Culture Surfing

Among the winners at last night’s National Book Awards ceremony in New York City was the pride of Milledgeville, GA, Flannery O’Connor. The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor, a posthumous collection that won the NBA for fiction in 1972, was voted by readers as the “Best of National Book Awards for Fiction” in the last 60 years of the event.

Losing to O’Connor in that category were William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Eudora Welty, and others.

Colum McCann was awarded the 2009 fiction prize for his novel Let the Great World Spin.

A full list of winners, finalists, and judges after the jump.

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Coolness: Decatur’s delightful children’s book shop, The Little Shop of Stories, won a challenge issued by rock-star genre writer Neil Gaiman to throw the best Halloween party in the United States. Thanks to the success of Little Shop’s Graveyard Book Halloween Party on Oct. 30, Gaiman will visit the store on Mon., Dec. 14, at 6 p.m. (Little Shop shares the honor with McNally Robinson Booksellers of Winnipeg, Manitoba.) Given the popularity of the English author’s graphic novels (Stardust, Coraline), film scripts (Beowulf), prose fiction (American Gods), laundry lists, etc., you might want to start lining up now.

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Down on Peachtree Street, just south of the High Museum, are the offices of Roark Capital Group. On its website, the private equity firm explains that it specializes in acquiring family businesses and managing franchises such as Seattle’s Best Coffee, Schlotzsky’s and Cinnabon. The website also offers an explanation of the name Roark, which refers to the character Howard Roark from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Distilling Rand’s philosophy in a few choice lines, it says, “Integrity … is commitment to one’s own thinking and one’s own mind. … Howard Roark’s life exemplified the true nature of this independence and integrity.” After reading that, I drove right down to Lenox Square to pick up a Cinnabon, but was disappointed when I didn’t taste much integrity or independence. That empty flavor has more than the name Roark in common with Ayn Rand.

Rand is experiencing a sort of renaissance these days. Atlas Shrugged sold more copies in 2008 than in any year since 1957 and will probably break that record again this year. Charlize Theron has signed up to star in an epic film adaptation of the 1,400-page novel. Glenn Beck can’t stop talking about the author. Perfectly timed to intersect with this capitalist feeding frenzy are the first two biographies to be written about Rand by authors other than her closest acolytes. Out of the two biographers, only Jennifer Burns had access to Rand’s journals, letters and private papers. She’s put that access to good use in Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, a vivid, intellectual portrait of the woman born as Alisa Rosenbaum in 1905.

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(Photo Courtesy Oxford University Press)

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The latest installment of  the Solar Anus reading series goes down at Kavarna tonight. New York native David Lehman will be reading poetry and Georgia-based Josh Russell will read short fiction.

The prolific David Lehman has two books out this year – a collection of poetry titled Yeshiva Boys and a non-fiction volume about Jewish songwriters titled A Fine Romance – as well as the latest installment of The Best American Poetry series, which he initiated and continues to edit. You can check him out reading a poem called “The Double Agent” below.

Josh Russell is the author of Yellow Jack and two forthcoming novels – My Bright Midnight and A True History of the Captivation, Transport to Strange Lands, & Deliverance of Hannah Guttentag. He was raised in Normal, Illinois and lives in Newnan, Ga.

Solar Anus is, hands down, the best name for a reading series in Atlanta. Local author Jamie Iredell hosts the roving series, which will conclude 2009 with a reading at Beep Beep Gallery this Friday, November 20 featuring Kate Greenstreet, Brigitte Byrd, and Scott Wilkerson.

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Let’s say you’re a Nick Cave fan. Maybe not even a “fan,” but someone who owns and likes a couple of his records. You might not listen to him much anymore. If someone asked you why you like him, you might talk about that inimitable Australian voice of his. Or you might talk about his songwriting (which has bordered on story writing for most of his career) and the enduring cast of characters he has born – murderers and witnesses and bystanders to the scenes.

Or, if you’re the story-telling type, you would talk about the first time you really listened to a Nick Cave album. It was Tender Prey and you were single at the time, so no one was around to tell you to turn it down. You pulled a bottle of Bushmills out of the cabinet and listened to it over and over again, turning up the volume a little each time until you realized that Nick Cave just sounded best at 10, blaring so loud that your speakers were in a vague sort of danger. You don’t remember how many times you listened to the album that night, but you can recall how the repetition of songs like “The Mercy Seat” were every bit as intoxicating as the Bushmills. You remember waking up the next day with a splitting headache and the needle skipping at the end of the record.

Maybe that didn’t happen to you, but that’s exactly how I remember it.  When Nick Cave’s second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, came out earlier this year, I was interested but only vaguely. Have you ever tried to read Bob Dylan’s novel Tarantula? It doesn’t bode well for the musician to novelist crossover. Using that reference as judgment, I didn’t pick up the book and still haven’t.

But I did listen to the audiobook. The unabridged, eight hour long book-on-CD is a recording of Cave reading along with a soundtrack performed by him and Warren Ellis.

Continue reading “Listening to Nick Cave read ‘The Death of Bunny Munro’” »

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Mary Jane Mahan's Brick Store Pub book jumped to the top of Amazon charts last night.

There is no shortage of love for Decatur’s Brick Store Pub. Love at the Pub by Mary Jane Mahan is the number one regional travel book on Amazon’s sales charts right now. This new book tells the “true story of a small southern town’s love for its friendly beer pub”  and explains how The Brick Store became the #2 ranked beer bar on Earth.

Last night was an organized, online launch party that included a “live world craft beer bar philosophy talk” with Brick Store owners Dave Blanchard and Michael Gallagher, 5Seasons Sandy Springs owner Dennis Lange, and Paste Magazine founder and Editor-in-chief Josh Jackson. The “Telesudinar,” as it was called, offered insights on how to operate a world class beer bar and the possibility to win gift certificates and prizes.

Could online readings and discussions be eclipsing the standard brick and mortar book store readings? It’s highly unusual to see a locally focused book like Love at the Pub, which was published through the self-publishing company iUniverse, rank so high on Amazon’s overall rankings (around #140 this morning, though it reached #82 last night). Authors and publicists might need to get a beer and mull that one over.

(H/T to Andy for link)

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Howardena Pindell and others criticize the work of Kara Walker in this collection of essays.

GENRE: Collected criticism about a contemporary artist

THE PITCH: Written responses to Kara Walker’s art divided into three sections: “NO” presents arguments against it, “YES” collects favorable reviews, and “?” is more ambiguous.

BOLD PRINT: Former Atlantan Kara Walker is a phenomenally successful artist, being one of the youngest recipients of the MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 1997  and named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World”  in 2007.

THE WORK: PBS says, “Kara Walker’s work explores the raw intersection of race, gender, and sexuality through iconic, silhouetted figures. Walker unleashes the traditionally Victorian medium of the silhouette directly onto the walls of the gallery.” A collection of her work and interviews can be seen at the ART:21 website.

AGAINST: Howardena Pindell sets the tone for arguing against the favorable reception of Kara Walker’s work, “Kara Walker’s work is being used as a weapon against the Black community in general to reinforce and maintain restrictions upon any visual dialogue with other artists of color and the wide range of work they produce.” Pindell and many of the contributors to this volume write that Walker’s work is racist and feel that their opinions have been silenced by “white privilege.”

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The “Dexter” Season 4 episode reviews have been shrink-wrapped to an autopsy table in an unknown location, and will have to be postponed indefinitely. Let’s kill time before the rescue with the new hardback Dexter By Design (Doubleday, $25) and consider how Michael C. Hall’s secret serial killer resembles the original creation of writer Jeff Lindsay.

The author introduced the perfectly-assimilated predatory sociopath in Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Published in 2004, the award-winning mystery served, rather loosely, as the basis for the 12 episodes of the Showtime series’ first season. Since then, the show’s continuity has diverged dramatically from the books. Sgt. Doakes, Dexter’s Javert-like police nemesis, was killed in the show’s second season but still lives on the page, if in a horribly maimed fashion. From Dexter’s perspective as the first-person narrator, his homicidal impulses, nicknamed “The Dark Passenger” manifests more like a secondary personality who keeps watch on Dexter’s consciousness.

The fourth book, like the show’s fourth season, begins with Dexter married to Rita, only Dexter by Design first finds the couple as newlyweds in Paris, not as sleep-deprived parents of a new infant. Dexter by Design sees our antihero thoroughly pwned by a pranksterish nutjob with a grisly artistic bent. Miami’s latest human butcher puts dead bodies on display in ghastly parody of South Florida tourist behavior. (Lindsay makes a passing nod to Carl Hiassen’s Tourist Season, which features a home-grown terrorist cell with similar anti-tourist motivations.) Staying one step ahead, the killer discovers Dexter’s true identity and targets his loved ones.

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Photo by Marlon Ettinger.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is one of those books that everyone likes. Most of the world, including The New York Times, Washington Post, The New Yorker, People, and this lady named Oprah, liked The Story of Edgar Sawtelle enough to call it one of their favorite books of 2008.  Getting people to like a nearly 600 page literary novel that mimics the structure of “Hamlet” is no simple task. Doing that with your first novel is like hitting a home run on your first time at bat. David Wroblewski is doing pretty good for a first-time novelist.

Edgar Sawtelle is a mute boy from Wisconsin who communicates and bonds with a group of dogs. His story is now available in paperback. An excerpt from the novel is available on Wroblewski’s website. You can catch Wroblewski reading from the novel at the Margaret Mitchell House tonight at 7 p.m. More details at the MMH website.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. Ecco. $16.99. 608 pp

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GETTING TESTY: A.J. Jacobs appears at the Book Festival of the MJCCA Fri., Nov. 11. 7:30 p.m.

In the backwoods of Virginia, a man named Brad Blanton is hard at work promoting the Radical Honesty movement. Blanton, who calls himself “white trash with a Ph.D.,” thinks people would be happier if they stopped lying. As in — I woud be happier if I just told you I’d rather be drinking beer than writing this article. Awkward moment, right?

For his recent book The Guinea Pig Diaries, author A.J. Jacobs visits Blanton for two weeks to test out Radical Honesty. He tells his in-laws they suck at giving presents; calls a friend to let him know he’s been fantasizing about his wife; and admits he’s bored while his wife is talking. Radical Honesty’s just one of many experiments Jacobs undertakes in his book, including outsourcing his daily routine to a team of workers in India and guiding his every action by the question, “What would George Washington do?” But Radical Honesty doesn’t feel as forcibly zany as the other tasks. Anyone could do it. I could just keep telling you I’m thinking more about the cold, delicious cans of beer waiting for me in my fridge than I am about work.

Continue Reading “Radical Honesty at the MJCCA Book Festival”

(Photo Courtesy Simon & Schuster)

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Flannery O'Connor on her farm in Milledgeville, GA.

Marking the 30th anniversary of the publication as The Habit of Being, Emory is celebrating Flannery O’Connor’s letters tonight. The southern gothic icon published relatively little fiction in her short lifetime, but her letter writing was wildly prolific. The heavily trimmed-down Habit of Being is longer than the unabridged, complete collection her short stories. Confined to a life lived “between the house and the chicken yard,” as she once wrote corresponding with a friend, O’Connor used letters as a way to interact with a wide group of friends. Literary friendships, like those with Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, or more personal acquantences, like the queer, lapsed-Catholic Betty Hester, blossomed in her letters, taking on lives as vivid as any of her stories.

As part of the celebration, local actress Brenda Bynum will perform a selection of her letters with Robert and Sally Fitzgerald. Instead of paging though a dogeared copy of The Habits of Being to select material for the performance, Bynum just went to straight to the source. Emory houses all of O’Connor’s archives in their special collections library.

“You know, anyone can go and do that. If you like what you hear me read, you really should go see what I left out,” she told me over the phone this week. “I pick out things that I think will read well. These letters create a kind of narrative of the friendship.”

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Alice Walker, Pearl Cleage, and the Indigo Girls will perform on November 6 at the Hillside International Truth Center

Tonight marks the beginning of two events that will take over Atlanta’s literary scene for the rest of the week. The Atlanta Queer Lit Fest and a celebration of Charis Books’ 35th Anniversary will get started tonight with a shared event at the feminist, Little Five Points bookstore. AQLF is sponsoring a huge spread of events including readings from Staceyann Chin and Manil Suri as well as a full day of workshops at the Decatur Library. The anniversary events for Charis have snagged some big names, including Gloria Steinem and Alice Walker.

Full schedule and details after the jump.

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Serial memoirist Augusten Burroughs will read from his new book, You Better Not Cry, at SCAD’s Ivy Hall tomorrow. If you can’t make it or want a sneak preview of the profane, droll world that spills from his mouth, we’ve got a got a great clip of him reading a passage from the book. It’s not quite as trancelike as his recent interview, but Burroughs has the sort of distinct voice that lends his stories a memorable charm.

Be sure to stick around for the opera singer.

Augusten Burroughs reads from You Better Not Cry

Free. 6:30-8 p.m. Wed., Nov. 4. SCAD-Atlanta, 1600 Peachtree St., 4C. 404-253-3206. www.artofrestoration.org.

(Mp3 courtesy of Macmillan Audio)

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Augusten Burroughs

Augusten Burroughs doesn’t want to be confused for a trained writer. “I don’t write like an MFA grad. I write from a subconscious place. I don’t think while I’m writing. It’s like going into a trance,” he says. “That’s the way people should write.”

The serial-memoirist is capable of speaking from trancelike states, too. He can orate breathlessly for minutes at a time, verbally wandering around subjects like brain chemistry or The Diary of Anne Frank, only to stop himself and ask, “How did I get here?” Like his books, Burroughs’ mouth is both vulgar and charming, the circuitous ramblings only making his monologues more authentic.

While discussing Christmas (his favorite holiday), Burroughs says he sees one common thread throughout his memories, “Each one has been horrible, worse than the last.” He’s recounted those laughably miserable memories in his latest book, You Better Not Cry, a loose collection of Christmas stories spanning from his youth until just a few years ago. Because so much of Burroughs’ personal life has already been published, it’s easy to plug his new stories into that public timeline. The drunken ones fit in before the sobriety of Dry; the earliest childhood recollections pre-date his life with the Finch family in Running With Scissors; and the latest stories come after his publishing success.

Continue Reading “Augusten Burroughs gets personal with Santa in You Better Not Cry“

(Photo Courtesy Augusten Burroughs)

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