Austen in a New Light

For those who cannot get enough of Jane Austen, there is no shortage of continuations, modernizations, or general homage to her novels of wit and manner.  What poses a challenge is finding an author who can do justice to the beloved stories but who also brings something new to the reader.  One such success is Joan Aiken, who was writing companions to Austen’s novels long before it was trendy.  In Jane Fairfax: Jane Austen’s Emma Through Another’s Eyes, Aiken chooses a minor character, one who in Emma seems cold and remote, and brings her to life as a complex, sympathetic heroine in her own right.  We're convinced Jane would approve.

The Emperor of the United States

Patty of the Fiction/AV/Teen Department recommends Norton I, The Emperor of the United States by William Drury:

In 1859, Joshua Abraham Norton audaciously declared himself “the Emperor of these here United States” and the “Protector of Mexico.” Emperor Norton walked the roads of San Francisco with an elaborate blue uniform, a sword, and perched on his curly hair was a beaver hat with a crooked peacock feather. Currency was printed with his likeness on it that was accepted at local establishments. Emperor Norton ordered decrees on a regular basis (though Congress and the U.S. Army consistently ignored them) and Mark Twain, Neil Gaiman and Robert Louis Stevenson have all based characters on him. In Norton I, William Drury examines the life of a loveably odd man who caused 30,000 people to flood the streets when he died.

In a Galaxy Beyond Narnia

Though beloved for The Chronicles of Narnia, Clive Staples Lewis did not limit his storytelling to that world alone.  In Out of the Silent Planet, the first of his Cosmic Trilogy, a man named Ransom is kidnapped and brought on a space voyage to be a sacrifice for the inhabitants of another world.  After landing on the mysterious red planet of Malacandra, he escapes and goes on the run, trying to learn more about his strange new surroundings while searching for a way home.  Out of the Silent Planet is a thought-provoking story of adventure that continues in Perelandra and That Hideous Strength.  Acknowledging his debt to H.G. Wells, Lewis creates imaginative settings and vivid depictions of space travel that are all the more amazing for having been written in 1938.

Outsider Architecture

Rhinestones, construction paper, sequins and glitter cover a house in McComb, Mississippi. Mystical sculptures took over a dilapidated country house in France. There is a concrete park along Highway 13 in Wisconsin that houses visual representations of everything from the chariot race in Ben Hur to Abraham Lincoln. Self Made Worlds is a photographic examination of obsessive environments and those that create them. Religious inspiration, dream instruction and eccentric insight are often the cause of these meticulous, passionate forms of outsider architecture. Brief, respectful essays tell the background of each shell garden, art yard, mosaic home, windmill park and modern, teetering castle, making this book more art review than “freak-show.”

Two Roads Converge

A nondescript taxi is the setting in which two men’s lives will change.  The driver, a young man from Senegal, has an easy-going manner, an electric smile, and a dream to become an airline attendant.  The passenger, a brusque older gentleman, carries his world-weariness in the lines of his face and in the blankness of his gaze.  An unusual request unites the two, setting in motion events that will alter the days to come.  Goodbye Solo, the latest creation of the gifted Ramin Bahrani, counts among its accolades the International Critics’ Prize at the Venice Film Festival.  Sometimes the most powerful and telling friendships are not the ones we choose for ourselves, and Goodbye Solo navigates that lesson with power and poignancy.

A Laudation of H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft was a writer of the weird. Lovecraft’s tales usually involved the idea that reality is a thin veil and when it is torn, those that see the horrors and truths behind it often go insane. In Lovecraft Unbound, Ellen Datlow has collected twenty stories framed in Lovecraftian elements. Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon and National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates both appear. “The Crevasse” by Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud is a standout story about an arctic exploration with a monster that stays at shadow’s edge. Laird Barron’s “Catch Hell” unearths occult rituals performed in a magnolia-lined small town. No one here is trying to be Lovecraft, but they are giving his themes of fate and forbidden knowledge new life.

How to Be Wealthy and Wise

Here’s a premise for a book: Take a random walk among America’s wealthiest neighborhoods, knock on the doors of millionaires, and ask those strangers about their personal finances.  What do you think will happen? 

It may sound like a misguided prank, but who better to give advice on making money than those who are most successful?  It’s an idea both absurd and brilliant, and (lucky for us) it worked!  Armed with only paper and pen, journalist Ryan D’Agostino approached 500 doors and interviewed 50 willing participants, including a man in suburban Chicago who made his fortune peeling shrimp.  In Rich Like Them: My Door-to-Door Search for the Secrets of Wealth in America’s Richest Neighborhoods, he compiles the wisdom that was shared in an engaging and easy-to-read narrative.  You don’t have to be born with a special gene for success.  You need only benefit from a good long walk.

Question Sleep

Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is best friends with a dead rabbit. A young neighborhood kid named Squee is his second best friend. Johnny has to keep his wall coated in fresh blood, else wise a monster of untold terror will break free. His house sits on an extensive cluster of caverns and labyrinths. It is here he kills people. Johnny is, generally speaking, a very bad man. Yet Jhonen Vasquez creates a sympathetic antihero as, over the course of seven comics, Johnny mocks and questions not only the world around him, but his own behavior. JtHM is a horror comedy and not for the squeamish, but if you like gallows humor, it is black comedy at its blood splattered best.

Nobel Literature and Booker Prizes Announced

What a week for literature!  Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, a meaty novel set during the reign of Henry VIII, has just been named the winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize for 2009.  When the king decides he wants a divorce so he might marry Anne Boleyn, Thomas Cromwell becomes one of his most influential advisors.  Not just for history buffs, Wolf Hall will celebrate its U.S. release on October 13.

Also announced was the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.  Herta Müller “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed,” writes of the oppression of dictatorship and the life of the political exile.  The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment are two titles available in English translation. 

Who Will Survive?

Dig up Dante and have him read passages of Poe’s "The Fall of the House of Usher" to a crowd of hedonists sitting under a hanging tree near the ruins of an abandoned mission and you might, just might get the feel of a Murder by Death album. Murder by Death’s third album, In Bocca al Lupo, an Italian good luck wish that translates to “in the mouth of the wolf,” is a collection of dramatic storytelling worthy of Bierce or Hawthorne. Eerie cello tendrils twine through testimonials of bad deeds and worse intentions. Deliverance and atonement are occasional and as the last song persists “there’s still time to start again.”