Because he didn’t travel well, Alexander Gödel packed his bags (an upright suitcase, an Italian calf-skin attaché, and a sparkling-new bowling ball tote to house his goldfish) and headed to his local airport. In purchasing tickets to a foreign country—“somewhere with tall women and almond trees,” he requested—he was kindly informed that a passport would be necessary, as well as an airport offering international flights.

Read the rest here.

Marcia wrote this book as part of the Drink of the Week blog. According to the site:

“We’ve concocted the only guide that teaches you to create your own infallible drinks. Using a simple system of basic ratios, you will learn to:

* Mix new flavor combinations for the perfect new blend using the Flavor Profile Chart as a guide
* Master advanced mixology techniques from infusing liquors at home to creating custom-flavored syrups
* Serve the perfect drink every time, whether it kicks off a rowdy party or winds down a romantic evening!”

Buy Marcia’s book here.

Jacinto’s decision to switch from ethanol to methanol was purely economic. Backing heavy sacks of sugar and maize all the way from Punta to home, Punta to home, Punta to home, often stole the greater part of his day: leveraging prices, choosing durable sacks, sidestepping the unlabeled plastic bottles that seemed to pursue him like mice. Plus, Marietta’s calling of him. “¡Jacintito!” she would tease him each time he passed. “¡Tus chinelas – tan celosa!” And it was true: the streets had never been kind to his shoes. Her voice would linger as he lugged each fragile sack along the streets of Bluefields, the dirt-path wheel ruts where the sidewalk ended, the steep hillside home… But beyond this. Beyond the barbed wire and rusted panels marking the boundaries of his small property, there were almendros, pinos, ceibas. Trees for a hundred kilometers inland, uncut and unguarded. Free. The decision had been easy.

Read the rest of Ken’s story here.

Judith’s parents’ barn is full of wooden spools. There are dozens of them wound with rope as thick as tree branches. Being in the barn is like being inside a giant sewing kit.

Our moms told us to play out here because it is Judith’s birthday and they’re setting up for the party. I know Judith from Sunday school. Every week after church, our parents take us to brunch at Adele’s diner, where they put paper umbrellas in our Cokes. Judith and Julie, our parents always say. Judith and Julie.

“My boyfriend is this one,” Judith says.

Read the rest here.

Is there a gender bias in literature? I don’t know, although there is some pretty damning evidence that something is amiss.

Tawni O’Dell wrote an essay on her experience with this subject, and her argument that there is a gender bias is convincing:

It wasn’t until many years later, … that I would feel the sting of gender bias in an area of my life where I least expected it: the publication of my first novel.

“Back Roads” was set in the coal-mining area where I grew up and was a dark, gritty portrayal of a family in crisis told entirely in the male first-person voice of 19-year-old Harley Altmyer. My publishing house was over the moon about the book, proclaiming me brilliant and tossing around phrases like “formidable talent” and “pitch-perfect prose.” The book was so good, as a matter of fact, that they thought it would be best to conceal the fact that it had been written by a woman.

I was informed over the phone one morning that Tawni was a “biker chick name” and no one would take the novel seriously if we used it.

I was stunned, not only because I had naively thought art was one area where sexism didn’t exist but because standing in my coffee-stained bathrobe in my suburban Chicago kitchen handing out juice boxes to my kids, I could hardly imagine anyone mistaking me for a biker chick.

My editor went on to inform me that they had decided to publish the book using my initials. That way they wouldn’t actually be lying and claiming I was a man but since the book was written in the male first person, everyone would assume it had been written by a man. Pretty sneaky.

Oh, it gets worse. Wait until you get to the part where she goes to a photo shoot and they ask her to get naked and pretend she is a wood nymph.

“… I heard a few gasps as I crunched barefoot through the snow, wrapped in yards of sparkling gauze, with my butt hanging out, and wondering to myself, Did John Irving ever have to do this?”

I bet not.

Read the essay here.

All right, this kid is a spoiled brat. I never once had a reaction like this at Christmas–my parents would never have allowed me to spit in the faces of their presents. But also, this kid’s attitude toward books makes me sad.

Besides, I keep begging everyone to give me books for Christmas, and no one listens!

Merry Christmas, Word Pirates.

Did you know that Jane Austen pretty much lived out Pride and Prejudice in real life, only she didn’t get married at the end? Neither did I, but that is what Hollywood wants you to believe in its biopic “Becoming Jane.” Anne Hathaway plays Jane Austen in a film where she undergoes the events that would later become her memoir–oops, I mean novel–Pride and Prejudice.

Jane Austen, in the film, is very smart. You can tell she is smart because she does not smile as much as the other characters. In Hollywood shorthand, one of the ways you can tell that a character is a genius is by how few smiles that person gives. To illustrate, behold this graph I made:

As you can see, few-to-no smiles correlates with a higher level of intelligence, as perfectly performed by Jesse Eisenberg, who does not smile even once while playing Mark Zuckerberg the boy-genius of Facebook in “The Social Network.” (To be clear, I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg is a genius, but that’s the popular view of him because he is rich.) On the other end of the scale is Ashton Kutcher’s character in “Dude, Where’s My Car?” where he smiles constantly to indicate his character’s stoned-out state. Anne Hathaway’s Jane Austen is on the Mark Zuckerberg end of the scale, but is not quite as extreme because she is a girl.

Although she does not smile, Jane Austen does mumble what are supposed to be wry English witticisms. At least, I assume so. I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying because of the loud musical score that overwhelms the movie. To be fair, Anne Hathaway is charming and lovely to look at, which is accurate casting because everyone knows Jane Austen was a beauty.

When the movie opens, we get one of my favorite cliché images of writing: the writer scratching with a quill on a piece of paper while muttering to herself. (Incidentally, this is my third favorite kind of cliché writing scene, the second being woman writer in a nightgown typing on a typewriter and the first being the writer scribbling something down and then crumpling the paper up and throwing it in a trashcan.) Then we are introduced to characters whom we are supposed to believe Jane Austen based Pride and Prejudice on. There is a Mister Collins. There is a Lady Catherine de Bourgh. There is Elizabeth Bennett’s mother and father and sister. And of course there is a Mr. Darcy as well as a George Wickham. People say lines from Pride and Prejudice to Jane. They insult her like they do in scenes of the novel. Really, you could just see one of the many movie adaptations of “Pride and Prejudice” and skip this film altogether.

Eventually one of several love interests enter the scene, including the leading man, Tom Lefroy. He and Jane instantly hate each other. They bicker in a forest. She snubs him at a ball. Then at another ball, they say English witticisms to each other while dancing, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying because of the loud score problem.

Tom Lefroy challenges Jane. He gives her Tom Jones by Henry Fielding to read, which I don’t remember being racy but Jane Austen finds it so. He rocks her world by doing things people in the 19th Century would never do, such as run from a mixed-gender cricket match while stripping off his clothes so he can jump naked into a lake. Also, he takes her to a boxing match and gets beat up. Jane Austen falls in love with him.

But: conflict: there is another man who wants to marry Jane and he is rich. Jane loves Tom Lefroy, but he is poor. Jane is torn. Should she marry this rich guy and secure her financial position? Should she make-out with Tom Lefroy by a lake? Should she just try to be a writer, even though that is not sexy and she is a woman? At yet another ball, she finds herself dancing with both of her suitors at the same time, and at each turn, she thinks, Money? Love? Money? Love? What will she do??

Sometimes I wonder if Jane Austen’s sister did her a favor by burning all Jane’s letters after she died. This act made the real Jane Austen a permanent mystery, forcing us to always return to her work for clues into who she was and what she thought. On the other hand, that mystery seems to make people want to fictionalize her. Thus Jane Austen is forced to solve mysteries and to act out the plot of her own novels on the big screen. This never happens to Shakespeare. Well, not usually.

In real life, Jane Austen did have two suitors, one based on affection and the other based on position, but they certainly didn’t happen at the same time and they certainly weren’t as fabulous as the movie suggests. When those relationships didn’t work out, she didn’t “live by her pen,” as the movie says. Because women didn’t write books in those days, she was turned down by publishers and was dependent on her brother’s financial mercy until finally, at the end of her life, she started publishing her books. She gained a modicum of fame and then died at age 41 from an unknown disease, probably cancer.

This movie strays so completely from Jane Austen’s life story that it seems indifferent to who she was as a person and as a writer. Instead of allowing the audience to hear Austen’s brilliant prose—which after 200 years surely must be out of copyright—we get montages and overlaid images of Hathaway mumbling under violin music. Fictionalizing happens in every biopic, but this movie seems so uninterested in its subject that it just comes off as a cynical attempt to cash in on the Jane Austen craze.

As such, it widdles her life down to this: Jane Austen didn’t get married, so she lived out the circumstances of her courtship over and over again in her novels. And even assuming that’s so (it’s not), then surely there’s no point in watching this movie when her books are readily available.

I must say, though, the office itself is a little creepy. I didn’t work there. I live in Colorado. But I’d visit 3-4X a year.

Everybody whispers.

It’s not exactly like being in a library; it’s more like being in a hospital room where somebody is dying.

Like someone’s dying, and everybody feels a little guilty about it.

There’s a weird tension to the place. If you raise your voice to normal level, heads pop up from cubicles.

And from around the stacks of review copies that lie everywhere like a graveyard of writers’ aspirations.

It always seemed strange. Making it to the New Yorker is an achievement. It is vastly prestigious, of course.

And the work is truly satisfying. Imagine putting out that magazine every week!

Yet nobody at the office seems very happy. The atmosphere is vastly strained.

This is not an environment I would thrive in.