Hispanic Heritage Month

As an American with roots in Latin America, I find it hard not to look askance at alleged celebrations of heritage. After all, Latinos and Asians, Arabs and African-Americans for that matter, are part of society 12 months of the year.  We don't need 30 days of exclusive recognition to realize that we count, that we matter, we're part of the melting pot. It is perfectly obvious to us that America is all of us and we are it.  We know this. I mean, McDonald's serves burritos, empanadas are street food, you can get frozen dumplings and microwave lo mein at the supermarket,and macaroni and cheese, that soul food staple, is the favorite dish of every kid in America under the age of 8 regardless of ethnicity. A delicious falafel pita is never more than a block away (ok maybe a little further outside Manhattan).  What all Americans need, no matter where our roots are, is to develop an understanding and appreciation for the "other" whoever that other may be. Literature, music and the arts allow us to do that.

Conventional Idiocy: Why the New America is Sick of Old Politics by Rick Sanchez

The popular CNN host writes about the public's disaffection with the same-old, same-old  politics as usual. In his fast-paced talkative style, he shares what his viewers are telling him and warns politicians and the media to ignore it at their own peril.

Bloody Twistby Carolina Garcia-Aguilera

Lupe Solano is back, chicas! The intrepid Miami detective is back in her seventh mystery. This time she's investigating a high-paid call girl who's also a virgin, and the two dead guys she says she didn't kill.

Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera  By Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Geogina Guzman
The murder and rape of over 500 women in Juarz Mexico has never been properly investigated by authorities in Mexico or the U.S. The murders have been the subject of at least 1 feature film (starring Jennifer Lopez), a documentary and several books by journalists, and independent investigators,  none of whom could ingnite a proper investigation or a semblance of concern by authorities. Now, twos scholars from the Chicana studies Department at UCLA have put together a scholarly analysis of the killings and the situation that has made them possible, from a number of perspectives. Chilling but necessary.
Alone in the Crowd: An Inspector Espinosa Mystery (Inspector Espinosa Mysteries)

Ahhh Copacabana. The sun. The surf. The bikinis. The bodies?  This fantastic mystery series features the existensial Inspector Espisosa never fails to disappoint. Did the old lady fall or was she pushed in front of the bus? Why did she visit the precinct just hours before her death? Who's the creepy bank teller? What gives? All will be answered in a psychologically compelling, suspenseful whodunit.

The Devil's Highway: A True Story  by Luis Alberto Urrea       This is one of the best feats of writing and journalism I've ever read, and should be required reading in every higschool. Urruea tells the story of a group of  men who decide to cross the border from Mexico into the U.S. by walking through the desert, as many have before. This time though, something goes horribly wrong and the men are abandoned by their "coyote" guides and are left to make their way through the desert alone as best they can. Dying of thirst and heatstroke isn't pretty, and if you're willing to risk it, there must be a damn good reason, don't you think? Urrea weaves together his account from all the perspectives involved ; the men who cross, the border agents whose job is to deter and detain, and the Mexican consulate in Arizona, who must collect, identify and preserve the remains of those who don't make it.

Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle  by Ingrid Betancourt

A former Presidential Candidate in Colombia, Ingrid Betancourt was kidnapped by FARC guerillas and endured six years in captivity in the jungle before a daring rescue freed her in 2002. This is the story of her captivity (which she spent in chains most of the time), numerous escape attempts, and of her enduring spirit.

Pirates of the Levant 
by Arturo Perez-Reverte
Your swash has never been buckled like this. Perez-Reverte, the enormously talented Spanish writer of The Flanders Panel and The Queen of the South, unleashes the sixth Captain Alatriste adventure this month. Think Three Musketeers on the high seas, complete with pirates, swords capes and heart-pounding battles.

The Latino Reader
 Almost from the moment Columbus landed Latinos have been recording, interpreting and sharing impressions of life in the new world. This extraordinary collection includes Cabeza de Vaca's account of the new world, and memoirs, essays, fiction poetry and drama spanning  five centuries. An invaluable resource and historical treasure of Latino history in the United States.

