Lundgren’s Book Lounge: John Leonard’s “Reading for My Life”
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 2 comments
John Leonard
Book reviewing is an endeavor that hints at the undeniably mercenary aspects of the book business–you know, that distasteful transaction of exchanging filthy lucre for creations that can justifiably be labelled as art. Yet sometimes literary criticism transcends the quotidian role of simply selling books and can be said to attain artistic heights as lofty as the works being commented upon. Nowhere is this elevation of reviewing books to art itself more evident than in the writings of John Leonard. And now these works of astonishing erudition and wit and wisdom have been collected in a single paperback volume, Reading For My Life. Continue reading →
Reading Under the Influence: Lundgren’s Book Lounge
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 4 comments
Maria Semple
[This week we introduce you to Bill Lundgren, who has a thing or two to say about current books, and blogs books at LongfellowBooks.com. He’ll be back!]
Where’d You Go Bernadette, a novel by Maria Semple
While waiting on a mother and daughter at the bookstore recently I asked if they would like to join the customer program. When they responded that they were from Seattle I had to ask whether they’d read Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple. “Everybody in Seattle has read that book,” the mother responded, “and it’s all true,” the 14 or 15 year old daughter added with the emphatic disdain that only an adolescent can produce. Continue reading →
Reading Under the Influence: A Look Back at Antonya Nelson’s Expendables
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 1 comment
.
Some years ago, in 2000, to be precise, I won a Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. I rented a fancy tux and headed Milledgeville and a grand award ceremony. But the real prize was seeing my collection, Big Bend, beautifully published. This yaer marks the 30th anniversary of the prize, and the editors asked us winners if we’d write brief posts about one another’s books for their blog. They are also offering a pair of e-anthologies of work from all the winners, coming soon. And before long, an e-book of Big Bend will finally be available, hoorah! Below, I’ll offer my post for the “30 Days of the Flannery O’Connor award,” this one about Antonya Nelson’s winning collection from 1990, The Expendables. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: It’s a Brave Old World
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 2 comments
Just what I pictured: Public House
A couple of months back, at a reading by Kate Miles at Devanney, Doak, and Garrett Booksellers here in Farmington, Maine, I found myself seated across from the Dover Editions rack. These are decent paperback editions of classics, or at least just work in the public domain, priced to reach the masses. While I listened to Kate beautifully read from her new book of the sea, All Standing, my eye kept returning to that rack. And after the reading among the milling crowd I made my way to it, the old bibliomania surfacing. I bought Kate’s book (which she signed to someone else, long story) and grabbed J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, one of those books I’ve meant to read lo these many years, first entering my consciousness in college (I thought it might be the Hugh Hefner story then, but was disappointed), and growing there over the years (various Irish kicks), blooming when A. Walton Litz mentioned it in a great Yeats and Joyce seminar I joined in graduate school. Something about the repression and stifling and conformity of Irish society, back in the day. I didn’t read it then, but I did read Ulysses, finally, A. Walton Litz having loaned me a complete set of cassette tapes: the Irish National Theatre doing a complete reading on Bloomsday, 25 hours. Finally I heard the Joyce’s voices, glorious; finally I could read and understand the book, the secret being to listen. Continue reading →
Great Pick-Up Lines
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 8 comments
Of course I’m interested in opening lines. Mine come first as I write maybe about half the time. Many come from later paragraphs in an early draft–I’m a big cutter of early pages. The rest get written in the revision, occasionally, as with Life Among Giants, are among the very last words added. Sometimes when starting new work I go through my bookshelves randomly and read first lines, first paragraphs. Some writers–some books I should say–start with a place. Many (especially contemporary) with character. More and more, in an impatient age, writers start with plot. The old-timers started with voice and language, often philosophy, knowing we had nothing better to do than listen. The project this morning is to close my eyes and randomly pick seven titles from the fiction section of my over-packed shelves, with the rule that I have to use whatever books come into my hands. Anything I violently don’t want to use for this post must go to the thrift shop (I now have a thrift-shop box on the porch–and like Samuel Pepys, vow that one book must go out for every book that comes in!). As it happens, no thrift-shop books emerged (I’ve been assiduously culling), far from it. As it happens, some of the books are collections of stories, so the line you’ll hear is from a story rather than a novel, very different game. Continue reading →
Alive and Well! A San Francisco Independent Bookstore Photo Haiku
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 2 comments
City Lights!
Giants on the Road, First Leg of the Mighty Tour, a Photo Epic
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 18 comments
Describing a football, or maybe a dance lift. [photo Stan Groner]
Bill’s Pub Day!!
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 3 comments
Books are dead, they say. Not true, we say here at Bill and Dave’s.
Well, okay, maybe books are dead, but not this one book……For today is the official pub day–trumpets please–of Life Among Giants. (Great title, Bill, did Dave help you with it?)
One of the pleasures of this book is that it is so very much Bill. “A man is best when he is most himself,” said Thoreau. Of course Bill is not really being himself here, for one thing he is not 6’8” like Lizard, his protaginist. But the book is him. The spirit is him, And it’s a spirit that you will like being with for a few days and 300 pages.
Below find a bunch of early reviews collected by Bill’s agent, Betsy Lerner, at her website:
CONGRATULATIONS BILL (old friend, great writer, sweet as pineapple) ROORBACH
on the publication of:
It’s Lonely Out There!
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 35 comments
Nothing sucks more than when no one shows up for a reading or event when you’re on the road. And nothing is nicer than a drink with friends in strange towns. I mean, the towns aren’t strange. I like the towns. But being alone is strange. So I’ll paste my tour schedule as it currently stands and hope you’ll come out and see me, also let friends and family know if I’m coming to their part of the country. Because they’ll like me! And I’ll like them. Continue reading →
Wild Ducks: How an Essay of the Empty Nest was Hatched
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 13 comments
Claire Gilbert at eleven, sledding with her puppy Jack (January 1998)
The past few years, working on a memoir of my experiences farming in Appalachia, I’ve generated tons of material—twice, 500 pages—and have spun some passages into stand-alone pieces. The published ones include an essay on my hired hand who died; another about a legendary pond-builder with a tragic secret; one about the historic first meeting of my future wife and my father; yet another about my father’s return to farming in retirement and his decline and death. Continue reading →
