Ernest Hemingway’s classic posthumously published 1964 memoir “A Moveable Feast,” which inspired Americans to trek and trist in Paris and write in cafes, has been reissued with new remorseful morsels. Read first chapter here (courtesy Oprah; the book is a summer reading pick) and last chapter here (courtesy The New York Times).

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Is there any digital application that can resist the siren song of networking? In Inside Higher Education, NBCC board member Scott McLemee recovers from digital overload to investigate Webnotes, Zotero 2.0, and scholarly social networking.

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To continue the Long Tail series, we have suggestions from Jim Gibbons and from Susan Larson of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. (You can read the earlier, omnibus post here. And a reminder: we asked respondents which work in translation had the deepest effect on their reading and writing.)

Jim Gibbons: The best translations bring out the poverty of our language as speak, read, and think in the grooves of habit and custom. In Hopscotch, Gregory Rabassa imports from Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela not only the longings of its characters but an entire climate of desire, a wistful, seductive weather that I, on my first reading some twenty years ago, had never encountered, never suspected its existence. The book made me rethink my signposts of reading. Its ironies, wit, and playfulness were of a different order than these qualities expressed by writers in English; its very mood was an alien country. Too much is made of what gets lost in translation: the compensatory discoveries in a book such as Hopscotch expand the language we think we know and make it richer, stranger, and more wondrous. Not once do we feel as if we’re reading some debased approximation of a superior original.

Susan Larson: I would say that the novels of Colette have been the works in translation that have most influenced me. I started with Six Short Novels, with that Glenway Westcott introduction, in my twenties, and worked my way through all the rest. Recently I returned to Break of Day, that tale of mornings and new beginnings and difficult reckonings, interweaving fact and fiction, and found it as wise, rueful and instructive as I did some 30 years ago.

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James Marcus surfing a wave of attention for his booty-shaking Philip Roth sampling, drawn from his Roth interview last September: The Guardian, the NY Times, the German press….

Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s latest memoir, “Not Now, Voyager,” gets a thumbs up from David Ulin.

Rigoberto Gonzalez begins his residency at The Robert Frost Place with a reading there on July 5th.

Mary Ann Gwinn talks to Wendy Marcus, editor of Drash magazine.

Regan McMahon call’s Jonah Raskin’s “Field Days” “a book that focuses on what really matters.”

Kate Walbert’s “remarkable novel” “A Short History of Women” “unfolds briskly,” notes Rebecca Donner.

NBCC member and poetry award winner Troy Jollimore finds that Robert Wright is not afraid of being controversial in “The Evolution of God.”

Walton Muyumba’s “The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism,” an original critical look at the work of Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, and James Baldwin, is due out from the University of Chicago any minute now.

Steve Kellman multitasking: reviewing Breyten Breytenbach for The Quarterly Conversation, editing “An American in the Making,” the story of M. E. Ravage, who immigrated to the US at the turn of the twentieth century, for Rutgers University Press, and reviewing José Maria de Eça de Queirós’s “The City and the Mountains” for The Review of Contemporary Literature.

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Maybe this isn’t the best way to respond to a somewhat negative review: Still Life with Book Maven reports on Alice Hoffman’s response to Roberta Silman’s review in the Boston Globe of her novel The Story Sisters—with Hoffman posting via Twitter Silman’s telephone number and e-mail address. Interesting thread of comments below.

*And now, Motoko Rich reports, Hoffman has issued a statement in which she says, to paraphrase Redd Foxx, “Sorry if I offended anybody.”

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Critical Mass regularly features an exemplary review by a National Book Critics Circle member critic. Here, from the Los Angeles Times, Art Winslow reviews Leonard Zeskind’s Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream

This April, when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report titled “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” the media world was briefly ablaze debating whether it was true.

“Rightwing extremists,” the report maintained, “have capitalized on the election of the first African American president, and are focusing their efforts to recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda.”

Citing the economic downturn, it drew parallels to the 1990s, a fertile time in the development of militia-style factions. In a footnote, “rightwing extremism” is defined broadly as applying to groups, movements and adherents that are “primarily hate-oriented” toward particular religious, racial or ethnic groups, or “are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority,” or may be dedicated to single issues such as opposition to abortion.

