"Amazing Amy stands for a newer creation: lovely girls, expensively educated to seize success for themselves (Amy has diplomas from Harvard and Yale), and yet still groomed for the dream of a beautiful dress and a white cake. As Nick puts it in the novel, 'Of course Amy can cook French cuisine and speak fluent Spanish and garden and knit and run marathons and day-trade stocks and fly a plane and look like a runway model doing it.'

"If no longer vital to a woman’s status as a human being, marriage is still understood as her crowning success, the event without which her life won’t be truly complete. When Amazing Amy grows up, she can’t not get married. The world is still no place for single women. They are regularly bombarded -- and I say this, let’s face it, from experience -- by both well- and ill-intentioned comments about their inability to find that special man."

--from Elif Batuman's terrific though spoilery essay on GONE GIRL, "Marriage Is An Abduction," for the New Yorker.

"I personally have at least 7.8% more work today than I did yesterday." --Elif Batuman on Twitter this morning.

Great news! Elif Batuman has a debut novel out there called THE TWO LIVES that just sold to a publisher!
Less great news for us: The publisher is in the UK, with no US deal announced yet, and we won't see it until 2015.

Five authors to watch out for on Twitter

Last week I went to a reading cohosted by Jami Attenberg, an author I discovered solely because she's on Twitter. Because of that, I know she's been out of New York for five-ish months (photos of New Orleans, road trips, cute dogs) and if we're lucky she might read from her new book THE MIDDLESTEINS, out this fall, whose fast food-patterned cover bears a blurb from none other than Jonathan Franzen. Of course, Franzen famously hates Twitter, but in Attenberg's case he might make an exception.

From Attenberg's tweets, and her blog, I assembled a picture of a woman who was quiet and solemn and somewhat tall. This is why online impressions are dangerous, because at the reading I was acquainted with a happy, near-bubbly woman who read from her New Orleans travel journal and made me want to pack my bags right away. (Also, about average height, not that it matters.) Turns out that social-media first impressions can be just as dangerous as the other kinds.

Here are five other authors you should check out on Twitter, if you aren't already following them.


Meghan Daum (@Meghan_Daum): Apparently she's not going to answer my pleas to write a new book every year, but the author of MY MISSPENT YOUTH and the recent LIFE WOULD BE PERFECT IF I LIVED IN THAT HOUSE writes a regular column for the L.A. Times now, and tweets about her writing life ("Speaking tonight at my alma mater. Managed to get worst case of laryngitis in my life. Anxiety dreams can come true!") as well as pithy commentary on the viral human-interest story of the day (on Marina Keegan: "Death of young Yale grad indisputably tragic. Wondering how many others w/o NYer jobs lined up also died last wk that we haven't heard abt?") It was also on Twitter that I found out (via Sarah Weinman, newsbearer to the book world) that she just signed a deal for a new essay collection, UNSPEAKABLE. Maybe I'll get my wish after all.

Elif Batuman (@BananaKarenina): Come for the punny name, stay for the insights into Turkish culture ("Naming the one Turkish character on your TV show 'Kemal Pamuk' is like naming your only British character 'Sir Winston Shakespeare.'") and meta-jokes ("Twitter suggested I follow Dalai Lama - I considered it, but what if later I change my mind and unfollow him and he gets super-mad?")

Matthew Batt (@MattCBatt): This is my official debutante pick for the first-time memoirist whose book SUGARHOUSE, out this very week, chronicles the years when he and his wife bought an old crack house and planted their unsteady flag in it. His tweets are like a tiny window into a different life ("Nothing like a trip on a hot day to a public pool to make me feel like a complete patrician ass.") and while he's there to promote, he does so with whimsy ("Index of evildoers mentioned in SUGARHOUSE: Karl Rove; Idi Amin; Darth Vader (twice); my 8th grade shop teacher; Mr & Lady Macbeth.")

