Anne Fadiman was interviewed over at Powells last month and somehow I missed it. She talked all about her new book and writing essays, which I love. Here's a bit:

They [essays] are sanctuaries for me also as a writer. When I'm writing one of these, I pretty much stop doing everything else for two or three weeks and lose myself in the subject, so I write only about things that I'm really interested in and want to know more about. I do nothing during those two or three weeks but read and think and then write about that subject. Or, in the case of a couple of these that were about food — coffee and ice cream — ingest, in addition to reading, thinking, and writing. [Laughs] It's good that I didn't spend more than three weeks on the ice cream essay; otherwise, I would have had a major obesity problem by the end.

They are sanctuaries, but that doesn't mean that they are divorced from the world. There are some fairly serious moments in some of these: the last one is about a drowning death that I witnessed many years ago; another one of the essays, the one on coffee, starts very lightly but ends with me drinking coffee after I get off the plane after I've just found out my father is terminally ill. I don't think of essays as a kind of trivial ivory tower, a way for Nero to fiddle while Rome burns. I think that they often provide a useful way of understanding why Rome is burning.

Feiwell and Friends, which is rapidly become one of my favorite pub imprints, has a blog with many interesting posts from staff and authors. Do take a peek at the description for next year's Steinbeck's Ghost, written by Lewis Buzbee of Yellow-Lighted Bookshop fame:

When we read Lewis's proposal for this middle-grade novel about a boy trying to save the John Steinbeck Public Library in Salinas,CA we flipped over the mystery (the protagonist stumbles upon some creepy history surrounding one of the locations Steinbeck wrote about -- sorry, can't tell you more here) and the promise of a protagonist who makes being a middle-school bibilophile cool.

That sound you hear is a ton of children's librarians cheering with unrestrained glee. I mean really - does this sound fab or what?!

From the Guardian review, Pat Barker's Life Class sounds rather reminiscent of Jacqueline Winspear's latest Masie Dobbs mystery, Messenger of Truth. I have had so-so luck with Barker but Winspear I can recommend wholeheartedly, as I did last January. Masie Dobbs is fantastic reading (the first book is the slowest but it lays out all the necessary back story). If you love historical fiction, you need to be reading this series.

In case you're wondering what good writing about books can do for a reader, well this piece made me want to read the Autobiography of Malcom X, something I haven't considered since high school (and I never got around to - dammit!)

Hans Insu Fenkl's introduction to Interfictions had me hot on the trail of his marketed as a novel when it's really a memoir, Memories of My Ghost Brother. Unfortunately it's out of print but from Endicott Studio I see that Hans is publishing it via his own small press (whose Summer catalog is due out shortly). Yea! (That's Terri Windling on Fenkl in my post title today.)

And finally, Tintin in the Congo has gotten kicked out of the children's section of Borders in England due to the overt racism found in the story. I'm surprised that it hasn't been altered as the original Nancy Drew mysteries were in the 1960s. Have you read any of those? Pretty damn eye-opening and I don't mean in a good way. Keep the original texts for the museum and update the stories for today. Not everything from 100 years ago was good, you know.