Amazon.com Bookstore's Blog

The World According to Toad:  In honor of the reissued edition of The Wind in the Willows, The New York Times waxes nostalgic on the simple genius of Kenneth Grahame's classic story: "The Wind in the Willows is a children’s book that, unlike most, doesn’t describe a world without grownups; instead, it parodies the grownup world."

Bee on the Big Screen: Variety is reporting that Chris Cleave's Little Bee has been acquired by BBC Films, with Nicole Kidman nabbing a starring role.

Moving and Shaking:  The top slot in Movers & Shakers today belongs to a textbook: Educational Psychology. Now I understand we are slowly creeping towards the fall semester, but I think the #2 title - Iced Tea by Fred Thompson - is more appropriate for mid-July.

From September 2006 to March 2007, Eisner and Harvey Award-winning illustrator and writer Seth serialized his latest work, George Sprott: (1894-1975), in The New York Times Magazine. But once finished, he expanded the piece in every sense of the word. The final bound edition of George Sprott is an impressive, oversized piece of art that dwarfs most of its contemporaries on the shelves. It is so unique that it merited a spot in our Best Books of the Year…So Far feature as one of the Hidden Gems of the year.  

While on tour to support George Sprott, Seth took time out of his schedule to discuss and delve deeply into his newest book, the solitary nature of his characters, and his work as a book designer on projects like the ongoing 25-volume Complete Peanuts Collection.

Amazon.com:  George Sprott: (1894-1975) does not hide that it is a story of the main character's death. From the title alone, readers are well aware of George's lifespan, and the narrator addresses this in the opening pages. Yet, there is a lot of life covered in the telling of his death, through patchwork recollections of George from colleagues and family members. What led to your decision to structure your latest book this way?

Seth:  The biggest factor in the organization of the story was the fact that it was originally going to be serialized in The New York Times Magazine. I knew that it would only appear once a week and I worried that a "continued next issue" approach would risk alienating the reader (they might not have caught the previous chapters or they might miss one, for example). It seemed to me that the best answer was to simply make each page of the story self contained and allow the reader to "add them all up" into one story if they bothered to follow the entire run of the strip.

This patchwork method of storytelling turned out to be a godsend when I decided to expand the story, because it made it very easy to insert new material into the story by simply placing it in between the existing pages. In fact, it allowed me to further fragment the story--which is what I wanted to do anyway, because I was trying to write a story where a lot of the value judgements ("Was George a good person?"  "Was his death tragic?") were left to the reader to decide.

Amazon.com:  The life of George is one of melancholy and longing, and the lonesome main character is a frequent subject for you. What is it about this type of personality that makes for such fertile storytelling in your work?

Seth:  Two simple answers: 1. I write these kinds of stories because I am somewhat this type of character myself, and it seems natural to write characters who are like me. 2. I think the process of "looking back" is fascinating--giving a depth to a character--and is often the most natural thing to write about when you are using older people for characters. Personally, I am pretty consumed by the "feeling" of time and experience accumulating as you grow older. In my own life I have seen how this reflective action has taken on more and more of a central role in my thinking as the years go by.

Amazon.com: George is surrounded by such a great cast of characters at Channel 10, my favorite being Sir Grisly Gruesome. Was public access viewing a childhood pastime of yours? Why use this as the setting for much of George's story?

Seth:  Most of the details about George's world come from my experiences of growing up around the Windsor/Detroit area. I watched a lot of television in those days and later, when the world of local TV and its celebrities started to fade away I realized how unique a "texture" all this material had had. Detroit, for example, had a huge local television scene with a wide variety of local hosts and performers and they impressed themselves onto my mind. The same can be said of Kitchener's TV scene.

The funny thing is that these local TV celebrities were the tip of a local iceberg. They represented a time when local cities had rich regional cultures: nightclubs, dance halls, comedy stages and popular restaurants, radio stations as well. That's why I made it a point in the Sprott book to focus attention on the individual buildings that made up such a rich part of George's life. These regional cultures don't feel as distinct to me any longer--to a big degree they have become homogenized.

Amazon.com:  In the book, you included photographs of models of these buildings. I don't think I've seen this before in your work. Did you construct these models yourself? What's the story behind their inclusion in the finished product?

Seth:  The buildings were indeed constructed by me. They are part of a long ongoing project called Dominion. This is an imaginary city of cardboard buildings that I have been assembling in my basement for years. Dominion has become the setting for many of my stories and George Sprott takes place there as well. I included the buildings because I thought it would be "neat" to see my models right next to the strips describing the locations. In some ways the cardboard buildings make the strip stories even LESS real--but that is okay with me. The whole point of George Sprott is to present a range of materials that fragment and disjoint the narrative.

Amazon.com:  George Sprott is an achievement in book packaging. It's far larger than I expected, with high quality paper stock, pages with full bleeds, not to mention a fold-out section, and embossed front and back covers. Can you walk readers through the design process on a project like this, and why you chose to give George Sprott the deluxe treatment? [See size comparison at left. --ed]

Seth:  The reason George Sprott is such a big book is that it's the only work I have done that really demands to be printed at a larger size. The individual pages have a lot of information on them and I didn't want them to be small and hard to read. Once it was established the book was going to be big, then it was important to use the space properly. That's one of the reasons for the large double-page spreads--those landscapes were included to take advantage of the huge size of the open book; something to give you a sense of space--something expansive. It was important--because the individual chapter pages are so dense--to break the rhythm of the book. All those individual page make a lot of starting and stopping in the reading process. I needed to change that constant staccato rhythm by have some long notes in there. The three page stories are there for the same reason--to break things up.

