I’m working my way through Charles Bock‘s Beautiful Children, having picked it up in preparation for an interview with him on CorridorBuzz.com to promote a reading he’ll do here in Iowa City on Tuesday, and find myself captivated. I’m not alone; it was a New York Times notable book and it earned dozens of rave reviews. I’m most impressed with his ability to capture a world few have thought about, let alone seen, that being the underworld in which runaways reside.

Bock talked a lot about the decade-long gestation of the book. He says he grew as a writer, both in terms of skill and emotional maturity, and that allowed him to write a book whose ambitious reach initially exceeded his grasp. Without the benefit of having read his first draft, I assume that it focused more on the feelings Newell Ewing, the 12-year-old at the center of the book, and others have for Las Vegas. Subsequent drafts clearly brought in other perspectives, allowing a more fleshed-out, well-rounded view of the city.

“When I was able for it to not be an angry book, when I was able to get out of myself and not be like, ‘I’m going to show you what I can do;’ when I was able to move from angry young man novel to a kid leaves home and what happens to his parents… to feel for them to tap into those feelings. That’s what makes the title non-ironic. That empathy and that desire for some sort of connection or understanding.”

Bock indulged a dumb question and gave it a thoughtful answer. I didn’t have room for it in the CorridorBuzz.com piece, so I present it here:

Beyond the obvious, how would this story be different set somewhere else?

It would have to be… it depends on where… where would you put it and what adjustments would you make? (Denis Johnson’s) Jesus’ Son takes place mostly in Iowa, and that’s a damn dark book. Could it take place somewhere else? I don’t know. There’s no shortage of runaway narrative. I think the book could have taken place somewhere else; I needed to write about Las Vegas.Nathanael West could have written about anywhere, but Day of the Locust has to take place in Hollywood.

We also talked about how the success of the book has changed him. He said he’s pretty sure he’ll have the chance to write another book, by which he means the book he’s working on now (which is not set in Las Vegas) will have a good shot at being published, and that he is exploring other avenues for his writing.

“I spent a couple of months dancing with some people in Hollywood about some things,” he said. “Who knows what will happen there. If you hold your breath waiting for Hollywood, you’ll have a giant brain hemorrhage and die.”

And for those who maybe found — like I did — that the beginning can be a bit of a challenge as Bock introduces us to numerous characters and plays with time and structure, know that it gets easier.

“My hope always was that the first half would be… it’s a serious book, and it’s not ha ha, happy happy joy joy… but that there is a lot of space to get to know people and it would be an enjoyable reading experience,” he said. “In a big book, in the second half, you don’t want people to be slogging.You want them to be in it and want to know how it ends.”

As someone now plowing through that latter half, rest assured, you do.

UPDATE: I’ve been asked to host Bock’s reading at Prairie Lights tonight at 7 p.m. CST. Listen in live here or check the University of Iowa’s Writing University site soon for an archived file.

Many things passed through my mind just now when I read a New York Times alert that John Updike had died of lung cancer at age 76. I thought of the books of his that I’ve read, those I haven’t yet and those I’ll undoubtedly get the chance to once his papers are sorted. I thought of how glad I am that I got to see him read and lecture. I recalled discussing with friends recently an essay by David Foster Wallace lambasting Updike’s work. Ultimately, what I came away with is that Updike was one of the last giants of American letters, and that regardless of what one thinks of his work, he will be sorely missed.

I came to Updike late, picking up Rabbit, Run as a way to prepare for seeing the author lecture at the 150th anniversary of Coe College in Cedar Rapids while I was a newspaper reporter in town. I liked it, and made a perhaps foolish vow to read each Rabbit book as I passed the commensurate time in my life (I’m overdue to dive into Rabbit Redux, I believe). It’s still the only of his novels I’ve read, though I’ve since read a considerable amount of his criticism (both in the New Yorker and in collections) and his poetry. I reviewed Americana, his last collection of new poems, in 2001, and have since gone back to read much of his verse as well. I’m amazed at his facility with language, the way he crafted sentences and chose words. That might seem a strange thing to say about a writer, but few possessed his talents.

