eMusic » Elizabeth Isadora Gold

Discover: Scandinavian Murder Mysteries

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 16:18:19 +0000

What is it about Scandinavia that inspires so many tales of murder? Actual crime rates in Sweden, Denmark and Norway are historically low (not counting the Vikings, of course), but ever since Stieg Larsson’s blockbuster The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo captivated U.S. readers, mysteries set in far northern Europe have become as ubiquitous as Harlequin romances back when Fabio was still in business. There is and forever will be only one Lizbeth Salander, but the fun of these other books is as clear as glacial runoff.

The detectives — from Jo Nesbo’s alcoholic but always remorseful Harry Hole to Rostlund and Hellestrom’s nostalgic and obsessive Ewert Grens — fall somewhere between Ingmar Bergman antiheroes and Dashiell Hammett private eyes. Like the best literary sleuths, they are brooding, hard-drinking and questioning of self and society, yet committed to justice and egalitarianism (you would never find a discussion of maternity leave in an American mystery). Settings and scenarios are foreign enough to feel exotic to American fans — victims turn up on fjord tour boats or amid fields of summer wheat; police detectives fiercely oppose the death penalty. It’s like a literary trip to Ikea, but these stories don’t require special light bulbs or funny wrenches. And with all that snow and ice, they’re perfect coolers for summer heat.

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Phantom

Jo Nesbo
2012 | Unabridged
Phantom feels like the final chapter of Nesbo's Harry Hole series, which is too bad, because Harry is pretty hot stuff. More psychological and less gory than Nesbo's previous books, Phantom is heartbreaking and pulse-quickening in equal measure. Hole is a recovering alcoholic perpetually falling off the wagon, handsome and difficult — a nice girl's bad boy. The star and scourge of Oslo's corruption-riddled police department, Hole has built his reputation on... catching serial killers. At the conclusion of the previous novel, the terrifying The Snowman, Hole fled Oslo for Hong Kong, hoping to give his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Rakel, and her troubled son ,Oleg, a chance at a normal life. Now Oleg is a teenage junkie who has possibly murdered his best friend in a drug deal gone sour. When Hole comes home to save Oleg, he finds the usual complications: the Russian mafia, tempting society ladies, and his own demons.
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The Stranger

Camilla Lackberg
2013 | Unabridged
Only in Sweden could a writer connect Hansel and Gretel with reality TV and come up with something more fun than either alone. Cutting between the mystery of two lost children and the murder of the heavy-partying reality show star Barbie, the novel follows detective Patrik Hedstrom, who has to find a killer whose motives could be anything from revenge to jealousy to panic. Set in the affluent tourist town of Fjällbacka,... his search takes him through Sweden even as his fiancée, Erica, plans their long-delayed nuptials and cares for their toddler daughter. In one of the more hilariously practical subplots, Erica searches for a wedding dress to suit her postpartum body, deciding that she and Patrik need to eat fewer buns (in every one of these books, the characters constantly eat sticky buns; it's very distracting). The Stranger's conclusion is both creepily satisfying and sentimental.
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Silenced

Kristina Ohlsson
2013 | Unabridged
Every culture has its own particular social issues. In historically homogenous Sweden, immigration rights and the plight of refugees are particularly current concerns. Silenced plays on this obsession, contrasting the story of a murdered liberal minister who hid illegals in his country home with that of his daughters, who have each had their lives and safety changed by their father's activities. Fredrika Bergman, heavily pregnant by her married boyfriend, a former concert... violinist, is one of the primary detectives on the case. As the bodies pile up and the moral questions multiply, Fredrika and the other members of her team struggle to find the truth. Ohlsson's characters are as strong as her plot twists, making Silenced particularly satisfying.
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Invisible Murder

Agnete Friis
2012 | Unabridged
Set in Copenhagen and Budapest, Invisible Murder is another book about the immigration issue. Nurse Nina Borg helps illegal immigrants who have fallen between the cracks of Sweden's refugee "problem." One night she is called to tend to a sick child in a hideaway on the far outskirts of town. Of course, the first child is only the beginning, and soon Nina risks her marriage, her already tenuous relationship with her teenage... daughter, and her professional status to help them. Meanwhile, a crew of homegrown criminals meets up with Tomas, a Hungarian Roma teenager. The fall of the Soviet Union has left him with some shady opportunities, and now he's trying to get that big score, the one that will pull his family out of poverty. When he steals his brother Sandor's passport, things start to go horribly wrong, as mistaken identities compound and more hidden Roma fall ill. Invisible Murder's plotting can be overly complicated, but the characters and detail pull the reader along.
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Cell 8

Börge Hellström
2013 | Unabridged
The members of Stockholm's police department have learned to both appreciate and ignore detective Ewert Grens. Morose, phlegmatic, obsessed with the singer Siw Malmkvist (Sweden's answer to Connie Francis), Ewert's emotional clock stopped the day he ran over his young wife's head with his car. Since then, he's become an excellent detective, but an intractable bastard, compulsively visiting his brain-damaged sweetheart at her convalescent home, defying criminals and prosecutors in equal measure.... Cell 8 is the third in the Grens series, and as in the others, the authors expand his purview to political and moral questions beyond Sweden's borders.

John Schwartz's case initially attracts Grens's attention because it involves a head injury — Schwartz, a musician, attacked a man whom he saw molesting a young woman on the dance floor. Soon, Schwartz's true identity becomes known: He was on death row in a U.S. prison and somehow escaped. Rostlund and Hellstrom present an interesting dilemma: Grens and his team must square their abhorrence of America's criminal justice system with their duties as sworn officers of the law.
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Martin Beck: Roseanna

Maj Sjöwall
2013 | Dramatization
Henning Mankell, author of the rightly acclaimed Wallander series, cites Sjöwall and Wahlöö as his literary progenitors, the first of the great Swedish crime writers. Roseanna was published in 1965, and is the first in a series starring detective Martin Beck. Beck's empty marriage and suburban malaise would fit in on Mad Men; he's post-war in an almost American way. The victim, a young American tourist and sexual libertine, is brutally raped... and murdered while on a cruise of Sweden's fjords. In spite (or perhaps because of) Beck's personal problems, he keeps pursuing the killer, doggedly refusing to declare Roseanna's murder cold. Beck also resists moralizing over her sexual freedom, reminding contemporary readers that Sweden was a land of sexual "health" while Americans languished in the prudish Eisenhower era. It's probably thanks to the current Nordic crime fiction trend that Sjöwall and Wahlöö's series has been reissued. Thanks, Dragon Tattoo fans!
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Interview: Adam Mansbach

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Fri, 31 May 2013 15:27:09 +0000

I first met Adam Mansbach in college. We were DJs together, sharing a love for classic soul records which, in those pre-iPod days, were only available in dusty thrift store crates or the trash-picked piles of homeless guys who sold them on the street. Adam, like me, considered himself a writer, even starting his own magazine, Elementary, dedicated to covering what we then loftily called “Hip-Hop Culture.” Did I want to write for it? Hell yeah. That’s how Adam wound up publishing my first piece, about the sound of Philadelphia — something I’ve also written about here.

We ended up in grad school together, both writing about music and about being white people in love with sound not obviously our own. Adam was a drum tech for the legendary jazz drummer Elvin Jones and traveled to Europe to interview graffiti writers. Soon enough, he published his first novel, Shackling Water (2002), about a young saxophonist.

After moving to the Bay Area, Adam had a daughter and published — a lot. In 2011, in the midst of managing the incomprehensible sleep-wake cycle of my own new baby girl, three separate friends emailed me PDFs of Go the F**k to Sleep. Once I stopped laughing, I realized it was written by Adam. By that time, it was No. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller list and a full-blown phenomenon.

What does a writer do after becoming the voice of Generation X parents? In Adam’s case, he returned to his first love: writing about hip-hop. Rage is Back‘s protagonist is Dondi, a teenage Dante on our tour of New York City’s b-boy past. Dondi’s father, Rage, was a graffiti writer who disappeared around the same time as the city’s bombed trains. When Rage reappears, seeking revenge for the supposed police murder of a member of his crew, Dondi joins him and the ragtag survivors of hip-hop’s golden years in one last brilliant caper. The novel’s language and lore will remind old heads of the glory years, educate young seekers, and make everyone laugh. And in true DIY hip-hop fashion, the book comes with a bonus: an “official” Rage is Back mixtape produced by J.Period with contributions by Black Thought and Common, among many others.

Adam and I caught up via phone on one of the first days of New York spring.

What were you listening to while you were writing?

I listened to a lot of dub and Nuyorican salsa stuff — Ray Barretto, Eddie Palmieri. That music is in hip-hop’s DNA and in New York’s cultural DNA so heavily. Also, foundational breakbeats: “Apache,” by the Incredible Bongo Band, and “Scorpio,” by Dennis Coffey. These have become household staples, because it’s important that my daughter understand breakbeats!

Why does Dondi identify so much with the golden age of hip-hop?

Dondi makes passing references to Jay-Z, Nas, and Biggie. He mentions Jay-Z less as a musician than as a cultural icon, in the context of the kids selling drugs on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. He sees the disconnect between what they’re listening to and what they want to be.

Did writing Rage is Back make you nostalgic for New York?

It made me nostalgic for New Yorkers, especially the graffiti artists I know — their speed and wit, the way they riff and talk shit, their grasp and compression of history. New Yorkers can have this weird provincialism, where everything that happened within the five boroughs is of monumental significance. Paying tribute to graffiti writers made me miss being there, getting to hear those stories.

How did you first get interested in graffiti culture?

I was always a graffiti head, but when I moved to New York for college in ’94, I met a lot of these guys and started hearing their stories, which were inevitably about someone who had disrespected the storyteller in some way. Graffiti writers are kind of unique cases, because their entire history has been eradicated. They’ve had to be the voices of history for so long. They all have their own stories, but it’s fascinating the level of detail and memory these guys have.

Can you talk a little about the roots of the music in the book? For example, why was an artist such as Afrika Bambaataa so important to the people in the book?

New York was a compressed, seething environment where this music and culture came to life. It’s easy to forget, given hip-hop’s global dominance, that it’s only 30 years old. Most of the pioneers are still around, and so are the people who made them what they are: fans, listeners, early adopters. Bambaataa is enormously important to my characters, not just because he made Planet Rock, but because he is one of the main figures who ushered New York City out of the gang era and into the hip-hop era — and from the position of being a gang leader. He had an amazing record collection and thought about music in an incredibly democratic and free ranging way. At his parties, he would play current disco hits, the Pink Panther theme song, old vaudeville routines. If a song didn’t go over well, he would play it again and again until people understood what he was hearing. But the reason he was able to get to that level was that he was the warlord of the Black Spades from Bronx River. When he transitioned into music, he could guarantee the safety of kids from other parts of the Bronx to come and hear him play. The force of his personality and the politics of what he did were totally transformative.

I think something that people don’t get now is what it felt like to be a kid then and how if felt when new record came out.

In the novel, Dondi tries to explain to the reader things he’s unearthed, not being a part of that generation. He’s taking his cues from his parents and their friends about what was important. ’87, ’88, ’89 — he cares about that time so deeply because it was pivotal to his father’s life, and the way guys marked time was by what music came out when. For example, you waited for a new album to drop, you copped it that day, and then you went home and started to dissect it. I was buying records at that time with my allowance money. I might have $8 left over and not really be sure what to buy. I’d pick an album because the guy on the cover looked a certain way, or the Stop the Violence logo was on the cover.

In the novel, there’s that amazing scene where Kid Capri is DJing on a boat…

As someone who DJs myself, I love the idea that DJing is all about that perfect ethereal moment of song selection. In Rage is Back, when the police show up, Kid Capri throws on “Police in Helicopter” and galvanizes this moment of protest. Kid Capri was an iconic DJ. He used to personally sit up on 125th St. and sell his mixtapes, back when being a mixtape DJ did not mean having a bunch of exclusives but actually doing interesting things with blending and mixing music. He’s one of the guys who got known for putting R&B vocals over a hip-hop beat, so you could argue that he ushered in an entire new era of R&B — New Jack Swing. I don’t think you would have gotten En Vogue singing “Hold On” over a loop of James Brown’s “The Payback” if Kid Capri hadn’t been selling mixes exactly like that years earlier.

Tell me about the mixtape for the book.

I got introduced to J.Period, who’s a renowned mixtape DJ. He creates these narratives, and goes the extra mile to paint a portrait of the artist. We both realized we lived in Fort Greene at the same time back in the day, and used to be the only two guys who would go to this one record spot in a little dusty store on Fulton Street.

You never told me about that record spot!

Yeah…J’s recently been made the musical director for the Brooklyn Nets, but I think he was also looking for something totally new to do. The tape includes part of the audiobook, with Danny Hoch and GZA. J and I discussed the form the mixtape could take, and he started giving copies of the book to people like Black Thought and Common, who have tracks on the record.

Sounds like a dream.

For sure. If you’ve been in hip-hop for a certain length of time, you have common reference points; you’re geeky and nostalgic about the same things. Whether it’s with J.Period or some graffiti artist from Stockholm who I end up quoting every line from Style Wars with, that remains really fun for me. Despite all of the millions of directions hip-hop has gone in, it still provides such a clear basis for friendship.

My Life In Philly Soul

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Fri, 31 May 2013 14:40:06 +0000

I was born into the Sound of Philadelphia family in 1974. My father, Larry Gold, was a cellist in TSOP’s house band, MFSB (the letters stand for Mother Father Sister Brother, or Motherfucker Son of a Bitch, depending who’s asking). Later, he wrote string and horn arrangements for Teddy Pendergrass and McFadden & Whitehead, sitting at our Yamaha upright with his friend Jerry Cohen, the brilliant keyboard player — and co-writer of “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now.” I fell in love with this music listening to that piano, and going to sessions at Sigma Sound Studios when I was little.

Songwriters, producers and soul music impresarios Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff and Thom Bell had been working together long before founding Mighty Three Music in 1973. They’d known each other since they were teenagers, singing and playing together in the Romeos, a prototypical ’60s R&B band. With little more than a song in their hearts and local garmento Ben Krass as investor, the Three began producing local acts such as the Soul Survivors (“Expressway to Your Heart”), as well as older stars looking for a comeback (Jerry Butler, Wilson Pickett). By the time Gamble and Huff signed their groundbreaking deal with Columbia in 1971, Philadelphia International Records, was already a sure thing artistically. But their vision was bigger: they wanted to retain both creative and financial control of their company — something that no black-owned label had ever been able to do. Gamble and Huff ended up not only changing soul music; they changed the face of the record industry.

With its combination of gutbucket soul vocals, orchestral strings, and jazz rhythms, Philly Soul ruled the charts through the seventies and early eighties. Gamble and Huff wrote and produced a record-breaking number of smashes, making Philadelphia International Records one of the most successful companies in the city, as well as one of the most profitable black-owned businesses in the country. The hits didn’t stop: Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs Jones,” the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money,” and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” to name a few. The iconoclastic Thom Bell stayed independent, writing and producing for the Delfonics, Stylistics, and the Spinners.

The Sound of Philadelphia is the sound of home to me. Growing up on the edge of North Philly, it was almost impossible not to hear “The Love I Lost,” wafting over my family’s back fence, or “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” blasting from a passing car Caddy. Hanging out with soul singers clad in head-to-toe lizard skin, feeling my family’s fortunes rise and fall with the charts… Well, it might not have been a typical childhood, but it was mine.

The Best Of Philly Soul - Vol. 2

Bunny Sigler
2006 | That Philly Sound / CD Baby

Whether growling like Sam and Dave, operatically thrilling and trilling like his hero (and fellow Philly native) Mario Lanza, or crooning like Smokey Robinson, Bunny Sigler — aka Bundino Sigilucci, Bunny Siglowitz, and Bunny O'Sigler (depending on the holiday) — is Philly Soul. Not to mention that he used to wear a Dracula cape and/or a Moses robe in the studio, drove a car called the Bunnymobile, and will break into Ave... Maria at the slightest provocation.

A successful songwriter for PIR artists including the O'Jays, and Wilson Pickett, Bunny's own albums too often languish in vinyl-only obscurity. While this disc may not be his wild seventies funk, these Jackie Wilson-style soul burners will get you dancing around the house singing into your hairbrush. Confidential to Paul McCartney: listen to Bunny singing "Yesterday." And eat your heart out.
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The Philly Sound Get Down - Funky Philly Instrumentals

Various Artists
Funkadelphia Records / The Orchard

The cover for these rare Philly instrumentals might seem weird. Who is that old guy, and why is he holding a (record freaks, chill) ridiculously rare Gamble label 45? Ben Krass was a purveyor of cut-rate suits, locally infamous for starring in his own Benny Hill-style TV commercials. Oh, and for being the only person in Filthy-delphia willing to invest in barely-out-of-his-teens Kenny Gamble's first foray into the record biz.

As for extended... info about these mostly mysterious songs…Even my trusty bible of early Philly Soul, Tony Cummings's The Sound of Philadelphia, has little to offer other than that the Panic Buttons are a "blue-eyed" (white) group. It is also safe to assume that the funkiest of these tracks — i.e.: all the stuff by the Interpretations — is actually the MFSB rhythm section. The guys had to do something in the 45 minutes a day they weren't playing on PIR tracks, right?
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The Early Greatest Hits

Patti Labelle and The Bluebelles
1993 | Brookside Records / The Orchard

Patti Labelle, Nona Hendryx, Sarah Dash and Cindy Birdsong must be about 15 years old on these tracks. While these doo-wop/R&B twisters don't give any obvious indications that the 'Belles would one day sprout bronze lamé wings and voulez vous their way to funk history, that's okay. The group's early hits are all accounted for on this collection, and Labelle's voice is already eerily powerful -- "Please Hurry Home" will give you... chills. Even on the more typical tracks, there are seriously special only-in-Philly moments. Check out the piano solo on "Itty Bitty Twist" (an uncredited Leon Huff or Thom Bell?), and Patti's break-the-glass finish on "Bridal Gown." Local faves "I Sold My Heart to the Junkman," and "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," will remind listeners how much the early sixties were still, culturally, like the fifties. Bring on the lamé.
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Philly Soul Girls

Various Artists - Distortions Funkadelphia
Distortions Funkadelphia / The Orchard

These songs are just adorable, holding their own next to early sides of other girl groups out of New Orleans or Chicago. Unfortunately, as with every early compilation listed here, there are no personnel listings for the songs, but I can happily guess that every musician on these cuts went on to record with MFSB. That's probably the legendary rhythm section of Ronnie Baker on bass, Earl Young on drums, Vince... Montana on vibes, and (depending on the day) Norman Harris, Roland Chambers, and Bobby Eli on guitar. Any track listed as written by Huff most definitely means Leon, which indicates he's also playing keyboard — and that Gamble and Thom Bell are probably somewhere around as well. Lucky us.
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13th And Pine

Nazz
2004 | Its About Music.com / The Orchard

If 13th and Pine seems an odd choice for this list, just listen to the opening bars of "Loosen Up/Under the Ice" — a Philly-style take off on Archie Bell and the Drells soul classic "Tighten Up." Before front man Todd Rundgren rocketed to psychedelic rock stardom (and his future as Liv Tyler's step-dad), he was in a Philly blues/R&B band called Woody's Truck Stop — along with my dad. Which I... tell you not as much to brag, as to illustrate yet again how interwoven the City of Brotherly Love's music scene was, is, and always will be. By the way, 13th and Pine is the Center City corner where Todd and the boys lived back when they started the band. Sorry, those stories are classified.
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Drowning In The Sea Of Love

Joe Simon
2013 | Ace Records / PIAS Digital

One look at Drowning in the Sea of Love's supa-dupa soul-psychedelic cover in my parents' record collection, and of course I threw it on the turntable immediately. What I heard surprised me. Philly Soul goes country? In fact, Drowning is a great example of what Gamble and Huff did best: taking a "mature" singer whose hit-making potential seemed tapped-out, and then playing to his strengths. While the title track hit No. 3... on the Billboard R&B charts, the whole record deserves a lot of listening. About half the tracks are penned by the songwriting team of Bunny Sigler and Phil Hurtt, the others by Gamble and Huff themselves. "If" is an especially poignant social-ills ballad, and Simon's cover of "You Are Everything" takes the Stylistics to church way below the Mason Dixon line — and brings the Philly strings along on the field trip.
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The Sound Of Philadelphia (Live In London) (Digitally Remastered)

Various Artists
2009 | CW Music / EMG / The Orchard

The Three Degrees' breathy repeated mantra of "People all over the world," and "Let's get it on, it's time to get down," on their No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 hit "TSOP" exemplifies latter Philly Soul to me: refined yet raw and sugar-sweet. Even more than with most girl groups, the Degrees' sound was a sum-of-their-parts blend; they're sirens, not soloists. Though the line-up switched almost as many times as the ladies changed... their diaphanous get-ups, you're hearing Fayette Pinkney, Valerie Holiday and Sheila Ferguson on the cuts from the group's '70s heyday. "When Will I See You Again?" with its heartbreaking lyric and gorgeous music, is understandably their most famous single. Other highlights: a cool cover of the Spinners' "I'll Be Around," and the saucy "Dirty Old Man."
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Philly Golden Classics

First Choice
2006 | Synergie OMP / The Orchard

Young, fresh and bursting with seemingly relentless disco optimism, First Choice were natural dance floor queens. Sometimes posited as rivals to the supposedly smoother Three Degrees, First Choice's Rochelle Fleming, Joyce Jones and Annette Guest hardly sound rough-edged. If the grooves feel familiar, it's because many of these tracks boast MFSB guitarist Norman Harris as producer. The Afrobeat opening and street-yet-silly title of "Newsy Neighbors" is pure TSOP, and "This is... the House" is Martha and the Vandellas-esque. Fans of sound-effects heavy soul will appreciate both the gunning engine on "Hustler Bill," and the sexy soul song convention-reversing masculine moaning on "Don't Fake It."
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Divorcing Neo 2 Marry Soul

Jaguar Wright
IndieBlu Music / Entertainment One Distribution

Warning: Jaguar Wright is one of the best soul singers in the world, with a voice that melds the ferocity of Patti Labelle with the depth of Chaka Khan. I have stood three feet away from Jag while she was singing, feeling as if the top of my head was going to blow off; I've also heard her take down the stadium at Jones Beach while supposedly acting as a side act... for the Roots.

Fave tracks on the cleverly titled Divorcing Neo include the cover of soul classic "Woman to Woman," and Jag's own bone-chilling composition, "Do Your Worst." Both tracks exemplify the singer as sort of the next generation-Philly Soul "devil" to Jill Scott's angel (check out Who Is Jill Scott? (Words And Sounds Vol. 1) if you don't know what I mean). As Jaguar herself explains, "Please just throw it down before I have to go and buy your moms a new black gown."
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Love Train: The Sound of Philadelphia

Various
2008 | Philadelphia International/Legacy

This box is not only one of the best values on eMusic, it's also a perfect intro to Philly Soul. The four discs cover PIR basics ("Love Train" and "If You Don't Know Me By Now," to name two obvious choices), and this is also the only place on eMusic to hear such crucial artists as the Spinners ("Rubberband Man" and "I'll Be Around" are standouts), and Dusty Springfield (yes, she... cut a whole record in Philly, and yes it is as good — maybe better? — than Dusty in Memphis). You also get early Gamble/Huff/Bell confections including 1967's "Expressway to Your Heart," by the Soul Survivors (complete with honking horns), and 1968's tragi-comic "Cowboys to Girls," by the Intruders. And be sure to check out a couple of famous career revivers: Jerry "the Iceman" Butler's "Only the Strong Survive" — pre-Elvis, mind you — and the almost ludicrously funky "Don't Let the Green Grass Fool You" by Wicked Wilson Pickett.
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Collectors' Item

Harold Melvin & the Bluenotes
1987 | P.I.R.

Purists may scoff that I've chosen a Best Of compilation for this group, rather than the more obvious Wake Up Everybody. I guess I can't resist that vinyl-sounding dusty opening on "The Love I Lost": solo organ (Leon Huff, probably), and then each member of the rhythm section joining in, one by one, until Earl Young swishes his way through what could be the first disco back beat on record. The... Bluenotes personnel can be confusing. Harold Melvin founded and led the band, but that's not his gruff voice singing lead — it's onetime drummer Teddy Pendergrass, before he went solo. What a voice he has here. Listen to "If You Don't Know Me By Now" after a fight with your lover and if you don't weep, you are made of stone. And be sure to check out looong versions of "Bad Luck" and "Miss You." Between McFadden and Whitehead's lyrics and Teddy's extended vamps, the songs are perfect vignettes of inner city life.
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Teddy

Teddy Pendergrass
2009 | Legacy Recordings

How do I describe this record? Take Barry White's unselfconscious love-man persona, add a dash of Al Green's gospel roots, mix with full-on last-days-of-disco hedonism, add a paper umbrella, and sip while lying in a Jacuzzi. There is just something about listening to a man instruct you to rub him "down with hot oils, baby!" I mean, gosh. It's no surprise that at Teddy's Ladies Only concerts in the '70s, fans showered... the singer with panties and stuffed bears. Heavy breathing aside, this is a fabulous record that most (younger) soul freaks don't seem to know too well, though back in the late '70s, Teddy was Gamble and Huff's premier solo act. This is probably because his career was cut short after he became paralyzed in a car crash in 1982. Check out the later records as well — his voice is still miraculous — but also be sure to listen to the amazing "Love TKO" on 1980's TP.
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MCFadden & Whitehead

McFadden & Whitehead
2007 | Legacy Recordings

John Whitehead and Gene McFadden were both dear friends of my family, and both passed away in recent years. I was lucky enough to interview them and hear them sing in the studio many times. Therefore, it's tremendously difficult for me to capture this record in a blurb. They sang together from the time they were teenagers, backing Otis Redding on his last tour and then coming home to Philly to write... hits for Teddy Pendergrass and the O'Jays, among others. They wrote "Back Stabbers," PIR's first No. 1 hit in 1972. In 1979, their "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now" was the label's last. That song is known as the "unofficial black national anthem" (as opposed to the "official" genteel hymn, "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing"). See Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor for a longer riff on the tune — John and Gene would have loved it.
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The Jacksons

The Jacksons
1987 | Epic

It's always shocking to me when even die-hard soul fans don't know that, after leaving Motown in the mid '70s, and before Michael made Off the Wall, the Jacksons took up musical residence in City of Brotherly Love. This lack of awareness is probably because The Jacksons (1976) and Goin' Places (1977) were not monster hits in the vein of, say, ABC. But really, who's counting? The world's most famous siblings hardly... waited out their awkward adolescences in silence. Instead, they recorded Gamble and Huff tracks, hung with writers/producers Gene McFadden, John Whitehead and Dexter Wansel, and — for the first time in their already formidable careers — played their own instruments and penned some of their own songs. My personal faves here are "Show You the Way to Go" and "Enjoy Yourself." However, how can my heart not drop to hear Michael, voice almost cracking, sing his own lyric, "Circumstances have me in a terrible fix," on "Dreamer"?
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That's How I'll Be Loving You

Bunny Sigler
2008 | Legacy Recordings

I've already said my piece about Bunny, so I think I will take this opportunity to let the man speak for himself: "I was the seventh child born with a tooth on the day after Easter, plus they heard me crying in my mother's womb before I was born. So they knew I would sing." As tempted as I may be to leave you with that, and just let you listen to... this fabulous record, I have to add that the title track, with its churchy chords and caramel-sweet vocal is one of those dream "lost" classics. "Shake Your Booty" somehow brings Sesame Street to Studio 54. And mere words cannot describe Bunny's slowed-down street-preacher cover of the O'Jays "Love Train." Switch off the lights, turn up the volume and get ready for goosebumps.
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Love Is The Message

MFSB
2008 | Legacy Recordings

When Kenny Gamble wrote the theme for Soul Train, PIR's rhythm guys had been playing together for years. "T.S.O.P." showed that the group was the tightest rhythm section north of Memphis, and the best (yes, I'm biased) pop strings and horns anywhere. MFSB's core included (but was not limited to): Norman Harris, Roland Chambers and Bobby Eli on guitars, Ronnie Baker on bass, Vince Montana on vibes, Earl Young and Karl Chambers... on drums, and Leon Huff and Lenny Pakula on keyboard — not to mention violinist Don Renaldo leading the strings and horns. Like Motown's Funk Brothers and Stax's Booker T and the MG's, the group named themselves, but with a Filthydelphia twist. MFSB stands for Mother Father Sister Brother, or Mother Fucker Son of a Bitch, if you're in the loop. Most of Love is the Message's arrangements are by Bobby Martin, but I would be remiss if I didn't add credits for Vince Montana and first flute Jack Faith.
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Here To Create Music

Leon Huff
2007 | Legacy Recordings

If Kenny Gamble is the voice of the Sound of Philadelphia, Leon Huff is the body — actually, make that the hands. Born in Camden, New Jersey, Huff taught himself to play by listening to the radio, and to his mother accompanying their church choir. Eventually, he became a session player on songs by the Ronettes, and other bubblegum acts. He and Gamble met in their teens, and the... rest, as they say, is history. When I went to interview Huff, he invited me to meet him at the PIR office on North Broad Street. As a young assistant led me through the labyrinth of gold and platinum record-hung hallways, I heard boogie-woogie piano playing, it seemed, all around me. I didn't realize it wasn't a recording, until I got to the studio. There, at the instrument, sat Leon Huff. As I approached, he finished with a glissando. "So what would you like to know?" he asked. Now you, too, can experience something like that amazing moment.
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Travelin' In Heavy Traffic

Don Covay
2008 | Legacy Recordings

Gamble and Huff's makeovers were always strokes of production genius. They'd sign up artists who'd been huge pre-British Invasion, and Philly-fy them with songs custom-written for their specific vocal chops — and maturity. This gave new professional life to Wilson Pickett and Jerry Butler, so why not try it with the lesser-known soul man Don Covay? Covay's musical life could give Bunny Sigler and McFadden & Whitehead a run for their money.... He was a behind-the-scenes southern soul legend, writer of smashes for, among others, Aretha Franklin ("Chain of Fools"), and small but beloved hits for himself ("Mercy, Mercy," also covered by the Rolling Stones). The Dexter Wansel-produced Travelin' is an odd record. Covay channels Mick Jagger on the title track — though reportedly, Mick's whole sound is based on copying Don — and doesn't always hold a tune. But "No Tell Motel" is pure funk fun, and "Six Million Dollar Fish" is weirdly stirring.
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Ebony Woman

Billy Paul
2008 | P.I.R.

Another anomaly from the Philly International vaults. Everyone knows Billy Paul for the illicit love ballad "Me and Mrs Jones." While Paul sang the hell out of that song, he was, in a sense, cheating with it on his own true love: jazz. Before signing with Gamble and Huff, Paul played with jazz greats from Charlie Parker to Nina Simone. Ebony Woman showcases the singer's elastic tenor voice, with pared down jazz... combo arrangements on some truly inspired covers. Any version of "Windmills of Your Mind" is amazing, and who knew "Mrs. Robinson" could get so beatnik cool? Billy Martin did the bigger arrangements here (unfortunately I cannot locate the identities of the players on most of these tracks).
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Gonna Take A Miracle

Laura Nyro & LaBelle
2002 | Columbia/Legacy

I am ashamed to say that I didn't know about this record until recently. Where had it been all my life? Miracle is one of the most feminine records I have ever heard, but it refuses to conform to "women's music" stereotypes. It's not Labelle at their sexy Nightbirds funkiest, or Nyro at her most girl-singer introspective. Instead, here is a collection of covers, sung by a still-young New Yorker who grew... up with her ear pressed to the R&B station on her transistor radio. Meanwhile, home in Philly, Patti Labelle, Nona Hendryx and Sarah Dash were selling their hearts to the junkman, and teasing out their bouffants. Then came the Women's Movement, without which this record would have been impossible. Miracle feels more like the early-'70s coming-of-age feminist novels — Fear of Flying or Memoirs of an Ex Prom Queen — than it does like other records of the era. And that's a beautiful thing.
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Ship Ahoy

The O'Jays
2003 | Epic/Legacy

It was ridiculously hard to choose one O'Jays album for this roundup. How could I pass over Back Stabbers? I mean, "Love Train," come on! Or Family Reunion, with its cover of the band surrounded by a multi-culti throng including a Hassidic man and a blonde girl holding a Raggedy Anne? Or So Full of Love, with "Used to be My Girl" and Bunny Sigler's raunchy "Strokety Stroke"? I ended up picking... Ship Ahoy because is it my favorite Philly Soul record, period. But why? Is it the Roots-reminiscent title track, the eco-disco "This Air I Breath"? Or "For the Love of Money," one of the most sampled songs ever? No. It's "Hooks In Me," another Bunny composition. When I first heard it as a teenager, I thought: This song is life. Even now that I understand the best relationships are peaceful, hearing Eddie Levert lead-up to the chorus makes me remember that revelation. Which, in the end, of course, turned out to be about the music.
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Presents Don Cello and Friends

Larry Gold
2003 | Rapster Records / !K7 Records

Don Cello is my father, and the hilariously appropriate nickname is from Jay-Z. When he told me he was doing this record, I knew it was a phenomenal idea. He was already collaborating with these amazing artists. How could he not get everyone together? Even if this collection/collaboration did not represent my DNA, I would still include it. It's a time capsule of Philly Soul's second golden age. Back in the '80s... and early '90s, it was hard to tell if Philly Soul would rise again. We should have known: of course it would. The older players and singers were still around — New Jack just hadn't played to their strengths. And there was a younger generation on the way, honing their chops the way musicians always will, in church and school choirs, piano lessons, their parents' basements and living rooms. I obviously love everything on this disc, but several songs are bittersweet. John Whitehead, Gene McFadden and Eddie Levert all passed away in the last few years. They are missed.
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Herman Koch, The Dinner

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:20:18 +0000

A comedy of manners with a dark moral heart

Don’t read this review before listening to Herman Koch’s novel, The Dinner. Instead, try to imagine the love child of Hitchcock’s single-take thriller Rope, a New York Times Magazine cover story on the evils of helicopter parenting, and the prissily detailed menu from the latest farm-to-table eatery. OK, have you got the picture? No? Well then read on, but beware of spoilers.

Though it’s actually set in the Netherlands, Koch’s home country, the story could just as easily take place in Brooklyn or Berkeley. Two couples, of youngish middle age, meet for dinner at a well-regarded restaurant. The narrator, Paul, seems resentful of the evening ahead; the husband of the other couple, Serge, is a flashy guy of some celebrity (we soon discover he is Paul’s brother and the leading candidate for Prime Minister). Paul is annoyed by Serge’s need to show off and the fact that he can’t just enjoy a quiet night at a local café with his wife, Claire. At first it seems The Dinner will be a comedy of manners: Serge shows off his wine knowledge by gargling his first sip, and the restaurant’s host points a pinky finger at every carefully sourced item on their plates.

But some details are sinister: Babette, Serge’s wife, arrives with sunglasses covering red-rimmed, puffy eyes; Paul is preoccupied by an incident with his son Michel. Earlier that afternoon, he snooped on Michel’s phone, and whatever he saw there haunts him. Claire doesn’t know — or does she? And Serge and Babette’s own children may be involved as well. Especially suspicious to Paul is his sibling’s adopted son from Burkina Faso, Beau. It is Paul’s lack of empathy toward Beau’s very existence in his family — he refers to the adoption as a “rent-to-own agreement” — that tips the reader off. Something is very wrong here, though Paul may not be a reliable narrator. The evening darkens, the courses come and go, and the true moral vacuity of The Dinner’s diners becomes as obvious as the warm goat cheese appetizer.

The Dinner has been a bestseller in Europe for several years already. However, the issues it raises — social responsibility, class conflicts, racism, violence, and the use of new technology — feel universal, as do Paul, Serge, Claire and Babette’s ultimately selfish and self-protective form of parenting.

Youthful Fumblings: A Pre-Sexual Revolution Valentine’s Day

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 22:16:07 +0000

The late great British poet Philip Larkin once wrote: “Sexual intercourse began/ In 1963/ (which was rather late for me)/ Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles’ first LP.” In other words, before the ’60s really hit, sex between consenting, possibly madly in love young people, was furtive, fumbling and shameful — even if it was also hot. In this collection, listen up for cringeworthy boudoir scenes and the euphoria of new freedom. From premature ejaculation to creepy nicknames to diarrhea, happy Valentine’s Day.

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Goodbye, Columbus

Philip Roth
2008 | Unabridged
Before becoming the Grand Old Man of American literature, Philip Roth built his career on chronicling the sexual frustrations of the Jewish man (see Portnoy's Complaint — the protagonist infamously masturbates with a piece of liver!). Goodbye Columbus was his first book, including short stories as well as the title novella about Brenda Patimkin, the perfect Jewish princess and Neil Klugman, her swain from the wrong side of the (New Jersey) tracks.... Theirs is a doomed love, from the first mention of Brenda's nose job to silent lovemaking by the flickering shadows of her family's basement rec room TV to Neil's extravagantly loose bowels brought on by overconsumption of plums and cherries from the Patimkins' designated "fruit refrigerator." Romeo and Juliet they're not, but the tragedy is just as clear: Assimilation is stronger than passion. And too many unwashed nectarines can really catch up on a guy.
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The Pregnant Widow

Martin Amis
2010 | Unabridged
Oh, Martin Amis, you are the only man in the world who can detail the sexual misadventures of British college kids in 1970 and make the reader feel dirty about Jane Austen. The Pregnant Widow's plot is classic love triangle: Lily loves Keith, who might love Lily but really wants to bed her busty best friend, Scheherazade. Then along comes Gloria Beautyman, whose proto-Kardashian "arse" is already legendary (her bikini bottoms were... "sucked off" in a Jacuzzi). The gang's summer in Tuscany is all very mad dogs and Englishmen, until Keith's obsessive lust becomes his undoing. As the now aging Keith recounts the '70s' downward spiral, Gloria — poor, misunderstood, spectacularly rear-ended — transforms from sexual consolation prize to…wife? Part comedy of manners, part dirty-birdy romp, The Pregnant Widow turns unexpectedly dark, much like the transforming decade it chronicles.
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On Chesil Beach

Ian McEwan
2007 | Unabridged
If ever there was a book that argued the case for premarital sex, it is On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. In 1962, Florence and Edward are newlyweds, both virgins, and their wedding night is…British. Perhaps that's an unfairly pejorative adjective, considering the Anglophone romps of other books in this group, but this wedding night is definitely of the "Close your eyes and think of England" variety. McEwan's writing is meticulous yet... florid — the candied cherry garnish atop the bride and groom's appetizer cantaloupe becomes a succulent symbol of Edward's desire and Florence's fear. When she gives him the fruit to suck off the tip of her finger, he assumes it indicates her lust, while in fact she is nervously ill with fear. It is a tribute to the writer that the reader feels equally touched by both characters.
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An Education

Lynn Barber
2010 | Unabridged
Lynn Barber was 16 when she met Simon Goldman, an older man of mysterious means and origins. For two years — those crucial pre-sexual revolution years, from 1960-62 — Simon squired Lynn to restaurants and plays, and took her for "dirty weekends" in Paris. Her parents, upright middle-class Brits, seemed not to mind their daughter's slow seduction. Instead, they welcomed Simon into their home and family, until the day all of his... tall stories finally fell apart. Barber's prose is both biting and self-deprecating. When Simon refers to himself as "Bubl" and to his schoolgirl paramour as "Minn," Barber wrings the full sexual ickiness out of the nicknames; deflowering her, she writes, he asks if "Minn would do Bubl the honour of welcoming him into her home." Ewww.
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Miss O'Dell

Chris O'Dell
2009 | Unabridged
On the other side of the decade — from the late '60s through the even more free-lovin'
'70s — is Miss O'Dell. Now 20 years sober, O'Dell recalls her days of working for the Beatles' Apple Records and "assisting" the Rolling Stones (finding girls for Mick to bed — herself included — and scoring drugs for Keith). Longtime best friends with Pattie Boyd, she was present when George Harrison lost Boyd to his... friend Eric Clapton. And O'Dell herself slept with Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr and…Was she a groupie? Well, when it comes to the mores of Sexual Revolution (mis)behavior, is that even a relevant question? Unlike the fictional heroines of Amis, McEwan, and Roth, O'Dell is not overtly symbolic. Like Lynn Barber, she was just a girl —one who happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right people: post 1963, after the Beatles' first LP.
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Libba Bray, The Diviners

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 21:21:05 +0000

A treat as bubbly and illicit as bootleg champagne

In this eponymous first installment of her new The Diviners series, YA favorite Libba Bray takes on a genuinely wild ride. It’s the height of the Jazz Age, and flapper Evie O’Neill has been “banished” to New York City by her conservative parents. Consigned to live with her stuffy Uncle Will, who just happens to run the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition and the Occult, Evie is thrilled to swill bootleg hooch, dance all night in Harlem speakeasies andâ€¦help solve a series of grisly murders? Beneath Evie’s Roaring Twenties slang and cloche hat, she hides a special power: She can divine (get it?) all sorts of information about people by holding objects that belong to them. Or – more importantly, in the case of the relevant murder victims – belonged.

Evie is just one of The Diviners‘ many characters. Clearly Bray is writing the first book in a series here, and while the main plot is resolved (no spoilers), almost too many threads remain tangled. How will our favorite Harlem numbers runner and poet, Memphis Campbell, help his possessed brother and make a life with Ziegfeld-girl-with-a-past Theta? Will young radical and Evie’s best friend, Mabel Rose, find love? And will Evie’s weird old lady neighbors, the Proctor sisters, ever explain why they’re sprinkling bags of salt in protective circles around their apartment?

No doubt, The Diviners‘ next installment will answer some of these questions while raising still others. In the meantime, Bray’s thriller is a kicky ride. Period details are delicious: Evie’s clothes seem to be exclusively peacock-patterned, and Mabel’s life changes when she bobs her hair. Silent film idol Rudolph Valentino has just died, and the girls love watching his pictures at red velvet-covered movie palaces. If your taste runs to historical fiction with just a soupçon of gore, The Diviners will be a treat as bubbly and illicit as bootleg champagne.

Continuing Education

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 15:09:23 +0000

For many of us, autumn brings back vivid sense memories: the smell of freshly sharpened pencils, the feel of a new backpack’s sticky zipper, the sound of an alarm clock ringing in the dark for the first time in months. But the best thing about back-to-school? New books. That stack of unbroken spines, pages clean of overenthusiastic underlining and highlightsâ€¦Of course, now that we’re all fully educated (yeah, right), we’re free to audit those interesting-sounding classes, the ones that never fit our schedule. And while reading may be fundamental, listening counts – especially with these too-cool-for-school works.

Biochemistry

A science class for those who couldn’t make it through Physics for Poets, covering material from uppers to downers and every illicit substance in between.

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Dog Soldiers

Robert Stone
2009 | Unabridged
The Vietnam War is almost over, and things have gone way beyond heavy. Stone is one of the great chroniclers of the post '60s expulsion from hippie Eden, and antihero John Converse is one of his darkest characters. Expect to learn about pharmaceuticals, jungle warfare, and heat exhaustion. Don't look for a happy ending; we lost the war.
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Stone Arabia

Dana Spiotta
2011 | Unabridged
A generation younger than Robert Stone, Spiotta's take on the post-revolutionary counter culture is more nuanced and less immersive. Growing up in L.A. at the tail end of the Baby Boom, siblings Nik and Denise are Beatlemaniacs-turned-proto-punk rockers – then they get kind of old. If Dog Soldiers introduces us to grizzled survivors, Stone Arabia is about the hopelessness of unfulfilled promise.

Herstory

Oh, for the heady days of the early ’90s! Women’s Studies felt so relevant, what with politicians threatening our bodies and choices and those creepy heroin-chic magazine ads. Wait a minute…

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The Mistress's Daughter

A. M. Homes
2007 | Unabridged
In her novels, Homes has dealt with hot-button subjects from child sexual abuse (The End of Alice) to school shootings (Music for Torching) – clichÃ©-free. Her memoir, The Mistress's Daughter, goes to the root of these obsessions. Adopted as a newborn, Homes never knew the story of her birth parents. Then, in her mid 40s, they contacted her, drawing her into their failed and tragic relationship. Homes' prose is clear as an... unpocked mirror and complex as that mirror's true reflection.
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Veronica

Mary Gaitskill
2008 | Unabridged
Bad Behavior, Gaitskill's debut collection, was shocking. Ostensibly dealing with sexual kinks, the book's true revelations were about the relationships between female friends. In Veronica, Gaitskill revisits this ground, examining the lives of two former “beautiful people.” We all know that even perfect faces eventually grow haggard and lined, and even the purest souls won't resist temptation. The question is, what happens after the inevitable?

Health Class

Get out your pedometers, we’re going on a runâ€¦to the most delectable Buffalo wings in town.

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Master Your Metabolism

Mariska van Aalst
2010 | Abridged
Admit it: If Michaels can scare 500-pound Biggest Losers into sit-ups and turkey burgers, she's probably worth a listen. Even if you don't agree, she's coming for you anyway. Be ready.
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Tales from the Tummy Trilogy

Calvin Trillin
2009 | Abridged
New Yorker raconteur and consummate gourmand Trillin is here to tell you everything you've always wanted to know about Chinese food. Don't listen to this when you're already hungry, or – heaven forbid – as you're walking around the grocery store; you won't make it out alive. Especially if you bump into Jillian Michaels while you're there.

Speech Class

Round your vowels and speak from your diaphragm. Otherwise, we won’t win the varsity championship this year!

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Judy Dench and Michael Williams: With Great Pleasure

BBC Radio 4
2010
What can't British actors make sound cool? Seriously, could Dench and Williams please read aloud the results of that Google search I just did on the best place to get hot dogs in Cleveland? (I'm still thinking of Calvin Trillin). Fortunately, the great Shakespearean actors have chosen better stuff: Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath, along with explanations of their own histories with the works.
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Lake Wobegon Days

Garrison Keillor
2010 | Abridged
Warm, folksy, and so much smarter than you think it'll be, Lake Wobegon Days fits neatly into the American humor tradition of James Thurber and Mark Twain. If you're planning any kind of career in broadcasting, you couldn't do better than to listen to Keillor's deceptively down-home enunciation.

Current Events

In this age of up-to-the-millisecond news cycles and blogging bloviators, sometimes it’s good to take the long view.

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The Bridge

David Remnick
2010 | Unabridged
Remnick has been editor-in-chief of the New Yorker since 1998 – arguably the most tumultuous and terrifying time in American history. In his biography of Barack Obama, Remnick displays both a journalist's instinct for story and an editor's eye for detail. Yes, it's long (at just over 24 hours, it's perfect for a cross-country road trip), but it's the truth.
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Hey Rube

Hunter S. Thompson
2012 | Unabridged
Hunter S. Thompson: inventor of gonzo journalism, the greatest of Tricky Dick Nixon's print antagonists, consumer of grapefruits by the crate and acid by the sheet. Hey Rube is one of his last collections, a meanderingly vicious set of short pieces about Thompson's two favorite Great American pastimes: sports and politics (only the Good Doctor himself could get away with writing about 9/11 for espn.com). As he once said, “When the going... gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
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Classics

Sometimes, when you’ve had enough of postmodern theory and the dialectic of whatever, you just want to delve into an old-fashioned good book.

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The Secret History

Donna Tartt
2009 | Unabridged
A deliciously weird novel. The characters: a group of college classics scholars. The story: after an ancient Greece-inspired bacchanal, these fresh-faced undergrads murder one of their own. The twist: the whole damn thing. Tartt is aptly named – her narrative voice is at once crisp, biting and complex. In examining the roots of cruelty, she makes us all feel as if we, too, could be guilty.
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Life

Keith Richards
2010 | Unabridged
Just listen. More than just sex, drugs and rock & roll, Life is a musician's story. Learn just how much practice it takes to play the opening riff of “Start Me Up” and how little it took to write “Satisfaction.” The moral of the story: put in the hours, then go to sleep with your guitar under your pillow. And whatever you do, don't mess with Keef's shepherd's pie.

Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 16:45:52 +0000

A peek into the creative landscape of one of our greatest writers
Margaret Atwood’s In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination may be a departure for those expecting fiction along the lines of her Booker Prize winning novel The Blind Assassin, her dystopian masterpiece The Handmaid’s Tale, or her brilliant future-as-genetic-engineering-nightmare diptych Oryx & Crake and Year of the Flood. Combining memoiristic essay with reviews and lectures, as well as several short sci fi-ish pieces, In Other Worlds is best heard as a peek into the creative landscape of one of our greatest writers.

Longtime readers may be able to guess at the breadth and depth of Atwood’s frames of reference. Somewhat predictable influences include Victorian novels, nature writing, the language and feminist literature. However, it might be unexpected to hear that such a “serious” author would also harbor a love of classic B movies, comic books of the 1930s and ’40s (especially those featuring female superheroes), and proto-sci fi-ers H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.

We often expect today’s great male writers to have read and absorbed Stan Lee and Mad magazine along with Hemingway and Melville. Similarly, we might expect our female writers to have absorbed — even channeled — Jane Austen and Vogue (along with Hemingway and Melville). So to hear about Atwood spending her WWII Canadian childhood drawing superhero bunnies in capes, and following her brother’s hand-drawn maps of their island home…It’s not surprising so much as it is gratifying.

Donna Tartt, The Little Friend

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 20:44:31 +0000

Twelve-year-old Harriet Dufresnes is about to have an intense summer. Obsessed with her brother’s unsolved murder (she was an infant when he died), Harriet decides to find his killer. Tartt’s setting is small-town Mississippi in the 1970s, in a big old house filled with Harriet’s maternal aunts and grandmother. As Harriet’s search intensifies, The Little Friend‘s plot darkens and twists. By the end of the novel, it’s hard to decide if Tartt has written a straight up Southern gothic, potboiler mystery, or a demented takeoff on To Kill A Mockingbird. Amazingly, it works as all three.

Ruth Rendell, Some Lie and Some Die

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 20:43:00 +0000

It’s hard to decide what’s more fun in Some Lie and Some Die, Ruth Rendell’s 1973 tale of murder at a British rock festival: Inspector Reginald Wexford’s overwrought suspicion of hippies, or the strangely charismatic flower child singer Zeno’s power over his fellow counterculture-ites. When the body of a brutally murdered young woman turns up on the outskirts of the festival site, a generational clash ensues. Who is to blame for this crime? The scary hippies, or the squares whose carefully trimmed shrubbery hides all sorts of nasty secrets? Wexford is the quintessential British country detective: irascible, fond of a pint with lunch, gardening, and his wife’s shepherd’s pie. There have been 23 Wexford novels so far, and Rendell shows no sign of slowing down.

Tana French, The Likeness

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 20:41:39 +0000

Dublin is one of the great literary cities, so it is surprising that relatively few mystery writers have chosen it as their setting. But the city’s famed class conflicts, labyrinthine streets and verdant vegetation make the perfect backdrop for crime. The Likeness‘ plot is surreal: Detective Cassie Maddox happens to look exactly like the victim Detective Rob Ryan is investigating. Worse yet, the former friends have been estranged since they solved a brutal child murder (the subject of French’s first novel, Into the Woods). As Cassie goes undercover as the dead girl, Rob must confront his habit of isolating the women he cares about most. Both characters are Wire-style urban officers, but The Likeness reads more like literary fiction than a straight up police procedural.

Henning Mankell, The Troubled Man

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 20:40:05 +0000

For those of us who have followed Kurt Wallander, Sweden’s most morosely optimistic detective, from the start of his career as an intrigue-busting, assassin hunting, slightly alcoholic mid-size town detective, the final novel in the series is a fitting sendoff. Wallander is now a loving grandfather with a dog and house in the country. However, just as he seems to find his own Ingmar Bergman-esque version of peace (depressive, but the summers are beautiful), his new son-in-law’s father disappears. Of course, Wallander must search for the titular troubled man. As he does, he discovers perhaps his own life will not end so peacefully after all.

Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 20:37:59 +0000

McCall Smith’s novels have become something of a cottage industry (there are 10 available on eMusic), complete with an HBO show starring Jill Scott as Precious Ramotswe, the series’ crime-busting heroine. The only female private detective in Botswana, Ramotswe is both proud and precise. Not content to merely solve crimes, she also must restore the honor of clients. Though sometimes the writing can tread a fine line between folksy and hokey, Ramotswe is an everywoman with spirit and common sense. Less bloody than the other books on our list, No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency would also be fun for a family road trip.

John Burdett, Bangkok 8

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 20:36:09 +0000

The first volume in Burdett’s quartet about municipal detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep is a trippy, tragi-comic ride, as chilly and caffeinated as a Thai iced tea. Sonchai is a mess of contradictions: a half-farang (white) devout Buddhist who was raised by a prostitute mother; the only honest cop left in Bangkok, and yet still very much in the thrall of his crooked boss; a stoner with a precise eye for detail. Burdett takes full advantage of his tropical, gritty setting. Sonchai’s meals, motorbike rides and hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold pals are so richly and wittily written that by the time our hero’s solved his crime you’ll feel as if you’ve spent a lost weekend in the Far East.

Donna Tartt

2007 | Abridged

Twelve-year-old Harriet Dufresnes is about to have an intense summer. Obsessed with her brother's unsolved murder (she was an infant when he died), Harriet decides to find his killer. Tartt's setting is small-town Mississippi in the 1970s, in a big old house filled with Harriet's maternal aunts and grandmother. As Harriet's search intensifies, The Little Friend's plot darkens and twists. By the end of the novel, it's hard to decide if Tartt... has written a straight up Southern gothic, potboiler mystery, or a demented takeoff on To Kill A Mockingbird. Amazingly, it works as all three.

Jo Nesbo, The Snowman

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 19:31:26 +0000

Oslo’s most tortured detective solves a gruesome crime

The Snowman begins with some backstory. A little boy and his mother go to visit a mysterious house on a snowy day. Leaving her son locked in the freezing car, the mother goes inside to meet her lover for a final tryst. It’s all very creepy and Freudian; we see the scene from the perspective of both mother and son, and clearly, something is not right. Next, we go forward to (almost) present day Oslo, Norway. Harry Hole, the city’s most tortured detective, notices a pattern of disappearances — women with children, all on the day of the season’s first snow. Of course, a serial killer is on the loose, and his “calling card” would only be possible in a wintry land: a snowman, adorned and/or completed with some gruesome reminder of his victim. Hole is a classic noir detective, brilliant yet flawed, a bad drunk with a history of failed romances and run-ins with his police force superiors. But, like all such anti-heroes, he always gets his bad guy. There are too many twists to The Snowman‘s both sexually and forensically explicit plot to risk spoiling, but suffice to say, if you don’t enjoy gritting your teeth in squeamish fear, this is probably not the greatest listen for a dead-of-night road trip through the Yukon.

The Snowman is being marketed as the Next Big Thing out of the frozen north, although it’s actually the seventh Harry Hole book. While it’s not quite necessary to have read the earlier installments in the series, Hole’s character is by now rather the worse for wear. If you’d like to know why the detective is so emotionally and physically battered, as well as the roots of his alcoholism and beginning of his love affairs (especially with Rakel, his Snowman love interest), be sure to check out the earlier books, which are all now available in translation.

Charles Bradley, No Time for Dreaming (Re-issue)

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A debut album purposefully recorded to sound as weathered as the singer's voice

Before CDs, before the Internet, soul music freaks had to rely on serendipity find the best dusty tracks: O.V. Wright's "Nickel and a Nail," Bunny Sigler's "Regina," Erma Franklin's "Piece of My Heart." I heard all of these for the first time on a little radio station, between the hatch marks on my dorm room FM radio, fine-tuning the dial enough to hear the announcer, writing down the info, and then heading off to my local dusty used record store, hoping to get lucky. Listening to Charles Bradley's No Time for Dreaming, reminds me of those musical dorm-room epiphanies. His voice is gritty as a gravel road, reminiscent of deep-soul men from Otis Clay to Joe Simon.

But Bradley is no forgotten soul great, though tracks such as "How Long" and "Golden Rule" could be lost Stax B-sides. Dreaming is a debut album purposefully recorded to sound as weathered as the singer's voice. Of course it's a Daptone record, those same soul-purists-with-hearts-of-gold who brought us the beloved Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. As with all of the artists in the Daptone catalogue, Bradley is backed by horn and rhythm sections that sound, literally, vintage. In this case, it's a new combo: the Menahan Street Band, led by guitarist/producer Thomas Brenneck, beautifully backing Bradley's stories of hard luck and regret. "Heartaches and Pain" is Dreaming's standout track. The true story of Bradley's brother's murder, it's disturbing in a way few of those "classic" soul records could ever dare to be.

Charles Bradley, No Time for Dreaming

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A debut album purposefully recorded to sound as weathered as the singer's voice

Rosanne Cash

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 16:33:48 +0000

Fans of Cash family music and lore may be surprised that Rosanne Cash’s new memoir, Composed, is as quietly introspective as its title implies. Neither hatchet job, nor tell-all, the book elegantly elucidates its author’s growth from semi-rebellious daughter-of to mature artist. Along the way, Cash touches on her family’s darker moments, but always comes back to warmth, love, and humor. She also depicts both her musical and personal progresses: Grammy-winning records, and four beloved children. Which, for those who already know Cash’s sensitive-yet-earthy songs and fiction (she published a collection of short stories, Bodies of Water, in 1996), will come as no surprise. That’s not to say that Composed doesn’t come with its share of revelations: Who would have thought, for example, that the Man in Black had such a sly and vivid sense of humor? Or that Cash’s mother, Vivian Dorraine Liberto Cash Distin, enjoyed a post-John life as a happy Southern Californian matron?

When Cash reaches the latter half of the book, things go from relatively benign musical memoir, to a list of tragedies and deaths that would make any country ballad sound optimistic. Her father, stepmother, stepsister, aunt, and mother died within months of one another. And that was before Cash developed a rare brain malformation that required terrifying surgery and extensive rehabilitation. This makes Composed even more of a restrained celebration: True survival and artistry is both quieter and more complicated than any Hollywood bio-pic.

eMusic’s Elizabeth Gold spoke with Cash about guitar lessons, legacy, and the challenges of balancing music with writing.

Can you speak a little to the idea of legacy? How did you decide now was the time to write about your parents, and especially your father?

I don’t think that’s a cognitive decision I could come to. I had to live life to get to that decision, and part of that was actually losing my parents. I don’t think I could have accepted it until they weren’t on the planet any more. It’s a bittersweet paradox. After making The List — and actually after the brain surgery, the things I wanted to do in my life became very urgent, I realized how it would be to have not taken the legacy. It was too painful to think about.

I’ve read your very beautiful writing on songwriting. As a writer and a musician, what do you feel are the challenges of writing about music? How do you feel being a musician changes that for you?

It’s difficult to write about music — the classic quote is it’s like dancing about architecture. I guess it’s from Joni Mitchell.

Some people say it’s from Thelonius Monk.

In some ways [that quote] is true. In another way, I think you can go as deep into pure language as you can into pure music. If you just find the place that they connect, it’s possible to do it, to write about it. If that fails, you can write about process: how you got to this song, where the inspiration came from…

When you sit down, do you know you’re going to be writing a song or writing prose?

Oh yeah. It’s not that fluid. I do think it comes from the same kind of source, but I have to choose the medium.

Is there ever a song that you look at after a while and think, this could really be something else, or vice versa?

Yes, that happens occasionally. The most obvious example is I wrote — I can’t even remember which one I wrote first now! — I think I wrote the song first, “Bells & Roses,” on my album 10 Song Demo. I was just obsessed with that image of bells and roses together, so I wrote a short story called “Bells and Roses,” for an [anthology] Blue Lightning, which was all musicians writing about music. Certainly, there are also other more subtle cross-references.

Would you say that your prose style is particularly musical?

I listen for the melody in prose. Maybe that’s more important to me because I’m a musician, but I don’t even think so. Some of the best writers I know have an amazing sense of melody in their prose — Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I just read Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, and she has a great sense of melody. I’m reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog [by Muriel Barbary], and she goes even further than Mantel.

I have to ask: guitar lessons with Carl Perkins and Maybelle Carter. That was one sentence in the book. Come on!

[Dry laugh.] Other people have told me the import of that, beyond what I realized myself.

Which in and of itself is interesting — that it seemed just like another Thursday night on the bus for you.

Well, it kind of was. I was so young, Carl Perkins was like my uncle, he was a really close friend of my dad’s. At that time, I knew he was good and people liked him, but I didn’t realize his importance in the history of this. These guys were still alive, so their legend had not been codified yet. And Mother Maybelle… This was all grownups.

Did they set you lessons? What was the teaching process?

Carl would show me something, but then he would be impatient, and want to go off and play on his own. Maybelle would show me something… but it was Helen Carter who really put in the time with me. A lot of times [Maybelle] sat there while Helen would teach me the songs, and really stick with me, and then would suggest another song for Helen to teach me.

And you’d go back and practice in your room at night?

Oh yeah. Until I could do it — practice and practice and practice.

How old were you then?

Eighteen, 19.

And you hadn’t really decided you were a musician yet?

At that time, when they were teaching me, I started to decide I wanted to be a songwriter. I got very excited about the music, and learning to do it.

Did it take you by surprise that you actually wanted to be a musician?

No. It felt like something I’d been circling around for my whole life.

What were the first songs they taught you?

The very first one was “The Banks of the Ohio,” which is a classic Carter Family song. Then they taught me “The Winding Stream,” which is a very obscure one. “Blackjack David,” “The Merry Golden Tree,” some of the other murder ballads — “Hello Stranger.” It was a huge lexicon.

Were any of those on your dad’s list?

The one I did: “Bury Me Beneath the Weeping Willow,” and also “Black Jack David.”

This was the first time you were playing the guitar, but you had always been singing, right?

No, I didn’t care about singing — it just seemed like a horrible thing to do. But I had been playing piano for many years. I took a year of music theory around that time, so I had an understanding, and could read music very slowly.

Music is such a collaborative medium, and writing is about being by yourself. How does that work for you?

I have to have both. Writing becomes too isolating, and too depressing. It just leads to this solitary life and it’s all in your head.

Yeah…

So I really crave collaboration: being in a band, and playing with other people.

I guess songwriting — when you’re writing with another person, you’re not by yourself…

No, when I write with John [Leventhal — her husband], we don’t write together. I usually give him lyrics. So it is very solitary.

Sort of going with the idea of being a private person versus a public person, you’re so active on Twitter! And sometimes people write really rude things to you about your family.

Oh God, I’ve dealt with that my whole life! The distinction I have to make it that I’m very private, but I’m also quite gregarious. I love a social life, and Twitter is kind of a virtual café society. My mind moves around a lot, and I like discussions about politics and music and culture. Also, I’m not baring my soul.

What songs would be on your list, if you were to compile one for your own children?

I think there’d be an overlap with my dad, but I grew up in Southern California in the sixties and seventies, so I’d have to have Neil Young, Elton John and the Beatles, Springsteen, Joni Mitchell. But I’d still have “Long Black Veil.”

What else are you reading these days?

A. M. Homes’s memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter. She’s interviewing me at the 92nd Street Y [in New York City] next month.

And what are you listening to?

Cory Chisel, I love, love, love him so much. He’s new — a great songwriter. Alejandro Escovedo. Yesterday, I was listening to Sibelius.

Do you feel as if you have more books in you? A novel?

No, I’m not interested in writing a novel. I just don’t think I could. I’m interested in writing volume two of my memoirs.

Queer Books

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 14:52:07 +0000

Those who have been ignored within the dominant cultural narrative must create their own stories. That’s certainly true for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered authors, who have had to revisit and accurately revise their own history throughout the years.

The six illuminating works below are listed in chronological order — not of their publication, but of the era in which each is set. Several of the books — Sarah Walters’s The Night Watch, Armistead Maupin’s Babycakes and David Sedaris ‘Naked — are ensemble pieces: novels or collections that deal with a cast of characters connected through bonds of blood, friendship and/or hardship (and in Sedaris’s case, somehow all three at once). This makes sense: Community is vital for people who have often been cast out and/or ignored by society. Perhaps this is why the “genres” — historical fiction (the Walters, again), sci-fi, humor (Sedaris, Wilde, Maupin), dramatic writing (Wilde, though not in this iteration, and Hwang’s M. Butterfly) — have been such welcoming homes for non-hetero authors.

Two books on the list, John Colapinto’s As Nature Made Him and The Trials of Oscar Wilde, are true stories. Both are simultaneously deeply upsetting and eloquent: the story of a mutilated child who had to find his own way to his true gender, and the transcripted downfall of the 19th century’s bravest and least abashed gay pioneer.

Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The next best thing to raising a glass or two with the famous gadfly himself
The word “memoir” has come to signify coming of age stories fraught with problems, issues, or quirks. Some of these books are, of course, wonderful, but the genre of late has often rolled towards TMI. Readers looking for a more old-fashioned and less solipsistic personal narrative will thank god for Christopher Hitchens’ Hitch 22 (the deity’s name is lower case, of course, in tribute to the author’s previous bestseller god is Not Great). Instead of discourses on eating disorders or funny family Christmases, Hitchens provides anecdotes on Trotskyite dogma, and word games with famous novelists.

Hitch 22 is more political and cultural bildungsroman than prototypical autobiography. Beginning with his English country childhood, in the embarrassingly named hamlet of Crapstone, Hitchens lays out his path from bourgeois beginnings to intellectual infamy. When his mother sent him to boarding school so he would reach the upper class, he guzzled books as if they were soda, and began a lifetime of in-print and in-person rabble-rousing. By 1969, Hitchens was an Oxford luminary, as infamous for his arrests for various left-wing causes as for his crystalline debate skills and ability to put away bottles of top-shelf alcohol. His next stop was London. Writing for various newspapers and journals, Hitchens became friends with fellow hippie-intellectuals including the then-budding novelists Martin Amis and pre-Satanic Verses fatwa Salman Rushdie.

Most Americans know Hitchens in his next incarnation. As Brit-in-America columnist for The Nation and Vanity Fair, he’s reported from war-torn Yugoslavia, gotten water boarded on camera, and — infamously — backed the Gulf War. It is on this last item that a bit more confession would have been appreciated; one of the great questioners of our time does not stop to exhume his own political missteps. As a frequent traveler to Iraq, Hitchens was privy to some of the worst and bloodiest of Saddam Hussein’s crimes. Understandable passion for the dictator’s overthrow caused Hitchens to atypically disregard the banner under which he marched: the Bush Doctrine and the disregard and lies it encompassed.

But still. This man stood literally side by side with Rushdie when few other so-called radicals would even publish his name for fear of violent retribution. Who, at the scene of his beloved mother’s death, still managed to think about the revolutionary greater struggles in the world — and so puts that loss into the context of the rest of his life. Whose friendships not only have lasted longer than his marriages, but who also has the dignity not to delve into personal-life details that would hurt or anger those still alive.

In the end, and especially for a book that so frequently uses the term “Trotskyite,” Hitch 22 is riveting. Or at least the next best thing to raising a glass or two and smoking a pack with the gadfly himself.

Six Degrees of Pride and Prejudice

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Mon, 17 May 2010 10:04:55 +0000

No book is a perfectly self-contained artifact. Books are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it’s not. It’s the very nature of literature — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic works and five other books we’ve deemed related in some way. In some cases these connections are obvious, in others they are tenuous. But, most important to you, all of the books are highly, highly recommended.

THE BOOK

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Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen
2008 | Unabridged
Simply told, the plot may sound more Harlequin Romance than Great Book. We begin with the Bennets, a family in rural 19th Century England. Though burdened with the universal difficulties of a flighty mother and preoccupied father, the clan's true problem is more time and place specific: too many daughters to marry off, and not enough money to do it. Elizabeth and Jane are the eldest Bennet offspring, burdened both by their... family's social inadequacies and by their own justifiably high standards when it comes to choosing husbands. Will the girls find the men of their dreams, or will they settle for less than a true marriage of minds and hearts? What follows is one of the great love stories in English literature. Jane Austen was just 21 when she completed the first draft of Pride and Prejudice. So it's especially remarkable that her writing is one of the wonders of British literature funny, clear and wonderfully detailed. Elizabeth Bennet feels like a truly modern heroine, if one constrained by her time and place. Austen herself never married, though her great subjects were the politics of courtship and social conventions. Famously reclusive, she neatly penned her novels on a tiny wooden lap desk in the drawing room of her family's home in Bath. Rarely perhaps never before or since, has a writer written so much, so well, under such strange circumstances. But many readers and viewers don't necessarily know how truly difficult Austen's writing life must have been, especially given the enormous popularity of her work these last few years. First, there were the multiple movie and TV versions of every novel, from Emma to Northanger Abbey. Then there were Austen "spin-offs": from The Jane Austen Book Club (contemporary women look to the author as a font of wisdom and romantic inspiration) and Becoming Jane (Anne Hathaway is lovely but fictional) to last year's unlikely hit read, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. In the midst of all these versions and revisions, it's too easy to forget why Austen's work and life inspires so much in the first place. Which is why it seemed more than fitting to lay out a network of her literary descendants.
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THE CHICK LIT PROTOTYPE

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Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason

Helen Fielding
2008 | Unabridged
Poor Bridget Jones. She's been blamed for so much: the rise of hot pink book jackets, Mr. Darcy jokes, the stereotype of single women-as-shoe-shopping, cheese-eating-megalomaniacs, Renee Zellweger's yo-yo dieting. I'm convinced, however, that most of the people who condemn Ms. Jones out of hand haven't actually read the books. Because, actually? They're hilarious. Fielding's skewering of British social conventions, and her ability to use pop culture against itself (the term "singleton," first... appeared in Bridget Jones, for example) is in the grand Anglo-satirical tradition of P. G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, and Jane Austen. Yes, the progenitor of rom-com is funny sometimes even laugh-out-loud hilarious (Mrs. Bennett is a particular object of ridicule, but the various snobbish sisters and priggish parsons across the Austen oeuvre keep the giggles coming as well). Back, however, to Bridget Jones. The End of Reason is the second installment, and it's actually weirder and more outrageous than its predecessor. Fielding seems to have decided that her character deserves whatever ridiculous torment she can devise (such as trading tampons for cigarettes in a Thai prison); it's almost as if she's deliberately playing with the stereotype she so infamously created. Hmm. Nothing chick-lit about that.
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THE SHARP WIT

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The Portable Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker
2008 | Unabridged
The connection between the high priestess of sarcasm and the sly wit of the drawing room may not be immediately obvious. Dorothy Parker was a product of the new freedoms of the Roaring '20s, smoking and drinking and cracking wise with the boys around the Algonquin roundtable; Austen's idea of a big night out was a quadrille at Bath. But in the latter's prose is the constant, discernible longing for more freedom... freedom that Parker had in spades. We'll never know if, in Parker's time and place, Austen would have chosen to use her sharp pen on the same odd (and, frankly, often dated) combination of unstinting criticism and lovelorn short fiction.
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THE CONTEMPORARY NOVELIST

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A Thousand Acres

Jane Smiley
2009 | Unabridged
One of Austen's great subjects was sisters: their love for one another, their rivalries, the differences in the ways they deal with family, suitors and society. While Smiley's Pulitzer prize-winning novel is explicitly based on Shakespeare's King Lear (there are three sisters and a crazed, power-mad father), the work reflects the canon of female authors as well as the Bard's play. Like Lear, it is a tragedy, harrowing, heartbreaking, and inevitably doomed.... It's also profane, upsetting, and focused on aging, rather than the relatively optimistic problems of proposals and betrothals. It does, however, concern several truly Austenian subjects: the inheritance of property by female rather than male heirs; and the parental expectations placed on too-dutiful daughters. I'd like to think that had Austen lived in a time when women's problems could extend outside the parlor (in her era, women were totally legally dependent on men), she would have come to write something as disturbing and un-comely as Smiley's novel.
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THE LYRICAL FEMINIST

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Moral Disorder

Margaret Atwood
2007 | Unabridged
Atwood has claimed with characteristic dry wit to be the first chick-lit author. According to any other yardstick, she is one of the finest, fiercest and most varied authors currently writing. While these short stories don't bear quite the heft of her now-classic dystopian fantasy, The Handmaid's Tale (1985), the overly feminist bite of her collection Life Before Man (1979), or the historic sweep and multiply narrated range of Alias Grace (1996),... Moral Disorder is Atwood in her emotionally subtle mode. The stories center on Nell, a woman growing up in post-war Canada. As Nell ages, we follow her relationships with family, friends, children and lovers. The connection to Austen could feel tenuous: after all, neither she nor her heroines lived to enjoy the contemplativeness of old age, and we rarely meet them after the first blush of young love. Nell is an Austenian protagonist: independent and intelligent, she seeks a marriage of equals. What could be more disorderly?
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THE ALIENATED GENIUS

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To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf
2008 | Unabridged
In A Room of One's Own, Woolf's seminal nonfiction treatise on women and writing, Jane Austen appears as literary folk hero, able to transcend the restrictions her gender placed upon her. On the author's ability to compose her works, in public yet in secret, Woolf explains, "[she] was glad that a hinge creaked, so that she might hide her manuscript before anyone came in." Yet, "I could not find any signs that... her circumstance had harmed her work in the slightest." Okay, but how does this relate to To the Lighthouse, one of Woolf's trickiest and most tenaciously Modern works? The novel centers on the Ramsays, a middle class family, emotionally and physically close to each other, but with repressed desires and ambitions that they cannot fully express. Austen's writing always concerned the push and pull familial relationships: sisters and parents, cousins and uncles. In this way, To the Lighthouse is almost a continuation, or twentieth-century retelling of Austen's work. Like Austen, Woolf struggled: to write, and to live happily. Ultimately, she lost the battle, killing herself at the age of 49. Perhaps she saw in Austen an example of why and how it was worthwhile to keep on, no matter how futile her efforts might feel. At the British Library in London, Woolf's final blue-pencil edited manuscript lies in the same glass case as Austen's tiny wooden lap desk. Both are powerful reminders of what it means to write, no matter what.
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Tainted Love: An Anti-Valentine’s Day Bookshelf

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:22:52 +0000

2009 | Unabridged

You think your most recent ex was full of herself? She’s got nothing on the exquisite Master Gray, the most malevolent narcissist ever committed to paper. Even after many re-readings, I always forget just how wonderfully repulsive and irresistible this slim volume is. But the story of a man who stays forever young, even as his painted likeness grows hideously decrepit, is also tragic, especially when viewed through the lens of the... author’s own life. I always wonder what Oscar Wilde’s feelings would be to learn that this novel is his most famous legacy — after his own heart-breaking biography. No doubt, he’d have a beautiful and brilliant quip at the ready, which would be its own tragedy, of sorts.

Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A creepy Swedish whodunit that explores globalism, the results of youthful revolutionary fervor and the legacies of capitalism and colonialism
To many of us, Sweden is known for massages, meatballs, a lovely Christmas pageant tradition and, of course, Ikea. Now, however, when a certain segment of the American reading population thinks of Sweden, they (fine, we) imagine murder. Ironically, Sweden — and the Scandinavian countries in general — actually have an extraordinarily low crime rate. But it is cold and dark much of the year, with a long tradition of epic — and epically violent — myths and sagas. Maybe that’s why so many of Sweden’s most popular and translated writers are those whose subjects are the most grisly and creepy of crimes. One such crime writer, Henning Mankell, is known for his very well-reviewed Kurt Wallander mysteries, but his latest stand-alone work features a sleuth who is not actually a professional crime-solver, but one of the best sorts of concerned amateurs. Birgitta Roslin, the heroine of The Man From Beijing, is a judge. She’s temporarily flagged from her magisterial duties by high blood pressure, seemingly brought on by a genteel mid-life crisis: her marriage has lost its passion, and she fears she’s left behind the leftist political ideals of her 1960s student days. When a horrible massacre occurs in HesjÃ¶vallen, a remote country hamlet, Roslin discovers both a familial connection to the case, as well as way to depart from the all-too-familiar routines of her daily life in the big city. Following Roslin’s path to the perpetrator of this shocking crime would be enough for quite a lively and compelling mystery. Mankell complicates matters, however, jumping from Roslin’s POV to both present day and nineteenth century China. In the process, the story goes from a relatively straightforward (if rather creepy) whodunit, to an exploration of globalism, the results of youthful revolutionary fervor and the legacies of capitalism and colonialism. The result could — perhaps even should — be preachy, or at least slightly didactic, but Mankell’s careful prose and cool-as-a-herring tone never allow for shrillness or political proselytizing. Instead, the answer, when it comes, is both tragic and unsettling.