The book has a lot of bells and whistles to it--but truthfully I was just trying to create a very pretty but fully integrated piece of art. I worked hard to make it as beautiful as I could. I like a pretty book.

Amazon.com:  I'd love to hear more about the fold-out section. The six-page fold-out dream was a treat. How did you construct this sequence and was the fold-out always your plan?

Seth:  The gatefold pages are my favourite part of the book. I chose to do this for the simple reason that you never really get inside George's head anywhere in the story. The story is always told for the outside perspective. I used the gatefolds to literally "go inside" George when you fold them out.

I will say that the gatefold section is not really a dream sequence. It's more of an interior landscape for George. Not necessarily at the time of his death but it could certainly be read that way. I constructed this sequence by simply roughing out a large random amount of free association strips about George (and from his point of view) and then editing it down repeatedly until the strips started to have a resonance with each other and connections were made that I didn't realize when writing them. I don't necessarily expect the reader to fully understand this section--they are free to form their own associations.

Amazon.com:  You make great use of fonts in George Sprott, as well as in the design of Fantagraphics' Peanuts collections. Is this a lost art in contemporary comics?

Seth:  Certainly hand-done display lettering is a dying art in the modern world--however cartoonists still continue to produce a lot of it. It's one of the basic skills in a cartoonist's bag. Personally I cannot imagine doing comics and not being concerned with the lettering--a computer will never replace the hand there. Nothing looks so good with a cartoonist's drawing as a nice piece of hand-done display lettering.

Amazon.com:  Can you talk at all about the design process for the Fantagraphics' Complete Peanuts collections? It seems like an impressive commitment: 25 books over 12+ years. How were you approached for the project, and, in turn, what is your approach for the design of each book?

Seth:  The Peanuts books were designed to exist as a 25 volume set and because of that there is really very little new design thinking from volume to volume. I simply continue to refine and adapt the design that I came up with for the very first volume. However, that doesn't mean I don't put real care into each volume. The series was meant to be a setting for the jewel that is Schulz's masterpiece. I wanted to make sure that Schulz's work was treated with the utmost seriousness and dignity. Some might say my designs are humourless for the series and therefore inappropriate--but I think that's overstating it. They may be sedate and muted but Schulz has had 50 years of pop-y, bright "funny" book designs and I thought it was time to give the man something different. I stand by my choices.

The project came about in the most mundane of manner. I told [Fantagraphics' co-founder] Gary Groth that if they ever published a Complete Peanuts I wanted to design it. He got the rights and called me up. There you go. To add a bit of detail, I had to go down and present a design to Jeannie Schulz and get her approval. I was nervous about it but when I got there I could see in her eyes that she legitimately believed her husband had been a genius. I knew then that everything would work out fine.

Amazon.com:  In your previous book, Wimbledon Green, a genuine love for comics came through the story of all these lonesome collectors. Are you an active collector, reader, or both? If so, are there any creators or titles that you actively follow?

Seth:  I am a collector. That's a given. I collect a LOT of stuff. I guess my big thing for the last ten years or so would be Canadian cartoonists of the past. That's a real passion. I've collected a wide variety of cartoonist's work for ages though. I love old cartooning. And, of course, I certainly read contemporary comics. I follow Chris Ware's work, Chester Brown, Dan Clowes, [Ben] Katchor, [Adrian] Tomine, etc. etc. I'm hesitant to create a very extensive list for the simple reason that I will leave out a lot of marvelous current creators. What I like is ambition. I'm not drawn to genre fiction and read really nothing of that sort in comics. I hate it when people tell me I should check out some crime comic or superhero thing. I have zero interest in that material. Sorry, Wimbledon.

--Alex

p.s. For more on George Sprott, see also the Omni spotlight back in April.

 
(Minister Faust, near the Red Sea, on his honeymoon.)

Minister Faust is one of the most interesting new writers I've come across in the last few years, his first novel, The Coyote Kings of the Space-Aged Bachelor Pad, published in 2004 and his second, From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain, in 2007. He's been a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, and is a champion of progressive politics in his home town of Edmonton, Canada. His work fits broadly into the realm of science fiction/fantasy but he often focuses on satire, social issues, and a biting sense of humor in ways that align him just as easily with writers like Kurt Vonnegut. It's worth quoting at length the Amazon.com review of The Coyote Kings of the Space-Aged Bachelor Pad, since it does a nice job of giving readers a sense of Faust's fiction:

"What do Edmonton, D&D, cannibalism, Star Wars, comic books, ancient African mythology, black culture, drugs, organic food, magic, and television shows have in common? They all play important roles in The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, a zany, stylish, and fun novel. Coyote Kings, the debut by Edmonton writer, teacher, and radio host Minister Faust, has a large cast of characters but mainly follows two roommates--Hamza, a former graduate student who's been reduced to working as a dishwasher, and Yehat, a video store clerk who invents insane gadgets in his spare time. They're stuck in a rut of self-pity and going nowhere real slow when a mysterious woman shows up and seduces Hamza by quoting his favorite comics and sci-fi films. (The only problem: she may not be human.) Before long, the three are caught up in a quest for a magic artifact, but they're not the only ones. Arrayed against them is a wide assortment of characters--including an old romantic rival of Hamza's, drug dealers who peddle a mystical high, and a former Canadian Football League player with aspirations of immortality--all with their own plans for the artifact. The action takes the cast through the streets of Edmonton and to Drumheller, where an ancient, startling secret is revealed."

While we generally focus on writers when they have a book out, I thought it would be interesting to talk to a writer between books. Minister Faust did not disappoint...

Amazon.com: What have you been working on since your second novel was published?
 
Minister Faust: Lots. I completed my tenth year of public school teaching and decided to move on. I was a cast member and writer for a sketch comedy television pilot and series. For eight months I worked as a host and associate producer of a national, live, daily lifestyle-magazine television show; then for the following eight months I worked as a freelance journalist, copy-writer and copy-editor, and with a youth group as leadership instructor, dramaturge and stage director. On the side, I continued producing an hour-long weekly Africentric/pro-democracy community radio news programme and a biweekly two-hour global African musics (plural) show for CJSR FM88/cjsr.com.
 
Writing-wise, I wrote for a local arts weekly, a health magazine, a cooking magazine, Canada’s largest paper (the Toronto Star), and for the Gen-X business magazine called Unlimited, on deejaying with neomillennial technology and the NBC horror anthology Fear Itself which shot in my home town. Recently I went to work for BioWare, one of the world’s leading video game design studios and the one with the best reputation for writing.
 
I’ve been conducting interviews for a book on HBO’s The Wire and have so far interviewed fourteen actors, directors, writers and producers for that show, with more on the way, plus a number of interested academics, writers and journalists for commentary on the show. [And I've started] work on my newest novel, a mainstream book with enough fantastical elements that many genre readers will still have plenty to feast on. And I’ve been working on a book with a psychologist friend of mine to help Gen-X/Gen-Y men get their acts together at home, school, work and heart.

Amazon.com: Can you describe what an average work/writing day is like for you?

Minister Faust: For the first twenty days of my new book, no matter what, I had to write one page a day, which means 500 words, but which usually became 1200+ and was sometimes over 4000. That meant a lot of exhaustion and missed time with my wife, which I really hate. For the third phase of my novel (I’m in that phase now), I’ve got to do 5000 words every five days. But it’s far better to do 1000 a day than in a single crunch. And then, of course, there’s my day job which is all about writing—creating characters, story, monologues and dialogue.

Amazon.com: What has most surprised you about reaction to your first two novels?

Minister Faust: I’ve been blown away by the praise. The New York Times dropped a reference which, even distally, connected me with James Joyce; CanWest News called my first book something like “the most exciting Canadian debut in decades” (I found that one about three years after the book came out!). That book was short-listed for three awards and ended up on four top-ten lists. With Doctor Brain, the PKD runner-up for 2007, I was stunned and delighted at how many people “got” the book. I was worried that the book’s JLA meets Bamboozled approach might really throw people. But instead, most folks who read it seemed to understand that it was satire and followed what it was satirizing. Some were particularly detailed and insightful (for instance, Prof. Steven Shaviro at the Pinocchio Theory. I guess expect to be misunderstood, misquoted and misrepresented. When that doesn’t happen, I consider it a good day.

Amazon.com: When did you know you wanted to be a writer, and how long have you been seriously working on fiction?

Minister Faust: I’ve known since I was ten that I wanted to be a writer. I first decided to be a writer when I was about twelve because of comic books. I was in grade seven. I’d been collecting comics for two years already—primarily Bill Mantlo’s Micronauts. Then I found Frank Miller’s Daredevil. He was one of the first celebrated auteurs of modern (post-Eisner, post-Ditko) comics, probably because he was in the “big two” of Marvel/DC. I’d never before seen the intensity possible in a work drawn by the same person who wrote it.

Narration in comics had generally been awful. Now I was reading DD #179 (I think), and finding a narrative shift from (I think) omniscient to first-person (reporter Ben Urich, who for some reason reminds me now of Seymour Hirsh). That stunned me. A narrative switch? Twenty years later I’d employ that same approach to the tune of eleven narrators in my first published novel, The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad.

So I’d already known, because of Michael Golden’s and Pat Broderick’s work on Micronauts, that I wanted to be a comic book artist. But as a result of Miller (and now that I think of it, also because of auteur Jim Starlin on Warlock), I was determined to write, not only draw.

By grade ten I found Frank Herbert’s Dune (hm… two Franks?). I’d known of the work for some time and had seen the David Lynch film on opening night, but what truly excited me about the work was the glossary. My friend Robert Oska had written his own story (for a class project) set in the Dune universe. I’d never seen a work so rich in imagination it demanded its own glossary. I determined one day to write my own novel with a glossary. I’ve now written two (unpublished) SF epics with glossaries. Hopefully, when I have time to put each of those megabooks on a diet (one is 300,000 words and the other is closer to 400,000), they’ll be in a bookstore near you.

I gave up on comics when, around age 20, I’d seen the demands that drawing them made on my friend Adrian Kleinbergen, a terrific cartoonist who created the R-Mer costume that ender up in Coyote Kings. A ton of work for little pay, and grueling hours to meet deadlines. And hell, a page took a day and if it had mistakes, it meant starting over. As a writer, I could create a bunch of pages in one day and fix them with a few clicks or at worst, a couple of hours of revision.

Amazon.com: Where did you grow up? How has it influenced your writing?

Minister Faust: I was born and have spent my whole life in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. My mother’s family came to Alberta in 1910 when the province was only five years old; my family first lived in Edmonton in 1940. My mother was a community builder here; as a school teacher, union leader and multiculturalist. The world’s largest multicultural celebration, the Heritage Days Festival, is right here, and my mother was one of the founders. It arose in part because of the arts and multicultural programme my mum started in E-Town’s inner city following a wave of Chilean immigrants fleeing the American-backed neofascist coup of September 11, 1973; that programme also included Italian-, Portuguese- and other Canadians.

I’ve been a part of the arts scene here, including theatre, improv and sketch comedy (onstage and on-screen), and have performed in two seasons of the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival, the second-largest Fringe festival in the world. I taught in the public school system here for more than a decade, and have been involved for twenty years in community broadcasting, and more than that in community activism for peace, multiculturalism and development.

I can do all of that here because this city is such a vibrant place filled with remarkable people. And in province known for its conservatism, the progressive community has earned it the nickname of “Redmonton”—curse from some, praise from others. Being this far north and this distant from most other cities, we’ve developed a tremendous self-reliance in this town, and a no-nonsense, we-don’t-brag sensibility. That’s why of the six novel manuscripts I’ve written, four of them take place in whole or in part right here.

Amazon.com: Do you find readers making assumptions about you or your fiction if they know you're black?

Minister Faust: That’s a great question, and honestly, I’m not sure. I have been amused by a few weird descriptions: one blog review which loved Doctor Brain also warned readers that the book’s author was a “Black militant,” whatever that means. It’s possible that some people are making positive or negative assumptions about me based on their perception of race, but in general I’d say I’ve been treated with respect and kindness.

Amazon.com: How does Philip K. Dick fit into your pantheon of influences? Who else is in there?

Minister Faust: I love PKD’s work, which has had a major influence on my high-level approach to writing. Like PKD, I’m not much interested in space princes and capital-V villains; I’m definitely intrigued by psychological realism, nuanced characterisation and ordinary folks in extraordinary circumstances. I first became aware of PKD just before Blade Runner came out; I read a series of articles in a Blade Runner-themed issue of Cinefantastique that was fascinating for its wide-ranging commentary on PKD and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? PKD’s treatment in that book of the issue of psychopathy has fascinated me since I encountered it back in 1982; I spoke extensively on PKD for a television spotlight on him for the series The Word This Week and was drawn to his work for his combination of a series of elements and issues that intrigue me: spirituality, metaphysics, altered reality, altered cognition, environmental decay, paranoia, and the meaning of being human. Like most PKD fans I love The Man in the High Castle, but I consider Valis his best novel. It’s a frustrating book in its first half, but worth every moment of brow-furrowing.

The other major influences on my work are varied: Dune for the scope of its imagination; Flowers for Algernon for its structural brilliance and its psychological depth; John Gardner’s Grendel and Watchmen for their lovingly twisted revisionism; Richard Wright’s stunning, full-length autobiography Black Boy for its social commentary and priceless poetical prose, and the same goes for Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Ellison’s Invisible Man and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice; and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye for its voice, characterisation, and emotional honesty. Poets have also had a major influence on me, especially Claude McKay, the original Last Poets, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Seamus Heaney (especially for his translation of Beowulf).

Amazon.com: As a Canadian looking in at the U.S. political system, what do you see now that the dust has settled?

Minister Faust: I’m saying this as a Kenyan-Canadian leftist: I’ve been worried about Obama since he first made a US-national splash at the DNC in 2004. I was worried then that he’d be the fake-progressive that the American Oligarchs would back because so many people would focus their dreams on him, using him as a blank slate for their (understandable) yearning for racial/multicultural/anti-corporate/anti-imperiali st/pro-democratic progress.

But I knew then, and it’s been confirmed, that any candidate, now president, backed by nearly a billion dollars (most of which came from the oligarchs) could not possibly be the progressive deliverer; if he were, he’d have gotten the same treatment that the real deal, with a five-decade track record, got—that is, he’d’ve been shafted badly and hypocritically as Ralph Nader has been for the last eight years.

There’s an old saying: You dance with the one that brung ya. And here’s one from journalism: follow the money. If you know those two things and nothing else, you know more about the world than someone who doesn’t know those two things but does know everything else. So you can figure out how I feel. And for five years I’ve been warning people that [to use a Dune reference] just because the Oligarchs backed the gorgeous Feyd-Rautha, doesn’t mean they weren’t the same people who’d backed the Beast Rabban.

Amazon.com: What do you most fear?

Minister Faust: Vulnerability. It’s the only thing to fear. And giant, destructive space robots. Duh.

Amazon.com: What do you most love?
 
Minister Faust: My wife and daughter and sister. 

People often ask us how we decide what to read next. My answer is that I don't really decide--I just start reading. I don't commit to just one book (I often have several going at once), and I am not one of those readers who feel compelled to finish every book they start (I know many who find this appalling--sorry dad!). This policy helps me deal with the blessing and curse of our jobs (there are so many books to read, and so little time to read them all!) and affords me the freedom to crack open any book that crosses my path and dive right in. Things that help me sort through what to keep and what to give in a box of books include anything from a clever title (a couple of us are hopelessly in love with After the Fire, a Still Small Voice), to a great quote (Colm Toibin's blurb on the cover of John the Revelator earned it a spot on my shelf), or a really good cover (yes, you can sometimes judge a book this way). This brings me to my current crush, Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, by Jonathan L. Howard. In the true spirit of a crush, I fell hard and fast--loved the cover, was intrigued by the epigraph (the opening stanza to Emily Dickinson's "A Clock Stopped"), and dug the pen and ink illustrations at the start of each chapter. I admit to being a sucker for Faustian tales, so the story of a snarky scientist who hastily sells his soul to the devil before he realizes he does in fact, need it, was enough to hook me. As an added bonus,the first chapter made me laugh out loud--always a good sign. I am only halfway through, however, so like many crushes, this one could flame out quickly. So far, it's a fun ride, and it looks like many of our customers have enjoyed it, so I’m not too worried.

Here's a taste of the first chapter to entice you, wherein our soul-less Johannes Cabal confronts Satan in hell, and they strike up a deal (cue The Charlie Daniels Band):

--

"Frankly I don't think your challenge is entirely fair."

There was a period of silence for a long moment.

Satan's periods of good nature--in common with many managerial types--lasted precisely up until the moment he was challenged. He scowled monstrously the smile falling from his face like a greased pig off a church roof…

"Not entirely fair," repeated Satan, all trace of jovial hail-fellow-well-met gone. "Not entirely fair?" His voice became that of the inferno: a rushing, booming howl of icy-evil…

"I am Satan, also called Lucifer the Light Bearer…"

Cabal winced. What was it about devils that they always had to give you their whole family history?

"I was cast down from the presence of God himself into this dark, sulphurous pit and condemned to spend eternity here…"

"Have you tried saying sorry?" interrupted Cabal.

"No, I haven't! I was sent down for a sin of pride. It rather undermines my position if I say 'sorry'!"…

Satan leaned back in his throne, and his voice dropped to the low tone of somebody who is about to abort an interview. "Look up 'Satan' in a thesaurus at some point, mortal. You'll find terms like elemental evil,' 'wickedness incarnate,' and 'the begetter of sins.' If you find 'nice chap,' 'good bloke,' and 'the embodiment of fairness,' then I would suggest you buy a new one. Do you accept the deal?"

--Daphne

Recommended for fans of Christopher Moore, Buffy, and readers who love cheeky anti-heroes.

Hemingway a KGB Agent?:  While a restored edition of Hemingway's classic A Moveable Feast is now available, the author's reputation might also require a bit of restoration. The newly released history Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (discussed in today's Guardian) describes how Hemingway was recruited and placed on the Soviet's list of U.S. agents. [The Guardian]

Trio of Picks from TLS Editor:  Author and editor Peter Strothard of the Times Literary Supplement calls out three unusual summer picks that have (almost) nothing to do with the UK. Think Scarlet, Simone, and Swinburne. [The Daily Beast]

Graham Greene Novel Lost and Found:  The LA Times reports that an unfinished early novel from a very green Graham Greene has resurfaced.  The 1929 manuscript "The Man Within" (written by author when he was just 22) will be serialized in the Strand Magazine. [Los Angeles Times]

Moving & Shaking:  Janet Maslin's review of The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes in yesterday's New York Times propels the book from a rank of 50,000 (or so) up to #29 in our Movers & Shakers list. We've also tapped this fascinating history of Romantic-era science as one our Best of July picks which features an exclusive Oliver Sacks bite-sized review.

--Lauren

How a man with a lifelong battle of the bulge landed the most influential job in the food world is only half the story (more like a third, really) in Frank Bruni's brave, brutally honest, often hilarious, and truly endearing memoir, Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater.

Bruni, who will step down from him current post as restaurant critic for the New York Times when his book is published next month, struggled with over-eating since he was a little kid growing up in food-focused family in White Plains, NY. From adolescence through adulthood, Bruni was on the losing side of maintaining a healthy relationship with food, and eventually his inability to control his hunger--manifested in Bulimia, convenience store binges, and bouts of sleep eating--defined his life. There aren't many books out there dealing with what it's like to be a man with an eating disorder, and even though his story is peppered with humor, Bruni's disgust at himself as he yo-yo's up to size 42 khakis at the Gap and endures years-long patches of celibacy, leaves the reader aching in empathy.

Self-doubt about his appearance causes him to sabotage any chances at happines as he makes lame excuses to postpone dates in the hopes that he'll drop those few extra pounds before he might have to reveal himself. And throughout the book he's banking on being slimmer in the future--whether it's a few days, weeks, or months--and sacrifices truly appreciating the present, even when he's holding prestigious jobs at Newsweek and the New York Times.

"I was in retreat, my weight a reason not to reach out or take risks. I'd deal with my love life once I got thinner.... Fatness simplified life and lessened the stakes. It put life on hiatus, making the present a larded limbo between a past normalcy and a future one. It argued against bold initiatives.... But while I wasn't trying to make things happen, they nonetheless happened to me."

There's a very funny account of how he worked with a photographer friend to digitally manipulate his author photo for Ambling Into History in an attempt "to transform the round into the oblong, chubby into chiseled, gone-to-seed to come-to-Papa." When he saw the results of the final photo (the one that would be taped behind the reservation stand of many New York restaurants) his friend wondered: "When was the last time anyone at the publishing house saw you?"

And when he gets the tap to become restaurant critic and leaves his gig as the Times' Rome bureau chief (and the strange, unwritten rules of working out in Italian gyms), he begins a preparatory world-tour of eating research before entering an exhausting career of eating out seven nights a week, juggling multiple dining identities (with matching AmEx cards), and becoming one of "the most loved and hated tastemakers in New York."

Recommended for fans of Heat, Between Bites: Memoirs of a Hungry Hedonist, and Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise.

--BTP

Over the last couple of weeks, YA author Eric Luper has been hosting a contest for readers to come up with a quip to characterize this equine predicament.

Some of our favorite entries:

michaelnorthrop:

Oh, man, stuck in a tree . . . I hope no one takes a picture of this.

Poker night with the Keebler Elves was not nearly as much fun as Horace thought it would be...

This is the last time I go to Squirrel's for tea!

Quick links...
The Guardian reports on parental concerns about Tender Morsels, which just came out in the U.K.

Guys Lit Wire reports that 600 books have been sent to boys in the L.A. County juvenile justice system through their Book Fair for Boys.

Meg Cabot meets a barracuda.

YABooknerd recommends bios for teens, especially DK's Amelia Earhart.

Happy reading.--Heidi

 
(The stunning covers for the Age of Misrule series, art by John Picacio, design by Nicole Sommer-Lecht)

Mark Chadbourn is a wonderfully talented fantasy writer just coming to the attention of a U.S. audience through his Age of Misrule series, which Pyr Books has released in three volumes spaced over the months of May, June, and July. Epic, substantial, and massively entertaining, World's End, Darkest Hour, and Always Forever are excellent examples of those blessed hybrids that make for excellent beach reading even as they manage to make you think. Chadbourn's premise? That the gods of Celtic mythology have returned, along with creatures like dragons, to our modern reality. The resulting clash takes place on a broad canvas while focusing on five flawed characters guided by a legendary champion to seek a resolution to the conflict, even as science begins to fail. It's a nice subversion of standard fantasy tropes.

Check out this nicely atmospheric prologue to the first book:

"And now the world turns slowly from the light. Not with the cymbal clash of guns and tanks, but with the gently plucked harp of shifting moods and oddly lengthening shadows, the soft tread of a subtle invasion, not here, then here, and none the wiser. Each morning the sun still rises on supermarket worlds of plastic and glass, on industrial estates where slow trucks lumber in belches of diesel, on cities lulled by the whirring of disk drives breaking existence down into digitised order. People still move through their lives with the arrogance of rulers who know their realm will never fall. Several weeks into the new Dark Age, life goes on as it always has, oblivious to the passing of the Age of Reason, of Socratic thought and Apollonian logic...No one had noticed. But they would. And soon.

For once, too, a book's press release is correct, describing the Age of Misrule series as "one part Lord of the Rings, one part Illuminatus!, one part Arthurian romance, one part Harry Potter--100% original!"

A fascination with secret places, mythology, and the supernatural infuses the Age of Misrule, and Chadbourn has been kind enough to give Amazon readers an exclusive glimpse at some of the real underpinnings of his books. Over the next couple of weeks, we'll run two more pieces from Chadbourn, one on "Mysterious Britain" and the other on "The Real-World Roots of Fantasy." For now, though...

THE INVISIBLE HAND OF THE GODS OF WRITING
by Mark Chadbourn

When the author and poet Robert Graves embarked on a study of ancient myth, he found an unsettling world opening up to him. The work in question, The White Goddess, proposed the existence of a long-forgotten cult dedicated to a moon goddess who was the root of most pre-Christian religions--Greek, Phoenician, Celtic, Roman, Scandinavian Hindu, even African.

The more Graves studied the age-old stories for evidence of the goddess, the more he was plagued by mysterious events, dreams and coincidences. He was bequeathed a carnelian ring bearing the cult’s three symbols--a stag, a moon and a thicket. Other artefacts that filled gaps in his research turned up as gifts.  Important information continually fell into his lap--quite literally on one occasion, when a book with a vital piece of evidence fell from a shelf, open at exactly the page he needed.

Graves was not superstitious man.  But after all this, the author famed for the historical novel, I, Claudius, said, “Chains of more than coincidence happen so often in my life that if I am forbidden to call them supernatural hauntings, I must call them a habit.”

Get a group of writers together and with a little subtle prompting, they will all--I guarantee--have similar tales.  

Researching my own book--World’s End, Age of Misrule Book One--I encountered these kinds of occurrences regularly. Like Graves, the story demanded I immerse myself in myths, old gods and their continued effect on the modern world, archetypes and symbols from long-gone times, mysterious sites like Avebury stone circle and Tintagel Castle, the legendary birthplace of King Arthur.

On a six-month research trip that took in many of the UK’s mystical locations and oldest myths, it wasn’t long before the weird started to dog my every step. In the plot I was building, the characters had to uncover an ancient secret encoded in the floor-design of Glastonbury Abbey (this was way before The Da Vinci Code). I thought I’d made it up--until I was handed a book in Glastonbury shop that opened to a section about an ancient secret encoded in the now-lost floor-design of the Abbey, which then led to a vital piece of information I was missing in my other research.

It was a disconcertingly spooky moment, but it was followed by so many more--books given by chance, information passed on by strangers, seemingly random events that became hugely important--that I fully understood Graves’ chill at the feeling that he was being guided in some way. Maybe it’s just the unconscious, or Jung’s collective mind. Maybe it’s the old gods. Who knows? It doesn’t make it any less unsettling, and that goes for every author who’s spoken to me privately, or publicly, about this phenomenon.

But when you’re waist-deep in the swamp of completing a book, you’ll take any help you can get--even if it does leave you with the unnerving feeling that you are never alone.

I'd been wanting to meet George Pelecanos for a long time. I grew up outside of D.C., and since I left I've discovered what Pelecanos was doing in mapping the city and its recent history in more than a dozen crime novels mostly set far away (in class and culture if not in miles) from the marble edifices of the Mall and the polished wingtips of K Street. And the reasons to talk to him continued to pile up, including, of course, his work as one of the main producers and writers of the every-bit-as-good-as-everybody-says HBO series, The Wire, as well as this excellent list of his favorite westerns he did for our Grownup School feature a few years back. (And one more reason, which came up since I talked to him: Hard Rain Falling, Don Carpenter's 1966 novel, which the saints at New York Review Books are bringing back out in September with an intro by Pelecanos. I just read it last week and was wowed by two things--first, what a knockout book it is (expect an upcoming Daily Crush from me on it), and second, what a George Pelecanos book it is, with a similar feeling for straightforward language and a similar sense of moral decision-making in a gray world. And with its story of young men reckoning with the effects of prison, I can't imagine it wasn't in the back of Pelecanos's mind when he worked on his latest novel, The Way Home.)

Which brings me to today's subject: I did get to meet Pelecanos, in my little interview booth at this year's BEA. We talked about The Way Home, which meant talking about young men and prison and writing stories about the decisions they face, and also about the neighborhood in the District where it is mostly set, which is a little closer to my own home suburb than the parts of the city Pelecanos usually writes about. You can listen right here, or read the transcript after the jump. (You can also watch his short tribute to the other current master of D.C. fiction, Edward P. Jones, which I posted last week. And for another--no doubt better--interview with him, see Stop Smiling, which has posted an excerpt from their lengthy, very local back-and-forth with him from their excellent D.C. issue.)

Audio: George Pelecanos on The Way Home

Amazon: Let's start with the new book. Your main character, Chris Flynn, he comes from Friendship Heights, which is not your usual side of the city. Talk about him, talk about his neighborhood. What's he doing on the Red Line to Shady Grove?

Pelecanos: Well, he lives in this kind of well-to-do neighborhood of upper Northwest, which I've never really written about in detail, but I'm familiar with it. And his dad is the last blue-collar guy in the neighborhood. He inherited the house. And he has a carpet and floor business. His father sort of has a chip on his shoulder about the rich people around him. So anyway, Chris starts getting into trouble, keeps getting into trouble. It gets worse and worse. And finally he has this night of crime where he does a bunch of things that the law can really no longer ignore.

And he gets sent to a place--in the book it's called Pine Ridge, but it's based on Oak Hill, which is D.C.'s juvenile prison. The juvenile prison is usually about 99% black inmates. Chris is a white kid from the rich side of town, but he goes in there and it's really not what you'd expect. It's not the kind of Bad Boys thing, where--what's going to happen to the white kid in that environment? Because the boys don't really fight a lot among themselves. If they're going to swing on anybody, they swing on the guards. And he makes some relationships there. The book follows him and his friends there, 10 years after, what happens to them when a couple of them find some money. They try to do the right thing. It doesn't work out well.

So that's the thriller element of it. But the meat of the story is Chris's relationship with his father, and how they find each other again, hence the title The Way Home. How do you get home, through the forest at night?

Amazon: It seems like there's a lot of kids in this story with disappointed parents. The kids didn't go the way their parents wanted them to, whether they go into trouble or not.

Pelecanos: That's right. That's the way a lot of parents feel, myself included. You have to remember to ease up a little bit. Try to remember what it was like when you were that age. And also, one of the things that I found when I was researching the book was that boys are wired differently. Neurologically, when they're in their teens, the majority of their brain is given over to impulse and adrenaline. Then when they get into their 20s, the majority of their brain is reasoning and conscience. So they do mature; they're going to get through it.

And my message to parents is, don't tweak out about it. Just do the best you can and wait for them to come home.

Amazon: Yeah. I thought the subtitle of the book could have been, "The Teenage Brain." That is the big question. How do you get through it, especially when there's guns around? How do you get through those years?

Pelecanos: Yeah, the hope is that when I say they'll get through it, they'll get through it unless something really bad happens. And that's what you're trying to keep them from. But not all boys can--they have to put their hand in the fire so they know it's hot. And Chris is one of those kids. You can't say, "Well, those kids on the other side of town. They don't have fathers around. It's a bad home environment." Yeah, that's true, but boys of all ages get in trouble. And girls too.

Amazon: But it's interesting that from his friends from juvie that they construct a little bit of a support network, which is not what you hear people go to jail do. Do you think that's typical of what you've seen at Oak Hill?

Pelecanos: Well, the boy in the book, Ali, who gets out and opens up kind of a storefront place to help other kids is very typical of all these little places around the city, like Peaceoholics and places like that. Just about all those places are run by ex-offenders trying to reach back. There's a tremendous amount of support there. Churches, Big Brothers and Sisters organizations. I mean, the community really does do a lot, and it goes unmentioned often, too often. Police, too. A lot of police I know are coaches in their spare time, that sort of thing.

In the absence of any meaningful help from the government, the community rallies and tries to help these kids out.

Amazon: Speaking as a novelist, that can be a hard story to tell--the story of the guy who goes straight or wants to go straight? A typical story is the guy who wants to make that one big score before he goes straight, and this is the guy who ignores the score--tries to ignore the score--and goes straight. Is that a hard story to write, or a hard story to sell?

Pelecanos: Well, you want to deliver the goods. I am still a crime novelist, so the impulse is to have him grab a gun and start shooting at the end of every book. I've done that before, when I was starting out, when I was younger.

Amazon: You had that teenage brain.

Pelecanos: I still had a piece of that teenage brain in there. My worldview has changed. I've matured. I've got kids. I've been a father for 18 years. I'm trying not to do that, because I don't believe in it. I mean, I don't think that's the answer. But the trick is to deliver those kinds of visceral thrills also, so what I often do is I show the people that are not going to make it. Yes, they go and do the wrong thing, and that involves an apocalypse of some sort.

Amazon: There are two characters who enter the book, who have done a lot more time than Chris and his friends. Chris, when he first goes off to Pine Ridge, he says he "knows how to jail." But these guys, they don't know anything but how to jail.

Pelecanos: Yeah, there's a boy named Lawrence in the book who is damaged, and had an abusive childhood. Ben has been in and out of foster homes, the other kid. Some of these kids are not--you're not able to save them. You just got to face that. They can't be reformed because too much has happened in their childhood. But the point is, you still have to try. I mean, right now, in the District, in the last four years we've had a new director of the DYRS, Youth and Rehabilitation Services, and he has transformed the system. And the way he did it was he got rid of the old school out there at the prison. Put in new teachers. He has stopped locking up kids for things like marijuana charges, because kids with marijuana possession charges don't belong in prison with kids who have murdered people. They just don't. That system taints you.

And he put them to work building the new prison as apprentice carpenters, that sort of thing. They are getting high school degrees, not GEDs. They are being nurtured. It's called the Missouri Model. And the result is that in the last four years, the recidivism rate for youths has gone down 19%. It is tremendous success and I wanted to put that in the book to show people that it can be done. You just have to change the system a little bit and there is hope for these kids.

Amazon: Yeah, it seems like the mood of the country--well, in the last 20, 30 years--has gone the total opposite direction: prison is not a place for rehabilitation, or nurturing. That word would blow some people's heads off.

Pelecanos: Well, you're feeding the prison industrial complex, you know what I mean? But I'm encouraged because people seem to be changing their minds about that. We lock up more people in this country than any other civilized country in the world, and it doesn't do anybody any good. So what I'd like to see also is a reform of this drug war that is just destroyed neighborhoods and families all over the country, and decriminalization and legalization of marijuana would help. It's crazy to put kids in jail and adults in jail for marijuana use when you can drink all the alcohol you want and go out and beat your wife up or wreck your car, kill somebody on the highway.

The politicians need to stop being so cowardly and do what they know is right because they all came from the same generation I did.

Amazon: A lot of your stories have taken place in the past few decades. This one is pretty contemporary. And you, or at least your characters, have some pretty positive things to say about how some things have gone in DC recently; about development that some people might look at as gentrification. What is your sense, as a long-time DC man, of how things are going there?

Pelecanos: I think it is good. When you go down to U Street now, the 14th Street corridor, it is what we've said we all wanted all along. It is people of all different races and backgrounds hanging out together. Economic backgrounds are different, and that's what we've been trying to do. So the people that complain about the H Street corridor is being-you see yuppies down there now. Well, you've got to think, before that those places were all dark. They were boarded up. Now all those places that are open are employing people. Folks have jobs. They are taking care of their families. Their kids are going to see them going to work everyday. That's how it works, man.

Amazon: One of your trademarks is the music in your books, kind of the soundtrack. And there is music in this book too, but in some ways it seemed like it was much more a book about books. A lot of your characters are readers or they are not readers: Chris and his dad, that's one of the ties that they have. Ben becomes a reader. Is that something you were conscious of when you were writing it?

Pelecanos: Yeah, because I actually got to this book because I was working out--I work in all kinds of prisons, but I was working out at Oak Hill trying to teach books. And I say "trying." And, now I am going to institute a program through the PEN-Faulkner Foundation where we make it a permanent part of the curriculum at Oak Hill where a writer like myself or one of my friends will go out and teach a book throughout a semester. And I just think that--there is a high rate if illiteracy at these places. When somebody can read and they go out in the world, they've got a tool in their toolbox that other people don't have. It gives them a leg up. It's not just about enjoying a book, it's about being able to make it in the world. And if you can't read, you can't make it, man.

Amazon: Are there certain books that you found work at getting that across?

Pelecanos: Well, you don't want to make it too complicated. And a crime novel is perfect, if it is an artful one. If it's well done you'll get their attention, they'll read the book, and they'll come out engaged in the world in a different way then before they read it hopefully.

Amazon: Chris and his dad, they are history buffs and their favorite books are some of my favorite books: the Taylor Branch trilogy.

Pelecanos: Yeah, that's a landmark trilogy. I think I mentioned With the Old Breed by E.B. Sledge, which is the greatest memoir to come out of World War II, I believe. And I was involved in the show The Pacific, which is coming out next year on HBO. And one of the books, the source material, was With the Old Breed, so I wanted to give that a shout out. And in the writing of that show, I got interested in American history. I've always been interested in the Civil Rights Movement and the Taylor Branch books are the best books, the authoritative books on the subject.

Amazon: Well, I was going to ask about The Wire and I was going to ask whether you think something like that could ever happen again, but that leads me to ask about The Pacific. That's the first I've heard about it, so tell me what you guys have going on.

Pelecanos: That's the sequel of sorts to Band of Brothers. It's not really a sequel but it is produced by the same people, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg. It is going to have that look but it is going to have a different story in that the Pacific War was a much different war. In many ways it was the most brutal war we had ever fought. My dad was a Marine who fought in the Philippines, specifically the island of Leyte in 1944. And I wanted to get on that to honor him. In addition to that, for the Wire fans, the same guys are doing a show set in New Orleans which we are making now. And it has been picked up by HBO. It is coming out next year. It is called Treme. It is about musicians who come back to the city after the hurricane and try to rebuild their lives.

"Rock Stars of Yeast and Flour": Cookstr's Katie Workman catches up with urban bakers Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, owners of Brooklyn and Charleston's Baked outposts and the authors of Baked: New Frontiers in Baking. [The Daily Beast]

True Crime: Bestselling author John Grisham is working on a screenplay of the 1997 rape and murder of Navy wife Michelle Moore-Bosko and the "Norfolk four," who Grisham believes were wrongly convicted. [The Virginian-Pilot]

Another Famous Book by Nabokov?: Playboy magazine has secured first serial rights to Vladimir Nabokov's The Original Of Laura, the late author's final, unfinished novella.  [The New York Observer]

Moving & Shaking: This morning's No. 1 Mover & Shaker, Richard Hughes's 1929 novel, A High Wind in Jamaica, thanks to Andrew Sean Greer's "You Must Read This" praise on All Things Considered. "To say A High Wind in Jamaica is a novel about children who are abducted by pirates is to make it seem like a children's book. But that's completely wrong; its theme is actually how heartless children are." [NPR]

--BTP