It’s been a very busy and exciting week. Here are a few reasons why:

Can you tell that Inge's head is upside down in this photo?

That’s Inge declaring ownership of the box in which a copy of my (giant) dissertation is sitting. The diss. is with my committee members now, and we’re working on scheduling a defense in late April. There’s still work to do, of course. But: whew. That is the sound of me taking a short breather. (And doing some Killingly work, I hope!)

The book sitting on top of my dissertation draft includes my first substantial scholarly publication. It’s an edited collection entitled Masters of the Marketplace: British Women Novelists of the 1750s – my essay is about Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote. The book looks beautiful, don’t you think?

(Inge is not responsible for making this week exciting and busy — thankfully — but she and Saki have definitely helped make it more enjoyable. Except for when they decide to race around the apartment just as I’m falling asleep.)

I’ve also learned that Alcestis is a finalist for the BSFS Compton Crook Award for 2010, with results to be announced in early April.

Finally, don’t forget that the Goodreads giveaway of three paperback copies of Alcestis ends March 15th!

After I catch my breath a bit, I’ll be back with more links and perhaps more news.

It’s been forever since I’ve done a meme like this, but I’ve seen this book meme circulating and I’m brain-fried enough to need some structure for my content this evening. So!

The book I am reading: I’m about 3/4 of the way through The Ambassadors, which I’d tried once before and hadn’t gotten into. I love James, though I think I’m more comfortable with the middle period than his late style (I haven’t read The Golden Bowl or The Princess Casamassima yet, though). The Ambassadors is — well, it’s an entire book about whether one young man will choose to leave one place and go back to another, from the POV of a fifty-year-old friend of the family who overthinks everything. It makes me want to flee to Paris myself, or rather to the Paris in the book. It’s a ridiculous book, in some ways — it has essentially no plot and the majority of the action involves characters turning each other’s words around and emphasizing things when they talk — but it’s very beautiful, too. I’m really enjoying it.

The book I am writing: Killingly — my 1890s New England Gothic about a disappearing college girl and her unusual best friend. And I recently finished writing a book-length dissertation, which should count for something, I think.

The book I love most: I’ve seen a lot of people refusing to choose, and I sympathize. Today I would say Middlemarch. Tomorrow it might be Persuasion, or Portrait of a Lady, or Possession.

The last book I received as a gift: There is a wrapped book sitting downstairs waiting for me to open it on my birthday tomorrow. I’m trying to remember what book I was given most recently before this. Possibly a gluten-free cookbook from family at Christmas?

The last book I gave as a gift: Hermione Lee’s A Very Short Introduction to Biography, which is really charming and well-put-together.

The nearest book on my desk: The fantastic Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington, A. C. Elias, Jr.’s 1997 edition from the University of Georgia Press. It’s two volumes totaling 845 pp., the second being only notes. LP is one of my dissertation subjects, and she’s probably the one I’d most want to invite over for tea. The gossip would be exquisite.

PS. Don’t forget about the Con or Bust auction entry for Alcestis — bidding ends on Sunday.

It’s been quite a year — one of the strangest and nicest in a while. Alcestis was released in February, an experience that really began for me when I returned from MLA a day or two before the new year and found my box of author’s copies awaiting me. They were so beautiful. I still can’t get over how lucky I’ve been with the design of this book and what a tremendous job Soho’s done; I’m very much looking forward to seeing the trade paperback, too.

And then I had a book launch party in February. I went to Wiscon for the first time in May, and taught a fiction workshop this summer. I’ve been on fellowship all year and I still have six more months of fellowship funding to go.

I wrote a draft of my dissertation, and I started writing Killingly, just a little bit. I revised “The Former Hero,” which I started in 2000, during my sophomore year of college — I can even remember the unfortunate college futon I was sitting on while I typed up notes from my copy of Much Ado. I think it still needs more work, but sometime I’ll get it right. Maybe in another ten years. (This interview with Michael Chabon is a good reminder that even the stubbornest projects can yield something excellent in the end, even if it’s a completely different something from what you intend.)

Tonight I’ll be outside Austin, at a house where you can actually see stars. (The house with the Nubian dairy goats, for those of you who have heard me rhapsodize about them before.) I won’t be tipsy, because I’m driving, but I expect that I will be happy. There’s a lot I want to get done in 2011, starting with finishing the final draft of my dissertation, and it may be something of a rough year. But I hope it will be a good one, too.

Happy new year to all of you.

This is probably the second least holiday-ish holiday season I’ve had — I have no courses or teaching to take a break from, end-stage dissertations do not give you downtime unless you force them to, and for various family reasons I won’t be traveling. But that doesn’t mean I’m not still enjoying choosing gifts for people, and reading gift guides, like the ones I linked in my previous posts.

So! Here are a small number of books and other things I’d recommend if you’re still searching for last-minute presents:

• A Very Short Introduction to Biography, Hermione Lee. A nicely sized survey of the history of the genre. I’d probably use this as a text if I ever get to teach one of the classes on biography that I’ve designed syllabi for, and not just because it’s full of useful information — it’s also an enjoyable read.
• Georgette Heyer’s Regency World, Jennifer Kloester — for friends of yours who really want to know all the workings of the ton. (And I’m going to stop there with books or I’ll be adding to this entry all day.*)
• Qwirkle, a game marketed for children but hilarious when played by grown-up humanists. You want the cubes, not the tiles.
• Robyn’s Body Talk Pt. 1 and Janelle Monae’s The ArchAndroid, for people who need some good pop music.
• Small batch jams from Confituras, a local Austin business. (I believe all their offerings are gluten free.) They wouldn’t arrive in time for Christmas, by now, but would make a nice present later too.
• Pears from Harry & David. These are grown near where my mother lives in southern Oregon — we drive by their orchards on I-5. They’re actually kind of worth it as a splurge.

Plus a few links before I retreat back to the land of dissertation and other grad-school-related stress:

• An article title I could’ve written myself: Your Attacks on Genre Fiction Grow Tiresome.
• Lit Folks Are Hip. The captions say so.
• Sara Ryan’s interview with Jenny Davidson — I’m saving this till after I’ve read The Explosionist, but I’m actually also using one of Davidson’s academic books for diss research right now, so I was happy to see this, which focuses on her fiction.
• The Lapham Quarterly‘s fascinating piece on the dwindling and disappearance of Barbara Follett, child prodigy of letters.
• A Roman-era statue emerges from the sea on Israel’s coast.
• The Google Labs ngram viewer, if you haven’t played with it yet. There are apparently some questions about the reliability of its dating metadata, but it’s still a nice hint of the ways large-scale research in the humanities can evolve from here.

* You could also, if you were so inclined, pre-order the Alcestis paperback for someone you love! It’s out February 1 but will probably ship early from Amazon (the hardback sure did), and of course the e-book version (Kindle, Sony Reader) gets delivered instantly.

Bliss: not having a headache after days of lingering migraine. Of course, I made up for it by taking a fierce tumble while I was out running on an especially rocky trail this morning and whacking the hell out of my knee. I don’t even know what I tripped on. Sigh.

While I’m sitting on the sofa with an ice pack, here are some links:

A lengthy and fascinating interview with Cynthia Ozick at the Paris Review, in which Ozick typed her responses to the interviewer’s spoken questions. And here’s the Times review of Ozick’s new novel Foreign Bodies, a reworking of The Ambassadors. I really want to read this!

Maud Newton’s grandmother’s recipe to make you “the skinniest, shittiest, sexiest, drunkest, bastard in town.” In 30 days. In case you’re on a deadline or something.

Rachel Manija Brown on “what freeze/fight/flight” has felt like for her, as a resource for writers.

A forthcoming collection of essays about alternative academic careers in the humanities, to be published online and freely available. (Can anyone tell me why people use “#alt-ac” as the alternate academic tag even though Twitter doesn’t recognize hyphenated hashtags? Is there something wrong with “#altac,” or even “#alt_ac”?)

A few more links! These are all related to women and writing. That’s sort of how I roll, especially on a Friday afternoon.

My dissertation is about antagonism between literary women in the early eighteenth-century, so I was amused to read this piece by Jessa Crispin about searching for positive depictions of female friendship in recent novels, which includes charming email correspondence with her own best female friend.

Slightly related: this flowchart of reductive characterizations of women in fiction.

One blogger’s thoughtful response to Lionel Trilling’s essay on Mansfield Park (which you can and should find in this book, if you haven’t read it — unsurprisingly, it’s delightful).

Last Thursday I did my first author visit. My dissertation director is teaching Alcestis in one of his courses this fall, which has led to a lot of delightful things — seeing the book get linked to Robinson Crusoe and The Tempest on Amazon, first of all, when a number of his students bought them together. We did a Q&A and they had great, insightful questions. (Lance is an amazing teacher and they are obviously careful readers.) They’d read the novel just after reading the Odyssey — how’s that for pressure? I didn’t ask them how the two compared. But we did talk about books that inspired the novel, about what Admetus really feels when Alcestis stood up at the banquet table, why Hades reacts the way he does to Persephone’s interest in Alcestis, and why Hermes has a tattered cloak. On that last question I had to resort to the frustrating artistic answer and admit that he just does.

It felt a little weird, honestly, to be in a literature classroom as a writer and a source of information about my writing. As a creative writing teacher, of course, I’ve talked about my writing, but in that case I’m usually talking with students as fellow writers. Normally when I’m in a classroom discussing books with students my role is not to impose my viewpoint, though of course I have topics I’d like address and readings that I consider more or less valid depending on the textual evidence. But this time I was there as Author, complete with Intentions. And I was definitely not dead (though I was a little migrainey).

Lance also tells me that some students in the class may be writing papers on the novel. It’s probably my years of academic conditioning talking, but I find that ridiculously exciting, and also kind of reassuring. As delighted as I was to answer questions about what I was thinking while I wrote the book, I’m glad they’ll be developing their own interpretations of it, too.

First of all, I was nowhere near campus earlier this week when the shooter opened fire — I was still in Oregon, on the last day of a nice long visit with my mother, who turned 60 this week. I was, however, emailing back and forth with my dissertation director, who was stuck in his office while the SWAT teams searched our building and who, earlier, saw the shooter fire into the pavement near the Dobie Mall building across the street. Another former colleague from the Ransom Center was also quoted in the local news because she was out in that courtyard when the gunshots started. It’s terrible that the shooter died and mystifying that he chose this way to die, but I’m so glad he didn’t actually shoot anyone else in the process.

Anyway: I’m still in catch-up mode right now — I did work a fair amount while I was in Oregon, but this semester continues to be more hectic than I expected. So here, have a big list of links:

• Ann Patchett on plot in the WSJ (outliners represent!).
• Laura Miller on Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx in Salon.
• Elizabeth Chadwick on writing historical fiction about real people.
• A recap of the Margaret Atwood/Ursula K. Le Guin conversation about SF recently held in Portland. I am so sad to have missed this! I was even in Oregon when it happened, but about six hours away and being stomped by a migraine, so.
• Sarah Prineas guest-blogging against authorial self-promotion online.
• An earth-like planet that may sustain life has been found, about 20 light-years away.

And finally, two links relevant to my plans for the evening:

• An interview with Paul Harding, the author of Tinkers.
• Cocorosieland. (They’re playing at Emo’s tonight! I’m so excited.)

Okay, I’m going to have more to say about this once I read McGurl’s book. But for now, if you’re interested in

• MFA/MA creative writing programs
• Critical historiography
• The recent history of American literature/fiction
• It-narratives
• The history of free indirect discourse and other narrative styles
• “High cultural pluralism,” “lower middle-class modernism,” and the denial of historical consciousness in contemporary American fiction
• Jewish characters in the European novel
• Anxiety and shame and what they have to do with “creativity”

… please go read Elif Batuman’s essay in the London Review of Books on Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. It’s entitled “Get a Real Degree.” (I aspire someday to be as bold, abrasive, and witty as Batuman, but I don’t think I’m constitutionally cut out for it.)

I want to block-quote just about every other sentence in this essay, but I’ll limit myself to the last paragraph, which, while it hardly summarizes the points above, calls for improvement to creative writing programs in ways I sympathize with profoundly:

In the greater scheme, of course, the creative writing programme is not one of the evils of the world. It’s a successful, self-sufficient economy, making teachers, students and university administrators happy. As for literature, it will be neither made nor broken by the programme, which is doubtless as incapable of ruining a good writer as of transforming a bad one. That said, the fact that the programme isn’t a slaughterhouse doesn’t mean we should celebrate, or condone, its worst features. Why can’t the programme be better than it is? Why can’t it teach writers about history and the world, and not just about adverbs and themselves? Why can’t it at least try? The programme stands for everything that’s wonderful about America: the belief that every individual life can be independent from historical givens, that all the forms and conditions can be reinvented from scratch. Not knowing something is one way to be independent of it – but knowing lots of things is a better way and makes you more independent. It’s exciting and important to reject the great books, but it’s equally exciting and important to be in a conversation with them. One isn’t stating conclusively that Father Knows Best, but who knows whether Father might not have learned a few useful things on the road of life, if only by accident? When ‘great literature’ is replaced by ‘excellent fiction’, that’s the real betrayal of higher education.

I love and value creative writing programs; I want to teach creative writing. And I think Batuman’s essay is one of the best pieces of critical writing I’ve read in years.

*Heh. See Batuman’s article.

Links! Because my brain is turning into dissertation mush.

• A. L. Kennedy interviewed about her new short story collection. I laughed at the last question, as will you all.
• Dinosaur Comics on TERRIFYING ROMANCE STORIES. Whenever I want to post about romance in the future, I may do it with dinosaur clip-art. It just makes everything better.
• FDR’s Third Inaugural recorded. No sound, but it is in color.
• Matt Gross’s new travel column for the Times begins with an article about Tangier, a place I would really like to go, assuming I could find a way to feed myself there (couscous everywhere, I imagine).
• And on that note, today is Celiac Awareness Day. I don’t talk much here about having celiac disease, partly because all it really means for me is that I have to eat gluten-free forever and ever. But 97% of people who have it remain undiagnosed, and undiagnosed celiac means severely elevated cancer risks and more unpleasant stuff. (It was even the mystery illness on House once! I felt validated and also amused.) If you have ongoing health problems, do yourself a favor and get the blood antibody test, just in case.