On the eve of 2008, it's nice to review the best books of 2007.  Kirkus Review has put out three different lists for the following categories: best children, young adult, and adult books of 2007.  Of this project, the editors write:   "Most of us would like to think of literature as a pure art, unencumbered by sales, charts and positions on bestseller lists...The reality, however, is of course more complicated, as each year hundreds of excellent titles are overlooked by the media or just don't sell as briskly as expected. For this Special, the editors revisited books that received strong reviews in Kirkus, then investigated how much public attention each received. The books featured are our picks for the outstanding overlooked fiction and nonfiction titles of the year."  You can see the list here. 
Included in this list are authors Amy Bloom, Mohsin Hamid, Andrea Barrett, Arabella Edge, Oakley Hall, and Valerie Martin, among many others.  This is a good list to have on hand in order to revisit those books you heard about, but never picked up for yourself. 

Recently, I became aware of the anthology Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak. The title alone raised some red flags for me; I am accustomed to hearing of poems coming from a prison, but from a military torture facility? It seems Dan Chiasson of The New York Times had a similar reaction.  He wrote a review of the book ("Notes on Prison Camp") back in August, shortly after the collection was released.

The story behind the book is something like this: a group of lawyers trying to represent the prisoners (sorry, "detainees") at Guantánamo have arranged with the Pentagon and the University of Iowa Press to have poems written by the inmates translated and published. I suppose we are to assume that these were written during all of that free time they have, in some free moment when they just had to express their emotions in a way that only poetry would allow.

Here's an excerpt from Chiasson's review:

[R]eading “Poems From Guantánamo” is a bizarre experience. “The Detainees Speak” is this book’s subtitle: but putting aside the real question of whether lyric poets ever “speak” through their art, in the sense of revealing a historical person’s actual life story (they have rarely done so through poetry’s long history, and often poets “speak” least revealingly precisely when they claim to be telling the truth), in what sense could these poems, heavily vetted by official censors, translated by “linguists with secret-level security clearance” but no literary training, released by the Pentagon according to its own strict, but unarticulated, rationale — “speak”?

Given these constraints, a better subtitle might have been “The Detainees Do Not Speak” or perhaps “The Detainees Are Not Allowed to Speak.” But the best subtitle, I fear, would have been “The Pentagon Speaks.” To be sure, it’s hard to imagine a straightforward propagandistic use for the lines “America sucks, America chills, / While d’ blood of d’ Muslims is forever getting spilled”; but you can’t help suspecting that this entire production is some kind of public relations psych-out, “proof” that dissent thrives even in the cells of Guantánamo.

I got a clearer sense of my initial reaction after I read Chiasson's conclusion, in which he points out the historical context that the book evokes:

[I]magine a volume of Osip Mandelstam’s poetry released by the Soviet government in 1938, or an anthology of poems by Japanese internment prisoners released by our government during the Second World War.

It makes me feel a bit dirty, as an aspiring poet, to see poetry being used in such a way. I'm wondering which would help me more: a shower, or some mouthwash.

The New Yorker has published Carver's story, "Beginners," which Gordan Lish edited to become "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." You can find Carver's original here, but what's more interesting, I think, is a copy with Lish's edits, here. Lish cut about five pages, chiseled the language throughout, and wrote a few new sentences, including the last. His edits change the feel story, but they really do sharpen it and make it stronger for the most part.

I got a subscription to Tinhouse for Christmas, and the current issue has a good story by Charles Baxter, "McQueer," an excerpt from a new novel called The Soul Thief due out in February. The narrator is a father of two teenage boys, and though he and his wife seem to be doing well enough, the story reads much darker than Baxter's recent novels. Two pieces of wisdom from the narrator: "Romance--this is my personal view--is a destructive myth after the age of nineteen. Most people give it up, and they should." Then, "middle-class life in this country seems to be operating on a contingency basis. It can change at any moment. They can pull the rug out from under you." Look for The Soul Thief in February to see how the rug is pulled out from under Baxter's new narrator and his wife.

Also in this latest issue of Tinhouse is a story by Joshua Ferris. I haven't read it yet, but Ferris is a young up-and-comer who has a great story in The New Stories from the South 2007, so I think he's one to keep an eye out for.

On a good friend's recommendation I've been visiting Fark, a media blog with links to various news articles, I think submitted by Fark members. The founder, Drew Curtis, now has a book, It's Not News, It's Fark, which came out earlier this year. It looks interesting.

