Shakespeare and Co. Booksellers

From one of my favorite contemporary novelists, Ann Patchett, comes a graduation speech, adapted and expanded into a comfy little book. An ideal gift for soon-to-be graduates of high school or college, or for anyone at a “crossroads” in life (or for those of us for whom all of life is an endless succession of crossroads). Simple prose, yet enlightening.

What Now? by Ann Patchett (HarperCollins, $14.95)

Excerpts:
“It takes discipline to remain curious; it takes work to be open to the world.”

“Sometimes the circumstances at hand force us to be braver than we actually are…Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.”

When you have an asthma attack, you can’t breathe. When you can’t breathe, you can hardly talk. To make a sentence all you get is the air in your lungs. Which isn’t much. Three to six words, if that. You learn the value of words. You rummage through the jumble in your head. Choose the crucial ones — those cost you too. Let healthy people toss out whatever comes to mind, the way you throw out the garbage. When an asthmatic says “I love you,” and when an asthmatic says “I love you madly,” there’s a difference. The difference of a word. A word’s a lot. It could be stop, or inhaler. It could even be ambulance.

– Etgar Keret, “Asthma Attack”
from The Girl on the Fridge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $12)

“A blunder we have seen more than once recently is when authors, reacting against the plethora  of “large-breasted” girls in fiction, describe a heroine as having “medium-sized breasts.”  This amounts to saying she had breasts.”

and…

“The reader wants to know what your characters look like.  But how do you get your point-of-view character to rattle off his height, weight, and skin tone?  Easy!  Frog-march him to the mirror!

Unfortunately, this is so obvious a convention of bad fiction that it might as well read, “Looking in the mirror, Joe saw a tall, brown-haired man, trapped in a poorly written novel.”"

- from How Not to Write a Novel by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman

[p. 260] In his lonely apartment, on a pillow pounded thin by dozens of night-fists, I dreamed. Perhaps he dreamed, too. I thought I saw him wandering down a street filled with balloons and leering gazelles — but I did not follow. I stood on a boulevard filled with prim orange poppies, and suddenly I tasted brandy rolling down my throat, and pale smoke filling up my lungs. My green-scarved quarter was savoring her snifter and her opium somewhere far from me. I saw the ostrich-child that night. I smelled the Seraphim sidewalks, rich and red, and traded, with only some hesitation, my long brown hair for the dress. Aloysius cut it with crystal scissors, and I walked over wood, under sulfurous stars, trailing dark feathers behind me. The wind was warm on my bare neck. My fingers were warm, too — my bald quarter was stroking a woman with skin like a snake’s.

– Catherynne M. Valente, “Palimpsest“

Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy (Senses Five Press; $14.95)

1. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (for setting the record straight)
2. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (for his celebration of lying)
3. Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee (for its pessimism)
4. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (for its optimism)
5. Middlemarch by George Eliot (for insight and wisdom)
6. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (for its call to arms)
7. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster (for its symphonic perfection)
8. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass (for his imaginative courage)
9. Beloved by Toni Morrison (for her emotional clarity)
10. The stories of Flannery O’Connor (for unerring narrative focus)

Jim Crace is the British author of nine novels, including Quarantine (a Whitbread Novel of the Year) and Being Dead (a National Critics Circle Award winner).

from The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, ed. by J. Peder Zane.

Visit the Top Ten website here.