http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_01.php#012352

Has there ever before been a fictional character like Fatima? At the age of 12 she flies a kite, reads Pnin, menstruates, and bears witness to the murder of her parents by the Taliban. Soon after she is sent to live with American Christians, and spends a fragile adolescence acclimatizing to the poisonous indifference and callousness of the West before attending an Ivy-league college where she majors in economics and sleeps with a professor (an adjunct but still). We thrill as she casts off her grim past to join a Wall Street investment firm, finds love, and indulges in fine sweaters.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_01.php#012351

I thought the Beth Lisick book Helping Me Help Myself was kind of worthless and turned a very funny and sharp writer into a bore, but oh lord. There's another one. The founder of Brain, Child, a very smart and worthwhile magazine, also wrote a book about following self-help called Practically Perfect in Every Way. Fuck, it's a trend. Publishing industry, please stop ruining our women writers.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_01.php#012349

An editor at Self decided that whole enlightenment thing that Eat Pray Love's Elizabeth Gilbert found sounded so good she too would wander the world for a year. And seriously, so unfair, god did not reveal himself to her. Nor did a publishing company finance her trip. Moe at Jezebel compares the travel experiences.

Holly says she got the idea to travel the world while reading a "galley" of the book -- she's a women's magazine writer, natch! -- and was struck by a scene in the beginning where Elizabeth Gilbert cries in the bathroom and thinks about killing herself. Holly likens that scene to a scene in her own life wherein she crosses the Williamsburg Bridge and gets weepy. There are a few crucial differences between Holly and Liz Gilbert's stories, however: namely, Holly is a 26-year-old unmarried magazine editor who lives in Brooklyn, and Lizzie is a 35-year-old writer who lives in the middle of nowhere in a loveless marriage. Also, Liz has a knife in her hand with which she intends to cut herself; I don't think it's even possible to jump off the Williamsburg Bridge -- and you'd probably totally live anyway.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_01.php#012350

Marjane Satrapi on the Colbert Report. (Link from Journalista.)

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_01.php#012348

Random thought while perusing publishing catalogs:

If you already wrote a memoir about having obsessive compulsive disorder a few years back, are you allowed to publish a new memoir about your hypochondria? Perhaps there should be a memoir commission that makes these decisions. "Sorry, this negates your last memoir, so you're going to have to tell us how bad your mother was to you instead."

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_01.php#012341

This week's Guardian Digested Read: Peter Carey's His Illegal Self.

Che's mind flickered through childhood memories, helping to distract him and everyone else from the gaping holes in the plot. Sometimes even he could do little but sit back and admire the beauty of his own sentences.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_01.php#012340

Sticky Pages

“I did not mean to sodomize Dick Cheney.” -- from “Li’l Dickens” by Jerry Stahl.

It’s a quickie today at Sticky Pages. We’ll examine “Li’L Dickens” by Jerry Stahl, in the collection, Sex for America, edited by Stephen Elliot.

Page three people.

It appears that Jerry Stahl felt the Bush Administration has rarely given the good people of the United States a reach-around. He chooses to work this frustration out in prose. Told from the point of view of a gun lover who bumps into Cheney in Wyoming at a gun shop, “Li’l Dickens” is the fictional tale of the encounter that follows.

The narrator is slowly drawn in to the power and intrigue that is the vice president. “I couldn’t help but stare at his tufted belly roll, his hairless chest, and -- be still my heart -- his pacemaker. Yes and yes again!”

Cheney undresses: “Big-girl panties!”

And then he offers the narrator some “high-grade government Kkush.” There are butt cheeks duct-taped and Cheney wants the narrator to call his member, “Bunker Buster.” Upon completion, Cheney recites part of Ginsberg’s HOWL.

It’s a moving scene. There’s a certain pathos to a man who calls the girls he banged in high school, Cheney-acs. Stahl’s prose is delicate and his narrator is sufficiently complex. He tears up at remembering his time with Dick, and is “concerned about the nagging chafe on my scrotum.”

My only complaint is the juicy part is lost in the narrator’s marijuana stupor. I mean what does Cheney’s sex face look like? He’s got such a great normal scowl when discussing public health or the privacy of Americans. How his face must contort during the act. Come on, Stahl. Give it to us. We can handle it. Or maybe we cannot. Maybe Jerry Stahl has given us as much as we need.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_01.php#012339

I missed Robert Burns night. My Scottish ancestors curse my name, I'm sure. But it's never too late to listen to Andrew O'Hagan and his delicious accent reading Burns poetry at the Guardian website.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_01.php#012338

Culture Pulp interviews Marjane Satrapi.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_01.php#012337

Bookslut's Indie Heartthrob Interview Series

A weekly interview series where someone involved in the small press (be it writer, editor, slush slave, etc.) is thrown into the spotlight, grilled over the state of the independents and sundry other items, and quickly made to return from whence they came after having graced us all with their presence.

This week: Joshua Cohen

Joshua Cohen is a former editor for BLATT and current literary critic for The Forward. In the meantime, he has also written several books of short stories and essays and more recently his novel Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto. His forthcoming A Heaven of Others is slated for a February release on Stacherone Books.

When did you originally become involved with BLATT?

There weren't many Americans - or English-speakers - living in Central/Eastern Europe at that time who wrote well (I mean Berlin, Germany, and east, circa 2001-2005). Those who did, or many, constellated in the pages of BLATT. Travis Jeppesen edits BLATT alone now, from Berlin, and he's turning it into quite the Empire.

And The Forward?

I began writing for The Forward five years ago, reporting from around Europe. Later, when I came back to America, I began working as a book reviewer. Then, they gave me the title "literary critic." Sounds better, same pay.

How do these experiences differ for you?

BLATT didn't pay my rent, The Forward does. I edited for BLATT, I wrote for The Forward... I'm not sure that question is answerable.

You also write your own work. Is it difficult to balance these responsibilities?

I don't "also write my own work" - I "also" pay my way by writing book reviews, or literary criticism. My own books, as they say, come first. It's difficult to balance, yes. Did you know I was born with three legs?

What would you say is your biggest influence regarding your writing/editing work?

I never was enough of an editor to know or care about big influences in that world. And I don't like being edited myself. As for writing - writing what? I like Borges' "journalism," his essays, prolegomena and lectures. Fiction, I can't say. Borges once quoted somebody who said something to the effect of lists serving only to stress what they omit.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_01.php#012333

I have a strange obsession with Nikola Tesla, particularly the whole pigeon/alien phase. Which is why I'm excited about Samantha Hunt's The Invention of Everything Else. She's at Studio360 discussing her new novel about Tesla.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_01.php#012332

More AL Kennedy and her award winning Day:

She's interviewed at the Scotsman about the misinterpretation of her dry wit and this abomination:

The former Booker judge John Sutherland wrote a bemused blog entitled "Can a woman pilot a war novel?" ruefully concluding that AL Kennedy can, and that it makes "my whatdoyoucallthems shrivel a bit".

She's also at the Guardian podcast.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_01.php#012330

JG Ballard explains how he came to write Crash.

Human beings, I was sure, had far darker imaginations than we liked to believe.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_01.php#012331

Please Dan Brown, we need you to return and save our publishing industry. And of course the critics will eviscerate you as soon as you come back into the spotlight, but seriously. You are our only hope.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_01.php#012328

Books that make you dumb.