September 28, 2005
Light bulb eating and, uh, other deviant acts
Lee Klein, who runs Eyeshot (and writes for a whole bunch of other things), has just posted his new novel online, in two places, here and here. It's about a lot of different things (how's that for a compelling description), but Lee delves into the, hmm, delicate and interesting world of an autofellator and his relationship with a lonely young woman. But in a tasteful way, let me stress that; Lee Klein's writing isn't made to appeal only to prurient tastes. He does a good job of, in his words, "giving people some steady ground and then slowly pulling it away". Check it out.
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September 14, 2005
Howards End (Z.S. remix)
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August 17, 2005
into the future!
Two things:
Colson Whitehead's new novel, "Apex Hides the Hurt", won't be released in January of '06 as I thought earlier, but in March 2006 instead. What's the hold up? Dude's been writing this bitch since like '02, right? You'd think the galleys would be all proofed and ready to roll by now. Anyway, Doubleday has at least put up a site for the book.
Good news though, the man himself has his own blog, which just came online last week, it looks like.
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June 27, 2005
DFW stock soars.
According to the always reliable Howling Fantods, David Foster Wallace is set to release a new book of essays and arguments on December 13, entitled "Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays". This is his second such collection, after the hilarious and educational "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", which came out a hell of a long time ago. Here's what'll be in the new book:
1. Big Red Son
2. Certainly the End of Something or Other...
3. Some Remarks on Kafka...
4. Authority and American Usage
5. The View from Mrs. Thompson's
6. How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart
7. Up, Simba
8. Consider the Lobster
9. Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky
10. Host
If 'Authority and American Usage' is what I think it is, then you can read at least an earlier version of it right here- it's probably one of the best things that Wallace has ever written, and features some excellent arguments about prescriptive and descriptive linguistics, and touches on Wittgenstein's talk about private languages, etc., but mostly it's about lexicography and usage (and it's way funnier than it sounds).
That's like 3 books from DFW in half as many years, which is nice and all, but hey- when are we going to get another novel? Doesn't have to be as long as "Infinite Jest" or anything...
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June 13, 2005
Colson Whitehead, you sneaky bastard.
So, randomly but obsessively googling someone's name does pay off in the end: courtesy of the Marsh Agency, there's now some definitive news to report about Colson Whitehead's new book. It's actually called "Apex Hides the Hurt" (which makes a lot more sense than the spurious 'Apex Hides the Heart' which was circulating earlier), and it looks like it'll be published by Doubleday in late January 2006. Which is a long time to wait, but it'll be worth it, judging by this plot description that Marsh Agency provides (click through below). Dude is a straight-up genius, this book will not disappoint. Plus look how sweet that cover is! Now if only Ben Marcus would get back to work...(although I guess having a baby makes that kinda tough).
When the town of Winthrop needed a new name for their town, they did what anyone would do – they hired a consultant. The protagonist of APEX HIDES THE HURT is a corporate namer. If you want just the right name for your new product, be it automobile or anti-depressant, sneaker or spoon, he’s the man to get the job done. Wardrobe lack pizzazz? Come to the Outfit Outlet. Always the wallflower at social gatherings? Try Loquacia. And of course, whenever you take a fall, reach for Apex, because Apex Hides the Hurt. Apex is his crowning achievement, the multi-cultural Band-Aid that has revolutionized the adhesive bandage industry. “Flesh-colored” be damned -- no matter what your skin tone is, Apex will match it or your money back. After leaving his job following a mysterious misfortune, his expertise is called upon by the town of Winthrop. Once there, he meets the town council, the three people who will try to sway his opinion over the coming days: Lucky Aberdeen, the millionaire software pioneer and hometown-boy-made-good, wants the name changed to something that will reflect the town’s capitalist aspirations, attracting new businesses and revitalizing the community. Who could argue with that? Albie Winthrop, beloved son of the town’s aristocracy, thinks Winthrop is a perfectly good name, and can’t image what the fuss is about. Regina Goode, the mayor, is a descendent of the black settlers who founded the town, and has her own secret agenda for what the name should be. Our expert must decide the outcome, with all its implications for the town’s future. Which name will he choose? Or perhaps he will devise his own? And what’s with his limp, anyway? APEX HIDES THE HURT brilliantly and wryly satirizes our contemporary culture, where memory and history are subsumed by the tides of marketing.
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May 12, 2005
Meloy and the 'Mats
Over this past weekend, I finally had enough free time (thanks, Amtrak!) to sit back and read Colin Meloy's installment in Continuum's 33 1/3 series, on the classic Replacements album, "Let It Be". Meloy's interpretation is mostly autobiographical, with occasional detours into short, brilliant sections of musical analysis. He begins by detailing his childhood in Montana, how his parents divorced, how he ended up going to a different school than his best friend, and how his college-age uncle was a huge influence on his listening habits. What I was most suprised at was how restrained Meloy's prose is (he acknowledges his struggle with this in the book's introduction)- the man is positively Hemingwayan in his phrasing. My expectations were high coming into this, given Meloy's lyrical work with the Decemberists and the fact that his undergraduate degree is in creative writing, and I was not disappointed by this book. Meloy does an excellent job of evoking the weird and almost ineffable mixture of confusion, ambition, fantasy, and fleeting passion that occupies a middle-school-aged kid's mind, and he is at his best when talking about the sort of wild devotion that one album can elicit (i.e. when was the last time you were able to listen to only one album for 4 or 5 months straight?).
One of the best parts of the whole book though comes at the very end, when Meloy writes an amazing portrait of the Replacements, from the formation of the band in a basement to the moment when the camera snaps the picture that became the cover for "Let It Be" (and this book). It reminded me very much of John Haskell's celebrity sketches in "I Am Not Jackson Pollock", all of which are simple, elegant, and gorgeously wrought. "Let It Be" is a fantastic little book (it's a quick read), and it'll make you want to go out and buy all the albums Meloy mentions (if you don't already own them).
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March 01, 2005
Liars update and Aleksandar Hemon
Aleksandar Hemon, author of the story collection "The Question of Bruno" and the novel "Nowhere Man", has a new story out in the February 28th issue of the New Yorker (pg. 70, people), called 'The Conductor'. As with many of Hemon's stories, this one assumes an almost autobiographical tone, relating the narrator's struggle to write poetry (well) and his interactions with a writer's circle in his native Sarajevo (and also his encounter with one of the authors from said circle, post-war, in the States). Hemon is one of my favorite writers, and the comparisons to Nabokov that get thrown around in regard to Hemon's style are well warranted. With sentences like this: "his eyebrows looked like little hirsute comets", it's difficult to believe that the man spoke no English when he came to the country in 1992. Read 'The Conductor' if you get the chance.
And Liars finally updated their news section with some reports of the new album that has been forthcoming since a few months ago. Here's what Aaron Hemphill (guitarist, sometimes drummer) had to say: "It's been a while since there has been any news....We finished recording again. For a fun game, scroll down the news section and see how many times we've "finished recording again"! There's no way I'm even going to guess if/when Mute will release it, so pretend I never said anything. Thanks alot to all the great people we spent time with in Italy. More tour dates soon."
Sounds like it could be a long wait for the follow-up to They Were Wrong...
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February 21, 2005
Jesus, Man!
Hunter Thompson is dead. Authorities say it was from a gunshot wound that was most likely self-inflicted. Fuck.
So far, this is maybe the worst month ever. It couldn't have come at a worse time, too. If ever there was an America that desperately needed Hunter Thompson and Arthur Miller, it's this one right here and now.
We got a text message about this late last night, and we totally forgot about it this morning until we fired up the machine. Man, this sucks!
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February 15, 2005
Small hypothesis
Has it ever struck anyone that "the Da Vinci Code" is sort of like a more sophisticated, slightly more adult version of the E.L. Konigsburg classic, "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler"? The latter book was an adrenaline shot of art historical high-jinks that seized my 5th grade brain and never let go (Wes Anderson is also apparently a big fan- viz. the scene in Royal Tenenbaums when Richie and Margot run away to the museum is lifted directly from 'Frankweiler').
While doing Google-journalism for this, I stumbled across a children's book called "Chasing Vermeer", which is referred to, multiple times, as 'a Da Vinci Code for kids'. Wasn't the "Da Vinci Code" meant for a 7th grade reading level anyway? What with all the 2-page cliffhanger chapters and such? Haha, ooh, burned you Dan Brown. Your trillions of dollars and fleet of space shuttles can't protect you from the scorn of an obscure, miscellany-focused website. Woo!
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January 28, 2005
No Child Left Behind
We finally purchased a Strunk & White last night. We're very proud to be fully vindicated in our intuitive uses of commas. Less heartening, however, is that we also learned that what we were told in the fourth grade was an appositive phrase is, in actual fact, a nonrestrictive clause. Now we're sort of questioning the whole foundation of our elementary education. Can someone tell us again why six was afraid of seven?
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December 02, 2004
Language Gun
The best weird-book ever created by humans? Perhaps. Ben Marcus' first proper novel, 'Notable American Women', is primarily concerned with a family in Ohio that partakes in a separatist linguistic movement (focused on silence- the explanation for this is that, by speaking, any person creates a small instance of weather, which can be harmful to the listener), and the history/development of this school of thought. Cross that with a very intimate and heartrending portrait of main character 'Ben Marcus' and the change in his family (his father, Michael, is buried alive, in the back yard, and is poisoned each day by the venomous speech of one of the Silentists)- the way they were before this cult came into their lives, and what occurs when Ben leaves the house/complex they inhabit- and you've got one of the most compelling and intellectually rich novels of the past, I dunno, 5 or 10 years. If that's not enough to motivate you to read it, keep in mind that Ben Marcus (the author, not the character) is one of the most hilarious writers out there, as evidenced by this review of a power planer he wrote for the Believer.
