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!

Teen Dream

Beach House’s self-titled 2006 debut sounded very much like two people making music in a room somewhere, and that’s exactly what it was – flubbed notes and all. The songs were spare and simple, but what was there was pure gold: basic drumbeats, fuzzy organs, old harpsichords, simple piano and guitar riffs, and, of course, Victoria Legrand’s mournful vocals. Gems like “Saltwater,” “Childhood,” and (above all) “Master of None” still frequent my playlist three years later. It was one of the most promising debuts of the decade.

Devotion, their second album, was a more proper and polished recording, but most of the edge and much of the personality were gone. Teen Dream is their latest and no doubt their worst effort, and fans of Beach House’s first album will no doubt wonder what the hell is going on. The singular tone of their early music has evaporated; the transformation that began with their second album is almost total. Chorale-like vocals and rough-hewn simplicity have made way for syrupy crooning and boring, over-produced melodies.

“10 Mile Stereo” sounds like a pale imitation of early U2. “Lover of Mine” is pretty much a late-seventies soft-rock ballad. “Zebra” starts the set with a dithering, generic guitar riff. Percussion shortly adds itself, then a breathy choir joins in, while Legrand’s increasingly rough voice – it sounds like she’s been smoking a lot in the last few years (another reason to quit, kids) – melodramatically rises and falls, spouting lyrical blandisms that recall Bono at his worst: “anyway you run, you run before us / black and white horse / arching among us.” The whole album trudges along like this – one sadly predictable moment after another.

So it’s back to the old songs for me. Here’s hoping this is the final hiccup before a return to form.

-Greg Waldmann

The Annotated U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence

Jack Rakove’s Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997, and his new book, the erudite and fascinating Annotated U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, came out in 2009. In 1997, most Americans would have picked up his new annotated guide to their founding documents and idly flipped to the sections on impeachment, perhaps wondering if it was really something that could result over a tryst with an intern, but not really caring either way. In, for instance, 2007, those same Americans (and perhaps many thousands of interested foreigners) would have frantically turned the pages to find out just exactly what the Constitution says about the President’s ability to ignore the law. Their trembling hands would have found Article One, Section Seven, which states in terms so clear as to command their assent that if a President objects to a bill or any part of a bill, he sends his objections to Congress, they deliberate on those objections, and if a majority still finds the bill worthy, it becomes law. Seeing this precise limit set to the President’s ability to do whatever the hell he wants, those same 2007 readers might have read Rakove’s typically engaging commentary with mounting anger:

Rather than veto legislation, some modern presidents – notably George W. Bush – have used presidential “signing statements” to express their intention not to enforce duly enacted provisions of legislation they find of doubtful constitutional validity. The requirement of this clause that presidential objections to legislation be formally registered in the congressional journals indicates that the framers would have looked askance at this practice. Indeed, many of them might well have been surprised to discover that a president who repeatedly used such statements to justify his fundamental obligation to faithfully execute duly enacted laws had not been impeached.

For a while there, in the interval between Rakove’s two books, it looked like an annotated guide to the U.S. Constitution would have been an exercise in bitter nostalgia, an autopsy rather than a celebration. Given how close things came, and given how dramatically they seem to have changed, Rakove’s book could be forgiven for gloating – but it never gloats. Rakove never postures in any way, even when we can suppose he has strong opinions. Take another contentious section of the Constitution, the much-abused Second Amendment which guarantees citizens the right to bear arms in a well-regulated state militia – Rakove comments:

In recent decades, the National Rifle Association and its supporters have waged a vigorous campaign to argue that the amendment was really meant to protect a personal right to keep arms for purposes of individual self-defense, and that the preamble to this clause did not limit its purpose to the militia alone. Though the historical evidence for that view is tenuous, in 2008 the Supreme Court sustained the individual-rights reading in its decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, overturning a broad prohibition on the private ownership of handguns in the nation’s capital. The Court reached this conclusion by largely ignoring the actual debates that led to the adoption of the amendment. Corresponding provisions in numerous state constitutions now assert an individual right to own and use firearms in language much more explicit than the much-disputed formula of 1789.

See the judicial restraint? See the absence of unhelpful terms like “redneck” or “gun nut” from the sober, evaluative prose? Wonderful!

In short, this is no sad encomium but instead an incredibly informative and ultimately thrilling tour of a still-living – not to say reborn – pair of documents that every American should know well (and most should know better than they do).

Abraham Benrubi

Birds of Eastern North America: A Photographic Guide

It’s only by working your way through Princeton University Press’ magnificent new Birds of North America page by page and bird by bird that you realize just what an impressive accomplishment it is.

You could guess the size of that accomplishment by the pedigree of the talent that produced it; Paul Sterry has written dozens of books on birds, including the texts of some mighty fine bird-guides from years past, and Brian Small is likewise experienced, the photo editor for Birding magazine and a prolific freelancer.

But even knowing these combined track records won’t fully prepare you for how eye-catching this volume is – and how handy it is. The achievement is made possible by the latest advances in digital photography and page-layout, and the philosophy is a functional revelation at which other guidebooks have usually only made cursory stabs: birds like to change their clothes.

Typical birding handbooks in the last century take a mug shot approach to their subjects. The page on bald eagles will feature a big picture of an adult male, perched majestically. The entire section of wood-warblers will feature one shot of an adult male golden-winged warbler, doing duty for everybody else. The 1990s saw a real revolution in this approach, with books like the seminal Sibley Guide giving aspiring and experienced birders indications of how the appearance of a particular bird species changes, not only between genders but between seasons and from adolescence to adulthood.

Birds of Eastern North America takes this revolution one step further: Brian Small’s digital photography is incredibly clear, and every entry displays its subject in the iterations watchers are likely to encounter (with distribution provided by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology). Since a young red-shouldered hawk looks like an entirely different bird than an adult red-shouldered hawk, this is a mighty helpful thing (and the sexual dimorphism of some species is drastically greater than this).

Whether you explore this volume while tromping through marsh and meadow or blanket-swaddled in your favorite reading nook, you’ll see these old familiar feathered friends in such a wealth of greater visual detail that you’ll have the very pleasant sensation of seeing them all for the first time. This is a guide to keep.

Tuc Macfarland

Brian Kane
Fantagraphics Books, 2009

The original Prince Valiant Companion has long been out of print, a stalking-horse for collectors. Fantagraphics Books is engaged in an elaborate job of reprinting all the Prince Valiant comic strips, and they’ve taken the opportunity to reprint and significantly update the Companion for a new audience of readers. Brian Kane, author of the Companion and surely the world’s foremost authority on the strip and its creator, Hal Foster, has once again done a herculean amount of work, and Fantagraphics has once again clothed that work in a sturdy, pretty volume. Prince Valiant hasn’t been treated this well since the ersatz King of England sang his praises.

Those unfamiliar with the character – a young man who finds adventure, fame, and even love at the court of the legendary King Arthur – will find here all the background information they could ever want: there are synopses of every one of the thousands of Prince Valiant strips (compiled by Todd Goldberg and Carl Horak and brought down to the present by Brian Kane), and there are full-color pages showing the strip – including its glorious Sunday extravaganzas – in all the stages of its visual evolution.

But even long-time Prince Valiant fans will find plenty to fascinate them in this volume. There’s an illuminating essay on the fantasy artists who influenced Foster – once-great and now-forgotten names like Malcolm Daniel and Gustave Dore – and there are several in-depth interviews with Foster (Kane somehow manages to be both reverential and warts-and-all about the man). Since I’ve read about Prince Valiant for years (including Kane’s own previous book on Foster), the parts of the book I found most interesting were the chapters devoted to the men who took on the intimidating task of carrying on the strip once Foster retired. There’s a long interview with John Cullen Murphy, Foster’s chosen successor, Frank Bolle, whom Murphy picked to take over from him, and Monstermen creator Gary Gianni, the strip’s current illustrator. The sense of carrying forward a beloved trust for the readers is palpable.

Fantagraphics will continue to bring out deluxe volumes of Prince Valiant reprints. I imagine this new Definitive Companion will be open alongside them for years to come.

Khalid Ponte

Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America

In his smug and useless (but mercifully brief) Introduction to Craig Shirley’s mammoth new account of the 1980 presidential campaign, George Will gets one thing right: the contest at first looked hopeless for candidate Ronald Reagan. Not only was he facing a sitting president (even somebody as “politically tone deaf” – Shirley’s phrase – as Jimmy Carter knew how to use the incumbency to his advantage), but he was also taking on a scion of American political royalty in the person of Edward Kennedy. In Rendezvous with Destiny, Shirley, a longtime Republican operative and apologist, has written a ground-view narrative of that campaign which by its very title cannot hope to be objective but which perhaps entertains other hopes.

If one of those hopes is to join the pantheon of truly great American presidential campaign-histories, fantastic and richly rewarding books like Jules Witcover’s Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency 1972-1976 or Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes: The Way to the White House (about the 1988 race), disappointment looms for Shirley. Though brimming with industry, Rendezvous with Destiny is barred from Olympus for two reasons: first, its insider-politics wonkery is pitched to a particularly annoying nerd-frequency that will alienate readers who are not already political junkies, and second, for all his industry, Shirley can’t write worth a damn.

There’s nothing to be done about the nerd factor (although it reinforces the age-old truism that the best historians never personally know their subjects), but there’s a potential solution to the bad writing: read less Mario Puzo. Political insiders always want to make their pallid, overcaffeinated fishbowl sound sexier than it is (a persistent failing of the otherwise-admirable TV series The West Wing, to which Shirley owes several hundred thousand uncredited debts), but even so, there’s such a thing as overkill. Rendezvous with Destiny (which, it should be pointed out, is about an all-American former lifeguard of Irish descent from the small-town Midwest) is full of people “going to the mattresses,” “taking the cannoli,” and making offers that can’t be refused. The book has more consiglieri than a Palermo gentleman’s association.

Cutting out the gangster-talk would be a start, but it wouldn’t fix everything. Far too much of this enormous book is marred by lazy clichés (“Ronald Reagan was on the brink of political oblivion,” etc), muddled turns of phrase, hilariously mixed metaphors, and an ongoing characterization of candidate Reagan as the hero in one of the Horatio Alger novels he so loved to read, with his nasty opponents being the pool-and-patio set of Marin County:

Washington insiders were proclaiming Reagan to be the William Jennings Bryan of the GOP, just another three-time loser. The country-clubbers of the GOP made fun of Reagan’s movie career. Clinking wine glasses, they were toasting, “Bedtime for Bonzo and Reagan!”

Frequent too are Shirley’s lapses into cloying backroom patter that’s almost Willesque in its arrogance, as at the conclusion of his account of the presidential debate in Cleveland:

Carter had been right when he said that there were “stark differences” between the two candidates.
But many of the elites – a.k.a. the “Beautiful People” – were not sure how to respond. It couldn’t be possible that Ronald Reagan – that actor – had beaten President Carter, could it? Nawww.

(Generally speaking, three consecutive w’s will scuttle any chances you might have of one day entering the Library of America).

It’s like nobody involved with the production of Rendezvous with Destiny ever took its author aside and warned him that such heavy use of right-this-minute slang taken from Entertainment Weekly and Saturday Night Live would only serve to make large chunks of his book incomprehensible to any reader who doesn’t already know the same slang. It distracts repeatedly:

[Republican power broker James] Baker planted the notion with the media that Reagan needed to do well in the big industrial states and his man [G.H.W.] Bush had done just that in the primaries, and that Reagan needed someone with Washington experience and with foreign-policy experience. Oh yes, and Bush wasn’t interested in the job. Wink, wink.

(As in the real world, so too in print: being wink-winked at like this makes one feel both scornful and slightly soiled).

Shirley’s book has undeniable energy, and that energy never flags (his main character – and, clearly, hero – Reagan was once described as “inexhaustible,” and the same word could be used legitimately in praise of this book). Reading his highly partisan descriptions of all this recent history is never less than entertaining, as in this quick aside on the quirks of the Carter team:

But the Carter campaign was not a seamless operation. There were internal disputes over tactics, strategy, and turf. If the Carterites were good at anything, it was writing memos. Memo after memo went out laying out various opinions and positions. Pat Caddell alone was a threat to American forestry, notorious for excruciatingly long memos. Carter’s team heard complaints from some state leaders centering on the president’s adman, Gerald Rafshoon. They were barking up the wrong tree in going after Rafshoon, who was close to Carter and a member in good standing of the Georgia Mafia.

But if Shirley’s goal here is to write a great campaign account, he needs more than a pile of newspaper clippings and uncounted hours of private conversations with the key players to make it happen. He needs a broad perspective, which he only intermittently displays; he needs a genuine sense of humor and the absurd, rather than the rather schoolboy aptitude for razzing he summons here; and most of all, he needs a polished prose style if he has any hopes of standing in the company of his betters – and there’s no hint of that prose style here. Instead, what we have is a massively detailed record of what happened during the 1980 presidential campaign, told by someone who thought Reagan was great long before he wrote a word of it. If that’s all our author intended to produce, he’s succeeded admirably. For anything more, the rest of us will have to keep waiting.

Abraham Benrubi

the reviewer's dog-eared copy

The Roman Revolution
Ronald Syme
Oxford University Press, 1939

As impossible as it seems, Ronald Syme’s classic study of ancient Rome, The Roman Revolution, turns 70 in 2009. The difficulty of taking this in stems not from mere temporality (seventy years being, as everyone knows, an unimaginably long time) but from the nature of the work itself: the lively insight and exquisitely controlled anger of The Roman Revolution read as fresh and vital today as they did when the book was first published.

