Tim Powers's Book "The Bible Repairman"

The name of Tim Powers has been a secret talisman for a select group of readers for decades. His ardent fans have used that byline as an unfailing compass pointing to contemporary urban fantasies of surpassing elegance, thrills, cleverness, and emotional heft, such as his Fault Lines trilogy orDeclare. But Powers has also worked in a historical or steampunk vein, and it is this mode that launched his name into wider spheres of public attention with the adaptation of his novel On Stranger Tides as the latest installment of Johnny Depp's Pirates of the Caribbean series.

New readers wishing to become familiar with the Powers magic could do no better than to pick up his latest superb short-story collection, The Bible Repairman. Here, in potent, distilled form, you will find Powers's trademarked secret histories, heroically damaged (or damagedly heroic) losers, creepy supernatural phenomena, and macabre humor.

James Tiptree advised writers to start readers off "in the dark and a mile underground," and that's the tactic Powers often employs. His narratives, despite a surface transparency of action, frequently involve an occult layer that pulls the reader in like quicksand. This is true with the title piece. Transfixed, we watch a middle-aged Latino man performing a series of obscure and eerie and grotesque actions. Gradually we learn that he is a kind of self-taught street-level brujo, about to be called upon the make the supreme sacrifice of his career.

The next tale, "Soul in a Bottle," opens with seemingly greater normality, as we follow a shabby used-book dealer on his daily rounds. But mystery soon intervenes in the form of a strange young woman. And even after her uncanny nature is explained, much suspense remains in how our hero will or won't accommodate her wishes. The melancholy outcome is quietly tragic without being melodramatic.

"The Hour of Babel" proves Powers is just as adept at science fiction as he is at fantasy. Reminiscent in tone of Heinlein's existentially upsetting "-- All You Zombies --", the story blends time travel with horror to make a superior interstitial hybrid.

In "Parallel Lives," two elderly twins, one dead, one living, play a cat-and-mouse game that evokes comparisons to the mordant creations of Shirley Jackson or Robert Bloch. Fritz Leiber, the grand old man of California contemporary fantasies, will surely come to mind in the cat-centric "A Journey of Only Two Paces." And rounding out the collection is a pendant to Powers's novel The Stress of Her Regard, which centered around the Romantics: Byron, Shelley, and crew. Here, with "A Time to Cast Away Stones," minor hanger-on Edward John Trelawny must contend with ancient forces unwisely summoned up in the Greek mountains.

Powers's subtle and beautiful prose is never flaunted, but always works in the service of his stories, which are marvels of ellipsis and concision. He captures venues and characters with just the right amount of description, and never belabors the events in his stories, always preferring to hold back when possible and let the reader's imagination supply the special effects and motivations. Powers's worldview is one where miracles exist just below the surface of the quotidian, revealed through random trapdoors. But open the wrong door, and you might receive a curse just as easily as a blessing. Contact with the gods can blind as well as enlighten.

The Review of Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap began its fifty-nine-year (and counting) run in London's West End on this day in 1952. In her autobiography, Christie tells the story of steeling herself to attend and even speak at the tenth-anniversary publicity party for the London production, despite her "miserable, horrible, inevitable shyness." She arrived unaccompanied and a half hour beforehand as requested, only to be told by an usher, "No admission yet, madam. Another twenty minutes before anyone is allowed to go in." Until rescued, Christie "wandered miserably round the corridors of the Savoy, trying to get up my courage to go back."

Christie's most famous unwanted publicity, and longest-running mystery, came decades earlier. In December 1926 she suddenly disappeared, her car found abandoned with its lights still on near her Berkshire home, her packed suitcase and driver's license inside. Though only thirty-five, Christie was already famous and an heir apparent to Conan Doyle. The mystery had made headlines for a week and foiled all attempts at solution -- tracker dogs, spotter planes, underwater divers, civilian search (one searcher being the other heir apparent, Dorothy Sayers) -- when Conan Doyle himself took action, or rather brought in a psychic to do so. Upon putting one of Mrs. Christie's gloves to his forehead, the psychic expressed optimism: "There is trouble connected with this article. The person who owns it is half dazed and half purposeful. She is not dead, as many think. She is alive. You will hear of her, I think, next Wednesday." He further indicated an impression of water.

