Very pleased to announce that my next book, co-authored with Scott Esposito, will be out from Zer0 Books on 25 January 2013. Spread the word!
The Oulipo celebrated its fiftieth birthday in 2010, and as it enters its sixth decade, its members, fans and critics are all wondering: where can it go from here? In two long essays Scott Esposito and Lauren Elkin consider Oulipo’s strengths, weaknesses, and impact on today’s experimental literature.
This got lost in the shuffle of the book coming out and my subsequent trips to Alsace, Berlin, and London– I reviewed John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead (FSG) for Writing in Public, a book which took me slightly outside of my comfort zone as a reader but which was well worth it. An excerpt:
Sullivan is a study in contrasts: a one-time born-again Christian and a liberal-minded critic, a Southerner and a darling of the New York literati, a goofy dude and a sober social conscience. He is, therefore, in an ideal position to explore the shady byways of American identity. His essay on the Tea Party, “American Grotesque,” features just this kind of intellectual magnanimity, even if he does (as he must) eventually come down on “our side” of the fence. “Today is September 12, 2009. We are marching,” he writes. We begin to meet the other marchers: “I want my America back,” reads one of their placards. It isn’t clear for certain whose America the sign refers to until we see another sign of Nancy Pelosi’s enlarged face, into whose open mouth the crowd is tossing Lipton tea bags. “It’s only fair,” Sullivan comments. “Liberals made fun of us because, at first, we didn’t know what ‘tea-bagging’ meant (…) Now we’re turning the joke back on them.” In the very next paragraph, we see a person standing on a garbage can wearing an Obama mask and a little gold crown, sporting “a bright purple pimp’s coat with faux-leopard-skim trim.”
Throughout this first part of the essay, Sullivan casts himself as a reasonably-minded member of an unspecified political rally. As he begins to mention its heroes— “[Glenn] Beck is an entertainer. We love him, but he goes over the top” — we know we’re at a Tea Party gathering, and we’re confused about what we’re doing there. It’s not until after the rally, back at the hotel, that it becomes clear why Sullivan has included himself in the “we” of the lunatic fringes of the Republican Party: he is there with his first cousin, an insurance executive from Kentucky whose politics are radically different from Sullivan’s. He gets into it with his cousin: “Didn’t the crap those people were spewing originate in the e-mail accounts of lobbyists and ‘former CEOs’ and other cynically interested types? Why else would these citizens purport to fear ‘socialized medicine‘ so intensely?” By the end of the essay, Sullivan is wishing his cousin luck and hoping for him to fail.
“’I envy you, writing about Venice,’ says the newcomer. ‘I pity you,’ says the old hand. One thing is certain. Sophistication, that modern kind of sophistication that begs to differ, to be paradoxical, to invert, is not a possible attitude in Venice. In time, this becomes the beauty of the place. One gives up the struggle and submits to a classic experience. One accepts the fact that what one is about to feel or say has not only been said before by Goethe or Musset but is on the tip of the tongue of the tourist from Iowa who is alighting in the Piazzetta with his wife in her furpiece and jeweled pin. Those Others, the existential enemy, are here identical with oneself. After a time in Venice, one comes to look with pity on the efforts of the newcomer to disassociate himself from the crowd. He has found a ‘little’ church—has he?—quite off the beaten track, a real gem, with inlaid colored marbles on a soft dove grey, like a jewel box. He means Santa Maria dei Miracoli. As you name it, his face falls. It is so well known, then? Or has he the notion of counting the lions that look down from the window ledges of the palazzi? They remind him of cats. Has anybody ever noticed how many cats there are in Venice or compared them to the lions? On my table two books lie open with chapters on the Cats of Venice. My face had fallen too when I came upon them in the house of an old bookseller, for I too had dared think that I had hold of an original perception.
“The cat= the lion. Venice is a kind of pun on itself, which is another way of saying that it is a mirror held up to its own shimmering image—the central conceit on which it has evolved” (13).
–Mary McCarthy, Venice Observed (1963)
« Il n’est pas rare de voir de grandes émigrations de peuples inonder un pays, en changer la face et ouvrir pour l’histoire une ère nouvelle; mais qu’une poignée de fugitifs, jeté sur un banc de sable de quelques cents toises de largeur, y fond un état sans territoire; qu’une nombreuse population vienne couvrir cette plage mouvante, où il ne se trouve ni végétation, ni eau potable, ni matériaux, ni même de l’espace pour bâtir; que de l’industrie nécessaire pour subsister, et pour affermir le sol sous leurs pas, ils arrivent jusqu’à présenter aux nations modernes le premier exemple d’un gouvernement régulier, jusqu’à faire sortir d’un marais des flottes sans cesse renaissantes, pour aller renverser un grand empire, et recueillir les richesses de l’Orient; qu’on voit ces fugitifs tenir la balance politique de l’Italie, dominer sur les mers, réduire toutes les nations à la condition de tributaires, enfin rendre impuissants tous les efforts de l’Europe liguée contre eux: c’est là sans doute un développement de l’intelligence humaine qui mérite d’être observé ».
–Daru, Histoire de la République de Venise (1819)
Toute existence est une lettre postée anonymement; la mienne porte trois cachets: Paris, Londres, Venise; le sort m’y fixa, souvent à mon insu, mais certes pas à la légère. –Paul Morand, Venises
[All of life is a letter posted anonymously; mine bears three stamps: Paris, London, Venice. It was fate that took me there, though I often didn't realize it, but certainly not casually.]
Perhaps it’s some belated fin-de-siècle fates that have assigned me to these three Jamesian cities, but for better or worse they’re where I’m linked; they are my subjects and my backdrops and my milieux. It seems somehow appropriate, then, that my first novel, about Venice, is being published in Paris before anywhere else, just as I prepare to move to London, at least part-time for now.
Morand, in his wonderful book-length essay Venises, reflects on his career as a diplomat and his relationship to history, to literature, to his family, and to place, writing lyrically about his connection to Venice, but also his tendency to find “Venices” elsewhere– in Paris, London, and even Bangkok. Anywhere there is unpredictable water, canals, waterways, watervistas, there is another Venice. And he reads back these cities onto Venice, where “every street is the Seine.”
Paris, as I have said, is where I taught myself to write, sitting in cafés imitating Ernest Hemingway, but as Paris became my new everyday, I moved indoors from the cafés, and developed the writing habits that are, by now, inseparable from the work itself. (That’s a fancy way of saying I can only write on my couch.) But spending more and more time in Venice gave me a space away from my everyday life– even in a beautiful city like Paris, daily life becomes humdrum– to measure the effects moving to a foreign country were having on my psyche. To set my first novel in Paris seemed too obvious, and potentially limiting– I didn’t want to typecast myself as someone who could only write about her own experiences, and expatriates in Paris is a subject that I believe has to be approached with either sheer innocence or advanced cynicism, neither of which I had at the time. So I turned to Venice, which seemed the perfect metaphor for the act of building your home in a place where you have no foundation to do so– no land to build on, only bits of mud.
The result, in English, is Floating Cities, but for now– and as of today!– the book is out (only) in French under the title Une Année à Venise. To have my first book come out in the city where I became a writer seems the sweetest of coincidences.
When I was in London in October, I ran into Stefan Tobler of And Other Stories Press at a White Review reading. He put a book in my hand called Swimming Home, by Deborah Levy, and promised I would love it. It had a blurb from Jeanette Winterson on the back, an endorsement which even in these cynical times I take seriously. Unable to get to it right away, I put it aside and took it home to New York with me for the holidays, and finally had a chance to read it on a plane ride to Seattle just after the New Year.
I drank it down with the kind of concentration you can only attain on a long plane ride, where being anonymous and surrounded by strangers as you all breathe recycled air creates a kind of atemporal reality buffer, so you fall deeper into a book than you might have in the comfort of your own home. Very short– pushing the boundaries of the novella– Swimming Home depicts a group of English people who are enjoying a perfectly banal holiday in France until a naked girl called Kitty Finch shows up in their midst. She has a well-crafted story and, apparently, no place to go. The characters take her in, and allow her to stay in the bungalow they are renting.
Kitty’s a slippery character, the kind of slightly older girl who seems, to a young teenager (as indeed she seems to fourteen-year-old Nina), to be extraordinarily exotic, knowing, and wise, but who just as quickly can slip into extreme flakiness or outright lunacy. Predictably, she gets involved with Nina’s father, the renowned poet Joe Jacobs. It becomes clear that Kitty has gone there on purpose in order to show her poetry to Joe– believing that he alone can understand it, and even more weirdly, claiming that only she can understand his.
But the point isn’t the plot, or Levy’s language, or the deliberate yet casual strokes drawn between the characters that delineate their relationships and needs. What Swimming Home points to is the insufficiencies and failures of language and storytelling to get across what we really mean: our urgencies, our worries, our fears. Laura, the close friend and holiday companion of Nina’s mother, Isabel, can’t understand why Isabel has allowed Kitty to remain on the premises.
Laura changed the subject and wanted to know if she thought Kitty Finch might be a little… she searched for the word… ‘touched’? The word stuck in her mouth and she wished she had another language to translate what she meant, because the only words stored inside her were from the school playground of her generation, a lexicon that in no particular order started with barmy, bonkers, barking, and went on to loopy, nuts, off with the fairies and then danced up the alphabet again to end with cuckoo.
We compose our own stories to understand the world, as Nina does to make sense of her parents’ relationship, only to find she has completely misjudged it, or as Joe does in order to minimize the effect Kitty has on him, typing her as a particular kind of person he has encountered many times before:
‘I can’t stand THE DEPRESSED. It’s like a job, it’s the only thing they work hard at. Oh good my depression is very well today. Oh good today I have another mysterious symptom and I will have another one tomorrow. THE DEPRESSED are full of hate and bile and when they are not having panic attacks they are writing poems.’
But try as he might, Kitty gets in. Funny, irreverent, and deeply unsettling, Swimming Home charts an unusual path through what might otherwise seem to be territory as familiar and knowable as a backyard swimming pool. But Levy’s storytelling method leaves much hinted at under the surface, unspecified and troubling.
I don’t usually make a plug for publishers when I talk about their books, but I’ll make an exception here. Recently, in The London Review of Books, Jenny Diski referred to And Other Stories as the future and best hope of publishing:
And Other Stories, the publisher of Deborah Levy’s novel, is a more interesting response to the commodification of writing. For £20 or £35 you can subscribe to two or all four of the new novels they will publish in the next year. You don’t choose the authors or the books; in fact, you don’t have any idea what they will be publishing. Stefan Tobler started And Other Stories in order to publish an international list of the kind of fiction, both translated and in the original English, which he believes is being rejected by mainstream corporations. The books or manuscripts are suggested by agents, interested members of the public, friends or colleagues, writers themselves; a shortlist is sent out for discussion to reading groups that have been set up around the world. Their thoughts are relayed back to an acquisitions meeting comprising what Tobler calls ‘the core team’, although people on the mailing list are welcome to attend. In the end, Tobler and his colleagues retain editorial choice, and are prepared, after broader consultation, to take a decision based on their own judgments. In much the same way as the old independent publishers.
Subscribers are welcome to participate in the process, but they aren’t putting their money on their favourite. They are staying curious and trusting Tobler and his small team to come up with four books that will engage and surprise them, even perhaps not please them, or maybe, as it was for me with Levy’s book, give them great satisfaction and a sense of relief that the book is there, handsomely designed and well produced, in the world for others to discover.
For more information, go to their website at www.andotherstories.org.
Ellis Avery, author of The Last Nude, out this week from Riverhead and set in Paris in the 1920s, went to Paris earlier this year on a sabbatical with her partner (Sharon Marcus, who has also written brilliantly on Paris) to do some research. Unfortunately, a foot injury prevented Ellis from flâner-ing around the city the way she’d hoped. Then she found she could get around just fine on a bus and a bicycle! Here, her tale of flânerie aboard public transport.
The Footsore Flâneuse: Claiming One’s Own Paris on Public Transportation
The glamorous Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka had the good fortune to live in Paris in the 1920s. While writing about her, I had the good fortune to live in Paris in 2008. My partner and I had the further good fortune, that sabbatical season, to be working on projects we loved. Sharon was researching Sarah Bernhardt; I was finishing the first draft of my Tamara de Lempicka novel, THE LAST NUDE. I was unlucky in only one area: my right foot. I would later discover my Parisian foot trouble was just one manifestation of a literally bone-breaking but ultimately treatable form of arthritis, but at the time, I thought I had an injury that simply refused to heal. In any case, they were scotched, my plans for long walks in my favorite walking city.
The foot injury made it easy for me to stay home and write my thousand words a day, five days a week. Sure, but what’s Owen Wilson doing in that Midnight in Paris poster? He’s walking through Paris. Ever since the first gimlet-eyed flâneur strolled out of the pages of Baudelaire, cane in hand, this is what writers have done. Bad enough, as scholars who work on the female city-stroller, the flâneuse, have pointed out, that a woman idly walking the streets is apt to be taken for a streetwalker. (I have, even dyked out in my old-man shoes). Far worse for my flâneurial ambitions, however, was the fact that I could not stroll. I could gimp along, sure, the way a moth can, but every step cost me. I could not cross the Palais Royal, change trains at the Place d’Italie métro stop, or even stand long enough to chop, sweat, and sautée an eggplant at home without needing an Advil.
But I was optimistic. At home, in New York, where I make a discipline of distilling my urban observations into a haiku a day, the raw material is often just out the window. (Night. The drag queen at/the corner pauses, wonders:/ Walk home, or cab it?) Surely this would be the case in Paris, too?
Our SabbaticalHomes.com sublet, the least expensive of a few palatable options, and, revealingly, the only one for which the owners had posted no pictures, did not offer much to see out the window. Oh-so-Parisian windowbox geraniums, yes, but the rooftops of the postwar Thirteenth arrondissement are not known for their charm, and the drizzling sky remained the color of vichyssoise for days. The interior of the apartment was even less inspiring: in addition to the living-room/dining-room, dominated by a couch we dubbed The Silent Killer for reasons that would become clear to each guest who attempted to find comfort in its maw, the apartment featured two tiny windowless closets—one for the shower, one for the WC—and an extremely dark bedroom, home to an aging bed whose sagging mattress was propped up, in places, with sofa cushions. A narrow L-shaped hallway lined in cabinets and rustic-tiled counters promised to open up onto the kitchen, until we realized it was the kitchen: when we cooked, we swiftly learned, food crusted between those rustic tiles. The day I noticed, from my spot on the floor by the Silent Killer, that the wallpaper print in the hallway matched the woven-straw wallpaper, no doubt tasteful and expensive in the Seventies, that adorned the living-room/dining-room, was the day I knew I had been staring at those wallpapers for too long.
I owe the pleasure I was able to take in Paris, despite these unpromising circumstances, to three things:
One: the elevator. The hollow spines around which the central staircase of many an old Parisian apartment building once spiraled have since been filled with tiny, tiny elevator shafts, such as the one that housed the lift to our sublet. One person with one large suitcase filled it completely. “Its merit,” as a neighbor would wryly tell us in elegant French, “is in existing.” Vive l’existence!
Two: Vélib. Although the ball of my right foot hurt after just a few steps, my heels worked fine, and so did my legs. Research revealed that my American Express card just happened to contain the chip that permitted me to use my Parisian all-you-can-ride transit pass, Navigo Découverte, to unlock Vélib, the city-wide free-bike system: I couldn’t contain my glee. “You are Vélibérée!” Sharon cried. I could borrow a bike from the rack by the bus stop, pedal it uphill to the métro stop, and leave it behind while I took the subway, and then I could pick up another bike when I got out of my train. Or I could just ride a bike the whole way: there’s no cure like exercise for injury-related depression.
The chunky public bicycles took me to Shakespeare and Company bookstore in the Fifth arrondissement, where I joined David Barnes’s writing group, and up to Culture Rapide in the Twentieth, where I could hear my fellow English-speaking poets read alongside French and Francophone freestylers. Culture Rapide sat beside the truly gritty Place Fréhel, a vacant lot littered with beer bottles named for a chanteuse who died in 1951.
I was glad the bicycle system could connect me with my fellow living writers, but even more grateful that Vélib could take me into the heart of my novel. I visited Lynn Jeffress, a novelist from my writing group, at 27, rue de Fleurus, who took my picture in front of the courtyard pavilion Gertrude Stein had used as her dining room. I found Le Sentier, the seedy garment district where a key scene in my novel is set, and slid down an alley as narrow as a drain, quixotically named Street of the Moon. Men passed me in either direction, wheeling garment racks. I whirred past the sullen little fortress of a columned church—Our Lady of Good News—and found myself face-to-face with a massive arch featuring mythological naked men beneath suits of empty armor: how weirdly fitting, for the garment district. My ride through Le Sentier allowed me to describe the neighborhood without gilding it with sentimentality or tarring it with melodrama.
Vélib also brought me to the Place de la Contrescarpe, steps from Hemingway’s first Paris apartment and home to a Hemingwayesque character in my novel. In one of the bakeries that fronted the place, I bought a flaky Breton kouign aman, asked for them to heat it up on the spot, and ate it at one of the cafés on the place while the waiter’s back was turned. As I ate and drank, the brazier beside me rendered the evening chill decorative rather than sinister; the cup of coffee warmed my hands. The trees and fountain at the center of the place—in the Middle Ages, a village square—lent a gracious look to the student quarter, but Hemingway’s rummies and poivrottes still collapsed here and there amid the clusters of kids in the cafés. A yellow dog with a torn ear trotted over to beg the flaky crumbs off my fingers. It was the best pastry I ever ate in Paris.
