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| Dave Eggers has outgrown his critics Any truth in the charges of pretentiousness still being levelled at him stopped applying nearly a decade agoIt may not rouse too much interest on this side of the Atlantic, but tonight Dave Eggers will be presented with the Literarian Award by the National Book Foundation for "outstanding service to the American literary community". It's the third major prize Eggers has won in as many years. In 2007 he was the youngest person ever to scoop the Heinz Award for his 826 Valencia network of non-profit tutoring, writing and publishing centres for teenagers. Last year he was given the prestigious TED prize, which he used to champion creative partnerships between people and their local schools. So what exactly is a Literarian? Founded in 2005, the prize generally goes to individuals who've spent their whole lives at the literary coalface. The inaugural award went to the then-octogenarian poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who co-founded the San Francisco bookstore City Lights and won a landmark court case over obscenity charges after publishing Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems. Last year it went to Barney Rosset, another veteran publisher who fought the courts to print uncensored versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. These were huge contributions to literary culture. So why is Dave Eggers strolling up to the podium at the tender age of 39? The answer is that Eggers has achieved an enormous amount already. His painfully clever and searingly confessional book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was an audacious opening gesture in 2000. Since then he has written reams of flash fiction (of varying quality, to be fair), several novels and a short story collection. He has continued to run the publishing powerhouse McSweeney's and launched the Believer magazine in 2003. But all that's just the day job: in 2004 he co-founded Voice of Witness, an oral history series recording the personal narratives of those caught up in human rights crises around the world. And presumably after finding some small hole in the space-time continuum, Eggers also launched a foundation for improving educational opportunities for Sudanese children. But despite all this, Eggers retains a dedicated following of naysayers. If you've not noticed, try this simple trick: next time you're among friends, mention liking Dave Eggers. At least one of them will recoil as though you've just confessed a fondness for drowning puppies. Noses will wrinkle, brows will furrow, eyes will rise to the heavens. Once they've regained composure (this can take anything up to five minutes) the words "smug", "pretentious" and "annoying" will probably start flying about. The knockabout self-awareness of AHBWOSG – hell, even the title of that book – seems to have scarred some people for life. And Eggers's short stories, many of which for my money are fresh and compelling, seem to have sealed him in some people's minds as a shallow trickster. The novelist Melvin Jules Bukiet launched a particularly scathing attack in the American Scholar, accusing Eggers and his McSweeney's crowd of "the implicit self-congratulation of wonder". Ouch. But even if you buy these criticisms, they are rapidly becoming outdated. Eggers's last major novel, What Is The What, was a serious, important and beautifully written book, recording the life of a Sudanese refugee named Valentino Achak Deng. Written after arduous years of research, the book was a remarkably powerful combination of fiction, journalism and biography. His forthcoming book about hurricane Katrina achieves something similar. Eggers is now mining a vein of American oral storytelling that makes him a worthy successor to the late Studs Turkel. Far from being smug and self-satisfied, Eggers's work is increasingly compassionate, selfless and outward facing. Those critics are sounding more remote by the minute.FictionDave EggersChris Coxguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Holiday Books: Travel This winter’s travel books offer a roughly even mix of vice and virtue, from prostitution and violence to classical antiquities and literary treasures. feeds.nytimes.com |
Night by Elie Wiesel This memoir is a horrifying portrait of the Holocaust, says Phil MongredienElie Wiesel was 15 when the Nazis came for the 15,000 Jews of his hometown of Sighet, Transylvania, in May 1944. Upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, his mother and sister were murdered within hours, while he was put to work as a slave labourer. Eight months later, the Germans evacuated the camp and forced the survivors on a death march that ended at Buchenwald. Wiesel was one of the few still alive when the Americans arrived in April 1945.One of the most horrifying memoirs ever written, Night was first published in English in 1960. To mark Wiesel's 80th birthday, the Nobel laureate's wife, Marion, has produced a new translation. In stark, simple language, he describes what happened to him and to his family. It is hard to imagine anything more hellish than the picture he paints of his arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau: "Huge flames were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there. A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children."Throughout, Wiesel conveys a collective sense of disbelief that "disciplined, educated men" could commit such crimes. In a key scene, he tells how one of Sighet's Jews, Moishe, had been deported to Poland in 1942. Moishe and his companions had dug their own graves before being shot and left for dead. But Moishe had somehow survived and returned to Sighet to warn his friends. Yet nobody would believe him. As the events of the 1940s slip ever further away, they become harder to comprehend and imagine. In his foreword, Wiesel explains why he felt compelled to write Night, saying his "duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living". He has done more