And all this was true, or as provable as anything ever was about the bizarre case. Distraught over her husband's announcement that he was in love with another woman, Christie had found her way to a luxury spa called the Harrogate Hydropathic Hotel. Here, by design or confusion, she registered as Teresa Neele -- Nancy Neele being the name of her husband's girlfriend. The husband later reported that Christie was extremely ill, with a three-year memory loss; the Happy Hydro Boys reported her dancing the Charleston to "Yes, We Have No Bananas." Conan Doyle, a determined believer in such psychics, reported his consultant to be correct on all counts: Christie was found alive and near water (Harrogate is a spa town), as reported to a relieved nation in the Wednesday papers.

White Truffles in Winter by N.M. Kelby

White Truffles in Winter imagines the world of the remarkable French chef Auguste Escoffier (1846-1935), who changed how we eat through his legendary restaurants at the Savoy and the Ritz. A man of contradictions—kind yet imperious, food-obsessed yet rarely hungry—Escoffier was also torn between two women: the famous, beautiful, and reckless actress Sarah Bernhardt and his wife, the independent and sublime poet Delphine Daffis, who refused ever to leave Monte Carlo. In the last year of Escoffier’s life, in the middle of writing his memoirs, he has returned to Delphine, who requests a dish in her name as he has honored Bernhardt, Queen Victoria, and many others.

Like a cook who refuses to follow a recipe slavishly, Kelby improvises with the basic ingredients of Escoffier's life to create a delectable dish of her own. She's occasionally heavy-handed with her seasonings -- adding too many over-sweetened sentences like "Only food can speak what the heart feels" -- but this is generally counterbalanced by the tart freshness of her characters, chief among them her version of the chef himself.

How does one define the complexity of love on a single plate? N. M. Kelby brings us the sensuality of food and love amid a world on the verge of war in this work that shimmers with beauty and longing.N. M. Kelby is the critically acclaimed author of In the Company of Angels, Whale Season, White Truffles in Winter, and the Florida Book Award winner A Travel Guide for Reckless Hearts, among others. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Van Gogh Is Writen By Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh

Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith galvanized readers with their astonishing Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography, a book acclaimed for its miraculous research and overwhelming narrative power. Now Naifeh and Smith have written another tour de force—an exquisitely detailed, compellingly readable, and ultimately heartbreaking portrait of creative genius Vincent van Gogh.

Working with the full cooperation of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Naifeh and Smith have accessed a wealth of previously untapped materials. While drawing liberally from the artist’s famously eloquent letters, they have also delved into hundreds of unpublished family correspondences, illuminating with poignancy the wanderings of Van Gogh’s troubled, restless soul. Naifeh and Smith bring a crucial understanding to the larger-than-life mythology of this great artist—his early struggles to find his place in the world; his intense relationship with his brother Theo; his impetus for turning to brush and canvas; and his move to Provence, where in a brief burst of incandescent productivity he painted some of the best-loved works in Western art.

The authors also shed new light on many unexplored aspects of Van Gogh’s inner world: his deep immersion in literature and art; his erratic and tumultuous romantic life; and his bouts of depression and mental illness.

Vincent van Gogh created some of the best loved - and most expensive - works of art ever made, from the earlyThePotato Eaters to his late masterpiecesSunflowers andThe Starry Night. He had worked as an art dealer, a missionary and as a teacher in England, and only in his late twenties did he begin a life that would be fundamental in shaping modern art. But when he died in Auvers-sur-Oise in 1890 at the age of thirty-seven he was largely unknown.Written with the cooperation of the Van Gogh Museum, Pulitzer-winning authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith recreate his extraordinary life, and the inside of his troubled mind, like never before - and they put forward an explosive new theory challenging the widespread belief that Van Goghtook his own life. Drawing for the first time on all of his (and his family's) extensive letters, which offer exquisite glimpses into his thoughts and feelings, this is the definitive portrait of one of the world's cultural giants.

