The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper: Books

Joseph Conrad Does Seattle

editor@thestranger.com (Paul Constant) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

by Paul Constant People who move from the East Coast to the Pacific Northwest have to bear a certain kind of pain as they acclimate to the region's peculiarities. You've seen the traits caricatured again and again: Everybody moves slower here, the passive-aggressiveness is stultifying, and you could choke to death on all the second-guessing. Reginald Fortiphton is a snide East Coaster who has been delivered to the Northwest to write a travel guide for a local publisher that feels that the New…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Can't You Like Victor LaValle for Himself?

editor@thestranger.com (Paul Constant) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

by Paul Constant In the opening of Big Machine, Ricky Rice is a bus station janitor ("Don't look for dignity in public bathrooms," the first sentence warns the reader) and a former junkie who is always about one phone call away from making a spectacular plunge off the wagon. The astounding thing about Victor LaValle's talent is that he renders the grubby world of the bus station into something the reader wants to linger in for another 400 pages, much like the addictive,…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Constant Reader

editor@thestranger.com (Paul Constant) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

Are All Northwesterners Douchebags? by Paul Constant Northwesterners tend to spend a lot of time wondering what it is to be a Northwesterner. In fact, that may be the most Northwesty trait of all. (Do you want to know what it is to be a New Yorker? Fuck you. That's what it is to be a New Yorker.) And so the few dozen people who gathered last Thursday at the Fireside Room in the Sorrento Hotel could have been taking part in the most Northwestern evening that's…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Meet the Inky Beatles

editor@thestranger.com (David Schmader) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

On The Simpsons' History-Making Collision of Art and Commerce by David Schmader Forgive the ostentatious name-drop, but when it comes to summing up The Simpsons, Beatles comparisons are inevitable. There's simply no other reference point for pop art that's simultaneously scaled the heights of popularity and artistry, creating those golden cultural moments when the most popular and beloved art is also the best. The Beatles analogy is made early and often in John Ortved's The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History, the salacious subtitle of which is an empty tease. Dishy insider dirt…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Constant Reader

editor@thestranger.com (Paul Constant) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

Stephen King Knows What Woodchucks Think by Paul Constant Here, you'll find a profile of Stacey Levine, The Stranger's 2009 Genius for Literature; look there if you want to read about an intelligent author. This column is not about a genius of literature, although you could probably make a halfway-decent argument that he's some kind of an idiot savant. Stephen King's new novel, Under the Dome, was released on November 10, and the book—all 1,067 pages of it—is being marketed as a return to form for King, whose last…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Constant Reader

editor@thestranger.com (Paul Constant) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

Who Killed Bailey/Coy Books? by Paul Constant Bailey/Coy Books owner Michael Wells told his staff over the last week—first, individually, the employees who rely on the bookstore for health insurance and then everyone else in a large, reportedly teary meeting—that Bailey/Coy Books will be closing by the end of November. Anyone who has seen Bailey/Coy's nearly bare shelves lately—some holding just a single lonely book—shouldn't be surprised by the news. In a press release, Wells thanked the community and the employees for keeping Bailey/Coy in business for…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Recipes Are for Old Ladies

editor@thestranger.com (COREY KAHLER) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

A Professional Cook Explains How to Read Cookbooks by COREY KAHLER I was struggling with a dish early in my professional cooking career, and so I asked a chef where I could find a recipe for guidance. The chef flatly told me that recipes were for old ladies. That may or may not be the case, but it by no means prevented this chef and myself from eventually discussing our cookbook collections at length. Very little of this talk was about the recipes; instead it focused more on a book's approach…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

The Atheist Soul of Neocons

editor@thestranger.com (Paul Constant) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 04:00:00 -0700

Wait, Ayn Rand Was a Human Being? by Paul Constant Ayn Rand invites a blind admiration that would make your standard cult leader blush. She also inspires apoplectic, spittle-flecked rants from her foes that accelerate from disagreement to incomprehensibility in seconds. Jennifer Burns, then, has achieved the impossible: She has written a biography of Rand that is neither adoring nor hate-filled. It helps that Burns has finally found a compelling hook to hang the story on. Rand, she argues, was a foil for the conservative movement before becoming a conservative…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Constant Reader

editor@thestranger.com (Paul Constant) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 04:00:00 -0700

Eoin Colfer Prostituted Himself for Nothing by Paul Constant Let's make one thing perfectly clear: And Another Thing..., Eoin Colfer's authorized sequel to the late Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, is a horrible, pointless book. The first, and perhaps most egregious, crime Colfer commits is simply not being funny. His book is unimaginative and sloppily devoted to Adams's previous work (characters who were created to be punch lines to throwaway non-sequitur jokes in the original series, like Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, are given backstories and motivations…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Finer Noble Gases

editor@thestranger.com (Brendan Kiley) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 04:00:00 -0700

