First, congrats to Cecil for a starred reveiw in Booklist for The PLAIN Janes

Also be sure to read Margo Rabb's blog tour interview over at Jen Robinson's yesterday; today she is at Fuse #8 where she says things like this:

I wasn't approached to write this book—one aspect of being a writer, which can make this career seem more like a nightmare than a dream come true, is that usually during all those years of labor, of writing and re-writing, there's no guarantee that your book will be published. And even if it is published, you have no idea if it'll be received positively. Writing a novel is just such a gigantic, unfathomable leap of faith. While CURES was being shopped around, I kept telling my husband that if it didn't sell I'd have to go drown myself in the Gowanus canal. Thankfully I didn't have to—the Gowanus would be a pretty disgusting way to go.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, young or old, you need to read this book.

James McBride has a fascinating piece in the new issue of National Geographic on the history of Hip Hop. He traces it back to Africa and through influences from all over the American south and Northeast. What's really interesting is that McBride himself was not a fan for a long long time (he's a jazz musician in addition to being a writer), so there's no gushing fanboy attitude at work here. Did you know Hip Hop dates back to the Beats?

But the artist whose work arguably laid the groundwork for rap as we know it was Amiri Baraka, a beat poet out of Allen Ginsberg's Greenwich Village scene. In the late 1950s and '60s, Baraka performed with shrieks, howls, cries, stomps, verse floating ahead of or behind the rhythm, sometimes in staccato syncopation. It was performance art, delivered in a dashiki and Afro, in step with the anger of a bold and sometimes frightening nationalistic black movement, and it inspired what might be considered the first rap group, the Last Poets.

Great stuff in this article; highly recommended.

Fresh off his NBCC win, Daniel Mendelsohn has a lot to say about writing and being a critical reviewer at over Critical Mass. One part of the interview in particular caught my eye; when Mendelsohn talks about graphic novels:

To be perfectly honest, I thought Alison Bechdel's book, which is completely mesmerizing, and literate – hello? The criticism of the graphic literature, let's call it, since that book is not a novel, is that it's not literature, that it's not literary. Well, hello? This is somebody who knows a lot about literary matters, and it's in her storytelling, but it deserves its own category. I think there should be a new category of graphic literature – that's what I think it should be called, and I don't think it should matter if it's fiction or nonfiction, whatever. It's clearly a new thing – and it's not going away. So why should this be in a category with people who are just using words for their stories? It should enjoy the benefit of being judged against similar objects.

I was really annoyed at the Morning Tournament of Books when Anthony Doerr pretty much dismissed Pride of Baghdad because of this: "Here we have an 1,100-page über-novel by an American master matched against a 136-page graphic novel by a writer best known for a series of comics about a superhuman mayor who can talk to machines."

Clearly Doerr likes big books with many words - he said as much in his review. And I know the Tournament is largely silly literary fun, but this dismissive attitude grates on me. I think the only shot graphic novels have of really being taken seriously (and no more of those stupid ass columns that start with "Comics are for adults now, who knew?") is to remove them from the sort of match-ups that Doerr considered. Yea for Mendelsohn that he sees what is possible here, and is willing to say what so many critics thinks would make them sound stupid. (Must buy his book also - too many people have raved about it to be ignored.