50 Funniest American Writers

Andy Borowitz discusses his new anthology of American humor on NPR, here.

From the accompanying article...

Writer and comedian Andy Borowitz says he initially got into comedy for one simple reason: girls.

In addition to using his jokes to charm women, Borowitz has also written for The New Yorker and runs a satirical blog called The Borowitz Report. His latest project is The 50 Funniest American Writers: An Anthology of Humor from Mark Twain to The Onion.

Borowitz read more than 1,000 stories before whittling his selection down to 50. Comedic writers who made the cut include Woody Allen and David Sedaris. But the book also features writers who are more famous for their serious work, like Langston Hughes and Sinclair Lewis.

"Sinclair Lewis could be funny when he wanted to be," Borowitz tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz.

The Lewis story he included is an excerpt from the 1922 book Babbitt, which Borowitz calls "a great satire of Midwestern, middle-class conformity."

Posters of the Canadian Pacific Railway

Dr. Rosenbach and Mr. Lilly

A story of the transactions between an impassioned collector and a renowned antiquarian dealer against the backdrop of modern book collecting.

A review in The Hindu...

It isn't an emotional or subjective account and yet you can feel, thrumming just underneath, the book collector's thrill and the passion of the bookseller. “Book collecting came naturally to Lilly,” writes Silver. “He possessed an eye for quality and detail, and a taste for the extensive minutiae that mark the highest levels of any collecting field”. He always bought cautiously, studying a dealer catalogue for a long time, comparing it with other copies when he could, and then taking the plunge.

But he was yet to deal with America's most famous antiquarian book dealer, the scholarly Dr. Rosenbach, who seemed always to be able to offer the best copies of the rarest books. Lilly had been reading Rosenbach's well written catalogues with great bibliophilic pleasure but as Silver notes, they couldn't take the place of actually meeting Rosenbach, which Lilly did in January 1929 because catalogues “couldn't carry the same combination of charm, knowledge, anecdote, and uniquely expressed confidence in the importance of the books as could Rosenbach's in-person performance.”

Books and on Looting Borders' Smoldering Corpse

I've been reading some good books lately, thought I'd take a bit of time to share. I'm one of those biblioholics out there, so naturally I am deeply concerned about the future of print media, trees be damned, but sooner or later I guess I'll have to adopt some sort of reading tablet and get up with the times. In the meantime, I've taken full advantage of Borders' corpse and looted it for all it was worth; I have about 100 new books* on my shelf now demanding attention, and I'm already wondering if the baby is going to object to me reading him things like The Seal of Karga Kul or Zombie CSU. I figure I'm good, at least until the poor little guy starts developing real language and comprehension skills, and is suddenly mortified to discover that his parents are a couple of uncool geeks...!

Anyway, some books I would strongly recommend:


The Edge of Physics by Anil Ananthaswamay is a great read, a chapter-by-chapter journey in which Anil travels to various remote corners of the world where physicists, astronomers and sundry other researchers are relying on the unique conditions of specific locales to do their research. It's a great read, with a fair amount of insight on how and why these remote institutes come into being and the trials and tribulations involved in doing the research in such exotic locations.



Tom Zoellner wrote Uranium which I am in the middle of and absolutely loving it. It's an engaging read (unlike Rhodes, who may know his stuff but I found tedious to plow through) and provides a great variety of interesting history and data on the discovery, development, research and seedy hidden details of the history of uranium. Well worth reading, and very engaging.



In fantasy, I finished Tim Waggoner's Thieves of Blood, the first volume of the Blade of the Flame trilogy set in the world of Eberron. It was a good read, with some very distinct characters, and a plot and pacing in style for the pulp fantasy world of Eberron. I'm looking forward to reading the next two books in the series now. My only gripe really was that clearly Wizards of the Coast was employing some lazy editors back in 2006 when this book came out, as there were a fair number of typographical errors best attributed to someone who was spell-checking with Office Word 2003 rather than properly proofing the manuscript by hand. That doesn't detract from the author's work, though.



Aside from the above mentioned books I'm plowing once again through Salvatore's Drizzt Do'Urden novels, which I read many years ago, around 1999-2000, getting up to around book 10 before I ran out of steam and took a break, never finding the time to return. Well thanks to the Looting of Borders I have all of the Salvatore Forgotten Realms novels to date, and plan to work my way through them, restarting with Homeland (in the can) and moving on from there. I'm sure everyone's familiar with these books, but I'll only comment to say that I am consistently impressed at how engaging and simple Salvatore's writing is, and how evocative his books are; I really do consider the first Drizzt trilogy to be among the best fantasy I have ever read.



Aside from all the fantasy, I'm also finally picking up Larry Niven's Known Space prequel series (co-written with Edward Lerner), and just finished Fleet of Worlds a few weeks ago. I haven't started Juggler of Worlds yet, but I will soon; I've also been catching up on his other collections such as N-Space and Crashlander. I really love Niven's Known Space universe, and its fun to read new books in the setting, revisit the classic Known Space tales, and watch how the authors try to reconcile the inconsistencies and evolving science of a series written over nearly five decades!

My wife says this is common among imminent first-time fathers, who try desperately to get all that last-minute living in before B-Day and the Loss of All Personal Freedom arrives. I guess I'll save my staggering video game exploits in recent months for another column...

*if you're following my blog and have noted my lamentation at not getting the Tome of Horrors Complete, I will admit that the 100 odd books I bought at Borders in its closing days probably had more to do with that than all the money I've spent on baby gear....sigh, such is the life of a biblioholic, sacrifices must be made and all that noise....!

Everybody Loves Our Town

The town is my hometown - Seattle. The reason - it was the birthplace of grunge. There's a new book about the history of grunge reviewed on the Guardian.

From said review...

In your standard rock narrative, there is a middle phase of joyous success before the hubris, unravelling, and so on, but grunge entered the harsh realm almost overnight. Within months of Nevermind's release, backbiting was rife, drug habits were burgeoning and flights from LA to Seattle were stuffed with A&R men scooping up bands such as the inauspiciously named Flop. It seemed like every group suddenly wanted to sound and look like Nirvana, except Nirvana themselves. Even as Cameron Crowe's 1992 movie Singles celebrated the Seattle scene, Mudhoney's typically sardonic contribution to the soundtrack, "Overblown", sought to bury it: "Everybody loves our town/ That's why I'm thinkin' lately/ Time for leavin' is now." Most music scenes are at their best in the darkness of relative obscurity but Seattle's burned up unusually fast on exposure to light: an unstable compound. One thinks of the description of Nirvana's messy "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video shoot: "The thing was never integrated enough to disintegrate."

Careful though Yarm is to chronicle those bands, like Cat Butt and the Gits, who were never destined for Time cover stories, the book's dramatic centre was always going to be Cobain and his wife, Courtney Love, a character who could start a war in an empty room. By this stage in the narrative, the playful misinformation celebrated by Everett True has curdled into savage disputes over Cobain's brief, tormented spell as America's biggest rock star. "How do you know when Courtney Love is lying?" asks Buzz Osborne of the Melvins. "Her lips are moving."



Studio 360 discusses "Nevermind" here:

A 7-Year-Old Girl Reviews Justice League #1

Illustrated History

The Los Angeles Review of Books discusses books that curate comics.



From the piece...



The less the books focus on comics per se, the less useful they are. In a common annoying trope in cultural history surveys, Walker wastes pages on potted and worthless surveys of what was going on in the culture at large, of the “it was an era of flappers and video games, of flagpole sitters and Watergate, of hippies and the Space Race” variety.



And despite the joys of looking at the pictures, the actual comics history part of both books is too tight and quick to provide much insight or pleasure; the criticism is non-existent except for a random sentence here and there, some astute and some bizarre (Robinson overuses the word “quixotic” to describe strips, and never correctly); and little in the way of interesting stories or anecdotes help bring either the creators or their business alive. For that sort of detailed narrative history, the comics fan might want to check out the out of print, but available through the usual online sources, Comics Art in America by Stephen Becker (Simon and Schuster), though that book’s story stops in 1959.

Everett Ruess - Vanished Writer

Honestly, a writer who vanished, never to be heard from again. What happened to him?

From a piece on NPR...

Everett Ruess could have been one of this country's greatest wilderness writers, a poet and author on a par with John Muir or Edward Abbey.

But we'll never know for sure, because Ruess disappeared without a trace in November 1934. With two burros trailing behind him, he left the remote southern Utah town of Escalante, heading down the desolate Hole-in-the-Rock Trail towards the Colorado River in search of his favorite things: beauty and solitude.

About a week down the trail, Ruess ran into two sheepherders and camped with them for a couple of nights.

And then, author David Roberts tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz, Ruess rode off into a nearby canyon and vanished from the face of the Earth.

Roberts is the author of the new book Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer.

How Not to Write a Book Review

Robert Pinsky, on Slate, gives us three golden rules.

From the piece...

Every book review, said the anonymous document, must follow three rules:

1. The review must tell what the book is about.
2. The review must tell what the book's author says about that thing the book is about.
3. The review must tell what the reviewer thinks about what the book's author says about that thing the book is about.

If this template is not actually Aristotelian, it has that philosopher's breathtaking plainness and penetration. To sneer at it as obvious would be a mistake. Even the clunky or stammering expression of the three rules ("what the reviewer thinks about what the author says about that thing the book is about") works as a hammer, driving home the essential principles and their distinctly separate, yet profoundly interrelated nature.

Applying the three-part standard to every book review I read, I find that many—or most?—fill only one or two of the requirements. Sometimes a reviewer dutifully paraphrases a book, fulfilling Rule One with a stab at Two, but seems too shy or fearful for Three. Another kind of writer, eager to show off, proceeds directly to Rule Three with a perfunctory glance at One and nothing about Two. Only a few reviewers do their work well enough to provide all three kinds of information, and a certain number—disciples of John Wilson Croker—avoid all three.

Sons and Fathers

Frank Miller's masterwork, The Dark Knight, is discussed by the Los Angeles Review of Books.

From the review...

For a variety of reasons, Batman has always appealed especially to those who want to distort the superhero ethos. First MAD, The Realist, and underground comics published funny, derisive, lewd versions of famous daily comic strip and comic book characters like Batman and Robin, allowing the backroom cynicism of politics, the newsroom, and showbiz to invade our youthful entertainments. Then, there was the infamously campy, Zeitgeist-grabbing Batman television show, starring Adam West and Burt Ward, which ditched the vestigial noir elements for a leap into pure pop idiocy.

Such sacrilege demanded a reformation, and Batman fans got it in the 1980s with the work of Frank Miller. Miller, a Gotham lover of the old school, gives his Dark Knight Returns a nod to its pulp sources with a reference to Commissioner Gordon’s “sketchy” early days as a Chicago cop. Miller picked the right superhero to revisit. Not only could the 60s devolution of Batman be improved: so could the original.

Miller is a classicist; he loves the melodrama of the comics form. He speaks of forcing his readers to slow down, to work against the impulse to race along with the storyline, in order to appreciate the art. A story chopped into a procession of frames colliding and sparking off each other is a perfect illustration of Eisenstein’s theory of montage, but there is a limit. When a comic book is reprinted as a bound book — much less in an extravagant, large, boxed, hard cover glossy re-framing of form like this edition — its cheap glory is corrupted by promising too much. The graphic-novelization of comics is a wrong turn as sure as Cinerama was for cinema. I never saw the first printing of Miller’s work, and I’m sure those who have seen the original art value the high-tone reproductions now available. Nonetheless, this deluxe treatment shifts focus from storytelling and the normal porn of form to the distracting fetish of printing specs.

Secret Histories

The Los Angeles Review of Books explores the world of steampunk.

From the piece...

Rachel Bowser and Brian Croxall, the co-editors of a recent special issue on steampunk in the online journal Neo-Victorian Studies, make much the same point when they suggest that steampunk visual art is a critical response to the “opacity” of contemporary technology, its imperviousness to tinkering, and its discouragement of amateur repair. Rooted in the “maker” and do-it-yourself movements, steampunk rejects planned obsolescence, and this helps explain its propensity for mixing together materials from different time periods, as in the artist Datamancer’s laptop computers fashioned out of wood and leather and ornamented with brass bear-claw feet and a large brass key as the on/off switch. Anachronism, they claim, is steampunk’s primary formal principle: “it creates a new paradigm in which technologies, aesthetics, and ideas mark different times simultaneously, instead of signposting different historical periods; anachronism is not anomalous but becomes the norm.”

Anachronism is as central to steampunk fiction as it is to fashion and visual art. The term “steampunk,” in fact, was originally coined in reference to fiction by the American science fiction writer K.W. Jeter in an April, 1987 essay in Locus magazine: “I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing,” he wrote, “as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term for [them] … like ‘steampunk’ perhaps.” Though largely overshadowed by its bigger, slicker brother “cyberpunk,” steampunk fiction did become an interesting development in science fiction over the next two decades. The grand achievement of the early days of the subgenre, by most accounts, is William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1991), a novel that projects a decidedly darker vision than most contemporary steampunk art. It is set in an alternative mid-nineteenth-century London where a technological breakthrough, the invention of mechanical computing machines, has ushered in a radically secular political regime — alternative history in an anachronistic mode. Lord Byron, in this world, has become a powerful Prime Minister rather than a poet. But London’s thriving trade in prostitution is unchanged, and its air pollution is even worse. Other notable examples, ones not necessarily identified as steampunk by their authors but sometimes claimed as part of the subgenre’s genealogy, include Philip Pullman’s highly successful trilogy His Dark Materials (1995-2000), with its very recognizable Oxford set in a fantastic alternative universe, China Miéville’s critically acclaimed New Crobuzon trilogy (Perdido Street Station [2003], The Scar [2004], and Iron Council [2005]), which clearly models the nation of New Crobuzon on imperial-era England, and even Thomas Pynchon’s mammoth historical novel Against the Day (2006), with its elaborate play upon Victorian speculations about time travel and multiple-dimensional realities.

Humorous Book Reviews on Amazon.com

Enjoy!