Russell Hoban.

I’m writing this on the morning of Friday, the 16th of December.  

Yesterday’s New York Times featured two big obituaries that were of note to people in the world of books and letters. George Whitman, the owner of (as people kept saying) the fabled, the legendary, Paris bookstore Shakespeare & Co., died at the age of 98. I never went to Shakespeare & Co. and I really don’t have much to say about the place, though obviously it was a landmark and hugely important. Godspeed to you, Mr. Whitman. But I am bitter and sad about the attention Whitman’s death attracted because the other big obituary I read yesterday affected me much more deeply, and I was surprised that I didn’t read the sad responses to it on Facebook that I had genuinely expected.

Russell Hoban died.

Were you ever a child? When you were little, did you read those books about the little badger named Frances who made up songs about how she didn’t like eggs? Who had a little sister named Gloria who loved Chompo bars? Whose best friend, Albert, was obviously going to grow up to be the only confirmed bachelor badger in town? Who had an awful friend named Thelma who was such a bitch that I cannot imagine ever naming a child of mine Thelma?

Russell Hoban wrote a short but hugely important series of stories about Frances. Bread and Jam for Frances; Bedtime for Frances; A Bargain for Frances; A Birthday for Frances; Best Friends for Frances; A Baby Sister for Frances. They are all absolutely wonderful. The illustrations were by Hoban’s wife, Lillian, except for the one done by the master Garth Williams (I feel bad about this, but have to admit that the one with the Williams illustrations is actually the one where I like the pictures the least -- this is not unlike how the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle book that I like the least, even though it’s wonderful, is illustrated by Maurice Sendak -- I prefer the Hilary Knight illustrations in the other three titles). Hoban wrote many, many other books, including acclaimed works for grownups. But I know nothing about them. I tell you this not in a boastful way, but just to make it clear I am no authority on Russell Hoban.

But I can tell you this: Hoban is a guy whose work was essential to the formation of thousands and thousands and thousands of readers around the world. Maybe not all highbrow readers -- maybe not the sort of people who shopped at Shakespeare and Company in Paris. But they were readers. And they loved those books.

When I was small, I spent a lot of time in the tiny town of Enfield, New Hampshire. There isn’t much happening in Enfield and there was even less happening then, when I was little. But they had a charming public library, which was a Victorian house that had been converted into a library. Every summer I would borrow the same books from that library. These were books I would never have touched the rest of the year, when I was in New Haven -- they were special summertime only books. The Frances books were summertime books. So was Eloise in Paris. Sacred titles, these.

When the Foundry Bookstore was still around, one day, about ten years ago, I very coolly went in and bought all of the Frances books they had -- I think there were four titles in stock. I didn’t need them, strictly speaking, but I thought, “I need to take these home and keep them safe.” I read them once and tucked them away on my shelf, with no intention of doing anything with them except enjoying them now and then.

Now, I have a three year old who adores the Frances books, which I have been reading to her since she was an infant. She loves to eat bread and jam because of Frances. We will always have copies of the Frances books in our house. Because not enough people seem to be taking this seriously, I will be loud when I say Rest in peace, Mr. Hoban. I know I didn’t know all your work, but what I knew, I loved.

The Baby in Emily Brownlow's Tummy

There’s a baby in Emily Brownlow’s tummy. Emily Brownlow babysits for my daughter Saskia most Friday mornings so we’ve been watching her belly rise like dough in a bowl and talking about the baby inside. The timing’s good for us—to see this belly rise, and mull that whole “where babies come from” question. Saskia turns three in about a month, around the time Emily Brownlow’s baby will be born. The timing’s good for us not because Saskia’s going to have a baby brother or sister—we are not, Saskia’s the fourth, our eldest is fifteen and we are done with babies—but because Saskia is adopted and Emily Brownlow’s belly provides an opportunity to talk about birth and babies—and adoption.

Through Emily Brownlow, we kind of “get” the idea that babies grow in tummies. Through Jamie Lee Curtis’ Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born we kind of “get” adopted. Putting those two ideas together, though, that’s harder.

The little girl’s story in Tell Me Again is about a closed adoption: the adoptive parents say the first mom couldn’t be a mom and the baby flies home from the hospital with her new parents, their family a neat, pretty triangle. Our family isn’t really like that, with four kids and five grandparents from us, plus the mother Saskia doesn’t know as her mother, and aunts, uncles, cousins plus four more grandparents...

Saskia knows her birth mother, Caroline, as Auntie Cece. While she knows her grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins on that side, all those connections elude most two year-olds. She knows things like, “Grandma Lisa has two dogs at her house,” or “Liz and Bob’s house has a small crib and a big bathtub.” I am the Mama and my husband is the Papa; we don’t really require parents because we are the parents. Caroline suggested that Saskia call her Auntie Cece the way her nieces and nephews do. Maybe it fits, in terms of the kind of relationship they have when they see each other. But it doesn’t speak to the essential mother role Caroline plays.

Last night we had dinner with Auntie Cece, Aunt Margaret, cousins Sydney and Adam, and one set of grandparents, Janet and Jacques. Saskia had a grand time eating plenty of pasta with cheese, hamming it up for her audience, wandering the restaurant and meeting all the babies there and opening wonderful presents from the family she accepts as her family although she does not understand the relationships much beyond very nice to me.

Yet, clearly, she sort of understood something was up. Because at bedtime, she told me this: “When I was a baby at the hospital, I was small.” We’ve talked about babies and hospitals before. It did not seem coincidental that after seeing Caroline, she brought the hospital up again.

I asked whether she knew whose belly she was in when she was born at the hospital. She pointed to me. Huh. I took a deep and I hoped upbeat breath. “I would have loved you to be in my tummy,” I said. “But you were in Auntie Cece’s tummy before you born and your Mama and your Papa were at the hospital, too, waiting for you, and we were so happy to be there to hold you right away.” I paused. Her dark eyes were wide, and trained upon mine. I tried to look relaxed and assured, as I continued, “Your Mama and Papa took you home from the hospital right to your brothers.”

She asked, “Did we go home in our car?”

I answered, “It was a different car, a station wagon, before we had a van that could fit us all.”

It really didn’t matter that she’d heard the Auntie Cece part before. It was like the first hearing. It was somehow real.

She looked sad, her mouth drooping down, her eyes shiny although not wet. She hugged me a few minutes later and I asked, “Are you sad about the bellies? Whose belly did you want to be in?” She pointed to me. I hugged her closer and said, “I was right there when you were born and I was your Mama right away. And I was so happy to be your Mama." ***

All the questions that could follow about did Auntie Cece really want me are a ways off. Saskia has a Mama and a Papa and she doesn’t want it another way.

A few minutes later though, Remy came in (he is eight) and Saskia told him, “I was at the hospital and I was born and after Auntie Cece’s tummy I went to Mama and Papa and then we went home in a different car.” Phew. ***

Right now, Emily Brownlow’s baby is letting us talk about tummies and mommies and how I came to be Saskia’s Mama in a more complicated way than some mamas get to be mamas. Later, I imagine that pregnant women and birthdays and all kinds of little things I can’t yet imagine will sometimes sting, the way learning about the tummies was sad for Saskia. I will keep telling her how happy I was to become her Mama—and hope my words and my arms will be enough for her. ***

Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser writes a blog, Standing in the Shadows, at the Valley Advocate site.  She has contributed to various newspapers and publications including Child Magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Southwest Review, and the anthology The Maternal is Political, edited by Shari MacDonald Strong.  Sarah lives in Northhampton, Massachusetts, with her husband and four children.

