Band of Thebes

Strong Women Weekend: Harriet Beecher Stowe

 
You know about Harriet Beecher Stowe's shattering success with Uncle Tom's Cabin from the first week of its publication, but did you realize she wasn't allowed to lecture in public about it for more than ten years? Such were the conventions of the times that she wrote her lectures, then a male relative would read them to a rapt audience. Luckily, she lived long enough to deliver her own words. Joan Hedrick's Pulitzer Prize winning biography of HBS is thorough yet refreshingly casual about the Stowes' same-sex intimacies.

Their immediate next door neighbor to the right was a young Samuel Clemens. He married beauty, brains, and riches in the form of Olivia Langdon, and they built a grander brick house, nonetheless inviting and comfortable. Never have I loved Mark Twain more than upon seeing his third-floor billiards room which doubled as his study. The main, central desk, he and his wife shared for correspondence. The spot where he wrote Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is a humble writing table tucked in a corner. He found the windows distracting. This is the back of the house.

For a twenty-four hour visit, Hartford rocks. When Stowe and Twain lived there, after the Civil War, it passed New Orleans as the nation's richest city. At nearly 400, the Connecticut capital has America's oldest continuously published newspaper, its oldest public park, and its oldest public museum of art, The Wadsworth Athenuem. Their wonderful collection includes fine examples of the usual early Americans and 19th century Europeans, and several surprises -- a kooky Ingres, a gripping William Merritt Chase, a western John Singer Sargent, and several homoerotic pieces. (Below: the statehouse.)

Spirit Awards Nominees: Frozen 7, Ballast 6, Rachel 6, Milk 4

Announced this morning, Film Independent's Spirit Awards nominations went heavily for Frozen River [above], Ballast, and Rachel Getting Married. Milk was shut out of the best picture and best director categories, but scored nominations as expected for Sean Penn, James Franco, and for best first screenplay and best cinematography. Chris and Don: A Love Story was ignored for best documentary, which saw nominations for The Betrayal, Encounters at the End of the World, Man on Wire, The Order of Myths, and Up the Yangtze. Although I was sorry not to see André Téchiné's gay drama The Witnesses nominated for best foreign film, I was particularly happy to see the non-gay Italian movie Gomorra included; it's among my top three so far this (disappointing) year.

The second-most nominated film, Ballast, has been in release for two months and so far has grossed $67,431. The most nominated movie has earned $2.2 million in four months. The highest grossing of the nominees, Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, has earned $22.4 million since August. The highest grossing film of the year, The Dark Knight, not an independent film and not a revelant comparison, has earned $530 million since July. Total movie ticket sales for the year are expected to be around $9.7 billion.

If you haven't yet seen Milk and you're in or near NYC, consider attending Wednesday night's screening at MoMA at 7:00, which will be followed by a Q&A with director Gus Van Sant.

Oscar Documentary Short List: No Love for Gay Love

The Academy Awards arbiters announced the fifteen films on their short list for the feature length documentary prize, and one glaring omission is the biggest gay doc of the year, Chris & Don: A Love Story. Other high-profile snubs were Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Dear Zachary, The Order of Myths, and Bill Maher's Religulous. Those that made it were:

"At the Death House Door, directed by Peter Gilbert and Steve James
**"The Betrayal" (Nerakhoon), directed by Ellen Kuras
**"Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh", directed by Roberta Grossman
**"Encounters at the End of the World", directed by Werner Herzog [photo above]
"Fuel", directed by Josh Tickell
"The Garden", directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy
"Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts", directed by Scott Hicks
"I.O.U.S.A.", directed by Patrick Creadon
"In a Dream", directed by Jeremiah Zagar
"Made in America", directed by Stacy Peralta
**"Man on Wire", directed by James Marsh
**"Pray the Devil Back to Hell", directed by Gini Reticker
**"Standard Operating Procedure", directed by Errol Morris
"They Killed Sister Dorothy", directed by Daniel Junge
**"Trouble the Water", directed by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin

The final five will be announced with all the other Oscar nominees [Milk] on January 22. I've narrowed my predictions to seven, marked with **. Feel free to contradict; this is not my category.

Skip Solace, See Role Models

You think you want to spend an hour and a half with Daniel Craig and Judi Dench, but everything that Casino Royale was, Quantum of Solace isn't. The movie has all the depth of a car commercial, minus the happiness. The whole thing is so rushed and panting (and vengeful), the characters never have time to enjoy the habitual Bond luxuries and hotness, nor does the audience. Terrible story, limp villain, so-so locations, no Moneypenny, zero gadgetry, and less wit.

Instead, go see Role Models (even with its lame f-slurs and brief, wrong-headed discussion of "gay"). It's very funny and all the lead actors are really great: Adorable crank Paul Rudd, happy go buffly Sean William Scott (braver than the newly prudish Bond and not afraid to show off his full backside naked), McLovin, "the black kid," and a truly awesome Jane Lynch.

IMPAC Dublin Longlist: Bennett, Leavitt, Smith, Winterson + 142 More

The IMPAC Dublin prize has announced their longlist for the 2009 award, which honors book-length fiction published in English (originally or in translation) during 2007, and among the nominees are at least four lgbt authors: Alan Bennett (The Uncommon Reader), David Leavitt (The Indian Clerk), Ali Smith (Girl Meets Boy), and Jeanette Winterson (The Stone Gods). The only nominated book to focus solely on a male - male romance is Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman who is straight. Another straight writer, Jonathan Coe, is nominated for his novel about a lesbian, The Rain Before It Falls. Marianne Wiggins' novel The Shadow Catcher reveals itself in its closing moments to be about a gay man but it hedges its bets in an unsatisfactory way.

Because the nominations come exclusively from libraries -- this year from 41 countries -- it's fascinating to see who suggested which titles. The Aciman is from Chicago; Bennet from Naples, Italy and Portland, Oregon; Leavitt from Adelaide, Beirut, and San Diego; Winterson from Waterford County, Ireland; and Coe from Brussels, Gent, Lisbon, and Thessaloniki. Take a look at their database.

At 100,000 euros, the prize is the world's richest for a single book of fiction, and at 146 nominees, it must also have the world's longest longlist. Some standouts are: Pat Barker, Louis Begley, Amy Bloom, Michael Chabon, J.M. Coetzee, Douglas Coupland, Peter Ho Davies, Don DeLillo, Junot Diaz, Annie Dillard, Nathan Englander, Anne Enright, Sebastian Faulks, Cristina Garcia, Elizabeth Hay, Peter Hoeg, Nick Hornby, Khaled Hosseini, Denis Johnson, A.L. Kennedy, Doris Lessing, Penelope Lively, Mario Vargas Llosa, Ian McEwan, Haruki Murakami, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Ondaatje, Ann Patchett, Arturo Perez-Reverte, Philip Roth, Matthew Sharpe, Graham Swift, and Rose Tremain.

The shortlist will be announced on April 2, 2009. Most years the IMPAC judges make excellent choices: In 2007 the winner was Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses and in 2006 it was Colm Toibin's The Master.

Notably absent are: Roberto Bolano, Peter Cameron, Dave Eggers, Louise Erdrich, Ha Jin, Thomas Mallon, Alice Munro, Richard Russo, Bob Smith, William Trevor, Edmund White, and an obscure Scottish writer named J.K. Rowling.

Infinite Rest: The David Foster Wallace Memorial Service

Even though you don't want it to be true, with twelve speakers at a famous person's memorial service  there can be an underlying sense of competition: who will best capture how he really was, or best convey the sense of loss, or illuminate some unseen aspect of his work. At yesterday's celebration of David Foster Wallace at NYU, most of the speakers rose above that, simply groping for ways to do him justice. The non-writers in particular showed great dignity as they shared the stage with literary stars.

Amid incalculable esteem and love and funny memories, apparently no topic was off-limits: his suicide, his depression, his suicide attempt as a teen, the misery of the final months, the speaker's anger at him, the speaker's own depression, the speaker's own bouts with suicide. Dave would have wanted it honest, they said. They unanimously praised his parents, his sister Amy, and his wife Karen, all in attendance.

Photography prohibited.

4:09  Michael Pietsch, his editor, said the speakers would appear more or less chronologically, in the order they knew Dave.

4:11  Mark Costello, novelist, roommate at Amherst and after. Whole class had "sick hyper-awareness of everyone and everything... swimming in 100% pure, unadulterated insecurity" and they all knew Dave was "smart," a word that "obviously impoverishes him." Dave corrected the logic prof's logic solution. Every night Dave did his "drag queen act" which meant green hoodie, open robe, and Timberlands as he went to brush his teeth each night at 11:45 for 45 minutes. Rituals, germs already key. "A mind in splendid overdrive." Self-awareness to mask problems, if he can joke about it then it's under control. The hoodie & boots guy was to Dave what the Little Tramp was to Chaplin. "Very dark times after the publication of Infinite Jest."

Unsuppressed math: He spoke for 21 minutes! If everyone does, that's 4 hours 12 minutes.

4:32  Amy Wallace Havens, sister. Very moving family stories, and grief. Dave taught her how not to throw like a girl and she still has a decent arm, though she suspects, "I throw like a boy who would rather be reading Kafka."

4:40  Bonnie Nadell, agent. Dave had never published a story outside of college, she had never sold a book. Agent as buffer and protector. Argued that his first novel needed a complete final sentence and period; lost argument, of course.

4:46  Gerry Howard, editor of first two books only. Dave miserable at Yaddo with "Jay McInerny, Mona Simpson, David Leavitt" where it was all "Andrew this and Binky that" and hated coming to NYC for a glossy magazine photo shoot with "Tama Janowitz and Christopher Coe. Coe was this flamboyant gay novelist who was camping it up." He's reading Our Mutual Friend "by Charles Dickens" and thinks Dickens was heavily influenced by Dave.

4:53  Colin Harrison, editor at Harper's Magazine. Dry, extra funny re-enactments, with perfect accents ("traish!"), of Dave's piece on the Illinois State Fair and his epic cruise ship essay, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."

5:04  Michael Pietsch, editor of IJ and everything after. Read droll, perfectly chosen excerpts from Dave's letters protesting cuts to IJ with "bared canines" and "teeth bared to second molars." Thought Dave wanted to use every known word at least once in his books before he was done. Like all the speakers, praised Dave's extreme kindness; everyone wanted to meet DFW when he came to the office, and he agreed but deflected attention, asked about the assistants, people's children. At Michael's house he played tag with his daughter until "that grew dull and they invented broom tag."

5:14  Don DeLillo. More a short piece of writing than spoken remarks. Ended: "Youth and loss. This is Dave's voice. American."

5:18  Zadie Smith. Beautifully done. Her favorite is Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Important word isn't irony but "gift." The footnotes and embellishments are there to "break the rhythm of thoughtlessness." Dave suggested that the "big distinction between good art and so-so art" was heart; to give love, not just create from the part that wants to be loved. Dave and Kierkegaard, BIWHM like Fear and Trembling; she taught them together to college students. The "most impassioned book recommendation Dave ever gave" her was for Brian Moore's novella Catholics.

5:25  Donald Antrim. Dave called out of the blue to ask if he could give him advice when he heard from a mutual friend of Antrim's difficulty. They had never spoken intimately before. Antrim read powerfully from "Another Paradox" about politicians and salesmen. "Not someone to believe but someone to believe in."

5:37  George Saunders. Reading BIWHM he found himself "agitated, flinchy, on the verge of tears," by this completely new kind of experience in writing, especially Dave's "terrified tenderness" conveying "what a fix we're in on this Earth." Dave's work is, "if it's not too corny to say so, sacramental." Saunders, thinking about these remarks, heard his "internalized Dave" saying "Don't look for consolation yet." It's too soon. "Now there's only grief... Grief is the bill that comes due for love." Dave is first among us, the best, the most talented. His legacy: "Mostly we're asleep but we can wake up."

5:43  Jonathan Franzen. Dave used "details as a way of letting out the bottled love in his heart." Franzen, like Saunders and others, admitted to nervousness at being found inadequate in Dave's presence. Twice Dave stood him up. Their early meetings were "stressful, rushed, less intimate" than their letters. They agreed "fiction is a way out of loneliness." Life got better when Dave met Karen. Life got worse when he went off his meds of twenty years. In August, asked Franzen to tell him a story about how all of this would end fine. In September, stopped listening.

5:54  Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor at The New Yorker, read from "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley," a poetic choice in part because at first it seemed an odd selection. Then not.

Haruki Murakami Is Charmed By Your Loud, American Gayness

Answers to your two questions.

Q. What would happen if the chatty man behind me in the very, very long book signing line at The New Yorker Festival told Haruki Murakami to his face, "Hey, If you ever decide you're gay, call me!"
A. Murakami would light up, elated, grinning, and say no, no. It looked like it might have been his happiest moment of the interminable session.

Q. Was the woman his translator?
A. No, she stamped the title page next to his signature. See below, in blue.

Free Answer: The two essential novels are Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Only in Wyoming: The Garage Door Blog

Before the internets and the google came along, Americans had garage doors to express their thoughts and feelings. That proud tradition lives on in the Equality State.

New Novels, New Orientations

 

Is there something about writing a thirteenth book that makes authors want to switch teams?

Before this week, openly gay writer E. Lynn Harris had published twelve books, all of which examined the lives of gay or bisexual black men and strong, smart, beautiful black women. According to AP, he's sold four million copies, so he's obviously struck a chord with readers. On Tuesday, Doubleday published his thirteenth book, Just Too Good To Be True, which is his first heterosexual novel. He says it took him four years to write. Here's the plot: A college quarterback falls in love with a cheerleader. Except it's really about a son's obsessive, co-dependent relationship with his mother, so maybe it's not such a departure after all.

Louise Erdrich's thirteenth novel, The Plague of Doves, is dazzlingly original. In 1911 in Pluto, North Dakota, four Ojibwe men are lynched for a murder they didn't commit; one of them survives the hanging; the lives of their descendants and the descendants of the white vigilantes intertwine throughout the twentieth century. Told like As I Lay Dying from many multiple points of view, the novel covers nearly the whole town over several decades, with some episodes seemingly less relevant (or more far fetched) than others, yet every story adds to the themes of history, love, betrayal, and redemption. Late in the book, the primary narrator, the surviving lynched man's granddaughter Evelina Harp, who has long nursed a crush on the blond grandson of one of the lynch mob, discovers she's a lesbian. She's nineteen. Her coming out romance takes place in a mental institution, which literary readers will either find objectionable or deftly subversive. Philip Roth calls The Plague of Doves a "masterpiece" and even Michiko raved.

Worst Album Covers Ever?

So the Onion disappoints again this week with an unfunny gay article called, "Controversial Court Ruling Upholds Homosexual's Right To Prance Around Demanding Attention And Being A Drama Queen," but never fear, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel's got your back. At the intersection of Absurd Avenue and Crazy Street comes their gallery of really awfully designed album covers.  Except I thought three of them were sort of good. I would totally listen to Space Escapade. And the second guy with his puppet, in b&w. So worth a look.

Bookvideos.tv: You'd Rather Be Reading

At first I thought something was very, very wrong when a search for anything gay on Bookvideos.tv yielded zero results. After all, the site launched nearly a year ago with lots of hoopla (that a lot of publishers seem to have swallowed) that the way to get Americans to read again is to get them to watch more tv-like clips on the web. But then I realized the problem is much larger: The site still only has 47 entries in Fiction and a mere nine in Literary Fiction, some of which are absurdly misplaced, such as Jodi Picoult's 19 Minutes. In Non-Fiction they claim to have 46, but the actual number is smaller because many titles are loaded more than once. (As for gay books, they ought to have tagged Marc Acito's new novel and Marianne Wiggins' The Shadow Catcher.)
    In any event, these clips aren't going to sell books. On YouTube, the Bookvideos.tv channel gets relatively little traffic, with even a major bestselling author like Philippa Gregory promoting a movie tie edition garnering only 7,800 views, and I would wager most of those are people who have already read the book. Many of the other titles' videos have a couple hundred views after 10 months. These book trailers mainly succeed at reducing the amount of time readers spend reading. On Monday, HarperCollins announced the formation of an in-house production department that annually will create 500 book videos, most in a Q&A format with the writer. In an age of fewer and fewer book reviews, author videos will be the new way people who have neither read nor bought the book can talk about them knowingly.

Elizabeth Strout at B&N

Last night Elizabeth Strout traced back the origins of her life as a novelist to a sleepover when she was twelve where the neighbor mom made French toast, cut it diagonally, and sprinkled it with confectioners sugar. Hearing her enraptured report, her own mother was not impressed. Not only did she ignore the hint that this was how every breakfast should be, she said, "Elizabeth, you don't know." It stunned her at twelve and took her years to understand she really didn't know why people do what they do, and has spent her adult life pondering such mysteries.
    She said she knew Olive Kitteridge, her blunt Maine heroine, was "a lot for the reader to deal with," and one of the reasons she told this novel in episodes, sometimes not directly about Olive, was to give the reader a break from her. Strout said as she's writing she thinks "a great deal" about the readers and what they need to make the story work. She also said ambivalence about her characters is "helpful" because it's "so freeing not to be responsible for their actions." Queried whether the difficult moms in all three of her books reflect issues with her own mother, she said, "Yes." I asked if her two minor gay characters came to her unbidden as she wrote or if she inserted them intentionally, to suggest a more universal aspect to the romantic troubles of her protagonists and she said they "just rose up," adding that she is in no way a political writer. She admitted she had not intended the ending to her previous novel, Abide with Me, but had planned for Tyler to "wander away and become a librarian in a seminary." The new novel continues to garner stellar reviews. Buy it.

Louise Erdrich at Lincoln Center B&N

Louise Erdrich has written twelve novels (major prize winners and finalists), three volumes of poetry, five novels for young readers, and two nonfiction books. She has raised her biological and adopted children alone since her husband's suicide, and she runs an independent bookstore in Minneapolis. In her spare time, she is working to reintroduce the Ojibwe language.  Her fictional world, a crossroads between her own two lines of ancestry, the Ojibwe people and German-Americans in North Dakota, is constantly compared with the whites and blacks in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Despite her lofty literary stature, she can still light up in thinking that she and all the North Dakotans at last night's reading "should have a picnic," and she can still laugh at her mistakes. Because she works on different books simultaneously, she said for a long time she didn't really know she was writing The Plague of Doves because she was so wrapped in another long manuscript she thought was "the greatest science fiction novel ever" but upon finishing saw that it "wasn't." She also laughed when describing her battle with The New Yorker's fact checking department, which refused to allow her story to be called "The Plague of Doves" because they were actually passenger pigeons. (She prevailed, but only after she proved 19th century citizens called them doves.) Even after she focused on this book, she found she was still writing around the central event, a lynching, but suggested this was typical, adding, "I never know what I'm working on." She also said, "My only advice to writers who have families is: don't clean." For her choice of whom to read on the road, she said she always takes "Chekhov when I'm traveling around so I can have a reliable story."

Philip Roth, who rarely gives blurbs, said: "Louise Erdrich's imaginative freedom has reached its zenith--The Plague of Doves is her dazzling masterpiece." Ron Charles, writing in the Washington Post's Book World, called the novel "miraculous." I trust them. Or, if you've never read her and want to be sure of some gay content, try my favorite, her absolutely terrific The Master Butchers Singing Club.

Inside Madonna's New York Apartment

Because, apparently, there's more to life than great books and little movies, in honor of today's release of HARD CANDY, not buying, you're invited to a special look inside Madonna's Central Park West apartment. Twelve photos. Did you guess she would have three paintings by Tamara de Lempicka, one each by Dali, Léger, Picasso, Maxfield Parrish, a boxer by Claggett Wilson in the sound-proof gym; and photographs by George Platt Lynes, Laure Albin-Guillot, and André Kertész? Madonna says, "I get strength from my art--all the paintings I own are powerful." Her gay brother Christopher, "self taught," designed the Art Deco interiors. Hard to imagine where Guy Ritchie hangs out, other than the kitchen. And London. Look here.

Today and Tonight in Books

ON SALE TODAY:

You know from the media blitz that Augusten Burroughs' new memoir, A Wolf at the Table, is about his father. You also know it will be gay, creepy, funny, perhaps hard to believe, and totally riveting. Hours old, it is already an Amazon bestseller.

A top ten selection on many year end lists including the NYT and winner of the IMPAC prize, Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses is released in paperback today. It was my favorite novel of 2007 and although there's nothing gay in it, readers may identify with the summer friendship between two young teens. It is narrated by one of them fifty years later, living alone in rural Norway. A small masterpiece.

Louise Erdrich's thirteenth novel, The Plague of Doves, is published today, and the NYT's very, very exacting Michiko Kakutani loved it, saying, "She has written what is arguably her most ambitious — and in many ways, her most deeply affecting — work yet." In some of her previous novels Erdrich has included gay characters, although I intentionally know nothing about this one. I'm going to hear her read tomorrow night; more Thursday.

AUTHORS TONIGHT:

Augusten Burroughs at Union Square B&N 7:00. If you're going, go early.

Peter Cameron and Sherman Alexie at the Strand, 7:00 - 8:30.

Building up to the Lammy awards ceremony May 29, the Lambda Literary Foundation is sponsoring readings by finalists in seven cities. (Philadelphia was last week.) This is a tremendous idea, and if you can attend, please do so.

NYC, Tuesday, April 29
6 pm, free, LGBT Center, 208 West 13th Street
Featuring Jennifer Baumgardner, Cris Beam, Jennifer Camper, James Canon, Roberto Ferrari, Kenny Fries, Sharon Marcus, Perry Moore, Michael Quadland, Robin Reardon, Michael Rowe, Sarah Schulman, Kevin Sessums, Aiobheann Sweeney, and others.

SAN FRANCISCO, Tuesday, April 29
5 pm, free, Hormel Center, SF Public Library, 100 Larkin St.
Featuring Rhiannon Argo, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Michael Thomas Ford, Ali Liebegott, Mattilda, Toni Mirosevich, Kemble Scott, Ursula Steck, Steve Susoyev & George Birimisa, Jess Wells, among others.

And NEXT WEEK:

SEATTLE, Tuesday, May 6
7:00 pm, Richard Hugo House,1634 11th Avenue, Seattle
Featuring Nicola Griffith and Corrina Wycoff. Emceed by Ruby Kane.

CHICAGO, Tuesday, May 6
7:30 pm, Free, Gerber-Hart Library, 1127 W. Granville Avenue
Featuring Kevin Barnhurst, Bertram Cohler, Michael S. Sherry, Jacqueline Taylor.

LOS ANGELES, Thursday, May 8
7:30 pm, Free, Different Light Bookstore, 8853 Santa Monica Blvd
Featuring Victor Bumbalo, Kittredge Cherry, Myriam Gurba, Jeff Hobbs, Frederick Smith, James St. James, and others.

NEW ORLEANS, Saturday, May 10
Saints & Sinners Writers Festival -- details at www.sasfest.org.
Featuring Anthony Bidulka, Vincent Diamond, Mark Doty, Greg Herren, Marianne K. Martin, Robert Taylor, Michelle Tea.

Two Essential Olives

Last Friday on the streets of TriBeCa, Andy Garcia reminded me how really great literature seamlessly becomes part of your life. When I saw him shooting a movie, I didn't think, Oh, that damned Terry Benedict! (I wonder if Danny and Rusty are around?). Truthfully, I promise you, I thought, Oh, there's Andy Garcia from that story by Manuel Muñoz. I couldn't remember the superb story's title, "The Comeuppance of Lupe Rivera," because I'm lame and because the book's enormous power comes from Muñoz's evocation of an entire community through all ten interconnected stories more than the perfection of any single, standout tale. His collection, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, most calls to mind Bobbie Ann Mason's debut, which is just about the highest praise possible, although she finds more humor in her views of working class whites in Paducah, Kentucky than Muñoz does in his explorations of working class Mexican Americans outside of Fresno. For the record, Andy Garcia isn't in the story himself, it's that Lupe's new boyfriend looks like him, according to the adoring young man across the street who has grown up in awe of Lupe's strength and independence and success with good looking men.   

That nine of the ten stories here are about gay men (sometimes seen only through a mother's or sister's point of view) adds another challenge to getting Muñoz the recognition he deserves. Earlier publishers told him Latino readers would reject it for being gay (wrong, it turns out), though his current publisher Algonquin has strenuously hidden any mention of gay content from the cover and copy; and, worse, gay bookstores have not carried the book either. So it's all the more heartening that the judges of the Frank O'Connor Story Prize, the world's richest award for short fiction at 35,000 Euros, chose Munoz as a finalist while passing over Alice Munro and William Trevor. Yes, he's that good. No, he didn't win. Miranda July did. He is also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, to be announced next month. Buy and read his remarkable book.

Last month, the terrific writer Elizabeth Strout published her third book, Olive Kitteridge. Its thirteen stories also form a portrait of a small town, in a more affluent, all white Maine, though half of them are about Olive specifically and in the other half she appears with varying degrees of prominence. Odd, but it works. Be warned, Olive can be unlikable, pushing New England flintiness too far, though even at her worst, Strout keeps our sympathy for her protagonist's frustration and rage. One gay man appears in the story about a boozy piano singer, and, later in life, a widowed Olive shouts at her aging suitor to love his lesbian daughter and support gay marriage. Many readers revere Strout for her first two novels, Amy & Isbabelle and Abide with Me. On Sunday, The New York Times Book Review's critic said this was her best book. Get it.

Verbatim

Doctor: "Oh, and your toes may turn purple. Don't worry."
Me: "Orange and purple. Together. On me. And I'm not supposed to 'worry'?"

Movie Roundup: Nim, Counterfeiters, Band, Blindsight

A word of warning to the Jodie Foster fans who haven't yet gotten around to seeing her new movie Nim's Island: Strong, Rope-Swinging Jodie appears on the island for the final four minutes. During the ninety-two minutes before that, the story concentrates on the beach life of Nim (Abigail Breslin) and her scientist dad (Gerard Butler) who gets lost at sea, then the movie crosscuts with Jodie as a reclusive adventure novelist given to panic attacks and unable to leave her apartment in San Francisco. Her many fears and phobias are exaggerated for laughs because this is a kids' movie, but it may or may not make Jodie fans uncomfortable to see her hamming up being weak, helpless, and screaming at the sight of a spider, while her male fictional alter ego is a brave hardass who gets to wear knock-off Indiana Jones costumes even when it's not Halloween in the Castro. Also, she does a lot of product placement for Progresso Soup and Purell hand sanitizer. On the plus side, Nim is a fairly awesome tomboy/science nerd who swims with dolphins.

If you can remember back to February, you know the The Counterfeiters won the Oscar for best foreign language film. It's well done, well acted, and effectively told, aiming for greatness and just missing the mark. Public intellectuals can debate whether or not there's something inappropriate about a happy ending Holocaust movie that shows well fed, relatively well dressed, marginally well housed prisoners -- because the Nazis needed them in good form to counterfeit pounds and dollars, based on a true story -- as if studio executives knew audiences wouldn't pay to see skeletal victims tortured by hunger, cold, and labor. A gay man is included in a Wiemar  bar scene, but the camera never fully shows any prisoner with a pink triangle. (It's possible that one pink triangle appears fleetingly, for a nanosecond in a busy scene, but it's much too fast to know, and frankly it's not enough.)

Enough complaining. If it's still in your area, make sure to see the wonderful, wonderful feature The Band's Visit, about eight musical Egyptian policemen stranded for one day and night in the wrong town in Israel. And, definitely, no matter what, when it comes to your favorite art house, go to the documentary Blindsight, about six blind Tibetan teenagers climbing a mountain in the shadow of Everest with sighted guides, their hero, Erik Weihenmayer (the first blind person to climb the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on each continent), and their teacher, Sabriye Tenberken. She went blind at twelve in her native Germany, moved to Tibet, invented braille for the Tibetan language and founded the country's first school for the blind by the time she was twenty-six. As the climb progresses into more demanding terrain, some of the kids clearly won't be able to make it to the 23,000 foot summit, and the adults split into opposing views on what to do. Of the 396 films shown at the Berlinale in 2007, Blindsight was voted the audience favorite. Please watch the trailer.

Cynthia Ozick on Dictation

Tomorrow, literary powerhouse Cynthia Ozick turns eighty but you wouldn't know it from the thoughtful fire of her remarks Monday night. She called the label "woman writer" stupid, foolish, confining, nonsensical, and anti-feminist. She politely scoffed at the notion that she was a public intellectual. When asked if there was one overriding emotion that drove her work -- love, motherhood, envy, etc. -- she said all of the above, repeated the list, and threw in "hatred" twice. She hasn't been to any theater since 1996 and hasn't gone out to a movie since 1997. Several individual women wanted to be photographed with her, and she obliged each of them with a smile. During the long wait to get books signed, many of us agreed our favorite of hers is The Puttermesser Papers. The new book, Dictation, is a collection of four stories, which sounds small, but the ideas are big and intriguing: The title story is about the chance acquaintance between the secretaries to Joseph Conrad and Henry James. As she signed books for me, I asked if she had ever included a lesbian or gay character in her fiction and without pausing she said, Yes, in my first novel. A gay man, he's just a minor character, but yes. She said that novel, Trust [1966], is the best thing she's ever written but she has yet to find someone who can prove to her they've read it to the end. I said, The best? She said, Absolutely. At her asking, I explained why I wanted to know about her gay characters and she said, "Do they have to say they're gay?" I said no, and she immediately launched into helping me, as if my problems were hers, to the increasing alarm of the people behind. She said, "Ansell in E.M. Forster's The Longest Journey! He's Jewish, a draper's son, obviously gay, it's a wonderful novel, even if it lacks the structure of the later work." The event was a terrific welcome back to New York.

TIME's "Most Influential" Poll Is 3.38% Gay

Don't even try to decode the "reasoning" behind the nominees for TIME's 100 Most Influential People list or why in the world there are 207 of them. A very quick glance that no doubt missed many relevant names found six gay men and one lesbian. It's not Ellen, even though she recently trounced Oprah (#25 here) in a poll of favorite talkshow hosts.

Given how utterly preposterous the whole list is, it's pointless to become enraged over our exclusion. But still. Influence is one of the things we do best as original thinkers and early adopters, yet they think we comprise 7 of 207 or 3.38% of the possible list? And seriously do hang onto to something solid and immovable when you read that one of the nominees is graphic designer Chip Kidd. He's dead last, or two below Eliot Spitzer.

Did I mention #1 is Rain? Yes, Rain. You can't fault TIME for the voting, which clearly proves fansites are sending their readers directly to their nominee page, but you can criticize the editors for their very lame and sloppy choices and for not offering the option of write-ins.

I don't want to fight about this, but of course Carine Roitfeld deserves her spot.

Read the whole list here. Rankings as of Tuesday:

7. Perez Hilton
74. [Ang Lee]
88. David Sedaris
134. Adam Moss
139. Suze Orman
151. Matt Drudge
203. Nick Denton
207. Chip Kidd