That swan table though

If you have $14.5 million you can own Jonathan Safran Foer's house, but you can judge its interior decorating job for free. Also, the Foer-Krauss axis is leaving Park Slope? Is it a trend now?

Filmbook: The Great Prestige Circus of Book Adaptations, Fall 2011

Now playing: "Moneyball," based on the Michael Lewis book of the same name, already receiving Oscar buzz; "The Three Musketeers," adaptation approximately #2745, not receiving any Oscar buzz whatsoever.

Opens Oct. 28: "The Rum Diary" (Johnny Depp) based on the Hunter S. Thompson book about Puerto Rico. I mistweeted when I said the only NY Public Library copy available to me was in Spanish and called DIARIOS DE RON (trans. RUM DIARIES); it's actually DIAS DE RON (RUM DAYS). I probably won't see the movie till I read that but I expect Peter W. Knox will have something up as soon as it opens. Also 10/28: "Anonymous" (I saw it already and blogged about it here), "Sleeping Beauty" (an adaptation of sorts).

Opens Nov. 18: "The Descendants," Alexander Payne's long awaited return to our screens (since 2004's "Sideways" or his heartbreaking segment in 2006's "Paris, je t'aime") -- it's George Clooney! It's Hawaii! It's sur...prisingly heartfelt? Highly anticipated by me in any case. Based on the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings. Also week of 11/18: "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1" (fourth of the planned 5 "Twilight" movies, in case you're keeping score)

Opens Nov. 24: "Hugo," based on the Caldecott Award-winning THE INVENTION OF HUGO CABRET by Brian Selznick. So it's a kids' movie, fine, but what if I told you that it was a kids' movie directed by Martin Scorsese starring such casual players as Ben Kingsley, Emily Mortimer, Christopher Lee, Johnny Depp (again?) and Michael "Deserves to Be Slightly More Famous" Pitt? Also, the book is spectacular (about the invention of film in turn-of-the-century Paris), but I'm trying to focus on what you want. Take your small cousins or something. It's a mitzvah. Also week of 11/24: "A Dangerous Method," based on the John Kerr nonfiction book of the same name about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, starring Viggo Mortenson and Michael Fassbender and I don't know why he keeps coming up either, it's a mystery, and "My Week With Marilyn," based on a memoir by one of Monroe's studio escorts while shooting in London (with Michelle Williams as Monroe).

Opens December 9: "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," based on the John le Carre novel of the same name about Cold War espionage and the search for a plant, starring Colin "Hey do you remember when I won an Academy Award last year? That was awesome" Firth and Tom "Universal Mancrush" Hardy. Hey, did you know this book is almost impossible to find in used bookstores? Also 12/9: "We Need To Talk About Kevin," Toronto-buzzed feature based on the Lionel Shriver novel.

Opens December 16: "Carnage" (dir. R. Polanski), which is technically based on a play by Yasmina Reza but I'm propping it up because the four-handed cast is terrific and there will be fireworks. Also 12/16: "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows" (a tenuous adaptation at best but will probably live up to the "silly but fun" I gave the first movie).

Opens December 23: "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo," U.S. adaptation, tracked here for almost two years.If you think you're going to hate David Fincher's take with Daniel Craig as Mikael "Kalle Bastard" Blomkvist, you could always rent or buy the Swedish trilogy as insurance. Also 12/23: "The Adventures of Tintin," 'starring' Simon Pegg because this is one of those creepy real-ish animation jobs, and "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," adapting the Jonathan Safran Foer novel in what will probably be an all too realistic 9/11 tearjerker. You have plenty of time to read this book, which I regard very highly, before it comes out. Not much up to Christmas but more holidays anyway.

Filmbook-to-Be: Trailer for "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"

No, you're tearing up. (PS: Max von Sydow alert!)

Brooklyn Book Festival 2011

Books I most want to read from having seen their authors live: Karen Russell, SWAMPLANDIA and Michael Dickman, FLIES. Russell read from a soon-to-be-published short story called "A Family Restaurant"; Dickman read some of his poems, and did you know, he has a twin brother who is also a poet?
Best reader of the festival (that I saw): Elissa Schappell. I feel as though it would be a slight to say that she was dramatic as she read from her collection BLUEPRINTS FOR BUILDING BETTER GIRLS but will you accept that she had stage presence?
Best mustache of the festival (that I saw): Jim Shepard. Monumental.
Best news from the comics panel: Kate Beaton of Hark! a Vagrant fame (also: GREAT GATSBYS, Dude Watchin' With The Brontes) will be cohosting a monthly comedy show here.
How to run a good panel at 10AM: Talk about dudes in kilts! (That was Diana Gabaldon on the influence of "Doctor Who" on her work, which is to say, it hasn't much.)
How to run a not-so-good panel at 10AM: Skip any discussion in favor of readings that lilt on softly... oh, so softly...
New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller authors met: One, Tom Perrotta, who spoke softly and briefly about battling back his mother's voice in his head telling him he couldn't write things. He read a passage in his new book THE LEFTOVERS from the perspective of a teenage girl, and I appreciated all over again how nuanced and non-histrionic I found that character's writing. Even her friend, the described-by-Perrotta "sexy teenager," has layers. It's a terrific book.

Books I brought with me to the festival: Just one, Amitav Ghosh's RIVER OF SMOKE (it's really long).
Best non-programming addition to the BKBF: Food trucks. It's obvious, right?
Panels hit: 7
Bookend events attended: The aforementioned Community Bookstore 40th Anniversary celebration, where I saw Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt, Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss all read in an unexpectedly cavernous church on a cloudy afternoon. I don't know how they picked their readings, but in Krauss' case, it was suggested that she had bought the book at the store itself (she and JSF live nearby, and if you do enough digging you can figure out where). This bookstore is not the closest to me, but it is the best closest to me, whose feats include handselling a pre-publication copy of THE PALE KING to me over Twitter, which is just spectacular service. Happy birthday! And many more.
Major and minor regrets: The parties I missed on Thursday/Friday nights; that Fran Lebowitz/ Wallace Shawn panel everyone was raving about. Did anyone notice that there wasn't an n+1 presence at the fest as there has been in previous years?
Brooklyn Book Fests attended by me: 5 (here's last year's recap. Without really intending to, this shaped up to be something of an alternative year for me; I didn't hit any ticketed panels because I didn't feel like waiting in line, so, I didn't, and I made it to (as mentioned above) panels featuring poetry, comics/graphic novelists and sci-fi/fantasy novelists, which is a broader scope than I usually take. It was quite pleasant!

Literary things I did while writing this post: Thought about buying a Joan Didion/ Sloane Crosley lecture ticket (is $25 too much?) (but I mean, DIDION); grew irritated at the New Yorker subscriber site for making me re-log in to that Dickman brothers article after nearly every page; wondered what I would ask Adam Rapp if I ever saw him again; realized I forgot to pick up my copy of THE DESCENDANTS at the library and now it's expired, shoot.
Literary thing I ate tonight: An "American Globs" ice cream cone at the new Big Gay Ice Cream store in the East Village named for, obviously, Neil Gaiman. It was good but I should have gone for one of the cones with dulce de leche.
Did I buy it on purpose? No; the girl at the counter recommended it because of the pretzels.
Had I left the store when I got the reference? Not yet!
Person to blame that this post is so late: Lance Armstrong.

The hype bites back

I spent the first third, at least, of THE TIGER'S WIFE trying to figure out what it was "about." What author Téa Obreht was "up to." I wish I could have that time back, because while I was trying to determine whether I was being outfoxed I could have been enjoying myself a lot more. At some point I succumbed to the book's spell (as cheesy as it is: this happened) and I was a lot happier, deeper into the story and more mystified (in a good way) thereafter.

Let me start by saying if it assuages your fears, that there is a literal tiger in this book (though not in the present), it is not imaginary and it enacts real damage. (Now I'm thinking about CHRONIC CITY again. I should probably write Jonathan Lethem an apology one of these days.) The tiger figures into the stories Natalia, a 20something doctor in an unnamed Balkan city in the former Yugoslavia, was told as a child by her grandfather. Grandfather, who has just died on a trip out of town, was also a doctor and he and Natalia were very close, so she knows what the family doesn't -- that he was sneaking around to conceal his cancer and treatments from his wife -- but she doesn't know what he was doing out of town on the day of his death. Preparing to cross the border on a humanitarian mission to vaccinate orphans, Natalia hopes to find out while she's out there what her grandfather was doing out there just before he died, even if she can't tell anyone.

