Featured Author: Richard Price
Why does Richard Price deserve to be a featured author?
1) He doesn’t have a website. Or if he has one, Google can’t find it, and that in itself is worth a gold star.
2) His writing, in whatever medium, is usually crime-related, but always looks around at social conditions and inward at twists in human nature.
3) He has written some of the scripts for the HBO program (if the library didn’t have a policy against blinking lights on our website, I would have inserted blinking lights here):
| The Wire |
The Wire was picked as a favorite by both Barack Obama and John McCain. Clearly, all Americans should watch this series.
4) Price has written some movie scripts. The filmmakers have mangled some of his work, and the critics don’t always like these films. But I tend to like them. An example is Sea of Love.
5) He has written some wonderful novels, among them his 2008 title, Lush Life.
6) His characters are wonderfully drawn, and his dialogue is legendary. There is some disagreement, actually, as to whether he “writes the language we hear and speak better than any novelist around” (Russell Banks, on the Lush Life dust jacket) or whether “Actual speech tends to be dribblingly repetitive, and relatively nonfigurative, nonpictorial. Price, by contrast, awards his characters great figurative powers, endows them with an ability to take everyone’s clichés and customize them into something gleaming and fresh.” (James Wood, in The New Yorker) I don’t know which of these is true, and I don’t care. Okay, I guess I’d go with Wood.
7) Price’s writing has great momentum. My intention was to read only a little bit of Lush Life, and pretend on this blog to be an expert on the book. Then I could get back to other things that I was trying to read. But I can’t put the novel down. Some cops are working a night shift in the prologue, and then in the first chapter the Virgin Mary appears in the condensation pattern on the freezer door of a mini-mart, causing an enormous line to form, and then a couple of drugged-up guys plan a mugging, and then someone gets shot and I can’t stop reading.
Since Google & I can’t find a Price website, you’ll have to make do with an interesting interview. It’s a two-parter. There’s a 2004 interview, and at the end of that you can click forward to 2008.
And if you don’t have time for the interview, here’s a little of what Price has to say about Lush Life:
This book is about a homicide on the Lower East Side. The Lower East Side at this point is six worlds, and the only thing anybody knows about is the historical, Yiddish boomtown and the new bohemian playground. The fact of the matter is, there are heavy housing projects, a lot of tenements, and the realtors haven’t gotten to a lot of the tenements yet. There’s still Hispanic, Dominican. There is a huge Chinese immigrant population, probably the second biggest population down there. Then you have the new bohemians down there who are sort of playing.
Everybody thinks the Lower East Side is this yuppy-buppy-schmuppy playground, and it is to some extent, and the prices have gone through the roof, but it’s also black and Dominican and Chinese and Orthodox Jewish. And everybody’s talking about this rehabilitation like it’s this done deal.
If you’re into momentum, and into being moved, try Lush Life, or another Price novel.
IMCPL Book Discussions through December
Jezebel by Jacquelyn Thomas will be discussed at Flanner House Library on November 10th at 6:30 p.m.
Known for “African American Christian romance that will surprise readers” Jacquelin Thomas now re-imagines the Biblical story of Jezebel as a compelling modern drama. It follows the exploits of manipulative Georgia beauty Jessie Belle who weds a trusting and prosperous pastor, Traynor Devereaux, as a ticket out of town. Traynor doesn’t realize that his cunning new bride isn’t just dreaming of a new life, but running from an old one-and an unsalvageable reputation that could destroy both their futures.–Publisher’s Description
Rick Bragg’s The Prince of Frogtown will be discussed at the Irvington Library on November 13th at 1:30 p.m. 
In his first two family memoirs,Rick Bragg . . . ignored his late father, who left the family when Bragg was six, except as the person who had made his mother poor and miserable. He dismissed his father as “a mean drunk and a tragic figure.” But at the age of 40, Bragg finds himself in love and married to a woman with a 10-year-old son, who thinks he “hung the moon.” For him to be a father, he needs to learn who that shadowy figure really was. For the first time he asks his father’s family about the past, from the Alabama mountains where his father’s people were born to the mill town where they married, drank, and fought. Brilliantly written and deeply moving, this is one of the great American memoirs, the equal of McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes.–Steve Bridge, Irvington Library
Zane Grey’s western classic Riders of the Purple Sage will be discussed at the East 38th Street Library on Monday, November 17th, at 6:00 p.m. 
