• Victor LaValle's new novel, Big Machine looks to be a breakout for him and has garnered comparisons to Thomas Pynchon and Ralph Ellison. His previous, The Ecstatic is a favorite of mine.
• Texan David Douglas looks just like Hemingway.
• Merce Cunningham has passed away. Speaking as someone who writes about books under a photograph of one of Merce's artistic and romantic partners, I'd just like to say, Bye, Merce. Thanks for everything.
***
Tonight you can join our friend and coworker Nick DiMartino in our U District cafe to talk about this month's Nick's Book Club pick, That Mad Ache by Françoise Sagan.
Showing posts with label Nick's Picks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nick's Picks. Show all posts
Monday, July 27, 2009
Friday, June 22, 2007
July Nick's Pick
Nick has announced his July pick.
"Imagine a remote, superstition-gripped village in the mountains of Albania clinging to such a steep slope that when drunks fall off the sidewalk, they land on someone’s roof.
That’s the setting of Ismail Kadare’s Chronicle In Stone, newly updated, revised, re-assembled and published complete for the first time in English by Arcade/Hachette. The wonder-filled little town is based on Kadare’s Balkan childhood home, Gjirokaster. It’s a world where witchcraft is a practical concern, eyeglasses are considered shocking, and the severed arm of an English pilot can become a sacred relic.
Now under Italian rule, now Greek rule, now German rule, the characters in this little village loom as mythic figures in the eyes of the near-sighted boy narrator, whose whimsical imagination struggles to understand a world of resistance fighting and Allied bombing, a world where a girl who kisses a boy in public can disappear forever..."
Read all about it—and lots more—on his blog, Novelworld.
Nick book club will be discussing Chronicle In Stoneon Monday, July 30, at 7pm in the conference room at University Book Store (U District).
"Imagine a remote, superstition-gripped village in the mountains of Albania clinging to such a steep slope that when drunks fall off the sidewalk, they land on someone’s roof.
That’s the setting of Ismail Kadare’s Chronicle In Stone, newly updated, revised, re-assembled and published complete for the first time in English by Arcade/Hachette. The wonder-filled little town is based on Kadare’s Balkan childhood home, Gjirokaster. It’s a world where witchcraft is a practical concern, eyeglasses are considered shocking, and the severed arm of an English pilot can become a sacred relic.
Now under Italian rule, now Greek rule, now German rule, the characters in this little village loom as mythic figures in the eyes of the near-sighted boy narrator, whose whimsical imagination struggles to understand a world of resistance fighting and Allied bombing, a world where a girl who kisses a boy in public can disappear forever..."
Read all about it—and lots more—on his blog, Novelworld.
Nick book club will be discussing Chronicle In Stoneon Monday, July 30, at 7pm in the conference room at University Book Store (U District).
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
A Note From Nick
Our friend Nick DiMartino sent us this report from...his easy chair!
Finding the Good Ones
24 March 07
Saturday night
What am I doing in this armchair?
I should be at the bowling benefit for gay marriage equality, and instead I’m caught up in Javier Cercas’ exciting new novel, The Speed of Light (paperback original, $13.95), unable to put down this unexpected, unsettling and perceptive Spanish take on the Vietnam war.
The book is due out next month. It’s about a Spanish grad student who gets an assistant professor post at the University of Illinois at Urbana, where he shares an office with a complex and embittered Vietnam vet. When his office mate disappears—and Rodney Falk is a fascinating guy—the unnamed narrator goes to the little town where Rodney lives with his Dad.
Well, now Part Two involves the Dad summoning the narrator back out to his house to tell him some dreadful tale of Vietnam—I’m expecting the worst. It’s really tense going. We’re about to find out why Rodney Falk is the way he is, and what we’ve already learned has been pretty heartbreaking. But fascinating! Narrated in this cool non-fiction style, utterly believable, blurring ever more the line between memoir and novel.
The only other book by Cercas in English translation is Soldiers of Salamis ($14.95), a similarly hyper-realistic recreation of a moment in wartime. In this case, it’s this classic unforgettable moment that the reader comes back to in the novel again and again: a fascist bad guy manages to escape from a mass execution at the end of the Spanish Civil War. A pursuing soldier finds him, locks eyes with him, holds him at gunpoint, and lets him live.
Out of this incident Cercas creates a fascinating fictional research project to make history surrender its secrets. Part One shows the author’s discovery of the incident and his research, with a little help from his girlfriend. Part Two is the biography of the fascist who walked away from the firing squad alive. Part Three is the author’s attempt to find the soldier who spared his life, in a search through all the nursing homes of France. It all turns into a subtle, smart meditation on war, memory, and fiction writing.
I haven’t finished Speed of Light, but I will never forget the ending of Soldiers of Salamis. Cercas is tough and unsentimental and a pleasure to read. It’s like no novel you’ve ever read before, and boy, does it have a cumulative effect at the end.
So it’s a hard act to follow, and this second book is every bit as good. And even more disturbing, because we’re not talking about the Spanish Civil War here, we’re talking about us, the American debacle seen by a non-American, a war in which almost sixty thousand soldiers died, most of them boys of twenty, and ten times more bombs were dropped than on all of Europe during the Second World War.
Enough blogging for one night—I want to get back to my book. Even though I'm nervous. I’m about to read about Rodney Falk’s encounter with Captain Vinh...
Finding the Good Ones
24 March 07
Saturday night
What am I doing in this armchair?
I should be at the bowling benefit for gay marriage equality, and instead I’m caught up in Javier Cercas’ exciting new novel, The Speed of Light (paperback original, $13.95), unable to put down this unexpected, unsettling and perceptive Spanish take on the Vietnam war.
The book is due out next month. It’s about a Spanish grad student who gets an assistant professor post at the University of Illinois at Urbana, where he shares an office with a complex and embittered Vietnam vet. When his office mate disappears—and Rodney Falk is a fascinating guy—the unnamed narrator goes to the little town where Rodney lives with his Dad.
Well, now Part Two involves the Dad summoning the narrator back out to his house to tell him some dreadful tale of Vietnam—I’m expecting the worst. It’s really tense going. We’re about to find out why Rodney Falk is the way he is, and what we’ve already learned has been pretty heartbreaking. But fascinating! Narrated in this cool non-fiction style, utterly believable, blurring ever more the line between memoir and novel.
The only other book by Cercas in English translation is Soldiers of Salamis ($14.95), a similarly hyper-realistic recreation of a moment in wartime. In this case, it’s this classic unforgettable moment that the reader comes back to in the novel again and again: a fascist bad guy manages to escape from a mass execution at the end of the Spanish Civil War. A pursuing soldier finds him, locks eyes with him, holds him at gunpoint, and lets him live.
Out of this incident Cercas creates a fascinating fictional research project to make history surrender its secrets. Part One shows the author’s discovery of the incident and his research, with a little help from his girlfriend. Part Two is the biography of the fascist who walked away from the firing squad alive. Part Three is the author’s attempt to find the soldier who spared his life, in a search through all the nursing homes of France. It all turns into a subtle, smart meditation on war, memory, and fiction writing.
I haven’t finished Speed of Light, but I will never forget the ending of Soldiers of Salamis. Cercas is tough and unsentimental and a pleasure to read. It’s like no novel you’ve ever read before, and boy, does it have a cumulative effect at the end.
So it’s a hard act to follow, and this second book is every bit as good. And even more disturbing, because we’re not talking about the Spanish Civil War here, we’re talking about us, the American debacle seen by a non-American, a war in which almost sixty thousand soldiers died, most of them boys of twenty, and ten times more bombs were dropped than on all of Europe during the Second World War.
Enough blogging for one night—I want to get back to my book. Even though I'm nervous. I’m about to read about Rodney Falk’s encounter with Captain Vinh...
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Nick's December Pick
Every month, our own Nick DiMartino chooses his favorite recent title and crafts a more indepth review than our regular staff favorites.
His December pick? The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham .
Here's what Nick says about it:
"Kitty doesn’t know how to love. She’s about to learn the hard way.
"Beautiful, wealthy, spoiled Kitty Garstin doesn’t love the young doctor, Walter Fane, but he’s a chance to get married before her younger sister, a chance to get away to Hong Kong.
"There she meets handsome Charlie Townsend and is swept into a passionate affair.
"Now Kitty has a choice – either get a divorce and ruin Charlie’s marriage and career, or accompany her husband to the remote Chinese province of Mei-tan-fu, in the deadly grips of an outbreak of cholera.
"The new film stars Naomi Watts and Edward Norton. Let’s read the book, see the movie, and discuss them both."
Wednesday • December 27 • 7pm
Conference Room
University Book Store
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Nick's Pick for October: The Places in Between
Every month, our own Nick DiMartino chooses his favorite recent title and crafts a more indepth review than our regular staff favorites.
His October pick? The Places in Between by Rory Stewart.
Here's what Nick says about it:
Trusting in Muslim hospitality, Rory Stewart walks across Afghanistan.
Rory Stewart is the smart person’s hero, a brave and well-informed 30-year-old Scotsman determined to complete his walk across all of Asia. Two weeks after the Taliban falls he’s ready to cross Afghanistan. So what if it’s winter?
This is travel writing at its best. As he follows in the footsteps of Babur, the first Emperor of Mughal India, he stops in over 500 village homes, talking with people of all ages, from soldiers to shepherds.
Best of all, in a land where dogs are considered unclean, he adopts a mistreated old war dog, names him Babur, and determines to take the dog with him all the way back to Scotland. Join Rory for a walk worth taking – see Afghanistan in all its complexity in the company of a superb writer and a fine human being.
The Places in Between is on sale now for only $11.20!
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