Another tournament of books.

For those who like this sort of thing, Time Out New York has a tournament going in which readers vote on "which book is most essential to life - and cocktail conversation - in New York City."  Being a bumpkin who has lived in Maine his whole life, I'm not that great a judge.  And no commentary?

I tell you what though, if Auster's New York Trilogy loses out to The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, I'll eat my red notebook.  (And shouldn't the graphic novelization of City of Glass get its own shot at the title?)  (via)

One story, every day.

Dan's the man with the master plan.

While the poets of the world have shrewdly united to have April be National Poetry Month every year, creating a fair amount of attention for their craft, we (proverbial) here at the EWN have decided that we sort of like concentrating on one form for a lengthy period of time, so we're declaring that around here, May will be Short Story Month.  While we don't believe that we'll have WITS stories to link to and discuss like we have this month, we do have more than enough short story collections lying around the homestead here that we have been waiting for a reason to crack open.

One of the original ideas behind this Work of the Day idea was to dip into those collections of stories and poems that I didn't think would ever get full reviews.  So, in the month of May, while some of the stories will come from online journals, and print journals, there will also be at least one story per day coming from a story collection.

I like to see this sort of thing.  I've written in the past about my love of the short story and wondered about its diminished - and diminishing - place in the lives of readers.  I finished The Secret Lives of People in Love - short stories - the other night and have been trying to figure out a way to write about it without resorting to outrageous hyperbole.  Still working on that. 

Stay tuned at EWN.

Having a laugh, are we?

Here's the best thing I've read about that whole "n+1 hates bloggers, bloggers hate n+1" business.  I needed a laugh.  Excerpt:

Open Letter to n+1*

Dear n+1,

Can I get my Totebag! embroidered?

2007 Tournament of Books: Round one, match five.

In Arthur and George, it was clear from the beginning that the mystery would be solved and that the solution wasn’t the sort that could be sussed out by a careful reader. That takes away much of the fun. The weakness is especially apparent in the final third of the book, when the plot seems to slow down and the story disintegrates into a legal tug of war over the fate of George Edalji. It wouldn’t have been so dry had Sir Arthur’s skills been more in doubt; the knowledge that eventually he would tap the correct villain and clear Mr. Edalji’s name took away some of my interest as I neared the end.

Conversely, One Good Turn has a slow start—it’s never completely obvious which of the many characters is the main crime-solver—but the twists and turns of the final chapters (indeed, the final lines) kept me up late, anxious to read just one more chapter rather than go to bed and leave the mystery unsolved. And when I was finished, I was pleased to be able to say that I’d had my suspicions about the character eventually pegged for the crime. Early on I’d thought, Now, that person is acting pretty funny for the circumstances. It is possible for a careful reader to solve the crime in this book, and for this sleuth, that makes a big difference.

Winner.  Eventually, Max must stumble. 

Auster on Marquez.

It was the spring of 1970. I was twenty-three years old, writing and
translating poems, writing essays and reviews, but also dreaming of one
day being able to write novels. By then, I had read nearly all the
masters of the twentieth century--Joyce and Proust, Kafka and Beckett,
Faulkner and Nabokov, Fitzgerald and Céline--and was feeling a little
crushed. How on earth could one ever get out from under those giants?

One
day, I read a highly enthusiastic review of a novel by a South American
writer whose name was unknown to me. At the time, thirty-seven years
ago, buying hardcover books was an extravagance I could scarcely
afford, but my curiosity had been aroused to such a degree that I went
out and sprang for the book anyway. I started reading One Hundred Years of Solitude
in the early afternoon and I didn't put it down until I had finished
reading it late that night. Here was soemthing new and fresh and
altogether mesmerizing: an imagination, a voice, a sensibility that
resembled nothing I had encountered before. And yet Gabriel García
Márquez's novel, in the masterful translation by Gregory Rabassa,
contained many old-fashioned virtues as well, most of which can be
summed up in a single phrase: love of storytelling.

This love is
what creates pleasure in the reader, the sense of amazement and
happiness that washes over us whenever we stumble upon one of those
rare books that changes the way we look at the world, exposes us to the
infinite possibilities of what a book can be. Every passionate reader
has had that experience, and each time it happens, we understand that
books are a world unto themselves and that world is better and richer
than any we have traveled in before. That is why we become readers in
the first place. That is why we turn away from the vanities of the
material world and begin to love books above all other things.

(via.)

Soon, "After Dark."

Quick peek from Bookdwarf at Murakami's forthcoming.

After Dark
by Haruki Murakami (coming in May from Random House)—Short novel from
one of my father authors. Set over the course of an evening, the
chapters cut between several interconnected stories: trombonist
Tetsuya, entering a Denny’s one evening, runs into Mari Asai. He was
once interested in Mari’s beautiful older sister Eri, who has been
asleep for a month, trapped in some netherworld. Meanwhile, a Chinese
prostitute is beaten badly by an officeworker at a love hotel and the
propietor, Kaoru, needs Mari’s Chinese translation skills. The book
doesn’t go anywhere. Rather it seems to be more of an observation on
coincidences and time.

Well, that could be horrible or really great. 

Do you believe in Magic for Beginners?

Audrey Niffenegger sure does; excerpt:

Thankfully, one need pine no longer: after a couple of years' worth of
word-of-mouth buzz on the internet, Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link's
superb collection of short stories, is finally available in bookshops.
Now, you may be thinking, I don't like science fiction. I don't like
short stories. Get over it. This isn't exactly science fiction (it's
not exactly not science fiction either). Link is the literary
descendant of Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka, those supremely
matter-of-fact creators of alternative realities. "Josephine the
Singer, or the Mouse Folk", Kafka's cheery little fable, would be right
at home nestled against Link's story "Catskin", in which children are
created from bits and sticks, turned into cats or princes, and
sometimes drowned in the river.

There's
a narrative uncertainty at times, moments when the author simply tells
us to decide for ourselves, or brusquely informs us that we aren't to
know what happened. But there are Borgesian, labyrinthine levels to
many of the tales, especially in "Magic for Beginners", the title
story, which features the aforementioned Free People's World-Tree
Library. This vast library is the setting for a TV show which is avidly
watched by a small band of ordinary American teenagers, even though it
never appears on a regularly scheduled day or channel. But the
teenagers themselves are in the TV show too, and the characters are
trying to contact them for reasons that are urgent, though hard to
figure out. It's complex; it is also continuously surprising,
compelling and strange.

That's right: Borges.  Big name to be dropping, no?  Give Stranger Things Happen a try.  (Free.)