The end of the year marks a time of goodbyes, eagerly chased by introductions. Beginning January 1, 2010, the OLM Blog will be no more. In its place, however, will be three exciting new blogs giving you all much more of the news, views, and book reviews we’ve tried to provide here in the past two years.

The first is called Like Fire. Run by book-blogging veteran Lisa Peet, Like Fire will feature links, short-form reviews, commentary, interviews, and many other features relating to literature and the book world. You will be able to find it here at http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/likefire/

The next is Stevereads. Stevereads is the personal blog of Open Letters managing editor Steve Donoghue. It will showcase all the book talk you can handle, with additional attention paid to new releases, older books deserving of reconsideration, comics, and the latest news from the Penny Press. Find it at http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/

Finally, we are adding a blog to celebrate the distinctive genius of Walt Whitman. Every day, we will publish an excerpt from his brilliant prose work Specimen Days, to which we will append all sorts of footnotes and addenda. It’s an exciting project, and you can find it at http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/whitmanblog/

We want to thank you all, good readers, for joining us these past two years–and we think you’re going to love the new blogs we’ll soon have to offer. So stay with us, and as always, we want to hear from you!

The OLM Blog is dead; long live the OLM blogs!

There’s no contesting it: we live in the heyday of the vampire.  From Anne Rice’s sexy, brooding Louis in Interview with the Vampire to Stephenie Meyer’s sexy, brooding Edward in Twilight, the reading public has been bombarded for the last thirty years with the un-dead in every incarnation and permutation imaginable. We’ve seen vampire villains, vampire heroes, vampire anti-heroes, vampire slayers, vampire world-conquerors, vampires in ancient China, fat Southern vampires, teen vampires, child vampires, vampire superheroes, and, in at least one instance, a vampire Pomeranian. Big screen Hollywood extravaganzas continue to hover into view in local multiplexes, and vampire-themed romance and science fiction novels roll off the presses every month in a seemingly unending supply.

So it seems only fitting to doff our caps today to the man who started it all (and no, we’re not talking about poor wretched Doctor Polidori, who can continue to rest in peace). Today is the birthday of Bram Stoker, the Irish-born (in 1847) journalist, critic, and theater manager who in 1897 gave the world Dracula. “Time is on my side” the fiendish Count says at one point in that novel (which is far more entertaining than you might recall and well worth a celebratory re-read), and it certainly has been: ‘Dracula’ as a literary icon has entered the pantheon of instantly-recognizable figures such as Sherlock Holmes or Tarzan. A new hardcover edition of Dracula is in bookstores now (as well as its very first Stoker family-authorized sequel!), a vampire series is the hit of HBO, and a new Dracula movie is in the works – and we owe it all to Stoker, who had the stroke of genius to bring these creatures of musty old folklore into the light of the present day and set them loose on modern science.

By one of those hair-raising coincidences that so bedevil the literary world, this is also the birth-date of Vlad Tepes, the big-nosed and utterly ruthless Romanian warlord known to history as “the Impaler.” But at Open Letters we’re peaceful folk, so we’re going to let him rest in peace too.

Once you’ve published your own review of a book, it’s always a bit vertiginous to read the same book reviewed elsewhere.  Surely almost every critic writing on deadline wonders if he’s missed something important, emphasized something trivial, or just plain judged a book wrong. When the ‘elsewhere’ in question is the mighty TLS, one of the few remaining genuine heavyweights in the literary journalism world, the anxiety is just that much more tingly.

So we turned with added attention to the 30 October issue of the TLS to take in their response to Pete Dexter’s latest novel Spooner, which is reviewed at length in our November issue by Sam Sacks. As great as the TLS is, their fiction reviews can sometimes be, shall we say, idiosyncratic, and when it comes to American fiction, their writers often seem to be working through anger therapy rather than examining a writer’s work.

Fortunately (for all concerned, really), the reviewer this time is T. O. Treadwell, as steady and first-rate a critic as ever sidled up to a typewriter, and Dexter’s book gets an entirely fair assessment, complete with quotable lines. About Calmer Ottoson, for instance, the true-blue  father-figure to the novel’s protagonist, Treadwell writes, “To draw a virtuous character without sentiment is notoriously difficult, and Dexter’s success here is not the least of his novel’s achievements.”

Most of the critics who’ve looked at Spooner have dwelt at length on the novel’s autobiographical aspects (Sacks makes a rather pointed reference to “the canny deflections of the memoirist”), and Treadwell – whose review is not long – does likewise, at one point mentioning, “One of the attractions of the fictional memoir must be the opportunity it offers for settling old scores, and Spooner contains a splendid range of monsters, many of them brought to satisfyingly gruesome nemesis.”

Treadwell’s verdict is kind: “Pete Dexter has transmuted the vicissitudes of a turbulent life into an accomplished novel.” To learn a great deal more about Dexter’s writing career in general and Spooner in specific – and to see what final verdict Sacks himself hands down on the final product, click on over to our November issue. And then tell us what you think, of course.

James Gibbons has a long, interesting piece in the current Bookforum about a batch of fiction and fiction anthologies that have emerged from Africa (or African expats), and the strength of the books prompts him to ask whether we’re in the midst of an ‘African literary renaissance.’ Perhaps, Gibbons says, but

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The new African writing is emphatically not homegrown. Forged in the crucible of globalization, it is a literature largely of displacement and exile. Most striking in scanning the biographical notes in Gods and Soldiers [an anthology edited by Rob Spillman] is how few of its contributors, especially the younger ones, live in the countries in which they were born. Nearly all the Francophone writers have settled in France, and the typical English-language writer has an American MFA and professorship.

It’s that last observation that is the sticking point for John Madera in his book review of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck in Open Letters June issue. Madera writes of Adichie’s stories,

Sure, [they] have all the necessary ingredients—that is, they have characters, settings, plots, resolutions, and all that. Her stories are technically perfect. They carefully navigate all the moods, conflicts, and changes. But is that enough? No. At best, the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck simply follow familiar recipes. At worst, they’re leftovers.

And not only are the stories formulaic in an overbearingly workshopped manner, Madera finds, but some of the stories are about writers in workshops. Gibbons comes at these stories from a different angle, but comes to a very similar conclusion:

Several stories in The Thing Around Your Neck Evolution release take place in the United States, where Adichie, recently the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, spends much of her time. They survey a range of Nigerian immigrants: a cuckolded wife enduring luxurious loneliness in Philadelphia’s suburbs; a Princeton graduate student and her unlikely friend, a gay Christian Igbo man whose papers have expired; a waitress in Connecticut often thought to be Jamaican by the locals. Although they are impeccably crafted, there is something thin about these stories when compared with those set in Nigeria. Except for the sympathetic priest in “The Shivering,” Adichie’s Americans are often ignorant and always self-satisfied.

The question of whether an African literary renaissance can emerge from an American creative writing program seems a pertinent one–Madera’s and Gibbons’ reviews are good places to start in thinking about it.

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Sometimes, you need one critic to formalize for you what you dislike in another. I knew that something about Michael Dirda’s ubiquitous book-ramblings had always bothered me, but it wasn’t until I read the rough handling Slipstream move he received from Open Letters Fiction Editor Sam Sacks that I saw just how annoying Dirda could be.

I still read Dirda’s book-essays, naturally, but now my antennae are extra-sensitive to his irritating qualities … many of which are on display in a piece he wrote recently for the New York Review of Books. His subject was the pair of new annotated versions of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, one by Annie Gauger from Norton, the other by Seth Lerer from Harvard University Press, and this was of obvious interest to me since Open Letters’ own Honoria St. Cyr reviewed Lerer’s book in our July 2009 issue.

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I knew that grand old lady was fond of Lerer’s efforts, so I was briefly dismayed to read Dirda:

Certainly anybody who wants to own just one annotated Wind in the Willows should choose Gauger’s. She simply offers more for the money.

As I recalled, St. Cyr didn’t think enough of Gauger’s edition even to mention it by name in her review of Lerer’s, so I wondered if our old girl was wrong. Searching Dirda’s essay for his reasoning (it’s often difficult to find, as Sacks implies), I grew confused. True, he tells us Gauger’s edition is the one to buy – but then he spends the bulk of his essay listing and tsk-tsking its (apparently) many and (apparently) egregious flaws. Her bibliographical research? Less exhaustive than Lerer’s. Her literary interpretations? Less accurate than Lerer’s. Even the quality of her edition’s picture reproduction? Less faithful than Lerer’s.

All this makes it fair to wonder why Dirda didn’t favor Lerer’s edition the way St. Cyr did – what does he have against Lerer? Well, that Lerer is tedious, for one (although Gauger’s sheer prolixity makes her sound deadlier than the male), and for another that he overreaches in his source-finding, as when he digs up the obscure Victorian poet Wathen Mark Wilks Call to elucidate a line from The Wind in the Willows Gods and Generals . Dirda complains:

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What’s the point of this tenuous association? Will we actually find anything that illuminates The Wind in the Willows in this piece of forgotten sentimental verse?

Such shots across the bow called for summary action, so I emailed Dirda’s essay to Honoria St. Cyr, who took time off from tending her quiet little garden to provide the following answer:

My word, is this what passes for literary criticism over there in the States? This man at four points all but calls the Gauger edition boring, but he somehow ranks it superior to Lerer’s? And how is one to explain his confusion over Lerer’s Wilks Call reference? Quite obviously, the point of such an association (hardly tenuous, since we know Grahame read the poet) – its illumination, albeit of low candle-power – is that although it is a “piece of forgotten sentimental verse,” it went into the great creative mix that produced The Wind in the Willows, which certainly brings it within the purview of someone annotating that book. One would think a professional book-critic would realize that without assistance from an amateur such as myself. Perhaps this Dirda person is out of his depth when it comes to children’s literature?

And that, as they say, is that. We stand by our gal.

–Steve Donoghue

“I adore annotated editions,” admits Honoria St. Cyr in her long, loving look at a new annotated edition of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, found in the current Open Letters. And you will find that her adoration is perhaps trumped only by her deep affection for Grahame’s classic itself. As St. Cyr finds, when you are as devoted to a book as she and many millions of others are to The Wind in the Willows, you can’t get enough of the trivia that surrounds it.

Such trivia is at the forefront of Peter Parker’s review

in the TLS

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of no less than two annotated Wind in the Willows, one by Seth Lerer for Belknap Press and the second by Annie Gauger for Norton. Though Parker has plenty of nits to pick with each editor (the debating over trivia being just as fun as the trivia itself), ultimately he can’t resist the pull of simply recounting some of the grand speculation that the classic has inspired. For instance, the is the idea that

Toad is an unholy amalgam of Oscar Wilde, Horatio Bottomley and Grahame’s purblind, tantrum-prone son Alastair, for whom the book was written…. Toads by their very nature give the impression of being puffed up, and the carriage of their heads unwittingly suggests snootiness. Strutting down the steps of his country manor, stuffed into his preposterous driving togs; supplied with funds to buy the latest shiny toy, or take up and as quickly discard every passing fad; writing his appalling invitations on stationery “with ‘Toad Hall’ at the top in gold and blue”: Toad is the embodiment of nouveau riche vulgarity and bumptiousness. Ludicrously vain, utterly shameless and horribly self-pitying, he nevertheless remains endearing.

Parker goes on to agree that there is much in Toad that reminds you of Oscar Wilde, “from his aphorisms and his imprisonment to his middle-parted hair.” And he additionally suggests that the scene in which Toad is heckled as he’s transferred from the courthouse to the prison is “strongly reminiscent of the notorious occasion when Wilde was transferred by rail from Wandsworth Prison to Reading Gaol and was obliged to stand on a platform at Clapham Junction, handcuffed and in convict dress, surrounded by a jeering mob.”

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More trivia abounds in both St. Cyr’s and Parker’s pieces, and of course in the new annotated books themselves—enough even to sate the most obsessive fans of Wind in the Willows. Dig in.

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In his weekly column for Slate, part-time literary critic, part-time muckraker, and part-time dime-a-dozen political pundit Christopher Hitchens shares his two cents about the crisis in Iran, and draws a particular focus on Ayatollah Khamenei’s recent paranoid invocation of the “evil” British government. Hitchens points out that while America-hating is commonplace in Iran, it’s a youthful phenomenon next to the decades of anti-British rhetoric. Hitchens then calls our attention to the great book that lampooned Iranian Anglophobia:

The best-known and best-selling satirical novel in the Persian language is My Uncle Napoleon, by Iraj Pezeshkzad, which describes the ridiculous and eventually hateful existence of a family member who subscribes to the “Brit Plot” theory of Iranian history. The novel was published in 1973 and later made into a fabulously popular Iranian TV series. Both the printed and televised versions were promptly banned by the ayatollahs after 1979 but survive in samizdat

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form. Since then, one of the leading clerics of the so-called Guardian Council, Ahmad Jannati, has announced in a nationwide broadcast that the bombings in London on July 7, 2005, were the “creation” of the British government itself.

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Hitchens goes on to recommend that we all get our own copy of My Uncle Napoleon, to which Open Letters can only agree. Recently, Bryn Haworth reviewed the book with an eye to the pre-election-crisis troubles in Iran, and found much to admire on both artistic and political levels:

The beauty of My Uncle Napoleon is that it is blissfully funny. Though it has the slapstick mayhem of many Egyptian comedies, it is more than pure farce. And although it has debts to European literature – My Uncle

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is very much like Don Quixote, or Sterne’s Uncle Toby Madhouse movie full (he even has his own Corporal Trim) – it is not a plagiarizing tribute to the classic comic novel. This is a book that manages to create memorable and believable characters while shamelessly sending them up, loading them with catchphrases and putting them in bizarre situations. Behind all its tomfoolery lie the serious issues of love, sexuality and, most importantly, paranoia on a grand scale.

Go here to read the rest of Haworth’s examination of a book given such abrupt and urgent relevance—and then, by all means, get a copy for yourself!

The only thing not debatable about the effect of writers’ workshops on contemporary letters is that workshops are currently immune to debate. The MFA program is now offered in most polytechnic institutes, and its ubiquity makes it virtually immune from speculation that it might be flawed and its influence harmful.

But that doesn’t stop the speculation from happening, for the simple reason that the omnipresence of workshops also makes them an obvious culprit for the most prevalent writing sins: conformity, laziness, mimesis. (Many of which our managing editor found on display in the recent New Yorker fiction issue). In the new Bookforum, the reliably excellent Mark Greif has a thought-provoking review of a book called The Program Era

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, by Mark McGurl

. McGurl’s book is an examination of what the custodial presence of the University has done to postwar fiction in America, and Greif pulls out a lot of fascinating ideas from it, such as this discussion of the legendary workshop that involved Wallace Stegner, Larry McMurtry, and Ken Kesey:

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McGurl’s case study disenchants the mythology that grew up around one of America’s great “antiestablishment” writers, Ken Kesey. An extraordinary section on One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and its composition for the Stanford University writing program directed by Wallace Stegner (“as the novel’s chapters were drafted, they were submitted for credit to the creative writing workshop classes Kesey was attending while he worked at the [mental] hospital”) suggests that elements of this ivied institution were mixed into Nurse Ratched’s psycho-gulag. The “group” parodied in the novel was simple group therapy, but it also travestied the workshop seminar with Stegner at its head. When Kesey left off writing entirely to decorate a bus for the travels of his Merry Pranksters, McGurl notes that it was a school bus. Equipped with recording equipment (and Tom Wolfe, as willing scribe), the “Furthur” bus became yet another incarnation of the writing project as university workshop. The ’60s were not always about individualism, but also about the desire to live in new collectivities, which put the writing seminar curiously in tune with the times. The exemplary dropout, Kesey, emerged from institutions and reproduced and renovated them in turn.

Greif’s piece is worth reading in full, but God knows it’s not the last word on the debate over workshopping. For an earlier word, I’ll recommend you to an essay I wrote a few years ago for the New York Press that attempted (in a rather more dyspeptic manner, admittedly) to highlight some of the systemic problems built into the MFA program. And as always, feel free to leave your own comments on the subject here, dyspeptic or no.

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Joseph Epstein has a review in the current Weekly Standard about Gertrude Himmelfarb’s new study of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and it contains the maddening binary traits that are always on appearance in Epstein’s (frequent) writing. On one hand, he’s one of the most prolific and prominent critics of Victorian era literature, a man seemingly always eager to snap up and report back on some new biography of Disraeli or Dickens. Himmelfarb’s book is right in his wheelhouse, and he makes some nice observations about it and Daniel Deronda in what is a largely fluent piece of work.

On the other hand, Epstein is perhaps the laziest writer alive, and when the material strays from his limited comfort zone, instead of stretching himself he invariably tries to cover with a reflexive and dismissive waspishness—an attempt to ridicule it all out of existence.

buy A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge The most ludicrous instance of this laziness came in a 2007 New Criterion article in which he tried to summarize how the literary world stood at that time, and in so doing made it manifestly clear that he hadn’t read more than 8 works of contemporary fiction in the past decade. But things aren’t much better in this piece on George Eliot. Epstein begins by establishing a kind of soccer-pitch rivalry of mores between the Victorian era and the Bloomsbury Group, and he writes the following:

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The Bloomsbury Group–a name that today sounds suspiciously like a dubious hedge fund–stood opposed to everything the Victorians stood for: earnestness, probity, the struggle with fundamental social, political, and moral problems and issues. The Victorians came at things straight on; the Bloomsbury writers–Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Clive Bell, Strachey, et alia–preferred obliquity.

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The Victorians had a comprehensive and confident view of human nature; the Bloomsbury writers could only assert, as Woolf contended, that human nature had changed in 1910, though she neglected to say precisely from what to what. The Victorians asserted the need for soundness of thought, high principles, and life considered in the long run; John Maynard Keynes, Bloomsbury’s economist, said that in the long run we are all dead, which eased the way for his fellow Bloomsburyites rather joylessly to philander, bugger, and stress personal relations over national destinies. For a long spell, it appeared that Bloomsbury had won, making the Victorians seem little more than a roster of prudish neurotics dedicated to nothing grander than sexual repression.

Which is all very neat, except that it is almost entirely untrue, and I don’t just mean the implied assertion that there were no gay people in the 19th century. For instance, Woolf’s overworked quote about “human character” (not “nature”) changing in 1910 of course is The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer hd grounded in context: she was talking about the shifting relationships between ”masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children”—which, in the spectrum of her profundities falls rather on the obvious side. And does Epstein really want to go on the record saying that the author of A Passage to India and Abinger Harvest was not interested in “fundamental social, political, and moral problems and issues”? And yet, as dumb as that sounds, it’s nothing next to the blindingly stupid statement that John Maynard Keynes (and, by implication, Leonard Woolf) had no interest in national (or, more relevantly at the time, global) destinies. (Keynes’ famous quote, manhandled here, concerned monetary policy, for Pete’s sake; Epstein acts as though he wrote it while performing at Woodstock.) Epstein is obviously correct that Lytton Strachey savaged many aspects of Victorian culture in Eminent Victorians Love Actually rip

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(although Strachey’s nearly hagiographic portrayal of Florence Nightingale gives the lie to Epstein’s too-easy formula), but he acts as though that nasty little book alone, and not a war in which nearly a million British men and women died to no apparent purpose, instigated the reaction against the assumptions of the previous century.

See, that’s the thing–when Epstein moves on to discussing George Eliot, he does fine; but your reading experience has been irrevocably tainted by the three paragraphs in which he insists on snidely talking out of his ass. It’s the exact same divide-and-conquer brainlessness that you find on cable news, where sneers and rants and distortions substitute for thought. Bad enough on CNN, but doubly depressing when it comes from a writer who knows so much about George Eliot.

My advice? Skip this review and head straight and untainted to Daniel Deronda, which really is one of the great books of all time.

—Sam Sacks

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It can be frustrating, that blithe recommendation to “wait for the paperback” when a book comes out that you think you’d like to read. Publishers know the pulse of the public’s reading interest (or at least they know sales figures), and they’ll sit on putting out the paperback until the last embers of interest in the hardcover have expired. It can be a maddeningly long wait.

But it’s a wait that’s eventually rewarded, and a few new titles in softcover were first reviewed here. Richard Price’s Lush Life, for instance (which was also reviewed in every other literary organ in the western world), was given a thorough going-over by Sam Sacks in the February 2008 issue. Sacks looked back at Price’s important early works, but also took Price’s work in television as a frame of reference for interpreting Lush Life Return to House on Haunted Hill video :

Despite his considerable reputation as a novelist, it’s no good running away from the likelihood that Lush Life is going to be read as a kind of Director’s Cut supplement to The Wire: not only is there superficially a great deal in the book to justify the connection, there is also a sense that Price is explicitly attempting in Lush Life to achieve the layered sweep of atmosphere and character for which the TV show is revered. Writing for The Wire is not like doctoring Hollywood scripts, and the prudent wall of separation bricked up to protect his novels seems in this case to have been breached. Price has said of the show that “it’s as close to a novel as anything on TV,” and Lush Life has pretty clearly drawn inspiration from it.

Ever After In our June 2008 issue, Laura Tanenbaum reviewed Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us, and no doubt did a lot of listening to the songs of Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, and Carole King, the three subjects of the biography. Tanenbaum was impressed not only by Weller’s treatment of the three singers, but by the keen evocation of a landmark era in the feminist movement:

From Weller’s account, we get the sense of period in which equality still felt radical, difficult and hard to reach, yet in which popular culture actively engaged. 1970, one year before each would have a seminal record (Mitchell’s Blue, King’s Tapestry, and Simon’s Anticipation

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), was a year in which Kate Millet could be on the cover of Time, having made her name with a book in which she took on literary and countercultural icons like Henry Miller and Norman Mailer. Even Ladies Home Journal dedicated a special feature to the feminist movement after a sit-in in their offices. While only a few years before, King’s “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” was a daring statement of female sexuality, now Mitchell could sing matter-of-factly about the joys of unmarried cohabitation in “My Old Man.”

And for your beach bag, Emily Giffin’s Love the One You’re With is available in bright green wrappers on the front table of any nearby bookstore. In our September 2008 Bestseller issue (in which, Gore Vidal-style, we reviewed every book on the fiction bestseller list), Julie McGinley gave a frank appraisal

of what you can expect from Giffin’s book:

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Ask any woman unlikely to have read many books, and chances are she’s read one by Emily Giffin. I’ll be completely honest and admit that this is the third book I’ve read of hers: I read both Something Borrowed and Something Blue on airplanes. For me, Giffin’s books are usually the perfect travel companions; the straightforward prose and somewhat predictable sequence of events means distractions are not a hindrance, and the chick-flick storylines help pass the time.

Bend It Like Beckham movie download Here’s hoping this helps in your book shopping. And do explore more of Open Letters’ archives to learn if you’ll be repaid for your patience in waiting for other books to emerge in more affordable paperback form.