The Surrendered

As the title suggests, Chang-rae Lee’s latest novel, The Surrendered, is not exactly uplifting, but critics are calling it moving and impossible to forget.  The Surrendered tells the stories of June, Hector, and Sylvie–three characters who come together after experiencing horrifying violence in the Korean War.  June is a young girl when the war (and the novel) begins, and she loses all of her family members in a series of terrifying events.  She later encounters Hector, an American GI, and Sylvie, an American missionary, who have also been traumatized by the war.  The novel then spans decades and continents and stays with the characters into the 1980s.  As several critics point out, June is the most realistic, haunting character in the book, while at times Hector and Sylvie feel less developed.  But all three leave readers with an impression of war (the brutal, non-sugar-coated variety) that makes them think, as any great novel should.

“A gripping and fiercely imagined work that burrows deep into the dark heart of war, leaving us with a choral portrait of the human capacity for both barbarism and transcendence.” - Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

“[Readers] will read this book to share the life that’s in it, and they have every right to expect that it will offer life in return. With one full-hearted portrait out of three, Lee has only partially but rather magnificently succeeded.” - Donna Rifkind, The Washington Post

“In truth, very little in this book is forgettable. The Surrendered is a meaningful, moving story.” - Catherine Ramsdell, PopMatters

“The plot is complex, as Lee [...] raises profound questions about the role of fate, accident, and choice in every life.” - Liza Nelson, O, the Oprah Magazine

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Finally, a book equating librarians and superheroes!

Are librarians the world’s last hope?  How long will Going Rogue be the only Sarah Palin title in bookstores?  And what does the future hold for book tours?  Find out below…

• This week’s news gets off on the right foot with the NPR article, “How Librarians Can Save the World.”  The article profiles Marilyn Johnson’s This Book is Overdue!, a new nonfiction book discussing how the role of the librarian has changed (and why they are still important!) in the digital age.  The book introduces readers to today’s librarians and shatters the stereotype of the bespectacled old woman shushing raucous children.  NPR calls it, “an overdue tribute, indeed.”

• Have you heard the latest Sarah Palin news?  No, no run for the White House (yet).  This week HarperCollins announced they will follow up bestselling Going Rogue with another book by Palin.  This second book doesn’t have a title yet, but the publisher says it will be a “celebration of American virtues and strengths.”  The Guardian has more details on the project, and ShelfLife wonders if the book is paving the way for 2012 candidacy.

• Ever wondered what goes into a book tour?  In a recent article and blog post, the Los Angeles Times‘ Carolyn Kellogg reports on the state of the modern book tour.  Because it’s become harder and harder for publishers to justify the cost, many authors find themselves on DIY tours that include couch crashing, thousands of miles on the road, and endless calls to book stores.  Kellogg says, “If things continue on their current trajectory, book tours will become striated by class. Elite authors will go where they can reach big audiences, while others will have to work the angles to propel a trip on the road.”

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Model Home by Eric Puchner

You know those novels about families where everything–I mean, everything–goes wrong, yet you can’t stop reading?  And laughing out loud amid the heartbreak?  That’s the kind of book Eric Puchner (award-winning author of the story collection Music Through the Floor) has created with his debut novel, Model Home. The novel tells the story of the Ziller family, a group of 5 adjusting to life in southern California in the 80s.  The family left Wisconsin to pursue real-estate wealth, and it’s not long before things start to unravel.  Told alternately from the point of view of each family member, Model Home captures the teenage angst, financial stress, and marriage fissures that eat away at the Ziller’s American dream.  Critics are raving about Puchner’s ability to capture the details that give life to his characters and capture the reader’s attention.  Boston Globe critic Kevin O’Kelly sums up why Model Home is a must-read: “This book deftly captures the ’80s, a decade of illusory wealth, tawdry spectacle, and willful innocence - which also makes it the perfect novel for our time.”

