Alan Cheuse's Book Picks To Warm A Winter's Night
'Becoming Americans' Cover Detail
Holiday time, with its wintry days that keep us bound indoors, is the perfect time for giving books — and recommendations about books. During this busy season, what better way to pause and reflect than with a book in our hands and a story or poem in our minds? Like those paper pills that, dropped into water, blossom into flowers and castles and creatures, the alphabetic shapes on the page expand to conjure up faces, distant times, adventures, dreams — and that's always a gift.
American Fantastic Tales
American Fantastic Tales (Boxed Set), Edited by Peter Straub, hardcover, 1,500 pages, Library of America, list price: $70
It might provoke more nightmares than dreams, but either way, the two-volume collection of American Fantastic Tales, edited by horror writer Peter Straub, is a collection with great gift potential. It's a 1,500-page compendium of fantasy and horror from American writers who make you worry about things you see out of the corner of your eye. The anthology isn't perfect — no anthology is. But there is so much of the good stuff that will just scare the hell out of you that if you enjoy this mode of writing, you may just want to buy two copies of the set — one to give as a gift and the other to keep for yourself.
It's got well-known work from Poe, Hawthorne and H.P. Lovecraft, as well as works from great modern horror writers like Richard Matheson and Stephen King. There is also off-the-beaten path fiction from just plain modern greats such as John Cheever and Joyce Carol Oates. Here's a wonderful way to keep your friends, or even yourself, so scared no one will notice that it's cold outside. Fantasist Kelly Link, in her novella "Stone Animals," will even make you worried about rabbits. (Read an excerpt from Kelly Link's "Stone Animals".)
Becoming Americans
Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing, Edited by Ilan Stavans, hardcover, 850 pages, Library of America, list price: $40
Becoming Americans, edited by Ilan Stavans, is another wonderful publication from the Library of America. The volume collects 400 years of immigrant writing about the great adventure of putting one's home country behind one and heading for these North American shores. "Hail holy land wherein our holy Lord / hath planted his most true and holy word" is how the English poet Thomas Tillam celebrated his arrival in New England on June 29, 1638. That's the first entry in this 700-page volume, which you can have for the celebratory price of $40. After Tillam the Baptist come convicted felons and slaves, Irish and Germans, Jews and Chinese, Mexicans, Russians and Hungarians, Poles and Dominicans and Filipinos and Haitians, poets and prose writers — all of the ingredients of our famous melting pot, all of them writers who offer their views of their new country.
Here, in one glorious example, is Lee-Young Li, who was born to Chinese parents in Indonesia and grew up mostly in Chicago, suggesting, in his poem called "Self-Help for Fellow Refugees," that:
If your name suggests a country where bells
might have been used for entertainment
or to announce the entrances and exits of the seasons
or the birthdays of gods and demons,
it's probably best to dress in plain clothes
when you arrive in the United States
and try not to talk too loud.
Vladimir Nabokov, writing in his novel Pnin, says that for his main character, English was a special danger area: "Except for such not very helpful odds and ends as 'the rest is silence,' 'nevermore,' 'weekend,' 'who's who,' and a few ordinary words like 'eat,' 'street,' 'fountain pen,' 'gangster,' 'Charleston,' 'marginal utility,' he had no English at all at the time he left France for the States." Well, these many writers in this useful volume have found their English and celebrate it — hard. (Read Lee-Young Li's poem "Immigrant Picnic".)
The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard
The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard, by J.G. Ballard, hardcover, 1,216 pages, W.W. Norton & Co., list price: $35
Squeezing together a fantastical imagination, fictional poundage and border-crossing inside one book jacket, I submit the 1,200 pages of The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard, short fiction by the late Shanghai-born British writer known for dystopian works such as Crash (which was made into a film by David Cronenberg). There are nearly a hundred stories here, among them such gems as the two-page "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race."
If you haven't read Ballard's novel Empire of the Sun, you may have seen the Spielberg movie, which provides some idea of the shattered childhood that gave rise to the brilliant if somewhat askew vision of this major late 20th-century science-fiction writer and fantasist. Reading him serially is like eating a meal of desserts, while somehow still getting a lot of protein. As Martin Amis points out in his introduction, Ballard goes over the course of his career from stories of outer space to the inner-space of the mind. (Read a story by J.G. Ballard about the fall of the Tower of Pisa.)
Manhood for Amateurs
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son, by Michael Chabon, hardcover, 320 pages, Harper, list price: $25.99
Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Michael Chabon's essays in Manhood for Amateurs ��� on the realities of coming of age, marriage and fatherhood — were originally published in Details magazine. And it's in the details that the truth of these essays lies, as you'll find out when you read these seemingly offhand pieces in which he employs an insouciant, confessional style.
Whether it's having an affair as a teenager with his mother's best friend, or talking to his kids about drugs, or helping his wife get through the hardest times, or musing on what he calls "the fundamental axioms of masculine self-regard," he often stands naked before the reader. Or at least he makes you believe that he's revealing a lot. Which is a kind of genius in itself and, on the subjects that he chooses here, enormously rewarding. (Read Michael Chabon's essay about meeting his (first) father-in-law.)
City Boy
City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s, by Edmund White, hardcover, 304 pages, Bloomsbury USA, list price: $26
Edmund White has a slightly different take on the meaning of manhood in the latest installment of his autobiography — this volume called City Boy, with the subtitle of "My Life In New York During the 1960s and '70s." Here's an X-rated, gay-hearted tour of a city of artists and writers and painters and lovers, all of them looking for happiness and love in a time when, as White points out, in some clubs every group of dancing men was required to include at least one woman. "A disco employee sat on top of a ladder and beamed a flashlight at a group of guys who weren't observing the rule." That's what White seems to be doing in this smart, gossipy roundup of all the men and ideas and good times and bad he danced with back then — beaming his light. (Read Edmund White's impressions of New York in the 1960s.)
Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera
Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, by Ron Schick, hardcover, 224 pages, Little, Brown and Company, list price: $40
Back to a more placid America. It turns out the artist Norman Rockwell painted from photographs. Some of the 18,000 photographs he made to jump-start his canvases are collected here, in Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, by Ron Schick. The images range through the entire carnival of plain-vanilla American life: beauty parlors and ice-cream shops, ball-parks and living rooms, America at peace and America at war.
The photographs and the paintings they led to stand side by side in these pages, making a wonderful case for a paradoxical Rockwell as the artist of the everyday, for whom reality wasn't quite enough. This is a book about one of our great homespun artists that will make you laugh, and also make you think. It's a real treasure.
Treasure Island
Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, Illustrated by John Lawrence, hardcover, 272 pages, Candlewick, list price: $24.99
Which brings me to my final recommendation for the holidays: Pick up a grand old book and start reading to whomever will listen. My choice this season is a new edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic tale of Long John Silver and his pirate pals, Treasure Island, with bold wood-block illustrations by John Lawrence. Sing out with enough spirit when you get to that great old chorus for a dark and cold season — "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest — Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum" — and you'll certainly engage both the young and young at heart. Cheers.
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ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
The holiday season is upon us. We here at NPR have our own literary Santa of sorts. Every year, we ask our bearded book reviewer, Alan Cheuse, to give us some suggestions of this year's good books that might make good presents.
Welcome back to the program, Alan.
ALAN CHEUSE: Ho, ho, ho, Melissa.
(Soundbite of laughter)
BLOCK: Well, let's start. What do you have first on your list here?
CHEUSE: It's a book about Norman Rockwell, and it gives us access to his method, which was to take photographs to use as models for his paintings, which complicates the supposedly sweet, simple world of Rockwell a little bit, I think. And there are some wonderful photographs that take us through the story of contemporary America in his lifetime.
BLOCK: And great fun to see these juxtaposed side by side. I'm looking at a page of the Saturday Evening Post cover "Two Plumbers." And then right next to it, you see the photograph, which is virtually identical - black and white instead of colored - but other than that, you can see exactly what he's working from.
CHEUSE: Well, actually, I thought the paintings were much better than the actual life rendered in the photographs. I think he got it right. He knew that he had to get the real thing in his painting.
BLOCK: Ah-hah. Let's move along from capturing Americans in pictures and on canvas to a book titled "Becoming Americans."
CHEUSE: This is a huge volume from the Library of America. This book gives us 400 years of immigrant writing, from the Puritans all the way to contemporaries like Edwidge Danticat and Jhumpa Lahiri. And towards the end of the book, there's this lovely poem called "Self-Help for Fellow Refugees" by a contemporary Chinese-American poet, Li-Young Lee, who grew up in Indonesia, and then in Chicago when his parents emigrated.
So he's got a kind of double vision. This poem really for me shows us we're all of us on the outside looking in and on the inside looking out.
BLOCK: Okay, here's Li-Young Lee reading his poem.
Mr. LI-YOUNG LEE (Poet): (Reading) If your name suggests a country where bells might have been used for entertainment or to announce the entrances and exits of the seasons or the birthdays of gods and demons, it's probably best to dress in plain clothes when you arrive in the United States and try not to talk too loud.
And if you meet someone in your adopted country and think you see in the other's face an open sky, some promise of a new beginning, it probably means you're standing too far. Or if you think you read in the other, as in a book, whose first and last pages are missing, a story of your own birthplace, a country twice erased, once by fire, once by forgetfulness, it probably means you're standing too close.
BLOCK: That's Li-Young Lee reading from his poem "Self-Help for Fellow Refugees." It's from the anthology "Becoming Americans."
And next on your list, Alan, is another anthology.
CHEUSE: Yep, in two volumes, "American Fantastic Tales," which is really the kind of dark side, the underside of American life. These stories run from the oldest horror stories we have in our culture, from Poe, Hawthorne, through H.P. Lovecraft, right up to a lot of contemporaries. And I think it's a great antidote to some of the horror light that we see around us in the culture today, you know, movies about vampires that don't really bite, polite werewolves. This is a horror book that will keep you up at night if you read the right stories.
I think it's a great way to introduce younger readers, especially boys, to the pleasures of being scared to death or nearly scared to death in prose.
BLOCK: Why especially boys?
CHEUSE: Well, you know, there's a problem about getting boys to read. And I think horror fiction is a way of bringing the boys into the great corral of American readers.
BLOCK: Let's give listeners a sample here. This is the fantasy writer Kelly Link, reading the opening of her novella, "Stone Animals."
Ms. KELLY LINK (Author, "Stone Animals"): (Reading) Out on the lawn, the rabbits were perfectly still. Then they sprang up in the air, turning and dropping and landing and then freezing again. Catherine stood at the window of the bathroom, toweling her hair. She turned the bathroom light off so that she could see them better. The moonlight picked out their shining eyes, the moon-colored fur, each hair tipped in paint. They were playing some rabbit game like leapfrog. Or they were dancing the quadrille, fighting a rabbit war. Did rabbits fight wars? Catherine didn't know.
They ran at each other and then turned and darted back, jumping and crouching and rising up on their back legs. A pair of rabbits took off like racehorses, sailing through the air.
CHEUSE: This is no fuzzy bunny story. This is going to make you scared, terribly afraid, of rabbits.
BLOCK: Uh-oh. That's Kelly Link, reading from her novella, "Stone Animals," part of the two-volume set "American Fantastic Tales."
And next, Alan, you wanted to talk about a novel for young adults, YA fiction. It's called "Wherever Nina Lies," and it's by Lynn Weingarten.
CHEUSE: Yes, and this is aimed at teenage girls - and surprise, surprise, no vampires, no werewolves, no magic - straightforward story about a young girl working as a barista in a city in the East, whose sister has disappeared. And she takes off with a guy she knows, on the road, trying to find her sister.
The first-person narrative is a voice that, really, I found quite attractive, and it's the kind of voice that I can read, anyone can pick up and read, and it reminds you of the really great voice of teenage characters like, say, Holden Caulfield in "Catcher in the Rye."
BLOCK: That's quite a model. Here's Lynn Weingarten, reading in this voice you're talking about, the voice of Ellie.
Ms. LYNN WEINGARTEN (Author, "Where Nina Lies"): (Reading) Two years ago, on the afternoon of June 24, my sister, Nina Melissa Wrigley, disappeared. She'd gone out in a late afternoon and then she just never came back.
When she was gone, she was gone. She didn't have a MySpace page or a Facebook account or a cell phone. All her stuff remained in her room exactly as it always had been: clothes in piles on the floor, tubes of hair dye on the nightstand, sketch pads and drawing pencils and pots of ink scattered everywhere.
Here's the thing about my sister. Nina did what she wanted. She wasn't reckless, but she didn't worry about things other people worried about: getting in trouble, getting laughed at, looking stupid. She pool-hopped late at night and cut class and talked to strangers. She was the type of person who, if she saw a guy wearing a big cowboy hat that she liked, would say, hey, cowboy, can I try on your hat? And he would probably end up letting her keep it.
BLOCK: Alan, we've worked our way through most of your list. We have one book left, and this is a real beauty. It's a reissue of "Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson with just these incredible woodcut illustrations and beautiful, beautiful type.
CHEUSE: It's a great pirate story. It's probably the best-known pirate story in the culture. And it's given us a song that allows me to sing ho-ho-ho again.
(Soundbite of laughter)
CHEUSE: (Singing) Fifteen men on a dead man's chest, yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum.
BLOCK: Is that singing, Alan?
(Soundbite of laughter)
CHEUSE: But I'm not advocating rum for kids there.
BLOCK: Okay.
CHEUSE: Just good stories and good books that they can cuddle up with at holiday time.
BLOCK: Alan, thanks for coming in and telling us about all your books this year.
CHEUSE: My pleasure.
BLOCK: And let's recap here. We talked about the new illustrated edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island;" Lynn Weingarten's young adult novel "Wherever Nina Lies;" the two-volume set "American Fantastic Tales: From Poe to the Pulps;" the anthology "Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing;" and finally, "Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera" by Ron Schick.
And, Alan, we should mention that your own latest book is a collection of travel essays called "A Trance After Breakfast." You can find more book recommendations at npr.org.
(Soundbite of music)
CHEUSE: Ho-ho-ho.
(Soundbite of song, "Zat You Santa Claus?")
Mr. LOIS ARMSTRONG (Singer): (Singing) 'Zat you, Santa Claus. Sure is dark out, ain't the slightest spark out. Pardon my clackin' jaws. Who's there, who is it, uh, stoppin' for a visit. Is 'zat you, Santa Claus? Are you bringin' a present for me.
SIEGEL: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.