If I had to describe this book as being "about" anything, it's "about" a small Balkan town in which the narrator's grandfather grew up, and the tiger that menaces it one winter, and how they deal with that.  The narrator's grandfather tells her this story at some indeterminately young age, and she retells it to us intercut with her present-day trip and the confrontations she has with locals there. So in a bigger sense, it's "about" what the stories we tell and are told say about us, and the extent to which we look to them to shape our lives, which turns out to be quite a lot in this case. When I write that, it just sounds so hokey, but this book is full of mysteries; it's a fair amount like that other book by that other wunderkind, Jonathan Safran Foer's EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED, in that respect. (But no Alex! Which is too bad because he's a premium dancer and all the girls want to be carnal with him.)

Obreht is able to bring across the kinship Natalia feels for her grandfather, the void his absence creates in her, without making either of them perfect; stemming from her remorse over his death is the fact that they weren't very close for most of the war, nor was Natalia involved in the war itself, being mostly concerned with going out with her fellow students. Her humanitarian trip is a way of making amends (to her view), an effort not universally welcomed.

THE TIGER'S WIFE received such elaborate praise as that casts suspicion over the book industry as a whole, but any author placed on the New Yorker 20 under 40 list before having a book come out would. I can't say definitively whether she "deserves" to be on this list as there are, oh, hundreds of thousands of writers who would fall into that age group, and I can't have read any significant share of them. I will be eagerly anticipating her next book, which I will probably fight again for the narrative it's trying to spin, only maybe next time I will surrender sooner.

New Yorker Festival: Foer, Pamuk, Their Stuff (With Digressions)

On Friday night I went to see Jonathan Safran Foer and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk at the New Yorker Festival event “Possessed,” with Deborah Treisman interviewing and moderating. The pairing was somewhat loose but turned out to be much more within my area of interest than I had initially expected (see Digression 1): Both writers have sideline interests in art and visual projects which they were only too happy to talk about in relation to their work.

Pamuk, who described himself as a “failed painter,” is in the process of transforming his most recent novel THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE into a physical museum in Istanbul, where he was born and where his office is now. The museum, he said, will be a “cultural oddity” to people who haven’t read the book, but for those who have will attempt to duplicate various scenes from it in tableaus of objects. He contrasted visual writers who make you see the world they’re working in (like Tolstoy) to verbal writers who dazzle you with their words (like Dostoevsky), placing himself in the former camp.

Pamuk described furnishing a piece (of which he showed pictures) where the protagonist of the book is standing in his bathroom and said the hardest part was finding the appropriate toothbrush since no one holds onto their toothbrushes from the ‘70s. For another piece he hired another artist to degrade over 4,000 cigarette butts (collected by the narrator from the woman he loves).

Foer, after publishing his first nonfiction book EATING ANIMALS (disliked by your humble blogger), has embarked on something completely different: His new novel TREE OF CODES is an art book created from the manuscript of one of JSF’s personal favorites, Bruno Schulz’s THE STREET OF CROCODILES, in which Foer has cut out parts of the pages or obliterated words in other means to create a new story from the existing story. (Even the title reflects this, see? THE STREET OF CROCODILES.) He didn’t mention this, but I think it’s worth noting that Schulz was a Jewish Pole who was shot and killed in 1942 by a Gestapo officer in a dispute with a friend of his.

To make TREE OF CODES, JSF physically worked on creating the book and shopped it around to several art publishers before finding one that would take it. (He has since started a new novel.) He talked about being inspired in a college sculpture class by the work of Joseph Cornell and wishing, like Pamuk, that he were a painter or visual artist, but deciding that the best way to inspire the same feeling in someone that he felt looking at Cornell’s work was to become a writer.

They both took questions from the audience after, none of which were particularly inspiring except a Polish woman who took the mike just to thank Pamuk for expressing something she could not have expressed. One woman asked Pamuk if he believed objects have auras and took very careful, deliberate notes on his answer (which was, in sum, “if we put them there?”) Foer expounded on his relationship with readers, describing every reading as a “misunderstanding” coming from the deepest part of himself. Unlike other panels I’ve been to, under the New Yorker umbrella or otherwise (see Digression 2), I felt like these authors had a really strong rapport and JSF was properly in awe of his cohort, as were we all.

