Reviewed by Ron Charles
Washington Post Book World
Gil Adamson's first novel bolts off the opening page: Men with hounds are chasing a young woman through the woods at night. Nineteen-year-old Mary Boulton has murdered her husband and now, still wearing a black mourning dress made from curtains, she's running from her brothers-in-law, massive, red-headed twins with rifles across their backs.
Welcome to The Outlander, an absorbing adventure from a Canadian poet and short story writer who knows how to keep us enthralled. Of course, the Girl Being Chased is one of the most enduring figures of chivalric and chauvinistic literature, a staple of television dramas and horror films (the dark street, those panicked backward glances, that plaintive cry: "Oh, why did I wear these heels?!"). But Gil is short for Gillian, and her strange and complicated heroine has nothing in common with Hollywood's worn-out damsels in distress.
For almost 400 pages, we follow "the widow's peculiar trajectory into the wild. The route like a skittering mouse, light-footed and almost aimless" through the mountains of Alberta, Canada, in 1903. She has
Eva Mendes has agreed to star in The Queen of the South along with Ben Kingsley and Josh Hartnett.
Story tracks a Mexican woman who escapes to Spain after her drug-runner boyfriend is murdered. Teresa becomes the reigning drug smuggler in Spain, bent on avenging her lover.
"Readers...won't be able to turn the pages fast enough," promises Publishers Weekly. "[A] portrait of a smart, fast, daring and lucky woman."
The last English-language adaptation of a Perez-Reverte novel was back in 1999 with Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate starring Johnny Depp.
[B]ased on a true story that chronicles an unlikely friendship between a wealthy art dealer struggling to salvage his crumbling marriage and a drifter living on the streets. [The book], which explores such motifs as miracles and the healing power of faith, gained grassroots support in
Faulks. Sebastian Faulks. Expect many more articles like this one from the Wall Street Journal as we approach the May 28th laydown date for the new James Bond novel, Devil May Care.
Doubleday and Penguin believe they can rekindle interest in the Bond brand by returning the story line to the Cold War. The Bond books of the 1980s and 1990s tried to make their stories contemporary, which critics said was jarring to fans. The Man With the Red Tattoo had Bond fighting terrorists who disrupted a Group of Eight meeting in Japan. Devil May Care is set in the classic Bond era. Its plot revolves around the heroin trade and a female character called Poppy, people familiar with the book say. The U.K. cover seems to corroborate this: It features a photo of a nude woman in silhouette, her body forming the stem of a blood-splattered poppy flower. Doubleday and Penguin decline to comment on the book's plot and didn't share a copy.
Not everyone is thrilled by this approach:
Some diehard fans are irate. "I find it terribly cheap and insulting to think that someone else has the right to continue writing on this storyline," says Russell Steer, who manages The Old Book Company of McLean, a used bookstore in McLean, Va., and owns complete sets of the Ian Fleming novels in hardcover and paperback. "Keep a work and its creator together. This is all about the money."
Meanwhile, there's no word on whether the audiobook version might be read by a certain Mr. Daniel Craig. (Best Bond since Connery — or even better than Connery? Discuss!)
The Biggest Bang:Chuck Palahniuk's next novel will have to ship with one copy containing an explosive device that will actually kill a reader, in order to top his own shock value.
The Fight Club author's latest book, Snuff, is described thusly:
Cassie Wright, porn priestess, intends to cap her legendary career by breaking the world record for serial fornication. On camera. With six hundred men. Snuff unfolds from the perspectives of Mr. 72, Mr. 137, and Mr. 600, who await their turn on camera in a very crowded green room. This wild, lethally funny, and thoroughly researched novel brings the huge yet underacknowledged presence of pornography in contemporary life into the realm of literary fiction at last.
The book — which doesn't seem to have much at all to do with snuff films — even has a MySpace page feature a faux aging porn star and a quasi-raunchy trailer. But, as far as I can tell, no explosive device.
Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea by Richard Kluger
Reviewed by Alan Taylor
The New Republic Online
In 1893, more than twelve million Americans traveled to Chicago to attend a national exposition celebrating the quadricentennial of Columbus's voyage of American discovery. "The World's Columbian Exposition" summoned Americans to celebrate the astonishing rapidity of their own ascent to continental dominance and international power. Barely one hundred years old, the United States had spread westward across North America to become one of the great powers on the earth, a nation capable of exerting influence and might throughout the Americas and across the Pacific to Asia. That expansion and ascent had come at the expense of North America's natives -- defeated, diminished, and confined to reservations -- and to the dismay of rival Spanish and British empires, driven from the continent or shunted to its margins. In 1893, the American victors sensed their arrival at a critical watershed in their history: a radical shift as continental expansion gave way to global reach.
[Editor's Note:Mark Sarvas will read at Powell's City of Books on Monday, May 12, at 7:30 p.m.See our calendarfor details.]
I'm a longtime and vocal Beatles fan, which I admit is scarcely an original passion, but what has me all worked up these days is a bootleg I was recently given. Now, the Beatles bootleg world is a deep rabbit hole, indeed, one into which I've done my best to avoid tumbling given my completist tendencies (or perhaps I should say "compleatist" in this case). But a friend recently gave me a CD which contained the original four-track Sgt. Pepper recordings broken down by track. I'm told this has long been out there but it's new to me and it's a revelation, one that has been filling my aural hours ever since.
On Pepper, the Beatles took advantage of four-track technology — which EMI had denied them in the early years — as never before, working more heavily than ever with overdubs, an experience Ringo didn't recall with much fondness as it left him feeling more like a session man than a ...
The protagonist is a D.C. lobbyist who casts herself in the center of a firestorm after she half-jokingly blogs a solution to the stress that retiring baby boomers will place on the Social Security system: a voluntary suicide program for the aging.
"[O]ne of Mr. Buckley's fizziest satires," praises the New York Times.
The screenplay will be written by Ron Bass — who won an Oscar back in 1988 for Rain Man.
The book tells of a plane crash near a hotel on an isolated island. The hotel becomes a gathering place for the relatives of the crash victims. An ornithologist, who lost her husband in the crash, travels
Editors at MSNBC.com removed and retracted a story about James Frey last Thursday afternoon after receiving some angry phone calls from members of Mr. Frey's publicity team. In the story "Frey Still Having Trouble Keeping Facts Straight," which ran in the Scoop gossip column, reporter Courtney Hazlett suggested that Mr. Frey, the disgraced memoirist whose debut novel will be published by HarperCollins next Tuesday, had been caught in a fresh tangle of lies.
But it turns out the MSNBC fact checkers were really at fault, which didn't please Frey's people in the least:
For Mr. Frey's supporters, the MSNBC item represented precisely the kind of sensational knee-jerk skepticism they had feared would dog the author's comeback attempt. Mr. Frey's agent, Eric Simonoff, wrote in an e-mail: "The irony is pretty thick: A writer is raked over the coals for lying, and forever after journalists can feel free to print whatever lies about him they choose to with utter impunity."
People often ask me whether strange people come to my Bonk events and ask peculiar questions. Not often. The people who come to my events are mostly book people. They're smart and funny and extremely likable. I have the most wonderful readers in the world. Though it's possible I'm biased.
There have been a few peculiar questions. Someone in Boulder asked me whether research had been done on whether volunteerism led to more intense orgasms. Wha..? Another person wanted to know if it's true that the genitals of a certain Amazonian tribe are deep blue. I surely hope that they are. This morning someone called in to the radio show I was on to ask about parallels between human and cetacean (dolphins and whales) sex. It was a bad connection, and I couldn't tell what exactly he was getting at. The program host encouraged me to talk about Alfred Shadle, whom I mention in the first ...
Reviewed by Rigoberto González
National Book Critics Circle
The Region of Lost Names by debut novelist Fred Arroyo tells the touching tale of Ernest and Magdalene, star-crossed lovers separated by conflicts that predate their families' migration from Puerto Rico.
College-educated and building careers in the Midwest, the two discover that they are not immune to repeating their parents' mistakes -- though, unlike their elders, they hope to earn forgiveness for the errors of their ways.
Ernest grows up in an agricultural town in Michigan, where his manhood is shaped by the burdens of hard labor and by his cruel co-workers, including Changó, his father, and his father's best friend, Boogaloo. When he's old enough, Ernest parts ways with his community to pursue an education. He readily admits that "there would be consequences for living my life around men like Boogaloo: They are a deep source of loneliness, despair, and work."
He becomes so focused on his future and on severing ties with his past that he loses sight of the woman who loves him, Magdalene. When
When father was ill and dying, I asked his permission to use material from a memoir he had written for his family and friends in the novel I was then writing. He said yes, and I integrated his stories about growing up during the Depression in rural Minnesota and his experiences as a soldier during the Second World War into The Sorrows of an American. The character of Lars Davidsen is based on my father, and so I've come to think of Erik Davidsen, the book's narrator as my imaginary brother, a person with parents similar to mine, who writes about the year following his father's death and his struggles to understand both his father's life and his own.
The narrative is organized around several secrets that unravel over the course of the book. Erik and his sister, Inga, discover a mysterious letter written in 1937 by someone named Lisa to their father begging him to keep his promise and never reveal what happened to an unnamed person who has died. Inga, a widow, finds herself entangled in a story her husband had kept hidden from her as she worries about her daughter, Sonia, who remains adamantly silent about both her father's death and what she saw from her schoolroom window on September 11, 2001. Erik realizes that the young artist he has fallen for and who rents the garden apartment of his Brooklyn brownstone, Miranda Casaubon, is keeping secrets of her own. She and her five-year-old daughter, Eglantine, are being harrassed by someone who leaves disturbing photographs outside the house, and Erik suspects that Miranda knows the identity of the stalker.
I think the novel is finally about the past in the present, the ghosts that haunt families from one generation into the next. As a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Erik confronts the traumatic memories of his patients as well as those that tormented his grandfather and father and which have affected him deeply. His search for answers takes him back to his immigrant roots, his childhood, and into the strangeness of his own dreams, where the dead are ressurrected. In one way or another, all the characters are trying to make sense of fragmentary emotions and memories that often resist explanation.
The Sorrows of an American was written as a fugue with reccuring themes and counter themes, associations, and rhythms. The form became a way to accumulate meaning through repetitions that emerged as I wrote the book: fathers and children, listening and deafness, recognition and blindness, the pain of speaking and the pain of keeping silent, the ambiguities of memory, loneliness, the music of feeling in the human voice, coldness and empathy, the fantasies that distort our perceptions of others, illness and recovery. The epigraph comes from Rumi. For me, his words summarize the novel's journey: "Don't turn away. Keep looking at the bandaged place. That's where the light will enter you."
What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
I worked for a medical historian on the Upper East Side in New York City when I was a graduate student. When the doctor interviewed me, he asked what languages I spoke. I said I spoke Norwegian, and had studied German and French. The old man leaned forward and inspected me. "Do you speak Persian?" "No," I answered. He looked shocked. "Not a word?" I confessed to knowing not a word. He hired me anyway and sent me off to the medical library to do research that seemed to have no focus. One day it would be leprosy, the next housemaid's knee, and the day after that, the plague. I enjoyed researching diseases, but began to suspect that my employer simply liked having me around, liked scrutinizing the index cards I filled up with notes, liked correcting what he felt were character faults — such as my interest in Foucault whom he detested — and that he paid me six dollars an hour for my presence. The research was entirely secondary. A strange job.
Writers are better liars than other people: true or false? Why, or not?
I have heard writers say that writing fiction is a form of lying. I passionately disagree. Fiction, when it is good, is a door to the truth (with a small t). I once wrote that writing a novel is "like remembering what never happened." It is an imaginative form of memory. Memory and imagination are closely related neurologically. People with memory impairment from brain injuries also have difficulties imagining things. The writer's search for a story that is emotionally true is a wrenching business, and when it works, it is possible for the reader to recognize something she could not have recognized without that particular work of art. That is why fiction can lie, can turn away from its own project, and become mere deception.
Ed Park is a founding editor of The Believer and a former editor of the Voice Literary Supplement. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review and many other publications. He lives in Manhattan, where he publishes The New York Ghost. Visit www.ed-park.com.
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Ed Park
