Peter Cameron: The City of Your Final Destination
A University of Iowa grad student decides to write his thesis on a Uruguayan writer who is survived by his gay brother, painter wife, and his lover and their child. Grad student visits family compound in the Uruguayan hills and complications ensue. A book about love and selfishness and the lingering power of old attachments.
Edith Wharton: The Custom of the Country (Penguin Classics)
As fresh and amusing as the day it was first published, with a heroine you love to hate--not quite the Paris Hilton of her day, but almost.
Jonathan Hayes: Precious Blood
The book is good--a tight, well-constructed serial killer story with spot-on descriptions of New York City. The author, who read at the Merc in January, is a senior medical examiner in the coroner's office in Manhattan and a food and wine writer for Martha Stewart Living. So you know he's not your average guy. He's also a great speaker--witty and smart and engaging, with some astonishing stories to tell. We hope to have him back again in April to talk about the Maltese Falcon, so look for the listing on our events calendar.
Want to know the next "it" novel before everyone else? If so, keep an eye on our John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. Last year's winner, Junot Diaz, went on to win the National Book Award and then the Pulitzer Prize for The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. We are in the midst of the current batch and will announce our short list in September, so stay tuned.
Rumors about the sale of the building have been flying at the Merc and though I hope we've reached most of you now by mail or email, just in case you've missed the news, here is what we're up to.
These are exciting times at the Merc. As many of you know, over the past three years, we've been working hard to establish ourselves as the Center for Fiction in New York, serving a growing public with a rich array of literary programs. Every month, we hold nine discussion groups and many additional readings, panels and other wonderful public events. Our writers studio is up and running and we have a terrific writing workshop, led by Peter Selgin.
With all these new programs, we have outgrown our beautiful, but aging, midtown building. Though we love do it, it's time to move into a space that will allow us to grow and become the kind of 21st century institution we envision. The library has had a long tradition of moving in order to accommodate new priorities. Our current building is actually the fourth home of the Merc. Of course, our first impulse was to renovate, not relocate, but after much research we determined that even a very costly renovation, one that would require a two-year closing, would not really meet our needs. At the end of all that work, the space still wouldn't be ideal. We wanted to be sure we could provide a beautiful, but also up-to-date, facility that can be a home for the library for many decades to come. And so, we decided to move.
To do this, we've entered into a contract to sell the 47th Street building. We hope to announce our new building and share our plans for it with you in the next couple months. When you see your next home, we're sure you will be as thrilled as we are.
We do expect to be between homes for approximately 18 months, but don't worry. I want to assure you that arrangements have been made so that you will be well served during this interim period and that our programs will continue.
• We will operate all our discussion groups out of a lovely space at the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesman building on West 44th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues.
• Our members will have borrowing privileges at the New York Society Library on East 79th Street
.
• We will continue to have a full schedule of readings and events and special programs at spaces in the General Society Library on 44th Street and at other venues around the city.
I understand that this all sounds a bit scary, but it's also very exciting. When this transition is complete, we'll christen the new building as the home of the only literary organization in the United States solely devoted to the art of fiction. We'll continue to do all the things we do for readers, but we'll also be doing much more to serve fiction writers. And we'll have many beautiful and welcoming spaces in our new building as well as a great home for our great collection.
As always, if you want to talk about this (or anything connected to the Merc), please call me. I'd love to hear from you!
I do realize that no one who has just committed to reading a 1200-page novel wants to be told there are other things one might read in addition, however I'm going to press on and recommend just a couple on-line resources.
For a basic understanding of the Napoleanic Wars, you can visit The War Times Journal online and read the article there by James Burbeck called "The French Revolt and Empire." http://www.wtj.com/articles/napsum1/
And you might want to take a look at the interview witht the translators, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, on the Barnes & Noble site at http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bn-review/interview.asp?PID=19363&z=y
Happy Reading!
Eh bien, mes amis--the game is on. Read your first thirty pages tonight and look for for posts here tomorrow.
Most of the time, I'll post what I've been reading in the column at left, but couldn't resist the opportunity to tell you all about Theodora Keogh's The Tattooed Heart. I saw a posting about Theodora Keogh on GalleyCat, one of my favorite blogs (www.mediabistro.com/galleycat), and went upstairs to our newly reopened stacks to see if we had anything by this overlooked writer. Turns out we had ten, that's right, ten of her books, many of them first editions. On Brooks Peters' blog (www.brookspeters.com/?p=610), there's a long post about Keogh that suggests that The Tattooed Heart is her best book. I'll keep you posted, but so far it's clear that though Keogh may not be our "greatest American author" as some of the hype declares, she's a wonderful writer and eminently worthy of rediscovery. I'll return The Tattooed Heart to the shelf soon, but in the meantime, you might was to read The Double Door , published in 1950. In this novel, in two adjoining houses on East 65th Street a man lives his life as a husband and father in one and as a gay man in the other, keeping the two completely separate until his teenage daughter steps through the double door.
For all of us who have been talking for years about reading War & Peace, but somehow never get to it, our moment has arrived. Here at the Merc, cultural historian James Sloan Allen and Elizabeth Cheresh Allen, a professor of Russian at Bryn Mawr, will be leading two evenings of discussion on the new translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky. Those discussions take place on March 19th and 26th and you can contact our front desk to join them. (frontdesk@mercantilelibrary.org)
But even if you can't attend the sessions, you can read along with me and join an online discussion on this site.
Here's the plan. We read 30 pages a day in the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation. We begin on Thursday, February 7th and end on March 19th. I realize that this doesn't work out precisely, but it's the best I can do. (If I were good at numbers, I wouldn't be working in a library.) We're also cheating a little in the beginning, so we can have nice round numbers to guide us throughout. So on the first day, you start on page three and read to page thirty. Then 31 to 60, 61 to 90, etc.
You can read more, of course, but you can only post comments on the 30 pages of the day. Try to post every day, even a sentence or two, so we all know you're still with us.
So, want in? Just post a comment and let us know you're game.
The Mercantile Library is one of the oldest cultural institutions in the city of New York. Founded in 1820, it began as self-improvement library for merchants and clerks and soon became the largest and most successful of the mercantile libraries, and for that matter of all membership libraries. In the nineteenth century, it was one of the foremost cultural institutions in the United States, with an extraordinary collection of books in the humanities and a popular lecture program that featured such renowned speakers as William Makepeace Thackeray, Frederick Douglass, and Mark Twain.
To build on this distinguished 185-year history and continue to play a vital role in the cultural landscape of New York City, in fall 2005 we transformed the Mercantile Library into the first center in the United States devoted entirely to the art of fiction. As the new Mercantile Library Center for Fiction, we continue to collect and lend fiction to our members. We also present much more literary programming and related cultural events, and provide more workspace for writers.
We believe that a life energized by books is a better life, and that for many New Yorkers this better life has come through the active reading of fiction. At the Center, these readers converge to read, discuss, and support great writing across all genres.
We are very happy to be able to provide a space for all New Yorkers who love fiction, one that is full of activity year-round--with writers from around the world reading their work and talking about the art of fiction, with book parties and literary magazine launches, with small press showcases, with more writers than ever at work in our Writers Studio, and with fiction discussion groups and seminars.
Our postings here will be an extension of the kinds of conversations and debates, the energy and excitement, that are part of life every day here at the Center, taking place over wine and cheese in our reading room with well-known authors, among 15 friends reading Proust together for the third time, in the director's office as the oldest book group in NYC discusses a contemporary first novel like The Brief Wondrous LIfe of Oscar Wao or tackles a modern classic like The Recognitions, or in the stacks as one member recommends a book to another member.
We think writers and readers deserve a beautiful, accessible center to meet, to read, to exchange ideas, and share books.
This blog will, we hope, bring at least some of that shared space to you.
