《纽约时报》评选出的2011十佳图书

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Dec 022011
 

以下是《纽约时报》评选出的2011年度10本最佳图书。虚构类和非虚构类个5部。

The 10 Best Books of 2011

FICTION

THE ART OF FIELDING

By Chad Harbach

At a small college on the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan, the baseball team sees its fortunes rise and then rise some more with the arrival of a supremely gifted shortstop. Harbach’s expansive, allusive first novel combines the pleasures of an old-fashioned baseball story with a stately, self-reflective meditation on talent and the limits of ambition, played out on a field where every hesitation is amplified and every error judged by an exacting, bloodthirsty audience.

11/22/63

By Stephen King

Throughout his career, King has explored fresh ways to blend the ordinary and the supernatural. His new novel imagines a time portal in a Maine diner that lets an English teacher go back to 1958 in an effort to stop Lee Harvey Oswald and — rewardingly for readers — also allows King to reflect on questions of memory, fate and free will as he richly evokes midcentury America. The past guards its secrets, this novel reminds us, and the horror behind the quotidian is time itself.

SWAMPLANDIA!

By Karen Russell. Alfred A. Knopf, cloth, $24.95; Vintage Contemporaries, paper, $14.95.

An alligator theme park, a ghost lover, a Styx-like journey through an Everglades mangrove jungle: Russell’s first novel, about a girl’s bold effort to preserve her grieving family’s way of life, is suffused with humor and gothic whimsy. But the real wonders here are the author’s exuberantly inventive language and her vivid portrait of a heroine who is wise beyond her years.

TEN THOUSAND SAINTS

By Eleanor Henderson

Henderson’s fierce, elegiac novel, her first, follows a group of friends, lovers, parents and children through the straight-edge music scene and the early days of the AIDS epidemic. By delving deeply into the lives of her characters, tracing their long relationships not only to one another but also to various substances, Henderson catches something of the dark, apocalyptic quality of the ’80s.

THE TIGER’S WIFE

By Téa Obreht

As war returns to the Balkans, a young doctor inflects her grandfather’s folk tales with stories of her own coming of age, creating a vibrant collage of historical testimony that has neither date nor dateline. Obreht, who was born in Belgrade in 1985 but left at the age of 7, has recreated, with startling immediacy and presence, a conflict she herself did not experience.

 

NONFICTION

ARGUABLY

Essays.

By Christopher Hitchens

Our intellectual omnivore’s latest collection could be his last (he’s dying of esophageal cancer). The book is almost 800 pages, contains more than 100 essays and addresses a ridiculously wide range of topics, including Afghanistan, Harry Potter, Thomas Jefferson, waterboarding, Henry VIII, Saul Bellow and the Ten Commandments, which Hitchens helpfully revises.

THE BOY IN THE MOON

A Father’s Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son.

By Ian Brown

A feature writer at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, Brown combines a reporter’s curiosity with a novelist’s instinctive feel for the unknowable in this exquisite book, an account — at once tender, pained and unexpectedly funny — of his son, Walker, who was born with a rare genetic mutation that has deprived him of even the most rudimentary capacities.

MALCOLM X

A Life of Reinvention.

By Manning Marable

From petty criminal to drug user to prisoner to minister to separatist to humanist to martyr. Marable, who worked for more than a decade on the book and died earlier this year, offers a more complete and unvarnished portrait of Malcolm X than the one found in his autobiography. The story remains inspiring.

THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

By Daniel Kahneman. Farrar

We overestimate the importance of whatever it is we’re thinking about. We misremember the past and misjudge what will make us happy. In this comprehensive presentation of a life’s work, the world’s most influential psychologist demonstrates that irrationality is in our bones, and we are not necessarily the worse for it.

A WORLD ON FIRE

Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War.

By Amanda Foreman

Which side would Great Britain support during the Civil War? Foreman gives us an enormous cast of characters and a wealth of vivid description in her lavish examination of a second battle between North and South, the trans-Atlantic one waged for British hearts and minds.

银河图书奖GNBP和国家图书奖NBA

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Oct 192011
 

GNBP是Galaxy National Book Prize（银河图书奖）的缩写，通常说成Galaxy Book Prize。2011年度的银河图书奖最后的短名单已经公布。在文学作品方面，桂冠诗人卡萝尔·安·达菲（Carol Ann Duffy）凭借其最新诗集《蜜蜂》（The Bees）而跻身其中。同时参加该奖项角逐的其他作家包括：Julian Barnes, Carol Birch,  Andrea Levy, Anthony Horowitz和 Alan Hollinghurst。【详细内容，请点击这里】

这里的NBA不是北美篮球联盟，而是“国家图书奖”（National Book Awards）。今年国家图书奖的最终角逐名单也已于10月12日正式公布。其中的文学部分的候选人包括：

  • Andrew Krivak, for “The Sojourn” (Bellevue Literary Press), a novel set during World War I
  • Téa Obreht for “The Tiger’s Wife” (Random House), a best-selling debut novel set in the war-torn Balkans
  • Julie Otsuka for “The Buddha in the Attic” (Knopf), about Japanese “picture brides” brought to the United States nearly a century ago
  • Edith Pearlman for “Binocular Vision” (Lookout Books), a story collection whose characters confront issues of identity and relocation
  • Jesmyn Ward for “Salvage the Bones” (Bloomsbury USA), a story of a Mississippi Gulf family facing Hurricane Katrina

据说这次美国国家图书基金会（ the National Book Foundation）还摆了个乌龙。他们将Lauren Myracle 的 “Shine”列入了短名单，5天后有电话通知人家撤出。详情在这里。

【有关国家图书奖的详细内容，请点击这里】

 

作家谈写作

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Sep 272011
 

9月24~25日美国国家图书节（National Book Festival）期间，《华盛顿邮报》专访了几位作家。请他们就文学创作的一些问题发表了看法。作家们对写作怎么看？以下是《华盛顿邮报》采访他们的一些摘要：

THE THING I’M HAPPIEST ABOUT IN MY WRITING CAREER IS . . .

That rarest of occurrences: being able to finance my writing life with the writing itself.  — Russell Banks

The sound of my father’s voice on the telephone when I told him that I had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. That the book, “Thomas and Beulah,” dealt with my home town and was about my maternal grandparents made the announcement that much sweeter.  — Rita Dove

The dream of becoming a writer as a young boy has been realized. I am so pleased I did not let my young self down.  — Jack Gantos

The writing. Which is an obvious thing to say but not obvious because so much goes into a writing career that’s not writing. And you have control over so little of it.  — Louis Bayard

When readers ask when my next book is coming out, especially my D.C. readers because they love recognizing the places, people and events that relate to the city.  — Kia DuPree

Financial security.   — Sam McBratney

That there are people who are neither friends nor relatives who actually read and appreciate what I have written.  — Jim Lehrer

By accident, I learned how to support myself comfortably enough to warrant the risk of adopting my three children, and life has never been the same since.  — Gregory Maguire

I WOULD LIKE READERS TO REACT TO MY WORK BY . . .

Laughing. I once watched a 6-year-old laugh so hard at my book “Diary of a Worm” that milk shot out of his nose — and I mean projected out like a jet stream. Hilarious.  — Harry Bliss

If an adult reads one of the stories to children, and they say at the end, “Read it again!”  — Joe Hayes

WRITING IS A SPIRITUAL ACTIVITY BECAUSE . . .

The fact that somehow, after hours and hours, a story will be there. . . . That’s a big leap of faith for me. Even after publishing 10 books. When it happens, though, it’s the closest thing to grace I know.  — Sarah Dessen

Actually, I think it’s quite physical.  — Linda Pastan

For me, anyway, [writing] is what infuses the world with meaning.  — Jennifer Egan

The five hindrances to successful meditation turn out to be identical to the five hindrances to successful writing: attraction, aversion, sloth, restlessness and doubt. In that way, I suppose writing resembles a spiritual activity.  — Sara Paretsky

I was once asked when I felt closest to God, and I surprised myself by saying, “When I’m writing.” I guess it’s because when I am really writing, I feel absorbed in a life that is much bigger than I am.  — Katherine Paterson

I find that it takes a lot of years of living, and many more of reckoning, to come up with one worthwhile paragraph. And when a deadline looms, prayer doesn’t hurt, either.  — Carmen Agra Deedy

For me writing is not a spiritual activity. Fishing is.  — Allen Say

THE BOOK THAT HAS HAD THE GREATEST INFLUENCE ON ME IS . . .

