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Laurie Hertzel is senior editor for books at the Star Tribune, where she has worked since 1996. She is the author of "News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist," winner of a Minnesota Book Award.
Posts about Book reviews
Two new books irresistible to book lovers
Posted by: Laurie Hertzel Updated: October 19, 2012 - 6:47 PM
Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" was dismissed by a critic for the New York Times when it first came out. "His characters are as shallow as the saucers in which they stack their daily emotions," the review, from 1926, said.
The New Yorker had no love for Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer." "Mr. Percy's prose needs oil and a good checkup," someone wrote in that magazine in 1961.
And John Updike's now-classic "Rabbit, Run," was panned in the Chicago Tribune by a critic who called it a "grim little story" that adds up to nothing. "The author fails to convince us that his puppets are interesting."
These, and other mocking, insulting, or just highly critical reviews--amusing given the hindsight of literary history--were collected 25 years ago in a cheeky little book called "Rotten Reviews," compiled by Bill Henderson, editor of the Pushcart Prize series.
Now Henderson sees need to revive his book, with a new introduction explaining that he was inspired by the Internet (even though he doesn't own a computer), where negative and snarky reviews flourish--and are usually anonymous, to boot.
"I realize now that we live in an on-line Wild West," he writes in his new introduction. "All civilty gone. Empathy, balance, decency, knowledge, out the window. Everybody a blogger. Everybody an instant critic."
Henderson believes writers deserve better. "These books had taken the authors years to compose, sometimes a lifetime," he wrote. "And so to have them dismissed so casually, well ... it just wasn't fair."
"Rotten Reviews Redux: A Literary Companion," pubs Nov. 22 by Pushcart Press and sells for $18.95.
A second book that arrived today celebrates books, and book-owning, and book loving, and bookshelves. Several dozen book-lovers--mainly authors, but not entirely--were asked to choose one shelf of books that best represents them and write a brief essay about it.
The design of this book is lovely, with glossy pages and with paintings, rather than photographs, of each contributor's chosen books. Roseann Cash, you'll find, was moved by "The Diary of Anne Frank," "Little House in the Big Woods," and E.B. White's "Here Is New York." What's not to love?
Junot Diaz (you've all heard of him, right?) read voraciously as a child to help improve his own English. "I had come from a family and a place in the Dominican Republic where books were basically medieval--few people had them, and they were very precious," he wrote. "The United States was a country of books."
Francine Prose's shelf contains Chekhov, Chekhov, Chekhov, Chekhov, Chekhov, Chekhov and Chekhov, along with a few others.
What a beautiful way to get to know a writer: to browse his shelves.
"My Ideal Bookshelf," is edited by Thessaly La Force, with art by Jane Mount. It pubs in mid-November and retails for $24.99.
New Jim Heynen book gives a little nod to writers gone before.
Posted by: Laurie Hertzel Updated: July 2, 2012 - 4:17 PM
There is something slyly satisfying about being deep in a book and happening upon a literary allusion or a nod to another writer. You stop. You read it again. You feel so darn smart that you got it. And then you look around for someone to share it with.
I spent most of the weekend reading St. Paul author Jim Heynen's new novel, "The Fall of Alice K.," which will be published in the fall by Milkweed Editions. I was cruising along, taking in the story of the Iowa farm girl and her growing romance with a young Hmong man, when Bam! Did that say what I thought it said?
Alice and her boyfriend are planning to go for a drive--away from the small town where everyone knows them, where everyone (except the boyfriend) is Dutch, to a nearby community "where the mailboxes had names like Brekken, Holm, and Rezmerski."
I think when I got to that sentence, I yelled, "Hey!" and then had to go find my husband and read it to him.("You know, Bill Holm, and his wife, Marcy Brekken, and his best friend from grad school, John Calvin Rezmerski.") (He just nodded politely, as any good husband would.)
