December's Book of the Month: Moby-Dick in Pictures

There are as many interpretations of Moby-Dick as there are splintered harpoons in the white whale's scarred skin, all of which tell a different story, none of which tell quite the whole story. Matt Kish's interpretation takes the form of an illustration for every page (all 552 of 'em) and is both a singular reading of Melville's epic and a piece of monumental art in itself. Like all imaginative readers, Kish creates from his voyages in search of the whale his own vision, referring back to the original, but full of its own mythology and the cultural influences of the 150 years since the publication of the original. As such, Moby-Dick in Pictures provides us with a fresh way of viewing a classic (and is likely to become a classic in its own right), reminding us that great literature both acts upon the present and is reimagined by it.

As ever, our Book of the Month is guaranteed.

The Future of the Bookstore

There has been a bit of a buzz amongst booksellers about this recent Dan Clowes New Yorker cover. It would seem to disparage bookstores not only for carrying all sorts of knick knacks and gewgaws aside from books, but for pushing the books farther to the back of the store.

Now, it is a nearly universal fact that bookstores are carrying all sorts of "sidelines" that you wouldn't have seen in a "bookstore" 10 years ago. Even City Lights is selling onesies (very cute). At Green Apple, we've added all sorts of toys and games and puzzles to the mix over the last few years. When Raymond Carver lived in the neighborhood in the 1970's, he didn't ponder whether to add a refrigerator magnet or some finger tentacles to his purchases. But a business has to do what a business has to do to stay in business, and if finger tentacles help keep the lights on, then bring on the finger tentacles.

But Mr. Clowes does have a point, I believe. With the advent of e-books, there is much discussion (see here and here) about the future of books and bookstores. As more and more people read their books digitally, which is inevitable, then whither the bookstore. I'm not going to make an argument for the many positive things a bookstore brings to a community. I just want to stick to the reality that they are endangered. Every single person doesn't have to buy a Kindle to make the neighborhood bookstore go the way of the typewriter shop, just enough of them so that it no longer becomes a viable business to sell books for a living.

Which brings us to my answer to the question, what will become of the bookstore? As digital reading slowly (or quickly) replaces the reading of paper books, those sidelines will continue to expand and multiply, until what we consider a "bookstore" will actually be a gift shop or a clothing store or some other type of general merchandise emporium that also happens to have a good selection of books. How long this will take is anybody's guess. My personal guess is that it will be much slower than some people think, as readers generally have a strong attachment to the physical book. The analogy would be to vinyl records compared to compact discs. Audiophiles still love their vinyl, and at Green Apple we are selling more vinyl now than we did ten years ago. Compact discs, nobody has an emotional attachment to, and apparently there is talk that production of compact discs will cease all together in the next year of two. I think it will be a long slow transition from bookstore to store with books.

Cat's Outta the Bag

November marked the first month of our new Apple-a-Month Club, a subscription service wherein you can receive a hand-picked (and eyeball-read) new fiction title in the mail once a month. Our hands are doing the picking, our eyeballs are doing the reading, and all you've got to do is check the mailbox and hug your postperson (or resist the urge) when they bring you a pretty little package like this in the mail.


And, now that November's subscribers have had the chance to be surprised by their new book and our handwritten shelf-talker, we can tell the rest of you that our inaugural Club selection is In Red by Magdalena Tulli, a beautiful new little translation from Archipelago Books.


The heart of Magdelena Tulli's novel is the imaginary Polish town Stitchings. Reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's famous Macondo (in One Hundred Years of Solitude), Stitchings serves as setting for an array of darkly fantastic events: from a girl who refuses to acknowledge her death to the home of a man destined for a bullet that's circled the earth for years, Tulli's town offers the ultimate pleasure to readers: the impossible made believable. As such, we felt it was the perfect place to start our Apple-a-Month Club.

Want in? Why wouldn't you. If you're interested in subscribing for 3, 6, or 12 months, please do so by December 5th to get your first book in the mail about a week later. Got someone on your holiday shopping list who you want to surprise closer to Christmas? Purchase a subscription by December 18th and we'll send the recipient a card in the mail to let them know they're getting an awesome gift, and they'll get their first book in January.

the Tuesday interview: Lucy Corin

[thanks for this goes to royalquietdeluxe]

Lucy Corin is the author of The Entire Predicament (Tin House Books) and Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls (FC2). She's currently at work on a novel about a hundred very small apocalypses and a novel about the brain. Her stories have appeared all over, including American Short Fiction, Ploughshares and Tin House Magazine. I'm pretty thrilled she's RQD's first interview.

