Shelfari

YA Wednesday: Watching and Reading

By Heidi

This week, John Green sort of reviews New Moon...

Quick links...

Bookshelves of doom reports that issue 2 of TBRT (TBR Tallboy), a lo-fi journal of short YA fiction, has shipped. To order or see submissions guidelines go here.

Two Sioux Falls, SD middle school libraries have restricted students' access to Stuck in the Middle. If kids want to get it from the library, they have to convince a teacher to use it in class. (School Library Journal)

School Library Journal posts its Best of 2009 list. Just a few YA (Grade 8+) honorees: Hate List, Fire, Liar, and Marcelo in the Real World.

Beautiful Creatures came out yesterday and there's already an announcement about a film. (KidsLit)

Melissa Marr has all kinds of video excitement on her blog these days. Last week: Wicked Lovely casting videos. This week: four book trailers for Radiant Shadows, the next book in the Wicked Lovely series (due in April 2010!).

Happy reading (and watching)!--Heidi

New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2009

By Tom

Publishing assistants all across Manhattan were kept from their dinners so they could hit the refresh button, but the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2009 list finally did go live this afternoon/evening. No big surprises there for anyone who's been reading the Book Review all year, and no real sleepers of any kind, but I for one was especially glad to see Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs, which was met with enthusiasm here and there but also a lot of mixed reviews, make the list--it has a few flaws in my mind too, but on the whole it's probably my favorite book of the year. The things it did well, it did so well that all else is forgiven (and even its failures were interesting). Ditto Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City, which inspired some really hostile responses (as well as some ga-ga raves), but which I found primarily delicious. I was surprised not to see Wolf Hallor Cheever there (looks like the Raymond Carver bio, which Stephen King reviewed more for Carver's life than the book itself in a recent NYTBR, got the lit bio slot), and very surprised not to see the new Alice Munro collection, after last week's cover rave, but things do get tight when you have only 10 spots (maybe such arguments are what delayed the list a few hours today...). Of those 11 top 100 consensus books I identified last week, two (The Age of Wonder and The Good Soldiers) are here too.

Fiction:

• Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy
• Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
• A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
• A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert
• Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

Nonfiction:

• The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes
• The Good Soldiers by David Finkel
• Lit by Mary Karr
• Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed
• Raymond Carver by Carol Sklenicka

As always, the major publishers are well-represented, although after last year's Knopf-fest, only one book (Moore) represents the borzoi this year, plus two more from publishing-group mates Doubleday and Pantheon. Scribner is the leading imprint, with three on the list. And with all the attention given this year to the lack of women writers on year-end and award lists, it's worth noting that six out of these ten were written by women. --Tom

Omni Daily News

By Tom

The anti-list list: The Millions has launched their annual Year in Reading feature, which bucks the trend (happily indulged in over here) of making Best of the Year lists that "posit an illusory pinnacle of achievement and quality," in favor of collecting a British-style series of what-was-the-best-book-you-read-last-year replies, under the commendable rationale that "true discoveries are often made not by finding out what everybody
liked, but by getting from one trusted fellow reader a recommendation
that strikes a nerve or piques an interest." Two pluses: they give each contributor more room to make their case than the usual UK list does, and they string out their posts throughout December, which makes for enjoyable daily grazing. So far, recommendations from Hari Kunzru, Julie Klam, Phillip Lopate, and LanguageHat's Stephen Dodson, who finally convinces me that, yes, I really have to go all-in on the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary as my big (my only?) gift request this year.

What Canada will read: Two big Canada lists are announced this week: The Globe and Mail's annual top 100 list (which, if we add it to our top 100 consensus list from last week, narrows the agreed-upon books to only tw Asterios Polyp and The Lost City of Z), and perhaps the most influential one of the year, the 2010 Canada Reads lineup of five books that will be debated on the CBC early next year in a series that always sends the books high onto bestseller lists.

Down with Daddy Lit: In the Daily Beast, Lizzie Skurnick lays waste to the budding genre of reverent, "child curation" Daddy Lit with a barrage of memorable one-liners, aimed mainly at Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, "a singular entry in the annals of parenting literature"”bypassing a
now-commonplace obsession with one's offspring to head straight to
sanctification."

Moving & shaking: Could it be that Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac birthday ode to John Crowley has sent his novel Little, Big, one of the all-time cult novels (which has been sitting on my to-read pile forever), to the top of our Movers & Shakers list today?

