John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, which is being reissued by New York Review of Books Classics, is primarily an idea novel. It is also a page-turner, despite a premise that may sound discouragingly familiar to a modern reader (the book was written in 1955). Set in a post-apocalyptic future where human beings are struggling for survival, the novel tells the story of a boy who discovers he possesses mutant powers. The discovery is problematic, since the society into which he is born is at war with mutants. So far this may sound like the plot of an X-Men comic book. However, Wyndham isn’t interested in nifty mutant-power tricks or spectacular super-human battles. He is concerned, instead, with those characteristics of humanity that make genetic mutation such a rich subject for fictional exploration: our self-love and tendency to elevate our species above all others, our desire for control, our fear of change and of the other, and the intolerance that these often breed. These themes would make the novel relevant at any period in human history, but they are of course especially resonant in America today, as religious and conservative groups are asserting their political power.
Fireside Follies
The time flies by quickly. I couldn’t believe it had been a month since I attended the first of the Fireside Follies reading series. My feet were taking me down the familiar route “warehouse on the right, warehouse on the left” to my most favorite fire place in Bushwick, Brooklyn Fireproof.
1. Fish-eyed: Cassandra Katsiaficas: “…when I was looking for my favorite pen to write in my purse, I found a tiny Budha who is smiling and eating, so I smiled back at him.” 2. Alyson Paty & Friend.
Mike Lala and Eric Nelson, the co-perpetrators of the finest Bushwick reading series, were tempting all the bookworms with a stellar constellation of readers: Christy Road, Melissa Broder, Cassandra Katsiaficas, Danniel Schooneebek, and Alyson Paty.
Aimee Bender + 100
Editor’s Note: Aimee Bender wrote the first sentence. Then, 100 writers collaborated to write the next. The story that happened follows.
I.
She was startled by what she saw on the bridge; it did not seem to have a shape, and yet it was moving toward her, and she found herself inexplicably compelled to stay put. She counted things to calm herself. Streetlights almost hidden by fog: 3. Parked cars tipped sideways: 2. Fat shadows so close you could touch them and feel their breath: 1. but she pulled a Marlboro red from her pocket & lit it, giving her time to figure out this shape cutting closer. Holes in the fog where it pressed through, nothing but her cigarette to hold on to, watching ashes light the descent, or was it just her wanting to see light on the ash–anything familiar and glowing. She needed glowing tonight, she needed familiar. Because so far, things had not gone according to plan. It was madness to come here, she knew. Yet, she’d been compelled to answer the phone. To obey that seemingly familiar voice charred with static. To agree to this place and time.
Help Me Help You
1. Help Me Help You. 2. Paige Lipari, Assistant Editor-cum-event organizer for A Public Space, and Ashley Martin, Intern and student at The New School, table the event.
BAM and A Public Space set forth on another installment of their seminal series Between the Lines last night. With this month’s theme (Help Me Help You) we found ourselves immersed in stories of public and private grief, a director’s unsuccessful attempt at helping a man smuggle himself into England, and attempts by anonymous strangers to help the pseudo-lovelorn find peace with themselves.
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National Book Awards
1. The banquet hall at around 6:30, before everything started. 2. Melanie Tortoroli, who works as an editor for W.W. Norton, Rosemary Brosnan, an editor, Rita Williams-Garcia, whose book One Crazy Summer was nominated for the Young People’s Literature NBA, & Garcia-Williams’s daughter, Stephanie Garcia. Brosnan has been Williams-Garcia’s editor for 24 years, which was, of course, the year that both women entered kindergarten.
Last night I attended the Oscars. Actually it was the National Book Awards, but it felt like the Oscars, and since this was a literary crowd and not a Hollywood one, the ceremony was populated by those who looked a lot “realer” than at the actual Oscars. People schmoozed and got photographed beforehand, and there was lots of champagne and hors d’œuvres (which were sometimes tweeted about). After a couple of hours of this, the actual ceremony began, which was hosted by Andy Borowitz. This was apparently his second time with these honors. He made all sorts of “funny” jokes about the state of the publishing industry (Oh, you mean the publishing industry isn’t doing so well? HA! HILARIOUS), and then told us some good things about the publishing industry, such as the fact that 2010 was clearly the Year of the Man, since three (three!) men were up in the ten slots for fiction and nonfiction. Yes, men are obviously making great strides in this historically female-dominated world.
Some Europeans at McNally Jackson
You know that joke, right? It begins like: “How many Europeans can you fit into the McNally Jackson Bookstore?” … and I promise to finish it at the end of the post.
November in New York can be pretty gloomy and depressive at times. And so was last night. Leaving one with the option of either wandering around the streets of the Lower East Side in the rain, listening to early Portishead and flirting with suicidal thoughts, or attending a reading of seven superstar European writers as part of the 7th New Europe Literature Festival. And as I have a soft spot for the new European wave in prose, the latter was my obvious choice.
On “Writing War”
Back when I was in public school I used to know it was Veterans’ Day because we had a day off. Now I know because of NPR. On 5th Avenue in Park Slope at 8pm last Thursday, the street felt the same as ever–sushi shops and happy hour crowds collecting in the usual numbers. But back in the Old Stone House in Park Slope, a place that is known for withstanding centuries of gentrification, not to mention the savage beginnings of the Revolutionary War, Louise Crawford, curator of Brooklyn Reading Works, knew what kind of mood to set for the latest installment of her series, “Writing War.” “Indeed the sight of the Battle of Brooklyn,” she announced as she welcomed the crowd, “one of the bloodiest battles of the Revolutionary War, is an appropriate setting for this literary event which will highlight writers who know war first hand.”
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Magazine Forté Launch
Disclosure: Christine Rath, Forté’s Senior Editor, and many Forté contributors attended BC’s MFA program.
1. The scene: Recess Activities before the party started. That’s clumps of hair on the ground. 2. The women of Forte: Sarah Chacich (Editor), Christine Rath (Senior Editor), & Georgia Sagri (Editor-in-Chief), with the director of Recess Activities, Allison Weisberg.
Magazine Forté is an audio-only magazine “born out of the desire for deeper and more digressive explorations of subject matter and curiosity about the effects of routing such explorations through the medium of sound.” Last night, Recess Activities, a non profit art space, hosted a listening party for the fourth issue, “Post-Shamanism.”
Christine Rath, the senior editor, explained that Forté‘s goal is to ACTIVATE YOUR BRAIN!!!!, because the experience of listening is a much different experience than that of reading. In listening to each of the recordings dozens of times, she could actually feel different parts activating, she said.
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5 Under 35: Neat as Hell
1. What a room. 2. Colum McCann gives it to us straight.
Last night, the National Book Foundation celebrated this year’s 5 Under 35 at the powerHouse Arena in DUMBO, Brooklyn. ‘How do you get to be a 5 Under 35?’ you might wonder, because that sounds neat as hell. It is, and if the 2010 recipients are the model, you do something like this: be naturally worldly by birth and upbringing, maybe get your MFA in creative writing or maybe don’t, put brilliant words to paper either way, win a handful of coveted and illustrious literary prizes, and then have an already-worshipped writer like Colum McCann pick you as one of literature’s youngest and brightest stars. No big deal.
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Meanwhile, in California: The Marriage Artist
1. Laguna Beach Books is so close to its namesake that you can smell it. It smells like salt and water. And money. 2. International photographer Roy Zipstein and his beautiful family.
I’m always a little shocked when a literary event takes place in Southern California. To me, a twenty-six-year native of Seattle’s perpetual gray gloom, the shut-in pursuits of writing and reading always strike as the province of drearier climates very unlike Laguna Beach and its warm, unconditional sun. Why sit alone at your computer when you could be out with your friends drinking mojitos by a beach bonfire? Why haunt a bookstore when you could be out catching some choice waves, dude?
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