October 31, 2007
Barthelme and Pynchon
The Teachings of Don B.. The collection is perhaps most notable in that it contains an introduction by Thomas Pynchon. I'm fairly certain it's the same essay by Pynchon that's found here. It begins:
Though to all appearances a gathering of odds and ends, what this volume in fact offers us is the full spectrum of vintage Barthelmismo -- fictions thoughtfully concocted and comfortably beyond the reach of time, reactions less exempt from deadlines and rent payments to news of past moments that nonetheless remain our own, not to mention literary send-ups, intriguing recipes, magisterially extended metaphors, television programming that never was, strangely illuminated dreams, elegant ranting, debonair raving, and more, much more.Now that's a blurb.
- C. Max Magee @ 9:52 PM ~
comments: 2 ~ Links to this post
October 29, 2007
Save the Date: Field Guide Launch Party, this Friday
I'll be reading from the book for about half an hour and showing slides of the illustrations. During the remaining hour and a half, I'll be signing books and Max and I will be hanging out and drinking free booze with you. We always enjoy meeting our readers, and I'd love to see any and all of you there. (I need all the support I can get!)
- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 7:24 PM ~
comments: 3 ~ Links to this post
Monday Links
- The New Yorker lovefest continues: Emdashes is compiling a list of the New Yorker articles that have appeared in Houghton Mifflin's annual Best American Essays series. It's a perfect guide for dipping into your Complete New Yorker set. Update: Emdashes has also done a "short stories" version of the list.
- My cousin Mitch produces a survey of state quarters. Arkansas: thumbs down. Connecticut: thumbs up!
- The Regret the Error blog (which tracks all sorts of funny newspaper corrections) has produced a book with a serious sounding subtitle.
- I would love to get my hands on Transit Maps of the World, an encyclopedic book that's already been noted by Boing Boing and kottke.
- C. Max Magee @ 7:23 PM ~
comments: 1 ~ Links to this post
October 28, 2007
Staff Picks: Mano, HST, Castle, Dundy, Powers, Lasdun
+ Take Five (Dalkey Archive) by D. Keith Mano recommended by Garth
D. Keith Who? This guy has written for TV and Sports Illustrated, which hardly explains how, in 1982, he came up with this gloriously funny, word-drunk modern mock-epic. Over the course of 5 days, filmmaker Simon Lynxx, in pursuit of a project called Jesus 2001, loses his senses...one by one. Recommended for: shaggy undergrads, lovers of Pynchon, Barth, Coover, and John Kennedy Toole.
+ Fear And Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 (Grand Central) by Hunter S. Thompson recommended by Andrew
I confess: I'm an election junkie. And though I'm a proud Canadian, it's U.S. presidential elections that really get me going. So as we (and by we, I mean you) gear up for primary season, here's a masterpiece of political journalism as the irrepressible Hunter Thompson chronicles a year on the campaign trail. You'll feel like you're back in 1972, rooting for McGovern, booing at Muskie and "Hube," your eyes darting about in case the ghost of Nixon is spying on you. There's lots of minutiae, but as with the best of Hunter Thompson, the devil's in the detail.
+ Boss Ladies, Watch Out! Essays on Women, Sex, and Writing (Routledge) by Terry Castle recommended by Emily
This collection of essays and reviews, by turns deliciously irreverent ("Was Jane Austen Gay?"), devastatingly funny (the opening of "Women and Criticism"), and astonishingly poignant ("To the Friends Who Did Not Save My Life"), is a must-read for any connoisseur of literary criticism - and, really, any connoisseur of literary style or authorial persona. Castle's masterfully elegant prose style, her irrepressible and self-deprecating sense of humor, and her shrewd yet humane readings of Cather, Colette, Charlotte Bronte, Austen, Casanova, and Lillian Hellman, to name a few, offer a new hope to those down-cast about the state of criticism, both academic and lay. Recommended for: aspiring Lady-Critics, despairing literature grad students, and belletrists of all stripes.
+ The Dud Avocado (NYRB Classics) by Elaine Dundy recommended by Edan
Originally published in 1958 and reprinted this year by the wonderful New York Review of Books, this book follows the adventures and misadventures of young Sally Jay Gorce, an American expat in Paris. She drinks too much, wears ridiculous outfits, and sleeps with the wrong men - it's like Sex and the City, but far smarter and funnier.
+ Wheat That Springeth Green (NYRB Classics) by J.F. Powers recommended by Patrick
J.F. Powers writes about Catholic priests the way Michael Connelly or David Simon writes about homicide detectives - they're all burned out, chain-smoking, overworked, borderline alcoholics. It's for precisely these reasons that anyone, Catholic or not, can enjoy Wheat That Springeth Green. More of a bildungsroman than some of Powers' other work, Wheat follows its protagonist, Joe, from childhood through the seminary and into his priesthood at a parish in Minnesota, where he has to put up with the new generation of sandal-wearing, folk guitar-playing priests. Funny, sexier than you'd think, and vaguely political (Powers went to jail for being a conscientious objector during WWII), this book has been a favorite of mine for years.
+ The Horned Man (Norton) by James Lasdun recommended by Max
Too many novels take academia as their backdrop, but few break the mold as thoroughly as Lasdun's 2002 debut. Amid inter-departmental backbiting, Professor Lawrence Miller discovers a bookmark shifted by a few pages in a book he's been reading. Beginning with this tiniest lapse from reality, the unexplained events get weirder and wilder: is a vagrant inhabiting his office? is he a killer? This psychological roller coaster is everything I've wished Paul Auster's novels could be.
- Editor @ 10:01 PM ~
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October 27, 2007
And now for a little self-promotion...
This November, I'm trying my hand at a weekend seminar, called Introduction to Fiction Writing. It's designed for new writers, but I plan for it to be useful to more experienced writers as well, those who want to revisit technique and gather new material. If you're an L.A. reader of The Millions, perhaps you'll join me?
Here's the course description:
In this seminar, we will explore the major tenets of fiction writing, including characterization, narrative voice, prose style, point of view, scene and summary, dialogue, and structure. Over the course of the seminar, we will continually return to certain questions: How can we use language to capture the uncapturable? How can a bunch of words on the page move us, make us understand what it means to be human? How can form and technique help us to improve as writers? In an attempt to answer these questions, we will look to published fiction for guidance, and dive into various writing exercises. Students will leave the seminar with the beginnings of several promising projects, as well as the skills to follow through with them.
When: Saturday 11/17 and Sunday 11/18, 10:30-12:30 and 1:30-3:30 pm each day
7 student maximum enrollment
The course will take place in Los Feliz
Course fee: $110
Email me at elepucki@aol.com for more information.
- Edan Lepucki @ 3:55 PM ~
comments: 3 ~ Links to this post
More Rejected New Yorker Cartoons
Who knew there was such a market for rejected New Yorker cartoons? The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker (which we noted upon its release) apparently did well enough to spawn a sequel: The Rejection Collection Vol. 2: The Cream of the Crap.Those who really go in for cartoons that never saw the light of day may also appreciate Killed Cartoons: Casualties from the War on Free Expression, a collection of editorial cartoons that got spiked from various newspapers for various reasons.
Finally, if we may leap to cartoons that were no doubt jettisoned from generations of classrooms, a massive two volume set collecting the complete cartoons of Mad Magazine legend Don Martin. Hard to go wrong with that.
- C. Max Magee @ 3:51 PM ~
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It's a Gass
- C. Max Magee @ 3:00 PM ~
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Awkward Solutions to Real-Life Problems
- C. Max Magee @ 2:57 PM ~
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Bull Sessions: Music and Film
- Most of you have probably read it, or at least heard about it: Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker posits that the cultural inter-borrowing that long underpinned the vibrancy of American music has fallen by the wayside in the current era of mopey indie rock (I mostly agree). The essay is good - though-provoking - but what has really rounded it out has been his series of responses, on his blog, to the various letters he received - 1, 2, 3, 4 - which have turned his effort into the sort of bull session that regularly happens among music fans.
- In a similar vein, in this case in the world a film, One-Way Street posits that we have a problem we never expected: "an American cinema that's too good." The argument is fairly convincing. But I can't help but think that some arguments to the contrary might turn the post into a bull session as intriguing as the one Frere-Jones has curated at the New Yorker.
- C. Max Magee @ 2:50 PM ~
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October 26, 2007
Everybody's President
Unfortunately for me, Mr. Colbert was AWOL when I had to leave to go to another meetingafter waiting for 20 minutes. Fortunately for all progressive conservatives a video of his speech can be found here.
"It turns out it takes more than 30 minutes a night to fix everything that's destroying America and that's where this book comes in," Mr. Colbert said about his debut work, I Am America (And So Can You!). "This book is truth - my truth," he said, "I deliver my truth hot and hard, fast and furious."
Mr. Colbert, who announced a possible run for president on The Daily Show on October 16th, declared on The Colbert Report on October 16th that he is indeed running for president - in South Carolina. "After 15 minutes of soul searching I have heard the call," he said, "I am doing it."
Like his predecessor, Jon Stewart, who in 2004 published the wildly successful America (The Book), Mr. Colbert is excelling in packaging his persona, mock seriousness and witty criticism for a supposedly apolitical generation that allegedly gets its news from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.
Comedy Central's two shows carved such a niche that Messrs. Stewart and Colbert went on to host the Academy awards and - to the apolitical youth's surprise and amusement - the White House Press Corps Dinner, respectively. "Stewart-Colbert '08" bumper stickers followed.
There is no surprise in Mr. Colbert's presidential aspirations - nor in his thriving business ventures. But both his seriousness and a jokester nation's ability to send him straight to the Oval Office - on the heels of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ronald Reagan, you would be an idiot to deny the possibility - make this "joke run" different from its historical antecedents.
The difference lies not only in the press' serious wonder at and contemplation of Mr. Colbert's run - as they should - but also in the hype and noise the candidate generated since his announcement, surely beating former Tennessee Senator and Law & Order star Fred Thompson.
Consider this, how many candidates could persuade The New York Times' Maureen Dowd to cede her space to a candidate? None - except for Mr. Colbert. And how many "mock-candidates" have appeared on Tim Russert's Meet The Press? You guess right, again - none, except, well, Mr. Colbert.
Like all presidential aspirants, Mr. Colbert too explains his stance on issues and outlines his strengths in his book. I Am America should inform all voters in the upcoming primaries, as well as make each reader a better, more patriotic American. And, it should be an easy read; the author proudly announced that he dictated the whole book over Columbus Day weekend. He also added, "Like a lot of other dictators, there's one man whose opinion I value above all others' - mine." Sound familiar?
- Emre Peker @ 4:15 PM ~
comments: 1 ~ Links to this post
October 25, 2007
Ask a Book Question (#57): The Greatest Magazine Ever?
You write a lot about your obsession with The New Yorker... Can you tell those of us that are unfamiliar with the publication more about it, and why you like it so much.I love The New Yorker for many reasons. I prefer to know a little about a lot of things rather than a lot about a few, and so I find the wide range of topics the magazine takes on is appealing. It's a surprising unpredictable magazine. I also like that the magazine has history, and that it has stayed true to itself by changing only incrementally over the years and for the most part taking pains to make sure any changes made sense. Generally speaking, The New Yorker is guaranteed to provide me with at least one transcendent reading experience per month, often more than that, and very few clunkers. It is exceedingly rare that I quit reading an article halfway through. By that measure alone it beats any other magazine I've ever picked up.
I could go on about The New Yorker for pages, but instead, I thought I'd let some others spill some ink on their love for the magazine. We'll start with Emily Gordon, who heads up Emdashes, a blog devoted to a single magazine. I'll let you guess which one.
When I tell people I write a blog about The New Yorker, they're either excited and ask for the url, or freaked out. The people in the second group get that funny look so familiar to elementary-school students and poets, and say with withering irony, "Wow, you must really LOVE it." Being an unfashionable enthusiast and advocate of the New Sincerity, I answer simply that I do.Millions contributor Garth also weighed in with his thoughts on the magazine:In his email asking for my thoughts about the magazine, Max called me "the Web's pre-eminent NYer expert." I wish! I'm reminded every time I go to a New Yorker-themed event--especially on the Upper West Side--that there are far more fanatical and expert readers out there, and they usually have a couple decades of subscribership on me, too. In my paying work life, I'm a magazine editor and a book and media critic, so that's the spirit in which I write the blog. At the same time, I sometimes feel like a roving preacher from a quirky sect, with all the attendant longing for clarity and community, and possibly some of the narrow-mindedness and naivete, too. Meanwhile, perhaps also like an evangelist, I get to experience moments, collectively and alone, of overpowering delight and that spooky but real phenomenon called "flow." (Also, the blogosphere being what it is, moments of derision, bafflement, and the sound of stone silence.) Man, I sound like Garrison Keillor. My real point is, I've made a lot of wonderful friends who feel the way I do, and despite moments of overextended self-doubt, I'm grateful for all of this.
But back to the reason for reading it in the first place. I read Walter Benjamin's "Unpacking My Library" recently, and wrote down this line: "Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories." That's probably at the heart of it. I'm a third-generation New Yorker reader, and the magazine's writers and artists are essential to both sides of family language and lore. When I was at the Daniel Alarcon and Zadie Smith reading at the most recent New Yorker Festival, in a beautiful church-like space called the Angel Orensanz Foundation, I had the strange thought that I was in the only church my parents (who are long-divorced atheists) would ever have attended. I got a little teary thinking about them, in the Church of The New Yorker with its Chastian or Steinbergian heaven, and hey, I was the one who said I was an evangelist. "This isn't a magazine--it's a movement." Harold Ross said that.
So what do I preach? That the magazine, far from a bastion of elitism and snobbery, is the site of the most hardworking and stirring journalism available in English, about essential subjects like New Orleans, the global environmental crisis, American poverty, education, and the war in Iraq. Some people will never agree; they think the whole thing is foolish. "Tell me why your project is so compelling or should be to someone like me who DESPISES the culture of writing that the NEW YORKER inspires and finds literary glomming to be complete bullshit," an acerbic fellow blogger once wrote me, sneeringly. He thinks the publishing-industrial complex needs taking down, not celebrating. I defended myself in the lengthy email exchange, but afterward I felt like my soul had been slapped to the floor, as in that scene in Amelie. I was so outraged but so suddenly unsure of my mission that I thought of shutting down the site entirely, taking my ball and going home, as my friend Tom would say; it's a little like the way I felt when I heard, just recently, that a New Yorker film critic (for the Goings on About Town listings, which contain some of the sharpest and wittiest writing in the magazine) refers to me as "the New Yorker groupie." Ow.
On the other hand, there are lots of worse things to be. Steve Martin wrote in the magazine this week that he sometimes feels nostalgic for the "high spirits and high jinks" of his early career, "before I turned professional, before comedy became serious." Maybe The New Yorker, too, is best viewed from one's childhood coffee table, before it becomes a media outlet, a buzz-worthy blog topic, an online brand, a symbol of what one has, in some senses, lost: the life of Pauline Kael; the grandparents who understood fewer and fewer of the cartoons and became sorrowful about it; the vast possibilities of a future full of limitless writing and reading opportunities. But for now, I've got a way of broadcasting my--let's face it--devotion. Want to be saved? Subscribe. I'm only half kidding.
I was trying to explain to a friend the other weekend why The New Yorker is the greatest magazine in the history of American magazine journalism. I can think of a few reasons.And finally, Millions contributor Noah brings us home:First, I love The New Yorker for the assumptions it makes about its readership. It assumes that we are bright, literate, patient, and curious about the world. (Okay, it also assumes that we're well-off and liberal, but that's less important). It assumes that I, who loathed biology in high school, will be fascinated and moved by 8,000 words on the redwoods...and lo and behold, I am. Rather than tailoring itself to the marketplace, which is how we now think of the publishing place, The New Yorker recognizes that it CREATES its marketplace. Which is why I hate to see it stoop to puff-pieces on Cate Blanchett or Mariah Carey.
Second, I find the history of The New Yorker, and its attendant myths, endlessly fascinating. One example: Jamaica Kincaid was doing odd-jobs for editor William Shawn when he decided that she should write for the magazine. She and George Trow and Ian Frazier became an inseparable, and eccentric triumvirate. Later, she married Mr. Shawn's son Allen.
Third, The New Yorker has subsidized a staggering (surprising) number of canonical writers. E.B. White? New Yorker. J.D. Salinger? New Yorker. The Fire Next Time? First ran in the New Yorker. Silent Spring? Likewise. Eichmann in Jerusalem? You guessed it. Oliver Sacks, Joseph Mitchell, Alistair Reid, Janet Malcolm, Calvin Trillin, Philip Gourevich, Pauline Kael, A.J. Liebling, James Thurber, William Steig, the Addams Family, John Cheever, Saul Steinberg... Among the current writers, Elizabeth Kolbert, Georges Packer and Saunders, Nick Paumgarten (the new Ian Frazier), Peter Schjeldahl, Mark Singer, and James Wood (as of last month), are all doing work that may still entertain and instruct years from now. This is not even to mention the art.
Each week, The New Yorker delivers a multi-course meal (about four-hours worth) of reporting, opinion, reviews, cartoons, and humorous "casuals" to my door. Sometimes the meal is mediocre, but it's always sustaining.
I don't have a subscription, though I once did. It started sort of piling up on me, making me feel like an arch procrastinator. I'd like to renew but I haven't gotten around to it yet. But one thing about The New Yorker: you can pick up an issue, be it this week's, last week's, or one from 1987, and it always reads. This is surely a testament to the quality of the writing, but also to the editorial sensibilities that drive the magazine. My most memorable New Yorker article was about Rafael Perez, disgraced and incarcerated LAPD officer, who testified for the state in the prosecution of numerous other LA cops who were part of the Rampart Crash unit, a renegade police outfit that committed numerous crimes. Denzel Washington's character in the movie Training Day was based on Perez. Perez has also been rumored to have had a hand in the murder of Biggie Smalls. Great article. The cartoons are fun too.
- C. Max Magee @ 10:32 PM ~
comments: 5 ~ Links to this post
October 24, 2007
Most Anticipated Books?*
- 10. Angstrom and Zuckerman Fistfight in Heaven, by John Updike, as told to Philip Roth
"World-weary Lieutenant Nathan Zuckerman's got one day left until retirement. But when the district commander pairs him with hot-headed rookie Rabbit Angstrom, s--t gets bananas.."
- 9. Moms are Not Nice, by Christopher Hitchens
"The next in this droll Englishman's series of fearless attempts to speak truth to power. To be followed in 2009 by Your Furniture is Ugly."
- 8. War & Peace Redux: The Official Restored Director's Cut (with Deleted Scenes and Commentary)
"Finally, experience this great novel as the author intended it! 3,000 pages of previously unreleased material flesh out Prince Andrew's sordid backstory, and introduce us to one of Tolstoy's greatest creations, 'Crazy Uncle Louie.'"
- 7. Cookin' with the Franz, by Jonathan Franzen
"Learn how to cook, the Jonathan Franzen way!"
- 6. Tammy O'Shanter and the Curse of the Missing Cowpoke, by Michael Chabon
"Once again, the award-winning novelist puts his unique stamp on our favorite fictional genres: in this case, Horror, Western, and Leprechaun."
- 5. Bigger Than You and You are Not Me or Him and Her, by Miranda July
"Envelope-pushing first novel."
- 4. How We Became You and What It May Mean, Someday, Someday, Never by Dave Eggers
"Envelope-pushing story collection."
- 3. Ten Days Later in the Hills, by Jane Smiley
"A group of chatty and libidinous zombies retreat to the Hollywood Hills for a week of stimulating politico-philosophical dialogue and sexual athleticism. That's right: zombies."
- 2. A Perfectly Fine Generation, by Tom Brokaw
"Just in time for Father's Day, Brokaw brings Baby Boomers a much-needed reminder that, hey, they're just fine."
- 1. Finite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
"The expurgated version (180 pp)."
- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 5:47 PM ~
comments: 7 ~ Links to this post
The Internet Gets Less Scary
But, of course, none of this ever came to pass. As I said at the time:
Google or not, the technology currently exists for anyone to start digitizing the books in the library or in their own homes, but I don't see this happening, and it's not because people are afraid of lawsuits from publishers, it's because people aren't that interested in digitized copies of books.These same thoughts are now being echoed by Penguin's top executive John Makinson: "There is a lot going on in the music publishing industry that is not going on in the book industry. Consumers don't want albums they want tracks and in publishing people want books not chapters" - a perfectly sensible assessment that should have been made a long time ago.
I think, though, that publishers are fully awakening to the fact that opportunities on the Internet to raise awareness about their books far outweigh the threats. Even used books, which have a huge market on the Internet, are not eating into profits as feared.
From a publicity and marketing standpoint, publishers are clearly on board with the Internet. Regardless of where the disappearance of newspaper book review sections registers on your fear meter, publishers are hedging their bets and spreading their efforts well beyond print, with creative author websites, outreach to online communities of readers, and a proliferation of all sorts of online writing contests and publisher blogs. Some publishers have learned to play nice with Google, while others have made legitimate efforts to digitize their books on their own. As a sign of how far we've come, two years ago making the entire Booker Prize shortlist available online was unthinkable. But publishers have come to the perfectly sensible realization that "if readers like a novel tasted on the internet, they may just be inspired to buy the actual book."
It may be too soon to close the book on this saga, but I think it's safe to say that reason has triumphed. Publishers are finally realizing that, while the internet has forced great change upon their industry, the threats faced have been far less dire than those faced by the music and film industries. At the same time, in a world where cultural content has been elbowed out of newspapers and magazines, the Internet offers easier access to the many people who do care about books but are underserved by traditional media. With fear behind them, publishers are stepping out bravely into a new world.
- C. Max Magee @ 7:49 AM ~
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October 22, 2007
The 'P' is Free: A Review of Jesse Ball's Samedi the Deafness
The set-up is pure Hitchcock: a (seeming) bystander, James Sim by name, witnesses an act of political murder that draws him into a web of intrigue (or, as my friend Colin's dad liked to put it, "a tissue of lies.") Confined to an asylum for compulsive prevaricators, Sim must ferret out the truth. Ball has followed Murakami, however, in replacing the traditional terms of the suspense novel with his own cryptic obsessions. It soon becomes apparent that Samedi the Deafness is less an epistemological mystery than an existential one. The important question for is not whodunit, but "Why am I here?"
The pursuit of an answer proves to be highly entertaining, thanks in large part to Ball's untrammeled idiosyncracies. This 28-year-old debut novelist is also a poet and an illustrator, and his prose, in Samedi the Deafness, leavens flights of hallucinatory vision with the arch diction and mannered dialogue of mid-twentieth-century British children's novels. (The bad guys are always saying things like, "For this reason...") At its weakest, the novel struggles to sustain its tone; the juvenile elements decay from wonder into whimsy, the poetic ones start to feel strained. At its best, the tongue-in-cheek and the earnest harmonize to produce a vivid and dreamlike whimsy, as in this flashback to James Sim's formative years:
"The best hiding place of all, said James's friend Ansilon, from his perch atop James's shoulder, is inside something hollow when no one knows it's hollow. Ansilon was James's one friend. He was an invisible owl who could tell the future and also speak English, although he preferred to speak in the owl language, which James understood perfectly. -But if no one knows that it's hollow, said James, then how would I manage to know that it's hollow? Should I just go around with a little hammer, tapping things?"
Ball has pronounced The Castle one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century, and this literary debt is obvious. Like Kafka's K., Ball's protagonist is a patient and bemused Everyman. His character emerges not in his actions, but in his reactions, and despite his unusual gifts (a near-photographic memory, for example), James Sim is a democratic figure; he could be any one of us. Ball is less successful at creating a supporting cast. Where the inhabitants of Kafka's village are both madcap and mysteriously human, the denizens of Ball's asylum often seem a mere accumulation of tics. Their setting redeems them, however. With its labyrinthine architecture and wonderfully arbitrary list of rules, the asylum itself becomes a character, and a worthy foil for our hero.
In the end, the delights of Samedi the Deafness outweigh its flaws. Ball's sensibility is, despite his many influences, entirely his own, and one can expect good things to come. (Another novel, The Way Through Doors, will be published in 2008). At a speedy 280 pages, Samedi is a welcome appetizer to what one hopes will be a rich and - dare we say it? - precious career.
- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 6:51 AM ~
comments: 3 ~ Links to this post
October 21, 2007
Now You Know: The Mysteries of NYT's Best-Seller List (or Not)
The Times' Public Editor Clark Hoyt explains the selection process, why the list is more widely followed and valued than other, competing "best seller" compilations - from USA Today and Rupert Murdoch's (ouch) Wall Street Journal - in an informative column.
Apparently an NYT Best Seller sticker can drive up sales by as much as 57 percent for a first-time author. Publishers are, naturally, conscious of this priceless marketing tool and accordingly try to rig the market, Hoyt writes. Not to worry, the editors at the Times safeguard readers against such shams.
But Times editors too might not fully understand the procedure, according to Hoyt. And while the Times might make sure that "evergreens" like Catcher in the Rye or an SAT study guide don't stay on the list forever, Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point - which came out in paperback in 2002 - has been on it for a stunning 164 weeks.
The column might leave you a tad confused, but at least you won't ask yourself what the heck an "NYT Best Seller" is next time you are idling at an airport bookstore.
- Emre Peker @ 10:56 PM ~
comments: 1 ~ Links to this post
Sharing a Name
My parents aren't big football fans so when they named me, they had no way of knowing that the name they gave me was effectively identical to the man who scored the first touchdown in the first Super Bowl.
Max McGee was a tight end for the Green Bay Packers, and it didn't seem to matter to football fans that our names are off by a letter (like me, he also went by his middle name). My whole life, people, upon hearing my name have asked me if I knew about him. It wasn't long before I knew by heart the story of that first Super Bowl. I'll let Wikipedia recount it:
In his final two seasons, injuries and age had considerably reduced his production and playing time. Ironically, these two seasons would be the ones for which his career is best remembered. In the 1966 season, McGee caught only four passes for 91 yards and a touchdown as the Packers recorded a 12-2 record and advanced to Super Bowl I against the Kansas City Chiefs. Because McGee didn't expect to play in the game, he violated his team's curfew policy and spent the night before the Super Bowl out on the town. The next morning, he told starting receiver Boyd Dowler, "I hope you don't get hurt. I'm not in very good shape."I bring this up because I've just heard the news that McGee died at the age of 75. Tragically, it happened following a fall from his roof, where he'd been clearing leaves. Since I've talked about McGee with people regularly for my whole life, it seemed strange not to mention his passing. I suspect people will still note the name we (almost) share, but probably less and less as his gridiron feats recede into history.However, Dowler went down with a separated shoulder on the Packers' second drive of the game, and McGee, who had to borrow a teammate's helmet because he had not even brought his own out of the locker room, found himself thrust into the lineup. A few plays later, McGee made a one-handed reception of a pass from Bart Starr, took off past Chiefs defender Fred Williamson and ran 37 yards to score the first touchdown in Super Bowl history. By the end of the game, McGee had recorded seven receptions for 138 yards and two touchdowns, assisting Green Bay to a 35-10 victory.
- C. Max Magee @ 6:48 PM ~
comments: 3 ~ Links to this post
The Worst Case Scenario: Pastoralia by George Saunders
To read one of George Saunders' stories is to gain a glimpse into an antic, often frightening, just-slightly-shifted alternative world. To read a George Saunders collection is to discover the human sorrow his stories plumb. Reading Pastoralia was something of a revelation for me because, though I've read many of Saunders' stories before, I had never dug into one of his collections and had not appreciated the full force of reading several of his stories back to back. As an aside, this would be an argument in favor of short story collections, which, well constructed and edited, should bring on a "greater than the sum of its parts" reaction in the reader.In the case of Pastoralia, Saunders' characters are, as ever, pathetic, trapped in soul-sucking existences, with demeaning jobs and dysfunctional relationships. What elevates Saunders' stories from what might be depressing muck is his eye for detail and his dry (almost deranged) wit. In the long title story that opens the collection, we peek in on the world of a caveman impersonator. Imagine if the life size caveman diorama at your local natural history museum were populated by actors, and you get the idea. That sounds bad enough, but Saunders overlays the world of corporate bureaucracy and buzzword double-speak onto this "edutainment" scenario. The "actors" are as much prisoners as they are employees.
But this is not 1984 or The Matrix. Saunders' characters do not conform to the typical occupants of dystopias - millions of buzzing drones and a handful of "enlightened" struggling against the status quo. He offers characters, who are, well, like us.
In the story "Pastoralia," we have a guy with a mind-numbing job (fake caveman), not enough money, a sick kid at home, coworkers that range from annoying to malicious, and a company in the throes of an "employee remixing." This sounds more like someone who spends his days stocking shelves at Wal-Mart or temping at a cubicle farm than the gray and black Big Brother, robot-controlled nightmare of the future that has always been offered as civilization's worst case scenario.
And this is what is so subversive about Saunders. He essentially is telling us that we are living in that worst case scenario, in the dystopia that we have been taught to fear and fight against. But he does so with such humor and well crafted detail that there is none of the didacticism that one my might expect from such a point of view. Saunders is no raving Luddite, instead he has the ability to highlight the absurd minutia of modern life that we typically ignore or take for granted: the "Daily Partner Performance Evaluation Form," the "fax makes the sound it makes when a fax is coming in," "Stars-n-Flags... They put sugar in the sauce and sugar in the meat nuggets," "Cute Ratings," "Credit Calcs," and "Personal Change Centers."
If our dystopia hasn't already arrived, then we are perilously close to it. And whether or not you choose to look for these parallels, consumed without prejudice, Saunders' stories are well crafted and utterly readable. I found myself careening through, hungry for the next off-kilter detail and scenario. I finished the book thinking that Saunders is a worthy chronicler of modern life.
- C. Max Magee @ 10:07 AM ~
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October 20, 2007
Dumbledore is Gay, Harry has Webbed Toes
The boy wizard isn't gay, but apparently his beloved professor is. J.K. Rowling "outed" Dumbledore at a Carnegie Hall reading, inspiring "gasps and applause" as well as wire stories. Over the years, Rowling hasn't been particularly aggressive about being a self-promoter; she hasn't had to as the Harry Potter books have made her rich and famous without her having to occupy too much of the spotlight. Still, this seems like an all too easy way to gin up a little controversy and keep Harry Potter in the headlines now that the series is over.Now I won't deny that it makes plenty of sense for writers to flesh out the lives of their characters in their minds. Many writers take this a step further and put these fictional biographies on paper. And it's quite probable that in writing Dumbledore over the years, Rowling decided that he was gay.
As the creator of perhaps the most beloved set of characters in literary history, Rowling has a tremendous amount of power. This sort of power can be easily abused. Knowing they will get no more books from Rowling, fans will take each new tidbit about Harry and the gang like the starving might savor a crumb. Meanwhile, each of these out-of-thin-air details will be folded neatly into the growing pantheon of Potter companion literature.
To me, though, there's something terribly spare and arbitrary about these post-publication revelations. What are we as readers supposed to do with these out of context details? Can we ignore them? Should we?
As a side note, have there been other examples of similar, post-publication, extra-textual revelations related to famous books? I tried to think of some, but came up empty.
- C. Max Magee @ 11:08 AM ~
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October 18, 2007
Unfurling The Publishing Umbrella: Dispatch From Frankfurt
No better does the difference between books and the book business make itself known than on the Sunday of the Frankfurt Book Fair. A severe degree of indifference descends on one Hall as rabid bookishness thrives in others. I had been warned, but the bustle of the first few days caused me to chalk up these claims to hyperbole. After endless meetings between publishers and sales people, agents, printers, packagers, fulfillment houses and foreign rights managers - and don't forget the nights that can easily last all morning - the weekend (especially Sunday) was dead in the Frankfurt Messe's Hall 8: the cavern of commerce that housed, primarily, English-language publishers.
With the chance to visit one of the other Halls (there are 10, making the Javits Center in New York look like my one-bedroom apartment), you begin to grasp the breadth of what publishing looks like all over the world, so long as you are willing to contend with the throngs of book fans, only a small portion of whom bother to trawl the Hall 8 aisles, where by noon on Sunday the crackling of packing tape replaced the cacophonous chatter of deal making so constant during the early going.
It is an overwhelming experience, no matter the size of the company or nature of its books or services. Everyone is there to do business (as opposed to show off books). My visits to other halls were limited in light of how much time I spent at the Messe from Tuesday evening's set-up to Sunday evening's teardown. I never saw the agents' pavilion, or the TV and Film Hall. The other international Halls hosted publishing industry outfits from across the globe, all of which were situated in loose regional confederacies.
The hometown German publishing Hall was packed all the time, as was Hall 4, where you found illustrated book publishers and incredibly high-end book arts publishers and artisans (including New York's own Booklyn). I returned to Hall 4 the most (for my own meetings and for curiosity's sake). If I could read German, I would covet all of Orange's books; Index from Spain is great; the books from Lars Mueller were a revelation – Who Owns the Water being one of my better personal acquisitions of the week.
But, as I said, and as The New York Times reported, Frankfurt at its core is about the business of books. According to the October 13 Frankfurt Book Fair Daily, in 2006 the world's 45 largest publishers generated $73 billion in revenue! Yes, billion. McGraw-Hill Education came in 7th on the list, the most profitable American publisher with just over $2.5 billion in earnings. The next two spots also belong to American companies, Reader's Digest and Scholastic respectively. Of those three companies' business, very little of it has to do with fiction, or even trade books for that matter. The top earners are more mixed, highlighting, like the Fair itself, just how huge the global book industry is, and why wheeling and dealing foreign rights and film options are one of the event's priorities.
And so, after several days steeping in this environment, it only seems natural to ponder the state of the book business today. It is lucrative, but it is clear that if these larger companies intend to plump their cash cows they must make changes that will, eventually, affect the actual books.
Two encounters stick with me as indicative of these shifts. The first happened during a wonderful little dinner party. Of the 10 or 12 of us in attendance, I was the most "indie" of the crew, meaning I have never been involved in a six-figure deal (or five-figure for that matter). These were agents and industry entrepreneurs, Americans and Europeans. Friendly and interesting, I was sorry that we adjourned to a noisy party where reasonable conversation went by the wayside.
Prior to that, however, I learned about DailyLit.com from its co-founder Susan Danziger. The basic idea is this: books are emailed to you bit-by-bit. Available titles include public-domain classics, as well as contemporary works of fiction and nonfiction in a few different languages (illustrated books are also in the works). The contemporary books require paid subscriptions, and I was told that the program's subscribers number in the hundreds of thousands. It seems to me that it is misleading to say this service is about reading books; it's really more about reading the textual contents of books. It is, without a doubt, though, about publishing. A great deal of us, myself included, spend large amounts of time in front of screens. DailyLit.com aims to add some well-worded and intriguing distractions to help us better use our Time, that ever more elusive and flitting notion. The trend to reformat books into our digitally reliant ways was apparent at the Fair, from Google's impressive stand to the number of e-book makers, sermonizing about convenience and lifestyle, efficiency and the future.
As I manned the Mark Batty Publisher booth on Sunday morning, bored and tired, an Australian woman stopped to fondle a few of the books. As she flipped the pages issuing exclamations about the lovely photographs and design, she mentioned that she worked with e-books. I nodded and said that I would never read one. Having obviously heard such a sentiment before, the perky Aussie said defensively, "We'll get you all one day, this is the future of reading." Judging by the popularity of DailyLit.com (a relatively new endeavor) and the hordes of money being invested in converting such assertions into fact, there are many interests that want to see the future of reading as something that does not involve ink on paper. And in light of the way we live now, perhaps the public's demand will in fact secure these new models.
But this next anecdote contests the public's willingness to start dismantling their bookshelves in order to make room for new flat-screen televisions on which they could as easily watch a movie or read a new novel. This encounter happened even farther away from the capacious Messe, at the bar in my hotel out by the airport. I met a German engineer in town for work, and on his way back home to Connecticut. He knew of the Fair, but his trip had to do with installing a machine in a factory. He was curious about the Fair for a very exact reason, however. He had a meeting coming up with a Silicon Valley company (he had already signed a non-disclosure agreement so he could not tell me which company) that, according to my new friend, planned to open close to 60 print-on-demand facilities in the United States within the next couple of years.
Because this gentleman could not divulge fully the nature of the business in question, it is fair to assume that these facilities would not strictly be used for vanity publishing, but rather they will allow businesses to order an array of printed material with greater ease than traditional off-set printers, though he did ask me if I had seen many print-on-demand books. His background was in printing and he was dubious about the quality of the books such machines could offer, suggesting that vanity publishing was indeed an aspect of this Silicon Valley company's business plan. No matter the products made in these 60 facilities, it is a return to ink on paper. We as a culture have not yet totally disregarded the paper page's status as a valuable vessel for information.
In the case of vanity publishing books, however, these would mostly be sold through non-traditional outlets, if they were sold at all. These products would be the blog equivalent of codex books, objects made because the authors want to see their words printed on bound pages. And like with blogs, some of these books could of course be quite good, while many of them would doubtlessly be middling, yet they would exist nonetheless. (Admittedly, the major difference between blogs and print-on-demand books is that the books usually still cost something.) Hang around with enough writers and you will inevitably hear frustrated rants about the difficulty of getting their completed works published. Take that small portion of the population and couple it with everyday folks who want to tell their stories or spout off about politics, and you have lots of potential books.
Now, these books, for the most part, would not be shopped around in a setting like Frankfurt, but that is the point. Books and the book business are not the same and the rift becomes apparent during this international trade show, which is so all-consuming for its attendees that it bounces back at them time and again, even once the day's meetings have ended and the parties begin. I knew this, of course, because even in the small and independent strata of publishing this reality rears its head more than I care to admit. It is a business that no matter the scale requires many participants, all of whom expect, and deserve, to be paid for their services.
Perhaps at the heart of this is how the range of services that falls under the publishing umbrella is expanding, and how all of the interests strive, and struggle, to keep up. The Frankfurt Book Fair has a history that reaches back to the time of Gutenberg, and what this behemoth of an event proves is that it will most likely have a future that extends for another 500 years. What that future looks like remains to be seen, but the hints become more apparent, as this year's innovations become next year's standards, or running jokes.
No matter what, however, the beautifully designed and well-printed book is not going anywhere, and that should be a comfort to anyone that has ever loved the experience of reading one.
- Editor @ 6:04 PM ~
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A Bit of Fiction in the Mail
The magazine recently unveiled a prettier website, which still includes the features I've always liked. You can check out the first lines of every story published by the magazine, as well as short interviews with each writer about his or her story and the process of creating it. It's interesting to see how different everyone's process is: one writer wrote his story in three nights, while another worked on hers for over a year. In these interviews, One Story always asks the writer to share the best writing advice ever received. Some people quote secondhand advice, while others share nuggets of wisdom from a past instructor. On a few occasions, I've written this stuff down, either for myself or for my students (or both).
- Edan Lepucki @ 2:31 PM ~
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October 17, 2007
Wednesday Links
- As has been much noted elsewhere, the Wall Street Journal landed reclusive Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson to review a recent bio of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz. New York explains how the review was arranged. Meanwhile, the New Yorker has John Updike reviewing the book.
- BLDGBLOG articulates why I love LA so much (and why it is quite possibly the greatest city in the country). For some of my own thoughts on LA, harken back into the deepest archives.
- Since almost the minute I finished An Army at Dawn, the first installment of Rick Atkinson's three-part look at the liberation of Europe during World War II, I have been pining for the second book. And now I have it. The Day of Battle covers the war in Sicily and Italy and I will be reading it presently. (It was An Army at Dawn that inspired our lists of World War II fiction and nonfiction.)
- My alma mater is showing Google Books some love.
- C. Max Magee @ 10:06 PM ~
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October 16, 2007
Underdog Enright Lands the 2007 Booker
From across the pond comes word that Anne Enright has won the 2007 Booker Prize for her novel The Gathering, beating out bookies' favorite Mr. Pip by Lloyd Jones and On Chesil Beach by household name Ian McEwan. The Independent's review of The Gathering sets the scene:brings together fragments of the past, real and imagined, all filtered through the consciousness of Anne Enright's narrator, Veronica Hegarty.For a second and third opinion, the Guardian offers a pair of raves from A.L. Kennedy and Adam Mars-Jones. Enright hails from Ireland and has three prior novels to her name The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like?, and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch. The curious can also read an excerpt from The Gathering.Veronica is a middle-aged, newly middle-class Irish mother of two, with a Tudor-redbrick-Queen-Anne house, a nice Saab and an incredibly long-suffering husband. She is endowed with vast numbers of siblings, one of whom, when the novel opens, has just walked into the sea and drowned himself in Brighton.
How We Got Here: the longlist, the shortlist
- C. Max Magee @ 9:59 PM ~
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Truth in Advertising
Though we try to pass over blog-bait, we can't resist directing your attention to the print ad campaign for the paperback version of Jonathan Franzen's The Discomfort Zone. "From the acclaimed memoir by the author of The Corrections" runs the copy, above several blurbs:- "Funny, masterfully composed" - Gregory Kirschling, Entertainment Weekly
- "[A] total lack of humor...perverse" - Daniel Mendelsohn, The New York Times Book Review
- "Luminous, essential reading" - Tim Adams, The Observer (London)
- "Odious...incredibly annoying" - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
[Editor's note: We wish we could find a version of this ad online, but Harper's readers can find it on page 51 of the November issue]
- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 5:15 PM ~
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October 15, 2007
Message from a Dead Man: A Review of Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke
This isn't entirely a bad thing (as both Gessen and I are in a position to know). Among other things, a graduate creative writing program provides a brief oasis of financial and social security in the hard country that is the writing life. (O, to return to the days when one could proclaim to an interlocutor, "I'm in grad school," rather than mumbling, "I'm a writer...") But the workshop is, as its best pedagogical theorists know, hostile to the new. At its worst, it is a machine for converting freshness into formula.
Which helps to explain the durability, among students of writing, of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. For a decade and a half, this slim collection has passed from hand to hand among M.F.A. students like samizdat. Johnson's stories are not reducible to formal principles. His plots are odd and ungainly. His sentences and dialogue, flirting with the poetic, violate the canons of understatement. Like the sentences of D.H. Lawrence, they seem to depend on the supernatural for inspiration. They may not always find it, but they are alive to the possibilities of language. My favorite Johnson story, for example, begins, "Sometimes I went during my lunch break into a big nursery across the street, a glass building full of plants and wet earth and feeling of cool dead sex."
Reading Johnson's latest, longest, and, in my limited purview, finest novel, Tree of Smoke, I kept thinking of Jesus' Son's reinvention of the short story. Now, in 2007, in wartime, we find Johnson straining against the teachable conventions of the novel, in a way that does honor to the form. Though there are passages and even pages through which I itched to run my workshopper's pencil, I would trade a dozen finely calibrated domestic comedies for a single chapter of Tree of Smoke.
This is a war novel in which the war never quite arrives. Instead, the tangled plot wraps itself around a handful of intelligence operatives, relief workers, and low-level grunts who hover around the peripheries of our decade-long quagmire in Vietnam. As some commentators have noted, the novel pays homage to the conventions of Vietnam literature and film, but it's the departure from the tropes of innocence and experience that matters. Here, as in Johnson's stories, the characters seem to have lost their innocence at birth. Their souls are stained with something like original sin.
The central figure is William "Skip" Sands, who in 1965, when the novel opens, has joined the family business - the CIA. His uncle is a vivid, Ahabian character known as "The Colonel." In the course of the novel, The Colonel will become obsessed with an elaborate psy-ops plot to feed phony intelligence to the North Vietnamese. Meanwhile, the Agency will become obsessed with bringing down The Colonel. Amid the proliferating intrigues, then, the main plot will boil down to classical terms: a conflict in Skip's loyalties, the family vs. the state.
Along the way, we meet the tormented Kathy, who provides aid to children injured in the war; the Houston brothers, enlisted men whose experiences in Vietnam may be said to be representative; and two Vietnamese ensnared in the Colonel's conspiracy. In lesser hands, any of these characters might have decayed into types, but Johnson invests each with a deep interiority, letting his or her mind wander at cross-purposes to the narrative. Here, for example, is Nguyen Hao, the reluctant co-conspirator, waking in the morning:
"Sloth kept him in bed awhile. Restlessness drove him downstairs to the tiny court behind his kitchen, where the sun made more mist. Under its warmth everything gave off ghosts. They woke from the bricks, rose with a deep reluctance, disappeared. Hao spread his white handkerchief on the stone bench, seated himself carefully, and tried to find some quiet in his mind."Johnson who lately has been writing plays, tends to let his dialogue run on for pages, stilted, staccato bits meant to indict the poverty of speech, to leaven the mood, and to build tension. But his real genius is for description. In a single, unassuming detail - that white handkerchief - the character of Nguyen Hao comes alive, not an Orientalist's prop, but a flesh-and-blood character, who might be our neighbor. Johnson works similar wonders with Skip Sands' moustache.
At 600 pages, the novel is clearly up to something bigger than a mere collection of characters. With its phony intelligence and its wartime hell built on the benevolent intentions of individuals like Skip, Tree of Smoke is an attempt to write about the present through the prism of the past. But Johnson's refusal to surrender completely to thematic and political imperatives - his remarkable ability to let his material breathe - rescues the novel from didacticism.
At times, I was reminded of a parable by Kafka, another writer who flirts with, but never gives in to, allegory. In it, a dying emperor "has sent a message to you, the humble subject." His messenger sets out on his journey, but beyond the emporer's bed is a chamber, and beyond the chamber door is another chamber, and beyond that an outer palace, and then more chambers and palaces "and so on for thousands of years... Nobody could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man."
War, in Tree of Smoke, is like that message. It exists, murderously, but just over the horizons. Explosions echo in the distance, flicker in the sky, waft the odor of charred flesh toward us, but we are trapped just outside it, at human scale, wrestling with the angels of our nature. In this way, the novel speaks eloquently to our condition here in the U.S, circa 2007. It's the kind of eloquence they don't teach you in school. I guess you have to earn it.
[an excerpt from Tree of Smoke]
- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 1:08 PM ~
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October 12, 2007
Awards Season Musings
Now, granted, this is purely anecdotal, but based on that experience and my haunting of various other bookstores over the years, I'd guess that generally speaking, the awards that generate chatter in the book pages are more important for burnishing writers' reputations than for inciting genuine interest among the general reading public.
It's very different in the UK, of course, where the Booker Prize is a national event that lands on page one of the country's newspapers. Even the gamblers get swept up in the action. In my experience, we Americans get swept up too, but it's hard to get too wrapped up when American writers are excluded from the action. To give some specific examples. Winning the Booker undoubtedly helped The Life of Pi become a big seller in the US, but it was a slow building crescendo of word of mouth that made the book a mega hit. Vernon God Little, on the other hand, not so much. Still, if the Booker were to make American books eligible, a plan that has been proposed and scuttled in the past, I could see it becoming nearly as popular in the US as it is in the UK
Here in the States, we have a pair of literary awards that are generally regarded as the most prestigious: the National Book Award and the Pulitzer. The National Book Award could be the US equivalent of the Booker, but it doesn't market itself as well. The name is too... on the nose, and the judges have at times shown an odd predilection for the obscure.
The Pulitzer, meanwhile, has plenty of name recognition, but it treats its "Letters" awards as little more than afterthought to its centerpiece journalism prizes. Bringing the book award to the forefront and creating a shortlist, as I have suggested, might be enough to create some Booker-esque excitement here in the States.
And so, that leaves the Nobel, which in my experience, actually sells books. I think there are a few reasons for this. With its broad slate of awards and century old pedigree, it's got serious name recognition. At the same time, it doesn't push aside its literature award to put the spotlight on the other categories. Finally, it recognizes a body of work rather than a single volume, perhaps subconsciously appealing to people in that it presents readers with a reading list ready to be explored.
In the end, these awards, even the Booker and the Nobel, are more fun to talk about than to get book recommendations from. I prefer to hear from my trusted fellow readers than any panels of judges.
Some other favorite awards: The Lettre Ulysses, the IMPAC, the MacArthur Genius grants
- C. Max Magee @ 8:37 PM ~
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The Librarians Speak
- C. Max Magee @ 7:40 AM ~
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October 11, 2007
Doris Lessing Nabs the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature
Interestingly, dating back to my bookstore days, out of all the major literary awards - the National Book Award, the Booker, and the Pulitzer - only the Nobel reliably drove significant interest. On the day the prize was announced, customers on the phone and in person would descend on the store, occasionally leading to problems when a relative unknown with little in print, like Imre Kertesz or Elfriede Jelinek, won the award.
Bonus Links: The curious can dig into articles on Lessing and reviews of her work dating back to 1984 at the New York Times; much of Lessing's copious output is available at Amazon.
- C. Max Magee @ 7:33 AM ~
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October 10, 2007
2007 National Book Award Finalists Announced
Fiction:
- Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski (excerpts) Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis (briefly noted)
- Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris (excerpt, a favorite of TEV's, a "most anticipated" book)
- Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson (excerpt, a "most anticipated" book)
- Like You'd Understand, Anyway by Jim Shepard (excerpt, Apparently, Shepard's publisher forgot to submit his books for NBA consideration in 2004)
Nonfiction:
- Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat (excerpt)
- God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens (excerpt, Atheism Hits the Bestseller List
- Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution by Woody Holton (excerpt)
- Ralph Ellison: A Biography by Arnold Rampersad (excerpt)
- Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner (excerpt)
Poetry:
- Magnetic North by Linda Gregerson (excerpt)
- Time and Materials by Robert Hass (poem)
- The House on Boulevard St. by David Kirby (excerpt, Kirby's colorful website)
- Old Heart by Stanley Plumly (excerpt)
- Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 by Ellen Bryant Voigt (poem)
Young People's Literature:
- The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (excerpt)
- Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One by Kathleen Duey (excerpt)
- Touching Snow by M. Sindy Felin (excerpt)
- The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick (excerpt)
- Story of a Girl by Sara Zarr (author blog)
- C. Max Magee @ 2:22 PM ~
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October 09, 2007
Pagination Blues
A page has been set up to discuss the best way to deal with the issue. (Incidentally, isn't it quite common for paperback editions to be paginated differently than their hardcover counterparts? I'm surprised that the Pynchon fans, in their attention to various minutiae, didn't already have a contingency plan in place.)Just got some, um, interesting news that the paperbacks of Against the Day will be paginated differently from the hardbacks. And, adding insult to injury, the UK paperback won't be paginated the same as the American paperback. We have to be somewhat amazed at the publishers' total lack of understanding regarding how Pynchon readers approach Pynchon's novels, and quite disappointed in the lack of any attempt by the author to respect the interest of his readers.
- C. Max Magee @ 7:57 AM ~
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