Certainly the experience of reading it is every bit as invigorating as ever. Syme took a particular style of writing history – overlaying a sparse, almost telegraphic voice on a consummate mastery of the whole of the classical canon – and polished it to a level of art unseen in the writing of classical history since Gibbon laid down his pen. It’s a muscular, incredibly assured style, achieved through meticulous self-editing, and it everywhere reveals a keen ear for the perfect little twist of a concluding point, as in describing the Roman world’s last piecemeal surrender to dictatorship:

And now for a moment a delusive ray of hope shone upon the sinking hulk of the Republic. Two veteran legions from Africa arrived at Ostia. Along with a legion of recruits they were stationed on the Janiculum and the city was put in a posture of defence. Whether the Senate now declared Octavianus a public enemy is not recorded: these formalities were coming to matter less and less. Octavianus marched down the Flaminian Way and entered the city unopposed. The legions of the Republic went over without hesitation. A praetor committed suicide. That was the only bloodshed. The senators advanced to make their peace with Octavianus; among them, but not in the forefront, was Cicero. ‘Ah, the last of my friends,’ the young man observed.

Syme attempts to float the same standard dispassionate phraseology that historians of the 20th century typically employ, but he doesn’t try too hard; though The Roman Revolution is in many ways a stunning work of historical detachment, it’s never difficult to tell where Syme’s likes and dislikes fall. He loathes Cleopatra, for instance, and drips a quizzical contempt all over her besotted lover Antony. And his richest ambiguities he saves for the central character of his narrative, the willowy, hypocritical twentysomething Octavian, whose cynical attempts to re-invent himself as the benevolent dictator Augustus draw repeated jabs from our historian, who’s no fan of fascism:

Special commands were no novelty, no scandal. The strictest champion of constitutional propriety might be constrained to concede their necessity. If the grant of extended imperium in the past had threatened the stability of the State, that was due to the ruinous ambition of politicians who sought power illegally and held it for glory and for profit. Rival dynasts rent the Empire apart and destroyed the Free State. Their sole survivor, as warden of the more powerful of the armed provinces, stood as a guarantee against any recurrence of the anarchy out of which his dominion had arisen.

But Augustus was to be consul as well as proconsul, year after year without a break. The supreme magistracy, though purporting no longer to convey enhanced powers, as after the end of the Triumvirate, still gave him the means to initiate and direct public policy at Rome if not to control through consular imperium the proconsuls abroad. For such cumulation of powers a close parallel from the recent past might properly have been invoked: it is pretty clear that it was not.

(The unforgiving starkness of this becomes all the more evident when contrasted with the rhetoric used in standard biographies of Augustus, like this from a work popular when Syme’s book came out: “As he [Augustus] went on there gradually awoke in him a nobler ambition, that of restoring and directing a distracted state. Neither now nor afterward do the more vulgar attributes of supreme power – wealth, luxury, and adulation – seem to have had charms for him.” After Syme, such innocence was no longer critically tenable).

Watching how Syme handles all his sources –watching the intricate, hitherto unseen connections and uprootings that he effects by sifting through everything so carefully (he’ll find a passing comment in an epic poem that sheds light on legionary cooking techniques, or a well-known paragraph from Cicero that can be read in a startling new way) – is at once humbling and exciting, and it’s no wonder The Roman Revolution has cast such a long shadow. The subject matter – the carefully-implemented plan by which Octavian took sole, personal control of the Roman Empire (and the equally careful plan to prevent the Romans from realizing the full import of what he was doing) – has been taken up many times by many historians in the ensuing seventy years. Syme’s masterpiece is in all their bibliographies, and most of those later histories of Augustus or the end of the Roman Republic would have been unthinkable had not Syme so impeccably paved the way.

The sobering fact is how little any of those later books manage to offer even a small amplification of Syme. Even now, The Roman Revolution is the first, best modern history of Rome’s preventable and misunderstood transition from Republic to Empire. Surely a Penguin Classic of it is finally in order?

Steve Donoghue

Henry VIII issued four sets of sumptuary laws during his reign, in 1510, 1514, 1515, and 1533, each designed to place restrictions on what kinds of clothing (made from what kinds of materials) his subjects could wear. Warnings were frequent, like the one issued in 1520 in preparation for Henry’s meeting with France’s king at the Field of the Cloth of Gold: “All noblemen and others are to be apparelled according to their degrees, and no man must presume to wear apparel above his degree.”
Such warnings in such numbers were necessary (at least from the royal point of view) because 16th century England saw an explosion of ways to warrant them. The traditional strata of feudal society – the king, the nobility, the clergy, and then pretty much everybody else – were rapidly blurring as more and more of the ‘middling’ sort, lawyers, businessmen, traders and the like, were amassing fortunes and land holdings great enough to give them aspirations their grandfathers would scarcely have dreamt. Henry VIII was not hidebound enough to scorn employing such men, even swelling their fortunes – but their increasing power made him all the more protective of his own. And then as now, a great deal of power lay in perception.
Maria Hayward does remarkable, often eye-opening spadework on this subject in her comprehensive new book Rich Apparel: Clothing and the Law in Henry VIII’s England (solidly put together by Ashgate Publishing). She focuses her study first on the pinnacle of English power, the king – who was, as she shrewdly points out, “the one individual for whom there were no clothing constraints” – and then on downward, through the landed nobility, the clergy, and spreading out to that burgeoning mercantile class. She scrutinizes wills, estate inventories, guild regulations, import and export figures, and of course she’s as grateful as everybody else for the scrupulous details preserved in the paintings and sketches of court artists like Hans Holbein. Her goal is to lay before the reader as wide and detailed a picture of the role apparel played in Tudor times as the primary sources will allow, and she succeeds admirably.
Readers should be cautioned that this is expository, almost testamentary historical writing – there is no unifying narrative, no bursts of rhetorical fireworks, no argumentative conclusions. It can often be quite technical too, although here it’s uniformly saved by Haywood’s clear, evocative prose:

Taffetas and sarsenets originated in the East but by the fourteenth century were being woven in a number of Italian cities. Both were lightweight, thin silk fabrics that were often used for linings. Both could be woven incorporating metal threads, often to produce a striped effect. Taffeta could also be produced as a shot, tabby weave (with the warp and weft a different color to produce a slightly iridescent effect).