A few chapters on, there was another, even slyer allusion:
"Mr. Vic also had them read stories by an older guy who grew up around Dutch Center and wrote stories about farm boys. Little tiny stories that were about as long as a sneeze and that some people thought were funny. Mr. Vic said he was the 'Hemingway of farm life.' Ho hum. Alice didn't have much use for this guy's work. Too much animal cruelty. In one of his stories, his farm boys threw live cats from the top of a windmill with homemade parachutes on them."
You probably know who Heynen is really talking about here; the "farm boys" reference is a good hint. If you need to, click on the link to see. And then look around for someone to share it with. Yell, "Hey!" So delicious. Book pubs in September. Watch for it.
The most romantic stories ever.
Posted by: Laurie Hertzel Updated: February 14, 2012 - 12:06 PM
File photo by Tom Wallace.
Is the scene in "Persuasion" when Capt. Wentworth leaves the love note for Anne Elliot the most romantic love scene ever written? (Oh, to get a letter that says, "You pierce my soul!")
Or maybe the tragic, true story of Abelard and Heloise is the most romantic book ever. The version I read, back in high school, was one I discovered in the stacks of the Duluth Public Library. It was written by George Moore, and the Duluth library had a first edition from 1921--bound in black leather, with yellowed, deckle-edge pages,.
The dialogue was not set off by quotation marks, but flowed through the text in what seemed to me to be a very poetic manner. I devoured that book, weeping a little, wishing, perhaps, just a little, that I, too, could be seduced by my teacher, who would then be castrated, and I would then flee into a nunnery where we would write passionate letters to each other for the rest of our lives.
It seemed, at age 16, to be the perfect relationship.
(And oh, the books you can find in your library!)
And of course there's Catherine and Heathcliff, though they left me colder than they did my friends. And that moment in "These Happy Golden Years" when Laura and Almanzo get engaged, and she offers her cheek to him and says, primly, "You may kiss me." It doesn't take much; it's all about timing and context and, of course, the way the author builds to that moment.
What are your favorites? Your most romantic books, or stories, or scenes? It's Valentine's Day. Let's get those hearts a-pumping.
NBCC announces its annual 'best of the small presses' list
Posted by: Laurie Hertzel Updated: December 15, 2011 - 11:30 AM
Bonnie Nadzam.
It breaks our heart--and the hearts of the folks over at the National Book Critics Circle too, apparently--when small presses, obscure presses, university presses and new and emerging presses are overlooked (deliberately or not) when the multitude of year-end "best of" lists come pouring out.
So over at the NBCC's "critical mass" blog, it's become a bit of a tradition for them to deliberately overlook the big publishing houses when they do their list.
This year's "best of the small presses" list includes Carleton College graduate Bonnie Nadzam's novel, "Lamb" (which our reviewer loved) and "Leche," by R. Zamora Linmark, published by Minneapolis' Coffee House Press.
Doesn't this list make you want to find out more about Ig Publishing? Or Salmon Poetry? Or Artistically Declined Press?
Here's the whole list:
1. "A Meaning For Wife," by Mark Yakich, Ig Publishing.
2. "Lamb," by Bonnie Nadzam, Other Press.
3. "Mad for Meat," by Kevin Simmonds. Salmon Poetry.
4. "A Double Life," by Lisa Catherine Harper. University of Nebraska Press.
5. "Ayiti," by Roxane Gay. Artistically Declined Press.
6. "Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas," edited by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, University of Arizona Press.
7. "Chulito," by Charles Rice-Gonzalez, Magnus Books.
8. "Boneshepherds," by Patrick Rosal. Persea Books.
9. "The Great Frustration," by Seth Fried. Soft Skull Press.
10. "Last Day on Earth," by David Vann. University of Georgia Press.
11. "Ciento," by Lorna Dee Cervantes. Wings Press.
12. "Leche," by R. Zamora Linmark, Coffee House Press.
Oooh, another 'top 100 books' list. Let's argue!
Posted by: Laurie Hertzel Updated: November 3, 2011 - 11:17 AM
Ernest Hemingway gets only one spot on the list of the top 100 American Novels 1891-1991.
Jeff O'Neal over at BookRiot (he also tweets as @readingape) has posted a list of the 100 best American novels.
(He also posted seven tips on how to fake it in book club--my favorite being "Create a diversion," by which he doesn't mean suddenly yell, "Fire!" but change the subject by asking who might play the main character in a movie.)
(Now I seem to be creating my own diversion by bringing up different blog posts. Let's get back to his list.)
He actually posted the list last July, but I first saw it this morning on the place where everybody sees everything nowadays (and the place where you might see this): Facebook. Connie Ogle, books editor of the Miami Herald, had posted a link, saying, "I would argue about the list for a good long time."
Anne Tyler
I'm always up for a good argument, so I clicked and read the list. I see holes! Big holes! Do you? (Nice to see Louise Erdrich, but where's Anne Tyler? Or Lionel Shriver?) (Although arguably Shriver's best stuff came after 1991, which is when the list ends.)
What else would you include? What would you kick off? Is "American Tragedy" better than "Sister Carrie"? Does "Day of the Locust" deserve to be there over "Miss Lonelyhearts"?
The list is not ranked, but is in chronological order. O'Neal included only books published between 1891-1991. (So, no "Huck Finn," which was published in 1884, for example, and no Franzen, who came later than 1991.)
Here's the list. Argue away:
- The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)
- Maggie, Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane (1893)
- The Country of Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett (1896)
- The Awakening by Kate Chopin (1899)
- The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
- The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
- The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905)
- The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (1906)
- Three Lives by Gertrude Stein (1909)
- My Antonia by Willa Cather (1918)
- The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington (1918)
- Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (1919)
- Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (1920)
- Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man by James Weldon Johnson (1921)
- Cane by Jean Toomer (1923)
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
- An American Tragedy by Theodore Dresier (1925)
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
- The Bridge of the San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (1927)
- Home to Harlem by Claude McKay (1928)
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929)
- Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe (1929)
- The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1930)
- Flowering Judas and Other Stories by Katherine Porter (1930)
- The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (1931)
- Call It Sleep by Henry Roth (1934)
- The Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)
- Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara (1934)
- The USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos (1936)
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936)
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
- Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West (1939)
- The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
- Native Son by Richard Wright (1940)
- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (1940)
- The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (1943)
- All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
- Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener (1947)
- The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (1948)
- The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles (1948)
- The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson (1949)
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)
- Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin (1953)
- The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)
- Andersonville by MacKinley Kantor (1955)
- On the Road by Jack Keroauc (1957)
- Gimpel the Fool by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1957)
- The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever (1957)
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1958)
- The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud (1958)
- Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth (1959)
- Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs (1959)
- The Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley (1959)
- Browngirl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall (1959)
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
- Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960)
- The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (1960)
- The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (1961)
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
- Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (1961)
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (1962)
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
- A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter (1967)
- The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron (1967)
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By Philip K. Dick (1968)
- Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
- House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (1969)
- them by Joyce Carol Oates (1969)
- The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (1969)
- Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion (1970)
- The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor (1971)
- Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed (1972)
- Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner (1972)
- Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
- Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow (1975)
- JR by William Gaddis (1976)
- Roots by Alex Haley (1976)
- Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko (1977)
- The World According to Garp by John Irving (1978)
- Airships by Barry Hannah (1978)
- Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1980)
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
- The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1982)
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)
- Cathedral by Raymond Carver (1983)
- Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich (1984)
- Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)
- White Noise by Don Delillo (1985)
- Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985)
- Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (1985)
- City of Glass by Paul Auster (1985)
- Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)
- The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (1989)
- The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick (1989)
- The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (1990)
- How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez (1991)
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