Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.

In this episode, a pair of conversations that are all about invention, and about the lies that reveal the truth. First, Kevin Young joins Bill Tipper for a conversation about America’s love affair with frauds and his new book Bunk: the Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News. Then, the Pulitzer-winning writer Jeffrey Eugenides walks with us through the stories in his new collection Fresh Complaint and reveals the places where fragments of his own experience took on strange new life in his fictional creations.

//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/6025778/height/90/theme/custom/autoplay/no/autonext/no/thumbnail/yes/preload/no/no_addthis/no/direction/backward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/87A93A/

Award-winning poet and critic Kevin Young tours us through a rogue’s gallery of hoaxers, plagiarists, forgers, and fakers—from the humbug of P. T. Barnum and Edgar Allan Poe to the unrepentant bunk of JT LeRoy and Donald J. Trump. Bunk traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon, examining what motivates hucksters and makes the rest of us so gullible. Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, race being the most insidious American hoax of all. He chronicles how Barnum came to fame by displaying figures like Joice Heth, a black woman whom he pretended was the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington, and What Is It?, an African American man Barnum professed was a newly discovered missing link in evolution.

Bunk then turns to the hoaxing of history and the ways that forgers, plagiarists, and journalistic fakers invent backstories and falsehoods to sell us lies about themselves and about the world in our own time, from pretend Native Americans Grey Owl and Nasdijj to the deadly imposture of Clark Rockefeller, from the made-up memoirs of James Frey to the identity theft of Rachel Dolezal. In this brilliant and timely work, Young asks what it means to live in a post-factual world of “truthiness” where everything is up for interpretation and everyone is subject to a pervasive cynicism that damages our ideas of reality, fact, and art.

Click here to see all books by Kevin Young.

Jeffrey Eugenides’s bestselling novels have shown him to be an astute observer of the crises of adolescence, self-discovery, family love, and what it means to be American in our times. The stories in “Fresh Complaint” explore equally rich­­––­­and intriguing­­––territory. Ranging from the bitingly reproductive antics of “Baster” to the dreamy, moving account of a young traveler’s search for enlightenment in “Air Mail” (selected by Annie Proulx for Best American Short Stories), this collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national emergencies. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people’s wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art founder under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in “Fresh Complaint,” a high school student whose wish to escape the strictures of her immigrant family lead her to a drastic decision that upends the life of a middle-aged British physicist. Narratively compelling, beautifully written, and packed with a density of ideas despite their fluid grace, these stories chart the development and maturation of a major American writer.

Click here to see all books by Jeffrey Eugenides.

Like this podcast? Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher to discover intriguing new conversations every week.

Author photo of Kevin Young (c) Melanie Dunea.

Author photo of Jeffrey Eugenides (c) Marco Anelli.

The post The B&N Podcast: Kevin Young and Jeffrey Eugenides appeared first on The Barnes & Noble Review.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2jzTrFc

In November 1996, a young writer named William Blacker, planning to travel to the wilds of northern Romania, wrote to Patrick Leigh Fermor for advice. Fermor, then in his seventies, replied:

Dear William — if I may make so bold —
I can’t think of anything more exciting than your imminent prospect — and well done starting in winter. (a) You have the whole world to yourself, and (b) inhabitants never take summer visitors seriously. Winter is a sort of Rite of Passage. Do take down any songs or sayings, above all descantice — spells, incantations, invocations, etc. I bet Maramures is full of them. Also, as much wolf and bear lore as possible — and remember, never drink rainwater that has collected in a bear’s footprint, however thirsty.

This jaunty note, now published in Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Life in Letters, edited by Adam Sisman, conveys so much of the “old boy,” as he himself might have put it: the generosity and enthusiasm, the arcane knowledge and irresistible wit. Fermor had by then been traveling and writing for almost six decades, and the letters gathered here span seventy peripatetic years, from 1940 to 2010. By turns gossipy, lyrical, profound, and dazzling, they carry Fermor’s voice so clearly that we seem to hear him speaking as we read. Not that we hear everything. Fermor admits to pruning his correspondence (“lots of things not for strangers’ eyes”), and Sisman has excised the more quotidian passages. Yet no letter seems incomplete. And thanks to Sisman’s astute selection and fine introductory notes, the volume’s gradually darkening mood seems to mirror Fermor’s ultimate journey from youthful exuberance to aged decline.

