New Books in Literary Studies

In the summer of 1957, Robert Lipsyte answered a classified ad. He was an English major who needed some cash, and The New York Times was looking for an editorial assistant. He went to work on the night shift in the sports department, serving as a copyboy for the surly old-timers. He didn’t like sports, and he hated the job. This would be just a brief stop on the path to literary fame, he presumed. But one assignment followed another at the paper. Along the way, Bob crossed paths with Malcolm X, the Beatles, and the NYPD narcotics detective who would be immortalized as Popeye Doyle. Eventually, by accident, he became a mainstay of the Times sports page. He did end up writing novels, both for adults and young adults, and he earned an Emmy award in television journalism. But it was in sports writing that he made a lasting mark in American journalism–as a reporter covering the saga of young Muhammad Ali, in two stints as the Times sports columnist, and as the author of some of the most trenchant commentaries on sports and contemporary society, most notably his 1975 book SportsWorld: An American Dreamland. In his memoir, An Accidental Sportswriter (Ecco, 2011), Bob unfolds this story with the literary style of an English major and the wry humor of a former fat kid. He tells of his long, sometimes stormy relationship with Ali, his run-ins with Mickey Mantle, tennis lessons with Althea Gibson, admiring friendship with Howard Cosell and friendly disagreements with Bob Costas, and his respect for Billie Jean King, his choice as the most important athlete of the century.  Bob does not shy from stating his opinions. But he also does not hesitate to admit when he has been wrong. His memoir makes for an amusing, absorbing, and insightful picture of postwar American culture–and sports. Hopefully, our interview captures just of bit of that. Bob was also a guest on last year’s Book List episode of the podcast. You can find that episode, which features Bob’s choices for the best sports books of 2011, in the New Books in Sports archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Elizabeth West has written an insightful study about the presence of African spirituality in the autobiographies, poetry, speeches and novels of African American women, ranging from Phylis Wheatley to Harriet Wilson to Zora Neale Hurston. West’s book is titled African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature, and Being (Lexington Books, 2011). It’s a powerful read! West’s two blubists, literary critics Georgene Bess Montgomery and Dana Williams, do not hold back in expressing their admiration of the work . Both detail how useful the book is to readers, students, and teachers of African American studies. Montgomery writes that “while [the authors West studies] have received much critical attention and analysis, [West’s] analysis is quite original and provocative.” And Williams adds that West’s book “is an important first step in advancing new frameworks through which to read African American literature.” This provocative examination of how Motherland spirituality inflects, influences, and sometimes challenges and often times mingles with Anglo-Christianity as a rhetorical device for black female authors is too important to miss. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

One lesson that the ever-present trickster figure in African American folklore teaches is how to use signifying to protect one’s intimate self. A challenge of writing Dorothy West’s life is getting beyond the masks she presents before the ever-prying gaze. To get around the problem, the biographer must think in unconventional ways. In Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color (Rutgers University Press, 2012), Cherene Sherrard-Johnson abandons the old battle between fact versus fiction; instead, she focuses on Dorothy West’s masks and what they show. Sherrard-Johnson respectfully evades West’s tactics of elusion and reveals a black woman artist with an acute awareness of the performative nature of class, and a keen sense of the intricacies of intra-racial identity. Dorothy West arrived to New York at the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance. Although her first novel, The Living Is Easy (1948) was critically acclaimed it was not until the re-issue of her novel in 1982 that literary scholars and readers alike began to take a closer look at what she had to say. Publication of The Wedding (1995), as well as Oprah Winfrey’s TV miniseries based on the novel three years later, placed West in the limelight before she passed away in 1998. Sherrard-Johnson, professor of English at the University of Wisconsin ­Madison, offers readers more than the conventional biography that beginsand ends with the birth and death of the subject. As she maps West’smovement from Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard to Moscow, Russia and back again, Sherrard-Johnson treats readers to a myriad of responses to thequestion Dorothy West asks in the epigraph of her introduction: “Why wouldanybody write a book about me?” Should you desire to see one way to meet the challenge of catching anelusive figure while being mindful of the intrusive gaze, a good start is to read ChereneSherrard-Johnson’s fine book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

