The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl

Believe it or not, a recent best-selling novel features C. August Dupin, the Rue Morgue, and the doppelganger motif. It's called The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl (author of The Dante Club and The Last Dickens).

You can read an excerpt here, or read the promotional description:

The body of Edgar Allan Poe has been buried in an unmarked grave. The public, the press, even Poe's own family and friends accept the conclusion that Poe was a second-rate writer who met a disgraceful end as a drunkard. But none of this deters a young Baltimore lawyer named Quentin Clark.

Quentin, an ardent admirer, discovers that Poe's last days are riddled with vital unanswered questions - that the police may be covering up. Just when Poe's death seems destined to remain a mystery, inspiration strikes - in the form of Poe's own stories. Quentin realizes he must find the one person who can solve the strange case of Poe's death: the real-life model for Poe's brilliant fictional detective character, C. Auguste Dupin, the hero of Poe's tales of crime and detection.

In short order, Quentin finds himself enmeshed in sinister machinations involving international political agents, a female assassin, the corrupt Baltimore slave trade and the lost secrets of Poe's final hours. With his own future hanging in the balance, Quentin Clark must turn master investigator himself to unchain his now imperiled fate from that of Poe.

Following his phenomenal New York Times bestselling debut novel, The Dante Club, Matthew Pearl has once again crossed pitch-perfect literary history with innovative mystery to create a beautifully detailed, ingeniously plotted tale of suspense that The Globe and Mail calls "a masterpiece," with which New York Times literary critic Janet Maslin says Pearl "has now created a two-book franchise on the cusp of mystery, literature and historical fiction." The Poe Shadow's groundbreaking research opens a new window on the truth behind Poe's demise, literary history's most persistent enigma, with documented material never published before. The resulting novel is a publishing event that "would make Poe himself proud" (Bookpage).

Book Review: The Wonder of Wiffling

Did you know that one who makes umbrellas is called a mushfaker? If not, read on. Here's a review from the Irish Independent of The Wonder of Wiffling:

...a new book offers rich pastures for even those with the gift of the gab. In its pages, office underlings can find fresh terms of abuse for their overlords, disgruntled husbands will discover new words to describe the mother-in-law and the wag in the pub need never be silenced again.

There are gems such as a seagull used to describe the kind of manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps over everything and then leaves, or a shubie, one of those sorry souls who buys all the latest surfing gear but doesn't surf.

The Wonder of Whiffling, which is published today, takes readers on a delightful tour of the extraordinary words in the English language, from ancient and now disused words to trailer park slang. Its chapters include rarely used terms such crambazzled -- to be aged prematurely through drink -- to words we have sadly lost from everyday use such as mushfaker -- someone who repairs umbrellas -- and stadge -- the date of issue stamped on a coin....

The book helps to keep wordsmiths up-to-date with the latest editions to the language, such as ham, used to describe legitimate email, as opposed to spam and popular textonyms, the name given to predictive text software coming up with the wrong word, such as 'book for cool', 'carnage for barmaid' and 'poisoned for Smirnoff'.

Read on...

Book Review: Her Fearful Symmetry

2 Generations of Twins, a Family Secret, and a Soul Unable to Rest in Peace
Review from The New York Times Book Review

Time and the supernatural are at the center of Audrey Niffenegger’s new novel, an entertaining but not terribly resonant ghost story about two generations of twins.

Audrey Niffenegger’s wildly successful first novel, “The Time Traveler’s Wife” (recently turned into a movie), used an old sci-fi device as a springboard for a high-flying meditation on the uncertainties and dislocations of life. In recounting the story of Henry, an involuntary time traveler, and his wife, Clare — who patiently waits for him to return home from his Odysseus-like wanderings through the calendar — Ms. Niffenegger not only conjured two memorable characters, but also created an affecting story about the magical ability of love to transcend time.

Time and the supernatural are also at the center of her new novel, “Her Fearful Symmetry,” an entertaining but not terribly resonant ghost story about two generations of twins, which like all ghost stories, addresses the hold that time past exerts over time present.

Whereas “The Time Traveler’s Wife” simply used the premise of time travel as a device to look at a couple’s efforts to sustain their love through all sorts of trials and tribulations, “Symmetry” buys into the literary and cinematic ghost story genre whole hog, embracing all of its best-known traditions, no matter how hokey or contrived. The novel’s got a haunted house (well, a haunted apartment), a creepy cemetery, a family with a bizarre secret in its past and two naïve young women at the mercy of unearthly forces. True to form, the familiar daylight world of contemporary life is penetrated by a spirit from the great beyond, while the obvious Freudian implications of haunting and being haunted are dutifully explicated and explored.

With “Symmetry,” Ms. Niffenegger has streamlined her storytelling to the point of slickness. This novel charges ahead in a much more straightforward manner than “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” creating suspense through its formulaic adherence to old genre conventions. Although the reader is pleasantly carried along by the author’s ability to create credible characters and her instinctive narrative gifts, the novel lacks the emotional depth of its predecessor; none of the relationships in this novel have the intensity or poignancy of Clare and Henry’s liaison in “The Time Traveler’s Wife.” What’s more, the psychological underpinnings of a crucial decision made by one of this novel’s heroines are fuzzy and unpersuasive — a fundamental flaw that undermines the cogency of the overall story.

continue reading...

Death By Books (and Other Stuff)

Speaking of urban legends, American literary light E.L. Doctorow (author of Ragtime) has published a new novel based on the urban legend of the Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, who were literally crushed to death by the books (and other paraphernalia) they collected in their Manhattan brownstone. From the review this week in The New York Times:

The subject of E. L. Doctorow’s gentle, enveloping new novel, Homer & Langley, is one that might easily come to any deskbound writer who spends his days amid mounting piles of books, newspapers and magazines. It’s the Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley — wealthy, reclusive Manhattan pack rats who lived for decades in squalor in a Fifth Avenue brownstone and died within a labyrinth of trash: towers of news­papers, battlements of books, mountains of boxes and heaps of chandeliers and debris (human organs in brine, pianos, a Model T Ford). After their deaths, in 1947, investigators had to break an upstairs window to gain entrance. Burrowing through walls of clutter, they soon found Homer’s body, but it took weeks to locate Langley’s, which lay within 10 feet of his brother’s, crushed beneath a booby trap he’d set for prowlers. After both Collyers were extracted, more than 100 tons of refuse was removed from the building.

Though their story is entirely true, the Collyers have become the stuff of urban legend; as such, they’ve inspired many commemorations before this one. A few years ago, Franz Lidz wrote a riveting, fact-filled nonfiction account of the brothers, Ghosty Men, interwoven with reminiscences of his uncle (also a compulsive hoarder). In 1954, the impetuous writer and critic Marcia Davenport (she titled her autobiography Too Strong for Fantasy) mined their biography for melodrama in her novel My Brother’s Keeper, in which a passionate opera singer drives two brothers to disposophobic lunacy. The peculiar pair have also popped up, by name or reputation, in plays, television shows and films, as well as in the horror and crime genre — from Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, in 1975, to Linda Fairstein’s “Lethal Legacy,” published last February.

Read on...

Oscar Wilde’s Personal Library

The Christian Science Monitor reviews a promising book on Oscar Wilde’s life as viewed through the prism of his personal library, proving that one can learn aplenty about a man through the books he owned, read, and digested. Wilde, it seems, truly "made his books his own." He went far beyond simply writing his name on the inside cover. Consider:

Wilde’s was a working library and its volumes were often stacked on the floor. Wilde scribbled in them, marked passages, and sometimes even chewed on them. (Literally – he would tear corners off pages and pop them in his mouth while reading intensely.) He dribbled crumbs and jam into them and sometimes used flowers to mark his place – all of which left an unusually personal imprint on his collection. He also borrowed widely from his books and perhaps even stole. (Plagiarism, he told a friend, “is the privilege of the appreciative man.”)

The book on Wilde's books is Built of Books:

Wilde was a brilliant scholar and droll, rapid-fire commentator. He was erudite beyond what most of us can even begin to imagine. Except that now, thanks to Thomas Wright, we can imagine. Wright, in a remarkable labor of love, has dedicated much of his life (about two decades) to a quest to intellectually reconfigure and read Wilde’s personal library. The result is Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde.

It could be argued that all of us are indelibly marked by the books we read. But there can be few people for whom this is as strikingly true as it was of Wilde, who became celebrated as a playwright, poet, author, and professional wit.

Books were the driving force of his existence, from earliest childhood on up, and later in life, when he was brought low by tragedy and disgrace, they were his last remaining comfort.

Wright has gone to great lengths not only to learn about the titles that shaped Wilde’s life, but to get his hands on as many of Wilde’s own copies of those books as possible. The result is an idiosyncratic yet insightful take on the man Wright refers to as “my hero.”

read on...

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

Over the past year we've talked plenty about the idea of "re-telling" stories, in the manner of Chaucer or Boccaccio or Irving. An American writer by the name of Seth Grahame-Smith recently teamed up with the long-dead Jane Austen to produce a hybrid novel called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. That's right, Grahame-Smith took Austen's work and grafted his own zombie novel onto it, producing some very, er, interesting results.

Apparently the Austen-hybrid fad has caught on. A new novel -- this one by Ben Winters -- is due out on September 15: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. The New York Times reports:

Like some monster stitched together in a mad scientist’s laboratory, another Jane Austen novel is about to be grafted to a classic horror milieu in hopes of creating a best seller. Publishers Weekly reported that Quirk Books would follow its unexpected hit “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” with a new title, “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters,” to be published on Sept. 15. “Zombies,” written by Seth Grahame-Smith, combined about 85 percent of Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” text with a tale of undead flesh eaters. The new book, to be written by Ben H. Winters, will find the Dashwood sisters tossed from their home and sent to an island of man-eating sea creatures. Jason Rekulak, a Quirk Books editor, told Publishers Weekly that the book would take inspiration from everything from “Jules Verne novels to ‘Lost’ to ‘Jaws’ to ‘Spongebob SquarePants.’ ” Mr. Grahame-Smith, meanwhile, signed a two-book deal with Grand Central Press that includes a new book called “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.”

You may want to check out the dramatic trailer for the book.

The 'Third Man' Phenomenon

Some of you have seen the excellent movie The Third Man (1950). Well, here's a "third man" of a different sort: Today's Wall Street Journal carries a review of an interesting new book called The Third Man Factor:

In 1953, Austrian mountaineer Herman Buhl became the first person to climb Nanga Parbat in the ­Himalayas—at 26,660 feet, the ninth tallest peak in the world. He climbed by himself and not far from the summit was forced to spend the night out in the open without a sleeping bag or tent. It was an agonizing ­bivouac, but Buhl survived—in part, he later wrote, ­because he sensed that he shared the ordeal with a ­companion. "I had an extraordinary feeling," he wrote, "that I was not alone."

Accounts of experiencing a supportive presence in extreme situations—sometimes called the "third-man phenomenon"—are common in mountaineering ­literature. In 1933, Frank Smythe made it to within a 1,000 feet of the summit of Mount Everest before ­turning around. On the way down, he stopped to eat a mint cake, cutting it in half to share with . . . someone who wasn't there but who had seemed to be his ­partner all day. Again on Nanga Parbat, on a 1970 climb during which his brother died, Reinhold Messner ­recalled being accompanied by a companion who ­offered ­wordless comfort and encouragement.

In "The Third Man Factor," John Geiger, a fellow at the University of Toronto, presents many accounts of such experiences, and not only from climbers. Among those who have felt a ghostly companionship he cites Charles Lindbergh on his solo flight across the ­Atlantic in 1927 and the last man to walk out of the South Tower of the World Trade ­Center before it ­collapsed on 9/11.

read on at WSJ...