847 Chapel Street, New Haven, Conn.

Many who know me know that I've been involved for some years with the Young Men's Institute Library, which has been located at 847 Chapel Street for the last hundred-and-some years. Growing up on York Street in the 1970s I had no idea the Library was there; living downtown in the 1980s and 1990s, I still didn't know it was there until (and I write this with chagrin) a Yale undergrad asked me one day if I knew anything about the place. I knew nothing. And I was too chicken to go up there and find out what it was. But the Yalie -- a sweet-and-fearless type -- went, and came back to me a day later saying, "You Need To Go There." In 2002 I was given a membership as a gift, and it changed my life. A few years after that, I joined the board of the Library, and my life changed again -- I gained a mission. I am an evangelist for the Institute Library.

At a dinner party in the fall of 2008 I met Will Baker, a local bookman. Our casual conversation about bookselling led me to ask him if he ever went to the Institute Library. He hadn't heard of it. I said, "Oh, you need go -- let me take you some day on your lunch break."

I took Will to see the Library the following week, as I recall, and it was, I gather, love at first sight. Shortly after that, Will left his position at the William Reese Company and enrolled in a library science program, a move that I found slightly confounding, but also understood: he had a mission, too. For various school assignments, Will threw himself into projects relating to or benefitting the Library. He built its first website -- a lovely, elegant little thing -- and conducted a survey of its members which was full of information that was interesting, surprising, and valuable -- and which would never have been undertaken by anyone on the Library's staff or board. The scale of effort Will put into these projects was simply beyond any one of us: these were labors of love, not merely assignments done to fulfill a degree requirement.

In January of 2011, the Board voted to install William C. Baker as the first Executive Director of the Young Men's Institute Library. A superior bookman -- by which I mean widely read, knowledgeable, and seemingly a Hoover for all information book-related -- Will moved to New Haven a few years ago and has thrown himself into becoming one of those social-lightning-rod types you read about in Malcolm Gladwell essays. I had heard of Will, myself, for years before I actually met him. On becoming acquainted with him, I learned that we knew at least a dozen of the same people. He's done volunteer work for New Haven Reads and at Christ Church New Haven; he has talked at length with at least 75% of the people he's ever laid eyes on, as far as I can tell; if he were interested in political office, he'd be a force to watch, but as it is, he's a bookman, and so he's just.... amazing.

Some folks are whip smart, and some folks are genuinely nice, and some folks are energetic and full of interesting ideas, but very few people combine all of these qualities. Will combines all of these qualities and adds a lot more to the mix; fortunately for the Institute Library, he's directing his love and energy toward the Library now, officially and full-time. The Library's hours have expanded: it is now open not just ten hours a week, but six days a week (M-F, 10-6; Saturday, with volunteer staff, 10-3). With Will at the helm, the Library will be developing new programming; re-working acquisitions policies; and, frankly, God knows what else. The guy's got a list of plans longer than my arm.

I know it's been hard for people to appreciate the Library in recent years because its hours were so choppy and difficult to work with. But now, the hours are longer. The place is open and right in the middle of a very buzz-y neighborhood (Chapel Street near Church -- there's a lot happening there); and there's wireless internet. You can go up and browse the shelves of books and borrow a stack of obscure 1930s thrillers or you can just sit and read for a bit and then amble off on your way. Either way, you are welcome to come by. Membership to the Library is still a humble $25 per year (and can be purchased with plastic for the first time if you go to www.institutelibrary.org).

I fell in love with the Institute Library when I saw they had almost every old book by Patrick Dennis on the shelf. Just sitting there. Waiting for me. I imagine that people who read the New Haven Review would have some similar experience on first browsing the stacks. On first walking in. The Institute Library is a beautiful time machine; a librarian walked in, one recent Saturday, and said to me in wonder, "It's a museum of what a library used to be." And it is.... except it's not a museum. It's the real deal. An old-fashioned membership library.

I predict you can fall in love with it too, and then, knocked silly with joy, you can leave the library and go have freshly made square doughnuts at the Orangeside Luncheonette around the corner. Really, a near-perfect morning.

And Everything Is Going Fine

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG9RajVgnaI[/youtube]

A Tribute to Spalding Gray by Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh’s new film does not ask: But who was Spalding Gray, really? That’s a nonstarter, if only because the asking act is best left to Gray himself.

Yes: an act, as in a bit of business -- or a performative personal literature, by which the audacity of sitting alone at a table on a stage and telling stories of self was refined into art. In those cozy dark hours just before the dawn of our era of online oversharing, Gray was the last great confessionalist.

And Everything Is Going Fine takes its title from an ironic leitmotif in one of Gray’s many monologues, whose intimacy and singularity the film has been designed to evoke. It’s a memorial scrapbook of archival Spalding Gray materials, arranged by Soderbergh and editor Susan Littenberg with affectionate attention and good organizational intuition. The images accrue not chronologically but in Graylike narrative zigzags: We see him getting older and younger and older again, moving through fluctuations of flannel and coif and footage formats. But the bigger picture, the story of his life, makes its way from a recognizable beginning toward an expected end. It’s the perfect one-man show: eccentric, hilarious and only boring to those already predisposed against him.

The rest of us are invited to cherish him once more, and to reflect. What a peculiar cultural figure, this doomed, delectably artful digresser. He was like a different make of David Foster Wallace -- the tone of his voice both intellectual and vernacular, the subject both himself and everything, the suicide both impossible and inevitable. The film does not directly acknowledge that Gray took his own life -- that’s the consensus, anyway -- in 2004, at age 62. It seems to presume that anyone who would be watching already knows this, and will not be able to forget it. Thus does hindsight become foreshadowing: We learn, or are reminded, that Gray’s mother’s mental illness was fatal; that after reading Freud he worried his unconscious would compel him to throw himself out a window; that he took a role in Soderbergh’s King of the Hill partly in order to explore a fantasy of self-induced death.

Expository concerns are handled as Gray handled them: forthrightly, yet discursively. There is no narration, except of course his own. The only character witnesses are his occasional interviewers and very occasional interviewees -- whose ranks include strangers gathered up from his audience and his own father. Otherwise, aptly, it is all Spalding all the time.

Gray recounts his experiments with sex, theater, family and fame. He charts the discovery and cultivation of his technique, which he came to describe as both “creative narcissism” and “poetic journalism.”

He says, “I like telling the story of life better than I like living it.”

My Caitlin Flanagan Problem: or, Shouldn't I Be Reading Something Else, Really?

My daughter was napping, so the house was quiet, and I was eating lunch and staring at my computer. On a whim, I went to the website for The Atlantic, which I always forget about and then remember with a huge sense of relief -- there I know I'll find something I'll want to read. I scrolled through the list of current articles and noticed a piece by Caitlin Flanagan, and clicked on it eagerly. As I settled in to read it, fork in hand, I shook my head and asked "Why am I doing this to myself? It's just going to make me crazy." But I had to read it.

Caitlin Flanagan is on a mental list I have of writers who I read whenever I can, even though they make me crazy. I've got a little list of such writers. Half the time -- more than half the time -- what they write turns me into a raving loony, pissed about their lack of critical thinking, their shitty writing skills, or some other massive flaw in their work; and yet I read every word I can find by these people. Why is this? Why is this? Why do I do this to myself? It's a form of masochism, right? But why?

And am I the only person who does this?

Flanagan is a writer who seems to inspire this reaction in lots of people, so I can't be alone. I mean, she makes people crazy, but she's still earning a living as a writer. I don't think anyone disputes that she's entertaining; she's got lots of clever sentences, and she seldom sounds simply moronic. But nuanced thinking may not be her strong suit, shall we say. I read her and while I'm laughing at some zinger she's come up with, I often think, "Well, no, that's not really true." And I wind up frustrated with the piece as a whole, even as I agree with several points, or even the thrust of the article overall. Even if I think she's got a good idea, I inevitably feel it's not well argued (which is comical, coming from me, because I am probably the least lucid or organized thinker in my zip code). When someone like me thinks a piece isn't well thought out, you've got problems.

But this phenomenon of "I hate you/I love you/When's your next book coming out" happens to me with fiction writers as well. Over the years, based on my affection for one writer, I've been led to the works of other authors who I've been told, or who I suspect, will quench my never-to-be satisfied thirst for another book by my beloved (ok, it's Laurie Colwin, I admit it). So over time I have read numerous novels that I opened hopefully, but have left me just angry that I wasted my time. Books by Maemeve Medwed -- who are the people who really think these are great? Because I just can't get into them; novels by Cathleen Schine, who I ought to love, but who I just.... don't; Meghan Daum. Oh, Meghan Daum. Her first book of essays made me insane: it was so good, so good, and she was so likeable in so many ways, but I just wanted to smack her on the head and tell her to shape up. I approached her novel The Quality of Life Report with apprehension, knowing on the one hand that it would almost certainly suck, but positive that I would devour it in maybe one and a half sittings. I was right on the money. Why did I do this to myself? I could have been reading something I actually enjoyed; instead, I forced myself to read this novel that held no surprises, no phrase that stuck in my head forever after (not true with My Misspent Youth, a collection of pieces that rings in my head all the time). I received her book about house hunting for my birthday last year and was so excited to read it, even as I knew it would disappoint -- and my suspicions were fulfilled. I opened it immediately and couldn't stop reading but in the end I was left feeling like I hadn't read anything at all.

It's very frustrating.

There's a test I have, though, which is, Do you keep your copies of the books by these people, or do you get rid of them (or never even buy them in the first place, but just borrow them from the library).

Cathleen Schine, I've kept one novel (last year's The Three Weissmans of Westport). There are no Medwed books on my shelves.

I'm keeping all my Meghan Daum.

Why do I read writers whose works I know I won't like? It's not like I'm getting paid to read these things (usually). I keep hoping for the next Veronica Geng, Laurie Colwin, James Thurber, or Patrick Dennis. I'm not looking for cosmic enlightenment, folks; just some solid light entertainment. I guess I'll just have to let you know when I find it, and in the meantime, re-read some Betty MacDonald. She's good on a cold winter day.

Snu? What's new with you?

What's new with us? First, our next issue is out.  Subscribe and check it out.  We have essays on being a ski bum, on being mistaken for a celebrity, on being the new New Haven librarian, on being married happily... or not, on crossing the border, on loving our unloveable hometowns, on being sick and healthy again.

Then there's the poetry and the fiction--all good stuff.

By why stop there?  Our publicity machine has been going strong as well!  The Boston Globe recently had an article about The New Haven Review and its book publishing venture.

And then there are our authors and their books.  Rudy Delson, author of NHR Books' How to Win Her Love, was interviewed on WFMU (the interview can be heard here) and our own local WPKN (listen here).

Poet Charles Douthat recently read from his Blue for Oceans at the Poetry Institute at the Institute Library!

And as for Gregory Feeley's own recent Kentauros, we are looking forward to our first radio programs, courtesy of Connecticut NPR, where he sits down with New Haven Review editors to talk books and whatever else his fervid imagination has cooked up--but more on that later!

Review of Kentauros

Lois Tilton over at Locus magazine has posted a very nice review of Kentauros, our new book by Gregory Feeley. Here's just a little of what she has to say:

Every part of this work casts a light, provides a different insight. But these lights are all aimed in a single direction and not at the fantasy story told in the second and sixth chapters. They are aimed at illuminating the myth. A fantasy story is one way of doing this; a literary story is another, and the several essays cast separate lights of their own. Pindar’s ode, no more and no less, was doing the same thing, thousands of years ago (the Greek poets notoriously made stuff up as much as today's fantasy authors). This work is a set of floodlights, and it is the myth itself on the stage, wearing different costumes in each act.

Thank you, Ms. Tilton. And for those whose interests are officially piqued, please visit our store.

20 Non-fiction Writers Under 40

OK, so you may remember that a few months back a little magazine called The New Yorker decided to make a list of 20 top fiction writers under the age of 40. Another magazine — something called “Granta” — does similar lists from time to time. But why does nobody ever make such lists for non-fiction writers? Some would say that non-fiction is rather vital right now. So we made such a list. We asked ourselves, we asked our friends. There is nothing scientific about this list. They are in alphabetical order. Some are in fact over 40 years old, but not by much. There are more than 20 of them. We did not all agree on all of them; some of us have substantial conflicts of interest with some of them. We hope you will meet some people you had not heard of. We hope you will seek out their writing. (Nota bene: much of the research for this list was done by our fabulous intern, and rising literary star, Jeremy Lent.)

There are hyperlinks here, but you have to hunt for them with your little mousie. Make it a fun game.

• Rachel Aviv is a freelance journalist and is currently a Rosalynn Carter Fellow for mental health journalism with the Carter Center. She’s written for the New York Times about off-beat educational topics, such as the death of Braille and naked parties at elite American colleges. In one of her greatest piece, she wrote about Toastmasters for The Believer.

• Eula Biss teaches and writes at Northwestern University, and she is the founding editor of Essay Press, which publishes long-form essays. After college, Biss taught in the New York City public school system before beginning to write essays and books. Her collection of prose poems, The Balloonist, was published in 2002. Notes from No Man’s Land (2009) is a book of essays about race and racial identity in America, and it won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

• Tom Bissell (b. 1974) began writing after a bout of depression cut short his stint with the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan. After his return, Bissell worked as an editor for Henry Holt before going on to write travel journalism and books. The Father of All Things (2007) is Bissell’s account of his father’s military tour in Vietnam and a recent father-son return trip to the country. In 2003, Bissell co-authored Speak, Commentary, a book of fake commentaries on science fiction films. (The supposed commentators include Noam Chomsky, Ann Coulter and Dick Cheney.) Most recently, Bissell wrote about his more sedentary pursuits in Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (2010).

• Dan Chiasson has published three collections of poetry and has been the poetry editor for The Paris Review. In 2007, he published One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America, a collection of essays on the pros and cons of autobiographical material in modern American poetry. He frequently reviews for The New York Review of Books. Chiasson teaches poetry workshops and courses on American poetry at Wellesley College.

• Ta-Nehisi Coates (b. 1975) is a senior editor at Atlantic Monthly, where he writes about politics, race and pop culture. He also writes a popular blog at TheAtlantic.com. Coates dropped out of college after a rough ride through the Baltimore public school system, but he was hired by Time in 2005. In 2009, Coates published a memoir, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood about his father’s complicated role in his childhood.

