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SATURDAY, JUNE 7, 2008 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM
SATURDAY, JUNE 7, 2008 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM
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Around the world MPI/GETTY IMAGES/WSJ
The backstories and stories of the books that make the cut as your summer reading The Wall Street Journal
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>> NONFICTION u When You Are Engulfed in Flames By David Sedaris, Out in the US, Little, Brown
An Italian serial killer. A Chinese coma victim. Hunting for fresh eggs in 1940s’ Leningrad. From thrillers to histories, this season’s books are journeying the globe
Quirky essays drawn from the author’s past with his eccentric family (his sister is comedian-actor Amy Sedaris), his years in New York and his life in France. Backstory: Sedaris’ audience is too big for bookstores; he can sell out concert venues (he got a Grammy nomination for David Sedaris: Live at Carnegie Hall). He’s sold more than four million copies of his books. Publisher Little, Brown plans an almost Grisham-sized first printing of 650,000 copies. What grabbed us: In the wake of James Frey and other scandals, the memoirist genre is under siege. Although Sedaris, 51, claims he keeps a daily diary, one has to wonder at his detailed recollection of conversations, people, events and clothes from his distant youth (Sedaris declined to comment for this article). Nonetheless, the author’s many fans will no doubt flock to his newest offering.
B Y R OBERT J . H UGHES ····································· or our summer reading round-up, we spoke with publishers, authors, independent booksellers, online retailer Amazon and chain stores such as Barnes and Noble. We asked them to name the coming releases they were most excited about—including such titles as The Monster of Florence, Beijing Coma and One Minute to Midnight—and picked our favourites after reading the works they recommended. In the coming weeks, bookstores will welcome new works by some best-selling authors, including essayist David Sedaris (When You Are Engulfed in Flames), Andre Dubus III (The Garden of Last Days) and Joyce Carol Oates (My Sister, My Love). “I had a dream the other night that I did a book signing and signed five books,” jokes Sedaris, one of the industry’s biggest draws. “I realize I’m very lucky.” The summer will also see books by many first-time authors, including the short-story collections One More Year by UkrainianAmerican Sana Krasikov and Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan, a Jesuit priest from Nigeria. “One of the things that makes American literature so vital at this point is that we have input from so many different cultures and linguistic backgrounds,” says Paul Yamazaki, coordinating buyer at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. Since it’s an election year, there’s a surge of political books in the US. Among them: a stilluntitled work from Ron Suskind on national security, Your Government Failed You by Richard A. Clarke and What Happened by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan. The $28 billion (around Rs1.18 trillion) American book industry faces challenges in a sluggish economy. Bookstore sales in the first quarter totalled $4.46 billion, a 5.1% increase over the comparable period in 2007, according to the US Census Bureau. But last month, Barnes and Noble lowered its sales forecast for the year. “There are people who believe that books are recession-proof,” says Stan Hynds, head buyer for Northshire Bookstore, Manchester Center, Vermont. “We’re going to find out.”
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u One Minute to Midnight By Michael Dobbs, Out in the US, Knopf
Write to wsj@livemint.com JAYACHANDRAN/MINT BRYAN BEDDER/GETTY IMAGES/AFP
AUTHOR Q&A | DAVID SEDARIS
‘I can just take vignettes and plug them into a story’ The humour writer talks about his writing—and inspiration
your books? I never sit down thinking I’m going to write a book. Four years might pass and I look around and think, I have enough (essays already written) for a book.
B Y R OBERT J . H UGHES The Wall Street Journal
··································· avid Sedaris is best known for his laugh-out-loud books such as Me Talk Pretty One Day and Naked. His latest collection of essays, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, (released in the US on 3 June), once again puts a humorous spin on his everyday doings. Sedaris spoke with WSJ.
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How do you come up with ideas for
You’ve said you rely on diary entries for your inspiration. I started keeping a diary when I was 20. Every season, I write a diary. So, one that runs from 21 December until 21 March is my winter diary. They’re all broken up into seasons. Most of them are just boring crap, but at the end I go through them and find things I might be able to use later. I keep a guide to what’s in every diary, then I go through that and get ideas. The guide is full of incidents. The
incidents aren’t enough to make a story—they’re just little vignettes—but sometimes I can just take the vignettes and plug them into a story. Do you consider your essays as memoirs? I wouldn’t call it memoir. If I had to call them anything I’d call them comic essays. For some reason, and I don’t know why I think this, I’ve always thought of memoir as more of a whole —I think of Angela’s Ashes, which is a whole book that begins at one point and ends at another point. My books are choppier than that. Often there are stories about things, not about people at all.
