Cyberflanerie: Writerly Edition (Aimee Bender, Claire Cook, Djerassi, Historical Novelists Society, Guadalupe Loaeza, Leslie Pietrzyk & More)

Pictured left, my handsome new writing assistant, Uli Quetzalpugtl. Right now he is specializing in mind-clearing walks. He will be four months old on the 25th. Yes, he is a pug. Yes, those are his real eyebrows. 

Aimee Bender on What Writers Can Learn from Good Night Moon
(Hat tip to @portershreve)

Claire Cook on Why I Left My Mighty Agency and New York Publishers (For Now) on Jane Friedman's Blog (well worth reading, and Yours Truly left a lengthy comment.)

Djerassi Resident Artists Program
> Watch a brief introductory video

Day before yesterday I finally joined the Historical Novelists Society, thanks to fellow members of Women Writing the West suggesting it. Joining Women Writing the West was one of the best things I did last year. I may have been publishing for over 20 years, but everything in publishing has so changed in the past few years… fellow members' advice on the listserv has been invaluable. 

Uli visits the childhood home of Willa Cather,
Red Cloud, Nebraska, June 2014.
What can I say, Uli has good taste in authors.
(He does try to chew my hand, after all.)

Here's what really impressed me about the Historical Novelists Society: their webpage is completely automated. I was able to pay, add my bio, and see my member listing without waiting for anyone to get back to me, bingo. (Such is life in the time of the bots…)

Yesterday I was interviewed for Mexico City's MVN radio live by Mexican writer Guadalupe Loaeza about Mexico's Second Empire / French Intervention and my novel El último príncipe del Imperio Mexicano (Agustín Cadena's translation of my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire), fue una verdadera delicia. Hope to have that link to the podcast by tomorrow. (P.S. Back in 2006, I translated a bit of Loaeza's hilarious classic on Mexico City's Polanco neighborhood for my anthology Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion). By the way, Loaeza's website takes a moment to load because it's got all this flash. Be patient... it's worth taking a look at. 

My amiga novelist Leslie Pietrzyk on the writing life: it really is a bowl of cherries.

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SURF ON, DEAR WRITERLY READER

30 Deadly Effective Ways to Free Up Bits, Drips & Gimungously Vast Swaths of Time for Writing

Giant Golden Buddha & 364 More Free 5 Minute Writing Exercises

Regina Leeds Guest-Blog for Madam Mayo 5 + 1 Resources to Make a Writer Happy in an Organized Space

Conversations with Other Writers podcast series

Susan Coll's 5 Favorite Comic Novels

The best novelists are sociologists with a wicked sense of humor. In her widely celebrated novels Beach Week, Acceptance, and Rockville Pike, my amiga Susan Coll has upward-striving suburbia nailed. This month Picador has released the paperback edition of Beach Week, so click on through and get your chuckles. Here's what this master of the genre has to say about some of her own comic reading. Over to you, Susan.

Now there is a pig in this world named “Super Sad True Love Story,” the thought of which is nearly as funny as Gary Shteyngart’s self-same novel, winner of this year’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. It’s encouraging to see an American--even one who came by way of Russia--win this award, which usually goes to a Brit. A few pages into Super Sad it occured to me that this book does have something of a British sensibility in that Shteyngart's humor relies on the mortification of his male protagonist. This got me thinking about my favorite comic novels--or at least books that had me doubled over in laughter, and I have to confess that the British do seem to have a lock on the sort of droll, dark humor that typically does me in. As do, apparently, men--which is at least the sort of observation that helps get me out of bed and to my keyboard each morning.

1. Our Man in Havana, By Graham Greene (1958), in which a cash-strapped vacuum cleaner salesman in Cuba is pressed into service by British intelligence to hilarious effect, and which, I only just learned from Wikipedia, was made into not just a film but an opera and a play.

2. Burmese Days, by George Orwell (1934), which you can read free, on-line, and which amazon describes as a mix of E.M. Forster and Jane Austen. “Stir in a bit of socialist doctrine, a sprig of satire, strong Indian curry, and a couple quarts of good English gin and you get something close to the flavor . . .”

3. A Good Man in Africa, by William Boyd (1982), about a hapless British diplomat in a fictitious African country in the fledgling days of independence. I wrote about this last summer for NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126501855

4. The Wimbledon Poisoner, by Nigel Williams (1994), a suburban comedy about a man who tries to murder his wife. Confession: I read this so long ago that really all I remember is my own hysterical laughter. While I can’t vouch for how well it holds up, I can tell you who borrowed my book and failed to give it back, so perhaps you can consult with him.

5. Memories of the Ford Administration, by John Updike (1992). Odd that Updike, not known for his comedy, should be the token American on my list. I worked up the nerve to approach him at a conference many years ago, and told him how much I loved this novel. He seemed surprised, and said something about having almost forgotten writing it. I later told this to a book critic who scoffed and said, “minor Updike.” Minor Updike! The definition of an oxymoron? Or the fate, too often, of comic fiction?

--- Susan Coll

---> For the archive of Madam Mayo guest blog posts, click here.
Previous guest-blogger novelists include Janice Eidus; Sandra Gulland; Daniel Olivas; Leslie Pietrzyk; Joanna Smith Rakoff; and Porter Shreve.

Guest-Blogger Porter Shreve on 5 Favorite Novels of the '70s

Today's guest-blogger is Porter Shreve, author of the novels The Obituary Writer, Drives Like a Dream and the recently-released When the White House Was Ours, which has been garnering some bodacious reviews, from the Washington Post ("[t]urn off the TV pundits, turn down the thermostat, and slip on a comfy cardigan") to the Los Angeles Times ("laugh out-loud scenes and wonderful passages"). Over to you, Porter!

Five Novels of the ‘70s

My novel When the White House Was Ours is set in Washington, DC, in 1976 and narrated by a twelve year old kid who has a dawning awareness of what it means to live in the post-Nixon, pre-Reagan transitional decade that cluttered the world with mood rings, lava lamps, feathered hair, afros, leisure suits, platform shoes, KC and the Sunshine Band and Donna Summer. An outrageous, cartoonish decade on its surface the Seventies are easy to mock as self-absorbed, materialistic, insubstantial. There wasn’t much to celebrate, either: the economy was in the tank; the succession of presidents included a crook, a bumbler and an ineffectual moralist. The critic Howard Junker complained that “the perfect Seventies symbol was the pet rock, which just sat there doing nothing.” And Norman Mailer called the Seventies “a decade in which people put emphasis on the skin, on the surface, rather than on the root of things. Image became preeminent because nothing deeper was going on."

I beg to differ-– and not just because the Seventies made up a good part of my formative years. Transitional eras, moments of betweenness, those times of blending and uncertainty before and after the big battles, provide great material for writers. So when I sat down to research When the White House Was Ours I found a wealth of Seventies novels to drawn on. My list could be much longer, but here are five favorites:

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie.
Talk about betweenness. Alexie’s first book of prose wavers between a novel and a story collection, lyricism and scene-driven narrative, hilarity and bleakness, realism and myth, and is packed throughout with the kind of irony characteristic of a whole era: “During the sixties, my father was the perfect hippie, since all the hippies were trying to be Indians.”

Flower Children by Maxine Swann.
I love a truly integrated story cycle or novel in stories (three of my recommended “‘70s novels” fit the bill.) And one of the finest recent examples of the form is this lush kaleidoscope about the legacy of Aquarius. Without strain or judgment, Swann takes on the perspectives of the kids of back-to-the-land hippies, showing the wonder and perplexity that comes with total freedom.

The Ice Storm by Rick Moody.
If the Seventies was a transitional decade, it was also a rather short one. Many social historians mark 1973 as the end of the Sixties, but for one family in the wealthy Connecticut suburbs the Summer of Love has just arrived. Moody makes a masterful metaphor of the ice storm and even finds meaning in seemingly ephemeral period detail, such as GI Joe, the Fantastic Four, and key parties.

The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor.
A social novel-in-stories, Naylor dramatizes the crisis of ‘70s era public housing through the perspectives of seven women living in the New York City projects. Beginning with the iconic epigraph from Langston Hughes-– “What happens to a dream deferred?”-– Naylor shows the burden of dispossession and broken promises with a rich weave of memorable voices.

Rabbit is Rich by John Updike.
Like all great books, Updike’s third Harry Angstrom novel is both timeless and quintessentially of its time. Here are two lines from the first page that could just as well have appeared in this morning’s paper: “The people out there are getting frantic, they know the great American ride is ending... People are going wild, their dollars are going rotten...”

--- Porter Shreve

---> For the archive of Madam Mayo guest-blog posts, click here.