Told by a master storyteller who, according to critic Russell Nye, “combined adventure, action, violence, crisis, conflict, sentimentalism, and sex in an extremely shrewd mixture,” “Riders of the Purple Sage” is a classic of the Western genre. It is the story of Lassiter, a gunslinging avenger in black, who shows up in a remote Utah town just in time to save the young and beautiful rancher Jane Withersteen from having to marry a Mormon elder against her will. Lassiter is on his own quest . . . –powells.com
At 10:15 a.m. on November 18th, Fortune’s Rocks by Anita Shreve will be discussed at the Lawrence Library
Fifteen year-old Olympia Biddleford is destined to live a life of privilege and prestige in Boston society. Everything changed in 1899. While staying her parents’ summer home on the New Hampshire coast, Olympia falls in love. Unfortunately, the man of her dreams is the married friend of her father. Dr. John Haskell loves Olympia in return and the two begin a secret affair. Olympia is wise beyond her years, but her maturity isn’t enough to prepare for the repercussions of her actions. The great scandal that rocks the Biddleford family is the subject of Fortune’s Rocks.–Amy Coffin, writing at The BookHaven.net.
Gatsby’s Girl by Caroline Preston will be discussed at the Southport Library on November 24th at 7:00 p.m.
In 1916, pretty 15-year-old Ginevra Perry is the spectacularly self-absorbed daughter of wealthy Lake Forest, IL, parents. After a series of scandalous romances that culminate in a shocking broken engagement to some hapless soul, she meets Princeton sophomore F. Scott Fitzgerald. They begin an intense, mostly epistolary romance that, for Ginevra, flames out by summer. Alas, Fitzgerald, already in the throes of messy public alcoholism, never quite recovers from this first all-consuming love. He embarks on a decades-long quest to immortalize Ginevra over and over again . . . Library Journal
Kurt Vonnegut’s collection of stories Welcome to the Monkey House will be discussed by the Pike Book Club at 6:30 p.m. on November 25th.
Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, what these superb stories share is Vonnegut’s audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.–Publisher’s Comment
The Known World, a novel by Edward P. Jones, will be discussed by the First Monday Book Club at the Wayne Library at 7:00 p.m. on Monday, December 1st.
Jones explores an oft-neglected chapter of American history, the world of blacks who owned blacks in the antebellum South. His fictional examination of this unusual phenomenon starts with the dying 31-year-old Henry Townsend, a former slave-now master of 33 slaves of his own and more than 50 acres of land . . . As a slave in his youth, Henry makes himself indispensable to his master, William Robbins. Even after Henry’s parents purchase the family’s freedom, Henry retains his allegiance to Robbins, who patronizes him when he sets up shop as a shoemaker and helps him buy his first slaves and his plantation. Jones’s thorough knowledge of the legal and social intricacies of slaveholding allows him to paint a complex, often startling picture of life in the region.–Publisher’s Weekly
At 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday, December 2nd, Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman, by Nuala O’Faolain, will be discussed at Central Library.
Nuala O’Faolain is the rare Irish female writer who’s man enough to pour out in public her own story of family misery and the demon drink. Breaking ranks with her sister Irish authors and their taste for delicate literary memoirs, she churned out the blisteringly candid ”Are You Somebody: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman” and earned entry into an exclusive club: the official (and mostly male) chroniclers of Irish pain and rebirth, from James Joyce to Frank McCourt.–Deborah Mason, The New York Times
Alan Alda’s Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself will be discussed at the Warren Library on Thursday, December 4th at 10:30 a.m.
After actor Alda (Never Have Your Dog Stuffed) recovered from a nearly fatal intestinal obstruction, he decided to live as if he’d been given a second life. To make his new life as meaningful as possible, he wanted to remember those rare moments when a special stillness had come over him, the kind that hits you when you hear something that goes to the core of who you think you are. These were moments when he’d had some understanding about the meaning of his life, his reason for living—the central questions that Alda grapples with, as he looks back over his life.–Publisher’s Weekly
In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash will be discussed at the East 38th Street Library on Monday, December 8th at 6:00 p.m.
Before Garrison Keillor and Spalding Gray there was Jean Shepherd: a master monologist and writer who spun the materials of his all-American childhood into immensely resonant–and utterly hilarious–works of comic art. In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash represents one of the peaks of his achievement, a compound of irony, affection, and perfect detail that speaks across generations . . . Shepherd’s wildly witty reunion with his Indiana hometown disproves the adage “You can never go back.” –Random House/Doubleday website
Secrets of a Sinner by Yolonda Tonette Sanders will be discussed at the Flanner House Library on Monday December 8th at 6:30 p.m.
