Late Last Night Books - Page 4 of 26 - because so much reading, writing, and living happens after-hours

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EVAN S. CONNELL, A. N. WILSON, WILLA CATHER: NOVEL BEGINNINGS

Thinking about how novels begin, I recently pulled many books off my shelves and was surprised by how unspectacular the beginnings of most seemed to me. There were exceptions, however. Consider:

Her first name was India–she was never able to get used to it. It seemed to her that her parents must have been thinking of someone else when they named her. Or were they hoping for another sort of daughter? As a child she was often on the point of inquiring, but time passed, and she never did.

Thus begins Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge published in 1959. (One wonders if today’s editors would let the passive voice of the second sentence stand.)

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Not Quite Lost: An Interview with Roz Morris

I recently interviewed English writer Roz Morris about her new book, Not Quite Lost: Travels Without a Sense of Direction (Spark Furnace, 2017), a delightful collection of essays that mixes travel and memoir. This interview is in the current (winter) edition of Rain Taxi Review of Books.

Many Lives Passed Through Place: An Interview with Roz Morris

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Novels Needs Characters, Not Roles: A Review of The English Teacher

The English Teacher by Yiftach Reicher Atir, translated by Philip Simpson, Penguin Books, 2016

A former Israeli intelligence officer, Yiftach Reicher Atir gives us a novel of a young woman recruited into the Israeli Intelligence Service–the Mossad––based on his vast experience. In a foreword, he describes the novel as “the true story of what never happened.” In other words, it is true in the sense that this is how the Mossad operates and how lives can be shaped by their methods.

One might expect such a novel to be exciting––a page turner. It is not. The problem is instead of telling it largely from the point of view of the primary character—the young woman, Reicher Atir tells the story from too many viewpoints including at times himself as the author.

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A Jolt of Inspiration: How One Writer Found Her Story

Back in September in this spot, I was ruminating on the joys and sorrows of writing historical fiction, and what could possibly motivate writers to pursue such a demanding genre. Many of us are drawn to specific points of inspiration, and I mentioned D.C.-based author Carrie Callaghan‘s encounter with a painting as one example. I went back to Carrie and asked if she’d like to share in more detail what drew her to this project and what kept her hooked through long bouts of research. Here’s what she said:

I Stopped and Stared

In the painting, she’s wearing a stiff lace collar as wide as her shoulders, and fine lace cuff at her wrists. In other words, no clothes a painter would actually paint in.

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Florida Mysteries a Respite from Winter

As I write this, snow is predicted for tonight. Temperatures have been in the teens and below but hovering during the day in the 20s. I walk my dog outside in this weather. I’m ready for Florida.

I once lived on a boat, sailed into Fort Lauderdale and stayed there for 15 years. I didn’t live at the Bahia Mar Marina like John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, but rather up the north fork of Fort Lauderdale’s New River. That’s when I began a love affair with books, especially mysteries, set in Florida.

What is more raucous and hilarious than a mystery by Carl Hiaasen. His characters, like the roadkill-eating ex-governor, are weird, but no weirder than many of the people I actually met in South Florida.

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Time is the Longest Distance

Larry Fondation is the author of five books of fiction, all set primarily in the Los Angeles inner city. Three of his books are illustrated by London-based artist Kate Ruth. He has written for publications as diverse as Flaunt Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Fiction International and the Harvard Business Review. He is a recipient of a Christopher Isherwood Fiction Fellowship. Four of his books have been published in France. In French translation, his work was nominated for SNCF’s 2013 Prix du Polar. His fifth U.S. book, Martyrs and Holymen, will appear in France in September 2018. His sixth book, Time Is the Longest Distance was released in December 2017. We recently discussed writing, L.A., and his new novel.

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FOLK ART AND FOLK WRITING

What exactly is folk art?

When I was on a tour at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Williamsburg, Va., a guide asked me if I knew what folk art is. I’m an antique collector, and I’ve seen a lot of what I thought was folk art, but I don’t have an exact definition.

The guide suggested that folk art is created by artists who have no formal training in art. Consequently, she said, most folk art paintings lack perspective or at best have very primitive use of perspective, such as outlines. As an example, she pointed out the dark spots beneath the children’s hands in one of Edward Hicks’ versions of “The Peaceable Kingdom.” The painting she was talking about, which hangs in the museum, is shown at left.

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In Praise of President James Garfield and His Biographer

A good novel can keep readers turning the pages as they try to guess what will happen. Nonfiction writers have the challenge of keeping readers interested even if they know what will happen. Candice Millard succeeds beautifully in Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, a page-turner about a president most Americans never think of, James A. Garfield. With her skillful storytelling, she brings the long-forgotten president to life and shows him to be a man of courage, brilliance, modesty, integrity, and goodness.

Garfield, the twentieth U.S. president, was shot just four months after his inauguration and died eleven weeks later. His short tenure robbed him of any chance at achievements and renown.

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AUDIOBOOKS: THE CHINESE FOOD OF LITERATURE?

I’ve got that craving again, that gnawing, empty feeling I get when I am not reading a book. Over the holidays I tidily finished up Henry James’s Daisy Miller , Paul Auster’s Mr. Vertigo, and a nonfiction book. Since then I’ve been tearing through old magazines and listening to audiobooks. Just yesterday I spent four hours listening to an audiobook while on the road. And I will listen to more of it when driving into town today.

This audiobook is superb: Sebastian Haffner’s memoir, Defying Hitler. I look forward to finishing it. And yet I feel empty, and bookless.

Remember that old saying about feeling hungry again an hour after eating Chinese food? I’m beginning to wonder if audiobooks are the Chinese food of literature.

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Give a Book, Inspire a Life

12-17-2017 Give a Book, Inspire a Life

Gift-giving season is here, which always makes me consider the perfect gift, a gift that is not only thoughtful but sets the imagination afire. Not like handkerchiefs or ties or socks or shirts that nail you to the ground and don’t produce even a spark of an idea.

Books. That’s the ticket. Books have changed my life, and I’m sure they’ve changed yours. Books are my favorite gift to give and to receive. The two gifts I remember most from my childhood, other than my bike, were the first series book I read, Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, which I couldn’t put down, and a nonfiction book called Lost Treasure Trails by Thomas Penfield.

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Tea, Sake, and a Glorious Life: An Interview with Novelist/Philosopher Carol Quinn

Tea, Sake, and a Glorious Life: An Interview with Novelist/Philosopher Carol Quinn

Carol Quinn is Professor of Philosophy and a Women’s Studies Associate at Metropolitan State University of Denver and also holds Graduate Faculty status at University of Colorado Denver. She was the 2017 recipient of MSU Denver’s Outstanding Woman Faculty Award and LGBTQ Ally of the Year Award in 2013. Her new novel, The Glorious Life of Jessica Kraut, was released just two weeks ago from Rock’s Mill Press.

Ron Cooper: Carol, I’m excited about the appearance of your new novel. We’ll get to that in a moment, but first tell us something about your background—where you grew up, your education, your early academic interests, etc.

Carol Quinn: I am a California girl who deeply misses the ocean and was forcibly transplanted to Colorado.

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Novelists as Tornadoes

Whenever I read another writer’s novel, I’m curious about what that person’s process was in composing the book. Writer’s approaches to their work are as individual as the various themes they write about. No two methods are the same.

For me, Curva Peligrosa first took hold of me back in 2000. Here is what I wrote in my writer’s journal on 7/16/00:

cyclone-2102397_1920 Was taken with the image of the tornado that swept into Pine Lake, a resort near Red Deer, Alberta, yesterday, and has killed several people, flattening trailers etc. It isn’t the destruction that interests me. It’s devastating and unimaginable. It’s the image of the tornado, so innocent in itself, flattening a community, bringing with it so much sorrow. The tornado has a magical, mythical quality, reminding me of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz.

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A Book Club’s View of Hawke’s Return

Let’s face it. For struggling authors, marketing and selling a published novel is at best a necessary evil—about as much fun as reading the Congressional Record (which, thankfully, I no longer have to do for work). We all tackle the marketing chores in whatever way we can because we know we have to, all the while hoping we’re not badgering and offending those on the receiving end of our too-frequent pitches.

But there’s one part of the process that is wonderful: Being a guest at a book club. What could be better than sitting around with a dozen people who have read your book and found enough in it to spark a substantive discussion? I was lucky enough to do several of these after my first book came out, and this week I got to do one on my recently published second novel, Hawke’s Return.

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WALKING AWAY FROM A LITTLE LIFE

I am on page 608 of a book I hate. And the more I read it, the more I hate it. And yet I keep reading.

This has to stop.

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The Italian Question

For about eight years now, I’ve been working on a novel about D’Annunzio, the Italian poet, novelist, playwright, memoirist, journalist, playboy, war hero and (arguably) proto-fascist. More than once I’ve thought the novel was finished, only to re-examine it a few months later and decide that it needed more work. I’ve queried agents about it—quite a few, sixty or seventy—and was surprised that none wanted to represent it. But recently, I took to heart what the most thoughtful agent had said about it (even though he admitted he had not read the entire novel) and began yet another revision—or perhaps more accurately, a rewrite, since it’s virtually a new novel now. In this essay I intend to describe how the novel has developed, where it has gone wrong, and what, if anything, I can hope to do about it.

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Ben Winters’ Underground Airlines: An Alternative History of Slavery and Freedom

Ben Winters wrote Underground Airlines (Mullholland Books, 2016) ostensibly to bring attention to the lingering pernicious affects of slavery, but his inventive story can also be read to show far we have come from the days when slavery was legal.

In Underground Airlines, an escaped slave––whose true name we never learn––has been coerced into serving as a slave catcher for the U.S. Marshall’s Service. Slavery persists as the result of a 19th century constitutional compromise that allowed each state sovereignty over the issue. In the time of the story slavery remains in four states—a situation that has engenered extremely negative consequences for the rest of the country, undermining its economic and moral status and creating an environment where life in the north for blacks is barely better than it is in the South.

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NaNoWriMo: Yes or No?

Grant Faulkner, Executive Director of NaNoWriMo, in an 11/14/17 tweet: “I just stumbled on this quote and thought it was good advice for this point in NaNoWriMo. ‘One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going.’ — Goethe . . . Sometimes you have to write as if you’re Mr. Magoo.”

In a month otherwise dominated in America by Thanksgiving and the increasing notoriety/hysteria that characterizes Black Friday, NaNoWriMo has become a thing, to the point that even non-writers have heard about it. Having originated in San Francisco almost twenty years ago, National Novel Writing Month urges its participants to do one thing: write.

Yes, there are “rules”: the stated objective is for participants to write 50,000 words of a novel within a thirty-day period.

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Character Traits and Personality Types

11/17/2017 Character Traits and Personality Types

In my 90s Club series, the 90-year-olds sometimes use stereotypes of the elderly to mislead their quarries into thinking they are harmless. My characters are able, alert, and active—as many 90-year-old and 100-year-olds are nowadays. In my writers’ critique group, I was appalled to hear my fellow writers push for the stereotypes as more “believable.” Most of us today avoid and dismiss the stereotypes of African-American, gay, Italian, Greek, Scandinavian, blonde, etc., I hope we’ve all gone beyond the use of eyeglasses to show an intellectual, studious, or nerdy person, a person who when she or he whips off the glasses, suddenly becomes sexy or strong. Think Superman. It still happens in the movies and television, though, where the elderly continue to be the victims of demeaning and sometimes vicious stereotypes.

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Literary Fall: An Interview with Liana Vrajitoru

Liana Vrajitoru Andreasen is a scholar, professor, and writer from Romania who has been living and working in the United States for over twenty years. Her work has appeared in journals such as: Rampike, Alecart, Texas Review, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, The Romanian Journal for Artistic Creativity, Southwestern American Literature, The CEA Critic, American Book Review, Lumina, Fiction International, Calliope, The Raven Chronicles, The Willow Review, Mobius, a Journal of Social Change, Scintilla, and Weave Magazine. I recently enjoyed the opportunity to speak with her about her forthcoming critical book, The Fall of Literary Theory.

Joseph Daniel Haske: Tell us about your new book, The Fall of Literary Theory. How long have you been working on it and what was the motivation/philosophy behind it?

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THE AUTHOR/CHARACTER QUANDARY

When you’re reading a novel, do you ever question the authenticity of the characters because they’re different from the author? Can male authors create realistic female characters? Can female authors create convincing men? What about white authors writing black characters and vice versa? These questions have been around since the beginning of literature. When the male/female issue is raised, critics like to cite the rich characterization of Madame Bovary, a testament to Gustave Flaubert’s understanding of a particular woman. And yet even great novelists can stumble. I’ve always contended that the male characters in Toni Morrison’s Sula are not as complex as the female characters and that the novel (excellent as it is) suffers for that.

When The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron was published in 1967, black critics banded together to denounce Styron and the novel.

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