Legend has it that Franz Schubert composed his most famous melodies in Vienna cafés, where for lack of music paper, he would jot stanzas on the backs of menus, across placemats, and even, it is said, on tablecloths. Those scraps eventually became the lieder celebrated for their piano accompaniments.
Like Schubert, 26-year-old Daniel Mason began his oeuvre on an array of scrap paper. During more than a year spent studying malaria in Thailand and northern Myanmar, he would scrawl his impressions—sometimes in Thai or Burmese—on napkins and bus tickets. These random notes grew into his debut novel, The Piano Tuner (September, Knopf).
“I didn’t realize that the papers and stuff would become a novel until about two months into writing it,” Mason says. “I had written some short stories before. But then I began to get sort of an eerie feeling that I would finish this, and it would turn into something larger.”
After graduating from Harvard in 1998, Mason received a one-year Luce Foundation grant to further his senior thesis research in malaria. Although he never caught the disease, he did catch an idea—the vision of a displaced piano alone in the jungle, which he says later drove him to write the book.
Mason, now a third-year medical student at the University of California-San Francisco, managed to squeeze writing The Piano Tuner between reading anatomy and physiology books. Writing helped him deal with the pressures of school, as well as the readjustment from his colorful, adventure-filled sojourns in the Far East to duller school days in America.
“It was a way of distracting myself,” he jokes.
Mason’s novel is ambitious and complex. Piano tuner Edgar Drake is sent from London to Burma to rehabilitate an 1840 Erard owned by British surgeon-major Anthony Carroll, posted in the remote Shan States. During his voyage up-country and subsequent encounter with Carroll, the story becomes an epic, and he learns the truth of the adage that the journey is the destination.
Mason isn’t done traveling, either. He plans to spend six months in Brazil, the setting of his planned second novel. No doubt he will be on the lookout for some sturdy matchbook covers and bar napkins.
JEFFREY MCDANIEL
September 19
Exoterica at the Riverdale Society for Ethical Culture, 4450 Fieldston Road, Bronx, 718-549-5192
Inventive, ingenious and spontaneous, McDaniel has condensed the magic of a poetry slam into a book, The Splinter Factory, the third of this L.A.-based poet’s collections.
BARBARA TRAN
September 19
Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 16 West 32nd Street, 494-0061
Already prominent among Vietnamese American writers, Tran just published a collection of her poetry, In the Mynah Bird’s Own Words, which broaches such ugly topics as the Vietnam War and exile in America with delicacy and beauty.
JULIE OTSUKA
September 19
Corner Bookstore, 1313 Madison Avenue, 831-3554
Otsuka’s promising debut novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, tells the story of one Japanese American family torn apart by the internment camps of World War II, as told from the perspective of different members of the family.
‘POETRY AFTER 9/11: AN ANTHOLOGY OF NEW YORK POETS’
September 21
St. Agnes Branch, New York Public Library, 444 Amsterdam Avenue, 877-4380
Six New Yorkers—Paul Violi, Frank Lima, Patricia Spears Jones, Eliot Katz, Carter Ratcliff, and Andrea Carter Brown—offer their poetic interpretations of the post-traumatic and healing periods following 9-11, one year later.
GABRIEL BROWNSTEIN
September 25
Community Bookstore, 143 Seventh Avenue, Brooklyn, 718-783-3075
A nondescript five-story building on West 89th Street serves as a microcosm of arguably the most eccentric city on Earth in Brownstein’s short story collection, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W.
JONATHAN FRANZEN +JEFFREY EUGENIDES
September 30
92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue, 415-5500
The author of The Virgin Suicides reads from his long-awaited second novel, Middlesex, a hermaphrodite’s bildungsroman, while Franzen, whose The Corrections topped bestseller lists last year, reads from a new collection of essays, How to Be Alone.
WOLE SOYINKA
October 12
Dia Center for the Arts, 548 West 22nd Street, 989-5566
Nobel Prize-winning Soyinka has written fiction, plays, and poetry. A staunch critic both of colonialism and the postcolonial Nigerian kleptocracy, he stands with countrymen Chinua Achebe and Ken Saro-Wiwa as giants of anglophone African literature.
DANIEL MASON
October 14
Barnes & Noble, 675 Sixth Avenue, 727-1227
ALEKSANDER HEMON
October 16
Community Bookstore, 143 Seventh Avenue, Brooklyn, 718-783-3075
Hemon left his native Sarajevo in the early ’90s, shortly before the brutal siege of the city. His wistful stories, including the latest collection, Nowhere Man: The Pronek Fantasies, about his native land’s struggle with politics and war, evoke Milan Kundera.
CLARIBEL ALEGRIA+ERNESTO CARDENAL
October 17
Americas Society, 680 Park Avenue, 249-8950
One of Nicaragua’s most important poets, Alegría has produced a sizable body of fiction and poetry and was an important voice in Central America’s liberation struggle. Priest, poet, and revolutionary Cardenal, also from Nicaragua, served as minister of culture under the Sandinista government.
‘NEW WRITING FROM THE U.K.’
October 17
Poets House, 72 Spring Street, 431-7920
Poets Paul Muldoon, Simon Armitage, and Glyn Maxwell join others in a group discussion of emerging writing in the British Isles, moderated by F.D. Reeve, author of The Urban Stampede and Other Poems.
REBECCA GODFREY
October 29
Corner Bookstore, 1313 Madison Avenue, 831-3554
Godfrey exposed Canadian readers to the seedy side of Victoria, British Columbia, last year. Now The Torn Skirt, her debut novel about burnouts, drugs, and teenage sex, is out on this side of the border.
NELLY ROSARIO
November 14
Halcyon, 227 Smith Street, Brooklyn, 718-260-WAXY
The Voice named Dominican-born Rosario a Writer on the Verge. Her recent novel Song of the Water Saints, the poignant saga of Dominican mothers and daughters, cemented her place among the next generation of young novelists.
HA JIN
November 21
Barnes & Noble, 2289 Broadway, 362-8835
A former soldier in the People’s Liberation Army, Ha Jin immigrated to America in 1985. His award-winning novels have focused on routine life under the totalitarian Chinese government; his latest, The Crazed, hits shelves in October.