War reporting has been at the heart of plenty of contemporary literary journalism: A scan through the list of of NBCC finalists and winners in the nonfiction categories reveals some excellent examples, from Michael Herr's Dispatches to Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. Roxana Robinson selected a book that won the 2008 NBCC award in nonfiction:

One of my favorite recent works of literary journalism is Dexter Filkins’ “The Forever War,” which is about Iraq. Filkins is a beautiful writer, clear and thoughtful, and this book is full of vivid moments in the war that reveal, like match-flares, the overwhelming darkness of our presence in that country. Filkins writes about our troops, about the landscape of Baghdad, about the people he meets there, about the meals and the journeys and the children and the awful sights of physical destruction. Never insisting on his own view, but delivering it with quiet clarity, Filkins shows us the violent and devastating storm that we created in Iraq.

Though it's not about combat, the 1997 nonfiction winner, Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is an essential book on the Cold War.  Daniela Gioseffi writes:

A comprehensive story of the building of the bomb and also a fine work of literature, it's a stirring intellectual adventure, clear, fast-paced and vividly revealing in rich human, political and scientific detail. It's a complete report of the building of the A-bomb from the turn of the century to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan.

On a similar note, Kate Vogl chose a 2010 nonfiction finalist, Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, as "one of my favorite reads of all time. As you read it, you trust you are getting well researched facts and marvel at the powerful and disturbing story she unfolds with them." And Mary McWay Seaman recommends three recent books informed by spycraft and statecraft:

Voices From the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland, by Ed Moloney (2010): This political tell-all discloses testimony (withheld until their deaths) of two former paramilitary enemies involved in The Troubles (1960s through the 1990s) in Northern Ireland.  The accounts of former Irish Republican Army leader Brendan Hughes, and former Ulster Volunteer Force operative David Ervine, were recorded for the Boston College Oral History Archive from 2001 through 2004.  Unforgettable revelations, lush with little-known details and clandestine deal-making, alternately stun and shimmer throughout Ed Moloney’s heartbreaking literary treasure.

Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage, by Douglas Waller (2011): This exceedingly entertaining biography of William J. Donovan (1883-1959) is also a work of history and journalism with superb chronicles of both World Wars.  Waller’s narrative is rich with scoops of political jousting and jealousies, and compelling vignettes of wartime mobilizations and hidden operations.  The book also reveals superlative examples of human nobility in the face of unimaginable savagery.

Time and Eternity: Uncollected Writings 1933-1983, by Malcolm Muggeridge, edited with an introduction by Nicholas Flynn (2011). Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the greatest English scribes of the twentieth century, served as a British soldier and spy during World War II, worked with the League of Nations, wrote for several newspapers, and authored novels and plays.  Nicholas Flynn introduces a fearless man who traveled by rail through the North Caucasus and the Ukraine in 1933 (the first Western journalist to do so) to report on the Marxist-engineered famine.  His reports enraged Stalin, and Flynn discusses the anti-Soviet articles that cost Muggeridge his job at a time when many chest-thumping intellectuals were attempting to put a shine on Marxism.  Flynn includes other Muggeridge literary jewels, especially some dazzling character profiles (particularly Churchill and Solzhenitsyn). Readers will find his resplendent writings as fresh today as when they were written.

 

The “Central Library Plan” and the Future of the New York Public Library: A Panel Discussion

Tuesday, May 22, 6:30-8:30

Theresa Lang Community Center, New School University

In an effort to open a public discussion of the New York Public Library's "Central Library Plan," the organizers of a petition calling on NYPL President Anthony Marx to reconsider the $350 million plan to remake NYC's landmark central library are holding a meeting on May 22 at the Theresa Lang Community Center of the New School for Social Research, 55 W 13th St, 2nd floor, from 6:30 to 8:30 pm.

National Book Critics Circle President Eric Banks will moderate a panel consisting of Joan Wallach Scott, a prominent historian at the Institute of Advanced Study who is spearheading the Committee to Save the New York Public Library; architect, preservationist, and architectural historian Mark Alan Hewitt, co-author of a monograph on Carrère & Hastings, architects of the main 42nd Street branch at issue; professor of history at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and award-winning biographer David Nasaw, author of The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (a finalist for the 2000 NBCC award in biography) and Andrew Carnegie; and writer Charles Petersen, whose investigative essay on the recent changes at the NYPL appears in the latest issue of n+1 magazine, where he is an associate editor.