I've been reading Alan Weisman's new book, The World Without Us, which is fascinating. The premise of the book is, what would happen if people just disappeared from the earth tomorrow? Drawing from civil engineering, anthropology, paleontology, ecology, and other natural sciences, he explains step by step what would happen to the world over time, beginning with crumbling houses to jungled cities. Within days, subway tunnels in major cities would flood and begin weakening structures from the bottom up. Meanwhile, expanding ice would crack up sidewalks, leaving room for trees and other plants to grow through the concrete, and fires would begin raging across rooftops as lightning rods corroded. Given enough time, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would settle, and an ice age in 15000 years would pulverize anything left--copper wires, bronze sculptures--to veins of dust under layers of soil. Weisman's voice is captivating and not very technical. My one qualm with the book is that it becomes a little to eco-friendly for my taste, going into too much detail about how polymers will never break down, and how every sea organism will soon have ingested tiny fragments of plastic. I guess that kind of argument comes with the territory of this book, but it's not as captivating as his descriptions of our world vanishing.

In the same spirit, I Am Legend, the new end-of-the-world zombie movie with Will Smith, is pretty decent. Based on an old Richard Matheson novel (and previously made into movies--The Omega Man, for instance), the story is that a team of scientists created an anti-cancer "virus" that either killed or turned into zombies all but 1% of the population. Smith's character and his German shepherd roam the empty streets of New York in an eerie and suspenseful first hour. But, because you need other characters for conflict, a woman and a child enter the story about halfway through, and from there the plot creaks a bit. The story feels rushed, events unearned, but Smith's acting is good and the imagery of empty Manhattan makes the movie a worthwhile vacation flick.

Liberating: the best word I can come up with for the experience I had reading Geoffrey G. O'Brien's second collection of poems, Green and Gray.  What else could I say about a poem that declares this victory over life's demands: "So much for problems and their solutions."?  What else could I say that would be more accurate than O'Brien's own commentary on the book and its methods, embedded throughout this self-aware collection?  As one poem puts it, "The feeling is / of the other side of the beginning of a bridge, / imaginary numbers, scratches on a table"; and these poems are "cold coals / of wildflowers, wars / at their centers, they go on for years / burning near the front / and from below."  Brilliantly conceived and executed, O'Brien has managed to be abstract and engaged in fairly lofty ideas without coming off as pretentious.

There is this warning for readers, though: if you're looking for perfect poems, you should probably look somewhere else; O'Brien doesn't write those.  He begins "The Nature of Encounters" by "already screwing up the end of the poem / with a hopeful form of forgetfulness."  If you're looking for poems that connect with you emotionally, that speak urgently to you, the reader, and bring comfort or mild epiphany to you in difficult times, this book might not be what you're looking for.  As O'Brien writes in “This Partly Imagined Tale,” "It may be / that feelings haven't been accurate / instruments for some time now."

What this book does take as its major concerns are the social, the intellectual, and the political; but especially, it addresses "the problem of senses confined to a head."  The focus on the perceiver, the senses, and the objects of perception keeps the poems from becoming didactic or sentimental by putting everything on the level of phenomenology.  His avoidance of a poetic voice as it is usually conceived of in the mainstream contemporary lyric also keeps him free of such pitfalls.  At the outset of "Objects in Portraits," he writes that, "In the uncertain light of the first person / anything made is embarrassing."  He has chosen an interesting way around such embarrassment; he has decided to compose many (possibly all) of these poems with the language of other texts: not his own expression, but the expressions of words moved and rearranged into new contexts.  In this way, the words do not follow an author's intended meaning so much as they precede it and give rise to it.  This reversal of the standard order of events or process is featured prominently in the poem “Hysteron Proteron” (the rhetorical term for such reversals).  It contains some of the most politically dangerous moments in the book.  O'Brien manages to cover bombs (think cruise missiles), toppled statues (think Lenin, think Saddam Hussein) and 9/11 with an intelligence and care to the nuances of connotation that allow him to get away with lines like “the fortuitous encounter on a sky / of two planes and two towers” and “911 Is a Joke, How Can I Move the Crowd, Police and Thieves, The Ocean.”  [Just for clarity's sake, “911 Is a Joke” is a song written by Public Enemy in 1990, here used as an example of how eerie hysteron proteron can be.]  Another poem, "They Met Only in the Evenings" (as a brief note at the front of the book explains), was composed using only language from the USA PATRIOT Act and Jean Genet's Querrelle.  "The New" was composed by extracting phrases that mark time from Dante's La Vita Nuova and arranging them into a meditation on causality.

