Culture Surfing

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.

Continue Reading “Rand-y for capitalism”

(Photo Courtesy Oxford University Press)

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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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GENRE: Hocus pocus standards to improve your overall quality of life

THE PITCH: Along with a rundown of some of history’s most famous curses this little book provides an alternative to waiting out life’s natural disasters. Downton lays down all the vengeful recipes you might need to take control of your life. Whether you incessantly get calls from telemarketers or can’t stand your monster mother-in-law, you’ll find a suggested remedy here.

Continue reading “Shelf Life: The Little Book of Curses and Maledictions for Everyday Use by Dawn Rae Downtown” »

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GENRE: Random trivia with a not-so-hidden message from one of today’s most influential liberal journalists.

THE PITCH: In an effort to make an inconceivable number more palpable, Hendrick Hertzberg shows you one million dots. Five thousand dots per page means you get 200 pages of mind-boggling, eye-crossing circles about the size of a pin head. Each page has statistics that correlate with one of those tiny spots. Individually, the facts seem arbitrary, but collectively generate a weighty conception of a mil.

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These excerpts from Top Shelf Productions’ original graphic novel The Surrogates, in which Lt. Greer confronts the anti-technology cult leader The Prophet and, later, his own pro-tech wife, show the ability of comics to drive narrative conflicts through dialogue.

Continue reading “The original Surrogates: Hard words” »

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For an example of how Top Shelf Productions’ The Surrogates differs from the Bruce Willis film version, consider this action-packed excerpt, in which Lt. Harvey Greer of the Central Georgia Metropolis’ police department encounters the enigmatic anarchist nicknamed “Steeplejack” (a character not in the film version).

Continue reading “The original Surrogates: Greer vs. Steeplejack” »

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Garrison Keillor  appears tonight at Agnes Scott’s Presser Hall. The event’s free, but no tickets have been handed out ahead of time. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and tickets will be given away then until all the seats are taken. The event starts at 7:30 p.m. From the Georgia Center for the Book:

America’s favorite storyteller and for 35 years host of NPR’s “Prairie Home Companion,” makes his first visit to the Center for the Book! He’ll be talking about his eagerly anticipated new novel, Pilgrims: A Wobegon Novel, a delightful chronicle of small-town Midwesterners we know and love, and a book critics are already calling “a modern day Canterbury Tales.” Keillor has written more than a dozen books including Lake Wobegon Days, Leaving Home, Pontoon and Homegrown Democrat. Perhaps this country’s best-known humorist, he also is heard regularly with “The Writers Almanac” on many NPR stations.

(Photo courtesy Georgia Center for the Book)

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Just when I knew I’d had my fill of anything related to “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” comedy goddess-turned-autobiography-writer Kathy Griffin proves me wrong as she did in this hilarious clip from “Jimmy Kimmel Live”:

Kathy Griffin’s new autobiography Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin is in stores now and she’s making sure everyone knows it. No one can accuse the “My Life on the D-List” star of being indirect. She regularly makes her feelings known on a variety of topics but never in such a personal way.

With her trademark smartass humor fully intact, Griffin talks about her belief that her older brother was a pedophile. She discusses being sexually abused by a family friend and the plastic surgery that nearly killed her.  Before I make you think this book is going to be some sad-sack woe-is-me crap, why not let Kathy describe it for herself:

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“You know, I’m getting up there. If I live till Friday, I’ll be 60,” said David Bottoms over the phone last week. There isn’t any particular reason Georgia’s poet laureate should be worried about living through the week, but his Southern drawl has a way of slipping mortality into the conversation. His poems achieve a similar trick, drawing the Southern landscape with shades of spiritual anxiety and ephemeral life.

“It’s the light they believe kills./We drink and load again, let them crawl/for all they’re worth into the darkness we’re headed for,” he wrote in Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump’s titular poem. His debut book told the stories of wayward youths living in the glow of jukeboxes and beer lights, scrap metal thieves roaming through graveyards, and country bands playing at the VFW. Bottoms’ verses subtly culled classical allusions from the circumstances. In 1979, Robert Penn Warren plucked that manuscript out of a stack of contest entries and honored Bottoms with the Walt Whitman Award, which guaranteed publication and a jumpstart to his career.

Continue reading “David Bottoms verses Georgians”

(Photo by Rachel Bottoms)

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New York Times best-selling author Eric Jerome Dickey doesn’t just write novels based on the drama of loves lost and found. Most recently, he’s been turning out cliffhangers with his Sleeping with Strangers series. His new addition, Resurrecting Midnight, follows international vigilante hit man Gideon as he travels to Argentina to help a former lover and uncover secrets of his past. Dickey discusses his new thriller at the Borders Lithonia on Thurs., Sept. 3, 7 p.m.; the Decatur Book Festival on Sat., Sept. 5, 4:15 p.m.; and Medu Bookstore on Sat., Sept., 12, 2 p.m.

What was your inspiration when creating the story line for the first novel in the series, Sleeping with Strangers?
My deadline. [Laughs] I was trying to create another character — just trying to evolve [Gideon’s] character. I love getting into a different world and he helped me create different characters as the story unfolds. I add and take away from his character; it’s fresh. With Gideon, I didn’t want him to be a familiar character with a different name. It could be challenging, for example, you want to do a-b-c but then you think I did those seven books ago.

Continue reading “Speakeasy with Eric Jerome Dickey”

(Photo by Joseph Jones Photography)

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Ivy Hall

Here’s the skedz:

Ivy Hall Writers Series 2009 – 2010 Schedule -
Colson Whitehead: Thursday, Oct. 22, 6:30-8 p.m.
Ray Anderson: Monday, Oct. 26, 6:30-8 p.m.
Augusten Burroughs: Wednesday, Nov. 4, 6:30-8 p.m.
Margaret Atwood: Tuesday, Feb. 23, 6:30-8 p.m.
Joel Cohen: Thursday, March 25, 6:30-8 p.m.

Now, let’s play a game. Match the author to his/her “claim to fame” so to speak.

A. Served as a co-chair of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development during the Clinton administration
B. Booker Prize-winning author of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin
C. Emmy award-winning writer for “The Simpsons”
D. Author of The Intuitionist and John Henry Days
E. Twice honored by Entertainment Weekly as one of the 25 funniest people in America

Leave answers in the comment field. I’m sure I can hook up the winner with some kind of swag… (T-shirt, movie passes, something.)

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When I was at Book Expo America back in May, one of the “must-grab” pre-publication books (called ARCs, or advance reader copies) handed out like candy was a young adult novel by Justine Larbalestier called Liar, about a young girl whose world of pathological untruths slowly dissolves around the reader. It’s an amazing, dark and disturbing story that leaves pretty much every question unanswered (you may hate that, but it’s the sort of device I can’t get enough of in books, and, for a YA book it’s really heavy and high-level). This is the cover (at right), as done by Larbalestier’s American publisher, Bloomsbury (Liar has already been out for a minute in her native Australia)

Almost immediately upon cracking that book’s spine, though, what you’ll find is that Micah, the teenage girl narrator, is, as the author describes her, “black with nappy hair which she wears natural and short.“

Anything discordant with that statement when you look at the cover?

Exactly.

I hadn’t started reading Liar when news began to break of Larbalestier’s distaste for what she termed a “whitewashing” of her book,  but when I did, despite the book’s creepily compelling plot and a narrator constantly shifting from reliable to untrustable, that cover, the little white girl with the straight hair and the big eyes, kept pulling me back out. Bleeding-edge New York-based lit critique blog and performance group Fiction Circus took that sense of disconnect all the way to the mat when it caught wind of what was going on:

“If a black cover is an absolute deal-breaker, THEN USE SOME OTHER IMAGE. Like, the word “Liar” up in flames. Or a central image from the text. A broken mirror. ANYTHING. Don’t put a little white girl on the front of your book about a little black girl. It’s going to change people’s ideas about the narrative, which is primarily a story about identity in the first place.”

Continue reading “Bloomsbury’s bad decision turns it into a ‘Liar’” »

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GENRE: Dystopian sci-fi odyssey

THE PITCH: Fleeing a futuristic Southern landscape ravaged by climate change, Jennifer and Mazy, a pregnant woman and a teenager, head toward a Northern promised land along a patchwork trail known as Snakeskin Road.

GRIM DETAILS: “The dead are starting to smell — those lying in the waterless reflecting pools, under trees, those in the courtyard mummy-wrapped. No matter where we go in the square, the wind picks up their decay and the syrupy plastic.”

HISTORICAL RELEVANCE: The Northern-bound odyssey Jennifer and Mazy endure is an evocative adaptation of 19th-century slave narratives.

Continue reading “Shelf Life: James Braziel’s Snakeskin Road“

(Image courtesy Bantam Books)

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Aerle Taree has accomplished quite a deal throughout her career. In the early ’90s, Taree won two Grammys and several other prestigious awards with musical group Arrested Development for hits such as “Tennessee.” An avid humanitarian, she supports various charities and foundations, including the National Alliance on Mental Illness. She’s also written four books and recorded a spoken-word album called PoeTaree: All She Wrote. These days, you can find the Atlantan managing her entertainment company Reality Writings Inc., and promoting her new book of poems, PoeTaree: The Jurisprudence of Life.

What was your inspiration for writing PoeTaree: The Jurisprudence of Life?
I was on tour when I wrote this book. I was going through a lot of things. When you’re on tour, it’s the fast life. You travel from city to city constantly. There’s partying and drinking everywhere. And even though I was surrounded by people, I was lonely. People wanted to go out, and party and I was saving money to buy a house. I was moving in a different direction in my life. It was just a reflection of how I was feeling when I was with the group.

Continue reading “Speakeasy with poet Aerle Taree”

(Photo courtesy Aerle Taree)

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