Of Bookmarks, Brothers, and BAD (with an Office Girl and a Swamp thrown in for giggles)

I got my Albatros bookmarks the other day and I'm digging using them.  It really may be a better bookmark, simple, elegant, and clever.  I would prefer they were re-usable.  We live in the golden age of adhesives so I can only guess this is a simple adjustment to make.  

Karen Russell won the New York Public Library Young Lions award for Swamplandia!  The award is for American authors under the age of 35 who show promise.  She was a finalist for her previous collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.  As if I haven't pimped her enough on this blog, I strongly encourage you to read her work.  

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt is out in paperback and continues to rack up awards, especially in his native Canada.  The new cover isn't nearly as enthralling as the original and whoever decided there was need to change it should be taken out and horsewhipped.  However it's what's between the covers that counts. 

Joe Meno's upcoming Office Girl is a winner.  I'll post more about it closer to its July pub date but be on the lookout for this one from those cool cats at Akashic Books.

Paul Fussell passed away yesterday at the age of 88.  A cultural critic with a sharp eye and an acid tongue, his book BAD or the Dumbing of America had a strong grip on me when I read it 20 years ago. I'm re-reading it now and find he is still dead on the money.  I can only imagine what he must have thought about the ubiquity of the Internet and cell phones, reality TV and the demise of empathy, honor and shame in American culture today.  Was he ahead of his time or have we as a society just gotten worse? 

The Times and The Swamp

http://goo.gl/I1kdq

Author Karen Russell and friend

Here the NY Times weighs in with their notable picks of the year.  It is a good solid list though with few surprises. 

I was pleased to see Swamplandia! by Karen Russell make the cut. 

My two cents on that book can be read here: 

http://goo.gl/a3Bi9.  Don't miss out on this book or her first short story collection, the brilliant St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.  Russell is an immense talent.

Oddly, the book is to be adapted by HBO and producer Scott Rudin as a "half hour comedy project"(!) with the author consulting.  While HBO has created some real magic, this leaves me baffled.  If it ever makes it to the screen, my high hopes for it will be matched with low expectations.  Then again, I would love to see HBO prove me wrong.

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

My how the month has flown.  Reading and writing have taken a back seat recently to a marvelous trip to New Orleans with Mrs. Next.  It was my first visit and I admit to having a rather serious crush on the Crescent City.  

At last I finished Karen Russell's Swamplandia! and I must say I wholeheartedly agree with Joseph O'Neill's backcover blurb:

"A wonderfully fertile novel by an unfairly talented writer."  Russell is only 29 years old and her writing makes my head spin like a radar dish.  In a good way. 

Swamplandia! itself is a down-at-the-heels theme park (the theme is alligator wrestling) on an isolated island in the Florida Everglades.  The story begins with the death by cancer of Hilola Bigtree, the park's main attraction and matriarch of the Bigtree clan.  Told alternately by Ava, the youngest of the three children, and her older brother, the fussy Kiwi, the novel Swamplandia! is a moving story of family, of deep love and crushing loss, of gators and ghosts.  

As Janet Maslin suggested in her NYT review, some readers might be turned off by the offbeat family and their strange exploits but I found them charming, maddening, upsetting, and lost in their own worlds.  Much like real families. 

The novel isn't without a few faults.  Without spoiling anything, I can't quite understand the need to put Ava through a terrible ordeal within an already painful ordeal.  As for the ending, I suspected there might be problems but the author pulled it off well enough that I was satisfied. 

Karen Russell is an immensely gifted writer and one deserving of a readers' time and full attention. She has the ability to make the mundane fascinating and the arcane seem like common, though worthwhile, knowledge. Because of her youth, there is also the promise of so much more to come.