Andrew Shaffer (@AndrewTShaffer, also @EvilWylie, @EmperorFranzen): The busiest man on Twitter, the one who showed up to Franzen's first FREEDOM reading in New York City in an Emperor Palpatine-style cloak, was always working stealthily behind the curtain even as he quipped about the sad state of modern letters ("TELL ME you didn't just put a link to your Amazon book on my Facebook wall with the status "Indie Authors Rule!" delete block block block"). And if I take the time to read anyone's parody of FIFTY SHADES OF GRAY, it's going to be his, FIFTY SHAMES OF EARL GREY, for which I hear he was handing out branded tea bags at BookExpo America a few weeks ago.

Kate Christensen (@aquavita): Attenberg's cohost at the event I went to last week is new to my Twitter feed, a former Brooklynite who lives in Maine now (a place, like Batt's St. Paul, I can only imagine). Unlike her cohost as well as Batt and Shaffer, I had read Christensen's most recent book THE ASTRAL (and really liked it) before I was even aware that she was on Twitter. From the landscape, I look forward to her blog posts about cooking and advice on writing as she presses forward with the memoir she said last week she had to write.

For more recommendations: Social media for authors: Play now, get to work later

Dear Elif Batuman, please be my best friend. Follow her on Twitter here.

Duh! Winning!

If I find myself playing "Never have I ever"* with Jonathan Franzen, I'll make sure to use "Never have I ever... stored weed in my freezer," as Elif Batuman reveals he apparently does. I knew this clean living was going to pay off eventually!

I feel a little sorry that Batuman's extremely thoughtful essay is frankly overshadowed by this trivium about some dude, but first, she did throw it out there, and second, I think she is gaining in cool points what she is losing in highbrow esteem from all this.

* Game occasionally involving drinking in which one player says "Never have I ever [done a thing]" and the other players who have done that thing either have to drink, or do something humiliating as previously agreed upon before the start of the game. I sort of doubt anyone plays this any more, because in adulthood you must ferret out all the dangerous tidbits of other people's lives instead of having them throw them out there for sport -- which in itself is like a game in which sometimes there is drinking and sometimes there is humiliation, but there is definitely risk and the risk you cannot avoid if you want to be semi-decent at it.**
** Of all the footnotes I have ever written, this is surely the least relevant to anything, but when I write my summer-camp book I know it will be useful background.

Leftovers

• Not only is there potentially a fourth Stieg Larsson book, his dad is now claiming there is a fifth which he wrote before #4 because it "was more fun to write." (L.A. Times)
• "The Kindle changed my reading habits, because I now buy books pretty much only when I’m drunk, and late at night." Elif Batuman sounds like she'd be fun to hang out with. (Boston Globe via Peter W. Knox)
• Forgive me if you all knew that Keith Olbermann is a huge James Thurber fan who reads his short stories out loud on his show. I just found out this week, perils of the cableless. (GalleyCat)
• Literary betting news! Britons can no longer bet on the Booker Prize after a suspiciously large amount of money was placed on only slightly tarnished star Tom McCarthy. (Guardian)
• "Discussed: Comical Hats, Tertiary Characters, Conan the Barbarian, The Dark One, Typologies Within Typologies, Moral Predicaments, Braid-Yanking, Rhapsodies Over Brocaded Silk, Arcane Metaphysical Theology, Clark Gable." Name that fantasy author! (The Believer)
• This SPOILERY review of "The Social Network" is probably my favorite which I also disagree with. It's an art. (The New Republic).
• "It was a great way of getting out of the house, of not being stuck alone in my room all day, and, as I have Lonoff say in THE GHOST WRITER, I got to use a public urinal — that was a breakthrough — and also I got to read a lot." Yeah, Philip Roth, it sounds like you really got a lot out of teaching. Any of his former UPenn students wish to speak to that experience? (Esquire)

"Novelistic alienation – the realisation that lived experience doesn’t resemble literature – was invented in DON QUIXOTE. And, ever since DON QUIXOTE, the novel has been concerned with social inequality. Class and religious difference are, after all, two major reasons why certain forms of human experience don’t get documented. Hence Cervantes writes not only about windmills mistaken for giants, but also about prostitutes mistaken for noble ladies, and Moriscos who carry ham under their arms as a badge of racial purity. But, in DON QUIXOTE, race and class have no higher an order of significance than, say, a hidalgo’s typical weekly diet, or the noise produced by a textile mill: aspects of an undocumented historical present. What was missing from the older literary forms, in other words, wasn’t social justice, but the passage of time – a dimension the novel was specifically engineered to capture. The novelistic hero is by definition someone whose life experience hasn’t yet been fully described, possibly because of his race or class, but more broadly because he didn’t exist before, and neither did the technology for describing him. The durability and magic of the novel form lies in the fact that, having gained a certain level of currency, the latest novel is immediately absorbed into the field of pre-existing literature, and becomes the thing the next novel has to be written against. In this dialectic, the categories of outsider and insider are in constant flux. For an outsider to become an insider isn’t ironic or paradoxical: it’s just the way things work."

--Elif Batuman

Park reading can breathe for the first time

Park: Bryant Park
Books: THE BASEBALL CODES and a little of Elif Batuman's THE POSSESSED: ADVENTURES WITH RUSSIAN BOOKS AND THE PEOPLE WHO READ THEM
Notes: New York's fever finally broke this weekend, so I spent most of Saturday and some of Sunday outside. I haven't appreciated Bryant Park recently; if I'm in the neighborhood I'm usually rushing through it, to somewhere else. Added to the Bryant Park Grill there is now a second bar, the Southwest Porch (inexplicably run sponsored [see correction] by Southwest Airlines ) where you can get a not-overpriced-given-the-neighborhood beer and sit on a swing, and keep reading until that errand you vaguely remember wanting to get done pops up in your mind, and then you go.

I could just stay home to read, but there's something clubby and comforting about being around a lot of people in their own solitudes. It's like going to your college library early in the morning and hearing pages ruffle from a few cubes down. It reassures you that you're doing the right thing. I thought to compare Bryant Park to my big-city backyard, but when I visit my parents I don't sit in the backyard reading because no one else will be out there. I'll read where everyone else is. If I went to the public park in my small town, I might see another loner like myself out reading with a tote bag... but probably not. She'd be at her complex's pool, or on her balcony. I don't have either of those, but I have Bryant Park.

Correction: According to a commenter the Southwest Porch is run by the Bryant Park corporation and 'Wichcraft, although maybe they could make that a little clearer on their site. Still, if Southwest would be going into the concessions business, they picked the right partners.

Photo: sketchyrecord

Singing Dancing Authors

The Daily Beast: The more I read about Elif Batuman's THE POSSESSED, the more I think this book of essays about Russian literature will be right up my alley. Here she offers a list of "alternative Russian classics."

Financial Times: UVa gave some of its new grad students a Kindle DX at the beginning of the year to see whether it would be feasible to go electronic with virtually all its course material. Not surprisingly, the answer is "maybe."

One Minute Book Reviews: Today book blogger extraordinaire Janice Harayda announces the winner of her Delete Key Award for the worst passage she's read in the past year. And since she reviews a book a day, I'm inclined to trust her! Finalists include a disturbing number of my recent reads, like PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, IT SUCKED AND THEN I CRIED and THE LOST SYMBOL (personally, the only one of those I wanted to send sailing across the room, but your mileage may vary).

New York Times: An adaptation of John Grisham's book A TIME TO KILL will take the stage in Washington D.C. next year, the first of his books to do so. It gives me scant hope that the company putting it on commissioned Rupert Holmes to write the script, the writer and composer of "Drood" but also "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)."

The Canadian Press: Margaret Atwood recently shot a cameo for a forthcoming Canadian movie called "Score: A Hockey Musical," in which she plays herself. I don't know what's better, that there is going to be a hockey musical (I picture it like the "Single Ladies"-driven episode of "Glee," except on ice) or that Atwood is considered famous enough to play herself in it. Biggest author coup since Salman Rushdie popped up in "Bridget Jones' Diary"?

Graphic for no reason: LOLerature.