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By Vick Mickunas
| Wednesday, October 15, 2008, 12:27 PM
The finalists for the National Book Award have just been announced. Here’s the list:
Fiction
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba (Scribner)
Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)
Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Salvatore Scibona, The End (Graywolf Press)
Nonfiction
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
(Alfred A. Knopf)
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton
& Company)
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a
War on American Ideals (Doubleday)
Jim Sheeler, Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives (Penguin)
Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order (Harcourt)
Poetry
Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems (HarperCollins)
Reginald Gibbons, Creatures of a Day (Louisiana State University Press)
Richard Howard, Without Saying (Turtle Point Press)
Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press)
Young People’s Literature
Laurie Halse Anderson, Chains (Simon & Schuster)
Kathi Appelt, The Underneath (Atheneum)
Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic)
E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (Hyperion)
Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now (Alfred A. Knopf)
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booms and busts
By Vick Mickunas
| Wednesday, October 15, 2008, 10:28 AM
Check it out! This is a very funny idea. click here:
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laughable
By Vick Mickunas
| Tuesday, October 14, 2008, 08:18 PM
One of the most difficult things for me to do is to pass up a yard sale…or a garage sale…or estate sales…estate auctions. I’m a sucker for all of the above.
If they have old books I’m really in trouble. I have almost gotten into fistfights at auctions over books. There’s one guy who turns up at all the area auctions. I’m guessing he must sell books on the internet? Every time I encounter him he is rooting through boxes of old books.
These boxes of books are neatly stacked. Some books that have been around for a century and they still look new. With dust jackets that are immaculate. No rips. No fingerprints. I crave them.
Then this guy usually shows up. He tears into the boxes, abusing these precious volumes. He violates their pristine pages with nasty, swinish grunting, picking out the ones he wants, trashing the rest. O, I have complained about him. The auctioneers then mocked me; they taunted me, sneering…“oooo this guy wants these crummy old books..he’s mad that they are getting ruined” and they never stop the guy. One time I nearly came to blows with this fellow. I call him STINKY.
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secret passions
By Vick Mickunas
| Monday, October 13, 2008, 11:09 AM
In the Amazon…
There was an amazing article yesterday in the New York Times. It went into great detail about the E-Commerce giants Amazon.com and EBay. Apparently EBay is losing traction while Amazon.com is on the rise.
Today in the New York Times there is another interesting article about Amazon.com. Almost one year ago, Amazon.com introduced the Kindle, their paperless electronic reader. I know people who won’t go anywhere without their Kindles. One guy told me that he reaches for it first thing in the morning before he even gets out of bed to download and read the New York Times.
This current article is about some new political e-books that are only available on the Amazon Kindle:
Campaign Articles From Newsweek Become E-Books for Amazon Kindle
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
“It would seem to be a magazine’s dream in these straitened times: Take something you have already published and sold, repackage it and distribute it without all that expense of paper, ink and trucks, and then sell it again.
This week, Newsweek will publish four books, one about each of the major presidential and vice presidential candidates — Senators John McCain, Barack Obama and Joseph Biden, and Gov. Sarah Palin — books that will not appear in print but will be available only as e-books from Amazon.com for download to Amazon’s Kindle device.
The books will contain versions of articles that Newsweek, owned by The Washington Post Company, has already published during the campaign. Turning this kind of collection into books is an old idea; what is new is to do it with such minimal production and distribution costs that even the most limited sales could be profitable.
Amazon says this is probably the first such venture by a publication, but it is not likely to be the last.
“We think it’s a very interesting model that could broaden,” said Ian Freed, an Amazon vice president in charge of the Kindle reading device. “This could start to change the way at least some books are published.”
The books, at $9.99, will go on sale Wednesday and can be ordered starting Monday.
Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek, approached Amazon with the idea about a month ago. The use of material published over the course of the campaign points to another advantage of digital books: a fast turnaround time.
“Every magazine editor thinks their stuff should be in an anthology, but that’s hard to do economically,” Mr. Meacham said. “Here’s a way of doing it more quickly and with virtually no overhead. This is competing in the digital space with our traditional strengths, and that’s been hard to do.”
News magazines, like newspapers, have struggled financially, with circulation and advertising in decline. The economic downturn has cut deeply into advertising, while the magazines are forced to compete with many sources of information available instantly, and usually free, on the Internet.
The Kindle, introduced in November, costs $359. Amazon offers 180,000 books for wireless download, along with more than 40 newspapers and magazines.
The potential audience may be voracious, but it remains relatively small — Amazon will not say how many Kindles it has sold. Industry analysts have estimated that the figure is in the low hundreds of thousands.
But the experiment is appealing “because anyone who owns a Kindle is someone we want as a reader,” Mr. Meacham said. “We’re putting it in front of committed readers.”
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in the Amazone
By Vick Mickunas
| Sunday, October 12, 2008, 11:18 AM
“The English Major” by Jim Harrison, (Grove Press, 255 pages, $24).
“It used to be Cliff and Vivian and now it isn’t.”
This opening line from Jim Harrison’s novel “The English Major” expresses the blunt reality of how a life can get turned upside down.
“The English Major” is written from Cliff’s perspective. As the story begins he describes how his life was thrown all topsy turvy. At their 40th high school reunion, Vivian rekindled her passion for an old flame.
Cliff, a former school teacher, was growing cherries on a farm on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Their marriage fell apart. Cliff lost the farm. His dog died. Suddenly untethered, Cliff embarks on an epic journey across America in his junker car.
He heads west. There isn’t much of a plot here. The reader is seduced by Harrison’s ornery narrator. Cliff brings along a jigsaw puzzle of the United States. Whenever he crosses another state border he discards the puzzle piece for the state he’s just left.
The trip allows Cliff the luxury to ponder his existence. He recalls warning signals ignored. ” I didn’t pay attention over a year ago when she looked up from her Robert Ludlum spy book and said, ‘You look so forgettable, you’d make a good spy.”
In Minnesota, he picks up Marybelle, a former student. Initially they get along well but after a few hundred miles she is driving Cliff nuts, talking constantly on her cell phone, annoying him to no end.
Harrison’s characterization of his cranky narrator is marvelous. The road trip shifts his memory to the man he once was. “Marybelle joked that I sounded like I had been in long-term parking for 25 years. My feelings were a little hurt and when we stopped to bury the North Dakota jigsaw piece under a rock in the austere landscape my mind wandered back 40 years to when my brain was so alive I could barely sleep.”
Cliff takes a circuitous route to San Francisco to visit his gay son, a successful location scout in the film industry. In California, Cliff’s long suffering vehicle expires. “I had just pulled off the freeway in Sausalito and was near the former home of my boyhood hero Jack London when Ron died. Ron is the private name of my 13-year-old Ford Taurus with just short of 250,000 miles on it. The actual Ron was a high school friend who died when his tractor (a John Deere) tipped over backward on top of him while he was pulling out a stump.”
As Cliff coasts to a fading halt inside the dying Ron, he meets a man with “the name ‘Fred” on his shirt pocket.” Cliff says to Fred: “I think my car has gone to heaven.”
If you enjoy reading a book that takes you to lots of fascinating places with minimal fuss, then you must check out “The English Major.” Jim Harrison writes fiction that feels so real you can believe that he has lived every moment of it. And perhaps he has.
Vick Mickunas
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confessions of a galley slave
By Vick Mickunas
| Saturday, October 11, 2008, 12:57 PM
After the stock market crashed things got bad quickly. Banks failed. Millions were out of work. People starved. The Republican president didn’t have a clue what to do.
Sounding familiar? President Herbert Hoover was deeply unpopular. They called the shantytowns where Americans struggled to survive HOOVERVILLES. By 1932, things had gotten really rough.
Fortunately for America, a visionary man became our president in 1932. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a product of an affluent upbringing. He was also a man who felt the pain of ordinary Americans and he had the gumption to do something about it. They called it the NEW DEAL.
America took a long time to recover - but it did. FDR had the courage to pursue bold initiatives that alleviated America’s economic ills. I’m reading a superb book that provides new insights into this man who came from privilege - a man who never stopped caring about those who had a lot less. TRAITOR TO HIS CLASS - The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Doubleday, Nov. 4) by H.W. Brands is being published at the perfect moment. It comes out right at the same time that we will be electing our next president.
FDR had a legion of critics. They called him a socialist and much worse. My maternal grandfather, a son of rural Iowa, a Marine veteran of WWI, a schoolteacher, and a life long Republican, despised Franklin Roosevelt.
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clearing the cobwebs
By Vick Mickunas
| Friday, October 10, 2008, 10:58 PM
The headlines are: screaming!
Body Blow for McCain as Palin Found to Have Abused Powers (The Guardian UK)
Palin’s Calendar Shows She Was Open to Business (The Houston Chronicle)
Alaska Legislative Probe Finds Palin Misused Power (The Washington Post)
Palin Found Guilty of Power Abuse (The Melbourne Herald Sun)
..thousands of stories about how Sarah Palin has abused her powers as Alaska’s governor.
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