books

David Foster Wallace, a postmodern writer and Atlantic contributor, hanged himself Friday.

Kurt Vonnegut, a novelist who practically begged to be put on suicide watch, thought that writing novels was a treatment for depression, if not an outright cure. Blues music, he suggested, was analogous: a way of palliating an intolerable condition by transmuting it into art. A clinical study at the University of Iowa supported the theory that depression runs in the families of writers, and a wide array of anecdotal evidence (I would cite the film Crumb) suggests that practicing an art can, if the artist is lucky, save him from the fate of his relatives.

Random House canceled publication of a novel purporting to depict the early life of the Prophet Muhammad and his child bride, Aisha.

Excerpts from Sherry Jones's The Jewel of Medina do not make it sound like fiction worthy of the novel's latest defender, Salman Rushdie. Denise Spellberg, an Islamic historian who reviewed the manuscript, called it "soft-core pornography," and "ugly" porn at that. Consider a first-person passage from Aisha, who, according to some traditions, married Muhammad at age 6 and had sex with him at 9:

This was the beginning of something new, something terrible. Soon I would be lying on my bed beneath him, squashed like a scarab beetle, flailing and sobbing while he slammed himself against me. He would not want to hurt me, but how could he help it? It's always painful the first time.

Paul Theroux's Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is published by Houghton Mifflin.

Theroux has been writing travel books for 35 years, and for almost as long, reviewers have been slandering him (repetitively -- they hunt in packs) as "prickly," ornery, or otherwise disagreeable. I must be unusually tolerant. To me, Theroux seems a model of evenness, neither too crabby nor too tolerant. More to the point: Have these reviewers ever traveled? Long-term travel is misery and loneliness. It is trips in buses where children puke out the window, in filthy boats captained by drunk Albanians, in trains where porters warn you to keep your windows open, so thieves can't gas you as you sleep. It is grim hotel rooms with stained sheets. A little crabbiness is the only sane response.

Jane Mayer's new book alleges the cooperation of the eminent psychologist Martin Seligman in government programs later involved in the torture of detainees.

In 2002, Seligman spent three hours at Naval Base San Diego, lecturing on torture and interrogation. But his lectures, he protests, were flipped on their head: he told the group of military men and women how to resist torture and interrogation by an unscrupulous foe. According to Mayer, the military used his insights to learn to induce in victims a condition of "learned helplessness" -- a type of forlorn passivity that Seligman first observed in randomly electrocuted dogs 40 years ago. He hasn't collaborated with that group since the lecture, he says, and he strongly condemns torture. "My career has been devoted to finding out how to overcome learned helplessness, not how to produce it."

Novelist Thomas M. Disch killed himself in his New York apartment on July 5.

Endzone, Disch's blog, was one of the Web's cheeriest and one of its darkest. It derived its cheer from a reckless, desperate wit, often expressed by ridiculing, lampooning, or harassing enemies and professional associates who had crossed him. The ancient blogger wisdom about counting to a thousand before posting a personal attack seemed not to have reached him, and the effect was amusing and bracing. When an editor at FSG rejected an introduction he had written to the poems of Allen Tate, Disch responded with a short verse-cycle, childish and pissy, denouncing the editor, quite unfairly, by name. (Disch could write well about other people's poetry, but he was an eccentric choice for a Tate introduction.)

Katie Hafner's A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano is published by Bloomsbury.

This book is really the story of two eccentrics. The first is Gould, easily the most finicky in a strong field of stubborn kooks on the concert-pianist circuit. The second, and more interesting, is the collectively eccentric industry of concert-piano builders, as epitomized by Steinway & Sons and the peculiar men (they are all men, at least in this account) who keep their products in tune. Other books have documented Gould's eccentricities better -- this one wastes a great deal of space reprising tired anecdotes about his summer overcoats, his extreme sensitivity to touch, and his diet of Arrowroot biscuits and ketchup -- but the Steinway thread reveals an unfamiliar and fascinating side of the classical-music industry.

A Nuclear Family Vacation is published by Bloomsbury.

The opening scene of the newest Indiana Jones film is set in Nevada in 1957, possibly during Operation Plumbbob, an actual nuclear-test series in which the U.S. measured the response of humans and physical structures to nuclear blasts. Satellite images give a hint of what's left: a pockmarked brown landscape of craters and broken buildings. There are smashed reinforced-concrete domes, shattered windows, as well as iron rails and bridges that the heat and explosion have twisted. It looks, I am told, like a place where Superman (or perhaps Uri Geller) had given himself over to a fit of rage.

The new Progressive Book Club started operations on Monday, luring prospective members with an initial offer of three left-of-center books for just $1.

Formed to imitate the highly-successful Conservative Book Club, the left-wing group will offer books chosen by a panel that includes novelists Michael Chabon, Erica Jong and Barbara Kingsolver and activists-cum-journalists like Todd Gitlin and the Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel. (Like any good information-age startup, it will likewise offer a social-networking component.) Whether it will succeed in an age when most book clubs -- the conservative one included -- are stagnating or taking losses is one question. Whether it will be good for liberals is another.

Invisible Nation, Quil Lawrence's book about the last two decades of Iraqi Kurdish history and politics, is published by Walker.

The south of Iraq is dominated by prickly and humorless factions -- groups often indifferent to the perceptions of outsiders, and rarely willing to soften their image to soothe the nerves of the journalists who want to report on them. The north of Iraq presents the opposite problem: the Kurds are just so damned smooth, so endlessly accommodating, that a journalist has to keep his guard up to make sure he isn't getting played.

Arthur C. Clarke, the celebrated science fiction novelist, died earlier today.

Clarke was best known for anticipating the advent of telecommunication satellites and for writing 2001: A Space Odyssey, later adapted by Stanley Kubrick into one of the most innovative and well-regarded films of all time. But more than that, Clarke was a dissenter, a cosmopolitan visionary who saw conventional patriotism and religious belief as a dangerous plague; only by doing away with both, he ofted argued, could humanity reach its full potential.

Charles Robert Jenkins, a U.S. Army deserter, has teamed with Jim Frederick to write a memoir of his forty years in North Korea.

Sgt. Jenkins's punishment is in his face -- a withered, jug-eared mug that looks about two decades older than its sixty-odd years. In January 1965, Jenkins deserted his unit in the Korean DMZ and slinked into North Korean territory, where he intended to turn himself in and go home after a prisoner-swap. The scheme failed badly. Instead of going home, he ended up confined with a handful of other American deserters, beaten bloody by one, malnourished from the start, and forced every day to do nothing but read and memorize the works of Kim Il Sung. It is a measure of the unpleasantness of the ensuing four decades that one low point was the ripping of a U.S. Army tattoo off his arm without anesthetic, and a high point was watching a bootleg video of Michael Jackson's (admittedly sublime) "Thriller," with the volume turned to nearly inaudible levels, lest someone hear it, turn him in, and possibly have him shot. MORE

Australian novelist Peter Carey's new book His Illegal Self tells the story of the kidnapping of the eight-year-old son of radical parents.

The boy at the center of this novel is a sort of Sixties royalty, a princeling of the radical left. The son of two figures sufficiently extreme to have concocted bombs and appeared on national news, his name is Che ("Jay," insists his patrician grandmother, his legal custodian after abandonment by his mother), and he's too young to know that the obligations of royalty are manifold, and rarely chosen. MORE

Novelist Zadie Smith offended literary aspirants by declaring that she and the other judges found no entries worthy of the 2008 Willesden Herald Short Story Prize.

Giosue Carducci, Henrik Pontoppidan, Giorgos Seferis, and Sully Prudhomme each won a Nobel gong for literature; Tolstoy, Borges, and Ibsen did not.

Zadie Smith's defense of high standards recalls V. S. Naipaul's tactic, when judging a weak field in a literary contest at Makerere University.  He awarded only one prize, and called it Third Prize.  Were the 850 Willesden entries really so bad?  Having been spared reading them, I cannot know.  What I do know is that prizes matter more than they should, and if their intent is to encourage good writing, incentivize greatness, and give bad writers kicks in the pants, then Smith's haughty dismissal has accomplished more than any actual prize would have.