So You Think You Want to Be a Librarian?

By Brian Kenney

Most people’s knowledge of librarianship is a mash-up of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Desk Set, some warm and fuzzy memories from an elementary school class visit, Rupert Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, even fuzzier memories of all-nighters in their college libraries, and maybe a high-minded article or two about the Digital Public Library of America.

If this sounds familiar, don’t be embarrassed. Librarianship is a notoriously opaque profession, and most Americans have about as much understanding of what we do as they have of cloistered nuns, or actuaries.

Here’s the first shocker: most professional-level library positions require a masters in library or information science, most commonly known as “the M.L.S.” Since the M.L.S. involves a serious commitment of time and money, then you better be doubly sure that this is the right decision, at least for the next decade or two.

Fortunately, librarians are the original oversharers, and they’ve produced a body of literature—from blogs posts to articles to books—to help you with your decision. This is especially useful since librarians come in different stripes—public, academic, school, special—with some significant differences among them. Librarians also conduct a lot of their professional lives online, so blogs, Twitter, and e-mail lists are all great places to soak up information.

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10 Biggest Book Adaptation Flops

By Gabe Habash

For this list, we didn’t just want book adaptations that were a critical/audience failure or a box office failure–we wanted both. That’s why the films you see below might not be the biggest money losers or the most panned; instead, they’re a combination of the most hated and most wasteful uses of celluloid out there. If none of these movies were made, over $913,000,000 would have been saved and approximately 4 billion viewing hours would have been saved.

(The following films were either critical or money failures, but not both, so they couldn’t make the list: The Great Gatsby [the Redford one], Lolita [1997], Treasure Planet, Beloved, The House of the Spirits, many more)

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Drenka Willen Wins First Ottaway Award for Promotion of International Literature

Words without Borders, a nonprofit and online magazine, has announced that Drenka Willen is the first recipient of the James H. Ottaway Jr. Award for the Promotion of International Literature (aka the Ottaway). Willen joined Harcourt as a translator and freelance editor in the 1960s and has been an advocate for literature in translation for close to 50 years. Among the authors and translators she has worked with are Nobel laureates Günter Grass, Octavio Paz, José Saramago, and Wisława Szymborska, as well as Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, and Stanisław Lem.

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War & Peace: Ru Freeman

Ru Freeman

By Claire Kirch

“All fiction is nonfiction,” declares Ru Freeman. A social justice activist and freelance journalist, her creative writing explores many of the same themes as her political commentary: war, peace and reconciliation, education, and women’s issues. Born in the capital city of Colombo, in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1967, the daughter of a civil servant and a teacher, Freeman recalls a tumultuous childhood and young adulthood in a family of intellectuals, set against a backdrop of political conflict and discord.

Her life clearly informs her fiction. Freeman’s second novel, On Sal Mal Lane (Graywolf), weaves together the experiences of a large cast of characters from 10 families of various religious, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds who make their homes on a quiet street in Colombo. Ordinary citizens, the fabric of their lives is ripped apart by the real-life civil war that erupted in 1983 following years of tension between two ethnic groups, the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority. By the time the war ended in 2009, 25 years after the events in On Sal Mal Lane take place, an estimated 100,000 Sri Lankans had perished.

“In Sri Lanka,” Freeman, 45, explains, “you have to live with everybody else. You don’t get to isolate yourself. So, when there are riots, or war, or suicide bombs, it doesn’t just kill one group; it kills a lot of people. They are from everywhere, from all religious backgrounds, from all ethnicities.” It’s a history of violence that Freeman, who now lives with her husband and three daughters in a bucolic village on Philadelphia’s tony Main Line, knows all too well.

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A ‘Perfect’ American Novel Strikes Gold Overseas

‘Stoner’ Success

By Gabe Habash

“Why isn’t this book more famous?” asked the writer C.P. Snow about John Williams’s Stoner in 1973, eight years after it was first published by Viking Press. A straightforward yet brilliant novel about an ordinary Missouri English professor, it seems almost fitting that for nearly 40 years, Stoner was quietly revered by its fans without being widely read. But by 2013, approaching its 50th anniversary, the novel is seeing a somewhat surprising revival—and not just in the U.S.

“Stoner is magic,” said Oscar van Gelderen, publisher of Lebowski, which published the Dutch edition in 2012 and now has over 100,000 copies in print. Currently, it’s the #1 bestseller in the Netherlands, where it’s been near the top of the charts for weeks. It was one of Israel’s bestselling books of 2012. And it’s moving units in France, Spain, and Italy; over 50,000 copies have been sold in the latter since it was published there in February 2012. “So far the book has kept selling without signs of receding,” said Cristina Marino from Fazi, the novel’s Italian publisher.

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Lehane Takes Home First Edgar

By Lenny Picker

It took 18 years, and 10 books, but Dennis Lehane finally got to take home a small bust of Edgar Allan Poe. At the 67th Annual Edgar Awards Banquet, held Thursday night at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan, his Live by Night (Morrow), about a cop’s son gone bad, was named the Best Novel of the year by the Mystery Writers of America. In his acceptance speech, Lehane thanked a troika of James’s who influenced his fiction-Lee Burke, Crumley and Ellroy, before acknowledging his daughters’ essential part in the creative process. “They cost so much friggin’ money,” he noted, to laughter, that he has no choice but to keep on writing. On a more serious note, he credited his early access to a public library as instrumental to his career, something he termed an “act of benevolence, or, as the Tea Party would have called it, socialism.”

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Can You Guess the Authors by Their Nobel Citations?

Mr. Murakami is not pleased, Swedish Academy.

By Gabe Habash

PWxyz doesn’t have time for non-nerdy quizzes; there are too many of those. Instead, here’s one of the more blistering tests this side of the Badwater Ultramarathon–guess the Nobel winner by citation. The format is much like a non-demanding English course–everyone’s favorite: multiple choice! In an attempt to make it less trying, we’ve narrowed down citations and choices to the more household-known Nobel winners.Sorry, 1903 laureate Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, you just missed the cut.

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Erotic Canadian Novel Awarded 2012 Believer Book Award

By Leigh Anne Williams

Toronto-based indie press Coach House Books is celebrating with author Tamara Faith Berger after her novel Maidenhead was chosen by the editors of San Francisco-based literary magazine The Believer for its 2012 Believer Book Award, as “the strongest and most under-appreciated” fiction book of the year.

Coach House promoted the book as a more cerebral alternative to E.L. James Fifty Shades series, but Maidenhead ventures into darker and more complicated places. Myra, its young protagonist, becomes involved with a Tanzanian musician and the violent woman who controls him. And, according to Coach House, it follows Myra as she enters “unfamiliar territories of sex, porn, race and class.”

 

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How H.P. Lovecraft Was Made Into a Graphic Novel

I.N.J. Culbard’s graphic adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is his second, following 2012′s At the Mountains of Madness. Culbard walks us through the process of retelling Lovecraft, while still retaining the author’s trademark style and mood.

The book opens in space. We see a crescent of light. It is the earth, small against the dark ocean. And then, as we turn the page, we zoom in closer and closer to the personal level, to the heart of the story—a scene in which Charles Dexter Ward has seemingly escaped his room at an asylum.

One of the key things about adapting Lovecraft is the sense of scale. Lovecraft writes about cosmic horror, the horrors of the universe, which are far, far greater than us. We are small and we are insignificant, and yet Lovecraft manages to make those horrors significant to us. He writes about understanding, the lack thereof, and the horror in the darkness of our own benighted ignorance—things beyond our comprehension and beyond our control.

Lovecraft’s protagonists are often detached individuals, and there is an ever-present sense of fragility and futility. Minds aren’t able to correlate the secrets of the universe, there are a great many questions that go unanswered, and people go insane in their pursuit of forbidden knowledge.

With The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Lovecraft brings the cosmic right down to a very human and intimate level. The story begins with something as horrifyingly simple as a change of behavior, a change of personality. And that change of personality is just scratching the surface of much bigger horrors.

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Books I Love: Edith Grossman

Edith Grossman

The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico Garcia Lorca Ascends to Hell by Carlos Rojas is the latest book to be translated by Edith Grossman, one of the most renowned translators in the world. And though she’s spent her career translating authors like Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Cervantes, she shared with Tip Sheet some of her personal favorites.

At first I thought I’d put together a list of ten translated books that have affected me deeply but decided not to when I realized, with some astonishment, that certain English-language books actually did turn my life around, change my thinking, and seriously influence my decision-making. I’m avoiding the issue of the precise number because books often came to my attention in groups rather than as individual volumes.

I had favorite books when I was a girl, especially The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Story of King Arthur, and Little Women, all of which I read over and over again, but the book that made a huge impression on me and invariably brought more tears to my eyes than the heartbreaking death of Robin Hood or the image of King Arthur sailing off to Avalon was Bambi. I read the book countless times and, as a consequence, developed a deep dislike of hunting, which I found incomprehensible. The effect has lasted to this day.

The other book that had a major impact on me a few years later, when I was about twelve and read it against my parents’ wishes and behind their backs, was The Naked and the Dead. Because I was so young I couldn’t comprehend all of the novel, but what I took away with me was an on-going commitment to pacifism. This came as a surprise: I grew up during the Second World War, and my mind was filled with a comic book version of villainy and virtue, a movie image of heroism. After reading the novel, I couldn’t imagine any cause that could justify subjecting vulnerable human beings to the kind of suffering and brutality depicted by Mailer. I still can’t.

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