Are you a sports fan? Maybe an ambivalent observer? Whatever your position or persuasion -- whether you're a shooting guard whose shot rarely falls or a championship parade party-pooper -- if you're reading this chances are good you've imagined, in a feverish dream or daytime diversion, your favorite books lacing up, trash-talking, and competing against one another. I'm sensing some shaking heads. Bear with me, metaphors are wont to run wild -- they have their own March Madness.

That's right, fellow page-flippers, it's Tournament of Books time! [cue the dramatic music]

This is the tenth year of the Tournament, which means (if all the ancient oracles are to believed), the winner will enlarge in size such as to destroy a city the size of Oakland. I might've misunderstood the prophecy, though. (Short version for the uninitiated: sixteen of the past year's best and brightest novels are seeded and progress to a winner-take-all championship by way of quirky reviews written by some of the best and brightest reviewers.)

City-destroying destruction notwithstanding, you should definitely follow the tournament HERE.

Ongoing now is an epic play-in round, refereed by the great Geraldine Brooks:

You'll have to click the image to find out the victor! 

The opening round kicks off March 6. See below for what you can look forward to.

March 6 -- The Luminaries v. Hill William (Rachel Fershleiser)
March 7 -- A Tale for the Time Being v. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (Mat Johnson)
March 10 -- The Good Lord Bird v. The Tuner of Silences (Sarah Schulman)
March 11 -- The Signature of All Things v. The Dinner (Roger D. Hodge)
March 12 -- The Lowland v. Eleanor & Park (Jami Attenberg)
March 13 -- The Son v. At Night We Walk in Circles (John McElwee)
March 14 -- The Goldfinch v. Long Division (Héctor Tobar)
March 17 -- [Pre-ToB Playoff Winner] v. The People in the Trees (John Green)

All of these titles are available for purchase online through DIESEL or in any of our four locations! We'll be reporting on the tournament all month.

1) New York-based poet Lucy Ives is contributing this month to the Poetry Foundation's bookmark-and-read-this-daily blog, Harriet. Each post thus far has been interesting, but especially so her most recent one on "Novelty."

"Were it not for my propensity to become inconsolably and sometimes hysterically dissatisfied by the definitions and descriptions—composed by individuals otherwise pretty much miraculously good at writing things—of the ways and reasons writing should get done, I would probably be living a full and productive life. As it stands, it’s possible that my life has been ruined by literature; more specifically, by something called poetry. It seems even more ludicrous that such a state of affairs has come to pass when one considers the afore-suggested fact that I have no idea what poetry is, much less, historically speaking, what it was."

2) NYRB Classics is releasing a new edition of William H. Gass's audacious philosophical ode to the color blue, On Being Blue. "What's so interesting about that?" you might be wondering. Michael Gorra's introduction sets the table wonderfully for Gass' verbal feast: (via NYRBlog)

"Gass has an ear like a Pantone chart, exquisitely alert to the semitones of sound and sense, fifty red words here and a hundred greenies over there. His blues themselves are enough to swallow you down. Consider the book’s first sentence, with its rattletrap inventory of some few of the things that particular color can be:

'Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; Russian cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes earn that gentlemen may wear; afflictions of the spirit—dumps, mopes, Mondays—all that’s dismal—low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call for trumps in whist (but who remembers whist or what the death of unplayed games is like?)….'

"It continues for a full page."

3) Feasts fit for Hemingway! (via The Millions)

"[P]ractical lessons lurk even in the most quintessentially modern texts. Ernest Hemingway’s 'Big Two-Hearted River,' the last story in his 1925 collection In Our Time, is essentially an instruction guide for camping and fishing. In it, Hemingway’s stand-in character Nick Adams goes on a solo fishing trip, seeking release from the past. The 'hard work' of hiking to his campsite pleases him: 'He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs.' [. . .] I decided to test the theory by treating “Big Two-Hearted River” like an instruction manual: I would cook every “recipe” it contains.

4) Zora Neale Hurston on Zombies?

1) Happy 100th, William S. Burroughs. Well, as happy as you'd ever have wanted it to be anyway. When looking to celebrate Burroughs with a video clip, there are several prime ones to choose from. His Thanksgiving prayer, for example, is for those who are not so faint of heart. I was, however, especially keen to find this interview between him and literary comrade-in-arms, Kathy Acker (made all the more poignant for having been conducted months before both of their deaths).

(2) In her two novels, Telex From Cuba and (most recently) The Flameflowers, Rachel Kushner proved herself to be a prodigiously gifted writer. In a recent fascinating interview with The Quietus, she points to her influences:

"I'm pretty inspired by Bolaño, it's true. It was somehow though only the second time I read The Savage Detectives that I saw him tear a kind of hole in story-telling to tell more stories, and then more inside those, all the while, keeping this very steady tone. His technique is still a bit mysterious to me, but maybe I felt a more confirmed permission, if you will, to let other characters take over the narrative from the narrator. DeLillo has also been someone I greatly admire. But there are many others: Anne Carson, Joan Didion (her novels, not her essays), Denis Johnson, William Gaddis (dead, but possibly still "contemporary?"). I like Bret Easton Ellis, and I like Michel Houllebecq, but I don't think either's influence is explicitly detectable in my work."

(3) This is too heartbreaking to say much about. Just this: rest in more peace than you could find here, Philip Seymour Hoffman. 

I know, I know . . . footnotes tend to be tedious and end notes annoying (all that flipping backing and forth!). Which is why we should celebrate the exceptions -- those not-so-few and exceedingly proud.

(1) Allen C. Shelton's bizarre book, Where the North Sea Touches Alabama, came out this fall with very little fanfare, but has over the winter knocked the socks off a few of our booksellers. A sociologist by trade, Shelton is a writer of Southern Gothic at heart. No summary would do justice to his baroque weaving of biography and cultural analysis. It simply must be experienced, likely in repeated readings. Those who are averse to end notes may at first squirm, his book nearly divided evenly between main text and notes, but the ping-ponging back and forth comes with its rewards. Here are two of my favorite examples from his copious notes, both about water:

43. A feral cat had wandered into the yard and the dogs had caught sight of the animal. One of the dogs was a hound called Smoky. He was a large blue tick. His bark was a low booming roar. There were at least two other dogs. Mom and I were outside. We saw the cat streaking across the grass with the dogs right behind it. How my mother was able to catch the cat is a miracle. She picked the animal up in her arms to save it from being torn apart. The cat bit her, leaving a deep cut on her forearm. She dropped it and the dogs were on it. In desperation, the cat jumped into the lake and tried to swim away. This lake had a hole in its deepest part through which all the water drained away every summer. The dogs jumped in and the cat was done for. They tore it to pieces. The barking stopped. The cat’s carcass half sank into the muddy water. My mother was treated for rabies. The shots were extremely painful. I have been terrified of these shots since I was a small child and read about Louis Pasteur in my child’s encyclopedia. My mother stepped in front of fate and she bore it.

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70. [...] I’m not an especially religious man, though some would quibble with that. I’ve read the Bible. I used to be quite proficient in what Southern Baptists call sword drill. I could whip to any book and verse in the Bible called out. That was years ago. I still have several Bibles. I used to preach to the Pentecostals from a black lamb-leather New Jerusalem translation. It was a Catholic Bible and many were worried. At a church retreat in Panama City, Florida, I did a teaching from a translation of the New Testament by Richard Lattimore, the Greek scholar who translated the Iliad and the Odyssey. The cover had a close-up of a putrefying corpse’s face. The eyes were open. The cheeks were purple. He was looking for Jesus. The rawness of the translation caused confusion. As I read the familiar passage of Jesus walking on the sea’s surface, stripped of the King James English, hands went into the air grabbing for Jesus as if they, like Peter were sinking. Several began speaking in tongues. There was a liquidness to the sound that slowly covered their mouths as if they were now underwater.

(2) Mary Jo Bang's new translation of Dante's Inferno has been justifiably praised since it was released. Hers is an exquisite modern rendering of the masterpiece, and will for many beckon a return visit to Hell. Easily missed, though, at the reader's loss, are Bang's Translator Notes.

 (3) This one is cheating a little. Okay, it's cheating a lot. Need we, after all, an excuse to listen to Patty Smith recite, with musical accompaniment, Allen Ginsberg's "Footnote to Howl"? I think not. (Oh, and as it is Allen Ginsberg and all ... NSFW!)