• Joshua Cohen (b. 1980) is the author of six novels and story collections. Most recently, he published Witz (2010), a novel about an imagined future in which only one Jew remains alive on earth and yet Jewish culture is all the rage. Cohen also wrote A Heaven of Others (2008), a novel about the afterlife of a Jewish boy killed by a Palestinian child. Cohen also writes a regular column for Tablet Magazine about literature in translation. The majority of his personal webpage is written in Latin.

• John D’Agata’s (b.1974) most recent work is About a Mountain (2010), a book-length investigative piece about the U.S. government’s thwarted plan to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas. D’Agata also published Halls of Fame (2003), a collection of essays. The eponymous essay explores America’s nearly 3,000 halls of fame, including one dedicated to shuffleboard players. In 2009, D’Agata edited the anthology Origins of the Essay, which begins with prose selections from Sumerian and Akkadian writers in 1500 BCE, then approaches the modern era by way of Petrarch, Bacon, Swift and Woolf. D’Agata currently teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa.

• Jason Fagone (31 years old) is a freelance journalist living in Philadelphia. He writes about science, sports and culture for GQ, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, Slate and other magazines. In February 2010, he published an investigative piece in GQ about a 2008 Philadelphia shooting, possibly perpetrated by former Colts wide receiver Marvin Harrison. As a result of Fagone’s reporting, the Philadelphia D.A. began reinvestigating the case. In 2006, Fagone published his first book, Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream, which chronicled his journeys to 27 eating contests.

• Keith Gessen (b. 1975) is one of the founding editors of n+1, a twice-yearly journal started in 2004 that publishes articles on politics, literature and culture. Gessen has also written book reviews for magazines like New York and Slate. Gessen was born in the USSR, and although his family moved to the U.S. when he was six, some of his writing has focused on Russia. That includes a 2004 article in Atlantic Monthly about the caretakers of Lenin’s tomb and a 2005 English translation of Voices From Chernobyl, an account of the nuclear disaster by the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich. In 2008, Gessen published his first novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, a tale of three recent college graduates, each struggling to make a life as a writer.

• Joshua Glenn (who is 42!) is the cofounder of HiLobrow, where he describes himself as a “freelance writer, editor, and cultural semiotics analyst for international brands.” The blog has various contributors who write everything from fiction to posts about web technology and, of course, cultural semiotics. Glenn was an editor and columnist for the Boston Globe’s “Ideas” section. In 2007, he co-edited the anthology Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects With Unexpected Significance, a collection of first-person essays about favorite objects. In 2008, he co-wrote The Idler’s Glossary, a listing of the etymology of hundreds of words and phrases used to describe people in various states of not working.

• Chuck Klosterman (b. 1972) worked as a journalist in North Dakota and Ohio before moving to New York City in 2002. Since then, he’s written freelance articles for the New York Times Magazine, The Believer and Esquire, among other publications. Some of his freelance work focuses on sports: Klosterman contributes to ESPN.com’s Page 2, which published his week-long blog during the 2006 Super Bowl. Perhaps best known for his nonfiction books, Klosterman has published six books since 2001. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto (2003) is a collection of humorous essays on such topics as MTV’s The Real World, Billy Joel and the computer game The Sims. In 2010, Klosterman released HYPERtheticals: 50 Questions for Insane Conversations, a card game involving unusual conversation-starters. His greatest work remains his first, the memoir Fargo Rock City.

• Brendan Koerner is a contributing editor for Wired, where he writes the monthly “Mr. Know-It-All” column, responding to reader queries about 21st century ethical issues in technology, medicine, video gaming, etc. Koerner also writes feature articles for Wired, covering topics like the continuing enigma of Alcoholics Anonymous, a fungus that’s threatening crops across Africa and the Middle East and the possibility that Facebook and Twitter help their users be more productive. In 2008, Koerner published Now the Hell Will Start, a biography of an African American soldier in WWII sent to help build a supply road between India and China.

• Gideon Lewis-Kraus is an American-born writer who lives in Berlin. We have no idea how old he is, but we think he is young; he writes young, and we mean that in a good way. He has contributed articles to Village Voice, The Nation, and Harper’s, among other publications. In 2008, Lewis-Kraus wrote an article for Harper’s called “The Last Book Party: Publishing drinks to a life after death,” a first-person report from the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair and a consideration of publishing’s future. The piece spawned a lot of talk. And that was because the piece was very, very good. He wrote this too.

• Dayo Olopade is currently a political reporter for the online news site The Daily Beast. She began her professional writing career at The New Republic, where she covered the 2008 presidential primaries and election. Olopade is also a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New American Foundation. Her fellowship duties include reporting on the effect of disruptive technologies on human development, with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. In June 2010, Olopade published an article in Foreign Policy about Apple’s troubling non-presence in Nigeria and surrounding countries.

• David Orr is a writer and lawyer living in Ithaca, New York. During law school at Yale, Orr began writing about poetry for various publications. In 2008, he wrote the article “The Politics of Poetry” for The Poetry Foundation, in which he used a comment made at an Ohio rally for Hilary Clinton (“[Obama’s] a poet, not a fighter”) to discuss the misconception that politics and poetry don’t mix. He has the virtue of making people mad. Orr also writes the column “On Poetry” for The New York Times Book Review.

• David Samuels (b.1967) is older than 40, but we included him anyway. He is a contributing editor at Harper’s, where he’s written about such topics as Super Bowl XL, America’s nuclear-testing program and Woodstock 1999 (an attempted revival of the 1969 rock festival). He writes for a lot of other magazines. In 2008, Samuels published The Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Imposter James Hogue, about a 28 year-old convicted thief who successfully passed himself off to Princeton admissions as a 16 year-old cowboy and self-taught orphan. At the same time, he published a collection of his work, Only Love Can Break Your Heart.

• Kelefa Sanneh has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2008. Prior to that, he was the pop-music critic for The New York Times, beginning in 2002. His article “The Rap Against Rockism,” which appeared in the Times in 2004, discusses a perhaps-ungrounded set of prejudices held by many “old school” rock fans. Sanneh’s New Yorker articles have included profiles of lesser-known pop-culture figures and a report on Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ (led by embattled pastor Jeremiah Wright). Sanneh’s work has appeared in the yearly anthology Da Capo Best Music Writing in 2002, 2005 and 2007.

• Samantha Shapiro is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and has also written for Slate, Mother Jones, Wired, and others. Many of Shapiro’s articles deal with religion: for instance, an obituary of “Reverend Ike,” a New York preacher who spearheaded the “power of positive thinking” gospel; a 2006 speech by the outgoing chancellor of the New York Jewish Theological Seminary that ruffled many Jewish feathers; a first-person account of how her atheist-leaning nephew finally got bar-mitzvahed. Here is a recent piece.

• Jake Silverstein (b. 1975) was named editor of Texas Monthly in 2008. After college and graduate work in English, Silverstein moved to Marfa, Texas, and began writing for the Big Bend Sentinel. Then, he embarked on a freelance writing career, roaming Texas and Mexico in search of magazine stories. The details of that search are chronicled in Nothing Happened and Then It Did (2010), Silverstein’s first book. In 2007, Silverstein won the PEN/USA Journalism Award for a Harper’s article about a deathly automobile road race in Mexico.

• Lizzie Skurnick is a critic, poet, essayist, blogger and author. She regularly contributes book reviews to The New York Times and The Washington Post. She has published her poems in The Iowa Review and The New Haven Review (among others), and in 2005, she released a collection called Check-In. Since 2003, Skurnick has maintained the blog Old Hag, to which she posts book reviews and her thoughts about various literary and journalistic matters. And if that weren’t enough, Skurnick has published ten teen novels, including some in the Sweet Valley High series. She writes a weekly column about teen lit for Jezebel.com, and in 2009, she published Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading.

• Zadie Smith (b. 1975) is crazy famous, deserves to be, and soon will start writing the New Books column for Harper’s. If you only know her novels, check out her collection of essays.

• Touré (b. 1971) is a music writer, novelist and TV personality. Since 1997, he’s been a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, where he’s published cover stories on such hip-hop artists as Alicia Keys, 50 Cent and Jay-Z. He has released two collections of his magazine writing, as well as Soul City (2004), a magical-realist novel about a mayoral election in an imagined utopia of African-American culture. Touré is also the host of two music programs on Fuse TV.

• Lindy West is the film editor for The Stranger, a weekly arts and culture newspaper in Seattle. She also makes a lot of noise online, both through her blog (posted on both TheStranger.com and Telegraph.co.uk) and on Twitter. On her blog, West’s bio says that she writes about “film, popular culture, lady stuff, animal attacks, and amusing garbage she finds on the ground.” Her film reviews are first-person, humorous and highly opinionated. She wrote this bit of awesomeness about Sex and the City 2. We have no idea how old she is.

Finding the Words

The Yale Cabaret is back.  And the new season began with a memorial service. At Good Words: A Memorial with Music for Paul Everett Tarsus, audience members found themselves sitting on folding chairs, eating from a catered buffet service, attending a memorial for a man who died in Hamden, a "local theater artist," according to his obituary, who requested that his memorial be held in a theater.  Seems the Cab's black-walled basement digs was the best they could do.

The conceit of the staging meant that for the opening of the play, we were addressed as congregants at a service.  Nehemiah Luckett welcomed us and filled in a bit of backstory, though very minimally.  When he led an onstage chorus (Sunder Ganglani, Taylor Vaughn-Lasley, Christina Anderson) in "Glory, Glory, Hallelujah," and got the audience to join in, the ice was effectively broken and we were ready to hear the story.

The burden of the story was borne by Paul's father, Dr. Paul Caleb Tarsus (Trai Byers), a minister descended from a teacher who abandoned the small school in the south where his father taught to study at the Yale Divinity School.  As that synopsis might suggest, we might expect a tale of  generational tension and disappointed expectations, about how a minister raised a theater artist, but the story of Paul Jr.'s life and death was not the main focus.  Instead, the drama focused on the old man's youth in New Canaan, Georgia, and his eventual flight to the north, where his son was born.

The power of the piece derived from the uplifting vocals of the chorus, and depended upon Byers' capable performance as the old man, doddering through his memories. As Dr. Tarsus told us, memory is like a cabinet with a lot of drawers in it, but lately the contents of his drawers have gotten mixed.  And that meant he sometimes spoke as a son addressing his own father and sometimes as the father of the young man who died, a slippage heightened by the chorus which provoked him with voices that echoed and bedeviled his statements while also adding strikingly rhythmic and poetic effects to his monologue.

The chorus were in fine voice, particularly Ganglani's spirited lead on "Poor, Wayfaring Stranger" and Vaughn-Lasley's angry rendition (in the role of Eula, the girl Dr. Tarsus left behind) of "Pass Me Not O Gentle Savior."  The songs flitted in and out of the narrative, commenting on Dr. Tarsus' memories, and opening his monologues to areas of feeling that his effort to find only "good words" failed to acknowledge.

The most unsatisfying aspect of the play, written by Meg Miroshnik, with music (including two original songs) by Mark A. Miller, directed by Andrew Kelsey (Artistic Director for the Cab this season) was the uncertainty about the ultimate nature of the relation between Paul the father and Paul the son, a relation indicated by the son's choice of theater rather than the ministry, but that story wasn't presented.  In its place was the theme of the overwhelming continuity of past and present, as Byers, recreating his courtship of Eula after she followed him to New Haven, enacted a forceful elliptical segue from his young start in life to an old man's present in which his son was gone.

It was great to be back at the Cab where each week provides a new experience, a new challenge, and, as the motto for the new season reads, "shifting perspectives on performance."  Next up, Sept. 23-25, is Far Away, by British Brechtian playwright Caryl Churchill, directed by Flordelino Lagundino.

Listen Here, Fall 2010 Season

The Arts Council of Greater New Haven, New Haven Review, and New Haven Theater Company are pleased to announce the return of Listen Here, the weekly short story reading series in which actors from the New Haven Theater Collective read short stories chosen by New Haven Review editors. The Fall 2010 season of Listen Here will take place on Thursday evenings, from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m., with reading occurring on a rotating basis at Book Trade Café (1140 Chapel Street), Lulu: A European Coffee House (49 Cottage Street), and Manjares Fine Pastries (838 Whalley Avenue, on the corner of West Rock Avenue). September 23: Hardly Boiled at Book Trader Café, 1140 Chapel Street, off York St. Woody Allen's "The Whore of Mensa," read by Steve Scarpa Ethan Coen's "The Russian," read by Jeremy Funke

September 30: Short Shorts at Lulu, A European Coffeehouse, 49 Cottage Street, off Orange St. Yukio Mishima's "Swaddling Clothes" Katherine Anne Porter's "Magic," read by Shola Cole Leo Tolstoy's "Alyosha the Pot," read by Bennett Lovett-Graff William Carlos Williams' "The Use of Force," read by George Kulp

October 7: Homesick at Manjares Fine Pastries, 838 Whalley Avenue, on West Rock Ave! Ernest Hemingway's "Soldier's Home," read by Peter Chenot Betsy Boyd's "Scarecrow," read by Hilary Brown October 14: Crossroads at Book Trader Café, 1140 Chapel Street, off York St. J.D. Salinger's "For Esme - With Love and Squalor," read by Steve Scarpa

October 21: Fathers, Sons, Mothers, Daughters at Lulu, A European Coffeehouse, 49 Cottage Street, off Orange St. Steve Stern's "The Tale of a Kite," TBD Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing," read by Shola Cole

October 28: Halloween Special at Manjares Fine Pastries, 838 Whalley Avenue, on West Rock Ave! Joyce Carol Oates' "Where is Here?," read by Jeremy Funke Charles Lambert's "The Scent of Cinnamon," read by Erich Greene

November 4: Hello, Goodbye at Book Trader Café, 1140 Chapel Street, off York St. James Joyce's "Eveline," TBD David Schickler's "The Smoker," read by Steve Scarpa

November 11: Strangers in a Strange Land at Lulu, A European Coffeehouse, 49 Cottage Street, off Orange St. Anton Chekhov's "The Bet," read by Ian Alderman Naomi Williams' "Rickshaw Runner," TBD

November 18: Food & Drink at Manjares Fine Pastries, 838 Whalley Avenue, on West Rock Ave! Beena Kamlani's " Zanzibar," TBD Paul Beckman's "Another One of His Punishments," TBD November 25 Thanksgiving — no readings

December 2: Mere Children at Book Trader Café, 1140 Chapel Street, off York St. Sarah Orne Jewett's "A White Heron," read by Shola Cole Amy Hempel's "The Most Girl Part of You," read by Hilary Brown December 9: Close Calls at Lulu, A European Coffeehouse, 49 Cottage Street, off Orange St. Ernest Hemingway's "The Killers," read by Steve Scarpa Roald Dahl's "Man from the South," read by Jeremy Funke

December 16: Tall Tales at Manjares Fine Pastries, 838 Whalley Avenue, on West Rock Ave! Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," read by Peter Chenot Stephen Vincent Benét's "The Devil and Daniel Webster," read by George Kulp

Working (for) the Man!

We're always happy at New Haven Review when one of our own takes to the printed page and places his or her authorial stamp upon something that a publisher has enough confidence in to put some financial muscle behind it. Such is the case for business writer and management consultant Bruce Tulgan, who has served as a trustee and guiding spirit to the New Haven Review since its founding. Bruce is the author of Managing Generation X (2000), Winning the Talent Wars (2002), It's Okay to Be the Boss (2007), and Not Everyone Gets a Trophy (2009). If it was okay to be the boss and not everyone got a trophy, apparently it is also okay to manage your boss: the argument Bruce makes in his latest work It's Okay to Manage Your Boss: The Step-by-Step Program for Making the Best of Your Most Important Relationship at Work (Jossey-Bass, 2010). The subtitle says it all, but just in case that wasn't enough, let's let the publicists in and do their share:

If you are like most employees, you answer to multiple bosses -- some directly, and others indirectly. You are often pulled in different directions by these competing authority figures with competing interests and agendas. All of them have the ability to improve or worsen your daily work conditions, your chances of getting rewards, and your long term career prospects. And all of them are different.

Under these circumstances, you are the only one you can control. You can control your role and conduct in each of these relationships. You can control how you manage and how you get what you need from these relationships. You have no choice: If you want to survive, succeed, and prosper, you have to get really good at managing your bosses.

Why? The boss—at every level—is the most important person in the workplace today. On this there is widespread consensus: Study after study show that the relationship employees have with their bosses is the number one factor in the ability of employees to produce high quality work consistently, to feel good about work, to earn credit and flexible work conditions and greater rewards.

If you are looking for guidance on how to manage your boss, there are zillions of so-called experts out there who will be happy to provide it. The problem is that so much of the advice about "managing up" or "managing your boss" out there doesn't tell the whole story. This book is written for people who want to be high-performers. In order to be a high performer in today's workplace, you need to create high-engaged relationships with every boss - whether that boss is great, awful, or somewhere in between.

I've read several of Bruce's books and they're always good fun if solid business advice is what you're looking for. Since I've worked for nearly two decades in publishing—many of those years in fact in the corporate business settings Bruce describes—the advice is well placed, based as it is on hundreds (if not thousands) of interviews Bruce has held with corporate employers and employees trying to manage those seemingly indefinable human elements in the business relationship. Congratulations, Bruce!

—Bennett Lovett-Graff, Publisher, New Haven Review

Blame Yale: A Brief Todd Solondz Q&A

You’ll be glad to know that writer-director Todd Solondz is not finished rummaging through the inner lives of depressive perverts. That puts it more cruelly than Solondz would, which is part of his charm. With Life During Wartime, a quasi-sequel, as he has called it, to his 1998 film Happiness (i.e. “the one about the pedophile”), Solondz revisits the variously troubled characters from that earlier film, and even recasts them. Instead of Philip Seymour Hoffman, we get Michael Kenneth Williams (who played Omar on The Wire). Instead of Jon Lovitz, we get Paul Reubens. And so on.

What remains is an arresting affinity for suburban dysfunction. You might call it the Solondz touch. You might call it an inappropriate touch. Here’s what the filmmaker has to say for himself.

Do people stop you in the street and say, “What’s wrong with you?”

I mean, people have been nice...to my face. I don’t quiz people. I don’t interrogate them. When people say nice things I say thank you. So no. I have to say it says something good about human nature that many people do stop and say nice things to me, actually. On the street, in the subway, what have you. But I know there are just as many people who hate everything I do. And they have the good discretion and good tact never to assault me.

I mean this as a compliment to you both: If Paul Reubens deserves to be in anyone’s films, it’s yours.

I’ve always loved him. He read for me years ago. So I had a sense of what he could do, and we both took a leap of faith in each other here. With Paul of course there’s an extra layer of pathos or poignancy because of the whole history that the audience is aware of with him. And also, no one has any idea that he’s even capable of such a performance. And that’s all very exciting. And I’m very playful; in my head the character probably even has his own Pee Wee Herman doll.

That’s something to think about. How did you first discover cinema?

I went to Yale, and they didn’t have a film major. But that’s where I first thought of the idea. I think because I was socially shy or awkward and felt intimidated. When I went, we had VHS tapes, they had film societies. It could be a Howard Hawks double-bill, followed by Maya Deren, followed by Bergman, Garbo. Every night, many options. And I went out all the time. In part to escape the pressures, the social pressures, and in the process I fell in love with movies in a way that I hadn’t taken seriously as a child. I mean, I can remember I was 16 and my mom came home, and she said, “I saw a movie, Todd. What a movie. It was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” I said, “Oh, I want to see that.” And she said, “No, no, you’re too young.” So I was very protected, in what I saw growing up. It had to be rated G. And then things changed in college. I didn’t have to understand a movie. I just let it all wash over me.

So at what age would the younger you be old enough to see the movies you now make?

I have a different viewpoint from my mom. I think children have built-in censors. I think parents are always worried about, “Oh my god, the sex, the violence.” But I can remember, as a kid, anytime they started kissing, I went for the Jujubes at the concession. I took a break. No interest. And I think usually the more anxious the parents are about that stuff, probably they don’t realize they themselves are the main source of whatever nightmares these kids are having.

What will be your next movie?

The title is Dark Horse. And I can tell you there’s no child molestation, rape or masturbation in it. But I’m afraid those are the only details I can share at this point.

Those are useful details.

It’s an abstraction, really, until it’s made. You have all sorts of plans; nothing ever turns out the way you plan it. If I were maybe smarter, wiser, I would maybe have a real career. But I’m not interested in that. I just make movies that interest me in my own way. I don’t pay attention -- I can’t -- to what I maybe should do. A lot of times I think, “Oh this could make a lot of money, I have a very marketable idea.” But then I end up writing something unmarketable. I listen to whatever compels me to put pen to paper. I don’t have a strategy. I’m very fortunate. When I look back, I say, “Oh my god, someone gave me money to make these movies.” It’s amazing. But I never presume that I will get money again. I have to be zen about all of this. I mean, you can just get depressed and jump out the window. But I have a sense of humor about it all.

Writers Artists Collaborative

Whenever a writing contest comes along that we believe in, we feel happy to post about. We reproduce the announcement from the Westport Arts Center below.

……..

The Westport Arts Center, in partnership with Ina Chadwick's MouseMuse Productions, is seeking well-crafted memoirs of up to 1500 words for its upcoming writing competition.

As a multi-disciplinary arts organization, WAC is committed to integrating the literary and visual arts within its regular programming. Building on the success of our two previous writing initiatives, the Writers Artists Collaborative will rely on the Arts Center's visual arts exhibitions as a starting point for literary exploration.

This writing contest will culminate with professional actors reading the winning works at a festive reception and award ceremony in the WAC gallery on Sunday, October 17, 2010.

Top winners will also receive:

1. $175 from the WAC Writer's Endowment

2. Online publication on the WAC web literary archive

3. Memoir read live on radio

4. Publication in Weston Magazine and its affiliate magazines

Entries are due September 7, 2010. Download the entry form here.