The Sleeping Army Writen By Francesca Simon

The Sleeping Army is the latest offering from Francesca Simon, a prolific and award-winning children’s author who is most famous for her impish anti-hero Horrid Henry ( Horrid Henry and the Abominable Snowman won the Children’s Book of the Year Award in 2008 at the British Book Awards). She has also written many books for younger children and early readers.
This novel aims at a slightly older audience and features reluctant heroine Freya, who lives in a familiar-yet-different England. In a parallel world where Christianity is an ‘exotic religious cult’ that died out ‘by the end of the 34th century’, the gods of Norse mythology are worshipped – or, by most, ignored, since secularism increasingly holds sway.
Simon has fun with household names: while KitKats escape unscathed, BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day comes from the Archpriest of York and Richard Dawkins has penned The Gods Delusion.
When Freya, bored in the British Museum, blows a ceremonial horn, she inadvertently transports herself to Asgard, land of the gods, alongside four chess pieces from another exhibit that miraculously come to life (the book is based on the Lewis chessmen).
Once there, she discovers that the gods are in desperate need of help – the goddess Idunn, guardian of the apples which grant immortality, has been kidnapped by Loki the trickster and given to a giant. Contrary to the myth, Idunn never returned and the gods are dying. (The myth itself was a political move worthy of Alistair Campbell on the gods’ part!)
However, the gods are unconvinced by Freya as their champion, and she herself candidly admits that the extent of her ‘spirit of adventure is trying a new vegetable’. So follows a rollicking adventure, in which Freya has to recover Idunn or become an ivory chess piece herself.
The plot takes in many of the Norse characters and myths, including the pitiable Hel, who rules the land of the dead and, despite her fearsome decomposing appearance, yearns for prettiness like any young girl.
Possibly because it’s aimed at a slightly younger audience, I didn’t feel the story had as much depth as it could have done, but it is chockfull of humour and you can’t help but feel sympathy for its characters – loyal Alfi, bullied by the gods, and the palsied, fallible gods themselves, who can’t remember their own spells and bicker about who used to get the most sacrifices.
And when all’s said and done, how can anyone resist a book with a character called Snot?
Tell us about any children’s books that you have found entertaining and educational in equal measure in the comments.
The Sleeping Army, published on 20 October 2011 by Profile Books Ltd, is available from Amazon for £6.19 in a beautiful hardcover edition or £4.49 for the Kindle version.
Francesca Simon is launching the book at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Saturday 22nd October at an event which will feature readings and themed activities for children aged nine and up.

Joan Didion Mourns Her Daughter

Somewhere in his published diaries the playwright Alan Bennett observes that when misfortune befalls a writer the effect of it is in a small but significant measure ameliorated by the fact that the experience, no matter how dire, can be turned into material, into something to write about. Thus Joan Didion, after her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a heart attack on Dec. 30, 2003, made out of her bereavement a remarkable book, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” which became an international success, speaking directly as it must have not only to those who themselves had been recently bereaved, but to hundreds of thousands of readers wishing to know what it feels like to lose a loved one, and how they might themselves prepare for the inevitable losses that life sooner or later will cause us all to suffer.
Now Didion has written a companion piece to that book. “Blue Nights” is an account of the death, in 2005, of her and Dunne’s adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, and more specifically, of Didion’s struggle, as a mother and a writer, to cope with this second assault upon her emotional and, indeed, physical resources. The new book, no less than its predecessor, is honest, unflinching, necessarily solipsistic and, in the way of these things, self-lacerating: Did she do her duty by her daughter, did she nurture her, protect her, care for her, as a mother should? Did she, in a word, love her enough? These are the kinds of questions a survivor — the relict, as the old word has it — will put to herself, cannot avoid putting to herself; questions all the more terrible in that there is no possibility of finding an answer to them. As Didion says, “What is lost is already behind the locked doors.”
Throughout her career, in her novels and especially in her journalism, Didion has been a connoisseur of catastrophe. Early on she forged — ambiguous word — a style for dealing with the world’s dreads and disasters, a style that has been much admired and much imitated. Her tone, measured yet distraught, is that of a witness who has journeyed, consciously if not willingly, to the heart of private and, more momentously, public horror in order to bring us back the bad news. Although she is always balanced, she is not a disinterested reporter; she writes with a numbed eloquence, and at its best her writing catches with awful immediacy the acrid flavor of an age that has known the Nazis’ death camps, Hiroshima, cold war terror, as well as the smaller nastinesses, the riots, the assassinations, the massacres — the mayhem that informs the noisy background of all our lives in a time that seems to have lost its collective mind.
But style takes the stylist only so far. In “The Year of Magical Thinking” Didion confessed, if that is the word, that “even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.” With the death of her husband, however, she needed “more than words to find the meaning.”
Now, six years later and in the aftermath of a second devastating personal calamity, her predicament as a writer has sharpened, and writing “no longer comes easily to me. For a while I laid this to a certain weariness with my own style, an impatience, a wish to be more direct. . . . I see it differently now. I see it now as frailty.” And this frailty, she recognizes, or feels she recognizes, is what her daughter feared, and that fear, we are given to understand, is one of the forces the mother thinks may have propelled the daughter to her untimely death.
Quintana Roo was named on a happy whim — “We had seen the name on a map when we were in Mexico a few months before and promised each other that if ever we had a daughter (dreamy speculation, no daughter had been in the offing) Quintana Roo would be her name.” Born in March 1966, the child was formally adopted by Didion and her husband the following September. When the ceremony was over “we took her from the courthouse in downtown Los Angeles to lunch at the Bistro in Beverly Hills.” Thus a pattern was set from the start, though Didion is sharply resistant to the notion that her daughter was “ ‘privileged,’ somehow deprived of a ‘normal’ childhood.”
Didion has always been the perennial insider — even if she has sometimes pretended otherwise, acting the wide-eyed ingénue from lil’ old Sacramento who never­theless will play it as it lays — first on the West Coast and now on the East, the one who knows whom to know and where to go, who can tell you if not the best then certainly the most fashionable place to eat, to buy designer apparel, to entrust with the task of making up Hawaiian leis for a Manhattan wedding. Her texts are littered with brand names, and “Blue Nights” is no exception: Christian Louboutin shoes, cakes from Payard, suites at the Ritz and the Plaza Athénée in Paris, the Dorchester in London. Even the far past is stuck with labels, like an old-fashioned traveling trunk. In 1966, seeking an assignment to Saigon, “I even went so far as to shop for what I imagined we would need: Donald Brooks pastel linen dresses for myself, a flowered Porthault parasol to shade the baby, as if she and I were about to board a Pan Am flight and disembark at Le Cercle Sportif.” No wonder that Didion, back in 1966 in the midst of a hectic life as half of one of the hottest writing partnerships in Hollywood, could not stop herself from wondering, when the adoption became a reality, “What if I fail to love this baby?”
From the evidence of this book, that fear is groundless. Yet the needle of such doubt drives deep. When John Gregory Dunne died, Quintana Roo was in the intensive care unit at Beth Israel Hospital in New York City, suffering from a viral infection that had turned into pneumonia. She might have died, but instead recovered. Three years later she fell ill with acute pancreatitis; this time she did not recover. Her life, what we can glean of it from the pages of “Blue Nights,” was joyful, intense, troubled. Despite her “depths and shallows, her quicksilver changes” — which, as Didion ruefully observes, were eventually “diagnosed” and given names, like manic depression — Quintana is a fleeting presence in these pages, as if her mother cannot bear to evoke her too vividly, for fear of the pain such conjuring might provoke. “You have your wonderful memories,” people tell her mother, but her mother knows better: “Memories are what you no longer want to remember.”
“Blue Nights,” though as elegantly written as one would expect, is rawer than its predecessor, the “impenetrable polish” of former, better days now chipped and scratched. The author as she presents herself here, aging and baffled, is defenseless against the pain of loss, not only the loss of loved ones but the loss that is yet to come: the loss, that is, of selfhood. The book will be another huge success, for reasons not mistaken but insufficient. Certainly as a testament of suffering nobly borne, which is what it will be generally taken for, it is exemplary. However, it is most profound, and most provocative, at another level, the level at which the author comes fully to realize, and to face squarely, the dismaying fact that against life’s worst onslaughts nothing avails, not even art; especially not art.
John Banville is the author, most recently, of “The Infinities,” a novel.

'Table Comes First' traces food culture's origins

"The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food" (Alfred A. Knopf), by Adam Gopnik: One needn't venture very far into Adam Gopnik's new book, "The Table Comes First," before beginning to wonder whether with all the recent books, TV shows and movies devoted to food and eating there remains anything more to be said on the subject.
With foodie culture encompassing everything from locavores, who eat only locally grown foods, and the slow food movement to Ferran Adria's "techno-emotional" cooking and molecular gastronomy, it seems there was never a time when society has been more obsessed by food.
Gopnik, however, points out that it only seems that way. Man's obsession with food is as old as civilization itself, or as he succinctly puts it: "An animal that eats and thinks must think big about what it is eating not to be taken for an animal."
So Gopnik's book finds its niche as a sort of intellectual history of eating, beginning at the table with its rituals and tracing them all the way back to Paris of the 1750s where the restaurant was born and where he explains, "the idea of eclectic eating in big cities began."
"The Table Comes First" lays the theory on pretty thick, with Gopnik citing everyone from the pioneering gastronomic writers Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and Alexandre Grimod de La Reyniere to American economists Gary Becker and Thorstein Veblen throwing in choice snippets from Scottish philosopher David Hume and Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards among others along the way.
Then just as readers may fear they are in over their heads, Gopnik leavens the proceedings with personal anecdotes and a few recipes of his own.
Throughout the book, Gopnik also carries on an imaginary correspondence with Elizabeth Pennell (1862-1952), a Philadelphia writer, food critic and cookbook collector whose views on food at the beginning of the last century seem especially prescient today.
The book serves as an exhaustive overview of the current state of foodie culture in America and its historical antecedents but eventually peters out into a kind of hodgepodge cobbled together from articles Gopnik has written about chefs and food over the years for The New Yorker.
Near the end of the book, we find Gopnik in Spain eating a comically complicated dessert, one which tries to emulate the emotions of a soccer goal, complete with the smell of grass and a contraption that flips over like a spring sending a white-chocolate soccer ball into the air, high above a white candy netting.
It's a fitting ending for a book that crams in lots of delicious morsels but is perhaps too rich. Suffering from too many themes, it ends up resembling an extravagant smorgasbord.