'Notable American Women' can be somewhat off-putting, if you're not accustomed to Marcus' habit of spitting out neologisms at the rate of about one or two per page. Once you sort of attune yourself to the fact that, yes, it is possible that someone would want to wear a helmet during sex, or perhaps chew on cloth to cleanse their head, the book will grip you and leave fingerprint-shaped bruises (it's that absorbing). Purchase it from L'Amazon here. Marcus is just an unqualified genius, that's all there is to it.
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October 20, 2004
Kid Lit, A New Narcotic
Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler is continuing his brilliant run of books by releasing the Grim Grotto this Thursday the 21st. You can check out the first hilariously enlightening chapter at the aforeposted link. In other news, the movie, which features the combined plots of the first three Series of Unfortunate Events books, starring James Carrey himself, will be released on December 17th, and you can check out the trailer to that beast right here.
Speaking of movies made from spookily addictive books, the Harry Potter Network is reporting that Ralph Fiennes and Miranda Richardson have joined the cast of 'Goblet of Fire', the fourth Potter film. Fiennes will play Lord Voldemort, which is just, we don't know, fucking awesome, question mark! Yes, it is. And Richardson will play the semi-annoying journalist, Rita Skeeter. We're feeling grotesquely dorky now, so let's finish this up quick: J.K. Rowling is about midway through writing the 6th book, 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' = good news for everyone, everywhere. All right. Now we have to go drink a lot of beer and drive around real fast in our car. Big boy stuff, etc.
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October 04, 2004
I Am Not Dante Alighieri
Oh, our mordant pith. Anyway, if any of you follow creative non-fiction as fastidiously as we do, then you'll be familiar with John Haskell, the author of last year's fucking mind-rendingly good 'I Am Not Jackson Pollock', which contained short stories set within the framework of facts, e.g. Jackson Pollock's life-ending car accident, or Glenn Gould's OCD people-phobia; basically stuff that, if it were badly done and featured more words like 'throbbing' and 'ample', would be considered really well-researched fan-fiction. 'I Am Not Jackson Pollock' was, along with Ben Marcus' 'Notable American Women', among the most elegant and precisely wrought prose we read last year, so the news that Haskell is releasing his debut novel already is enough to make us want to shave off our beard(s?) of unhappiness (long story). That's right. While strolling wistfully through the Farrar, Straus and Giroux website, as we often do on Sunday afternoons, we stumbled across a listing for 'American Purgatorio', to be released on January 4th of '05, 248 pages of pure Haskell text-fuckery. Here's FS+G's surely unbiased opinion about the book:
A mesmerizing first novel about a man, a woman, and a disappearance.
"I'm from Chicago originally. I went to New York, married a girl named Anne, and was in the middle of living happily ever after when something happened."
So begins John Haskell's mesmerizing first novel, American Purgatorio, the story of a happily married man who discovers, as he walks out of a convenience store, that his life has suddenly vanished. In cool, precise prose, written as both a detective story and a meditation on the seven deadly sins, Haskell tells a story that is by turns tragic and comic, compassionate and gripping. From the brownstones of New York City to the sandy beaches of Southern California, American Purgatorio follows the journey of a man whose object of desire is both heartbreaking and ephemeral.
You can pre-order 'American Purgatorio' over at L'Amazon, even though for some reason they have the book listed at 256 pages. They must be counting the dust jacket and hardcover as separate, readable pages, those crazy bastards.
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September 29, 2004
the father of the son
Kingsley Amis' body of work is both extensive and consistently worthwhile, which is rare for an author so prolific. His best books, like 'Lucky Jim', and 'That Uncertain Feeling' are timeless, and are as hilarious now as they must have been 40 years ago when they were published- but even his lesser-known books, like 'I Like It Here' and 'Take a Girl Like You' have such a perfect focus and mixture of both beautiful descriptions and comic set-pieces that it's hard to imagine that the man ever made a mis-step. Amis the elder seems to have possessed an almost unshakeable grasp of the balance between writing something plot-heavy and writing something that would be regarded as fluff or that merely functioned as scaffolding for his jokes. His prose is wildly inventive; definitely the kind of stuff that you go back and read just to appreciate on a sentential level.
And although Martin Amis, Kingsley's son, is an excellent writer in his own right, 'Dead Babies' was the only work of his we ever really enjoyed even near as much as any one of his father's. If you're going to start anywhere with K. Amis' stuff, start with 'Lucky Jim'- it has a laugh-to-page ratio as high as Sedaris' books. Plus, you know, it's a classic campus novel. Just don't watch the movie, we hear it's pretty much an adaptational rape.
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September 24, 2004
We beat you this time, Bookslut!
This is total hearsay and rumor-mongering, but according to some shady characters that greenideas knows (i.e. message board dwellers), Colson Whitehead (the author of the mind-blowing 'Intuitionist' and 'John Henry Days', one of which was nominated for Pulitzer, we'll let you guess which) will finally release his third novel some time in the late fall/early winter time-slot, and it is entitled "Apex Hides the Heart". This may or may not be the book that Whitehead has foreshadowed in interviews for the past couple of years as '[being] about band-aids'. The gaggle of marketing folks over at Doubleday sent us an enchanting form letter in reply to our inquiry about release dates/cover art/plot, and so there's not much to report on this for the time being. If you're aching for some Colsonified prose stat though, you can always pick up a copy of The Colossus of New York, which is a series of impressions regarding the city, at your local Amazon.com
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September 22, 2004
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Economics
(Disclaimer: The book we're about to talk about isn't hip at all and is in no way affiliated with anybody who has ever written for McSweeney's. Continue reading at your own peril.)
A few years ago, a Peruvian economist named Hernando De Soto wrote a book called The Mystery of Capital, in which he set out to answer the question of why capitalism has only worked in Western nations. In so doing, he and a team of researchers went to several developing and former communist nations and conducted an extensive survey of the extralegal assets of those nations' poorest residents.
While his results were fascinating (and surprising), what we found most impressive about the work was that, whenever De Soto appeared to lapse into either neo-liberal free-market tropes or
eurocentric orientalism, he would almost always find a third way which reflected both scholarly cunning and striking compassion.
Seriously. We can't possibly recommend this book enough. The ideas contained therein are positively electric, and they represent what might be the best chance of ending global poverty. Seriously. This is genuine Nobel material.
A whole lot of De Soto info (including the first chapter of Mystery) can be found here (at PolicyLibrary).
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September 02, 2004
This Will Take Care of You
Yo. So Anthony Doerr has a new book coming out. It drops, as they say in the book industry, on September 21st. What's that, you have no idea who we're talking about? He wrote The Shell Collector, a short story collection, back in aught-two. Was on Entertainment Weekly's 2003 'It List' (only mentioned because there is obviously a huge overlap between greenideas' readership and EW's), between Zooey Deschanel and Snoop Dogg. His debut novel is entitled About Grace, and you can read some sample chapters at the aforeposted link.
Doerr is an extremely talented writer, very much comparable to someone like Norman Maclean (author of A River Runs Through It). He focuses on nature as a narrative/metaphorical device, and flirts with magical realism from time to time, which is why his novel will be so, so good. It's about a boy who is obsessed with snow, and who can see snatches of events which take place in the future. Unstoppable! Pre-order that beast here! Impress others by prominently displaying the book on your front door/in your pants. Check out that hot cover art.
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September 01, 2004
And But So...
David Foster Wallace's new short story collection, Oblivion, is maybe the best book that's come out this year. Unlike his previous collection, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, Oblivion has more of an immediate, warm feel to it. Where BIWHM comes off as being more formally experimental and forced, Oblivion resonates emotionally, as many of the stories concentrate on the problems that are created in the disconnect between thought and language- and how much of an incredible feat it is, really, that anyone does communicate meaningfully with anyone else. One story in particular, Good Old Neon, which was an O. Henry selection in 2003, is one of the most terribly gorgeous and desperate prose pieces we've ever read, and features an ending so complex and subtle and surprising that it really cannot be described at all without resorting to just blubbery, inarticulate praise. The book contains threads and themes from both philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and linguistics, and while that might sound horribly boring and repulsive, Wallace presents all the topics in such a way (as he often does) so that everything dovetails into the stories naturally, without feeling like narrative intrusion. Read "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" (which is about black widow spiders, a Raid can malfunction, and public transportation) here.
He teaches at Pomona College, in CA. And freakishly enough, one of his female students rated him on Rate My Professor (said he's a heartbreaker!).
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August 25, 2004
Curly-haired California Jesus
Dave Eggers is planning on releasing a new book of short stories, sometime this month, on his own McSweeney's imprint. The book, entitled How We Are Hungry, is, according to McSweeney's website editor John Warner, "supposed to be low key". This is exciting for several reasons, one of which is that Eggers is a pretty fantastic short story writer, as anyone who went out and bought Nick Hornby's Speaking With the Angel knows. Despite having a title that sounds like it could be a Liars song, Eggers' new book should be a pretty gripping read. Plus it's got what looks like a cameo of a deformed griffin on the cover.
Also, I'd like to say that I'm pleased to be helping out here at Greenideas. The royal 'we' is now no longer merely ornamental: it's mercilessly accurate.
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