Best Blogs 2008
August 13, 2008
- By now those of you with your ears to the ground will have heard the following: publication of The Jewel of Medina, a historical novel by Sherry Jones, has been indefinitely postponed by its publisher, Random House. The reason? The novel, which chronicles the life of Aisha, a wife of the Prophet Muhammad, could provoke violent backlash from conservative Muslims. One excerpt, in which Aisha ...
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August 12, 2008
- My best excuse for not having written a novel in the last three years is that I wrote libretto for an opera, "The Bonesetter's Daughter," which, by coincidence, is the name of a book I wrote. The composer is Stewart Wallace, who's done a number of operas, including Harvey Milk. We met at Yaddo the year that the cops were chasing OJ down the freeway (that's how he and I remember ...
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July 29, 2008
- I like lists. Like Jhumpa Lahiri in The Namesake, right?This afternoon, as I sipped a mango lassi (blend ice, plain yogurt and mango slices; add sugar to taste) I thought about how much ink has been spilled on the importance of first lines in a novel. There must be a list for that, I thought—and several appeared at a quick click. From the haunting (Rebecca), to the stately (Anna Karenina), to ...
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July 20, 2008
- So, let’s say you’ve got an actual audience for your reading. Fantastic! Now what? In other words, I’m wondering if anyone in le Chambre Rouge has tackled the issue of being the best public reader one can be. Not all writers, after all, are natural performers…or, in many cases, even adequate readers of their own work. For many, there’s a reason they’ve chosen a gig that ...
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July 17, 2008
- Last night I did a reading at The Depot in Mill Valley, CA. Five minutes before the reading was scheduled to begin, there were only three people in the room, all of whom I knew. Then a gentleman wandered in, very tall and broad, dressed in a motorcycle jacket. Because readings always breed in me a certain brand of desperation, I walked up to him and said, “Are you here for the reading?” He ...
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July 9, 2008
- Like any other morning. I sit down at my desk, turn on the computer, drink some coffee, and step into the Red Room. First stop, the Blogs. Who will it be this morning? Ah, some of the usual suspects, and I'm happy to see them all. And a few folks I don’t recognize – it’s nice to see new faces, read new words. Everything is as it should be in the Red Room. Then I mosey on ...
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June 18, 2008
- How does a story form? Somehow, disparate words and images coalesce into something that resembles narrative thought. Stories are mysterious things. Stories that do not come directly from our actual lives are even more mysterious, they’re mystical. Often I am asked how I, a New Yorker, wrote a story about a spiritually gifted Appalachian boy. I do not know the answer. The story was given ...
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June 11, 2008
- One of the confounding things that happens after a writer has published a few novels is being asked to write blurbs for new books. We have to decide, then and there, whether to blurb because we're asked or to blurb because we really like the manuscript. This can be tricky, as we want to maintain good relationships with friends and with editors, but we also--at least I do--want to maintain ...
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June 4, 2008
- Suzanne Kleid is invincible. She writes for McSweeny’s and blogs about lit on Bay Area PBS Station KQED’s website. She has a day job slinging books. Seeing her selling Bukowski to British tourists, you wouldn’t think that she was one badassed SOB, but she is. At Book Expo America last weekend, I, Count Dante, The Deadliest Man Alive no less, applied a devastating chokehold to her and ...
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May 27, 2008
- There was a story I once heard about a woman – an ordinary woman of the sort you meet every day – who gave birth to children and raised them, and that was that. “Goodbye, my dears,” she said, giving each one a kiss. Off they went, those adult children, self-sufficient and sturdy. And our heroine, her job completed, retired from motherhood. It’s a nice little ...
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