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Hot tips: Read your way around Miami Book Fair International's block party
Hot type: Read your way around Miami Book Fair International's block party
Miami Book Fair International kicks off its street fair today at Miami Dade College's Wolfson Campus, 300 NE Second Ave. in downtown Miami. Hours are 10 a.m.-6 p.m. through Sunday. $5 admission on Saturday and Sunday; 18 and under free.
ANTIQUARIAN ANNEX
10 a.m.-6 p.m. today, Saturday and Sunday, Northeast Second Avenue
Collectors can browse antique posters, sheet music, maps, postcards and more than 10,000 books from dealers around the state.
INTERNATIONAL PAVILIONS
10 a.m.-6 p.m. today, Saturday and Sunday
No time to travel to China, Israel, Spain, Brazil, the Dominican Republic and Haiti in one day? Learn about the countries' cultures at the International Village.
WRITE OUT LOUD CAFE
Corner of Northeast Second Avenue and Third Street
7-9 tonight
11 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Saturday
11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday
Take a break and enjoy poetry, readings of fiction and nonfiction and music.
ROCK BOTTOM REMAINDERS
5:30 p.m. Saturday, Student Life Patio Stage
Join Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson, Greg Iles, Aron Ralston, Andy Borowitz, Daniel Handler and surprise guests as they forget about writing for a while and just . . . rock.
CHILDREN'S ALLEY
On the Plaza
9 a.m.-2:30 p.m. today
10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday
At eight different tents, kids can meet classic fictional characters -- hello, Curious George! -- hear storytellers, enjoy plays, puppet shows and readings, create arts and crafts and read with their families.
Special appearance: Connie Kaldor, author of 'A Duck in New York City,' this year's One Picture Book, One Community selection, reads at 10:45 a.m. Saturday on the Target Children's Stage.
BARACK OBAMA
6 p.m. Saturday
Tickets for the Barack Obama appearance will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis at noon inside the book fair grounds at Northeast First Avenue between Third and Fourth streets. One ticket per person. The venue will be announced Saturday.
Illinois Senator Barack Obama at Miami Book Fair International
Illinois Senator Barack Obama at Miami Book Fair International this Saturday
BARACK OBAMA
6 p.m. Saturday
Tickets for the Barack Obama appearance will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis at noon inside the book fair grounds at Northeast First Avenue between Third and Fourth streets. One ticket per person. The venue will be announced Saturday.
Eric Larson: Bestseller signals author's return to style
Eric Larson: Bestseller signals author's return to style; Thrilling, true tale tracks a creator -- and a killer.
The idea is almost impossible to imagine, but Erik Larson had his heart set on following the bestselling The Devil in the White City -- a richly detailed, compelling National Book Award finalist about a visionary architect and a diabolical serial killer set during Chicago's 1893 World's Fair -- with a book along the lines of The Five People You Meet in Heaven.
''My intent was to do a small, gentle book the length of one of those Mitch Albom things,'' a chuckling Larson says from a hotel in Minneapolis. ``I was really deadset on some straight line narrative. . . . After The Devil in the White City, I swore I would never do a dual narrative again. I made my life too difficult. It's more like writing two and a half books. A book on each story and another half a book to make them work together.''
But Larson failed miserably in his plan, and readers are luckier for it. Thunderstruck (Crown, $25.95) weaves another fascinating double narrative around a creator and a killer: Guglielmo Marconi, obsessive inventor of the wireless, and mild-mannered Hawley Harvey Crippen, whose transatlantic flight to freedom was tracked -- and transmitted back to thousands of mesmerized newspaper readers -- by Marconi's scientific breakthrough.
The parallel stories stretch from Edwardian London to Cape Cod and Nova Scotia and back and forth across the Atlantic, as Marconi labors to transmit messages against a frenzied backdrop of technological achievement, the jealousy of other scientists and looming World War I.
In the hands of Larson, who also wrote the chilling Isaac's Storm, about the devastating hurricane that killed thousands in Galveston in 1900, history is fluid and fast-moving, its larger-than-life personalities even more vital than its events.
''He's one of the people who have caused this resurgence of history with a human face,'' says Les Standiford, who in preparation for writing Last Train to Paradise, his book on Henry Flagler, read Isaac's Storm for inspiration. Larson, he says, has ``the narrative gift, the ability to create characters and bring history alive in a novelistic way.''
Larson, who rarely relies on assistants for help with research, was mulling over the evolution of the wireless when ``I did what any self-respecting writer does. I went to Google. As usual about half a billion websites came up.''
