by Nonfiction Editor, Erin Blakeslee

Billy Collins, judge of Sycamore Review's 2008 Wabash Prize in Poetry, is featured on the cover of the new Poets & Writers (September/October 2008).  A charming profile by Elizabeth Kelley Gillogly in the magazine's print edition is well worth checking out.

Guidelines for the Wabash Prize in Poetry can be found here.

A Review of Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming

by Contributing Reviewer, Tony Russell

In July 2007, Ian Fleming Publications commissioned British novelist Sebastian Faulks to write an all-new James Bond novel. The new volume, Devil May Care, was released May 28, 2008 to commemorate the centennial celebration of Ian Fleming’s birth. (Fleming died in 1964 at the age of 56.) Faulks is the fifth writer after Fleming to write for the series and begins where Fleming left off in The Man with the Golden Gun.

Devil May Care is an enjoyable read, but for fans, it holds few surprises. The plot is the standard Bond formula (reconnaissance, girl, capture, victory) and feels like a cross between Dr. No and Casino Royale. It also reads like an index of previous Bond adventures, which will lose casual readers, but will challenge Bond connoisseurs to match up Faulks’s clues with Fleming’s novels and short stories. For example, Faulks mentions a name like Tracy di Vicenzo or that “whole Japanese night”, which avid fans will recognize as the name of Bond’s tragically-murdered wife in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and a reference to his amnesia in Japan in You Only Live Twice, respectively. Bond’s own body in Devil May Care documents his perilous existence:

His torso and arms bore a network of scars, small and large, that traced a history of his violent life. There was the slight displacement of his spine to the left where he had fallen from a train in Hungary, the skin graft on the back of the left hand. Every square inch of trunk and limb seemed to contribute to the story.

The novel’s plot centers around shutting down an opium-processing plant in Iran. (Bond stops a smaller, but quite similar operation in the Fleming short story “Risico” in For Your Eyes Only). The principal villain, Dr. Julius Gorner, suffers from a rare physical deformity, main de singe, or Ape Hand, where the thumb of his left hand is not opposable. But what makes Gorner even more sinister, M explains to Bond, is that his “whole hand is completely that of an ape. With hair up to the wrist and beyond”. Gorner, sensitive about the deformity, hides the hand under a white glove.

Gorner’s deformity is a bit over the top, but no more than Dr. No’s dual prosthetic hooks. Still, there is a disturbing quality at how deformity and psychosis go together so often in the series. In all, Faulks’s verisimilitude overly depends upon Fleming’s previous body of work, despite the fact that the novel’s byline declares that Faulks is “writing as Ian Fleming.” Still, Devil May Care is a quick read that Bond fans will enjoy, even if Faulks’s allusions and Gorner’s long soliloquies sometimes slow down the action. Devil May Care is available in hardback from Doubleday for $24.95, but fans with indiscriminate loads of cash may take a look at the leather, hand-stitched, limited edition offered by Bentley for $1500, although the rest of us may have to hatch our own world-domination blackmail scheme to get our hands on one.

by Erin Blakeslee, Editorial Assistant

The adage warns us not to judge a book by its cover, though it is hard not to be attracted to Brock Clarke's most recent novel, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, what with its tongue-in-cheek title and burning orange background, the color of a Fire Lane warning sign.

But what of a first sentence?  Can we judge by that?  I find I often do, and it was Clarke's juicy, dramatic, hilarious first line that sold me when I first pulled his late 2007 novel off the bookstore shelf:

I, Sam Pulsifer, am the man who accidentally burned down the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Massachusetts, and who in the process killed two people, for which I spent ten years in prison and, as letters from scholars of American literature tell me, for which I will continue to pay a hgh price long into the not-so-sweet hereafter.

Thus begins Sam's tragicomic tale, which, true to the novel's title, sees the accidental arsonist's life events intersecting with the homes of Dickinson (whose house, in real life, still stands, lest fans read Clarke and fret), Twain, Frost, and others.

No scribe is safe in Sam's world.  He introduces us to a bitter literature professor who refers to Willa Cather as a c***, because, well, she "thinks all writers are c***s."  He recalls that his mother would never let him read Uncle Tom's Cabin and To Kill a Mockingbird in the house "because they were so full of pity."  Sam even makes fun of his own author, Brock Clarke, when he comes across Clarke's earlier novel The Ordinary White Boy in a bookstore:

On the back it said that the author was a newspaper reporter from upstate New York.  I opened the novel, which began, "I was working as a newspaper reporter in upstate New York," and then I closed the book and put it back on the fiction shelf, which maybe wasn't all that different from the memoir shelf after all [...]

So apparently, Clarke allows his characters to judge by covers and first sentences, too!

Highly recommended, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England is silly-yet-subversive beach reading for the type of well-read literary nerd that is more likely to spend her summer vacation touring writers' homes than actually going anywhere near a beach.       

by Erin Blakeslee, Editorial Assistant

Purdue University Creative Writing professors, Sycamore Review advisors, and general talent monopoly Porter Shreve and Bich Minh Nguyen recently received a nice profile in Indianapolis Monthly.  Read it here.

by Erin Blakeslee, Editorial Assistant

Or a texting approach to the novel?  CBS Sunday Morning recently did a segment on the Cell Phone Novel, a new genre emerging in Japan and poised to gain in popularity worldwide.  Mobile-phone-wielding authors type their work using text-messaging programs, then upload their fiction to a number of different websites that allow any interested reader to download it, often in serialized form.  (After all, the average cell phone screen is half the size of a credit card!)

Though Cell Phone Novels are generally free-of-charge to download, Japanese consumers have proven willing to open their wallets for printed copies in the bookstores, buying hundreds of thousands of Cell Phone Novel books last year alone.  Some thumb-callused novelists have even seen their work adapted for the large and small screens.

It is exciting to see people discover creative-writing uses for new media: Now that busy Tokyo commute can be spent writing or reading a potential new literary masterpiece.  However, with the hefty standard text-messaging fees my cellular plan sticks me with, I think I'll stick with old-fashioned paper for the time being.