Natalie Coleman has always done whatever she needed to do to survive-even stealing another woman’s husband or trading her favors for money. But now Natalie finally feels her life getting back on track. However when Natalie is rejected by the man she loves, she returns to the home she ran from years ago. There, with her grandmother’s help, she confronts the painful events of her past, finding comfort in the faith of those around her. As old wounds heal, Natalie realizes God has led her home to show her that with love and prayer, every sinner can be saved, every life redeemed.–Publisher’s Description
Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Magnificent Ambersons will be discussed at the Irvington Library on Thursday, December 11th at 1:30 p.m.
Critic Van Wyck Brooks said that the Magnificent Ambersons is perhaps Tarkington’s best novel. It is a typical story of an American family and town—the great family that locally ruled the roost and vanished virtually in a day as the town spread and darkened into a city.
The novel helped to inspire Tom Torluemke’s new mural in the Indianapolis Special Collections Room at Central Library.
Bridge of Sighs, a novel by Richard Russo, will be discussed at the Fountain Square Library on Thursday, December 11th at 1:30 p.m.
With the same humor and pathos that turned Empire Falls and Straight Man into best sellers, Russo’s latest tale unravels the tangled skein of love, regret, hope, and longing that wraps itself around friends and family in a small upstate New York town. Russo’s multigenerational tale follows the fortunes of two families, especially the careers of the respective sons . . . a winning story of the strange ways that parents and children, lovers and friends connect and thrive.–Library Journal
The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeanette Walls will be discussed at the Southport Library on Monday December 15th, at 7:00 p.m.
Walls’s parents—just two of the unforgettable characters in this excellent, unusual book—were a matched pair of eccentrics, and raising four children didn’t conventionalize either of them . . . With a fantastic storytelling knack, Walls describes her artist mom’s great gift for rationalizing. Apartment walls so thin they heard all their neighbors? What a bonus—they’d “pick up a little Spanish without even studying.” . . . While Walls’s father’s version of Christmas presents—walking each child into the Arizona desert at night and letting each one claim a star—was delightful, he wasn’t so dear when he stole the kids’ hard-earned savings to go on a bender.–Publisher’s Weekly
At the Lawrence Library on Tuesday, Demember 16th at 10:15 a.m., there will be a discussion of Gregg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations, One School at a Time.
In 1993, Greg Mortenson became very ill when climbing Mt. K2, the world’s second tallest mountain, in the Himalayas. As he recovered for seven weeks in the small Pakistani village of Korphe, he was so touched by their kindness . . . he vowed to return to build their first school. This led to the founding of the Central Asia Institute, which has built 55 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mortenson tells . . . everything he went through to achieve his goal of bringing education to a place rampant with Anti-Americanism.–abcnews.go.com
Readings with Indiana Poet Laureate Norbert Krapf
During November, Indiana’s Poet Laureate Norbert Krapf will be giving poetry readings at three different IMCPL agencies.
Central Library: Saturday, November 15th, 2:00 p.m.
Irvington Branch: Monday, November 17th, 6:30 p.m.
Glendale Branch: Sunday, November 23, 2:00 p.m.
Click on the Start button to the right, and watch Krapf be interviewed by IMCPL’s Jon Barnes.
The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood
Somewhere in Southern Indiana: Poems of Midwestern Origins
Looking for God’s Country: Poems
Spirit & Place: Powered by Poetry
The Spirit & Place festival will be with us in Indianapolis from November 1st through the 16th; and some programs will be presented at Central Library.
Powered by Poetry–Whirl of the Divine
Clowes Auditorium, Central Library
Thursday, November 6 7:00 p.m.
Sunday, November 9 2:00 p.m.
This program will feature readings from the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Czeslaw Milosz and others. Norbert Krapf will be one of the presenters. The following booklist includes these authors and others who might set you whirling.
Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation, by William H. Gass is Gass’s translation of a number of Rilke’s poems, including the Duino Elegies. There is commentary on the poet’s life and work, and Gass compares his own efforts with translations that have preceded his. Stephen Mitchell and A. Poulin, Jr. come out of it pretty well.
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell
Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, translated by A. Poulin, Jr.
I was scanning the shelves for whirling poetry and The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, by Marie Howe caught my eye, because of Howe’s title and because of her daughter’s artwork on the cover. The poems are incredible. The immediacy and mordant humor of these poems, their refusal to deny the unbidden presence of the sacred in a life, maybe especially in a secular life–all of this and a pitch-perfect ear make these poems necessary, beautiful.–Patricia Hampl
Selected Poems, 1931-2004 by Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz
In addition to a collection of Milosz’s poems, you might be interested in his anthology, A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry.
Speaking of anthologies, I have a copy of The Rattle Bag, a collection edited by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, on the shelf at home. Every once in a while I take it down and read something. Not until I looked at our catalog record, yesterday, did I realize that it was geared toward children. There are two possibilities here: library catalogs all over the country are mistaken about this or, much more likely, I’ve slipped into a new childhood without knowing.
I believe that New Poems (1968-1970), by Pablo Neruda is out of print. So this yellowed copy is all we can provide. But I’m recommending it because I’m on a salvational mission. The translator, Ben Belitt, died in 2003; and he’d been condemned to hell decades earlier by fellow poet & translator Clayton Eshleman, who thought that Belitt had made Neruda’s poems seem too European. I’m trying to save Belitt in part because I don’t think that poets, whatever their feelings, should go around damning each other, even metaphorically; and in part because I bought a copy thirty years ago and am still grateful. Belitt’s versions took me somewhere, and it didn’t feel like Europe.
If you don’t want to read a yellowed book, the library has lots of other Neruda titles to check out. And yes, in his introduction to New Poems, Belitt is pretty rough on Robert Bly; so I guess what goes around comes around.
Somewhere in Southern Indiana: Poems of Midwestern Origins, by Norbert Krapf
Norbert Krapf, Indiana’s Poet Laureate, will be the subject of another blog in the near future, anticipating some other readings that he’ll be giving. So I’ll just say in passing that his poems are wonderful.
Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania, edited by Jerome Rothenberg. I was dining with family a few years ago, and a sister suggested that we all name some books that had changed us–changed the way we saw things. This collection of “primitive” poetries was one of my picks.
You can’t request it at the moment, because the only copy in our catalog belongs to the Indianapolis Museum of Art. But IMCPL cardholders can request an Interlibrary Loan from another library system. And when editor Rothenberg appeared at the Butler Visiting Writers Series a couple of years ago, his wife proudly told me that Technicians of the Sacred hadn’t been out of print since it was first published in 1968. So maybe IMCPL can buy a new copy.
Zen Poems of China & Japan: The Crane’s Bill, translated by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto
I haven’t quoted any poems, yet, but these Zen poems are all quite brief, so I’ll quote one and a half enlightenment poems. The authors are both Chinese. Choro (the first author) lived in the eleventh century, and Tosu in the twelfth.
With one foot on the brick step,
The All burst in my head.
I had a good laugh by
The box tree, moon in the bluest sky.
Forget everything–everything!
Now from the path the night bell
Tinkling . . .
Hope to see you on the 6th or the 9th.
A related program for young people, Powered by Poetry–One Wild and Precious Life will be presented in the Learning Curve Theater at Central.
Saturday, November 8 2:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m.
Sunday, November 9 3:30 p.m.
Saturday, November 15 1:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m.
Sunday, November 16 3:00 p.m.
Booth Tarkington (and the New Mural) in the Indianapolis Room
We’re excited about Tom Torluemke’s mural–newly installed in the Indianapolis Special Collections Room at Central Library–which was inspired in part by Booth Tarkington’s novel, The Magnificent Ambersons.
Winner of two of the first Pulitzer prizes for literature (The Magnificent Ambersons in 1919, and Alice Adams in 1922), Tarkington was best known for his stories describing middle-class life in the American Midwest. A prolific writer, he produced 171 stories, 9 novellas, 21 novels, and 19 plays besides a number of movie scenarios, illustrations, and radio dramas. Perhaps his most surprising achievement was a short term in the Indiana House of Representatives (1902-03).
His works in the Indianapolis Special Collections Room number over 120 titles, about half of them autographed. The collection also holds eleven boxes of both handwritten and typed pages relating to the creation of Tarkington’s novel Kate Fennigate. –Lois Laube, Central Library
Should the Library Be Promoting This Book? (Woof!)
David Wroblewski’s novel The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is already a bestseller, and an Oprah book to boot; so although we’re glad to make it available to you, we needn’t knock ourselves out trying to push it.
What’s my excuse for this blog posting? The blame falls entirely on Sue Kennedy, Manager of the Irvington Branch. A year ago June, she created a wonderful booklist about dogs. The nonfiction picks were all by Sue, and they included Dog Years, a memoir by poet Mark Doty.
That book tells the stories of Doty’s two dogs, Arden and Beau. It’s funny and moving and uncompromising in its regard for the bonds between humans and canines.
But the plain truth is that no one should have to defend what he loves. If I decide to become one of those dotty old people who live alone with six beagles, who on earth is harmed by the extremity of my affections? There is little enough devotion in the world that we should be glad for it in whatever form it appears, and never mock it, or underestimate its depths.
Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.
