On today's menu:
1. J. D. Salinger has been unmasked! Newsweek has a photo of the photo-reluctant author, taken in in 1968 when The Catcher in the Rye
scribe was 49 years old. And he looks....strikingly similar to the single image of the face most of us have been seeing for years--except with more lines and bags. Salinger is sitting on the edge of a bed lacing up his left shoe, "ever so faintly" smiling, as Newsweek puts it. The recluse is unguarded in that moment and appears to share a deep connection with whoever clicked the shutter. What's even more interesting than The Face is the place which the candid snapshot reveals, Newsweek notes:The intimacy of his setting--the milky tangle of used blankets and sheets--is offset by the spare thrift of his Cornish, N.H., bedroom, with its humble furnishings: small wastebasket, austere dresser. Bare, blank walls. Pack of smokes. But the most telling detail is on the door, at the left edge: a flash-enhanced glint on the room’s steely lock. It’s a reminder of its tenant’s unflinching mantra: keep out.With Salinger's death, the high walls of privacy have started to crumble and soon we'll be watching a documentary (Salinger) and reading an 800-page biography (The Private War of J. D. Salinger) written by Shane Salerno and David Shields. What would J. D. think of all this? Perhaps we need to go back to those famous opening lines of Holden Caulfield:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They're nice and all--I'm not saying that--but they're also touchy as hell. Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything.
2. At The Huffington Post, Ron Currie Jr. tells us what he learned while writing Everything Matters!
Among other things:I learned pretty early when I was writing the book that my father was dying. For a while after that I stopped working, more or less. Instead of writing I drove around a lot, smoking and listening to music and feeling bad for myself. I spent a lot of time fishing on the Sebasticook River, where my father took me and my brothers when we were kids, to the spot just below the dam where the big boulder juts up out of the water and there are plenty of pools the bass like to hide in. You know the spot, or a spot like it? Yeah. And then one day a few months before my father died, I snagged an eager smallmouth in the eye with a treble hook. There's no gentle way to remove a barbed hook from an eye, but I tried. And I realized that if this fish could scream it would, but instead all it did was gape, and I released it into back into the river, hurting and silent and probably bound to die. And after that I lost the stomach for fishing, and have hardly done it since.Everything Matters! remains on my increasingly-long list of books I want to read before the end of the year.
(whose orange spine now has scoliosis from multiple reads) and continuing on through today where, in my basement library, I have an entire collection of nearly 150 black-band Penguin Classics. Simply put, they are the most exciting way to discover (and re-discover) the classics. A world without Penguins would be a very bleak landscape indeed.
, which has piled up the accolades, but for my money nothing can beat Ware's 
for sheer beautiful misery. Published in 2000, one year before our national tragedy, it chronicled the awkward, lonely life of the titular loser who must deal with father issues in the bleak midwinter of his life. Imagine Richard Yates' characters trapped in the panels of a comic strip and you'll have some inkling about the depth of wallow in Jimmy Corrigan.
, about a teenage girl accompanying her scientist mother on a trip to Madagascar to study lemurs. I haven't had the chance to read the rest of the stories in this new collection, but the jacket copy at publisher Dzanc Books' website hints at the odd and beautiful ways that van den Berg uses myth and humor to reveal the human condition: A failed actress takes a job as a Bigfoot impersonator. A botanist seeking a rare flower crosses paths with a group of men hunting the Loch Ness Monster. A disillusioned missionary in Africa grapples with grief and a growing obsession with a creature rumored to live in the forests of the Congo.
. Hill makes horror feel as fresh as the day his father published 
. In 20th-Century Ghosts, the frights come by way of a haunted movie theater, a museum which collects the "last breath" of famous people and "Pop Art," a sad, bizarre tale of an inflatable boy.
and 
. If you do nothing else this week, hunt down the latter collection and read her classic story of a masturbator on the loose in the Butte Public Library ("Butte as in Beautiful").
, I wrote: In his 2006 novel, 
, Kevin Brockmeier gave readers a dazzling vision of an afterlife where residents of a city are kept "alive" only as long as someone back on earth remembered them. In his new collection of short stories, Brockmeier again proves to have a boundless imagination when writing about matters of the spirit. He takes readers on a series of magical mystery tours through worlds that only resemble ours on the surface; scratch deeper, and you'll find a place that's a delirious mix of science fiction and religion. It's no accident that some of these stories are labeled "fables." Brockmeier's tales are surprising, meaningful, and sentimental in all the right places. I can't wait to read what he writes next.
, flew under the radar two years ago, and here's hoping his newest one, 
, gains elevation and starts showing up as a major blip on reader radars everywhere. Here's what I had to say about Arkansas (in a mini-review at 
(also from Dzanc Books). Want more encouragement? Here's the first line of the first story in that book: I hate Christmas, but this year is different because there is a small chance my wife will die and take our unborn child with her.
. I said it was "inspiring fiction which just happens to be set in a room filled with smoke, sad songs and slurred words." That book came out in 2007. I've been keeping my eyes peeled (ouch!) for more Barry to hit the bookstores. However, there's been nothing but crickets since then. Ms. Barry, when are you coming back?
made me look at five-dollar bills in a whole new light. The "novel" shone a kleig light on Honest Abe's complex inner life from thirteen different perspectives in as many short stories. The tales of Lincoln were just varied enough to be "fresh" and were technically stunning in their execution. His subsquent books have done the same literary psychoanalysis on Jackie Kennedy and Sarah Bernhardt.
was the first book to roll off their presses. It's been nothing but reams of excellent literature ever since. 
. But I was fully on board when, eleven years later, he delivered unto the world 
. In 
and 
remain untouched), but what I have read, I've really, really liked. 
is required reading if you want to know the chemistry for a story fueled by jet-propulsion sentences. But 
. I once wrote (and still stand by my words): If there's a bone in Sherman Alexie's body that isn't funny, I'd like to know where it is. The left metatarsal, perhaps; or maybe the coccyx...Take a look at the author photo on the back of his latest book, Ten Little Indians, and you'll see what I mean. His eyes are squeezed shut and his mouth's wide open in mid-guffaw; the teeth practically leap off the dustjacket. That laughter often leaps right back onto the page. Alexie's sentences are jazzed with jokes, the paragraphs pop with the pleasure of puns.
, it 
and the ONLY reason I put it aside was because I'm in the midst of reading two other books and I want to be able to devote my complete attention to the story of three generations of flawed males bonding and breaking in the Oregon wilderness; b) those three pages were pretty fucking good; c) I like elk and Percy's debut collection was called 
; and d) I've been told by several people whose opinion I trust that I will love Percy. I've been kicking myself from here to Regretsville for not reading 
when it came out a couple of years ago. To put it bluntly, Benjamin Percy is the best writer I haven't read....yet.
. If you saw that blog post and haven't yet started reading those three stories about misfits in rural Virginia struggling with loneliness, depression, and turbulent romance...well then, shame on you. Why am I even shouting into the blog-o-sphere if you won't take my advice when I dispense it?
, more strenuous methods had to be applied in order to bring me back from the dead. I'm still pissed that Wallace hung himself in 2008 when he was 46. He robbed us of his greatness. What remains, however, we must cherish.
, which is a weird and wonderful and hilarious tale of a dystopian future. Based on that story alone, I really need to check out 
and 
bandwagon....but what an exhilarating ride that bandwagon is giving! I'm a little more than halfway through the apocalpytic-vampire-child savior novel, but I can tell already it's going to be one of my favorites for this year. Cronin has a beautiful way with horror. Take for instance, these sentences about a vampire attack: Anthony fell on him swiftly, from above. A scream and then the man was silent in wet pieces on the floor. The beautiful warmth of blood! I'll probably post more about The Passage after I finish it, but for now let me just close with this unpardonable pun: it's the kind of novel that sinks its teeth into you and never lets go.