1. There will be a release party here in Charlottesville for Free Union, the newest book in the VQR Poetry Series. The publication of John Casteen’s book will be celebrated at The Bridge on Sunday evening at 7 PM.

2. The New York Public Library has named the finalists for their annual Young Lions Fiction Award, and one of the five is Sana Krasikov, who contributed “Asal,” a short story that we published in our Summer 2008 issue. That’s just one of the pieces that make up One More Year, the short story collection for which she’s been nominated.

3. Word spread last week that The Oxford American was facing bankruptcy at the hands of the IRS, a result of a high-profile embezzlement by an now-indicted former employee. The feds want the $31,000 in payroll taxes that the employee stole, and they’re not willing to establish a payment plan. (The IRS offers little flexibility on payroll withholdings, because of the employer’s fiduciary duty to their employees, on whose behalf they’re paying the taxes.) But this story has a happy ending: an anonymous University of Central Arkansas graduate has given the magazine $100k, which covers a good chunk of the amount stolen.

4. We’re rediscovering all sorts of fun articles since we opened up our archives earlier this month, mostly by seeing what bloggers are finding and linking to. From our Spring 1978 issue comes John Hammond Moore’s “Getting Fritz to Talk,” his account of the military’s establishment of illicit interrogation facilities during WWII. It was located in an isolated portion of George Washington’s estate in upstate Virginia, code-named “P.O. Box 1142.” (My address, unsettlingly.) The whole thing was a flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention, though it sounds like the Germans gave as good as they got.

5. PEN is asking for people to sign a petition to free writer and PEN Member Liu Xiaobo, who is imprisoned in China for calling for democracy in China.

Our friends at the University of Virginia Young Writers Workshop are currently accepting applications for their summer program. The 27-year-old workshop is for high school students who want to hone their writing skills among similarly talented peers in the residential program. Teachers and guest writers have included many VQR contributors, including Sydney Blair, Rita Dove, Merrill Feitell, John McNally, Greg Orr, Lisa Russ Spaar, Christopher Tilghman, Natasha Trethewey, and Charles Wright. Intensive workshops include fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, playwriting and songwriting.

Two of us here at VQR are alumni of the Young Writers Workshop, and we’re all big fans of the program. Applications are due Monday, although begging has been known to allow an extension. (That’s how I got accepted in 1995.) Spread the word.

Along with an estimated 50% of Americans, I took my chances with the flu shot this year. Unfortunately, the gamble didn’t pay off. I also suspect that the hospital bill for visiting the Emergency Room with a 104.1° fever and then being admitted for 48 hours will far outweigh the $25 fee for the flu shot I skipped.

However, even as I am still swallowing my antiviral medications twice a day round the clock, I’m startled to notice reports of breaking scientific news that might herald an end to the yearly “to vaccinate or not to vaccinate” question. Published just yesterday in a collaboration by groups at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in La Jolla, the CDC in Atlanta, and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, a team of scientists announced in the prestigious journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology that they may have stumbled across a way to outwit the influenza virus.

The problem with the flu is that the virus mutates so rapidly that the single-dose-and-you’re-done model of most childhood vaccines doesn’t work. Instead, about this time every year, scientists around the world must analyze the many active strains of this year’s influenza outbreaks, compare the changes to last year’s outbreaks, and then, on the basis of evolving trends, try to guess which genes in the influenza genome shuffle will be present in next year’s disease. These guesses—and it’s all guesswork—will form the basis of next year’s vaccine cocktail. Since it takes a good six months to manufacture the vaccine, in order to be ready for the start of the fall vaccine season, production has to start now.

This guessing game is the reason why there is such wide variability in the efficacy of the vaccine. Those years in which very few people get sick are the ones in which we guessed correctly, and the vaccine is effective against the majority of strains of active influenza. But every few years the virus goes in a direction no one expects, and even vaccinated people still get sick. The influenza virus is a wily foe that has been making us sick for a long time.

