Before the word loses its meaning, let’s take it back to its root. From the Latin cura, meaning “care,” a curator is essentially one who minds our cultural heritage. More than just an editor, a true curator contextualizes and interprets our history through artifacts and objects.

Can a literary journal be a curator? It seems unlikely, unless of course you’ve picked up a copy of Lapham’s Quarterly. Like great museum curators, Lapham’s  Quarterly’s editors exhibit ancient and modern texts side-by-side.

Developed by distinguished editor Lewis H. Lapham, Lapham’s Quarterly brings history to a popular audience through short readings that expand upon a single theme, the driving force of the issue. Each issue sees historical essays and stories by luminaries like Plato, James Baldwin, Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Hildegard of Bingen printed alongside contemporary ones by Francine Prose, Simon Winchester, George Packer, Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens, and Garret Keiser.

Since the its first issue, “States of War,” the magazine has made its readers think a little differently about how much things change (and how much they stay the same). Under the heading “Voice in Time,” Lapham’s Quarterly featured a 2003 speech given by Lt-Col. Tim Collins in Kuwait that begins “We go to liberate, not to conquer,” and illuminated its historical and cultural significance by printing it just before the 1917 address “Lt-Gen. Sir Stanley Maude Presents the Gift of Freedom to the People of Iraq.”

In the Spring 2011 issue “Lines of Work,” American Apparel’s company-wide rules of grooming are displayed along with a historical letter about sexual harassment in the workplace, written by a young female slave in 19th century North Carolina. These contrasts are made even more apparent in the “Conversations” section, where 17th century writer Anne Bradstreet’s poem about filial piety is linked by ampersand to a bilious letter from Franz Kafka about his demanding father. Juxtapositions throughout the magazine feel like the literary equivalent of a really good mix tape, where obscure songs of various styles come together to tell you something more about the music.

Lapham’s Quarterly was recognized early on for its unique vision and excellent production. It was a finalist for the National Magazine Awards in 2011, an amazing feat for a publication that was, at that time, just two years old. Two of its essays have been featured in the Best American series: the incomparable Simon Winchester’s “Take Nothing, Leave Nothing,” about a trip to the remote Tristan da Cunha, was in Best American Travel Writing 2010, and Garret Keizer’s “And Such a Small Deer,” from the magazine’s “Book of Nature” issue, was selected for Best American Essays 2009.

The editors of Lapham’s Quarterly shared the magazine’s objectives, vision, and history with Fiction Writers Review by email. Throughout our conversation, it was clear that the magazine’s goals are as timeless as the writing they publish: to find the best readings that serve a topic, to make the readings timely and topical, and to respond historically to the events of the day.

What is the role of Lapham’s Quarterly (LQ) in today’s literary community, be it for readers or writers?

LQ is a literary curator and a historical mirror. The readings we choose for an issue may revolve around a single theme, but oftentimes we choose them because they still feel very modern or very true. Curation has become an essential form of creation, and we want LQ to serve as an entry point for writers you may have heard of but never read, writers you’ve read but never enjoyed, and writers you may have enjoyed as a student who have reentered your life in a new way.

How do you see Lapham’s Quarterly’s mission and tastes evolving in the next two years?  Will the rise of digital publishing impact the composition of a magazine that prizes treasures from the past?

The mission of LQ will always remain the same. Our themes will expand and contract according to the continued interests of editorial staff. Treasures from the past aren’t necessarily endangered by digital publishing (unless they are literally ripped up and thrown away by libraries as they scan them, like in Nicholson Baker’s Doublefold, and works in the public domain in particular have a lot to gain from being distributed freely, printed out on EBMs, downloaded to iPads, or written across the sky. It’s our job to make sure you know about them—there’s a wide range of work between the classic and the forgotten, the esoteric and the unknown.

If you could put three items in a time capsule (or USB drive) to be opened in 1,000 years that would provide a snapshot of Lapham’s Quarterly’s aesthetic today, what would they be?

Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars, a painting by Paul Klee, and a bottle of McCallan 18. A copy of our “Future” issue might be nice too, just so our blue-skinned, computer-brained counterparts can read about future predictions from the past four thousand years.

What album is playing on the Lapham’s Quarterly stereo these days?

