Manuel Muñoz

The sad thing about Laura Miller’s slapdash effort to take down this year’s slate of National Book Award finalists is that it sounds like the same argument made last year, the year before, and the year before that. Miller calls the “head-scratching” about the fiction slate a “frustrating impasse between the press and the public,” but fails to take responsibility for how she and other book reviewers—not the prize juries—are largely responsible for that impasse.

However Miller might want to define “public,” a little more honesty about the nature of that public would be in order. It matters very little to me, as both a writer and a serious reader, what the American public might be buying in droves. (I worked in publishing and I know the answer to that question—you really don’t want to know.) If Miller wants awards to function as tools for readers to “sort out the most important books of the year,” they’ve got plenty of other ways to do that, from ubiquitous best-of-the-year lists from loads of sources, to the latest movie trade paperback tie-in (the ones with your favorite book cover suddenly replaced with a garish movie poster and stacked all over Walmart). That alone should suffice for the four or five books that Miller guesses the average American reader takes on over the course of a year. And if that’s not enough, Miller is welcome to revive the now-defunct Quill Awards if she’d like a People’s Choice Award equivalent to selecting our country’s finest.

But for the rest of us who truly take reading seriously, a National Book Award finalist slate is something we approach with two key elements most book reviewers are missing: curiosity and generosity. My impulse is not to sniff at a writer like Jesmyn Ward, but to read more about her and what her book might offer me. Readers like us end up glad to learn of “obscure” writers like Bonnie Jo Campbell or Joan Silber or Kate Walbert. Edward P. Jones was alerted to many not with The Known World in 2003, but way back in 1992, when his fantastic (and classic) short-story collection, Lost in the City, was a finalist for—you guessed it—the National Book Award.

For Miller to carp about the slate ignoring writers like Ann Patchett or Amy Waldman is disingenuous. As a reviewer, she’s privy to the big-house publicity for these books, and she responds in kind by reviewing a handful of them. She chooses, and in doing so, is a judge of sorts. Talk about irrelevant: it’s no wonder so many book reviewing venues have gone under. When reviewers like Miller grant the same paltry number of titles all the attention, you’re damn right that we, as serious readers, start to depend on prizes to do the work that reviewers should help us do. I doubt very much that Miller even cracked open the package that contained Andrew Krivak’s small-press offering The Sojourn. Why would anyone trust her dismissal of a book she chose to ignore? Remember when Tinkers won the Pulitzer? The “holy goddamn” New York Times (to borrow Robert Duvall’s lovely phrasing from Network) issued the weakest apology about how they “missed” it. Lots of readers (and booksellers) are grateful that the Pulitzer prize jury did not.

Prizes like the NBAs have never been designed, first or foremost, as sales tools. They are efforts to build and sustain our national literary culture. Granted, time ends up being the harshest judge of all, and books move up or down as readers consider them in their own eras and spaces. But the efforts of organizations like the National Book Foundation, the PEN/Faulkner, the Pulitzer board, etc., are much too important to dismiss, much less by people who have failed to read the books they are prepared to rail against. With the demise of so many outlets for book coverage, we truly have become a nation of book reviewers in the worst sense: the re-packagers of the publishing industry’s major “pushes,” with little filtering. We used to have book critics, people who assisted the whole of American literature by alerting the public to good books. And they did so with the spirit of generosity and curiosity, nothing more. We could really use a little more of that.

I love when the major American literature prizes get announced: I gripe very little about omissions or snubs. With only five slots (three for the Pulitzers), no list will please anyone. Instead, I take the prize list as a personal invitation to take up a writer with whom I might not be familiar. I wish newspaper reviewers and columnists would approach the lists the same way, rather than wonder about this or that book that they bothered to take note of only because a major house was really pushing it.

In poetry, the prize lists always serve me well: since I’m not of that world, I need a guide of some kind. The National Book Awards brought me to Alan Dugan, for example, when he was a finalist (and eventual winner) in 2001 for Poems Seven. They brought me to Ben Lerner’s beguiling Angle of Yaw and Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler and Linda Gregerson’s Magnetic North. My poet friends usually have plenty more to tell me about what I don’t know, but I hang on to the pleasure of discovery. It isn’t very much different from my bookshop days in the 1990’s, when I’d scour the Lambda Literary nominations (back when they sort of meant something), then went looking for those titles at Wordsworth. It helped me build a reading list.

In fiction, the pleasure is even deeper, maybe because I take so much heart and inspiration when the major prizes lift someone out of the fog. This morning, I literally jumped out of my chair when I read that Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories was nominated. I’m thrilled because she’s a short-story writer—a very dedicated one—who has been published widely and yet modestly. It’s Lookout Books, a small press out of North Carolina, that published her title this year, and they get to join Bellevue Literary Press and McPherson as presses (those two that brought out Tinkers and Lord of Misrule) that clearly privileged merit over market value and, in doing so, have been richly rewarded in other ways.

