Check it: new literary blog @ The New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/05/introducing-page-turner.html

This is a quote from Roger Angell that I want to remember about what makes good writing (akin to taking the top of my head off):

In the mid-nineties, Roger Angell wrote an essay called “Storyville” about how the fiction department selects stories for inclusion in The New Yorker. The only formula he settles on is the experience of radiant surprise that occurs when a story works. “Reading short-fiction manuscripts can be wearing and wearisome,” he wrote, “Every human situation, every sort of meeting or conversation, is something you have read before or know by heart. But then here comes a story—maybe only a couple of paragraphs in that story—and you are knocked over. Your morning has been changed: you are changed.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/05/introducing-page-turner.html#ixzz1uy2iXRS9

The Weird Sisters

I just finished Eleanor Brown's new novel The Weird Sisters,and now I'm alternating between trying to decide how many copies to mail out to friends and stewing over what to read next. Whatever follows, it had better be this good. I actually savored The Weird Sisters, lingering over it before leaving for work in the mornings. I even waited a few days before finishing the last chapter because I didn't want to get to the end. This is a habit of my mother's which I have never understood until now. But these sisters struck a chord with me. The title of course alludes to the three elusive witches from Macbeth, which is I why I picked up the book in the first place. If there is anything remotely witchy about them, it is that people love these girls (and you will, too) despite their flaws. Each sister feels she has failed her life in some way and has returned home to her family's university town, where their mother has been diagnosed with cancer and their quirky father reigns as an eminent Shakespeare professor. Cleverly, the narrator is the voice of all three sisters, collectively looking down at their lives with omniscience and empathy.

What enchants me about their story is the family's devotion to literature. Their father hides behind his Riverside Shakespeare, but he lovingly and somewhat cryptically quotes the Bard to his children at every possible opportunity. "You speak like a green girl, Unsifted in such perilous circumstance...Tender yourself more dearly," he writes to his most free-spirited daughter, who has just revealed - well, you'll have to read the novel. He references Shakespeare at breakfast, lunch, and dinner; he has named his daughters Cordelia, Rose (Rosalind), and Bean(Bianca). I am sure there are many things this father would sorely wish for his daughters, each of whom is in the throes of an identity crisis, but he can't possibly be disappointed by the way they have inherited his love of reading and language. As different as the sisters are, they toss Shakespeare's lines to each other like sophisticated slang; they leave half-read novels all over the house; they never leave home without a book in tow. This collective love for literature is one of the ties that binds them, even in the worst of times.

As I read this novel, I couldn't help thinking back to my own childhood and the boxes upon boxes of musty hardback books that my sister and I would bring home from Given's Books, a local used bookstore. Our father would drive us over to this dimly lit store on the far end of town to load up a box of whatever suited our fancy. He never censored a thing (Gone with the Wind in elementary school? Why not?), but he definitely steered us toward his own favorites at times. I don't think it was a coincidence that by high school I had read all The Hardy Boys and the Thomas Hardy novels. My sister and I would plow through our box, and then we'd return those books for credit and fill up again. As different as my sister and I are, magically we both loved to read, and we shared the same bad manners of trying to sneak books at the dinner table.

In The Weird Sisters, the three return home because they need to simplify and order their lives again. They return to the start, which is, among several things, a return to books and Shakespeare. Maybe this is what resonated most with me: turning to books as much for solace and escape as for structure. A return to order. A way to simplify.

"Teach the Books, Touch the Heart"

You know it is going to be a good New York Times article when it begins with the lines: "FRANZ KAFKA wrote that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.” I once shared this quotation with a class of seventh graders, and it didn’t seem to require any explanation."

And the winner isn't...

Ann Patchett's NYTimes response to the lack of a Pulitzer Prize winner for literature this year. And yes, it should have been Jeffrey Eugenides for The Marriage Plot:

Let me underscore the obvious here: Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.

Unfortunately, the world of literature lacks the scandal, hype and pretty dresses that draw people to the Academy Awards, which, by the way, is not an institution devoted to choosing the best movie every year as much as it is an institution designed to get people excited about going to the movies. The Pulitzer Prize is our best chance as writers and readers and booksellers to celebrate fiction. This was the year we all lost.

Ann Patchett is the author, most recently, of the novel “State of Wonder” and a founder of Parnassus Books.

Letters

I just finished putting the final touches on the last of my college recommendations for the year. There is only one phrase that does this particular task justice:

Blood, sweat, and tears.

As difficult as it can be to capture the essence of a student in a letter, I absolutely love doing it. I love celebrating these girls: their talents, their achievements, their individual styles. The fact that I get to do it in writing is the best part. I know I've said this before somewhere in this blog, but I have a thing for letters. Elizabeth Bishop used to teach a class on the art of letters, and I would have fought my way into that class if I had been around then. Now that I think about it, I might have to teach that class someday.

In the spirit of letter writing, here is a poem/letter from Billy Collins to his readers. I spent three glorious days hearing him lecture at Vanderbilt this fall, and I listened to him read in his disarming way this poem.

"You, Reader"

I wonder how you are going to feel
when you find out
that I wrote this instead of you.

that it was I who got up early
to sit in the kitchen
and mention with a pen

the rain-soaked windows,
the ivy wallpaper,
and the goldfish circling in its bowl

Go ahead and turn aside,
bite your lip and tear out the page,
but, listen—it was just a matter of time

before one of us happened
to notice the unlit candles
and the clock humming on the wall.

Plus, nothing happened that morning—
a song on the radio,
a car whistling along the road outside—

and I was only thinking
about the shakers of salt and pepper
that were standing side by side on a place mat.

I wondered if they had become friends
after all these years
or if they were still strangers to one another

like you and I
who manage to be known and unknown
to each other at the same time—

me at this table with a bowl of pears,
you leaning in a doorway somewhere
near some blue hydrangeas, reading this.

- Billy Collins, from his collection The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems

The Names by Billy Collins

Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.
A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,
Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.
In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name --
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner --
Kelly and Lee,
Medina, Nardella, and O'Connor.
When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.
Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.
In the evening -- weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds --
Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.
Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in a green field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

"Winter in the Summer House" by Robert Watson

Home is a place we never notice
Needing much repair, and coming back
Year after year, the separated man
Filled the cracks in the hardwood floors with his own dust.

The house no longer creaked, or he no longer heard it;
The walls were painted but not covered;
Tiles of flint lay crossward on the lawn;
The trees were a silent siege; the heat went on.

As if he were custodian, he kept his tools
In pegboard tracings; sawdust neatly piled
Along the jagged band; a vise in waiting,
Capable of holding till the glue was dry.

The same old Dodge still lurched from neutral
Into gear; old leaves hissed in the vents;
Backing out was the only gamble,
And by now he knew this road so well.

Deadpan breakfasts, cakes with molasses—
All that remained from his little version
Of the triangle trade, with its casks of whiskey,
And captives in the hold who salted the Atlantic.

As if to prove he wasn’t still at sea,
He put dramatic lights up in the branches
And all the same old people in their places,
Triumphantly discarding in an evening game of hearts.

If only he had made a little room for her,
Or made a play; if, in between the deals,
He’d made a modest bid; a run in suits;
Or cast away a hopeful flush to keep the pair.


From The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2010/08/09/100809po_poem_watson#ixzz128wWV41Y