Also, the Nov 16 issue of Publishers Weekly features a story about the adult coloring book phenomenon.
Coloring is great for relaxation, and there is a wide variety available through amazon.com and other retailers. They range from funny ones (Unicorns are Jerks, The 1990s Coloring Book) to more scientific (The Art of Nature Coloring Book).
Thanks to Erin for the information!
The December 2015 issue of School Arts Magazine is full of great pictures and ideas. Thanks to Erin for the submission!
For lovers of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, a fourth book has been published.
The Girl in the Spider’s Web’ by David Lagercrantz
By LEE CHILD SEPT. 1, 2015
There are many ways to continue a series after its author’s death. One is to wait a long time, until the original material has achieved classic status, and then find an established heavyweight willing to step up, like a great actor taking on his third King Lear. Examples would be John Banville reviving Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, or Jill Paton Walsh giving us more of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey. As readers we approach such attempts cautiously, with style points and degrees of difficulty in mind, as if we were judges at an Olympic diving competition, and therefore, however good the execution may be, these books will always remain to some extent interesting curiosities.
Another way is to continue as soon as possible, to give the newly bereft reader the sheer joy of another story with much loved characters and familiar scenarios. There are many such examples, but the all-time champ could be Robert Ludlum, who seems to have published nearly two dozen books in his lifetime, and considerably more than that after its untimely conclusion.
Some endeavors have a foot in both camps. Sophie Hannah’s Hercule Poirot is both a technical challenge and catnip to those craving more from Agatha Christie’s enigmatic Belgian. And now joining her is David Lagercrantz, with “The Girl in the Spider’s Web,” which continues Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series. That sequence was only three books long (“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “The Girl Who Played With Fire” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”) and, unusually, Larsson was dead even before the first installment came out. That sad and poignant fact launched the series from the features pages, rather than the book pages alone, which helped from a coldblooded promotional point of view. But there’s no doubt that its spectacular success was driven by its two central characters, the journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the — what, exactly? — Lisbeth Salander. Certainly, when the continuation was announced, there was joy on fan sites at the prospect of more from both of them — and in particular more from Salander, irresistibly tough, punkish, leather-clad, pierced and inked (including the dragon on her back) and at times unhinged.
Thus Lagercrantz’s first responsibility was to give us more of those two, which promised to be easy enough in Blomkvist’s case. Blomkvist is a journalist writing for Millennium, a Stockholm magazine dedicated to investigative reporting. In real life, Larsson was a journalist and so is Lagercrantz (as well as being a fine novelist in his own right), so we can expect him to know the terrain — although Larsson’s surviving long-term partner, Eva Gabrielsson, shut out of ownership or control by Sweden’s surprisingly behind-the-times attitude to inheritance by common-law spouses, feels that Lagercrantz lacks Larsson’s, and hence Blomkvist’s, passion and radical instincts. Which hints at Lagercrantz’s technical challenge. To what extent are fictional characters genuinely reproducible? To what extent are they animated by the singular psyche of the original author? To what extent can that author’s sparking synapses be detected through his language and served up again by another through his own?
Those challenges are only heightened by a character like Salander. She sprang off the page fully formed and vivid from her first appearance, as if shouldering aside the words to hover in the air between the reader and the book. It’s no exaggeration to say that as an invention she’s in the same ballpark as Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter. She’s a classic antihero — fundamentally deranged, objectively appalling, lawless, violent and deceitful, but fiercely loved by millions of readers because she has good reasons for the way she is and a heart of gold. Can she be brought back to life by a different author — or will she lie inert on the slab? I opened the book, considering style points but mostly hungry for, yes, more of Salander.
Any Swedish crime writer’s first task is to decide whether to dodge or embrace the titanic shadow cast by Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, who 50 years ago began the 10-book Martin Beck series, which invented modern Scandinavian crime fiction and still stands as its finest achievement. Lagercrantz chooses to embrace that tradition, and thus the narrative feels calm, patient and familiar. An agnostic Jewish cop named Bublanski says sadly of his department, “Inevitably there were corrupt and depraved people in the force.” Both the line and the character could have been written by Wahloo and Sjowall. Other minor characters are introduced with full biographies and backgrounds, which isn’t a pacing error but rather a courteous, very Swedish, approach to storytelling.