Pearlman has been published by Eastern Washington University Press, Sarabande Books, and University of Pittsburgh Press via the Drue Heinz Literature Prize in 1996 (which is how I discovered her, reading the titles that had won the prize, back when it seemed like the Drue Heinz was the only short-story prize contest around). These are smaller presses with modest distributions, but more important is how they collectively contributed to what big publishing houses always claim to do, but seldom accomplish: nurture and support the growth of a writer.

I’m thrilled to see someone like Edith Pearlman receive recognition like this. It reminds me very much of when Gina Berriault’s Women in Their Beds came out from Counterpoint and ended up winning both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner. I was about twenty-five years old at the time, but I remember sensing even then that some writers are asked to wait in the wings for a long time before being invited out to the national stage. I’ve been irked, too, as I posted this morning on Facebook, that this phenomenon happens most frequently to women writers. But no matter. Pearlman’s nomination means so many good things: more readers for her, some more attention to yet one more small press fighting the good fight, and perhaps even some new converts to the great pleasures and mysteries of the short story.

When I worked in publishing, I was always puzzled about “the fall season,” as if anything the book world could unleash was on par with Hollywood’s “Oscar season,” which starts right after Labor Day. In publishing, the fall books are geared to release and ship just in time for holiday shopping: hence, the glut of big books by big names releasing by mid-November, all of them vying for the same review space, but only a handful getting any sort of consistent traction. It always made little sense to me, especially with big open spaces in other parts of the year, like early summer or January. Take Jayne Anne Phillips’s Lark and Termite, which Knopf wisely released right at the beginning of 2009. Apart from being a good book, it competed with very little in the bright white of January’s nothingness (at least in the review sections), and that tactic helped sustain attention for the novel all the way through October and the National Book Award nominations.

This year, the fall season in the book world has brought two titles I really have been anticipating. Book glut be damned, I’ve got my eye on Dagoberto Gilb’s new short-story collection Before the End, After the Beginning, which pubs on November 1st from Grove. The other is already out: David Trinidad’s wonderful Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems, from Turtle Point.

Trinidad’s volume is the latter of his stunning one-two punch this year. In addition to this volume, he edited A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos for Nightboat Books, a definitive edition for any young poet, but also one imbued with a moving, elegiac, and ultimately instructive quality. Trinidad’s introduction to that volume speaks to his dedication in preserving Dlugos’s work and legacy—the poet died of AIDS at forty—and the extraordinary patience with which Trinidad arranged and ordered Dlugos’s output, awaiting the right publisher. It translates into an act of literary rescue, one poet devoting energy and mind to another who can longer speak for himself—an act, really, of community in the truest and deepest sense.

I said the Dlugos volume was “instructive,” but Dear Prudence has the same feel. To carry each volume is a nod to persistence, to the value of a writer producing poems that, consciously or not, speak to each other across years, across forms, and across subjects—there’s literal weight to this work. The selected poems come from a variety of small presses that published Trinidad’s earlier books before he began being published by Turtle Point in 2000, and I had a hard time not skimming through to revisit poems I knew from Plasticville or The Late Show (books I remember from the late, lamented Wordsworth Bookstore in Harvard Square).

Dear Prudence starts with a section of new poems titled “Black Telephone.” In them are some of Trinidad’s recognizable preoccupations—the allure of sub-narrative in film, the refractive quality of pop music on one’s emotional history, the continual reshaping of the personal past the more one digs into it. But something new (to me, anyway) is the affirmation of influence. A clever framework is a series of poems around Sylvia Plath, a poet whose singular fury functions as a baseline for most of us in our early reading, but whose real power comes only later (mostly in reading her terrible imitators). But seeking models or idols or mirrors in poets like Plath is hardly anything to snicker at. In “Underlined in Sylvia Plath’s Copy of Tender Is the Night” comes a testimony to the power and need for reading, a writer’s ever-present search for the arresting and the startling, often in another writer’s work. It’s no surprise when Anne Sexton, another of those poets who serves as a timeless first-gate-keeper to poetry for many, shows up to comment on all of this in “Anne Sexton Visits Court Green.” Half the fun of the poem is giving over to its authority in depicting Sexton as the cool, serenely acidic woman her pictures suggest she might be, and this blends in perfectly with Trinidad’s lifelong obsession with the movies, with performance and public masks, but also with the spell woven by the mythology of art and its producers.

That world of art can appear anywhere, as suggested by the look Sexton gives to the laburnum in Plath’s garden, the poet’s subject often within striking sight. So it’s no wonder to me that Trinidad finds something worthwhile in producing a haiku for each of the episodes of the Peyton Place television show DVD reissue (“Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera”) and that, embedded in the strange curl of Dorothy Malone’s hairdo, is yet one more space still untouched and undefined by a poet. This book starts to serve, in moments like that, as a testament to maintaining and holding true to a remarkable vision, however idiosyncratic it may seem to the rest of the world. “Fame not necessary,” he writes in “Pink Button,” “for the poems / each word / eye candy / for the literary / pilgrim.” Damn right.