A mention of Crippen in connection with Marconi caught his eye. Larson remembered the name. ''My mother was a real mystery junkie,'' he says. ``She wrote mystery short stories and loved to read them. And I remember her telling me about Crippen. I didn't remember any details about the case, but there was this overall aura of romance and mystery. . . . The funny thing is, the references you find are only glancing references to Crippen. I didn't know really what he'd done. And it turns out it was one measly murder.''
Compared to the vile acts of Jack the Ripper or even the monstrous H.H. Holmes from The Devil in the White City, who lured victims to his basement maze of soundproof rooms and crematoriums, Crippen's rap sheet seems relatively short, if exceedingly gruesome. He carved up his unfaithful, selfish wife, buried parts of her in the cellar and then fled London with his young mistress aboard an ocean liner -- and captured the British imagination.
''It was a buttoned-down time,'' Larson says. ``Outwardly there were all these constrictions on behavior, so that when Crippen fell in love and made a break for freedom, for a lot of people there was something liberating about the idea. . . . It was the first time in history people were able to watch what passed as real time unfolded. One critic wrote that it was the first reality TV show.''
Larson wisely refused to become bogged down in too many technical details, given that Marconi wasn't a trained physicist and didn't really understand why his wireless experiments worked. Larson retained ``the little boy parts I found fascinating, like how the original transmitting towers were so gigantic. But ham radio operators are going to be disappointed.''
He also shied away from elements he found even remotely dull. 'I don't know about you, but I hear the word `patents,' and I start to nod off. Wireless ultimately became a tangle of conflicting claims, and to this day nobody can really peel them apart.''
To build tension and maintain reader interest Larson uses quotes but only from letters, memoirs or other tangible records, even statements, found in the British National Archives, from the dustmen who removed trash from Crippen's house. ''Maybe this is an example of how jaded the country is about truthiness'' -- props for the Stephen Colbert reference -- ``but people often assume I've made it up, and that drives me wild.''
Larson also packs Thunderstruck, like Devil, with riveting facts about the period, some of which were forced by length into footnotes (for one of the book's most entertaining passages, see No. 21, on a bizarre experiment involving snails).
''My passion is digression,'' Larson admits. ``I love packing books with little bitty things. With Devil, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. It was ideal because of all the stuff I could work in. . . . What I've found is I have to pack everything into a rough draft and then start taking it out. My secret weapon is my wife. We've worked out this code system. It took awhile to make this a nonconfrontational system. One rule we have is I can't be in the house when she's reading the manuscript. I don't have the psychic stamina to watch someone read my stuff.''
Richard Ford: A man can't shake his roots -- they're always stalking him
Richard Ford: A man can't shake his roots -- they're always stalking him
He hails from the South, but novelist's landscape is all his own.
RICHARD FORD: 'The South was a place well served in imaginative literature, without need of exploration. I couldn't be further away, emotionally and visually, from Mississippi.'
He spoke by telephone from his room in a generic hotel in an eastern city but to someone with Mississippi roots, a conversation with Richard Ford was like going home.
It's his easy affability, his genteel manner, conveyed in a voice modulated by geography and culture, that resonates. Ford, who is tonight's ''An Evening With . . .'' speaker at Miami Book Fair International, can make another tiresome interview on a long publicity tour seem as comfortable as a chat on the front porch of his Mississippi Delta farmhouse.
Mississippi, a poor state, too long mired in backward social constructs and antebellum fantasies, can claim a disproportionate share of great and notable writers. Ford's critical acclaim, his Pulitzer Prize and a PEN-Faulkner Award have given him a place in a list that begins with William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy and maybe places him ahead of Shelby Foote, Larry Brown, Willie Morris, Barry Hannah and Ellen Gilchrist.
Yet the stories of Ford, 62, unfold in other places. ''The South was a place well served in imaginative literature, without need of exploration,'' Ford says. ``I couldn't be further away, emotionally and visually, from Mississippi.''
A JERSEY GUY
Ford says he needed a place ''evocative of me,'' and his most famous novels -- The Sportswriter, Independence Day and his newest work, The Lay of the Land (Knopf, $26.95) -- have been dubbed his Garden State Trilogy. All three are set along the central Jersey shore. Ford, born in Jackson, Miss., an occasional resident of Coahoma County, Miss., and, for years a resident of New Orleans -- the town where God-fearing Mississippians go to sin -- can lay claim to the modern-day title of New Jersey state writer.
The New York Times celebrated publication of The Lay of the Land with a special feature on Ford's New Jersey and an accompanying map, describing the real-life towns that correspond to the fictional haunts of the trilogy's angst-ridden hero, Frank Bascombe. But Haddam, N.J., seems such a mighty distance from Yoknapatawpha County.
Ford now lives in Maine, with past addresses that include Montana, France and, of course, New Jersey. Only one of his nine books, Piece of My Heart, ventures into his home state. But he shrugs off notions that the actual place called New Jersey coincides with the geography of his imagination. ''It's a made-up place,'' he says.
The real setting lies in the mind of his protagonist. And that's a landscape that evokes his native home, insists William Ferris, author, historian, associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina and former director of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Ferris says Ford's characters, like those of Walker Percy, exhibit a peculiarly Southern sense of inner torment and alienation. ''There's a deep sense of place that he brings to all his work that owes a clear debt to his old friend Eudora Welty and other great writers from his home state of Mississippi,'' says Ferris, a native a Vicksburg, Miss. ``Ford writes the way a skater skates on ice, with incredible verbal dexterity, creating a web of allusion that masks the kind of southernness that one encounters in Faulkner and Welty. But this is a very contemporary Southern literary expression.''
Ford says he has deliberately avoided the home-state territory explored by his iconic predecessors. And he rejects the myth, created by the coincidence of so many literary giants coming from one little state, that ''place makes character.'' His place of origin may not have shaped his character, but it follows him like a specter.
KATRINA `WRENCHING'
The Lay of the Land is set in the fall of 2000, far enough in the past to avoid the two cataclysmic events of recent times. Ford wrote a profound essay for The New York Times about ''sense of national loss'' after 9/11. But he says, ``Katrina was much more wrenching. It seemed so specific to us.''
He says the destruction of New Orleans crushed him as well as his wife Kristina, who had been executive director of the New Orleans Planning Commission, and ``left us convulsing in tears for days.''
He wrote yet another wrenching piece on disaster for The Times: ''In America, even with our incommensurable memories of 9/11, we still do not have an exact human vocabulary for the loss of a city -- our great iconic city, so graceful, livable, insular, self-delighted, eccentric, the one New Orleanians always said, with a wink, that care forgot and that sometimes, it might seem, forgot to care,'' he wrote. ``And our inept attempts at words run only to lists, costs, to assessing blame. It's like Hiroshima, a public official said. But no. It's not like anything. It's what it is. That's the hard part. He, with all of us, lacked the words.''
One man has the words. But he offers none beyond a few paragraphs committed to a daily newspaper. The horrors of Katrina and the horrors of 9/11 are not the stuff of a Richard Ford novel. He will no more write about them than the contradictions and cruelties of Southern life. ''I just don't see in myself any urge to do that,'' he says, as if the inner voice of a novelist was as independent and contrary as a separate personality.
Ford maintains that mysterious sense of place to the end. Asked where he plans to be buried, it was as if he was also waiting for that inner voice to decide. ''I think about that every day,'' he says.
Mississippi's greatest living novelist does have a notion about his next literary venture. ``I'm thinking it may be set in Saskatchewan.''
Deborah Eisenberg: Short stories explore a vast landscape
Deborah Eisenberg: Short stories explore a vast landscape
Politics may lurk just off-stage, but it's people who fascinate short story writer Deborah Eisenberg.
DEBORAH EISENBERG: 'It's extremely hard to have a private life any longer or even the illusion of a private life. We no longer can think of ourselves as unconnected to things that are happening all over the world.'
Since 9/11, fiction writers have struggled to assess its lingering damage to the country's psyche, a landscape scarred by upheaval and anxiety. So it's no surprise that short-story writer Deborah Eisenberg, a New Yorker by choice, turns her insight to the elusive -- and possibly fruitless -- search for resolution in the aftermath of uncertainty.
People, not politics, intrigue Eisenberg, who appears Sunday at Miami Book Fair International. But these days some influences are hard to escape, although only the elegiac title story of her new collection Twilight of the Superheroes (Farrar Straux Giroux, $23) revisits the actual attacks.
''I don't think you can live in the country without being what we call political now,'' Eisenberg says from Chelsea, where she lives with her longtime partner, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn. ``Our consciousness has been permeated by public concerns. . . . It's extremely hard to have a private life any longer or even the illusion of a private life. We no longer can think of ourselves as unconnected to things that are happening all over the world.''
The characters in Twilight are preoccupied with their own dramas. And yet Eisenberg infuses each story with an aching sense of unresolved tension -- the post-traumatic bafflement of ''Where do we go from here?'' -- whether she's writing about a young woman who has impulsively kidnapped her violent boyfriend's toddler, an adulterous wife coping with her son's deepening mental illness or a brother fretting over the isolation of his bipolar sister.
''Her famously unhurried stories stand out not only for their obvious intelligence and wit, but also for the way they include a reader,'' says short-story writer Amy Hempel in an e-mail. ``She seems as mindful of her relationship to readers as she is to the story itself. It means a reader is truly transported, and her characters are heady company to keep. And she never, ever wastes a reader's time.
These new stories, like those in the earlier collections All Around Atlantis, Under the 82nd Airborne and Transactions in a Foreign Currency, ''have plenty of content that we would identify as political,'' Eisenberg says ``They're concerned with social issues. But they proceed from the inside out. I want to know: What does it feel like? I'm not interested in writing dogma or ideology, but I am very interested in the capacity of fiction to witness the experiences of other people.''
That exploration includes work inspired by Eisenberg's travels to Central America in the 1980s ''to find out what our tax dollars were doing.'' From trips to Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, she turned an unsettling feeling of displacement into such ravishing works as Holy Week, in which a travel writer blithely rates tourist spots in an unnamed country (``The Buena Vista offers probably the best lunch deal in town. Help yourself to the unlimited buffet, complete with tortillas. . . .''), ignoring rumors of death squads while his younger girlfriend seethes.
What awed Eisenberg was ``seeing myself reflected from the outside, through the eyes of people who knew much better than I did what my role in the world is. We would meet little children in El Salvador who were under no illusions about my relationship to them, but I was under plenty.''
In Twilight of the Superheroes, Eisenberg's attention veers homeward, as if to spotlight a new, more familiar front in the war on careless, unexamined peace of mind. In the title story, young Nathaniel, struggling to keep alive his comic-strip character Passivityman, has sublet an apartment that looks out onto the World Trade Center. ''When they'd moved in, it probably was the best view on the planet.'' And then: bright blue sky and chaos. Nathaniel's introduction to Manhattan is a front-row seat to destruction. Afterward, his chastened uncle Lucien tries but fails to continue his way of life. ``It was impossible to have fun or to want to have fun. It was one thing to have fun if the sun was shining generally; quite another thing to have fun if it was raining blood everywhere but on your party.''
Eisenberg, who also wrote the play Pastorale and teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Virginia, views the Twilight stories as an unconscious reflection of a ''sense of urgency that is definitely a consequence of that overwhelming feeling of being poised at a brink,'' a sensation she recalls vividly.
``Big cities are moody, and New York is a moody city. But there was this marvelous fluid moment before an official attitude had been settled, a beautiful moment of empathy, a feeling of connection and communication with people on the other side of the world. It was profoundly moving, but it was tremulous. Everybody was waiting to see what would happen. . . . I was scared to death because I was sure we would move swiftly into a mode of retribution. I would have to say that I'm not often right in my life, but I was right about that. I think it was extraordinarily painful to the majority of New Yorkers, to find ourselves the occasion for so much violence.''
Eisenberg doesn't rush for the remote each morning to see the news to make sure nothing else tragic has occurred -- she doesn't own a set and calls TV ''meretricious'' and ''cheesy'' -- but ``when I hear helicopters over my apartment or a low-flying plane, I'm not going to tell you my body doesn't react.''
Still, she's not tempted to write a novel based on these weighty matters. Short stories -- immediately entrancing, painstakingly crafted, gloriously vivid -- are what she loves to build.
''Years ago people were hoping that I would write novels,'' she says dryly. ``Now people know I'm this odd, old sea creature sitting on a rock somewhere. They throw me a peanut now and then, but mostly leave me alone.''
Barack Obama is someone worth making the trip for. I heard him once and this guy has a lot of charisma. At a time where every politician is for himself, he is appealing to the crowds by preaching unity.
Do you know if he will be talking or just signing his new book?
Barack Obama is someone worth making the trip for. I heard him once and this guy has a lot of charisma. At a time where every politician is for himself, he is appealing to the crowds by preaching unity.
Do you know if he will be talking or just signing his new book?
Good question Tilezanj .... I don't know ... let me send some email & make some phone call ... I'll get back to you ...
Tilezanj, I'm trying to make it for the Obama presentation. Hopefully I can get some tickets. And who knows I might get to meet you there. Who else will be there?
Illinois Senator Barack Obama at Miami Book Fair International 
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