The Omega Institute is a 30-year-old retreat -- the kind of place where communal vegetarian dining, yoga and meditation give shape to the day.

Seems like an odd fit for the author of "Another ... Night in ... City," a memoir with a title that's profane enough to send your average family newspaper into fits of ellipses, a book that Mark Doty called "ferocious ... harrowing."

In it, Flynn recounts his troubled family history: His mother committed suicide when he was 22, and later, when Flynn was working at a Boston-area homeless shelter, his long-estranged father surfaced there as a client.

"I couldn't imaging anything worse, really," he told Robert Birnbaum for Identity Theory in 2005. Yet he continued:

People say with the book sometimes, "How did you write this book, it has no self-pity? It's compassionate. Dah, dah, dah." I say you should have seen the drafts. They are full of self-pity and ridiculous rages. And I edited them out mostly because when you look at the stuff on page it doesn't ring true, actually. It does feel like a diversion from the essential state. Which, hopefully if you can get to it, is a little purer.

So maybe Flynn won't be as odd a fit with the authors of "The Guru Looked Good" and "A Monk Swimming" after all.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Nick Flynn. Credit: Carolyn Cole  Los Angeles Times

The excellent literary website the Second Pass has decided to take a bite out of the canon. Its victims are books by Don Delillo, Charles Dickens, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Jonathan Franzen, D.H. Lawrence, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cormac McCarthy and Virginia Woolf. And Jack Kerouac.

On the one hand, some of the targeted books are lesser works by masters whose other books, it is implied, would remain safely canonized. "Absalom, Absalom" should go, but other works by Faulkner should stay. "The Road" might be Cormac McCarthy's bestselling book, but it's not his best. "'A Tale of Two Cities' would be a good book by another writer," they write, "but for Dickens it was a failure."

But in other cases, it's a direct attack. If just one book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez could go on a must-read list, it would be "One Hundred Years of Solitude" -- but they would banish it. The same for Jack Kerouac's "On the Road." Which is where I draw the line. This is how the critique begins:

Like many nerds of the ’80s and ’90s, I read "On the Road," that classic of identity literature, in high school. I read it as a textbook on how to be cool. And like many of the traditional textbooks I read at the time, it filled me with awe and boredom.

I'm not sure when "On the Road" became "identity literature" -- is it creating an identity? How can something that described a lifestyle that was alternative to mainstream culture in 1950 be an adoptable identity today? The author goes on to describe the cultural role that the book played, both personally and in a greater sense, which she (it is a she, I checked with the editor) found alienating.

But I would argue that whatever cultural hallmarks it might signal, the book is a work of literature, one with an intensity of vision and a language of impure steamroller incendiary jazz.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

Keep your cultural baggage: That's going straight into my canon. 

After the jump: Kerouac reads, accompanied by Steve Allen on piano. The above passage begins about 2 1/2 minutes in.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Jerry Yulsman / Associated Press

If you can’t make it to London before the exhibit ends, and if you feel that faithfully watching Showtime’s "The Tudors" isn’t the best way to observe the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession to the throne, there’s the British exhibit's catalog,  "Henry VIII: Man and Monarch" from the University of Chicago Press.

Organized chronologically, the catalog begins with a drawing of Henry as "a strapping two- or three-year-old infant" dating from the 1530s and ends, almost 300 pages later, with the engraving "The Family of Henry VIII" -- a picture of harmony and peace in the house of Tudor that was entirely illusory.

Objects, this catalog suggests, allow us to draw our own conclusions without intermediaries. There’s a prayer roll (called a "bede"), for instance, that Henry used as a youth. Though there is debate that the king always had his doubts about Catholic practices, his use of this roll containing medieval devotions suggests something else.

One of the more interesting items is a prayer book, in which Henry and Anne Boleyn exchanged flirtatious notes during Mass. The page on which Anne scribbles an expression of her devotion is apt: It shows an obedient Mary listening as the angel Gabriel tells her she will be the mother of God. Henry, on the other hand, inscribes his note at the bottom of a page showing the bloodied body of Jesus. Perhaps he meant this to be poetic as well -- his lovesick mood made him feel like a Man of Sorrows? -- but linking romantic desire with a tortured body is, well, gross.

Other objects give us the feel of life as it was lived in Henry’s household: There are pewter dishes, schoolbooks, writing desks and livery chains (worn by the king’s followers), as well as the scientific instruments the king loved (among them astrolabes and compasses). (There is, however, no object suggesting the king was "a tree-hugger," as Prince Charles has called him.) There's also a shaffron (a helmet/mask for horses) that was worn in battle and during tournaments -- Henry, you may recall, was nearly killed during a joust. Such objects are invaluable in bringing that period to life.

What lingers most, however, is the irony suffusing this catalog. There is Jane Seymour, proudly announcing the birth of Edward VI in a letter: "By the inestimable goodness and grace of Almighty God we be delivered and brought in child bed of a Prince." The king's concerns about succession were eased even though Edward would die in his teens: Henry was spared that knowledge by dying first.

Or else there's this early letter to Henry’s father-in-law, King Ferdinand, in which he declares his love for Katherine: "Even if we were still free, it is she, nevertheless, that we would choose for our wife before all others." Fifty pages later, of course, we find documents concerning his struggle for an annulment. How soon love fades.

-- Nick Owchar

On Tuesday, the NEA announced its stimulus grants (aka its American Recovery and Reinvestment Act direct grants) to support arts organizations around the country. More than 25 L.A.-area nonprofits, universities and municipalities received grants ranging from $25,000 to $250,000, for a total of more than $1.6 million.

And of that, there was a single grant to an L.A.-based literary organization: PEN Center USA West, which got $50,000.

Although funds from other arts grants may trickle out to support the Los Angeles literary scene, it's hard not to feel a bit, well, underfunded. Especially when you look at how much other cities garnered to support their bookish culture.

In Minnesota, four literary nonprofits in Minneapolis-St. Paul received grants totaling $125,000, more than double what L.A. will receive. The region has a population of 3.1 million, less than a third that of L.A. County's 10.3 million. If you do the math, that's about a half a cent per person in L.A. for literature, versus 4 cents per person in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Not that the math really makes sense -- those funds are likely to support infrastructure as well as programs.

Not surprisingly, New York maintains its place as a center of literary life, with seven organizations in New York City slated to receive $275,000, far more than any other region of the country.

Literary institutions can support and maintain the cultural dialogue of a city through readings, celebrations and more. Clearly, the NEA has made it a priority to support nonprofits struggling to make it through these challenging economic times. But will book-loving Angelenos have anyplace to go? Other than N.Y. or Minneapolis, that is?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times

Today, neurologist and author Oliver Sacks turns 76. His most recent book, 2007's "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain" is, we wrote in our review, "not so much a greatest-hits collection as a purposeful set of remixes" of cases he'd written about before, shifting attention to the issues of music and the brain.

The stories Sacks tells are so fascinating that his storytelling is, perhaps, overlooked. Take the title of his 1985 book, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" -- it's wonderful, isn't it? It could easily have been called Case Studies in Neuroscience, or Perceptual Aberrations Today. But chances are it wouldn't have become a bestseller.

In an interview with the National Review of Medicine last year, Sacks talked about taking time off after med school and traveling in Canada. 

I kept a journal, called Canada Pause, in 1960. Canada Pause because travelling in Canada, especially in the Rockies, was sort of an interim for me. I had left England but was not sure what to do, not sure I wanted to stay in medicine. I wanted to write, but I had no idea what about.

As he undertook his medical career, his writing developed in tandem. Tim McIntyre interviewed Sacks for the Whole Earth Review in 1985.

TM: Your passion for literature seems to come through with the numerous literary references that you make in your books.

OS: I don't think of them as "literary references." I don't feel like a very literary person, but they just seem to apply. I mean, when I was reading Donne's Devotions, which I quote a lot in "Awakenings," it just seemed so close: "Diseases hold consultations. They seem to multiply among themselves." This was not just poetry: it was actually what seemed to be happening in front of me, and it was like a sort of science.... I think that medicine, and case history in particular, allows us a blending of art and science. That's why I like it.

Sacks is devoted to classical music -- Bach over Beethoven, as he demonstrated when they filmed his brain as he listened to both for the recent Nova television show Musical Minds. Back in 1995, McIntyre asked him about the music, writing and reading.

TM: I think you can hear the music in a lot of the best writing. James Joyce, for instance. His sentences have a musical feel to them, and supposedly he had a beautiful tenor singing voice.

Happy birthday to Dr. Sacks.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Oliver Sacks speaks in June at Columbia University in New York City. Credit:  Chris McGrath / Getty Images

The entirety of Chris Anderson's book "Free" is currently available free on the online service Scribd and at GoogleBooks. The not-quite-practicing-what-it-preaches rub: it's free to read online, but not to print or to download. What you can get for free: a downloadable 9-page excerpt at Scribd and the complete audiobook (links here). The abridged audiobook is on sale for $7.49, and no, I don't get the logic of that, either.

In other news, yesterday Amazon dropped the price of its Kindle 2 from $359 to $299. The company has not released sales figures for the device, which has perhaps been overshadowed by its newer, larger brother, the Kindle DX, whose price hasn't budged from the original $489. The lower price for the Kindle 2 makes it more competitive with the basic Sony eReader, which sells for $279 in navy and silver -- not just beige -- and includes special Michael Connolly and Danielle Steele editions.

And I knew it was coming: Octogenarian Ray Bradbury has more on his summer agenda than the two previously noted benefits. As they've done in years past, the Mystery and Imagination Bookshop in Glendale will throw the science fiction icon a party on Aug. 22, his actual birthday. Bradbury, who is turning 89, will be in attendance, and I believe there will be cake. Events get underway at 1 p.m.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: At the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture in Seoul, South Korea. Credit: Doo-ho Kim via Flickr

You used to live in Los Angeles – and you’re reading here tonight. What about the city resonates with you?

When I lived in Los Angeles, I worked in film, and it seemed like everyone I met worked in film, and all we talked about was film. I regret that, because I now know that there is so much more to the city than that. I have a friend here who takes the bus everywhere, and I wish I'd done that at least, because I found being in a car all the time very strange. I actually put a lot of that isolation -- that feeling of ships passing in the night -- into "The Embers."

In "The Embers," how much does place inform character?

Place definitely informs character in this book. I really wanted to explore another place I know very well (and have tremendous fondness for), which is New York City -- as well as the Berkshires, where the Ascher family has a country house. The Ascher family is a very New York family. Joe is a famous playwright and actor, best-known for his one-man shows. He has a chip on his shoulder because he was raised in the Bronx and is "half-Jewish" -- and doesn't carry the waspy Upper East Side pedigree of his wife, Laura. Their kids, Emily and Thomas, are very New York kids -- precocious and, of course, exposed to a lot -- not just the culture of their city's museums and theaters and so on, but to the drugs and old-beyond-their-years ways that a lot of city kids have.

The thing about the Berkshires is that it's this place where they all go to get away, and there is something very pure about the natural setting, and something more natural about their interactions there. Everything that happens in the Berkshires house, though, happens in the past, because in the present, the Berkshires house is gone. The house has been destroyed -- and the family, too, has fallen apart. Thomas is definitely the "purest" character in the book -- partly because he dies before he moves beyond the fairly innocent age of 18, and his ashes are scattered amidst an apple grove on the hillside above their former house. Emily is determined to hold her wedding -- a happy occasion, and one of new beginnings -- in this very grove, when the apple trees are in bloom. And the wedding will be the first time that she, Joe, and Laura have been reunited since Thomas' death 15 years before.

About a place that's no place, and the symbolism of gardens.

A large portion of the book also takes place at a hotel in the Midwest, where Joe, who has not written a play since Thomas' death, is skulking around, trying to write. I'm intentionally unspecific about where this hotel is, but I thought the Midwest was a good choice since the rolling hills and farms are something that mirror the Berkshires setting. And because he is looking back on his past so much while he is trying to write, I wanted the two places to feel somewhat similar. I also like the idea that he is at a hotel, because a hotel is so filled with transience -- lots of strangers passing one another and never connecting -- and this very much reflects Joe's current state of isolation, and his lack of connection to his family, who he really yearns for in many ways. In the hotel garden, he strikes up a friendship with this precocious young girl, Ingrid, who reminds him a lot of Emily when she was younger. Not to get overly symbolic, but for me, the garden setting is very significant for this friendship, which is very much about a loss of innocence. Ingrid, teetering between childhood and adulthood, is on the cusp of waking up to all kinds of things; while Joe is looking back at his life with feelings of regret and yearning -- and very much longing to rekindle the kind of friendship he had with his daughter when she was more innocent -- not just because of her age, but because she had not yet experienced the heartbreak of her brother's death.

And how do your characters define home? How important is home to them?

Home to me is synonymous with family, and this whole book is about family. Joe and Laura and Emily are very important to one another, and have tremendous love for one another. But certain things have happened -- betrayals and challenges, some big and some small, the biggest of course being Thomas' death -- that have really torn at the fabric of this family. Ultimately, there is a sense of redemption, and the love between them triumphs. You know, these people are really connected to one another no matter what. In some sense, they are each other's home and will always be each other's home. At the same time, Emily is embarking on a new life with her fiance, Clay -- they are starting their own home together, and she is very wary about this leap she's about to take because she's so aware of all the challenges that can come up and wreck everything.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Sharah Shatz

The first lines Graham Greene uttered in the literary universe are these, from his 1929 novel "The Man Within":

We're introduced to the character of Andrews, who in the course of the novel attempts to flee smugglers he has betrayed. Future biographies, however, may need to replace those first lines with these:

This comes from an unpublished, unfinished novel Greene wrote when he was 22. The Strand Magazine is taking the five chapters of the manuscript and will publish them as a serial, starting with its forthcoming July issue.

