Miami News Blog

​In almost every sense -- except the most extreme -- Tao Lin's for sale. Of course, there's his published output, including the poetry books You Are a Little Bit Happier Than I Am ($14) and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy ($14.95), the short story collection Bed ($14.95), and a novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee ($14.95). Plus, now you can purchase the 26-year-old author's brand-new wordy blurb, Shoplifting From American Apparel ($13), a 103-page pseudo-autobiographical novella about sex and stealing among twenty-something hipster-nerds. 

​Take a look at the biographical blurb and accompanying author photo on the back cover of David Hajdu's latest book, Heroes and Villains, and you'll discover that not only is Hadju a professor, but he looks like one. Smiling wryly behind frameless spectacles, the 54-year-old prof (and music critic for the New Republic) folds his arms across the front of his grey, long-sleeve, button-down sportshirt while his short, neat coif blows in the wind. 

Ben Greenman

​

Simon Bruty for HarperCollins

​Former Miami Herald scribe and current Sports Illustrated senior writer S.L. Price makes his living where sports and culture intersect. His 2000 book Pitching Around Fidel was an exploration of the crumbling Cuban sports machine, and the importance of play to a people deprived of basic freedoms. His newest non-fiction tome, Heart of the Game, gains the reader access to a culture that might just be as closed to outsiders and as arbitrarily ruled as Fidel's fiefdom: minor-league baseball.

In a July 2007 contest between two bush league ball-clubs, a first base coach named Mike Coolbaugh was killed almost instantly when a batted ball cometed into his neck. The ball had been hit by a player named Tino Sanchez. Both Coolbaugh and Sanchez were minor league "lifers", with a combined 28 years of pro ball between them. The tragic accident was national news for a moment, but with a merciful lack of video, the sports media quickly moved on.

Price starts with that fateful foul ball on a Sunday night in Little Rock, Arkansas, and unspools the tape of both men's lives--one which began in Binghampton, New York, the other in Puerto Rico--to impart on us an understanding of what life is like in the minor leagues. And it's bitter, mean, and unfair. Time and again, deserving and talented men are robbed of the chance to fulfill their dream because of circumstance, luck, or prejudice, and the real-life Moonlight Graham doesn't shrug off his thwarted big-league opportunity. "Fans look at baseball as this sort of 'Field of Dreams' environment of magic and romanticism," says Price. "Baseball players really don't. Everybody's got an 'I got screwed' story. I wanted to write an adult book about baseball, that told the truth about this very tough existence."

Coolbaugh's 'I got screwed' story has him being passed in the Toronto Blue Jay organization's third base hierarchy in favor of less-talented bonus-baby Chris Weinke, who would later quit the sport to become, at age 28, the oldest Heisman Trophy winner in history for Florida State University. Coolbaugh accumulated only 83 major league at-bats, although scouts insisted he had the talent to be at least a benchwarmer in the Bigs, before retiring from playing and being killed at age 35. Says Price: "I identify with Mike. I think most of us are more like Mike than we are like Alex Rodriguez."

Price will speak at 3 pm on Sunday, November 15, in a sports panel that also includes authors of new books on a female wrestler and baseball owner George Steinbrenner.

Photo by Jan Cobb

John Hodgman

​Minor television personality and big-time genius John Hodgeman is an expert on things that don't matter: Presidents who have hooks for hands. The perfect name for a Hobo. Monsters hunters.

He'll be in town for the Miami Book Fair International (November 8-15)and is one of those authors who could fly under the radar. (But shouldn't.) His new book, More Information Than You Require, reads like a gift sent from the God of attention deficit disorders. It's a trivia book full of fake facts, footnotes, and lists.  Think McSweeny's deadpan humor. "It's grab-bag nature wasn't a choice; more of a reflection of my adult brain," Hodgman explains, "And my hatred of long paragraphs or even complete sentences."

Did we mention that it's hilarious? Or that Hodgman is somehow able to make the subject, "Speaking of Parasites" funny? Perhaps best known as "That guy in the Mac commercials," Hodgeman began as a freelance writer in New York City. He then became a literary agent and humor editor for New York Times Magazine. Eventually, he says, he was able "to fool someone into thinking a collection of my insane obsessions might be worth publishing."

The Miami International Film Festival concluded its 26th year last night, with a few scattered screenings at four different theaters, which is a pretty decent metaphor for the festival as a whole. After Art Basel and the Miami Book Fair, MIFF should be the third biggest cultural event in the city's calendar, but it's hard at this point to rank it anywhere near those other two. AB-Miami is the best art fair west of the Alps, while the Book Fair ranks only behind L.A.'s. Where does MIFF rank nationally, much less internationally, among film festivals? Somewhere between Fort Lauderdale and Rotterdam?

Most screenings were respectably full, but if you've ever been to Sundance and stood in a four-hundred person line in driving snow to see a short film made by a 19-year-old Sri Lankan, you realize how far MIFF has to go. (The only film that created "around the corner" lines was Jens Hoffmann's 9 to 5: Days in Porn, which had the unfair of advantage of cum-swapping.)

Part of MIFF's mixed performance is due to its transition in 2003 into the purview of Miami-Dade College, an potentially awkward marriage, and having its third director in three years doesn't help either. The festival currently seems trapped between being a Latin American Cultural Celebration (the cinematic Calle Ocho) and becoming a fledgling international player in the film industry. You can't accept every single Cuban-related feel-good story on nitrate and expect to compete with Tribeca.

Ironic as it may sound, MIFF needs to move past the "Gateway to the America's" PR schtick to become relevant to the America's. And I actually think Tiziana Finzi is the person to do it. She showed real promise in the degree of daring in her programming, and while I disagree with the choice of Abel Ferrara as worthy of a lifetime achievement award, at least she went out on a limb. (And Ferrara came packaged with Willem Dafoe, a legit celeb who attended, literally, every major event.) The question is: how far will Miami-Dade College, basically another city bureaucracy, let her go?

The Miami Book Fair may be, uh, in the books, but it's also on the YouTubes. CSPAN, everyone's favorite must-watch cable channel, aired some sessions from the fair, and CSPAN Junkie collected them for your viewing pleasure.

• Scott McClellan: What Happened: Inside the Bush White House
• The Fight Over Presidential Power
• Dave Barry & Frank McCourt: Future of Education in America
• International Panel: Writers and Artists Against the Surveillance State
• Naomi Klein and Jeremy Scahill 2008 Miami Book Fair International

You can also view Riptide coverage of the book fair, including exclusive interviews and event reviews here.

--Kyle Munzenrieder

On its 25th anniversary, the Miami Book Fair International is just that -- drawing authors from around the world as varied and well respected as Salman Rushdie and Frank McCourt.

Saturday morning's marquee session, however, felt more like a hometown celebration, bringing together three of the most successful products of Florida International University's creative writing program.

Dennis Lehane -- author of Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone -- was the biggest star of the bunch, but FIU professors James W. Hall and John Dufresne are hardly slouches. Hall just published his fifteenth thriller -- Hell's Bay -- and Dufresne is promoting the roundly acclaimed Requiem, Mass.

Read on through the jump for more about their session and an interview with Sam Sarkar, author of the graphic novel -- and soon to be John Woo film -- "Caliber: First Canon of Justice."

-- Tim Elfrink

Nikki Giovanni was once known as the princess of black poetry, but nowadays she shares the queendom with the likes of Maya Angelou. Bold, forthright and sharp, Giovanni has paved the way for new generations of young black poets, she celebrated hip hop and recognized its power before many of her peers did. Nikki Giovanni fought and won her battle with breast cancer and came out with an unabashedly blond hairdo for her struggles, and when her students and peers at Virginia Tech needed an unwavering voice in the face of unspeakable grief, she rose to the occasion.

The morning after a most auspicious election, New Times was lucky enough to speak with the acclaimed poet about politics, hair, and her latest book Hip Hop Speaks to Children: A Celebration of Poetry with a Beat, which features the lyrics of Kanye West, Mos Def, Queen Latifah, and The Sugar Hill Gang all presented with the kind of art we'd be proud to hang on our walls.

Click below to listen to a conversation with Nikki Giovanni. Visit www.miamibookfair.com for a complete schedule of authors appearing at this weekend's street fair.

-- Patrice Yursik

Mitchell Kaplan is one of Miami’s most beloved figures. As the owner of Books & Books, he already had established a headquarters for a then burgeoning literary scene. When he co-founded the Miami International Book Fair 25 years ago, Kaplan helped to further cement the city as a mecca for everyone who is anyone in the writing world.

This year, the Miami International Book Fair will offer a first foray into public book readings for many new authors, and quite a few frequent visitors will return, including Martha Stewart, Nikki Giovanni, Salman Rushdie, and -- appearing as a cowbell player in the literati band the Rock Bottom Remainders , not as an author -- Simpsons creator Matt Groening, who, according to Kaplan made his Book Fair debut a quarter century or so ago at the very first fair. Mitchell Kaplan shared some of his fondest Book Fair memories with me at the Café at Books & Books -- click the video above to hear the man himself wax nostalgic about the likes of James Baldwin and Gore Vidal.

The Miami International Book Fair began on Sunday but it goes through November 16. Click here for a complete schedule of events and authors.

-- Patrice Yursik

Its been said that a person living on the right cross streets in downtown New York in the 1950s could get a university-level education just by hanging out in bars. If that’s true, then someone could get a Sorbonne-level education by hanging out in a bar with Russell Banks.

The novelist was approached last year by the French documentary filmmaking team Arte to do an interview about their countrymen’s common misconceptions about American history, so Banks, who has written novels on the Civil War (Cloudsplitter) and ‘60s radicalism (The Darling), invited the filmmakers to his home in Ithaca, New York. The cameras were turned on first thing in the morning, and Banks began talking off the cuff, with no preparation, beginning from pre-colonial times and moving up to the present moment.

Art Spiegelman- the Michael Jordan of literary comics- headlines this year's book fair. The artist who created the hugely popular Holocaust comic tome Maus is here touting two new works. The first is Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, a re-release of a collection of his early comics. The second is Jack and the Box, an early-reader comic book for his wife, Francoise Mouly's, publishing imprint, Toon Books. It's demographic: 3-to-5-year-olds. So don't try to say Spiegelman isn't eclectic. He'll be speaking on Saturday, November 15th, at 11:45 AM at Miami-Dade College's Chapman Conference Center, and 2:45 that same day at PEN, and on November 16th at 1 PM at the Target Children's Stage.

Riptide caught Spiegelman at a Boston hotel in between university talks. After the jump, the artist tells how the publicity game is like giving birth, how is career is like that of a one-hit blues musician, and three questions we're glad we didn't ask him.

-Gus Garcia-Roberts

Dennis Lehane, author of best-sellers turned box office hits Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, is as Boston as the Dropkick Murphys and "Sweet Caroline" at Red Sox games.

But he's actually a South Florida guy, too. Lehane studied at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg and at our own Florida International University and now spends part of the year living in St. Pete.

He'll speak about his newest critically acclaimed novel, The Given Day, which explores a riotous 1919 Boston police strike, at 10 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 15, in the Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus Auditorium.

After the jump, Lehane talks baseball, midgets, Martin Scorsese, and why his life is like "Apocalypse Now."

Evelyn McDonnell, tattooed feminist, author of Mamarama: A Memoir of Sex, Kids, & Rock 'n' Roll, and former Herald pop culture critic speaks Sunday at 12 p.m. at the Miami Book Fair.

New Times: What do you think about today’s music? Coming from the 60s and 70s, where good music was so easily accessible, do you think music fans nowadays have to assert more effort into finding good music?

McDonnell: I came of age in the late 70s where they played Blondie and The Pretenders on the radio, but everything else I got from printed media. Or going to record stores and just talking to people. Like then, it demands a certain commitment from music lovers.

NT: What about mainstream music?

EM: Mainstream is not for music lovers anymore....

“Rarely has one man been blessed with such an auspicious destiny. Few have been endowed with so many gifts, opportunity and the good will of so many. That he squandered it so makes Cuba’s tragedy all the more wrenching.”

That man, of course, is Miami’s nemesis: Fidel Castro. The woman who wrote such an astute assessment is Ann Louise Bardach, who apeears at the Miami Book Fair on Sunday.

Bardach is a journalist who has covered Cuba for 15 years. She’s also been the target of some Miami residents’ ire over the years – namely, the hard-line Cuban exiles who think Bardach’s writings on Castro have been too soft, too forgiving. Bardach takes it all in stride, however: “At different times, different people in Miami hate me, while others love me. You cannot write about Cuban politics and have people love you all the time.”

Govind Armstrong has never been a prissy, stick-to-the-rules kind of chef. Even his culinary background is unconventional – instead of culinary school, he gathered his knowledge working with Wolfgang Puck at Spago at age 13, then working amidst a crowd of young, innovative chefs in acclaimed restaurants in California and Europe.

Armstrong will present his latest book, Small Bites, Big Nights: Seductive Little Plates for Intimate Occasions and Lavish Parties, tomorrow at the Book Fair.

He’s the executive chef and co-owner of Table 8, a chic, loungey restaurant that has bases in Los Angeles and right here on South Beach. It only makes sense that Armstrong’s cookbook would be an unconventional exploration of all things delicious. It’s organized into funky sections – “Celebr8,” “cre8,” and “l8 night” are among the loosly sorted “chapters” -- each of which include recipes for cocktails, appetizers, entrees, and desserts. By organizing (some might say disorganizing) his book in this fashion, Armstrong liberates aspiring cooks to create their own culinary experiences.

“I didn’t want to write a food bible that would just sit there on the shelf. I wanted this book to be totally approachable. I want people to get it dirty, use it often, and enjoy it. It’s about having a good time,” the celebrity chef explains.

Molly O'Neill will appear at the Miami Book Fair tomorrow, November 10, at 1:30 p.m. Her book, American Food Writing: An Anthology with Classic Recipes, cooks up a look at America’s history via over 100 concise and distinctive stories concerning food. O’Neill, the New York Times food columnist for a decade and host of the PBS series Great Food, talked with New Times:

NT: Just how much food writing did you have to read in order to compose this book?
MO: We read about 100 pages a week, for three years.

NT: After it was published, did you say, “Omigod, I forgot so and so? “
MO: Not forget, buy you’re always sad that -- I mean even though this is a huge book, there are people I wish that we’d been able to include.

NT: How come you didn’t include any of your own work?
MO: Well I have the introduction and all of the connective tissue. It would have seemed kind of piggish to put in more of my own writing.

NT: Any food writers complain to you about not being selected?
MO: Um-hmm.

NT: Care to name any?
MO: No. (laughs)