The NYPL has been invited to send a representative to join the panel discussion.

Along These Highways, University of Arizona Press, 2012.

Rene S. Perez II was born in Kingsville, Texas, and raised in Corpus Christi. He received a BA from the University of Texas and an MFA from Texas State University. He is the winner of the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation Award and currently teaches in Austin.

The setting of these stories is the South Texas Valley, a place that has inspired a number of Chicano/ Latino writers. And scholars of Chicano/ Latino letters have noted how prevalent young people are in Chicano/ Latino fiction. One unique angle in your work is that minors are relatively absent as main protagonists. Even those who are closest to adolescence (like the fraternity brothers in “Random Punchlines” and the lovers in “Remember, Before You Go”) are at the center of very adult situations. Was it a conscious decision to focus on adults and the adult world? Is that why the opening story is “One Last Drive North,” about a son who’s about to join (and eventually take over) his father’s funeral home business? The days of youth are left behind from the get-go.

A distinction to make before answering your question: These stories are not set in the ‘Valley.’ The Rio Grande Valley is comprised of Staar, Hidalgo, Willacy, and Cameron counties. Greenton, as I call it, is based specifically on Hebbronville TX, the town where my father grew up. Aside from living there a couple of years when I was very young and spending large portions of my summers there as a child, I’m not from Hebbronville and feel like I don’t have the right to set my stories there, stories I hope to represent as truly to life as possible. That said, Hebbronville is located on the west end of the Rio Grande Plain, and Corpus Christi is located on the Coastal Bend.

It was never a conscious decision to focus on adults in my stories. It may have, early on, been a sub-conscious decision. Specifically, “One Last Drive North” is the collection’s oldest story. I wrote it during my freshman year of college. Now, there have been many edits and re-workings of the story, but the idea, the action, the characters have remained. I think it’s possible, probable, even, that I was trying to write more mature characters because that’s what I was striving toward myself in that wonderfully self-serious, college freshman way. To follow this train of thought all the way, the two stories you mentioned as being about younger characters were stories I wrote later, I suppose when I felt far-enough removed from the time I was writing. As I mentioned, however, none of this was ever conscious on my part. Ideas come when they come, and I only hope I can get them down before I pollute my mind with useless noise to the point of stories washing out.

The stories “Lost Days” and “Letting Go a Dream” are also unique to the collection because, in a highway landscape that’s explored in cars, the bond to the vehicle is very male. But these two stories are narratives about mothers and their sons. In both, the women are dealing with personal losses and the anxiety of letting go or forgetting. The car, however, still functions as an agent of escape or contemplation (in the first story) and (in the second story) as a placeholder for an absent person, both a vessel of and an altar to memory. Does the expansive Texas landscape and its Old West clichés preserve these gendered associations to the car despite the fact that women must also drive? Was it a challenge to include women in a story collection that stays close to the “man behind the wheel” image, albeit he’s not always in control of his destiny (or destination)?

I hold a very true hope that these stories serve to subvert Texas’ Old West clichés. I am not afraid of ten-gallon hats; I just write stories about people who, like most Texans, don’t wear them. Those clichés do persist, but I think that anyone trying to write truthfully exposes them for what they are—familiar, but out of touch with most people’s reality. I think “Lost Days” serves well to reclaim the wheel for women. The character in that story finds the same kind of solace in escape’s solitude as any male character ever written as taking to the road to get away from the world. Both she and the mother in “Letting Go a Dream” are dealing with similar losses. The mother in the latter story is plugged into, informed by, the clichés of old. That’s why the Fairlane is treated as sacred. It is her son’s connection to the boring, the clichéd, the American dream. It represents a son less remarkable than the one in jail.

