A Stranger in Olondria in the Guardian!

My wife's novel A Stranger in Olondria has been selected by the Guardian as one of the year's best (together with Margaret Atwood, Jeff VanderMeer, Stephen King, and others). I think it would make a nice Christmas present.

Making Strange

Seamus Heaney has died. Here's one of my favorite poems:

Making Strange

I stood between them,
the one with his traveled intelligence
and tawny containment,
his speech like the twang of a bowstring,

and another, unshorn and bewildered
in the tubs of his Wellingtons,
smiling at me for help,
faced with this stranger I’d brought him.

Then a cunning middle voice
came out of the field across the road
saying, ‘Be adept and be dialect,
tell of this wind coming past the zinc hut,

call me sweetbriar after the rain
or snowberries cooled in the fog.
But love the cut of this traveled one
and call me also the cornfield of Boaz.

Go beyond what’s reliable
in all that keeps pleading and pleading,
these eyes and puddles and stones,
and recollect how bold you were

when I visited you first
with departures you cannot go back on.’
A chaffinch flicked from an ash and next thing
I found myself driving the stranger

through my own country, adept
at dialect, reciting my pride
in all that I knew, that began to make strange
at the same recitation.

Tom Sawyer

Hemingway famously said that all American writing comes from Huckleberry Finn. But Huckleberry Finn comes from Tom Sawyer.

"Furlough"

I have a new story up at the Center for Mennonite Writing website. It's called "Furlough," and is not my usual fantasyish stuff. This one draws on my childhood growing up in Kenya.

The Book on Fire in process

For some reason, I kept every scrap of paper I used while writing The Book on Fire. Before we left Egypt, I took a picture of the stack, then dumped it in the trash.

Here's the first page. As you can imagine, much of my time is spent trying to decipher my handwriting.

The Tale of Robin Duck

I have a new story called "The Tale of Robin Duck" up at Interfictions. It's a click-through slideshow, and has lots of pictures!

Del Samatar

My brother-in-law, Del Samatar, is a wonderful artist. Check out his website. The image above is from a project he's working on with my wife.

African Flavors

My mother, who is a wonderful cook, has put together a cookbook that combines her love of African food with recipes from across the continent. It's a feast for the senses and the mind! It's available from Amazon.

A Stranger in Olondria

My wife's gorgeous first novel, A Stranger in Olondria, is now shipping! It's the story of Jevick, the Tea Islander who learns to read, and the ghost who haunts him, and the journey they must make together. It contains great sorrows and great joys, told in the finest prose this side of Angela Carter. You'll love it.

It's available as a paperback, hardcover, and ebook. Sofia also now has a nifty website where you can learn a bit about her and meet all the books she likes.

The Book on Fire on Kindle

 

The Book on Fire is now available as a Kindle ebook. This is the updated version and includes the story "City of Bones."

For those who have other ereaders, Smashwords offers several options. It is also available for Barnes & Noble's Nook.

Fahrenheit 451 Cover Design

This is designer Elizabeth Perez's cover for Fahrenheit 451. The spine is a striking surface, and it includes a match.

Sausages: Food of the Intelligentsia

From Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson:

A letter to Einstein's first lover, Mileva: "We understand each other's dark souls so well, and also drinking coffee and eating sausages, etcetera."

Elsa [Einstein's second wife, and cousin!] "'recognized the need for keeping all disturbing elements away from him,' a relative noted. She would make his favorite meal of lentil soup and sausages, summon him down from his study, and then would leave him alone ..."

From Youth by J.M. Coetzee:

"His diet is unvarying: apples, oats porridge, bread and cheese, and spiced sausages called chipolatas, which he fries over the cooker. He prefers chipolatas to real sausages because they do not need to be refrigerated. Nor do they ooze grease when they fry."

"And what is the upshot of this lack of heat, this lack of heart? The upshot is that he is sitting alone on a Sunday afternoon in an upstairs room in a  house in the depths of the Berkshire countryside, with crows cawing in the fields and a gray mist hanging overhead, playing chess with himself, growing old, waiting for evening to fall so that he can with a good conscience fry his sausages and bread for supper."

The image is a Literaturwurst by Swiss artist Dieter Roth. It's the complete works of Hegel, ground up and made into sausage. 

Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby

Here's the first paragraph of one of my favorite stories, "Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby," by the great Donald Barthelme. You can read the whole thing here. Jessamyn.com has many more Barthelme stories (used by permission).

Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he'd gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes. We didn't pay much attention to this argument. We asked him what sort of music he would like played at the hanging. He said he'd think about it but it would take him a while to decide. I pointed out that we'd have to know soon, because Howard, who is a conductor, would have to hire and rehearse the musicians and he couldn't begin until he knew what the music was going to be. Colby said he'd always been fond of Ives's Fourth Symphony. Howard said that this was a "delaying tactic" and that everybody knew that the Ives was almost impossible to perform and would involve weeks of rehearsal, and that the size of the orchestra and chorus would put us way over the music budget. "Be reasonable," he said to Colby. Colby said he'd try to think of something a little less exacting.

Sofia Samatar Roundup

Here's the cover of my wife's forthcoming novel, A Stranger in Olondria. The release date has been pushed back to April 2013.

Sofia has been publishing poems, stories, and reviews hither and yon. Here are some links:

A wonderful story, "Honey Bear," appeared in the latest issue of Clarkesworld (in very good company, as you can see above!).

The decidedly Borgesian "A Brief History of Nonduality Studies" appeared in Expanded Horizons.

A poem, "The Hunchback's Mother," appeared in inkscrawl.

"Burnt Lyric" appeared in Goblin Fruit.

"Lost Letter" appeared in Strange Horizons.

Literature and Doping

http://www.flickr.com/photos/carolineshih/6961846481/

In the spirit of the Olympics ...

In 2018, following the National Commission on Literary Doping’s decision to impose standards retroactively, the literary canon shifted dramatically. Naturally, works such as Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and Naked Lunch, which, by the authors’ own confession, had been written under the influence of drugs, were dropped from curricula and library shelves. That much had been foreseen. However, the NCLD’s discovery that increased levels of alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine in the bloodstream could enhance creative output and, as they noted in their report, “allow for the free association of images, thus providing users with a distinct creative advantage” jeopardized the legacy of a number of authors who had been viewed as relatively “clean.”

Though it was difficult, in the absence of blood tests and urine samples, to ascertain the precise levels of proscribed substances in historical subjects, diaries and contemporary reportage provided damning evidence in many cases. Ernest Hemingway, Malcolm Lowry, and Graham Greene were among the first to lose their credibility. Hemingway’s Nobel Prize was retroactively rescinded and bestowed on a Norwegian farmer named Oddmund. Martin Amis and Beryl Bainbridge, whose usage of performance-enhancing nicotine greatly exceeded the pack-a-day limit, were also swiftly excoriated, and laudatory reviews of works such as Money and Every Man for Himself were excised from websites.

Perhaps most controversial was the caffeine limit stipulated by the Commission. Keith Miller, whose novels were undergoing a critical reappraisal, was discovered to have exceeded the three-cups-of-java-a-day limit on multiple occasions, and it was determined that the excess caffeine had directly influenced the celebrated purpleosity of his prose.

The new NCLD-certified canon is topped by Catherine Marshall’s Christy, followed by the complete works of Patricia St. John.

Durrell Revival?

Peter Pomerantsev in Newsweek has an article on Lawrence Durrell, arguing that he's "the most important 20th-century novelist for a 21st-century reader." Is this the beginning of a Durrell revival? Hope so. Here's more:

"The city at the center of his masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet, is the prototype of the global village, of the smudged meta-city we increasingly inhabit. Published between 1957 and 1960, the Quartet is a series of interlinked novels set in Alexandria preceding and during World War II, but it’s uncanny how its political disorder anticipates our own. The Alexandria of the Quartet is run with an ever-weaker hand by Western powers losing their will to rule, and is ever-more dominated by ambitious but corrupt emerging nations, influenced by deracinated tycoon financiers, stirred on the streets by Islamic “nightmare-mystics, shooting out the thunderbolts of hypnotic personality.” The state of Israel, off-stage but central to the plot, divides loyalties to the point of death and tragedy. The Quartet is an exceptional political thriller: imagine John Grisham rewritten by Joyce."

He concludes: "The world is finally catching up with Lawrence Durrell. We are all Alexandrians now."

