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!
A final reminder about the giveaway contest being run by Wonders & Marvels — the deadline for entering to win a copy is today, Sunday, February 28.
Yesterday, my day was made by this stunning and thoughtful review of the book, which places Alcestis in the context of Mary Renault’s historical fiction. I can’t claim that my writing has been very directly shaped by Renault’s work — I’ve only ever read The Persian Boy — but I’m honored by the notion that Alcestis offers a similar reading experience to her novels, but one “centered in women’s experiences.” This is also one of the most beautifully written reviews I’ve read. “Giddy” would not be too strong a word for my reaction.
The fabulous historical blog Wonders & Marvels is giving away four copies of Alcestis! The deadline for entering to win a copy is this Sunday, February 28. To enter, visit the blog post linked above and post an answer to the following question as a comment:
What little-known character in history deserves to be in the spotlight and have his or her story told?
There are some great responses in the comments already. I would love to read a novel about Alcibiades and Socrates. I think some of the women writers I’m analyzing in my dissertation would make excellent subjects for historical fiction. I can’t believe that nobody’s written a novel about Laetitia Pilkington yet, and Delarivier Manley would also be a fine candidate for fictionalization, as long as you didn’t let the most boring lawsuit ever dominate the story, the way she does in her own fictionalized autobiography. But the delightful Charlotte Charke would top them all — probably literally, if that were possible.
That’s Charlotte as Damon, one of her popular breeches roles. Her Narrative is way funnier than her father Colley Cibber’s Apology, should you ever have the desire to read a mid-c18 autobiography about the life of a player.
Anyway, many thanks to Wonders & Marvels for hosting this giveaway! I look forward to reading everyone’s suggestions.
I’m offering a signed copy of Alcestis in the Con or Bust auction being run by the Carl Brandon Society. The money raised in this auction is available to fans of color who request assistance in order to attend Wiscon, the feminist SF convention held annually in Madison, Wisconsin. (I’ll be going for the first time this year!)
And something very close to my heart: Austin’s No Kill Coalition, which will be presenting a No Kill Resolution to the City Council on March 1. Join the coalition, email the council — do what you can.
Lessons I have recently learned: when people say that you should only go running while sick if your illness is above the neck, they’re not kidding. I went for a short run on Friday and my lungs are still in revolt. (I apologize to everybody who had to listen to me cough my way through part of a panel at the Harrington symposium at UT yesterday!)
In nicer news, I recently received my first copy of the Historical Novels Review, the review publication of the Historical Novel Society. The February issue contains a review of Alcestis and a mention of me and the book in a short feature on debut historical novelists, as well as articles on magic in historical fiction and Jane Austen and the new gothic, interviews with writers, and more. It’s a great publication and I’m sad that I put off joining the HNS for as long as I did — my grad student poverty notwithstanding, it’s basically an organization devoted to everything I like. I’m delighted that Alcestis appears so prominently in the Review.
Speaking of fascinating historical information, check out Kathryn Hughes’s write-up in the Guardian of this book about arsenic in Victorian England (not yet released in the US, but coming in March). Hughes calls it “a lovely book, a near-perfect blend of rigorous scholarship and jaunty storytelling,” but even more remarkable than that praise is Hughes’s summary of the perniciousness and pervasiveness of arsenic in Victorian material culture:
Perhaps most sinister of all, though, was the way that arsenic insinuated itself into the very fabric of the Victorian home. The poison was used in the production of green dyes, which were incorporated into everything from ribbons to playing cards. The scene was set for a neo-Websterian tragedy in which beautiful maidens and society bucks crumpled to their deaths following a gift of haberdashery or quick game of whist. Even more fateful was the craze for deep green wallpaper, which led to thousands of families meeting their deaths as a result of their taste in home furnishings. Not that they actually licked their walls: the dye was very unstable, so the slightest breeze could dislodge a puff of toxic dust. Queen Victoria herself was so appalled by the homicidal tendencies of green wallpaper that she ordered every room in Buckingham Palace to be stripped of the stuff.
Makes you wonder which ubiquitous chemicals in our daily lives might be looked at this way in hundred years, no? Creepy.
I’ve just uploaded the video Travis recorded at my book launch party to Vimeo, so you can now watch and listen as I read the prologue to Alcestis and talk a bit about the content of the book. Feel free to share this video, too!
Don’t forget about the AuthorBuzz giveaway of five signed copies of the book: details here.
I linked this guest post I wrote for Wonders & Marvels last weekend, but it may have gotten buried. If you’re curious about how I decided to afflict poor Hippothoe with asthma, that post is for you.
This review, by Kelly Lasiter of Fantasy Literature, makes me VERY happy. (I found it on GoodReads. Did you know that it’s really hard to resist looking at your book’s page, even when you’ve logged on intending to add yet another book to your own TBR list? It’s an amazing feeling to see, for example, that people are reading the book at that very moment.)
Today I got a shiny CD from my friend Kristin, who took wonderful photos of the Alcestis book launch party last Sunday at BookPeople.
T. says that I should do a Wesley Willis-style description of the event: “I read at BookPeople. About thirty or forty people were at the show. It was a rocking good time.” Which is actually pretty accurate! Because I did my master’s degree in fiction writing at UT and am still in the same department for my Ph.D. work, I am lucky enough to have a group of amazing friends who have watched me write this novel, revise it, wait and wait to see if it would find a publisher, sell it (with much rejoicing) to Soho, revise it some more — you get the picture. So they were excited to see the final product in print, and I was tremendously excited to share it with them.
The one thing I forgot to get a picture of was my name on the marquee sign out front, which was pretty damn exciting all on its own. There was another sign inside the store with the event listed, and I couldn’t help it — I walked up and pointed and said, “Uh, that’s me.” And the kind staff member (Jen R., if I remember right) in charge of the event took excellent care of me (and T., who came early with me to help set things up).
The reading was held on the second floor, in the big open space between sections of the store. Below is a photo of me reading, with some of the audience visible:
I read the Prologue and the majority of Chapter 7.
And then I hung around and signed books for old friends and new friends, too.
If you want to see more photos from this reading, check out the Flickr set that Kristin created. I’m really looking forward to my next reading, now!
All photos are copyright Kristin Ware (thanks, Kristin!).
Yesterday’s launch party was just wonderful. My friend Kristin Ware kindly volunteered to photograph the event and did a marvelous job — I’ll have photos from her soon to share with you. T. also recorded a video of me reading. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to edit that and get it posted quickly as well.
In more Alcestis news of the visual sort, the lovely Realm Lovejoy interviewed me for her blog. Realm is a videogame artist, an author, and an illustrator, and she creates beautiful illustrations to accompany her author interviews. For my interview, she painted a gorgeous portrait of Alcestis. Please go check it out and leave her admiring comments!
And finally, one more photo of Alcestis in the wild, from, of course, my mother:
This is Alcestis at Bloomsbury Books in Ashland, OR, where I will be reading on the evening of March 18.
I write fiction and creative nonfiction. I'm a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. My novel Alcestis, a retelling of the Greek myth, is now available from Soho Press.