Three: the bus. Sometimes it hurt too much even to ride a bicycle. As the autumn deepened, it began to grow too cold and wet to ride. My nearest métro stop, Place d’Italie, was unwalkably far, but it wasn’t long before I could spot the insignia of the boxy mint-green bus that stopped near our apartment building from several blocks away: a black 67 emblazoned on a pink square. In order to announce their alternate, nighttime schedule, many Parisian buses bore spooky, Halloweeny lettering, proclaiming, Le soir, cet autobus devient noctilien! In the evening, this bus becomes nocturnal! I savored the reptilian word noctilien, so much more sinister than its English counterpart, as I watched the wrong 67, not mine, approach from the wrong direction, stop, disgorge passengers, and swish away in a wash of pneumatic hiss and prerecorded chime.
The “wrong direction,” for me, was out toward the stadia that lay between the city and its beltway, the Périphérique: the 67 terminated at the Stade Charléty. The “right direction” brought me closer to the city center, first uphill to the charming Butte aux Cailles, where thickly-planted chestnut trees lobbed their buckeyes at passers-by. I could follow the example of the old ladies in the neighborhood and fill a plastic bottle with water from the artesian spring at the heart of Place Paul Verlaine. Or I could buy a delicate, buttery quiche Lorraine from my favorite bakery, Legendre, and limp it down the street to check out stark, tile-lined Place André Masson, named for a painter who had died in 1987. “That place was like the drain of an abattoir,” I reported to Sharon that night.
“Once you see his work, you’ll know why,” she deadpanned. I realized that even if you’re worthy of commemoration by Parisian city planners, the more recently you’ve died, the more remote and crummy your place will be. Poor Masson. Poor Fréhel.
Farther north, and deeper into the heart of the old city, the bus let me off at the end of the linden-lined Île Saint-Louis. I could stand at the easternmost tip of the island and look down to where, just feet below, the seventeenth-century breakwater split the river like the prow of a ship. The bus route turned west from the Pont de Sully, traversed the rue du Rivoli, and brushed past the Louvre, where I could either pick up another bus or limp my way west toward the Palais Royal. I could rest at Le Nemours and nurse a café crème while surveying the expanse of paving-stone outside the Comédie Française. This is where I developed my Principle of Perfect Parisian Places: I’m sitting outside with my coffee, and I’m looking out at people, not cars.
Well, that just about covers most of Paris, huh? Au contraire, this experience is harder to come by than it sounds. To offer a few clarifying corollaries to this simple expression of pleasure:
1) Cars aren’t driving past me.
2) My sightline isn’t blocked by a parked car.
3) Nor is it blocked by a plastic hedge. (Why, Les Deux Magots? Why?)
4) I’m at a café, not a restaurant: no one is bullying me to order food I don’t want.
Place Saint-André-des-Arts hits all these marks gracefully, as do Place Stravinsky and Place de la Sorbonne. From my café perch overlooking Place Colette, I could watch well-dressed Parisians cross under the plane trees, pause to listen to an open-air chamber orchestra, gape at the acrobatic skateboarders, or pass through the fanciful spun-glass arch marking the Palais Royal métro entrance. I grinned. I was a cane-chair flâneuse.
If I stayed on the 67 bus, it headed north from the center of Paris, out past the old city walls and into the Pigalle, home to the Moulin Rouge and other schlocky monuments to the skin trade. From there, I could take the squat little Montmartrobus up absurdly charming streets, coiling past an unlikely vineyard and windmill before reaching the foot of the massive Sacré Coeur, that domed white-wedding-cake folly of the Belle Epoque. From there I could drink in some of the best views of the city before taking a funicular back down the hill to Place Saint-Pierre. I could curl up with another crème at one of the brazier-heated cafés and listen to an all-girl brass band on Place Suzanne Valadon beat the air into a giddy Cajun froth. It hurt to dance, but I felt so grateful to Paris, and so blessed: my Navigo pass had brought me this far. –Ellis Avery
The Millions has a great round-up of their most anticipated books of 2012, and since they're all from US publishers I won't complain that they didn't include mine, which is coming out in April but in France and in French, so, ok.