The real achievement of this book is in the unexpected and often unexplainable moments of clarity that O'Brien arrives at through the expert use of these compositional methods.  "In Re Others" pulls this off better than any other poem.  One of many in the collection organized around anaphora—a technique which O'Brien employs to great effect—the poem moves along steadily on the repeated phrase, "There is this to say."  And much is said about the self and the “other”—those it coexists with—much of which “can be said with a ship / and a wave, with only and also."  But what it comes down to in the end is this: "a bee in a well, the edges of islands, / any meeting place of the one life and the other / and the rekillable flowers that grow there / as though to say: there is this."  The tail of the anaphora, "to say," has fallen off, and there is only "this" left, naked and glorious: a thingness that is beyond any of the poem's things, an awareness that is not confined to any sum or part of those who are aware, an imperceptible hum that can even resist the word silence.  I suppose this is what I mean when I call this book liberating.

-- Reviewed by Eric Scovel 

(University of California Press, 2007; $19.95)

New translation by Simon Armitage reviewed at the NY Times.  The reviewer compares it to Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, comments on how considerate Armitage is to sound, and closes with,

Five years ago, W. S. Merwin published a learned, lyrical translation. Now Simon Armitage has given us an energetic, free-flowing, high-spirited version. He reminds us that “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” still wields an uncanny power after 600 years. We’re fortunate that “our coffers have been crammed / with stories such as these.”

It's interesting that old epics are getting popular new translations (Robert Fagles's new translation of The Aeneid got a lot of buzz), so does this signal the return of the epic?

Let me start by saying, this is in no way an advertisement.  Amazon.com, always knowing what I want before I do, sent me an email today about the Amazon Kindle, their new e-book unit, and I have to say, I'm intrigued.  What makes it different than reading a book on my Palm Pilot, (which, incidentally, I never do)?  Supposedly, an electronic-paper display, a high-resolution screen that "looks and reads like real paper."  It's got just about every major newspaper and magazine, as well as about 90,000 books available wirelessly.  You don't have to download them onto your computer and sync them, you don't have to find a T-Mobile hotspot, and there's no monthly bill.  It costs $400, then about $10 for every book you download wirelessly.  It can hold about 200 at once. 

Call me old-fashioned, but I've never been a big fan of reading things off screens.  Even when revising my own writing, I always print it out so I can see it on the page before marking it up.  But I can't help but think that my conversion might be inevitable, like buying all my books online, or ditching CD's in favor of an IPOD.  As a writer, there's no denying the influence the electronic age has already had on publishing, but this has the potential to blow-up the e-book market, making it not an add-on business, but the primary method of selling books.  The demand for this device has been so high, that they're already sold out through Christmas.  On Amazon's web site, they've got everyone from James Patterson to Toni Morrison telling shoppers that this is the greatest thing since sliced bread, even though frankly, I've got a hard time picturing Toni Morrison sitting in a Starbucks reading Margaret Atwood's newest novel off of this:

In my opinion, there will always be a demand for hard copies of novels.  But as local book stores crumble under the weight of major chains, and writers reach for laptops over notebooks and old-fashioned typewriters, I can't help but wonder:  is the question will I convert, or when? 

Well, gentle readers, issue 20.1 is off to the printers! At last. After months of hard work by the entire editorial staff and our numerous editorial assistants, we've culled an exceptional issue that we think will blow your socks off. Look for the anniversary issue of Sycamore out in late January. And if you'll be attending AWP in NYC, do stop by our table at the book fair and chat with our editors.

Reviewed at the Times:

There’s a great story to be told about the success of Starbucks. But we’ll have to wait to hear it from somebody other than Taylor Clark. This is a shame because Clark is an enthusiastic young writer who has the seat of his intellectual pants hooked on the horns of an interesting conflict. He both appreciates the 'Starbucks experience' (whose advantages elude many of us 60-year-olds), and he deplores the very existence of a large, omnipresent, profitable corporate store chain (whose disadvantages elude many of us 60-year-olds, especially if we made a timely purchase of Starbucks stock for our retirement portfolios).

This review is worth reading because of the reviewer. The book sounds interesting, but the reviewer is nice and crotchety. He very clearly does not "get" Starbucks, and he gets quite testy with Clark's book for not explaining the phenomenon to him. At one point, Clark cites a sociologist who explains that neutral public spaces are declining, and the reviewer says, "I beg to differ. It's called a bar."

I just learned that Miramax and producer Scott Rudin have already acquired the movie rights to The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz's acclaimed first novel. In 1996, Diaz's first short story collection, Drown, made him an instant literary celebrity, and after eleven years of intense pressure, his first novel has proved to be a runaway success.

As Sycamore Book Reviewer Paul Rutz writes, the novel follows the exploits of "Oscar de León , the obese and verbose son of Dominican immigrants living in New Jersey. A nerd of the highest order, he seems destined never to get laid, an unusual problem for a Dominican (we’re told). But, as fans of Díaz’s short fiction will anticipate, Oscar’s problems seem to be part of a larger, more ancient set of issues. He and his family may or may not be under fukú—a curse supposedly brought to the Caribbean in 1492 and the reason why Dominicans still do not speak the name Cristóbal Colón. This book, one of its narrators tells us, is a “counterspell” of sorts to end an impressive trend of bad breaks for the de León family. Bouncing between New Jersey, the Dominican Republic, and the last several decades, we follow Oscar’s exploits, grabbing on to several subplots and historical asides along a largely rewarding journey."

You can read the rest of Paul's review in the upcoming 20th Anniversary Issue of Sycamore Review, along with reviews of Benjamin Percy's Refresh, Refresh; Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach; Charles Baxter's new collection of craft essays, The Art of Subtext; and many more.  

A few weeks ago, Bookninja pointed to this thing, a humorous ranking of American authors, starting with the self-published "Centipede in the Darkness," moving up through "Three for a dollar feeder fish" to "9.98 PETCO Gerbil" and on up:

"$9.98 PETCO GERBIL: Anne Tyler/Carol Shields/Jane Smiley

Have won the Pulitzer Prize and other major awards but are thought of by most critics, writers, and journalists to be primarily romance authors or perhaps 'self-help' authors, partly because all their books are bestsellers but mostly because they are women who write about human relationships and are not from a foreign country. Make enough money to not have blogs, MySpace pages, or their e-mail addresses on the internet. Will never be written about in Review of Contemporary Fiction. Secretly considered 'unseemly in a wholesome way somehow' by serious literary critics; 'I don't know, is it okay to read these people?' by MFA students at Iowa Writers' Workshop; and 'I really, really want to stay away from those people and their books' by people who like Thomas Pynchon a lot."

The writer makes some astute points, such as women rarely achieve the "F-14 FIGHTER PLANE SHOOTING MISSILES AT CACTI IN NEVADA" success of Pynchon and Delillo, and that Philip Roth is "shit talked only by $9.98 Petco Gerbils or lower."

We've slowed down our blogging lately partly because we're graduate students in the thick of finals and partly because we've been working to get issue 20.1 together. We're in the process of copy editing the issue, so all fiction submissions are now being considered for issue 20.2. I'm going to be traveling for the holidays, so if you haven't heard from me in the next week, your story is on my desk ready to be read first thing in the beginning of January. In general, stories submitted in November have gone through the editorial assistants and are on my desk for this week. Stories submitted so far in December are logged and ready to go to the assistants in early January.

Issue 20.1 has come together nicely and should be available in time for the AWP conference at the end of January. As Mehdi noted, Richard Bausch has agreed to judge our fiction contest in the spring. Guidelines are posted on the "Wabash Prizes" link to the right, so we are accepting submissions between now and March 15. Entry fees are $10, and the prize is $1000. All contest submissions are considered for issue 20.2.

As a side note, I think it'd be an interesting study of magazines with contests what the odds are of publication compared to general submissions. We tend to get more general submissions than contest entries, and for issue 20.1 I think we accepted less than 1% of stories, but I don't know what percentage of contest entries we generally publish. Also, to muddle it up, you'd have to consider that since contestants are paying to have their stories read, those stories on the whole might be more polished than the average general submission.

The NY Times reviews Gregory Clark's "A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World." It looks like an interesting read, in line with all the recent economics books that aren't full of endless equations:

"Clark argues that persistently different rates of childbearing and survival, across differently situated families, changed human nature in ways that finally allowed human beings to escape from the Malthusian trap in which they had been locked since the dawn of settled agriculture, 10,000 years before. Specifically, the families that propagated themselves were the rich, while those that died out were the poor. Over time, the 'survival of the richest' propagated within the population the traits that had allowed these people to be more economically successful in the first place: rational thought, frugality, a capacity for hard work — in short the familiar list of Calvinist, bourgeois virtues."