Click film Tomorrow night at 7 p.m. (Thursday, September 16), Housing Works Bookstore will be the venue for the first ‘Don’t Know Much About Literature’ Literary Quiz, hosted by Kenneth C. Davis and his daughter Jenny Davis. Open Letters‘ Sam Sacks will be on one of the first round panels, along with other book bloggers such as Garth Risk Hallberg from the Millions, Edward Champion of edrants.com

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, and Jason Boog from GalleyCat. But after the first round the questions will be directed to the audience. The event is free, the PBR is cheap, the place is full of great books, and any money raised goes to support Housing Works’ mission of providing housing for homeless men and women with AIDS/HIV. Follow the link here for more details. And come join the fun!

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Corvus: A Life with Birds
Esther Woolfson
Counterpoint, 2009

“Familiarity doesn’t dull me to the wonder of birds,” writes Esther Woolfson at one point in her beguiling book Corvus, which mainly concerns the rook she takes into her home and names Chicken:

No Retreat, No Surrender hd …what they are and what they do. Chicken becomes more mysterious, more miraculous the more I learn, the more I observe. I spread her wings in my hand. She grunts and, briefly, objects. Before she tugs it back under her own control, I look at the lovely arc of it; feel the fine bones under my fingers, feathers all in their symmetrical and asymmetrical orders.

There are other birds than Chicken in this avian memoir – there are starlings and parrots and magpies, all taken into Woolfson’s home for varying lengths of time, all watched with her lively curiosity and observed (and often sketched – the book is delightfully illustrated) in intimate detail, by a bird-enthusiast so ardent she feels only sympathy even for the much-maligned Lord Byron when she reads a passage in his journal where he laments that “some fool” trod on his pet crow’s foot. “I salute the man,” she says. “I am unmoved by Lady Caroline Lamb’s famously designation of him, because nothing can alter the fact that it speaks well of a man when he cares about his pet crow’s toe.”

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In Corvus

, Counterpoint has published a book sure to become a classic of the bird-book genre, something to put on the same shelf as Owl

by William Service or That Quail Robert by Margaret Stanger, and the reason is the same: like those authors, Woolfson has done more than simply take a bird into her home – she’s paid scrupulous attention to the person her guest quickly becomes, and she’s done it in graceful, affecting prose: “On a late-November afternoon, I see a hawk flying against a cold, silvered sky, the half flap, half smooth glide, the silhouette that can reduce a safe, protected indoor bird to shrieking terror.”

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Bird aficionados won’t want to miss Corvus, but it has a much greater appeal than that. Anybody who’s ever shared their life with another species will find a wonderful, insightful sympathy in these pages, a book to recommend and pass along.

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The current YA popular supernova, Stephanie Meyer’s quartet of vampire novels (boosted by the release of the film adaptation of the first book Twilight), has not only provided brick and mortar bookstores around the country with one of their only reliable means of profit, but has also given ample writing fodder to a number of periodical reviewers. One of the best of these is Caitlin Flanagan, who gives us a long and personal essay in this month’s Atlantic in which she explores why Meyer’s books have so utterly ravished millions of pre-adolescent female hearts. Flanagan is wonderfully eloquent about the special relationship girls have with reading:

The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.

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And she goes on to locate Twilight Porridge ’s special place in these secret worlds:

Twilight is fantastic. It’s a page-turner that pops out a lurching, frightening ending I never saw coming. It’s also the first book that seemed at long last to rekindle something of the girl-reader in me. In fact, there were times when the novel—no work of literature, to be sure, no school for style; hugged mainly to the slender chests of very young teenage girls, whose regard for it is on a par with the regard with which just yesterday they held Hannah Montana—stirred something in me so long forgotten that I felt embarrassed by it. Reading the book, I sometimes experienced what I imagine long-married men must feel when they get an unexpected glimpse at pornography: slingshot back to a world of sensation that, through sheer force of will and dutiful acceptance of life’s fortunes, I thought I had subdued. The Twilight series is not based on a true story, of course, but within it is the true story, the original one. Twilight

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centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known. We haven’t seen that tale in a girls’ book in a very long time. And it’s selling through the roof. 

Open Letters readers will recall that in our October 2008 issue, well before the movie and Christmas hype had surrounded Twilight, Sharon Fulton delivered an in-depth and playful review of the quartet. Sharon’s foucs wasn’t on YA novels, but on the sprawling vampire genre. Yet the seduction of the love story between mortal Bella Swam and vampire Edward Cullen is at the front of the book’s appeal for her as well:

Bella is basically Molly Ringwald for a new generation, but instead of the soft-spoken hunk Jake from Sixteen Candles The Haunting of Molly Hartley hd , Stephenie Meyer serves up one of the tastiest female fantasies ever put to print: a sensitive, auburn-haired, dazzlingly handsome, highly intelligent, rich, musically-inclined, telepathic, 90 year-old (in the physical body of a 17-year-old lad) with superpowers. If you like older men, Edward’s the guy for you. If you like jailbait, Edward’s the guy for you. If you like superheroes, Edward’s the guy for you. There’s only one small thing keeping the young (and young-looking) sweethearts apart— Edward desperately wants to drink Bella’s tasty-smelling blood. Oh, high school.

So click over to both articles for some good, culture-savvy reading! Why should 11-year-old girls have all the fun?

The Virginia Quarterly Review has announced the winner and runners-up of its young reviewer contest Sniper release . The winner is Emily Wilkinson, who’s also a blogger for the fine site The Millions. And that’s all very well, but what really catches the eye is that former Open Letters contributor Giles Harvey is one of the finalists. Giles’ submitted piece is unfortunately not linked, but curious readers are invited to return to his review in these pages of J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year

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judges liked so much. Congrats Giles, our newest award bridesmaid!

On the eve of another presidential election, and amidst the swarming panic attacks it invites, it seems a wise idea to take a few hours of solace in the newest issue of The New York Review of Books. This is The Review’s 45th anniversary issue, and its very perdurability inspires a sense of calm and order. The magazine has endured 11 other elections; it has persevered through the Vietnam War, Nixon, the sluggish Reagan era, the ADD-age of O.J. and Monica Lewinsky, 9-11, and now, the barrel-scraping tenure of W–persevered and scarcely changed from its groundbreaking first issue. The look of the new issue remains as fussily text-based and technophobic as ever (and the glaring typo on the cover reinforces its ma-and-pop cornerstore charm); the daunting diversity of subjects is covered as usual, and at the usual daunting and wonderful length; the bad habit of including friendly reviews to the books of past contributors remains; and the dense, exhilarating intelligence that’s been The Review’s hallmark is evident throughout its pages. The only thing outdated in the Opening Editorial reprinted in this issue is the magazine’s address.

Which is not, of course, to say the issue is perfect–but that’s part of the comfort of reading: there’s always something to object to. Why, for instance, has Reuel K. Wilson written about the journal entries of Edmund Wilson as though Wilson and Mary McCarthy were characters he learned about in a textbook, instead of the people who were in fact his parents? (The photograph of the three together provides an unnerving contrast to the oddly aloof tone Reuel K. Wilson assumes.) And who does Mark Danner think he’s fooling when he affects to cover the Obama and McCain campaigns as though he just flew in from Mars and has no prior leanings toward either candidate. The fog of insincerity that smothers the piece make its depictions seem false, however prettily described.

But the excellent far outweighs the spotty: Daniel Mendelsohn gushes beautifully about Constantine Cavafy and Ian Buruma tempers admiration with unpleasant biography in a heartfelt look at V.S. Naipaul. Anthony Grafton writes with customary wit about Giordano Bruno and the mighty Helen Vendler blends analyses of the lives, letters, and poems of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. Those who read Dan Green’s breakdown of James Wood’s latest work of criticism in Open Letters will be interested to see John Banville tackle the same. David Bromwich, like Joan Didion before him, writes a blood-boiling piece on that most blood-boiling of character, Dick Cheney. And a smorgasborg more of pieces on subjects from Auden to King Hussein are there to pull you out of the day’s headlines and into the relaxed back rooms of the intellect.

The greatest challenge The Review has faced has been internal: co-editor Barbara Epstein’s death in 2006. Epstein was a crucial counterpoint to Robert Silvers, who is most comfortable with heavygoing works of scholasticism and meticulous critiques of current affairs; Epstein, in contrast, had a knack for bringing in younger writers and more idiosyncratic voices. Her absence is still felt, but there has at least been a conscious effort to fill that gap, best seen here with a curious essay from Zadie Smith about the future of the novel. It’s a terrific issue, worthy of the event. And it remains, as it was from its inception, one of the most stimulating and enjoyable periodicals in which to take sanctuary.

–Sam Sacks

The Dart League King By Keith Lee Morris Tin House Books, 2008 In his choppy but spirited sophomore novel The Dart League King, Keith Lee Morris tries gamesomely to make a mountain from a molehill. The premise of the book is flauntingly trivial: in a tiny town in Idaho a league dart match is waged at a local bar. Russell Harmon, our lovable loser of so much sitcom lore, is the reigning dart league king; however, on this night he’s pitted against Brice Habersham, formerly a professional dart thrower.

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Gradually, though, into the foreground of this rather sweetly generic landscape, Morris inserts an increasingly manic and bizarre menagerie of subplots. Russell owes money to a coke dealer who may decide that night to kill him over the debt; a local beauty (with “breasts as large as grapefruits”—Morris gets lazy when it comes to characterizing women) reveals to one of the dart players that he is the father of her child; one of Russell’s teammates becomes deranged from his secret knowledge behind the news report of a missing college student; and an FBI agent plans to arrest Russell and his dealer as part of a drug sting—after competing in the match, of course.

These melodramas are crudely knotted together by way of some exceedingly unlikely behavior in a manner that’s as entertaining as it is heavy handed. Each character, moreover, gets the benefit of a narrative voice, and the style of the prose in every chapter alternates to reflect their different backgrounds and attitudes. Morris has a humorous, easygoing colloquial touch (television writing seems an inevitability), but a few too many voices, particularly that of Vince the vengeful drug dealer, fall short of resolving into plausible people:

…you could just leave old Vince out of the big money, he’d just go on making his money slowly, slowly, because that way he could sleep nights like he hadn’t for a while, partly because of the fucking meth on the streets now, this homemade cheap-ass shit that Vince wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, all these amateurs cooking up this shit in their trailers out in the fucking boonies, but primarily because of this dickwad Russell Harmon, this goddamn addicted fuzzy-brained numb-nuts who wouldn’t pay his legitimately accrued debts…

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The debt to George Saunders in this fragment is found on virtually every page of The Dart League King, so it’s not surprising that the best bits of the novel flourish from its most mundane aspects. The dart matches are terrific, joyously suspenseful in the infallible tradition of come-from-behind sports stories. When Morris tries to attain comparable suspense from his more operatic subplots he goes amiss. The end of the novel especially is weird and disturbing to no clear purpose (it’s a horrific scene involving the missing student and the grapefruit-breasted woman). Morris is taking a risk with it, and you can’t exactly grudge him for that, but nevertheless it feels like a fucking lame-ass douche move (as Vince might put it) to drop the reader from the highs of an underdog dart triumph to a meaninglessly grisly and shocking finale.

                                                                                                       –Sam Sacks

As surely as the days shorten, hardcovers turn to paperbacks, and lo! become almost affordable. Open Letters has featured many of these titles, not least Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream, her manifesto on the reflexively old-fashioned gender roles that locked into place in the aftermath of September 11. Joanna Scutts studied this challenging book in its every jot and tittle:

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This constraint soon became apparent in the one arena in which women’s were the dominant voices: the experience of the bereaved. Despite the fact that about a quarter of the victims of the attacks on the twin towers were female, widows were everywhere and widowers nowhere. The media favorites were pregnant widows, with stay-at-home mothers a close second, all of whom were repeatedly, relentlessly interviewed about their grief, their fears, and their all-consuming focus on their children. But as the event receded into the past, more and more of the widows began to go “off-script,” moving on with their lives and going back to work—and, Faludi shows, earning themselves much less flattering scrutiny in the process.

Ronald Brownstein approaches history from the angle of political partisanship in The Second Civil War–it’s a delicately partisan subject itself, but Greg Waldmann reports that Brownstein artfully dodges the typical minefields that bring down so many political histories:

What separates The Second Civil War from the usual hackery is its century-spanning history of political warfare. What begins as a wonderfully succinct evaluation of the 1896 Presidential election expands as the author incorporates statistics, anecdotes, polls and demographics to throw the insular world of the capital into wide relief. Beginning that year, the McKinley-Bryan race “ended a period of extended political disorder” and inaugurated the “age of partisan armies,” a period of “intense conflict between remarkably unified partisan coalitions.” Presidents were elected with overwhelming majorities in Congress, and sought consensus within their parties in order to overwhelm the opposing party.

Andrea Barrett’s most recent novel The Air We Breathe continues in the tradition of her earlier work–fiction utilizes themes from science and natural history–but Karen Vanuska points out that there is a new, successful twist here:

In a Barrett story, finding the fossil, mapping the Himalayas, or building an X-Ray machine is far easier than telling a woman her hair ribbon is attractive or telling a man that you like his sextant. Misunderstandings and disappointments are the stuff upon which her fiction is usually built. However, in The Air We Breathe, the stakes are much higher than discovering the winter nesting grounds of swallows. While it would be asking too much of Barrett to leave her scientific comfort zone entirely—and yes, in this novel we must endure opaque quotes from nineteenth century chemistry textbooks and detailed passages on the development of X-Ray technology—World War I thankfully intervenes.

Shop wisely and read well!

If the abrupt and confusing events surrounding the presidential election in just the last week (suspended campaigns, botched interviews, economic doomsday predictions followed by frantic bailout legislation, a presidential debate, and of course, polls, polls, and polls!) have confidently demonstrated only one thing, it’s that political blogs are damned addictive. Barack Obama speaks at a rally in Virginia? Fifteen minutes after the fact you’ve got capsule summaries, biting editorials, and hundreds of spittle-flecked, agrammatical comments. Sarah Palin buys a cheesesteak in Philadelphia? Make that two hundred comments!

But for all the undeniable gratification provided by the sleepless posters at DailyKos or National Review Monster a-Go Go ipod

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, FiveThirtyEight or Instapundit, there still is nothing in political writing that can match a well written long-form essay; Jeffrey Goldberg provides one such piece on John McCain in this month’s Atlantic that no one should miss.

The rest of the issue is strong as well: Ben Schwarz somewhat surprisingly looks at the trendy blog-book Stuff White People Like, to interesting results, and Christopher Hitchens turns out a discursive and enjoyable pan of Philip Roth’s Indignation. But “The Wars of John McCain” is the centerpiece. Goldberg conducts a thorough, scrupulously fair character study of the Republican presidential nominee; what emerges, along with a lot of great quotes and a striking assessment of McCain’s feelings about Barack Obama, is a man still deeply informed by his experience in Vietnam and his country’s failed prosecution of that war:

In my conversations with McCain, however, he never appeared greatly troubled by his shifts and reversals. It’s not difficult to understand why: tax policy, or health care, or even off-shore oil drilling are for him all matters of mere politics, and politics calls for ideological plasticity. It is only in the realm of national defense, and of American honor—two notions that for McCain are thoroughly entwined—that he becomes truly unbending.

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Open Letters has always prided itself on being another home to the long-form essay, and Politics Editor Greg Waldmann has also written a comprehensive piece on John McCain Five Easy Pieces movie Shrink release , both on his delicate relationship with the truth and on the powerful mythology that has grown up around him. After you’ve skimmed the blogs for the moment’s news, settle in for a great, durable read with “The Truth and John McCain.” All the more so since the word at the editorial desk is that Waldmann’s pendant piece on Barack Obama will appear in October!

The lines at your local bookstore will be a little longer today, as Americans scurry to procure a copy of David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, in response to its selection for Oprah’s Book Club. Oprah Winfrey’s awesome powers may be at their zenith (partisans of both candidates Obama and McCain are anxiously wondering whether she will take to the stump before November, and thereby singlehandedly decide the outcome of the presidential election), and soon anyone who hasn’t read Edgar Sawtelle will be treated with pity and scorn. But the fact is that Wroblewski’s debut has already been on the bestseller list for fourteen weeks, so there are a lot of people who are permitted to indulge in knowing, oh-yes-I-read-it-months-ago smugness in the coffee room.

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Of course, as it often seems to work out, Open Letters

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readers have cause to feel doubly knowing, since not only is The Story of Edgar Sawtelle reviewed by Sam Sacks in this month’s issue, but that review predicts Oprah’s selection. Sacks calls the book “a longwinded, laboriously workshopped piece of neo-folk art, an orphaned Oprah pick that’s been lovingly clutched to the bosoms of thousands of book clubs.” He concludes with a book club mise-en-scene, so now you know in advance what those will look like:

While reading The Story of Edgar Sawtelle it’s easy to imagine the transcription of a book club gathering devoted to discussing it. “Did you notice that Almondine is portrayed as the Ophelia character, and the first thing Edgar discovers when he returns home is her grave?”—things like that. The connections between the novel and the play are so gratifyingly linear that the book itself becomes a puzzle—a cryptogram solvable even for readers who haven’t read Hamlet New York Stories release since high school, or only seen the movie. This is a novel you figure out, and that’s almost guaranteed to make for a fun evening with the other ladies (and token guys) in the group.

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The Hunger Games
By Suzanne Collins

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Scholastic Press, 2008

Before even beginning to discuss the merits of The Hunger Games, the new young-adult novel behind which Scholastic Press (which published Harry Potter) is throwing its full marketing weight, it’s necessary to point out that the premise of the book has been smooched from Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale and no credit given. In both cases a group of teenagers are thrown into a controlled environment and forced to fight to the death, to the entertainment of a massive viewing audience; in both cases the games are the design of a totalitarian government as a means of terrorizing the population and eliminating insurrection. So as Collins makes somewhat pietistic claims in interviews that she conceived The Hunger Games from the myth of the labyrinth and the Minotaur, spare a thought for Takami, unmentioned in her acknowledgments.

Still, in the apparently burgeoning teens-fight-to-the-last-survivor-in-a-dystopian-reality-show genre, The Hunger Games

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But the brutality is also thrown into relief by the goodness of the novel’s resourceful heroine Katniss Everhart. Katniss is from coal-producing District 12, the poorest of the outlier districts, and because the Capitol holds tight control of grain distribution (mass starvation is the consequence of the slightest perceived rebellion), she’s learned to hunt to provide for her mother and sister. She’s our sturdy moral compass, and Collins makes sure that she never becomes jaded by either the glamorization of murder or the cruel disparity between the luxury of life in the Capitol and the poverty elsewhere:

What must it be like, I wonder, to live in a world where food appears at the press of a button? How would I spend the hours I now commit to combing the woods for sustenance if it were so easy to come by? What do they do all day, these people in the Capitol, besides decorating their bodies and waiting around for a new shipment of tributes to roll in and die for their entertainment?

But obviously the Hunger Games are the real feature here, and they’re extremely absorbing. Collins weaves in a prototypical juvenile romance that in this case leads to all kinds of shaky alliances and double-crosses as the Games progress, and ultimately results in a nifty surprise ending.

That ending is only the start of Collins’ planned trilogy, though, and it’s pretty clear that the succeeding books will be about Katniss’ attempt to overthrow the Capitol. Katniss’ bravery and wise humanity should make her confrontation with a powerful political authority stimulating stuff. The Hunger Games

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is fine spectacle, but I think the next books will be even better.

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                                                                                                                                  –Sam Sacks