Recent Stories in Literature

(via TBTL, who are in the midst of their TBTL-athon)

Author Sherman Alexie has parlayed his Colbert Report appearance into real fame, as he's booked on TBTL today. With Colbert he discussed his opposition to a digital media that doesn't protect authorial ownership. With Luke Burbank, today at noon, he gets into "the plan he's hatched for monetizing art in the digital age, and how (on a totally unrelated note) pickup basketball is the only way for grown men to express their love to each other." [UPDATE: Twitter just sent me this link to three new poems by Alexie.

Kirkus Reviews calls Matthew Flaming's debut novel, The Kingdom of Ohio, "impossible to resist," praising its "marrying poetic prose with hints of steampunk aesthetics." Closer to home, the Stranger's Paul Constant labels it "just deadly dull," adding that "There's nothing in the central mystery to entice the reader on."

So clearly it sparks differences of opinion. For me, this Booklicious review nails down the general outlines, and discontinuities, of the work: "Part historical fiction, part alternate reality, and wholly romantic, Flaming’s novel is a conglomerate of popular publishing trends and timeless storytelling elements."

The daily life of a turn-of-the-century New York subway construction worker is vividly evoked; the Kingdom of Toledo's founding by French pilgrims is carefully footnoted; the unlikely romance between young engineer Peter Force and math genius Cheri-Anne Toledo springs up amid their opposition to a powerful cabal starring J.P. Morgan and Thomas Edison.

All is recounted by a peculiar old historian, closing up shop in Los Angeles, who is less convincingly elderly than reminiscent of that stodgy younger man you know who annoyingly litters his speech with literary archaisms. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, young men fond of archaisms, it's just not as significant of advanced age as it is of advanced bookwormery.)

There's an ambition to this agglomeration that isn't actually to write the ultra-selling novel, but to powerfully reimagine a splintering world as worlds of possibility colliding--this, sadly, is a task that exceeds Flaming's abilities, as yet, as a novelist. Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride....

Atul Gawande speaks Sunday, January 10, at 7:30 p.m. at Town Hall, 8th & Seneca. Advance tickets are $5 [brownpapertickets].

Atul Gawande, the Checklist Manifesto. At Town Hall on Sunday.

One of the most passed-around, must-read articles this summer among those interested in the future of health care was Atul Gawande's examination of McAllen, Texas, which has the distinction of being one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. [New Yorker].

Comparing the town's health care delivery system to that of its less pricey neighbor El Paso and to the Mayo Clinic, he revealed how entrepaneurial spirit, affinity for procedures, and reimbursement structures contribute to the county's extreme medical expenditures.

His conclusions were reassuringly frustrating (more doctor-patient time, less testing, and a centralized responsibility for the totality of patient care results in lower costs and better outcomes) and ominous (this model seems to be winning, nationally).

The article is emblematic of the lucid, evidence-based writing that Gwande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard associate professor, has regularly contributed during his decade-long tenure as a staff writer for The New Yorker. He appears as part of Town Hall's Future of Health Lecture Series tomorrow in support of his latest book, The Checklist Manifesto [amazon], a simple and effective response to the enormous strains resulting from the demands to make sense of the increasing complexity of scientific discovery.

Opening with surgical anecdotes sure to grab the attention of lovers of grisly medical mysteries and spanning beyond the operating theater to other fields, he aims to show the pivotal role of the checklist. The topic, while perhaps not the most riveting on its surface, has powerful and wide-ranging implications and seems especially timely in this month of resolutions for self-improvement.

Few authors are as successful in shape-shifting and genre-hopping as Michael Chabon. From the epic, Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, to the mind-boggling Jewish-Alaskan homage to crime noir, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, to the sword-swinging adventure tale, Gentlemen of the Road, Chabon has always shown an incredible knack for adopting and reinventing whatever writing style he takes on.

Chabon's newest book, Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, shows off Chabon the essayist, thoughtfully dissecting and reflecting upon what it means to be a man in modern America.

"A father is a man who fails every day," Chabon writes in the book's first essay, "The Loser's Club." It is a line that serves as both a wonderful introduction to the stories ahead and as an invitation to the rest of us to go ahead and join the club. Nothing to be ashamed of in here.

While Manhood for Amateurs is certainly told from a male perspective, the book is by no means a boys-only tree house of stories. In fact, many of the essays are either about, or are at least inspired by, the women in Chabon's life. From his mother's support and eventual consolation following a failed comic book club, to the dazzling pride and adoration he feels for his own daughter during her bat mitzvah, Manhood for Amateurs is as much about being a man as it is an ode to the women we love, who have the patience enough to love us back.

In "A Woman of Valor," Chabon reminisces about one of his first flames, the little-known DC Comics superheroine, Big Barda. For nine edifying pages, Chabon takes us on a journey through the history of Barda and her contemporaries (Wonder Woman, Super Girl, Sheena) and proclaims, after much rumination and analysis, Barda to be the most perfect of the super heroines.

Lacking the usual chauvinist cliches--the "tininess" of Shrinking Violet, or the "insubstantiality" of Phantom Girl, or the nonsensical narratives (or lack thereof) of Wonder Woman and Super Girl--Barda was, according to Chabon, the first true female role model in the world of comics. Not only was she strong and vigilant and fully capable of kicking some ass, she was also intelligent, thoughtful, empathetic, and vulnerable only to those who had earned her trust and her love. Most importantly, Barda was submissive to no one....

Tonight at 7 p.m., Greil Marcus, one of the country's most astute cultural critics and music journalists, stops by Seattle Central Public Library to speak about his new work: A New Literary History of America (Harvard Univ. Press, $49.95), a doorstop anthology of work by the best and brightest in American letters, edited by Marcus.

The book is somewhere between pop culture compendium and Comp. Lit. wet dream: clocking in at over a thousand pages and featuring essays by everyone from Camille Paglia to Ishmael Reed, it ranges widely over the bric-a-brac of American culture. "Literature" is a bit of a misnomer, as the cultural products explored include everything from jazz to Mickey Mouse to war memorials, stretching from the Founding to Obama's election.

Marcus, a long-time music journalist who started his career in the early days of Rolling Stone before moving on to the Village Voice and others, has long since established himself as one of the most insightful writers in the country. He did more than most any other journalist to establish pop music writing as a serious endeavor, and has long since expanded his purview to everything from visual art to political culture. So even if the thought of dropping nearly fifty bucks for his book is a bit of a stretch, the talk along is worth hitting.

It's probably a happy coincidence, but the same week that CNN is launching its miniseries Latino in America, Seattle Arts and Lectures is welcoming the poet Martín Espada to town. Born in Brooklyn in 1957, Espada is either famed or notorious for his political views, derived from his Puerto Rican heritage. "The melting pot" is not his preferred metaphor.

In an earlier interview about his book, Republic of Poetry, Espada said: "The American history taught and published in this country all too often resembles a consensus on what to forget. This is especially true when it comes to Latinos, Latin America, and their history." Talking with Bill Moyers, he put it more bluntly: "I mean, we have to deal with this paradox that there are 40 million Latinos in this country and yet we're invisible."

The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer, and came on the heels of his collection Alabanza, which gathered selections written between 1982 and 2003. Both titles are taken from poems.

In Espada's "The...

David Byrne says "much of Seattle" is "vibrant and full of life." He wrote it down in black-and-white in his new book, Bicycle Diaries. But there is another paragraph that summons up Seattle, too.

There is often a highway along the waterfront in many towns. Before these highways were built, the waterfronts, already dead zones, were seen as the most logical places from which to usurp land for conversion into a concrete artery. Inevitably, little by little, the citizens of these towns become walled off from their own waterfronts, and the waterfronts become dead zones of yet a different kin--concrete dead zones of clean, swooping flyovers and access ramps that soon were filled with whizzing cars. Under these were abandoned shopping carts, homeless people, and piles of toxic waste. [...]

Much of  the time it turns out the cars are merely using these highways not to have access to businesses and residences in the nearby city, as might have been originally proposed, but to bypass that city entirely.

The book itself...

Recently, I saw Gloria Steinem speak at Town Hall.

70 years old and that hottie totally rocked the house. It turns out she was there in support of Hedgebrook Women Writers Retreat. Waxing poetic about the importance of the place as a support for women writers, Steinem said, "Hedgebrook isn’t a retreat…it’s an advance." I happen to be a woman and a writer so I started snooping around.

Among lots of cool offerings, there was one thing that really piqued my interest; they've launched this thing called the Women Writers Master Class Retreat Series.

Theresa Rebeck

The slot that caught my eye is in November with renowned writer Theresa Rebeck. The week-long experience is at their 48-acre Whidbey Island getaway. Each resident writer (me hopefully!) is housed in a handcrafted cottage in the woods with a sleeping loft, work area and wood-burning stove...I mean, how charming is that?! All meals are prepared by Hedgebrook’s in-house chef using fresh produce from their organic garden...