Books to Read, Poetry to Peruse, and Monsters to Fear, but Ultimately Love

A plethora of links today, including a Kelly (It's funny cause her last name is Link, see?)

Via Bookslut: Check out two new poems from Sherman Alexie, "How to Create an Agnostic" and "Mystery Train," at failbetter.com. While you're there check out their interview with Susan Choi and learn about irrepressible urges, tight plots, and anxieties over the pantheons of Russian and Jewish literarure.

Every week, the good folks at the Onion A.V. Club throw out a question for discussion among their staff and readers. This week they have an article asking, "What one book would you most like to make the rest of the world read?" Picks range from the pilgrims of Chaucer to the endogged stars of Dianne Wynne Jones. Be sure and stay for the credits, too. As always with these sorts of articles, some of the most erudite, and erm, colorful commentary can be found in the comments section.

And finally, from the invisible world of radio, head over to those uncertain folk at, To The Best of Our Knowledge (TTBOOK as the kids call it) for a discussion of horror, including conversations with Andrew Davidson and Kelly Link about their books, Gargoyle and Pretty Monsters, respectively.

On the first Wednesday of every month, the English Department at Ole Miss, plus whoever else stumbles in or we wrangle along, convene at Jubilee on the square to celebrate the work of a fiction writer and a poet from our program. We call this Broken English. There's a shiny MC, a podium of many autographs, and a lot of very supportive, not too drunk, people. It's one of the cooler things about matriculating in Oxford, actually.

Here's what our shiny MC says...

"This Wednesday's reading features the soaring prose of fiction writer, Chris 'Don't Make Me Show You My Superpowers' Kammerud, and the lyrical phraseology of poet, Alicia 'Obama Mama' Casey."

Drinking begins at 8, the spoken word at 8:30. Stop by if you're in the neighborhood and say hello. I'll be the guy in a cape*.


*A superhero cape, not a Dracula cape. Probably I'll just wear a t-shirt.

Banned Books Week

Reading Neil Gaiman's journal, one learns many interesting things about cats and Maddys and graveyards, plus the occasional interesting thing about books, such as that this week is Banned Books Week. Every year the ALA celebrates our freedom to read by reminding us of those small pockets of resistance still carrying on in their noble, hopefully futile, quest to rid the world of children's books with too many wizards, adult books with too many racisms, or books of any sort with homosexual penguins.

The ten most frequently challenged authors of 2007 according to the ALA:

1) Robert Cormier
2) Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
3) Mark Twain
4) Toni Morrison
5) Philip Pullman
6) Kevin Henkes
7) Lois Lowry
8) Chris Crutcher
9) Lauren Myracle
10) Joann Sfar

Do your part readers, go to your local library or bookstore and pick up a book THEY don't want you to read. Do it for your country, for your soul, and for that little devil on your shoulder that looks remarkably like a young Mark Twain.

Cartoonist as Auteur

In honor of The Yalobusha Review opening it's doors, er, pages, to short graphic stories (graphic here meaning pictures, not naked lawyer mud wrestling, although...), here's a couple of links from the world of narrative art.


First, check out those hip geeks at The Wall Street Journal and their article about the life-changing work going on in graphic novels from Europe. Here you'll discover cool phrases like bandes dessinées, and learn that while we yanks have been slow in embracing comic books as a medium for more than the adventures of radioactive men and women, places like France and Belgium have celebrated the many possibilities of the artform for decades: see Tintin or Asterix.


When you're done feeling sophisticated and worldly, head over to Amazon's Omnivoracious and their Graphic Novel Fridays post about the throwback to early sci-fi pulp and wonder that is Fear Agent by writer Rick Remender and artist Tony Moore (Walking Dead). Who doesn't love space suits and tentacle monsters, right?

Mostly Harmless and Another Thing...

A couple of pan-galactic and large-hearted links for you today, readers:

From the "I never could get the hang of Thursdays" department, Eoin Colfer will write the sixth volume of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy and will also, almost certainly, be unfairly maligned by readers for being named Eoin Colfer and not Douglas Adams, but that's not really his fault is it? Let's put the blame where it really belongs people, on Eoin's parents.


That said, Largehearted boy has blogged Esquire's 75 books Every Man Should Read, a list that has neither Eoin Colfer or Douglas Adams on it. You will find such manly luminaries as Roth, Cheever, London, and Saunders on it, though. Even foreign men like Murakami make an appearance. Not too many women, though. One, to be exact. Flannery O'Connnor, who Barry Hannah has admitted he thought to be a man for many years. Head here, for the whole thing in slideshow-style.

Final Country

Opening lines of James Crumley's The Last Good Kiss:
"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonora, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."

From Crumley's The Final Country:
"It's done. This may not be my final country. I can still taste the bear in the back of my throat, bitter with the blood of the innocent, and somewhere in my old heart I can still remember the taste of love. Perhaps this is just a resting place. A warm place to drink cold beer. But wherever my final country is, my ashes will go back to Montana when I die. Maybe I've stopped looking for love. Maybe not. Maybe I will go to Paris. Who knows? But I'll sure as hell never go back to Texas again."

James Crumley, author of the hard-boiled classic The Last Good Kiss, died on Wednesday afternoon at the age of 68. George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, and Michael Connelly are among the authors that counted Crumley as a major influence. Crumley was born in Three Rivers, Texas, grew up in south Texas, and spent three years in the U.S. Army. His Vietnam novel One Count to Cadence was his thesis at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Struggling to follow it up, he was introduced to the work of Raymond Chandler and wrote The Wrong Case, a landmark crime novel. With The Last Good Kiss, his third book, Crumley changed the face of contemporary crime fiction. Crumley was also the author of The Mexican Tree Duck, Bordersnakes, Dancing Bear, The Final Country, and The Right Madness. Over the years, he taught at the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of Arkansas, and the University of Montana. He died in Missoula, Montana.

A 2006 interview with Crumley:
The Right Madness

An Indignant Philip Roth Battles Zombies

Wouldn't it be pretty if it were so, dear readers? But no, as of yet, Philip Roth has not joined in the fight against the undead. He has, however, published a new novel by the name of Indignation, which the Washington Post says "ought to be handed out on college campuses along with condoms and tetanus shots." I hadn't realized Roth had resorted to writing about sex with rusty robots, but considering his growing fascination with zombies, who can keep up these days.


In related news, Kelly Link's short story, "Some Zombie Contingency Plans" is now available for free online as part of John Joseph Adams anthology, The Living Dead, which collects zombie stories from the likes of Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and others.