September 2002 | Ahh, nothing reminds us of our favorite book season like the dusty smell of fall leaves. No need to dust off the books we're recommending this month, however! These are fresh in every sense of the word: wonderfully imaginative, truly original, and hot off the shelf. Grab a blanket and curl up with one of these reads on a cool autumn night.

1.  Books of Late: Three books we're excited about now
2.  Tips: Join other women writers at The Write Stuff
3.  Food for Thought: Fall favorites to bring in the new season
4.  Etc.: Some of the juiciest book gossip

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1.  Books of Late

Everything is zany; everything is irreverent; everything is wonderful about this spankin' new novel from a disgustingly talented new writer-only twenty-five years old! What are they putting in the water back East? At any rate, Safran Foer is the fortunate creator of two great new heroes for our time. The first, also named Jonathan Safran Foer, or alternately, "the hero," is a young American Jew (born, coincidentally, the same year as the non-fictional Safran Foer, 1977) who has traveled to the Ukraine to trace his family roots. The second, Alexander Perchov, also known as "Alexi-stop-spleening-me!" is a plucky young stud from Odessa who enjoys, according to his own account, much success with the ladies in many famous and premium nightclubs. It is Alexi's job to escort the fictional Jonathan to the remote village of his ancestors, in aid of research that Jonathan needs to complete the novel that he is working on. It all adds up to a story within a story within a story, but despite this postmodern trickiness, the novel is a joy and a delight to read, truly capable of reducing the reader to both helpless laughter and uneasy tears.

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The Lovely Bones is the lovely and amazing story of Susie Salmon, the most dynamic teenage murder victim ever to narrate a novel. Fourteen-year-old Susie has only been dead about a week as she addresses us from heaven, a place that takes a bit of getting used to in the beginning. Lonely and uneasy in her unbelievably felicitous new environment, Susie spends the majority of her time looking down on the family and friends she has left behind in the land of the living. In the weeks, months, and eventually years that pass following her untimely death, Susie continues to observe her loved ones as they struggle to overcome the crippling grief of loss, as each of her friends and family members seeks his or her own way to make sense of the totally senseless horror of her death. This would have been an incredibly powerful story of a family's collective response to tragedy even without Sebold's creative masterstroke of choosing a dead girl to narrate, but Susie's perspective and presence make this novel something transcendent, strange, and wonderfully unique.

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How to describe this meaty and miraculous novel? Well, it's kind of like The Old Man and the Sea meets The Black Stallion, only quite a bit better than either of those two respectable tomes. A smallish Indian sets sail for Canada with his family, accompanied by the remaining animals of the former family zoo. A mysterious shipwreck leaves Pi the sole survivor, well, almost the sole survivor; he is stranded alone on a rowboat in the middle of the ocean, with only an enormous and very hungry full-grown male Bengal tiger for company. The water around him is churning with sharks. This heart-thumping story is so strong and so good that you can almost hear the water around Martel churning with publishers vying to acquire the paperback rights. You'll race to finish the novel, but you won't forget it in a hurry -- unique, awesome, and utterly necessary.

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2.  Tips

Let Your Inner Writer Come Out and Play!

* Have you ever thought that you had a great idea for a book, but need help getting started?

* Are you an aspiring writer looking to take your craft to the next level?

* Would you like to learn the practical tricks & tools that make a difference from some of the most experienced industry professionals?

* Is it time for you to learn the ins & outs of the publishing industry?

Register now for THE WRITE STUFF, an exciting, supportive forum presented by Women Writing the West.

Saturday, October 26, 2002
Brown Palace Hotel
Denver, Colorado
$75

SOME PANEL CHOICES INCLUDE:

1. Write a Marketable Kids' Book in Six Weeks
2. The Perfect Plan to Complete Any Kind of Writing in Record Time
3. Navigate the Complex World of Publishing
4. AND MANY MORE!

For registration & detailed forum information, contact Good Books Lately at
(303) 744 - 8000.

Click here for printable brochure.

Click here for printable program and registration form.

(To view and print the brochure and program, you'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader. Click here for a free and easy download.)

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3.  Food for Thought

Chicken or Veal in Aspic “Holodets”
(to enliven your Everything is Illuminated discussion)

Chicken or Veal in Aspic “Holodets” is a perfect appetizer for the holiday and the best snack with vodka. Holodets can be also called Studen and is served with horseradish sauce.

Ingredients:
2 chicken breasts (about 1 pound), or 1 pound boneless veal 2 pounds calf or pork feet
1 pound beef round
1 onion
1 carrot
1 parsley root
2 ounces celery root
1/2 teaspoon salt plus additional salt to taste
10 black peppercorns
5 allspice berries
2 bay leaves
3-4 cloves garlic, crushed or finely chopped
3 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and sliced Horseradish or Mustard

Directions
1. Rinse the calf or pork feet, put in a 4-quart pot, and add 2 quarts of water.
2. Bring to a boil, lower the heat, cover, and simmer for 4 hours. The stock should have reduced by half, and gristle should fall away from the bones.
3. Add the beef, onion, carrot, parsley and celery root, and salt to the pot, bring to a boil, lower heat, and simmer, partially covered, for 40 minutes.
4. Add the chicken breasts, peppercorns, allspice, and bay leaves, and continue to simmer until the beef and chicken are tender, about 20 minutes.
5. Cool, then refrigerate for 3-4 hours.
6. Remove all the fat from the top of the aspic.
7. Melt the aspic over low heat.
8. Remove the calf’s feet, beef, and chicken, add the garlic and salt to taste to the broth.
9 . Skin and bone the chicken.
10. Remove the meat from the calf’s feet, discarding the bone and the gristle.
11. Cut all the meat into 1-inch pieces and place in a 2- to 21/2-quart serving dish or in individual 1- to 1 1/2 cup dishes.
12. Strain the broth over the meat, discarding the vegetables and spices.
13. Top with slices of hard-boiled egg and refrigerate until set, about 2 hours.
14. Cut the meat into as many slices as you will need and serve from the dish, accompanied by horseradish.

Click here for more Russian recipes.

Curried Pumpkin Dahl
(to whet your palate when you're talking about Life of Pi)

Pumpkin and black-eyed peas are widely used in South Indian cooking. We’ve combined them here in a spicy dhal stew. For a traditional Indian meal, serve the dhal warm or at room temperature over basmati rice. Accompany with chapati or papadam (Indian flat breads).

Ingredients:
1 medium yellow onion, quartered
1/4 cup (25g) grated coconut
3 cloves garlic, sliced
2 serrano or Thai chile peppers, seeded and diced
1 Tbsp fresh ginger root, minced
2 tsp garam masala
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp turmeric
1/4 tsp ground coriander
2 cups light chicken or vegetable stock or water
1 Tbsp canola oil
2 cups tomatoes, diced
4 cups fresh pumpkin (1 small pie pumpkin), peeled and diced
2 cups cooked black-eyed peas
2 cups kale or spinach, chopped
3 Tbsp mint, minced

Directions
1. Combine onion, coconut, garlic, chile peppers, ginger root, garam masala, cumin, cinnamon, salt, turmeric, coriander and 3 Tbsp stock in a blender.
2. Puree mixture to a paste, scraping down the sides of the blender beaker as necessary.
3. Heat oil in a large saucepan, then add the spice paste and cook, stirring often, for 10 minutes.
4. Add remaining stock, tomatoes and pumpkin. Cook over medium heat, stirring often, until squash is just tender, about 20 minutes.
5. Mix in black-eyed peas and kale. Continue to cook, stirring often, until kale is tender, about 10 more minutes.
6. Remove from heat. Taste and adjust seasonings; stir in the mint just before serving.

Visit GNC.com for more healthy fall recipes

Click here for a printable version of the recipes.

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4.  Etc.

Rowling's "Huge" New Manuscript Is Almost Ready
J. K. Rowling tells the Wall Street Journal that she's "completed the bones" (in the newspaper's words) of book five, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and is "in the process of tweaking and polishing. She said she is satisfied with the work she has produced and has written a beginning, middle and ending." Clearly Rowling still has work to do, though, and should wouldn't say when it will be finished--"but she didn't contradict a suggestion that the work could be submitted within three to six months." (For contrast, see the UK's Times, which boasts of a much shorter "exclusive interview" with Rowling: "The novel...is already readable and she is happy with the result. She is now at the tweaking stage. So can her millions of readers expect a Christmas present? 'Possibly.' There is a deep, throaty chuckle." And Reuters reports her telling a children's news program, "There's a lot of the book done. That's all I want to say, because if I give it a date and then I pass it everyone will be upset.") Rowling has also announced that she's four months pregnant. The bad news, for those of us with children who aren't yet able to read the books to themselves, is that yet again she's preparing a manuscript that is "frankly huge" in her words--every bit as long as Goblet of Fire (when that book was published she promised us the next one would be much shorter). Intriguingly, "Ms. Rowling added that she has written some other, non-Harry fiction, but she declined to be more specific."
Times story

Banned Books
Banned Books Week starts this week. Will those ever-popular, offensive classics--like Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men, and Catcher in the Rye--make the list? You can bet on it. We'd venture to guess that Rowling's Harry Potter books have once again caused a fuss.
Sacramento Bee article

Vidal's Latest Swipe
Never one to pass up a good fight, Gore Vidal has chosen to be inflamed by last week's LA Times story on the reissue of his 1981 novel CREATION and former editor Jason Epstein's comments (which, while critical of that book, still praised Vidal). Vidal faxed LA Times writer Tim Rutten a four-page essay called Editors; by both fax and phone "he disparaged not only his former editor but also contemporary American publishing, which Epstein helped shape." Are you ready? Vidal says: "Epstein is never busy; sloth, self-promotion and neo-Automat cooking are his sluggish activities. Epstein has no known interest in antiquity or in any other past save his own as the self-proclaimed creator of today's publishing industry. Apart from cookbooks and the lives of big money New Yorkers, he reads little....The general ignorance of people in book publishing is appalling, though reflective of the rest of the American population. It's just that people in publishing have to do more bluffing."

For more great gossip from the book trade, click here to subscribe Publisher's Lunch.

 

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