most wildlife in North America is confined to national parks and protected areas, we often overlook the wildness in our own backyards. Few animals have adapted to human urbanization, and of those that have, almost none are mammals.

And then there are squirrels.

The squirrels’ ability to thrive in our urban domain might be the reason that many people disregard and even disdain squirrels. If you look more closely at these fellow mammals, however, you will discover extremely sociable and familiar creatures.

And look closely Eder does. Sixty-six species are grouped and color-coded, regions indicated, weight and general appearance noted. Illustrations include points to look for when making identifications. (Especially important with some of the chipmunk types, which seem very alike until the details are pointed out.

A charming and well-executed book, Squirrels of North America is sure to please the amateur naturalist in your life.

U.S. Publication of Holden Caulfield-ish Novel Delayed

It seems to me that, even if the American publication of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye by “J.D. California” is delayed forever, the free publicity this book has gotten will sell a lot of copies around the world.

Today, another chapter was added to the ongoing saga. From The New York Times’ blog:

The judge, Deborah A. Batts, said a new book that contains a 76-year-old version of Caulfield cannot be published in the United States for 10 days while she weighs a copyright infringement case filed by lawyers for Mr. Salinger. The lawyers contend that the new book, published in Britain, was too derivative and that Mr. Salinger’s most well-known character was protected by copyright.

Clearly, the story is not over yet. But for one impossibly tiny Swedish publisher the outcome probably doesn’t matter very much: internationally, this windup bird is gonna have wings.

We’ve been covering this story for the last few months. See previous pieces here and here.

Rowling’s Originality Under Question Again

I don’t even want to think about the possibility that J.K. Rowling ripped off the work of another author in creating her beloved and top selling Harry Potter series of books. However, since everyone else is thinking about it, I don’t have to. Here are some of those links: The New York Times, Coventry Telegraph, E! Online, CBC, Sky News, Entertainment Weekly and The Daily Mail who go to the trouble of encapsulating the whole mess:

JK Rowling and her publisher are being sued for £500million for allegedly copying Harry Potter from an earlier children's book, also by an English writer.

Adrian Jacobs's book Willy The Wizard -- also about a child discovering he has magical powers - was published in 1987, ten years before the first in the Harry Potter series and three years before Miss Rowling says she came up with her idea.

Trillium Prize Winners Named

The $20,000 Trillium Prize has been awarded to Pasha Malla for his debut collection, The Withdrawal Method (House of Anansi). “It’s awesome,” Malla told The National Post, “it’s just weird. I [feel] completely bewildered by it.”

Pasha wins in a very tough field that included Kevin Connolly (Revolver), Helen Humphreys (Coventry), Ibi Kaslik (The Angel Riots), Nino Ricci (The Origin of Species) and Charles Wilkins (In The Lane of Long Fingernails).

Never a shrinking violet, Malla was enthusiast when he spoke with The Post. “To me, $20,000 -- you win more money on The Price is Right than that. But to me it just seems like a fucking fortune.”

The Trillium Book Award/Prix Trillium was awarded in four categories:

Trillium Book Award in English-language
Pasha Malla, The Withdrawal Method (House of Anansi Press)

Trillium Book Award in French-language
Marguerite Andersen, Le figuier sur le toit (Les Editions L'Interligne)

Trillium Book Award for Poetry
Jeramy Dodds, Crabwise to the Hounds (Coach House Books)

Trillium Book Award for Children’s Literature
Paul Prud'Homme, Les Rebuts : Hockey 2 (Les Editions du Vermillon)

Happy Bloomsday!

Bloomsday is celebrated each year on June 16th in honor of James Joyce and his novel Ulysses.

The name comes from Ulysses’ central character, Leopold Bloom, though the date actually commemorates the very first romantic date shared by Joyce and his future wife, Nora Barnacle. The year was 1904 and the couple walked to the Dublin village of Ringsend. Though the relationship would be fraught with ups and downs, in 2004 Sotheby’s sold an erotic letter from the writer to his lady for £240,800.

Bloomsday is most enthusiastically celebrated in Dublin, however Joyce aficionados can find Bloomsday activities around the world.

In Dublin, start at the James Joyce Centre at 35 North Great Georges Street, the hub of all things Joycean. Among other things, the Centre’s Web site rounds up Bloomsday activities from Paris to Poland and from Broadway to Brazil. Look for walking and talking events, rallies and even entire literary festivals dedicated to the life and works of this most celebrated Irish writer.

Biography: Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits by Barney Hoskyns

Appearances can be deceiving. For example, it is easy to look at Lowside of the Road (Broadway), veteran music writer Barney Hoskyns’ biography of music icon Tom Waits, and be impressed by the apparent breadth and depth of the work: it’s a big, fat book. However, once you delve in deeply, it becomes obvious that Hoskyns is stretching some very excellent material mighty thin. And that’s a shame because, while Hoskyns clearly has both the talent and the passion to write the definitive biography on this subject, Lowside of the Road isn’t it. And why? Because not only did Waits himself not cooperate, he instructed everyone he knew not to, as well.

Even so, Hoskyns does a credible job with what he does have: some really excellent interviews with both Waits and some of the people close to him, done, however, before work began on this biography. Hoskyns uses these along with some good old-fashioned footwork plus the view from his own not inconsiderable experience in the music industry to craft a very informative and informed view of the notoriously private Waits.

Does Lowside of the Road lack some of the depth a sanctioned biography would have had? I think so. But, in the end, this is currently as good as it gets. Want something closer to the artist himself? For that you’ll just have to wait.

Plum Outrageous

Fifteen books into her extraordinarily successful Stephanie Plum series, Janet Evanovich answers ten questions from her fans via the new issue of Time magazine.

Among other things, Evanovich responds to questions about the ongoing quality of the series, whether or not fans can anticipate a Plum movie any time soon and if she’s planning on ending the series. Interestingly enough, she’s not, if for no other reason than even the author can’t decide between those two hot guys.

“You know,” Evanovich tells Time, “I wake up some days and think Stephanie should go off into the sunset with Joe Morelli and have babies, and then I wake up the next day, and I’m like, Oh, no, she’s gotta go with Ranger. I don’t see myself ending it anytime soon, just because I’m having a lot of fun with it.”

Finger Lickin’ Fifteen (St. Martin’s Press) goes on sale June 23rd.

New This Week: Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson

If you love SF/F and have not yet encountered Brandon Sanderson, you can forgive yourself: the whole thing has happened pretty quickly. That said, don’t stick your head in the sand on this one. He may be relatively new, but expect him to be around for a while.

Sanderson is a writer with talent, vision and chutzpah, a combination that put him into awards line-ups and bestseller lists almost from before the first moment. This because Sanderson was hand-picked to write the conclusion to Robert Jordan’s epic Wheel of Time series after Jordan’s death in 2007. Being heir apparent to one of the genre’s most legendary writers did nothing to detract from Sanderson’s reputation, but when you read his work, it’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t have gotten there on his own. He is a writer that not only can write, but does. He’s so good, he makes it look effortless, to the point where Warbreaker (Tor) was more or less written online. Sanderson explains on his Web site: