Advance Copy

M.G. gets a G.G.: At the venerable Governor General's Awards in Canada, ex-pat Kate Pullinger slipped past bigger names like Alice Munro, Michael Crummey, and Annabel Lyon at the post to win the fiction prize for The Mistress of Nothing, while two-time Giller Prize winner M.G. Vassanji won the nonfiction award for A Place Within: Rediscovering India. [Globe & Mail coverage]

The Ryan Leaf effect: On his blog, Malcolm Gladwell responds to Steven Pinker's NYTBR cover critique of What the Dog Saw (as linked in Old Media Monday this week). Scroll down into the comments section for an sometimes substantial debate about, among other things, "igon values" and how to measure whether NFL quarterbacks' draft positions correlate with their career success.

No recession for political book authors: Although no one but the president himself has yet written a big bestseller about Barack Obama, the NY Observer reports that Jodi Kantor has turned her recent NYT Magazine profile of the Obamas' marriage into a "stunning seven-figure book deal" with Little, Brown. Meanwhile, in other seven-figure political book news, Karl Rove's first book now has a title and pub date: Courage and Consequence, coming on March 9.

Moving & shaking: Sarah Palin's not the only bestselling author on Oprah this week. Jenna Jameson's appearance yesterday sent her 2004 memoir, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star (finally coming out in paperback in January) back into our top 100 and to the top of our Movers & Shakers list this morning.

--Tom

Isn't the world ending in 2012?: On the day after an off-year election day, Marc Ambinder notes that the top three GOP frontrunners for 2012 all have books (and big book tours) on the way in the next six months: Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Mitt Romney.

Speaking for all PWBJHTPMMATOK?s: At the NYT, novelist/ironist Colson Whitehead celebrates the one-year anniversary of Obama's election (and the apparent end of all racism forever) by offering to be the first secretary of postracial affairs: "Some changes will be minor. In television, 'Diff’rent Strokes' and 'What’s Happening!!' will now be known as 'Different Strokes' and 'What Is Happening?'"

You think our Top 100 is long...: The longlist for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award was announced yesterday. The award is notable both for offering the "world’s most valuable annual literary prize for a single work of fiction published in English" (€100,000), and for having the longest longlist imaginable (156 titles, based on nominations from libraries worldwide). 2008 Booker winner The White Tiger received the most library nominations.

Trois livres puissantes: The big literary prize week in France continues, following the awarding of the Prix Goncourt to Marie NDiaye's Trois femmes puissantes, with the Prix Médicis prizes given to two North American writers: Haitian-Canadian Dany Laférriere for L'énigme du retour (available on Amazon.ca) and American Dave Eggers for the translation of What Is the What. (Interested Francophones can check out Amazon.fr's literary prizes page for more.)

Moving and shaking: The death at age 100 of anthropology and cultural theory titan Claude Lévi-Strauss (more on that later) sends his books Tristes Tropiques and The Savage Mind to the top of our Movers & Shakers list this morning.

Open book: News starts to break about Andre Agassi's upcoming memoir, Open, leading with his confession that he used crystal meth for a period at the bottom of his career in 1997, and then lied about it to the ATP to avoid suspension. (For what it's worth, there's a lot more to Open than that--it's a pretty fascinating book. Here's a longish article from The Australian that gets at least one detail wrong: he and Steffi Graf didn't fall in love at a dance after winning the French Open.)

Not eating animals: In early talk with New York magazine about his own upcoming foray into nonfiction, Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer discusses the ethics of eating meat in the age of factory farms and busts on Anthony Bourdain's hypocritical schtick.

C'mon already, Stockholm: The sold-out literary event of the year in Toronto features a conversation between two writers with 169 years between them: short story legend Alice Munro and editor and memoirist Diana Athill, who made the difficult journey across the ocean at the age of 91 because "now I had a chance to meet [Munro] and I've damned well got to do it." The Globe & Mail has a full podcast, as well as one highlight clip in which Munro describes how commercially unpromising the premise of her current project is: a man who has never been interested in sex. (Athill says that it's not sex that she misses so much as chamber music--she's too deaf to enjoy it.)

Moving and shaking: Tales from the Crypt's upcoming Jeff Kinney parody, Diary of a Stinky Dead Kid, jumps in our sales ranks from #11,733 to #125, making it #2 on our Movers & Shakers list.

--Tom

Hat trick time?: The nominations for the venerable Governor General's Literary Awards in Canada (the second biggest north of the border behind the younger, snazzier Giller) are out. Top stories: a nomination for Alice Munro, who pulled her collection Too Much Happiness out of the Giller running to make room for less-lauded writers, and one for Annabel Lyon, whose long-researched debut novel, The Golden Mean, was an audacious stretch into Greek intellectual history after two promising story collections, and who now holds nominee tickets for the three biggest Canadian fiction prizes, the Giller, the GG, and the Rogers Writers' Trust. GG winners announced November 17.

Jacko, chimp: Top news from the Frankfurt Book Fair: Michael Jackson was apparently working on a graphic novel (with Gotham "Son of Deepak" Chopra) called Fated, "about a Jackson-esque pop icon named Gabriel Star whose fame has left him isolated and emotionally cut-off." U.S. publication is scheduled for next June. Also shopped at the fair: The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, a hot debut novel from Iowa Workshop grad Benjamin Hale about the life and loves of the first chimp--not named Bubbles, I assume--to learn to speak. (Via Slog)

"Blog, blog, blog, blog, blog": Might be too much inside baseball, but everybody in publishing is forwarding the list of book publicist dos and don'ts for the early middle Web era from Amy Hertz, editor of the new (and generally bewildering, but maybe I'm too old for this) HuffPost Books page, e.g., "Book reviews tend to be conversation enders, and when you're living in the age of engagement, a time when people are looking for conversation starters, that stance gets you nowhere."

Moving & shaking: A Good Morning America appearance sends Pam Streep's Mean Mothers to the top of Movers & Shakers and into our top 100.

--Tom

To be more specific, my Crush today is on a single chapter from Orhan Pamuk's new novel. I don't think I've crushed about a chapter before, but that's the way crushes work: you fall for something small--a lock of hair, the sweep of a neck, the timbre of a voice--that you think might stand for the whole. And no one knows that better than Kemal, the young, half-hearted industrialist who is the hero of The Museum of Innocence. It's a long book built around a short affair between Kemal and a poor, beautiful cousin of his, Füsun, and it's structured, loosely, around a tour that Kemal gives you of a museum he has constructed to display various items--soda bottles, a spoon, a map--from their short alliance and its long repercussions.

I'm just over halfway through the book, and like many books (and many crushes) my feelings about it have shifted over time. I started out in love, most of all with Pamuk's patient mastery of his story--you can tell from the first pages that he will be playing on multiple registers at once, both the immediacy of his story and the layers of memory through which it is told (and withheld). And I loved his love for the stray but crucial details of his setting: the book may be about one man's obsession with a woman, and thereby with everything that reminds him of her presence, but it seems to me equally about Pamuk's obsession with Istanbul, especially the city of his youth: the brand names, the film stars, the streets, the clothes, the intricate social relations between classes and between modernity and tradition. It's saturated with those details, as if the museum of the title was not in honor of Füsun but of Istanbul, circa 1975. (Apparently, Pamuk is planning to build an actual museum in Turkey to display, Jurassic Technology-style, Kemal's putative collection.)

But Kemal himself is not an easy man to love, and as his infatuation becomes more encompassing and destructive, I, like so many of Kemal's friends (and certainly his fiancee!), began to lose patience with him and his story. But Pamuk, more patient than I, drew me back in with a single chapter. In a book whose short sections often carry chatty and jokey titles like "Don't Lean Back That Way, You Might Fall," "Like a Dog in Outer Space," and "Is It Normal to Leave Your Fiancee in the Lurch?", the 54th chapter, which arrives just after the halfway point of the book, is merely called "Time." And it's about that very thing: Kemal steps back from telling his story with an almost day-to-day meticulousness to describe--and justify--a nearly eight-year period in which almost nothing happens--or rather the same, almost incomprehensible thing happens over and over again. It's again a shift between registers--between the immediacy of the moment, and of decisions made often without consideration, and the nearly endless (but finite!) sense of a life seen through memory, in which those moments and those decisions survive far beyond their time. And coming across it at this point in the story, when I was just about fed up with Kemal, took my breath away and reminded me once again what a delicate and thoughtful structure Pamuk had created, which I will happily continue to live in for the rest of the story. Here's a favorite section of "Time":

For the sake of any readers who are amazed that I could visit Füsun and her family (it seems so clinical to call them the Keskins) for eight years, and who wonder how I can speak so breezily about such a long interval--thousands of days--I would like to say a few words about the illusion that is time, as there is one sort of time we can call our own, and another--shall we call it "official" time?--that we share with all others. It is important to elaborate this distinction, first to gain the respect of those readers who might think me a strange, obsessed, and even frightening person, on account of my having spent eight lovelorn years trudging in and out of Füsun's house, but also to describe what life was like in that household.

--Tom

Recommended for fans of Andre Aciman's Call Me By Your Name and Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience.

Seeing how his book is responsible for my jacked-up knee, ESPN.com's Bill Simmons graciously took time recently for an exclusive Q&A on NBA history, great nicknames, surprising myths, and other gems from his upcoming book, The Book of Basketball.  Not sure if my injury guilted him into this interview, but hey - always gotta work the angles.

--Dave

Amazon.com: What is your reaction to fans that dismiss the NBA by saying "I can only get into the college game"?

Simmons: I wrote a whole column about this recently: It's the curse of the LA Clippers, which I called "The Curse of the Sacred Buffalo." Things turned for them in 1976, when they were the Buffalo Braves, when the owner tried to move them to Florida. All hell broke loose. You can't piss off Indian spirits and that's what the owner did. Thirty-three years later, the franchise remains the biggest mess in pro basketball despite signs of potential life with this year's team... which reminds me, good seats still available for the 2009-2010 season! Call Rob Strikwerda of the Clips for details. He's waiting by the phone.

No, really.

Inside Chowder's head: The rhythms of casual conversation are hard-earned. To get the voice right for Paul Chowder, the poet narrator of his new novel, The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker recorded and transcribed 40 hours worth of himself talking about poetry as if he were teaching a class. (Via Maud.)

Fancy Lottie: David Benedictus's new authorized sequel to the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, not only adds new tales to Christopher Robin's canon, but a new female character: Lottie the Otter, “a smart and elegant character” who is “always dressed in pearls." (I confess: it's always taken a bit of effort for me to remember that Piglet is not a girl.)

Take the world personally: Jim Shepard's advice to writers timid about making fiction out of history: "Writers shouldn’t lose sight of the essential chutzpah involved in trying to imagine any other kind of sensibility. And that they should take heart from that chutzpah, as well." (Via The Rumpus.)

Not written in Russia: How did Sarah Palin (and her ghostwriter Lynn Vincent) knock out a 400-page book in just a few months? Letterman's Late Night writers speculate with Sarah Palin's Top Ten Tips for Writing a Book:

Moving & shaking: Thanks to a few excited tweets to our Best of the Month page (thanks, Bill!), Bill "The Sports Guy" Simmons has sent his upcoming Book of Basketball (which already sent our own Dave Callanan to the orthopedist) up to #4 on Movers & Shakers and #6 in our overall Top 100.

So what's my beef?

Had you possessed such foresight, my world would be a better place today. 

My injury notwithstanding, I strongly recommend Omni readers give The Book of Basketball a shot (horrible pun totally not intended) next month.  Just don't come crying to me when you're looking for a good orthopedic surgeon in early November.

--Dave

Recommended for fans of The Breaks of the Game, The Official NBA Basketball Encyclopedia, and readers without a history of knee problems.

On GQ's blog, there's a pretty fascinating interview with Taylor Branch, author of my favorite nonfiction books ever, his civil rights trilogy, about the story behind his upcoming book, The Clinton Tapes. I'm on record, for better or worse, as wondering in relation to this book whether "anybody cares about Bill Clinton right now," an idea that understandably was met with some resistance by Branch's publisher. What I meant, although it didn't sound this way in the quote, was that I am genuinely curious about the level of Clinton interest right now: for the past year Obama has drawn so much of the attention in Democratic politics, and, perhaps even more importantly, the dramatic events of the last eight years have made the issues of Clinton's presidency seem very distant. But now as the battles of the last year's primaries, in which Bill ended up being cast as the heavy, recede, and as Obama struggles, much as Clinton did, with Congress and against the vocal opposition of the far right, I think the timing for this book is already improving.

And the fuller backstory behind Branch's book will itself draw a lot of attention. I hadn't realized he had been roommates with Bill and Hillary when they all worked in Texas on the McGovern campaign in '72, nor did I know that they then fell out of touch for two decades (by the time Clinton became president, Branch had become skeptical, as many on the left were, about his old friend's motivations and his politics). And I didn't know either about the level of secrecy he and Clinton had to maintain about their shared project (an in-the-moment personal historical record of his presidency), out of a well-founded fear that their conversations would be subpoenaed. Here's Branch on that subject:

I couldn’t communicate with people, because I felt like I was in a different galaxy. I just dropped out. I didn’t see a way of fighting it that didn’t endanger the project. I couldn’t challenge my friend [Washington Post critic] Jon Yardley, who would sit around and bitch and moan about Clinton: “He’s no good, he doesn’t care about anything, he doesn’t believe in anything.” I couldn’t say, “Jon, I know that’s not true.” I couldn’t start that conversation, because the only way I could combat it would be to say, “I’ve been around Clinton a lot, and my experience is totally different.” And then some story would come out that he had these tapes, and they would get subpoenaed. So I just basically had to be quiet and not talk to people.

The whole interview is worth a read. The Clinton Tapes comes out in late October September (thanks, Toquam), but I just got my copy today, so I'll be digging in soon. --Tom

Without real world repercussions, superpowers are a fun idea. Flight and invisibility, for example, are generally under the control of their respective users, and hey, if things get too out of control, there's usually a pack of super-friends to act as a safety net.  Rarely do readers glimpse what it must be like to wield a power that isn't so "super."

Cue Matt Kindt's 3 Story: The Secret History of the Giant Man, due in October from Dark Horse Books. In this original graphic novel, Craig Pressgang experiences an ever-increasing  condition that is less of a growth spurt and more of a long, painful stretch. He outgrows his clothes, car, and childhood home until he can no longer even hear normal speech, given how far removed his ears are from human sounds. In a clever dose of reality in an otherwise oft-used superpower, a doctor explains to Craig that because his nerve endings are so long, "There's a delay" in everyday sensations, like a kiss or a pin-prick.

The three women in Craig's life--his mother, wife, and daughter--tell their versions of living with (and without) the Giant Man, as his condition alienates then endears him in the eyes of the general public. At first co-opted as an attention-getter at a protest rally, Craig soon turns his "power" into something a little more lucrative, like shilling cigarettes ("Giant flavor!") and creating original pieces of art by using his handprints. Unlike a superhero, Craig cannot turn "off" his power, and he continues to grow long after the novelty is over, and he and his wife must deal with physical logistics in their relationship and living conditions.

It's a somber tale despite the wealth of cheap-shot opportunities, but Kindt keeps 3 Story from settling too far into woe-is-me fare with his autumnal watercolors and pleasant, easy-going artwork. His characters look almost approachable, and the panels range from measured to wide-open. Near the end, I really took my time with the pages, as the panels grew richer, and the story slows to match Craig's exhaustion.

Kindt is also credited with the design of 3 Story, and it feels very much like a creator-run project. Bits of pop culture litter the narratives via newspaper clippings, ads, childhood drawings, architectural blueprints, and more. The cover of the book features a cut-out window, which, when opened, reveals Craig to be reflecting on exactly the type of mundanity we all take for granted, but it's one the Giant Man can no longer have. These small touches build in the life and packaging of a character too large for even himself.