It was no challenge at all to include women in this collection. Both of these women are contemplating specifically male losses. These women exist in the Old-come-New West. In speaking of Old West, my mind is taken to country music. These are the good-hearted women loving good-timing men; they are Kitty Wells singing “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels.” Kitty Wells’ song in particular represents what I hope to do with female characters in these settings. It speaks to Old West tropes of masculinity as being self-serving and destructive.

Without ruining any of the surprises, can you speak to your affinity to the surprise ending? There are at least three that caught me off guard (but in a satisfying way): “Curses by Numbers,” “Remember, Before You Go,” and even “Pawelekville” to a degree. The revelations at the story’s closing don’t null whatever came before, but in fact, add a startling dimension to the characters. What literary works were influences in this kind of narrative structure?

I can’t really say I have any affinity for surprise endings. I will say that once I get an idea, a seed of inspiration—a line, a theme, a character, a situation—I almost instantly know where a story will go. I almost work backwards in that regard. I am not often surprised by the end result of any story I am writing. I don’t take journeys with my characters, as I know some writers do. Even if I’m working on something longer, I always have mapped out in my head, from the start of a project, the trajectory of a story. Perhaps it’s knowing where I am going that leads me, in the writing of a story, to play with misdirection. I can’t name any literary influences on my tendency, if it can be called that, toward writing endings like I do. If I had to think of anything that did influence that, it would be the copious amounts of TV and, even more so, movies I consumed in my adolescence.

The expectation for any author who debuts with a story collection is that he/she will “graduate” into the writing of a novel, as if story-writing were any easier. I am curious about what you are working on now and whether you will continue to inhabit the same Texas landscape or if, like a few of your characters in Along These Highways, you are only dreaming of driving to other places only to find yourself back at home? If you are indeed working on a novel, what has been your experience so far after having dedicated an entire book to the compressed form?   

While I don’t feel like I’ve graduated to any higher state of writerly being, after Along These Highways I have shifted to novel writing. In the time it took the collection to be published, I started and finished a novel, and I have since started another. This isn’t to say that I have given up on the short story. I am still writing stories. The process of writing a story, diving in and not coming up for air until I’ve hammered out a finished piece (sometimes over days, sometimes weeks), has been a great help to calm me when I’m hip-deep in a novel whose end seems miles away.

The first novel I wrote is set in Greenton. It focuses dually on the whole town and on one character in particular, a high school student. Maybe I’m officially at a safe enough distance from that time so that I can have written a whole novel around a young character. Still, though, like the aforementioned characters, this one is dealing with adult situations. The novel I’m currently working on is set in Corpus Christi. I could never leave South Texas behind. As I mentioned of initially writing mature characters when I wanted to see myself as mature, I think I wrote characters that were yearning to break free, to move on and up and away from their corners of the world, of Texas. Now that I am away, I am an adult, I do have the agency and mobility and freedom, I am okay to go back home, to stay home, narratively speaking. These are the only places I know, really, them and Austin. I love them. They are me.

(Photo by John Anderson)

The death of celebrated children’s author Maurice Sendak inspired a flood of appreciations from the Los Angeles Times, NPR, Christian Science Monitor, Publishers Weekly, the Guardian, the Barnes & Noble Review, and the New York Times.

Lev Grossman describes the role of the reviewer today: “The critic’s job isn’t to change my mind about whether or not I like a book. Not anymore. The critic’s job is to make me a better reader.”

Adam Kirsch considers President Barack Obama’s interpretations of T.S. Eliot for the New York Times.

Craig Seligman reviews John Irving’s novel In One Person for Bloomberg.

Carolyn Kellogg reviews former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s memoir Prague Winter for the Los Angeles Times.

Laura Miller reviews NBCC fiction winner Hilary Mantel’s new novel, Bring Up the Bodies, for Salon.

Would a new bookselling model help independent stores keep their doors open? Tony San Filippo considers one idea at the blog of the American Association of University Publishers.

Your reviews and recommendations help seed these roundups: If you’re an NBCC member with a review you’d like considered for inclusion, please email nbcccritics@gmail.com. You can also get our attention by using the Twitter hashtag #nbcc, posting on the wall of our Facebook page, or joining our members-only LinkedIn group.