My favorite book as a teenager (and in fact the only book I ever read as a teenager) was All Quiet on the Western Front. I liked it mostly for the vivid scenes of trench warfare. Teenage boys love that stuff (or at least I did). But even then I recognized that it was essentially an anti-war book. It was hard to miss: the protagonist, Paul, has a pretty nasty time of it in the trenches, and he gets killed at the end. In the years that followed I somehow got the impression that All Quiet was essentially the first real anti-war book. Before WWI, I thought, everyone who wrote about war glorified it. As Cynthia Wachtell shows in War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914 (Louisiana State University Press, 2010), I was just dead wrong about this. In American letters anti-war sentiment abounded. Many of the leading lights of American lit wrote anti-war tracts, and some of them were remarkably “modern” (those by Ambrose Bierce are particularly astonishing, and I highly recommend them). Wachtell does a masterful job of uncovering many of these neglected works, putting them in historical context, and establishing that there was, in fact, an American anti-war tradition. This is an excellent, eye-opening book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The public image of Kurt Vonnegut is that of a crusty, irascible old man. Someone with whom one would want to drink, but never ever fall in love. The Vonnegut we meet in Charles J. Shields’s insightful new biography, And So It Goes. Kurt Vonnegut: A Life (Henry Holt, 2011), is much the same. However, in Shields’s capable hands, Vonnegut’s crustiness is cast in a new light, and his black humor is leavened by the humanist sensibilities it cloaked. With the icon stripped away, we’re left to confront a real human being, and a life that was provocative in ways one might not imagine. There are nearly 1,900 citations in And So It Goes, a fact that belies the book’s incredible readability. As a rave review in The New York Times noted, this is not a stodgy affair, but “an incisive, gossipy page-turner of a biography.” Shields eloquently tracks the soap operatic elements in the iconoclastic writer’s life, while also offering acute analysis on his private self and celebrity persona. And So It Goes is full of memorable snapshots, but my favorite is this: “At home, [Kurt] secretly pored over an unabridged dictionary from his parents’ large library because he ‘suspected that there were dirty words hidden in there’ and puzzled over illustrations of the ‘trammel wheel, the arbalest, and the dugong.'” You can just see him–the man who bucked twentieth-century literary tradition–a curly-haired kid, canvassing the dictionary for words that were forbidden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

I vividly recall a time in my life–especially my late teens and early twenties–when I thought I could be anyone but had no idea which anyone to be. For this I blame (or credit) my liberal arts education, which convinced me that there was really nothing I couldn’t master but gave me little or no indication of what I should do (beyond platitudes like “discover myself” and “do good”). So I thrashed about, armed with an ounce of knowledge and a ton of arrogance. I was insufferable. I won’t go into details, but let me just say my quest to discover who I was ended rather badly, albeit not in the long term. Life taught me what my liberal arts education couldn’t: that I was who I was and not much more. Having read Rosamund Bartlett‘s excellent Tolstoy: A Russia Life (Houghton Mifflin, 2011), I’m left wondering if Tolstoy ever came to this realization. Throughout his life, he searched for his true self. His launching pad was not a liberal arts education, but rather an aristocratic background, a flock of tutors, and a remarkable talent. The first taught Tolstoy that he could do anything he wanted (which was largely true as it concerned the serfs that Tolstoy’s family owned); the second gave him the cultural tools he needed to conduct his search; and the third gave him the ability to rise above all the other Russian aristocrats who were trying to figure out what they should do and where Russia should go. Tolstoy tried on Russian identities the way you try on cloths at a department store. He was, by turns, a student, a slacker, an enfant terrible, a rake, a soldier, a pianist, a slave master, a gambler, a journalist, a teacher, a bee-keeper, a patriarch, a national poet, a peasant, a pundit, and a child-of-nature. At the end of his life he became a holy fool, or monk, or cult leader–take your pick. Some see this identity as his final destination, his moment of Buddha-like enlightenment. I don’t think so. Had he lived another five years he would have become someone else. Tolstoy–perpetual adolescent.Thankfully for us, the common thread in his loosely woven life was writing. He was a always a writer, and one with preternatural descriptive and dramatic gifts. Rosamund Bartlett is also a writer with considerable gifts, which explains why her grasp of Tolstoy is so solid and why her ability to vividly portray him so great.  If you want to know Tolstoy, read Bartlett. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this installment of Faculty Insight, produced in partnership with Harvard University Extension School, ThoughtCast speaks with the esteemed Harvard classicist Gregory Nagy about one of the earliest and greatest legends of all time: Homer’s epic story of the siege of Troy, called “The Iliad.” It’s a story of god-like heroes and blood-soaked battles; honor, pride, shame and defeat. In this interview, we dissect a key scene in “The Iliad,” where Hector and Achilles are about to meet in battle. Athena is also on hand, and she plays a crucial if underhanded role, with the grudging approval of her father, Zeus. And Nagy is the perfect guide to this classic tale. He’s the director of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC, as well as the Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard. We spoke in his office at Widener Library. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

[Re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh’s ThoughtCast] Tom Perrotta, the esteemed author of Little Children, Election, The Abstinence Teacher and the recently published novel The Leftovers (St. Martin’s Press, September 2011) speaks with ThoughtCast about a writer who fascinates, irritates and inspires him: Flannery O’Connor.  His relationship with her borders on kinship, and he admires and admonishes her as he would a family member, with whom he shares a bond both genetic and cultural.When asked to choose a specific piece of writing that’s had a significant impact on him, Tom chose O’Connor’s short story “Good Country People,” but then he threw in two others — “Everything that Rises Must Converge” and “Revelation.” As Tom explains, these three stories chart O’Connor’s careful trajectory, her unique vision, and her genius. This interview is the second in a new ThoughtCast series which examines a specific piece of writing — be it a poem, play, novel, short story, work of non-fiction or scrap of papyrus — that’s had a significant influence on the interviewee, that’s shaped and moved them. Previously, Harvard literary critic Helen Vendler discussed an Emily Dickinson poem that’s stayed with her since she memorized it at the age of 13. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In his new book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford University Press, 2011), Alan Jacobs, Clyde S. Kilby Chair Professor of English at Wheaton College, discusses the state of reading in the United States. Where some would argue that there are too few people doing the wrong kind of reading, Jacobs argues the contrary. He believes that literature is flourishing, pointing to the existence of enormous booksellers like Amazon or Barnes and Noble, as well as the influence of Oprah’s Book Club as evidence. In our interview, we talked about why our reading muscles have weakened over time, the importance of reading at whim, and the wondrous reading silence of children immersed in books.  Read all about it, and more, in Jacob’s thought-provoking new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook, if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Last spring’s Cricket World Cup was a major global event. Estimates of the television audience for the final matches ranged from 400 million to one billion, while the website ESPNcricinfo.com had an average audience, throughout the entire 43-day tournament, of 72,000 people per minute. But for most American sports fans, the Cricket World Cup was a distant curiosity, if it registered at all. A lengthy piece at one reputed sports site treated the Cricket World Cup with college-dude mockery. The writers’ judgment of the sport as “effing weird” surely reflects a common American view of cricket. But while their tone was generally derisive, the writers did come to a realization during their introduction to cricket: the characteristics of cricketers can be explained in relation to baseball players–the grace of a fielder, the power of a batsman, the dominance of a bowler. Another, more appreciative piece by an American sportswriter who attended the World Cup found that the two sports share similarities not only on the field but also in what draws their fans. “I do know this: I am a fan,” he wrote of watching Sachin Tendulkar bat against England. “I am sunburned but do not care. I lose track of time.” A baseball fan could have written the same line about an afternoon at the ballpark. Martin Rowe and Evander Lomke have long recognized the commonalities between cricket and baseball. Their book Right Off the Bat: Cricket, Baseball, Literature & Life (Paul Dry Books, 2011) points out those analogies in an erudite yet readable style. The book is a primer to both sports. They give a brief and comprehensible explanation of what happens on the field. But more important to them are the lessons of the sports’ histories, the patterns of their cultures, and the deeper attractions they have for their fans. In the book, and our interview, Martin and Evander talk about the slow meander of time at a game, the expanse of green spaces under summer skies, the guarantee of the familiar and the thrill of the unexpected. If you are new to cricket or baseball, you will find their book a gratifying guide. And if you are already a fan of one of the sports, you will gain a new appreciation and new insights when seeing it alongside its cousin in the bat-and-ball family. Be sure to visit Martin and Evander’s website, where they continue their conversation about baseball and cricket. And stop at the Facebook page for New Books in Sports. You can leave your comments about podcasts, get announcements of new interviews, and find links to thoughtful, shorter sports writing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies