Sunday in the Sun, get a review of Poe: A Life Cut Short, a new biography by Peter Ackroyd. Here are excerpts from Allen Barra's review:

Every life and reputation could use some buffing up now and then, and Edgar Allan Poe, his influence obscured by legions of bad imitators, more than most. Peter Ackroyd, in this short, sharp and immensely readable little biography, is just the man to do it. ...

One of the few biographers with equal standing as a critic, Ackroyd is the first writer in decades to bring Poe’s life and work into sharp focus and impress urgency on an appreciation of his oeuvre. (He also profiled Chaucer and the painter J.M.W. Turner in his Brief Lives series and has splendidly dealt with, among others, Shakespeare, Dickens and T.S. Eliot at greater length.)

Relying heavily on Edgar Allan Poe, Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom, and Kenneth Silverman’s 1991 Edgar A. Poe, Ackroyd rescues Poe from the layers of cliches and misinterpretations built up over generations. For instance, Poe did not invent Gothic literature; he "reinvigorated the Gothic tradition of horror and morbid sensationalism by centering it upon the human frame," Ackroyd writes. ... Poe was "the most calculating of authors, never to be confused with his disturbed and even psychotic narrators. Poe the writer arrived carefully after the most extreme effects."

"Anxiety," though, "was his childhood bedfellow," Ackroyd says. Born in Boston in 1809 to Southern parents — traveling actors "whose status was just a little higher than that of vagabonds" — Edgar was orphaned at age 2 when his father abandoned the family and his mother died of consumption; he was taken in and raised by friends of his mother. As a youth, he was described by some as having "a very sweet disposition ... always cheerful." It did not last long: "Young Poe harbored a grudge against the world," Ackroyd says. ...

He has become, in our time, "the image of the poete maudit, the blasted soul, the wanderer. His fate was heavy, his life all but unsupportable," Ackroyd says. Never accepted by his contemporaries, he was, in what would have been his old age, lionized by European writers such as Baudelaire and Tennyson (who thought him "the most original genius that America has produced") and later, by such diverse writers and poets as Nietzsche, Kafka, Yeats and Joyce. It’s hard to believe that Poe wouldn’t have considered such praise fair payment for a life quenched in misery.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Edgar Allan Poe
        

I got a chance today to talk with Elizabeth Alexander, whose poem "Praise Song for the Day" was part of the Obama inauguration ceremony. Almost as soon as her words died out, the poem sparked a debate on Read Street. Some called it inspiring, a celebration of everyday life. Others thought the poem -- and her delivery -- were flat. You can click the following link to hear the full 12-minute interview: Interview with poet Elizabeth Alexander Here are excerpts from the interview;

On what she wanted listeners to take away from the poem: "That's really not how I approach a poem ... . I just want people to take it in. That's the wish. That people will pause for a moment and take the poem in."

On the challenge of a ceremonial poem: "My job was to ... address the occasion in some way but also hopefully do it in language that would have some resonance beyond the occasion. My challenge also was to do it with the utmost clarity, but clarity that did not sacrifice complexity."

On preparing for a reading heard by millions: "I told myself, 'OK, the hard work is the making of the poem, When you read it, you're sort of setting it free. In a way the moment for nervousness is in the making. .... I did speak to an actress friend of mine and her wonderful reminder, which became my mantra, was 'Remember to breathe. If you get nervous, breathe. If you think you're going to start to cry, breathe. If you start to cry, breathe. Before you start, breathe.' "

On the sometimes harsh reaction to the poem: "If people think it was not complex enough, then I hope they might take a moment to go back and look at it in its written form and perhaps see what it yields. ... I'm sure that before this poem there were plenty of people who did not care for my work. I certainly respect any artist who puts themselves out there ... .

"Being an artist is not about being liked. That's not why you do it. That's not why I do it.  ... What I know from this extraordinary outpouring on the street and on my email and in my mailbox, is that a whole lot of people, and a whole lot of people who have never encountered my poetry before, and who have never encounterd poetry before, in addition to many who do, they're finding something there. So that's nice. ...

"The main reason I'm doing this press is it's important to take this moment on behalf of the art. Guess what? We can have this national conversation about poetry and it won't hurt a bit."

Photo by AP

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 1:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)
        

Jon Katz is again writing about his life on the appropriately named Bedlam Farm in upstate New York, where he is in residence with goats, chickens, a rooster, sheep, barn cats, a steer named Elvis and his dogs, his wonderful dogs, in Izzy & Lenore: Two Dogs, An Unexpected Journey and Me.

Still grieving the loss of Orson, a mad border collie he was never able to trust, Katz rescues another border collie, Izzy, but one with a quite remarkable disposition. Together, they become hospice volunteers and, while Katz sits back and watches, Izzy finds a way to quiet and comfort the dying.

Katz is on his own dark journey, through depression, and it is the arrival of Lenore, a rambunctious, loving and lovable lab, that allows Katz to begin to find his way out of the darkness.

Katz has a tendency to overwrite and to ascribe thoughts, talents and motives to dogs that they might not really possess. But it is a pleasure to imagine yourself on Bedlam Farm with all the animals that come so richly to life under Katz' pen.

Tom Strechschulte narrates, as he has some of Katz other books, and he has the perfect timber and the perfect sardonism for the task.

It is winter on Bedlam Farm, just as it is here. But it is more fun to be there, through the magic of audiobooks, than to be here.

Posted by Susan Reimer at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Audiobooks
        

I don't know about you, but lately when I haven't been forcing myself to leave the comforts of home to go to work, I've simply been reading. So if you want to ignore all events this week, I completely understand.

For everyone else, there's plenty of fun to be had!

Saturday morning, the Enoch Pratt Library is sponsoring a Silent Spring discussion. Do you remember spring? Maybe this will jog your memory. Author Rachel Carson, a Johns Hopkins alum, wrote the book in response to concerns about the use of synthetic pesticides and their effect on the environment.

The 1962 book became a landmark controversy and eventual wakeup call about how man and nature interact. Who doesn't like a little controversy in the morning?

The creative types will be happy to see that it's that time of the month again: Ukazoo's creative writing group will meet Monday night at 6:30. Bring your projects, your ideas and a few friends.

And for $5 on Tuesday night, you can enjoy a mystical night with Daniel Pinchbeck, author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl; Breaking Open the Head; editor of Toward 2012; and founder of RealitySandwich.com. After his talk, which will include Pinchbeck's thoughts on 2012, Shamanism, alternate realities, crop circles, and plant spirit drugs, there will be a reception at Dogwood, whose food I highly recommend.

For more events, check out the calendar. And if you have any you'd like to add, please let us know!

Posted by Nancy Knight at 7:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

To continue of the theme of The Washington Post closing Book World, here are some thoughts about newspapers and bloggers from author Joshua Henkin and Becca Rowan, creator of the Bookstack blog. Their comments are from a guest post I wrote for the Poe's Deadly Daughters blog last year. But they bear repeating in light of the Post's announcement:

Henkin, who wrote Matrimony, may be one of the authors most attuned to -- and supportive of -- bloggers. In an email exchange, he wrote: "The rise of book blogs is a good thing, it seems to me, but the concomitant decline of book sections in newspapers certainly isn't. It gets harder and harder for new writers to be discovered when the page space for book reviews keeps shrinking. ... So for a certain kind of book of literary fiction, book reviews are indispensable, and to the extent that book review sections are, in fact, being dispensed with, it's a loss for literary culture."

Blogger Rowan said in an e-mail, "if the trend keeps up at this rate, I can see blogging supplanting the role of newspaper reviews, with the exception perhaps of the 'gold standard' reviewers like the Times and the Guardian. ... And though I grew up as a huge newspaper junkie, I rarely read the print versions of papers or book review pages." (She does profess to like Read Street, for which I'm grateful.)

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Another newspaper's book section is disappearing. The  Washington Post said today that it will end its standalone Book World tabloid on Feb. 15, melding book coverage into the Sunday Outlook and Style sections. That follows similar moves at other papers, including the Los Angeles Times, and leaves the New York Times with the only free-standing section.

What's behind the move? When newspaper revenues fall, budget-cutting often focuses on two major expenses: people and paper. By reducing the number of pages devoted to book coverage -- the Post plans to publish about three-quarters of the roughly 900 reviews it now carries annually -- it can save a pile of money.

Here's the larger, underlying problem, in my view: Newspapers' book coverage has been slow to react to changes in society. Millions of Americans are in book clubs, but book sections have done little to  focus on their needs -- other than to note interesting books. The Post does have a book blog, Short Stack, which helps build a community of readers, but many papers don't even go that far. (And even now, hours after the Post announced Book World's demise, the blog has not noted it.)

Meanwhile, an army of bloggers has filled the vacuum of book coverage. That's a good thing -- there are more and more independent voices offering opinions about books. Bloggers also  create a sprawling conversation on every topic associated with reading -- just look at the dozens of comments on Read Street about polygamous readers or the inaugural poem. As book sections vanish, that is the future.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)
        

Oh yes, isn't the snow pretty! And the schools are closed! Time for some quality family time! Maybe a trip to the library! Sorry, guys. Snow is evil. Ice covering your car is even worse. And if you're planning a trip to the library today, take note: only five branches are open, with truncated hours of 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Central Library, 400 Cathedral Street

Southeast Anchor Library, 3601 Eastern Avenue

Pennsylvania Avenue Branch, 1531 West North Avenue

Light Street Branch, 1251 Light Street

Hamilton Branch, 5910 Harford Road

My advice? Stay inside until April. And if you must go outside, stay bundled up and safe, Read Streeters!

Posted by Nancy Knight at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

I don't often get to blog about two of my favorite pursuits -- baseball and reading -- but John Updike's death gives me the chance. Updike was a prolific writer, and his works include novels, poetry and literary criticism -- much like another great American, Edgar Allan Poe. But Poe never covered a baseball game.

Yesterday, I re-read "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," Updike's classic magazine piece on Ted Williams' last game at Fenway Park. Published in October, 1960, in The New Yorker, it does have a few purplish moments, which I attribute mainly to a half-century of age. But from the opening lines, he grabs you with his decriptive language: "Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg."

He perfectly captures Williams, a Red Sox legend, at rest and at work. "Williams' conversational stance is that of a six-foot-three man under a six-foot ceiling. ... He ran as he always ran out home runs -- hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of." 

That story is the perfect counterpoint to a snow-covered Baltimore. And I bet you get a chill when Ted gets his last homer. That is Updike's genius at work. 

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

Turning Points, the new issue of the Little Patuxent Review is out, and the writers represented include Manil Suri, Daniel Mark Epstein, Rafael Alvarez and Rosemary Klein. There is also beautiful artwork from Linda Press, whose View from the Hotel l'Odean is shown here, and Henry Niese.

You can buy the review at Daedalus Books, Howard County Poetry & Literary Society events and office, Howard Community College, Howard County Art Center in Ellicott City, Columbia Art Center, Howard County Office of Tourism and the Unitarian Church in Columbia book store. 

Or contact Mike Clark at clarkmj1@verizon.net or 410730-7624. A subscription for two issues yearly, including postage and handling, is $30. Individual copies cost $10 plus tax.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in the postwar prime of the American empire, died Tuesday at age 76, the AP said. Updike, a resident of Beverly Farms, Mass., died of lung cancer, according to a statement from his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. (You can pay tribute with a comment here or at legacy.com.)

A literary writer who frequently appeared on best-seller lists, the tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir "Self-Consciousness" and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams. He was prolific, even compulsive, releasing more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s. Updike won virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for "Rabbit Is Rich" and "Rabbit at Rest," and two National Book Awards. His most recent work was The Widows of Eastwick, reviewed here. ...

He captured, and sometimes embodied, a generation's confusion over the civil rights and women's movements, and opposition to the Vietnam War. Updike was called a misogynist, a racist and an apologist for the establishment. On purely literary grounds, he was attacked by Norman Mailer as the kind of author appreciated by readers who knew nothing about writing.

But more often he was praised for his flowing, poetic writing style. Describing a man's interrupted quest to make love, Updike likened it "to a small angel to which all afternoon tiny lead weights are attached." Nothing was too great or too small for Updike to poeticize. He might rhapsodize over the film projector's "chuckling whir" or look to the stars and observe that "the universe is perfectly transparent: we exist as flaws in ancient glass." ...

He received his greatest acclaim for the "Rabbit" series, a quartet of novels published over a 30-year span that featured ex-high school basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom and his restless adjustment to adulthood and the constraints of work and family.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 1:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
        

I checked in with Roswell Encina, director of communications at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and he has reassured me that the police won't be coming for you delinquent readers.

"Here at the Pratt Library under no circumstances will we have anyone arrested for not returning books or any items," Encina wrote in an e-mail.

"If a patron hasn't returned a book or any item for a period of time we refer them to a collection agency."

Of course, I'm assuming the collection agency isn't run Dog the Bounty Hunter-style.

(Photo by hellori on stock.xchng)

Posted by Nancy Knight at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Ah, alliteration. It makes me so happy.

But back on topic: So you've been looking for a book club to join, you say. But you don't want to read the same five books Oprah's been peddling to the world?

Well, Atomic Books has the cure for the common book club: Reading Club 2009 is all about the cult classics.

The last Wednesday of every month this year, Atomic will host a group to discuss the books, and those who sign up to participate get a 15 percent discount on any book scheduled throughout the year.

"Some of the books are really huge," Rachel Whang of Atomic Books explained. "So you can buy the books early and get a head start."

You've never read The Fountainhead? April is your month. Are you dying to discuss Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and how dreamy Harrison Ford was in Bladerunner? September's for you. (Also, you're wrong, he's best as Dr. Jones, clearly.)

Yes, it's probably a little late for January, unless you have been poring over Post Office already. But don't let that stop you next month! Just drop by the store to sign up for the club and the discount.

Posted by Nancy Knight at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Book Clubs
        

This will make Nancy's day. One of her literary heroes, master of imagination Neil Gaiman, has won the 2009 John Newbery Medal. (Here's her review of the book. I'm new to Gaiman, and am preparing to read American Gods, which Nancy loaned to me. Now she gets to say, "I told you so" -- which she seems to do about once a week.)

"I am so wonderfully befuddled," the best-selling author said Monday, according to AP, after winning the 88th annual Newbery for "The Graveyard Book," a spooky, but (he says) family friendly story about a boy raised by a vampire, a werewolf and a witch.

"I never really thought of myself as a Newbery winner. It's such a very establishment kind of award, in the right kind of way, with the world of librarians pointing at the book saying, `This is worthy of the ages.' And I'm so very used to working in, and enjoying working in, essentially the gutter."

The Newbery and other awards were announced by the American Library Association, currently meeting in Denver, AP said. Also Monday, the Randolph Caldecott Medal, given to the illustrator ...

of the best picture book, went to Beth Krommes for "The House in the Night," written by Susan Marie Swanson. The Coretta Scott King Award for best author was given to Kadir Nelson, for "We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball." The illustrator award went to Floyd Cooper for "The Blacker the Berry." The King prizes were founded 40 years ago to honor the works of black Americans.

Other winners included Melina Marchetta's "Jellicoe Road," given the Michael L. Printz Award for young adult literature, and two Pura Belpre awards for Latino writing — best author to Margarita Engle's "The Surrender Tree" and best illustrator to Yuyi Morales for "Just in Case."

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 1:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)
        

The latest from John Grisham highlights the books that will hit stores Tuesday; here are several opening chapters from The Associate. This week's releases:

The Associate by John Grisham (Doubleday, $27.95). Three months after leaving Yale, Kyle McAvoy becomes an associate at the largest law firm in the world, where, in addition to practicing law, he is expected to lie, steal and take part in a scheme that could send him to prison, if not get him killed.

A Darker Place by Jack Higgins (Putnam, $26.95). Famous Russian writer and ex-paratrooper Alexander Kurbsky is fed up with the Putin government and decides he wants to "disappear" into the West. It’s a real coup for the West, except for one thing: Kurbsky is still working for the Russians.

Dark of Night by Suzanne Brockmann (Ballantine, $25). Taking on the world’s deadliest criminals is what elite security force Troubleshooters Incorporated does best. But now it faces a new and powerful threat from its most lethal enemy yet — a shadowy government outfit known only as The Agency.

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis (Collins, $26.99). In a book that’s one part prophecy, one part thought experiment, one part manifesto and one part survival manual, Internet impresario and blogging pioneer Jeff Jarvis reverse-engineers Google — the fastest-growing company in history — to discover 40 clear and straightforward rules to manage and live by.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford (Ballantine, $24). Henry Lee, a Chinese-American, recalls the difficulties of life in America during World War II, when he and his Japanese-American school friend, Keiko, wandered through wartime Seattle.

The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes by Bryan Burrough (Penguin Press, $29.95). Capitalism at its most colorful oozes across the pages of this engrossing study of independent oil men. Vanity Fair special correspondent Bryan Burrough (coauthor of Barbarians at the Gate) profiles the Big Four oil dynasties of H.L. Hunt, Roy Cullen, Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson, along with their cronies, rivals, families and, in Hunt’s case, bigamous second and third families.

Amazon.com and Publishers Weekly

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

For you scofflaws who always hoard your library books way past their due return date, one Iowa library has turned into your biggest nightmare.

Shelly Koontz, 39, of Independence was arrested last week and charged with fifth-degree theft — which, by the way, I didn't even know was a charge. Her offense? She had held on to the library's copy of The Freedom Writers Diary since April.

"Police say the book — which is about a high school teacher's effort to inspire students to write — is valued at $13.95," the Associated Press article said. But Koontz paid a $250 bond before they'd let her go home. I sure hope it was worth it!

Yes, nine months is a long time. But JAIL? For having kept only one book? There have to have been bigger offenders than Koontz! Unless Iowans are much more honest than I could have ever imagined.

I think this is the sign you've been waiting for to return your overdue books, people. Don't say I didn't warn you.

(Photo by lckidwell at stock.xchng)

Posted by Nancy Knight at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

Today, we’ll consider an important question about your character: Are you monogamous?

No, not that kind of monogamy — that’s your business, and we don’t need to know about it. We mean literary monogamy. Do you read one book at a time? Or do you have two or more going at once — say, a novel, a nonfiction book and a collection of short stories?

Alison Morris, a Publishers Weekly blogger, has identified several species of polygamists. They include: the Whimsical, who dips in and out of multiple books at once; the Placebound, who reads several books simultaneously but each in its own locale -- at home, at work, on the subway; and the Noncompetitive, who reads one fiction book and one non-fiction book at the same time, or some similar combination.

Dave: In school, I juggled several books — a novel for African-American Lit, a science textbook and nonfiction for government classes. But now, I’m a one-book man. I like to focus, to get comfortable with the author’s pacing and language. And I want to keep track of the subtleties of a character, setting or plot. I may have a magazine article, comic piece or short story handy in case I only have a few minutes to read. But I prefer at least an hour of quiet — and one book.

Nancy: I love to read, and I do it just about all the time. But what if I’m not in the mood for the collection of political profiles I picked up a few days ago? Well, I just pick up the graphic novel about zombies. Or the Mexican crime novel. Or re-read Pride and Prejudice. You get the idea. I just don’t want to be hemmed in. Do I ever get confused or lose my place? Sure! I’m fairly certain that after eight months, I’m going to have to start the translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses all over again. But most of the time, it’s a system that works for me.

What are your reading habits — do you subscribe to Davidite monogamy or Nancyist polygamy?

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (83)
Categories: Whatever
        

In Sunday's Sun, get a review of Michael Davis' Street Gang, The Complete History of Sesame Street. Here are excerpts from Diane Scharper's review: As Davis, a former editor for TV Guide and The Baltimore Sun, tells it, this program changed the course of not only children’s television programming but also of social and cultural history.

Davis, who spent five years interviewing nearly everyone connected to Sesame Street, focuses primarily on the show’s founding and early years. He looks carefully at how the show got its start; how it was influenced by other early children’s television programs like Captain Kangeroo, The Howdy Doody Show and Ding Dong School; and how its founders laid out its guiding eclectic philosophy.

Joan Cooney, a little-known television producer ... wondered whether underprivileged preschool kids could learn numbers, the alphabet and concepts like over, around, under and through by using a jingle. Soon Cooney, with money from the Carnegie Corp., conducted a study of children’s television, which found that television could use its expertise, especially with regard to frequent repetition, clever visual presentation, brevity and clarity, to teach children the basics. ...

Cooney also set the precedent of including an integrated cast of real-life characters: Hispanic, black and Asian actors, senior citizens and the disabled — men, women and children.

Although Street Gang sometimes feels overreported, it never gets too heavy, thanks to Davis’ lighthearted style, which seems inspired by the show itself. Davis writes puns, tells jokes and uses a narrative drive, as he weaves profiles of the show’s major players with Sesame Street chronology. Davis writes with such vivid details that one can almost see the brownstone houses and the furry, feathery, fresh-faced Muppets with googly eyes talking to human friends like David, Bob, Gordon and Susan.

There’s Big Bird learning of Mr. Hooper’s death and asking Susan the childlike question: When is he coming back? ... There’s Bert singing his rubber duckie song, and Oscar praising the joy of trash, and Kermit offering his plaintive rendition of "Bein’ Green." Even the (unintelligible) conversation of the Twiddle Bugs seems to echo through the years.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Marylandia
        

With acclaim and acrimony surrounding Elizabeth Alexander's inauguration poem, I turned to Poetry Foundation president John Barr for some perspective. The Chicago-based non-profit publishes Poetry magazine and "exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience," according to its website (where you can see more of Alexander and her poems).

Barr liked "Praise Song for the Day," which he described as "more like a prayer or hymn than a modernist poem." He noted that writing a ceremonial poem is a tough assignment -- the words have to be understood on the spot by a large audience.

"A ceremonial job has certain requirements that don't go along with a poet sitting at a table and writing a poem of self-discovery. ... You can't get as many levels established in the poem."

He praised Alexander for using cadence and rhetoric to reinforce meaning, maintaining the theme of dignity, and sending the audience "home with lines to think more about." One example: "love with no need to pre-empt grievance."

As for the critics who have pummeled Alexander, he thinks their harsh words are misplaced. Again noting the restrictions of a ceremonial poem, he says critics are comparing Praise Song "to poems written for different purposes. [A ceremonial poem] is like asking a poet to write with one hand tied behind her back."  

Photo from the Poetry Foundation

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Martha Womack faces a challenge: making a 19th Century writer meaningful to her students in Farmville, Va. Luckily she's a Poe enthusiast and contributor to the Poe Decoder. She even drove to Baltimore for this week's celebration (and sold some t-shirts with her bicentennial design; info, womackme@fuquaschool.com). Her take on teaching Poe:

The first author studied in my English 9 class is always Edgar Allan Poe. I tell them that it is a terrible thing to have an enemy in life, but it is even worse to have one in death. Such is the case of Edgar Allan Poe. From the very first word (just like in a Poe story), I have captured their attention and imaginations. From there, I explain to them how one man is responsible for the character assassination and the misconceptions that we have about this author, and that my mission is to set the record straight. Together, we create an accurate biographical sketch as well as discuss the mystery and theories surrounding Poe's death. By then, they are more than ready for a Poe story.

Poe is not an "easy read," and ninth graders sometimes are confused by Poe's use of language and vocabulary. That's why I start with an easier story like "The Tell-Tale Heart," and work into "The Black Cat" and "The Cask of Amontillado." These are stories that offer a "safe scare" to the students, and soon the difficulty with words seems to disappear as the mystery and the gore come to the surface. Teachers can find vocabulary words/lessons right there in the story - who needs another book? (One of my favorite Poe words is "sagacious"; it's a great word!) Also, Poe provides the teacher an opportunity to show how our language and word meanings can change over time. For example, "singular" in Poe's stories quite often means "strange" or "unusual" not just "one."

 So, as we approach Poe's birthday, my ninth graders are more than ready to begin reading their first Poe story as well as await the news about the Poe toaster visiting Poe's grave on the bicentennial of his birth. Happy Birthday, Poe! You are still going strong after all these years!

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Edgar Allan Poe
        

For historical perspective on Poe, we turn to David S. Reynolds, a Distinguished Professor of English & American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His latest book is Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson. Here, he writes about The Two Poes (click here for all guest posts):

In American memory, there are two Edgar Allan Poes: the popular writer who penned “The Raven” and tales of terror that thrill readers of all ages; and the highbrow aesthete whose ideas about literary art influenced intellectuals from the French symbolists to the Modernists. These Poes seem contrary, but they are not. Poe was an aesthete largely because he was a popular writer.

Poe emerged at a time when popular culture experienced a dramatic transformation. Changes in printing technology between 1830 and 1850 permitted rapid production of cheap newspapers designed for the masses. American publishers could now satisfy the public’s craving for news that was racy and sensational. A Mysterious Disappearance, a Double Suicide, Incest by a Clergyman, or an Awful Accident—anything zestful or intriguing was considered fit to print. James Gordon Bennett, the editor of the era’s most popular paper, the New York Herald, found that Americans “were more ready to seek six columns of the details of a brutal murder, or the testimony of a divorce case, or the trial of a divine for improprieties of conduct, than the same amount of words poured forth by the genius of the noblest author of our times.” Ralph Waldo Emerson commented that Americans spent their time “reading all day murders & railroad accidents.”

Newspapers, which had formerly sold for six cents, were now widely available for one cent. Newspaper production and circulation surged. Poe claimed that the influence of the penny papers was “probably beyond all calculation.”

There were plenty of sensational stories for the penny papers to report, including the Maria Monk scandal, involving the alleged ex-nun who reported whoredom and infanticide in a Montreal nunnery; the trial of Richard Robinson for the murder of the prostitute Helen Jewett; and the diverting case of teacher John C. Colt, who in September 1841 axed to death the printer Samuel Adams and stuffed the corpse into a crate later found in the hold of a New Orleans-bound ship.

When juicy stories were lacking, the penny papers invented them. The most famous example was the moon hoax, a story that ran in the Sun in the summer of 1835 and was widely reprinted. Capitalizing on the public’s growing interest in curiosities, the reporter Richard Adams Locke wrote as fact the story of a powerful telescope through which a scientist, Sir John Herschel, could see society on the moon, featuring talking man-bats, a golden temple, blue unicorns, biped beavers, and odd birds and trees. The public gobbled up this fantastic story, sustaining interest in it even after it was revealed as false. Poe called the moon hoax “decidedly the greatest hit in the way of sensation—of merely popular sensation—ever made by any similar fiction either in America or Europe.”

Poe’s wording here—Locke’s story was a “merely popular sensation”-- speaks volumes about Poe, the one American of the period who produced sensational writings with lasting appeal.

Poe lived in the cut-and-thrust world of popular journalism. He once challenged a rival, William Lummis, to a duel, and he got into a fistfight with the poet Thomas Dunn English, who pummeled him so badly that Poe spent several days in bed. As an author or editor who worked for several magazines and newspapers in major American cities, Poe knew well the public’s thirst for the sensational. He published several hoaxes, like his April 1844 “Balloon Hoax,” which under the title “Astounding Intelligence…The Atlantic Ocean Crossed in Three Days!!” described the alleged transatlantic voyage of a gas balloon that flew from London to South Carolina in three days. Poe felt that “it is…the excitable, undisciplined and childlike popular mind which most keenly feels the original.” His tales teem with bizarre or macabre images: live burial, bloody murder, sadism, necrophilia, and so forth. Many of them were originally published in the popular press.

But Poe was a sensational writer with a difference. He avoided what he dismissed as “merely popular sensation.” It is useful to compare him to his Philadelphia friend George Lippard, the era’s most popular author of sensational novels. Lippard’s best-seller The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, the most popular American novel of the 1840s, brims with violence and demonism. Its labyrinthine plot contains as many perverse moments as a score of Poe’s tales. Poe admired Lippard’s fiction but found it undisciplined. Regarding another of Lippard’s blood-soaked thrillers, The Ladye Annabel, Poe said it was “indicative of genius” but caviled, “You seem to have been in too desperate a hurry to give due attention to details.”

It was as a reviewer of numerous writings by popular authors that Poe honed his aesthetic theories. Poe commented on all sorts of fiction and poetry, from the moralistic to the sensational. Popular literature of the day was divided between conventional, sentimental-domestic literature and adventurous or sensational fiction. Poe attacked works on both extremes. He denounced what he called “the heresy of The Didactic.” Imaginative literature must not preach; that was the province of nonfictional writing. At the same time, Poe criticized what he regarded as the excesses of popular sensational fiction. He had no toleration for the common character type of the likable or justified criminal—the evildoer shown in a positive light. For instance, he wrote that his “principal objection” to Joseph Holt Ingraham’s Lafitte: the Pirate of the Gulf, was that its hero was “a weak, a vaccillating [sic] villain, a fratricide, a cowardly cut-throat,… Yet he is never mentioned but with evident respect.” Nor did he approve of fiction that harped at length on gore or physical suffering. He charged the novelist William Gilmore Simms with “villainously bad taste” for describing the “minutest details of a murder committed by a maniac” who suffocates his victim in mud, an act “dwelt upon by Mr. Simms with that species of delight with which we have seen many a ragged urchin spin a cockchafer [i.e., a may bug] on a needle.” Simms, wrote Poe, shows “a certain fondness for the purely disgusting or repulsive, where the intention was or should have been merely the horrible.”

