The Millions

Bad sex in fiction!  Here are your excerpts from Literary Review’s annual contest.

The last of the World Cup qualifying matches wrapped up this week and the final list of qualified teams is in.   See the list of the 32 qualified national teams headed for South Africa in 2010 here.

Late November brings work of another favorite Madrileño to the forefront. The final book of Javier Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, Poison, Shadow, and Farewell, will be published at the end of the month by New Directions. The incomparable Marias will make two New York appearances, a reading at the 92nd St Y (with Paul Auster) and a conversation with Paul Holdengräber at the New York Public Library.

Catch it while you can: Charlie Rose’s hour-long interview with Pedro Almodóvar and his muse, Penélope Cruz, touches on character, confidence, and control, and is currently available online. Almodóvar’s latest film, Broken Embraces, which I saw  last summer in Madrid sans subtitles, was so visually stunning and well-acted that despite my meager translation the film enthralled. With a proper translation, it should be ravishing.

If  you haven’t already, be sure to check out the new books and culture website The Nervous Breakdown. They’ve already got a great interview with Millions favorite Dan Chaon, as well as some interesting essays that I’m looking forward to digging into.  I also like their “self-interview” series–where writers ask, and answer, their own questions.

Fans of Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club and Cherry: At the New York Times Book Review, Susan Cheever describes Karr’s latest memoir, Lit, as “the best book about being a woman in America I have read in years.”

Slate corrects an oversight to Sarah Palin’s otherwise impeccably edited memoir: no index. Theirs runs from “Alaska, autumn bouquet of” (page 1) to “‘you betcha’ – revelation of as not actually Alaska’s state motto” (page 309), and includes such helpful detours as “exclamation point, usage of” (pages 4, 26, 120, 121, 122, 138, 150…) You almost – almost – don’t have to read the book.

A harrowing interview with How to Sell author Clancy Martin is up at the Torpedo blog.

Paula Fox’s ostensible review of L.J. Davis‘ A Meaningful Life in the current New York Review of Books is really (pace N1BR) a transporting memoir of Brooklyn in the ’70s.

Pevear and Volokhonsky (first names no longer needed, really…like Madonna or Cher) rap with The Wall Street Journal about their luminous (dare we say definitive?) new translation of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories.