Sleepy-Eyed Writer, Wandering Byzantium
By CHARLES McGRATH in the New York Times
Published: March 2, 2008

YOU might not know it to look at him, but the novelist Richard Price has over the years picked up what one of his characters might call some cheddar. He has a house in Gramercy Park and a summer place out on the Island; his work has earned him an Edgar award for television writing, an Academy Award nomination and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. But Mr. Price, who grew up in the Parkside Projects, has shed neither his Bronx accent nor any of his street-smarts.

He is still wary, even a little jumpy at times. Walking around the Lower East Side, where his new novel, “Lush Life,” is set, he could easily be mistaken for one of the locals. Pale, thin, high-strung, with the baggy eyes of someone who doesn’t get enough sleep, he could even be a guy looking to score a little coke — something Mr. Price admits to doing with regularity back in the ’80s. He walks quickly, jokes a lot without smiling much, and, as readers of his books know, has a pitch-perfect mastery of urban speech in all its varieties. He may be the only middle-aged white man in America who can say “True dat” without sounding ridiculous.

Now 58, Mr. Price published his first book, “The Wanderers,” set in the blue-collar Bronx of his childhood, when he was just 24 and barely out of Cornell — from which he emerged, he has said, even streetier and more Bronx-sounding than when he began — and the M.F.A. program at Columbia, where his models were Hubert Selby and Lenny Bruce.

He has published steadily every since, eventually turning from more or less autobiographical work to books like “Clockers” and “Freedomland,” big, Dickensian novels about the drug trade and life in the projects. He has also written the screenplays for “Clockers,” “The Color of Money” (for which he received the Oscar nomination), “Sea of Love” and “Mad Dog and Glory,” among other movies, and recently he has written some episodes for the HBO series “The Wire,” which won him the Edgar. He’s one of a handful of contemporary novelists to work for Hollywood and emerge more or less unscathed.

[ click to view full New York Times article ]

Hardcover Fiction

Published: March 9, 2008

snipped from ShelfAwareness newsletter

“Once I could have sold my books to any number of local used bookshops for a reasonable sum–now nobody much wants anything, aside from rarities–because everything is available online. I myself understand the attractiveness of being able to buy everything you want, but I don’t like the whole outlook. It’s like a billionaire buying a beautiful woman any time he wants one to sleep with–where’s the romance, where’s the excitement, the heartache, the attendant glories and sorrows of romance? Once it was exciting to go out ‘booking’–and there were scores of places to go. But now, now. To make everything freely available makes everything seem that much less interesting and desirable. But I begin to rant.”–Michael Dirda in a live, online discussion at Washingtonpost.com

2007 Award Winners in Fiction and Nonfiction

Find the best new literary talent from 2007! Our distinguished panel of jurists have voted — and this year’s Discover Awards go to Joshua Ferris for his dazzling Then We Came to the End and to Kate Braestrup for her inspiring Here if You Need Me.

• See Past Winners & Finalists
• See Other Book Award Winners

from MediaBistro’s FishbowlNY

On Monday, Salman Rushdie headed to Pennsylvania for a speaking engagement at Widener University, located outside Philadelphia in the suburb of Chester

The town of Chester decided to act with prudence when they found out Rushdie would be visiting. So they swarmed the Widener campus with police SWAT teams and K-9 units. As a matter of fact, they even forced a police escort on Rushdie at a Philadelphia train station.

Rushdie, who frequently travels the New York subways unescorted and is a bit of a man about town in these post-fatwa days, was terrified and said:

“It’s insane! […] I was absolutely horrified. Assault rifles, tracker dogs – they scare me!”

Hmm. Maybe the Chester police department just wanted to protect Rushdie from Padma Lakshmi and the risk that his ex-wife would have had been in posession of her (alleged) favorite herb.

However, the most depressing part of this story is that Chester is one of the most crime-ridden municipalities in America. The police resources deployed to “protect” Rushdie could have been put to much better use elsewhere… It’s too bad for the good people of Chester that few of them happen to be famous writers — then maybe they could actually put a dent in the crime rate.

(Image via Southbank Centre)

Mark Brown, arts correspondent
Tuesday February 19, 2008
The Guardian

A 21-year-old playwright is to join theatre history as one of the youngest writers to have a debut play performed in London’s West End.

Photograph: Alex Macnaughton/Rex Features

Polly Stenham’s story of a dysfunctional middle class family, That Face, surprised most critics when it opened at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, central London, last year, and went on to win a string of awards.

Now a wider audience will have the chance to see it when it opens at the Duke of York’s theatre for a 10-week run in May.

Sonia Friedman, a West End producer, said she wanted to be involved in the play as soon as she saw it. “I can’t remember the last time I sat in a theatre and felt so moved and stunned by a theatrical experience. It was just so extraordinarily insightful and exciting,” she said.

The critics also loved it, with the Observer calling it “gob-smacking” and the Daily Telegraph critic calling it one of the most astonishing debuts he’d seen.