He certainly divided the literary world. There are folks like Nicholson Baker, who spun a full length book, U and I, from his appreciation of Updike’s work, and others like Wallace, who’s “Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think,” a review of Updike’s Toward the End of Time republished in his Consider the Lobster collection, picks apart the author’s work: “Toward the End of Time is also, of the let’s say two dozen Updike books I’ve read, far and away the worst, a novel so clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.”

At that 2001 appearance in Cedar Rapids, a member of the audience asked Updike if he wrote as a child. He said he fell in love with books early on, and his impulse was to do something creative with pencil and paper.

“The world has been kind and allowed me to continue to play as children do,” he said.

His work, hardly child’s play, fills 50-plus volumes and leaves us a lot to digest. His critics may be at least partly right when they say he spent much of his life writing about thinly veiled versions of himself, but few have done so as eloquently — or compulsively — and the world of books is richer for his place in it.

Lots of news from Joe Pernice this week, including word that he has completed his forthcoming novel and has two albums in the works.

The novel, It Feels So Good When I Stop, is due in September from Riverhead. Pernice writes in his occasional newsletter that “It’s not a book for kids, which is a general way of saying it’s not for anyone offended by raw language and sex. I sent an email to my family telling them that my book should not be read by anyone under twenty-one, anyone over fifty-five and Judy (my sister).” No word on a plot, but given the author, I’m guessing there is some melancholic heartbreak to be found in its pages. It will be Pernice’s third book, following his self-published poetry collection Two Blind Pigeons and the 33 1/3 book about the Smiths’ Meat is Murder.

Pernice reports there are “quite a few incidental musical references throughout,” which led him to what sounds like a covers album/soundtrack of sorts. Tracks include James and Bobby Purify’s “I’m Your Puppet,” the Chills “Rolling Moon,” Tom T. Hall’s “That’s How I Got to Memphis and Sebadoh’s “Soul and Fire.” His label, Ashmont Records, will release the disc around the time of the novel’s publication.

The true follow up to 2006′s Live a Little from the Pernice Brothers also is in the works. Pernice has been recording tracks for the disc for quite some time with Ric Menck, James Walbourne and his brother, Bob Pernice. It is due sometime in 2009 under the name Murphy Bed. (Here is Pernice’s amusing story about the title: “I was planning on calling it Light, Sweet, Crude (in my mind, all three words are adjectives), but some other band beat me to the punch. It’s just as well, I suppose. I’ve decided to call the album Murphy Bed. (If that name is taken, I’m shelving the album for all time.)”).

He explains the gap between albums with an excuse: He decided to put everything on hold until the book was done because “Riverhead/Penguin was paying me real money. If you think Ashmont Records Inc. would do in kind, you need to get your wiring checked out. And anyway—the international financial crisis and a handful of bloody conflicts aside—the world has done just fine in my absence from releasing albums.”

Two short-fiction heavyweights and an upstart who wrote one of the best books I read last year are the three finalists for the fifth annual Story Prize.

The annual award for short fiction has announced that Jhumpa Lahiri, Tobias Wolff and Joe Meno are the finalists for the 2008 award. They were selected from among 73 collections published by 56 different publishers or imprints.

Lahiri is nominated for Unaccustomed Earth, he second short story collection and her third book. Wolff’s Our Story Begins is a new and selected collection that gathered 16 stories from previous collections and 10 new stories. Meno’s Demons in the Spring is this innovative young writer’s latest.

While I haven’t read either Lahiri’s or Wolff’s books, I can highly recommend their work. Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies was masterful, and Wolff’s three story collections that lend some of their pieces to Our Story Begins are uniformly excellent. Meno’s book, my first — but not last — experience with his work, was fantastic. I must admit that I was turned off of his work without reading a word thanks to his early promotion and seemingly ridiculous titles like Hairstyles of the Damned. My loss. Demons in the Spring is the work of an assured writer, each of its 20 stories each creating a world that feels perfectly lived in completely different from the others. For added appeal, each is illustrated by a different comic or graphic artist, adding a pleasing dimension to the work.

Prize founder Julie Lindsey and director Larry Dark selected the finalists, and three judges will select the winner: Daniel Menaker,former executive editor-in-chief of Random House, fiction editor at The New Yorker, and an author; Rick Simonson of Seattle’s Elliott Bay Books who founded and directs the store’s reading series; and Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief and Animal Crackers and the editor of literary magazine One Story.

The winner will be announced at a March 4 event in New York. The winner will be presented with $20,000 and an engraved silver bowl; the two runners-up will each receive $5,000.

Past Story Prize winners are The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat (2005), The Hill Road by Patrick O’Keeffe (2006), The Stories of Mary Gordon by Mary Gordon (2007), and Like You’d Understand, Anyway by Jim Shepard (2008).

That image there is just wishful thinking, but I have a 1 in 597 shot of seeing something like it on bookshelves one day. I filed a proposal during the latest open call for 33 1/3 submissions from Continuum Books in December, punching up and significantly expanding my plan for a book about The Police’s Synchronicity.

I felt good about the proposal last time out, but feel exponentially better about this one. Again, if chosen I plan to explore the animosity in the band as it reached its end, but I’ve come to realize that this is not only a tired angle, but one that misses the mark. Seeing the band on its reunion tour and hearing subsequent live recordings, I’m struck by how simpatico these three musicians are and how what each brings to the table meshes with that offered by the others to create something unreplicated in pop.

I’m glad my proposal improved, for the competition is even more fierce. Last time, there were 449 proposals for 380 different albums.This time? The just-published longlist includes 597 proposals for 490 albums! I’m happy to report mine is the only Police submission, so there’s no competition there, but based on the fact that I’d love to read books about many of these proposed albums, I know decisions facing series editor David Barker are tough. As usual, the proposals range from the head-scratching (Dag Nasty?) to the obvious (Liz Phair, Radiohead, etc.). One surprise: seven proposals for Slint’s Spiderland.

Barker says 20 to 25 books are likely to be contracted from this batch, so the odds are about as tough as getting into the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop down the road from me here.

For the first time since 1982 when the National Endowment for the Arts began surveying Americans about their reading habits, the number of adults who said they read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous year has risen.

Two stats jump out as positives beyond that: the biggest increases were among those 18 to 24, and here were 16.6 million more adult readers of literature in 2008.

Signaling the change, the NEA’s report – which in the past has been called “Reading at Risk” and “To Read or Not To Read” – is called “Reading on the Rise.”

It’s a startling reversal, given the slide the survey has documented since its inception. Still things are not as rosy as this might lead one to expect. When the survey debuted in 1982, it reported that 56. 9 percent of adults were readers. Even with a significant rise since 2002, that number now stands at 50.2.

Surprisingly, fiction accounts for the new growth in adult literary readers, according to the report. Unsurprisingly, reading of poetry and drama continues to decline. And in a sign that points to the future, “nearly 15 percent of all U.S. adults read literature online in 2008.”

Interestingly, at a time when we often talk of two Americas from a political perspective with shades of red and blue, the NEA reports its own “two Americas,” with half of the country identified as readers and the other half not. It would be interesting to see an overlay map to determine how closely these two versions of the two Americas align.

As I looked forward to 2009 and the prospect of spending more time with this blog, one of the things I have done is put together a Monday Interview list. I have a few feelers out here and there, and at the top of the list sat Donald Westlake. Westlake, under the name Richard Stark, wrote one of the best crime fiction series in existence, the Parker novels. The University of Chicago Press this fall began an ambitious reissue program that will bring three of the Parker novels back into print each year. The series began with The Hunter, The Man with the Getaway Face and The Outfit. The editions are clean, crisp and good as ever. Having devoured all three in a weekend, I was eager to correspond with Westlake about that early work and his continued success.

Alas, I’ll never have the chance. Westlake died on New Year’s Eve. Luckily, there will be plenty more Westlake/Stark. The U of C Press already has announced the next three in the Parker series: Mourner, The Score and The Jugger, while his obituary reports that his last book, Get Real, is due in April. Meanwhile, Hard Case Crime will reissue his first novel, 1960′s The Mercenaries, in February as The Cutie.

If there is one bright spot in all of this, it’s that Westlake is receiving a lot of attention right now. Perhaps all of the Barnes & Noble giftcards that changed hands this holiday season will be put to good use. And anyone seeking more information about Westlake can surely find it in the links being posted with pieces just like this one all across the web today. They include praise from novelist John Banville a 2006 interview with Ed Gorman (in which he discusses The Cutie) and a recent interview with the folks at the U of C Press.

I don’t remember when I first picked up a copy of Chunklet. It was definitely several years ago, probably around the time of the first “Overrated” issue. I was amazed; here was a zine that didn’t fawn over favorite acts, but rather slagged off those it hated (and event slung a few arrows at ones it liked). There was precedent for this, of course, in early mags like Answer Me! and Motorbooty. But no one had done this so long, or so professionally.

Henry O. Owings (H20, for short) is the man behind Chunklet. What started as a small zine has 15 years later become a tidy little multi-media empire. He puts out the magazine (no. 20 just out), has published two books, released CDs and vinyl and promotes shows. It’s all built, it seems on promoting things Owings likes. That means CDs from bands like Harvey Milk, comedy albums from Patton Oswalt and books about things wrong with the state of rock ‘n’ roll.

Owings latest endeavor is his second book, The Rock Bible (from the great Quirk Books imprint). Promising “Unholy Scriptures for Fans & Bands,” it gathers wisdom from scads of Chunklet writers, offering an indispensable guide for the budding rock star. Follow these tenants and you might just avoid pissing off Owings and his crew. Then again, what’s the fun in that?

TIRBD: 15 years later, Chunklet has become quite the media empire, with books, music releases, concert promotion and 20 issues of the magazine. How does that jibe with the way you envisioned things progressing when you started?

HO: I had no idea what I wanted to do when I started. Seriously. I got out of school in ’91, the middle of the last (great) recession and couldn’t find a job. I just thought, “Shit, if I’m unemployed, I might as well be happy.” I moved to Athens and just got interested in things that interested me. That’s it. So all of it just comes from that point. The book spawned from the magazine. Graphic design spawns from the mag. Ditto concert promotion, records, etc., etc. There was certainly no long-term marketing plan that I drew up, but I’m genuinely excited about all the projects I’ve been able to get done in the last 15 years. No doubt about it.

Do all of these efforts pay the rent, or do you do other things to pay the bills, thus allowing time for things like this?

I do graphic design, album production, concert promotion and writing for a living. The mag has never been something I derive money from. It pays for itself, and that’s it. I think it’s great that it’s a self-sustaining enterprise. In 2008, that’s saying something.

Do you see the magazine as the main thrust of things, or has that become just one of the many things you do?

Seriously, I have no idea what my main thrust is. I just do what makes me happy.

Has your outlook as a magazine publisher and as a music fan changed over the past 15 years?

I think I’m more involved with and excited by music now than I was in 1993.

Is your excitement driven by your involvement (you know more therefore it’s easier to be into it), or is there more to be excited about today?

Not to sound fatalistic, but I’d rather do everything that interests and excites me instead of leaving it to somebody else. Life is for the living and people that sit on the sidelines aren’t rewarded. My goal was to get involved, and I am. Period.

It has been said that tough times yield the best art, because artists have something visceral against which to react. Are we in for some of the best art of our lifetimes?

It’s easy to say that good art will come out of America’s loins in the next few years, but that’s not for me to say. All I know is that the last creative explosion was when Reagan and Bush left office in the late 80s and early 90′s. Before that was after Nixon. So yeah, I think we can anticipate greatness spawning from some suburban garage in the not too distant future.

You’ve said that unlike people who launch anonymous tirades online, you have always been upfront, standing behind even your most caustic criticism. Has that had an impact on the relationships you have with artists? Do your musician friends live in fear of the day you’ll turn your pen on them?

Nah, I’m not a chickenshit. Regrettably, I’ve lost a few friends, but none directly from something in the magazine. I’ve never held back though. I remember when people like Death Cab or The Shins started getting “big” and I pretty much told them I’d lay into them and they were totally excited about it. I don’t know, getting knocked on in Chunklet is a badge of honor to many. To those who don’t think it is, I just say “go get fucked.”

The alternative (for lack of a better term) comedy artists you’ve championed for years are coming into the mainstream these days. What kind of world is it when H2O is a tastemaker?

Beats me. I still approach everything like I did when I was 15. But tastemaking? Give me a break. I just like that what I like. If others dig it, great. Otherwise, I’ll be happy knowing I’m right and that’s all.