What favorable timing, then, for Leonard Zeskind’s Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream (FSG), which addresses all of these issues, provides a context in which to assess them and offers an extended look inside a little-understood cultural zone that is really a panoply of small groups.

Unless you too resent ZOG (the Zionist Occupation Government), Zeskind’s decades-long perspective will help explain why, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were 926 hate groups active in the United States last year—a 4% increase from the previous year but representing a 50% increase since 2000. Demographically speaking, this involves a tiny slice of the populace: Zeskind estimates that 30,000 men and women constitute the white nationalist hard core, with an additional 250,000-plus forming a periphery of supporters. In a country of more than 300 million people, that is one-tenth of 1%.

Zeskind tracks the white supremacist impulse, as embodied in various groups since the mid-1970s, in chronological fashion. He analyzes every twist, turn and rivalry—historically, the groups hardly yielded a harmonious or even coherent “movement,” although there is more of one today than in the past. (In a prequel section of the book, Zeskind also traces roots stretching back into the mid-1950s.) Much of his narrative is cast around the schism between “mainstreamers” who seek to temper their message in return for broadened public support and potential electoral success, and more militant “vanguardists” who have not and often take a separatist approach.

“Mainstreamers believe that a majority (or near majority) of white people can be won over to support their cause . . . [while] vanguardists think that they will never find more than a slim minority of white people to support their aims voluntarily,” Zeskind writes.

The common thread, despite a difference in orientation, is a sense of cultural dispossession: He writes that the Christian right sees 1962, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided to ban prayer in public schools, as a prominent marker of that dispossession. White nationalists see the court’s decision to desegregate public education, in Brown vs. Board of Education, to have “stolen their national birthright.” For others, a hot point was the 1993 passage of the gun-control Brady Bill, just months after the incineration of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, following which, in Idaho, Montana, Michigan and the South, “militiamen popped up like cardboard targets on a rapid-fire shooting range,” Zeskind says.

Zeskind takes a kitchen-sink approach to this multifaceted phenomenon, which is not exclusively race-based, despite the book’s subtitle. So readers will be exposed to groups including skinheads, Christian Identity adherents and Ku Kluxers; individuals such as David Duke, Patrick Buchanan and Pat Robertson; and also to “cadres” (a word employed with a little too much abandon throughout) driven by racism, anti-Semitism, opposition to abortion, antipathy toward homosexuality, hatred of the federal government (and especially the Internal Revenue Service), gun-rights activism, millennial beliefs, anti-immigrant fervor and a taste for Holocaust denial.

Given such diversity, if Zeskind had not provided connective tissue showing significant contacts between groups and cross-pollination over time, Blood and Politics would seem merely a compendium of relatively fringe groups and their leaders. Part of the challenge he faced was inherent in the terrain: “The problem of organizational succession has remained unsolved for white nationalists,” he notes. “Most organizations are basically sole entrepreneurships…dependent on the energy and vision of their founders. Those that avoid repression by law enforcement agencies or survive the vagaries of insurgency rarely turn into self-sustaining institutions.”

And yet there is continuity too among the figures Zeskind follows. Willis Carto, creator of the group Liberty Lobby, which appealed to both anti-communists and arch-segregationists, was an anti-Semite whose influence spanned decades. His magazine the Spotlight helped forge the white supremacist movement from disparate parts into something “self-conscious of its unique identity.”

The same can be said of Carto’s longtime rival William Pierce, an acolyte of American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell. Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries glorified race war and influenced a generation of younger Aryan militants, including Timothy McVeigh, who sold copies of it at gun shows and whose bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killed 168 people. Aryan Nations head Richard Butler was another pivotal figure—and yet, though Butler was an advocate of Christian Identity, Pierce saw Christianity as “an impediment to the liberation of white people” and was motivated by beliefs about racial genetics.

Tom Metzger, a California Klan leader who became a guru to skinheads (a central figure in Elinor Langer’s 2003 book A Hundred Little Hitlers), also figures prominently in Zeskind’s narrative, as does the Christian Identity minister Pete Peters. Peters, in contrast with many of his peers, decided that “both swastikas and Confederate flags symbolized a form of nationalism he didn’t share,” although he did see nationality as race-based, and organized a 1992 meeting that Zeskind credits as being “the foundational moment” for the militia movement that followed.

