Jacket copy

Sincerely wish I had this pulp edition of The Outward Room. Instead, picked up an old copy at Argosy last week; it's the Simon and Schuster second printing from 1937.

Loving the cover text from the S&S edition -- the back features a snappy bio of Millen Brand, who at the time was more or less an unknown. Interesting facts! About Brand!:

He is now thirty years old. He plays chess occasionally, but is indifferent about most games. He is no automaton. ... he has, according to his wife (who is Pauline Leader, author of And No Birds Sing), an irritatingly even disposition.

Will probably scan/write more about this later when I collect my thoughts. New York Review Books reprinted it in 2010 -- if you're interested in a work that begins with a riveting escape from a mental hospital, this is for you!

Stocking the bookshelf for 2011

New additions (from Powell's Books in Portland and Argosy Books on 59th between Park and Lex):

1. Nina Berberova, The Book of Happiness
2. Millen Brand, The Outward Room
3. Richard Cobb, Paris and Elsewhere
4. Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and Into the Trees
5. Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question
6. Ed. Erin McKean, Verbatim
7. Susan Minot, Lust & Other Stories
8. Susan Minot, Monkeys
9. Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris
10. Joanna Scott, Tourmaline
11. Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

I just finished Sacred Games (Vikram Chanda) and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Nick Flynn). Sacred Games was just what I needed for vacation: sprawling but fast paced, absorbing, full of Hindi expletives (bhenchod!). Haven't read many memoirs lately, and Suck City was a pretty good one; it focuses on Flynn's relationship, or lack thereof, with his father, a writer/bank robber/homeless man in Boston who begins sleeping at the shelter Flynn is employed by. At heart, it's just a fascinating story. And it's true: "There are many ways to drown, only the most obvious wave their arms as they're going under." 

Sumeet and I are keeping it low-key for the night: trying out Tiffin New York, finding something good on Netflix, listening to our cat mewl, and breaking out the Martinelli's at midnight. Here's to 2011! We (plus my parents) salute you from our great backyard in Milwaukie!