Posted at 07:01 AM ET, 12/ 1/2008

Read Any Foreign Lit Lately?

I don't know about you, but I was really struck by the news last week that Harcourt/Houghton has decided to stop acquiring works until further notice. What does that mean? That this giant of quality publishing will not longer be sniffing out worthy manuscripts? That it will now ignore an in-box that may contain a work of world literature that could change the way you and I think?

Harcourt has always been a front-runner in apprising American readers of excellence in world letters. (Full disclosure: Many, many years ago, I was an editor there.) Harcourt, after all, has published a preponderance of Nobel Prize-winners in recent years. We wouldn't know Gunter Grass, Octavio Paz, Jose Saramago, Wyslava Szymborska, Umberto Eco, Amos Oz, etc., etc., if it weren't for a very perspicacious editor in Harcourt's ranks, Drenka Willen. And Houghton, in turn, over the years has published Winston Churchill, Edna O'Brien, Salman Rushdie and Peter Ho Davies, to name a very few.

So what happens when a mighty conduit of great international literature turns a deaf ear?

It got me to thinking about what's on the other side of that equation. What Europeans read by Americans.

Surprise: They often read John Grisham, Jane Smiley. Thomas Friedman, Jeffrey Sachs.

Just last week, Britain's The Guardian featured our very own Malcolm Gladwell's latest book Outliers. And on the British fiction bestseller lists are James Patterson (Cross Country) and Maeve Binchy (Heart and Soul). Spain is reading YA American phenom Stephenie Meyer (Breaking Dawn). The Spanish are also reading Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture. In Germany, at the top of the charts are Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife, about a zoo in Warsaw, and Pat Buchanan's book Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War.

So you see. They read what we write. You could argue that what's shown up on their lists lately by Americans is fairly predictable and not all that deep. On the other hand, it's clear they know more about American writers than we know about Europeans. They're well aware of Philip Roth, John Updike, Hanif Kureishi, John Irving, Toni Morrison, Stephen King.

You could dismiss this and say it's quintessential proof of American "soft power," what Harvard Kennedy School professor Joseph S. Nye Jr. argues is our best hope of winning the world's favor -- a cultural offensive more influential than military might.

Or you might just say: We don't listen.

Tell me what you think.

-- Marie Arana

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Posted at 06:00 AM ET, 11/28/2008

Black and White and Read All Over

For chess enthusiasts (and those who love them), I want to pass along a few good moves ... in terms of what to read.

On a recent coast-to-coast flight, I devoured Zugzwang (now out in paperback), the first and only chess thriller I've ever read. It's by the talented Irish novelist Ronan Bennett. A chess game, based on an historical match and accompanied by illustrations showing the positions of the players, is built into the plot, which revolves around a plan to assassinate the czar during an international chess tournament in St. Petersburg in 1914. I spent six years as a correspondent in Russia, so I know "Peter," as the city's friends and admirers call her, pretty well. I thought that Bennett's physical and historical descriptions were first rate. Zugzwang, for the uninitiated, is a German (not Russian) chess term for a point at which any move a player can make just worsens his position. Patrick Anderson favorably reviewed the novel for Book World last fall.

Also, British journalist Daniel Johnson has just published White King and Red Queen, a nonfiction account of the role of chess in the Cold War. He begins with a brief history of chess in Russia, including a description of the actual chess tournament on which Zugzwang is based. Johnson then recounts how the Soviet leadership attempted to rebuild the country's chess capacity after most of its top players emigrated during the Revolution and civil war. A key figure in this effort was N.V. Krylenko, the commander in chief of the Red Army and a strong amateur player. When, in 1928, Stalin announced the first five-year plans for the economy, the general moved his pawns, too.

"We must organize shock brigades of chess players and begin immediately a five year plan for chess," Krylenko announced. I just love that quote; it says so much about the Soviet mindset.

White King and Red Queen captures the personalities as well as the heavily politicized international rivalries of the early Soviet grandmaster Mikhail Botvinnik, the great Cuban player Jose Raul Capablanca, the emigre Alexander Alekhine and many others, right up to Viktor Korchnoi, Boris Spassky, Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov. All in all, a very entertaining, edifying lens on the Cold War.

Compared to Zugzwang and White King and Red Queen, I was disappointed by Kasparov's memoir, How Life Imitates Chess, now available in paperback. It aims to be a high-class self-help book, but the insights into intuition and decision making are not nearly as well explained as in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, and a lot of the advice ("the attacker always has the advantage," "we push ourselves to greater exertions if we have a competitor") struck me as questionable or banal. I say this despite considerable admiration for Kasparov, both as a chess player and as a quixotic voice in Russian politics.

I have not read Katherine Neville's chess-related thrillers, The Eight (1988) and the newly published The Fire. Art Taylor, who regularly reviews mysteries for Book World, devoted a recent column to them and clearly admired the older book more than the sequel. The author is speaking this Sunday, Nov. 30, at 5 p.m. at Washington's Politics and Prose bookstore.