The plot itself starts with computer hacking — into the National Security Agency in Maryland, no less — and Lagercrantz distinguishes himself by making the computer stuff very human. The technology serves the characters, rather than being a character itself. There’s a mute and autistic boy who needs protection and has vital clues locked in his head, which might or might not be revealed in a drawing. Lagercrantz distinguishes himself there too, with a fine and sympathetic portrayal. There’s artificial intelligence and code breaking and bad guys as icy and brutal as you’d like, but none of it is “techno” — its Swedishness, even as rendered in George Goulding’s English translation, keeps it very real and modest, a little romantic and a little inhibited. It’s a fine plot, with perhaps just one missed opportunity: American thriller writers know that if the N.S.A. were hacked, the response would be ballistic, hence offering a nice contrast between D.C. hysteria and Stockholm stoicism. But Lagercrantz makes nothing of it.
And what of Lisbeth Salander? Given that Lagercrantz knows she’s what readers want, her long and suspenseful introduction is masterful. It’s a striptease. She’s mentioned in the prologue (“One Year Earlier”), and then she’s not in the story at all, and then she is, maybe, purely by inference, and then we get a brief glimpse of her, and then another, and then some longer scenes. But it’s not until Page 216 that she actually speaks to Blomkvist. “Lisbeth,” he asks, answering her phone call, “is that you?” “Shut up and listen,” she replies, and he does. And we’re off to the races. Or are we? Does she spark to life and get up off the slab?
Very, very nearly. After he reunites her with Blomkvist, Lagercrantz seems to lose his nerve. He relies too much on third-party description — we’re told that Salander is intense and fierce, which is a poor substitute for seeing intensity and ferocity for ourselves. Certainly she’s appropriately brave, headstrong, smart and willful. And certainly the book’s stronger foot is firmly in the “sheer joy of a new story” camp. But the sublime madness of Larsson’s original isn’t quite there. Interestingly, Lagercrantz has a character pick up a copy of Stephen King’s “Pet Sematary” as potential bedtime reading. The conceit of that book is the existence of a patch of earth where, once buried, a dead pet or person will come alive again — but, crucially, diminished to a degree that depends on the time between death and the start of the magic process. It’s been eight years since the Swedish publication of “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.” Was that too long? Was the hat-tip to “Pet Sematary” a coded acknowledgment that the task was impossible?
THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER’S WEB
By David Lagercrantz
Translated by George Goulding
403 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.
How do we explain to the new, knowing wash-ashores, Brits and Aussies mainly, who have insinuated themselves into the media here, and into popular American culture generally, and to the very young, that there are touchstones and events that define us, that have formed us, that they know nothing about? They don’t have the slightest clue, nor do they know Bo Diddley.
In my own life, the most shocking event, overwhelming everything else, was the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955, then the assassinations — John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. These horrors, along with vivid marginalia, “The Great Gildersleeve” on radio; Phil Silvers and the Army-McCarthy hearings on television; the senior prom; the Thanksgiving Day football game; Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene”; and in literature, for me, “Tropic of Cancer,” “Peyton Place,” “Generation of Vipers” and “The Lottery.”
An essay could be written about the occasions, big and small, that occupy the collective unconscious of the average American who came awake in the 1940s. It is proof of the power of Shirley Jackson’s story that it was still resonating in Miss Bagley’s English class when I was a student at Medford High in the late 1950s. It electrified the readers of The New Yorker when it was first published in June 1948 and — I reread it the other day — it still sends chills, reminding us just how potent and inspiring a short story can be.
“I remember one spring morning I was on my way to the store,” Shirley Jackson writes in an essay in “Let Me Tell You,” this new collection of fiction and nonfiction, “pushing my daughter in her stroller, and on my way down the hill I was thinking about my neighbors, the way everyone in a small town does. The night before, I had been reading a book about choosing a victim for a sacrifice, and I was wondering who in our town would be a good choice for such a thing.”
After that explosive story came her first collection, with “The Lottery” as the title story. And in 1959, with her novel “The Haunting of Hill House,” she established herself firmly in the American Gothic tradition. Three years later came the equally strong novel “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” and then, with the exception of some stories and sketches, nothing more. She died in 1965 at the age of 48. The centenary of her birth is next year.
Shirley Jackson in 1938
For those of us whose imaginations, and creative ambitions, were ignited by “The Lottery,” Jackson remains one of the great practitioners of the literature of the darker impulses and (in a term she uses in “Hill House”) “the underside of life.” The texture of her two major novels tends to lushness and formality, more verbal foliage, while her stories are plain-spoken and persuasive for their apparent directness.
What we have here are 30 short stories (22 of which have never been previously published), 10 humorous bits of family memoir and 16 essays and talks, nearly all of them in print for the first time. The stories range from sketches and anecdotes to complete and genuinely unsettling tales, somewhat alarming and very creepy. None can be called terrifying, nor can any be ranked with Jackson’s best work, yet the whole of the book offers insights into the vagaries of her mind, which was ruminant and generous, accommodating such diverse figures as Dr. Seuss and Samuel Richardson — and managing to succeed at something many English majors fail at, finishing both “Pamela” and “Clarissa.”
The helpful chronology provided by Joyce Carol Oates in “Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories,” the Library of America’s volume that collects the major novels and the best stories, indicates that Jackson’s life, although mostly sunny, clouded over in her last decade. Some of the pieces here recount her happy marriage to the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, who became an energetic booster of her work. The couple rusticated themselves to Bennington, Vt., where he was a teacher and she — as far as the neighbors knew — was a housewife, raising four talkative children. Ultimately, for various reasons, the neighbors took against them. Oates’s 1956 entry in the Jackson chronology provides details: “In this and coming years, townsfolk will harass the Hymans with anonymous hate mail, soap their windows with swastikas and repeatedly dump garbage into the bushes lining their front sidewalk.”
You associate the Green Mountain State with gourmet ice cream and cows, not swastikas and hate mail, but on second thought it’s possible to conclude that such small town infernality is very Jacksonian. A version of this village small-mindedness and hostility is a feature of “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” but no mention of any of this appears in the jolly reports and family reminiscences that are included here. The titles are self-explanatory: “Here I Am, Washing Dishes Again,” “Mother, Honestly!” “The Pleasures and Perils of Dining Out With Children” and half a dozen more, most of them chirpy, with the sigh of fun-poking exasperation you associate with Erma Bombeck, whose columns these much resemble. We will have to wait for next year’s promised biography by Ruth Franklin, who wrote the foreword to this volume, to know how deeply Jackson was affected by the harassment and the shunning.
One consequence was Jackson’s increasing reclusiveness. This shows in the uneven stories, and they add proof to my theory that lesser works reveal much more of the writer’s mind and circumstances than finished and finely wrought fictions. What is Jackson’s landscape? Where are the road trips and the open skies and the noodle salad in the picnic area? They do not exist. Hers are fictions of interiors; her world is a house — an ideal cast of mind for someone writing ghost stories. And the larger the house, the more numerous the rooms, the greater the possibility for menace. It’s obvious that Jackson kept herself to her house and then made something of it — sometimes denying its misery with her litany of domestic satisfactions and jollifications, at others making it into darkness, in the tone of the captive she presumably felt herself to be.
Even an exterior, big-city story like “Paranoia” — one of the best here — is given its impetus by conveying the impression that the man being stalked is trapped, confined by busy streets and brooding buildings. Another urban story, “The Arabian Nights,” takes place in a nightclub and has an odd juxtaposition — a family hectoring a young girl to talk to a man who looks like, and might be, Clark Gable. “Family Treasures,” which takes place in a college dormitory, is the tale of an innocent-seeming kleptomaniac. “The Lie,” as with many others, is a story about insecurity. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” features a wicked child. A group of stories that predate “The Lottery” are set at the close of World War II: “The Paradise,” “The Homecoming,” “Daughter, Come Home” and “As High as the Sky.” What the wartime ones have in common is melancholy, unease and especially a sense of separation bordering on alienation, the territory of her like-minded near-contemporary the Alabama novelist and short story writer William March, who is remembered only for his last novel, “The Bad Seed.”
Although some of what appears in this collection, culled from the Jackson archives by two of her children, is clearly from the bottom drawer, the assortment is large enough to contain much that is satisfying. It shows the many directions her writing took and provides many tantalizing asides. At one point, she mentions something she intended to write, “a long story about a girl who runs away from home and tries so successfully to eradicate any aspect of her old personality that when she wants to go home again she can’t get in; they don’t know her.” This fetching idea is the general concept of Albert Camus’s “Le Malentendu.” I wonder if she ever wrote it?
LET ME TELL YOU
New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings
By Shirley Jackson
Edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt
416 pp. Random House. $30.
from http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/books/review/let-me-tell-you-by-shirley-jackson.html?emc=edit_bk_20150731&nl=books&nlid=71940650
Great reads under 200 pages. Mostly.
posted on Sept. 2, 2014, at 7:12 a.m.
Dept. of Speculation, a series of short dispatches from the front line of a marriage, is by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, and often both in the same sentence.
Orwell’s classic allegory is as sharp and biting as when it was first published nearly 70 years ago, and just as relevant. Well worth a reread.
A gripping tale of murder most foul on the estate of the Blackwood family, Shirley Jackson’s final novel is the kind of book you’ll want everyone to read just so you can talk about it.
A book about cultural identity as much as politics, The Reluctant Fundamentalistfollows a Princeton-educated Pakistani as his life in America collapses post 9/11.
In Nora Ephron’s hilarious novel, based on the breakdown of her second marriage, group therapy and infidelity share the page with recipes for pot roast.
If Monty Python had done science fiction it might have been like this. At once supremely silly, laugh-out-loud hilarious, and as British as dead-parrot jokes.
A woman in a loveless marriage recounts a childhood friendship in this beautifully crafted tale of innocence and growing up.
Achebe’s classic novel follows Okonkwo, a man who finds himself at odds with society and history amid the changing cultural landscape in Nigeria. 209 pages.
The story of a woman trapped in her marriage was condemned when first published in 1899, ending Chopin’s career, but is now rightly recognised as a classic.
An exploration of loneliness, softened by Martin’s witty observations and dry humour,Shopgirl follows the titular character as she navigates life in Los Angeles.
Classic Christie, classic Marple. When the body of a young woman is discovered in the library at Gossington Hall, the hunt is on to find out whodunnit.
In a future America, books are outlawed and “firemen” burn any that are found. One of Bradbury’s best.
Explores similar themes to Fahrenheit 451, but written for young adults. Don’t let the recent film adaptation put you off.
An examination of life and the narratives we construct for ourselves that won the 2011 Man Booker Prize.
'The sense of an ending' by Julian Barnes is the best book I have ever, ever read. Read it in a few hours, could not put it down
— Caitlin (@Caitlinellen__)
Sula follows the contrasting lives of two girls growing up in a poor, black Ohio neighbourhood, and the different paths they choose.
A sparse, dark, brutal novella about a Welsh farmer struggling to make a living from his sheep, and an unnamed man digging up badgers to bait.
An absurd, delightful novel about a Polish immigrant in Los Angeles who schemes to reinvent herself in order to gain access to the Twin Palms nightclub.
Two friends plot the downfall of a politician in this Booker-winning novella.
Although frequently challenged for its depiction of gang violence and youth drinking,The Outsiders is in fact a classic morality tale wrapped up in ’60s street gang culture.
This story of an ageing, down-on-his luck fisherman fighting to reel in the catch of a lifetime won Papa a Pulitzer. Some love it, some don’t. A must-read either way.
This multi-award-winning young-adult novel deals with the trauma caused by rape, and the difficulty victims often have in reporting and talking about sexual assault.
Nick Carraway encounters reclusive billionaire Jay Gatsby at a party. Jazz ensues. You may already know the story, but like one of Gatsby’s lavish soirées, Fitzgerald’s sparkling prose warrants revisiting.
The aftermath of a gang rape on a young mother is explored in a searing indictment of rape culture and the lack of justice, care, and understanding for victims.
A seasoned English journalist in Vietnam watches as a young American turns good intentions into bad policy and bloodshed in this powerful anti-war allegory.
A fantastical, lyrical love story set during the Napoleonic Wars.
The classic fable of a seagull who wants more. Unwilling to conform to the norms of his flock, Jonathan goes in search of a higher purpose to life.
A novel in verse, Autobiography of Red gives voice to a minor character in Greek mythology, updating his story to the present day. There are those who love it and those who haven’t read it. Be the former.
A stream-of-consciousness journey into the mind of a man on his lunch break.
A collection of 16 utterly compelling, gorgeously crafted short stories.
A horror novel following the 12th expedition into the uncharted Area X. Any guesses what happened to the previous 11 expeditions? Nope, weirder than that.
Babbitt’s beloved fable about immortality will outlive us all.
A brilliant satire about a gardener turned political pundit.
The story of Sam, a boy who runs away from home to live in the Catskill mountains, where he befriends a peregrine falcon he names Frightful.
Written when Toole was just 16, but not published until after his death. Well worth a read for fans of his A Confederacy of Dunces.
An experimental novel that defies literary convention and category, this mix of fiction, critique, memoir, confession, and essay demands to be experienced.
An ageing journalist requests a virgin prostitute for his 90th birthday, but instead of sex, he finds love for the first time.
A darkly comic novella in which the narrator tells her unborn daughter the story of how she came to be. A romantic comedy with the emphasis on comedy, not romance.
A woman assigned to deal with the estate of an old flame finds herself in the middle of a secret war between two mail distributors in Pynchon’s satirical novel.
In 1930s Saigon, a young French girl enters into a passionate affair with the son of a wealthy Chinese family that threatens to tear their families apart.
The narrator befriends a young New York society girl, Holly Golightly, who relays tales of her dates with wealthy men, and finds himself entranced by her.
Ethan Frome struggles to tend to his farm and his wife – then her beautiful cousin comes to stay.
In a reverse narrative, the protagonist moves backwards from death towards the story’s beginning and his role in one of the most horrific events in recent history.
A witty and searing indictment of the ’70s New York literary scene, in which a poet observes her peers at a writer’s colony upstate.
A harrowing account of the author’s time in Nazi concentration camps.
An essay in narrative form, arguing against the treatment of women both as fictional characters and as writers of fiction in a male-dominated literary world.
An alcoholic bartender in Los Angeles observes the lonely, broken, and grotesque characters who populate his bar, among whom he may be the most broken.
Patrick deWitt's Ablutions is an astonishing first novel with a second person narrative. Brutal yet brilliant and visceral. I loved it.
— Ranjit (@qtfan)
More than 50 years after it was written, What Pet Should I Get? is being published.
"This never-ever-before-seen picture book by Dr. Seuss about making up one’s mind is the literary equivalent of buried treasure! What happens when a brother and sister visit a pet store to pick a pet? Naturally, they can’t choose just one! The tale captures a classic childhood moment—choosing a pet—and uses it to illuminate a life lesson: that it is hard to make up your mind, but sometimes you just have to do it! Told in Dr. Seuss’s signature rhyming style, this is a must-have for Seuss fans and book collectors, and a perfect choice for the holidays, birthdays, and happy occasions of all kinds.
An Editor’s Note at the end discusses Dr. Seuss’s pets, his creative process, and the discovery of the manuscript and illustrations for What Pet Should I Get?" From http://www.seussville.com/books/book_detail.php?isbn=9780553524260.
Being a book lover doesn’t always result in happy endings. Here are 14 of the worst things that can happen to any true bibliophile!
From: http://media.bookbub.com/blog/2015/07/20/14-horrible-situations-for-book-lovers-to-be-in/
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