“Puchner is a tender, humane observer of family life, and his lithe prose deepens our understanding of his characters.” - Marisa Silver, New York Times

“Puchner is an extraordinarily talented writer. He’s a master of mood and tone, able to make moments of pure hilarity follow heartbreak with the seamlessness of real life.” - Kevin O’Kelly, The Boston Globe

“Puchner knows how to bring home the ache, to let us feel with the characters that connection is only just barely out of reach.” - Catherine Brady, The Rumpus

“Puchner’s prose in these pages is forthright, delightfully detailed, with the distance he strikes from his characters just right” - Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune

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Barry Hannah, R.I.P.

• This week the literary community remembers novelist and short-story writer Barry Hannah, who passed away on Monday at the age of 67.  Hannah was the author of eight novels and five short-story collections, including his National Book Award-nominated debut, Geronimo Rex.  As a creative writing teacher, he worked with students around the country and helped develop the career of fellow Mississippi writer Donna Tartt.  Omnivoracious and Jacket Copy have more information about Hannah’s life and work.

• Peter Hedges, author of What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, has a new book out this week, and he chats with ShelfLife about his favorite books turned movies (no, he does not include What’s Eating Gilbert Grape on his list of faves).  He mentions classics like To Kill a Mockingbird and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and ShelfLife readers chime in with their own favorites below.

• And for you competitive literary types, the Guardian gives us “A Lenten quiz on hunger in literature.”  Test your knowledge of hungry characters and meager rations, from Aesop’s Fables to Lord of the Rings.  After the quiz, take a moment to appreciate the grocery store around the corner.

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Read Across America is Seussational!

Tuesday, March 2nd, is Dr. Seuss’s birthday, and the National Education Association (NEA) invites you to celebrate with Read Across America!  Read Across America is an annual event promoted by teachers, librarians, bookstores, politicians, and celebrities across the country to get kids excited about reading.  The NEA website and various reading blogs give tons of suggestions for how to celebrate, but here’s the simplest idea–read to a child!  One book, two books, red book, blue book…

Now if you want to go beyond reading a book, check out the following activities and events for ideas.

ACTIVITIES FOR KIDS

• The NEA website features a Read Across America song, complete with downloadable sheet music.  What kid doesn’t love a song that rhymes “school” and “cool?”
• For students with a flair for ceremony, the NEA gives us the Reader’s Oath, once administered by Supreme Court Justice Steven G. Breyer to a group of Washington, D.C. school children.  The site suggests having a judge present, but an official-looking teacher or librarian will probably suffice.
• Seussville.com offers printable Dr. Seuss door hangers, coloring sheets, and word searches to help kids celebrate the late author.
• For even more activities and extras, like Read Across America e-cards, check out Reading Rockets and the main NEA Read Across America website.

IDEAS FOR ADULTS

• The NEA suggests ways to get people involved in Read Across America, from bus drivers to high school students.  Ideas include overnight readathons and culture cafes with books on the menu.
• If you’re looking for books to recommend, check out the booklists provided by the NEA.  The Kids’ Top 100 Books list is especially great for reluctant readers since it features all the books kids love to read.
• The NEA also gives tips for teachers who want to organize a reading event. The official Read Across America day might be March 2nd, but you can celebrate reading anytime.

COOL LOCAL CELEBRATIONS

• Kids in Northern Arizona may get a visit from an Arizona Sundogs hockey player today to celebrate reading! This is the fourth year in a row that the team has participated in Read Across America.
• Vail, Colorado is celebrating with an event at the Vail Public Library. Local dignitaries (including the mayor) will be in attendance, and there will also be cake!
• Schools in Lincoln, Nebraska are working together to make sure every child can celebrate Read Across America.  Adams Elementary, one of Lincoln’s more affluent schools, collected over 1,800 books to donate to McPhee Elementary, a school with a more economically-challenged student population.  Thanks to Adams, every McPhee student will be going home today with several new books.
• If you’re hosting a unique event, let the NEA know by entering the 2010 Read Across America Awards!

But Can I Dance While Reading Across America?

• Of course you can! (Dr. Seuss IS the author of Hop on Pop, after all.) Check out this video showing how one elementary school plans to celebrate Read Across America this year.

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Mario - secret bookworm?