Stephen King: Readers are too  Lazy to Read Short Stories

In a brief interview with publisher Simon and Schuster, Stephen King bemoans the fate of the American short story, blaming readers who, according to him, prefer American Idol to good fiction. King, who had called himself the literary equivalent of a Big Mac earlier in his career, has had just as many of his short stories/novellas translated into film as novels, starting with the legendary Creepshow.   Apt Pupil, Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption and  1408 are just a few of the films based on King's short stories.

Do you think King is right? What was the last short story or anthology you read?  What is your favorite story or anthology of all time? Post a comment.

  And try short stories campfire style for Halloween. Light up the jack-o-lanterns, set up the snacks light the fire and play an audiobook of scary tales like King's Sorry, Right Number and Other Stories. Then try and sleep.

Digital Revolution Hits Writers in the Wallet.

The Wall Street Journal reports on the paradigm shift in the book publishing world, in which the emergence of Kindles, Nooks, Readers and computers is making the e-book the standard in book delivery. While digital downloads are good news for anyone with over-stuffed bookshelves and a tight budget (e-books rarely cost more than $15 while a new hardcover can cost from $25-$30), for writers it means that making a living with words is becoming less likely.
Frightened publishers are publishing less new authors, and when they do, advances are now much less than $15,000, when they used to be around $50,000 for a promising debut novel, reports the Journal.
"The bar is higher," says Jamie Raab, publisher of Lagardere SCA's Grand Central Publishing, which is buying less debut fiction than in prior years. Although launching debut titles is one of the most rewarding aspects of publishing, Raab says, "publishers are buying more selectively, agents are being more selective with choosing clients, and retailers are taking fewer titles."
E-book sales haven't reached the point where they can mean serious income for a writer, unless that writer is a brand name, like James Patterson, John Grisham or Stephen King. Literary writers, like John Pipkin, need to keep their day jobs. His first novel, Woodsburner  won several literary prizes and print sales of more than 10,000 copies, he has only sold 359 digital copies.

Pipkin, who has Ph.D in English Literature, says he cobbles together an income based in part on grants, fellowships and a partial advance he has received for his second book. "I've had to rethink my plans in terms of supporting my family full time as a writer," he says.

PEN USA Announces 2010 Awards

PEN USA, the West Coast center for the writers’organization International PEN, announced the winners of the 2010 Literary Awards. The prizes honor outstanding work by writers in 11 separate genres, including a new award for Graphic Literature. They will be presented at the 20th Annual Literary Awards

Festival, known as LitFest, on November 17, 2010.

The winners are:

Fiction

Victor Lodato for Mathilda Savitch: A Novel

Poetry

Amy Catanzano for Multiversal

Creative Nonfiction

Vicki Forman forThis Lovely Life

Research Nonfiction

Minal Hajratwala for Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents

Children’s/Young Adult Literature

Paul Fleischman for The Dunderheads

Journalism

Mary Melton for Julius Shulman in 36 Exposures in Los Angeles Magazine

Translation

Fady Joudah for Mahmoud Darwish’s If I Were Another

DramaScreenplay

Julie Hebert for Tree

Jason Reitman & Sheldon Turner for Up in the Air

Teleplay

Peter Blake for House: “The Tyrant”

The Graphic Literature Award

Matt Fraction for Outstanding Body of Work

Exceptional First Book Award

Angela Garcia for The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande

Inaugural Prize for South Asian Authors Announces Nominees

The long list of nominees for the first annual DSC Prize for South Asian Literature was announced today, reports Outlook India.com . The prize will award $50,000 to "writers of any ethnicity writing about South Asia and its diasporas," says DSC, and must have been written in English or must have been translated into English.

The longlist of fourteen includes Upamanyu Chatterjee for Way to Go, Ru Freeman for A Disobedient Girl: A Novel, HM Naqvi for Home Boy: A Novel and Jaspreet Singh for Chef: A Novel .

The fourteen nominees will be winnowed down to a shortlist of five, which will be announced at the end of October during the South Asian Literature Festival. The festival will take place October 15-25  in London and from October 26 to 31 in the rest of the UK.  The winner of the award will be announced in January 2011 at the Jaipur Literature Festival.  The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature is open to any author in  any part of the world as long as the work is based on the South Asian region and its people.