Poe’s own tales are uniquely horrific but removed from “the purely disgusting or repulsive.” The narrators of his murder stories are so clearly insane or deluded, as in “The Black Cat” or “The Cask of Amontillado,” that they thrill us without winning our sympathy. The sadism and perversity of which they are guilty is communicated not through extensive descriptions of blood but through portraits of their diseased psychology. Unlike Lippard or Simms, Poe at his best brings order and control to the horrific or sensational. He carefully sculpts terror, using controlling devices such as the first-person narrator, understatement, and singleness of effect. His invention of the detective genre stems from his effort to apply logic and intuitive reason to crimes of the sort that were commonly reported in the penny press. In poetry, his careful regulation of rhyme, meter, and other techniques, famously described in “The Philosophy of Composition,” structures emotion even in poems of wild passion like “The Raven.” Another controlling device is geographical distancing, by which he chooses foreign cities as settings even for sensational events based directly on reports in the American penny papers—as in “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” his Parisian take on the widely reported murder of the New York cigar saleswoman Mary C. Rogers. His fascination with codes, cryptograms, puns, and the like show his overriding concern with various kinds of logic.

His response to mass-oriented sensationalism parallels his politics. Orphaned at an early age, he was raised in luxury by the Virginia merchant John Allan. Poe’s erratic lifestyle caused a falling out with Allan, but Poe never lost the sense that he had an aristocratic heritage. He became a Southern Whig, and he stood opposed to what he saw as the flattening effect of Jacksonian democracy. In “Mellonta Tauta” he described “a fellow by the name of Mob” as a horrible despot, “a giant in stature—insolent, rapacious, filthy; had the gall of a bullock with the heart of an hyena and the brains of a peacock.” “Democracy,” he writes, “is a very admirable form of government--for dogs.” “The queerest idea conceivable,” Poe writes, is that “all men are born free and equal—this in the very teeth of the laws of gradation so visibly pressed upon all things both in the moral and physical universe.” According to these laws of gradation, certain individuals naturally separate themselves from the crowd. Just as certain races were superior to others, in Poe’s view, so genius towered above mediocrity.

To this extent, he stood opposed to the populist impulses of Jacksonian democracy. Mobs and crowds in Poe’s stories are negative symbols. In “The Man of the Crowd” a bustling city crowd made up of all social classes becomes a symbol of depressing anonymity and anomie; Poe’s narrator spends a day following around a thin old man who find it impossible to separate himself from the crowd—Poe calls him “the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone.” The man is, in a sense, the typical Jacksonian, absorbed into the masses.

For Poe, he is a terrifying example of the loss of individuality threatened by the rise of the modern masses. Poe, then, was in the ambivalent position of a writer completely immersed in the popular culture of Jacksonian America and yet in some ways repelled by it. His relation to popular culture paralleled his relation to alcohol: he was dependent on it, yet he struggled to separate himself from it. Several times he joined temperance groups and had periods of sobriety, but he regularly backslid, and his habit contributed to the downward spiral that led to his death at forty, possibly after an alcoholic binge. In his writings, he swung between vilifying popular tastes and catering to them. He was simultaneously the alienated genius and the panderer to the mass audience. As magazine editor, fiction-writer, and poet, he knew he had to emphasize the sensational themes that captivated popular readers. He borrowed freely: “The Cask of Amontillado,” for instance, was indebted to “A Man Built in a Wall,” a grisly magazine tale by the popular author Joel Tyler Headley. Poe declared that “the truest and surest test of originality is the manner of handling a hackneyed subject.” He hated popular themes when they were handled ineptly, without control.

By asserting such control in his own works, he produced enduring literary art. And by explaining his techniques in essays like “The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Poetic Principle,” he denounced the excesses of didacticism and sensationalism with such finesse that he became a guru of the art-for-art’s sake school.

Poe never could have been so eloquent an aesthete unless he had been immersed in a vibrant popular culture that he powerfully adapted and critiqued.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Edgar Allan Poe
        

To start our final day of Poe tributes, here's Jonathan Hayes, an author and a senior New York City medical examiner. His first novel, Precious Blood, will be followed this year by A Hard Death. (For more Poe, including all guest posts, click here.) His topic is "Now That You've Gone":

For the record, I'd like to state that neither Poe's detective stories nor his horror stories had anything to do with my becoming a forensic pathologist (the blame falls squarely on Conan Doyle and Donald J. "Encyclopedia Brown" Sobol). Moreover, while I recognize Poe's mysteries as the foundation on which the genre has built, I feel they've become lessened over time, both from familiarity and from the dilutional effect of so many minor – and major – works which bear their mark.

No, as a kid, and even now as a medical examiner and crime fiction writer, it's always been the creepy stuff that got to me, Poe's luxuriantly over-the-top sense of horror. His great gift is his uncanny ability to take a straightforward story and, with a couple of deftly revolting twists, reinvent it as something nightmarish and visceral.

Those twists stem from Poe's obsession with the perverse: his characters are compelled to do things they fully know are wrong, to do them just because they are wrong, even though their actions fly in the face of their own professed beliefs and personal interest. The traditional struggle between Wrong and Right is largely foreign to Poe's protagonists – they will murder and mutilate, and they will do it because they are perverse.

This resonates with my professional experience. In the real world, most murders are pathetically trite, the fall-out from miserable little squabbles over money, "love", pride. If Poe read the Sun today, I don't see him particularly intrigued by the murder of a drug dealer, for example: the killing of a dealer is too tragically legible, too prosaic. I suspect that Poe would be drawn instead to the bestial lyricism of the serial killing, as much for the opacity of motive as for the macabre obsession with details.

When I wrote Precious Blood, my first novel, I created a serial killer who was similarly opaque. I felt this was more realistic - you can't explain or justify a serial murder. We may identify common childhood contexts and behavior patterns among serial killers (the "classic" progression from bedwetting to animal mutilation to fire-setting to voyeurism to rape and finally to serial murder), and often discern distinctive signatures to their killings, but at the end of the day, their motives are inexplicable. Serial killers are not rational, they just are.

The killer in Precious Blood discloses his past, and the meaning of his killings becomes increasingly clear as the story unfolds, but no excuse is made for his behavior, no explanation advanced. He is diseased, and this is what he does: he commits acts that are symbolic but in truth almost arbitrary. He just is.

In Poe, too, motive is often trivial, a mere shadow of the killing itself – in "A Cask of Amontillado", Fortunato is bricked up because of the vaguest of perceived "injuries", Montresor referring to him as "my friend" even as he leads him deeper through the vaults to meet his fate. The murderer in "The Tell-tale Heart" dismisses all reasonable motive, stating about his victim, "I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I felt no desire." In "The Black Cat", the protagonist progresses from battering his wife, to mutilating and killing his cat, and on to murder; of course, the murder is what the killer is compelled to do right from the start, the alcoholic "intemperance" he invokes the most gossamer of excuses.

"The Black Cat" is macabre Poe par excellence. Even beyond its careful disquisition on the nature of the perverse, the story is a cornucopia of key Poe themes: the narrator's questionable sanity, doppelgangers, a revealing sexual subtext, and most appealing of all (well, for me) Poe's curious focus on how the corpse is handled after death, a pattern repeated over and over in his work. In "The Black Cat", the narrator spends three paragraphs proudly detailing how he'd disposed of his wife's body, including alternate methods considered (pitching her down a well, chopping her up, etc.), a description of the layout of his cellar, even a recipe for the plaster he used when he walled her up (mortar, sand, hair). Yet while living, she'd merited barely a sentence or two.

For Poe, death isn't a discrete event, but a greasy continuum. His protagonists can't tear themselves away from the newly departed, variously concealing, dismembering or pathologically mourning them, even using Mesmerism to keep a dead man in suspended animation for months ("The Facts of the Case of M. Valdemar"). The body stays with its murderer, resulting in climactic scenes where the killer, no longer able to contain himself, either manages to taunt the police until they find the body or erupts in confession (in "The Imp of the Perverse", Poe actually sets up confession as an act of perversion). These sequences propel the reveal of the corpses, which nobody does better than Poe.

The killer in Precious Blood poses his victims (serial killers are often very conscious of what the person who comes across the victim will see, and may take great pains to arrange the body and its surroundings for maximum effect, even considering the perspective from which a likely discoverer will approach). Poe's handling of his bodies really informed the way I presented these tableaux in my book. I particularly relish Poe's habit of entombing his victims in a standing position, so that when the "dozen stout arms" tear down the wall at the end of "The Black Cat", the policemen – and killer – are face to face with the dead wife – maximum drama achieved!

It seems fitting that, given Poe's love for the prolonged and degraded farewell, in death he himself was not allowed to rest peacefully. The physician who treated him in his terminal delirium capitalized on the attendant celebrity, happily misrepresenting the circumstances of his death in print and on the lecture circuit. Worse, on the day Poe was buried, the New York Tribune ran an obituary that began "Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it." Signed "Ludwig", the obituary was written by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, a long-standing rival and enemy of Poe, who managed to become the literary executor of Poe's estate, and promptly (and effectively) set about destroying Poe's reputation.

Poe's body hardly had an easier time. His funeral was a bust, chopped down to three minutes because of the sparse crowd. He was buried in an unlined wooden box, unadorned by handles or nameplate; there wasn't even a cushion for his head. He was lodged first towards the back of the churchyard; the marble headstone his family attempted to provide was destroyed when a derailed train crashed through the stonecutter's yard, so his initial resting place bore only a numerical marker. It took another quarter century before concern over his grave mounted; after a false start in which the wrong body was exhumed, Poe's remains were finally moved to a more prominent spot in 1875. The body of his child bride (it seems one must always speak of Virginia Clemm as his "child bride" – ideally tossing in the fact that she was his first cousin) was orphaned when her cemetery was destroyed; in a note worthy of Poe himself, one of his biographers collected her bones, and kept them in a box under his bed. The two were finally reunited when Virginia was buried next to Poe on what would have been his 76th birthday – an adequately romantic ending, I think, for a Poe story.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Edgar Allan Poe
        

I was hoping to hear by now from Elizabeth Alexander, whose inauguration poem has sparked both praise and derision. I'd like to hear the poet and Yale professor discuss what she was reaching for, the difficulty of following Obama's speech (as many spectators headed for warmth) and her take on criticism.

But so far, she has given no post-inauguration interviews, says her agency PMK/HBH -- a bicoastal powerhouse whose celebrity clients include Al Pacino, Jennifer Aniston, Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe.

An interview she gave Sunday to the Yale Daily News provides some clues. Excerpts from the article: Though her poem was certainly steeped in the African-American literary tradition ... she hoped to reach all Americans through her language. She praised Obama’s speeches for transcending race, while still drawing from the African-American rhetorical tradition. ...

The poem was always meant to stem from her personal and intimate understanding of American citizenship, an understanding steeped in her own experiences as a black woman writer, Alexander said in the interview.

“There’s beauty in the impossibility of the task,” she said.“You can’t speak to all those people, you can’t know what all these millions and millions will hear and find in your work.” ...

Instead, she attempted to use her inaugural poem to encapsulate the hopes and beliefs she had experienced in the aftermath of Obama’s historic victory in November. “In a kind of paradox, that audience of millions and millions left me very free to listen to myself and simply hope that I can provide clarity,” Alexander said.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 2:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

The weekend is so close, everybody! While I'll be in NYC this weekend (to see a play and then to watch my Terps crush Duke), there are plenty of events right here in Baltimore to keep you busy!

Tonight at 7, head over to breathe books to meet Lisa Alcalay Klug, author of Cool Jews. Klug, who has written for the New York Times and Forward, among others, will discuss the Jewish cultural revival and keep you laughing while she's at it.

The next day, you can attend the Poetry for Peace panel at Sub-Basement Artist Studios from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.

If you're interested in a more glamourous way to spend your time, Baltimore Reads is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a gala Saturday evening. Tickets cost $175 per person, or $300 per couple. For more information, e-mail birthday@baltimorereads.org.

And Baltimore Chop Bookstore hosts the Maryland Writers Association open mic Monday night, which promises to be open until "whatever o'clock." Take 10 minutes to shine, or spend the evening listening in on some Baltimore talent.

Check out our calendar for more bookish fun, and have a safe, warm time.

Posted by Nancy Knight at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Book It
        

Edgar Allan Poe's talent for horror, detective stories and poetry is well-known. But cryptography? Yes, his genius extended there too -- and will be noted at the 2009 RSA Conference, touted as the world's largest tradeshow for information security. General manager Sandra Toms LaPedis explains why:

Each year the conference determines a new creative theme, focusing on a time period or person who represents an aspect of information security or cryptography. In 2009 the influence and cryptography interests of Poe will be celebrated.

Poe may seem to be an unusual choice for an information security theme but as some may know, he was fascinated by cryptography. An American poet, short-story writer, magazine editor and literary critic, Poe often concealed anagrams and hidden messages in his works. His famous story – “The Gold Bug” – centers on the solution of a cipher, which turns out to be a map to hidden private treasure.

Poe amazed his magazine readers with a seemingly mystical ability to solve their submitted cryptograms; he even unmasked cheaters who sent in nonsense entries. In 1839, Poe conducted his own cryptographic contest, challenging readers to submit their cryptographs to him.

Poe ended the contest claiming to have solved all of the 100 ciphers sent to him. From April 20-24 at Moscone Center in San Francisco, RSA Conference 2009 will remember and celebrate Edgar Allan Poe’s life, work and his powerful and enduring legacy to furthering the field of cryptography.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Edgar Allan Poe
        

Florida writer S.J. Chambers, whose work has appeared in Fantasy, Up Against the Wall and The Hiss Quarterly, sees many links between Poe and modern culture. She considers herself an independent Poe scholar, and her plans for the bicentennial include a trip to Baltimore. She writes of Poe's lasting influence (here are all guest posts and more on Poe):

I was introduced to Poe by The Simpsons’ first Treehouse of Terror, which I watched a few days after a close family friend died. First aired in 1990, the episode has Lisa, with a little help from James Earl Jones, read “The Raven” to a blasé Bart and an eavesdropping Homer. Bart is unimpressed, of course, whereas Homer goes to beds in chills, and even thinks he sees Poe’s raven outside his window. So did I. The ideas of memory and haunting that the Bart-beaked raven showed spellbound me. I remember lying in bed having jejune thoughts about being haunted by Mrs. Larrimore, of a parentless future, of devils spying on me from the headboard, and goblins under the bed. It was all suffering from an overactive imagination, but all of those night terrors came from Poe’s power of suggestion--the source of his lasting appeal.

He is the first pioneer of the imagination. He never left the U.S., never completed university, and never held down a job for more than a year--yet, he wrote about medieval Europe as if he had been there, he could calculate with frightening accuracy the delicate geometry of the Inquisition’s pendulum, and he used all of the scientific theories of his day to try to unravel death. Everything that came from his pen was filtered or completely invented by his imagination. As a result, his work has an odd and indescribable tone. The only thing I can compare it to is the difference between painting from life or from memory. If you paint from life, you have the hard precision of an Ingres or Pouissan; if you rely on memory, you have the smears and oscillations of a Monet or a Munch. The reality looks a bit warped, a bit strange. The smears and oscillations leave gaps within the images’ meaning, gaps for the viewer’s mind to fill in. Poe’s work is full with these ambient gaps, which artists, writers, directors, even Fox television animators have been trying to spackle with their own inventions.

Poe’s appeal also stems from his diverse and dimensional mutability--a Poe for all seasons. There is the melancholy poet, the critic of early American letters, the pioneer of science fiction, the father of the detective story, the puppeteer of horror, and the denizen of fancy. His net spread wide, Poe is probably the most referenced writer in popular culture (after Shakespeare, of course).

Roughly 25 novels have been published about Poe, most recently Matthew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow and Louis Bayard’s Pale Blue Eyes. As far as allusions or influence goes, Poe can be found in the writings of Charles Baudelaire, Henry James, Victor Hugo, H.G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ray Bradbury, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King and Neil Gaiman (to name a few). His work pops up in the music of heavy metal like Iron Maiden and Rob Zombie, and mellow rock like The Yardbirds and Jeff Buckley.

Poe’s work has been illustrated by Manet, Whistler, Clarke, Redon, Moreau, Gauguin and Magritte, as well as in comics like Roman Dirge’s Lenore: The World’s Cutest Dead Girl, James O’Barr’s The Crow, Richard Corben’s Haunt of Horror, and the Nevermore anthology.

Adaptations of Poe’s work began as soon as cinema was invented with the 1908 silent film: Sherlock Holmes and the Great Murder Mystery, which combines Doyle’s famous detective with Poe’s ratiocination tale “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Since then, about 200 movies and television shows have been adapted from Poe’s work, most famously the Roger Corman/Vincent Price flicks. Traces of Poe’s shadow can also be found in Alfred Hitchcock, Tim Burton, and Christopher Nolan, whose The Prestige perfectly utilizes Poe’s compositional theories of mood and “ultimate effect.”

In addition to The Simpsons, Poe has made a personal appearance in cartoons like Beetlejuice, Cartoon Network’s The Venture Brothers, and in a Rocky and Bullwinkle segment of Sherman and Mr. Peabody.

The list could go on and on. In every book, film, comic, painting, or cartoon where Poe and his work appear, he becomes a token of the creator’s imagination. I believe that all of the artists who are influenced by Poe share a common yearning to address the unaddressable. Poe merely provides the blueprint.

But what does all this mean to those who are unfamiliar with Poe; who, like Bart Simpson, think “anything” is scarier than the ambient “nothingness” of Poe’s nineteenth century cadences? It means they are being left out without even knowing it. Poe could be the very foundation of a beloved story, film, song, or comic. You yourself could be missing out on some important allusions, but more importantly you could be missing out on your imagination’s potential. If anything can be said about Poe, it is that he understood the importance of dreams—not in a somnambulant, Freudian sense, but in a waking sense. Poe’s life was a hard one, and many believe the way that he coped with death, poverty, and isolation was by relying on his thoughts for escape. He can show you where lie the trapdoors, just as he has been showing readers, scholars, and artists for 200 years.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Edgar Allan Poe
        

Here's Michael Sears, the other half of the mystery writing team known as Michael Stanley:

There is a sense of menace in the way each of the horror-style stories develops right from the first line. You know that whatever appears on the surface, something awful is going to happen. That build up of tension and expectation keeps the reader glued to each sentence, each word. I can’t remember ever needing a bookmark for any of those stories! Take for example "The Fall of the House of Usher". There’s no doubt where this is going after the first sentence. One strives for this as a writer. Poe achieved it.

The other aspect I recall is the cleverness of plot twists. My favorite is "The Purloined Letter". Here the detective must see the obvious and beyond the obvious. Something precious is disguised as something valueless but, more than that, as itself. In our novel A Carrion Death the detective is smart enough to see this and pays appropriate credit to Poe’s story. In fact a letter is stolen too, which turns out to be pivotal. I hadn’t even realized that part of it might be due to Poe until writing this piece!

Finally, of course, as with most great writers, Poe adds phrases and meanings to the English language. We couldn’t describe our villain after a murder more shockingly or in less words than to say he was " … a nightmare from the Mask of the Red Death".

Thanks, Edgar.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 1:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Edgar Allan Poe
        

Have I mentioned lately how much I love the Internet? Because I do, so very much.

My friend Mary pointed out this beautiful embroidery download to me yesterday, and if any of you happen to both ove Poe and know your way around a sewing machine, I knew you'd appreciate it.

Even better? It's free till the end of January.

My advice? Go ahead and download it now, and worry about making it later. Chances are, if you're reading this blog, you or someone you know would love it as much as I do.

(Photo from urbanthreads.com)

Posted by Nancy Knight at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Edgar Allan Poe
        

Elizabeth Alexander's inauguration day poem, "Praise Song for the Day", has drawn praise -- and sharp criticism -- from Read Street readers. But there's no denying it got everyone's attention. Funny how a poet can live in relative obscurity and be launched to stardom by a few minutes in front of TV cameras.

Alexander's publisher, Graywolf Press is making the most of it. The small St. Paul, Minn., company, which is operated as a non-profit, is releasing a commemorative chapbook edition of the poem on Feb. 6, for $8. First printing: 100,000 copies.

This could be a real breakthrough for Graywolf, whose current best-selling title is If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland; more than 200,000 copies have been printed since it was released in 1987. Want more of the Graywolf story; here's a company profile from AP.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (65)
        

Both members of the South African-born mystery writing team known as Michael Stanley (A Carrion Death, The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu)were inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's ability to wring emotion out of readers. Here is Stanley Trollip's account (later today, we'll hear from writing partner Michael Sears):

[I] often used to read after “lights out” at my home in Johannesburg, South Africa -- a naturally scary time for an impressionable teenager. For my personal reading, I devoured a lot of boys’ books, such as the Hardy Boys from the USA and Teddy Lester from the UK. In addition to traditional readings, I would also venture into the books of rebellion, such as Marx’s The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and Mao’s The Little Red Book, and books on sex and love, like the Kinsey Reports and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Of everything I read, I only recall a few vividly. The one that had perhaps the greatest impact on me was Poe’s "The Pit and the Pendulum". After I turned the bedside light out, darkness brought vivid mental pictures of impenetrable cell walls and a gaping hole in the middle of my bedroom floor. The swish of curtains nearly caused cardiac arrest as I imagined a great scythe swing ever closer to my shaking body. I knew that creaks in the house meant that the walls were closing in. Mice running across the pressed metal ceiling of my room convinced me that rats were swarming all around my bed. My active imagination took its toll, and I was terrified for weeks after finishing the short story.

What writer would not want such reactions? The power of words! Poe played on my innate fears by triggering my imagination – a death sentence; red-hot walls that were closing in; the sound of the blade. Aaaargh! Poe must have smiled as he witnessed the impact he had on me.

Now I am a writer, I constantly strive to emulate Poe’s ability to conjure up vivid mental pictures and spark strong emotions. I want readers to know how the places we write about look and smell and how our characters feel about each other. I want readers to become emotionally involved, to be happy, angry, or scared with our characters. Poe set high standards and it’s a constant challenge to try and attain them.

Happy birthday, Edgar.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Edgar Allan Poe
        

We interrupt our coverage of Poe's 200th anniversary to note the extraordinary inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States -- and Elizabeth Alexander's poetry.

Alexander had the toughest time slot of the morning. She had to follow Obama's inspirational speech with her ode to the inauguration. Tough to hold onto an audience that had waited hours in the cold.

But her words were equally inspiring, invoking images worthy of a Rockwell painting. I particularly liked this portion: "Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables."

You can read the full transcript here.  

Photo by the Associated Press

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (30)
        

Rob Velella, who describes himself as a "devourer of Poe," is among the organizers of the Edgar Allan Poe 200 Project and created the Edgar Allan Poe 2009 Bicentennial Desk Calendar. He also blogs about Poe. In this guest post, he describes Poe's timeless appeal:

I first read Edgar Allan Poe when I was in my seventh grade English class. It was 1992 and I was 13 years old. I don’t remember the teacher’s name or the name of any of the other authors I read that year. But I remember Poe.

We read "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Raven" and probably others. I was moved enough to write my own "Gothic" story, so close in concept to "The Tell-Tale Heart" that the Poe estate could have legitimately accused me of plagiarism (and not even Longfellow could deny it). Poe was the first author that I wasn’t ashamed to enjoy – and I remember what pulled me in were his sights and sounds. I heard the tremor in the narrator’s voice when he told me how "calmly" he would tell me the whole story. I saw the old man’s evil, vulture-like eye, blue film and all. I heard the sound of the old man’s heart, beating like the ticking of a watch when enveloped in cotton.

What appealed to me then is still what appeals to me now: his ability to take words that do more than tell a story, but show one. He was a writer of sensation, creating images that are impossible to forget – a writhing black tongue in "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," a shackled man in jester’s motley appealing "for the love of God!" in "The Cask of Amontillado," and the one-eyed black cat sitting triumphantly on the head of a murdered wife in "The Black Cat," just to name a few.

During Poe’s time, just as today, horror writers were a dime a dozen; anyone can write a horror story. But, rather than just presenting us a few scary images, Poe writes stories that are not only terrifying, but shockingly possible – or, at least, he convinces us as much. His rich words pull us out of our rational selves for a moment and into these fictional worlds that are beyond reality. We listen to the murderous narrator as he inadvertently proves his insanity to us. We fear for the man doomed to die either by pit or by pendulum despite his best efforts as his captors mock him at every step. We lament our lost Annabel Lee in that kingdom by the sea and truly believe it was the love that was more than love that caused her death.

Poe, of course, was more than a horror writer. Poe has the distinction as "father of the modern detective story." There may have been earlier examples, but Poe’s creation of a coherent model inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes, and every fictional detective thereafter owes Poe a nod. Today, mystery is one of the most enduring and popular genres out there, not only in paperbacks but also on screen.

What helped make his horror popular posthumously may have been an unintended side effect of the mechanizations of Rufus Griswold: the real-life villain who tried to crush Poe’s reputation in a series of lies and exaggerations about his personal character. In presenting Poe as a disreputable, perpetual drunkard with no moral compass, he created the "Poe myth" which endures today as part of his appeal and helped create a sort of Poe cult. After all, why just read about a fictitious murder, when you can read about a fictitious murder written by an alleged madman? This mythical character endures today and, regardless of where the truth ends, is perpetually linked to his works, making the name "Poe" synonymous with "horror story."

But to say that Poe’s modern popularity is only owed to the image of Poe as one of his own characters doesn’t do him justice. He is still one of the most widely-read American authors today because of his writing, independent of his biography. Like me, many others say that Poe was the first assigned reading they weren’t embarrassed to admit they enjoyed, and sought out more to read after class. And, even though he’s been adopted as a symbol of the Goth subculture, you don’t have to wear black nail polish to say, "This stuff is good."

Even people with Ph.D.s think Poe’s stuff is good. When Poe wrote "The Raven," as he explained in his essay "The Philosophy of Composition," he intended to write one poem that at once appealed to both the popular and the critical taste.

It is this ability to dually please both mainstream readers and the literary scholars that has led to Poe’s enduring legacy today.

Poe’s fans include Matthew Pearl, who fictionalized a quest to look into the author’s mysterious death in the novel The Poe Shadow. Others who have brought Poe into modern fiction include Louis Bayard, Harold Schechter, Joyce Carole Oates, and a distant relative named Robert Poe.

The Alan Parsons Project helped kick start a flurry of music inspired by Poe as well, from big names like Lou Reed to obscure bands like Tiger Army. Even the Beatles sang about "kicking Edgar Allan Poe" and featured his tiny visage among dozens of others on the album for Sgt. Pepper’s. On screen, Roger Corman re-introduced Poe to millions of viewers, and films referencing Poe and his works range from the subtle (a short recitation of "The Raven" in The Crow) to the blatant (the upcoming Edgar Allan Poe’s Ligeia sticks the author’s name right in the title, even if the plot of the film doesn’t coincide with the source story). On television, Poe and his works have made appearances in The Simpsons, Boy Meets World, The Venture Bros., and even Gilmore Girls (or so I hear).

Ultimately, what leads people back to Poe? He’s a good, talented writer, who creates rich stories with luscious textures and deep underpinnings – and he makes it all seem so easy. Top it all off with his inherent "cool factor," and you have a writer who will endure and for generations to come.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Edgar Allan Poe
        

Today's guest poster is Stuart Kaminsky, a Mystery Writers of America grand master and editor of On a Raven's Wing -- a compilation of new mysteries marking Poe 's 200th. Among the featured authors: Mary Higgins Clark, Thomas H. Cook and S.J. Rozan. Kaminsky's post, adapted from the book's introduction:

A little while ago I was looking up at the pale-faced and closed eyed bust of Poe which I received as Grand Master. It resides on a bureau just across from the desk at which I work. There is a continuing problem with the bust, however. The paint on Edgar's head is slowly peeling away. As I’ve done before, I went to the garage, got some black paint and dabbed at the several places in his hair showing white where black should have been.

I was careful, but the paint began to drip across Edgar’s face forming a startling set of black tears which ran from the outside corners of both of his eyes down his cheeks. Was I reading something into the moment that was not there?

My answer to the last question was a tentative "yes". Edgar was no more weeping black paint than I was the only person who will be left after the Rapture.

Still, I felt that chill, the one that makes my shoulders shiver. It is also the shiver that I feel and have felt when I read one of Poe’s tales of terror.

I have felt it stepping into Poe’s preserved dormitory room at The University of Virginia. I have felt that shiver sitting at the desk at which Poe sat at The Southern Literary Messenger. The desk, part of the Koester Collection at The University of Texas, Austin, was in a well-guarded tower on an upper floor, against a wall in a room that reminded me of the vast warehouse at the end of Citizen Kane.

You can go to the internet to find an odd list of Poe artifacts the very reading of which reminds me of something one of Poe’s morose characters might compile: locks of Poe’s hair, fragments of Poe’s original coffin, a pen holder made from a fragment of Poe’s original coffin, the bed in which his child bride Virginia died, Poe’s rocking chair, Poe’s bible and much more.

Things we know about Poe and often say and hear include the assertion that, in his forty years of life, he created the short story, the detective story, the modern horror story. As far as I am concerned, it does not matter if he was first or if he created any literary genre. What matters is that he had the power to send me into a near syncope with his stories and poetry.

One of my earliest encounters with Poe was through a half-hour live teleplay in the 1950's of The Cask of Amontillado. The production was a disaster. Actors muffled and mumbled lines. Painted sets rattled in the breeze of passing performers. And still, just before the last painted cardboard brick was set in place, I felt the horror of that imprisonment as the actor called out, "Fortunato."

Poe's life and work have inspired radio episodes; television tales; popular music by, among many others, The Beatles and Joan Baez; classical music and even operas by Claude DeBussy. There are Poe tee shirts, candies, bobble-head dolls and action figures. And don't forget Raven Beer.

The revenue from the tee shirts and bobble-heads alone would almost certainly come to far more than Edgar's estimated lifetime earnings even adjusted for inflation.

I know there are many, including writers, who do not share my appreciation of the odd-looking and wild-eyed Poe. At my regular poker game a few months ago, I said something about Poe and was asked if I would like to meet him were it magically possible. I said ‘no’. Poe, haunted and besotted, was as morose and difficult as any of his characters. I think a meeting with the man would depress me and probably end with him asking me for ten dollars which I would gladly give him.

I am content to look up and see the bust of Poe and be inspired, depressed, transported or even, on some occasions, happy.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Edgar Allan Poe
        

Charles Todd, the mother/son mystery writing team of Caroline and Charles Todd, drew inspration from Edgar Allan Poe. Their latest work in the Inspector Ian Rutledge series, A Matter of Justice, will be released. Here is their guest post:

I met Edgar Allan Poe while hanging over the arm of the sofa as my father read "The Gold Bug" aloud to us. We’d gone to Hatteras, rented a creaky old house among the dunes, and it had poured rain for the first two days. So my father—ever prepared—read to my sister and me. She wandered off after a while to play with the house cat, but I was well and truly hooked. The treasure was hidden in much the same seaside, as far as I was concerned, and I could picture men just out of sight, digging away. Working out the code was intriguing, and I never forgot that e was the most common letter in the English alphabet. When the rain went on another day, we got "The Purloined Letter" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", true mysteries. These were a little beyond me, but with my father’s voice changes and explanations, they kept me enthralled. I didn’t know what an Ourang-Outang was, then, but many years later, I got to touch one’s hand in Indonesia, and the memory of "Rue Morgue" came back to me.

At the Brandywine River Museum just over the line into Pennsylvania from Delaware, there is a small painting by one of the Wyeths, the father who did so many wonderful illustrations for children’s books. It’s one I’d like to have—you can see the hole, but not what’s in it, and the men stand there in astonishment, the lantern they’ve lowered casting a golden glow over their faces as if the treasure itself is reflected there. It’s just what I pictured, there among the Hatteras dunes.

In the years to come, I got to know Poe in other ways. First came "The Raven," which we had to memorize in school, and all the other glorious poetry that used words in ways that whetted my appetite for more. They danced and sang and stayed in the mind. One of the reasons I’ve always loved poetry comes from Poe — "Eldorado", "Annabel Lee", "To One in Paradise", and of course, "The Bells". How can you resist lines like “And all my days are trances, And all my nightly dreams Are where thy gray eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams—”?

I’d progressed on my own through the less horrific tales — "The Cask of Amontillado", "The Masque of the Red Death", the more shivery ones read under the covers with a flashlight and couldn’t sleep afterwards for thinking about the story. I think of Stephen King when I go back to those now: "The Tell-tale Heart", "The Black Cat" —

In college we read his prose articles, “The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Poetic Principle.” Most people don’t remember that Poe was a critic as well writer. I remember that he felt that Tennyson was the “noblest of poets.” And while not as much fun as his poetry and stories, he had a great deal to say about the writers of his day, while they were still living and actively writing.

In turn, I read Poe to my own children, watching them hang on every word, their eyes far away, picturing the scenes as I had done.

But we weren’t finished with Poe. There was a Sisters in Crime reading in his house in Philadelphia. They say it’s haunted, and I believe it. One of the rangers there put on the most wonderful performance of Poe’s life, reciting from his poetry, his short stories and his critical articles. She—you wouldn’t have believed it!—was so real it was hard to think of her as anyone but Poe. It was like meeting the man I’d only known on the printed pages and covers of the Mystery Writers of America’s Banquet Annual, where various portraits of him graced the cover. (I arranged for the first Poe cover in full color something I am proud of.) While in Richmond, I made a point to see the house there, almost hidden behind the railway station overpass. We joined Mystery Writers of America shortly after A Test of Wills, the first Rutledge mystery, came out, and their logo is Poe because he wrote the first modern mysteries, his character C. Auguste Dupin the Parisian Sherlock Holmes of his day.

Dupin has been described (in the stories) as a man of “peculiar analytic ability” despite his equally peculiar way of life-—or perhaps it might be better to say that Holmes was the English C. Auguste Dupin of his day. We’ve been nominated for an Edgar [the MWA award] and we’ve presented Edgars to other winners. There’s something about standing on the stage, looking across the darkened ballroom as the person whose name we’ve just called, tries to make his way to the podium in a state of shock and euphoria. Meanwhile, Charles and I are taking turns hugging the Edgar statue or the Raven statue, and wishing it was going home with us. One of these days, dear friend Laura Lippman, we’ll edge you out.

While we were in Baltimore for the Bouchercon Mystery Convention at the Sheraton, we went to see Poe’s grave. No mysterious veiled personage was there before us in the cold sunlit morning when Elena Santangelo and I walked there. It’s at the side of a church yard, the church an awesome Victorian backdrop well suited to a master of words, and iron railings cutting it off from the busy street, a quiet corner where he sleeps—and dreams? Charles went by in the evening, listening to the scuttle of leaves and the whisper of the wind around the church towers. It’s an evocative site.

I have a feeling we’re not finished with Poe yet. There’s that elusive statue for one thing. And I think if Charles and I had to pin down books that sparked our creative instincts as youngsters, it was Poe’s "Gold Bug", "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter", Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and Conan-Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Why? Because they speak to a child’s imagination and these are the stories that set your tastes in reading early on. Stories that are exciting and suspenseful and a feast for a young reader just discovering the magic of words on a page. Dick and Jane and Spot can’t hold a candle to them. These were the Harry Potter tales of another day, books that were accessible and intriguing and well within a child’s understanding without being condescending. Every generation of readers needs its own Harry Potter and its Poe and Stevenson and Conan-Doyle. They keep literacy—and authors worth remembering—alive.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Edgar Allan Poe
        

 I was at a party a few weeks ago, flush with my success at having gotten through Junot Diaz' Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and even happier that I finished on good terms with the book.

Sure, the first third was a slog, I was telling my friends, but it was wonderful! The elaborate history of the Dominican Republic in all those little footnotes was absolute necessary in order for you to understand at the end exactly what the unlikely hero Oscar had accomplished.

With my and others' ringing endorsements, I handed the book to a friend, certain he'd love it.

A few days later, I was amazed to read on his blog that he had been shocked by the language in the book. And he's right: The text is sprinkled with f-bombs and other offensive words in both English and Spanish. It just never crossed my mind to warn him about it.

I guess I've become desensitized to mature language over the years in newsrooms.

His blog post went on to question if there's a need for a rating system for books. I know we have a system of sorts to categorize books for small children, so hapless uncles and aunts (like me) can buy the little ones books that are appropriate for their age group.

Do you think we should have a similar arrangement for adult content in books? Or is it the default assumption that if you're old enough to pick up a book and choose to read it, you're old enough to handle the subject matter?

Posted by Nancy Knight at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)
        

What better way to begin the 200th anniversary celebration of Edgar Allan Poe's birth than the words of author Marilynne Robinson, who won the Pulitzer prize for Gilead. Her wonderful guest post describes how he inspired her to think about the written word (for more on Poe, see the Read Street archives.):

There were times in my girlhood when an engrossing need to write poetry arose in me. The occasion and the subject were usually a storm. These episodes never yielded anything of much interest. In fact the dozen lines I could manage before the mood passed always disappointed me, and I hid them from myself and never looked at them again. But the impulse to write them, which might linger the whole of an afternoon, was as intense an experience as I have ever had, akin to but lonelier and more wonderful than the experience of reading a very good book.

I don't know when Edgar Allan Poe entered my imagination and took his place there, a place that somehow seems to have been waiting for him. At school we might have been reading Carl Sandburg and Paul Dunbar and Vachel Lindsay, all very forthright and American. But at home I was reading Poe--strange, arcane and melancholy Poe.

The poetry I was given to admire sounded to me like information. I accepted as fact that Chicago was hog butcher to the world, but I was moved by the unworldly territories of Poe's imagination--"In the fairest of our valleys, by good angels tenanted"--perhaps because in those days worlds made of words were vastly more real to me than Chicago, and the encounters of the mind with itself were closer to my sheltered experience than any social realism could have been.

Poe made me think about words. Which is the loveliest word, the loveliest letter? I believe I may have known that these are the kinds of almost idle questions one poses to oneself when a night seems to be unending, when the weight of sorrow is so great as to be dangerous. His stories rehearse grief and guilt, betrayal and accusation, and they are contained in a skin of language that is too elegant, too precise, as if their burden could be distanced by refinements that made art of them, by the wry attentiveness to cadences and sonorities that let the teller seem to think art was the whole point of the tale.

Poe at his best is not imaginable without the excesses for which he must be forgiven. I think I have always loved him because to love him requires loyalty. Those gothic dreams of his are the sort of thing a pre-adolescent girl might be enthralled by, and I did notice that brilliance and learning were among the glories of his perishing damsels. But I had to defend him and myself together from the idea that the tales were simply lurid or morbid. I knew better because I could not stop memorizing his poems. To say them and hear them taught me to feel the deeper coherences of language, as if words ordered by their sounds and suggestions were a charm that opened more meaning than words contain. And I learned from him that an ancient or an alien language had the intimate sound of a whisper at my ear.

Phrases come back to me still-- "his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming." And they remind me of that old joy I felt while I failed to put words to whatever it was that consumed me for an hour or two in my youth, a joy that yielded nothing and felt far more like inspiration than anything I have felt in all the years afterward.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Edgar Allan Poe
        

Happy birthday, Edgar! Tomorrow is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, the great writer who for a time called Baltimore home. Some call him America’s first literary critic. Some say he wrote the first detective story (and established sleuthing characteristics made famous by Sherlock Holmes). Some credit him with creating the horror genre.

We've put together a photo gallery of his Baltimore connections. And we asked authors, scholars and others to describe Poe’s influence on them — and on the world. What was the source of his genius? Why do his works seem so timeless? We’ll publish these guest posts all week on Read Street. Actor John Astin, who is featured in Poe tribute shows at Westminster Hall, will weigh in. So will author Marilynne Robinson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Gilead. Some excerpts:

Robinson: Poe made me think about words. Which is the loveliest word, the loveliest letter? I believe I may have known that these are the kinds of almost idle questions one poses to oneself when a night seems to be unending, when the weight of sorrow is so great as to be dangerous.

Stuart Kaminsky, a grand master of the Mystery Writers of America: Things we know about Poe and often say and hear include the assertion that, in his forty years of life, he created the short story, the detective story, the modern horror story. As far as I am concerned, it does not matter if he was first or if he created any literary genre. What matters is that he had the power to send me into a near syncope with his stories and poetry.

Charles and Caroline Todd (A Matter of Justice): I think if Charles and I had to pin down books that sparked our creative instincts as youngsters, it was Poe’s "Gold Bug" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"/ "The Purloined Letter," Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and Conan-Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Why? Because they speak to a child’s imagination and these are the stories that set your tastes in reading early on. Stories that are exciting and suspenseful and a feast for a young reader just discovering the magic of words on a page.

To read the complete posts — and see many more — come back to Read Street. We’ll feature Poe all week — including The Sun’s 1849 front-page article on his death. Four measly sentences!

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Edgar Allan Poe
        

Sunday in The Baltimore Sun, Towson University professor Diane Scharper offers capsule reviews of several books of local interest. Excerpts from her reviews:

Now the Drum of War By Robert Roper (Walker & Co. / 421 pages / $28). Walt Whitman (1819-1892), author of Leaves of Grass and the father of American poetry, came from a large, close-knit family. Poor and prone to strokes, heart disease and mental illness, the Whitmans were nevertheless tenacious, talented and smart. Roper, a Johns Hopkins University professor, looks at Whitman and his relationship with his family primarily during the Civil War. In a style reminiscent of Ken Burns, Roper focuses on Walt, his doting mother and his younger brothers, Jeff, a water engineer, and George, a Union soldier. When their father died of a stroke in 1855, the three took over the task of providing for their mother and siblings. Roper argues that Walt learned his poetic craft from his work as a reporter for various newspapers as well as from correspondence between himself and George, who wrote with an eye for details.

The Colts’ Baltimore By Michael Olesker (The Johns Hopkins University Press / 240 pages / $24.95). Although Olesker’s latest originates from his Sun column mourning the 2002 passing of Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas, this book reads more like a love poem than a funeral dirge. ... The text brims with details from the past with local landmarks like Carlins Park, Memorial Stadium, Read’s Drug Stores and Seton High School, as well as cultural and sociological touchstones like The Buddy Deane Show and signs saying White Only.

Historic Photos of Baltimore By Mark Walston (Turner Publishing Co. / 206 pages / $39.95). Photography is a mirror with a memory. That’s how Mark Walston sees it in this exquisite book of photographs and short essays. Offering both a history of photography and of Baltimore, Walston evokes Baltimore’s rich past from Fells Point, which was once the nation’s second-busiest immigration port — just after Ellis Island — to its tailor shops, which rivaled those of New York City. He also illustrates Baltimore’s unique position as a blue-collar town holding white-collar aspirations.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Marylandia
        

With Barack Obama scheduled to ride a train to Baltimore for a pre-inauguration stop tomorrow afternoon, history buffs are recounting a similar trip by another famous Illinois politician: Abe Lincoln.

In early 1861, Lincoln’s trip was much rockier. Detectives found evidence of a plot to sabotage his train on the way to Baltimore or assassinate him as he transferred from one downtown station to another.

The tale is recounted in Michael J. Kline's The Baltimore Plot. To foil the plotters and avoid angry secessionist mobs, Lincoln was disguised, and he slipped through Baltimore in the middle of the night. But he was soon ridiculed for cowardice by the press, which noted that no conspirators were ever charged. The Sun said, "Had we any respect for Mr. Lincoln ... the final escapade by which he reached the capital would have utterly demolished it, and overwhelmed us with mortification." 

You can hear an interview with Kline on WYPR's Maryland Morning show; just scroll down to the Tuesday, Jan. 13, show.

I'm betting Obama gets a warmer welcome -- from Baltimoreans and Sun editorials -- tomorrow.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Marylandia
        

Here's you chance to get published -- in The Baltimore Sun.

We'd like to know: What does the inauguration of Barack Obama mean to you?

Just leave a comment below. We will select a number of comments to be published in the Sun on Sunday, Jan. 25, in the Maryland Closeup section. 

Please include an e-mail address in case we need to contact you; it will not be published with your comment.

Photo from Bloomberg News

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
        

This weekend is going to be filled with fun, as well as cold. So bundle up and go!

Friday night, from 7 p.m.-10 p.m., the Baltimore Museum of Art hosts 60 Objects, Countless Stories. The free event highlights the first audio tour of the collection, with commentary from curators, conservators and local writers. There will be live readings from authors featured in the tour, and you can meet all those who contributed to the project, with an evening of poetry, discussions, music and a cash bar.

Saturday will prove to be quite busy, and fulfilling, for those willing to leave the house. Daedalus Books is celebrating it's third anniversary, offering a 10 percent discount to all customers. After you're done stocking your shelves, you can go see author (and president-elect) Barack Obama at 4:15 p.m. at the War Memorial Plaza. The gates open at 1 p.m., though, and space is limited, so pack your thermos of hot chocolate, slap a hat on your head and get there early.

Not enough action for you? Then go check out John Astin's tribute to Edgar Allan Poe at Westminster Hall from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Tickets are $30 in advance and $35 at the door. He'll have a repeat performance Sunday at 4:30 p.m., and again Feb. 1.

Monday night, Westminster Hall is sponsoring Honor by Horror, with a viewing of the 1961 film Pit and the Pendulum and a theatrical perfomance of The Black Cat. The event is free, but registration is required. For more information, visit www.nevermore2009.com.

And stay warm, everybody!

Posted by Nancy Knight at 5:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Book It
        

A new study of the nation's "most literate cities" ranks Baltimore #16 for 2008, well behind co-leaders Minneapolis and Seattle. That's not bad, considering the same survey ranked Baltimore 27th in 2007.

The survey, conducted by John W. Miller, the president of Central Connecticut State University, measures six broad factors that reflect literacy. They are: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources.

I'm surprised that Baltimore jumped so much in the rankings. But Read Street readers deserve at least partial credit. The measurement of Internet resources includes per capita web page views for the major newspaper, and because Read Street launched last May, your readership  helped boost the city's score.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Marylandia
        

Mo Willems, whose latest book is Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed, was in town yesterday for a visit to Park School. His appearance was part of the school's Gordon Berman '68 Lower School Resident Author program. The 25-year-old progam has hosted Newbery medalists Jean Craighead George and Nancy Willard, and Caldecott winners Mordicai Gerstein, Molly Bang and David Wisniewski.

Each year, authors and illustrators of children's books come to Park for presentations and workshops with Lower School students. The fund was created by Dr. and Mrs. Barnett Berman to honor their son Gordon, who loved to read.

Congratulations to Park and the Bermans, for creating and maintaining a great program that encourages reading!

Photo courtesy of Park School

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Marylandia
        

The best news of 2009 so far? Winnie the Pooh is back!

Last week, publishers in the U.S. and Britain announced the first authorized sequel of A.A. Milne's iconic children's book since his own The House at Pooh Corner.

Written by David Benedictus, with illustrations by Mark Burgess, the book is slated for an Oct. 5 release.

And while they naturally won't reveal their plot, Benedictus told the Associated Press that he hopes the book "both complement and maintain Milne's idea that whatever happens, a little boy and his bear will always be playing."

Personally, I feel that Burgess has the bigger challenge of the two, since E.H. Shepard's gorgeous, simplistic illustrations were always the highlight of the books for me.

So whether you remember the original releases from the '20s, or you're more familiar with the various Disney incarnations, I think we'll all have something to celebrate come October.

Welcome back, Pooh Bear!

Posted by Nancy Knight at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Dawn Rennert, who blogs at She Is Too Find of Books ... and often highlights interesting bookstores, invited me to do a guest post about the French shops I visited in Paris last year. She posted it today -- and it looks great. She must be a designer in real life.

Meanwhile, my daughter, who was studying in Paris for the fall semester, returned safely on Monday. Whew! She brought me this book, about Baltimorean Sylvia Beach, who ran a Left Bank bookstore and befriended many of the great writers living in Paris between the wars. Oh, one other note: she was the original publisher of Joyce's Ulysses! A remarkable woman. I can't wait to read the book.

By the way, I'd like to expand the map of favorite bookstores that we created last summer on Read Street -- you can find it in the right rail of the homepage. With your help, we listed more than 150 U.S. stores, and the map has been viewed more than 35,000 times! Now we're going worldwide. I've added several Parisian stores to the map already, but would like to hear your favorites from around the world. Post a comment and I'll add them to the map.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Worried about the cold weather and security hassles that await in Washingtion for Barack Obama's inauguration? Here's an alternative: Watch the historic event in the Enoch Pratt's beautiful Main Hall.

Starting at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 20, the library will host a simulcast on a 10-by-10 screen in the central branch on Cathedral Street. Broadcasts will also be available in many Pratt branches.

For details, check out the Pratt Web site, which also features a page dedicated to the new president. The page includes Web sites and other resources on Obama, as well as recommended reading (this is a library, after all).

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Marylandia
        

 The good news: According to an NEA study released today, more than half of American adults have read a novel, play, short story or other piece of literature last year than in '02.

The bad news: Most of them said they'd really rather not.

The AP article says the survey found "[R]eading rates increased for whites, blacks and Hispanics, for men and for woman, for all levels of education and across virtually all ages. Reading among 18-to-24 year olds jumped from 42.8 in 2002 to 51.7 percent last year."

And last year, Read Street was born. Coincidence? You decide.

Of course, it may also have something to do with homework.

"Adults who read books of any kind — fiction or nonfiction, online or on paper — that were not assigned by a teacher or employer dropped from 56.6 percent of adults in 2002 to 54.3 percent last year," the article went on to say. "The fall was greatest among those younger than 55."

So bravo, teachers! Maybe by the next survey, we'll have actually learned to love our books.

(Photo courtesy of capgros at stock.xchng)

Posted by Nancy Knight at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

New releases this week will show you how to find your man -- and then be snarky to him.

Snark by David Denby (Simon & Schuster, $15.95). New Yorker critic and best-selling author David Denby takes on the snarkers, naming the nine principles of snark — the standard techniques its practitioners use to poison their arrows. Snarkers like to think they are deploying wit, but mostly they are exposing the seethe and snarl of an unhappy country, releasing bad feeling but little laughter.

Mounting Fears by Stuart Woods (Putnam, $25.95). President Will Lee is having a rough week. His vice president just died during surgery. The squeaky-clean governor whom Lee has nominated to replace him may have a few previously unnoticed skeletons in his closet. And a rogue CIA agent is plotting his revenge on the CIA director.

The Best of Everything by Kimberla Lawson Roby (Morrow, $23.95). Alicia Black Sullivan swore to never repeat her father’s mistakes: She would never break any promises, she would never be unfaithful. And most important of all, when she got married, it would be for good. And she really does love her husband. She just happens to love money as well.

Become Your Own Matchmaker by Patti Stanger (here she is on YouTube) with Lisa Johnson Mandell (Atria, $25). Patti Stanger, a third-generation matchmaker and president of the Millionaire’s Club, gives advice on how to find the man of your dreams in less than a year.

Amazon.com; Publishers Weekly

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

The issue of embellished "memoirs" and downright fakes is troubling for readers -- do you blacklist the authors or simply read the books as fiction? Reasonable people can disagree on this. My wife, for example, read James Frey's A Million Little Pieces even after he acknowledged that some scenes were untrue; I refuse to read it.

So what's the responsibility of the big, online bookstores such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble when these situations arise? Is it ethical to ignore the controversy completely? Should they warn off unknowing consumers with a note? Should they leave it to consumer reviews to detail the problem? Or should they withdraw the books altogether? Consider a few examples:

Atop its editorial reviews, Amazon notes the controversy over Frey's book, and links to an author's note that he "altered events and details all the way through the book" and embellished criminal acts. Barnes & Noble refers to the "debate about the line between fiction and nonfiction" and points out the problem in its editorial review section. What I found most annoying was the "Discover Great New Writers" logo.

How about the faked Holocaust memoir Misha, in which a girl supposedly fled from the Nazis and lived with wolves? Amazon does not have an editorial review or note the hoax , though reader reviews do. At Barnes & Noble, the overview includes this sentence: "In the course of her travels she was befriended by wolves, and among their family she experienced the happiest moments of her troubled life;" there's no mention of a hoax. The few reader reviews do not mention it, either.

Love and Consequences, was another faked memoir. Amazon's editorial review calls it "A stunning memoir of a mixed-race girl growing up in gang-ridden South Central Los Angeles, where she followed her foster brothers into the Bloods before she hit puberty: what she witnessed, how she survived, and-against all odds-thrived." No mention of the fact that author Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, a white woman who grew up in a well-to-do part of the city. Customers reviews note the fraud. (I couldn't find the book at all on Barnes and Noble's site.)  

I'm OK with the way both sites handled the Frey book; the problem isn't noted in 100-point type, but it's not hidden, either. As for Misha, I think the sites should have an official disclaimer by now; shame on them for ignoring the issue. And double shame on Amazon for touting a bogus story by a nonexistent author in Love and Consequences. (BTW, kudos for all the reader-reviewers who were not shy about noting the problems with all three -- even if they decided to read the books.)

Am I being too harsh? What's your take on these sites?

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)
        

While your 2009 calendar is still fresh, starts saving the dates for the area’s top literary events. One year-long celebration kicks off next weekend, as Baltimore marks the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth, but there are many other events for book lovers. Here’s a sampling:

Poe bicentennial: Start the party Saturday at 7 p.m at Westminster Hall in Baltimore, where Poe is buried. The event features a tribute by John Astin of The Addams Family, -- check him out reading The Raven -- music and a theatrical performance. Tickets are $30 in advance, $35 at the door. (Similar events will be held Jan. 18 at 4:30 p.m., and on the weekend of Jan. 31/Feb. 1).

On Jan. 19, the actual anniversary, visit Westminster Hall for the 1961 movie Pit and the Pendulum and a performance of The Black Cat. The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. It starts at 7 p.m.

Baltimore Reads gala. The adult literacy organization marks its 20th anniversary with a celebration Jan. 24 at the Radisson Plaza Lord Baltimore Hotel. Tickets cost $175 per person or $300 per couple.

Booklovers’ Breakfast. James McBride (The Color of Water) and Nikki Giovanni (Love Poems) are featured Feb. 7 at the Enoch Pratt event at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel. Tickets cost $40; advance registration is required.

Frank McCourt. The author of Angela’s Ashes, ‘Tis and Teacher Man is the speaker for the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society’s annual Evening of Irish Music and Poetry on Feb. 20. Tickets cost $35.

Later in the year come some perennial favorites – and they’re all free! The CityLit Festival, April 18 at the Enoch Pratt on Cathedral Street, features Junot Diaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao). The Baltimore Book Festival is Sept 25-27 in Mount Vernon Square. And the One Maryland One Book program, sponsored by the Maryland Humanities Council, will have a statewide series of book discussions in the fall.

You’ll find many more events in the calendar on Read Street’s home page, along with daily updates on book news and reviews. Have a great year of reading!

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Edgar Allan Poe
        

Sunday in The Baltimore Sun, read a review of Louise Erdrich's The Red Convertible by Carole Goldberg, former book editor of The Hartford Courant. Some exceprts from the review:

Erdrich’s first story collection (HarperCollins/494 pages/$27.99) may make you wonder why the Pulitzer judges have not yet awarded her Erdrich the prize for fiction. This all-you-can-read buffet of stories, some well-known and some never before published, as well as versions of material from three of her 12 novels, represents her work spanning the past 30 years.

It is a magnificent feast.

Erdrich, whose mother is French and Anishinaabe (Ojibwe/Chippewa) and whose father is German American, sets her tales largely in North Dakota and Minnesota, on reservations and in small towns and the Twin Cities. ... Ranging back to the ancient peoples and forward to the present day, she weaves history and irony, bawdiness and spirituality, humor and violence into an endlessly unfolding narrative, as these 36 stories demonstrate. ...

The pain and pleasure of love is an undercurrent in much of Erdrich’s work, and she evokes with equal ease lyrical romance and raw animal coupling. Passion of a warped nature is explored in "Saint Marie," in which a would-be novice and a domineering nun are locked in a dance of shocking abuse. Memorably linked religious, musical and physical ecstasy — and brutal violence — is at the mysterious heart of "Naked Woman Playing Chopin." ...

"A Father’s Milk" is Erdrich at her lyrical, mystical best. Here Fox, a repentant cavalry soldier, saves an infant girl after he helps massacre her tribe and miraculously nurses the starving child: "It seemed, when he held her close upon his heart as women did, that the child grew angry with longing and desperately clung, rooted with its mouth, roared in frustration, until at last, moved to near insanity, Fox opened his shirt and put her to his nipple."

The girl will later find her true mother, her true tribe. She moves on.

The story remains with you.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

While considering financial resolutions, here's another option -- one that will save a few bucks on books. You can get a free download of Suze Orman's 2009 Action Plan, thanks to Oprah. But hurry (I love that infomercial phrase) -- the offer expires Jan. 15.

Orman is a media darling these days, thanks to exposure on Oprah and other shows. Here's how Orman decribes the book: "As I have said for years: "If you plan for life's 'what if's' there's no need to panic when the news turns bad. An emergency cash fund is your security when a recession causes rising unemployment. A long-term investment strategy that employs a mix of stocks and bonds makes it easier to get through scary bear markets; living within your means, rather than running up credit card ... debt leaves you better able to weather financial storms."

That sort of advice has been a primer for financial health long before Orman became a star. Folks around Baltimore will remember similar suggestions made by Julius Westheimer for years. But in these times, a back-to-basics strategy is pretty sound.    

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 1:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

No, not the Jonathan Murray who created The Real World and Road Rules. THIS Jonathan Murray can actually improve your life.

When he isn't working as the daily financial analyst on WBAL Radio or appearing on WBAL TV, he contributes to The Today Show, MSNBC and Fox Business News with his twin brother, David, who he wrote Two for the Money with.

In other words, this guy knows money, and he spends his life helping you and me figure out how to manage our own.

Compare that to watching the young and insipid puking their brains out. I think I know who I want advising me.

To celebrate the New Year, I'm going to give you a little present that might surprise you, coming from a financial adviser: I'm giving you permission to NOT do a family budget. This runs counter to many financial planners, who will probably tell you that before you do anything, you need to get on a budget to monitor your expenses.

But, here's the problem with budgets: nobody sticks with them. It's like that New Year's gym membership, or exercise bike, or new diet you vow to stay on…soon, your commitment has passed, your enthusiasm has waned, and your discipline has eroded. Telling yourself that "you're just too busy," you then revert back to your old, bad habits and you're disgusted with yourself. I'm sparing you from that disappointment.

You see, I know that if you're like most folks, you thought about a budget, maybe even tried one for a while, but it didn't work. Monitoring daily expenditures, recording every cup of coffee…we're just too busy for that. So, bag it. Why beat yourself up?

Instead, I'm going to ask you to do something much simpler, requiring much less time on your part, that will allow you to reach your financial goals…are you ready?

I want you to save 15 percent of your income, starting immediately.

"WHAT?!" you cry. "Fifteen percent?! There's no WAY we can do that! I mean, we're barely scraping by as it is, living paycheck to paycheck, both of us working, having to pay for daycare, the mortgage, dry-cleaning, healthcare, cable, gas-n-electric, car payments, and food, to say nothing of going out to eat, or going on a vacation."

Well then, let me put it another way. If I asked you if you could survive on 85 percent of your 2008 income, could you?

Most folks I talk to in this country could live on 85 percent of what they made last year—they'd find a way.

You see, saving 15 percent, or surviving on 85 percent, are the same thing…it's just a question of perspective. And, unlike doing a budget, once you put your savings plan on autopilot, it's simple. I didn't say it'd be EASY, but it's simple…just have 15 percent of your pay automatically direct deposited into your Roth, your 401(k), your savings/investment account…whatever your goals are, apply those monies there. Then (and here's the really fun part) anything left over is yours to spend as you wish, because you have the comfort of KNOWING that you've already saved what you need to reach your goals. Go ahead and buy that latte. Get that new pair of shoes, because, as the old expression goes, you've "paid yourself first."

Too many people do it the other way around…they say, "Once I pay my bills, THEN I'll sock some money away." But, before you know it, years have passed, with little to show for it.

And, here's the other interesting thing...if you're like most people, you won't miss that 15 percent after a few months' time. In 5 years, you'll be amazed at how much you've socked away for your future goals.

Posted by Nancy Knight at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

I'm going to let you in on a dirty little journalism secret. Sometimes, we overcompensate.

See, we like to cover our butts, and reach out to as many sources as possible. In my case, I contacted a couple of different financial authors, in the hopes that one of them would be kind enough to share some of his financial wisdom and wizardry on Read Street.

And then both of them did! Lo, Financial Friday was born.

I'm going to start us off with Mort Zachter's post, for no other reason than it was the first one I received.

You may have seen Zachter recently at breathe books, discussing his memoir and the events that inspired it: The discovery that his struggling working-class family harbored a couple of millionaires.

He tells the story far better than I ever could, hence the 2006 AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction. So if you haven't had a chance to check out his story, I suggest you run to whichever venue you get your books from and snag yourself a copy.

Posted by Nancy Knight at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Barack Obama is seeping into pop culture, and there's no better example than Marvel Comics' decision to feature him in a special issue of Amazing Spider-Man. On Jan. 14, Marvel will release #583 with Obama on the cover; it will sell for $3.99. The story line revolves around Spidey foiling an attempt to sabotage the inauguration.

"It was a natural after we learned the new president is a Spider-Man fan," Marvel editor in chief Joe Quesada told USA Today, noting reports that Obama once collected Spider-Man comics. 

I'm glad Obama got a chance to star with an A-list superhero, and not someone like Green Arrow (is he still around?).  As a kid, my comics pantheon featured Superman and Batman at the top, with Spider-Man and Flash not far behind. The rest were B-listers to me. 

You can see some of the Spider-Man panels in this gallery. For a look at other presidents who have found a place in comics, including John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, check out this Sun gallery.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)
        

Calling all Sesame Street fans! Michael Davis, a Baltimore Sun alumnus, will be at Greetings & Readings Saturday afternoon to sign copies of his new book, Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street. Working with one of the show's co-founders, Joan Ganz Cooney, Davis gives you a behind-the-scenes pass to the longest-running children's show in history. Perhaps he will even answer that age-old question: What exactly does Oscar wear under that can?

Sunday at 4 p.m., PoetryInBaltimore.com presents Gimme Shelter Productions Community Harvest Benefit for Hearts Place Shelter. For $3, or a nonperishable food item, you can enjoy the poetry of an opera singer, teacher, performance artist and many more.

The open-mic fun continues Monday night when Eight-Stone Press sponsors an evening of Baltimore related stories, poetry and art. Stop by at 7 p.m. and share your own Charm City stories.

If you still haven't had enough of Poe, join the fray at The Great Poe Debate on Tuesday evening at the Philadelphia Free Central Library. Philadelphia's Ed Pettit, Boston College's Paul Lewis and our very own Jeff Jerome of the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum will (metaphorically) duke it out for our dear Poe's legacy and resting place.

And, as always, there are plenty more events to be found on the Read Street calendar.

Posted by Nancy Knight at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Book It
        

Here's the latest on Angel at the Fence, the partially fabricated Holocaust memoir that detailed the relationship of Herman and Roma Rosenblat.

Although the original publisher withdrew after the fakery was exposed, a small New York publishing house says it is in talks to release the book as fiction, the New York Times reports today. If only Herman had taken that route to begin with, we might all be reading his The Boy in the Striped Pajamas-like tale -- similarly thought-provoking, yet similarly far-fetched. But even if his book is released as fiction, count me among the folks who will not read it -- out of principle.

Meanwhile, on Slate, Lev Raphael asks why Americans are suckers for such bogus memoirs.  He notes that William Dean Howells once said the problem with American audiences was that they always wanted "a tragedy with a happy ending." That need for romance blinded the publisher and others who should have seen the story as too good to be true, Raphael says. 

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

In the latest episiode of "Authors Behaving Badly," the New York Times reports on some plagiarism by Neale Donald Walsch, the writer whose titles include Conversations with God and Happier than God. In a December post on his Beliefnet blog, Walsch detailed a charming tale about his child's school Christmas pageant. Problem was, the story had been published years earlier by Candy Chand.

Here's how Walsch explains it on his blog: All I can say now -- because I am truly mystified and taken aback by this -- is that someone must have sent it to me over the internet ten years or so ago. Finding it utterly charming and its message indelible, I must have clipped and pasted it into my file of "stories to tell that have a message I want to share." I have told the story verbally so many times over the years that I had it memorized...and then, somewhere along the way, internalized it as my own experience. I am aghast at how improbable this sounds, even to me, yet I can find no other explanation for how this story came out of my mouth in Candy Chand's words.

Hey, my memory can be spotty -- I have a hard time with my neighbors' names even though I can recite the 1969 N.Y. Mets lineup. Still, I don't think I would confuse an event involving my own child. It's worrisome that this troubling episode comes amid another controversy over Angel at the Fence, a Holocaust memoir canceled because part of it was fabricated.

Can't you trust anything you read these days? I don't know whether you're less likely to read memoirs -- or believe them -- but I sure am.

Photo from Beliefnet

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Today's Sun reviewed three cookbooks promoting slow cooking: Phyllis Pellman Good's Fix-It and Forget-It Big Cookbook, Andrew Schloss' Art of the Slow Cooker and The Best Slow & Easy Recipes by the editors of Cook’s Illustrated. Here's an excerpt from the full review: 

If you aren’t using that slow cooker that’s probably sitting in the back of your cupboard, Good has more than 1,000 reasons why you should. Her latest tome for slow cooking, the Fix-It and Forget-It Big Cookbook (Good Books, 2008, $29.95), is a compilation of 1,400 recipes culled from five cookbooks in her popular Fix-It and Forget-It series. ... All of the recipes in the books come from home cooks across the country, so they have been tested in real-life situations. Geared toward novices or those who face feeding the hungry family at 5 o’clock, the recipes are simple and usually require little advance preparation before the ingredients are placed in the pot. The recipes leave little to chance, specifying the size of slow cooker that works best, estimating the time the dish will take and providing clear, step-by-step instructions.

Those looking for more inventive fare, however, may wish to turn to the Art of the Slow Cooker  (Chronicle, 2008, $24.95), which features 80 recipes for dishes such as Seafood Caldo With Chorizo and Duck With Red Wine, Wild Mushrooms and Forest Herbs. Unlike Good, who emphasizes how easy slow cooking is, Schloss points out that the method is not effortless. The recipes in his book are divided into "simple everyday" and "spectacular entertaining." The ingredients lists, even for simple fare, can be extensive and the preparation time can be considerable. Typically, the recipes call for precooking — browning meats, marinating, toasting and grinding spices, etc.

The Best Slow & Easy Recipes (America’s Test Kitchen, 2008, $35) takes the middle ground in how much effort to put into slow cooking. This book contains 250 recipes, not only for the slow cooker, for also for roasts, stews, braises and other slow methods. The authors describe the recipes as "uncomplicated cooking that’s worth the wait."

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

While we're on the topic of resolutions, let's consider a 2009 campaign against overused words and phrases. We've discussed these annoyances before, but the folks at Lake Superior State University reminded me that the fight can never end. (And they are good allies -- just look at LSSU instructor Lynnea McFadden.)

The school recently released its 34th annual List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness. Atop the list was "green" and its derivatives. That includes "carbon footprint" and "carbon offsetting." Also on the list were "maverick" and "First Dude," though they probably vanished with the sinking of the McCain-Palin ticket.

I'm getting tired of credit crunch, meltdown and the other crutches used to describe economic troubles. And with the Super Bowl a few weeks away, I'm bundling up for the approaching blizzard of cliches, mis-used words and mixed metaphors. Here's a recent double-dip from Ravens receiver Derrick Mason, who was happy that his quarterback had "stepped up to the plate."

So let's join Lynnea and bag some annoying words in 2009! Other suggestions for worthy targets?

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

Drs. Janet Horn and Robin H. Miller, authors of The Smart Woman's Guide to Midlife and Beyond, have been kind enough to share their thoughts on healthy living.

Dr. Horn has been recognized by Baltimore Magazine and The Daily Record as a top doctor in Baltimore and a top woman in Maryland, respectively. A former faculty member at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, she now practices medicine at The Shepherd's Clinic in the city, according to the book's Web site.

Dr. Miller, a former fellow at the University of Arizona, is an award-winning medical correspondent and author of a children's health book, Kids Ask the Doctor. She currently practices integrative medicine in Oregon, and is a medical reporter for local television.

And as to their own New Year's resolutions, they are quick to point out the flaws of the concept on their own blog, right before naming a few exceptional ones they plan to keep for 2009.

Getting physically fit is a classic new year’s resolution, one that, unfortunately, seems to be difficult for many people to maintain, one of us included. We’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out why. Is it because it is not important to some? Is time an issue? Or is it not enjoyable?

Let’s address the most important issue first. Is fitness important?

While we were doing research for our book, both of us were surprised by how many new and ongoing studies there now are looking at exercise and health. And we were even more surprised by how many studies have already shown benefits for all parts of the body from regular exercise. Sure, everyone knows that aerobic exercise is good for the heart; but did you know that it is also good for the brain? And would it surprise you to know that people who exercise regularly live longer than those who don’t? We could go on and on, but the bottom line is that regular exercise is no longer a "nice to do" but is a "must do" to stay healthy.

And what about those who think they don’t have the time for it?

Time really may be an issue for some, especially since new recommendations by the Department of Health and Human Services came out in late fall 2008 advising a total of 2 ½ hours per week of moderate aerobic physical activity. The American Heart Association and the American College for Sports Medicine released their recommendations for the same amount of aerobic exercise, and in addition, especially for older adults, strengthening exercises two days per week, as well as exercises for balance and flexibility at least two days per week.

And what about those of us who just don’t enjoy it?

Well, although one of us loves to exercise and has done it regularly since elementary school, the other of us would rather read a book. Here, in an excerpt from our book, is what she says about the reasons she, and many of her patients, don’t exercise:

" One reason is that during the twentieth century, we have become spoiled about instant gratification; in other words, we like to do things for which we see results quickly. We have no patience for a long drawn out program, particularly if it’s not enjoyable. In addition, we like to tackle the problem, find the solution, and be done with it – not have to keep working at it forever so that it becomes incorporated into our lives, which is the way an exercise program should be. And if we don’t keep reminding ourselves of how beneficial and necessary physical activity is to our health, we forget, and instead see it as just one more chore (and the first thing to go when we get busy).

All of these reasons are true for me. My life, like yours, is very busy and crowded with things I have to do to keep it humming along so that it won’t crash. So I don’t have the desire/discipline to do things that don’t immediately affect my life, especially if they are not fun to do. . .

But, regularly moving is crucial to our long term health, especially now that we’re older. Like breathing, we need to move regularly to live. Unlike breathing, we will not die quickly if we stop exercising, which makes it easier to stop doing it after awhile… Perhaps an even better analogy is that of brushing your teeth. Aren’t you fairly regular about doing that? Have you ever stopped to think why? It’s either because this habit was drummed into your head since you were little, or because you know on some level that if you don’t, you will eventually have gum disease and lose your teeth. We need to think the same way about physical activity (not that you’ll lose your teeth if you don’t do it, but that there will health consequences)."

Hopefully, knowing that regular exercise is crucial to your health in the long term, you’ll be convinced to start, and continue, to do it. So, has that line of thinking worked for us? One of us will simply continue her longtime nearly-perfect (ok – perfect) exercise regimen this year, while the other, though better about it, still has it on her new year’s resolutions list, if that tells you anything. Stay tuned.

Posted by Nancy Knight at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

College and pro post-season football games have put a crimp in my reading time. (I love the commercial that asks a guy: How can you spend nine hours watching football in a weekend? Answer: Skip one of the four games!) I'm not that bad, but I have become better acquainted with my recliner lately.

To honor the Ravens' push for the Super Bowl, I re-read the Sun interviews that asked players to name one book they'd want if stranded on a island. The best response was from Mark Clayton (pictured), he wanted a suspense novel so he could create his own endings with each re-reading. Others were more literal:

Lorenzo Neal and Jason Brown: The Bible

Todd Heap: Angels and Demons by Dan Brown

Brendon Ayanbadejo: The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

Willie Anderson: Think Big, Act Small by Jason Jennings

Samari Rolle: The Shack by William P. Young

Jarret Johnson: A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith

Sam Koch: Beach Road by James Patterson

Jim Leonhard: The Secret by Rhonda Byrne

Haloti Ngata and Fabian Washington: ESPN magazine (They deserve demerits, but I'm not going to be the one to tell them. Ngata is 6-4, 345 pounds, by the way.)

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)
Categories: Marylandia
        

You may already have heard about Dave Bruno, the man who's determined to whittle his possessions down to 100 items this year.

Personally, I couldn't even narrow my library down that much, but I do applaud the effort -- and have even accomplished a little bit of purging myself. Just stay away from my bookshelves, buddy.

If you want to learn more about Bruno, visit his blog. He is also writing a book about the "100 Thing Challenge," which will be published by Harper Perennial.

Some time ago I came up with a hair-brained idea. I decided to live a year with only 100 personal possessions. I call it the "100 Thing Challenge." It is an attempt to see if the average American guy, living an average suburban life can make it through a year without being overwhelmed by stuff. And now with a recession in full swing, it seems timely to resist consumerism.

But the 100 Thing Challenge is also relevant around the New Year. Have you ever noticed that we often buy our way into achieving our New Year's resolutions? That is especially curious because so many of our resolutions are about getting rid of stuff.

We resolve to lose weight. We buy a new treadmill for workouts. We resolve to get out of debt. We buy new budgeting software for money management. We resolve to find a better job. We buy a new suit for interviews.

And even when we resolve to add an achievement to our lives, we often buy our way to success. We resolve to run a 5k. We buy new running shoes. We resolve to write a novel. We buy a new computer. We resolve to get organized. We buy a new day planner.

How is it that resolutions about purging lead us to purchasing? And why do we buy our way to achievements? I have a theory.

Americans like to shop for accomplishments.

There are any number of reasons why an ethos of consumerism pervades our efforts to reach our goals. At least one reason, I think, is that buying stuff kind of feels like an accomplishment. We walk out of a store with a bag full of stuff, and we feel like we are halfway to our goal.

Of course we're not. In fact, that store is not anywhere near our goal. Let me give an example. I really like to hike, especially up hill. The views from a large mountain are unbeatable. And the feeling of accomplishment after trudging up a mountain is wonderful. Living in Southern California, there are plenty of places for me to get out, hit the trail and bag a peak. So where do I find myself going? REI of course.

That store has got all the gear I will ever need to tackle California's fourteeners. I can buy everything to reach my goal: backpack, sleeping bag, boots, crampons and ice axe (just in case), trekking poles, tent and more. In fact, as best as I can tell, there are only three things required to reach my goal of hiking mountains that I cannot buy at an REI store. Skills. Legs. Lungs.

Shopping for resolutions is a very real temptation for lots of people. But it is a distraction that often leaves us ill prepared to achieve our New Year's resolutions. Also, trying to buy our way to our goals ignores the reality of a frequent outcome of what we set out to accomplish. Failure.

Call me a pessimistic sourpuss, but let's face it, we regularly don't achieve our New Year's resolutions. Remember Dr. Seuss's advice? "Wherever you fly, you'll be the best of the best. Wherever you go, you will top all the rest. Except when you don't because, sometimes, you won't. I'm sorry to say so but, sadly, it's true and Hang-ups can happen to you."

So what happens if we buy our way to a New Year's resolution and get stymied? Well, we'll have to deal with failure, which is natural and healthy. But also we'll have a closet full of crap reminding us that not even the fanciest gear and most generous credit card can handle all our goals. And it's been my experience that stuff does not provide lasting comfort after a let down.

So that's a side benefit of the 100 Thing Challenge. This year I don't have the option of buying my way to success. I cannot experience that small jolt of accomplishment at the cash register in 2009. Achievement will just have to wait for the real thing. Cannot wait.

Posted by Nancy Knight at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

It's the time of year when everyone makes resolutions: New Year, new you, and all that. So this week, we've invited a few authors to give you the lowdown on their new year's resolutions, and how you can use them.

Not like Dave, who won't let me steal HIS resolution of keeping a book diary, to better track reading habits. Now I have to come up with my own.

I've gotten a couple of good ideas from our Twitter friends: Catherinette wants to read more nonfiction, starting with Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. And oneeyedcarmen says he's going to read at least 35 books before Dec. 31, 2009. Both are great goals.

So here's mine: I resolve to read more local authors. We've got an amazing stable of writers in Maryland, and they deserve as much appreciation as they can get. Feel free to help me out through the year with suggestions, and I'll make sure to report back on my successes and failures.

Meanwhile, tell me your resolutions, and get a free book from 2008.

Posted by Nancy Knight at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)
        

Everybody knows George Bush's popularity has tanked, but does the publishing industry have to rub it in? First lady Laura Bush has secured a multimillion-dollar contract for a memoir, even as her husband -- who still is the president -- can't get a deal.

Laura's deal with Scribner was announced today, and the book is  expected to be released in 2010, according to the Associated Press. There were no details on financial arrangements, but past deals involving first ladies have carried multimillion-dollar payouts; Hillary Clinton received $8 million for her memoir.

Laura Bush's life is already a best seller in fictional form, in Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife. And books by recent first ladies, including Barbara Bush, have had more dependable commercial appeal than those by former presidents, the AP noted.

But the Laura Bush name is not a surefire winner. She wrote a children's book, Read All About It!, with daughter Jenna and it had  an announced first printing of 500,000. Though launched by a mother-daughter appearance on the “Today Show,” only 80,000 copies have sold, according to Nielsen BookScan.

Laura Bush said she looked forward to working with the publisher “as I tell the stories of the extraordinary events and people I've met in my life, particularly during my years in the White House.” She will work with a collaborator, the AP said, but one has not yet been named.

“As a rare witness to the private moments of one of our country's most consequential presidencies, and as a first lady who has maintained a notable level of discretion, her memoir will provide a candid and personal perspective, and an enduring record, of the years that have already determined the course of the 21st century,” said Susan Moldow, executive vice president and publisher of Scribner.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

New books out this week include the latest thilller from Janet Evanovich. A sampling:

Plum Spooky by Janet Evanovich (St. Martin’s, $27.95) According to legend, the Jersey Devil prowls the Pine Barrens and soars above the treetops in the dark of night. As eerie as this might seem, there are things in the Barrens that are even more frightening and dangerous, as bounty hunter Stephanie Plum is about to learn.

Eclipse by Richard North Patterson (Holt, $26). Damon Pierce, a 40-year-old partner in a huge San Francisco law firm, who specializes in international litigation, agrees to defend the husband of a former lover from bogus murder charges.

Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals by Temple Grandin (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26). Temple Grandin, famed for her decades-long commitment to treating livestock as humanely as possible on its way to slaughter, considers how humans and animals can best interact.

Bones of the Dragon by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (Tor, $24.95). Skylan Ivorson is a sea-raider of the Vindras and eventually becomes the Chief of Chiefs of all Vindras clans, an honor he truly feels he deserves as one who has been blessed by Skoval, the god of war. But sometimes a blessing is a curse in disguise.

The Power of Soul by Zhi Gang Sha (Atria, $25) The Power of Soul teaches soul healing, soul prevention of sickness, soul rejuvenation, soul transformation of every aspect of life (including relationships and finances) and soul enlightenment.

The Great Depression Ahead: How to Prosper in the Crash Following the Greatest Boom in History by Harry S. Dent (Free Press, $27). Harry Dent outlines the critical issues that will face our government and other major institutions, offering long- and short-term tactics for weathering the storm.

Red Carpet Suicide by Perez Hilton (NAL, $23.95). Perez Hilton makes his publishing debut with a pop-cultural satire about today’s insane celebrity-driven world.

Rich Brother Rich Sister: Two Different Paths to God, Money and Happiness by Robert Kiyosaki and Emi Kiyosaki (Perseus/Vanguard, $24.95). Two people, born of the same parents, and with the same childhood experiences, take different paths to find truth, happiness, purpose and ultimately financial success.

The Man from Oakdale by Henry Coleman with Alina Adams (Pocket, $23). Desperate to locate her missing granddaughter, high-powered businesswoman Lucinda Walsh hires Henry Coleman for the job.

With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the Battle of Britain by Michael Korda (HarperCollins, $25.99). Michael Korda takes the reader back to the summer of 1940, when fewer than 3,000 young fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force — often no more than 900 on any given day — stood between Hitler and the victory that seemed almost within his grasp.

The Great Eight by Scott Hamilton (Nelson/Practical Living, $24.99). Olympic gold medal figure skater Scott Hamilton shares his eight secrets to finding happiness in the face of a life filled with challenges, difficulties and career-canceling odds.

On the Grind: A Shane Scully Novel by Stephen J. Cannell (St. Martin’s, $25.95). In Stephen Cannell’s ninth Shane Scully crime thriller, Scully is unceremoniously dismissed from the LAPD and lands an entry-level job in Haven Park, a city known for having the most corrupt police department in California.

Three Weeks to Say Goodbye by C.J. Box (St. Martin’s, $24.95). Jack and Melissa McGuane’s dream of becoming parents comes true with the adoption of their daughter, Angelina. But nine months after bringing her home, they receive a call from the adoption agency telling them the baby’s father, a teenager, never signed away his parental rights and he wants her back.

Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos (Atlantic Monthly, $25). Hope Jones, a Nebraska mother of three, is whisked away by a 1978 tornado, her body never found. Twenty-five years later, when Hope’s children gather for their father’s funeral after he’s killed by a lightning strike, Llewelyn’s death is one of many quandaries haunting his children.

All Pets Go to Heaven by Sylvia Browne (Fireside, $23.95). World famous psychic, spiritual teacher and New York Times best-selling author Sylvia Browne exercises her insight to illustrate the purpose our pets have on Earth — and what animals experience after death.

Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell (Little, Brown, $24.99). A hit man-turned-doctor tries to make a new life for himself in a decrepit Manhattan hospital, but the past has a way of finding him.

Daemon by Daniel Suarez (Dutton, $26.95). Gaming genius Matthew Sobol, the 34-year-old head of CyberStorm Entertainment, has just died of brain cancer, but death doesn’t stop him from initiating an all-out Internet war against humanity.

Amazon.com and Publishers Weekly

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Recent news that another memoir -- Angel at the Fence by Herman Rosenblat -- was at least partially fabricated left me both angry and sad. (In Angel, Rosenblat claimed he met his wife, Roma, at a concentration camp; after questions were raised by The New Republic, he admitted they met after the war, and the book's planned publication was halted.)

I was angry because such trickery violated the unwritten contract between author and reader. A memoir carries a premium because readers often form an emotional bond with the author. That reaction goes much deeper than appreciating a writing style or plot twist. If a memoir veers from the truth, the author is stealing those emotions.

And angry because publishers should be more careful in vetting books. Last year, Margaret Seltzer’s "memoir" of gang life, Love and Consequences, and Misha Defonseca’s Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, were exposed as fakes. And who can forget the spectacular crash of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces?

And angry because such trickery gives ammunition to crackpot Holocaust deniers.

But I was also saddened that Rosenblat — a true Holocaust victim and concentration camp survivor — will now be remembered for all the wrong reasons. Not for the quiet heroism of facing overwhelming evil. Not for having the strength to build a new life. after the war. Not for a long life and long marriage.

Photo by J. Pat Carter/AP

Here’s what some Read Street readers have said:

Over the past months, I have received this story — always the same — in an email countless times. It’s well-written. Quite a tear-jerker. I never believe any of these email stories, but a lot of people have believed this one, since there is always some sort of note assuring the recipients of the truth of the event. — Eve

Mr. Rosenblat’s lies have made it harder for scholars and survivors of the holocaust to be believed when they speak in public. — David

Misrepresentation is still wrong, just as it is in Mr. Rosenblat’s case. I still believe that he is, as well as all holocaust survivors, a national treasure to be cherished. ... He paid for sins that he never committed and he did his time at Buchenwald. Let the poor man alone. — Esso

Retitle it as a fiction based on fact then go forward. How many books have we read and loved that just weren’t exposed. A well written book is a book worth reading. Let’s look to Wall Street for the BIG falsehoods. — Georgia

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
        

Sunday in The Baltimore Sun, get a look at a couple of novelits poised to break out in 2009. Some excerpts:

Stacey D’Erasmo’s third novel, The Sky Below, has its roots in journalism; its protagonist is an obituary writer for a paper in Manhattan. "You’ve seen me," the book opens. "I’m the guy opposite you on the subway or the bus, I’ve passed you on the street a million times." Her story is not about dissolution but redemption. The Sky Below ... moves back and forth between the real world and the elaborate layers of its characters’ inner life.

Jonathan Littell would be a face to watch even if his second novel, The Kindly Ones, weren’t coming out in the United States. It’s just that kind of book, and he appears to be that kind of writer, ambitious and controversial, unafraid to stir it up. Published in France in 2006, The Kindly Ones is constructed as a memoir, the story of Max Aue, a French intellectual who also happens to be a former Nazi officer. Sprawling, graphic and unrelenting, the book won two of France’s most prestigious literary awards — and HarperCollins reportedly paid $1 million for the American rights. 

Photo of Stacey D'Erasmo by Nina Subin

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

I hope everyone is enjoying their new year so far! Sure, it's been a tad chilly, some of us have lost power and the bankruptcies just keep rolling in, but I say, let's give 2009 a chance. After all, it is the Year of Poe, and nothing bad ever happened around that guy, right?

Tomorrow afternoon, the Enoch Pratt library hosts "200 Birthdays: A Toast to Edgar Allan Poe." They're doing it up right, with a Poe impersonator and three films based on his books, including The Fall of the House of Usher. I can only hope it's the version with Vincent Price.

Head to Towson Monday evening for Ukazoo's creative writing group. You can follow the prompt or bring your own work, and then take advantage of friendly critiques and writing tips. Advance registration is requested, so call 410.832.BOOK.

And if you want to get away from it all, escape into a graphic novel or two at the Lutherville Borders' graphic novel discussion group.

Do you have a bookish event you'd like included in the Read Street calendar? Let us know. And have a great weekend, everybody! 

Posted by Nancy Knight at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Book It
        

Heckuva a way to start the new year -- but Radio France International reports that Librairie de France, a charming bookstore that has been located at Rockefeller Center for 73 years, plans to close in September. Apparently the area's chic boutiques are crowding out the shop; annual rent jumped from $360,000 to $1 million, according to the RFI report. 

I have fond memories of the store, located on the promenade near the ice rink. Even though I don't read French well, I always enjoyed browsing among the old prints, Petit Prince books and French merchandise. The shop provided the sort of burst of foreign charm that makes New York such a wonderful place. Where will I get that now?

The bookstore opened in 1935 at the invitation of David Rockefeller, who wanted Europeans to be part of his new office building, according to RFI. During World War II the bookstore published French authors, such as André Maurois, Jules Romains and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who had fled the German occupation of France.

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)