At a panel discussion on Tuesday evening, E.L. Doctorow, Pete Hamill, and Cynthia Ozick graciously discussed New York in literature at NYU’s Fales Library in celebration of its 50th anniversary and Pete Hamill’s donation of his papers (Doctorow donated his to the library in 2001, and Ozick is a class of 1949 alumna.)

Cynthia Ozick was rather endearing and had plenty of nice library quotes. She read from her 1997 novel, The Puttermesser Papers. In describing an idyllic New York City, she writes, “The libraries are lit all night,” there is an increase in gardening and a decrease in crime, and “the bureau of venereal disease control has closed down.” She spoke of living in Pehlam Bay in the 1930s when it was a semirural community: “We didn’t have a library!” Instead, they had a green truck, and she recalled shouting, “The library is coming! The library is coming!”

Pete Hamill had a few jewels of his own. His newest novel, North River, out in June from Little, Brown, is set in 1930s New York. To explain his choice of time and place, he referred to his last novel, Forever, which he finished writing on September 10, 2001. He, owning up to its length, took another year to add in the events of 9/11 and cut something out—the Depression, an era he saved to tackle in his latest.

E.L. Doctorow early on declined to identify himself as a New York novelist: “New York does not confer literary identity.” For him, “If the time was hot in a certain place, that’s where the book was set.” To close with an interesting fact, he was named Edgar after Edgar Allen Poe, who he called “the greatest bad writer.” He asked his mother why he was named after an “alcoholic…delusional paranoid…with necrophiliac tendencies.” She was not amused.

Like many bookies since Kurt Vonnegut’s death last week (see Heather’s blog of April 12th, below), a library fundraiser friend of mine reminisced about the author — and of his own encounter with the man:

“As a child of the Sixties, I regarded Vonnegut with awe for his truth-telling, hallucinogenic imagination, which was combined with a clear perspective – unusual qualities in members of our parents’ generation! As a college sophmore in 1972, I even wrote him a letter. It went unanswered — for a few decades, anyway.

“One May evening, five or so years ago, Vonnegut came to a benefit that I was running here in NYC. My assistant, 25 years my junior but as excited as she knew I’d be, told me that Vonnegut was “outside, smoking.” I went outside. I went over to him, declaring myself a fan and requesting an audience. I was even taller than he was — maybe that’s what did it. Anyway, he consented. I bummed a cigarette, saying I thought smokers were God’s true optimists.

“After only briefly talking about the event we had ducked out of, we spoke of his work and inspiration, and then I turned the conversation to sanity and drugs. We talked about his son Mark’s book Eden Express, which I had found deeply moving. Vonnegut said he thought it was the best description he had ever read of sliding into madness. We talked about LSD, how it could catalyze some into mental illness. I asked him if he had ever tripped and he said that when he was at Iowa in 1965, his friends had tried to get him to, but he never did, fearing it would leave him insane. With his offbeat creative abilities, perhaps one could presume a brain biochemistry that didn’t need hallucinogens.

“Cigarettes extinquished, we went inside. My letter had been answered.”

Yes indeed.

Cormac McCarthy is having a very good year. As if an Oprah endorsement weren’t enough (see From the Book Review Vault: McCarthy’s The Road), now he’s got Joseph Pulitzer on his side. With this much brouhaha over his postapocalyptic novel, you know patrons are going to be asking for readalikes in the not-too-distant future. Nobody writes quite like McCarthy, but other scribes have successfully played with the idea of an American wasteland.

Just today, I came across our Xpress review of a 2004 graphic novel reissue from Drawn & Quarterly: Anders Nilsen’s Dogs & Water, according to our reviewer J. Osicki, is “a compelling, one-of-a-kind trip akin to Samuel Beckett conceiving Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as a graphic novel”; it’s made up “of a series of spartan black-and-white illustrations of a young man on a road to nowhere in a vast, denuded landscape.” A stuffed teddy bear and various and sundry packs of animals are the boy’s only pals—the few people he encounters, meanwhile, are “desperate and hostile.”

The Road, of course, centers on a father and son who scavenge for food in “a devastated country,” to quote our reviewer Stephen Morrow. Here, “friends are extinct.” The protagonist in Dogs & Water can no doubt relate. Order his odyssey, and watch the circ numbers escalate.

• 8:15-9:00           Registration and Buffet Breakfast
• 9:15-10:15         The most banned children’s book of the year: Authors Peter Parnell (playwright, author of QED; screenwriter/producer for West Wing and The Guardian) and Justin Richardson, MD [co-author of Everything You Never Wanted Your Kids to Know about Sex (But Were Afraid They’d Ask)], their editor, David Gale (S. & S.), and  librarian Pat Scales discuss the creation of And Tango Makes Three and the reaction to it. 
• 10:15-11:30       Editor’s hot picks: Top editors from adult trade houses reveal what fiction and nonfiction you should be buying for the fall and what the latest trends to watch are.
• 11:30-11:40       Break
• 11:40-12:15       LJ Talks to:  A conversation with a long-time editor/publisher.
• 12:15-1:15        Lunch
• 1:15-2:30        YA crossover: Many books speak to both adults and young people, but how do the editors and authors make the decision to pitch them to one audience or the other—or both. (TK).
• 2:30-2:40         Break
• 2:40-3:55        Romance: An editor, author, reviewer, and librarian discuss the latest trends in the most popular genre, including erotica, ebooks and e-marketing, and more.  Panelists include Eloisa James, whose latest book, due in June from Avon is Desperate Duchesses, and Kris Ramsdell, LJ’s romance columnist.   
• 3:55-4:00       Wrap up.
• 4:00-5:00       Cocktails

Although I am a slave to my gray tuxedo cat (see Mr. Felix below), I usually despise cat mysteries or any other kind of fiction involving felines, canines, or any other creature, great or small (with the exception of the classic and very rabbity Watership Down).

 

But as a former senior scribe of my high school’s Latin Club (also known as the Junior Classical League), I couldn’t resist when British mystery book blog, Euro Crime, posted a story (”All Hail Spartapuss!) about a new children’s series set in an ancient Rome ruled by cats.

  

The publisher Mogzilla say the books are ”based partly on historical events as recorded by the great classical writers Tacitus and Suetonius”. The first book, I am Spartapuss, tells the story of a slave from the Land of the Kitons who becomes a Roman gladiator (or is that cat-iator?). This is followed by Catigula and Die Clawdius. If only I had these in Latin class!

In other feline news, the New York Times reports today that Grand Central Publishing  (the former Warner Books) is paying $1.25 million for the rights to publish the life story of Dewey, a rescued cat who lived for 19 years in the public library in Spencer, Iowa. Wow! That would buy a lot of cat food and kitty litter.

Dewey’s biographer is librarian Vicki Myron who will co-write Dewey, a Small Town, a Library and the World’s Most Beloved Cat with Bret Witter, a former editorial director at Health Communications, the publisher of the “Chicken Soup for the Soulâ€? books.

And in a related NYT story, “Home Cooking for  Pets is Suddenly Not So Odd“, pet owners are starting to prepare home cooked meals for Fido and Fluffy in light of the recent Menu Foods tainted food crisis. As a result, sales of pet cookbooks like Real Food For Dogs and Home-Prepared Dog and Cat Diet are rising. If you have these and other pet culinary titles in your collection, you might do a special display for your  pet-loving patrons. 

 

This morning a fellow editor left  a copy of Stephen King’s April 6 Entertainment Weekly column in my chair. HIs latest The Pop of King editorial, “How to Bury a Book” raved about Mischa Berlinksi’s debut novel, Fieldwork and chastised publisher Farrar Straus & Giroux for failing to  better market the book. “Under the drab title and the drab cover, there’s a story that cooks like a mother,” he writes.

 

 A few months ago in an another EW column, “The Secret Gardiner”, King sang the praises of Meg Gardiner, an American thriller writer living and published in Britain.  Lo and behold, shortly after the column appeared, Dutton acquired the U.S. rights to publish her five novels plus two new ones.

Not surprisingly there will probably be increased demand for Fieldwork. A quick check of the New York Public Library’s Leo catalog shows 18 holds for the system’s 11 copies. I would be curious to hear from other libraries about patron response to King’s editorial. Still, I feel a little resentment at how the opinion of one person can sway millions of reading decisions, especially since a few months ago a librarian blogger complained that books that received positive LJ reviews didn’t circulate in his library (Best Books=Best Circulating?).

So I forgot to post my Subway Sighting of last week, and to make up for it, I’m going to bombard you with the book titles I’ve spied over the past two weeks. This is my highly unscientific experiment to determine if the good people of Gotham—at least those who ride and L and R trains—have a preference between fiction and nonfiction.

Fiction wins in this match-up, with Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Kinky Friedman’s The Mile High Club, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (Bk. 1), and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness contributing to its victory. This doesn’t surprise me considering how much New Yorkers are assaulted with incarnations of “fact” via newspapers, subway ads, billboards, and street hustlers. Sometimes, a person just wants to go to a different (quieter?) place. 

Yet nonfiction’s no slouch either. Check Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India, W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, Will Blythe’s To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever, and Brian W. Jones’s The Emperor Domitian, which give credence to the oft-repeated idea that New Yorkers are an informed, cerebral bunch all too eager to debate sport and politics.

Of course, you could read into these sightings for the length of the A train (the longest at 31 miles), and that’s what’s so fun. Books make me think, even when I’m only glancing at their covers.

Today in a web-exclusive interview, librarian and LJ reviewer Andrea Tarr chats with author Tawni O’Dell whose new novel Sister Mine is an April BookSense pick. 

 

Find out how O’Dell’s upbringing in Pennsylvania’s coal-mining country has shaped her fiction.

This just in, lady and gent readers: Oprah has just chosen Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as the latest addition to her book club—and scored big points with this editor. McCarthy remains one of my favorite discoveries from grad school. Notoriously press-shy (there’s no way in hades he’ll appear on Oprah), the writer is not known for seeing the more honorable side of humanity (see his brutal anti-Western, Blood Meridian).

An LJ Best Book of 2006, The Road continues in that vein, describing with macabre elegance “a devastated country where food is scarce and everyone becomes a scavenger, ” according to our review by Stephen Morrow. While I haven’t read it (it’s sitting on the floor, next to my bed), methinks ole Winfrey isn’t so much in a pessimistic mood as moved, simply, by McCarthy’s ability to etch beauty in despair. I have to wonder if her demographic will go along for the ride (though as my colleague Wilda Williams pointed out, the book has already been a best seller), but here’s to disseminating quality literature.

If a subway commute can set the tone of a day, it’s going to be an atypically good Tuesday. This morning, I didn’t have to lubricate my shoulders to fit into a car, AND there were sightings galore. Standing directly in front of me were two nursing students highlighting away in textbooks whose titles escape me; to my left and right, I took in at least four examples of popular fiction, most in subway-friendly mass market paperback.

Michael Connelly’s The Concrete Blonde (Warner, 1994) captured my attention because of its title, a nod, I couldn’t help thinking, to Concrete Blonde, a favorite band of mine from Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, that’s where Connelly’s Edgar Award–winning Harry Bosch novels take place. The second in the series, Blonde homes in on a serial killer who disfigures women’s faces, not an original conceit as far as I can tell, but what do I know about mysteries?

I admit it: I’ve never read a Connelly. In fact, as I wrote in The Case of the Nonmystery Readers, I haven’t killed time with a single contemporary mystery. Not even a 20th-century old schooler like Raymond Chandler, Connelly’s hero. I’m not sure if this makes me squeamish, prudish, snobbish, or just plain poorly read. How can I be out of the biggest genre-fiction loop ever? My answer: other books (including last week’s Subway Sighting, The History of Love) just get in the way.