Rin Tin Tin

"He believed the dog was immortal."""
"S"o begins Susan Orlean's sweeping, powerfully moving account of Rin Tin Tin's journey from orphaned puppy to movie star and international icon. Orlean, a staff writer at "The New Yorker "who has been hailed as "a national treasure" by "The Washington Post," spent nearly ten years researching and reporting her most captivating book to date: the story of a dog who was born in 1918 and never died.
It begins on a battlefield in France during World War I, when a young American soldier, Lee Duncan, discovered a newborn German shepherd in the ruins of a bombed-out dog kennel. To Duncan, who came of age in an orphanage, the dog's survival was a miracle. He saw something in Rin Tin Tin that he felt compelled to share with the world. Duncan brought Rinty home to California, where the dog's athleticism and acting ability drew the attention of Warner Bros​. Over the next ten years, Rinty starred in twenty-three blockbuster silent films that saved the studio from bankruptcy and made him the most famous dog in the world. At the height of his popularity, Rin Tin Tin was Hollywood's number one box office star.
During the decades that followed, Rinty and his descendants rose and fell with the times, making a tumultuous journey from silent films to talkies, from black-and-white to color, from radio programs to one of the most popular television shows of the baby boom era, "The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin." The canine hero's legacy was cemented by Duncan and a small group of others--including Bert Leonard, the producer of the TV series, and Daphne Hereford, the owner of the current Rin Tin Tin--who have dedicated their lives to making sure the dog's legend will never die.
At its core, "Rin Tin Tin "is a poignant exploration of the enduring bond between humans and animals. It is also a richly textured history of twentieth-century entertainment and entrepreneurship. It spans ninety years and explores everything from the shift in status of dogs from working farmhands to beloved family members, from the birth of obedience training to the evolution of dog breeding, from the rise of Hollywood to the past and present of dogs in war. Filled with humor and heart and moments that will move you to tears, Susan Orlean's first original book since "The Orchid Thief "is an irresistible blend of history, human interest, and masterful storytelling--a dazzling celebration of a great American dog by one of our most gifted writers.

The Count of Monte Cristo

　　The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

　　Dashing young Edmond Dantès has everything. He is engaged to a beautiful woman, is about to become the captain of a ship, and is well liked by almost everyone. But his perfect life is shattered when he is framed by a jealous rival and thrown into a dark prison cell for 14 years.
　　The greatest tale of betrayal, adventure, and revenge ever written, The Count of Monte Cristo continues to dazzle readers with its thrilling and memorable scenes, including Dantès’s miraculous escape from prison, his amazing discovery of a vast hidden treasure, and his transformation into the mysterious and wealthy Count of Monte Cristo—a man whose astonishing thirst for vengeance is as cruel as it is just.

Snow Flower And The Secret Fan by Lisa See

　　
　　In nineteenth century China, 7-year-old Lily lives among such traditions as foot binding, and match makers, where daughters are meant to be matched to men of power, as a daughter… is a lowly thing, where sons are raved on and honored and live in their birth homes forever.
Girls, such as Lily were paired with laotongs, “old sames” friendships that were meant to last a lifetime and Lily is paired with Snow Flower who is believed to come from a higher social standard which will be good for Lily’s eventual husband matching.
The girls quickly become the closest of friends, sharing messages of hopes and dreams sent to one another on handkerchiefs and within the folds of a fan.
As the years pass and the girls grow to young women their times together change from girlish whispers and giggles to talks of their arranged marriages, loneliness, and motherhood. As time passes, things change and Lily and Snow flower are torn apart.
Now, Lily, years later, as Snow Flower lays close to death – Lily recaps what happened, and how she can possibly ask for forgiveness from the one person who was always by her side.

　　
　　
　　It is not often I will say this, but if you have not read or listened to this book – I want you to drop everything and run to your local book store, or your favorite online ordering spot and secure a copy for yourself. Trust me, you will be glad you did. This is one of the best books I have listened to this year.
This was not the type of story that takes a while to get into… no, from the very beginning I entered nineteenth century China I was taken in by the sites, and by the traditions as Snow Flower and The Secret Fan is filled with tradition… painful images of foot binding, match makers, and most importantly… the laotong (a friendship that I will go into more when I post the movie review tomorrow.)
And really… that is what Snow Flower And The Secret Fan is about is friendship… a friendship that is more powerful than all the other relationships in Lily’s life…. and that… makes for an amazing story.
Normally when I am done listening to an audio it goes on my giveaway shelf as I know I will not listen to it again. This time, I will be hanging on to this audio book as I know I will listen to it again someday and remember Lily and Snow Flower.