American novelist Anne Rice has “quit being a Christian.” Using her Facebook page, she said: I quit being a Christian. I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I [...]

On Monday, Jacket Copy wondered how former USC football coach Pete Carroll's book "Win Forever" is selling. Carroll's winning tenure has come into question after the NCAA leveled penalties against the school for improprieties made during his time there. Carroll...

Today YouTube announced that the upload limit for users has been increased to 15 minutes. Undoubtedly, authors around the country are already plotting 15 minute book trailers.

Not that we would advise authors to create 15 minute book trailers--this GalleyCat editor is a firm believer in the short and sweet school of book trailer-making. Nevertheless, how would you make a 15 minute book trailer? YouTube is actually hosting a contest for 15 minute videos, so you can enter your creation.

Here's more about the contest: "We encourage you to take full advantage of this new time limit by making a video of your '15 minutes of fame.' Imagine that this video is all the world will ever know about you: what would you want to communicate? What will be the enduring stamp you’ve left on us all? Tag your video with 'yt15minutes,' upload it by Wednesday, August 4, and we’ll select a handful of people to truly gain their 15 minutes of fame by featuring them on the YouTube homepage in a future spotlight."

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

‘When people said it was strange to construct the perfect society on a foundation of human bones, all you got was glib self-satisfied answers from the communists. Oh, they said, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. . . . How callous. How inhuman.’’ So wrote the indignant mother of Feliks Zhukovski, recounting her experiences in her native Poland ...



Communism - History - Apple - WordPress - IPad

The United States' 32nd President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had the extraordinary tasks of seeing our nation through the Great Depression and much of World War II. Wouldn't that make for an interesting memoir?

Archivist of the United States, David S. Ferriero offers this quote: "Roosevelt did not keep a diary, did not sit for extensive interviews with historians, and did not live to write his memoirs." With that said, New York State's recent acquisition of 5000 pages of the former President's letters is sure to be a feast for writers interested in this leader's life. Included in this collection are notes from FDR's mistress, Lucy Page Mercer Rutherford.

A former aide to FDR, Jonathan Daniels, wrote of this relationship in his 1966 memoir, The Time Between the Wars. Archivists are hoping to make this collection publicly available by November 2010 and later, online by January 2011.

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Ever since Harry Potter, adults have been dipping into the YA bookshelf.

Counting on our readers' collective knowledge of books, GalleyCat Reviews regularly features curated book lists from Flashlight Worthy Book Recommendations. The site includes the crossover list, 7 Beach Reads You Can Grab Off Your T(w)een's Bookshelf.

Over the last year, Flashlight Worthy Book Recommendations has created more than 385 lists--giving reading advice on everything from book club books to cancer survivor books. Working with this carefully curated publication, we will share our favorite lists with GalleyCat readers.

Check out the complete list below, and add your favorite YA books for adults in the comments section.

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There are two phases that most kids go through at some point in their young lives. The first phase begins when they decide reading is boring. The second begins when they decide that "bathroom humor" (as my mother always diplomatically...

Amazon.com has introduced a Kindle for $139. The most inexpensive e-reader offered by the online retailer, which is Wi-Fi only, will ship Aug. 27. A $189 model, also available next month, will be equipped with 3G. Only last month, the...

Ernest Hemingway lives on. Since 1981, Florida has been home to the Hemingway Look-Alike Contest held at Sloppy Joe's Bar in Key West. That tradition continues with the crowning of the 29th "Papa." This group of jolly men lovingly welcomed Charles Bicht as the 2010 winning Hemingway Look-Alike. In the photo above, you can see the 2009 winner, David Douglas planting a congratulatory kiss on Bicht's cheek.

The winner's statement includes this quote: "For eleven years I stood on Green Street outside Sloppy Joe's waiting for the winner's name to be called. Each year, with a little disappointment for myself but a great excitement for the winner, I would gather my loyal family and friends who were always there to support me and we would find a good restaurant to have a final meal for the year in Key West. This year was a little different. I felt more relaxed and comfortable. I knew if it was meant to be, my time would come. I always enjoyed the competition but as the years rolled by I was enjoying the camaraderie more and more."

The 1954 Nobel Prize Laureate still has many devoted fans who call For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea as their favorite books. The Hemingway Look-Alike contest is arguably one of the most creative ways to showcase Hemingway enthusiasm. Besides the feel good fun of this contest, it was actually formed to serve a charitable purpose. The contest funds the Hemingway Look-Alike Scholarship program which is awarded to students who attend Florida Keys Community College.

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In a dramatic series of Facebook posts, novelist Anne Rice declared that she is no longer a Christian.

Check it out: "I quit being a Christian. I'm out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of ... Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen."

Rice wrote Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession, a memoir about her own conversion to Christianity--making the post a bit more surprising.

In another post, Rice also admitted, "I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being 'Christian' or to being part of Christianity." So far, her posts have drawn nearly 2,000 comments and well over 3,000 "likes." (Via Gawker)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

So, let's look at what's going on with a horror novella called The Painted Darkness by Brian James Freeman.

Thanks to the magic of Facebook, our calendar is now packed with events around the country--find readings and signings near you in our regular Booked feature.

Author Michele Carlo is inviting the whole world to join her at two release parties for her book, Fish Out of Agua. The first will be in Brooklyn on August 10th (Tuesday) from 7pm to 10pm at the Powerhouse Arena. The second will be in Manhattan on August 25th (Wednesday) from 6:30pm to 8:30pm at the Tenement Museum.

The Annie Oakley Festival at Sailwinds Park located in Cambridge, MD will be having a book signing on August 7th (Saturday) featuring authors Judy Reveal, Diane Marquette, Hal Wilson, Jody Panzenhagen and Terry White.

David Jedeikin will be signing copies of his travel memoir, Wander the Rainbow, at Books Inc. located in the Castro District of San Fransisco, CA on August 12th (Thursday) starting at 7:30pm.

Urban fantasy author Harry Connolly is having a book signing event for his second novel, Game of Cages, at Magnolia's Bookstore in Seattle, WA on September 4th (Saturday) at 1pm.

To get your events posted, visit our Facebook Your Next Literary Event page for more information.

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After nearly eight years, independent bookseller Michele Lonergan is closing her Michigan bookstore, Tree House Books.

In August, the bookstore will host a liquidation sale, selling books at a 30 percent discount. Last year eastern Michigan lost a great independent bookstore when Shaman Drum closed in Ann Arbor. According to mlive.com, the bookstore was once named the best west Michigan bookstore by Lake Magazine.

Here's a sad quote from Lonergan: "We have some wonderful memories of standing room only author events and costume parties, and of course, our midnight Harry Potter events. The one thing the staff has agreed that we will miss the most of all is YOU,our loyal fellow book-loving customers. We want to thank you for your committed patronage, for believing in an independent bookstore when you could get your books cheaper at Walmart." (Via Publishers Lunch)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Damn, son. Let’s ponder the yesteryear of bookplates: More to be seen here. Filed under: Books, Pictures Tagged: Books

I know, I know, it’s been a while, but the latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Erik Sean Estep on Noberto Fuentes’s The Autobiography of Fidel Castro, translated from the Spanish by Anna Kushner and published late last year by W. W. Norton. (FYI, the paperback edition will be available in December.)

Erik Estep is someone I know from the long, flat days of Central Illinois. At the time he was working in Milner Library at Illinois State University. Around the time that we all left Dalkey for Open Letter/Three Percent, Erik escaped as well, and is now a Reference Librarian at East Carolina University. Erik is also the most deluded Cubs fan I ever met, but that’s neither here nor there.

Now, although we probably should’ve reviewed this back a few months ago, the announcement regarding Castro’s memoirs actually makes this a bit timely. (Planned. Totally planned.)

Anyway, here’s the beginning of Erik’s review:

Most of the icons of the Long Twentieth Century (defined by most as stretching from the Great War to the suicide of the Soviet Union) have left the scene. If you were on team communism, chances are you in formaldehyde or you have turned over your kingdom to an heir. If you were on the capitalist side of the field, you’ve likely been given a nice state funeral by the victors, long after, sadly, your brain had turned to jelly. However, there is one leader who is still in game, a survivor who has managed recently even to return to the big screen, via an undisclosed location, to inspire the masses. That man, of course, is Fidel Castro. A stroke may hobble The Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, thus speeding up the transition to the Great Grandson of The Leader, but El Comandante continues to lead.

Castro has not yet published his memoirs, but is said to be working on them since formally relinquishing power several years ago. Norberto Fuentes in his delightful, brutally honest, and satirical book The Autobiography of Fidel Castro has beaten him to the punch. Fuentes was a companero of Castro and his regime until the late ‘90s until he became persona non grata and had to flee to Miami. Jean Jacques Rousseau invented the superstar memoir genre with his Autobiography, and, it is important to note, that the veracity of that book was challenged from the outset. Rousseau, ever the bad boy of the Enlightenment, was said to have shaded things in his direction. Even though we know that Fuentes book is a work of fiction, his many years at Castro’s side have made his work indistinguishable from “true” memoirs.

Click here to read the full review.

The American literary genre of you can't go home again – that fertile ground farmed by Faulkner, Twain and Kerouac – has in the last half-century found a new voice abroad

At six foot, six inches tall, Thomas Wolfe had trouble entering most rooms. But he also had a problem with going back through them, especially if they led to the past. He had told too many truths – and too many lies – about where he came from in North Carolina.

In his posthumous 1940 novel, You Can't Go Home Again, he gave Americans a literary catchphrase for the pain so many of us who wind up far from where we grew up feel acutely.

After all, in the case of many Americans, if you leave the provinces only to return home, you are marked as a failure. At the very least, you run the risk of finding that flight has spoiled any fond memories you managed to smuggle out.

Think of the successful ad-man hero of John Updike's The Farm, who returns to his family's crumbling Pennsylvania farm for an emotionally fraught visit, or Quentin Compson of William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, shivering in his dorm room at Harvard, who begins his defence of the American south with the ringing endorsement, "I don't hate it ... I don't hate it."

This thread of conflicted nostalgia is strongest in America's most autobiographical novelists, especially the ones who had to leave to write but continuously dial back the past in their work: writers such as Jack Kerouac, who frantically travelled America, but wrote most of his later books about Lowell, while living with his mother in Queens and Florida.

Then there's Mark Twain, whose autobiography appears in the new issue of Granta, who rose out of Missouri and saw the world, but settled in Hartford, Connecticut in a white mansion that everyone around him could see looked exactly like a river steamboat.

But like so many things America feels it has invented, from democracy to baseball, the you-can-never-go-home again narrative is hardly unique to it. In fact, in the last half-century (and especially in the last 20 years, as diaspora writers from the Dominican Republic to Nigeria to India and Pakistan have emerged as some of our most vigorous storytellers), nostalgia – which is a combination of "returning home" and "ache" – has taken on a different texture.

In Granta's new issue, there's a story by the Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela, about a young man who has come to London from Khartoum to study mathematics. His mother, who worries he will never return, arranges for him to marry a devout Muslim wife – a move which backfires when she comes to London and reminds him of everything he left behind. Chimamanda Adichie, meanwhile, has a story about a Nigerian "big man" whose life is turned upside down when his ex-girlfriend announces she has come back to Lagos. As he speculates about the reasons for her return, Adichie's hero worries whether he has sacrificed something essential in his rise to the top.

In stories like these, not to mention the novels of Monica Ali or Kiran Desai or Uzma Aslam Khan, the export duty to elsewhere is high. The past isn't just the past – it's another country. And for reasons political and personal, there is no going back.

Actor Steve Carell stars as an amateur taxidermist who enjoys creating elaborate dioramas with his stuffed rodents in the new Jay Roach film Dinner for Schmucks. The two comedy vets talk improv, pathos and more.

Artists and Artisans new agent, Gwendolyn Heasley moonlights as an author and offers a unique perspective and empathetic ear for her clients. In today's interview she discusses exactly what she's looking for, why having an agent who is also an author is an advantage and the importance of self-promotion for her authors.

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Yesterday, Amazon.com revealed their latest Kindle e-reader, scheduled to be released on August 27. It's smaller, lighter and, perhaps most significantly, cheaper than both its predecessors and competitors. $139.

Wow. That's cheap. Yes, to get to the $139 price point you have to opt for the WiFi-only version of the Kindle, but these days most consumers considering such a device can certainly access WiFi for the short time it takes to download an e-book (The 3G model is also still available at $189). The other significant aspect of Amazon's new Kindle e-reader is their plan to release a version in the UK along with a UK e-bookstore.

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What does an 83-year-old former Cuban president do during retirement? Publish your autobiography series is as good of an option as any. Fidel Castro is currently penning the first volume of his memoirs, The Strategic Victory. Barbara Walters interviewed Fidel Castro in the 20/20 episode embedded above from YouTube.

The Guardian reports: "Over 25 chapters Castro recounts, using maps, photographs and diagrams, how his outnumbered rebels routed the dictator and paved the way for their triumphant march into Havana on 1 January 1959. "The defeat of the enemy offensive after 74 days of incessant combat marked a strategic turning point in the war," according to excerpts from an article Castro published on a state website this week."

Earlier in the week, GalleyCat reported on two other world leader-turned-authors. Gordon Brown is preparing a tome on current global financial issues. Pope Benedict XVI has written a children's book entitled, The Friends of Jesus.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Those English whippersnappers - Barnes, Rushdie and McEwan - simply do not compare to the old-timers like Melville, Kafka, or Proust, says the former Weidenfeld professor of comparative literature at Oxford University. He also says Roth is rubbish too. Apparently, the English novel is “in a very fallow period.”

Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle reviewed in the July 30th issue include:


The Glass Rainbow, by James Lee Burke. A Dave Robicheaux novel. Simon & Schuster. Print length: 384 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...the venerable author still writes with the same intensity, and moral avidity, that energizes his equally aged hero..." Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (6 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Detective Dave Robicheaux [is] back in New Iberia, Louisiana, and embroiled in the most harrowing and dangerous case of his career. Seven young women in neighboring Jefferson Davis Parish have been brutally murdered. While the crimes have all the telltale signs of a serial killer, the death of Bernadette Latiolais, a high school honor student, doesn’t fit: she is not the kind of hapless and marginalized victim psychopaths usually prey upon. Robicheaux and his best friend, Clete Purcel, confront Herman Stanga, a notorious pimp and crack dealer whom both men despise. When Stanga turns up dead shortly after a fierce beating by Purcel, in front of numerous witnesses, the case takes a nasty turn..." - www.jamesleeburke.com/
Less expensive alternative: Crusader's Cross, another peek into the violent and complex world of the New Iberia, Louisiana sheriff's deputy.

Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart. Random House. Print length: 352 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...funny, on-target, and ultimately sad..." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (14 reviews). Kindle edition $14.30. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"In a very near future—oh, let’s say next Tuesday—a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don’t that tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, the thirty-nine-year-old son of an angry Russian immigrant janitor, proud author of what may well be the world’s last diary, and less-proud owner of a bald spot shaped like the great state of Ohio. Despite his job at an outfit called Post-Human Services, which attempts to provide immortality for its super-rich clientele, death is clearly stalking this cholesterol-rich morsel of a man. And why shouldn’t it? Lenny’s from a different century—he totally loves books (or “printed, bound media artifacts,” as they’re now known), even though most of his peers find them smelly and annoying. But even more than books, Lenny loves Eunice Park, an impossibly cute and impossibly cruel twenty-four-year-old Korean American woman who just graduated from Elderbird College with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness." - www.randomhouse.com/
$9.99 or less alternative: Shteyngart's earlier comic novel Absurdistan.

03, by Jean-Christophe Valtat. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Print length: 96 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...inner monologue, which takes place entirely in a single moment at a bus stop [and] manages to ring true..." Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"A precocious teenager in a French suburb finds himself powerfully, troublingly drawn to the girl he sees every day on the way to school. As he watches and thinks about her, his daydreams - full of lyrics from Joy Division and the Smiths, fairy tales, Flowers for Algernon, sexual desire and fear, loneliness, rage for escape, impatience to grow up - reveal an entire adolescence. And this fleeting erotic obsession, remembered years later, blossoms into a meditation on what it means to be a smart kid, what it means to be dumb, and what it means to be in love with another person." - Amazon.

Everything Is Going to Be Great: An Underfunded and Overexposed European Grand Tour, by Rachel Shukert. Harper Collins. Print length: 336 p. MEMOIR. EW's slant: "...lurking beneath the jabs and one-liners is an affecting - and pretty unforgettable - coming-of-age tale." Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"When she lands a coveted nonpaying, nonspeaking role in a play going on a European tour, Rachel Shukert - with a brand-new degree in acting from NYU and no money - finally scores her big break. And, after a fluke at customs in Vienna, she gets her golden ticket: an unstamped passport, giving her free rein to 'find herself' on a grand tour of Europe. Traveling from Vienna to Zurich to Amsterdam, Rachel bounces through complicated relationships, drunken mishaps, miscommunication, and the reality-adjusting culture shock that every twentysomething faces when sent off to negotiate 'the real world' - whatever that may be." - Amazon.

THRILLERS FOR SUMMER READING MENTIONED IN THIS ISSUE

Crashers, by Dana Haynes. Minotaur Books. Print length: 352 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (21 reviews). Kindle edition $11.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"When a passenger plane, a Vermeer One Eleven, slams into the ground outside Portland, Oregon, a team is quickly assembled to investigate the cause. Usually the team has months to determine the cause of a crash. But this time it's different. This time, the plane was brought down deliberately, without leaving a trace, and this was only a trial run. In LA, Daria Gibron - a former Shin Bet agent, now under the protection of the FBI - spots a group of suspicious-looking men. Missing her former life of action, she attaches herself to them only to learn that, somehow, they were responsbie for the plane crash and are preparing for another action. While her FBI handler tries to find her and save her, Daria risks her life to try to get close enough to learn what's going on and thwart the coming terrorist action. But time is running out and her cover story is running thin." - Amazon.
$9.99 or less alternative: the two novel collection Whistleblower and Never Say Die. In Never Say Die, a woman travels to Asia to search for the truth about her father's mysterious death in a plane crash twenty years earlier.

Galveston, by Nic Pizzolatto. Scribner. Print length: 288 p. NOVEL. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (8 reviews). Kindle edition $11.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"...a taut first novel suffused with a strong noir sensibility. Roy Cady is working as a strong-arm man for a low-level New Orleans gangster when two events change his life: he’s diagnosed with terminal cancer, and his boss puts out a hit on him. Soon enough, Roy and a young prostitute, Rocky - thrown together after a blood-spattered encounter with the would-be hit men - are on the run, traveling from New Orleans to Galveston. ....Pizzolatto builds tension by moving back and forth in time: we know it all goes bad, but we don’t know how. Add to that a writer with a real feel for the special poetry of noir, and you have a fine crime-fiction debut. - Bill Ott for Booklist.
$9.99 or less alternative: Pizzolatto's earlier collection of short stories, Between Here and the Yellow Sea.

House Justice, by Mike Lawson. Atlantic Monthly Press. Print length: 384 p. NOVEL. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (6 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"An American spy in Iran is exposed by a female journalist, and the spy is tortured, then executed. Enraged, the director of Central Intelligence blames the leak on Congress. Speaker of the House John Fitzpatrick Mahoney isn’t sure who leaked the information, but he’s certain the journalist, jailed for refusing to name her source, will spill the beans about their one-night stand 20 years earlier. Mahoney summons Joe DeMarco, his personal gumshoe and fixer, to identify the leaker and keep the journalist from embarrassing him. Lawson’s tight, high-energy prose drives a plot with more turns than the Burma Road, as DeMarco finds himself surrounded by sleazy legislators, CIA spooks, Russian gangsters, FBI agents, assorted hit men, a misanthropic billionaire, a SoCal surfer/computer-gamer/millionaire, and a mysterious Iranian florist hell-bent on avenging the murdered spy..." - Thomas Gaughan for Booklist.
This is Lawson's fifth political thriller to feature Joe DeMarco. All are available in Kindle editions starting with The Inside Ring.

Rock Paper Tiger, by Lisa Brackmann. Soho Press. Print length: 368 p. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (16 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"American Iraq War veteran Ellie Cooper is down and out in Beijing when a chance encounter with a Uighur - a member of a Chinese Muslim minority - at the home of her sort-of boyfriend Lao Zhang turns her life upside down. Lao Zhang disappears, and suddenly multiple security organizations are hounding her for information. They say the Uighur is a terrorist. Ellie doesn’t know what’s going on, but she must decide whom to trust among the artists, dealers, collectors, and operatives claiming to be on her side - in particular, a mysterious organization operating within a popular online role-playing game." - Amazon.

The Taken, by Inger Ash Wolfe. Houghton Mifflin. Print length: 432 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (9 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef is having a bad year. After major back surgery, she has no real option but to move into her ex-husband's basement and suffer the humiliation of his new wife bringing her meals down on a tray. As if that weren't enough, Hazel's octogenarian mother secretly flushes Hazel's stash of painkillers down the toilet. It's almost a relief when Hazel gets a call about a body fished up by tourists in one of the lakes near Port Dundas. But what raises the hair on the back of Micallef 's neck is that the local paper has just published the first installment of a serialized story featuring such a scenario." - Amazon.

When David Markson, author of the postmodern classic "Wittgenstein's Mistress," died in New York in June at age 82, he left behind a vast library of books. In the dissolution of Markson's worldly possessions, more than 50 cartons -- holding...

What can the publishing industry learn from a bunch of DIY 'zine makers and punk rock fans from the 1980s? A lot.

Today's guest on the Morning Media Menu was rock journalist and publisher Ian Christe--talking about his indie press, Bazillion Points. Christe explained how his press assembled Touch and Go: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine '79-'83, a collection of writing from Michigan-based punk fans. He also shared advice for aspiring rock writers.

He explained his fascination with zine culture: "There's something about the documentation of 1981 and 1982--what the look was. What these people were doing with scissors and tape and Xerox machines. Sometimes writing a record review and cutting and pasting each strip individually over a dark photograph of Elvis Presley--it completely decimates anything that can be done with Adobe Creative Suite. Everything we see now is so cool and stylized and slick. This was an elementary school teacher who was sneaking in at night to use the Xerox machine at school with sheaf of dirty papers in his pocket."

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Last night I wandered the 2010 Literacy Signing making a music video. With Ke$ha. Not actually with me but playing on endless loop in my head. It is only fair I share the ear worm with you, right?

Thank you to all the authors who let me film them (I’m sorry I could not use all my footage, as some of it was really wonky when I imported it) and who wrote all the lovely books I buy by the truckload every year. And congrats to everyone for raising over $62,000.00 in one night to fight illiteracy. That RULES.

(My apologies for the not-perfect editing. Lip-synching is HARD.)

A new interview is up at TMN this morning – Robert Birnbaum talking to David Mitchell. Here’s an excerpt: DM: In a way, dominant novelists are actually political—politicians. RB: Give me an example. DM: I wasn’t clear enough. I mean, novelists are in the business of creating fictional narratives. Politicians also are in the business [...]

With innovation, entrepreneurship and significantly smarter fiscal policies, America should eventually escape its "hireless recovery." But what won't hasten new...

If you have not already read The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, there probably isn't anything I can say that would get you to read it now. I could not do a series on love stories without including it though. It is one of my favorite books of the past decade, and at its heart it is a timeless love story. Henry and Clare's relationship is complicated, imperfect, challenging; but it is also beautiful, deep and full of the kind of longing and waiting that set timeless love stories apart from romance novels. If you haven't read it yet, what are you waiting for?!

Any other timeless love story recommendations? Other books that have been hyped up but that people might not realize are love stories?

_{Cover Photo Courtesy Harcourt Trade}

Although I’m not a big reader of Nordic crime, it’s nice to know that places like Ice Cold Crime are out there, translating and publishing these titles, which probably appeal to a pretty wide audience. And Ice Cold Crime’s story — featured in this article — is kind of touching:

Riding the wave of recent popular Nordic crime novels — beginning, but not ending, with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — [Jouko] Sipila, 39, has begun publishing English translations of crime novels written by his brother, Jarkko, a journalist in Helsinki. This fall, Sipila’s publishing company, Ice Cold Crime, will begin publishing a second Finnish mystery writer.

Good for them. I’ll definitely be adding these to the translation database, and wish them the best of luck. And those of you interested in Finnish crime might want to check these books out.

But the main reason I wanted to post about this was to point out some of the stereotypes, cliches, and bad puns in the piece. OK, poking fun at local papers is a fish, barrel, smoking gun situation, but what the hell, this is the Star Tribune, a mid-sized market/paper, thus totally open to mockery . . .

Even before the “riding the wave” cliche quoted above, there’s this awesomely odd lede: “There might be a pipeline of pro hockey players from Finland to the United States, but mystery writers?”

OK, so the Finnish are known for their ice hockey skills, and what else? Oh, maybe death metal. Which is what this photo seems to be invoking.

My favorite bad joke from this article is translator Peter Ylitalo Leppa’s comment that the humor in Jarkko Sipila’s novel is “served cold.” Ice Cold perhaps?

What a groaning way to start the day . . .

Though I do want to give props to Chris Steller for referencing the Finnish Literature Exchange for subsidizing the translation. FILI rocks! In a non-death metal sense of the word.

There has been a dramatic shift in the publishing industry in the past couple of months. This is one that might not be seen as important by many of the readers of this blog, ...

In the Funny or Die video embedded above, actor Joshua Jackson staged a mini-festival outside Comic-Con to celebrate fan fiction writers who love his Dawson's Creek character, Pacey Witter.

During his satirical San Diego Comic-Con skit, Jackson read from actual fan fiction stories about his character. There are more than 1,000 fan fiction stories about Dawson's Creek on FanFiction.net, and most of them focus on his character, Pacey.

Here's more about the project from MTV: "For any fans that doubted the authenticity of this gathering, the actor revealed that the Pacey-Con fan fiction was the real deal, written by real 'Dawson's' fans. Unfortunately, Comic-Con security wasn't necessarily convinced: Jackson was thrown out of the San Diego event."

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Earlier this week the judges for The Man Booker Prize for fiction announced their longlist for the prize.  The list includes: Peter Carey: PARROT AND OLIVIER IN AMERICA Emma Donoghue: ROOM Helen Dunmore: THE BETRAYAL Damon Galgut: IN A STRANGE ROOM Howard Jacobson: THE FINKLER QUESTION Andrea Levy: THE LONG SONG Tom McCarthy: C David Mitchell: THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET [...]

And the beat of self-published-to-book-deal success stories goes on. Author Raymond Bean never thought he'd have such success as a middle grade author. As a teacher, he was frustrated by the lack of books for boys and decided to create a book that he believed boys would read. The result? Sweet Farts and although some have criticized books like his as using the lowest common denominator to lure boys into reading, Bean believes books like these just might be the recipe booksellers and educators have been looking for.

In our in-depth interview with Bean today, he discusses his rise to success, how he bagged a top agent after years of rejections and his suggestions to other authors who want to follow in his path.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

CBS News and Simon & Schuster's Scribner imprint have teamed up to build an enhanced ebook edition of Rick Perlstein's 2008 book, Nixonland. It is Simon & Schuster's first enhanced eBook.

The new edition provides a unique solution to a dilemma for publishers--where and how can they find relevant video material for a satisfying enhanced eBook? The book will feature 27 video segments woven into the original text, CBS News stories that illustrate historic moments in the book. The text also includes a bonus interview between Face the Nation anchor Bob Schieffer and Perlstein. Available in the iBookstore, the enhanced eBook retails for $15.99.

Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy had this statement: "Since the first digital books were published, many have wondered when we would be able to add to the reading experience by exploiting the full capabilities of digital media. That moment is now, and we are especially pleased that for Nixonland, our first enhanced ebook, we are able to partner with our colleagues at CBS News to offer readers a book that combines to superb effect a critically acclaimed bestselling work with the gold standard of broadcast journalism."

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

- How do we purify the world?- asked a disciple. Ibn al-Husayn replied: – There was once a sheik in Damascus called Abu Musa al-Qumasi. Everyone honored him for his great wisdom, but no one knew whether he was a good man. “One afternoon, a construction fault caused the house where the sheik lived with [...]

Name: Mitali C. Where is your home town? Terre Haute, IN – I am the Indian from Indiana. What do you do at First Book? I work with amazing national nonprofits and   government agencies to get them connected to First Book resources. What book are you currently reading? “Banker to the Poor” by Nobel Peace [...]

by Martin Filler

A major theme in literature is a wistful regard for life as it was lived some forty or fifty years earlier, typified by Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920), which looked back at upper-class mores in 1870s New York. Similarly, the five-decade postmillennial perspective afforded through the rear-view mirror of Mad Men—the critically acclaimed and cultishly followed cable-television drama series that first aired on AMC in 2007 and began its fourth season on July 25—bridges an equivalent time span, long enough to feel historical yet still within living memory of many.

For those of us who came to cultural awareness during the Kennedy years—the purview of Mad Men during its first three seasons, with the present cycle beginning in 1964—Mad Men offers anything but a comforting wallow in nostalgia. The series, which focuses on the fictive Madison Avenue advertising firm Sterling Cooper (later Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce), derives its thrilling power from the dark and seamlessly unified vision of its creator, executive producer, and head writer, Matthew Weiner, an auteur with few peers in the history of his medium.

In the first episode of the new cycle, for example, time marches inexorably onward in the small but significant ways that used to be of considerable import, most noticeably those seasonal adjustments of skirt length, figure silhouette, and hairstyle that women followed with far more conformity than they do today. Yet Mad Men’s extraordinary fidelity departs from conventional period recreations in one crucial respect. As the series’ production designer, Dan Bishop, has explained:

[Weiner] wanted to make sure it wasn’t a textbook study of mid-century modern America—as Matt specifically pointed out, look around your own house, does everything exist from 2007 or do you actually have stuff lying around from the ‘80s?…People didn’t adopt the modern ideas any faster then than they do now.

Among many things that make Mad Men so intriguing is its broad definition of what constitutes design. For example, its cunningly detailed, not-quite-couture female costuming—the B.H. Wragge-style coat-and-dress ensembles, the Koret handbags, the Coro costume jewelry—makes the female characters (especially the spectacularly curvaceous Christina Hendricks as the office manager, Joan Holloway) seem as if they have stepped straight out of the Sunday New York Times during the twilight of Lester Markel. But the clothing’s impact is accentuated by the way in which these good, serviceable outfits are seen on more than one occasion, as would have been done by working girls on a budget in those days before such disposable-chic stores as H&M.;

Equally fanatical attention is paid to interior design. The offices of Sterling Cooper were done up in the spacious, late International Style corporate mode epitomized by the boxy glass-and-steel skyscrapers that rose along Park Avenue after World War II. (The first was Lever House of 1950–1952 by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.)

Authentically, Sterling Cooper’s executives occupy private offices on the periphery of the structure, with the open-plan secretarial pool closer to the building’s core. The women’s workspace is illuminated not by windows, but rather by dropped ceilings that conceal fluorescent lighting above an overhead gridwork of translucent plastic panels. (The new offices of the fledgling breakaway agency Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, seen for the first time in season four, are decorated in the same mid-century modern style as the partners’ former digs, though the current spaces are rather more cramped, a subtle signifier of the firm’s still uncertain financial footing.) In a technique pioneered by the master cinematographer Gregg Toland for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), Weiner assumes an uncommonly low camera angle to include ceilings in his shots, and thereby gives a greater sense of verisimilitude by incorporating one of the most characteristic design elements of the upscale postwar office.

Such High Modernist interiors were already being satirized when they were almost new. Edward G. Boyle’s exuberantly cartoonish set designs for the film adaptation of Frank Loesser and Abe Burrows’s musical comedy hit How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967) present a perky, pastel-colored flip-side to Weiner’s relentlessly moody vision. Not that Mad Men’s creator is immune to knowing winks. In one of the show’s most inspired casting coups, the part of Bertram Cooper, the ad agency’s co-founder, is played by Robert Morse (now 79), who, as a brash young man, starred in both the Broadway and Hollywood versions of How to Succeed.

Then there are the countless small touches that can leave older viewers gasping with a shock of recognition over the most quotidian but long-forgotten activities. At the end of one Sterling Cooper workday, secretaries proudly swoosh beige vinyl typewriter covers over their coveted IBM Selectrics (the “golfball” model introduced in 1961, with its spherical type component that allowed interchangeable fonts).

Weiner’s perfectionism has of course challenged some aficionados to ferret out anachronisms. Though there have been none of the wristwatch-with-toga bloopers beloved by film buffs in Biblical epics, a few slips—in word usage and occasionally in soundtrack music—have been noted on several fan websites the show has engendered. An amusing if only fitfully provocative new book, Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s Mad Men Unbuttoned, is likely to become a trivia-lover’s bible, as well as recommended reading for the inevitable college media-studies courses on this pop-cultural phenomenon.

Weiner’s instinct for design appears closely reflected in the brilliant role assignments by his casting directors, Laura Schiff and Carrie Audino. How else can one begin to describe the series’ principal protagonists, Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and Betty Draper (January Jones), except in terms of their dazzling good looks, which so effectively distract us from their underlying weirdness? It’s not as though beauty has become any less useful an aid to career advancement since the 1960s, but Weiner brings this truth home time and again in the physical presentation of his actors.

Thus, apart from the Drapers, the lodestar of Mad Men is the mesmerizing secretary-turned-copywriter Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), whose striking cosmetic makeover in this latest season could well presage her further rise in a world where appearances may not be everything, but nearly so. This Brooklyn-bred character is based in part on the trailblazing copywriter Shirley Polykoff, creator of the smash 1956 “Does She … Or Doesn’t She?” campaign for Clairol hair dye, which definitively proved that the ad game was no longer a boys-only club.

As such, Moss’s Olson has emerged as one of Mad Men’s most consistently fascinating personalities, not only because of her dogged proto-feminist gumption, but also because of her repeated willingness to sacrifice the personal to the professional. She never gives the slightest indication that she will live to regret either her cold-eyed decisions—including secretly bearing, and then giving up for adoption, a baby after she was impregnated by her slimy married co-worker, Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser)—or her remorseless business-is-business ethos.

If Mad Men has one recurrent weakness, it is an annoying recourse to topical tragedies of those troubled times—seemingly gratuitous references that have included self-immolating Vietnamese Buddhist monks; the four black schoolgirls killed in the Birmingham church bombing; and the assassination of Medgar Evers, all of which occurred in 1963. Particularly offensive in the fourth-season opener was a brief, almost decorative invocation of Andrew Goodman one of three young civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi during the “Freedom Summer” of 1964. Goodman’s sacrifice surely deserves to be remembered, honored, and memorialized, but not as a throwaway line to vouchsafe Weiner’s liberal bona fides. Such missteps apart, by peeling back the surface layers from that not-so-distant past, Matthew Weiner is performing one of the most instructive—not to say diverting and entertaining—sleights of hand in the modern theater of memory.

I know there’s all sorts of shit going down in the lit world while I slack off this week, but if you were at all privy to the unfolding narrative of my life you’d tell me to take a break. I haven’t even been able to take the ads down from May. And by the [...]

Today we are publishing a novel written by a bright young thing and everyone here at Penguin is very excited. You see, every now and then in this publishing racket you get hold of a novel that really shakes you...

South of Broad by Pat Conroy
Reviewed by Ivy from Montclair, NJ.

In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise by George Prochnik
Reviewed by Bevan from Santa Monica, CA.

The Lost Cyclist: The Epic Tale of an American Adventurer and His Mysterious Disappearance by David Herlihy, a review from The Oregonian by Jeff Mapes.

Today’s links of interest: Kindle to Go ‘Mass Market’Wifi only device will go for $139. Wifi plus 3G will go for $189. We are getting remarkably close to a price point that makes the investment a no-brainer.

When I grow up, I want my bookshelves to look like this. With the orange chair, the figurines on the table, and everything.

3 Vote(s)

Something wonderful arrived in my mail last week. Richard Ring, special collections librarian at the Providence Public Library sent a sampling of Occasional Nuggets from the Rare & Special Collections of the Providence Public Library. Each issue highlights something wonderful...

In a previous post I wrote about a review I requested from Charlie Courtland for A Promise Is A Promise from my Nurse Hal series. Charlie is the author of Dandelions In The Garden and has a book review website: http://www.bitsybling.wordpress.com. I appreciated her good review and the fact that she put it on Amazon and www.goodreads.com, where it could be seen by [many] people.

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New Resource Pages: Writing, Publishing, Book Marketing

Amazingly, [The Creative Penn] now has nearly 400 posts and nearly 3000 comments and I get emails every day with questions, so I thought it was time to add some better navigation options. I want this to be a really useful site for all who visit!

So, I have added a new Resources page that has links to my main content. It includes:

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When writing a synopsis for your novel, are you allowed to hold back information, or must you spoil the surprise for your editor by telling all? That’s the first of two questions we’ll look at today. Alice posted two questions on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page: I have a question about writing a synopsis [...]

Tonight, with typical Amazon timing, news leaked that Amazon will unveil a $139 edition of the Kindle eReader tomorrow.

It will be smaller, cheaper, and have higher resolution. Tune into eBookNewser for all the details.

Earlier this week, we showed you how to cover your Kindle with that newspaper case. If this price war strategy works, demand for these covers (and other accessories) could explode.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.