Digression 1: This is my fourth (!) year attending the New Yorker Festival because I am awesome. However, I don’t love how they clump most of the fiction writers’ events on one night (Friday in this case). It forced me to make a tough choice between this panel and another featuring two authors I love, Michael Chabon and Zadie Smith. Ah, for a clone! My logic behind picking JSF/Pamuk was that I had never seen either of them live, and I thought Pamuk still lived in Istanbul full time, so it would be more difficult to catch him. (He actually teaches at Columbia now; see Digression 3.) Despite the pang I think I made the right choice. (Actually, I was supposed to see Foer AND Smith together at my first fest in 2006, but didn’t make it in from Pennsylvania in time. At least I didn’t have to miss that David Remnick-hosted screening of “Borat.”)

Digression 2: Between this and the Brooklyn Book Festival a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about what makes a good panel of authors, and have found no one ingredient that really makes it. But this I know, a bad panel makes everyone look like they’re shouting past each other into a void, and not the one where the audience is. I don’t even think it’s necessary for authors to have much in common, so long as they’re respectful and acknowledge the distance, but sometimes the rift starts in the pairing. The audience can contribute too: Two years ago I went to an A. M. Homes/ Miranda July festival event, and fully 75 percent of the audience was composed of July fanboys and -girls who had no interest in anything Homes said, and that lack of interest was mirrored onstage. Also, don’t ever be on a panel with Miranda July, she takes very odd pauses in her speaking.

Digression 3: Orhan Pamuk’s problems with the Turkish state never came up during this panel, but it was difficult not to be reminded of them as he discussed his work. “I have seen so many military coups,” he said simply in the process of explaining a scene from THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE, and having felt the current regime turn against him, even slightly (the charges were dropped after all) it’s hard to imagine it is not current in his mind. I wonder if he worries about having problems re-entering Turkey to complete his museum. It would be overly simplistic to compare the unrequited love plots that run through his books to any sort of nationalistic feeling or political critique, particularly the sense of betrayal one might feel while being charged with “insulting” one’s own nationality. I mean only a really hack blogger would do that. … …

Resolved, I do not have a conscience

I finished the David Foster Wallace essay "Consider the Lobster" this morning on the train, and then I went to Luke's Lobster for lunch. (By coincidence -- work friends suggested it.) Clearly this is an extension of the cast iron stomach that allowed me to read FAST FOOD NATION and EATING ANIMALS and continue eating both fast food (well, sparingly) and animals.

The Luke's Lobster roll is satisfying, but pricey for what you get. The atmosphere is kind of hokey. Order the ginger beer you can also buy there (Maine Root Ginger Brew) -- I was warned as to how spicy it was, but the balance between bite and taste is actually perfect. And food writing is definitely not my strong suit; I just fell into an Internet rabbit hole trying to figure out how celery salt is made.

The New Yorker's 20 Under 40

In classically bitchy fashion, the Times goes ahead and publishes the list before David Remnick's baby hits newsstands next Monday. The question isn't whether you have any opinions on it, but do you have enough? Herewith, the class of 2010:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chris Adrian
Daniel Alarcón
David Bezmozgis
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Joshua Ferris
Jonathan Safran Foer
Nell Freudenberger
Rivka Galchen
Nicole Krauss
Yiyun Li
Dinaw Mengestu
Philipp Meyer
C. E. Morgan
Téa Obreht
Z Z Packer
Karen Russell
Salvatore Scibona
Gary Shteyngart
Wells Tower

I will quickly call out a few members:

The Prodigy: The youngest author on the list is 24-year-old Téa Obreht, a Cornell MFA grad from the former Yugoslavia whose first novel hasn't even come out yet. All eyes will be on that book (it's called THE TIGER'S DAUGHTER) but Roving Editor seems to have read it and apparently there is an actual tiger in it. Oh boy.
The Overachiever: Author Chris Adrian's other job is pediatric oncologist.
The Married Couple: Super day for the Safran Foer-Krauss hauss, or launch of a thousand after-dinner arguments? Just kidding, I'm sure they aren't that petty.
The First Mistake: Despite the Times calling out the "international" character of the list, at my extremely rough count, the list stands at 9 foreign-born, 11 American-born, which means your odds are still slightly better as an American. U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
The Disappointed: Of all the authors who were too old to make the list, the Times singled out only Colson Whitehead and Dave Eggers as not making the cut. Strikes me as slightly unfair, since a lot of authors are also too old, although some are much too old and others are just slightly too old.
The Busy Summer: By my accounting I have a lot of reading to do, since I've only read books by five of them. Pathetic showing. Dare you do better?