Rich Apparel contains many charts, and its appendixes feature the texts of several Tudor wills and inventories – coming after so many pages of Haywood’s astute use of their contents, the documents themselves prove unexpectedly interesting. The guiding intelligence here makes the entire book interesting, although the steep incline of the scholarship may deter all but the most dedicated fans of the Tudor era. The book’s one major shortcoming (an utterly astounding one, given the subject matter) is that aside from the cover portrait of insufferable hatchet-faced Tudor moneymaker wunderkind Thomas Gresham, none of the book’s other illustrations is in color. True, color plates would add to Rich Apparel’s already considerable price tag, but considering the fact that clothing’s appearance is at the very heart of Haywood’s topic, the addition would certainly be worthwhile in future editions.

Steve Donoghue

The Silver Skull – Swords of Albion

The year is 1588, and an assault has been made on the Tower of London by England’s most implacable enemy – but the foe is not the Spanish, and the goal was not coin or carnage. For twenty years, Queen Elizabeth’s government has kept a mysterious ancient artifact – the Silver Skull – locked up in the Tower, trying to figure out how it works and more importantly, how it could be used against England’s great Enemy, the otherworldly Unseelie Court. But in this eerie nighttime assault, the Skull is stolen by the Enemy – and promptly lost by them. And now it’s up to England’s most renowned swashbuckling spy, Will Swyfte, to retrieve the Skull before it becomes a deadly weapon in the hands of England’s nemesis.
Such is the slam-bang premise and opening action of Mark Chadbourn’s The Silver Skull – Swords of Albion (two perfectly good titles, used in weird conjunction – maybe the author couldn’t decide between them? Or maybe it’s meant to be Swords of Albion Book One?), an alternate-reality Elizabethan novel in which England not only faces the hatred (and rumored Armada) of Spain but also the long cold war with its supernatural Enemy, the war a disillusioned young Christopher Marlowe characterizes bitterly:

“As children we walked in summer fields and dreamed of the wonders that lay ahead. Yet we sold those dreams, and our lives, to defend England against something that can never be defeated, which waits, quiet and patient and still, until we let our guard slip, as it always will, and then we are torn apart in a gale of knives and teeth, unmourned even by our own.”

Chadbourn’s premise is exciting but hardly original (this is by my count the seventh ‘supernatural Elizabethan times’ novel in the last five years), but The Silver Skull – Swords of Albion stands out from all the others on the strength of two things: first, its hero. In Swyfte Chadbourn has danced as close to parody as he can come without tipping his whole story into farce; Swyfte is strong, sure, handsome, endlessly experienced, and cool under pressure. Everyone knows who he is, and melodrama his name invokes is almost worthy of the silent film era:

“If William Swyfte is captured [says Walsingham, the queen's spymaster], we will deny all knowledge of his mission. He has been driven half mad by grief over the loss of his close friend, Grace Seldon, and holds a personal grudge against Spain.”
“You will abandon him?” Burghley said. “He will be tortured and executed.”
“That is the price we must pay.”
“If Swyfte does not reclaim the Skull, all is truly lost!” Elizabeth raged. Even with his caution, Walsingham could see that Elizabeth understood the true situation. “He cannot fail. He cannot!”

All this is saved by the second thing – Chadbourn’s writing. It’s got a good deal more snap and energy than the common run of current fantasy novels; the action sequences (of which this one volume sports hundreds of examples – there’s scarcely time to draw a breath, and that’s wonderful) leap off the page, and the characters are drawn with deft, precise strokes. Almost any amount of old-timey melodrama can be forgiven if it comes dressed in a narrative this adult and assured.
One thing that certainly doesn’t distinguish this book from its competitors is its cover! It features a computer-manipulated photo of professional male model Paul Marron wearing vaguely period clothing and pouting purposefully, and in that it’s virtually identical to about five hundred romance novels currently on bookstore shelves. Don’t get me wrong – Marron is a good-looking young man (although his main claim to modeling fame, his chiseled chest and abs, are totally obscured on this present cover), but his presence on so many covers feels like imaginative bleed-through, an impoverishing state of affairs that could be easily rectified if publishers like Pyr would hire good old-fashioned fantasy illustrators to create their covers.
But provided you don’t judge a book by its cover, The Silver Skull – Swords of Albion is very much worth your time. This book has all the marks of being the first in a series; it’s a hell of a book, so let’s hope it’s a long series.

Khalid Ponte

Great White: The Majesty of Sharks

Chris Fallows
Chronicle Books, 2009

Photographer and shark expert Chris Fallows opens his visually stunning new coffee table book with a quick autobiographical sketch:

I had no money, no car and still stayed at home with my fantastically supportive mother after my folks had divorced a few years earlier. I had not achieved a great amount by the age of 20, but I was content. I was following my passion and I know worked with the greatest fish in the sea, the great white shark.

If that ‘worked with’ sounds a bit naïve (like they were collaborating on a stage musical, Fallows hatching out the lyrics, the shark tentatively plinking away at the piano), it’s to be forgiven – Fallows was passionate even then about showing people the wonder and ecological fragility of the world’s big shark species. His later work will be familiar to nature fans (and YouTube idlers) the world over: he made the groundbreaking observations of great white sharks leaping entirely out of the water at Seal Island off the coast of Cape Town – the so-called “Air Jaws” that was the subject of two popular documentary films. This book – full of gorgeous photos only somebody in Fallows’ line of work could get – continues his mission, as he succinctly puts it:

To see the magnificence of a great white shark firsthand is the fastest way to change perceptions and separate fact from fiction. This is the only way people will ever learn to love and not fear sharks.

Again, just a bit naïve. I’ve been in semi-murky water when a great white suddenly showed up, and I can tell you what countless other divers could second: there’s not much to love about a predator the size of a Volkswagon who tends to bite first and ask questions later. And Fallows himself perhaps unwittingly perpetuates the very reaction he dislikes: this book is filled with pictures of 13-foot 1-ton sharks hurling themselves entirely out of the water in a single-minded desire to not only kill but pulverize seals swimming at the surface. It takes absolutely no stretch of the imagination whatsoever to picture a human swimmer in place of those seals. It takes absolutely no stretch of the imagination whatsoever to picture that human swimmer is you. This is, therefore, a deeply terrifying book.
But terror is a primordial kind of respect, and humans have always been fascinated by what they fear. Maybe Fallows isn’t so naïve after all.

Tuc Macfarland

When you first see the title of this new Arthur Conan Doyle anthology from Skyhorse Publishing – ten tales under the heading Vampire Stories – your first impulse is to beg for mercy and feel betrayed; et tu, Arthur? you want to cry. In the current heyday of the undead, it seems like vampire stories have hijacked every genre of fiction going. Blood-sucking fiends infest the Romance section of every bookstore; they’ve long had a claw-hold in the Science Fiction section; and let’s not even talk about the Teen section, where Encyclopedia Brown was turned two years ago and Nancy Drew is a dark brood-mother by now. Surely, surely, if there’s one bastion that will hold out against this necrophilic onslaught, it’s the creator of that rational icon, Sherlock Holmes, who once reprimanded Watson with words that should be spelled out for Stephenie Meyer with holy water: “This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.”
Those words, ironically, come from the 1924 tale “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” which is of course featured in this delightful, indispensable collection – and just as the vampire in that Holmes story turns out to be far more subtle and substantial than a pretty boy who glitters (glitters!) in the sunlight, so too this Skyhorse volume, edited by vampire-lore expert Robert Eighteen-Bisang and veteran anthologist Martin Greenberg, is far more satisfying than its title implies. For although Conan Doyle was friends with Bram Stoker, he almost entirely avoids the literal kind of undead so crowding bookstores these days. Instead, he gives us a much wider variety of creatures who prey, in various ways, on the vitality of those around them.
There’s Isadora Klein of “The Adventure of the Three Gables,” who flourishes while her lovers languish; there’s Baron Gruner of “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client” (another Holmes story), a truly vile blackmailer who ruins women as methodically as ever the evil Count did; there’s the diminutive Miss Penclosa of “The Parasite,” who exercises a powerful mental coercion over the men in her life, who resist her at their peril:

“You fiend!” I cried. “You have come to the end of your tricks now. I will have no more of them. Listen to what I say.” I strode across and shook her roughly by the shoulder. “As sure as there is a God in heaven, I swear that if you try another of your deviltries upon me I will have your life for it. Come what may, I will have your life. I have come to the end of what a man can endure.”
“Accounts are not quite settled between us,” said she, with a passion that equalled my own. “I can love, and I can hate. You had your choice. You chose to spurn the first; now you must test the other. It will take a little more to break your spirit, I see, but broken it shall be…”

And there’s Octavius Gaster, the mysterious gaunt-faced figure at the heart of “The Winning Shot,” an eminently fascinating character who will have readers momentarily forgetting all about the consulting detective of 221b Baker Street. These nine stories (the tenth is a pastiche by Bill Crider that’s effective enough but can’t help but look a little, shall we say anemic, alongside works by a master like Conan Doyle) fully deserve the wider audience this book’s canny angle will certainly bring them. And Eighteen-Bisang’s brief, incredibly comprehensive bibliography (included as an appendix and listing every imaginary encounter between Holmes and Dracula, in books and comics) is an added treat. So there’s no betrayal here after all, just vintage Arthur Conan Doyle probing the dark edges of the human condition every bit as effectively as his friend Stoker did, and every bit as entertainingly. I highly recommend this book.

–Khalid Ponte

Not A Chimp: The Hunt
To Find The Genes That Make Us Human

When Jeremy Taylor writes, in his terrific, rabble-rousing book Not a Chimp, that “we humans are an exceptional species,” he’s courting trouble from all comers, and you get the sense that he not only knows that but delights in it. Animal rights activists and many animal behaviorists will say he’s wrong: humans share, we’re so often told, 98% of our genetic makeup with chimpanzees, after all – surely the rest is window-dressing? Surely any attempt to reposition mankind at the unique and undisputed top of the evolutionary ladder is an attempt to sanction all the barbarities mankind has perpetrated on so-called “lesser” animals, most certainly including chimps, throughout history?

Taylor is having none of this. He makes the point – and follows it with a very detailed, very convincing layman’s tour of the neuroscience involved – that when it comes to evolution and life sciences, tiny percentage points can make gigantic differences. He urges his readers to move past a “chimp-ist” viewpoint in which taxonomical proximity to mankind lends chimps a brighter aura of sentience than, say, ravens or goats or elephants:

The important take-home point is that cognition is a tool to do an adaptive job, and when social and ecological problems are similar it can be expected to solve them in similar fashion, whatever the species. Claims for chimpanzee tool use, deception, manipulation of others, and insight can no longer reinforce claims for their evolutionary and genetic proximity to us, but only show that, like big-brained corvids, they have shared some of the same social and ecological problems as us. Any species that does so will evolve the necessary, and functionally analogous, cognitive structures to deal with them. The argument by analogy is undone.

Not a Chimp is a merry counter-blast to the animal rights and conservation activists who advocate, at least partly on the basis of genetics, extending human rights to mankind’s nearest cousins. The book’s flaw is tribal: Taylor stresses the cognitive differences between humans and chimps in order to pull back human-style civil rights, to stop the “lunacy” of extending those rights to chimpanzees. The fascinating science he’s synthesized and shared would work equally well if his ethics were more elastic – not fewer rights for chimps, but more rights for everybody, including, say, ravens, goats, and elephants.

–Tuc McFarland

In the awkwardly named “Young People’s Literature” category the award was given to Philip Hoose’s Claudette Colvin, about a courageous black teenager who refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. It may well be that this is a very good book, but, given its subject, the deep suspicion remains that it’s not the best book but the book adults think would be best for

“young people.” Keith Waldrop won the Poetry award for his collection Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, and maybe this book too is deserving, but maybe, you can’t help but wonder, Waldrop has just put in the most time in the close-knit world of poetry publishing and garnered slightly more name recognition than his competitors. T.J. Stiles takes the palm in Nonfiction for The First Tycoon: the Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the skepticism continues to adhere. Maybe it’s excellent, or maybe Americans love to anoint one big fat mainstream biography of an American figure per year, tailor-made for Father’s Day and Christmas.

Parked hd

For me, such skepticism is originally fostered by the Fiction panel’s decision to reward Colum McCann’s novel Let the Great World Spin. I have read this book (I reviewed it in our September issue), and I can easily report that it’s nowhere near as good as the other nominees. It is, in fact, a bad book, breathlessly overwritten, manipulative, and thick with cheap ethnic stereotypes. But what’s perhaps most disappointing is that Let the Great World Spin is almost identical in its subject to last year’s PEN/Faulkner award winner, Joseph O’Neil’s Netherland. The enervating implication that readers take away is that if you write an angst-ridden, sentimental novel that makes constant, thinly-cloaked references to September 11, you are ipso facto writing great fiction. That, and the ancillary implication that the best books are the ones that the most people will approve of on paper.

–Sam Sacks

Falling, maybe, into the “practical interest” category has been the latest promotion of The Shirley Jackson Award, a fledgling award for horror and fantasy fiction and an alternative to the Bram Stoker Award.

Last year, The Shirley Jackson Award committee, to raise awareness and presumably money, invited a couple dozen (plus) authors (only one or two a name anyone not deeply engaged with small press horror would recognize) to blog their own “Jack Haringa Must Die!” story (Jack Haringa is the editor of Dead Reckonings, a magazine of short, genre fiction reviews and occasional essays)—to imagine a humorous and/or gruesome death for Haringa in a few hundred words. These stories were collected, with an additional two non-blogged originals, in a slim volume called Jack Haringa Must Die!, to be sold online and at conventions for $10 a pop. Last month, a similar promotion was launched, this time, “Brian Keene is Dead.”

Curious, I read Keene’s blog entry on the stunt and scrolled through the comments to see what folks were saying, and I came across this comment, written by David Kearny:

I’m a little surprised they’re doing this again. Did the Jack Haringa book do well? I read it; most of the stories were built on private jokes that fell flat for me, who is outside the circle of friends who wrote them. I’m not attacking the concept, nor the cause, but if the goal is to make money for The Shirley Jackson Awards, shouldn’t a book be devised that people not on the committee or directly involved with it would want to own? …I hope this collection evolves into something more thoughtful than the last—considerate, that is, of the audience it seeks (rather than the audience it already has). I did like Laird Barron’s story in the last book… but the rest were uninteresting at best.

Brian Keene replied, thoughtfully, and corrected Kearny’s assumption that “Brian Keene is Dead” will be a book:

To clarify: This was devised by Paul, Nick, Nick, Lee, myself and a few others. Our goals were simply to once again raise awareness of the organization and hopefully earn some donations…

There are no plans at this time to collect the stories into a second volume. Not saying we wouldn’t do it if such an opportunity presented itself and the monies went to the org. But as of now, there are no plans and no offers. The goal was simply to increase awareness, if only for a day.

And to have a bit of fun doing it. ;>)

All well and good, and it does sound like fun, but Kearny got me wondering this: why promote an award named for Shirley Jackson and with the goal (presumably) of being taken seriously as an award worth winning with writings unrelated to Jackson and of such highly limited interest? Wouldn’t the committee serve the reputation of the award better—and create a more interesting artifact—by taking inspiration from the award’s namesake? Would it have been a better use of the undoubtedly limited resources used to publish Jack Haringa Must Die!

to instead compile an anthology of essays written (perhaps exclusively) by women about Jackson? With the money spent to print Jack Haringa Must Die!, a few women authors could have been paid to create original fiction inspired not by an advisory board member but by Jackson herself, which could have been posted on a website with a “donate here” button for readers to click. I suggest women authors in both cases for good reason: I suspect it’s no accident that the award is named for a woman author, that by doing so the committee consciously chose to underline that genre fiction is not exclusively the domain of boys, a common—and totally understandable—perception. Indeed, of the twenty-eight entries in Jack Haringa Must Die!, I count only six by women.

I think Kearny’s questions can be boiled down to two very obvious questions: Why is a literary award creating anthologies of tossed-off fiction with a localized appeal rather than linking itself to more thoughtful work and why is The Shirley Jackson Award committee ignoring Shirley Jackson?

– Adam Golaski

The Lost Origins of the Essay
John D’Agata, editor
Graywolf Press, 2009

Readers who remember John D’Agata’s first anthology, The Next American Essay, might cringe at the return of its Dave Eggers-style arrogance. “By ‘Next’ is meant those essays that will be inspired by these,” that collection declared. “By ‘American,’ of course, I mean not the nation. And by ‘Essay,’ I mean a verb.” And by “arrogant,” I mean a boy who sees fit to instruct his readers on the meanings of words in common usage, but The Next American Essay nevertheless was a superb anthology, leaping with life, full of lurid juxtapositions. So at the appearance of D’Agata’s follow-up volume, The Lost Origins of the Essay (again very handsomely produced by Graywolf Press), there’s dread mixed with anticipation.

The dread starts with the thing’s title. Who preens enough to use “lost origins” in an essay collection that features Francis Bacon, Virginia Woolf, and, God help us, Montaigne? Where’s the “lost” in that, considering the presence of such fixtures in every single essay anthology ever made? And the author isn’t helping things any, intoning about his title “Because I think having a broader sense of history can inspire a deeper sense of identity.” Yeesh. Granted, he’s not a boy anymore, but still – even old men don’t talk like that if they want to be taken seriously.

But once again, the ‘nevertheless’ follows right after – The Lost Origins of the Essay is a big, brilliant, absolutely invigorating anthology. Its net is cast much wider than in the first volume, for D’Agata’s conception here is that almost all narrative nonfiction that isn’t explicitly history comprises the “lost origins” (or, more properly, “long origins”) of the essay form we know today. So there are odd extracts from Sumer and Babylonia, as well as bits from Heraclitus, Theophrastus, Plutarch, and Seneca (the last three of which, we’re told, were translated by the editor). Africa is represented, as is China – and Japan, where the delightful Sei Shonagon (“she is gossipy, bitchy, snobby, fun,” D’Agata writes, “A complainer, a bragger, a tease, a sap”) gets her say. We come to Italy and approach the Renaissance and perhaps more well-trod ground; there’s Petrarch (also, we’re told, and perhaps we now blink in wonder, translated by the editor), a long rumination by Montaigne on Virgil, a refreshing inclusion of the great Thomas Browne, a travelogue by Basho, Swift’s oft-anthologized (but no less brilliant for it) “A Modest Proposal,” and 500 more pages of smartly chosen, wonderfully arranged stuff.

There’s plenty of experimentation here, a deep cosmopolitan breath of inclusion, and some winding-up remarks by John Berger, Lisa Robertson, and Samuel Beckett (whose “Afar a Bird,” we’re told – and by this point we’re either too skeptical or too tired to resist – is translated by the editor). The end result is much akin to The Next American Essay: sometimes infuriating, always thought-provoking, and ultimately very, very satisfying. Whatever John D’Agata’s other talents may be (raconteur, one fears, and polymath – and linguist! Let’s not forget that), he’s one hell of an editor.

–Liz Satterwaite

Francis Bacon, "Man with Dog"

From the backseat of my parents’ car, I listened and was afraid. Late autumn, deep dark—back then, in the mid-1980s, the roads weren’t so well lit. At the tail-end of a long family trip, warm and sleepy, it was easy for me—aged eleven or twelve—to slip into a very wild place, where the line between fun, boys’ adventure story and lost in the woods (something monstrous glimpsed up in the trees) was very thin indeed.

I listened to an episode of Nightfall, a production of the Canadian Broadcasting Company, originally aired in the early 80s (so, unlike Inner Sanctum or The Hall of Fantasy, both originally aired in the 40s, Nightfall was modern, with synthesized music and state-of-the-art studio production to prove it). The episode was “No Admittance/No Exit,” a story about an automated emergency clinic that determines treatment based on patients’ potential to contribute to society. Certainly, the story scared me (I’m easily scared), but it needn’t have for Nightfall to have kept me up that night, because the show’s opening had already done the trick.

That opening: A crash of notes high on a piano’s keyboard, like shattered glass, the sound of wind, and the host’s introduction: “In the dream you are falling, lost in the listening distance, as dark locks in…” a scream—a man falling—and then the host’s emphatic, “Nightfall.”

Maybe it sounds hokey to you youngsters, and maybe it is, but that intro was intoned by Henry Ramer, and he made it all sound so serious. Ramer was known to listeners of Nightfall as “your host.” He set up each episode, not in the cackling, punning style of The Crypt Keeper, who you know isn’t good for you, but like a gentleman—a gentleman with an upstairs torture chamber and a basement full of wicked science. “Good evening,” he said, not like Bela Lugosi (or someone impersonating Lugosi), but with a hint of vocal fry and an even sense of humor. Then, “tonight I would advice you to make certain that all of your escape routes are clear. The play is called, ‘No Admittance/No Exit’”—extra emphasis on “exit,” the emphasis one would place while pulling the mask off to reveal that he has no face!

Ramer provided the voice for numerous cartoon characters, including an invisible villain on a Canadian animated incarnation of Spider-Man, did voiceover work, commercials, and appeared in films, including The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

and Between Friends.

Yesterday, Neil Marsh wrote to tell me that Ramer died on November 12. (Marsh is the author of a website dedicated to the history of Nightfall, for which he contacted many of the cast and crew, including Ramer. Marsh and his research was invaluable when I wrote about the show for All Hallows, the journal of the Ghost Story Society.)

It’s as the host of Nightfall that I knew Ramer—his voice has long been a part of my peculiar internal landscape. I hear it often: when I re-listen to episodes of Nightfall, and when I hear certain words that Ramer said best.

–Adam Golaski

Samuel Johnson: A Life

Samuel Johnson: A Biography
W. Jackson Bate
Reprinted by Counterpoint, 1998

In writing his fast-paced, engaging new biography of the great and terrible Doctor Johnson, David Nokes has three separate massive, uphill battles to fight. The first is with Johnson himself, who was vain enough to relish attention but cynical enough to savage biographers (and whose life absolutely refuses the neat arcs and resolutions the current book-buying public seems to demand). The second is with James Boswell’s mesmerizing, idiosyncratically epic Life. And the third is W. Jackson Bate’s monumental 1975 biography, rightly called the greatest modern life of Johnson.

Johnson is of course immortal, and thanks to Johnson Boswell is too, but a modern aspirant to the post of Johnson biographer might hope that time and advancing scholarship would remove Bate from contention. Fortunately, no: Counterpoint has kept his book in print in a very handy paperback, and so it pops up as persistently as old King Hamlet’s ghost, intoning ‘remember me’ to every new contestant.

And scholarship likes to think it’s more important than it really is; in simple truth, as a full-dress biography Bate’s book is unsurpassable. Johnson roars and rumbles through its pages as vividly now as he did when I first read the book forty years ago. Bate’s command of the innumerable pigeonholes of Jonnsoniana is absolute, and his prose scintillates (bless the folks at Counterpoint for keeping this feast before us). Nokes’ is quite the best book on Johnson to appear since Bate, and his book is leaner and quicker, often with sentences stitching together quotes from Johnson and others that run on for paragraphs at a time. Great care and discernment went into this production, but it can’t escape periodic duets with its looming predecessor.

Here’s Nokes about Johnson’s famous Dictionary:

Writing the Dictionary’s Preface he struck an elegiac note, remembering that both his wife Tetty and his former publisher and friend, Edward Cave, were now deceased. The work, he wrote, ‘was written’ (not compiled, but written) with little ‘assistance of the learned’ and with no ‘patronage of the great’, not in ‘the soft obscurities of retirement’ nor under ‘the shelter of academick bowers’ but amidst ‘inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow’. The tone he struck was truculent. It was with ‘frigid tranquility’ that he affected to dismiss the Dictionary from him; but though this intensely personal statement goes beyond good taste, it makes one thing unmistakable. The Dictionary that he produced would be recognised as his.

And Bate, on the same work’s genesis:

The thought of creating an English dictionary that could stand comparison with these works [the standard Italian and French dictionaries of the previous century] had long depressed the spirits of any individual qualified even to begin on such a project. For of course it would have to be an individual. There was not only no academy in Great Britain similar to the French Academy but also, given the pride in British individualism, not much prospect of one.

Readers will decide for themselves (and on more evidence, obviously) which author they more fully trust, but the signal differences are on display even in excerpts: Bate is calm and summarizing where Nokes is urgent and intertextual. Bate tends toward a magisterial remove; Nokes takes us into the London streets and drawing-rooms, quoting Johnson & co. the whole time. Both do a superb job, although we’ll have to wait and see where Nokes’ book is in forty years. For the present, readers should rejoice at having both books at their disposal. Johnson would have fussed, but he’d have been pleased just the same.

– A.C. Childers

The Tyranny of Email:
The Four-Thousand Year Journey To Your Inbox

• Ali Baba Goes to Town full movie

John Freeman
Scribner, 2009

John Freeman’s slim, heartfelt screed The Tyranny of Email opens with a quote from Gandhi, a preposterous understatement, and an unsubstantiated statistic. This isn’t the best way to begin an attack on a daily mainstay of your readers’ lives.

The preposterous understatement comes after Freeman – the impossibly young new editor of Granta – lists some of the benefits of email:

Today we can type a note on our computer in New York and it will be received in New Zealand in nanoseconds. We use e-mail to send documents, music, wills, photographs, spreadsheets, and floor plans, communicate with our banks, send invitations. We no longer have to fill out those irritating forms to receive a return receipt by post, proof that our important letter arrived. The computer does it for us.

And then he somewhat grudgingly says, “some of this is a good thing.”

Some of it? All of the things Freeman lists are undoubtedly good things, and all of the things he doesn’t list would fill an entire book the size of this one. We use email to stay in touch with our friends and relatives, ask quick questions (for which we’d like quick answers) of colleagues, employers, employees, service companies, etc., make or confirm important appointments, check whether or not we have the right destination in mind before we go all the way over there, make and receive job offers, and a hundred other things that were far more time-consuming, cumbersome, and inexact before email. Then there’s the literary publishing world of which Freeman himself is a part: conferring with fellow editors, dealing with freelance submissions, working up documents for final revisions – is Freeman too young to remember what a logistical nightmare such things were when done via mail and carbon copies, or is Granta Charlie Chan in Egypt hd stodgy enough not to care?

The unsubstantiated statistic follows right after this: “Information overload is a $650 billion drag on the U.S. economy every year.”

Oh please. If anything at all were a “$650 billion” drag on the economy every year, that thing would be firebombed by Special Ops team by 10 a.m. on Tuesday, and that would be the end of that. Not only is no source given for this scarifying number, but no source could be given – what on Earth does “information overload” even mean? More importantly, where will you find three people who agree on what it means?

Freeman throws these things out there in advance of his main argument, which is that the burgeoning of email, “the techno-rave of send and receive” (as he more than once breathlessly refers to it), is deteriorating our interpersonal skills, eroding our free time, destroying our ability to be still, ruining our powers of concentration, and conspiring to murder President Lincoln. His book takes us on a fairly standard tour of the history of interpersonal communication, from stone tablets to postal service to telegrams. It’s done with more wit and prose-writing ability than what you’d find if you typed “correspondence” into Wikipedia, but there are no more facts and no better documentation.

It’s all foundation for his main point, delivered in the book’s concluding chapters, “Manifesto For A Slow Communication Movement” and “Don’t Send.” In these chapters, Freeman outlines his plan to fix all the information overload floating around these days, and it’s a plan that would win Nancy Reagan’s approval: it all boils down to abstinence.

He argues that email is killing us, and he’s not above a little speechifying to get his point across:

The ultimate form of progress, however, is learning to decide what is working and what is not; and working at this pace, e-mailing at this frantic rate, is pleasing very few of us. It is encroaching on parts of our lives that should be separate or sacred, altering our minds and our ability to know our world, encouraging a further distancing from our bodies and our natures and communities. We can change this; we have to change it. This book has been an attempt to step back from the frenzy and the flurry of the now – the now we have created and the now we have to slowly remove ourselves from – to make this argument. Of course e-mail is good for many things; that has never been in dispute. But we need to use it far more sparingly, with far less dependency, if we are to gain control of our lives.

The natural response to all this — “By all means, you remove yourself from the ‘frenzy’ right away! Take as much time at your calligraphy as you need, and rejoin us when you’re rested” — is easy but not entirely cheap. Much of The Tyranny of Email could be summarized in an email: “Sorry. Having a bad day.” The problem here isn’t common sense, it’s common narcissism: instead of concluding that he’s bad at handling email, Freeman decides email is bad. It isn’t. It’s a miracle. It can be abused just like anything else, but if it’s eroding your personal time and destroying your ability to read, it’s because you’ve let it do those things. Freeman’s book has its share of flaws (Star Trek: The Next Generation is not, for instance, an “ongoing television drama,” nor do wolves “haunt Central Park at night”), but by far the biggest one is that it never acknowledges – nor even seems to conceive – is that there are levels of self-control that fall short of throwing your computer out the window and joining an ashram.

Like it or not (and only a “crank,” as Freeman confesses himself to be, would not), the technology of interpersonal communication has advanced beyond hand-delivered cards and letters, and society has to adjust. Those who’d rather not adjust are free to opt out – but kindly don’t drag the rest of us back to the escritoire with you.

– Liz Satterwaite

Will

The double entendre that is the title of Christopher Rush’s bracing, brilliant new novel Will is shorthand for the inspired idea at the heart of the book: a lawyer has come to Stratford to take down the last will and testament of Will Shakespeare, who’s feeling old and ailing and doesn’t, we know, have long to live. Just that: just that simple: Rush uses the famous will to prod the famous Will to retrace the winding paths of his life and times, with the lawyer as first questioner and then quickly awestruck audience. And the lawyer’s not the only one; by the time half a dozen pages have passed, the reader is also awestruck – and mighty damn pleased. This is a book to grapple to you with hoops of steel, an entirely grand, roistering, true book that you know right away you’ll wish to savor, to inhabit, and to endlessly recommend.

Rush in his parting comments tells us that this novel has been “growing underground” for his entire life, and certainly the finished product shows it. There’s not a scene, not a scrap of dialogue, not a single throwaway observation that doesn’t spring wholly to life in your mind, and virtually every page features some passage that begs to be copied out longhand. For instance, here’s Will’s imagining of his mother’s grief at the death of her firstborn baby girl:

So nobody noticed when an old air started up from Henley Street: Mary Arden, down on her hunkers in the dust, bubbling and snivelling and singing her song. A wordless ballad that all mothers sing for a dead child. They know it by heart throughout the world, that raw crying. It’s the coldest air in the universe. It never wakens the dead.

Rush’s Will is having his final say about everything, in one headlong monologue after another, and as with the real Bard, you want to quote almost all of it – like the page-long rumination on the infamous Tower of London, a part of which reads like this:

Founded on tears and corpses, its stones cemented by human blood, and at night its corridors and stairways stalked by the ghosts of all who’d come to the Bloody Tower through Traitor’s Gate. The young Princess came through this gate one pouring Palm Sunday, sat down on the drenched steps, and cried out in the downpour that she was the truest subject landed there. She knew that the headless body of her mother lay buried and bloodstained somewhere inside those awful walls, behind which was Tower Hill, darkened by the shadow of the scaffold and gibbet. Many proud heads bent and fell on Tower Green, the lopped flowers of the nobles.The last of the Plantagenets bled horribly to death there. Margaret of Salisbury, stubborn old nob, refusing point blank to put her head down on the block simply to let Henry Tudor’s head rest easier under its crown, and the poor old bitch was pursued by the headsman, who hacked her to death like a beast in the shambles, like a bolted cow.

Or Will’s grudging-generous tribute to Philip Henslowe, seedy proprietor of the Rose theater:

One thing, he would never see you stuck, always saw you round a hard corner. Drove you to regret it later, but without him there might never have been a later. He stood between some poor swine and suicide or the wolf at the door, and when times were hard in London I knew I could always go to Henslowe. He knew what he could wring out of me in return. ‘Your pen is mine, Will. Write me a bright speech, finish me that dull play and make it sparkle, conclude that Act. I have a scene here needs re-working for tomorrow and there’s no pen that speeds like your pen. Harry the Sixth? Harry the Sixth can wait. Harry the Sixth comes after Henslowe the First, Philip the Foremost.’ (Philip the Foreskin to his debtors).

We would expect a thorough knowledge of Shakespeare to be on display in a novel about the Swan of Avon (although countless novels have bungled their way into disarming that expectation), but what really shines in excerpts like these and countless others in the book is something more, a love of Shakespeare that suffuses everything about the man, his times, and his plays. Elizabethan and Jacobean times come alive on these pages, but the real treat here is the sense of the man. Actual biographies of Shakespeare can be a losing game, as Samuel Schoenbaum so amply demonstrated in his massive Shakespeare’s Lives (and as talented writers can play nonetheless, as, for instance, Charles Nicholl showed in his recent study The Lodger Shakespeare), and here fiction can act with more freedom. At one point Rush’s Shakespeare satisfyingly describes himself, saying “The upstart crow was in fact a good citizen and a talented and genuine writer: upright in his actions, honest in his dealings, civil in his demeanor, urbane in his art – and with a ball-crushing grip” … and reading along, we can’t help but agree.

Novels as strong as Will don’t come along as often as anybody would wish. Under no circumstances miss this book.

– Steve Donoghue

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.