RQD: What are you working on now? What's interesting to you about these characters?

LC: I'm writing a novel. Just yesterday, actually, I started a "character chart" to track the things I know so far about the characters, b/c I don't get interested in already-imagined characters so much as who they start being as I accumulate pages. So what interests me about these, is that I am developing them in relation to each other (trying to see how they counter and balance each other in the story) and struggling with fully imagining them the way I am writing them (rather than what in my life they spring from). I'm focusing on 2 characters who are obsessed with two possibly mad people, and trying to find the personhood within the context of madness is the point of writing the novel. There's a way that even including madness in the world of a book can dehumanize people/characters, and that's what I'm struggling with.

RQD: Who are some of the visual artists you're thinking about now in relation to your work?

LC: I spent some time looking at Marcel Dzama last year, and James Casabere photos of models of housing developments, and Simon Evans' maps. Going to SF MOMA today!

RQD: Is there a book or story or poem that you return to over and over?

LC: White Noise, Lolita and "A Good Man is Hard to Find," are probably the "most reread" things.

RQD: What are you reading now?

LC: Zeno's Conscience and Promethia

RQD: And as a kid, what were you reading? Did they impact your work? How?

LC: Incredibly important. My mother read me wonderful inappropriate things as a kid: James Dickey (The Sheep Child-- very formative!), Poe, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas...ee cummings (here is little effie's head whose brains are made of gingerbread...) she read me things she was into that were musical-- I remember how important musicality was both to her sense of what would appeal to a child and what the point of literature was. She also told me stories about British Royal history... the Stuarts and the Tudors and Anne Boleyn. It was great melodrama. I didn't learn to read until I was maybe 7 (dyslexia) but as soon as I could read I read intensely. Anne Frank was the first whole book I read by myself- I think I was 8. I wrote a poem about it. Z for Zaccharia (sp? author O'Brien?) was an important YA book for me. At 13 it was all about Jim Carroll's Baskeball Diaries.

"Winnipeg Standoff" Marcel Dzama at David Zwirner

A slipcased sea

With the exception of a year in the Midwest, I've spent all of my adulthood living at most a few miles from a coast. Yet even when I could hear the Atlantic's staticky, nor'easterly roar from my bedroom window in New Jersey or now, when on clear days in San Francisco I can see the Pacific from the roof of my building, I've always wanted a tangible object to keep close by.

We all know people who collect shells or stones or driftwood. (I remember very distinctly my grandmother's homemade shell-filled lamp.) I'm a book person, so it's perhaps unsurprising that I've always desired to have the sea between the pages of a book.

Until now, though, I've never acted on that desire, maybe because I felt caught between the atavism and the consumerism of the impulse (as if any object, especially a photograph, can properly capture The Sea), or because I've never quite found the perfect book, despite there being no shortage of such collections. Besides, let's face it, there is also a lot of sentimentality about the sea; romance as well, but rarely romance that doesn't devolve into hackneyed phrases and imagery.

This book, though. This is the one. It's full of romance that steers clear of the dangerous shoals of sentimentality; it's got grandeur and shipwrecks and symbolism; it evokes the real sublimity and ordinariness of of the sea, while managing to permit it its dream quality. It's also got a slipcase. (A slipcase, I say!)

Francis Mortimer, The Wreck (1911)

Adolf Fassbender, Crashing Wave (c. 1930)

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Black Sea, Ozuluce (1991)

the Tuesday interview: Kara Levy

I met San Francisco writer, Kara Levy at a Peter Orner reading at Dog Eared Books through another writer friend, Cora Stryker. The reading was for JoyLand Magazine where Kara is the SF/Bay Area editor. Later, after another reading, we talked about what we say when people ask, "what do you write about?" Kara sometimes says, "sickness and the body." Well, they don't usually ask again after that.

RQD: What are you working on? What interests you about these characters?

Kara Levy: Right now I'm working on a novel — it's a sort of humorous adventure novel that follows a self-proclaimed journalist-turned-Professional-Sick-Person on an unlikely quest to find a cure for Crohn's Disease. Crohn's Disease isn't curable (yet), but the novel involves a fake medieval-style pilgrimage, battle reenactments, a few infidelities, some madcap teenagers, and a lot of capes and baubles in the characters' quest to see if it could be. It's as much about these characters' quest to find a cure for something incurable as it is about their beliefs (or lack thereof) that the impossible could be possible, through belief or friendship or will or something we can't even understand. As an optimistic skeptic, that's a theme that interests me a lot. I'm also polishing up my finished story collection, Doctors of the Natural World, which examines issues of illness and the body too. In that book, the recurring question seems to be, "What choices do we make after the body makes choices for us?" I spend a lot of energy trying to convince people it's not depressing. I guess you'll just have to read bits of it to believe me.

RQD: What art or artists interest you?

KL: I feel like I've been hugely influenced by standup and screen comedians: Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, Lucille Ball, George Carlin, and so on. There's so much more than humor behind those performances — and performers — than meets the eye. I'm really interested in comedy for what it can do to express real things about our experience, sometimes more than theater or performance that purports to be serious. I also love medieval art, particularly architecture. You'll see a lot of that showing up in my novel. Is it appalling to say that I wrote a whole story in my collection while listening to an Akon song on repeat? Truth: That happened. Akon knows things.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?

KL: Oh, geez, so much. Lorrie Moore's Self-Help is inescapable for me. I think I have two copies of it, for some odd reason. I also love Andre Dubus's story "Fat Girl," and go back to that often. I've reread Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler many, many times and I always learn something new, particularly about structure (which is not a strength of mine). In recent years I've found myself often revisiting a Wells Tower story, "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned." It's the title story of his collection, and I think it's so brilliant. It's the perfect storm of humor and pain and character and story. He takes the unfamiliar and makes it so familiar it's almost disorienting. I wish I could figure out how to write anything even closely approximating it.

RQD: What are you reading now?

KL: I'm reading Eric Puchner's Model Home. A friend recommended it to me, and I'm really enjoying it. I also just started Erik Larson's In the Garden of the Beasts, also on a friend's recommendation. I find fictional-style retellings of history fascinating. It reminds me a little of a book I loved in high school, Alison Weir's The Six Wives of King Henry VIII. I remember thinking it was such a revelation that history could be communicated so compellingly. (No offense to my high-school history teachers, who were also, of course, totally compelling.)

RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?

KL: As a kid I loved Roald Dahl, but I don't think I realized until much later in life just how dark he really is. I also liked the Madeline l'Engle books, and then, when I got to middle school, I decided on A Separate Peace as my favorite book. Tortured, woeful Funny! Common theme: I reread it as an adult and was like, Wait, what? I think I saw impact as a different thing back then. The impact was a lot, lot less reading it fifteen years later. Sometimes it's interesting to go back and revisit things you've always held up so high, you know? Sometimes they're just as you remember them, but for different reasons, and sometimes the distance shows you how much your taste has changed, or your threshold for certain types of narratives.

Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels

Here's a new book recommended by staffer Kevin Davis:

Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels

In the early 90s, (We were the “Twentysomethings,” We were on the cover of “Time Magazine”), I’d see this ethereal young man around town named Justin Bond who looked exactly like the weak-chinned, moon faced thieving gypsy girl in Georges de La Tour’s 1630 painting, “The Fortune Teller.”

I also thought of the local pale androgyne upon viewing that scene in the film “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” when the American solder, Luther, viewing Hansel sunbathing nude in East Germany says, “Damn Hansel, I can’t believe you’re not a girl. You’re so fine.”

I’d see Bond working at the Eureka Branch Library, at Queer Nation meetings wearing a mod black zip-up Adrienne Vittadini mock turtleneck, and at A Different Light bookstore on Castro Street (back when it was a real bookstore and de facto community center co-owned by Norman Laurila, managed by Richard Labonte and staffed by up and coming artists like Darrell Lynn Alvarez, activists like Tommi Avicolli Mecca, and authors like Betty Pearl, and not the poppers-selling gay airport gift shop the store became). Bond even had a sadly brief tenure as a columnist for the LGBT “Bay Area Reporter.”

Anyway, I’d see Justin and think, what’s his story.

Well, guess what? Mx Justin Vivian Bond, (she invented that prefix herself), now a 48-year-old cabaret singer/songwriter and performance artist who has entertained everywhere from Carnegie Hall to Sydney Opera House, has written a coming of age book all about her middle school affair with a cute ruffian, as well as polymorphous Boy Scout troupe shenanigans, a warm tribute to her hysterical former beauty queen mother, and the angsty challenges endured by the misunderstood, delicate-featured boy with ADD.

Although the story is slight and uneven, I so related to Bond’s sad effort to become invisibly butch, as opposed to the goddess she considered herself to be, after being denied the glamour of wearing frosted watermelon lipstick to school.

There’s a reason this book has been blurbed by everyone from Michael Cunningham to Sandra Berhhard.