When I was a child, the book I read and re-read was “Hitty, Her First Hundred Years,” by Rachel Field. Later on, I discovered “Kristin Lavransdatter,” by Sigrid Undset. I re-read that book yearly. Eventually Philip Pullman published the three-volume “His Dark Materials.” That was truly a thrilling reading experience.  — Tomie dePaola

“The Color Purple” confirmed that it is all right to tell the truth about your life. This novel gave me the courage to say, “I am a little black girl from North Carolina. My grandmother could not read or write, but I can do it for her.”  — Shelia P. Moses

“The Autobiography of Malcom X” really changed my attitude toward reading for pleasure, something I can’t say I had ever done until I read this book in high school. After finishing it, I was hungry for another joyful reading experience. “Where the Wild Things Are,” by Maurice Sendak has had the greatest influence over my picture book work. It is a visual storytelling masterpiece.  — Kadir Nelson

In recent years, it has been Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” As I was writing my book “Black Gotham,” “Beloved” greatly influenced my thoughts about the African American historical past, how much of it has been lost to us, and how family memories can help us to retrieve it.  — Carla L. Peterson

Pablo Neruda’s “Odes to Common Things” convinced me early on to explore, as a writer and a songwriter, the utterly ordinary and tease out the beauty therein. Picked it up used at a bookstore in Louisville when I was 19.  — John McCutcheon

“The Once and Future King,” which begins with “The Sword and the Stone” and continues to the imminent death of King Arthur, perhaps was most influential. It showed me that books for adults could be serious, comic, moral, epic, gripping, all at once, without having to give up the things that made children’s books so wonderful: a sense of play, of magic, of the numinous, of consequence.  — Gregory Maguire

Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls . . .” opened the world of literature to me, although I’d always been a reader. I’d read books with interesting characters and literary figures, but it was in Ntozake’s work that I felt the human experience in literature.  — Rita Williams-Garcia

My mother was a living “book” of poems for me — and I grew up swimming in the ocean of poems she knew by heart: Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson, Dickinson, Longfellow — along with “A Child’s Garden of Verses.” I remember one day in our backyard in St. Paul, Minn., when I was about 3 — my mother pushing me on our red swing and reciting “The Swing,” by Robert Louis Stevenson, as she flung me up into the air, then back. I felt as if I were swinging inside the poem itself, out on the first line, back on the second — the rhythm of the poem exactly in synch with my pendulum flight! “How do you like to go up in a swing?/ Up in the air so blue?/ Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing/ Ever a child can do!” Swinging within that poem, urged forward by my mother’s hands and voice, made me understand the “shape” of poetry or words — their inspiration and safe return to earth.  — Carol Muske-Dukes

THE BEST SENTENCE I’VE EVER READ IS . . .

“Dear Harry, enclosed you’ll find your royalty check and statement for the period ending September 2006.” The above sentence is my favorite because it represents my son Alex’s full college tuition.  – Harry Bliss

“Where’s Papa going with that axe?” From “Charlotte’s Web.”  — Mary Brigid Barrett

“You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.” From “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”  — Tomie dePaola

“But it is the memory of that woman, that boy and that vast field that continues to ride and ride in my mind, not only because it is a warm, safe and proud thing I carry with me like a talisman into cold, dangerous and spirit-numbing places, but because it so perfectly sums up the way she carried us, with such dignity.” From “All Over but the Shoutin’ ” by Rick Bragg.  – Terry McMillan

“I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes.” From Langston Hughes’s poem “I, Too, Sing America”  — Shelia P. Moses

“And now abide faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love.” From 1 Corinthians 13:13. It is the best because it tells me who I am and who I am meant to be.  — Katherine Paterson

THE COOLEST THING I’VE EVER DONE AS A RESULT OF MY WRITING IS . . .

Taking gladiator training in Rome at the Gruppo Storico Romano, a school on the Appian Way that trains gladiators for movies and reenactments. I got to wear the helmet, carry the shield and sword, and learn both offensive and defensive fighting techniques.  — Margaret George

Sesame Street! I was U.S. poet laureate at the time, and Big Bird kept introducing me to the TV audience as the poet Laurie Ett. It was a blast; Big Bird is really huge! For many years afterward, I’d meet people who had seen that show when they were kids.  — Rita Dove

My journey 1.5 miles down into a deep gold mine in South Africa. It was very, very hot and wet, and at the same time was the kind of subterranean environment that scientists think could support life on cold and dry planets like Mars. The imagination runs wild.  — Marc Kaufman

Last year in rural north India, I got to visit the descendants of one of the American loyalists I wrote about in “Liberty’s Exiles,” who still live on the land their ancestor settled 200 years ago. They took me to their forebear’s tomb, its red sandstone dome soaring out of a yellow mustard field: a Mughal monument built by a colonial American. It was one of my most powerful encounters with the past, because it was so alive.  — Maya Jasanoff

Landing and catapulting off an aircraft carrier a half-dozen times in high-performance jets for a book I wrote on Navy pilots.  — Douglas Waller

 

卡森·麦卡勒斯谈爱情

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May 012011
 

Carson McCullers Talks about Love（卡森·麦卡勒斯谈爱情）是一部正在上演的音乐剧。由苏珊娜·维嘉（Suzanne Vega）创作并担当主演。表达了对于美国南方哥特小说创作的代表人物卡森·麦卡勒斯的热爱和敬仰。

Carson McCullers

苏珊娜·维嘉的卡森·麦卡勒斯情结只是因为大约30年前的一次偶然：那个时候的苏珊娜在书店看到了一本麦卡勒斯传记。她当时并没有去购买阅读这本书。但是封面给她留下了深刻的印象。据说因为她们长得非常像。从此，她对麦卡勒斯的热爱日渐加深，成了麦卡勒斯的忠实拥趸。她反复阅读了卡森·麦卡勒斯的《心灵是孤独的捕手》（The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter）、《婚礼成员》（The Member of the Wedding）等等。她的很多歌曲灵感都来源于麦卡勒斯的作品。而要为麦卡勒斯创作一部音乐剧的设想也在她的头脑里盘旋了20多年了。现在，她的愿望终于实现。

根据苏珊娜·维嘉的介绍，音乐剧Carson McCullers Talks about Love（卡森·麦卡勒斯谈爱情）的全部歌词都来源于卡森·麦卡勒斯的小说。

Suzanne Vega

苏珊娜·维嘉是美国著名的词曲作家、歌唱家。曾经7次获得格莱美奖提名，已经销售了700多万张唱片。

【点击阅读英文介绍】

【书评转载】亚瑟的悲剧

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Apr 282011
 

近两周来，小说《亚瑟的悲剧》（Tragedy of Arthur）的受关注度极高。以下是来自《纽约时报》的书评文章：

Fake Memoir With Bogus Shakespeare

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Author of Tragedy of Arthur

“The Tragedy of Arthur” is a novel about the discovery of what is reputed to be a lost Shakespeare play, and with it Arthur Phillips has found the perfect vehicle for his cerebral talents: his ingenuity; his bright, elastic prose; and, most notably, his penchant for pastiche — for pouring his copious literary gifts into old vessels and reinventing familiar genres.

Mr. Phillips’s earlier novels, of course, testified to these gifts, though they also tended to point up his reluctance to delve convincingly into the inner lives of his characters. His much talked-about first novel “Prague” — about young Americans in Europe — was filled with echoes of Nabokov and James. “The Egyptologist” worked variations on old Hollywood mummy movies and H. Rider Haggard stories. “Angelica” gussied up the Victorian ghost story with some postmodern pyrotechnics. And “The Song Is You” read like a mash-up of “Sleepless in Seattle” and a cheesy stalker movie.

With “The Tragedy of Arthur” Mr. Phillips has created a wonderfully tricky Chinese puzzle box of a novel that is as entertaining as it is brainy. If its characters are a little emotionally predictable, we don’t mind all that much: we’re more interested in seeing how the author cuts and sands his puzzle pieces, assembles them into a pretty contraption and then inserts lots of mirrors and false bottoms.

Mr. Phillips — who, in addition to writing, has been a child actor, a jazz musician and a five-time “Jeopardy!” champion — begins this complicated enterprise by cunningly creating a frame story to explain the finding of the lost Shakespeare play “The Tragedy of Arthur” in which, he, Arthur Phillips, author of four novels, is a central player.

In a lengthy fake memoir that is supposed to be the “Introduction” to this Shakespeare play, Mr. Phillips pretends to be a fictional version of himself, recounting the story of how his con-man father — who is also named Arthur and who is serving jail time for forgery — came to give him “a quarto edition, dated 1597” of the lost play and how that play came to be authenticated by assorted forensic and scholarly experts and published, here, in these pages, by Random House.

The narrator — that is, the fictional Arthur Phillips — has an intense love-hate relationship with his father. He feels his dad repeatedly abandoned him and his twin sister, Dana, during their childhood because he could not resist committing petty crimes that kept getting him sent to jail. At the same time young Arthur hungers after his absent father’s approval: he wants his Shakespeare-loving father to ratify his own creative efforts as a writer.

In recounting the tale of his fictional namesake Mr. Phillips does a clever job of orchestrating well-known Shakespearian themes, like the contingency of reason and love; the rift between appearance and reality; and twins and doubles and confused identities. He makes questions of legitimacy (which percolate through the history plays) and authenticity (which underlies Shakespeare authorship debates) central to this novel.

Mr. Phillips depicts the fictional Arthur’s father, Arthur Sr., as a phony and pretender — as a sort of combination of the con-man father in Geoffrey Wolff’s memoir “The Duke of Deception” and one of the charming, prodigal fathers in John le Carré’s fiction.

Arthur Sr. has served jail time for things like forging fake grocery store coupons and scratch-off tickets for the New York Lottery. When his children were young, he even enlisted their help in creating phony crop circles as a prank. Why? “To astonish,” his son explains. “To add to the world’s store of precious possibility. To set the record crooked once and for all, so that someone’s life (some stranger’s) was not without wonder. It almost seems like a charitable act, if you subtract his ego.”

Given his father’s suspect history, why would the narrator believe for a second that “The Tragedy of Arthur” is the real thing? After all, the play is oddly filled with echoes of Phillips family history, including a dog with the same name as Arthur Sr.’s onetime pet.

Why would young Arthur lend his own reputation as a writer to another one of his father’s scams? The novel suggests hypotheses of widely varying plausibility: that for once in his life Arthur Sr. is telling the truth and has in fact stumbled across that rare and amazing thing — a new Shakespeare play, which he stole from the library of a wealthy man who didn’t know what he owned; that Arthur Sr. found a fake Shakespeare play and embellished it with some of his own imaginative embroiderings and then reprinted it on old paper with old ink; that young Arthur has himself written this phony play and pretended that his father gave it to him in order to inflate his father’s legend of shamelessness and manipulation.

How good a job does the real Mr. Phillips do of faking an early (and not very good) Shakespeare play? Well, let’s just say it’s hard to imagine that the fictional Arthur Phillips or the fictional Random House managed to find experts who would give the play their stamp of approval. The whole production feels truncated and rushed, and it’s filled with labored, lumpy poetry. On the other hand, we are supposed to suspect that “The Tragedy of Arthur” (or to be more precise, “The Most Excellent and Tragical Historie of Arthur, King of Britain”) is a fake Shakespeare play written by a Shakespeare-loving con man. So its actual quality is sort of beside the point.

Not only does Mr. Phillips have a lot of fun concocting this play, borrowing a little from “Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2,” “Henry V,” “Hamlet” and even “Macbeth” along the way, but also in writing “The Tragedy of Arthur” — the book we hold in our hands, not the play within it — he’s constructed a sly, spirited novel that deftly showcases his own versatility and shiny literary panache.

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