Justin Torres' dark "We the Animals" wows book world

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Author Justin Torres is shown in this publicity photo released to Reuters September 19, 2011. Though Torres has been writing for years - currently as a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford -- his debut novel ''We the Animals'' just went on sale the first of this month.

Credit: Reuters/Simon Koy/Handout

By Andrea Burzynski

NEW YORK | Mon Sep 19, 2011 6:21pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - When author Justin Torres was writing "We the Animals", he had no idea he was writing his first novel nor, as could be expected, that he would become the publishing industry's latest sensation.

Though Torres has been writing for years -- currently as a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford -- it is only since his debut novel went on sale in September that he has begun to taste the fruits of a novelist's success.

Reviews for the book that, in part, is based on his own life have been positive. He has been praised by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham, and "We the Animals" sits at No. 26 on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list.

It may seem easy, now to see why the book is successful, but it wasn't always that way. In fact like many authors, Torres had only parts of stories on paper before recognizing he had something bigger.

"I realized that I had all of these fragments and pieces, and was like 'Oh, I guess it's a book," he told Reuters. "It slowly dawned on me that that was what I was doing."

"We the Animals" tells the story of three boys growing up from the perspective of the youngest. The short chapters are patches of information and anecdotes detailing their adventures, which are influenced by the turbulent marriage between their white mother and Puerto Rican father, their poverty, and eventually, by the narrator's sexual orientation.

The narrator and the town where the story take place both remain nameless throughout the book, a deliberate decision Torres made so that the boundaries between readers and characters would seem more permeable.

He doesn't shy away from difficult themes, and that fact is not lost on reviewers who frequently describe the book as "dark" in addition to finding it "brilliant" and "powerful."

Cunningham called it "a dark jewel of a book" that is "heartbreaking" and "beautiful, and Esquire magazine wrote that it is "the best book you'll read this fall".

ANIMAL IMAGERY, HUMAN LIFE

Torres said the title "We the Animals" is also meant to reflect the book's tone, and is based on the story's frequent use of animal imagery to help show transformation.

"It's a little wild, it's a little out of control, but by the end of the book I wanted people to realize that these characters are fully human," he said.

Throughout the story, the characters navigate experiences involving domestic violence, early parenthood, mental institutions, closeted homosexuality and the day-to-day consequences of poverty.

Though Torres admits he doesn't shy away from exploring the darker side of life, he wanted his story to reflect the complexity of humans. He said he realized this after some of his mentors said his stories would be more interesting if they captured the full spectrum of human emotion.

"They told me, 'You need to go back in where there are possibilities for people to behave in ways that are beautiful, even if it's an ugly circumstance,'" he said.

Torres calls "We the Animals" "semi-autobiographical" because like the narrator, he grew up the youngest of three biracial brothers born to working-class teenaged parents. Although the book ends with the narrator still in his teens, it incorporates hints about Torres' forced stay at a state-run mental institution and some of the difficulties he and his brothers encountered in later years.

Despite mixed opinions in the literary world about authors whose fiction is largely based on their own lives, Torres feels that mixing personal elements into his work is natural.

"Your consciousness is informed by your experience," he said. "It's just how the mind works."

He recognizes that his life and story may be individual, but he believes that everyone can identify with the themes of developing one's identity amid family love and struggle.

"What I think is interesting as a reader is to find yourself and your experience in an experience that is very different than your own," he said. "You always learn something new when you're forced to reconcile who you are with who the character is."

(Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)

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Missouri local school board ends ban on Slaughterhouse Five

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By Kevin Murphy

KANSAS CITY, Missouri | Tue Sep 20, 2011 12:46am EDT

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (Reuters) - A school board in southwest Missouri on Monday restored two books it had banned from public schools for being contrary to teachings in the Bible.

The Republic School Board voted 6-0 to make the two books - "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Twenty Boy Summer" - available to students for independent reading as long as they are kept in a secure section of the school library.

Only parents or guardians can check them out.

Under a policy the board adopted in July, teachers still cannot make the books required reading nor read them aloud in school. The old policy had removed the books from the school altogether.

The novel Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut is a satirical account of the bombing of Dresden, Germany, during World War II. Some people object to violence, language and sexual material in the book.

"Twenty Boy Summer," by Sarah Ockler, is about young people and sexual relationships.

Area resident Wesley Scroggins, a Missouri State University associate business professor, objected to those books and other materials he said "create false conceptions of American history and government and or that teach principles contrary to Biblical morality and truth."

Several anti-censorship organizations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, sharply criticized the book ban, which received national attention.

In August, The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis offered up to 150 copies of "Slaughterhouse-Five" to any Republic students who wanted to read it.

(Edited by Peter Bohan)

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John Martin, "master of apocalypse," gets rare show

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A worker walks past John Martin's recently restored ''The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum'', in Tate Britain in central London September 19, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/Andrew Winning

By Mike Collett-White

LONDON | Mon Sep 19, 2011 11:59am EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - The public adored John Martin's apocalyptic images of destruction and chaos yet the art establishment shunned him, helping to consign the British artist's works to the storage vaults.

Now a new show at London's Tate Britain gallery seeks to remind modern viewers what all the fuss was about nearly 200 years ago, when thousands of people queued to see Martin's work.

Charting the artist's rise to stardom, fall from grace and brief posthumous rehabilitation, "John Martin: Apocalypse" represents the largest display of Martin's works seen in public since 1822.

The exhibition, which runs from September 21-January 15, 2012 also features Martin's "lost" masterpiece, "The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum," painted in 1821 but badly damaged in a flood in 1928.

Experts have carried out a painstaking restoration of the large, dramatic canvas, and the work will be seen in public for the first time in almost a century.

"His images touched the lives of thousands of ordinary people in Britain and around the world, but his reputation has suffered from art world snobbery and misunderstanding," said Martin Myrone, curator of the show.

Martin is best known for his large canvases depicting spectacular scenes from the Bible, legend and history in which the romanticized backdrop -- architectural or natural -- dwarfs the human element.

Among the earliest examples on display in the exhibition is "Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion," dated 1812, based on James Ridley's popular Orientalist fantasy "Tales of the Genii."

Myrone said the picture was deliberately designed and executed to have maximum impact at the Royal Academy exhibition where it was first displayed.

He said Martin chose the upright format rather than the more familiar landscape, and painted in bright red to draw viewers' attention to the dramatic work.

"John Martin was trying to make a name for himself and grab public attention," Myrone told reporters at a preview of the show.

The tactic worked, and Martin built on his early success with a series of blockbuster paintings, notably "Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon" (1816), "The Fall of Babylon" (1819) and "Belshazzar's Feast" (1820).

Two were purchased by Martin's former employer in 1821 and went on display in a touring exhibition around the country that was highly profitable for the organizers but made little or no money for Martin himself.

The artist, never slow to eye a commercial opportunity, aimed to match the success of that tour with his own solo exhibition in London, where "The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum" was the centerpiece.

Soon after, he turned his attention to producing a series of mezzotint engravings to illustrate John Milton's "Paradise Lost" after receiving a hefty commission.

His work with prints helped spread his fame around the world, although they did little to enamor the critics who became increasingly hostile to his work.

John Ruskin, the arbiter of artistic taste in the 19th century, once wrote: "Martin's works are merely a common manufacture, as much makeable to order as a tea-tray or a coal-scuttle."

Myrone said he suspected "some form of class prejudice" in such judgments, while Tate Britain director Penelope Curtis saw parallels between Martin's self-promotion and that of contemporary artist Damien Hirst.

The exhibition, organized roughly chronologically, dedicates a separate room to Martin's "Last Judgment" triptych painted toward the end of his life.

According to the Tate, the pictures were on show from 1854, the year of Martin's death, until the 1870s, travelled across Britain as well as to New York and Australia and were seen by up to eight million members of the public.

By the turn of the 20th century, they were out of sight and out of mind, dismissed as examples of Victorian "bad taste."

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)

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Russian modern art gets younger, less politicized

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By Nastassia Astrasheuskaya

MOSCOW | Tue Sep 20, 2011 5:01am EDT

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Up-and-coming artists competing for Russia's top contemporary art prize kicked off a marathon of exhibits in the Russian capital, which hosts the fourth Moscow Biennale.

A studio strewn with musty books, pages rustling in an artificial breeze; a multicolored play-dough cube squeezed into a cage; and a sphere made out of hundreds of plastic bags were among the 40 art works contesting the prestigious Kadinsky prize.

Named after abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1904), the award hands out cash-prizes of up to $55,100 to modern artists featured at Moscow's Central House of Artists.

"This exhibit cuts across Russia's contemporary art and art forms of today," said Shalva Breus, who founded the award in 2007.

Breus hailed an increase in the number of younger participants and avant-guard ideas alongside a steady decline in Soviet symbolism in Russian art.

"If three years ago, artists widely addressed imperial symbolism, be it of the Russian empire or the Soviet empire, there is no more of that today," he told Reuters at the opening. "There are many more abstract installations."

The fading references to Soviet symbolism in contemporary art highlights that award nominees are getting younger each year, with today's art students born at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The trend may also be market-driven, as younger collectors emerge in Russia, demanding art that speaks to post-Communist era, participants said.

"The buyers of Russian modern art are mostly Russians, and the new emerging trend is that there are a lot more younger collectors nowadays: The so-called 'Progressive Youth'," said Mikhail Molochnikov, a Russian artist working in Moscow, Berlin and Zurich galleries.

Globalization is also erasing the focus on local politics and history, experts said. Nevertheless, a few artists waxed nostalgic for Soviet times and one work -- "First Grade" -- depicted the legs of schoolchildren in traditional Soviet gear.

While themes are changing, Russian contemporary artists lagged behind their Western peers in the use of innovative materials, Breus said.

"We are trying to catch up with the West and we are copying European artists but we are definitely still falling behind," he said.

A jury will vote on the winners by the end of the exhibit, which is on until October 7. There are three categories in which to win: "Project of the Year," "Best Young Artist," and "Media-art Project of the Year."

The fourth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art opens on Thursday, lighting up galleries across the city until November.

($1 = 0.725 Euros)

(Reporting By Nastassia Astrasheuskaya; editing by Alissa de Carbonnel and Paul Casciato)

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Warhol painting among $2.8 million Irish bad bank auction

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DUBLIN | Mon Sep 19, 2011 8:18am EDT

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Ireland's state-run "bad bank" will auction works of art by the likes of Andy Warhol and Alex Katz after it put global auction house Christies in charge of a 14-painting collection valued at up $2.8 million on Monday.

Created to purge Irish banks of their risky real estate loans, the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) is selling helicopters and private jets as well as skyscrapers and five-star hotels to try and claw back the 31 billion euros ($42.7 billion) it has shelled out for the loans.

NAMA's chief executive said in July that the agency was getting tough on the lavish lifestyles of some of its debtors, many of whom became household names before a property crash brought Ireland's "Celtic Tiger" economy to an abrupt end.

Christie's said the collection -- which includes Warhol's "Dollar Sign" painting that it values at between $400,000 and $600,000 -- belonged to one NAMA debtor and was being offered with the debtor's co-operation.

The Irish Times newspaper reported last month that the collection was formerly owned by Derek Quinlan, an ex-tax inspector who went on to buy several of London's top hotels, including the Savoy.

NAMA has seized control of a number a buildings belonging to Quinlan who also owned part of the Citigroup Tower in London's Canary Wharf business district, which was put on the market earlier this year for more than 1 billion pounds ($1.6 billion).

A spokesman for NAMA said it would not comment on the identity of the debtor.

U.S. pop art painter Alex Katz's "Ace Airport" will go under the hammer along with Warhol's Dollar Sign in Christie's New York auction room on November 9 and is expected to fetch between $150,000 and $200,000.

Works by William Scott, Roderic O'Connor and Jack Butler Yeats -- brother of Irish author and poet W.B. Yeats -- will be auctioned in London a week later.

($1 = 0.725 Euros)

(Reporting by Padraic Halpin; editing by Anna Willard and Paul Casciato)

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U.S. needs a wake-up call, says new Friedman book

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Author of the book, ''The ''World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century'', Thomas Friedman delivers a speech at a seminar held by Asia Society in Hong Kong December 16, 2008.

Credit: Reuters/Woody Wu

By Andrea Burzynski

NEW YORK | Fri Sep 16, 2011 1:04pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A new book by Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum began with a broken subway escalator the authors encountered during their daily commutes that they saw as epitomizing the state of politics and economy.

"That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back" comes at a time when many Americans are puzzling over the issue posed by the title.

Faced with stagnating unemployment numbers, an historic credit downgrade by S&P, and partisan rancor over how to reduce the U.S. debt, the two foreign policy columnists tap into public hunger for answers.

"People are getting more and more concerned. When you see the polls, you find a large majority feels the country is on the wrong track," Mandelbaum told Reuters.

The authors, who describe themselves as "frustrated optimists," attempt to diagnose America's problems and prescribe solutions to return to a robust economy.

The book, which has hit No. 3 on the Publishers Weekly hardcover nonfiction bestsellers list after its release last week, addresses a wide range of popular issues such as the national debt, education, energy consumption and technology.

Friedman and Mandelbaum take pride in the United States' past successes, which they attribute to a set of policy priorities they call "the American formula".

The formula includes government investment in education, infrastructure and research and development, attracting and retaining the most promising immigrants, and certain regulations on the private economy.

"America didn't get to where it is today in terms of its vibrancy and level of development by accident. It got here by applying this formula," said Friedman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist. "The book is a wake-up call and a pep talk to get back to that formula."

PASS THE POTATO CHIPS

America's problems have come about because it has strayed from its formula for success and failed to take leadership on issues that will be integral to future prosperity, such as energy technology, write Friedman and Mandelbaum.

For example, the authors point out that U.S. consumers spent more money on potato chips in 2009 than their government applied to energy research and development.

The book also decries "magical thinking" about the economy, which the authors cite as a key factor in the spiraling deficit. They call on the United States to "spend less, save more, and accept higher taxes".

"We really feel a sense of urgency about this," Friedman said. "We're driving around right now in a car without a bumper or a spare tire."

The authors also take aim at the political partisanship they feel is responsible for exacerbating many of the country's problems. "We really believe the country is nowhere near as divided as our politics right now," said Friedman.

As Congress returns to Washington after summer break, presidential candidates campaign, and President Obama touts a major new proposal to encourage job growth, Americans are eager for a plan to address their country's woes.

Friedman and Mandelbaum call for "political shock therapy," a third party presidential candidate who will adopt pragmatic solutions from both ends of the political spectrum and speak truth about the consequences of maintaining the status quo.

"We believe that it's the platform that's important, not the candidate," said Mandelbaum, who has written more than a dozen books and is a US foreign policy professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Though they are not optimistic that such a candidate could be elected, the authors believe he or she could have a major influence on the nation's political priorities as a whole.

For Friedman, the author of the bestseller "The World is Flat", the stakes are also personal.

"If we can't sustain the American dream, my daughters will not just grow up in a different America -- they will grow up in a different world," he said.

(editing by Christine Kearney and Bob Tourtellotte)

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"Father of pop art" Richard Hamilton dies aged 89

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By Mike Collett-White

LONDON | Tue Sep 13, 2011 12:00pm EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - British artist Richard Hamilton, regarded by many as the father of pop art, died on Tuesday. He was 89.

"This is a very sad day for all of us and our thoughts are with Richard's family, particularly his wife Rita and his son Rod," art dealer and gallery owner Larry Gagosian said.

A statement from the gallery called Hamilton the "father of pop art" and a "pioneering artist of unparalleled skill, invention and lasting authority.

"His influence on subsequent generations of artists continues to be immeasurable."

Nicholas Serota, director of London's Tate gallery, added: "Greatly admired by his peers, including (Andy) Warhol and (Joseph) Beuys, Hamilton produced a series of exquisite paintings, drawings, prints and multiples dealing with themes of glamour, consumption, commodity and popular culture."

Despite his age, Hamilton had been working until just a few days ago on a major museum retrospective of his work scheduled to travel to Los Angeles, Philadelphia, London and Madrid in 2013/14.

Gagosian did not say how Hamilton died or where, although he was in Britain.

Hamilton's best known work was his 1956 collage "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?," considered by some historians to mark the birth of the pop art movement.

Hamilton is also credited with coining the phrase "pop art" itself, in a note to some architects who were considering putting on an exhibition with him along similar lines to the 1956 "This Is Tomorrow" show.

In words dating from 1957 that are seen as prescient of the likes of Warhol and, more recently, Damien Hirst, he wrote:

"Pop art is popular (designed for a mass audience), transient (short term solution), expendable (easily forgotten), low cost, mass produced, young (aimed at youth), witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, big business."

Hamilton is often associated with the swinging 60s, including for his painting of Mick Jagger and art dealer Robert Fraser in handcuffs following a drugs raid.

He also designed the sleeve of the Beatles' "White Album," consisting of a plain white sleeve with the band's name embossed on it.

Hamilton is remembered for his modesty and sense of humor as well as his artistic talent.

Asked about people's perception of "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?," he said in a recent newspaper interview: "I'm rather bored with it but it's a nice little earner!"

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)

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