About Anne Landsman
Anne Landsman (http://www.annelandsman.com) is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, The Rowing Lesson (Soho Press, November 2007), which will be published by Granta in the UK and Kwela Books in South Africa in Spring 2008. Her debut novel, The Devil's Chimney, was nominated for four awards including the PEN/Hemingway Award for a distinguished first book of fiction. Originally from South Africa, she lives in New York City with her husband and two children, and remarks on the setting of her books, "some portion of my heart will always beat in that opposite hemisphere, in the shadow of the Brandwacht mountains, not far from the house with the loquat trees. Some part of me stayed down there. I belong where I am not."
Recent Posts
Anne Landsman has made 1 posts
Previous Entries
- The Books Are Always the First to Go: A Personal Note
- Indra Sinha’s Footnotes
- Anna Deveare Smith on Radio Open Source
Recent Comments
May all the boys—and the *woman*—enjoy their new place.
– kissthenightair
on “The Books Are Always the First to Go: A Personal Note”
Hey Bud. Best of luck with the move. I just experienced a brutal one myself...but I must say, although the booked mover backed out at the last minute, and it took forever to pack up my books (66 boxes in total...how many do you have?) unpacking and re-orging them on the shelves was a real pleasure…
enjoy your new room.
NB
– Nigel Beale
on “The Books Are Always the First to Go: A Personal Note”
All the best to you and your lovely family!
– amcorrea
on “The Books Are Always the First to Go: A Personal Note”
Pretty good opening hours at that library too Bud - nice to hear they have a good children’s collection.
I feel a wee bit jealous, it looks like a beautiful place. And you are still only a couple of hours from the big smoke, after all.
Best wishes to all four of you with your big move 
–
on “The Books Are Always the First to Go: A Personal Note”
I have a map of Tivoli up on my screen 
–
on “The Books Are Always the First to Go: A Personal Note”
Hope the move goes smoothly & well.
– Robert
on “The Books Are Always the First to Go: A Personal Note”
Oh Good Lord--they’re beautiful! Can’t believe it’s been over a year already.
Good luck and congratulations on the move--it sounds like a little piece of heaven with a quiet cloud for you.
– susan
on “The Books Are Always the First to Go: A Personal Note”
It could be done. Bookscan would need ot agree to do it. The hassle is that that’s VNU/Neilsen, who might not want ot go to the bother, especially given the pissing and moaning that’ll happen over who’s indie, who isn’t....And I know that when I once leaked Bookscan data, they totally came after me.
But I’ll be safe here in the comments, so here’s a littlebit I can figure out, just don’t link to GalleyCat, OK?
Adult Hardcover General Fiction, one indie in the Top 50. Grove.
THE ENGLISH MAJOR 9780802118639 HARRISON JIM
Adult Paperback General Fiction, four:
THE GATHERING 9780802170392 ENRIGHT ANNE Grove
THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG 9781933372600 BARBERY MURIEL Europa
AN ARSONIST’S GUIDE TO WRITERS 9781565126145 CLARKE BROCK Algonquin
NIGHT TRAIN TO LISBON 9780802143976 MERCIER PASCAL Grove
– Richard Nash
on “In Search of a True Indie Bestseller list”
Hi Jim - glad to hear from you! Be sure to read Greg’s follow up post too.
Bud
– Bud Parr
on “Stepanich on Wynton Marsalis's Latest Book”
Hi Bud--
I liked this post a lot. I have been getting into Miles’s later stuff lately and there is some great music there--easy to dismiss on grounds of jazz purity, but not on the grounds of its quality. I think you are dead on about Wynton: great live, not as good on record, and not a very compelling composer. He’s an emblem of that 80s group of musicians: great chops, but too worried about jazz history to add to it. Maybe their work was a necessary injection of swing back into jazz, but I have been startled at how good so much of the fusion I used to dismiss out of hand actually is. (I’ve been tutored by my bass teacher, a Berklee grad with very, very big musical ears.)
But I would say, anyone who loves music of any kind ought to see Wynton live. That’s where he really becomes the musician everyone hoped he would be.
Jim
–
on “Stepanich on Wynton Marsalis's Latest Book”
On Deck +
Contributors +
Notes & Links
“The ‘marketing’ crisis is a failure of capitalism, yet another example of its increasingly crude, bottom-line mentality, with the marketing of books now being outsourced to the writers themselves. Should we cheerfully give in to this?
- Dan Green (and be sure to catch the ever lively comments to Dan’s post)
“The fact is, most newspapers no longer come close to providing much of interest to reading enthusiasts, because they haven’t a clue as to what they are interested in. Reading litblogs would help, but I suspect the world they would encounter there would seem alien to them. After all, what kind of people would prefer reading Shakespeare to reading David Broder? Nevertheless, that global network of book lovers is only going to grow and strengthen. Whatever the future of publishing may be, it is a future that will be inextricably bound up with that network.”
– Frank Wilson
“One thing Frank said that really resonated was how dull movies and television have become since blogging has taken hold…The active nature of reading and sharing thoughts on same via the blog, plus the lively exchange of commentary, is so engaging it renders the experience of passively sitting in front of a box or big screen, flat, dull, dead, and plain boring in comparison.”
– Nigel Bealeed. I had the same thought last night as I relaxed by writing a blog post instead of watching a movie
“I have my doubts about the rest of the paper, but there are only a handful of arts sections in the world that can compete with this one.”
- Chad Post on the New York Sun
“One of the most important things that distinguish man from other animals is that man can get pleasure from drinking without being thirsty.”
“Part of the tension felt right now, perhaps, is that blogging and the internet have allowed for enthusiasm to encroach upon the terrain of criticism at a time when the arts landscape itself seems to be shrinking. Ebert (and Scott in his praise for him), however, provide a useful reminder that audiences perhaps gravitate most towards unique voices that are able to offer both enthusiasm and criticism rather than attempt to demarcate the boundaries between the two.”
“Paul Theroux is the kind of guy who travels to Malawi in a train and looks out the window and then writes about how the people outside all look very dumb and bored and unhappy and Malawi is an unhappy country… I think it’s utterly uninspiring, both as language and as perception… Günter Grass wrote a book about India, for example. I actually went through the book and counted how often he described shit. There are 289 mentions of shit in this small book. If you’re so obsessed with shit, there’s no need to go to India, just describe your own latrine—that would be just as representative of your neurosis. But if you are claiming to describe something out in the world, that’s another matter.”
- Ilija Trojanow quoted from Pen America 8 on the Pen America blog
“Ashbery – born in 1927 – has gone on writing his poems, and writing them faster than most of us can read them.”
- Stephen Burt in “John Ashbery, a poet for our times” Times Literary Supplement
“Baker pointed out that for every book he has written, he would generally get one third of the way into it before “something goes wrong.” Then, he sets it aside. But he had been working on a book-length history of the Library of Congress, dwelling in particular upon Archibald MacLeish, who was the Librarian of Congress in 1939. MacLeish would go onto become a key propaganda figure during the war. And thus Baker found himself immersed in “an interpretive problem.” He had to understand World War II. So he put aside this project and Human Smoke began to take shape.”
- Ed Champion on Nicholson Baker
“If you find Elbow’s music glum and depressing, you’re missing the point. Anyone who considers Elbow, Radiohead etc in any way miserable needs to spend some time finding the real beauty in this world of ours, for I fear that those folks are taking the whole thing on face value only. Let a little sadness into your lives and see how happy it can make you.”
- Simon Collison on Elbow’s “The Seldom Seen Kid”
“For instance, in the new shop, she’d like to offer tie-in products with books on certain subjects, i.e., yoga mats near the wellness shelf or wooden spoons near the cookbooks.”
- The New York Observer on Sarah McNally’s plans for a new bookstore on the Upper West Side
“Here’s my prediction though: Lots of people will watch this and think—hell, it’s not that hard to put together an internet show that’s at least this good. A bunch of different programs will suddenly come into existence, a few of which are actually quite good. Around the time that we find out that one of these new ones is 10 times more popular than Titlepage there will be a big media backlash against these “amateur” programmers, dismissing internet programs as “not the real thing.” A divisive spat will ensue mimicing the whole bloggers vs. print thing, and readers will be back where they started with nothing worth watching.”
“Most disturbingly, users are locked in, too: anybody using an iPhone, an old version of Windows, any version of Linux, or any other operating system or device not supported by Silverlight will be unable to use the Library of Congress’ new website. How is that compatible with the principles of democracy or librarianship? It’s taxation without web presentation.”
- Casey Durfee at LibraryThing on the LOC’s
via Three Percent
“It’s a great crib, no doubt, but ‘one of the most prominent critics of our time’ should surely be doing a lot more than writing a kind of student’s guide to the novel.”
– Mark Thwaite on James Wood’s How Fiction Works
“By the time I reached the ending…I could do nothing but breathlessly close the book and sit thinking…and thinking…
Dissertations could be written about this novel.”
- amcorrea on Steve Erickson’s Zeroville
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