Oh, the Horror!
The Dead Janitors Club: Pathetically True Tales of a Crime Scene Cleanup King

By Jeff Klima  341pp $15.99 non-fiction Trade paperback Sourcebooks

Crime scene cleaners aren't the sexy CSIs portrayed on TV.  CSCs are the people who show up after the the body (or what's left of it) has been removed, detectives have left, and the evidence had been bagged, tagged and photographed. Their job is to remove blood stains, brain matter, bodily waste and the putrid decomp that occur after death, from wherever that death occurs. You definitely did not hear about this employment opportunity at career day.  It's not a glamour gig, but it pays well, which was all the author cared about when he heard about an opportunity for a CSC job.  Our hero is a student at Cal-State Fullerton and working a soul-crushing retail job when he hears about the opportunity. He's immediately interested and after a wait of a few weeks Klima is called to his first death scene. He's had no training. When he arrives his boss/partner (a sheriff who's moonlighting) hands him a crate with some special cleansers and brushes, a uv flashlight (the better to see bloodstains with) and a tyvek suit. Welcome to the funhouse.

At the first scene they need to scrape blood, brain and skull matter off the walls of a house where a woman shot herself.  Its amazing what a mess a little old lady with a shot gun can make. Klima and his partner get to work and just as they were finishing up they spot some unfinished business splattered on the stucco ceiling. Klima reaches up and begins to scrape, when "I felt the gentle, cold splat of something soft connect with the naked orb of my eye." Oh, the horror. Klima is shaken up, but not shaken enough to quit. The money is too good, even with his idiot partner doing everything wrong. 

A pond of blood, the circumference of a throw rug, lay on the smooth linoleum of the kitchen floor as though someone had dropped the world's largest red egg onto it. And in the center, comprising its yolk, was a piled up large crimson mass with a jellylike consistency....which I speculated was a brain...

Klima hangs in there, going into scenes that are by turns violent (the dead prisoner), poignant (the old lady who was so alone she died and disolved into the floor) and horrific (the quintuple suicide that was discovered after three weeks). Throughout the story, Klima's kick-ass style and gallows humor makes the horror less horrible.

At some point the business expands to cleaning up hoarder homes for the county. If you've seen those homes on the A&E show Hoarders: Buried Alive, you know the kind of cleanup involved. The only upside is the chance of finding a hoard of cash.

All this goes on against a background of the author pursuing his dream of becoming a frat boy and pledging a fraternity. Although these scenes provide a fuller portrait of his life at the time , the work is center stage.

Klima's formidable talent turns what could be a creepy voyeuristic tale into a fast-paced, rip-roaring yarn. You will laugh out loud, you will groan out loud, but you won't want to put it down.

I Know, Therefore I Am
Memory by Donald E. Westlake
HardCaseCrime 368 pp. $7.99

This is not your average hard-boiled mystery. There is no crime per se, no detective punching out bad guys and chasing down clues, no gorgeous dame with an inconvenient husband batting her eyelashes. And yet the mystery here is as noir as it gets.

Before we're introduced to the protagonist, Paul Cole, he's been beaten nearly to death by a jealous husband who caught him en flagrante.  When he wakes up he's in the hospital, and he has no idea who he is, where he's from or where to go next.  Released from the hospital and intimidated by the local cops, he decides to skip town and try to track down his former life. 

As he accumulates bits and pieces of information regarding his identity, Cole faces a tragic obstacle of his own memory, which no longer works as it should. He wakes up every morning to a series of notes explaining himself to himself, a la Memento.  The picture that starts to emerge of his life before is at odds with who he seems to be now, but of course, he wants want anyone in his shoes would want, for everything to get back to normal as soon as possible. But if he isn't the man he used to be, who is he?
You'll be thinking about this long after you've finished, and wondering about the nature of identity.
Donald E. Westlake, who died in 2008 ,was an award winning crime writer who wrote under several aliases because he was so prolific. Memory is his last book.