At the center of the plot is a swindling financier who, as Newsweek points out, is a Bernie Madoff for the Victorian age. All of Trollope’s novels deal in one way or another with  money (he often tells us precisely how much money his characters have, and his novels are tutorials in what kind of  lifestyle that money could buy), but The Way We Live Now, in particular, is scathing in its examination of  greed.

If you decide to follow up on Newsweek’s recommendation (and mine) to read The Way We Live Now and it gives you a taste for Trollope, you have lots of great reading ahead of you.  He wrote almost 50 novels.

I’ll admit, thinking about all the myriad online extras of the various media that I ingest makes me a little bit crazy, knowing that I’m missing what I’m sure are all sorts of crucial tidbits just because I wasn’t savvy enough to watch season three of Whatever Hot Show and then rush to the internets to catch up on all the backstories and character vital stat sheets and mini-webisodes. I’ve even seen commercials try to goad me into following them down the virtual wormhole to special director’s cuts and outtakes. Really? Has that worked on anyone?

But, I can get behind this kind of online extra. As the writer in residency, Ness provided a whole set of tips for aspiring writers, and then followed and broke them to come up with this short story. Is it crucial to the understanding of his Chaos Walking universe? Nope. Is he trying to sell me more books by writing it? Not directly. He’s just putting his pen where his advice is, and we get some neato bonus information that answers a couple of the bucketloads of burning questions we have about his universe. It’s more of a gift than a ploy, which is awfully refreshing.

“To be able to write like that when she was going through what she was going through is just astonishing – the sheer beauty of the language, the descriptions of the environment; she has such an amazing sense of place.” (”Carnegie medal posthumously awarded to Siobhan Dowd,” by Alison Flood, the Guardian)

In other news, the Locus Award for Science Fiction winners were announced today:

Science fiction novel

Anathem, by Neal Stephenson

Fantasy novel

Lavinia, by Ursula K. Le Guin

First novel

Singularity’s Ring, by Paul Melko

Young adult book

The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman

Novella

Pretty Monsters, by Kelly Link

Novelette

Pump Six, by Paolo Bacigalupi

Short Story

“Exhalation”  (Eclipse Two),by Ted Chiang

Anthology

The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois 

Collection

Pump Six and Other Stories, by Paolo Bacigalupi

Non-Fiction/Art Book

Coraline: The Graphic Novel, by Neil Gaiman; adapted and illustrated by P. Craig Russell

So Penguin’s the Screening Room has launched Penguin Storytime and YA Cafe. I was particularly taken by the latter, which takes advantage of some pretty slick production values while grilling a few of the publisher’s heavy hitters. The first three interviewees: Laurie Halse Anderson, John Green, and Lauren Myracle (who I video-interviewed right here on Likely Stories). Though the videos are long-ish, I’m really digging the supplements. In the case of Anderson, in addition to the 7-minute interview, you get an original poem read by the author, the Wintergirls book trailer, and a 26-minute discussion of Wintergirls between Anderson and five real live teens–apparently escaped from the wild! I found this last video the most interesting, as sometimes we in the youth book racket need a reminder of what real teens look and talk and act like.

Bravo, Penguin. Now all we need is an uninterrupted live feed of John Green’s living room and we’ll be good.

The Phoenix Award is named after the fabled bird that rose from its ashes with renewed life and beauty. Phoenix books also rise from the ashes of neglect and obscurity and once again touch the imaginations and enrich the lives of those who read them.

The award is given to a noteworthy English language book that hasn’t won any major awards, some twenty years after its original publication.

Meanwhile, Junot Diaz is somewhere doing a dance of joy. According to The Millions blog, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has, with the IMPAC Dublin Award nomination, become one of the most highly praised novels in the last 15 years. Wao is in the top four modern classics, with the  No. 1 slot is occupied by Edward P. Jones’  The Known World. Titles quickly scaling the  list include: The Secret Scripture, Olive Kitteridge, Home, The Lazarus Project, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Animal’s People.

Some parents of incoming freshmen at Antioch High School want an assigned summer reading book pulled from the school’s shelves and the curriculum because it uses foul, racist language and describes sexual acts.

You can read Ian Chipman’s review of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian to see how unimaginative these parents are being. I don’t link to these stories too much anymore, partly because American Libraries and AL Direct do a better job of it, but partly because the stories seem so depressingly similar. Often it feels as though you could change the proper nouns and republish the story.

This one, though, had a quote from one of the parents that jumped out at me:

Anderson said she read the book because she wanted to be able to help her son understand it.

“I began reading, and I started to cross out sections that I didn’t want him to read,” she said. “Soon I thought, ‘Wait, this is not appropriate; he is not reading this.’ “

I love how blase this is, as if the act of helping your child understand a book involves crossing out the parts you don’t even want to talk about. As the chairman of the English department so sensibly states, the book is exactly about the kinds of things that the high-schoolers-to-be will encounter in high school; it’s exactly the kind of book to help them with it.

Parents, of course, should always be part of their children’s learning experiences, but they should act as transmitters of ideas, not censors. In this case, the teens would be better off without their parents’ “help.”

Final thought: the reading list apparently already includes an alternative title, quoted as “Down River,” although they probably mean Will Hobbs’ Downriver, not John Hart’s Down River. But does it hurt a YA author’s street cred to be the safe alternate for a controversial book? Just asking.

As I’ve gotten to know Daniel Kraus, I’ve found that we have some similar touchstones. And I’m guessing that if, for me, Rushmore was startling, for him, it must have been mind-blowing. As part of the lead-up to the release of his first novel, The Monster Variations, he’s digging up video of movies he made with his friends while growing up in Iowa and screening them at Francis Ford Iowa. And, yes, some of them were remakes of movies that he really liked.

Unlike me, Daniel grew up to be an honest-to-god talented filmmaker. But, as you’ll see from the apologetic annotations that accompany his clips, it wasn’t always obvious that things would turn out that way.

The British publisher Bloomsbury denied on Monday that J. K. Rowling copied substantial parts of another children’s book to write “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” Reuters reported. The estate of Adrian Jacobs, an author who died in 1997, has said it seeks a trial in the London High Court against Bloomsbury for copyright infringement. The estate said that Ms. Rowling’s 2000 novel, the fourth entry in her wildly popular Harry Potter series, was plagiarized from Jacobs’s 1987 book, “The Adventures of Willy the Wizard — No 1 Livid Land.”

Even if her book shares some plot points with Goblet, Jacobs clearly didn’t have Rowling’s knack for fantastic monikers, which raises that age old question: What’s in a name? Would the HP books have been quite so wildly popular if Willy the Wizard, and not Harry Potter, had flown off to “Livid Land” instead of Hogwarts each year?

Still Life, by Joy Fielding, was published by Atria in March, while Keeper of Light and Dust, by Natasha Mostert, was published by Dutton in April. So Fielding beat Mostert to store shelves–but which book wins the battle of the Booklist reviews? Writing about Keeper of Light and Dust, Allison Block calls it a “mild tale of modern romance”–but Mary Frances Wilkens calls Still Life a “heart-pounding mainstream thriller.” Winner: Still Life.

 Censoring an Iranian Love Story, which received a starred review in Booklist in the April 15, 2009 issue.  Mandanipour won numerous awards in Iran, yet his fiction was censored, hence unpublished, between 1992 and 1997. Mandanipour came to the U.S. in 2006 as an International Writers Project Fellow at Brown University, and is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University. His novel about two young, thwarted lovers, and a censored writer attempting to outsmart the authorities, is an ironic, funny, and incisive journey through the labyrinth of paradoxes and power plays that shape Iran today.

I knew that Michelle Obama had seen spoken word and poetry slam poets while in Chicago, so I called them. I reminded myself that their house, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, is our house, too. I’m Dutch (my middle name is Roelof) and it has been ingrained in me since I was a wee child: be responsible for your dollar. If someone is taking your money, they owe you. That is how I called the White House—my cash pays for the food there so why wouldn’t I call? At least that’s what I told myself. And the Obama’s are Chi and I’m Chi. I love Hyde Park . . . I’m finishing up a degree at the University of Chicago . . . I have met Barack Obama before when he was working a fund-raiser in Will County. It would almost be stupid not to call them. Right? Right? A poetry slam at the White House; a certain je ne sais quoi, no? I called in late March.

An early conversation went from, “Mail us a letter,” to “Poetry Month is when?” to “Wait while I get so and so on the phone,” to “Here are some cell phone numbers . . . let’s do this.” This statement is not my ego speaking: First Lady Michelle Obama and her staff should be commended for giving me the opportunity to work with them on bringing poetry slam poets to the White House. That is to say, the policy of CHANGE has been thrown around so long for two years that to have this small show come from a high school English teacher, a poetry enthusiast of modest means—I think this says something positive about the new climate at the White House. The White House could have easily invited academically titled poets for a poetry night. Instead, they dug from the roots of the poetry slam world created by a former construction worker from the southeast side of Chicago. The everyman is one of the underlying guides to the poetry slam. Marc Smith is “For the Little Guy.” (Audio sample on Amazon.)

And here it is, poetry slam at the White House, er, kinda.

My high school students, my family, the different artists I spoke to—all were very positive about, even proud of my travels to the White House. I felt as though I was going as an emissary for those who could not go. When I arrived at the East Gate, early in the evening on May 12, I was allowed in with Zach Braff and a beautiful and corky congresswoman from Arizona; Spike Lee and George Stephanopoulos were in front of me. They were cool. I, on the other hand, had bags of gifts for the First Family. The candy bar and pop shop at my hotel gave me plastic bags to put my gifts in. So I walked in with a bag of sweatshirts, some books, and other small items. As the cool ones kept going, I gave my bags to security staffers and told them, “Okay, the sweatshirt is from my high school, it is for Barack, it is our basketball sweatshirt and a little bigger. The other bag has T-shirts for the girls. They might be a little big right now. And these books are for Michelle, I think she’ll like . . . ”, as people, dressed to the nines passed by, I could hear them chuckling. I’m good with that. I was there on the back of others and trying to be responsible.

As I walked in it was a bit surreal. I gave a big smile. I tried to digest the history of the house. But as I climbed the steps to the East Wing, I immediately felt less hold on tradition. I saw one of the old slogans for the poetry slam (I’m not sure it was true), “This ain’t your grandmother’s poetry.” As I walked in there was a DJ, a Mac laptop, two speakers grinding out beats, youth, diverse faces, and a bar: this ain’t your grandmother’s White House. It was full-on junior prom—save for the open bar. People were hiding and not hiding in corners. Pictures were flashing constantly. It was a far cry from walking into the Green Mill and having Smith stand there, greet you and try to set a scene. The people here, like me, were a bit overwhelmed and star-struck. There were some hand shakers. There was some whiskey being poured (don’t listen to the NPR reports about this being a white-wine event only. I’m sure some drank wine, I know many didn’t drink at all, but others . . . well). This was less about a poetry show and more about being in an intimate space with a small amount of people and the President and First Lady. I don’t think that is necessarily true for the First Family, or the staff, but it is hard to get past the surroundings and the who-was-there to get to the art. I didn’t know what my role was, what I was looking for by helping with this thing. Was I being honest?

We don’t have a good quiz app on Booklist Online yet–so print out the PDF and sharpen your pencils!

This next video shows Smith performing his poem “Something” at his home base, the Green Mill Jazz Lounge. The video is part of a 30-minute documentary about Smith and slam poetry, called “Sunday Night Poets,” directed by David Rori. I think both videos represent Smith at his best as a poet and performer.

Looking back, what I should have added to my post yesterday are the rules for the slam part of the show. I suppose anyone can call a poetry slam an event in which poets get up, read poems for about three minutes, and then are evaluated by random judges 0-10, 10 being high. The poet with the highest score wins. What I was trying to get at, at least here in Chicago, is that the competition is only a part of the show—and, in fact, it is my least favorite part. Not the poems, and not the scoring, but people thinking that the scoring means anything. It doesn’t. It is a theatrical gimmick devised to use elements of competition to allow the audience a bit more fun. That’s it.What IS necessary for a good slam is an emcee who knows how to work a room (think entertainment) and keep the talent in line; a narrative in the show that has a beginning, middle and end (think Aristotle); and a diverse level of talent. All of these things under the umbrella of a community of people who want to get out of their houses for an evening—turn off the TV or the radio—or artists, whether professional or amateur, who want a stage to show their work.

When I pitch poetry slam shows to different organizations, I am always operating under the above guidelines. Emcee, narrative, community, and diverse talent. The White House pitch I started in late March was no exception. The resulting White House Poetry Jam became an extension of that pitch. Here is one poet from the poetry slam community who performed on May 12 at the White House event:

I’ll write more about the underbelly of the White House event tomorrow, but here is a fun anecdote. In my role of editor and poetry show producer I have had the opportunity to be around some celebrity artists. I am always very shy about asking for pictures—I don’t like asking, I don’t like taking. That being said, it was passed down to me by higher powers that the White House event is one of those times you ask for pictures. I did not take any the entire first part of the show, but a very friendly Zach Braff was taking pictures with people, saw me holding my camera, and nudged me to comply. He grabbed my camera and we took a picture together—I was very thankful and I began snapping.

James Earl Jones was a performer that evening, reading from Shakespeare’s Othello:

So I asked him for a photo. His lovely wife grabbed the camera and began taking pictures. It took her a while, so while I awkwardly stood there with my arm around James Earl Jones, I mentioned that I am a high school English teacher. This always gets a response like, “Oh, God bless you, thank goodness it isn’t me,” which is pretty much how Jones replied. But I was prepared. Our discussion, with my arm around Darth Vader’s voice for close to ten minutes as his wife was trying to take our picture, went something like this:

“I’ve met the Chicago writer Bill Brashler who went to school with a professor of mine.”

Jones gives me a blank stare. He looks at his wife, who says, “I’m going to get this picture for you Mark.”

“Brashler wrote The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, about the negro baseball league, one of your early films.”

“Oh yes,” said Jones, recognition dawning. He chuckled and smiled at his wife. “We don’t let the writers on set.”

“He told me that Billy Dee Williams was supposed to be the catcher in the film, but when they started shooting he didn’t want his face covered up by the catchers mask,” I continued.

Jones looked at me, not sure if he was hearing me correctly. He he smiled and pointed at his chest. “I was the catcher.”

“Yes, I know. What I mean is, I think they had to rewrite the script because in the book, Billy’s character, the leader, was the catcher.”

“I was the catcher,” Jones said again, his voice closer to Vader this time then before.

“Billy Dee Williams face was his money . . . he didn’t want it covered up,” I replied.

A blank stare from Jones. “It doesn’t really matter, Richard Pryor stole the film,” I added. (I didn’t mean this as an insult, I meant to compliment the dead, which I’ve been taught to do, and I thought it would be a nice way to switch it up, bring back some memories).

“Honey, you need to take this picture. The President is leaving and he wants me to say goodbye to him before he goes,” Jones said, removing his arm. Pictures were snapped. Jones started collecting his things and his wonderful, beautiful and earnest wife handed me my camera back.

As they were leaving, Jones turned to me one last time, smiled and poked his finger at me. In full on, scary Darth Vader voice (mind you I was raised on the first three Star Wars films and still believe to this day that Darth Vader is the ultimate evil in the universe). “BASHLER,” he intoned, addressing our first part of the conversation.

“No, BRASHLER,” I countered.

“BASHLER,” he repeated, and moved on to say so long to the President. What’s one to do when confronted by the ultimate evil in the universe in regard to a misname? I did as any youngest sibling of four would do, I whispered to his walking back, “Brashler . . . ”

More to the point tomorrow.