Les Paul, Caribou, Four Tet, The Civil Wars, lots of 80s music, and lots of jazz.

Lapham’s Quarterly’s newest issue “Means of Communication” is on newsstands now. Readers can look forward to an expertly culled selection of writing about media and communication, as well as staff-written lists about pigeon messengers, ancient libraries, and invented languages like Klingon and Loglan. It is, in other words, not to be missed by readers, tastemakers, or Pinterest curators everywhere.

If you haven’t explored it yet, Lapham’s Quarterly’s website is a treasure trove. There are book recommendations from the editors, wonderful podcasts (including a compelling one with historian and humorist Sarah Vowell), content from past issues, and even a recorded interview of the great Lewis Lapham himself at Google’s headquarters. While you’re on their website, you can subscribe to Lapham’s Quarterly and receive four beautiful issues full of 224 esoteric and illuminating pages this year.

For those of you already in the FWR Twitter family, you know our presence there exists in part to inform followers of what’s happening here on the site, as well as to update the community on literary trends, worthwhile links, etc. We couldn’t be happier to see this role expand in a way that allows us to put journals we love in the hands of readers who will love them too.

“It’s not my job to decide who comes into this world and who doesn’t,” she said. It struck me as an intensely humble decision on her part, and I’ve always remembered it. So it felt like deja vu (in the best way) when I read Leah Hager Cohen’s The Grief of Others (Riverhead, 2010), which centers on a similar event and its aftermath within the Ryrie family in the suburbs of New York City. Ricky, mother of two and hard-shelled financial analyst, knows that the child in her womb has anencephaly—a neurological defect in which the brain and skull are undeveloped—but gives birth to him anyway, despite not having told anyone in the family about the coming tragedy of his short life. Simon Ryrie lives for only fifty-seven hours, all of them in his mother’s arms, and Cohen weaves a moving family history out of the reverberations (and preverberations) of this event.

Like most families in literature, the Ryries are a mess, and Simon’s brief life only intensifies their tensions and their personal rudderlessness. Ricky’s scenic designer husband John has a twenty-something daughter from a previous relationship, and for all his jovial “fuzziness” he is as lost from his family as she is. Their high schooler Paul has gone from popular kid to outcast, and their adolescent daughter Biscuit has become obsessed with mourning rituals. Moving back and forth in time, Cohen gives us characters who are raw but beautiful, who move through the pathways they have made in life but always keep looking for other pathways that could lead to another self they might have been, or might still become.

Throughout her writing career—which dates back to her 1994 nonfiction book Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World, about a Manhattan school for the deaf where her father worked—Cohen has naturally been drawn to the dynamics of communities outside the public eye, or living in eddies where they might easily escape notice. The 2004 novel Heart, You Bully, You Punk explores the life of a teenage math whiz, her father, and her math teacher. For Glass, Paper, Beans (1998), she shadowed a Nova Scotia lumberjack, a quality controller at an Ohio glass factory, and a Mexican coffee grower, and combined that reportage with far-reaching observations about the nature of everyday commodities we use without thinking.

Cohen is intensely curious about the world, and especially gifted at finding small, ornate microcosms that show us how people view their own humanity, and The Grief of Others continues that aesthetic program. As a book of personal deja vu for me, it paid off immensely; I left it feeling that I understood the woman I’d met who wanted to have her baby, even though she knew it would die, far more intimately than I had before. But I also grew to understand—and this is a credit to Cohen’s art—those people who could not square themselves with the complicated decision to give birth to something so ephemeral.

Leah Hager Cohen is currently the W.H. Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches fiction, nonfiction, and intriguing courses of her own design. She also teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University and contributes frequently to The New York Times Book Review.

Interview:

Steven Wingate: What struck me most about the book is how aware your characters are that each individual moment in their lives is full of portent—that every single decision defines who they are, and that life is a continuous moment of truth with no “time outs.” I’m thinking in particular of Ricky as she calculates how she can drive off of the Tappan Zee Bridge leading out of Tarrytown, but this boiling down of life to moments like this happens throughout the novel. What leads you to such moments and how do they come to you on the page?

Leah Hager Cohen: Oh dear, the very first question and I’m afraid I have no good answer. I suppose you are talking about a certain kind of acuity and attunement, a sharp awareness of the moment as it is being lived? It’s difficult for me to address how this happens, since it isn’t something I’ve consciously cultivated. It’s simply how I have always experienced life. Back in adolescence, I remember having an epiphany that the whole idea of hyperbole is fallacious—since nothing we perceive, nor any words we are capable of using to express it, could ever begin to approach the fullness of the thing.

In a short essay attached to the review copies of The Grief of Others, you talk about your own miscarriage and how it played into writing the book. Yet the book doesn’t feel fully (or even predominantly) autobiographical; the narration follows a lot of people in various different directions, and it’s ultimately about the Ryries as a unit. Did you always conceive it this way, or did that focus on the collective build over time?

I began with the character of Biscuit. It was her and her alone, to start: a ten-year-old girl riding her bike to Hook Mountain with a pocketful of chicken bones and fireplace ashes. Who was this kid? What was she doing, and why, and what was going to happen next? In my effort to understand her whole, round story, I was led to the other characters. But very early on the book suggested itself as an ensemble piece. In fact, in an earlier draft it was even more of an ensemble, because Baptiste and his Grann were more major characters.

You’re right that the book is not particularly autobiographical, other than the setting, for I did spend a large part of my childhood in Nyack. But the characters were mysterious to me, and a large part of what drove me to write the book was a desire to understand each one as fully as I could.

Ricky stands at the center of the Ryrie family and the clearest center of the novel, since her personal decisions drive so much of the action. She comes across to me as a thorny character: cold, willfully deceiving, loath to reach beyond the confines of herself into generosity and love. What went into the creation of her character, and how did it feel writing her?

I don’t see Ricky as you describe her. I see her as hurting, and in her pain she does act sometimes ignobly. But in a way she is more honest than John, her husband. While he makes an effort to pretend all is well, she cannot summon the will to do so, and her evident sadness, her subdued withdrawal, express more accurately than his joviality that something is seriously amiss within their marriage.

I also have sympathy with her difficult position: almost from the beginning of their relationship, it has been a given that John occupies a kind of moral high ground to Ricky’s low ground. In families as well as in relationships, we often unwittingly assign people roles that then circumscribe our ability to see them fully, in all their nuanced complexity. Part of Ricky’s grief and rage come from this long-standing, unacknowledged perception that has ill-served her and her husband both.

That said, it was challenging to write Ricky, because she is fairly defended and emotionally somewhat unsophisticated; she’s still stuck in that little girl self who needs to ask her father, “Am I good?” We all have our limitations, but Ricky may be particularly limited in her ability to realize her limitations. In this sense, I had to open my heart very wide to feel I could first grasp and then convey who she is.

The adolescent Biscuit is obsessed with ritual—she throws those chicken bones and ashes in a river, steals a library book about mourning customs worldwide, etc. She knows that her family needs mourning and ritual more than anything else, so within the book she functions as a soothsayer. This in turn lends a metaphorical layer to her character, a position from which the reader can see contemporary American society. What was it like to work with Biscuit? And are we, from the perspective she allows, a society that has lost its rituals?

You may be right in noticing ways in which Biscuit operates to an extent as soothsayer, but I never related to her as anything but a specific individual. I think if I’d set out to write her as a metaphor, I would’ve landed flat on my face. Working with her was pretty delightful, especially in the section of the book when she is two years old, with her pacifier and her diapers and her limited language skills, all regal toddlerish obstinacy and idiosyncracy. She cracked me up.

As for societal rituals, certainly they have changed; at the very least, 21st-century rituals incorporate new ways of relating to technology, virtuality, globalism, temporal and geographic boundaries, spirituality and mortality. And yes, I think that as a society we probably do have fewer shared rituals, in part because as a society we are increasingly less homogenous. So this may be more gain than loss.

You break the fourth wall at the end of the novel by asking the reader “what more is there to tell?” It’s not something we normally see in fiction, so I’m curious about why you made that choice. Was it a spontaneous decision for you, or something you knew was coming down the pike from the early phases of the novel?

As I neared the end of the book, I began to fret, because I was having a hard time seeing my way clear to what that ending should be. This was at a point where, with other books, the ending would have already made itself clear to me. Then all at once I saw how it should end, but I went into a new sort of fretting, because what I saw seemed so radical and rule-breaking, at least for me, as a writer of realistic fiction, not meta- or experimental fiction. In the end, though, it felt so absolutely right that I followed my impulse.

When my agent sent the book out to editors, it was interesting to see how many of them said they loved the book, but might I consider changing the ending? vs. those who loved the book with the ending as it was. I think it was about fifty-fifty.

You have a Columbia University graduate degree in Journalism, and that journalistic training shows up clearly in your nonfiction books. Do you feel it come into play with your fiction? If so, is that influence consistent across your novels, or did it differ for The Grief of Others?

I’ve done some research and reporting for all of my books, not just the nonfiction ones. I had an important mentor in Journalism School, Sam Freedman, who taught a wonderful class called “Reading, Writing and Thinking,” and in this class he assigned novels as well as works of nonfiction (which seemed sort of daring and almost seditious within the context of J-school). He was instrumental in helping me think of all storytelling as occupying a similar plane and answering a similar call.

Do you feel any general movements in your career as an “amphibious” writer working in fiction and in nonfiction, and can you describe how you work along that cusp? Are there realms of inquiry that you focus on that travel across the genres? How do you know when you’re best off stepping away from one genre into another?

All of my books, as I look back on them, seem to engage the idea of “other,” whether in the form of marginalized cultures or the private “otherness” we all sometimes feel in moments of loneliness or isolation. And I see all of them as part of a larger effort to reach out beyond that isolation, to fathom the unfathomable.

Lately I have drawn more to fiction than nonfiction, which I think has to do with my interest in exploring people’s inner lives. In nonfiction, one cannot report on someone’s psyche except in a speculative mood. Even when a subject reports on his or her own feeling state, that assessment is likely to be partial or imperfectly understood. Lately, I am liking the way fiction allows more unfettered access into complex emotional and spiritual terrain.

You use the word unfathomable in the answer above, the very same word around which you centered a faculty seminar at Holy Cross—“Fathoming the Unfathomable,” which I much enjoyed taking. What particular unfathomable emotional and spiritual terrain piques your interest right now, and are you currently researching another book?

Yes, over the past few years I’ve found myself increasingly interested in the question of whether fiction has a moral imperative or moral purpose. My own highly personal and idiosyncratic response to this question is that it does, or can, or ought. That purpose, I believe, has to do with expanding our capacity, as humans, to feel, to empathize with others, and to grow.

I’m about halfway through writing a new novel, about a sister and a brother. The brother is, to put it in simple terms, a person who is hard for the world to love. He may be on the autism spectrum —he’s never been diagnosed, and to remain true to the characters and ideas in the book, it’s important that I, as author, don’t diagnose or label him either. But his way of being in the world is atypical in a way that makes it difficult both for him to get along and for other people to comprehend and accept him. His “otherness” leads to a terrible event, for which he is held on criminal charges, and which his sister becomes desperate to fathom from his perspective so that she can explain to the world—and to herself—that her brother is not monstrous.

Further Links & Resources

• Leah Hager Cohen’s excellent blog with musings on life, literature, lunar phase calendars and why one must fight indifference: Love As Found Object
• Cohen recommends physical labor as balm for the soul in Poets & Writers‘ “Writers Recommend” series.

Image credit: Flicker - Todd Mecklem

Mary Roach is my favorite nonfiction writer—partly because she’s wickedly funny, and partly because we share the same fascinated appreciation for the absurd. I’ve been a huge fan since her first book, Stiff, which is about the various uses of human cadavers. In it and all her other books (Spook, about science and the afterlife; Bonk, about science and sex; and Packing For Mars, about manned space exploration), Roach unearths details that are just too crazy to make up—such as the fact that a dead pope is struck on the forehead with a special hammer to be sure he’s really dead, or that not long ago in Thailand there was a rash of disgruntled wives cutting off their husbands’ penises. And that’s barely scratching the surface. Seriously, if you’ve never read a Mary Roach book, go treat yourself to one right now.

In a recent interview with Robert Birnbaum on The Morning News, Roach discusses research and her discomfort with making things up:

MR: I love archives: the dustier, the better. Also now because of the internet, I still want to find things that are surprising. I am so disappointed when I find out something is already on the internet. So I am going further and further and further into archives to try to find things that people don’t know about—everything is on the internet.

