Bookstorm

The 2009 Tournament of Books office brackets are now available. Start placing your bets.

Hey, Ellen: we've got another Valentine's Day on our hands, and I've been reading Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil. Here's a little piece I thought you might enjoy:

What will you say tonight, poor lonely soul,
What will you say old withered heart of mine,
To the most beautiful, the best, most dear,
Whose heavenly regard brings back your bloom?

--We will assign our pride to sing her praise:
Nothing excels the sweetness of her will;
Her holy body has an angel's scent,
Her eye invests us with a cloak of night.

Whether it be in night and solitude,
Or in the streets among the multitude,
Her ghost before us dances like a torch.

It speaks out: 'I am lovely and command
That you will love only the Beautiful;
I am your Guardian, Madonna, Muse!'

I've never been one for author interviews, but this one, with Mary Gaitskill, actually gets interesting:

One thing I'm very envious of men for is when they get married--this is less true than it was, but I still think it's true--their wife is going to help them. Look at Nabokov. He was a brilliant writer. He would have been a brilliant writer no matter what. But do you know how much his wife did for him? She did the shopping. They would drive to the store together--she would drive. She did all the dealings with the landlord, she shoveled the walk. She typed his manuscripts, she edited them. I don't think most women would go that far, but women are far more willing to do the support work, which is really, really helpful. Virginia Woolf--I'm sure she would have been a great writer, regardless, but she had a lot of help, too. Leonard was a wife. That's invaluable. Women do not have that very often.

Michael Chabon has been given the first Scripter Literary Achievement Award.

Often cited as one of the foremost talents in contemporary American letters, Chabon is the author of seven novels, two volumes of short stories and a recent collection of essays. His first book, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, originally written as his master’s thesis at UC Irvine, became a New York Times best seller.

Chabon followed Pittsburgh with Wonder Boys, which was adapted for the big screen and for which he won the 2001 Scripter Award. The same year, he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. An adaptation of his most recent novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, is currently under development by Joel and Ethan Coen and is scheduled for release in 2010.