Monday's Body of Work

Don't Fuck With Oskar

Face it, Monday happens. To ameliorate your drudgery, here are some uplifting literary links. Read them. Weep. And then do it again tomorrow. We of the literary persuasion are gluttons for punishment. We buckle knuckles and twist throats, especially when a colleague does well and gets notice for it. Happy Monday America. Here’s to literacy, and the diminishing fact that any of this, EVER, will matter. God bless Kurt Vonnegut. There, we said it. — Kevin Murphy

– Fifty years after he rocketed to the international stage with “The Tin Drum,” Guenter Grass is still surprised at the overnight success of his tale of World War II as told through the eyes of a stunted boy and his toy instrument. Grass — who turned 82 Friday — paused when asked the reason for the book’s global appeal during an interview with The Associated Press in the library of his German publisher, Steidl, in the central German university town of Goettingen. — Guenter Grass in the AP

– The title alone of the book under discussion, The Late Age of Print, offers all sorts of elegiac vapors — instantly retrospective, placing the present almost immediately in the past, it frames the now from the vantage point of a future from which we can gaze back upon the current times. — Publishing in the Critical Flame

– It’s all a matter of perspective, of course, and while not intentionally minimizing the real agony of a distinct minority of high schoolers, it’s my belief that in a matter of years most of these supposedly afflicted young men and women will look back and have at least a half-hearted chuckle at their self-absorption. – Gym Class in Splice Today

– It’s been a capricious month for awards. First there were the Nobels, with the peace prize going to President Obama for work as yet undone and the literature prize to Herta Müller for works most people haven’t read. Then last Wednesday came the announcement of this year’s finalists for our own National Book Awards. Three of the five candidates in the fiction category were not born in this country; two of those three live abroad. — American Literature in the NY Times

Rebel Yell!

– It’s been a rather big year for Charles Darwin. 2009 is the bicentennial of the man’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of “The Origin of Species,” and the explorer and naturalist has been the subject of books (including a graphic novel adaptation of “The Origin of Species”), a movie starring Jennifer Connelly (with its own ensuing controversy), and even a viral video hit starring “Growing Pains” actor Kirk Cameron. — Evolution in Salon

– “The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis.” At nine pages, “Glenn Gould,” a monologue by Lydia Davis, is longer than most of her work, which are typically between three and four; many are as brief as a paragraph, or a sentence. Most of them are not conventional “stories”—they usually feature people who are unnamed, are often set in unnamed towns or states, and lack the formal comportment of a story that opens, rises, and closes. There is no gratuitous bulk, no “realistic” wadding. — Lydia Davis in the New Yorker

– I was sitting in a bar one night, talking rather loudly about a person I hated — and a man with a beard sat down beside me, and he said amiably, “Why don’t you have him killed?” “I’ve thought of it,” I said. “Don’t think I haven’t.” — Kurt Vonnegut in the LA Times

Video: Kurt Vonnegut in Back to School