Valerie Martin’s Holiday Gift Suggestion

Valerie Martin is perhaps best known as the author of such novels as Mary Reilly and the Orange Prize-winning Property; longtime Beatrice readers might also recall her essay on Chekhov, which I published last year to recognize her short story collection, The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories, when she was reading from it in New York. By sheer coincidence, she’s in town again and will be reading from her most recently published book, Trespass, tonight at the Housing Works Café as part of an all-star lineup of contributors to Akashic’s New Orleans Noir anthology that also includes Joshua Clark, Tom Adcock, Julie Smith and Kim Sykes.

I wouldn’t give a work of fiction to anyone I didn’t know well. Since I don’t know your friends and family, I’ll suggest two great non-fiction books, both recently out in paperback that should satisfy all sorts of folks. The first is The Bedside Book of Birds, edited by Graeme Gibson. Even non bird-lovers will find much to remark upon in this varied and lavishly illustrated collection. Poems, stories, myths, lore, old engravings, paintings, photos, all are gathered edifyingly under such headings as “Then the Birds Attacked—Avian Defense and Flying Nightmares” and “A Bird in the House—Sinister Auspices.” In fact, even avid bird haters will find much to mull upon in this sometimes humorous, sometimes sad and touching, always fascinating volume. Put this old-fashioned miscellany by the bed and drift away to dreams of flight and feathers.

My second choice, for all your friends and relatives who think they should have been, might be, want to be, or are writers (and that, I’ve no doubt, is most of them), is Gay Talese’s brilliant A Writer’s Life. With care and narrative cunning Talese tells the story of a writer (himself) who sets out to investigate three very different stories and never finishes even one of them. Cheerfully Talese recollects how he got to these projects and how they finally got to him. Anyone who has ever struggled with an unwieldy sentence will find this book both a joy and a terror; a witty, exhaustive, and deeply cautionary tale for us all.

(Note: Trespass is published through Nan Talese’s imprint at Doubleday.)

3 December 2007 | gift ideas, guest authors |