Zeskind’s account is fine-grained, which is both its strength and its weakness. Late in the book, long sections detailing Carto’s machinations and lawsuits during infighting over the organizations he created, for example, do not contribute to the ideological portrait that is the main attraction of Blood and Politics.

Along with the 51 politically or racially motivated murders that one watchdog group attributes to white power skinheads in 1987-2001 and the potential of another Timothy McVeigh, the most frightening aspect of what Zeskind documents is the sustainability of the ideas: The vanguardists, as he calls them, “survived police crackdowns, multiple criminal prosecutions, civic opposition and legal challenges” and managed to keep the tenets of national socialism alive, “a usable past for any similar movement in the future.”

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To continue the Long Tail series, we have suggestions from Believer editor Meehan Crist and from Jim Ruland, whose most recent collection of short fiction is Big Lonesome. (You can read the earlier, omnibus post here. And a reminder: we asked respondents which work in translation had the deepest effect on their reading and writing.)

Meehan Crist: The first time I read Auschwitz and After by Charlotte Delbo, translated from the French by Rosette C. Lamont, I could hardly believe that such a book had been written. Delbo blends poetry, reportage, and memoir to create a singular cartography of almost unspeakable physical and mental suffering. It is truly an example of how form can arise from, perhaps be demanded by, content. The book is a fascinating companion to Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, because it portrays women’s response to life in the camps, which was arguably different from the responses of men in Levi’s account. It is valuable both as a historical document and as the work of a singular prose stylist.

Jim Ruland: The first time I read Jean-Philippe Toussaint I was standing in the main gallery of BEA in L.A. last year. I was flipping through Monsieur, Toussaint’s second novel, and stopped to read a page.  Amidst the hustle and bustle of ten thousand books crying out for attention, I was instantly, unequivocally hooked . Somehow the words of a Belgian author from a work written in French and published 20 years ago found purchase in my imagination. And it hasn’t left. Since then I’ve read four Toussaint novels—two of them twice—and look forward to rereading Monsieur later this spring. Toussaint’s novels are slender affairs that can be read in an afternoon. They’re full of motion, obsessed with ideas, and utterly unconcerned with motive. Dalkey Archive Press recently re-released a trio of Toussaint’s books (one in June, two in November of 2008) and each one is a treasure.

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Although we posted our omnibus summary of responses back in May, we will continue to highlight individual choices through the summer. To continue the Long Tail series, we have suggestions from novelist and fierce Chekhovian Roxana Robinson, whose most recent book is Cost, and from the Perec-mad Martin Riker, associate director of the Dalkey Archive Press. (A reminder: we asked respondents which work in translation had the deepest effect on their reading and writing.)

ROXANA ROBINSON: How can you ask such a question? Chekhov, Chekhov, Chekhov! Who else delivers such a huge, beautiful, intricate and perfectly observed world? Who else creates such small exquisite panels, ones that fit so flawlessly into the great tapestry of human desire? Who else feels such a deep and abiding compassion for the people among whom he lives? Those people whose lives he reveals and forgives?

How can you ask such a question?

MARTIN RIKER: That would be one or all of Georges Perec’s novels. If I had to pick one, it would be Life, A User’s Manual, unless it was W, or a Memory of Childhood. Although it might also be his early novel, Things. These are the translated titles, to which I resort because I don’t speak or read French. I once had the occasion to write to the translator of these books, David Bellos, and I took the opportunity to let him know that Perec is my favorite writer, and that, since a translator is to a large extent the creative force behind a translated work, he, David Bellos, is also, in a palpable way, my favorite writer. Few writers have opened up the possibilities of literary art with as much enthusiasm, mastery, and pleasure as Perec.

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All Screwed Up, Benu Press, 2009.

Steve Fellner’s first book of poems Blind Date with Cavafy was released by Marsh Hawk Press. It won the Thom Gunn Gay Male Poetry Award. His non-fiction has appeared in The Sun, North American Review, and Western Humanities Review, among others. He currently lives in Brockport, NY with his partner Phil.

Your award-winning book of poetry touched on some similar territory as the memoir (gay identity, dysfunctional family life), though the voices in these two projects are startlingly dissimilar: the humor is heightened somehow in the poems; the prose, though funny at times, elicited a more sympathetic reading response. It’s interesting because you exercise compression in the prose pieces—most of the entries are only a few pages—so if it’s not the length, is it the approach to exploring the story of this young man’s life that made these two books different experiences? Can you speak to the process of writing these two projects that overlapped thematically? Were they written simultaneously?

They weren’t written simultaneously, but the projects began in much the same way. I’ve always regretted not being a person who likes to take photos (I still don’t even own a camera, which drives my partner crazy).  But I am obsessed with images. So both the book of poetry and this current memoir were attempts to assemble scrapbooks but with words instead of photos. 

Years before I had used variations of a few of these images in a long poem. But there was a particularly visual memory that had never made it into my poetic work that kept coming back to me: when my brother and I were kids, my mother, an ex-trampoline champion, used to tell us in all seriousness that she had once bounced so high she once reached out and touched a bird.  That was the image that started this project. I wish I had a photograph of that!  Instead, I decided to create autobiographical short-short stories, all self-contained yet linked, focusing on my mother and I. Relying on images, I tried to “tell” as little as I could.  I wanted vignettes to come as close to photos as possible.

As to why I chose prose this time over poetry, I think my silly hypochondriac tendencies had something to do with the form of this project.  Being a connoisseur of emergency rooms, I’m always afraid of death, ignoring lab tests and doctors who say nothing’s wrong.  But one day when I was particularly (irrationally) convinced I was dying, I decided that I needed to write my mother a love letter.  That was the last thing I need to accomplish before I passed away.  So that’s what I tried to do. Poetry is only possible when I’m calm, centered.  Concentration is key. With prose, I feel I can be sloppy.  Someone else will clean up the mess.  That someone was my partner Phil.  He helped remember stories I told him, edited, proofread, and helped assemble the final product.  I wish I could tell you that he doesn’t always tidy up after me.  But I can’t.

Readers will either appreciate or raise a brow at the level of honesty and revelation in All Screwed Up. The young Steve stumbles his way through adolescence and early adulthood with plenty of heartache, rage, but also courage (he’s a survivor, even if the narrator never admits to it). The characterizations of the unconventional mother and the father, who abandons the family and then returns as a vagrant, are shocking but sympathetic portrayals of two imperfect people who somehow parented. But in the end, this book is mostly about a relationship between a woman and the boy she adopted. The one character who remains in the margins is the brother. How did you negotiate the focus of the narrative and how did you gauge the level of participation of the various family members? The inevitable follow up question: What has been the response, if any, by members of the family who have read this book?

Not to sound disagreeable, but I don’t see myself as a survivor.  I wish I had been one.  It would have been easier to justify telling my life story.  With the current economic crisis, I’m even reminded more that, like many people, I simply continued.  That’s all I’ve ever done.

There’s nothing special about living with a single mother in a trailer park, being gay, and wanting to meet your biological mother.

I’m obsessed with the ethics of creative non-fiction.  It’s important, I believe, to be emotionally honest, but kind.  Too many family memoirs are written out of revenge.  That desire didn’t motivate my project.

The book is composed of small chapters, no more than seven pages in length, several are even just a brief paragraph long.  I decided that after I finished all the vignettes, I would send them to my mom.  I told her to place each piece in one of three piles: one marked “O.K.”, one marked “You’re making things up,” one marked, “Too personal.”

Without asking for explanation, I excised any vignettes marked “Too personal.”  For the ones marked “You’re making things up.” we talked about them, trying to reach a compromise.  Only a couple of times did I resist her and kept them in the book.  The O.K.’s were of course untouched. As for my brother, he is a private person, and I wanted to respect that.

The setting is Illinois, not far from Chicago, in a typical Midwestern town, and the family is markedly working class. It’s interesting that, though sexuality is an important component of this young man’s identity, it’s his role as an adopted son (and a child in a relatively poor family) that fuels his anxieties. This is not a coming-out memoir, and in many ways, it’s not a memoir about triumph or transcendence, but about trauma, which, in this case, isn’t paralyzing though it does cause emotional damage. How did you position your story (if at all) in terms of other memoirs written by gay men? Was it important (or unavoidable) to emphasize class?

I’m happy that you didn’t see it as a coming out memoir. 

Coming out wasn’t that difficult for me.  Growing up everyone read me as gay.  The only people who I ever convinced I was straight were a few of my best friends. “Everyone thinks I’m queer,” I said to them, “So wouldn’t it be easier for me to admit it if I really was?”  They bought that argument (but even then, only for a little while).

So I gave in to the inevitable. And if I announced my sexuality, I thought, I’d develop all these new friends, huge social life.  People would be standing in line to talk to me.  It never happened.  Instead, I read and wrote more.

I wish I could tell you something like Paul Monette’s Becoming a Man impacted me.  But it didn’t.  He was wealthy.  And it’s good that you mention class, as Monette’s “coming out” memoir did bother me a little, when I first read it.  His sentences reflected his privilege; they were clean and neat. I just couldn’t connect.  I liked being poor.  It meant I could act up and people would blame it on my trashy parents.  There are many writers I like and admire—big names like James Merrill and Edmund White—who were part of the early gay ‘canon.’ But it was hard not to notice that much of this work came from a fairly privileged background.  I think as social progress continues to move forward, we’ll see more memoirs that reflect economic backgrounds where it’s been historically more difficult to be openly gay.

More than any gay author, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted influenced me the most.  It reads like a play, which gave me permission to do the same.

BONUS QUESTION: What recent small press title do you recommend to Critical Mass readers? Why?

I’m obsessed with Aaron Shurin’s amazing King of Shadows, City Lights Books.  It deals with queerness, growing older, the writing life, and nature.  Nature writing usually bores me.  I planned to skip over those sections.  Much to my surprise, I didn’t.  I was never bored.

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Former NBCC president John Freeman moves from American editor to acting editor to editor of Granta. Freeman in the New York Observer here. Granta 106 is a special fiction issue.

Dave Eggers talks about all his projects—films, newspapers, novelization of “Where the Wild Things Are” here.

Lev Grossman and Andrea Sachs on Amazon, the monopoly. Dennis Loy Johnson (Mobylives) discusses Simon & Schuster’s “war” with Amazon, via choice of Scribd.

Art Winslow’s review  of Leonard Zeskand’s chilling and timely “Blood and Politics.”

NBCC award winner in biography Julie Phillips talks to Toni Morrison in Amsterdam about “A Mercy.”

Jonah Raskin reports on the print friendly Class of 2009.

Oscar Villalon talks to Ethan Canin, at a fundraiser for Litquake.

Susan Shapiro, an NBCC member since 1985, has been publishing nonfiction since 1981. She just sold her first novel, “Speed Shrinking,” due out August 3 (Her second, “Overexposed,” which she started in 1995, comes out next summer).

Celia McGee on Paperless Post.

Jennifer Reese cooks without a recipe for Slate’s food issue.

Robin Hemley’s “Do-Over” of summer camp, the prom, on NPR. Ditto Lizzie Skurnick’s “life lessons from young heroines.”

Tim W. Brown calls CAConrad’s “Advanced Elvis Course” an “odd compendium.”

Gregg Barrios, fresh from “Rancho Pancho,”  multiple productions and book tour, has an NEH fellowship to work on a play. He’s ensconced in the Catskills.

The new issue of The Quarterly Conversation is chockablock with essays and reviews by NBCC members, including editor Scott Esposito, Jeremy Hatch, Karen Vanuska, and Matthew Jakubowsk.

Karen Vanuska also has a review in Open Letters Monthly; she assesses Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Nocturnes,” says it reads like a good blues song.

Michael O’Donnell in Washington Monthly on Leonard Bernstein’s music and his radical streak.

In NOLAfugees’ latest: John Biguenet can be a hell of a writer, but Lee Horvitz finds that he is not yet a dramatist, in his review of “Shotgun,” the second in a cycle of post-Katrina plays, commissioned by Southern Repertory Theater, Horvitz suspects the third might be a charm…

In case you missed it, an excerpt from Maud Newton’s novel in Narrative online.

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