In February 1935, James Monroe Smith, president of Louisiana State University, decided his institution needed two things—a literary journal and a press. He drove his black Cadillac to Robert Penn Warren’s house and invited the newly-minted LSU professor and his graduate student boarder, Albert Erskine, to go for a drive. He wanted to know what they thought it would cost to produce a top-flight journal. Warren told him $10,000 per year—that’s more than $150,000 in today’s dollars. Surprisingly, Smith quickly agreed on two conditions: 1) he wanted Warren and Erskine to team up with Cleanth Brooks, then a professor in the English department, and Charles W. Pipkin, dean of the graduate school; and 2) he wanted a full proposal from them by the next morning. Warren and Erskine worked deep into the night, and the next day Southern Review was born. Shortly thereafter, Smith appointed Marcus Wilkerson to the directorship of the newly formed LSU Press and set aside money for several ambitious projects, including a history of the university, a two-volume survey of Western civilization, and a doorstop anthology of American literature co-edited by Brooks and Warren (based on Warren’s literature course at LSU)—the now-classic An Approach to Literature. “Although James Monroe Smith was not himself an intellectual,” writes literary historian Mark Royden Winchell, “he valued intellect in others and knew how to put it to work for the good of the university.”

Nearly seventy-five years later, Southern Review remains one of the most important quarterlies in the country, and LSU Press has earned a reputation as one of the nation’s most revered university presses. In the last three decades alone, LSU Press’s literary titles have garnered four Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and its exceptional history list has won three Bancroft Prizes and the Lincoln Prize. Yet, LSU’s new chancellor, Michael Martin, has targeted both Southern Review and LSU Press as entities within the university that, due to the economic downturn, will now need to contribute additional revenue to the university—or else. According to the preliminary budget report issued by the university, “it is very possible they cannot generate the revenue needed and will close.” In a prepared statement released after the budget was made public earlier this week, Martin praised LSU’s nationally recognized publications as “a very valuable asset to this university” but insisted that “we must protect the academic core of LSU first and foremost.”

(more…)

Sometimes it pays to be friends with a children’s librarian. Without the recommendation of someone who sees what gets published under the “Young Adult” label I would never have found The Book Thief, Australian native Markus Zusak’s second novel and one of the best I have read recently. The origins of YA literature can in part be traced back to Sarah Trimmer, an eighteenth-century children’s literature critic who introduced the idea of “books for children” (under age 14) and “books for young persons” (ages 14-21). By the mid-twentieth century, publishing houses caught up with this concept and started marketing novels for the emerging adolescent crowd.  This in turn led to a snowballing effect as schools, booksellers, and librarians created so-called “YA” sections distinct from both the regular fiction titles and the children’s books.

Yet defining the boundary between adult fiction and young adult fiction can often be murky at best. Even if a main character is not quite an adult, does that have to direct a novel’s marketability towards teenagers? Knopf chose to market Zusak’s novel towards a younger audience, at least in the United States, but for a story set during the Holocaust in which Death serves as the narrator for the entire 550 pages, I can’t help but think there are themes which might be lost on younger readers.

And then there is also the prose, without doubt representing a fluidity of language with a compelling twist that had me hooked from the first chapter when Death introduces himself:

—Of course, an introduction.

A beginning.

Where are my manners?

I could introduce myself properly, but it’s not really necessary. You will know me well enough, and soon enough, depending on a diverse range of variables. It suffices to say that at some point in time, I will be standing over you, as genially as possible. Your soul will be in my arms. A color will be perched on my shoulder. I will carry you gently away.

At that moment, you will be lying there (I rarely find people standing up). You will be caked in your own body. There might be a discovery; a scream will dribble down the air. The only sound I’ll hear after that will be my own breathing, and the sound of the smell, of my footsteps.

The question is, what color will everything be at that moment when I come for you? What will the sky be saying?

Personally, I like a chocolate-colored sky. Dark, dark chocolate. People say it suits me. I do, however, try to enjoy every color I see—the whole spectrum. A billion or so flavors, none of them quite the same, and a sky to slowly suck on. It takes the edge off the stress. It helps me relax.

And with that introduction, I could not put down the story of Liesel, a child abandoned by a mother who cannot afford to care for her in the early days of Hitler’s Reich; the Hubermans, the childless couple who take her in; Rudy, the neighbor boy down the street with whom she falls in love; and Max, the Jew who eventually finds his way to Himmel Street. As the world collapses around her, Liesel sees not the events of the world—although Death reminds us of his increasingly busy schedule—but rather her great secret: she cannot read. Books are burned in Nazi Germany and 1938 gives way to 1939 with the coming storm of WWII, but we see Liesel discovering the magic of words and the beauty of language even as Death is the one who notes her progress.

Young adult? Hardly. Worth reading? Absolutely.

This week, Israeli writer Amos Oz celebrated his seventieth birthday. Often considered part of a band of co-generational greats that includes A.B. Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld, and the lesser-known Yoel Hoffmann, Oz is regularly touted as a Nobel candidate. He has published books of short stories, essays (political and otherwise), novels, numerous newspaper pieces, a masterful memoir that is a fine introduction to his work and to Mandate-era Palestine, fables, and even a novel-in-verse. Often associated with the Israeli left, Oz was a founding member of Peace Now and though he’s perhaps less vocal politically than he was in the nineties, he’s occasionally mentioned, like his younger compatriot David Grossman, as someone who could be a viable high-level candidate, should he ever seek public office.

His latest book published in English is Rhyming Life and Death, which has received generally positive reviews. There’s also a new anthology of his work, titled The Amos Oz Reader. And given the occasion, the seventieth birthday of a writer who has chronicled the state of Israel—and, it should be said, much else—since its inception, he has merited a fair number of retrospective pieces. These are a few:

• “Dipping a Pen in the Inkwell of Life” (written, in fact, by A.B. Yehoshua)
• “Generosity and restraint“
• “Interview with Amos Oz“
• “Amos Oz, Approaching 70, Sees Israel With a Bird’s-Eye View“
• “The outsider“

I spent almost six months in 2007 and 2008 in Arad, the small town in the Negev desert that Oz has called home for many years. (I never got the chance to meet Oz, but someone pointed his house out to me from a distance—it looked like all the others—and a friend swore she saw him at a coffee shop at the only mall in town.) Arad is a strange place—a town of more than twenty thousand that often feels like one tenth that size, with only a few restaurants, carefully planned neighborhoods, no traffic lights, numerous parks for children, and hundreds of stray cats milling about, scavenging for food. At any given point, the open desert is no more than a five minute walk away, and at night, the fog rolls in, producing a beautifully eerie luminescence from the orange streetlights that dot every corner. Jackals can sometimes be heard calling in the distance. (Oz’s first book of fiction was called Where the Jackals Howl.)

It’s also one of Israel’s most diverse towns, filled with Jews of all manner of religiosity and ethnic extraction—Russians, Ethiopians, Indians, South Americans, Sabras—and many Bedouin, some of whom also live in the unrecognized communities that surround Arad. They live in dilapidated homes run on generators, and some subsist on raising sheep or camels that graze on the meager desert scrub. Occasionally, hiking around town, such as in the spot where Oz was photographed for the “Sees Israel with a Bird’s-Eye View” piece linked to above, one can encounter a Bedouin man or woman, sometimes a couple of children, quietly moving their flock along the rocky brown hills, trailed by a pair of lazy dogs.

This alluring place is neglected in writing about Israel, which usually revolves around Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, holy cities like Safed, the Occupied Territories, and the Diaspora. However, Oz frequently invokes Arad, especially on his occasional flights of meta-narrative, and it’s a welcome perspective. Unless they’re stopping through on their way to the nearby Dead Sea or Masada, few Israelis even bother to go to Arad—many asked me some version of, “Why would you ever want to go there, much less live there?”—but this small, humble town, too, is part of Israel, deeply representative of the desert, which informs so much of the area’s history. Oz’s descriptions of the place, littered throughout his work, serve as one more reason to turn to this great writer, who has much to tell us about where he comes from and where this country might be going.

VQR contributor Dimiter Kenarov visited us here in Charlottesville last week, and VQR editor Ted Genoways recorded a discussion with Dimiter about his article in our spring issue, “The Mask of Sanity: On the Trail of a Serial Killer in Macedonia,” about reporter Vlado Taneski, who was hot on the trail of a murderer in the small town of Kičevo when the unthinkable happened.

[podcast]http://www.vqronline.org/media/2009/kenarov.mp3[/podcast]

Spoiler warning: this interview gives away who the killer is—the mystery at the center of the article.

If you enjoyed “The Mask of Sanity,” you may also like “Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Georgi Stoev’s Gangster Pulp,” Dimiter’s account of the rise and fall of a Bulgarian mafia hit man turned tell-all author, which is the May 18 issue of The Nation.

An environmental advocate who has worked as a photojournalist, Tipper Gore’s photo essay in our Spring issue on Bishop Glacier in British Columbia combines these two pursuits. Her piece, which includes expansive shots of the glaciers, provides striking visual evidence for climatic changes that have already occurred. Gore continues to promote environmental awareness through The Climate Project, where her photos raise funds for the cause. I e-mailed her for a short chat about the ways in which her art and her activism intersect.

You got your start as a photojournalist for the Nashville Tennessean before your husband was elected to Congress in 1976. Has photography affected your work in politics and your life as a public figure?

I feel comfortable behind a camera, as an observer of events as well as a participant. Our life in public service has given me unique opportunities to photograph people and places I would not otherwise have seen. Where the issue of homeless people and programs are concerned, I was able to replace statistics with a human face, with the hope of inspiring individual and community action.

What are your favorite subjects to photograph?

I like trying to capture the humanity and spirit of people on the streets, around the world.  I love photographing landscapes, trees and water in particular.

Your photos in the Spring issue provide a visual argument for climate change. Are there any other places you’ve traveled that revealed this to you, or was this experience unique?

I visited and photographed New Orleans a year after Hurricane Katrina and The Tennessean ran the photos that showed the devastation and inaction.

What cameras do you use?

I use the Canon EOS 40D, and Canon 5DMark II. I also like the Leica D-Lux 3 and the Canon G10 as pocket cameras.

Considering your access to significant events in US history, was there any one moment when you wished you had had a camera with you?

I’m rarely without one, anywhere.

With Barack Obama at the helm, US foreign policy towards the Muslim world has already taken a drastically different tack. In the first three months of his presidency Obama pledged to withdraw American troops from Iraq, charmed the Turks, and extended a YouTube olive branch to the Iranian people. But with a global economic crisis to solve, a health care plan to pass, and nearly a hundred years of entrenched American interests in the Middle East, how much can Obama really change?

After nearly a decade of books attacking, defending, and explaining Islam, the newest crop of books about the United States’ relationship with the Muslim world has a decidedly hopeful twist. Here are four of the best:

How to Win a Cosmic War, by Reza Aslan. Random House, April 2009. $26
In clear and elegant prose, Religious Studies scholar and Daily Show regular Reza Aslan breaks down the faulty logic of the Bush Administration’s War on Terror and lays out a new way forward. “It is time to strip this ideological conflict of its religious connotations,” he writes. “To reject the religiously polarizing rhetoric of our leaders and theirs . . . and to address the earthly issues that always lie behind the cosmic impluse.”

We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land, by Jimmy Carter. Simon & Schuster, January 2009. $27
This thoughtful and much-needed book eschews the partisan recriminations and historical gerrymandering that typify most discussions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Instead, former President Carter offers a pragmatic solution to the problem, arguing that these next few years may be the last chance for a two-state solution. “The time is now,” he writes. “Peace is possible.”

Engaging the Muslim World, by Juan Cole. Publisher, March 2009. $27
University of Michigan professor and blogger, Juan Cole argues for a new and more subtle approach to our relationship with the Muslim world. According to John Esposito, the Grand Poobah of Islam scholars, the book is “a MUST read, the right book at the right time for anyone who wants to understand ‘What went wrong, why, and where do we go from here.’”

Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East, by Rashid Khalidi. Beacon Press, February 2009. $26
You might remember Columbia Professor Rashid Khalidi from the bit role he played at the end of the election. He was the “former terrorist” whose farewell dinner Obama attended in Los Angeles. In reality, Khalidi is a highly lauded scholar and an incisive commentator on the politics of the Middle East. His new book argues that current conflicts in the region can be traced back to American and Soviet cold war policies.