Fernanda Eberstadt is the American expatriate author of five acclaimed novels, Isaac and His Devils, Low Tide, When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth, The Furies, and her latest – Rat. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Commentary. Her nonfiction book Little Money Street is about the struggle of Gypsies in southwest France, where she lived with her family before returning to London. We look forward to welcoming her to the Library on Wednesday 1 February at 19h30. She writes:

I’m thrilled to be appearing at the American Library and will be talking about the delights and perils of being an American writer in Europe and in particular about my most recent novel, “RAT.”

The novel is named after its heroine, a fifteen-year-old girl growing up in the French countryside, raised by a feckless, charmingly narcissistic single mother. Rat has never met her biological father, who lives in London. The person she loves best in the world is her adopted younger brother—the son of her mother’s best friend, an ex-prostitute who died of AIDs—and when her mother’s boyfriend begins to take a sexual interest in the kid, Rat decides it’s time for her and her brother to leave home in search of her father.

Like all my books, RAT is about family.

For years, I’d been haunted by the subject of a child who grows up obsessed by a father she’s never known, and finally sets off to find him for herself. My heroine Rat’s fantasy is that once she’s reunited with this unknown father, he will somehow give her all the steadiness and sense of belonging she’s always lacked.

But of course the reality turns out to be quite different: Her father was a twenty-something-year-old Englishman on a beach-holiday, who had sex one night with a local girl he met in a nightclub. And felt completely outraged when his one-night pickup not only got pregnant, but insisted on having the baby, without his consent.

He goes on to marry a suitable wife to whom he never mentions this traumatic episode; they have a child. And then fifteen-year-old Rat shows up, like Banquo’s ghost, ruining the domestic feast.

The irony of the book is that in the end, her father comes to love this girl he wished had never been born, and to recognize an affinity with her almost deeper—certainly more involuntary, more agonizing–than what he feels for his “real”, lawful family.

RAT raises a lot of crucial contemporary subjects: what is the nature of biological identity, of genetic inheritance? If women have reproductive rights, do men, too? What happens when children are obliged to parent their own parents? What makes a family? (It’s significant that the only “family” in which Rat and her brother feel completely at home is a bunch of anarchist squatters they meet in an abandoned dynamite factory.)

RAT is set in the French Pyrenees, where I spent six crucial years; my children got most of their education in a village school there. We were living on a vineyard half-a-mile from the Mediterranean. The tourist image of the South of France is of Gold Coast glamor, and yet in fact, for all its natural majesty and blessed climate, this area is poor, down-and-out, blighted by political corruption, a honky-tonk stretch of trailer parks and fast-food stalls that are boarded up nine months a year.

In my last book, LITTLE MONEY STREET, I wrote about Gypsies and Arabs in this area. This time, I wanted to write about the white French families who have drifted down here in search of a cheap place in the sun.

One of my aims in this novel was to create a heroine who is genuinely heroic. Surrounded by dangerously needy adults, Rat is obliged from a young age to become a kind of mother to her younger brother, feeding him, clothing him, protecting him from harm.

I’ve always loved children’s books. One thing I’ve noticed, reading aloud a whole new generation of writers to my own children, is that the world of children’s literature is astonishingly dark. The best children’s writers are tough-minded: they do not shrink from exposing their characters to wrenching ordeals and moral dilemmas. Yet, unlike the heroes of most contemporary “adult” fiction, those of children’s books tend to meet adversity with pluck and resourcefulness. You read Philip Pullman’s Lyra trilogy, and you want to be as brave as she is.

I wanted to do something similar in RAT: to create a heroine who raises a reader’s spirits.

RAT is my own way of grappling a very particular cultural problem. I think of myself as being a New York writer. Yet for most of the last twelve years, I’ve been living in rural France, my children have been going to school in French, and our outside life has been largely conducted in French. In 2009, we moved to London. Closer, but still not Manhattan.

Which means that the daily sights, sounds, smells, opinions, attitudes, pop culture that have been feeding my fiction for the last decade-plus are a European mishmash. The world is indeed becoming Americanized, but the music Rat and her friends listen to, their language and expectations and cultural assumptions are not the same as American kids’. The “New York” of my imagination, the New York in which I grew up, is by now about as archaeological a relic as Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Warsaw.

RAT is written in American English, but it’s my first work of fiction whose characters and setting are a hundred percent European.

Reviewed by Liz Gomes

Little Rat wants to learn how to play the violin and make wonderful music like what she hears in concerts.  But for her to do so, she needs to practice, which is not so easy, it is boring and her violin can make horrible noises.

This inspiring tale tells how Little Rat, while learning to play the violin, goes through some difficulties, but after a lot of practice, she can create beautiful music.

A great story for parents who wants to teach their children how ‘practice makes perfect’.

You can find Little Rat Makes Music in the Children’s Library with the I CAN READ books under EB.

Sophie Hardach wrote her novel The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages while working as a journalist for Reuters in Paris. Originally inspired by the fragments of stories she was told while out on various reporting assignments, the novel follows the intertwining lives of a Kurdish boy struggling to build a life in Europe and a Registrar working at a Parisian town hall. Today, Sophie writes about the French pamphlet that inspired the novel:

Inspiration comes in many different forms: a thunderbolt, a light bulb, or, in the case of my first novel, a pamphlet printed by the French government.

About three years ago, I was working as a correspondent for Reuters news agency in Paris when the French government launched a campaign against forced marriages. I interviewed some activists in the field – like the victims, many were of North African, Turkish, Kurdish or Senegalese descent – and was struck not just by the fact that the problem persisted, but that it was much more pressing than I had expected. During one interview in a cramped little office in a Parisian suburb, staffed by one lone activist and her assistant, the phone kept ringing with calls from girls seeking help. A rescue mission for a girl whose parents had already booked her ticket to the country where she would be married off against her will was planned for that night. Another organisation had just taken in a girl whose own grandmother tied her to a bed on the wedding night – and this happened not in some remote, deserted location, but in the trendy 10th arrondissement.

So the French government decided it was time to do something, and one of the things it did was print a peppy, pink-and-red little pamphlet titled “Prévention des Mariages Forcés – Guide à l’usage des élu/es“. It was a guide for bureaucrats in town halls all over France who might unwittingly preside over forced marriages. It was also, in a way, a tour through the hopes and dilemmas of modern France, or rather, a France that is figuring out how to be modern. There was great idealism in the way the pamphlet directly addressed the reader: you – yes, you, mayor of Boondocks-Sur-Seine – you too can be a soldier in the fight for good. But just how that fight should be fought wasn’t quite clear. The intention was there, but as soon as it went into detail, the guide sounded curiously helpless. So how do you spot a forced marriage? Well, apparently an age difference of 10 years is a bit suspicious, and so is a “menacing attitude” by the bride’s entourage. Certain communities are singled out as higher-risk, but there’s also a stern warning not to become too wary of foreign and mixed marriages as that would be against the European Convention of Human Rights.

Sitting in a press conference under the high stone arches of an old Parisian town hall, I pictured an anonymous official reading the guide and scratching her head: “Hmmm…they say that ‘Yes’ does not always imply consent…I’m meant to be suspicious if the bride cries…and then alert the prosecutor if I think it’s a forced marriage… but oh dear, if I get it wrong, I’ll have an enraged bride, groom and two families accusing me of ruining their big day!”

It’s not surprising that a real-life French official told me he didn’t know anyone who used the guide.

And one of the seasoned, tough activists I interviewed simply said: “There’s no way the girl would show any opposition once they’re all at the town hall. There’s simply no way she would suddenly confide in the mayor, or cry or something like that. She’d feel like a traitor.”

Incidentally, that activist’s organisation – Elele, which mainly advised Turkish and Kurdish girls – had to close down in 2010 after its government subsidies dried up. Elele was listed in the Mariages Forcés pamphlet, but that did not protect it from the budget cuts. Given this rather depressing development, it would be easy to write off the pink pamphlet as yet another example of political cynicism: print a few thousand brochures with great fanfare and lots of press coverage, then withdraw funds from the very people who are helping the victims.

And yet, something about the pamphlet stuck with me. It seemed to encapsulate so many of the issues we grapple with today, and have grappled with through the ages: whether, and how, a society should interfere with a private issue such as marriage; whether it’s better to stay out of certain conflicts and risk being accused of turning a blind eye, or try to help and perhaps make the situation worse.

The news cycle soon moved on to the burqa ban and the economy, but in my spare time I continued to think about all those questions, and about migration in general, and about my own experiences as a migrant in particular. Eventually I wrote a novel: “The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages”. It’s about a woman who works at a Parisian town hall, about her friendship with Selim, a Kurdish refugee, and about a pact they made in the past that overshadows the present. The manual in the novel is fictional, though it shares some characteristics with the original, such as a fondness for capital letters and exclamation marks. Since the book was published in April 2011, I’ve had lots of interesting comments from readers. Some are especially intrigued by Selim’s story, since the plight of the Kurds is not a common subject in fiction. Others see it as a story about identity, or about the joys and challenges of multi-culturalism. And others again simply read it as a story of two people trying to make their way through this often delightful, often bewildering world.

Arthur Phillips was born in Minneapolis and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, and a five-time Jeopardy! champion.

His first novel, Prague, was named a New York Times Notable Book, and received The Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum Award for best first novel. His second novel, The Egyptologist, was an international bestseller, and was on more than a dozen “Best of 2004” lists. Angelica, his third novel, made The Washington Post best fiction list of 2007 and led that paper to call him “One of the best writers in America.” The Song Is You was a New York Times Notable Book, on the Post’s best of 2009 list, and inspired Kirkus to write, “Phillips still looks like the best American novelist to have emerged in the present decade.”

His fifth book, The Tragedy of Arthur, was published to critical acclaim, including being named a New York Times Notable Book. He lives in New York with his wife and two sons.

Where did The Tragedy of Arthur begin?

I have started novels from many of those places: a setting, a plot twist, a character.  But in this case, it started from what I can only call a dare.  I simply wondered one day, what would I have to learn to be able to write a Shakespeare play?  A peculiar thought, I’ll admit, but one that got under my skin in the most irritating way.  I was halfway through writing a different novel and most of the time I was itching to start work on this ill-defined forgery scheme…

Can you tell us about being a five-time Jeopardy champion?

Trivia has always stuck to me.  I know a very small amount about a lot of things, and a lot about… nothing.  Turns out that, plus quick thumb-muscle reflexes and a willingness to risk public humiliation makes for a successful gameshow career.  I was on in 1996, not long after my wife and I got married and she was beginning to despair about my earning potential.

What books are on your nightstand?

Last great book I completed: Cards of Identity by Nigel Dennis. Currently reading Shakespeare and the Jews by James Shapiro, author of Contested Will and 1599.  Next up: the new Ron Rash novel The Cove.

What is the best advice you have ever received?

I don’t know about the best ever, but I read this today and liked it.  I’ll say it’s the best advice I’ve received today:

” Look at getting published the same way that career criminals look at getting arrested. Sure, there is validation in it. And people will know what you did, why, and how. But the crime is the fun part and getting away with it is even better.”– http://www.fictioncircus.com/

What advice would you give to beginning writers?

Since we’re tapping into their wisdom today, I liked this, too:

“Getting rejected by magazines you don’t read or editors you don’t know isn’t real rejection. It is just unsuccessful adultery.”– http://www.fictioncircus.com/

What are you looking forward to doing while you are in Paris?

I lived for two of my happiest years in Paris, writing my second novel here, so I am likely to indulge in some serious nostalgia, walking, gazing, sighing, recalling.  That and seeing old friends at old favorite restaurants.

What’s next?

I’ve been working on television scripts at the moment, trying to find my feet in a new medium.  Then…back to novels.

Recommended by Children’s Library volunteer Christel Prestige

Charlotte Usher feels practically invisible at school, she is desperate to be popular to try and attract Damen’s attention. And then one miserable day, she dies of the most unbelievable death: she chokes on a gummy bear! Alone, once again! However, Charlotte isn’t going to let the little inconvenience of being dead get in her way…

Check out Ghostgirl, it’s new @ the Library. You can find it with the Young Adult fiction on the Teen Mezzanine under J HUR (YA).

Cherie Burns is the author of Searching for Beauty–The Life of Millicent Rogers, the first comprehensive biography of the Standard Oil heiress and fashion icon.

Raised in the Gilded Age of New York society, Rogers came of age as a debutante and flapper. She eloped with an impoverished European nobleman and lived with three husbands in high-living pre-war Europe. During WWII she returned to the U.S to pitch into the war effort, and at war’s end she followed American glamour–and Clark Gable–to Hollywood. Her last reincarnation was in Taos, New Mexico where she fell in love with the Pueblo Indians and re-imagined southwestern style for her followers in the New York fashion world.

Rogers was considered the first American woman with real style to merit the admiration of Parisian couturiers and fashion arbiters. Beautiful, rich, spirited and always impeccably dressed, Rogers re-invented herself with every decade of the first half of the Twentieth Century.

In addition to Searching for Beauty, Cherie Burns is author of The Great Hurricane: 1938, of which  Liz Smith  wrote in her column in The Daily News: “A must if you care about brilliant reporting…” and Stepmotherhood—How to Survive Without Feeling Frustrated, Left Out or Wicked.  It  has sold over 40,000 copies in the U.S., England and Germany and remains in print after twenty years. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine,The Wall Street Journal, People, Glamour, New York, and Sports Illustrated. She now lives primarily in Taos, New Mexico.

Cherie Burns writes: People frequently ask me how and why I became interested in writing about Millicent Rogers. I first took note of Rogers when I visited the museum named after her in Taos, New Mexico when I came to Taos with my family to ski in the 1990s.   I didn’t know much about her and the name blurred with Mabel Dodge Luhan, Dorothy Brett, Frieda Lawrence and Georgia O’Keefe, other famous women who found their way to New Mexico and left an impression with their bohemian ways, flair, mischief and artistry. One cannot but wonder at the photos of Frieda Lawrence, D.H.’s wife, with the cigarette dangling from her lip,  O’Keefe, the severe artist with her tight kerchiefs, magisterial Mabel and  eccentric Brett.   It was not until I came to live in Taos in 2005 that I routinely visited the Millicent Rogers Museum, and Millicent Rogers began to come into focus for me. She was an elegant beauty,  mysterious and evocative because less was known publicly about her life. I often took visitors to the adobe museum on the edge of town to show them the regional artistry and New Mexican sensibility on display there. Waiting for them in the lobby, I had time to study the likenesses of Millicent on the walls.

The more I looked into her legend and realized that of her 51 year-long life, only six of those years were lived in Taos, the more intrigued I became.  Though she is associated in the modern public consciousness with  New Mexico, she lived most of her life in New York and Europe, tripping the light fantastic wherever she went. Researching her life story gave me the opportunity to learn more about Taos, and to fill in my dearth of knowledge about the 1930s and 40s, Millicent’s heydays, in both fashion and political history.

Millicent H Rogers dying her own textiles in the home of Mabel Dodge Luhan. Taos, NM 1948.

]]> http://www.americanlibraryinparis.org/blog/2012/01/cherie-burns-on-fashion-icon-millicent-rogers/feed.html 0 http://www.americanlibraryinparis.org/blog/2012/01/lionel-shriver-talks-about-kevin/ http://www.americanlibraryinparis.org/blog/2012/01/lionel-shriver-talks-about-kevin/#comments Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:51:50 +0000 Janet http://www.americanlibraryinparis.org/blog/2012/01/lionel-shriver-talks-about-kevin/

We look forward to welcoming prize-winning novelist Lionel Shriver on Wednesday 11 January at 19h30. In this essay, Shriver talks about how it feels to have her widely rejected manuscript become a best-selling, prize-winning novel, then a book-club favorite and the toast of the Cannes film festival.

It has now entered the cultural canon that, on completion in 2001, the manuscript of Lionel Shriver’’s seventh novel was widely rejected by publishers and literary agents alike. In retrospect, this incidental fact being widely known is alone a little weird. After all, every day writers numbly receive curt, dismissive rejections of work they’ve slaved over for years. Writers should have some grasp of publishing’s brutality, and this morose process of having your beloved creations stepped on and pissed over comes with the territory. Hence people in my occupation are routinely expected, as Kevin would say, to suck it up.

Sorry, did I say “Kevin”? That’s what’s truly weird: the large number of fiction readers who know exactly who Kevin is, and that number is set to swell once a cinema audience joins the mix. Yet “Kevin Katchadourian” is just a name I picked after combing through the phonebook on an ordinary afternoon.

The premiere of Lynne Ramsay’s film of We Need To Talk About Kevin at the Cannes film festival provides an apt juncture at which to celebrate the miraculous power not of film but of fiction. Lo, I have created a monster.

Tilda Swinton, Ezra Miller, Lynne Ramsay, John C Reilly and his wife Alison Dickey on the red carpet at Cannes Photograph: Ian Langsdon/EPA

Sorry, did I say “Kevin”? That’s what’s truly weird: the large number of fiction readers who know exactly who Kevin is, and that number is set to swell once a cinema audience joins the mix. Yet “Kevin Katchadourian” is just a name I picked after combing through the phonebook on an ordinary afternoon.

The premiere of Lynne Ramsay’s film of We Need To Talk About Kevin at the Cannes film festival provides an apt juncture at which to celebrate the miraculous power not of film but of fiction. Lo, I have created a monster.

Kevin is a dark book, and many of those initial rejections objected that its narrator, Eva, is “unattractive”: a woman uneasy about pregnancy, who feels alarmingly blank after childbirth, and fails to form the bond with her boy that we like to imagine is as instinctive as closing the epiglottis when we swallow. The novel breaks one of the last taboos (and how amazing that at such a late date I found a taboo still standing): a mother disliking her son. Rife with difficult characters and climaxing in a high-school massacre of the sort Americans are rightly ashamed of, Kevin was a poor commercial bet from the get-go.

More, my timing was mythically crap. I submitted the final draft to my New York literary agent right after 9/11, in that hilarious little window when everyone thought Americans would never read or watch anything violent again. Waiting for her response, I recorded in my journal that my new novel “abruptly seems irrelevant and, more dangerously, dated”. (Indeed, the week the twin towers fell, New York Times columnist Frank Rich listed Columbine among a catalogue of national issues from “before” that suddenly didn’t matter.) Ominously, my usually responsive agent went silent for weeks. Finger-drumming, I wrote presciently to myself: “Should this day, too, pass, with no comment from NY, I have vowed to break my silence and press her for a response. But the responses you have to ask for you don’t want.”

Xan Brooks gives his verdict on We Need to Talk About Kevin, while assorted bloggers, buyers and blaggers share their thoughts Link to this video Quite. Finally I got an email – a long, unparagraphed, associative wail of dismay of which I’ve kept a copy: “For the life of me, I don’t know who is going to fall in love with this novel . . . People in the industry are so thin-skinned right now – I just don’t think anyone is going to want to publish a book about a kid doing such maxed-out, over-the-top, evil things, especially when it’s written from such an unsympathetic point of view.” She worried the plot might invite copycat killings. She suggested a rewrite with “a lot more humour (in that way which ONLY YOU can do) instead of one kid from hell who will make people sick just reading about the things he does. Don’t make him a mass-murderer . . . And have him actually have a soft spot for his sister because she is easily humiliated and poses no threat.” She demanded I pay my photocopying bill.

I paid the bill. I spent the next eight months shopping in vain for a new agent. Finally in desperation I sent the manuscript directly to an editor at a small house who’d published me before. She read it over the weekend, made an offer on the Monday, and that’s where the fairytale starts. Offer in hand, I got a wonderful new agent whom I retain today.

Nevertheless, Kevin was a slow burn. The book went to 30 different British houses before the Little Publisher That Could, Serpent’s Tail, picked up the title with a tiny advance but great compensatory enthusiasm. Meanwhile, three months after its hardback publication in America – publicity budget: near-zero – an article appeared in the New York Observer describing all these women on the Upper East Side biking a little-known novel to each other and convening coffee klatches to discuss it. “Word of mouth” had begun.

Word of mouth, far more than critical acclaim, is what elevated Kevin to the enduring status he appears to enjoy today, for the novel hit the London Times bestseller list before it won the Orange prize in 2005. Oddly, for a book to do well merely because people like it is surprisingly rare. This novel has been driven from the off not by advertising and publisher hype, but by individual readers who passed it on to friends. Its success is therefore a populist tribute. Even Lynne Ramsay bid for the film rights well before the novel was a commercial hit. She was simply one more reader who discovered the book for herself.

Book clubs have also powered Kevin as he went viral, and I’ve visited a few, where groups cleave into ferocious camps: one convinced that the boy was evil from day one, the other just as convinced that his mother’s coldness was criminally culpable. A fine spectator sport in which I never participate, since what the book means is no longer up to me.

The novel passed the signal sales mark of 1m copies worldwide some years ago, and I’ve stopped keeping track. It has secured 25 translation deals, including Estonian, Serbian, Arabic and Russian; I collect foreign editions because I enjoy comparing covers. My favourite is the Chinese version: a belligerent, deranged-looking teddy bear. The title has so installed itself in the British cultural lexicon that it’s given rise to books such as We Need To Talk About Kevin Keegan and the wittily christened science primer We Need To Talk About Kevin. And now the movie.

What has it felt like, watching a novel travel from pariah manuscript to Cannes? Obviously, publishing the novel at all was a relief. Finally hitting a bestseller list when six previous novels had lost money was satisfying, though in general my experience of “success” has been surprisingly mild; I couch that word in inverted commas out of superstition, and also from dubiety that ever regarding one’s self as having summarily arrived is good for one’s character. My life is not so different, really, and though I’m less prone to depression I hardly leap out of bed every day bursting with disgusting go-get-’em-girl vim and vigour. (Any writer still wallowing in self-congratulation over the popularity of a novel written a decade ago should be shot.) I’ve travelled from amazement to incredulity to bewilderment, and at last to bemused detachment.

Yet underpinning all these emotions is gratitude. I owe thanks to a thoughtful, sophisticated readership hungry for challenging subject matter, for honest portrayals of parenthood, and for fiction whose meaning is neither obvious nor morally pat. This peculiar, tortured novel was an unlikely bestseller, and has benefited from numerous individual readers with independent tastes who have hand sold it. I’ve met many of these readers, and they’ve confirmed my view that the publishing industry routinely underestimates book buyers, especially women, who don’t all want to read girly pap. I’m sometimes asked if I get bored with talking about Kevin, and of course the short answer is yes. Nevertheless, after a long slog in the literary trenches I never take a single reader for granted, and always remind myself that for new readers the unfolding story is fresh.

Most of all, Kevin as a phenomenon long ago ceased to have anything to do with me. I’ve published two novels since, and I’m stuck into another; fortunately, many Kevin fans have moved on to other novels of mine as well. Meanwhile, Kevin can continue to suck a lychee sadistically in front of his mother after her daughter has lost an eye without any further help from me.

My starkest realisation that this novel has achieved a life of its own was while watching Ramsay’s riveting adaptation of the book. Mind, I’ve been lucky, because Ramsay’s version is excellent: well cast, beautifully shot, and thematically loyal to the novel. Settings such as Eva and Franklin’s slick, ghastly suburban house in fictional Gladstone look almost unsettlingly close to the way I saw them in my mind’s eye.

Before the premiere in France, meeting Ezra Miller, who plays Kevin as an adolescent, was particularly surreal. In social circumstances, he still exudes a seductive eroticism you instinctively want to resist, a beguiling exterior disguising you’re-not-sure-you-want-to-know-what, and a subtle manipulative sleaziness that I recognised instantly from the novel. Talking to Ezra in Cannes was so eerily like having a conversation with Kevin himself that at the premiere’s after-party I turned to him with narrowed eyes. “You little shit,” I said. Rationally I knew better, but something in me truly believed that this kid had killed seven students, a teacher, and a cafeteria worker at his high school, and still thought rather well of himself for pulling the atrocity off.

Tilda Swinton in We Need to Talk About Kevin. Photograph: Nicole Rivelli photography

Allowing herself to look washed-out and haggard, Tilda Swinton is brilliantly cast as Eva, and seems already to have replaced my own flickering image of my narrator. Though the script is sparse, her silences exude an overload of conflicting emotion – a dismay, anguish, loneliness, and fury too dangerously combustible to express. John C Reilly brings to the role of Eva’s husband Franklin a weight, presence and warmth that rescues the father from seeming simply a dupe in the face of his son’s sunny pretence of being a normal, rambunctious boy. And the two child actors who play Kevin when younger both capture the exasperation with the meaningless adult world that I tried to impart to the novel’s character, as well as providing Kevin a seamless physical contiguity as he grows up.

The film’s literal manifestations of impulsive, near arbitrary decisions at my computer I found a riot. I picked the dorky name of Eva’s squalid place of employ out of the air one day, yet the production team had to carefully paint a real sign over a real shop premises reading “Travel R Us”. I snatched the name of the walk-on who runs that shabby travel agency with equal flippancy, yet there she is, in all her three-dimensional glory, with “My name is Wanda” pinned to her dress. Both comical and a little scary, my apparent capacity to conjure the solid from mere caprice suggests a power I’m not sure anyone should enjoy.

The film is an interpretation of the novel, of course, and Ramsay was obliged to edit out multiple scenes, lest the film run to 10 hours. But here’s what’s fab: the book still exists, inviolate. All the dialogue Ramsay eliminated is still in the book. All the scenes she couldn’t dramatise are still in the book. All the literary reflections that have evaporated into a wordless interplay of colour and space are still in the book.

