My brain is full of dissertation at the moment; well, dissertation, the sunny-seventies weather Austin’s been having this week, and a million little administrative things that I have to keep track of and sort out in the new few months. But next week I get to do more Alcestis stuff: I’ll be reading at Bloomsbury Books in Ashland, OR, on Thursday night, meeting with a book group Friday afternoon, and filming an interview with a local book TV show in Ashland on Saturday. And then Monday, I’ll hopefully be attending fellow Soho author Cara Black‘s reading at the Bookwagon in Ashland, too.

And yes, this is exactly the kind of spring break I like best!

Any advice for books I should read on my trip? I’m thinking about taking The Known World and maybe The Woman in White (both of which are on that list I made of books I want to read this year), but I also really want to read Jedediah Berry’s The Manual of Detection, which just got nominated for this year’s NYPL Young Lions award.

In other news, a few links before I dive back into the diss:

I’ve been a little leery of Dave Eggers’s work since A Heartbreaking Work…, not for any very good reason — too much self-aware self-awareness? The fact that McSweeney’s can be twee? (It can also be awesome.) But this Guardian interview is wonderful, and makes me want to pick up What is the What and especially Zeitoun.

And finally: some great advice from The Millions about how to break into publishing.

I mentioned recently that the Chronicle had included the first line of Alcestis in their ongoing feature of “grabbers.” On Twitter a little while ago, someone (I forget who, argh) linked to this list at Flavorwire of their thirty favorite opening lines in literature. As usual, I liked some of them and boggled at others, and there are few lines I’d add to any list of that sort.

For example…

From Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle, which I taught for the first time in the fall:

I planned my death carefully; unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.

And, okay, from Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale:

We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.

(Totally beats The Road, I’m sorry.)

P&P always gets the most love among Austen’s openings, for good reason, but Emma‘s is also brilliant:

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling:

An Author ought to consider himself, not as a Gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary Treat, but rather as one who keeps a public Ordinary, at which all Persons are welcome for their Money.

A Sentimental Journey:

–They order, said I, this matter better in France–

And if we’re including plays, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, of course:

Heads.

Do you have favorite first lines you feel are always overlooked? I’m intrigued that the Flavorwire list is specifically about favorites, not just about lines that are particularly grabby. I think my own favorite first lines tend to be those that communicate a flavor of the book. I almost included the opening of The Portrait of a Lady here, but it’s an intentionally misleading first line, tonally; it’s breezy and somewhat superficial and it hides from you the depth of the drama within the book. That’s a respectable strategy, but it means that I don’t really think about the first line when I think about the book as a whole.

Speaking of great openings, here’s the beginning of Lydia Kiesling’s lovely post about Brideshead Revisited at the Millions:

Brideshead Revisited is one of my favorite novels.  I am prone to the use of superlatives, fits of florid enthusiasm, and weeping, so I have dozens of favorite novels, songs, and movies.  I also have a lot of mortal enemies (mostly from the parking lot) and several best friends.  Both my cats are my favorite.  There are so many things to love (and loathe).  Let’s say that I am catholic with my affections.

The people in Brideshead Revisited are also Catholic with their affections, but for them it means something different, namely that they are crazy.  Or not crazy, exactly, but capable of nuances of feeling, infinitely tied to a class and place and time, that seem no longer to be part of anyone’s emotional spectrum.  These feelings do not register on the brute psychic seismographs of today; they require some exquisite baroque device, ancient but extraordinarily sensitive, sitting under a drop cloth in a crumbling country estate.

Don’t forget that a signed copy of Alcestis is available for bidding in the Con or Bust auction — proceeds will help fans of color who need assistance getting to Wiscon. Bidding ends March 13.

Also, speaking of queens, check out this article about the mysterious snake image that has appeared in a portrait of Elizabeth I as the painting has aged. Somebody needs to write a book about that.

Today’s my birthday! I’m officially 28 — I say officially because my brain decided I was 28 about four months ago, and I kept having to remind myself that I was, in fact, still 27. But no longer! So far it’s been a nice relaxing morning, though now I really need to get back to work on dissertation-writing. Eliza Haywood’s early poetry waits for no woman.

Nice things:

• Last weekend the SF Chronicle mentioned the first line of Alcestis in its ongoing series of “Grabbers.” That post also features the first line of Matt Beynon Rees’s new book The Fourth Assassin (published by Soho!).
• Alcestis is listed as a staff pick by Jennifer of the Doylestown Bookshop in Doylestown, PA, not far from where I grew up. Yay independent bookstores! Check out the other staff picks, too — some great historical fiction.
• The book also has a high score on a site called SFF Meta, which looks like a kind of Rotten Tomatoes for book reviews? What a neat idea.
• I’m finally just about over my two-week-plus cold and no longer sound like Batman when I talk!

And a reminder — I’ll be heading to Oregon in mid-March and am reading at Bloomsbury Books on March 18 at 7 pm. More about this soon.

This is apparently the week of great in-depth reviews of Alcestis! (Not that I would object if it became, say, the month of in-depth great reviews. Or, hey, the year would work, too.) Finch Bronstein-Rasmussen at Open Letters Monthly wrote a beautiful review essay that ties the novel to Edith Hamilton’s version of the Persephone story and focuses on the primacy of the Alcestis/Persephone relationship in the book. I was particularly touched by this paragraph, which addresses the end of the novel:

Readers familiar with Miss Hamilton (or with the other source, some guy named Euripides) will know what to expect from the rest of the story: in the myth, Heracles comes upon the house of his friend Admetus deep in mourning, makes an ass of himself as usual, and to make amends, tromps down to the underworld intent of wrestling Hades for Alcestis, intent on bringing her back to the land of the living. In the ancient Greek plays of which Euripides was a master, the audience always knows the rest of the story – the genius of the writing arises from how skillfully the author can bend the path and pile on the ironies, so that the conclusion the audience knows is coming feels nevertheless strange or poignant when it arrives. The genius of Alcestis is that it flawlessly preserves this duality. In the underworld, surrounded by shades, fascinated by (and fascinating to) Persephone, Alcestis is on the verge of becoming more alive than she ever was in the daylight, so when we see Heracles lumbering through the drifting shades, intent on bringing her back to her feckless husband and her joyless life, we feel the exact opposite of what we might have expected: we don’t want this rescue to happen.

Writing about a myth places both reader and author in interesting positions — the skills required to retell an already-familiar story are slightly different from those required to create a believable new fiction, and readers expect different things from retellings, too. But it also means that the notion of “spoilers” becomes, as we say in grad school, “vexed.” Of course there are elements of the book that are unique to my version of Alcestis’s story, but can readers really be spoiled for them? In a retelling, the high-concept angle is the plot, in one sense. So I was very glad to read that this reviewer found the retelling effective not just as its own story but as a new version of the tale informed by the previous versions. In other words: yay!