Archive for the Excerpts Category

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Compliments

Posted in Books, Excerpts with tags , on 26 November, 2008 by Jenna

Two new paperbacks we have IN STOCK, would make a great pair to read back to back, or simultaneously.

youngstalinIn western Georgia, [Stalin] traveled with fishing-rods and tackle, and when arrested by the local police he convinced them he was just fishing.

-Young Stalin, Simon Sebag Montefiore (Vintage, $16.95)

Those who felt joy at Stalin’s death were mostly too cautious to show it in public.  Any sign of pleasure had to be concealed.  Zinaida Belikova, a factory worker in Krasnodar, recalls that many of the town’s intelligentsia, doctors, whisperers1teachers, even Party officials, found it hard to hide their excitement when Stalin died.  ‘The mourning ceremonies in Krasnodar were more like a holiday.  They put on a mournful face, but there was a sparkle in their eyes…

-The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, Orlando Figes (Picador, $20)

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Aw, Bonehead

Posted in Books, Excerpts with tags on 20 November, 2008 by S&Co.

[p. 395]:

I asked him how he got the nickname Foot.

“The first day I went into the coal mine, a guy looked down and said,  ‘Damn, how big are your feet?’ I said, ‘Fifteen.’ He said, ‘You’re a big-footed son of a bitch.’ And that was it. One guy had a huge head, so of course we called him Pumpkin. One guy had a big red birthmark on his face, so of course we called him Spot. They don’t cut you any slack. They’ll get right on you. A coal miner will get right on you.”

I shined my light on his boots and he wagged them, like puppets.

It was tough getting used to identifying people, in the darkness, just as feet, shoulders, chin, teeth. As for Foot, he was a truck of a man, forty-nine years old, a wide load in both girth and spirit. He had a messy mop of gray hair and a rugged, intelligent face that often wore one expression: “You gotta be kidding me.” He was proud of a lot of what he’d done with his life — his three kids, his stint as a county commissioner, his coal-mining expertise — but his heart, he said, belonged to his fifty-two head of beef cattle: Pork Chop, Frick and Frack, and, aw, Bonehead, with the amazing white eyelashes.

– Jeanne Marie Laskas, “Underworld,” originally published in GQ
from The Best American Magazine Writing 2008

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This I Believe II

Posted in Books, Excerpts with tags , on 20 November, 2008 by Jenna

From the popular little NPR program, This I Believe, comes a second edition of collected essays, now IN STOCK.

This I Believe II: More Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women, (Henry Holt, $23)

The following is an excerpt from the essay “Doing Things My Own Way” by Bela Fleck–who, it should be noted, has been spotted shopping at Shakespeare & Co.  believe-3

When I perform with my own group, my map of the banjo is all I need.  But when I move into more conventional jazz or classical situations, I don’t always have the tools to fit in.  I can barely read music.  I don’t thoroughly understand the conventions of each tradition and I’m not sure how to voice jazz chords–which notes to leave out, how the scales work, all the rhythmic concepts.

I heard that when George Gershwin wanted to study harmony from Ravel, he was advised against it.  Ravel felt that Gershwin would obliterate the very thing that made him special by learning conventional approaches to rhythm and harmony.  I’d like to think that the same is true for me, but I’m not convinced.  I worry that my approach might not be built on a strong enough musical foundation.

It’s this fear that allows me no rest in my musical pursuits.  When I’m at work–whether it is writing, practicing, or editing and mixing CDs–I obsess.  To say that I am picky is an understatement.  Delegating is pretty much impossible; I can be downright controlling.  I have to get everything just right.  Then, one day, the intensity disappears.  This usually  means the project is done…

…I believe in living with and giving in to my obsessive side when it serves the music.

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Conversation Was Impossible

Posted in Books, Excerpts with tags on 11 November, 2008 by S&Co.

michaels190From “Making Changes,” by Leonard Michaels:

The hall was clogged with bodies; none of them hers, but who could be sure? The light was bad, there was too much noise, too much movement. Too many people had been invited. More kept arriving. I liked it, but it was hard to get from one room to another. Conversation was impossible. People had to lean close and shriek. It killed the effect of wit, looking into nostrils, shrieking, “What? What?” But it was a New York scene. I liked it. Except she was missing; virtually torn out of my hands. Cecily. I would have asked people if they had seen her, but I was ashamed to admit I had lost her. I was afraid she was someone’s date or inextricably into something. I was afraid she was copulating. She had been dressed, but it was a New York scene. Minutes had passed. I shoved through the hall — hot, dark, squealing with bodies — and looked for her. I shoved into the kitchen and saw just one couple, a lady in a brown tweed suit talking to a short dapper man in spats. She was stout, fiftyish, had fierce eyes. Flat, black as nailheads. Her voice flew around like pots and pans. The man glanced at me, then down as if embarrassed. The lady ignored me. I ignored her and busied around the wet, sloppy counter looking for an unused glass and a bottle of something, as if I wanted a drink. The lady was saying, slam, clang:

“Sexual enlightenment, the keystone of modernity, I dare say, can hardly be considered an atavistic intellectual debauch, Cosmo.”

– The Collected Stories (FSG; $15) IN STOCK

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P. 96

Posted in Books, Excerpts with tags , , on 9 November, 2008 by S&Co.

And suddenly there it is, on page 96 of Laurie Colwin’s Another Marvelous Thing (1986), the only instance I can find — have ever found — in literature of the use of the word unflapped.

Billy went about her business outwardly unflapped.

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Eat, Memory

Posted in Books, Excerpts with tags , on 6 November, 2008 by Jenna

memory“Gravy is the simplest, tastiest, most memory-laden dish I know how to make: a little flour, salt and pepper, crispy bits of whatever meat anchored the meal, a couple of cups of water or milk and slow stirring to break up lumps.  It smells of home, the door locked against the night and a stillness made safe by the sound of a spoon going round in a pan.  It is anticipation, the last thing prepared before the meal comes to the table, the bowl in Mama’s hand closing the day out peacefully, no matter what came before.”

-from Dorothy Allison’s “Crossing to Safety,” in Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table, edited by Amanda Hesser, IN STOCK

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Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

Posted in Books, Excerpts with tags on 2 November, 2008 by S&Co.

Lowell always seems to be stuffing her newest poem into his billfold, so he can take it out later like a hundred-dollar bill.

– William Logan, reviewing Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell in The New York Times Book Review

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Richard Yates

Posted in Books, Excerpts, News with tags on 1 November, 2008 by S&Co.

Two Richard Yates novels, Disturbing the Peace (1975) and Cold Spring Harbor (1986), have been reissued in paperback.

From Disturbing the Peace:

Everything began to go wrong for Janice Wilder in the summer of 1960. And the worst part, she said afterwards, the awful part, was that it seemed to happen without warning.

She was thirty-four and the mother of a ten-year-old son. The fading of her youth didn’t bother her — it hadn’t been a very carefree or adventurous youth anyway — and if her marriage was more of an arrangement than a romance, that was all right too. Nobody’s life was perfect. She enjoyed the orderly rotation of her days; she enjoyed books, of which she owned a great many; and she enjoyed her high, bright apartment with its view of midtown Manhattan towers. It was neither a rich nor an elegant apartment, but it was comfortable — and “comfortable” was one of Janice Wilder’s favorite words. She was fond of the word “civilized,” too, and of “reasonable” and “adustment” and “relationship.” Hardly anything upset or frightened her: the only things that did — sometimes to the point of making her blood run cold — were things she didn’t understand.

“I don’t understand,” she said to her husband on the telephone. “What do you mean you ‘can’t’ come home?” And she glanced uneasily at their boy, who sat on the carpet eating an apple and absorbed in the CBS Evening News.

Disturbing the Peace (Delta; $15) IN STOCK.

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Payback

Posted in Books, Excerpts with tags , on 30 October, 2008 by Jenna

I am not ashamed to admit that a new book on the “non-fiction side” of the store–Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth–caught my eye the other day, simply on account of the author: Margaret Atwood is hands-down one of the finest living writers of the English language today.  After opening the book and discovering how culturally relevant it is, I felt it merited at least a brief blog posting.

How is it that just as when this global financial fiasco has just begun, Atwood happens, by coincidence, to have a book on the general topic, fresh off the press?  Only goes to show, in my opinion, that there’s no doubt something super-human about this woman, as I have often suspected.  In the author’s own words, Payback is a book about “debt as a human construct–thus an imaginative construct–and how this construct mirrors and magnifies both voracious human desire and ferocious human fear,” drawing from history, religion, literature, and current affairs.  If you’re at all interested in the financial situation of the world right now, you need to take a look at this book.  (It is, appropriately, a paperback: less likely to plunge you into the very situation that the book’s all about.)

“Debt is the new fat,” someone said recently.  Which led me to reflect that, not so long ago, fat was the new cigarette-smoking, and before that, cigarette-smoking was the new alcohol-drinking, and before that, alcohol-drinking was the new whoremongering.  And whoremongering is the new debt; and so we go in circles.  What all these things have in common is that at one time or another each has been considered the very worst sin of all but has then gone through a period of being thought, if not totally harmless, at least fashionable.  I left out hallucinogenic drugs, though they fit in there too.

– Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, by Margaret Atwood (Anansi, $15.95), IN STOCK

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The Hypocrisy of Disco

Posted in Books, Excerpts, Writing with tags , on 30 October, 2008 by S&Co.

This book, a memoir, by an Austin writer named Clane Hayward, is almost certainly good, possibly great, perhaps even brilliant. I’m not sure yet because I have not read enough of it to say for sure. But it has definitely, belatedly, one year after publication, caught my attention:

[p. 13] Andrew and Matt and Melena and their little brother, Jude, and their mom, Susan, they live in a house near us, near me and Haud and our mom and our little sister, Ki. We live near the river in a vacation cabin even though we’re not on vacation. Because it’s cheaper, our mom says, even if it is a little chilly and dark. Scott and Cynthia live with their mom across town. We haven’t lived here that long, we never live anywhere long, we move all the time. We come and go with no explaining, and all the people I know come and go with no explaining either. Maybe the only thing I can explain for sure is my name. When people ask how we got our funny names, and they always do, I say, with extra patience, Our dad is Claude and our mother is H’lane and it goes Haud and Claude and Clane and H’lane, get it? Then I say I also have a sister named Ki and a brother named Random, and they’ll ask, Key like in lock and key? and I say no. Ki means life force, it’s Japanese. Random like, by chance? No, duh, Random like Random House.

– Clane Hayward

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