I’ve often marvelled at the ability of visual artists to let things go – to craft unique objects, to which they surely become attached, yet which they sell off and may never see again. By contrast, the medium in which I work allows simultaneously for generosity and piggy hoarding. I’ve given my book away to a director, producers, and cast; to dozens of translators whose skills this unilingual moron has to take on faith; and to countless readers, who have breathed their own life into the story and brought their own analyses to bear on the characters. Yet no matter how many copies my publishers sell, I get to keep mine, filed by chapter on my hard drive.

via todayilearned.co.uk

Just a gentle reminder that the American Library is closed on December 24th and 25th as well as December 31 and January 1st.

Wishing everyone happy holidays! Hope that your new year will be filled with good cheer and great books!

via Real Simple

1. Wakefield Chandelier

I bring you the Wakefield Chandelier as inspiration. Perhaps you are a blacksmith on the side and need a new project. Or perhaps this will encourage you to go out and find a blacksmith and claim him (or her) as your own. Or perhaps you can reach into the depths of your DIY soul and create your own out of papier-maché and some clothes pins.

2. Personalized Bookshelf Paintings

I fell in love with these bookshelf paintings (and their creator, Jane Mount, a little bit too) the second I saw them. Send her pictures of the spines of your favorite books, and she’ll create a one-of-a-kind painting featuring your ideal bookshelf. I can think of no better gift come Christmas (except for maybe the books themselves).

Like another person’s bookshelf more than your own? Ms. Mount sells prints of some of her finest works for a pretty penny less that the custom piece.

3. Library Smell in a Bottle

If you love the smell of 19th c. Dickens novels, but can’t afford a first-run copy, CB I Hate Perfum provides a solution. The purveyor of unique scents (including perfumes, room sprays, and pungent oils) has created In the Library, a “warm blend of English novel, Russian & Moroccan leather bindings, worn cloth, and a hint of wood polish.”

4. Postertext Pictures

Postertext transforms the words on the page into the scenes in your head with their absolutely stunning black&white works. The team at Postertext transforms the entire body of work into a famous eye-catching and captivating scene.

5. A Word from Save the Words

It is hands down my favorite online campaign, even though it takes a good two minutes for the blasted site to load. Once it does, though, Save the Words has rounded up the endangered vocabulary that text messaging and emoticons have threatened with extinction. Browse the site for your favorite obscure utterance and adopt it, therefore promising “to use this word, in conversation and correspondence, as frequently as possible to the very best of [your] ability.”

It’s brilliant. It’s the perfect gift. And it’s free.

6. Book Page Wallpaper

The downside to this great gift idea is that you need to make absolutely sure that the recipient really wants to have new wallpaper. And that his/her landlord is okay with it too. Note: pointing to a picture in a magazine and saying “that’s pretty neat” is not a green light for this project.

However, if the green lights are a go, a wall covered in beautiful book pages (old time-y dictionaries are the recommended vessel) is really, really pretty. Apartment Therapy makes the whole process sound easy. I’m not entirely sold, but those who wield their decoupage with dexterity: have at it.

7. It Was a Dark and Stormy Night – the Game

It’s a game for those who enjoy the concept of olde fashioned family fun but clam up any time a Humdinger comes around their way. All you do in It Was a Dark and Stormy Night is identify the book or author based on a series of opening lines and trot your way around the board. A bunch of book categories (ranging from non-fiction to short stories to children’s books to contemporary fiction) makes it equally interesting and challenging.

Fun, simple, smart and just pretentious enough.

8. Literary Tea

Sure they are a little bit cutesy, but what sort of reader isn’t also a tea drinker? I’m not 100% positive Novel Tea has the very finest English Breakfast tea on the market, but the packaging is nice and the concept, too, is nice: 25 teabags featuring classic quotes from the kind of books and authors you would expect to read while drinking tea. You’ve got your CS Lewis, your Louisa May Alcott, your Rita Mae Brown. Etc.

I feel like this would be the kind of thing you’d get your awkward book-wormish co-worker or your grandmother as a stocking stuffer.

9. Manly Book Cologne

I’m not sure how many men seek to own any scent inspired by Animal Farm‘s Napoleon, but in their defense Ah & Oh Studio did set out to exhibit “the dark sides of men’s nature with a line of scents named after famous writers” (sic).

I have a feeling I wouldn’t really like the man who loves loves loves this present, but I’m sure he is out there. So do it. Buy it. See what happens. The bottle is pretty swanky, after all.