Several years ago I was in New Jersey visiting my lovely sister.  Each day as her and her then fiance (now husband) would cart off to work I would dutifully take the train into the city.  After a few days my wandering became isolated to the Chelsea area of Manhattan, with the train trips back to Jersey being consumed with the then brand new Sonic Youth biography Goodbye 20th Century by David Browne. What I started to realize on my trips home was that I was wandering around the stomping grounds of Sonic Youth thirty years too late.  I would read an address from a now defunct club and think, “I walked past that building today. I know exactly what that is, where that is.”  It certainly enhanced my reading experience.  If this had not been the case, I believe I still would have thoroughly enjoyed this biography.  Browne explains that Sonic Youth were not just a band.  They were a catalyst for a

“new generation of musicians (Nirvana, Cat Power), film directors (Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola, Todd Haynes), actors (Chloe Sevigny), and visual artists (Raymond Pettibon, Richard Prince).”

Goodbye 20th Century is just as much about the culture of the New York art scene as it is about Sonic Youth.  If you enjoy listening to Daydream Nation or Goo or Washing Machine, or you just enjoy New York  and 80s culture, this is a fantastic book to read.  It’s amazing how many people had their careers launched by Sonic Youth.  Drummer Steve Shelley discovered Chan Marshall, who goes by Cat Power.  If Sonic Youth hadn’t made the jump from indie label to major label, Nirvana probably wouldn’t be as iconic as they now are.  Sonic Youth actually pressured Geffen to sign Nirvana, implying they wouldn’t sign with Geffen if they didn’t.  Do not overlook this book.  

If I had not read this book, I probably wouldn’t know who Lydia Lunch is.  Lunch is portrayed as a real hard-ass New York artist type, at one point running away from home,

“earning spare change by pretending to collect money for cancer research on the streets of the Village.  A ravaged kewpie doll with a dark mop and a lasciviously smoky voice, she had no problem confronting local icons like David Byrne and Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye on the street, where she would scream her nihilistic poems in their faces. “

She became a fixture in the New York scene when, together with James Chance, she started the provocative No Wave band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks.  Her success and influenced a young Thurston Moore at the turn of the 1980s. Prior to his marriage to Kim Gordon or his success with music, “Moore had idolized her from afar.”  After meeting Lunch, Moore was quickly swallowed up to play in a rhythm section of her band

“she likened to a good hate-fuck.  Just sort of relentless pelvic pounding.  The other part of his audition involved losing his virginity to Lunch – quite willingly, mind you. “

Moore admits

“She was very flirtatious.  She was kind of a man-killer.”

If it seems like I am rambling about crazy people, I am, but it’s for a reason.  Since reading Goodbye 20th Century  a number of years back, I have known who Lydia Lunch is.  When people ask I usually tell them she was a “musician, artist, anti-socialite kinda gal from the 80’s in NYC. Very edgy and counter-culture, ya know? ”

Okay.  Now that you are super familiar with who she is, I’m writing to you to tell you that she has a really strange new cookbook out called Lydia Lunch: The Need to Feed.  Lemme tell ya, this book is wild.  Aside from recipes, the book is littered with comic-style line doodles of food, body parts, animals, and sometimes naked ladies or murder scenes.  Each chapter suggests several songs to go along with the type of food you are making.  Occasionally the chapters have tag lines like 

“ass-kicking, blood-pumping, tongue-swelling recipes for the masochist in your life.”

and

“outrageously quick pick-me-ups for that chance encounter or unexpected late-night visitor.”

Just to give you an idea of the dishes.

You’ll Thank Me For Kicking Your Ass Curry
Curry recipes are like dirty uncles: everybody’s got one. 

6 organic chicken thighs, rinsed and patted dry
4 tablespoons virgin coconut oil, divided
2 cups thinly sliced yellow onion
2 tablespoons minced garlic
2-inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and minced
1 red and 1 yellow bell pepper, sliced thin
1 to 3 hot chili peppers such as Scotch bonnet or Piri Piri, seeded and chopped (depending on how much you want this to hurt…)
2 cups low-sodium chicken or vegetable broth
1 (15-ounce) can unsweetened coconut milk
1 tablespoon light brown sugar
2 tablespoons finely chopped cilantro

Or

Kill Billy With Beef In Chipotle Marinade
When you need a meat fix, this does the trick. 

4 tablespoons minced chipotle chiles in adobo sauce
2 tablespoons honey
4 garlic cloves, minced
4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 to 2 1/2 pounds London broil, top round, or flank steak, about 1 inch thick
2 teaspoons kosher salt
Lime wedges for serving.

If you want to know how to actually make these dishes, you should come to Lemuria and buy the cookbook.

Both of these books perfect gifts for yourself, or for that edgy friend in your life.  They really are both enormously interesting on several different levels that are guaranteed to bring hearts to the eyes of anyone that looks at them.

Lydia Lunch: The Need to Feed–Recipes for Deeply Satisfying Foods by Lydia Lunch, Universe Publishing, September 2012, $35.

Goodbye Twentieth Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth by David Browne, Da Capo Press, 2009, $16.95.

by Simon

I think it’s not a stretch to say that between Square Books and Lemuria, we can rock a debut author’s world. At Lemuria, our AMAZING FIRST EDITIONS CLUB MEMBERS are a power house of influence with publishers. We are lucky to have you! Without you we might not ever meet such wonderful authors and read their books.

But what happens when the author is from Washington State? What happens when it’s his first trip to Mississippi? Yeah, that’s so not Mississippi.

Well, Lance Weller took it all in stride, despite the fact that it was his first published novel and Mississippi was his first stop on his tour. As he says, he was “nervous as hell”!

I was catching up with Lance on his blog and wanted to share a funny piece about his Mississippi experience during the first week of September.

Here’s what Lance felt in Mississippi in his own words:

Before leaving the Jackson city limits, I stopped at a roadside burger joint because I was hungry and thirsty since, besides being unnatural, air travel isn’t conducive to my appetite. I parked my cool car. Shut down the engine. The air conditioner hissed to silence. I stepped outside and immediately had no idea what was happening to me.

The engine had obviously exploded and I was caught in that moment that you read about in pulp novels where you know you’re dying—that transient-yet-impossibly-long second before the body gives way and lets go the soul and you’re aware of it all and there is no pain. But no, there was no explosion. Instead, someone had obviously thrown a wet cloth bag over my head and I was suffocating. I imagined government vans and black helicopters. Waterboarding. But no, I was not being manhandled. All I had done was to step from an air-conditioned car into something like 90 degree heat and 90% humidity and my glasses had instantly fogged and my lungs felt as though they’d collapsed. I must’ve made a sound, some sort of strangling noise, because folks in the parking lot looked up from their concerns and, seeing me flailing about—instantly drenched in sweat—just shook their heads and smirked and went about their business.

Somehow I found my way into the restaurant then back out again. Serena [GPS voice], patient and cool, guided me back onto the interstate and we set off north once more. I paid attention, now, to the temperature gauge on the dash and, at seven o’clock in the evening, it stayed steady at 92 degrees Fahrenheit. Mississippi woods flowed past to either side. The interstate ran straight and flat, the paving softly brown, shading into pale red. The sun slowly set at my left shoulder and it took its time going down—a thing far different from what I was used to. The west went brilliantly yellow and everything was watery. -Lance Weller

Hop over to Lance’s blog to get the rest of the story:

The Great, 4-Day, Mississippi Wilderness Roadshow

We gave Lance’s new pen a workout, not to mention his hand.

About Lance Weller

Lance Weller is the author of Wilderness from Bloomsbury, September 2012 & Lemuria’s September First Edition Club Pick.

First Printing of Wilderness: 15,000

His short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, New Millennium Writings, Quiddity, The White Whale Review, The Broadkill Review and Terracotta Typewriter.

You can join our First Editions Club by clicking here!

In my days as a literature major and later as a bookseller, I’ve found that it takes a certain type of person to really be excited about sinking their teeth into a Russian novel. Maybe they’re a little dark or maybe they just kind of enjoy being mired in doomed love affairs and the problems with muzhiks.

If you are ambitious in your literary ventures, think about picking up (Is it too early to start thinking of New Year’s resolutions?) one of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translations. After all even Hemingway once said that reading “the Russians was like having a great treasure given to you.”

Pevear and Volokhonsky are translating wonder team—they have translated several of both Tolstoy’s Dostoevsky’s works, Bulgakov’s The Master and the Margarita, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and various texts by Chekhov and Gogol. I can personally attest to their great work, having read their version of Anna Karenina twice. Their translation is both accessible and elegant, and they provide the reader with detailed footnotes to put you up to speed on 19^th century Russian culture, obscure literary references, and the occasional French translation (those aristocrats and the way they throw around French phrases).

I would argue that Pevear and Volokhonsky are (thanks in part to the selection of Anna Karenina by Oprah for her book club in 2004) some of the best-known translators in the literary world today. In The New Yorker’s 2005 article “The Translation Wars,” David Remnick describes the couple’s translation process, in this case specifically pertaining to their first translation, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov:

“Their division of labor was—and remains—nearly absolute: First, Larissa wrote out a kind of hyperaccurate trot of the original, complete with interstitial notes about Dostoyevsky’s diction, syntax, and references. Then, Richard, who has never mastered conversational Russian, wrote a smoother, more Englished text, constantly consulting Larissa about the original and the possibilities that it did and did not allow. They went back and forth like this several times, including a final session in which Richard read his English version aloud while Larissa followed along in the Russian. “

The danger with translated works is that there’s a fine line between taking creative license as a translator and making the original story flow in a new language and perhaps taking it too far, so that the temptation is to “smooth out” as Pevear says in Remnick’s article the “mixed metaphors, stumbles, and mistakes” of human speech. Such is reportedly the case with Constance Garnett’s original translations of the Russians—critics, Nabokov among them, stated that Garnett’s work simplified the complexities of the original texts.

And though I cannot read Russian, (maybe another New Year’s resolution?) so cannot comment as to the true accuracy of Pevear and Volohonsky’s translation, I can tell you that their work is a masterpiece.

by Kaycie

I have been patiently waiting for Zadie Smith, one of my favorite authors, to publish her new novel NW for some time (It’s been seven years since her last novel.) I was lucky enough to get my hands on an advanced copy this summer (just one of the perks of being a bookseller) and dropped all of my other reading for Ms. Smith. The novel is set in the northwest corner of London, not exactly the desirable part of town, more like the kind of neighborhood where poverty reigns and does not invite many opportunities for upward social mobility. Centered around four characters from Caldwell, an enclave of northwest London,  NW follows Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan as they navigate their adult lives outside of Caldwell.

Like Ms. Smith’s other novels, White Teeth, The Autograph Man and On Beauty, her beautiful prose and keen observation of daily human interaction surface in NW; however, I am experiencing mixed feelings about the novel as a whole, as are some other reviewers.

NPR’s book critic Maureen Corrigan shares her thoughts on Ms. Smith’s new novel:

This fall book season is bristling with lots of new novels that share the distinction of being long-awaited. Prominent authors like Martin Amis, Tom Wolfe, Michael Chabon and Zadie Smith have kept readers waiting for a while, which means, of course, that our expectations are as high as an elephant’s eye. Trim them down a bit. That’s my advice, at least in the case of Zadie Smith’s just-published novel “NW.”

For more of Ms. Corrigan’s review, read here.

Ron Charles of The Washington Post suggests that:

[Y]ou either submit to Smith’s eclectic style or you set this book aside in frustration. At times, reading “NW” is like running past a fence, catching only strips of light from the scene on the other side. Smith makes no accommodation for the distracted reader — or even the reader who demands a clear itinerary. But if you’re willing to let it work on you, to hear all these voices and allow the details to come into focus when Smith wants them to, you’ll be privy to an extraordinary vision of our age.

For the rest of Mr. Charles’s review, read here.

While I agree with Mr. Charles, I do believe that new readers of Ms. Smith would be better off starting with White Teeth or On Beauty; long-time readers should stay the course and see what they they think of the new novel for themselves. Even if NW is not a run-away hit like some of her other novels, I caught glimpses of Ms. Smith’s ability to put into words feelings that you as a reader may not have even realized you have felt before. She deftly seeps into your psyche and she just gets it. Reading NW has not discouraged me from patiently awaiting Ms. Smith’s next novel. Believe me, I will be just as excited for the next one.

by Anna

In this and any election season, things can get…tense. If you get too vocal, you can lose friends. Or what was once a mere political disagreement can become a family feud that lasts for generations. Recently we were sent a few promotional buttons that read GANDALF FOR PRESIDENT, one of which I immediately pinned to my purse. My preference is clear, and it’s one I don’t mind sharing. Rather than lose sleep and shell out the big bucks for massages to relieve our political tensions, why not have a good laugh over the whole circus–and teach our kids a thing or two about how our democracy works along the way??

Enter Bad Kitty, a hilarious character written and illustrated by Nick Bruel–who is coming to visit us and crack your kids up on Thursday, September 20th at 4 PM! Bad Kitty is fed up with stray cats digging in her neighborhood garbage cans, and she’s determined to do something about it. Good thing Old Kitty’s second term as president of the Neighborhood Cat Club is just about up!

If you and your kids haven’t met Bad Kitty yet, there’s never been a better time. This hilariously written and illustrated series will not only have kids rolling with laughter, but the  also sneakily teach them real facts about cats and, in this newest installment, the election process. (If your child has been begging for a kitten, talk about two birds…this series will gently educate them on the realities of cat ownership as well!)

You know how those times you’ve laughed the hardest stick out in your memory, no matter how many years have passed? Laughter serves the same purpose here, helping kids remember important lessons in democracy and citizenship.

If you haven’t brought your kids to Lemuria recently (or ever) to meet an author and have a keepsake book signed and inscribed with their names, now is the time. Making the connection between books and the real people who create them is so exciting for children, and is a vital part of raising lifelong readers and learners. Bad Kitty is a series targeted at preschool through third grade children–bring yours in to Lemuria for an event they’ll never forget!

by Mandy