RB: No, I’m not sure that’s true. I’m impressed with Erik Larson, who refuses to use the internet and does his research in libraries.

MR: I once went to a talk he gave on how he does what he does. Somebody said, “How can you describe the corner store in London in 1847? How do you know what was upstairs?” Assuming he was making it up. He said the Sanborn Insurance company went out and documented every street in London: Here’s the year, here’s the address and here’s what it looked like, and here’s who was upstairs, here’s what was down the street. So he had this resource to recreate the street scene. Amazing—and that was just in one example. He probably has 15 resources like that.

RB: Readers presume that it is made-up.

MR: I think the reader is just baffled—I was until I heard that. I know he doesn’t make things up I but I never understood how he or any writer—I remember I wrote Stiff, my first book, and I wanted to talk about that guy who put cadavers on a crucifix in his office in Paris—Pierre Barbet—and I wanted to set the scene. He published a book, A Doctor at Calvary—there was a typo and they changed it to Cavalry [laughs]. I wanted to set the scene and all I knew of him was his book and I couldn’t find information about him. I wanted him walking along carrying a briefcase of some kind. a leather portfolio, and I thought, I don’t know if he had a leather portfolio. I was very uncomfortable with it.

RB: Were there catalogs at that time?

MR: But I didn’t know which one he had. So in just two sentences I felt [like] a scammer, making it up.

Even though I’m a fiction writer and make things up—in fact, even though I am a fiction writer because I like to make things up—I understand Roach’s discomfort. When I write nonfiction, I have a hard time hewing to the facts, yet when I write fiction, there are certain things I like to get right: dates of real-life events, prices, geographical locations—things a knowledgeable reader might know. For the fiction writer, these real-world details are the stage setting of your story: get them right, and the made-up parts are more convincing; get them wrong, and your reader will immediately question everything else you say.

This is where I’m immensely grateful to be living in the Internet Era. While writing my novel, I’ve spent far too much time on Wikipedia, of course: where else can I find out whether Post-It Notes had been invented yet (1980, so no), or that the “rabbit” pregnancy test was more likely to be done on frogs, or when that car buzzer that tells you haven’t buckled your seat belt became prevalent? (And I’m not alone: nonfiction writer Peter Gill described his love for the site in The Guardian.)

And I have a folder of bookmarks to help me find other bits of real-world information, like:

• How Much Is It, which tells you how much a dollar (or a pound, or a yen, or a yuan) was worth at any given point in history. So if my character wants to spend $50.00 on a pair of books in 1977, I know that’s over $175.00 in today’s dollars, and that was an extravagant purchase.
• How Far Is It, which tells you the distance between any two points in the world
• The Baby Name Voyager, which shows you the popularity of a particular name over time, as well as where it’s most popular geographically—so you can avoid having a character named Jennifer before the 1930s, for example, when the name was practically non-existent
• The Social Security Administration’s name index, which gives you the most popular names in any given year
• The U.S. Naval Observatory website, which gives the phase of the moon and the times of sunrise, sunset, moonrise, and moonset on any day in history

Okay, those are my secret research sites. Now it’s your turn: what details do you like to get right in your fiction? Where do you go—on the internet or in real life—to research those bits of info?

Jon-HammLionsgate has confirmed that they will adapt the bestselling pregnancy bible What To Expect When You’re Expecting and intend to give it the Love Actually and Valentine’s Day treatment. In other words, we’ll see a series of intertwining vingnettes with enough star wattage to blind most any moviegoer.

For those of you looking to spin the straw of other reference material into your own story gold, i09 has a great essay by comic book writer and novelist Greg Rucka on researching a story:

In this day and age, it’s easy to be lazy with research, possible to fake it altogether. I say this as a fan of the web, of search engines and the dark corners of the Net where the strange facts lurk. My own research, in fact, normally starts in two places-on the web and in the library. I hit sites like Google Earth to get the lay of the land and YouTube to see the places that I cannot reach myself for one reason or another (say, Dubai); I abuse free trials at sites like Jane’s Information Group, and I pay for the right to comb Highbeam for articles and photographs. Ten minutes with a search engine-five if your webfu is really cracking-and you’ll find sites even more esoteric, more specific, more . . . well, insane, really. Web forums discussing the best yeast to use in making your Malbec, or how to fit a SOCOM silencer to a Walther P99.

And all of that looks good, but if it ends there, it is cheating. The best stuff is rarely posted online. To get that, you need the people. I met one of my best resources because I cold-called the local FBI office one day early in my career with questions. The agent who took the call knew someone who knew someone who was ex-Army, trained in personal protection. The resulting introduction was one of the best, most enduring friendships I’ve ever enjoyed.

Read the whole essay here. And tell us: What unlikely real-life subjects would you like to see made into fiction?

You know that moment in life when you realize that stories of the things that loomed large in childhood — your terror of the woman who lives next door or your absolute certainty that some of the playing cards in a deck are female and some, male — can be condensed, as if through a trash compactor, into little nuggets of pure cuteness and innocence that you can then hand to others for the rest of your life in one long show-and-tell, knowing they are obligated to laugh nostalgically and then hand you theirs?

Actually, I don’t know quite what or when that moment of realization is, but we must all go through it to get to adulthood, because we all have those anecdotes to share — the things we were afraid of, the things we were sure of — told now with the requisite amused adult chuckle and shake of the head.

A Girl Named Zippy (Doubleday, 2001) is a collection of these from the life of Haven Kimmel, and where you might expect to find them cloying in bulk, they are anything but. Maybe she just tells them better than most people. Or maybe she has better, funnier stories. Or maybe she does a better job of keeping the events to the scale of childhood perception. She doesn’t use much of an “I know so much better now” voiceover, which is refreshing.

But I think her success has the most to do with her always having seen herself as a character. The caboose in her family, late to talk and late to grow hair, little Zippy seems more like her family’s mascot than their third child, and even as a kid she seems to know she has more leeway and can exist more languidly in her childhood fancies than perhaps her siblings were able to.

Haven Kimmel with her dog, Cloud / photo by Greg Plachta

It helps that she has parents who seem to enjoy her and share in her delight in just making stuff up. For no apparent reason, they tell her she was adopted from a family of gypsies (traded for an especially nice bag), even though you have only to look at a single baby picture to know it’s a lie. Her dad’s a bit unhinged, and her mom exhibits signs of depression, but their affection for Zippy and their taste for the absurd are such constants that somehow this still manages to be a book about a happy childhood, without sanitizing or idealizing it. Two steps over in tone and this could have been a different kind of memoir (think Julia Scheeres’ Jesusland). But being essentially down with the goofiness and even the trials of youth is what makes A Girl Name Zippy unique and so worth giving yourself over to.

I envy everyone who still has this book ahead of them.

Read an excerpt from (and further browse) A Girl Named Zippy via the publisher’s website.

What makes Fantasy Freaks And Gaming Geeks so arresting is not only the diverse, vibrant role-player communities which Gilsdorf introduces us to and provides insightful commentary on, but the hybrid nature of his text – both on a substantive and emotional level. Gilsdorf effortlessly bounces between fun, vivid-picture-painting journalistic narrative jam-packed with juicy facts and anecdotes of others, to deeply personal confessions about his own real life. The book opens with a heart-breaking scene from his early childhood in the aftermath of his mother’s brain aneurysm that completely altered her personality. This sudden and tragic metamorphosis, which left Gilsdorf and his two siblings to fend for themselves, is presented as the impetus for his retreat into Dungeons and Dragons and Tolkien, and a predilection for fantastical worlds that he is unable to shake off, even, to his anxiety, at forty.

Harry and the Potters / copyright: Ethan Gilsdorf

Indeed, most of the individuals whom Gilsdorf interviews and befriends express how fantasy, particularly fantasy role-playing, has empowered them in some way – to find a release in hard times, to learn lessons/skills that have enabled them to lead a richer real life. The way we really get to know so many of these individuals whom so many (including myself) had previously written off as weirdo geeks, forces a reassessment of our prejudices. There is Phyllis Priestly, who holds a PhD in Greek mythology and founded a primary school; she compared playing World of Warcraft to “breathing for the first time”. As Gilsdorf summarizes it, “After countless hours of playing, Priestly felt she had become a better person. The game leaked into her real world. All that rapid-fire picking off of wolves, quilboars, and troggs had sharpened her reflexes, quickened her reaction time, and heightened her senses. She claimed gaming had made her a better driver.” And, most movingly, there is Nissa Ludwig, a church music director who suffered from a debilitating muscular disorder that kept her at home most of the day. “The muscles in my body are slowly rotting,” she said, “but I type really well.” As Gilsdorf writes, “Online gaming created an alternate world where no one saw her crutches or wheelchair. And that was, in her words, ‘a beautiful thing.’”

Through Gilsdorf’s expeditions and interviews we see that there is no definitive answer to why so many of us embrace fantasy. Everyone has their different reasons, their different impulses–and even if for some, it is just straightforward escapist entertainment, we should certainly not dismiss all fantasy and gaming enthusiasts as geeks or freaks. As with most things, there are no simple, straight-forward answers, but by examining this genre more carefully (with open minds), our reading lives can only be richer and our journeys, if not always entirely successful, at least more fantastic.

Further Resources

The Author as Geek / copyright: Ethan Gilsdorf

- Listen to Ethan Gilsdorf read a chapter about LARPing (at a Four Stories reading in Boston).

- Watch the author learn to swordfight, and read about his experience wielding a longsword.

- Behold the Geek Gallery on the author’s website; he calls these photos “outtakes from the book.” Another fun thing to do on his website: discover your fantasy name.

- Whether you live in Minnesota, California, Massachusetts, Tennessee, or pretty much anywhere, Ethan Gilsdorf is coming soon to a bookstore (or gaming store) near you. You can follow him on Twitter (ethanfreak) and on his blog.

- The author teaches at Grub Street in Boston. Check out his one-evening-only seminar, Mapping the Hybrid Memoir, on Wednesday, Dec. 9.

- Read essays by Gilsdorf: “J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: A Literary Friendship and Rivalry” at the Literary Traveler / “Lord of the Gold Ring” (on Tolkien and commercialism) at Boston.com

- Gilsdorf introduces Fantasy Freaks… via this video preview. Pick up your copy from an independent bookstore.

Since Hemingway’s personal papers were released in 1979, scholars have examined and debated the changes made to the text before publication. Now, this new special restored edition presents the original manuscript as the author intended it to be published.

But is it more accurate, or revisionist? The new edition is edited by Pfeiffer and Hemingway’s grandson, Sean Hemingway. From the NY Times:

Among the changes he has made is removing part of that final chapter from the main body of the book and placing it in an appendix, adding back passages from Hemingway’s manuscript that Seán believes paint his grandmother in a more sympathetic light.“I think this edition is right to set the record straight,” said Seán Hemingway, 42, who said Mary cut out Hemingway’s “remorse and some of the happiness he felt and his very conflicted views he had about the end of his marriage.”

Now that the “restored edition” is out, Hemingway biographer and longtime friend A. E. Hotchner (also in the NY Times) calls it “bowlderized” and questions the influence descendants might have over published books:

As an author, I am concerned by Scribner’s involvement in this “restored edition.” With this reworking as a precedent, what will Scribner do, for instance, if a descendant of F. Scott Fitzgerald demands the removal of the chapter in “A Moveable Feast” about the size of Fitzgerald’s penis, or if Ford Madox Ford’s grandson wants to delete references to his ancestor’s body odor.

What do other writers think? Was Scribner right to allow Sean Hemingway to “restore” the text of A Moveable Feast? How should a publisher handle the editing of posthumous, unfinished works?

Via NPR, don’t miss Alan Cheuse’s list of carefully chosen (and enthusiastically recommended) books you should read this summer, complete with compelling reviewlets and links to excerpts. If only all reviewers *loved* books the way Cheuse obviously does!

Who would be interested in joining this group review, which we’d aim to do in early August? Celeste, I know you’re in (and thanks to both you and KC for pointing me to the article, and to Erika for writing about it).

A taste from Menand’s review:

Most readers of “The Program Era” are likely to be persuaded that the creative-writing-program experience has had an effect on many American fiction writers. Does this mean that creative writing can, in fact, be taught? What is usually said is that you can’t teach inspiration, but you can teach craft. What counted as craft for James, though, was very different from what counted as craft for Hemingway. What counts as craft for Ann Beattie (who teaches at the University of Virginia) must be different from what counts as craft for Jonathan Safran Foer (who teaches at N.Y.U.). There is no “craft of fiction” as such.

Buy a copy of The Program Era via this link to support independent bookstores and FWR!

Happiness is a warm puppy–and also a good book.

Schulz and Peanuts (Harper Perennial) is the perfect biography for fiction-lovers. Author David Michaelis paces the book like an epic novel, starting in Charles Schulz’s distant past and then retreating further, to the immigrant histories of his mother and father’s families. Michaelis eventually catches up with himself and takes young Charles, known throughout his life as “Sparky,” throughout his eventful career.

It’s a quick 550 pages, and along with a wonderful story, the book provides some great anecdotes. An example: Snoopy got his name from Sparky’s Norwegian mother, who told her son on her deathbed that the family should name its next dog “Snupi,” a term of endearment in Norwegian. She didn’t live to get another dog, but Peanuts’ Snoopy would capture the hearts of millions.

Schulz drew on an impressive number of seemingly trivial details from his own life. One more: Spike, Sparky’s real childhood dog, showed up as Snoopy’s cousin. Spike was from Needles, California, where Sparky’s father briefly moved the family in a short exile from Minnesota. But the number of emotional details, like Charlie Brown’s loneliness and the general sense of ennui that pervades Peanuts, is also substantial, and the standard autobiography charge leveled at novelists was often leveled at Schulz.

In fact, in his own way, Schulz was a novelist himself. He created a cohesive Peanuts world that, like J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter universe, follows its own perfectly consistent rules: the characters never grow older, they have an adult’s awareness of themselves, they never get physically hurt, adults never play any substantial roles, animals can talk, fantasy lives are just as concrete as reality.

For almost half a century, Schulz spent every day in that universe as a consummate creator of characters. Those characters grew far more famous than Schulz himself; the comic was syndicated in countries around the globe, and a child in Scotland or Sweden or the Philippines who recognized Snoopy at first glance probably would not know Charles M. Schulz’s name.

Michaelis’ biography got mixed reviews when it was first published in 2007. The author never got to interview Schulz; he didn’t even start the project until after Schulz’s death in 2000. But Schulz’s family granted the author full access to records and contacts, and the end of the book is crammed with citations from past media reports and first-person interviews of childhood friends, teachers, family members, collaborators, mentees and more. It is astonishingly complete, and readers feel like they know the man by the end of the book.

Some critics, however, suggest that Michaelis was unfair to Schulz. And Michaelis does have a thesis — namely, that Schulz suffered from paralyzing anxiety and insecurity all his life and never recovered from his mother’s death — and he doesn’t shy from pushing it forward throughout the entirety of the biography. When Schulz found unprecedented success, he wasn’t just driven, he was desperately seeking approval; when he married his nurturing second wife, he was trying to create the unconditional love that his mother never could give.

Michaelis makes a good case for this agenda, however, and his thesis is borne out by a close look at the Peanuts strips themselves. Like any good critical writer, Michaelis always goes back to his primary-source material, finding exceptional examples of his points within Schulz’s own work.

And the author leaves readers with a full (if slightly overblown) sense of Schulz’s impact on the world, suggesting that everyone who did anything innovative with characters in their chosen art forms, from Bill Waterson to Matt Groening to Jerry Seinfeld, owes a debt to Schulz. Michaelis also leaves his readers in tears: the passages about Schulz’s illness and death, as well as the last Peanuts strips, are heart-breaking and beautifully written.

Although he had no objection to aggressive merchandising of his characters, Schulz included a clause in his Peanuts contract that guaranteed no one would be allowed to take over the strip after his death. Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Lucy and the rest of the gang may never have any new adventures, but the Peanuts universe is still alive in Schulz’s characters — and Michaelis’ stellar book.

Further Resources

- Read an excerpt from Chapter One of Schulz and Peanuts.

- Peruse archived Peanuts strips at Comics.com.

- Preview the collectors’ edition of Schulz’s Happiness is a Warm Puppy.

- Hear Michaelis talk about Charles Schulz — and Schulz and Peanuts:

- Watch this 1984 interview with Schulz on the San Francisco local program People are Talking: