Postscripts

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Fall Titles

This is the time when I start to actively pretend I don't live here, and one game I've invented to ignore the heat is to think almost exclusively about books coming out this fall. It's a game you can play, too: In September, FSG is publishing Where the Stress Falls, Susan Sontag's first collection of essays in 35 years… W.G. Sebald, one of the writers Sontag is impressed by in Where the Stress Falls, has a new novel, Austerlitz, coming from Random House in October; it's about an orphan, Jacques Austerlitz, who goes to England alone in 1939 and ends up being raised by a Welsh minister and his wife as their own child but, as the narrative unfolds (there's an unnamed narrator who is listening to Austerlitz tell his story), it becomes clear that Austerlitz doesn't really have memory of where he came from. So, of course, he has to find out. This is a big-idea book but it's as readable as a good mystery… Poet and Beat personage Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights Books in San Francisco, will have a slim (128 page) new novel, Love in the Days of Rage, published by Overlook Press in October. It takes place in Paris in the spring of 1968… Angie Cruz is new talent; her Soledad (Simon & Schuster, August 18) is about the revelatory voyage of a young woman who must reluctantly return home to Manhattan's Washington Heights after working her hardest to get away from it… Joan Didion has been writing about politics for The New York Review of Books since 1988, and in September comes a collection of her articles, Political Fictions (Knopf). "As the pieces began to accumulate," Didion writes in the foreword, "I was asked with somewhat puzzling frequency about my own politics, what they 'were' or 'where they came from,' as if they were eccentric, opaque, somehow unreadable. They are not."… Lily Burana's Strip City (Talk Miramax Books, September) is subtitled A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America, and it's funny, ardently Americana, and intelligent… More Douglas Coupland this fall: In All Families Are Psychotic (Bloomsbury, September) , the Drummond family descends upon Florida to watch their sister and daughter Sarah take off into space, which should be all happiness and light, but this is a Coupland novel, after all. There's a character named "Shw."… Jonathan Franzen's third novel, The Corrections, will be out in September from FSG; it's the story of Enid Lambert, whose husband Alfred is becoming increasingly remote, spending his time in the basement committing "shadowy, unspeakable acts." Their eldest son Gary is a materialistic banker in Philadelphia, the middle child Chip has for some strange reason quit being a professor in order to pursue a "transgressive" lifestyle in New York, and Denise, the baby of the family, is having an affair with an older married man. They all get together for Christmas… A&M history professor H.W. Brands' new book, The Strange Death of American Liberalism, an investigation into why so many Americans seem to distrust the federal government, is being published by Yale in November… Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources (Overlook Press, October), David Mamet's new novel, examines the strange things that happen when the Internet crashes.

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Three Ring Poetry

The year's big Poetry Slam event, the Three Ring Poetry Benefit, takes place at 7pm on Friday, July 20, at the Mercury (214 E. Sixth, above Jazz restaurant). In addition to slam poetry and this year's team, there will be bands, a female impersonator, a magician, Satan's Cheerleaders, and fire eaters. During the entertainment, people will be able to bid on items that will be part of a silent auction.