Lydia Davis, Loneliness Artist by Brendan Kiley If Lydia Davis's characters were atoms, they'd have no valence. They'd live in closed shells, occasionally bumping into each other but rarely exchanging any meaningful amount of energy. The relationships in her stories, such as they are (between mothers and daughters, friends, lovers, roommates, neighbors, strangers who meet on the street, people and things), all seem to have equal weight, an equal degree of intimacy. An ex-husband and the neighbor of a dead aunt and a chair wield the same…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Cows, Collards, and Heroin

editor@thestranger.com (Brendan Kiley) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 04:00:00 -0700

A Brief Correspondence with Lydia Davis by Brendan Kiley The most immediately unusual thing about your stories is their brevity. Why so short? When did you first realize you could write—were allowed to write—such short, short stories? Although I had read Kafka's Parables and Paradoxes in college, I never thought of trying such short forms, as though this "classic" were enclosed in an untouchable box. The only form I seriously considered was the traditional short story. Then, at a time when I was stuck in my writing, a few…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Mother(fucking) Nature

editor@thestranger.com (COREY KAHLER) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 04:00:00 -0700

Red Snow: Talking Tanuki with Testicles Exposed by COREY KAHLER The first story in Susumu Katsumata's collection of 10 gekiga, "Mulberries," begins with a typically comic situation—an early adolescent boy and girl bicker back and forth. Within just a few pages, however, the girl has nearly been raped and the boy has been given relationship advice by a mythical creature, while Katsumata also pauses to close in on bugs and the silhouettes of bathers in the distance. These moments don't climax to any resolution, however. Instead, these observations of rural…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Double Fantasy

editor@thestranger.com (Paul Constant) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 04:00:00 -0700

Chronic City Is Jonathan Lethem's Best Book Yet by Paul Constant With all due respect to Camelot, Dickensian London, and Mort Weisinger's Metropolis, if I had to choose one fictional location in which I had to spend the rest of my life, I would choose Jonathan Lethem's New York City. There's plenty of room there for heroism (it's the kind of city where a detective with Tourette's syndrome can unravel an immense, shadowy conspiracy) and music (in The Fortress of Solitude, 1970s Brooklyn seemed to be the set of an enormous…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Loosely Collected and Tightly Bound

editor@thestranger.com (Paul Constant) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 04:00:00 -0700

Sherman Alexie Knows About Mixtapes and Clitorises by Paul Constant Last week, Sherman Alexie debuted his newest book, War Dances, at Town Hall in a funny and often profane performance. (I nearly felt sorry for the father who was forced to drag his teenage daughter out of the sold-out performance hall not five minutes after Alexie took the stage, but I was too busy laughing with everyone else at Alexie's story about his drunken father's nickname for a clitoris—"the little man in the boat"—to be too concerned.)Between poems, stories, and…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Constant Reader

editor@thestranger.com (Paul Constant) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 04:00:00 -0700

Michael Chabon Writes About Owning a Penis by Paul Constant Because publishers are idiots, the wall of women's studies books at Elliott Bay Book Company is a shockingly bright shade of pink. "Because," you can imagine the marketing departments reasoning, "girls won't know if a book is about girly stuff unless it's pink." If you spend any amount of time dipping into the enormous and somewhat insulting pinkness, you'll find serious books about the deplorable state of women's rights in various countries around the world, and humorous books about body…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Nick Hornby, Naked

editor@thestranger.com (Paul Constant) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:00:00 -0700

How Nick Hornby Got His Groove Back by Paul Constant Nick Hornby is a real rarity: an incredibly successful author you just can't help but feel sorry for. His first novel, High Fidelity, became the kind of freakishly successful book that only hits once in a generation. Publishers blew millions trying to mimic the book's "man-child finds love and grows into responsibility" formula. In the early part of this decade, every publisher tried to launch at least one so-called "lad lit" author with a Fidelity rip-off. (These were the kind…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Bertrand Russell: Funny-Book Star!

editor@thestranger.com (Paul Constant) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:00:00 -0700

by Paul Constant When it's done properly, writing about mathematicians can be fantastic—consider the genuinely mind-altering beauty of a book like Gödel, Escher, Bach or David Foster Wallace's underrated Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity. Logicomix, a new comic-book biography of mathematician and logician Bertrand Russell, isn't as fundamentally earth-shattering as either of those two books, but it's as close to it as comics have ever gotten. The structure of Logicomix is appropriately complex: At the end of his life, Russell…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Great Expectations

editor@thestranger.com (Paul Constant) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:00:00 -0700

Reading the Three Highest-Profile Books of 2009 by Paul Constant On September 15, Dan Brown's sequel to The Da Vinci Code and Jon Krakauer's biography of Pat Tillman were released, the day after Edward M. Kennedy's memoir went on sale. Immense stacks of the books littered Elliott Bay Book Company, so even the idiots could find them. More idiot-proof stacks of books filled gaudy window displays in Borders and Barnes & Noble. QFCs that day had tables with the books pyramided on top and a big yellow sign trumpeting a…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Nicholson Baker Should Be Less Farty, More Smarty

editor@thestranger.com (Paul Constant) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:00:00 -0700

by Paul Constant In theory, this should be the perfect Nicholson Baker novel, because it combines Baker's great analytical love of literature (like in his criminally underrated memoir U and I) with his rigorously intelligent storytelling (like the sublime The Mezzanine). But The Anthologist, the story of minor poet Paul Chowder and his inability to write an introduction to his upcoming anthology of poetry, instead feels half-baked. Some of Chowder's procrastinatory babble about poets and poetry shines with Baker's incisive thoughtfulness: At some…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Sometimes Oprah Thinks About Thinking About Nothing

editor@thestranger.com (COREY KAHLER) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:00:00 -0700

Tao Lin is the Asian Haruki Murakami by COREY KAHLER New York–based Tao Lin is a straightforward guy, and so is his fiction. His latest, Shoplifting at American Apparel, is, not surprisingly, about a writer living in New York. It moves between moments of misery and humor, and Sam, the main character, often finds that instead of doing things, "it's better to just think about it." Lin's critics have called him annoying and brilliant. Reading through your work, you write about Sam in the same way you write about yourself.…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

We Expect More from You

editor@thestranger.com (Brendan Kiley) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 04:00:00 -0700

David Byrne Is Brilliant Except When He Sucks by Brendan Kiley So many people want to be omnicelebrities: Rappers want to be fashion designers, actors want to be musicians and vice versa, and everybody's a writer. But David Byrne is one of the few who succeed. He makes excellent music (duh), films (True Stories), books (The New Sins), furniture (his dresser-chairs), and PowerPoint presentations ("Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information"). He's a genius and that's all there is to it. But his new Bicycle Diaries, though it has an attractive cover, is only…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Responsible Perverts

editor@thestranger.com (Paul Constant) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 04:00:00 -0700

Sperm and Consequences in a New Novel by Paul Constant If for some reason Sherman Alexie were to suddenly renounce Seattle and move to, say, Pismo Beach, Ryan Boudinot would immediately become the most talked-about author of literary fiction in town. They are a twinned set of figures on Seattle's literary map: the accomplished author and the up-and-coming younger star. And maybe it's due to an unconscious comparison with Alexie's larger-than-life stage persona, but in person, Boudinot is much more boring than you'd expect him to be. Or maybe it's…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Because You Have To

editor@thestranger.com (Paul Constant) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 04:00:00 -0700

How to Become a Writer (Hint: It Involves Writing) by Paul Constant "Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?" It's a nearly inevitable question at author readings, often preceded by an overlong description of the epic novel/memoir/free-verse poem that the questioner has been working on for the past decade. Every author's response is a little bit different: Chuck Palahniuk, for instance, usually takes the question seriously, providing a sincere, detailed description of his process, but other authors emphasize some tiny part of their writing technique to the point of self-hagiography, making…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

There Will Be Blood

editor@thestranger.com (Sean Nelson) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 04:00:00 -0700

The Adderall Diaries: An Abusive Memoir About Drugs and Abuse by Sean Nelson A small confession: I had read the title of Stephen Elliott's The Adderall Diaries for months—on Twitter, on the author's website, on the spine of the review copy even—before I got the joke of it. Once I clocked the pun on Jim Carroll's iconic drug memoir The Basketball Diaries, I felt invited into a book I kept not being able to get into. Not because of the Carroll—RIP by the way—but because of the pun. I had expected a standard-issue…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Constant Reader

editor@thestranger.com (Paul Constant) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 04:00:00 -0700

A Great Week Kicks Off Seattle's World-Class Reading Season by Paul Constant All of a sudden, everything hits everywhere at once: The week after Labor Day, virtually every venue in town started hosting the kind of high-quality literary events that make Seattle the best book city in America. On September 10, former New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni read from his new memoir to a packed room at Elliott Bay Book Company (the internet bubbled over the next day with cell-phone photos of—and declarations of love for—the formerly anonymous Bruni) and…]]> [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]