Literary Regrets

Lisa Dickler Awano is a scholar of Alice Munro and an alumna of the University of Chicago, which I attended as well. She is also a subscriber to New Haven Review and a forthcoming contributor.

When we saw each other at the most recent New Haven Review gala, we talked briefly, as we have before, of the ol' "U of C." She had recently visited the campus, where Amy Kass was being honored. Our conversation turned, as per usual, to the topic of faculty we had known.

For me, Amy Kass, and her equally eminent husband and fellow faculty member, Leon, were not among those with whom I had the honor of taking a class (notwithstanding their conservative credentials). But Lisa and I were able to share fond remembrances of David Bevington, the U of C's premiere Shakespeare scholar. (Bevington's edition of the Shakespeare's complete works remarks for me a touchstone of quality in editing and exposition of the Bard's work.)

Our conversation then took a curious turn. She knew that the greatest influence on my early development as a reader and critic had been literary scholar William Veeder. But that influence, as I've written elsewhere, affected less the shape or quality of my criticism than the confidence—sometimes reckless—that underwrites it. In brief, Veeder trained me in the attitude a literary critic must take to the object of his attention rather than in the actual tools of analysis that should be brought to bear. For a critic to do his work well, one simply cannot tread a path of undue reverence to authors or their work.

And while this was a necessary first step to the art of reading well, the tools he offered at the time did not, as I suspected then but know now, deliver much substance in the way of interpretation or criticism. This is seemingly harsh, but it is without doubt the case that Veeder's passion then for psychoanalytic criticism offered readings that, in my humble view, were seemingly complex but terribly hollow. While the article on him in Wikipedia conveys the strengths of his basic positions as a literary pragmatist (that meaning is engendered by the intersection of text and reader in a given context), his in-class instruction often dwelled to absurd lengths on intricate variants to the Oedipus complex and other Freudian and post-Freudian phenomena.

Veeder supplied the starting blocks. But my "literary regret," small and speculative though it may be, was the opportunity I missed to have a baton passed to me by U of C's best-known literary critic then: Wayne Booth.

Part of the reason for the missed opportunity was simple timing. Somehow I managed to graduate from U of C in three years (an achievement not to be mistaken for any act of genius or even above average intelligence on my part: I sweated seven years on a doctorate that wasn't all that great when I finished.) My junior year was thus also my senior year, which gave me the privilege of shouldering my way into any class I wished but did not bestow the magical property of compelling professors to return to the classroom early from sabbaticals. The academic year after, I bridled with jealousy when a peer and friend regaled me with tales of Booth's erudition and kindness during classes he took the year after my graduation.

At the time, there was no doubt in my mind that the star who shined brightest in U of C's English department then was Booth. True, by the mid-1980s, my undergraduate years, his star had begun to fade under the glare of deconstruction and a cadre of poststructural reworkings of feminist, psychoanalytic, and Marxist literary theory. Booth's theories seem quaint by comparison, but with the receding of the Continental tide of theory, the artfulness and articulateness of his struggle with issues subsequently advanced by narratology and reader response criticism seem to have worn well, or at least, better than some other theories.

This, of course, is just one reader's opinion, and Booth was not necessarily my favorite or even the most convincing critical theorist. But I do think he was, at the time, the best U of C had to offer. But I'll never really know. It is always possible that he as an instructor and I as a student would have been less than compatible. But such is the nature of regrets, even literary ones, which exist in some other universe with its own history.

BBC Blues

I have been watching a lot of BBC Television lately. This surge of anglophilia was occasioned by my wife's return from Walmart with two collections of "BBC Video Classics" tucked into a plastic shopping bag. The first, "The Charles Dickens Collection," contained dramatizations of Our Mutual Friend, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Bleak House, Mrtin Chuzzelwit, and Oliver Twist; the second, "The Jane Austen Collection," featured—naturally enough—adaptations of her six complete novels.

Working my way through the latter, while folding laundry or stuffing envelopes, proved both illuminating and disappointing. The first thing you need to know is that both collections comprise BBC's first round of Masterpiece Theatre-like forays into high literature. All of the productions appeared in the 1970s and 1980s and were shot, to their detriment, as video.

Now let me be clear: I'm an unapologetically avid admirer of Austen. But no amount of avidity can forgive the woodenness of these productions. The stilted deliveries, passive blocking and not infrequent lack of dramatic subtext are fittingly complemented by the flaccid camera work, wan indoor lighting, and general absence of sound engineering. (Everybody speaks with a faint hallway echo).

While hardly distraught, I was, well, dismayed. Did Austen translate that badly? BBC productions clearly have the luxury of length, the lack of which in Hollywood productions was a continual source of frustration for me. In Emma Thompson's rendering of Sense and Senibility (1995), there is no midnight visit by the faithless but regretful John Willoughby, seeking forgiveness for his caddish behavior; in Keira Knightly's Pride and Prejudice (2005), scenes in Rosings Park and Pemberley are painfully abridged, while several characters were altogether eliminated.

Perhaps the faults I perceived lay in the dramatizations (the British term then for adaptation). I had started with Pride and Prejudice, a personal favorite. This BBC version had the distinct honor of being adapted for video by British writer Fay Weldon. Yet despite the seeming coup in selection of dramaturg, the execution was pale at best. It certainly did not compare favorably to BBC's 6-part reworking in 1995 with Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet and Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. And yet somehow, I did receive some modicum of pleasure, so I turned to my next favorite novel, which I had recently read: Persuasion.

Ack! It was unwatchable. The blind were surely leading the blind when someone cast 38-year-old Ann Firbank as the 27-year-old Anne Elliot. Even worse, that someone then set her against the much younger looking Valerie Gearon (who was 34 but looked 25!), who played Anne's elder sister, Elizabeth Elliot. The overall effect was creepy, with the younger sister, the romantic object of the novel, looking like the older sister's mother!

The real test ultimately proved to be Sense and Sensibility because here I could compare BBC and Hollywood productions and directly. (I owned the 1995 movie version.) Now I could assess more intelligently what worked and what did not. The differences were palpable. Despite the inevitable contractions that movies impose on their novelistic sources, both adaptations shared a number of identical lines, demonstrating by contrast what real talent can deliver. Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Hugh Grant, and Kate Winslet earn their reputations for subtlety and expressiveness when compared to the weirdly vapid and at times uninspired verbiage of the BBC production, which no doubt explains Masterpiece Theatre's reputation among some Americans in the '70s and '80s as a waste of cathode rays.

And yet…and yet, I can't seem to give up my commitment to Austen, even when done badly. To be blunt, as dramatizations of literary classics go, these BBC "video classics" suck—but not so much as not to be worth the watching. So is this what makes a "classic" a classic? Somehow the stories still compel even as the productions repel. There is a mystery here that I can't explain.

But forgive me. I see I have a load of laundry on the bed and Mansfield Park is in the DVD drive, so I best get back to work…

Listen Here! on the Radio

If you were curious about how the Listen Here! Short Story Reading series evolved and how it's been going, then you'll want to hear this interview.

Our interviewer was Binnie Klein, author (Blows to the Head, check it out here) and subscriber!

The interviewees were New Haven Review publisher, Bennett Lovett-Graff, who picks the stories for the series, and actor and casting director Brooks Appelbaum.

The Long Read Coming to a Town Near You!

What is The Long Read?

Following in the wake of our season of weekly readings for Listen Here!, the New Haven Review, the New Haven Theater Company, and the Arts Council of Greater New Haven have dutifully organized a six-hour reading marathon in which we revisit the best stories of the last year, as selected by our voters. So if you missed them the first time, come see them now! If you liked them the first, see them again!

How does The Long Read work?

The Long Read! is a simple idea: buy one ticket, stay for as long as you like. Come to the first hour or the last hour, or every other hour. Do what you will and take your downtime in Bar, where we'll be reading our tales of joy and woe, pleasure and passion, heartbreak and healing. To get your tickets, visit http://newhaventheatercompany.com/vote. No box office pick up needed. Just print them off from your computer!!

So when is it?

Sunday, June 6, 2:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., with stories paired for reading each hour.

And where is it?

At Bar, located at 254 Crown Street in New Haven!

Did you say Bar?!

Yeah, we did.

But, like, isn't that a bar…and a restaurant…and, well, noisy?

Sure. But Bar has a back room ideal for performance. We know because the New Haven Theater Company has performed there in the past already. So no worries on that front!

And what are you reading again…and when?

Oh, yeah…that. Here it is:

From 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.,

J.D. Salinger's "The Laughing Man," read by Steve Scarpa

John Cheever's "The Pot of Gold," read by Brooks Appelbaum

From 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.,

Jim Shepard's "Courtesy for Beginners," read byT.Paul Lowry

Steve Almond's "The Soul Molecule," read by Sharen McKay

From 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.,

Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl," read by Shola Cole

Eudora Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O.," read by Brooks Appelbaum

Dave Eggers' "After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Was Drowned," read by T.Paul Lowry

From 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.,

Tobias Wolff's "Hunters in the Snow," read by Eric Nyquist

James Farrell's "My Grandmother Goes to Comiskey Park," Steve Scarpa

From 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.,

James Thurber's "You Could Look it Up," read by T. Paul Lowry

Marisa Silver's "What I Saw from Where I Stood," read by Eric Nyquist

From 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.,

Kurt Vonnegut's "Miss Temptation," read by Steve Scarpa

David Sedaris' "You Can't Kill the Rooster," read by Jeremy Funke

Listen Here Thanks You!

We at the New Haven Review wanted to thank all of those who participated in the spring 2010 season of Listen Here! Among those to whom we are grateful:

The staff of the New Haven Review and its trustees: You helped pick the stories, you attended the readings, you cheered the series along. Thank you!

The staff of the New Haven Theater Company: T. Paul Lowry, director of the New Haven Theater Company, and Brooks Appelbaum, who cast and directed this series, you have been indefatigable in your efforts and support for this project. Thank you!

The Arts Council of Greater New Haven: Director of Communications, David Brensilver, and his colleagues at the Arts Council, you have been with us from the beginning, lending moral and marketing support to this project. Thank you!

Our Actors: There are too many to thank by name, but, we'll give it the college try: T.Paul and Brooks, Eric Nyquist, Jeremy Funke, Hilary Brown, Sharen McKay, Ian Alderman, Rachel Alderman, Steve Scarpa, George Kulp, Rebecka Jones and others, you stepped up to the plate to read on our behalf. Thank you!

Our Coffee House sponsors: Owners and staff of Koffee, Blue State Coffee, Manjares Fine Pastries, Willoughby's, Lulu, and Bru, you have been great hosts to this event. We raise a cup…of coffee…to you. Thank you!

Our Audience: Without you, there would be no Listen Here! We do this because all of the participating organizations believe in the value of performance, of literature, of community. We are grateful to have had you as our guests. We hope you'll continue to attend. Thank you!

For the next season, fall 2010, we continue to experiment with the idea of the "public reading." You can look forward to our exploring readings paired with musical interludes or background effects; ensemble readings of a single story; side-by-side readings in English and a foreign language; readings against slide show or video backgrounds; and whatever else our brains can cook up for the next season!

An Inspiring Read

Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversation with America's Poets. Edited by Alexander Neubauer.  Knopf, 342 pp. This book is a perfect gift for any reader or writer of poetry.  It consists of transcripts excerpted from the amazing classes held by Pearl London at the New School in New York, from 1970 to the late '90s.  The class, Works in Progress, featured invited guests -- some of the major American poets of our day -- to speak with London and her students about poems the poets were working on, distributing drafts and commenting on the process of revision that goes into the making of a poem.

These exchanges should be of considerable value to anyone who writes, for it's safe to say that not even the most grizzled veteran of the poetry workshop circuit can lay claim to having been in the presence of such an array of literary notables.  From Maxine Kumin in 1973 to Eamon Grennan in 1996, twenty three poets in all, featuring the likes of Frank Bidart, Louise Glück, Robert Hass, June Jordan, Philip Levine, James Merrill, Robert Pinsky, Muriel Rukeyser, Derek Walcott.

Neubauer, who taught fiction at the New School, provides an informative introduction about London and the class, and a brief forward on each poet, focused on the stage of the career when he or she appeared in London's class, and often characterizing the mood of the exchange.  Neubauer had access to 90-minute tapes of each class that, transcribed, ran to over fifty pages apiece.  Distilling each exchange to about fifteen printed pages took considerable editorial skill, but it means there's rarely a dull moment.  In each case, Neubauer selects a substantive discussion that gives real insight into a poet's personality, frame of reference, and attitude toward a particular poem and to poetry in general.

Not surprisingly, all the guests take their work very seriously, but it's quite refreshing that they don't seem ponderous or self-serving.  The book demonstrates that a great public value of contemporary poets is their ability to speak engagingly about their craft and their motivations as writers.

The exchanges also make one marvel at how fully in her element a great teacher like London can be.  She leads the discussion but never dominates, nor is she timid or fawning.  Informed, relaxed, she easily inserts comments the featured poet has made on other occasions -- sometimes previous visits to the course -- and, like the poets, is quick to call to mind lines from poems to illustrate points about great poetry.

And that is the main issue under discussion: how to make a good poem better.  Each poet confronts this problem in an individual way, but each is clearly committed to a sense of poetry that does not permit being satisfied with anything less than the best effort.  And each is quite candid about the trials and errors that goal entails.  Neubauer helpfully provides a photostat of the poem under discussion, in most cases in both draft and published versions.

I could cite examples from every exchange that illuminate what choices poets consider in creating a poem.  In particular, I liked the way several poets pondered what they consider to be the main tasks of form, and of the relation of the sentence to the poetic line.  But to pick a favorite moment, it's this comment from Glück, in 1979: "Something can be marvelous and still need to be stopped.  Otherwise you don't change.  It's as simple as that.  And if you don't change, then you stop writing good poems."

This is a truly challenging formulation, not simply to student writers but to the most accomplished poet.  And it shows that teaching writing is not simply about improving the words on the page but should inspire constant exploration and discovery.  Poetry in Person does that.

New Haven Author Chandra Prasad Reads

We're big fans of Chandra Prasad at New Haven Review. She's an accomplished novelist and greater New Haven resident. What more could one ask?

When Chandra published Breathe the Sky: A Novel Inspired by the Life of Amelia Earhart, we were all quite excited! There's even a part in the novel when Amelia comes to New Haven!

So take advantage of seeing, listening, and breathing the same air as Ms. Prasad at Cheshire Public Library (104 Main Street, Cheshire, CT 06410-2406) this Thursday, May 13 at 7:00 p.m., where she'll be reading.

The program is free and open to the public. For more information about Chandra, check her out at www.chandraprasad.com.