[ click to read full article at Guardian UK ]

from MediaBistro’s GalleyCat in New York City

Sunday night, poet Owen Sheers read from his first novel, Resistance, at KGB, pairing off with Richard Gwyn for one of the first events of Wales Week USA, an eight-day celebration of Welsh culture featuring, among other events, musical performances, art exhibitions, and a closed-circuit screening of last Saturday’s rugby game pitting the Welsh national team against the Italians (which, happily, they won 47-8).

Sheers and Gwyn will also read Wednesday night at Housing Works and Saturday afternoon at The Ear Inn with their fellow countryman, Lloyd Robson, and Thursday night Sheers is going to lead a discussion at the New York Public Library with the acclaimed travel writer Jan Morris. After the KGB event was over, I got out my camcorder and asked Sheers to tell me more about his participation in Wales Week USA, and about his fellowship at the NYPL’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers…

[ click to read full blog and videos at the GalleyCat pages ]

snipped from Shelf Awareness

In another publisher experiment making material available at no cost on the Internet, Random House began offering the entire text of Beautiful Children, Charles Bock’s debut novel, for free online as of 12:01 this morning until midnight on Friday, Leap Day. Readers will be able to share, e-mail or print the text, which is available as a PDF download at beautifulchildren.net/read. In cooperation with Random, Amazon.com, B&N.com, Powells.com and Northshire.com are making the file available to their customers.

Beautiful Children, which first appeared in primitive print form at the end of January, concerns the effect of the disappearance of a 12-year-old boy in Las Vegas on his parents and others.

Incidentally last week, Random House Audio announced that it will no longer require that retailers use digital right management (DRM) when selling audiobooks via digital download. The company decided, it said, “that this move will allow for healthy competition among retailers targeting the iPod consumer, without posing any substantive increase in risk of piracy.” Still Random can use DRM for authors who want it.

March 2, 2008

Hardcover Fiction

by Paul Johnson in The Spectator

I gave up writing novels in my mid-twenties, when I was halfway through my third, convinced I had not enough talent for fiction. Sometimes I wish I had persisted. There is one particular reason. The point is made neatly by W. Somerset Maugham in Cakes and Ale:

These remarks need qualification. I’m not sure that the essay can be used for such a purpose. Hazlitt, a great essayist, wrote an extended essay — short book length — to exorcise the torturing spirit of his landlady’s awful (but to him divine) daughter, Sarah, and it did not work: merely got him into fresh, public trouble. It is true that Lamb, an even better essayist, occasionally used the form to rid himself of shaming memories: for instance, not sufficiently appreciating the kindness of his humble aunt who brought him culinary titbits when he was a charity boy at the Charterhouse, and in that delicate essay ‘Poor Relations’. But I have published, I calculate, about 800 essays without using one for exorcism. It works in poetry, especially to expunge the pangs of loss — witness Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ and Shelley’s ‘Adonais’, and most of ‘A Shropshire Lad’ — indeed nearly all Housman’s verse was exorcism. It can be made to work, I suppose, in non-fiction. I suspect there is exorcism in some of Ruskin’s prose, and Carlyle’s.

But fiction is the ideal medium for killing painful memories. The most excruciating emotional torture in Thackeray’s life — prolonged, too — was his hopeless passion for Mrs Brookfield, ending in heartbreak, bitterness and bad temper on the part of her unpleasant husband. But he cured himself by putting it all into Henry Esmond. Gustave Flaubert wanted to forget about his ten-year on-off affair with Louise Collet. So he wrote Madame Bovary, which did the trick and also proved to be by far his best novel because, unlike Salambo and Bouvet et Pécuchet, he had lived it. I think Anthony Trollope tried to deal with his illicit and unspoken love for the American girl Kate, not once but several times — she flickered in and out of at least three novels — but the fact that he had to repeat the dose shows it didn’t work, any more than did Aldous Huxley’s attempt to expel Nancy Cunard from his memory in Antic Hay.

[ click to read full article in The Spectator UK ]

Check out this nice little literary blog from NYC (and buy one of her shirts)…

Book Nerd
Location: Brooklyn, New York, United States

I work at an independent bookstore in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood. Someday I will have a bookstore of my own in Brooklyn. I love reading books, talking about books, and being where literature hits the streets. I think independent bookstores can be a source for culture, community, and social justice. I live in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood with the ALP (Adorably Literate Partner), who reads everything that I don’t. You can reach me here: booknerdnyc at earthlink dot net.

Thanks to the graphic design help of my brilliant sister Sarah…

You can now purchase your own Book Nerd T-shirt!

Just imagine — bookish types walking around, all over the country, with their hair-band/L.A. gangster/motorcycle-mob typeface t-shirts, proclaiming their unrepentant book nerdism. It’s a beautiful thing.

[ click to visit The Written Nerd blog ]