u The Monster of Florence By Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi, Out in the US on 10 June, Grand Central Publishing
Which other writers do you admire? Tobias Wolff. I like the way he’s abstract. So many people get abstract and they’re not interesting and you don’t believe in their characters—they’re words on a page. But Wolff just continues to astonish me. I don’t think he gets the credit he deserves. You can’t fake his humanity. What essays in When You Are Engulfed in Flames are you particularly fond of? All The Beauty You Will Ever Need, about buying drugs with my brother. I like reading it aloud, the way it moves, the laughs it gets, the feeling I get at the end when I’m reading it. Write to wsj@livemint.com
A minute-by-minute account of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when the US and USSR were close to nuclear war over Soviet missile installations in Cuba. The book features new data about the movement of Soviet forces based on declassified government documents and interviews with surviving Russian participants. Backstory: Dobbs wanted to write about the missile crisis while there were still survivors to interview. He says the threat of disaster didn’t come from the decisions of Kennedy or Khrushchev, but from unpredictable events while “the military machine cranked along”. What grabbed us: Dobbs argues that while many academics have studied the crisis, the “human story has been lost”. He details some little-known tales within the larger drama, such as the errant flight of Charles Maultsby’s B-52 reconnaissance plane, which drifted into Soviet airspace hundreds of miles from his planned route over the North Pole.
The humorist: Sedaris’ new book of essays is a humorous spin on everyday doings.
The story of one of Italy’s most notorious serial killers, who has eluded capture for decades. One of the co-authors, Italian journalist Mario Spezi, was jailed when Italian authorities accused him of being the Monster of Florence (he was later released and the prosecutors involved were censured). Backstory: Best-selling thriller author
Charging ahead: One Minute to Midnight is about the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Douglas Preston, when living in Florence in 2000, learnt about the murderer who attacked lovers in their cars and had killed 14 people. It was, he says, “the most horrific story I’ve ever come across in my life”. Preston teamed up with Spezi, who had covered the case, to solve the crime. What grabbed us: In separate chapters, each author tells us of his involvement in the investigation. The authors detail the history of the case and offer up their theories about who the killer could be, and why the case matters. “Many countries have a serial killer who defines his culture by a process of negation, by exposing its black underbelly. England had Jack the Ripper. Italy had Monster of Florence.”
define the variety of nerd subcultures. One conclusion: “Nerdiness offers respite from the chaos of home life.” What grabbed us: Nerds make for an entertaining treatise, and Nugent is serious about them. The book is not jokey. For instance, he compares nerdiness to Asperger’s syndrome, a condition that includes poor social skills. STAFF/AFP/GETTY IMAGES/WSJ
u Nixonland By Rick Perlstein, Out in the US, Scribner The book charts the path from John F. Kennedy’s death to Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide election victory. Against the backdrop of race riots, war protests and assassinations, it shows how middle-class Americans and liberal intellectuals came to see each other as un-American. Backstory: “I am obsessed with the 1960s,” says Perlstein, who spent about six years writing and researching the book. One surprise: “The astonishing numbers of right-wing vigilante violence that somehow didn’t make it into standard accounts of the 1960s.” What grabbed us: There is a lot about the 1960s that isn’t known. “It surprised me how much strangeness there is in the recent past,” Perlstein says, noting Max Rafferty, California’s superintendent of police, had banned the teaching of evolution.
u American Nerd By Benjamin Nugent, Out in the US, Scribner Nerds, inside-out. This essay-cummemoir examines what a nerd is, from the high-school debate team to computer techies and Dungeons and Dragons experts. The author also writes of his own life as a nerd. Backstory: Nugent says, nerdily, that nerds have suffered “a history of oppression based on arbitrary categorization”, and that he wanted to
Last leg: All about the 1960 Rome Olympics.
uRome: 1960 By David Maraniss, Out in the US on 1 July, Simon & Schuster The Olympics in Rome was during the height of the Cold War, and on the cusp of the civil rights movement, when black American athletes such as Rafer Johnson, Wilma Rudolph and Cassius Clay won gold medals. This was the infancy of the televised games, too, leading to today’s extravagant coverage. Backstory: Maraniss says the Rome Olympics featured a “great setting, wonderful characters and so much of the modern world coming into view”. He interviewed many Russian athletes for the book. What grabbed us: Maraniss writes that “the forces of change were profound and palpable in the Eternal City. In sports, culture, and politics—interwoven in so many ways—one could see an old order dying and a new one being born. With all its promise and trouble, the world, as we see it today, was coming into view.” TURN TO PAGE L14®