More Best Covers: The Book Design Review Poll Begins

By Tom

We're not the only ones taking votes on the best covers of the year. As I mentioned before, Joseph Sullivan at the Book Design Review, venerable year-round commenter in this field (we're just amateurs sneaking in during the holidays), has done a poll of his favorite covers in each of the past few years, and this year he is opening the process to three booksellers as well. He posted the first list yesterday, a top 14 from the staff at WORD in Brooklyn that's heavy on the paperbacks, both new ones and classics reimagined. They agree on one of our nominees (Never Smile at a Monkey), and they chose one of the other Ruben Toledo Penguin Deluxe Classics (Wuthering Heights; we went with Pride and Prejudice). Here are a few of my other favorites on their list:

That's The Sickness Unto Death by Soren Kierkegaard,The Book of Fathers by Miklos Vamos, and The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt (which really does get better the more you look at it). Vote there, and don't forget to vote here too. --Tom

Omni Daily News

By Brad Thomas Parsons

Keys to the Literary Kingdom: The Olivetti manual typewriter that Cormac McCarthy bought in 1963 for $50 at a pawnshop is going up for auction at Christie's and is expected to fetch up to $20,0000.

In the Meat of Passion: The Wall Street Journal reviews Julie Powell's Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, the Julie & Julia author's brutally honest new memoir about the butchering of her marriage (along with many sides of beef).

Kitchen Keepers: NPR shares their picks for The 10 Best Cookbooks of 2009.

Moving and Shaking: The scorching effect of one of our for-a-limited-time Cyber Monday Lightning Deals sends Janet Evanovich's Plum Spooky to the No. 1 spot on our Movers & Shakers.

--BTP

The Sweet Filth of History (Guest Blogger Jesse Bullington)

By Jesse Bullington

In yesterday's essay I talked a bit about writing fiction set in a historical past on a rather broad level, and so today I would like to address what to me constitutes the single most important aspect of writing historical fiction"”realism. Coming from the guy whose novel contains witches and demons, I know, but hear me out. The pleasure I get from a book often hinges on how realistic"”according to its own fictional reality"”I find it, which goes just as much for consistency and realization of character as it does for the setting and plot. Given the wide sea of scholarship one must wade through, writing a realistic past as opposed to a romanticized one is almost as difficult as creating realistic characters to populate it.

Capturing the mindset of characters the better part of a millennium removed from both writer and reader is hard work, and before it can even begin one has to have as tight a grasp as possible on the catfish-slick beast that is history because until one really knows their physical world they have no hope of knowing the minds of the people who populate it. Then there is the infinitesimally fine line of describing the world for readers without being overly expository"”it's not as though real people usually comment on the details and peculiarities of their era or locale in a fashion that would be easily understood by an outsider. Flora and fauna, landscapes both political and literal, theology and superstition, currency and attire, transport and technology, specific cultures and general lifestyles, in short, everything that constitutes reality, must be both present and unobtrusive, lest the novel tilt toward an anachronistic or simply unrealistic world or go the other direction and be a plodding exercise in world-building with all the excitement of an especially dull textbook. Obviously including everything and rendering a perfect facsimile of a historical past is impossible, but the struggle to come as close as possible is, in my opinion, an important one.

One thing which has been brought up in many a critique of The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart is the book's perceived filthiness. All I really care to say in response is that I set out to write a very human novel, a story, for all its supernatural elements, about real people. Real people get sick, real people void waste, real people are full of all sorts of substances that can be distasteful when they leave the body by hook or by crook. Blood, excrement, urine, pus, vomit, and yes, even sexual fluids are all occasionally referenced in the book, but such things are simply human, and in attempting to write a fantastical novel with a human heart I needed blood, and once the blood got going and the heart started beating the skin started to sweat, and soon the excreta began to build and the rest, well, is perfectly natural.

I understand why some writers choose to gloss over matters they find unfit for dinner table conversation but to me it often smacks of willful escapism"”swordfights are not glorious, they are vicious and desperate, and living in pre-modern cities is not romantic, it is, by today's standards of hygiene, rather disgusting. This is not to say that everyone needs to write in graphic detail about their character's bathroom habits for a book to be realistic, but for me the actions and settings of many a historical-set text come off as whitewashed. This does not even touch on the endemic problem of characters in historical settings having a modern, broad worldview instead of a realistic, era-appropriate mindset that might rightly be perceived as narrow and comparatively uneducated.

Again, a call for more realism coming from the guy whose novel contains witches and demons. For me, however, having realistic characters and settings is as crucial to successful fantasy and horror as it is to straight historical fiction. Period pieces should have dirt under their fingernails, not Converse All Stars under their ballgowns.

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

By Tom

New York Times:

• Leah Hager Cohen on Too Much Happiness by Alice Munr "A quick tally yields all the elements of pulp fiction: violence,
  adultery, extreme cruelty, duplicity, theft, suicide, murder. But while
  in pulp fiction the emotional climax coincides with the height of
  external drama, a ­Munro story works according to a different scheme.
  Here the nominally momentous event is little more than an anteroom to
  an echo chamber filled with subtle and far-reaching thematic
  reverberations." Meanwhile, Kakutani wrote, "The willful melodramatics of [some of] these tales make them far cruder than Ms.
  Munro's best work. Unlike the true gems in this volume "” the title
  story, along with 'Fiction,' a story about a woman who glimpses her own
  life in a work of fiction written by the daughter of a onetime romantic
  rival "” they fail to make full use of their author's remarkable and
  copious gifts."
• Nicholson Baker on Googled by Ken Auletta: "Wait. What real value? Come now, my prominent executive friend. Have
  you not glanced at Street View in Google Maps? Have you not relied on
  the humble aid of the search-box calculator, or checked out Google's
  movie showtimes, or marveled at the quick-and-dirtiness of Google
  Translate? Have you not made interesting recherché 19th-century
  discoveries in Google Books? Or played with the amazing expando-charts
  in Google Finance? Have you not designed a strange tall house in Google
  SketchUp, and did you not make a sudden cry of awed delight the first
  time you saw the planet begin to turn and loom closer in Google Earth?"
• Maslin on The Cello Suites by Eric Siblin: "Although those footsteps do not lead him in anything resembling a
  straight line, they take him all over the Bach landscape in ways that
  make 'The Cello Suites' a work of ever-percolating interest. Mr. Siblin
  winds up mixing high and low musical forms, art and political
  histories, Bach's and Casals's individual stories and matters of arcane
  musicology into a single inquisitive volume."
• Ron Powers on Ford County by John Grisham: "John Grisham, shake hands with Michael Jordan. And then get back to what you do
  best, as His Airness did, more or less before it was too late.... We talkin' short story now, sonny "” and stories are viewed by many as
  the major leagues of literary fiction. The seven examples in 'Ford
  County,' while not exactly dreadful, suggest that the majors remain as
  far from Grish­am's grasp as they did from Jordan's."
• Dominique Browning on Family Album by Penelope Lively: "Banal but terrifying things happen. Then we forget them. Somehow,
  though, they don't forget us. Memories lie buried, yet remain forceful
  enough to shape our lives. In its infinite dimensions, this is the
  subject Penelope Lively, the British author of more than two dozen
  children's books and numerous adult novels, has explored throughout her
  long and impressive career. In her haunting new novel, 'Family Album,'
  the act of forgetting is as strange and interesting as the power of
  remembering."

Washington Post:

• Yardley on Memoir: A History by Ben Yagoda: "One would look high and low to find more incontrovertible and
  devastating evidence of the triumph of memoir (if 'triumph' is the word
  for it) than is contained in Yagoda's opening chapter. In mostly
  deadpan style, he enumerates in some 25 pages the 'million little
  subgenres,' from 'celebrity, misery, canine, methamphetamine, and
  eccentric-mother memoirs' on and on through 'the dad memoir,' the
  spiritual memoir, the 'rock-star memoir' and of course 'the seemingly
  endless series of bombshells over fraudulent lives.'"
• Charles on Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton: "If you're on the lookout for some light adventure this holiday season, thar she blows!"

Los Angeles Times:

• Bernadette Murphy on Stones into Schools by Greg Mortenson: "Though 'Three Cups of Tea' is not prerequisite reading -- most of the
  material is recapped in the new book -- it may serve to whet readers'
  appetites. 'Stones Into Schools' has more characters, more
  regions to consider, more obstacles to overcome, more history to
  digest. At times, these 'mores' can require a slow and careful read. But be not discouraged: Like the trouble it takes to build these
  important and life-enriching schools, endeavoring to better understand
  this region through 'Stones Into Schools' is worth the effort."
• Dinah Lenney on Cleaving by Julie Powell: "To write a good memoir, you have to be more than shameless;
  self-awareness -- which is not the same as self-loathing -- is at a
  premium. No doubt Powell has been as honest as she knows how to be, but she's an
  unreliable narrator, vain and self-pitying by turns, and lacking
  necessary perspective. Yes, she can be fearless and provocative, but 'Cleaving' -- which has a
  third meaning: to penetrate -- wants to be wise, as well.
  Unfortunately, at the end of this book, Powell seems not much closer to
  piercing insight about anybody's heart, her own least of all."
• Tim Rutten on Crichton's Pirate Latitudes: "If you're on an airplane for a flight of several hours and not in a
  particularly demanding mood, 'Pirate Latitudes' would be a reasonably
  agreeable companion."
  

The Globe and Mail:

• Brian Boyd on The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov: "In my role as Vladimir Nabokov's biographer, I was the first person other than Nabokov, his widow and his son to read The Original of Laura.
  After years of imploring Véra Nabokov for access to the manuscript ... she allowed me to read it in 1987, 10 years
  after her husband's death "“ once only, without taking notes, and under
  her eyes, which were trained on me like a drill. When Véra and Dmitri later asked me what I thought they should do with
  the manuscript, which Nabokov had told Véra she must destroy, I said,
  to my own surprise, 'Destroy it.' How glad I am that they ignored my
  advice and that their attachment to Nabokov's work overrode even their
  respect for his wishes."
• Zsuzsi Gartner on Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith: "In Changing My Mind, Smith's trademark insouciance ... has been tamped
  down, but the irreverent wit is on display, alongside a penetrating
  sonar-depth understanding of the fictional enterprise. Shuffle on over,
  James Wood, there's a new maestro of the literary essay in town.
  
  Smith reads with both 'brain and spine,' as one of her heroes, Nabokov,
  exhorted his students to, and the results here are often thrilling."

The Guardian:

• Joseph O'Connor on The Collected Stories by William Trevor (UK only): "What is remarkable about this collection is how it reveals the extent
  to which the touchstones of Trevor's aesthetic were there from the very
  earliest stories: the crafted sparseness of description, the luminous
  sense of place, the extraordinarily profound insight into the depths
  concealed by social conversations. Each story proceeds at a kind of
  internal rhythm, the clarity of cadence and gracious austerity of the
  writing achieving an exactitude few living writers could match."
• Terry Eagleton on Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger by Fintan O'Toole: "In its rise and fall, as Fintan O'Toole remarks in this superb polemic, 'Ireland made Icarus look boringly stable.' It had moved from being the
  poster child of free-market globalisation to one of the great economic
  basket cases of modern history. All this has been accompanied by a culture of corruption so shameless
  and spectacular that it makes Dublin look like Kabul.... As O'Toole points out, bribery, tax
  evasion and false evidence under oath have not simply gone unpunished;
  the very idea of penalising the culprits is viewed by the governing
  elite as unsporting or even unpatriotic."

The New Yorker:

• Sam Tenenhaus on Going Rogue by Sarah Palin: "Polls taken last November showed that she had alienated centrists, and
  a majority of people still eye her with mistrust. But this is beside
  the point. Populists, from William Jennings Bryan and Huey Long through
  Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace, have always been divisive and
  polarizing. Their job is not to win national elections but to carry the
  torch and inspire the faithful, and this Palin seems poised to do. That
  she is the first woman to generate populist fervor on such a scale
  enhances her appeal"”and makes her, potentially, a figure of historic
  consequence."
• Nicholas Lemann on My Paper Chase by Harold Evans: "Manchester, when Evans joined the Evening News, in 1952, was
  home to twenty-six newspapers. Evans lovingly and evocatively describes
  the vanished newsroom of Linotype machines and gigantic manual
  typewriters, nearly as noisy and smelly as a factory floor. The best
  passage in this book is an extended set piece about the work that a
  copy editor (known as a 'sub') did on a British paper in the fifties,
  with all the calmness, efficiency, and speed that Evans's father
  brought to his railroad work. Newspapers thrived because they had
  figured out a way to perform what was then an indispensable and
  logistically difficult service, one that was impossible for anybody
  else to replicate."

Harper's (subscribers only):

• Dave Hickey on Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963 by Susan Sontag: "After her death, the administrators of Sontag's estate decided that she
  intended these intimate jottings to be published posthumously. I seriously doubt this. Sontag's son, David Rieff, has written at length about her conviction that she would survive her affliction. Yet Reborn
  is in print, the first of three volumes. Rieff himself is the editor,
  and he has exercised this Victorian perquisite to abandon all scholarly
  apparatus and cut enormous sections of Sontag's text to fashion what
  amounts to a gay chick-lit memoir with a few big words."
• Kim Phillips-Fein on Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Phillips and Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns: "Both Heller and Burns have instead written works of
  historical scholarship that seek to illuminate Rand's complexities
  rather than simply to support or condemn her. Rand celebrated the
  rational and independent individual, but she herself was often deeply
  depressed, powerfully sensitive to negative reviews of her work, and
  likely addicted to amphetamines. She praised originality, but the
  subculture she created to promote her ideas was inhospitable to debate.
  She aspired to high seriousness, but her writing was firmly grounded in
  Hollywood kitsch.
  
  It is understandable, then, that neither book seems entirely sure how to treat Rand."

--Tom

Omni Daily Crush: "La's Orchestra Saves the World"

By Lauren Nemroff

During the holiday weekend, I managed to stave off the food coma long enough to read a few upcoming December releases.  At the top of the short stack was Alexander McCall Smith's new novel, La's Orchestra Saves the World (available December 8).  I must confess that I'm a bit of a late-comer to McCall Smith's impressive bibliography of more than 50 works. I got hooked on the beloved Scottish author's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series last spring while prepping for our podcast interview, and more recently was intrigued when I heard about La's Orchestra--a stand-alone novel (rare for McCall Smith) that's set in the small town of Suffolk in the English countryside during the Second World War.  Fans of McCall Smith's female sleuths Precious Ramotswe and Isabel Dalhousie will find just a few mysteries punctuating the story line. The book is mainly concerned with the day-to-day life and concerns of a young widow named Lavender ("La") Stone, a promising Cambridge student who, like many women of her class and generation, finished school, married well, and led a comfortable and respectable life.  In La's case, things take a wrong turn when her philandering husband unexpectedly leaves her, and dies shortly thereafter from an injury incurred during a freak accident.  Just before the start of the war in 1939, she retreats to her in-law's country house to sort out the emotional wreckage of her failed marriage and premature widowhood.  In this self-imposed exile at the age of 28, she begins to finds solace by helping the war effort in this very quiet corner of civilization.  La tends to the hens on a neighbors farm, starts a victory garden, and conducts an orchestra composed of local amateur musicians. The atmosphere of fear and anxiety of the war years permeates the mood of the novel, and Nazi atrocities and wartime mayhem are certainly referenced and discussed within the story, but like a Shakespearean drama, the physical violence occurs off stage. 

Fans will certainly recognize and appreciate McCall Smith's consistently subtle and quiet prose. The writing is smooth and enjoyable to read. The reader feels as if s/he is sitting right beside the characters as they converse across the table and over a strong pot of tea and biscuits.  A co-worker told me that this is just the kind of book that she intends
to give to her great grandmother as a holiday gift. That sounds like a fine idea, however,  but I'd suggest that McCall Smith's story merits a
broad audience.  La Stone and her rural life in the context of WWII might seem inconsequential or perhaps even quaint.  But the book's literary merits don't obscure the gravity of the protagonist's predicament and her pathos.  La's daily battles represent generational and social struggle to lead an independent, ethical, and dignified life in the face of hardship, pressing social expectations and conventions, moral ambiguity, and isolation.  La Stone may be rendered with softer lines and contours, yet she bears many of the qualities and fortitude of McCall Smith's well-known heroines.    --Lauren

Recommended for fans of Alexander McCall Smith, Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs WWII novels, and the recent breakout bestsellerThe Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society.

Omni Daily News

By Anne Bartholomew

Twilight trendspotting: The Daily Beast forecasts which new series are poised for mega-popularity now that Twilight is over. Among them are Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy, Fallen by Lauren Kate, and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, but we think they missed a major contender: Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl's Beautiful Creatures. (Vampires are so last year).

Moody tweets: Jacket Copy reports on Rick Moody's Twitter experiment: a short story called "Some Contemporary Characters," conducted in collaboration with Electric Literature, that follows a man (older) and a woman (younger) getting to know each other after meeting online. JC is mildly critical of the process, since the story is getting fed out simultaneously by multiple Twitter accounts (and I agree this could be kind of confusing), but so far I like where it's going. About 2 hours ag "I think he wore an earring at some point, you could see the little divot in his earlobe"”how long ago and why?"

For fans of Confederates in the Attic and The Guinea Pig Diaries: NPR contributor Charlie Schroeder has signed with Penguin to write Re-Enactor: Learning About History One Bloodless Battle at a Time. This sounds like a good History Channel special.

Judging books by their (new) covers: You may have noticed we're a little jacket-obsessed lately, so this piece of news on a new look for Margaret Atwood caught my eye. These covers do seem poised for a younger audience (a la Penguin Classics new "couture" editions), but something about the photo-illustration mashup jars me a little. What do you think?

Moving & shaking: Greg Kincaid's A Dog Named Christmas trots up our daily list, thanks to yesterday's Hallmark Hall of Fame special. (I didn't watch this, but have it on good authority that it is a major tear-jerker.) --Anne

History, Fantasy, and the Blurry Lines of Literature (Guest Blogger Jesse Bullington)

By Jesse Bullington

The best thing about writing historical fiction, for
me, is the history. There is no substitute for hitting on some obscure fact or
figure and realizing in this crackling flash that all the problems I was having
with Chapter 17 are banished, and better still, the novel will be more fun for history
buffs in the bargain. Considering the vast expanse of the historical record,
passing up the real world for a completely fictional creation is a somewhat
baffling choice to me.

The worst thing about writing historical fiction,
for me, is the history (if you didn't see that one coming you need to get out
more). There is nothing more frustrating than realizing the fine plot threads I
meticulously wove together into a tapestry of wit in Chapter 18 need to be
completely unraveled because I skimped on researching the finer points of 14^th
century fishing boat schematics or confused Pope Urban V with that chump Urban IV.
Looking at the teetering stack of library books I have to get through to make
Chapter 18 work again, I am somewhat baffled by my decision to work with real
history instead of a wholly fictional, "second world" counterpart.

Not that I think creating a believable, nuanced
world from scratch is easy. On the contrary, I have enough problems rendering a
believable, nuanced facsimile of our own world with all of human history and
learning at my disposal, so forget about my trying to invent a world any more
than I already do. By which I mean that recreating a historical setting in a
work of fiction does involve a great
deal of invention, at least to render your world in such a way that is accurate
and unobtrusive but still detailed enough for the casual reader who hasn't
spent far too much time reading up on Medieval fashion and politics.

The main reason I write fiction set in our
historical past is that it appeals to me. Not a very illuminating answer, I
know, but it's the simplest one I've got. Writing fiction set in a fictional
world wholly removed from ours, or a contemporary, parallel universe, or our
species' theoretical future, doesn't get my brain humming the way inventing
stories set in our past does, although I've read and loved many a work of
second world fantasy, science fiction, magical realism, or whatever we're
labeling any given text at any given time. So no hating on so-called genre
titles or non-genre speculative fiction titles, if there really is a difference
between them"”don't ask me to define the fundamental distinctions between
Margaret Atwood's
fictional futures and Ray Bradbury's
other than the usual differences you find between disparate authors; on my
shelf she's under A, he's under B, and that's about it.

In talking about historical fiction as opposed to
other genres, and genre in general, I seem to have left out a rather important
aspect of my own writing, which is that while at present I'm describing what I
do as historical fiction not everyone would agree with me. The reason is that
my work contains fantastical elements, and rather strong ones at that. Part of
my motivation for incorporating the supernatural in my historical-set work is
that many of the individuals living in said eras believed in monsters and
witches, but that is far from the only reason I include patently impossible
characters and creatures. A short answer would be similar to my reasoning for
writing historical fiction in the first place, that I simply enjoy fantasy and
horror and thus use both fairly heavily in my work, but even that doesn't
completely cover it.

Without getting bogged down with why we invent
monsters and what they might symbolize to different cultures at different
times, I would say that part of my desire to include fantastical elements stems
from a desire to restore the magic that went out of the world when we realized
witches were just midwives, madwomen, and charlatans, seamonsters simply whales
and seals, dragons and griffins and countless other beasts nothing more than
old dinosaur bones mixed with legend and the imagination of whoever stumbled
over them. By telling stories set in a past that is as close to ours as I am
capable of rendering, and by keeping the supernatural elements to the
hinterlands instead of the civic centers, I'm trying to bend history but not
break it, to recreate a world where the impossible was real, as opposed to
creating a new world with its own realities.

Whether the reader thinks this
means I'm a writer of fantasy or a writer of historical fiction doesn't concern
me so long as I get to keep blending the unbelievable with the everyday, the
horrors of a hard life with the presumed horrors lurking just beyond the
firelight, the real with the never-was. Just because we've lost our sense of
wonder doesn't mean we should inflict our mundane reality on our ancestors.