The book turned me into a Doty fan. So when I saw his rave on Edgar’s dust jacket–
| This remarkable hybrid seems like an impossibility: an American Hamlet, both ghost story and melodrama, a coming of age tale, a hymn to the land–and central to it all, some of the best writing about the inner lives of dogs anywhere . . . |
–I was hooked. Or to put it in canine terms, I was ready for the hunt, running and panting. And like a good, sociable dog I want company.
Edgar is indeed a Hamlet variation. Instead of a Danish prince who talks and talks, you have a kid in Wisconsin who was born mute. And the kid’s family raises dogs, so that’s another difference. But just as in Hamlet, there are gripping family involvements, and there’s a death and the suspicion of murder. If you’ve ever loved a dog–or actually if you’ve ever seen a dog–and are one of the fourteen people in Marion County who haven’t requested this book, join the pack.
But if you’ve read Edgar, or if you’re waiting for your copy to come to your branch, have another look at Sue Kennedy’s list.
And I’ll add one more title with dog-consciousness content: The Green Knight, by Iris Murdoch. There are family problems and at least one sudden death in this one, too; and on the first page we’re introduced to Anax, “a distinguished and unusual collie with blue eyes,” whose point of view the reader is sometimes allowed to share.
Financial Crisis Booklist
This list of recent books about our nation’s current financial crisis was assembled by Beth Baker Schoch, who works in the library’s Selection area. She’s a brave soul. A couple of these sound like Robert Ludlum titles, and I wish they all were.
The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means, by George Soros
Chain of Blame: How Wall Street Caused the Mortgage and Credit Crisis, by Paul Muolo
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein
I.O.U.S.A.: The Country That Can’t Save a Dime Is Out to Save the World, by Addison Wiggins
Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity, by Michael Lewis
Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, by Charles Poor Kindleberger
What is Teen Read Week, Anyway?
From October 12 - 18th, we’re promoting Teen Read Week on our TeenScene blog; but that blog for the time being is possessed by vampires. If you are curious about this program, but value your blood, read on.
Since 1998, there has been a Teen Read Week every year. It’s an initiative of the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA). The theme changes, and in 2008 teenagers all over America are reading ”Books with a Bite.”
If you activate the video above, you can watch an interview with Dawn Savage, a librarian at the Lawrence Branch. Dawn talks with Communication Specialist Jon Barnes about how IMCPL has always offered a range of services to children and adults, but is currently making a unified effort to provide more services for teens.
In short: If you’re attracted to the idea of encouraging teens to read, then feel good about Teen Read Week.
IUPUI´s Reading Series Begins October 23rd
IUPUI kicks off its 2008-2009 Rufus & Louise Reiberg Reading Series on Oct. 23 with a reading by novelist Porter Shreve, director of the M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Purdue, reading from his newly published novel When the White House Was Ours, set in an experimental school in Washington, D.C., on the eve of the Carter administration.
All readings are held at 7:30 in the Lilly Auditorium (lower level) of University Library, 755 W. Michigan St., except for the Frank X. Walker reading in the spring, which will be held at the Julia M. Carson Government Center, 300 E. Fall Creek Pkwy., at 7 p.m.
For more information, contact Terry Kirts at 274-8929 or tkirts@iupui.edu. Or visit http://liberalarts.iupui.edu.
Porter Shreve, October 23, 2008
International Women’s Day, March 5, 2009
Jesse Lee Kercheval, March 26, 2009
Frank X. Walker, April 23, 2009
The Great Vegetable Cut-Up
‘Tis the season for paring. Julie Able at Central Library has prepared a list that includes cookbooks as well as carving guides, and covers pumpkins, gourds and squash. Some of the cover art really jumps out at you. Out of friendliness, Julie seems to have thrown in a biography of my Uncle Lou. I didn’t know he was famous, outside the family.
Play with Your Pumpkins, by Joost Elffers
A Harvest of Pumpkins and Squash, by Lou Seibert Pappas
Compleat Squash: A Passionate Grower’s Guide to Pumpkins, Squash and Gourds, by Amy Goldman
Beyond the Basics: Gourd Art, by David Macfarlane
Food Play: A Collection of Pictures, by Saxton Freymann
Pumpkin Chic: Decorating with Pumpkins and Gourds, by Mary Caldwell
Extreme Pumpkins II: Take Back Halloween and Freak Out a Few More Neighbors, by Tom Nardone
Gourds: Southwest Gourd Techniques & Projects from Simple to Sophisticated, by Bonnie Gibson
Classic Zucchini Cookbook: 225 Recipes for All Kinds of Squash, by Nacy C. Ralston