Watch your favorite books

In the 15 minutes I wasn't paying attention to them, book trailers became so big that they got their own award show -- albeit one described by its MC as "meant to be a spoof." The 2010 Moby Awards, handed out by Melville House Publishing, handed out such accolades as Best Performance By An Author -- it was this guy! -- Trailer Least Likely To Sell The Book and Bloodiest Book Trailer. Zach Galifianakis took home a Moby for Best Cameo for his performance in a video about John Wray's excellent LOWBOY, but Jonathan Safran Foer probably didn't pick up his statuette for Most Annoying Performance By An Author for this video tied to EATING ANIMALS. (Okay, I haven't watched that one yet. We all need our illusions.)

The most memorable book trailers I've seen recently were the Brad Meltzer "All my negative reviews at once" one and ABRAHAM LINCOLN, VAMPIRE HUNTER. (Naturally, neither of these were on TV, although occasionally you'll see a TV ad for a book and it's usually a deeply weird experience.) Have you seen one recently you'd like to call out?

"I used to write in a local coffee shop, but there was another guy, another writer, who kept sitting in my favorite seat. I would show up, and he would be there, and I would get exiled to a couch or something, and it would throw me off my game. Then I figured out that he was Jonathan Safran Foer. True story. You don’t get over a thing like that."

--Lev Grossman: First-time novelist, TIME book critic, obvious bookworm hipster douchebag. (And I an even bigger one for thinking "Figured out!? All you need is one good look.")

Clearly, JSF's game was not thrown off by working in the vicinity of someone who has written about him; his new book EATING ANIMALS hits stores November 2.

Get back to work!

I have no way of verifying this, but I'm pretty sure I saw Jonathan Safran Foer last night.

I happened to be at Joe's Pub for Mike Daisey's new show, "If You See Something Say Something." (I have to write a proper review of it, but in short: Go see it!) He passed by me while I was standing in the line for the bathroom afterwards; he looked straight at me and I almost did a double-take.

I was tempted to call after him "Hurry up and write your third book!" But I didn't, because honestly I was too shocked to see him. When I moved to New York I expected the streets would be thick with writers, but they manage to stay pretty well disguised.

Will we see a great 9/11 novel?

Of course no one needs to be reminded what today is.

About a month ago I was working on a review of a book about New Orleans and brought up the question of whether every novel about the city from now on would, if not directly dealing with the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, in some sense be in dialogue with that disaster. (The book, BABYLON ROLLING, was set in the summer before Katrina, as residents prepared for another hurricane, but the parallels were impossible to avoid.) You could ask the same question about books set in contemporary New York City, whether they explicitly depict some aspect of the day's events or just mention it in passing.

I think there will be a great 9/11 novel, although I'm not sure it will come out of those which have already been written. The best I have read so far, although I think their strength goes far beyond their willingness to confront this historic moment, are Jonathan Safran Foer's EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE and Julia Glass' THE WHOLE WORLD OVER. Glass' book takes place mostly outside New York City but follows a local couple who separates when the husband stays in New York and the wife moves to New Mexico to work as the new governor's personal chef. Her second novel is a model for how to use the September 11th attacks and their effects on people without it feeling obvious and inevitable. Safran Foer's sophomore effort, which I actually like better than EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED, is a tale narrated by a young New Yorker coming to terms with his father's death.

I applaud authors who try to address it from this potentially myopic view, although I personally am not sure I can write about it yet (as you can tell from this increasingly uncomfortable post). I think there have been a number of strong contenders in the category of fiction, though, which is more than I can say for movies -- I feel frustrated and dissatisfied by films like "Shortbus" and "The Great New Wonderful" that use it to fuel certain emotions in the audience. (To be fair, I've read books that do the same thing.) It's hard for me to recommend books that intentionally seek this darkness out, but Safran Foer and Glass are masters.