HOMETOWN ‘HERO’ ... Bestselling Menlo Park writer Bruce Henderson will discuss his novel “Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War� July 21 at 7:30 p.m. at Kepler’s, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park. “Hero� is the harrowing true story of U.S. Navy pilot Dieter Dengler’s escape from a P.O.W. camp in Vietnam in 1966. The tale was made famous by the 2006 Werner Herzog film “Rescue Dawn� starring Christian Bale (as Dengler). Author Bruce Henderson is a former newspaper and magazine writer. He currently teaches nonfiction writing at Stanford University and lives in Menlo Park. AUTHOR, AUTHOR ... Upcoming authors at Keplers, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park, include: Dora Calott Wang, M.D., “The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrist’s Reflections on Healing in a Changing World� (July 6, 7:30 p.m.); Tatjana Soli, “The Lotus Eaters� (July 7, 7:30 p.m.); Belle Yang, “Forget Sorrow� (July 8, 7:30 p.m.); William Powers, “Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age� (July 13, 7:30 p.m.); Susan Moon, “This is Getting Old: Zen Thoughts on Aging with Humor and Dignity� (July 14, 7:30 p.m.); Allegra Goodman, “The Cookbook Collector� (July 15, 7:30 p.m.); Ayelet Waldman, “Red Hook Road� (July 16, 7:30 p.m.); Justin Cronin, “The Passage: A Novel� (July 20, 7:30 p.m.); Ally Carter, “Only the Good Spy Young� (July 22, 6 p.m.); Jeffrey Ma, “The House Advantage: Playing the Odds to Win Big in Business� (July 22, 7:30 p.m.); Maggie Stiefvater, “Linger� (July 23, 7 p.m.); David Carnoy, “Knife Music� (July 27, 7:30 p.m.); Stefanie Syman, “The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America� (July 28, 7:30 p.m.); Adrienne McDonnell, “The Doctor and the Diva� (Aug. 2, 7:30 p.m.); and Laura Fraser, “All Over the Map� (Aug. 5, 7:30 p.m.). Information: Go to www.keplers.com. MORE TALKS ... Upcoming authors at Books Inc. at Town & Country Village in Palo Alto include Alan Eagle, “William’s Magic Football� (July 15, 7 p.m.); Abraham Verghese, “Cutting for Stone� (July 20, 7 p.m.); and Lisa Gardner, “Live to Tell� (July 28, 7 p.m.); Information: Go to www. booksinc.net.
Items for Book Talk may be sent to Associate Editor Carol Blitzer, Palo Alto Weekly, P.O Box 1610, Palo Alto, CA 93202 or e-mailed to cblitzer@paweekly.com by the last Friday of the month.
Title Pages A monthly section on local books and authors, edited
by Tyler Hanley
REMEMBERING
Great American novelist the
‘Mark Twain Anthology’ rife with insight, inspiration by Jennifer Deitz “The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works,� edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin; Library of America; 492 pp.; $35 ith 2010 marking the centennial of Mark Twain’s death, editor Shelley Fisher Fishkin has put together a fascinating and diverse anthology of essays and remembrances by an international cast of writers paying tribute to one of the best known and loved American authors of all time in “The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works.� Samuel Clemens, writing under the pen name of Mark Twain, was a brilliant humorist and satirist whose novels “Tom Sawyer� and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn� have become classics in the literary canon. For decades now, Twain’s writings have been required reading in
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schools around the country and have become time-honored favorites of readers both young and old. Twain also landed famously in the center of the book-banning controversy due to a vocal minority who argued that the public, particularly children, should not be exposed to the “coarse language� Twain used (mostly coming from his characters who spoke in a Southern dialect and made frequent use of the “N word�) and demanded that Huck Finn be removed from public-library shelves and classrooms. The collected voices included in this anthology offer a welcome reminder of what an immense talent Twain was as a writer and what a truly remarkable influence he has had not only on the landscape of American fiction, but internationally as well. Fishkin, who is a professor of English and the Director of the American Studies Program at Stanford University, is a highly regarded expert on Twain and his writing, having authored or edited 33 books on the man and his works, in addition to producing the Broadway play of Mark Twain’s “Is He Dead?� Her own mastery of her subject is well in evidence in the finely crafted introductions to each essay, which provide a brief context and history for the writer’s own career and how their particular relationship to Twain evolved. What will likely most surprise readers who have not studied Twain as exhaustively as Fishkin has is the sheer breadth of influence Twain had on both his contemporaries
Steve Castillo
Book Section Talk
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, an English professor and the Director of the American Studies Program at Stanford University, has authored or edited 33 books on Mark Twain and his works. and on future generations — influences spanning an incredibly diverse group of novelists, visual artists, playwrights, actors, philosophers, humorists and political activists, including Rudyard Kipling, Gore Vidal, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Orwell, T.S. Eliot, Jose Marti and John Cocteau. Writers Toni Morrison, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, whose novels are now considered classics and are widely admired for their depictions of racism against African-Americans and racial and ethnic identity in America, all point to ways in which reading Twain’s work at various points in their development as writers served alternately to comfort, disturb and inspire them. So much so that — as Fishkin notes in her introduction to writer, critic and commentator David Bradley’s essay — Bradley surprised audiences at a 1985 speech in Hartford, Conn., by going against the grain of the generally understood definition of “black� literature as being necessarily written by black authors, to argue that “Huckleberry Finn is a black novel.� Bradley further suggested that while Samuel Clemens, the man, was white, his alter ego of Mark Twain was black and the vehicle by
which the writer was able to access ideas Clemens, the man, could not have expressed. In Bradley’s essay, originally published as the 1996 introduction for “How to Tell a Story and Other Essays,� he describes how as a young boy reading Huck Finn he was able to find first in the protagonist — and later in the quality of Twain’s approach to writing itself — an inspiration to shake off the religious propriety of his upbringing that had stifled his creativity and to embrace the life of a writer. Norman Mailer, the novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning master of “new journalism� who often pooled in with the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Hunter S. Thomas as “man’s-man� author and celebrity, was also a fan of Twain’s. Mailer’s is a hilarious, tongue-in-cheek essay entitled “Huck Finn, Alive at 100,� about going back to read Twain and imagining how this book would be reviewed if it were the debut novel of a present-day author. Very likely, Mailer says, Twain would be accused of having “stolen� Hemingway’s style, and by way of proof, excerpts a paragraph from Huck Finn describing the river and the landscape with a diction and style that has come to be so closely (continued on next page)
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