Here are the books I'm looking forward to myself, or which I've already read and loved:
I'm particularly looking forward to Ben Marcus's The Flame Alphabet (Knopf), and not just because his mom was my dissertation advisor. Here's what The Millions had to say:
In Ben Marcus’s Flame Alphabet, language is the poison that youth inflict on adult ears. Utterances ushered from children’s mouths have toxic effects on adults, while the underage remain immune to the assault. The effects are so harmful that The Flame Alphabet’s narrator, Sam, and his wife must separate themselves from their daughter to preserve their health. Sam sets off to the lab to examine language and its properties in an attempt to discover an antidote and reunite his family. Marcus’s uncharacteristically conventional narrative makes way for him to explore the uncanny eccentricities of language and life. (Anne)
The Last Nude, by Ellis Avery (Riverhead). I reviewed it for The Daily Beast and will let you know when that runs. Set in Paris in the 20s, and featuring a cast of characters from Tamara de Lempicka to Sylvia Beach, with a Hemingway double to boot, The Last Nude owes more to Jean Rhys than to Hemingway. Like Rhys, Avery draws her characters with a sharp wit and a strong sense of empathy. Look for an essay on Paris from Ellis on this blog later this week. Here's what The Millions said:
With starred reviews from both Booklist and Library Journal, Ellis Avery’s second novel The Last Nude imagines the brief love affair between the glamorous Art-Deco Painter Tamara de Lempicka and the young muse for her most iconic painting The Beautiful Rafaela. Set in 1920s Paris, among the likes of Jean Cocteau, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, and a fictional American journalist named Anson Hall (a sort of Ernest Hemingway type), Avery explores the costs of ambition, the erotics of sexual awakening, and the devastation that ensues when these two converge. Critics have praised The Last Nude as riveting, elegant, seductive, and breathtaking. (Sonya)
Smut, by Alan Bennett (Picador). What The Millions had to say:
Given the existence of Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes, a new book entitled Smut would seem to have a lot to live up to—at minimum, it should descend into dimensions so filthy and moist that they would cause Baker’s own thunderstick to droop in disgusted admiration. Instead, the absurdly prolific, versatile, and esteemed writer of The History Boys and The Madness of King George provides a pair of very English stories about the sexual adventures of two middle-aged, middle-class British women. So, rather than a lightspeed journey smack into a rigid “Malcolm Gladwell,” Smut is, in the words of the Guardian, a “comedy of false appearances.” And that’s probably not such a bad thing. (Jacob)
Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down, by Rosencrans Baldwin (FSG, April). Because I don't know how many times I've tweeted that exact sentence. Based on Bladwin's essays for The Morning News. Here's The Millions's take:
In the grand expatriate tradition, Baldwin went to Paris looking for la vie en rose and found himself in a McDonald’s. The editor of The Morning News and author of You Lost Me There moved his family to Paris for a copywriting job and soon learned that it’s not all croissants and cathedrals. Learning to live with constant construction, the oddities of a French office, the omnipresence of American culture, and his own inability to speak French, Baldwin loses his dream of Paris but finds a whole new reality to fall in love with. (Janet)
Equally excited for the sequel to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, for the next volume of Sontag's essays (which I'm slated to review for the QC) and for Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? to be published in the US (I reviewed the Canadian edition for The Quarterly Conversation).
But I say enough, enough, enough of books with titles like Nobody Here Loves You More Than Me/Nobody Here is More Sad Than You/Nobody Here But Us Chickens.
Read the rest here.
Helen DeWitt is in town from Berlin this week at the invitation of the Center for Writers & Translators, the Department of Comparative Literature and English, and the Masters in Cultural Translation at AUP.
The event will take place Thursday, December 1st, at 6:30 pm at 147 rue de Grenelle, 75007, ground floor.
DeWitt's most recent novel, Lightning Rods, was published by New Directions this fall and is receiving glowing reviews. Her first novel, The Last Samurai, has been translated into twenty languages, and is not to be confused with the Tom Cruise film of the same name.
The Los Angeles Review of Books has a panoply of coverage of Lightning Rods, including a review by Scott Esposito, here.
DeWitt will discuss the topic of translation in the context of a range of phenomena that are only partly linguistic, among them bidding conventions in bridge and the aesthetics of programming languages.
The general public is welcome. Please RSVP to Daniel Medin (dmedin@aup.edu).
… publishes today! And I'm proud to have a short story in this issue, called "A Naturalist in the Family," which is about technology and humanity, success and failure, and ends with a duel in Les Halles. Ordering information here.
The rocking cover (all queens!) was drawn by Badaude.
The issue also features art and reflections on art by James Franco. (Because he's everywhere else– why shouldn't he be in Her Royal Majesty?)
For those of you here in Paris, you're warmly invited to the launch party tonight at Le Carmen. No word on whether James will show up.