Here’s a quick rundown of some interviews, articles, reviews, and other media for What You See in the Dark, all in a handy-dandy list:

VERY CHOICE BITS

An alumni profile in Harvard Magazine (for all the dirt on how Manuel came from dirt).

A radio interview with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm (if you want to hear Manuel quiver in front of a genius).

A review by the film critic Charles Taylor at the IFC film blog (if you’d like a beautifully argued observation of the novel’s chief aims).

A review by the film critic Miguel Rodriguez at KPBS’s Cinema Junkie (if you’d like a consideration of why Psycho is used as the novel’s cultural touchstone).

An invited blog post at the Library of America (if you’d like to see the debt Manuel owes to the great mind of Gwendolyn Brooks).

Manuel’s Juror Favorite selection from the 2011 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories (if you’d like proof that Manuel’s literary taste includes something other than his own, and also if you’d like to say you appreciated Matthew Neill Null before everyone else did).

Some pictures of Manuel’s work space (in case you’re curious like that).

SOME INTERVIEWS

An interview conducted by fellow writer Jenny Shank over at New West (if you want the scoop on why the hell Manuel did the second person thing).

An interview at TimeOut Chicago (if you want a precise rundown in a glossy, classy mag).

An interview with the lovely Creosote Journal (if you want some more about how Manuel ran across the Petula Clark/Harry Belafonte moment).

An interview with the very popular film blog, The Film Experience (if you want to hear Manuel go on about Robert Altman and the glory of Nashville again).

An interview with Houston’s OutSmart Magazine (if you’d like to get a read on Manuel’s sometimes testy relationship with queer literature).

A video interview with Park City TV in Utah (if you want to judge how jazz-handy Manuel is on camera, or to admire his scuffed boots).

An interview at La Bloga (if you’d like a take on small-town transgressors and a little cachetada at Obama’s tip-toeing).

SOME PRINT AND MEDIA REVIEWS

They loved it at NPR.

They loved it at Publishers Weekly.

They loved it at O Magazine.

They loved it in Cleveland.

They loved it in Philly.

They loved it in Austin.

They loved it in Chattanooga and in Edmonton, Canada (no, really–there are just no links anymore!)

SOME BLOG POSTS

A playlist of film scores is posted over at Largehearted Boy.

A pairing with Chuck Palahniuk at Beverly in Movieland.

A review by Laura Marris at CultureMob.

A review by Lisa Peet over at Open Letters Monthly.

A review (for realzies!) from the very well-read Backlisted.

A review over at Three Guys, One Book.

I’ve said many times that good mentors nurture not only writing, but spirit and heart. I was reminded of that at the end of July while team-teaching with my mentor, Helena María Viramontes, at the invitation of Sandra Cisneros’s Macondo Foundation in San Antonio, Texas. In a week of hard work, gentle debate, and open discussion, Helena demonstrated once again how critiques need not be harsh, how performing the service of reading—especially at the draft stage when a writer is most vulnerable and fragile—is always an opportunity to selflessly reaffirm, to encourage a vision other than your own.

Over at the IFC film blog, critic Charles Taylor shows book reviewers how it’s done with a beautifully argued observation of the novel’s chief aims.

At KPBS’s Cinema Junkie, critic Miguel Rodriguez does the same thing in considering the role of Psycho in the novel as more cultural milestone than simple re-enactment.

A huge thanks to both of these gentlemen for their thoughtfulness and their enthusiasm.

Over at the Library of America blog, a guest post about the lasting influence of Gwendolyn Brooks’s gorgeous novel, Maud Martha.

Anything you wanted to know about how a working-class Chicano kid made it through Harvard is all right here. Thank you, Harvard, for acknowledging me as one of your own.

The great Michael Silverblatt of KCRW’s Bookworm posts an interview with me recorded in early April. Nice to be bookended on the program offerings by David Foster Wallace and Marjorie Garber, no?

Well, he did—along with Christine Schutt and A.M. Homes, to boot! The 2011 edition of the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories pubs on Tuesday, April 19. Check out your local indie bookstore, buy a copy, and support 20 great writers in the process!

(For those of you who know about the selection process—yes, it is completely anonymous. The story by Matthew Neill Null, “Something You Can’t Live Without,” is complete bliss—he’s already sounding like our American masters. Incredible!)

An interview with the film writer Nathaniel Rogers is now up at The Film Experience, complete with chitchat on Psycho, Robert Altman’s Nashville, and film as inspiration.

Over at Largehearted Boy, Manuel posts a playlist of film scores that helped shape the novel.

Algonquin Books shares a great Q&A with author Nina Revoyr, author of Wingshooters.

Houston’s OutSmart magazine offers up a discussion on sensibility, inspiration, and the importance of community.