In today’s news, see who made the cut for the PEN/Faulkner short list, find out how to incorporate the classics into your Nintendo gaming schedule, and see why “tattoo” and “Bridget Jones” are in the same sentence.

• After considering 350 novels and short story collections, the PEN/Faulkner judges have announced five finalists “that freshly express the complex ways Americans believe and behave,” according to judge Al Brown.  Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs made the list, as did Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna and Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor.  Rounding out the list are two cheery-sounding short story collections, Sherman Alexie’s War Dances and Lorraine M. Lopez’s Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories.  Check out the Guardian for more details about the finalists and judging criteria.

• For those of you that get the urge to read Shakespeare in between games of Super Mario, Nintendo has answered your prayers with its new Classics Books pack.  This single game cartridge contains 100 titles from classic authors, including Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, and Arthur Conan Doyle.  Nintendo also has an e-reader in the works set to release March 28th (it doubles as a game console, of course).  Jacket Copy has more information, including a video of the e-reader in action.

• “Tatted up” isn’t generally an expression you’d associate with J.M. Coetzee and Helen Fielding, but Penguin is giving classics some street cred with its new “Penguin Inks” series.  The series commissioned tattoo artists and illustrators to create new covers for six modern classics, which you can see at ShelfLife.  Maybe you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but you have to admit–these covers are pretty cool.

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The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

As the cover and title suggest, Jerome Charyn’s The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson is a foray into the reclusive poet’s private life.  Charyn uses his talent as a fiction writer (he’s written 30+ novels) to assume the voice and persona of Emily Dickinson.  He tells the story in the first person, including snippets of Dickinson’s poems along the way.  Though he adheres loosely to Dickinson’s true biography, Charyn invents several central characters, including Tom, the reappearing love interest.  So far, the obsession Charyn’s Dickinson develops with Tom seems to be the novel’s biggest fault.  Critics claim that the fictional poet appears flighty and neurotic when confronted with romance (as she is several times throughout the novel), and she loses the intelligence and curiosity that infuse her work.  One critic even calls Charyn’s Dickinson “an embarrassment.”  Still, the novel doesn’t claim to know Dickinson inside and out–when read as Charyn’s exploration of who Emily Dickinson might have been, the book is a fun experiment in language that caters to the voyeur in all of us.

“[S]adly, Charyn’s greatest risk, Emily’s voice, resembles a clotted mosaic, pieced together from bits of Charyn and shards of Dickinson.” - Caryn James, New York Times

“Through a perceptive reading of Dickinson’s verse and correspondence, [Charyn]’s re-created her wild mind in all its erudition, playfulness and nervous energy.” - Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“I am pushed to say that the Emily Dickinson depicted in this novel is an embarrassment.” - Jane Juska, San Francisco Chronicle

“Charyn wisely makes Dickinson the narrator, allowing her to spin her oratorical web. We glimpse many different Emilys: the victim, the seeker of justice, the bold ingénue, a rebel, a saint, a sufferer of many deeply burning flames.” - Hillary Kelly, The New Republic

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Edward Cullen is only the latest fad in the history of vampire obsession.

Today’s news focuses on science fiction and fantasy, from the Nebula Awards to vampires to an emerging genre of paranoid fiction.  Speaking of which, is that your boss looking over your shoulder?

• The 2009 Nebula Award finalists have been announced, and Omnivoracious blogger Jeff VanderMeer (who also happens to be a nominated author), gives a brief overview of finalists in the novel, short story, novelette, and novella categories.  Vandermeer senses a welcome broadening of the Nebula Award’s criteria, writing, “In the past, the Nebula has seemed fairly conservative to me, but in the short fiction categories at least the nominations below begin to hint at a coming sea-change.”

• NPR’s article “For Love Of Do-Good Vampires: a Bloody Book List” confirms what we’ve all suspected–the vampire craze really is everywhere. In the piece, NPR contributer Margot Adler confesses to reading 75 vampire books in the past nine months, which led her to some fascinating questions about what our love of vampires says about us as a culture.  She talks to other vampire experts (aka, literature professors and critics) who suggest that the vampire stories of each generation say something about society’s underlying fears.  It’s up to you how you interpret Adler’s summary of today’s vampire, who “are all struggling to be moral even though they are predators by nature.”

• And from vampires to other dark fiction, Word Play’s Sonja Belle discusses an emerging genre of teen fiction that she calls “novels of the paranoid.”  She defines these as “stories in which characters live in a weird, oppressive world with arbitrary rules; a general sense of dread gradually resolves into a certainty that there is an evil force in charge, and that the evil force is out to get us, personally.” Unlike The Hunger Games, the characters in these novels are trapped by forces that aren’t human, such as a living prison in Catherine Fisher’s Incarceron.  Other new YA books that Belle includes in her “novels of the paranoid” are The Maze Runner by James Dashner, Dreamhunter by Elizabeth Knox, and The Midnight Charter by David Whitley.

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Cuba may be lacking a biathlon team, but they could take home literary gold in the 2010 Best Translated Book Award!

Today’s news should give you lots of ideas for weekend reading, from the best translated books of 2009 to a spotlight on unreliable narrators.  And if pictures are more your thing, we have some exciting news involving James Patterson and comic books… enjoy!

• The Olympics aren’t the only international competition going on!  Earlier this week, Three Percent, the University of Rochester’s international literature blog, announced the ten finalists for its 2010 Best Translated Book Award.  According to the blog, “these ten books separated themselves from the rest of the pack for their overall quality, including the greatness of the original book and its translation.”  Winners will be announced in March.  In the meantime, Jacket Copy discusses the finalists.

• In one of its fun, random top ten lists, the Guardian publishes a roundup of top ten unreliable narrators by author Henry Sutton.  In addition to naming ten books (yes, Lolita made the list), Sutton discusses the expanding role of the unreliable narrator in postmodern literature.  Compared to today’s books, he says, The Catcher in the Rye is “almost tamely reliable.”  Just don’t tell Holden Caulfield he said that…

• Because 9,826 bestselling titles isn’t enough, James Patterson is teaming up with IDW Publishing to create a comic book series debuting in May.  The first five-part series will be based on his young-adult novel Witch & Wizard, but the comic version will be called Shadowland (not to be confused with Alyson Noel’s vampire book of the same name).  USA Today has more details about the arrangement and what readers can expect.

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

If you haven’t read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks yet (it’s only been out for 2 weeks), you probably will soon.  In this nonfiction merger between history, science, race relations, and bioethics, Rebecca Skloot tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of 5 who died of cervical cancer in 1951.  The thing is, not all of Lacks’ cells died with her.  While she was in the hospital, a doctor took cell samples from her cervix without her consent.  These cells–dubbed “HeLa” cells–proved able to survive and multiply in a laboratory environment, which no other human cells had done.  Scientists took this discovery and ran with it, growing literally tons of tissue culture from the cells and testing and developing thousands of drugs.  We’ve probably all benefitted from the research done with HeLa cells, and pharmaceutical companies have reaped in profits, but what about Lacks’ family?  As Skloot shows in her book, Henrietta Lacks’ children didn’t know HeLa cells existed until 1973 (over twenty years after their mother’s death), and doctors had deliberately kept them in the dark along the way.  As Eric Roston of the Washington Post explains, Skloot’s book is “a deftly crafted investigation of a social wrong committed by the medical establishment, as well as the scientific and medical miracles to which it led.”  See what other critics are saying below.

“Readers are transported from the realm of white-coat laboratory science to the realms of poverty, racial discrimination, evangelism, fear and, ultimately, a weird brand of hope.” - Steve Weinberg, San Francisco Chronicle

“‘Immortal Life’ reads like a novel. The prose is unadorned, crisp and transparent.” - Eric Roston, Washington Post

“A complex and fascinating drama about how medical research intersected the lives of a poor black family in America.” - Jerry Coyne, Barnes & Noble Review

“Science writing is often just about ‘the facts.’ ­Skloot’s book, her first, is far deeper, braver and more wonderful.” - Lisa Margonelli, New York Times

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