And there is more to come. I'm particularly intrigued by Andrei Codrescu's The Posthuman Dada Guide, which will be published in April by Princeton University Press. The publisher calls it a "Dadaesque guide to Dada," the anti-war (and anti- almost everything) cultural movement that swept Europe in the wake of World War I. The book begins with an imaginary chess match in a Zurich cafe in 1916 between Tristan Tzara, the daddy of Dada, and Vladimir Lenin, daddy of communism.

-- Alan Cooperman

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Posted at 07:02 AM ET, 11/27/2008

Five Novels That Serve Up Thanksgiving Dinners

Thanksgiving Night, by Richard Bausch. It's fall, 1999, in a small Virginia town. In his signature sensitive way, Bausch winds together the stories of an enormous cast of characters, some tragic, some comically eccentric.

A Patchwork Planet, by Anne Tyler. Several Tyler novels would fit on this list -- she loves meals and holidays -- but this one includes a great potluck Thanksgiving dinner (sans turkey).

The Lay of the Land, by Richard Ford. In the final volume of Ford's "Sportswriter" trilogy, Frank's Thanksgiving doesn't look too promising. His wife has left him, he has cancer, he hates his daughter's boyfriend, and George Bush is stealing the election.

The Ghost at the Table, by Suzanne Berne. Cynthia doesn't want to come home to Concord, Mass., for Thanksgiving, but her sister guilts her into it. A witty, wise novel about the way we try to force our visions of the perfect holiday onto each other.

Model Behavior, by Jay McInerney. More great satire of Manhattan wannabes. Includes a particularly disastrous Thanksgiving dinner at a swanky restaurant.

Any dishes I forgot to bring?

-- Ron Charles

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Posted at 07:00 AM ET, 11/26/2008

The Best Bad Sex in Fiction

Among the prestigious prizes being doled out this season, don't forget one of a somewhat less dignified nature: the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Last night at a bawdy ceremony at London's In and Out club (I'm not making this up), Rachel Johnson, the sister of London Mayor Boris Johnson, won the coveted "plaster foot" for her cringe-inducing descriptions of hanky-panky in Shire Hell.

But the real climax of the evening came when four-time nominee John Updike won a Lifetime Achievement Award. "Good sex or bad sex," the judges said, "he has kept us entertained for many years." The celebrated American novelist did not attend the ceremony.

AP quoted the magazine's deputy editor, Tom Fleming, saying, "All the passages this year are equally awful, but Rachel Johnson's struck us because of the mixture of cliche and euphemism. There were a couple of really bad animal metaphors in there."

"I'm not feeling remotely grumpy about it," Johnson told the Guardian. "I know that men with literary reputations to polish might find it insulting, but if you've had a book published in the year any attention is welcome, even if it's slightly dubious attention of this sort."

Tantalizingly, Shire Hell has not yet been published in the United States. But Touchstone (a division of Simon & Schuster) has plans to bring it out here next year.

The Bad Sex in Fiction prize was set up by Literary Review editor Auberon Waugh in 1993 "with the aim of gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels."

Here's a list of this year's finalists:

Last year, the award was given posthumously to Norman Mailer for his bizarre novel about Hitler's childhood, The Castle in the Forest.

Read any particularly awful sex scenes in serious fiction this year? Do tell....

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Posted at 07:00 AM ET, 11/25/2008

Details of the Dead

In the current issue of Book World, Steven Moore reviews Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666, which he called "a fascinating meditation on violence and literature." The source of the violence that permeates the 898-page novel, which Bolaño finished on his death bed in 2003, is the 400-plus "femicides" that remain unsolved in Ciudad Juarez, which Bolaño fictionalizes as Santa Teresa. The source of the literature is an elusive German writer named Benno von Archimboldi, whom several literary critics believe may have turned up in Santa Teresa.

In 2666, "Archimboldi never meets his critics, the reporters never solve the crimes, and nothing is resolved at the novel's end," writes Moore. But in the Dec. 8 issue of the Nation, Marcela Valdes (who contributes often to Book World) has nailed the story behind the story. How did Bolaño -- a Chilean who once lived in Mexico but finished his life in Spain and had never been to Juarez -- manage to convey the "strangling, shooting, stabbing, burning, rape, whipping, mutilation, bribery and treachery" rampant in his fictional city and the all-to-real Juarez with prose that, as Valdes describes it, is "equally precise and uncanny"? "To pull off this kind of hyperrealism," she writes, "he must have had the help of someone on the inside, someone whose interest in autopsy was as relentless as his own."

I'll leave it to Valdes to reveal who fed the novelist's hunger for detail; her article about Bolaño -- whom his source called "crazier than a goat" -- is truly compelling.

-- Rachel Hartigan Shea

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