Reading Under the Influence: “Leaving Tuscaloosa” by Walter Bennet
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Walter Bennett
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Leaving Tuscaloosa is set in the Deep South of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1962. This is the year before Bull Connor turned his fire hoses on civil rights protesters in Birmingham and the Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church. Walter Bennett paints a raw, violent, and realistic landscape of racial tensions that existed prior to the eruption of Connor’s fire hoses. Yet what draws the reader into this novel are not its historical implications but the characters’ authentic voices and Bennett’s skillful weaving of plot and storytelling abilities. Simply put, Bennett is a master storyteller. Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “The Sea and Civilization,” by Lincoln Paine
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Lincoln Paine (photo: Nellie Large)
Rejected Titles For That Novel I Haven’t Bothered To Write Yet
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Lost In Thought On A Cold Morning Looking At Trees and Shit
Divinely Beautiful And Incredibly Humble, Too
The Oils That Dry In Our Bones And Our Dishwasher
Emailed Soliloquies of Grandeur
You Look Hot In That Flannel Shirt: A Memoir Of Love Lost Continue reading →
Pas de Trois: Three Books About Ballet
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Not too long ago, loose in New York for an evening, I went to see the Bournonville ballet La Sylphide at the Met. This was a last-minute decision, not too many dollars in my pocket, but a chance to see the ballet that’s at the heart of my novel Life Among Giants. At the Tonight’s Performance ticket window I swallowed my pride and asked for the cheapest seat available, found myself in The Family Circle, top tier of the wedding cake. Nosebleed! But as the lights went down and the curtains rose, I quickly found that the birds-eye view was perfect for dance. From so high above the choreography was visible as if drawn by a swift hand on a sheet of paper in a practice room, entrances and paired arrows, arcs and exits and lifts and stops, the overall shape of things clear and rousing. Nixies and nymphs! Magical blankets! Love and temptation and, well, degradation, one of the bleakest endings in theater, all expressed in gesture, impossible leaps, tragic fades. Anyway: I’ve found over the years that books provide a similar birds-eye view to dance, and even offer entry to another world, a world as different from ours as that of the sylphs and fairies of Bournonville’s ballet, but perhaps as dangerous. Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “Gaining Ground,” by Forrest Pritchard
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Of all the different kinds of work I have done in my life (truck driver, legislative aide, carpenter, farmer, teacher, writer, educational consultant, bookseller), my favorites have been teaching and running the organic farm in Vermont. Perhaps that’s why Forrest Pritchard’s memoir about trying to save the family farm, Gaining Ground, resonated so deeply… but I suspect this is a book that will move nearly any reader. It’s a tale about growing up and finding one’s way in the world and of the industrial agriculture machine that mostly rules our food choices and the power of family and the ways that a family farm can find a niche within the confines of the present-day capitalist marketplace. Continue reading →
Serial Sunday: Henry Miller’s Commandments for Young Writers
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A photo of a page from a yellowed book has been going around Facebook: it’s Henry Miller’s commandments, just a note he jotted to himself while living and working in Paris, c. 1932. It’s collected in a New Directions paperback called Henry Miller on Writing. And he was a guy who had a lot to say on the subject. [here’s a great interview with him in The Paris Review]
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Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “The Circle,” by Dave Eggers
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From an inauspicious debut that became a publishing sensation, Dave Eggers has crafted a career remarkable for the breadth of its range across the worlds of literature, culinary arts, pop culture, politics, education and publishing. Eggers has parlayed the wholly unexpected success of his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, into a publishing powerhouse (McSweeney’s), two best-selling magazines (Lucky Peach and The Believer), a series of books focussing on the politics of incarceration and human rights abuses (Voice of Witness), a tutoring center for inner-city youth (826 Valencia) that now has an international presence and a ground-breaking series capturing the zeitgeist of literary pop culture (Best American Non-Required Reading). And oh yes, did I forget to mention that he has continued to write (Zeitoun, What Is the What, How we Are Hungry, A Hologram for the King), garnering nominations for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award along the way? Continue reading →
Bizarre Copyright-Beating Pirate Computer Translation Attacks Invoice Roorbach
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Okay, this coming Sunday, November 10, my review of Eleanor Catton’s second novel, The Luminaries, will appear in the print edition of the The New York Times Book Review. The review has been online since October 16 in recognition of Ms. Catton’s winning the Booker Prize the day before, wonderful. But something strange–a friend googling to find the review came up with a site called Daily News. The photo of Ms. Catton is oddly stretched out, and then, so is my prose! Pirates! They’ve apparently used a computer program to slightly alter the text (no doubt in an effort to avoid the letter of copyright law, but maybe as a perverse courtesy, as they are no doubt in some other part of the world. I was given no by-line on their version, but the program did include my bio. I offer two paragraphs here for comparison. And my bio, which is meant to say: Bill Roorbach’s most recent book is Life Among Giants. He blogs at Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour. Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: Alice Munro, Nobel Laureate!
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Alice Munro, perhaps alone among English-speaking writers, can be said to measure up to the artistic genius of Chekhov. Over a career spanning fifteen remarkable collections, Munro has plumbed the mysteries of the human heart, almost exclusively the female heart, in short stories that rival any novel for their depth and breadth and startling view of the capriciousness of lives we pretend to be defined by their stability. And now Munro has been recognized for her life’s work by being awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature. Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge,” by Peter Orner
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Peter Orner