Tomatoes

Tomatoes
by Stephen Dobyns

A woman travels to Brazil for plastic
surgery and a face lift. She is sixty
and has the usual desire to stay pretty.
Once she is healed, she takes her new face
out on the streets of Rio. A young man
with a gun wants her money. Bang, she’s dead.
The body is shipped back to New York,
but in the morgue there is a mix-up. The son
is sent for. He is told that his mother
is one of these ten different women.
Each has been shot. Such is modern life.
He studies them all but couldn’t find her.
With her new face, she has become a stranger.
Maybe it’s this one, maybe it’s that one.
He looks at their breasts. Which ones nursed him?
He presses their hands to his cheek.
Which ones consoled him? He even tries
climbing into their laps to see which
feels the most familiar but the coroner stops him.
Well, says the coroner which is your mother?
They all are, says the young man, let me
take them as a package. The coroner hesitates,
then agrees. Actually, it solved a lot of problems.
The young man has the ten women shipped home.
then cremated them all together. You’ve seen
how some people have a little urn on their mantel?
The man has a huge silver garbage can.
In the spring, he drags the garbage can
out to the garden, and begins working the teeth,
the ash, the bits of bone into the soil.
Then he plants tomatoes. His mother loved tomatoes.
They grew straight from seed, so fast and big
that the young man is amazed. He takes the first
ten into the kitchen. In their roundness,
he sees his mother’s breasts. In their smoothness,
he finds the consoling touch of her hands.
Mother, mother, he cries and he flings himself
on the tomatoes. Forget about the knife, the fork,
the pinch of salt. Try to imagine the filial
starvation, think of the ravenous kisses.

Karen Blixen: The Kenya-Wisconsin Connection

When I was growing up in Nairobi, the name of Karen Blixen naturally came up quite often. The neighborhood in what used to be her old farm, at the foot of the Ngong Hills, is to this day called Karen, and everyone, of course, had read Out of Africa (even before the movie came out). My violin teacher, Anna Martin, was the wife of Remy Martin, who had bought Blixen's farm. I read Out of Africa and Shadows in the Grass and her cook Kamante's memoir Longing for Darkness when I was twelve or thirteen, and enjoyed them (though they weren't nearly as evocative as Elspeth Huxley's The Flame Trees of Thika). In 1982, Judith Thurman's wonderful biography Isak Dinesen: Life of a Storyteller came out, and  in 1985 the movie with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, and suddenly she epitomized the romantic notion of Africa. Her house remains a massive tourist draw.

Partly because I was tepid on Out of Africa and partly because of her new fame, I ignored Blixen's other writings till I was in my twenties. Then I discovered Seven Gothic Tales on a bookshelf in Atbara, Sudan. What a revelation! "The Roads Round Pisa" and "The Monkey" are, in my opinion, the two finest, strangest stories ever written. I reread them every year - they're like a little holiday to an exotic country.

When we moved to Wisconsin a couple years ago, I remembered that Blixen's father, Wilhelm Dinesen, had lived in northern Wisconsin. He'd spent a year or so with the Chippewa, had a relationship with his cook, Nesuw-wge-zhicqo-quay (later "Kate"), fathered a daughter, Emma "Denson," by her, and contracted syphilis. His cabin has recently been restored, and is open to the public. You can see a picture of Joseph Ackley, Wilhelm Dinesen's great-grandson, and Blixen's ... what? half-grand-nephew? here. I think he looks a bit like her!

Review of The Book on Fire

One of my favorite sites, the wonderfully named Biblioklept, has posted a nice review of The Book on Fire:

"Balthazar, the hero of Keith Miller’s agile and trippy novel The Book on Fire, is a biblioklept. He comes to Alexandria to rob the famous library, a cavernous, labyrinthine complex that still exists—under heavy guard—in Miller’s mystical version of that ancient Egyptian city. Miller’s Alexandria is a byzantine maze, humming with a turn-of-the-century buzz, a kaleidoscope world that strongly reminded me of the strange cityscapes of William Gibson or William Burroughs. . . .

"For Balthazar, books are a drug, and the Library of Alexandria is the heady nexus point for his addiction. . . . While The Book on Fire does have the strong, page turning plot of a thriller, that plot exists mostly as the bones for Miller to hang rapturous descriptions of reading and books and, best of all, his strange Alexandria, a city of marvels." 

Nneka - Lost Souls