than most to keep alive their memory. Elie Wiesel was 15 when the Nazis came for the 15,000 Jews of his hometown of Sighet, Transylvania, in May 1944. Upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, his mother and sister were murdered within hours, while he was put to work as a slave labourer. Eight months later, the Germans evacuated the camp and forced the survivors on a death march that ended up in Buchenwald. Wiesel was one of the few still alive when the Americans arrived in April 1945.One of the most horrifying memoirs ever written, Night was first published in English in 1960. To mark Wiesel's 80th birthday, the Nobel laureate's wife, Marion, has produced a new translation. In stark, simple language he describes what happened to him and to his family. It is hard to imagine anything more hellish than the picture he paints of his arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau: "Huge flames were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there. A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children."Throughout, Wiesel conveys a collective sense of disbelief that "disciplined, educated men" could commit such crimes. In a key scene, he tells how one of Sighet's Jews, Moshe, had been deported to Poland in 1942. Moshe and his companions had dug their own graves, before being shot and left for dead. But Moshe had somehow survived, and returned to Sighet to warn his friends. Yet nobody would believe him. As the events of the 1940s slip ever further away, they become harder to comprehend and imagine. In his foreword, Wiesel explains why he felt compelled to write Night, saying his "duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living". He has done more than most to keep alive their memory.Historyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Last Bachelor by Jay McInerney | Book review Jay McInerney's second collection of short stories, while beautifully written, lacks variety, says Alexander LarmanJay McInerney's second collection of short stories sees him revisiting a favourite milieu: the lives and loves of privileged Manhattan socialites. Although the myriad references to 9/11 place the stories in the 21st century, much of the characterisation and dialogue self-consciously echoes F Scott Fitzgerald. The first story, "Sleeping With Pigs", features a winning touch of surrealism – the protagonist is forced to share his marital bed with a pot-bellied pig. Individually, each story is witty, beautifully written and highly evocative. Cumulatively, the effect becomes akin to gorging yourself on several courses of the same rich food. If reading about the casual adultery of the idle rich isn't your thing, these stories might end up trying your patience.Fictionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Will Tesco films be Finest or Value? Tesco's decision to make a Jackie Collins novel into its first movie makes me wonder what cinematic joys we can expect - from this and other major retailersThinking logically, it was only a matter of time before Tesco got into the movie production business. After all, you can already buy Tesco food, wear Tesco clothes, read Tesco magazines, talk on the Tesco phone network, heat your home with Tesco gas and electricity, bank with Tesco and go on a Tesco holiday, so the film industry does seem to be the only pie that the supermarket hasn't already jabbed some sort of appendage into.And now it's happened: this week Tesco announced it was going to start making its own films. Admittedly, not any films you'd actually want to watch – they'll all be straight-to-DVD affairs, and the first release will be an adaptation of a Jackie Collins book – but it's an interesting decision nonetheless. A company with the undeniable clout of Tesco would be able to market the titles to kingdom come and, given its success rate in other ventures, there's a good chance these DVDs will make everyone a lot of money regardless of their quality.But what next? Since this is Tesco we're talking about, it goes without saying that producing one version of each movie won't be enough. Surely it'd be more in keeping with the company's ethos to release several – a Tesco Finest version starring Ralph Fiennes and Helen Mirren, a regular version with Mark Addy and Fay Ripley, and then a dirt-cheap Tesco Value effort featuring Kerry Katona and the bloke from the Go Compare adverts gooning around in an abandoned pub car park while an unsteady bystander tries to record it on their mobile phone.That's not to mention the gratuitous product placement we should all expect from these films. Philip Pullman is apparently one of the authors discussing the possibility of letting Tesco adapt his books into films, but how much money would it take for him to agree to alter The Amber Spyglass so that it ends with Metatron being bonked on the head with a 400g tin of Tesco cream of mushroom soup or decapitated with a Tesco thin-and-crispy ham-and-pineapple pizza, a snip at the low, low price of £1.50?But worst of all, should these Tesco movies turn out to be a profitable venture, it goes without saying that all the other supermarkets will fall over themselves to get in on the act, too. And that hardly bears thinking about. During every trip to Waitrose you'd be bombarded with adverts for whatever dreary old Merchant Ivory-style period snoozefest it was about to release. Asda would quickly corner the market in garish lowest-common-denominator rom-coms. Lidl would fill its stores with badly dubbed versions of forgotten communist-era eastern European propaganda films. And, yes, every movie Sainsbury's released would be rendered unwatchable because of its contractual obligation to cast Jamie Oliver in the lead.Of course, you have the power to stop any of this from happening. All you need to do is somehow avoid buying Tesco's first Jackie Collins adaptation on DVD. It's asking a lot of you, I know – but if you dig deep I'm sure you can do it.TescoSupermarketsPhilip PullmanStuart Heritageguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |