New books by writers I have met in real life and interviewed

Olivia, subject of From The Notebooks of a Middle School Princess. Illustration by Meg Cabot.

Meg Cabot has recently returned to the world of the Princess Diaries with two new books, one for adults and one for middle schoolers. As an (alleged) adult, I can attest that Royal Wedding is a fun read. Princess Mia is all grown up and facing some regular grown-up issues as well as some only-royalty-of-a-small-European-principality issues. And interesting fact about From The Notebooks of a Middle School Princess: Meg illustrated the book — which is copiously illustrated — herself. I talked to Meg about the books, as well as about why she lives in and sometimes writes about Key West. The interview ran in one form on WLRN and in another in The Miami Herald.

I can’t help, while I’m talking about Meg Cabot, to give a shout-out to a couple other series by her that don’t get anywhere near the attention of the Princess Diaries or some of her other books but that I think are worthwhile reads. The first is Insatiable and its sequel, Overbite. They’re vampire books for adults that both riff on and gently satirize Bram Stoker’s original. They’re fun and funny, without being outright satire. The other is the Abandon trilogy, which is a YA series of books based on the Greek myth of Persephone — and set in Key West!

And I recently read the The Fatal Flame, the final volume in Lyndsay Faye’s excellent trilogy about Timothy Wilde, an early New York policeman or copper star. I interviewed Lyndsay for Littoral, the Key West Literary Seminar’s blog, before she came to the 2014 Seminar about crime fiction. When I got hold of this final volume, The Fatal Flame, I read it as slowly as possible, savoring my first immersion. I almost never do that, especially with crime fiction. If you’re interested in historical fiction, historical crime fiction, 19th century New York or any of the above, give these books a try. Can’t wait to see what Lyndsay gets up to next.

 

Friends of the Library Lecture Series

If you’re interested in books, writers and just hearing interesting stories from smart people — and you happen to be near Key West — it’s that time of year. Mondays are the Friends of the Library lecture series, when you get to hear writers and other interesting people talk … for free!

The first lecture of the series is this Monday, Jan. 19, at the Lecture Series’ temporary new home, the Community Theater of Key West, 512 Eaton St. That’s across the street from the new Studios of Key West, where the series will eventually be held.

And this lecture should be particularly interesting: Michael Mewshaw will be talking about his new book, Sympathy for the Devil, recalling his 40-year friendship with Gore Vidal. Those of us who were here for Vidal’s appearance at the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar know firsthand that, even in his final years, he lived up to his reputation as a fearless provocateur who said exactly what he thought.

The lectures continue every Monday through late March. The schedule is available on the Friends of the Library website. See you there.

Key West Literary Seminar: The Dark Side, Final Chapter download

Lyndsay Faye and Sara Gran. Read them! Read them now! Photo by Nick Doll.

It’s always a risk when the Key West Literary Seminar puts on a double session, meaning two separate Seminars two weekends in a row. We want to accommodate as many people as possible, and we’re limited by the seats available at the San Carlos Institute. But it’s exhausting for the staff and other organizers. And worst of all for those of us with the terrible duty of attending both weekends, it can get repetitive so you feel like you’re stuck in some literary version of Groundhog Day.

To everyone’s great relief and delight, this year that did NOT happen. Probably because only one panelist — James W. Hall — appeared on both weekends and truly, he’s the kind of guy you could listen to tell funny stories all day. The two weekends felt quite different, but both offered illuminating and diverse discussions of crime fiction in its many and varied and forms. Having superstars Lee Child and Michael Connelly in the house for the Final Chapter certainly added to the excitement and they were both great. Child, in particular, was an erudite speaker, who set the tone Friday morning with an entertaining talk about the roots of suspense fiction going back into human history. Evolutionary history.

With Child, Connelly, Lisa Unger, Tess Gerritsen and other big names on board — and two, count ’em two Edgar nominees for Best Novel (William Kent Krueger and Thomas H. Cook) — this week might have felt more commercial, to apply an overly broad adjective. Maybe because of that we had less of the old genre-vs.-literary discussion which I am alternately fascinated and bored by (I’ve got a bunch of links on my Readme page if you feel like delving into it). John Banville, Mr. Literary Himself with a Booker Prize to prove it, said he dislikes the genre stuff and wishes bookshops would shelve everything alphabetically — mainly because he feels like it ghettoizes literary fiction and consigns it to a dark and forbidding corner. We shelve all the fiction alphabetically at the library, I’m happy to say.

Once again, though, it was the women who really caught my interest — I’ve already posted about my bordering-on-embarrassing-fangirldom of Lyndsay Faye, whom I interviewed for Littoral. I had seen Sara Gran last summer at ALA, and she was even smarter and cooler than I remembered. Malla Nunn was a terrific new voice for most of the people in this crowd and her stories of writing about mixed-race people in South Africa as apartheid was being instituted were riveting. Elizabeth George’s keynote was great, setting a wonderful tone — and making me realize that I must have some kind of sick voyeuristic Protestant fascination with hearing about miserable Catholic childhoods. Mary McCarthy, Mary Gordon, Frank McCourt, you name the writer — I just never get tired of hearing about them. Or reading about them.

I tweeted a lot less this time. Not sure why, but I do know partway through Elizabeth George’s keynote I put down my notebook and just allowed myself to sit back and listen — she was not speaking in tweetable nuggets and I did not want to distract myself by focusing on listening for them.

Key West Literary Seminar: The Dark Side, Chapter One download

Megan Abbott, Laura Lippman and Gillian Flynn. Lifetime should hire these three for a regular show analyzing their movies. Photo by Nick Doll, courtesy of the Key West Literary Seminar

I was confident the Literary Seminar was going to be great. First of all, it always is and second, with this line-up, how could it not be? Carl Hiaasen brought down the house Friday night, just as you’d expect. Joyce Carol Oates was eerily mesmerizing, like she always is. Still, it’s the unexpected that brings me the most pleasure. And though I hoped (see previous post, below) that the women were going to be my favorite parts of the event, they managed to exceed my expectations. The highlight was a Sunday morning panel titled “Fatal Vision: The Imprint of True-Crime Movies.” The panel consisted of Megan Abbott, Laura Lippman and Gillian Flynn. They set out by telling us that the panel’s title had been classed up and what they were going to talk about was their unironic love for Lifetime movies. And then they did. It’s already on the Seminar’s Audio Archives page and it’s worth the listen even if you’ve never seen or wanted to see a Lifetime movie in your life. Laura Lippman has already written a great essay expanding on the panel’s central theme — the lack of meaty roles for middle-aged women in Hollywood and how the true crime genre, frequently derided as trashy, allows women to express their full dark sides. Clearly it speaks to great numbers of people — mostly but not all women — and it goes beyond the camp value of seeing Meredith Baxter or Farrah Fawcett enter a homicidal fugue state. Several female friends and I agreed immediately after this panel that we need to have a Netflix movie viewing binge weekend. I also think Lifetime should consider hiring these three to host a show about the genre. Gender was on my mind a lot through the weekend — and not in a preachy, academic kind of way. Perhaps because we started off with a keynote from Sara Paretsky, a pioneer of kickass female P.I. fiction. Cara Canella wrote a nice piece about it for Littoral and the address itself is on the Audio Archives page. And BTW, keep an eye on Littoral in general for great Seminar coverage, words and pictures, throughout. Many people were kind enough to say nice things about my program intro Friday morning and it’s also excerpted on Littoral. The other great revelation to me during this Seminar was not a younger woman at all, but an older gentleman — Alexander McCall Smith. He’s easily dismissed as a writer of gentle cozies. He is, in person, hysterically funny and one of the Seminar highlights was when he would crack himself up reading his own work. Hopefully the audio will appear soon; when it does I’ll post it here.

Into the dark …

The 2014 Key West Literary Seminar is sold out, both sessions — no surprise, given the star power of many of the writers who will be appearing, many of them for the first time in Key West. There are, however, two free sessions that are open to the public on Sunday afternoons — Jan. 12 and 19 — so if you don’t have a ticket you’re not completely out of luck.

If you’re one of those people who just likes to read a few books by Seminar authors or is overwhelmed by the sheer number of writers on the roster here, here is my recommendation: Forget all those rock star guys and look to the women. Especially the younger women. For me, the Seminar’s chief appeal — beyond getting to hear from really smart and often hilarious writers — is the discovery of emerging writers, the non-rock stars. Who, more than likely, will be the rock stars of tomorrow. This year, for whatever reason, most of those newer voices seem to be women.

While the hard-core thriller world is male-dominated, it’s not like women writing crime is a new thing. The Golden Age’s primary stars were women: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham. Since then, P.D. James and Ruth Rendell have been writing great books. More recent and successful female crime writers include Sara Paretsky (who will deliver the keynote at the Seminar’s first session, Chapter One), Elizabeth George (Final Chapter keynote), Laura Lippman (Chapter One panelist), Lisa Unger (Chapter One), Tess Gerritson (Final Chapter) and Kate Atkinson, who will not be at the Seminar, but whose Jackson Brodie books are among my all-time favorites. The hottest rock star at this Seminar, despite the presence of such crime writing celebrities as Carl Hiaasen, Lee Child and Michael Connelly, might just be Gillian Flynn, of Gone Girl fame. She’ll be at Chapter One, including a talk at the free Sunday afternoon session.

The writers I’m most looking forward to hearing from, though, are the women you may not have heard of … yet. I’m guessing they’re the rock stars of the future: Megan Abbott, Sara Gran, Attica Locke, Malla Nunn … and my personal favorite, because I’m especially fond of historical crime, Lyndsay Faye. I already loved her books set in 1840s New York and her Sherlock Holmes solves Jack the Ripper book, Dust & Shadow. And she couldn’t have been smarter or more generous when I interviewed her via email for Littoral, the Seminar’s online journal. The books by these younger women are on the radar screens of librarians and smart readers of non-formulaic crime fiction. I hope the Seminar introduces them to many more.

If you are interested in following the Seminar in close to real time, the best way to do that is via Twitter. I’ll be posting @keywestnan, the Seminar itself is @keywestliterary and many folks will probably use the hashtag #kwls. If you’re enough of a Twitter person to subscribe to lists, both the Seminar and I have lists called the Dark Side, of the writers attending this year’s Seminar so you can follow them even if they don’t use the hashtag.

Key West Literary Seminar: Session 2 download

First of all this is not a particularly good photo, I KNOW, and if you want to see much better photos of the Seminar, head on over to Littoral, the Seminar blog. But it’s my photo of D.T. Max talking about David Foster Wallace, shot on my phone from my perch in the balcony (that dark thing in the bottom right hand corner is the railing) and I’m going to use it, dammit.

I’ll confess I caught less of the second session, which I already regret, but I thoroughly enjoyed what I did see starting with Colm Toibin’s masterful keynote on Thursday night that discussed the poets Thom Gunn and Elizabeth Bishop, both poets whose work shows “grief and reason battling it out,” according to Toibin — along with the work of Robert Frost and Joseph Brodsky.

Both Gunn and Bishop were stylistically and personally opposed to the trend of confessional poetry that swept through their chosen field in the 1960s, which certainly did not mean they had not suffered through traumatic times in their lives. Quite the opposite. And it doesn’t mean those traumas didn’t show up in their poetry. Bishop “buried what mattered to her most in her tone,” Toibin said, most tellingly in the villanelle “One Art,” about “the art of losing.” Toibin calls it “a poem about what cannot be said.”

I also didn’t know, until Toibin told us, that Bishop wanted the line “awful but cheerful” inscribed on her tombstone. It’s the closing line from her poem “The Bight,” about Key West.

Other not-quite-random stuff from the seminar:

Ann Napolitano, who includes Flannery O’Connor as a character in her novel A Good Hard Look:

• “You’re supposed to be from the South if you write about Flannery O’Connor. I had barely been to the South.”
• “There is no way that I could imagine hanging out with Flannery O’Connor. I just think she would eviscerate me in about 30 seconds.”
• “Trying to get inside the skin of someone who is very prickly and you don’t think would like you is a peculiar experience.”

Brad Gooch, author of Flannery, a biography of the same writer:

• “She was her own biographer in the sense she saw her life clearly and created it.”
• “As a biographer … I have to stop where the facts stop. It’s sort of annoying, but grounding as well.”
• “The thing about biography is that no matter how inspired you get, you sort of need a fact to get from one sentence to another.”
• Both Gooch and Napolitano were, in very different ways, inspired to write about O’Connor by “Habits of Being,” a collection of her letters.

Brenda Wineapple on biography:

• As a child, “Biography was a genre I didn’t understand or really much care for.”
• On telling a professor at an academic conference that she was writing a biography: “‘How did it feel,’ he asked, ‘to work on something so theoretically regressive?'” This while swirling sherry condescendingly in his plastic cup.
• “What haunts the house? I think that’s what the biographer has to discover.”
• “Biography matters because people matter. They matter to us because we want to know them and understand them.”
• “Biography is an invasion of privacy made palatable and jusifiable .. by the empathy that inspires it.”

D.T. Max, author of “Every Love Story is a Ghost Story,” a biography of David Foster Wallace:

• On DFW’s college-age ambition to go into politics: “The thought that David Foster Wallace wanted to be a Congressman from Illinois is so weird.”
• On writing a biography soon after a subject’s death: “The laptop lid opens after the casket closes.”
• Biography is “the only nonfiction genre that’s survived basically unchanged for the last 200 years.”
• On meeting readers with tattoos of lines from DFW’s novel “Infinite Jest,” or the dates they began and finished the book: “This is not what biographers are used to encountering.”
• Comparing the reaction to DFW’s death to the reaction to the deaths of John Lennon and Kurt Cobain: “There was a way in which David was toucing people the way musicians usually do.”
• “If grief and sadness are what brought a lot of us to Wallace over the years, I certainly don’t believe it’s what kept us there.”

I’ll give the last word to Geoff Dyer, even though he speaks in long discursive sentences that are very difficult to get down accurately, especially if you’re busy listening for his next witty comment:

• I recognized his surprise, as an undergraduate, when he realized “how quickly doing English came to mean doing criticism.”
• I was surprised and delighted to hear him call F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender is the Night” “one of my two favorite novels of all time.” I loved that book, too, even though, at least in this country, “The Great Gatsby” gets most of the critical love.
• “Thomas Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’ is one of those books everyone has read. You’ve all read it, even if you’ve not done so personally.”

If there’s one image from this Seminar

Key West Literary Seminar: Session 1 download

Colm Toibin at the 2013 Key West Literary Seminar, Writers on Writers. Photograph by Nick Doll.

Session 1 of this year’s Key West Literary Seminar wrapped up yesterday. If you missed it, I suspect recordings will be showing up soonish on the Seminar’s audio archive site. And we’re getting particularly good coverage this year on Littoral, the Seminar blog and from WLRN, the public radio station in Miami. If you’re Twitter-inclined, check out the hashtag #kwls — you’ll even see eminences like Judy Blume and James Gleick chiming in along with us lesser mortals in the audience. This year is not as Twitterific as last but we don’t have William Gibson and Margaret Atwood with us (though Gibson is scheduled to return next year — don’t wait too long to sign up for 2014’s Seminar, The Dark Side, because it’s selling fast). As has quickly become tradition, Jason Rowan is back making custom-crafted cocktails, tailored to the year’s theme. Keep an eye on his blog, Embury Cocktails, for recipes and more information in the near future.

Phyllis Rose opened with a wonderful keynote address Thursday night, examining John Hersey (for whom the Thursday event is named) as a lens through which to view the whole writer vs. person question. Is the man Key Westers saw riding his bike around the island the same person who wrote “Hiroshima” and “A Bell for Adano”? The answer is, of course, no and yes. Rose was also refreshingly dismissive about the overwhelming adoption of deconstruction and other French-influenced critical approaches toward literature, which tortured those of us who were English majors in the latter part of the 20th century and dared to think that writers’ lives and times might influence their work. For literary scholars who didn’t feel like sacrificing themselves on the altars of Derrida and Foucault, literary biography became “a welcome oasis during the desert years of deconstruction,” Rose said. “Writers about writers were rescued by readers who wanted to know about writers’ lives.”

A sporadic sample from the rest of the weekend:

From Judith Thurman, biographer of Isak Dinesen and Colette and staff writer for The New Yorker:

• “Fiction is high-minded betrayal and biography is dirty-minded fidelity.”
• One of Thurman’s early jobs was translating pornographic movies. “It’s freelance work that I heartily recommend because it’s easy — you just have to understand the words ‘Yes…. yes!’ and ‘More!'”
• Translation is “yoga for the mind and for the ear.”
• “One definition of the truth is that which is untranslatable.”

From Brenda Wineapple, biographer of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Gertrude and Leo Stein, author of a book about Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

• On her subjects: “I prefer them deader and deader.”
• Emily Dickinson is “the elusive subject par excellence.”
• Oscar Wilde quote: “Biography adds new terror to death.”

Most amazing fact learned at this year’s Seminar (so far):

• Bram Stoker based the character of Dracula on Walt Whitman (amazing fact supplier: Mark Doty). Edmund White followed this with a comment on why vampire is so often code for gay in literature: “You meet someone, you kiss them and you turn them into you.”

Time to get reading some Writers on Writers

I love this time of year for a few reasons. Holiday decorations in Key West are fun and appear to be getting more fun every year. I love the best of the year book lists that come out around now, to compare my own reading and to get ideas for books I might have missed. And I love the annual library display of books by writers appearing at the upcoming Key West Literary Seminar.  The theme this time is Writers on Writers and the works encompass straight-up biography, meditative memoir and novels with real writers as fictional characters. Lots more detail, including the writers appearing and the schedules for both sessions, is available on the Seminar website. You can still register!

The books by this year’s authors include some serious — as in long and demanding attention — books. But don’t let that discourage you. While you may not be up for wading through a magisterial Literary Biography, especially during the distractions of the holiday season, there are plenty of other books that you may find surprisingly entertaining, as well as edifying.

We’ve just put up a display of books by Seminar writers at the Key West Library so if you’re in town stop by and check it out (the display is in the Reference Department, turned over the summer into a more open reading room if you haven’t been in recently).

Finally finishing a book about not really writing a book about D.H. Lawrence

Last night I finished reading Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer. According to my record on LibraryThing, where I obsessive-compulsively record such things, I started reading it on March 6. So it took me more than four months to read a 256-page book.

First up: It was great. More on that later.

I have good excuses. I had a couple other things going on. Moving, mainly, which involved organizing, and packing, and holding a yard sale and unpacking. Most of our books remain in boxes since we still haven’t built the Wall of Bookshelves. All that chaos meant I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to appreciate Dyer’s dry, funny, smart observations on literature and himself. It was easier to dive in to various kinds of genre novels and a true crime book. And I went out of town for a week and that meant I had to read a Patrick O’Brian book because I only read those when I travel and I rarely travel these days. Besides, procrastinating on reading a book that is, in large part, about why and how we avoid doing the things we supposedly want to do, seemed appropriate.

But I kept the book near the surface level of the moving chaos and eventually finished it and am extremely glad I did. Dyer is hysterically funny, writing about his journey to write (or not write) a critical study of D.H. Lawrence, which winds up being this book instead, a memoir of sorts and meditation on the creative process and, not least, on Lawrence and his choices in life.

I especially loved Dyer’s rant about academic literary criticism, which is over the top but perfectly expresses the fury many of us feel toward the current “official” approach to literature by its self-appointed judges who appear to be interested only in finding reasons to tear it apart and blame it for humanity’s evil excesses, and then express their findings in repellent prose. Who needs it? Dyer speaks for those of us who love reading, and wind up majoring in English or studying literature in some fashion but are horrified by the way academia handles the field.

There’s one other good reason to read this book if you’re in Key West or interested in coming to Key West this January: Dyer will be here for the Key West Literary Seminar’s upcoming session, Writers on Writers. We’re holding two sessions — the first is sold out but there’s still room in the second, Jan. 17-20. And Dyer will be here for both, along with an impressive roster of fellow writers. Can’t wait to find out if he’s as funny and interesting in person as he is on the page (though after reading his comments on Rome, Santa Fe and Taos, I fear a little for Key West in future essays).

Future Perfect Continuous

From left, Jim Gleick, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood and China Mieville mix it up in the first panel of Yet Another World. Photo by Nick Doll.

It’s all over but the workshops. Yet Another World materialized in the San Carlos for one night and three exhilarating days, and then it was over. What’s left is the post-Seminar letdown … and a massive new reading list.

I promised further explanation of this year’s theme. Can’t say I can, other than to reiterate that it isn’t really dystopia — though there was a good bit of that — nor scifi, or speculative fiction as high-end scifi is frequently styled these days. The subtitle was “Literature of the Future” and the guiding texts were 1984 and Brave New World, if that helps. In his introduction in the Seminar’s program, Program Chair James Gleick writes this, referring to the writers gathered for the Seminar: “What they do share — what their work reveals — is a deepening awareness of past and future, which also means an awareness that our world is not the only one possible.”

I won’t even try to come up with a coherent report about what the Seminar covered or explicating further on the theme — keep an eye on the Seminar’s always-expanding Audio Archives for recordings of individual sessions. Here, instead, is an episodic report of stuff I heard that I thought was interesting (and short) enough to jot down in my notebook.

Interesting information new to me

In his opening introduction, Gleick told us about a religion newly officially acknowledged as such in Sweden: Kopimism, or copyism, it is a religion dedicated to file sharing. Ctrl-C and Ctlr-V are sacred symbols. “That is not speculative fiction,” Gleick said. “That is Wikipedia. And it wasn’t there yesterday.”

Sharks save swimmers, according to Jonathan Lethem. How? Because after a shark attack, the number of drowning deaths decreases for a few years.

Year of the Flood, according to Margaret Atwood, is not a sequel or prequel to Oryx & Crake but a simultaneal.

Colson Whitehead’s first piece of professional writing, for the Village Voice, was a think piece about the series finales of Who’s The Boss and Growing Pains.

After finishing a novel, Cory Doctorow buys a steampunk bondage mask from some specialty shop in Bulgaria. According to William Gibson.

After Chronic City was published, Wikipedia had to lock down the Marlon Brando page because fans of the book were trying to revive him in keeping with the book’s plot.