text:
Home Land: A Novel
By Sam Lipsyte
We Are All Cold Callers Now: Sam Lipsyte's Savagely Satirical Fiction
Gerald Howard - 1.7.2019 | 2
"The consolation of acute bitterness is the biting retort."—Hark
1."Is it too soon?" It's one of those recurring cultural questions that has lately been revived in the context of the #MeToo movement, regarding the matter of when, if ever, such high-profile sexual abusers as Charlie Rose, Louis C.K., Mario Batali, Garrison Keillor, and Kevin Spacey might make their way back into the public sphere, or at least a paying job. Alpha males, however disgraced, get twitchy on the sidelines, and so, as James Wolcott put it in his Vanity Fair column on "The Return of the Scuzzies, "we hear the # MeToo Men tap on the microphone as they seek to reintroduce themselves."
For a male fiction writer, a foray into this massively trip-wired territory might seem about as inviting as a several-mile stroll atop a third rail. Yet there, in the pages of the Nov. 19, 2018, issue of The New Yorker, was the fearless edgemeister Sam Lipsyte with "Show Recent Some Love," surely the first male work of fiction to address, in no way obliquely, the issues raised by the movement. To do this in what we call "the current climate" was an act of perhaps foolhardy courage; to have pulled it off with as artful and well judged mixture of sensitivity and sharpness as Lipsyte did, is a high-wire achievement of no small dimension.
The story succeeds in "going there"
without inducing moral nausea because the ogre of the piece, the abusive and
predatory Mike Maltby, CEO of Mike Maltby Media Solutions (now renamed Haven
Media) is unambiguously presented as one of "history's ceaseless cavalcade of
dickheads." Left to navigate the treacherous cross-currents of Maltby's ignominious
departure is Isaac, his one-time stepson, whom Maltby rescued from a life of
video gaming and Jagermeister shots by giving him a job as a copywriter. Not
unreasonably he fears for his position now, given the toxicity of his
association with Maltby; underneath Isaac's vocal disgust he also experiences
involuntary and unnerving spasms of sympathy, as confused and anxious humans
In Lipsyte's fiction it is the
wives who see right through the husbands, and Isaac gets pinned to the specimen
board of contemporary male fecklessness by his wife with this observation:
"Standing next to a villain and hoping people will notice the difference is not
the same as being a hero, Isaac." Isaac stands in here for the legions of men trapped
in the queasy twilight zone between innocence and complicity. "And don't be
certain they won't come for you one of these days," she adds with brutal
directness.
Since his 1999 debut story collection Venus Drive Sam Lipsyte has published four novels and two more collections that have established him as the premier anatomist of contemporary male malaise and sexual confusion. A skilled and consistently hilarious satirist with tummler-tight timing, he explores with merciless and lacerating precision the demoralized state of the urban man-boy and alterna-dad, marinated in gender guilt, trapped in the low-paying and uncertain jobs that are the portion these days of liberal arts majors, barely tolerated or peevishly despised by his spouse and children. Call him Lipsyte Man—a baffled and wounded specimen.
2.A North Jersey native and high school shot putter and teen literary phenom ("a little show pony writer", in his words), Sam Lipsyte amusingly was named as a Presidential Scholar of the Arts by none other than Ronald Reagan; the award was given to him by the once famed virtuecrat William Bennett. A no doubt formative lesson in the uses of cognitive dissonance. He attended Brown in the late '80s in its peak years as a powerhouse in semiotics, cultural studies, and advanced fiction, studying with such luminaries as Robert Coover and graduating in the same cohort as Rick Moody and Jeffrey Eugenides. Dispirited by the hegemony of literary theory over practice, however, he drifted into music for a time when he came back to New York, fronting a noise rock band called Dung Beetle and dutifully picking up the bad habits of dissipation the position called for.
Sam's path back to literature took him through Gordon Lish's fabled and/or notorious writing workshop, where the shameful and unsayable were quarried for the rawest of raw material. Lish was also fanatical on matters of style, and perhaps Sam's chief takeaway from his time in Gordon's boot camp was that every word of every sentence had to count. "There is no getting to the good part. It all has to be the good part," he once approvingly quoted Lish.
Venus Drive, published in 2000 by the much-missed literary magazine and publisher Open City, strongly reflects that aesthetic. Its sentences display aphoristic economy and keenly calibrated rhythm, as in this specimen: "His eyes had the ebb of his liver in them and he bore the air of a man who looks right at you and only sees the last of himself." Several of the stories draw on the druggy discontinuities, moral squalor and grim, bone-in-your-throat humor of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. One character does Keith Richards considerably better by shooting up his mother's cremains. (What stage of grief is that anyway?) Another informs us with addled precision that "I wasn't nodding, I was passing out." William Burroughs's algebra of need was clearly a familiar equation to the author.
Other stories engage with a broader consensus reality, specifically the emerging service economy that appears to be our portion until the robot overlords dispose of us. In "Probe to the Negative"—the very title can be taken as an ars poetica—a failed artist with dependency issues works as a phone marketer under the faux-helpful supervision of Frank the Fink.
"Maybe Frank was a decent guy once, but he's management now … the higher you move up, the more of a tragedy you are," the narrator mordantly observes. But as he also says, "We're all cold callers now," an epitaph that has ominous ring of truth.
"My Life, for Promotional Use Only"
opens with a perfect snapshot of the emerging dot-com economy:
The building where I work used to be a bank. Now it's lots of little start-ups, private suites, outlaw architects, renegade CPA's, club kids with three-picture deals. It's very arty in the elevators. Everybody's shaved and pierced in dainty places. They are lords of tiny telephones, keepers of dogs on battery-operated ropes.
The basis of
effective satire is simply close, cruel observation.
I heard Sam Lipsyte read one of his stories at an Open City event, a literary event for me of major proportions. So I made my predatory desires known and as a result became the editor of his first novel, The Subject Steve. The shock of recognition I experienced upon first reading it was electrifying; somehow this young writer managed to channel the irreverent and unruly reading of my formative years of the '60s and had made that sensibility his own. It was the first of many times he has caused me to use my inhaler for an episode of laughter-induced asthma.
Black humor had emerged in the late '50s as a literary mode and broader cultural style as a release valve for the stifling seriousness and repression of the decade and also an expression of paranoia and delayed trauma from the horrors of the late war and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Its strategies were the send-up, the put-on, the resigned shrug, the spasm of panic, the barely stifled scream, the bitter laugh, the taboo-busting saying of the Unsayable. It was born on whatever day the first lampshade joke was told. Its emergence was coterminous with and fueled by what Wallace Markfield, a now forgotten black humorist himself, called in 1965 "The Yiddishization of American Humor"—comedy that, drawing on the traditions of the Borscht Belt and the shetl, was" involuted, ironic, more parable than patter"—and infused with a distinctively Jewish fatalism.
The ur-black humorist was of course Joseph Heller and as I read The Subject Steve I could, I thought, detect his influence in every line. Begin with the book's premise: The book's narrator and antihero Steve is informed by two quack doctors that he is dying of a disease unquestionably fatal, yet with no discernible cause nor duration; they dub it Goldfarb-Blackstone Preparatory Extinction Syndrome. A terser name would of course be "Life." Lipsyte elaborates this illogically logical Catch-22 premise with caustic wit and a verbal energy that recalls Stanley Elkin at his most manic. Savor the spritzing pungency and tart wordplay of this passage:
The bad news was bad. I was dying of something nobody had every died of before. I was dying of something absolutely, fantastically new. Strangely enough I was in fine fettle. My heart was strong and my lungs were clean. My vitals were vital. … My levels were good. My counts were good. All my numbers said my number wasn't up.
Heller's brilliantly morose novel of white collar angst, Something Happened, is also a presiding influence on this and subsequent novels by Lipsyte. Steve quits his indeterminate cube-based job, stating in his exit interview: "My work, albeit inane, jibed with the greater inanities required of us to maintain the fictions of our industry." He fails to get much sympathy from either his divorced wife or disaffected daughter, and fleeing a media frenzy goes on an increasingly violent and saturnalian New Age odyssey in search of a cure or at least of modicum of certainty.
The Yiddish word for a hapless soul like Steve is "schlemiel," a character without much agency and dignity, buffeted by domestic or historical forces far beyond his resistance. The schlemiel is a stock figure of black humor fiction—Yossarian, Billy Pilgrim, Benny Profane, just for starters—and can be traced as far back in American literature as Lemuel Pitkin, the All-American designated victim who gets literally taken apart in Nathanael West's Depression-era demolishment of the Horatio Alger luck-and-pluck, A Cool Milllion. With The Subject Steve Lipsyte had revived a tradition of gleefully cynical disillusion that had largely faded from our increasingly earnest literary fiction.
Sadly, rather too much black humor of a distinctly unfunny sort attended the novel's publication, as it was literally published on Sept. 11, 2001. Irony of any sort, however well achieved, was not in favor that grievous season; the reviews were complimentary enough but thin on the ground, and sales suffered accordingly. As a result Sam's next novel, Home Land, was not offered on (with the keenest possible sadness) by me, and went on to garner an astounding 22 editorial rejections before being finally published as a Picador paperback original in 2004. That the novel quickly became the book to be reading on the L and M trains and with each passing year feels more and more like a masterpiece—to the point of having been selected by Christian Lorentzen in New York as one of the canonical works of fiction of the newish century, calling it "a Gen-X Notes from Underground—must prove something besides the need to pick your pub date carefully, but what? Perhaps that as the Iraq War and the broader war on terror were both clearly becoming clusterfucks of Vietnam-esque proportions, black humor Lipsyte-style acquired a new relevance and resonance that has only become stronger in the 15 disillusioning years since Home Land's publication.
Among other things it has one of the best premises for a comic novel ever devised. Lewis Miner, aka "Teabag," the member of the Eastern Valley High Class of '89 who most conclusively has not panned out, pens a series of uproariously bitter letters to his Alumni Newsletter, bringing his cohort of bankers and brokers and doctors and state senators and "double major[s] in philosophy and aquatic life management" up to date on "the soft cold facts of me." At first he "shudders" at the prospect of his successful classmates chortling at the particulars of his dismal tale, but quickly rethinks his phrasing: "Shudder, in fact, is not quite the word for the feeling. Feeling is not quite the word for the feeling. How's bathing at knifepoint in the phlegm of the dead? Is that a feeling?"
Miner rents a dismal apartment in his hometown, attends the occasional "aphorism slam," and ekes out a sort of living concocting fake anecdotes for a soft drink's newsletter Fizz (while spending even more time trawling the net for lovelies in legwarmers). His dispatches at once satirize the nauseating smugness of most alumni updates and recount in granular detail the hell on earth that was most people's experience of high school. The novel's climax takes place at a predictably disastrous tenth anniversary "Togethering" reunion—"one big horrible flashback," as these things tend to be.
Miner's spew of snark is a beautiful thing to experience and he represents Lipsyte Man in his first full incarnation. Imagine—work with me on this—if Rodney Dangerfield had somehow managed to attend Oberlin or Hampshire College, but emerged with his sense of humor intact. Miner and his successors also partake a bit of W.C. Fields's befuddled in-the-American-grain misanthropy and his sense of terminal male embattlement. These suckers are never going to get an even break.
Published in 2010 in the rump of the Great Recession, Sam's next novel The Ask shifts the scene to an academic setting: the development office of an institution its denizens call the Mediocre University at New York, whose art program affords the marginally talented the opportunity to "take hard drugs in suitable company, draw from life on their laptops, do radical things with video cameras and caulk." Milo Burke is a failed painter who works there none too effectively; as the book opens he has been cashiered for using an ill-advised epithet to an obnoxious coed whose 'father had paid for our shitty observatory upstate." Saddled with a wife and young child, his one route back to a paying job is if he can engineer a hefty give from his college friend Purdy, who 'had been one of the first to predict that people only really wanted to be alone and scratching themselves and smelling their fingers and firing off sequences of virulent gibberish at other deliquescing life forms"—in other words a pioneering internet tycoon. (One of the many updated and flourishing Milo Minderbinder-types who populate Sam's fiction.)
In Milo Burke, Sam Lipsyte perfected his portrayal of the sad sack contemporary male—a failure at work, a barely tolerated presence at home, overloaded with seemingly immortal student debt and untenable notions from his trendily overpriced liberal arts education. All that Lipsyte Man has to fight back with is his hefty reserved of disappointed spleen and a verbal facility that is a consistent delight to the reader if not to his interlocutors. The Ask is saturated with the feeling that the promise of American life has curdled and vanished, leaving us the task of managing our disappointments as best we can. Sam's acute sense of the small-bore sorrows and indignities of contemporary domestic life sometimes puts me in mind of Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet, his late, terminally disenchanted satire of two dimwitted clerks failing to escape their petit bourgeois fate. Wherever you go, there you are—unfortunately.
Eight years on, with his new novel Hark, Sam engages with the Age of Trump, aka the Big Con—a time when our disappointments are so acute that the need to believe on the part of a large percentage of the citizenry apparently cannot be extinguished by the preponderance of evidence or application of common sense.
The first thing to be said about the book is that Sam has never been sharper or funnier. It is my habit when reading a bound galley for review to dog ear pages where passages that made me laugh or that seem worth quoting strike me. My galley of Hark is so comprehensively dog eared that the whole thing resembles a dog's ear. The second thing to be said is that Hark presents Sam's most socially expansive portrait and diagnosis of American life, tinged with a slightly futuristic and dystopian vibe. It features the largest canvas and cast of characters of all his novels, and is the first of them to be written in the third person rather than the first, allowing access to a several competing and complimentary points of views and interior realities.
The Hark of the title is Hark Morner—his mother mistook the word in the Christmas carol for a name rather than an exhortation—who has accidentally drifted from stand-up into guru status when his routine on "Mental Archery" and its sharpening of "focus" proves congenial to corporate conventions and TED-type conclaves. Despite his lack of internal conviction he has attracted a circle of seekers who see in him whatever it is they seem to need. Chief among them is Kate Rumpler, an heiress and financial angel who is on her own private atonement tour, flying bone marrow from donors on flights around the country. Then there is the obligatory Lipsyte Man, Fraz Penig, an unemployed—actually never-employed—filmmaker who tutors the children of the one percent for a sort of living and produces video content for the Harkist website. He is married to Tovah Gold, a poet who earns the real paycheck in the family concocting bullshit-speak for something called the Blended Learning Enhancement Project"; both partners are "locked in a low-level quotidian apocalypse" and the marriage is mired on the shoals of her boredom and barely contained annoyance. ("The qualities in Fraz she once claimed to adore are not so adorable anymore.")
Hark, a cipher to himself and an empty vessel similar to the figure of Chance in Jerzy Kosinski's Being There, serves as a blank screen on which these and other characters project their ambitions and unreasonable hopes, family, work, sex, country and community having proven to be letdowns or outright delusions.
Lipstye's satire in Hark has never been more cutting or timely. Meg, one of Hark's acolytes, excitedly extols the virtues of something called Mercystream: "It's amazing. Instead of letting refugees into the country, we can give them laptops and listen to their stories as they stream them from their camps. It's all about empathy." Fraz's prematurely wised-up daughter Lisa declares, "School's like a factory where they make these little cell phone accessories called people." Musing on the root of her attraction to Hark, a character decides, "Your brain gets tired, brittle. It's a bitch being attuned to the bleakness all the time. You crave a certain stupor, aka belief"—in itself a neat capsule statement of the novel's controlling theme.
Lipsyte crams quite a lot of event into Hark's 284 pages, much of it violent, some of tragic and fatal, and some of it even mystical and visionary, with a final chapter taking place in what is clearly the afterlife. To my mind Sam is attempting to craft a contemporary parable about the birth of religion, how faith, battered into near-extinction by the fraudulence and mendacity of the world, will batten on to the nearest plausible object. In this sense the novel is strikingly similar to Robert Coover's The Origin of the Brunists, the powerful, even overwhelming first novel of his teacher at Brown that similarly deals with the birth of a cult in the wake of death and disaster. There are also many parallels to be found in the way Nathanael West handles the volatile mixture of credulity and rage in the people he calls "the disappointed" in his indelible The Day of the Locust. In this as in so many other ways Sam Lipsyte is West's truest successor among our living American novelists. I can offer no higher compliment.
3.Sam Lipsyte began writing in earnest in the early '90s, just as the pundits were declaring the end of history and a global reign of liberal (or neoliberal) democracy and a goodies-producing market economy stretched into the foreseeable (hah) future. It was not perhaps the best psychic weather for a natural-born naysayer with a provocateur's instinct and a shot putter's explosive delivery. But what happened on 9/11 and the subsequent dot-com crash and then the Great Recession opened up a space in the culture for the sort of uncompromising and truth-telling satirist Sam was born to be and the mode of black humor most congenial to his extravagant gifts of language and imagination. It is a critical commonplace that the brain-numbing events of the Trump presidency have rendered satire powerless—a critique of fiction's incapacity in the wake of American idiocy that dates back to Philip Roth's in the early '60s, a time of comparative legibility. Tell it to Aristophanes, Juvenal, Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, Gustave Flaubert, Mark Twain, Bertolt Brecht, the George Orwell of Animal Farm.
Tell it to Sam Lipstye. And then you'd better duck.
Image: Flickr/Pete Banks
The Millions Interview
Writing Something Irresponsible: The Millions Interviews Andrew Martin
Alex Norcia - 7.24.2018 | 1
I first met Andrew Martin about a year ago through a friend (whom I had also, basically, met through a friend) at bar in a Brooklyn. I had some questions about my literary future—meaning I had some questions about how to get out of my stagnant present. (Graduate school? A job not in the media? New friends?) He had recently sold his debut novel and short story collection to FSG, and our mutual friend assured me we shared the same sensibility, which I figured meant cracking jokes at the first rumbling of anything serious.
I wasn't wrong. Andrew was there before I arrived, and he was the only one reading a book while drinking a beer. I liked him immediately. Over the course of a few hours (far more than he needed to spend with me), he was a sincere advice-giver, in that he often freely admitted he had no fucking idea what he was talking about. But he did, of course—he owned the struggle, often self-imposed, on the years you waste, or at least think you waste, trying to become a writer. That novel of his, Early Work, came out on July 10, and it's very much about this time in a young writer's life: that "early work," all that effort that may, or may not, pay off in the end.
Much of the story is narrated by Peter, a cynical and somewhat jaded millennial who lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his longtime partner, Julia, who's on the verge of becoming a doctor (she's also a poet). Peter says things like: "I spent so much time on the daily logistics of just staying alive that I often went weeks without remembering that I had no idea what I was doing with my life. I knew, because I'd been told, that passivity was not a quality to aspire to." He's comically lost, it seems—or at least has no clue what direction to go in—until he meets Leslie, another aspiring writer who's staying with her aunt in the city while her boyfriend resides across the country. Peter and Leslie, each in their own fits of complacency and familiarity, fall in love, and their affair leads both of them to question, exactly, how best to lead the life of an artist. It sounds grandiose, but it's not—it's a hilarious look, really, about how we evolve into the adults we one day become, creative or not.
Below is a conversation Andrew and I first had over the phone but, because of the perils of advanced technology, failed to record when I hit the button. It was had, a second (hopefully better) time, over email a few days later.
The Millions: You seem particularly interested in codependent relationships. Take your two stories in The Paris Review, "Cool for America" and "With the Christopher Kids"—especially the latter. Without getting too much into the plot, that one's basically about a guy on Christmas Eve who, after breaking up with his girlfriend, does a bunch of cocaine at his mom's house, in the company of his rehabilitated—though constantly relapsing—sister. It's implied they often exist like this—one of them is on drugs, the other isn't, and then they swap roles—and they move through each other's lives, simultaneously helping and destroying the other.
Peter and Leslie, you could argue, have a similar companionship—they provide each other almost with a stable instability. What I'm getting at is if you think that's what you need to create art: not a muse, necessarily, but not a steady partner, a routine life, and so on.
Andrew Martin: I hadn't made this connection before, but I think your question touches on a few things that I've tried to think through in the novel and in my stories. It does seem that I tend to write about characters who are deeply reliant on other people for their sense of self, in ways that (obviously) aren't always to their mutual benefit. As a reader, I'm drawn to these kinds of stories—one of my favorite novels, Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker, is about a woman hell-bent on ruining her sister's wedding because she's too in love with their relationship to let her go, and the Christopher kids are kind of less precious, more drug-addled members of J.D. Salinger's Glass family. In Early Work, I think that Peter, who narrates most of the novel, is in search of the person who might best reflect back the version of himself he most wants to see. That's especially true of Leslie, the woman he falls in love with, but it's also true of his partner, Julia, and his friends, all of whom seem, at least to him, to have a clearer idea than he does of how to function in the world. I think, in Peter's case, his codependence (or desire for it) might be a yearning to fully understand other people, or at least be understood.
As for the question of whether one might need that kind of relationship to make art, it doesn't seem to be the worst option, as long as both parties have a good idea of what they're getting into. But I think it's harder to achieve "productive instability" than the characters in the novel would like to admit. Peter—maybe a bit like the book's author in his younger days—has set up a dichotomy in his head between a Kerouac by way of Jesus' Son existence, where you drink and drug yourself toward some kind of enlightenment, and a more prosaic, stable life with a reliable partner and dog and decent craft beer. He does seem to realize every now and then, almost despite himself, that there can be more weirdness and intensity in a serious relationship than there is in blacking out in a dive bar, but it doesn't really stick. In real life, you—I—probably need some balance between hedonism and comfort, but I clearly haven't figured out how to write about that yet.
TM: Do you think your novel, then, is somewhat about a person rejecting, consciously or not, "the regular current of American life"? Isn't that, really, a "classic American story"?
AM: Yeah, I think that both Peter and Leslie are trying to swim against the regular current of American life, though I think they're pretty hapless at it. Their rebellion is basically romantic—they like to imagine themselves in the Partisan Review scene of the New York of the 1950s or something. I don't think their affiliation with these olds books and ways of thinking is an affectation, or not entirely one. They're trying to figure out, like Sheila Heti, how a person should be, and not finding very useful models.
One obvious way to reject the status quo that they don't spend much time contemplating (though many of my friends have, especially recently) is through radical politics. The characters in the novel are basically passive "good liberals," as a friend of mine refers to anyone to the right of Che Guevara. Since the book was drafted almost entirely before Trump was elected, but then sold and edited in the immediate aftermath of his coming to power, I thought a lot about whether or not I needed the story to reflect the nightmare political situation that we've spent the better part of the last two years thinking about and trying to mitigate. The novel takes place mostly in the summer of 2015, and though there are a few references to the coming storm, in the end I decided to leave it mostly as a snapshot of a tiny strata of the country before the deluge. They—we—should have known better, but some of us didn't, or at least certainly didn't do enough. I'd like to think the characters in the book have been to a lot of protests since they were last seen on the page.
TM: At the risk of being too broad, I want to chat a bit about your comedic influences, and how you manage to be so funny on the page—it's no easy feat, and you make it look natural. I'm a huge fan of Sam Lipsyte—and I remember that you are, too—because of his constant deconstruction of the language we use every day.
AM: First, Sam Lipsyte was definitely a direct influence on my work, both in his writing—especially the stories in Venus Drive and his novel Home Land—and as one of my first writing teachers when I was an undergraduate at Columbia. He was the first person who explicitly taught me that one could build a piece of fiction from voice rather than plot or theme or whatever else. (It seems hard now to remember what I thought I was trying to do before that.) Maybe even more significantly, he introduced me to the work of a number of writers who became really important to me, especially Padgett Powell, Gary Lutz, and David Gates, the latter of whom became a mentor and friend many years later. I love how all of them, in very different ways, bring "gusto from the get-go," as Lutz said in an interview.
In recent years, my biggest influences, comedic and otherwise (though they set an impossibly high bar) have probably been the stories of Deborah Eisenberg, Lorrie Moore, and Amy Hempel, especially the longer ones. In super-recent years, the mutant story collections, or whatever they are, of Jen George and Claire-Louise Bennett have been the books that most make me want to keep writing fiction. I laugh every time I think about the art school whose curriculum consists entirely of burying dead horses at the Aqueduct racetrack in George's story "Instruction."
For my own writing, even though my default day-to-day instinct is to be funny in the face of routine misery, it seems like I have to have an epiphany every few months that I can use my sense of humor to get me out of all kinds of jams in my writing. It'll be days and weeks of trying to address something I want to write about in an appropriately serious fashion before I "give up" and revert to caustic jokes. It still feels like a last resort, maybe because it comes more naturally to me than sustained serious contemplation. I worry about seeming glib, but I try to make sure the glibness is coming from the characters rather the work itself. Which I think is possible?
TM: What was the genesis of this novel? I don't really want to ask you if it's autobiographical, but some of my favorite authors—particularly Roberto Bolaño—write constantly about writing. Maybe I'm just a sucker for that kind of shit? Are you?
AM: The novel initially arose, to some extent, out of a sense of frustration, both with my own nascent career as a writer and, I think more fruitfully, with the sense that no one had quite written the book I wanted to read. I wanted to write something irresponsible, or at least not worry about whether or not I was following the rules of proper conduct and proper novel writing. And I think part of that was writing a book with a character and life situation that looked a lot like mine, in which the main point-of-view character behaves abominably.
The basic state of Peter's life at the beginning of the novel bears more than a passing resemblance to mine when I started the book—I was living in Charlottesville, Virginia, with my partner, Laura, who is a doctor, teaching classes at whatever local institutions would have me, and generally not producing work at the level I wanted to produce it. I wanted to write about artistic ambition and sex and drugs and the somewhat fucked-up and unresolved gender dynamics that exist (or so I've heard) in friendships and relationships between writers. I felt an urgency to write about these things honestly. Very little that happens in the book is literally true (though I did waste two hours watching Only Lovers Left Alive), but I freely adapted the story from the questions that preoccupied me during those lean years in Virginia. The two protagonists of the novel, who fall in love, are basically mirrors of each other, and they both have different parts of my biography, so… make of that what you will.
But also, yes, all I really want to read about is writers. Bolaño, Philip Roth, Jenny Offill, Sarah Manguso… I'm always very surprised when other people don't feel this way.
TM: To quote Peter: "My sisters and I had turned out artistic and useless despite (because of?) our parents' emphasis on the value of hard work." Would you say Early Work is about these types of people? How would you classify who they are?
AM: The book is definitely about people who at least imagine themselves to be artists, and a few of them justify that self-conception by actually producing art. I'm pretty much an unreconstructed romantic about the value of making, or even attempting to make, art—the sentence from the novel you quote is obviously kind of a flip, punkish thing to say, not least because actually carrying yourself through the world as an artist, in the face of other people's skepticism and your own constant self-doubt, is really hard work. I had every educational advantage possible and a decent amount of encouragement, financial and otherwise, when I needed it, and it was still excruciating. I have a lot of friends who didn't have those things and have still found a way to be poets and musicians, etc., even as people have told them they're wasting their time. The novel is probably irresponsibly bereft of "real jobs" being done, but I can assure you that Molly and Kenny and the other peripheral characters in the book have worked a lot of shitty jobs in order to earn their right to drink heavily and make pronouncements about things.
TM: And then of course: What's next?
AM: I've got a short story collection under contract, consisting of some stories that have been published and a bunch that haven't. There are some characters that move freely between the novel and the story collection, and pretty much everybody in both books would probably get along if they found themselves at the same bar in, say, Missoula, Montana. I like the idea of creating a landscape with characters who can move across different books and stories—you mentioned Bolaño, who is the master of that, and Junot Díaz and Alice Munro and many other writers do it remarkably well. I think the collection will pretty well close out this phase of my writing, the hopes and dreams of the young and reckless years. After that it'll be mostly post-apocalyptic, by which I mean we'll probably all be rooting around in the wreckage of abandoned houses trying to survive. And I'll be writing a book about it.
A Year in Reading: Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - 12.6.2013 | 1
The Fun Parts by Sam Lipsyte: For the last decade, Sam Lipsyte has very slyly become one of the leading deep-sea explorers of our contemporary American society. I won't be giving much away if I tell you that what he has so far surfaced to report back to us hasn't been very pretty. The Fun Parts, book five in Mr. Lipsyte's opus, which includes The Ask and Home Land, continues the troubling dispatches from beneath. This collection of stories, several originally appearing in The New Yorker, are as subversive, absurd, and hilarious as his earlier work. Witness, for instance, how our fellow citizens wrestle with their weight, their families, their jobs as, say, a (male) doula. "Classic American story," Mr. Lipsyte begins one story, "I was out of money and people I could ask for money." You know this won't end well, but you'll enjoy getting there. Mr. Lipsyte has mastered the art of fusing, within one sentence, pathos and hilarity. The effect on the reader is generally a guilty ghoulish humor — that is if they're able to avoid looking in the mirror. In "The Republic of Empathy," a tale about a man being hounded to have a second child, Mr. Lipsyte writes, "That night, I dreamed I had another son, a bigger one, and he punched me in the neck and I stumbled off the edge of a skyscraper. I fell through the air. I could also feel myself climbing out of the dream." This might be as good a way as any to sum up our American century thus far.
Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
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Some Answers after The Ask from Sam Lipsyte
Daniel Roberts - 9.9.2010 | 5
On a Saturday night in April, Sam Lipsyte is at KGB Bar in Manhattan, reading from his new novel The Ask, which everyone from book critics to blogosphere lit nerds have heaped with praise in the eight short weeks since its publication. Each time Lipsyte mentions the character named Vargina, the crowd erupts with cackles and guffaws.
Fast forward to the present. Exactly six months after the release of The Ask, sales are strong, it sits proudly on featured tables in bookstores, and every lit nerd that you know is raving about it. They—and everyone else gaga over The Ask—fall for the novel's voice in a matter of sentences.
That voice comes from the narrator and protagonist of The Ask, Milo Burke, and many have confused this entertaining font of rage for Lipsyte himself. Lipsyte is a far cry from his antihero, but that's why they call it fiction. And this time, Lipsyte's fiction has catapulted him to a height of fame and success that he had never reached before, though his longtime readers insist the talent was always there, waiting to get noticed.
Milo is an angry fuckup who is disillusioned with the arts fundraising department of the New York college (he calls it "Mediocre University") at which he works and, by the end of the first chapter, has already proven it by giving one spoiled arts brat a verbal beating that Milo tells us "there is no point in repeating." The onslaught gets him fired, though he is soon given a second chance dependent on his success with the "ask," which is business lingo for a rich donor.
The big ask turns out to be an old college friend, now turned wealthy sleaze, named Purdy Stuart. Milo must wring Purdy dry for a huge donation to the Mediocre U. arts program. Poor Milo—and the reader, along for the calamitous ride—spends the rest of the book leaping through hoops for the potential donor.
Milo speaks in a furious invective that is somehow as endearing as it is caustic and vulgar. His lexicon is the resentful vocabulary of a failure—one with a hilariously dirty mouth. On the page, it reads like a personal screed, angrily dictated into a recorder. When read aloud, it's even more effective. People at his readings listen with devilish grins, like they're being naughty, indulging in a bit of shared misbehavior.
Lipsyte reads from The Ask in a different voice from his own, loud and declarative, imitating the different voices perfectly. With each raucous sentence, tangled in swear words and name-calling, Lipsyte brings his character to life, and readers form a real relationship with Milo.
Milo's creator is different. He's calm, collected, and friendly. He converses in a soft, earnest tone. He makes direct eye contact and holds it. He's an easy, fuzzy presence. But in congratulating his newest work—caught up in their love for its protagonist—reviewers seem to have taken Milo as a direct surrogate for Lipsyte himself. "Yeah, some people seem to think I'm Milo," says Lipsyte with gentle reproach but no sign of frustration. "A lot of people thought I was the guy in the last book, too. And they thought I was the guy in some of the short stories."
A review of The Ask by Jennifer Schuessler in the New York Review of Books garnered particular frustration from Lipsyte's literary peers. Schuessler calls Lipsyte the "poet laureate of overeducated American loserdom." Similarly, a New York Magazine profile begins by encouraging "you schmoes of America" and "sad sacks in sweaters" (those with "rampant neck beard[s]") to, "rally 'round your bard!" The tone of pieces like this suggests a presumption that Lipsyte is one of the very men about whom he writes—that his characters are all slightly altered stand-ins for Sam Lipsyte.
"As far as some reviewers are concerned," says Alex Abramovich, one of Lipsyte's best friends, "Sam is modeling each character after his life. And that's a stupid conclusion." Abramovich and his friends welcomed Lipsyte into their circle with open arms, and are, in a sense, the reason he moved to Astoria.
Lipsyte is a large man, a bit soft around the edges, but he doesn't seem out of shape. As it turns out, he was a star shot-putter in high school. "Look," Abramovich sums up, "the main difference between Sam and all of his characters is that Sam has never been a loser at anything he's ever done in his life. Have you read his sentences? He's clearly one of God's winners on this earth. He's just too fucking charming to be a loser."
To be fair, there are surface similarities between Lipsyte and his character. Both men are Jewish. And the "Jewish question," as it turns out, hits a nerve for Lipsyte in curious ways.
"I'm not observant at all, but I think about being a Jew all the time," says Lipsyte. "And I write characters that have a similar condition." Indeed, The Ask isn't really a Jewish novel, but there are, throughout its pages, tinges of the Jewish experience. For one thing, Milo routinely kvetches over his decision to not have his son circumcised.
Meanwhile, his son, Bernie, has his own obsession—more age-appropriate—with the extra tubing. "Do superheroes have foreskins?" he asks his dad. "Does Goliath have a foreskin?" Lipsyte, as is his talent, turns a meaningful family moment into comedy just in time: "Not for long," Milo answers. "Not when David's done with him." When Bernie asks who David is, Milo tells him, "A foreskin collector."
But apart from these brief mentions—allusions to Milo's inner Jew—the character does not outwardly act like one of the tribe, and Lipsyte isn't interested in writing a Jewish novel. "It was done," he declares. "There was a whole generation that dealt with that. I'm not going to say, Oh, I'm Jewish and people really like books about Jewish stuff, so I should write something that has to do with Jewish stuff. That's not really going to get you anywhere."
Nevertheless, there are those who see deeply entrenched Jewish themes in Lipsyte's work. Once, a decade ago, a friend of his ended up on a panel for some sort of Jewish literary prize. Lipsyte's book of short stories, Venus Drive, was nominated, and according to his friend, one of the panelists said during a discussion, "Why are we even considering this one? There's barely any Judaism in it." Lipsyte's friend responded: "Are you kidding me? It's like the most Jewish thing I've ever read."
Another link between Lipsyte and Milo: they both have five-year-old sons. In The Ask, Milo says of his kid: "Bernie was a beautiful boy. Good thing, too, as he'd become an expensive hobby. Preschool, preclothing for the preschool. Then there were the hidden costs, like food." When this line is read aloud to Lipsyte, even he can't help but laugh. Yeah, he wrote it, but it's damn funny. Yet suddenly, he gets very serious and says, "I think Milo also deeply loves his son."
When the progressive, hippie-taught "school" that Bernie attends shuts down and Milo must spend entire days with Bernie, his fatherly love does shine through. Lipsyte has fond memories of walking through Astoria with his own son, early inspiration for scenes in which Milo strolls through Queens with Bernie, chiding him to stop playing with trash from the street.
Lipsyte says that someone once asked him if having kids would change his writing. "Well, I hope so," he told the guy. "It would be kind of weird if it didn't." He chuckles, remembering this.
Abramovich feels that Lipsyte's affability is a main cause of his friend's newfound mega success. "Sam had a huge log built up of people who adore him," he says. "He's just the warmest, most generous and likeable person. And this isn't boilerplate bullshit; this is true. One thing is that he never says 'no' to anyone. But another is that he's really doing the work."
Commitment is what the young writer Tao Lin, who has done readings with Lipsyte, also points to. "Everyone I know feels that he really 'went for it' with this book," Lin wrote over Google chat in May. "Which explains the 'mad coverage' it's getting."
Lipsyte has earned a stellar reputation among other writers, even if it took reviewers longer to hop on board. On the evening he read at KGB, the author John Wray, who has been lauded for Lowboy, read before him. Wray announced, "I was going to read from Lowboy until I realized I'd be reading with Sam Lipsyte, and well, he's very funny. So I'm going to read something a little goofier, with aspirations toward comedy." His offering wasn't nearly as funny as what Lipsyte read, but it was a valiant attempt.
Lipsyte acknowledges the connections he has to Milo. "I think we have many selves and there may be a version of me inside that sort of has the same thoughts as him," he says about his crude hero. "I don't necessarily wallow in the bitterness, but his way of looking at the world isn't alien to me. I think he's often pretty clear-sighted."
Then, inevitably, he teases himself: "Maybe I'm just making up friends for me to have." But the happy truth is that he doesn't need to make up friends anymore. For most of his career, he struggled to get noticed. Although The New York Times reviewed all of his books, the consensus is that he was still under the radar, though Lipsyte responds playfully, "I always wonder where the radar is located, ya know?"
Finally, with The Ask, Lipsyte has struck a chord. And people aren't just praising the book, they're interested in him as well; twelve major magazines interviewed Lipsyte in March and April. Ever humble, he tries to deny an increase in press. "I've always had great response from the people whose opinions I've cared about," he insists. "So in my mind, my work was getting noticed." Soon enough, though, he folds: "Okay, I've gotten more mainstream recognition for this book than my others combined. It's been a leap in coverage and conversation."
What excited Lipsyte the most in post-Ask coverage of him has been the fact that in a People magazine feature on which books celebrities are reading, Michael J. Fox mentioned The Ask. Fox said he was enjoying it. "I grew up watching Family Ties, so to see 20-something years later that Michael J. Fox is reading the book, well, I think I can retire now." Lipsyte is positively giddy when he says this.
Why did The Ask finally earn him such success? Why not his novels Home Land or The Subject Steve, or his collection of short stories, Venus Drive? "The Ask might be different [from his past work] in that there's a family at the core of it, a family that's come apart," speculates Ben Marcus, a colleague and friend of Lipsyte's in Columbia's Creative Writing department. "Perhaps that draws more people in, feels more universal."
Lipsyte himself is more hard-pressed to wonder about the winning combination. "I think that what happened with this book is that I've been working for 15 years, and building something of a readership, and good will among some critics, and I benefited from that," he guesses. "And the rest is sort of timing."
In a period of economic stress, political strife, and general apathy, The Ask nails the current malaise, and not in a preachy, tiresome way. It handles the issues that are bugging everyone by acknowledging just that—they're bugging us. In the case of Milo Burke, they're pissing him off.
Yet if Milo were just pissed off, he'd be a more grating, whiny character. Instead, his anger is conveyed with humor. "Sam's humor isn't sitcom humor," says Abramovich. "You don't come up with some wacky situation. His humor is gnarly syntax and juxtapositions, and that's a hard sell. I think it's a happy miracle that he's gotten as far as he has."
Whether it's the family focus, his many years' worth of strong relationships, or the humor that is to thank, Lipsyte's number has been called at last. What has emerged is a writer who cares about fiction, in a literary climate that continually seems to cast it aside.
Lipsyte read Reality Hunger—perhaps the year's most discussed nonfiction release, in which David Shields suggests shattering labels like "memoir" or "novel" and simply calling everything a "book"—but Lipsyte is not concerned about the future of the novel. "There's this constant debate about the novel. Is it dead, has technology rendered it dead, but the novel is a technology," says Lipsyte. "What the novel can still do that other outlets can't do is operate on a certain level of language and consciousness and association. There's so much to do there, and there are still so many possibilities."
Sam Lipsyte, then, is less ordinary than he seems at first glance. He takes language and twists it, tortures it. He makes you laugh until it hurts and makes you nearly cry, often in the same paragraph that a few sentences earlier had offended you, outraged you. He isn't sure which other contemporary writers are writing the same kind of books.
"I'm in a tradition," he says with a furrowed brow, "but I don't know who else I belong with right now. Maybe I'm the beginning of a new trend." Whether or not it's a new trend, Lipsyte is doing something new, bringing something fresh and valuable to the literary table—something seriously funny. And his next work, a book of short stories for FSG, will almost certainly be welcomed with rave reviews.
Correction: Originally, this piece incorrectly stated that Lipsyte had once worked at the New Yorker, and that he was half-Jewish. Those statements have been corrected. We apologize for the error.
[Image credit: Ceridwen Morris]
Most Anticipated: The Great 2010 Book Preview
C. Max Magee - 1.5.2010 | 69
Update: Don't miss our newest "Most Anticipated" list, highlighting books for the rest of 2010 and beyond.
There's something for every lover of fiction coming in 2010, but, oddly enough, the dominant theme may be posthumous publication. Roberto Bolaño's relentless march into the canon has inured us to the idea of the bestseller from beyond the grave (and of course, for as long as there have been literary executors, this has been nothing new), but beyond the four(!) new books by Bolaño we also have have potentially important works by the likes of Ralph Ellison and Henry Roth, intriguing new books from Robert Walser and Ernst Weiss, a guaranteed bestseller from Stieg Larsson, and, looming in 2011, the final, unfinished novel of David Foster Wallace. Perhaps, amid all this, it is a relief to hear that we have many exciting books on their way from those still with us, including Elizabeth Kostova, Joshua Ferris, David Mitchell, Jennifer Egan, Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, Yann Martel, and many others.Special thanks to The Millions Facebook group for helping us compile this list.January (or already available)
Three Days Before the Shooting by Ralph Ellison: Fitting that this book preview starts off with a posthumous novel. Ellison's unfinished opus will not be the the only posthumous work to grab readers attention in 2010, but it will be perhaps the one with the most history attached to it and maybe, in the accounting of those who manage the canon, the most important. Ellison famously struggled to complete a second novel after the landmark publication of The Invisible Man. After Ellison's death, Juneteenth was cobbled together by his literary executor John Callahan and met with decidedly mixed reviews. But, as a 2007 article in the Washington Post argues, Three Days Before the Shooting, the result of years of work by Callahan and co-editor Adam Bradley, was always meant to be the true Ellison second novel. Readers will soon find out if it's the masterpiece they've been waiting for for decades.The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris: If your debut effort (in this case, Then We Came to the End) gets nominated for a National Book Award, you are on the express train to literary stardom. Quickly, however, focus shifts to the sophomore effort. For Ferris, early signs look good. Word is that The Unnamed is dark in tone, darker than and by all early accounts dissimilar to TWCTTE. The protagonist Tim's affliction is that he's unable to stop walking. In an early review, Bookforum likes it and says "Ferris possesses an overriding writer's gift: a basic and consistent ability to entertain while spurring engagement." See also: Joshua Ferris writing at The MillionsMonsieur Pain by Roberto Bolaño: The frenzy of posthumous Bolaño publication will continue in 2010 with as many as four (that I was able to find) books by the Chilean author published. Bolaño has been unmistakably one of the biggest publishing stories of the last few years, and publisher New Directions has been capably and speedily adding title after title to the Bolaño shelf at your local bookstore. Monsieur Pain (January) is about a Peruvian poet with a chronic case of hiccups. Antwerp (April) has been described as both a prose poem and a crime novel. The Return (July) is a new volume of short stories, as is The Insufferable Gaucho (August?), which was apparently the last book Bolaño delivered to a publisher. And look for more Bolaño in 2011. Garth may need to start updating his Bolaño Syllabus on a quarterly basis.Fun with Problems by Robert Stone: Fun with Problems will be Stone's first collection of short fiction in twelve years. And his first book since his 2007 memoir Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (see Garth's review).Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd: Boyd's novel is already out in the UK where it has been receiving characteristically good notices. "There are tantalising hints of a broader ambition in William Boyd's wide-ranging new thriller," said The Guardian. The book is ostensibly about a man on the run, but Boyd, in an interview with Edinburgh Festivals alluded to the depth that The Guardian picked up on, "It's a chase. And the drive is that the man is being hunted. But like the last four of my novels, it's also about identity, about what happens when you lose everything that makes up your social identity, and how you then function in the modern city."The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova – The follow-up to Kostova's big selling The Historian (the first ever first novel to debut at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list) promises to be just as densely detailed as its predecessor, weighing in at a hefty 576 pages. Recently departed Kirkus has some quibbles with the plot machinations, but says "lush prose and abundant drama will render logic beside the point for most readers." PW adds "The Swan Thieves succeeds both in its echoes of The Historian and as it maps new territory for this canny and successful writer." See Also: Elizabeth Kostova's Year in ReadingIn January, Archipelago Books will publish a translation of Ernst Weiss' Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer some 70 years after the novel's appearance in German. Enthusiasts of German-language literature have compared Weiss favorably with his contemporary Thomas Mann and his friend Franz Kafka, but he has remained something of an unknown on this side of the Atlantic. Already, Joel Rotenberg's translation has begun to remedy this neglect. An excerpt appeared in A Public Space a while back. (Garth)February
Point Omega by Don DeLillo: Anticipation for DeLillo's forthcoming book has been decidedly truncated. Publisher Scribner first tweeted about DeLillo delivering the manuscript in June, and the book will hit shelves a scant eight months later. One reason for the quick turnaround might be the book's surprising slimness, coming in somewhere between 117 pages (says PW) and 128 pages (says Scribner). Imagine: reading an entire DeLillo novel in an afternoon, or perhaps just over lunch. So will the book's slight profile belie some interior weightiness? A recently posted excerpt may offer some clues, and PW says "Reading it is akin to a brisk hike up a desert mountain—a trifle arid, perhaps, but with occasional views of breathtaking grandeur."Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields: We've already discussed Shields' forthcoming "manifesto" quite a lot at The Millions. It was first noted, in glowing terms, by Charles D'Ambrosio. This prompted me to dig deeper in a longer look at the book. From my sleuthing, and noting blurbs by J.M. Coetzee, Jonathan Lethem, and others, I posited "the intriguing possibility that a book of ideas will capture the popular interest [in 2010]." The book now sits on my desk, and while haven't yet jumped in with both feet, I can report that it is both structurally (a lettered and numbered organization scheme whose logic is not immediately discernible) and stylistically (deep thoughts, reminiscences, aphorisms, and pop culture nuggets abound) unique. It will be interesting to see if readers decide the book coalesces into a successful whole. This just in – British publisher Hamish Hamilton reports that Zadie Smith will be writing up the book in The Guardian soon. See Also: David Shield's Year in ReadingThe Infinities by John Banville: Banville follows up his Booker-winning effort The Sea with a novel with a rather unique conceit: it is narrated by the god Hermes. The reviews hint at further oddities. In The Guardian, for example, "Old Adam, a physicist-mathematician, has solved the infinity problem in a way that's not only led to some useful inventions – cars that run on brine, for example – but also proved the existence of parallel universes, a category that includes the one he inhabits. In this novel, Sweden is a warlike country, and evolution and relativity have been discredited."Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett: Haslett made a big splash in 2002 when his debut effort – a collection of short stories called You Are Not a Stranger Here – was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Union Atlantic, his first novel, takes the depths of the recent financial collapse as a backdrop (which explains why a work of literary fiction is getting notice from publications like American Banker). PW gave it a starred review and insinuates it might be a seminal novel of that particular historical moment. Esquire recently published the novel's prologue. It begins, "Their second night in port at Bahrain someone on the admiral's staff decided the crew of the Vincennes deserved at least a free pack of cigarettes each."March
Solar by Ian McEwan: McEwan's new novel was discussed extensively in Daniel Zalewski's New Yorker profile of McEwan in February 2009. More recently, the magazine published an excerpt from the novel. The book's protagonist is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, and it appears that the book's chief drama will arise in his becoming embroiled in the climate change "debate." The book is also being called a satire, but, to the extent that several of McEwan's books have elements of satire, it's unclear whether Solar will be much of a departure for McEwan. The excerpt in the New Yorker would seem to indicate it'll be a typical, and probably quite good, effort.The Ask by Sam Lipsyte: Lipsyte had a breakout hit with Home Land in 2005. His follow-up novel was reviewed recently in The Quarterly Conversation, which says "let's be frank: this is a hard novel to review. The Ask makes for your heart with its claws so efficiently that it leaves you torn and depleted. How are you to review a book that simply frightens you?" Ultimately, TQC decides The Ask "isn't quite as good as Home Land. The latter was nearly perfect in idea and execution—an '80s high-school movie gone sick with nostalgia for its own John Hughesian past. The Ask is more generationally diffuse. While just as snot-blowingly funny as its predecessor, The Ask is more devastating in its pitilessness."The Surrendered by Chang-Rae Lee: Bookdwarf read this one recently and says Lee "offers no easy endings or heartwarming coming-together, instead bringing to life a powerful, unpredictable, and occasionally painful story."Burning Bright by Ron Rash: Rash's follow-up to Serena is a collection of stories. The book's title story appeared in Ecotone in 2008.One More Story: Thirteen Stories in the Time-Honored Mode by Ingo Schulze: Garth has been talking about Schulze here for at least two years. Most recently he wrote "The East German setting of New Lives, and its uroboric epistolary structure – starting late in the story, slowly filling in the background – made for slow going at first, but the ethical intensity of its restaging of Faust has haunted me since I read it." The English (and somewhat illogical) title of Schulze's new book would seem to obscure the unifying theme of the new collection, whose title, translated directly from the German original, is Cell Phone: Thirteen Stories in the Old Style. According to an abstract for a paper in the journal German Monitor, "the cell phone functions in many stories as a threatening symbol of exposure to pressures and problems that make East(ern) Germans feel ill at ease."So Much for That by Lionel Shriver: More hot button issues. Just as Ian McEwan's forthcoming novel is informed by climate change, Shriver's latest takes on the healthcare debate.
The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk: Cusk's novel is already out in the U.K. where Hilary Mantel wrote, "It is the author's mix of scorn and compassion that is so bracing. Sometimes she complicates simple things, snarling them in a cat's cradle of abstraction, but just as often, a sentence rewards with its absolute and unexpected precision."Silk Parachute by John McPhee: This new collection by McPhee is built around what FSG's promotional material calls "McPhee's most anthologized piece of writing." "Silk Parachute" is, especially for the typically measured McPhee, a brief, tight, funny and emotional essay (It's available here as a .doc file). The rest of the new collection is composed of McPhee's recent New Yorker essays on lacrosse, "long-exposure view-camera photography, the weird foods he has sometimes been served in the course of his reportorial travels, a U.S. Open golf championship, and a season in Europe 'on the chalk' from the downs and sea cliffs of England to the Maas valley in the Netherlands and the champagne country of northern France." Since McPhee's most recent collections have had fairly strong thematic threads running through them, this more loosely tied book sounds like a bit of a departure.Long for This World by Sonya Chung: And, of course, Millions contributor Sonya Chung will see her debut novel Long for This World arrive in March. Sonya wrote about the peculiar challenges of settling on a book design in a recent essay.April
The Notebook by Jose Saramago: Nobel Laureates can do "blooks" too. The Notebook is the collected entries from 87-year-old Saramago's blog, O Caderno de Saramago. The book, "which has already appeared in Portuguese and Spanish, lashes out against George W. Bush, Tony Blair, the Pope, Israel and Wall Street," according to the Independent, in its report on the book's Italian publisher dropping it for criticizing Prime Minister Silvio Burlusconi. Despite his age, Saramago is a busy man. In addition to The Notebook, there's an August release date in the U.K. for a new novel, The Elephant's Journey, which "traces the travels of Solomon, an Indian elephant given by King John III to Archduke Maximilian II of Austria," and Cain, "an ironic retelling of the Bible story," was recently published in Portuguese and Spanish.Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey: Carey's new book is based on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville and wields two narrators. Olivier, the de Tocqueville "character" is, like de Tocqueville, the heir apparent of a wealthy family. Parrot is his clever servant who also happens to be a spy and all around rake. Early reviews from Australia, where the book is already out, have been strong. The Sydney Morning Herald called it "a tour de force, a wonderfully dizzying succession of adventures and vivid, at times caricatured, characters executed with great panache."The Dead Republic by Roddy Doyle: This book wraps up Doyle's The Last Roundup trilogy (previously: A Star Called Henry and Oh, Play That Thing!). This time Henry Smart has gone to Hollywood and then back to Dublin. A bomb blast there turns him into an accidental hero.What Becomes by A.L. Kennedy: This short story collection is already out in the U.K. The Spectator likes it: "The hardest thing about the advent of a new collection of stories by A.L. Kennedy… is the search for synonyms for 'brilliant.'"Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel: Though Martel's previous effort, Life of Pi, was far from universally loved, the book became something of a literary phenomenon, putting up sales impressive even for a Booker winner. As a result, nearly a decade later, Martel's follow up is one of the most heavily anticipated books of the year. As before, it seems Martel will be trading in talking animals, a taxidermied donkey and monkey. More details: The book is about the Holocaust, reportedly. It's Canadian publisher has called it "shocking." And Martel is comparing it to Animal Farm.The Big Short by Michael Lewis: Original set for November 2009, the publication of Michael Lewis' much anticipated chronicle of the financial crisis, The Big Short has been pushed back to April. In October 2008, when economic uncertainty was at its height and fears were voiced in some rarefied quarters about the possibility of some sort of structural collapse, we wrote, "The world needs an exhaustive look at what happened in 2008 and why." There have already been many books about the collapse and what caused it, from The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown to The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, but many readers have been waiting for a book by Lewis, both because of his long history writing about Wall Street's excesses and because of the powerful essay he penned on the topic for Portfolio magazine at the height of the crisis. Some readers may be weary of the topic by the time the book comes out, but it's sure to garner some interest. Noir by Robert Coover: An excerpt of this new novel by "pioneering postmodernist" Coover was published a while back in Vice. It is introduced thusly: "Noir is a short novel starring you as Philip M. Noir, Private Investigator. It began as a story about a dockside detective in pursuit of something—like truth or beauty, the ineffable—and became over the course of its writing a kind of companion piece to Ghost Town, which played with the western genre and mythology the way this one plays with the hard-boiled/noir genre and urban myth. It was the French who discovered and defined noir; consequently, this book will have its first publication in Paris, in French, in the spring of 2008."May
The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis: This book, long in the works, has been evolving as Amis has struggled to write it. In 2006, he told The Independent it was, "blindingly autobiographical, but with an Islamic theme." As it turns out, the autobiographical bits were causing Amis trouble. He told the National Post in August 2009, "it turned out it was actually two novels, and they couldn't go together. So I wrote The Pregnant Widow, [that's] one half of it, and the other half I started, and it will be very autobiographical, the next one." Subsequent comments from Amis appear to indicate the two book solution is still the plan.
Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis: Imperial Bedrooms is reportedly a sequel to Ellis' first novel Less Than Zero. First sentence of the novel? "They had made a movie about us."The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer: Orringer received more than the typical notice for a debut short story collection when her 2003 How to Breathe Underwater was named a New York Times Notable Book, landed on various other lists, and picked up a small prize or two. It's looking like that promising first effort may translate into a "big" novel for Orringer in 2010. Library Journal reported a 60,000-copy first printing for The Invisible Bridge – the book follows a trio of Hungarian brothers in Budapest and Paris before and during World War II – and it carries with it a blurb from Michael Chabon ("To bring an entire lost world… to vivid life between the covers of a novel is an accomplishment; to invest that world, and everyone who inhabits it, with a soul… takes something more like genius.")The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson: Larsson's nordic crime fiction (which has won Larsson posthumous stardom in the States) isn't exactly in The Millions wheelhouse, but, with nary a mention on the site, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo vaulted into our Millions Top Ten and has stayed there. When Millions' readers get behind a book, it's often worth taking notice. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is the final book in Larsson's "Millennium Trilogy" (Dragon was the first and The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second). Though just becoming well known in the U.S., Larsson was the second top-selling author in the world in 2008. Part of Larsson's sudden success is his odd path to (posthumous) publishing fame. Larsson was a journalist and activist who died of a heart attack. The manuscripts of his novels were found after his death. He had apparently written them just for fun. Five years later, the books are a publishing sensation.Private Life by Jane Smiley: There's not much info on this one yet other than that it follows a Missouri woman's life, from the 1880s to World War II.The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman: Pullman (famous for his His Dark Materials children's series) will once again be courting controversy with this new book. According to The Guardian, "The book will provide a new account of the life of Jesus, challenging the gospels and arguing that the version in the New Testament was shaped by the apostle Paul." In addition, the book will be released on Easter in the U.K. and is part of Canongate's "Myths" series of books. Pullman also wrote an introduction to that series.The Microscripts by Robert Walser: The pothumous publication of Nabokov's The Original of Laura, reproducing, front and back, the notecards on which Nabokov hat charted this unfinished work, was met with no small amount of scorn. This year, another posthumously published book, based off of notecard scrawlings, may be met more favorably. The story behind Walser's Microscripts is fascinating. From the New Directions blog: "Walser wrote many of his manuscripts in a highly enigmatic, shrunken-down form. These narrow strips of paper… covered with tiny ant-like markings only a millimeter or two high, came to light only after the author's death in 1956. At first considered a secret code, the microscripts were eventually discovered to be a radically miniaturized form of a German script: a whole story could fit on the back of a business card… Each microscript is reproduced in full color in its original form: the detached cover of a trashy crime novel, a disappointing letter, a receipt of payment."June
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell: After Black Swan Green, a departure from the frenetic, layered Cloud Atlas which was broadly considered one of the best novels of the last decade, Mitchell fans may be pleased to hear that The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is being described as a return to form. It's long (512 pages) and set in Japan in 1799. The Guardian says, "Mitchell returns to the big canvas with this historical novel set in a Japanese outpost of the Dutch empire."An American Type by Henry Roth: Here's another interesting posthumous publication. Roth is revered for his 1934 novel Call It Sleep and his 1990s "comeback" effort, the Mercy of a Rude Stream cycle, and so news of this book, "discovered," according to the publicity materials, "in a stack of nearly 2,000 unpublished pages by a young New Yorker editor," will surely interest readers. A little more detail from the publicity materials: "Set in 1938, An American Type reintroduces us to Roth's alter ego, Ira, who abandons his controlling lover, Edith, in favor of a blond, aristocratic pianist at Yaddo. The ensuing conflict between his Jewish ghetto roots and his high-flown, writerly aspirations forces Ira, temporarily, to abandon his family for the sun-soaked promise of the American West."A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan: This new novel by National Book Award nominee Egan sounds like it's as ambitious and layered as Look At Me–and I'm sure it'll be as addictively readable as The Keep. According to Amazon, it centers on the life of Bennie Salazar, "an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs," and the narrative traverses various eras and locales, "from the pre-Internet nineties to a postwar future." Color me intrigued. (Edan)July
Update: Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart: A reader points out in the comments that Shteyngart has a new book coming out and since we absolutely would have included it had we known about it, here it is. A recent item at The Rumpus has the scoop: "His new novel is set slightly in the future. When he started writing it a few years ago, he envisioned a world where the world's economy had collapsed and the central banks had to bail out the Big Three automakers. As that came to pass, he had to keep changing his novel, which got bleaker and bleaker. And now it's set in 'a completely illiterate New York,' he said. 'In other words, next Tuesday.'"
Sympathy for the Devil: This is a long way off so it's hard to say how good it will be, but it sounds pretty cool: an anthology of stories about the devil from the likes of Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Kelly Link, China Mieville, Michael Chabon, and others.I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson: Petterson has been on the road to international literary stardom for a few years now and that means his new novels get translated into English with relative alacrity. This means that English-speaking readers will get to see I Curse the River of Time, first published in Norwegian in 2008, later this year. The book won the Norwegian Brage prize and, according to a "sample translation" on Petterson's agent's website, it begins: "I did not realize that my mother had left. There was too much going on in my own life. We had not spoken for a month, or even longer, which I guess was not that unusual, in 1989, when you consider the things that went on around us back then, but it felt unusual."
C by Tom McCarthy: At Ready Steady Book in September 2007, Mark Thwaite asked McCarthy: "What are you writing now?" And McCarthy responded: "Pathetically, my answer to this question is the same as it was when you last asked it over a year ago. I'm just under half way through a novel called C, which is about mourning, technology and matter. I'm writing it very slowly. It's called C because it has crypts, cauls, call-signs, cocaine, cyanide and cysteine in it. And carbon: lots of carbon."Unknown
Nemesis by Philip Roth: News of this novel was announced nearly a year ago, but there is no release date thus far and not much is known about it beyond that it's "a work of fiction set in the summer of 1944 that tells of a polio epidemic and its effects on a closely knit Newark community and its children."Freedom by Jonathan Franzen: Jonathan Franzen's follow-up to The Corrections, Freedom, is likely to cause a stir when it appears, most likely in the fall. Among the prominent media narratives – the backlash, the backlash-to-the-backlash – will be the length of the novel's gestation. Really, though, in novelist time (as distinct from internet time), nine years is a mere blip – particularly when you publish two books of nonfiction in the interim. Far more remarkable is how tight-lipped Franzen has managed to be about the novel's content. From various obscure interviews, we've managed to cobble together the following: 1) The novel has something to do with U.S. politics, of the Washington, D.C. variety. 2) Franzen's original conception of how those politics would intersect with the narrative changed radically in the writing, likely shifting from an "inside baseball" look at bureaucracy toward the personal. 3) Germany, where Franzen has spent some time recently, "will play an important role in the novel." 4) After two New Yorker short stories notable for their smallness and misanthropy, the excerpt from the novel that appeared last year was notable for its return to the more generous ironies that endeared The Corrections to our "Best Fiction of the Millennium (So Far) panel." (Garth)The Pale King by David Foster Wallace: Wallace's unfinished opus is sure to be a blockbuster when it appears – April 2011 is the latest word on a release date. The Howling Fantods, home to all things DFW, has been staying on top of the story. A recent report contained a number of tidbits, including this: "The subject of the novel is boredom. The opening of the book instructs the reader to go back and read the small type they skipped on the copyright page, which details the battle with publishers over their determination to call it fiction, when it's all 100% true. The narrator, David Foster Wallace, is at some point confused with another David F. Wallace by IRS computers, pointing to the degree to which our lives are filled with irrelevant complexity."There are many other exciting books coming out in 2010 not mentioned here – let us know what books you are most looking forward to in 2010 in the comments section below.
Best of the Millennium
Best Fiction of the Millennium (So Far): Honorable Mention
As we had hoped, our "Best of the Millennium (So Far)" poll stoked a fair amount of conversation around the web last week. List-making, as we've argued in the past, is an imperfect enterprise, and reactions ranged from "Great picks" to "Why didn't you mention x?"
One of the difficulties of reaching consensus on books is that there are so many of them; The Corrections' appearance at #1 in our poll may reflect the likelihood of our panelists having read the book as much as it reflects inherent excellence. In our survey of 56 panelists – who had, collectively, 280 votes to allocate – something like 160 titles were mentioned. And so, as we sifted through the ballots, what struck us was not a "unified sensibility," but an exhilarating diversity, which we plan to share with you in the coming days.
As we continue to discuss our "Best Fiction of the Millennium" results – and the heuristic value of list-making in general – we'll announce the rest of the titles that received votes, and maybe some of those that came up in the comments. We hope that you discover some pleasant surprises on these lists, as we did, and we hope you'll continue the conversation about what books from the last decade were worth your reading time. First, though, we thought we'd post an "Honorable Mention" list of 15 books that received multiple votes in our poll but didn't crack our Top 20.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon.
This massive – and massively popular – novel follows two comic book creators in the World War II era.
Any Human Heart, by William Boyd.
A series of journal entries documents the life of an Englishman and his century. (See our review.)
By Night in Chile, by Roberto Bolaño.
A Catholic priest embroiled in the hothouse of Chilean politics delivers a riveting dramatic monologue.
The Children's Hospital, by Chris Adrian.
A flood of possibly divine provenance turns the titular hospital into an ark in this, the second novel from a hugely ambitious young writer.
A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, by Ken Kalfus.
Paired disasters – a divorce and a terrorist attack – mirror each other in this novel set in New York in 2001.
The Feast of Love, by Charles Baxter.
Stories of love knit together a community in Ann Arbor in this novel by a critical favorite.
The Golden Compass/The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman.
The first and third installments of the His Dark Materials trilogy open up a parallel universe of daemons and Dust.
The Great Fire , by Shirley Hazzard
Traveling East Asia after World War II, an English war hero finds love among the ruins. (See our review.)
HomeLand , by Sam Lipsyte.
Class notes from a ne'er-do-well form the spine of this comic novel.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Samantha Clarke.
Two magicians spar in this novel, which is long and erudite in the Victorian manner. (See our review.)
The Master, by Colm Tóibín.
Tóibín, an Irishman, recreates a pivotal period in the life of Henry James.
The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, by Brady Udall.
A half-Apache youth matriculates at the school of hard knocks and various other failing 1960's institutions.
Oblivion, by David Foster Wallace.
Wallace's final collection of short fiction is dark and dense, bleak and exhilarating.
Remainder, by Tom McCarthy.
McCarthy bends the legacy of the Gallic avant-garde in the direction of pop perfection in this novel of memory and forgetting.
Still Holding, by Bruce Wagner.
The final entry in Wagner's cell-phone themed trilogy explores the glitter and emptiness of Hollywood.
A Year in Reading: An Emerging Best of List
Dan Wickett - 12.6.2005
Last year, Dan Wickett, proprietor of the Emerging Writers Network and its accompanying blog sent me his list of best books by emerging writers. The post was a big hit, and he was kind enough to share this year's list with us. Enjoy:NovelsAmerican Purgatorio by John Haskell (interview, audio) – Haskell follows up his I Am Not Jackson Pollack with a page turner of a novel. He has adapted to the longer form with no problem at all.Please Don't Come Back From the Moon by Dean Bakopoulos (excerpt) – This is the debut effort by Dean, who has also published many excellent short stories in literary journals the past few years.Homeland by Sam Lipsyte (excerpt) – This one won't be unfamiliar to LitBlog readers. Lipsyte's paperback original has some great black humor and was well deserving of the attention it garnered.Bitter Milk by John McManus (excerpt [pdf]) – John's debut novel after two well received short story collections, and it is quite original with a narrator that may or may not exist, and if he does, it could be in various relationships to the youth he narrates about.Belly by Lisa Selin Davis (excerpt) – Another debut effort, Davis takes an interesting look at how small to mid-size American towns are changing, or Walmartizing, in the 21st Century. That she doesthis and allows her readers deep into the relationships of a specific family is pretty impressive.Garner by Kirstin Allio (excerpt) – A winner from Coffee House Press – Allio writes of a small New England town and sets her tale nearly a century in the past. Her descriptions of the landscapes and the townfolk put her readers right in their lives.Last year's list had two authors that were established, but not nearly as much as they should have been, in Steve Yarbrough and Percival Everett. This year sees a similarity with authors Lee Martin and Walter Kirn:The Bright Forever by Lee Martin (excerpt) – His second novel and sixth book (including a hard to find chapbook) overall, The Bright Forever is a stunning novel told in various points of view. A little girl disappears and Martin slowly allows his readers the full story – the anguish and honesty he is able to infuse his characters with as they spill this tale is incredible.Mission to America by Walter Kirn (excerpt) – Like Martin, not a newcomer, but a well-respected author who hasn't received the sort of attention that he has with this latest effort which only boosts Kirn's reputation as one of today's better satirists. He takes on religion, new ageism, health nuts, and many others his latest.Short Story CollectionsSightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap (excerpt) – An excellent debut collection from this author whose name is sprinkled about in the story anthologies the past two years – Best New American Writing, BASS, O'Henry, etc.God Lives in St. Petersburg by Tom Bissell (excerpt) – Bissell lets his experiences in the Peace Corps and as a journalist lead him into many excellent short stories mainly set throughout countries formerly part of the USSR. The best in this collection will rival the best you'll read this year.Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami (blog) – This collection, Lalami's first, follows four Moroccans as they try to find what they hope will be better lives if they can get into Spain. The stories are very well written and the collection is set up very interestingly with the story of the attempted trip to Spain leading off, and then individual stories about each of the four characters Lalami concentrates on – first a story of each of their lives prior to the trip, and then a story of each of their lives after it.We're in Trouble by Christopher Coake (excerpt) – Coake is a writer not afraid to tackle the longer story as this collection has a novella or two in it. He's also not afraid to tackle heartbreak and sorrow, but does so in a manner that doesn't beat his readers up. He gets right into the minds and feelings of his characters.Copy Cats by David Crouse (excerpt) – One of this year's Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award winners. The collection has some excellent stories, including the title story which leads it off, but the big winner is a stunning novella that leads me to hoping Crouse is working on something a bit longer like a debut novel to look forward to.Big Cats by Holiday Reinhorn (excerpt) – With her debut, Reinhorn slips into T.C. Boyle neighborhood – her opening lines completely grab the reader and let them know that the author is completely aware of her characters and their situations. The stories also tend to grab odd situations you hear of occasionally, but rarely read about, and use them to allow her characters to move their lives forward.Non-FictionOrphans by Charles D'Ambrosio – (excerpt) – This collection of essays has the bonus of being an interesting little book published by Clear Cut Press. Besides the different look, and pocket size, the book has D'Ambrosio's writing which is frequently stellar. I found myself reading about religious haunted houses and mobile home inspections without being able to set the book down – a true testament to his writing. Beyond those couple of essays, there are some really interesting efforts that were previously published in a Seattle alternative newspaper about topics I'd be more inclined to read about.House: A Memoir by Michael Ruhlman Ruhlman continues as one of the best in the non-fiction genre these days, choosing a topic and writing about it, completely covering it and allowing the reader to appreciate it in ways they may never have considered. Following past efforts that took on single sex education, cooking, and wooden boats, this time around, Ruhlman writes of a 200 year old house in Cleveland that he and his wife purchase and restore.Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich (translated by Keith Gessen) (interview) – I don't think I set this 300 plus page book down once after I started reading it. Alexievich, at danger to her own self, visited the area surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear reactor and interviewed anybody she could find who would talk – people who had been firefighters, or relatives of residents who evacuated, those who didn't, hunters of animals left behind, etc. It's absolutely fascinating to read what happened, how people found out, and the various reactions to the news.One Last BookThe Bear Bryant Funeral Train by Brad Vice – Unless you already have a copy, or are willing to drop nearly a thousand dollars to obtain one, you'll not get a chance to read this former Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award winner. The press recalled and pulped as many of the copies as they could (and it sounds like they got most of the small print run) due to what is being referred to as plagiarism in the opening story, "Tuscaloosa Knights." It's too bad something else couldn't have been figured out as Vice is one helluva writer. If you look around, you can find many of the stories that are within the pages of the few copies floating around – at least two have been in the Algonquin Best New Stories of the South series in the past few years. A recent Five Points has the story, Mule, in it. The story that caused the trouble can be seen at www.storysouth.com (look for the link there to Thicket, where the story truly is located).{Ed: Dan recently responded to further allegations of plagiarism against Brad Vice at his blog.}


Rani Mukerji came in an all-black sari at Deepika and Ranveer's wedding reception but failed to impress with us her sartorial choice this time. While Rani's styling was fine, the outfit didn't look good on her at all.
Rani wore a sari that was plain black-hued and was draped in a classic Nivi style. The border of her sari was accentuated by sleek golden embellishment. Her sari was minimal but the blouse was elaborately done. From a designing point of view, it was the perfect pairing but somehow this outfit didn't suit Rani at all. Her black-hued blouse was round-necked and half-sleeved. It was intricately embroidered with nature-inspired patterns and floral prints.
She carried a small sling bag with her that was detailed with shimmery accents. Rani accessorised her look with sleek danglers and shiny bracelet. Her makeup was marked by a heavy kohl and glossy pink lip shade. Her side-swept tresses completed her look. How did you find Rani Mukerji's ethnic outfit of the night? Feel free to share opinions in the comment section.


Several state lawmakers have vociferously come out against Amazon's plans to build its new headquarters in Long Island City. Their positions tend to vary slightly, but all come back to the idea that a company as profitable as Amazon shouldn't be given up to $3 billion in state and city subsidies. Some want the online retail and entertainment giant to go elsewhere, and are calling for the state to withdraw the promised tax breaks and other incentives.
Here's the thing: State lawmakers can derail roughly $700 million of the pledged $3 billion from Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio. And all they have to do is — nothing.
You see, the bulk of Amazon's tax breaks — $1.2 billion — come from the Excelsior jobs program, which is available to any company that comes to New York and creates jobs that trigger the tax credit. The state's proposed outline of these benefits in the memorandum of understanding (MOU) is contingent on this program's being expanded and extended in a few years, well before the pledge to Amazon is fully played out.
This was all detailed in an insightful analysis by the Citizens Budget Commission of New York.
So, if lawmakers are truly opposed having Amazon in LIC, they simply need to stand up and say, "I pledge not to extend and expand this program." If enough legislators do so, it would send a clear message to the tech company that it is not welcome — and that if it stays, it can kiss $700 million of the cash promised to it goodbye.
From our perch, it seems like some of the lawmakers voicing the loudest opposition to Amazon's coming are not intellectually committed to this anti–big-corporation message, and are instead reading the political winds and jumping up and down to make sure they are lumped in with the energetic progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
If they truly believe Amazon's arrival is bad for Queens and for New York City, then they should take that pledge. If they aren't willing to do so, we should dispense with the political theater of protesting the arrival of 25,000 high-paying jobs and start working out the details of welcoming this tech behemoth into town, with an eye towards protecting the culture of Queens' communities and making sure rent doesn't skyrocket in the already increasingly unaffordable city.


The 2019 Open Day will be held on 23 January 2019. The Open Day for the MSc took place in January 2018, view the Metals & Energy Finance Open Day Presentation 2018 .
The course overlaps with other finance-related MSc courses and builds on Imperial College London's long standing relationship with the minerals and energy industries. The course benefits from close ties with industry, and most students base their final project on a relevant industry case study. In addition there are annual field excursions, which allow students to gain first hand experience of a range of metals and energy projects at various stages of development. Please see scholarship opportunities below.
The MSc Metals & Energy Finance programme is accredited by the UK Engineering Council so that graduates with appropriate first degrees and relevant professional experience qualify for the CEng (Chartered Engineer) designation. The UK CEng in turn has reciprocal standing in Europe and as such engineers are entitled to use the EUR ING designation.
The course is aimed at geoscience and engineering graduates who wish to develop a broad understanding of the financial and strategic elements of metals and energy projects. It is also suitable for graduates in finance and accounting who wish to develop an understanding of the technical and geological concepts relevant to metals and energy projects. Many of the participants have some industry experience prior to embarking on the course.
We welcome recent graduates, but will not make any offers to those who have not yet been awarded their degree. In this case, your application would be accepted and processed; if you meet the criteria you will be placed on a reserve list and a place may become available.
Why choose an MSc in Metals and Energy Finance?
Demand for basic raw materials continues to rise, particularly in the emerging economies. Mining and energy companies, as well as the financial institutions that support them, continue to evaluate new and existing projects to satisfy this demand. Graduates with a combination of the technical and financial skills required to develop metals and energy projects are well placed to make the most of this opportunity.
The MSc in Metals and Energy Finance provides you with the opportunity to participate in a challenging and stimulating MSc course, while simultaneously improving your employment prospects in the financial and mining and energy sectors.
Imperial College London has been at the forefront of teaching mining and energy-related courses since its formation in 1907. It is recognised as a centre of world-class research and teaching in science, engineering, medicine and management.
Department of Earth Science and Engineering students ranks highly in national surveys and university league tables. Our teaching received the top rating of 24/24 in an assessment by the Higher Education Funding Council of England.
In the 2008 research assessment, all of the Department of Earth Science and Engineering's research was evaluated as excellent and of international significance.
Imperial College Business School was established to provide world class teaching and research at the heart of Imperial College, London. In the 2008 research assessment it ranked second in the UK after London Business School. The Metals and Energy Finance MSc course sits alongside other Finance related MSc courses delivered by Imperial College Business School.
Produce graduates equipped to pursue careers in the technical and financial appraisal of natural energy and mineral resource projects.
Offer traditional minerals related training directly applicable to a career in the minerals industry.
Introduce key technical and geological concepts relevant to petroleum projects.
Enhance career opportunities in the financial services and petroleum and mineral industries.
Provide the basis for an understanding of quantitative finance, accounting and strategic management within the context of technical principles that apply specifically to mineral and energy projects.
Respond to the importance of the City of London as a global centre for mining and energy finance by providing knowledge of corporate finance, the equity markets, debt finance, metals markets and associated derivative markets.
Provide training in financial modelling, financial engineering and in the techniques of risk modelling.
Cover transitioning to business leadership roles, sustainable development and engineering ethics.
Provide the skills needed to undertake independent research projects both in industry and in the university environment.
Total has offered a scholarship for students on Metals and Energy Finance MSc in the 2018-19 academic year. The scholarship is for students who demonstrate exceptional academic merit and/or potential, and an interest in developing a career in the petroleum sector (financial service, producers, consulting and advisory).
The scholarship has a value of £21,000. In order to be considered for the scholarship, candidates must hold an unconditional offer, and submit a profile for consideration by Total. With any queries, please contact Joanna Owens, MSc Administrator.
The Bank of Montreal (BMO) has made a gift to Imperial to establish the BMO Scholarship for Women in Metals and Energy Finance. The scholarship, which was first awarded for the 2015-2016 academic year, is open to female students on the MSc in Metals and Energy Finance who demonstrate exceptional academic merit and/or potential. The scholarship will have a value of £30,000, covering tuition at UK/EU rates and a £15,500 bursary. In order to be considered for the scholarship, candidates must be in possession of an offer for enrolment by 30 June. Interviews and selection will take place in the first half of July.
Further details of the BMO 2015-16 scholarship awardee, Dasha Shalashova, can be found by clicking here.
Following a successful launch in November 2016, Professor Buchanan, the course Director, is redelivering this one-week short course based on the book "Metals and Energy Finance" first published in 2016 by Imperial College Press, with a 2nd edition launching in January 2019.
The Metals and Energy Finance Short Course is delivered through the Imperial College Centre for Continuing Professional Development and is an executive summary of the degree. The short course may well offer an alternative option for applicants seeking admission onto the MSc. Find out more details of the book and details of the short course.
The MSc Metals & Energy Finance Open Day took place on 24 January 2018, view the Metals & Energy Finance Open Day Presentation 2018 .
The 2019 Metals and Energy Open Day will be held on 23 January 2019. Please contact Joanna Owens for further information or to register your interest in attending.
Please note that the programme is a one-year full-time degree and is not offered on a part-time basis.
Applicants to the course are expected to have reasonable fitness and agility as both the Wessex and South African excursions involve some physical exertion.