"To me what is wonderful about all of this is that Greene published a few short stories in the old Strand," said Andrew Gulli, the Strand’s managing editor, "so I feel we’re continuing the tradition."

According to Gulli, the manuscript was discovered by Greene scholar Francois Gallix at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin.

"Gallix set up a team of people and transcribed the handwritten material," he said.

Gulli gave Jacket Copy a preview of this first chapter, which is titled "The Empty Chair." One’s initial reaction is that the novelist who wrote this is (understandably) a far cry from the one who went on to produce "The Third Man," "The Power and the Glory" and "The Human Factor."

How so? That's after the jump.

The manuscript presents us with a country house mystery, and the first chapter opens as the guests assemble in the morning and notice that one, Richard Groves, whom everyone regards as "a lazy devil," is conspicuously absent. When their irritation at Groves’ absence turns into concern, they go to wake him and break down his locked bedroom door:

It's a situation straight out of the Agatha Christie playbook (the large cast of suspects, for instance) with a touch of Chesterton thrown in (theology hovers over much of the table talk; Greene, Gulli notes, converted to Roman Catholicism in the same year that he wrote this story). Gulli -- who acknowledges the support of Gallix and Greene’s ICM agents in allowing the serialization in the Strand -- says his magazine would like to find a writer to finish the manuscript.

"We have several candidates in mind, but in the end I want to respect the decision of Greene’s son and Mr. Gallix," he said, adding that he doesn’t know if there will be plans to eventually publish the manuscript as a book.

Oh, I'd say it's a safe bet that turning the manuscript into a marketable novel will almost certainly happen. You don’t have to look very far in the publishing season to see why. Nabokov’s final, unfinished novel, "The Original of Laura," will be published this fall; as will "The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps," which culls stories from several of William Styron’s abandoned writing projects; there is also Scribner's "A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition" as well as Vintage's "The Original 'Frankenstein' " by Mary Shelley (with Percy Shelley)  -- so, a "new" book by Greene in the future doesn't seem all that unusual.

-- Nick Owchar

Photo: 1978 photo of author Graham Greene. Credit: Karsh.

Perhaps the students who read this thought of Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five." Or maybe they just thought it was kind of profound. Or recognized Shakespeare in this, below.

There is graffiti in Arabic, Greek, Russian, Latin, Hindi. There are warnings — "Never take a class by Edward Wallace" — and declarations, like the one below, that get high marks from a reader ... who has spelling anxieties.

Nerd storage ... after the jump.

There are plenty of critiques, praises, paens. Sometimes rendered graphically.

There are pleas and reassurances.

There are political statements, of course.

Poetry seems to lend itself to the project of graffiti.

But sometimes, it's not enough to read the classics. You have to take a poll.

All photos by Quinn Dombrowski, a new technologies staffer and researcher at the University of Chicago. Thanks to her for using Creative Commons, so we could repost the photos here. To get a full sense of the scope of the graffiti she found in the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library, check out her Flickr set of more than 700 photos.

— Carolyn Kellogg

Photo credits: Quinn Dombrowski via Flickr

The rules about the signing,which begins at 8 p.m., are strict, and there are no tickets -- it's first-come, first-served. Only 5,000 of the books have been printed. I won't be there because I absolutely can't, not that I don't feel like I should. Like I said. Look at that.

And you can listen here.

The phrase "Dark Night of the Soul" came from St. John of the Cross in the 16th century and is actually about a spiritual rebirth. I hear that Lynch has had himself one; luckily, his creepy vision of middle America remains as dark as ever.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: David Lynch / from "Dark Night of the Soul"

Given the decidedly premodern overtones of the word "canon," the idea of a postmodern one may seem like a contradiction in terms. Indeed, one approach to constructing a postmodern canon is to set the parameters so wide — Kathy Acker, Philip K. Dick, Grandmaster Mele Mel — that the term becomes practically meaningless. In the narrower purview of literary critics, however, references to canonical postmodernism tend to cluster around a group of white male fiction writers of a certain age: Barth and Barthelme, Gaddis and Gass, DeLillo and Coover and Pynchon.

Obviously, this canon is as hobbled by omissions as the prepostmodern canon it subtends. Still, in light of its demographics, it seems doubly baffling that Joseph McElroy, who turns 79 this year, is so often left off the list of po-mo masters. Like his rough contemporary Thomas Pynchon, he is the author of eight works of fiction acclaimed for their encyclopedic embrace of contemporary life. The New York Times wrote:

• To ignore ["A Smuggler's Bible," 1966] would be as shameful an act of self-deprivation as that which so many of us performed when "The Recognitions" and "Under the Volcano" were first published.
• ["Hind's Kidnap," 1969] is full of marvels.
• "Lookout Cartridge" [1973] is the rarest kind of achievement.

Yet Google Joseph McElroy, author, and you'll come up with about 5,000 hits, compared with roughly a quarter million for Pynchon. What gives? The short answer, it seems to me, is a single book, a behemoth called "Women and Men."

"Women and Men" belongs to the maximalist subspecies of postmodern novel that includes "Gravity's Rainbow," "The Recognitions" and "Underworld," somewhat the way the Chevy Suburban belongs to the "light truck" vehicular class, or Andre the Giant belonged to the World Wrestling Federation.

If those other books swing for the fences, "Women and Men" swings for the parking lot. If they represent, in their rigor, a form of literary calculus, "Women and Men" is chaos theory. And — no getting around this — if these books are big, "Women and Men" is bigger. At roughly 700,000 words (that's 1,192 closely printed pages), it is one and a half times the length of "War & Peace."

The book reached advance readers in 1987 in the form of two 600-page galleys. The reviewer for the New York Times made no secret of having sped through the book in a matter of days. And his tone, which mixed acknowledgment of the novel's ambition with barely disguised resentment at having to read the damn thing, typified critical response. Apparently the audience for literary fiction needed little encouragement to avoid a book that weighed 4 pounds in hardcover. "Women and Men," reportedly 10 years in the making, was not so much a publishing event as an anticlimax.

I happen to have a soft spot for underdogs, and another one for the postmodern mega-novel, and having some free time last summer, I picked up a "like new" first edition of "Women and Men" for something in the neighborhood of 10 bucks. I carried the book with me everywhere for six weeks, moving through it at a rate of about 30 pages a day. It quickly became obvious why the book is so rarely read. In persevering, however, I discovered some reasons why I think it should be.

Why it should be read ... after the jump.

Beyond the question of the novel's length, I found in short order, there is the matter of its difficulty. Plot here means both story and conspiracy, and in the intricacy of the enjambment, McElroy makes few concessions to his readers' limitations. On the level of story, "Women and Men" follows apartment-house neighbors Jim Mayn and Grace Kimball, who never quite manage to meet. On the level of conspiracy, it traces the nearly infinite connections between the two, uncovering personal and political intrigue stretching from Pinochet's Chile to Cape Kennedy to the New Mexico of the Pueblo Indians.

McElroy chooses to elide key terms in these connections, which means that important plot points are left unresolved, like circuits that are simultaneously on and off. It also means that the novel overwhelms — intentionally, I think — the reader's memory. This is frustrating at first. Eventually, though, it makes the book come peculiarly alive; by the final episodes, every detail McElroy mobilizes — seemingly every word — resonates with half-remembered associations. And there is a philosophical method to McElroy’s madness. Where the "black comedy" strain of postmodernism seems to take the instability of narrative as an assault on the possibility of truth, McElroy's ecstatic brand is asking us to imagine truth as the sum of all the ways to narrate it.

In pursuit of his pluralist vision, McElroy redefines the limits of our language. Short-story-like interludes show him to be capable of taut, stripped-down prose, but in between, "Women and Men" swells to contain some of the longest and strangest sentences yet written in English. Their diction constitutes a straightforward enough matrix of colloquial New Yorkese and specialized discourses (science, myth, theology, meteorology, economics). Yet their sheer length, and McElroy's syntactical trick of nesting clauses inside one another, requires both vigilance and patience from the reader.

Still, if you can hang with it, "Women and Men" turns out to be an avant-garde variation on what fusty old Henry James dubbed "the present palpable-intimate." Between, behind and within its compositor-slaying thickets of information, the novel conveys the unutterably dense texture of life in late-'70s New York: what it’s like to teach your kid to ride bikes in the park, what it’s like to hang around Madison Square Garden after dark, and so on. Moreover, McElroy renders the improbable lives of Jim and Grace with wit, urgency and human warmth. It is these old-fashioned virtues that kept me reading. 

The critics missed them in 1987, and the reaction to "Women and Men" seemed to disclose a lurking hostility toward McElroy's uncompromising aesthetic. His next book, the considerably svelter "The Letter Left to Me," would receive little of the deference that had greeted his mind-bending novels of the '70s. McElroy would subsequently part ways with his longtime publisher, Alfred A. Knopf; 2003's "Actress in the House" would find a home with the New York-based independent Overlook Press. Overlook has since produced handsome paperback reissues of two other seminal McElroy novels, but "Women and Men" remains out of print. Europeans apparently regard it highly, but in the U.S., McElroy’s work recalls William Gaddis' description of a composer’s corpus in "The Recognitions": "It is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played."

Perhaps it is fitting that "Women and Men," the apotheosis of a certain strain of American writing, summoned and distilled the ambivalence readers feel about the postmodern mega-novel in general. Indeed, your feelings about his peers are probably a good index of how you might respond to McElroy. For a reader who finds "Gravity’s Rainbow" ponderous, a book like "Women and Men" is going to be indefensible.

In my view, however, such dismissals proceed from the misbegotten idea that our job is to decode novels rather than to immerse ourselves in them. It is an idea postmodernists have promulgated as assiduously as their modernist forebears did. McElroy may thus be a victim of postmodernism as much as he is a master. Not that it appears to have fazed him much. He continues to live in the New York area and to write: about Steve Erickson for the Believer, about Sept. 11 for Electronic Book Review, about Gao Xingjian for the Nation. He may be the lost postmodernist, but he's right under our noses, waiting to be found.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

Garth Risk Hallberg is the author of the novella "A Field Guide to the North American Family." His short fiction manuscript, "The Descent of Man," portions of which have appeared in Glimmer Train, Canteen and Best New American Voices 2008, was the runner-up for this year's Prairie Schooner Book Prize. He blogs frequently for The Millions.

Wray's first book, "The Right Hand of Sleep," earned him a prestigious Whiting Award, and he was named one of America's best young novelists by Granta in 2007. In a profile this spring, New York Magazine called him "a phenomenally versatile writer."

He's a writer with serious literary credentials, one who, by all accounts, is due for more attention than before. So why wouldn't Esquire ask him to write some short-short fictions to accompany a fashion spread? And why, like any writer who needs to make a living, wouldn't Wray say yes?

The result, Esquire's Collected Short Stories of Summer Style, shows that sometimes it might be better to make like Nancy Reagan and just say no.

The four pieces by Wray are inelegantly written and belabor the obvious: Objects in fashion photos are sexualized, or they're meant as signals for sex. Fashion photos are carefully created to tell stories -- yes, pants hanging on a wall imply that someone is, sexily, pantsless -- and in each instance, Wray fails to tell a better story than the photographer and stylist did in the first place.

Clearly, Wray is a gifted writer, one who is willing to experiment with his writing. Which means now and then an experiment is going to go wrong.

Or did it? Take a look and tell us whether you think Wray should skip the fashion next time.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: John Wray. Credit: Bebeto Matthews / Associated Press

Indeed. Well, they've gotten their publicity. But I won't be calling the "Idiot's Guide" author. Nor would I recommend that anyone who wants to leave their affairs in order begin at the idiot level; I'd say a lawyer is a safer bet.  

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: The hearse containing Michael Jackson's casket arrives at Staples Center in Los Angeles. Credit: Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times

What's remarkable about the Oxfam Bookshops is not that they are having their first annual Bookfest in hundreds of locations, now through July 18. It's not that the proceeds from the sales of its used books go to the international aid organization Oxfam. It's that, with 130 shops and $2.6 million in monthly sales, Oxfam is the third-largest bookseller in the United Kingdom, according to this article in the Guardian:

Its average selling price for a book is £1.60, but it has twice made £18,000 at auction for titles discovered in its stores....

"Book sales have been helping us in our fight against poverty for more than 50 years, as we've sold everything from the first ever Sherlock Holmes story to the latest Harry Potter novel," said David McCullough, Oxfam's director of trading. "During Bookfest, we want people to donate to and buy from our bookshops so they can really see the impact that buying a book from Oxfam can have on the lives of poor people around the world."

Bookfest's hundreds of events includes everything from actor Bill Nighy and author Monica Ali ringing up books for buyers today in London to an author-heavy Edinburgh launch of "Ox-Tales," a four-book series of short stories from Kate Atkinson, Sebastian Faulks, Helen Fielding, John le Carré and more. But it's all happening in the U.K. -- it's not easy for Americans to participate.

And though I wish we had a chain of Oxfam Bookshops across the U.S., it's hard to imagine that used books would carry such a premium here at home.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Actor Bill Nighy helps out at an Oxfam Books in London on July 6. Credit: Joel Ryan / Associated Press

Two Chinese writers locked themselves up with coffee and cigarettes, no cellphones and no sleep for 48 hours -- and emerged with a finished Michael Jackson biography. "Moonwalk in Paradise" hit shelves this weekend, fewer than 10 days after the pop star's death. The newspaper China Daily reported:

The 130,000-word book, titled "Moonwalk in Paradise -- the Michael Jackson biography," written by Jiang Xiaoyu and Xing Han, and published by Chinese publishing house Xiandai was available for pre-order sales online on Friday and on bookshelves Saturday. ...

A report in China Youth Daily said the writers never met or interviewed Jackson and simply wrote the story from their "accumulated knowledge about the king of pop."...

[co-author Jiang Xiaoyu said] "I am not only a music critic but also a fan of the King of Pop, so I understand what fans really need.... fans cannot wait for months." 

Jiang Zengpei, a Chinese publisher, expressed concern about "instant books" like this one, which have begin making regular appearances in China. "Many instant books have been fabricated with information from other books or the Internet. Publishing, an important part of the culture industry, should be creative work."

Although U.S. publishers may be trying to rush Jackson products to shelves, domestic efforts are hardly instant. The earliest Jackson books will include an updated version of J. Randy Taraborrelli's 1991 biography "Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness," coming out as "Michael Jackson: The Magic, the Madness, the Whole Story: 1958-2009" on Aug. 5 from Hachette, and "Life Commemorative: Michael Jackson" due Aug. 18. 

Here in L.A., Jacksonmania continues: Over the weekend, 1.6 million people signed up for a lottery for the memorial to be held at the Staples Center, and the winners queued up this morning -- radios blaring Jackson music, of course -- to pick up their tickets.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Michael Jackson with mime Marcel Marceau in rehearsal in 1995 for an unaired HBO television special "Michael Jackson: One Night Only." Credit: Kathy Willens / Associated Press

Robert McNamara, chief architect of the Vietnam War, has died at age 93. As U.S. secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, he was considered both a whiz kid and a lightning rod for antiwar activists. In later years, he turned his attention toward nuclear-arms issues and helping the world's poorest nations.

With his critical role in Vietnam, McNamara garnered the attention of historians and biographers. The 1992 biography "Promise and the Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara" by Deborah Shapely set the tone. In a review in Foreign Affairs magazine, Douglas Brinkley wrote:

McNamara's flaws overwhelm a lifetime of achievements, for the portrait that emerges from Shapley's book is of a man who was the primary culprit in America's ill-fated military engagement, a historical assessment that is likely to stick no matter how many nuclear arms reduction speeches and articles he churns out. The McNamara story is one of tragedy, for a dedicated public servant and for America, fueled by our frustration that a man of such promise chose, out of a misguided sense of mission, not to tell the American people what he knew about the dim prospects for victory in the Vietnam War when it might have made a difference.

In its obituary, the Washington Post turns to David Halberstam's assessment of McNamara in his bestselling history, "The Best and the Brightest."

David Halberstam, describing McNamara's trips to Saigon, wrote in "The Best and the Brightest" that McNamara, the ultimate technocrat, was "a prisoner of his own background . . . unable, as indeed was the country which sponsored him, to adapt his values and his terms to Vietnamese realities. Since any real indices and truly factual estimates of the war would immediately have shown its bankruptcy, the McNamara trips became part of a vast unwitting and elaborate charade, the institutionalizing and legitimizing of a hopeless lie."

In Halberstam's judgment, McNamara "did not serve himself or his country well. He was, there is no kinder or gentler word for it, a fool."

McNamara himself decided to weigh in with the 1995 memoir, "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam." McNamara wrote, "We sought to do the right thing ... but in my judgment hindsight proved us wrong." Today, the N.Y. Times writes, "He published his denunciation of the Vietnam War and his role in it ... for which he was in turn denounced."

In fact, one of those denunciations was written by David Halberstam, who reviewed "In Retrospect" for the L.A. Times.

This is a shallow, mechanistic, immensely disappointing book. Had it been published 25 years ago while the battle itself and the debate over it was still raging -- had McNamara come forth then and said, as he does here, that what had come to be known as "McNamara's War" was "wrong, terribly wrong," it would have been an extremely valuable part of the ongoing debate; indeed, it might have ended the debate then and there....

In this book, much heralded by his publisher as a mea culpa, the agenda is McNamara's, not the reader's.... [H]e not only gets to give the answers he wants but he also gets to choose the questions he asks himself....

This should have been an important book. But it is not. It permits us some insight into McNamara's inability to come to terms with his role and its consequences, and it involuntarily offers a rare insight into the difference between the mind of a truly public man and the mind of a bureaucrat. But that is little recompense. McNamara comes to us now as a sad and greatly diminished figure from a tainted past. The debate has long since passed him by.

With the Vietnam-era decision-makers passing on, only these competing accounts remain. Will Halberstam's be definitive? Or will McNamara have a voice in his own place in history?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: From left, John F. Kennedy, Robert McNamara and Lyndon B. Johnson in 1961. Credit: Henry Burroughs / Associated Press

Bill Clinton is many things -- among them a U.S. president for two terms and a leader of international diplomacy and relief efforts -- but he's also a kind of bookish guy. He's the author of the 1,024-page autobiography "My Life," which came out in 2004. And he likes to read.

In 2007, after a book signing at the Texas bookstore BookPeople, Austinist wrote that he purchased "For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women" by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, "Ingrid: Ingrid Bergman, A Personal Biography" by Charlotte Chandler, "Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity" by Samuel P. Huntington, "Water for Elephants" by Sara Gruen and "The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples." 

A 2004 exhibit at the Clinton Presidential Library had Clinton's 21 official favorite books on display. It included Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," "Homage to Catalonia" by George Orwell, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou and Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations."

"Meditations" has been a Clinton favorite since at least 1999, when he attended a dinner full of literary heavyweights at William Styron's house. Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote about the evening for Salon, and his account makes it sound like a book geek's dream.

Clinton said his [favorite] was the "Meditations of Marcus Aurelius," and Carlos Fuentes stuck loyally to "Absalom, Absalom," Faulkner's stellar novel, no question, although others would choose "Light in August" for purely personal reasons. Clinton, in homage to Faulkner, got to his feet and, pacing around the table, recited from memory Benji's monologue, the most thrilling passage, and perhaps the most hermetic, from "The Sound and the Fury."

I wonder what Cinton is reading today? Maybe it's another classic by a Southern writer, or something by one of our founding fathers. Or maybe he's put his book down, is having some barbecue and waiting for the fireworks to start.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Bill Clinton reads from "My Life" on Oprah Winfrey's television show in 2004. Credit: George Burns / Associated Press / Harpo Productions

Comedian Lewis Black was born in Washington, D.C., in 1948 and brought up in Silver Spring, Md. He first did stand-up when he was studying at the University of North Carolina, and he went on graduate from the Yale School of Drama. A long career in the theater -- including the 40 plays he's written plays -- has been eclipsed by his intense, ranting comedy persona, made popular on "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart."

Black's most recent book, "Me of Little Faith," came out in paperback last month.

In a video on his website, he gives advice to aspiting writers.

I would just like to say to those of you who are thinking of writing a book: don't. Unless of course you get great joy out of sitting at a desk and staring into space wondering why you agreed to write a book, and now you haven't got one thought in your head... What's the worst thing about writing a book? Remember what it was like when you were a kid Sunday, late afternoon, just after a really great weekend -- you hadn't thought about school at all. And just as the sun begins to fade into darkness, you hear your mother: she says, 'did you do your homework?' that's what every day is like until the book is written... you have homework every day. It never stops. It's always there... there are few things worse in this life than homework every day.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Lewis Black in West Hollywood on June 29. Credit: Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images

Amy Tan, 57, was born in Oakland to the daughter of Chinese immigrants. She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from San Jose State. Although she is the author of five novels, she is best known for her first -- the bestseller "The Joy Luck Club." In 2005, she talked to the Guardian about the legacy of that first book.

I accept that probably for the rest of my life I will be identified with The Joy Luck Club -- I will always be introduced as the author of the Joy Luck Club. On my tombstone -- if I wanted a tombstone, which I don't -- it would say Author of The Joy Luck Club. That's fine. I hope that I continue to write my best book with each book that I write. I am very lucky that that happened to me.

In addition to continuing to write novels, Tan has performed in the literary group the Rock Bottom Remainders and appeared as a character on "The Simpsons."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Amy Tan in New York in 2005. Credit: Joe Tabacca / Associated Press

John Irving is the author of more than a dozen books, including the National Book Award-winning "The World According to Garp." Five of his books have been made into films, and Irving wrote "My Movie Business" about the 13 years he spent turning "Cider House Rules" into a viable screenplay -- for which he won an Oscar. 

During high school, Irving excelled at wrestling but struggled in his classes with something like undiagnosed dyslexia -- it took him longer to complete his assignments than his classmates. But, he later told the American Academy of Achievement, "I knew how to work. I knew how to concentrate, because I had to." And that fed his reading:

I read Charles Dickens when I was 14 or 15. It might be hard for many 14, 15-year-olds today to read Dickens. That language seems so old fashioned, if not exactly dated, to us now -- the amount of detail, the sheer complexities of those stories and plots. But those were the novels I read that made me want to write novels. If I had read, frankly, some more modern or post-modern novels at the time, I might have wanted to do something else. I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story. Those old 19th century novels, all of them long, all of them complicated, all of them plotted. Not just Dickens, but especially Dickens, but also George Eliot, Thomas Hardy. And among the Americans, Melville and Hawthorne always meant more to me than Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. I'm not a modern guy.

Irving's thirteenth novel, "Last Night in Twister River," will be published by Random House this fall.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: John Irving at home in Vermont in 1994. Credit: AP Photo/Craig Line