This recent study is so promising precisely because it offers a potential way around the guessing game. After screening a library of 28 billion human antibodies—the parts of our immune system that recognize foreign invaders—this cross-institutional team discovered a handful that recognize not the constantly mutating surface of the influenza virus and the current targets of our vaccines, but rather a critical component of the viral machinery that does not change from year to year. This small cog in the mighty viral machine might be the molecular equivalent of Achilles’ heel. Studies in mice are promising: animals immunized with the protective antibodies were protected against a broad range of influenza viruses, including some of the more deadly strains known to cause pandemics.

Could this be the beginning of a single-shot, anti-pandemic influenza vaccine? It’s still too early to say. Results are nonetheless promising and a reminder that investing in biomedical research is a worthwhile enterprise. Influenza kills an estimated 250,000 people worldwide each year, and that’s not counting pandemic years. Anything we can do to minimize that toll is a good thing.

As for me, well, I’m still considered infectious, so I’m stuck at home with my computer and a pile of books I’ve been meaning to read but haven’t had time to get through lately. And I’m thinking I might start with an old favorite.

Love in the Time of Cholera.

The death last week of the great Sudanese novelist, Tayeb Salih, went largely without comment in this country, subsumed perhaps in stimulus news and the flotsam of daily life. Those searching for a novel about the modern Arab world (or just a great novel) should buy his brilliant Season of Migration to the North, or The Wedding of Zein. According to Laila Lalami, NYRB Classics is re-releasing Season of Migration to the North in April, so it shouldn’t be hard to find.

A moment of silence, and a few remembrances:

• The New York Times
• The Guardian
• BBC News
• Laila Lalami

When Marisha Pessl’s debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, was released in 2006, a flurry of articles and blog posts appeared grousing that Pessl was awarded a lucrative book contract for her good looks or that the 28-year-old author’s book jacket photo was treated as more important than the work itself.

The irony, of course, is that these pieces, by their very existence, added to a debate that didn’t have to be. If all involved ignored the author’s looks as incidental—as her publisher surely did, being that no one publishes a book of literary fiction because of how its author looks in a single photograph—then there would be no issue, and the book could remain center stage. Instead, there was a faux controversy and a fair amount of righteous indignation, prolonged by coverage pieces like those by the New York Times and the AP, respectively titled “With Marisha Pessl, You Can’t Judge a Book by the Photo on the Cover” and “Don’t hate Pessl because she’s . . .”

(The actual book received generally positive reviews, occasionally bordering on hyperbolic, while critics called it excessively stylized and bemoaned the arrival of yet another highly precocious adolescent protagonist. It was a bestseller, and reportedly the writing team behind the well-received “Half Nelson” is working on the film adaptation.)

It all seems like a waste of time, yet it’s certainly happened many times before and since. For whichever reasons, honest or prurient, some bookish types can’t let the issue go. Somehow, calling Taylor Antrim “painfully—ridiculously—attractive” and “downright Gatsby-like” enhances a profile piece, telling us more about the writer and his relationship to his work. Unsurprisingly, these descriptions appeared in a piece entitled “Wonder Boy ‘07″—for young, debut novelists, the hype machine rolls on. 

At the risk of rehashing a tired issue, I feel compelled to write this after reading Janet Maslin’s recent review in the New York Times of Miriam Gershow’s The Local News, also a first novel about the traumatic high school years of a highly precocious teenage girl. Here Maslin wades into the gossipy territory of author beauty, in the process becoming guilty of violating one of Updike’s valuable rules of reviewing: review the book, not the reputation. More specifically, she tries to use vague information about Gershow’s life to establish a connection between the writer and the text. Maslin writes:

Ms. Gershow has been a teacher at the University of Oregon, where some students’ online ratings of her sound like a continuation of Lydia’s high school nightmare. Being regarded as neither popular nor hot seems to be territory that Ms. Gershow knows well, maybe in the classroom and certainly on the pages of her unusually credible and precise novel. But these real-life disadvantages become assets in giving “The Local News” its strong verisimilitude, even in its graceless touches.

When I first read this passage, I had to stop and reread it several times to see if Maslin really wrote what I thought she did. Shockingly, Maslin is saying that because college students’ online ratings of Gershow judge her unpopular and “not hot,” that information is somehow both relevant for a book review and credible. For her research, Maslin presumably turned to Miriam Gershow’s profile on RateMyProfessors.com, a service which allows students to rate professors in several categories, all based on standard academic metrics—difficulty, teaching ability, helpfulness, etc.—with the addition of one more: “appearance,” employing a simple “hot or not” rating that the site explains is done “just for fun.”

This is a lazy and shallow tactic for a reviewer to take. She essentially says that the author must know how to write about an unattractive loser because some college kids think she is. As someone who was in college a few years ago, let me say: don’t trust my erstwhile peers, who provide such illuminating commentary on Gershow as:

I NEVER GIVE AN ADVICE BEFORE BUT THIS ONE IS THE WORST TEACHER IN THE UNIVERSE. IF YOU REALLY VALUE YOUR LIFE THAN DO NOT THINK ABOUT TAKING HER CLASSES. A SUICIDE DECISION. HORRIBLE HORRIBLE HORRIBLE!

She is funny at all. Its not easy to get an A in her class. I don’t really like her!

Miriam was nice. Very helpful during office hours. She made sure everybody participated in class. But…her way of grading was dumb. Nice person but not good in grading. I couldn’t believe I got a C for missing 5 lines to complete my whole paper, even though I had a good argument. >:-(

(sic) all around. 

Maslin might have been trying to show some sympathy for Gershow and her poor student reviews (though there are some positive ones as well; her overall rating is 3.0 on a five-point scale, which is to say average), but she ended up producing a backhanded compliment of the worst order in an overall laudatory review. It’s always a dangerous game to try to imbue a text with additional meaning by examining a writer’s biography, which in this case is rather sparse. Gershow might have succeeded in writing a compelling protagonist because she knows what it’s like to be disliked in a setting far different from that of her novel, or maybe she did such a good job because she, like, you know, has an imagination.

1. The Espresso book machine will print, bind, and trim a 300-page book in just under four minutes. The video of it in operation is a bit mesmerizing.

2. In our Autumn 1976 issue, Forrest McDonald really, really hated Page Smith’s A New Age Now Begins: A People’s History of the American Revolution:

One might sum this up merely by saying this is the worst book I have ever reviewed, which is true enough. But one cannot let it go at that. [...] Had such a work appeared anonymously in an underground newspaper, no one would have a right to be offended, but for it to appear under the imprint of a respectable publisher and a reputable historian is nothing less than prostitution.

The Supreme Court has defined an obscene book as one that is offensive to ordinary standards of decency and contains no redeeming social value. By that criterion, A New Age Now Begins is on a par with the movies of Linda Lovelace.

I kind of want to read it now.

3. Cecily Parks is giving a reading at New York’s KGB Bar on the 26th. We published a collection of her work, Field Folly Snow, as a part of the VQR Poetry Series.

4. Harper’s Index is now online in its entirety, back to its 1984 beginning, complete with a clever Ajax-y interface. Here are some facts about monkeys:

• Percentage of Americans who say they approve of using monkeys in medical experiments: 69
• Number of pygmy monkeys seized from a traveler’s pants last December by L.A. customs officials: 2
• Number of mine-detecting monkeys erroneously reported to have been given to the United States by Morocco in March: 2,000
• Number of monkeys fed a nine-course meal at last year’s Chinese Banquet for Monkeys in Lopburi, Thailand: 3,000

Since you were wondering.

5. VQR used to review cookbooks, unusually, and lots of them. Walker and Claudine Cowen reviewed a dozen or so cookbooks at a time from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s. Check out the Summer 1976, Autumn 1982, or Spring 1985 installments for some samples. I wonder if similar publications have ever been in the habit of reviewing cookbooks en masse.