He began traveling in 1933 at the age of eighteen by walking from England to Constantinople, a trek that took a year and produced a trilogy — A Time of Gifts (1977), Between the Woods and the Water (1986), and The Broken Road (2003) — that remains one of the treasures of English travel writing. Never mind that The Broken Road was unfinished at Fermor’s death in 2011 (procrastination was a lifelong affliction) or that he inserted episodes from the 1980s into his odyssey of the 1930s (an “extremely immoral procedure” charmingly justified in a letter to a Hungarian scholar). Fermor’s true sleight-of-hand is his seemingly effortless ability to conjure up a place or person with astonishing clarity — a hillside at dawn, a garrulous stranger — while simultaneously revealing a world that is centuries deep. The breadth of his scholarship, so airily present and matched only by his curiosity, compresses time. In a 1948 letter to his then-lover Joan Rayner, for example, Fermor writes, “I knew a very old woman in Athens whose father had been alive when a Stylite was living on top of one of the pillars of Olympian Zeus.” (The Stylites being ancient monastic penitents.)

No penitent himself, Fermor occasionally retreated to monasteries to write, and that otherworld is as powerfully evoked in these letters as it was in his short book A Time to Keep Silence, published in 1957. Two masterworks followed: Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966), which chronicle Fermor’s travels in Greece, the country where he spent most of his life. And where he fought. Operating undercover alongside Cretan partisans during the Nazi occupation, Fermor’s most famous mission was the abduction of General Heinrich Kriepe, with whom Fermor was reunited in 1972 for a Greek TV documentary. “Tremendous singing, and lyre-playing and Cretan dancing,” after the filming, Fermor writes to a comrade’s widow, “all ending up pretty tight, and many tears being shed for old times’ sake…After all, the old boy hadn’t managed to do any harm in Crete before his capture and I always liked him… ”

He likes most people. In Northern Ireland in 1972 he spends a pleasant hour or so drinking with an Irish Republican Army spokesman (“Three dull thuds, two streets away, of exploding bombs”) before returning to “Blighty” for a weekend at Chatsworth, seat of Deborah Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire.   One of the Mitford sisters, “Debo,” was a lifelong friend, (their correspondence was published in 2008), and of her homey palace Fermor writes, “it’s wonderful what forgotten knitting and a couple of seed catalogues will do for a bust of Diocletian.” His world in such moments is English to the core, with a hint of P. G. Wodehouse: all weekend larks and biffing off to the country. Indeed, many of Fermor’s acquaintances could be characters out of Thank You, Jeeves: Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, fourteenth Baron Berners; Lady Dorothy “Coote” Lygon, daughter of the seventh Earl Beauchamp, and so on. There’s Miss Crowe, a relic of British rule on Corfu, pacing her terrace, ” . . . stick in hand, only slightly stooping, and followed by a rippling wake of old and half-blind dogs.” There’s Lady Wentworth, granddaughter of Lord Byron, sporting “a gigantic and very disheveled auburn wig that looked as though made of strands from her stallions’ tails” and occupying a manor “as untidy as a barn — trunks trussed, and excitingly labelled ‘LD BYRON’S papers . . . in chalk.”

But the writer and the man revealed in these letters is no Bertie Wooster-ish dilettante. Though “never less than two years overdue” finishing a book, Fermor, we learn here, took his craft, if not himself, seriously; in one letter he identifies his literary flaws and in another speculates how screenwriting for a 1958 John Huston film might instill “lessons about concision and dexterity.” And while expert at “high-class cadging” of Italian villas and the like, he detests anything “smart” — the “revolting” Côte d’Azur, for example — and observes, after an evening on an Onassis yacht, that there is “something colossally depressing about contact with the very rich.” Fermor cannot be corralled, either by class or by place. Throughout his life, and throughout these letters, he strays. Into love affairs and across borders, enraptured by the ancient and the natural world — even when mortality looms. “We walked in the fields yesterday where we slid on the hayrick twenty years ago,” he writes in 1975 to Alexander Fielding, a constant friend since wartime. Joan Rayner, his wife and strength, drops dead in 2003 — “no pain, thank heavens, except for survivors” — and Fermor will live eight more years. In a 1948 letter to Joan, he had described waking from sleep “as easily and inevitably as the faint touch of the keel on the sand of the opposite bank.” Across the final page, that image seems to shimmer.

The post Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Life in Letters appeared first on The Barnes & Noble Review.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2kbLHbG

Editor’s note: an earlier version of this article was originally published on December 7, 2016.

The battered and scorched Nevada lay aground to one side. Ahead, the Arizona still burned wildly. All day, workmen had swarmed the exposed keel of the turned-turtle Oklahoma, trying to cut holes. Hundreds of sailors, living and dead, remained encased in her, the living tapping for help, running out of air. The harbor reeked of smoke and fuel, and defeat.

— from Steve Twomey’s Countdown to Pearl Harbor

Seventy-six years later, the moment-by-moment, witness-by-witness accounts of the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor have lost none of their power, and the images of the vaunted Pacific Fleet in ruins still summon horror on the scale of Greek tragedy. Some 2,400 were killed that morning; today, about the same number of Pearl Harbor veterans are still alive, and many of them, along with their families, will be present at this year’s commemoration events in Hawaii, to honor and be honored.

In A Matter of Honor, Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan say that the story of Pearl Harbor is not only one of large-scale hubris and small-scale heroism but “Betrayal, Blame, and a Family’s Quest for Justice.” As blame foretold, that story began in the first minutes of the Japanese attack with Admiral Husband Kimmel, commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet, watching the devastation in anguish:

So close are the enemy planes that the watchers at headquarters can from time to time see an “exultant look on the faces of the Japanese pilots as they dive past our window. We worry about the Admiral exposing himself.” They worry with good reason. Marine Colonel Omar Pfeiffer will recall the “slight ping as a spent and tumbling 50-caliber bullet breaks through the window glass and strikes Admiral Kimmel on the left breast, in the area where the service ribbons are usually worn.” But for a bruise on his chest — the Admiral has been protected by the eyeglass case in his uniform jacket pocket — Kimmel is unhurt. Glancing down at the bullet on the floor, according to communications officer Maurice Curts, Kimmel says quietly, “Too bad it didn’t kill me.”

Even the eyeglass case seems prescient, for once the immediate shock of the attack was over Pearl Harbor became itself encased in issues of foresight and hindsight — who knew or should have known this, who did or should have done that, who deserves what portion of blame. Kimmel and his immediate subordinate became the primary targets, both of them demoted and humiliated for “dereliction of duty.” In A Matter of Honor, Summers and Swan ask if Kimmel was “a failed commander or a man cynically maligned;” their exhaustive analysis of the facts and testimonies presented in nine separate investigations, and of some newly available documents, demonstrates how Pearl Harbor was the result of systematic unpreparedness and of human error and misjudgment up and down the chain of command. While this convincing exoneration of Kimmel is no doubt encouraging to his family, his grandsons carry on the fight for the official restoration of his naval rank and good name.

Pearl Harbor is not one of the six battles featured in Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century, but military historian Alistair Horne does discuss its precedent, the 1904 Battle of Port Arthur. This surprise attack on the Russian fleet by the Japanese was so similar to Pearl Harbor, and a lesson so ignored by U.S. military command, that an incredulous Commander Fuchida, leader of the Pearl Harbor attack, afterward wondered, “Have these Americans never heard of Port Arthur?” This is the same sort of question being asked again today by those who are warning that a “cyber Pearl Harbor” is all too possible:

Our cyber warriors and, to the extent that they think of cyber war, our national security leaders in general, may take comfort in the fact that we could perhaps see a cyber attack coming. They may think that we could block some of it, and they may believe we could respond in kind, and then some. The reality is that a major cyber attack from another nation is likely to originate in the U.S., so we will not be able to see it coming and block it with the systems we have now or those that are planned . . . The reality may also be that when the U.S. President wants to retaliate further, he will be the one who will have to escalate. (Richard A. Clarke and Robert Knake in Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It)

The post A Failure of Vision appeared first on The Barnes & Noble Review.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2BdloNo