Salman Rushdie’s new book is a potent cocktail of myth, magic, and mystery.  My favorite passage in it is Luka’s speech to the assembled figures of world mythologies.  He reminds them that it is “only through Stories that you can get out into the Real World and have some power again.  When your story is told well, people believe in you; not in the way they used to believe, not in a worshiping way, but in the way people believe in stories–happily, excitedly, wishing they wouldn’t end.”

On Monday evening, I will be discussing Luka and the Fire of Life with Rushdie at First Parish Church in Cambridge (corner of Church and Massachusetts Ave.) at 7pm.  Tickets are $10. and on sale at the Harvard Book Store.  Rushdie shows himself in this volume to be the powerful creator of a new syncretic mythology that offers an alternative to the clash of civilizations.  We encounter the Shah of Blah, Ra the Supreme, Queen Soraya, a Flying Carpet, Hathor, Elephant Birds, the Chinese Wind Gods, Oonawieh Unggi, and many others in this fast-paced, inventive narrative about a boy searching for a way to prolong his father’s life.

Stephen Mulvey and Cat Koo write about celebrity children’s books and define them (with help from Maria Nikolajeva) as books “easy for publishers to splash all over the media, but . . . rarely of any literary value.”  Their interest in the phenomenon is sparked by the publication of Barack Obama’s Of Thee I Sing.  I’m not certain I would put Obama’s book in the same category as Jay Leno’s embarrassing If Roast Beef Could Fly or Jerry Seinfeld’s shameless Halloween.  Obama’s gallery of cultural heroes (Georgia O’Keefe, Albert Einstein, Billie Holiday, Jane Addams, Sitting Bull, and Martin Luther King, among others) are presented with imagination and finesse–haikus to creativity, intelligence, and strength of character.

“These are coffee-table books that adults read. I have never yet heard about a celebrity children’s book that really was enjoyed by children,” Professor Nikolayeva notes.   “There is lots of discussion about them when they first appear, but three months later they are forgotten. They come and they go. They don’t have a lot of impact.”  Guilty as charged when it comes to the Leno and Seinfeld volumes.  To Thee I Sing will likely have real traction, as a kind of Profiles in Courage for young children.   Many celebrity children’s books are written by hired guns, but Barack Obama’s, presented in the form of a letter to his daughters and dedicated to his wife, looks like the real thing.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11764200

http://www.salon.com/books/literary_prizes/?story=/books/laura_miller/2010/11/16/fairy_tales

Laura Miller weighs in on Salon.com about the NBA’s exlusion of retellings of folk-tales, myths, and fairy-tales. I liked her illustration but I think Maxfield Parrish’s princess contemplating a frog works even better to alert readers to her subject.  Kate Bernheimer and I are hoping that the NBA Committee will respond to our petition soon.

Bernheimer and Tatar point out that the NBA rules don’t exclude “retellings of the Bible and Shakespeare’s plays,” or, for that matter, retellings of any other literary form. The singling out of fairy and folk tales belies a long-standing uneasiness with the form, its vaguely disreputable air. The fairy tale plays havoc with the premium we moderns place on originality.