Today, after two decades on the run and another in prison, Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Comrade Duch, the notorious commander of the Khmer Rouge-run Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, will finally stand trial for crimes against humanity. To mark the date, there’s an excellent brief history of the Khmer Rouge on Time’s website and a moving editorial by François Bizot, a former prisoner at Tuol Sleng, on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. We, at VQR, direct your attention to “Faces Fleshed in Green,” a gathering of the chlorophyll prints by Binh Danh and poems by Robert Schultz from our Winter issue, honoring the dead of Tuol Sleng.

As fate would have it, just as Duch’s trial begins, Attorney General Holder must decide whether to approve and make public a report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which, by all published accounts, strongly criticizes the legal arguments supporting the Bush administration’s use of interrogation techniques deemed to be torture under the Geneva Convention. The New York Times says:

The report is expected to focus on three former officials of the Office of Legal Counsel, the Justice Department office that advises the executive branch on the interpretation of the law. They are John Yoo, a Berkeley law professor, now a visiting professor at Chapman University, who was the primary author of opinions on torture while at the counsel’s office in 2002; Jay S. Bybee, now a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, who as head of the office signed the 2002 opinions, which were later withdrawn; and Steven G. Bradbury, who wrote three more still-secret opinions on interrogation in 2005, when he was the top lawyer in the counsel’s office.

Though those memos remain secret, it is widely held that they were the basis for White House authorization of waterboarding. I think VQR’s stance on torture is already pretty clear, so I won’t belabor the point. I will only offer up one simple observation—one that will doubtless be repeated by many others: the favored technique for extracting confessions at Tuol Sleng was waterboarding.

If you would like to see more of Binh Danh’s work and hear more poems by Robert Schultz, plus commentary and poems by John Balaban, you’re invited to attend the VQR-sponsored event, “Faces Fleshed in Green,” at 10 AM, Saturday, March 21, at the Charlottesville City Council Chambers (605 E. Main Street), as part of the Virginia Festival of the Book.

Looking through the 340-page AWP conference guidebook, it’s hard not to be impressed by the breadth and variety of panels, readings, lectures, and tributes. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference covers everything from the minutiae of craft to the nuts and bolts of finding a creative writing job or financing a literary magazine, a diversity of events that reflects a wide range of members and constituencies. As the former employee of a membership organization, I can imagine the endless discussions that went into creating a conference that would best serve AWP’s various members, from MFA students to creative writing professors, program administrators, literary magazine editors, and writing conference directors. And so I was surprised to find that the majority of the fiction panels and readings were oriented towards the short story, rather than the novel.

By Eric Brown / CC

This tilt, I would imagine, has nothing to do with bias and everything to do with the structural realities behind the two most important institutions in the world of AWP: the MFA program and the literary journal. MFA workshops and literary journals are both perfectly suited to short stories, poems, and essays. The unwieldy size of novels, however, make them difficult to workshop in MFA programs and almost impossible to publish in literary magazines. As an organization that serves MFA programs and literary magazines, it makes sense that the AWP conference is oriented less towards novels and more towards short stories, poems, and essays. And one might argue convincingly that it makes sense for an arts organization like AWP to support genres and forms that don’t do as well in the marketplace. However, I fear that the aforementioned structural constraints (compounded by the AWP conference) have created a Short Story Bubble not unlike the housing bubble that recently brought our economy to its knees.

By liz_com1981 / CC

All around the country, thousands of young fiction writers are scribbling furiously, focusing their creative and psychological energies on producing and publishing short stories, not necessarily because the short story is their favorite form. But, rather, because it’s the form best suited to the workshop, because they think it’s the easiest way to get published, because it’s what everyone else is doing. All the while, the literary magazines these young fiction writers hope to publish their stories in are supported largely by their own tuition, subscription, and contest entry dollars. It doesn’t take John Maynard Keynes to see that this is not a sustainable market. As long as MFA programs continue to grow, as long as short story writers are willing to pay $25 to submit to a contest, this closed feedback loop will continue growing. But, as a lover of the short story, I fear for the day when the bubble bursts. The global economy may not collapse, but I won’t be surprised if a few literary magazines do.

At AWP, the audience can be just as interesting as those on the dias. My first panel of the day was a reading celebrating the voices of the Austin-based literary magazine, American Short Fiction, which caused a minor stir a few months back when they started charging a reading fee to submitters. This reading featured Ethan Rutherford, Ben Percy, Tiffany Yanique, and Don Lee. The post-reading discussion, which began with a unanimous endorsement of Paul Yoon’s upcoming story collection, turned to the subject of Charles Baxter, who was standing in the back of the room listening to himself be called a “genius” and “the short fiction establishment.”

From American short fiction I turned to the novel and a National Book Critics Circle/Chicago Tribune/NEOMFA sponsored reading with Marilynne Robinson, Alexander Hemon, and Bharati Mukherjee. Robinson gave a stunning reading from Gilead (which I’m embarassed to say I haven’t yet read) then left to catch a plane like the literary rock star she is. She was a tough act to follow and what would normally be great readings from Hemon and Mukherjee felt flat in the shadow left by Robinson. Rumor has it that Dorthy Allison cast a similar shadow over ZZ Packer and Joe Meno at the Friday night reading at Columbia College.

Dipping back into the Bookfair before dinner, I discovered two books that I’ll be reading once I finish Gilead: Jeddeiah Berry’s metafictional detective novel, The Manual of Detection, which comes out from Penguin Press next week; and my friend Nomi Stone’s new book of poems, Stranger’s Notebook, which traces her experience living with one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world on the Tunisian isle of Djerba and just came out from TriQuarterly.

Due to the constraints of public transport between Chicago and Madison and the pressures of Valentine’s Day, I wasn’t able to make the conference on Saturday, but if anyone went to any great readings or panels, feel free to post them in the comments.

The most striking thing about AWP is the simple fact of having so many writers in one place. For one long weekend 8,000 or so lonely souls come together in a really nice hotel to talk about the minutiae of their craft, geek out over ekphrasis, and do their best to schmooze with the editor of their favorite lit mag. Perhaps it’s like any other conference, and only the panels and the minutiae are different, but it feels profound to have so many people used to working in relative solitude and obscurity come together in one place.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the Bookfair. Housed in the lower level of the Hilton Chicago, the Bookfair is comprised of four massive exhibition halls, all of them stacked with representatives of literary magazines, publishing houses, MFA programs, writers’ organizations, and the like. It’s kind of like a human slush pile in reverse. After the guard inspects your badge to make sure you aren’t some yahoo sneaking in off the street, you descend into a sea of tables and banners, stickers and sample copies. It took a bit more than two hours for my friend Jonah and I to tour the entire place and we only stopped a few times to schmooze with editors. You could easily spend all day there. And in fact, I spoke to someone who did just that, from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, going from table to table trying to get a sense of the lit mag landscape.

After maxing out on the Bookfair, I headed upstairs to the panels, which seem to be the meat of the conference. “Is There Balm in Cyberspace?” a panel about online creative writing classes, was a bit boring, though in retrospect I’m not sure what I expected. Any disappointments, however, were washed away by the University of Michigan alumni reading I attended next. The reading featured the always great Rattawut Lapcharoensap (reading a story inspired by Leonard Michaels), as well as Jason Bredle, Nami Mun, Tung-Hui Hu, and Patrick O’Keeffe.

I have to admit I was not expecting much from the evening’s keynote. I read Maus in high school and I like comix as much as the next guy but, I thought, what is Art Speigelman going to talk about for an hour and a half? It turns out he has a lot to say, about the history of comix and his role in their development. Although he sped through his presentation and skipped over a few slides, he is quite an entertaining guy, telling a story about chastising Paul Auster and Don DeLillo for not paying attention to their book boards. But the line of the night (about reading online) was probably: “When I’m on the web I’m always one click away from Porn Tube or The Huffington Post, depending on my mood.”