On May 3, the PEN World Voices festival hosted the panel "Reviewing Translations" at the New School in New York City. The NBCC was a cosponsor of the panel, which NBCC President Eric Banks comoderated with Susan Bernofsky. The speakers were Ruth Franklin, Julya Rabinowich, and Lorin Stein. Check out the video of the complete event below.

Many of the respondents to our latest NBCC Reads question selected literary journalists who are currently working. Before getting into those, however, let's take a brief look at some of the authors who are inspirational figures in the history of modern longform journalism, influencing the likes of Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe (discussed in previous NBCC Reads posts).

Editor and critic Gerald Howard selected Joseph Mitchell's 1959 book, At the Bottom of the Harbor:

A long time New Yorker  staffer who wrote almost exclusively about the colorful denizens of his adopted city of New York, Mitchell is often cited as a journalist whose work of the forties, fifties and early sixties presaged the so-called New Journalism to come. This exquisite suite of pieces evoking the atmosphere and the characters of a now sadly vanished maritime New York  casts a unforgettable and melancholy spell not unlike Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." A lot of superb literary journalists are flashier or write on a larger scale, but nobody can quite match Joe Mitchell's achievement in this, his best book.

Baruch College journalism professor Carl Rollyson chose Rebecca West's 1941 book, Black Lamb and Gray Falcon:

Favorite work of journalism? Black Lamb and Gray Falcon, of course, the mother of all literary journalism, as Truman Capote and many others have testified. West writes a travel narrative in the form of a novel while digressing along the way to discourse on the fate of Western Civilization, the history of the Balkans and its art, the relationship between men and women, her own marriage, the nature of Christianity, the coming of World War II--in other words, the whole kaboodle.

Speaking of Capote, David Abrams chose his 1966 classic, In Cold Blood:

I'm hardly the first to say this, but Truman Capote's In Cold Blood stands head and shoulders above not only its peers in nonfiction reportage, but also many works of fiction whose techniques it emulates and lays like a transparent slide over every page. Capote was not the first to blend fact and fiction in a major published book, but he was one of the best.  His literary investigation of the Clutter family murders works from the outside in. 

Just look at the opening of the book: a wide-angle view of Holcomb, Kansas, "with its hard blue skies and desert clear air" and "white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples" from the wheat. Capote sustains that narrative distance and intimacy of language all the way to the closing scene of the book where convicted killer Perry Smith mounts the gallows to his fate of the thud-snap of a broken neck: "Step, noose, mask: but before the mask was adjusted, the prisoner spat his chewing gum into the chaplain's outstretched palm."  True-crime books are as common as spent bullet casings in a rough neighborhood, but Truman Capote makes his book seem somehow truer than the rest through his use of magnetic prose.

And, selecting the oldest book mentioned by an NBCC Reads respondent, NBCC board member Oscar Villalon discusses George Orwell's 1938 book, Homage to Catalonia:

This isn't an easy thing for me, to choose a favorite work of literary journalism, given how many works I love. Any and all of Ryszard Kapuscinki's books, especially "The Soccer War," would do, but then there's that whole tricky question of how much he wrote about was "true" and how much wasn't. So with that in mind, I turn to George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia," a work I greatly admire for its author's restraint and empathy. What stays with me about the book is Orwell's modesty. Any author today would make such a book entirely about himself, about his travails and misadventures. Only an Orwell would preface a chapter in which he's shot in the neck with a line (and I'm paraphrasing from memory here) like, This next bit is in the book because I was shot in the neck and that in of itself is sort of interesting, but feel free to skip this chapter because it's really just a digression from the story at hand. All too often, that event would've been the focus of a book, with everything leading up to that. ("The Road to Wigan Pier" isn't bad, either. Required reading, one would think, in today's current awakening to the discrepancy between the haves-a-ton and the haves-not.)

The latest NBCC Reads question asks: What is your favorite work of literary journalism? Here, member Richard Melo considers the legacy of Tom Wolfe:

Tom Wolfe? Ewwwwwww. Him? Get outta town. Tom Freakin’ Wolfe. He sure ain’t no Thomas Wolfe, or Tobias Wolff, or Virginia Woolf, or Howlin Wolf. He’s the least of all writerly Wolves, while jes mebbe the most wolflike of ‘em all.

Okay, I’ll stop writing like that now. While that isn’t exactly the reaction I get when I mention that I like Tom Wolfe in the company of book people, I have found that mentioning the man in the white suit often rubs people the wrong way.

What does the world hold against Tom Wolfe? It could be his conservatism, including his defense of the values of George W. Bush, or that the famously non-reading ex-president counts himself a Tom Wolfe fan.

It could be the sound effects Wolfe writes into his prose (like repeating the word hernia over and over to mimic the sound of a Las Vegas slot machine), a technique many writers give up after the eighth grade. Did I mention the white suits?

Wolfe isn’t beloved in the same way as other literary journalists of his time: Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, to name three. Those writers work hard to bring you over to their side. Wolfe is more comfortable as the outsider’s outsider. If one of the premises of American literary journalism is to hold up a mirror so people can see how they appear to others, the mirror image that Wolfe wants readers to see is that of a pig. Scathing satire won’t win you many friends when your readers are among those you’re mocking.

Long before the Mike Daisey era, Wolfe stirred a truth vs. fiction pot of his own. Wolfe’s brand of the New Journalism included getting inside the heads of the people he wrote about, second guessing thoughts and intentions, and calling it reporting. One example is his description of the psychedelic and paranoid freakout of a Merry Prankster named Sandy in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Readers said there was no way Wolfe could be that much inside Sandy’s head, that he was using too much of a fiction writer’s license in his writing. Unlike Daisey, Wolfe knew what he was doing. He was giving readers something to talk about, and talk about it, they did, and he sold a lot of books.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, is the seminal book depicting the 60s youth counterculture written in real time; it took years for novel writers to catch up. As a bright blue paperback that put the mass into mass market, it was a book that hippies heading out to communes took with them, and a book that affirmed the Silent Generation’s worst suspicions about young people. You can look at The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as the middle book in a trilogy that begins with On the Road and ends with Helter Skelter.

No stranger to controversy, Wolfe in the late 1990s embroiled himself in a real, live literary feud. It began with Wolfe’s supposition that novelists ought to to draw from the reporter’s bag of tricks and base their fiction on real people and events more than their imaginations. It ended in a bout of public name-calling with Wolfe on one side and strange bedfellows John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving on the other. While Wolfe’s prescription for the novel never came to pass, and if anything has gone in the other direction with the reverie around novels such as The Road, Wolfe’s own The Bonfire of the Vanities is the pinnacle of the late twentieth-century Dickensian journalistic novel and a blueprint for other novelists wanting to see how it’s done.

There’s more to why I like Tom Wolfe. I admire his technique of describing the actions of his subjects/characters with the same speech pattern they would use in describing themselves. I also think highly of The Right Stuff, and how Wolfe took the sprawling history of the space program and managed to base the story around the verbal tics of the key players (phrases like “pushing the envelope” and “screw the pooch”), and the book’s opening chapter is one of the best pieces of journalistic storytelling I’ve ever read.

However, what I find most remarkable about Tom Wolfe is his writing on race. White, male writers often carry on like race is invisible, except when writing about it is either a) convenient or b) unavoidable. Wolfe’s writing starts with the premise that race isn’t just hiding in plain sight, that race is everywhere. Race is certainly front and center in his three novels (The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons).

Underlying Wolfe’s satire is the idea that people getting worked up over skin color is ridiculous, which is not itself an innovative concept. From there, Wolfe pushes the envelope, mocking the excesses not only of the white establishment but also those of anti-racism activists. The most prominent of Wolfe’s pieces in this vein is the 1970 article “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” about a fundraiser Leonard Bernstein threw for the Black Panthers where the players come off more self-serving than altruistic. when Wolfe writes about race, reader reactions often fall somewhere in between a squirm and a cringe, but there is laughter in there, too. Satire likes to hammer home the point that everything is stupid, but with the subtext that it can be better. As a pop figure doing social commentary, Wolfe might have more in common with Dave Chappelle than many of his literary contemporaries.

Over time, Wolfe’s legacy might center more on his race writing than his contributions to the New Journalism and the other hot buttons he pushed.