Preview: new poetry
October 10, 2009
Marie Ponsot’s newest poetry book, Easy, is due to be published by Knopf this month. Ponsot is in her late 80s, with five previous poetry books to her name. She’s won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and I have a feeling, from what I’m reading about this new work, it could be stunning.
I’m not familiar with Ponsot, so I found two of her earlier works in the online catalog of a nearby library. I stopped there on the way to my workout to pick them up. Evidently, I didn’t read the fine print on the catalog results page because the library’s Information Man said the books had been discarded.
What’s surprising is not the obliteration of the books, rather my standing like an immovable ape in front of the man’s desk, waiting for another answer.
I’m well aware libraries discard (please, deaccession) their books for reasons of bad condition or no readership. But I simply couldn’t digest what he was saying. I wanted to read Ponsot after my workout. I wanted another answer. Couldn’t he offer a banana and say, “Let me check in the back,” like a store clerk? Or, look up availability at another library? Or, even commiserate over the horror of getting rid of a book I wanted?
I said the word “discard” three times, stalling, and then announced, “She has a new book coming out this month,” as if that would highlight some shame on his part.
I later found one Ponsot book at an out-lying library that will transfer the book to my neighborhood library. By that time, though, I’ll have Easy in hand and, if it’s as good as I hope it will be, then I’ll be shopping for first editions of her other books.
10 books to anticipate this fall
September 4, 2009
Summer Beach Reads behind us now, the fall brings with it new books to read by the fire or tucked in bed before turning out the lights. Here are a few I have on my radar screen.
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith (Peguin Group)
Kirkus Reviews says, “Rarely does a book that seems to promise so little deliver so much.” It’s divided into four sections: Reading, Being, Seeing, and Feeling and covers a range of topics.
The Price of Love and Other Stories by Peter Robinson (HarperCollins)
This is Robinson’s first collection of stories. He’s got a fan base for his best-selling Inspector Alan Banks novels, described as “perceptive novels that probe the dark side of human nature.” I haven’t read then. I’m thinking this might be a good entry into his fiction.
City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s by Edmund White (Bloomsbury)
Publisher’s Weekly has given this autobiography a starred review. Bloomsbury’s website says, “A memoir of the sociel [sic] and sexual lives of New York City’s cultural and intellectual in-crowd in the tumultous 1970s, from acclaimed author Edmund White.”
Lit: A Memoir by Mary Karr (HarperCollins)
The HarperCollins website says Lit is about, “getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; and learning to write by learning to live.” Library Journal claims it will be the memoir of the season.
The Humbling by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin)
The Chicago Tribune says this novel will find favor with Roth fans. From the synopsis, it appears to be in keeping with Roth’s current fictional focus on illness and death, featuring an aging actor.
Family Album by Penelope Lively (Viking)
The Guardian says Lively’s new book ”should be rated as one of her most impressive works.” It also says Lively ”plunges us into an entirely convincing world of bustling family life, yet at the same time keeps her distance with lethally sharp observations.”
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins)
Kingsolver’s first new novel in nine years gets a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly. The protagonist Harrison Shepherd embarks on a journey that begins in Mexico in the 1930s, connecting him to artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro (Alfred A. Knopf)
10 new stories from this Grande Dame of short storywriting.
Invisible by Paul Auster (Henry Holt & Co.)
From the Holt website: “Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Paul Auster’s fifteenth novel opens in New York City in the spring of 1967, when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born and his silent and seductive girfriend, Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life.”
Devil’s Dream: A Novel About Nathan Bedford Forrest by Madison Smartt Bell (Pantheon)
A fictionalized story about a Confederate Civil War General. Pantheon’s description: “Considered a rogue by the upper ranks of the Confederate Army, who did not properly use his talents, Forrest was often relegated to small-scale operations.”
There are no dead
August 5, 2009
In the previous post, I wrote about a book soon to be published by the late William Styron. But Styron’s not the only author publishing from the Great Beyond this Fall.
Charles Bukowski fans can look forward to a new collection of poetry.
Here’s the big news, though.
Knopf will publish, in November, the book Vladimir Nabokov was working on but didn’t finish when he died in 1977 — The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun): A Novel in Fragments.
According to Library Journal (July 2009), the book will have removable facsimiles of Nabokov’s 138 index cards.
Read below to understand what that means, from Knopf’s website (paragraphs inserted by me):
“When Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions for his heirs to burn the 138 handwritten index cards that made up the rough draft of his final and unfinished novel, The Original of Laura. But Nabokov’s wife, Vera, could not bear to destroy her husband’s last work, and when she died, the fate of the manuscript fell to her son.
“Dmitri Nabokov, now seventy-five—the Russian novelist’s only surviving heir, and translator of many of his books—has wrestled for three decades with the decision of whether to honor his father’s wish or preserve for posterity the last piece of writing of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
“His decision finally to allow publication of the fragmented narrative—dark yet playful, preoccupied with mortality—affords us one last experience of Nabokov’s magnificent creativity, the quintessence of his unparalleled body of work.”
A bookshop across the pond
July 14, 2009
Two books with September publication dates in the United States, featured in the post Headlights on September, are already available for purchase at the London Review Bookshop online – or at 14 Bury Place, in London’s Bloomsbury district, should you be heading that way: Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro and Ulysses and Us by Declan Kiberd
I recently subscribed to the London Review of Books and discovered the availability in an advertisement for the shop. The discovery comes with a bit of a ‘duh!’ factor, considering the books are by U.K. authors.
Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to England in 1960. He became a household literary name with the novel The Remains of the Day (1989) about an aging British butler. It won Ishiguro the Booker Prize and became a movie staring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. It’s also his first novel with a British protagonist set in England – his two previous novels (1982, 1986) feature Japanese protagonists.
Kiberd is an Irish writer born in Dublin 1951. He’s a professor of Anglo-Irish literature and drama at University College Dublin. The Irish Times describes him as, “an individual given to responding with his heart, as well as his intellect.”
Kiberd’s Ulysses and Us has been published in the U.K. with a slightly different subtitle from what we’ll see in the U.S.: “The Art of Everyday Living” versus “The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece.”

U.K. Edition
Also of note: A. S. Byatt’s new novel The Children’s Book, with a U.S. publication date in October, is also already published across the pond.
Here’s what the London Review Bookshop writes about it:
“A.S. Byatt’s latest novel, ‘easily the best thing [she] has written since her Booker-winning masterpiece, Possession (1990)’ according to Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times, is a panoramic four-family saga set between 1895 and the end of the First World War.” (Read more.)
All this in case you can’t wait for publication of the U.S. editions. (I couldn’t.) Keep in mind eagerness costs more money. Delivery takes 7 working days, so they tell me. Not bad.
Will you be dispensable?
April 22, 2009
The Other Press is publishing The Unit in June, the first novel by Swedish author Ninni Holmqvist
, translated byMarlaine Delargy. From what I read in the press release, it’s sci-fi along the lines of Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World.
Sci-fi is not a genre that calls to me, although I’ve read the aforementioned classics, and I’m currently reaching the end of an Ursula LeGuin sci-fi classic (urged upon me by a friend who says it’s one of his all-time favorites). What strikes me about The Unit is the unsettling premise of living a necessary life determined by society, let alone the concept that one could be dispensable.
From the press release:
“In the world of The Unit, women over fifty and men over sixty who are childless, and do not contribute in ways deemed productive for society, are designated as ‘dispensable,’ and are expected to contribute in other ways. They are taken to a special reserve bank for physical and psychological experiments, where they participate in various tests – some benign, such as exercise regiments; others more dangerous, such as experimental drug therapy. …each ‘dispensable’ is expected, slowly but inevitably, to donate their vital organs to the ‘necessary’ ones, those outside the Unit.”
The Unit press release also says Holmqvist refrains from giving us simple answers, which is exactly why I’m drawn to read this soon-to-be-released novel.
The memorable Jack Brule
March 23, 2009
In the March 2 issue of “Publisher’s Weekly,” there’s a starred preview of Ward Just’s novel to be published this July, Exiles in the Garden. The reviewer says, “Just writes with confidence and authority as he works through larger themes of politics, history, war and historical judgment.”
I’ll be eager to read it — I’ve been waiting for another book from Just as seductive as An Unfinished Season (finalist for the 2005 Pulitzers). Put another way, Forgetfulness that followed An Unfinished Seasonwas a huge disappointment for me with its unsatisfying story about Moroccan terrorists and the death of a French woman — nothing near Unfinished Season’s moving 1950s summer story of Wils Ravan getting involved with the daughter of a famous psychiatrist named Jack Brule whose friends include Adlai Stevenson and Marlon Brando.
The aloof Jack harbors a painful and profoundly private secret from his military service during World War II, and it is this secret – one that’s even kept from his daughter – that grips Wils with insistent curiosity.
Jack says to Wils, in a much longer, stunning monologue:
“It’s a different thing entirely when you see the devil face to face, snake-eyed, malignant, merciless. He wants to erase you, destroy your soul. He’d do it in a second, without a moment’s thought or a backward glance.”







