I'm in Amazon

I know it's not too hard to peddle your wares on Amazon, but I have to say, when I stumbled across my name listed as "Editor" for something being sold on Amazon, it was quite a thrill. The book that I helped edit has been out for quite some time, but seeing it in Amazon made me realize that now might be a good time to mention it again. The book is called Two Letters, and I first mentioned it about a year ago when the book came out, but I didn't really get into the details or how I came to be involved with the project; I was busy with school and deep in the depths of my first Chicago winter, but that's no excuse, really.

One of the great things about living in Los Angeles was that everyone there has a side project. People have day jobs, but they never talk about them. They're always working on a short film or getting ready to open a gallery. Hollywood aside, it's a very creative place. One such side project was conceived by a couple of friends of mine, Christopher Lepkowski and Mark Dischler. They wanted to create a publication that showcased talented writers and artists and they wanted it to look nice. If it ever got more high concept than that, I wasn't told about it. In order to provide some structure to the book, my colleagues came up with the theme "sneaking in," and decided that all of the work in the book would loosely adhere to that theme. I was brought on in the later stages, to recruit writers and help select work - fiction and non-fiction - for the book. I ended up getting some of my very talented friends involved. My friend Cem wrote about "sneaking in" to Burma and speaking to dissidents when he was living in Thailand. My friend Alexa wrote about unexpectedly assisting her photographer boyfriend on an erotic photo shot. My friend Joseph wrote the sort of boozy, heartbroken stories that he's so good at. I helped my fellow editors get all the writing together, and then life intervened. I got into grad school, left Los Angeles, got married, and sort of forgot about the book. I'd almost given up hope that Two Letters would see the light of day, but then, in January of 2005 a few copies showed up in the mail. There had been delays with the printing, as is so often the case with these sorts of things, and the guys had wanted to get everything just right. I'm glad they took their time, because the book looks great. There's tons of great art and comics, but my favorite part is that for each piece of writing, artist Michael Vecchio created an original illustration. It's hard for young writers to get their work published, but to see it presented with such care was just a thrill. It was a great side project to be a part of, and I hope more side projects like it come my way soon. When I saw it there on Amazon the other day, I thought that I should really try to do better by Two Letters, even though it is coming a little late.

A new installment of Two Letters may be on the way shortly. Here's the website.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:05 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Bumper Crop of Baseball Books

Opening Day is almost upon us, and that means that this year's baseball books are already upon us. My friend Derek was once a Baltimore Orioles fan like myself, but then the Nationals swept into Washington, DC, and stole his heart away. I consider him a traitor, of course, but in his defense, I'm told that watching the Nats play at RFK has become one of the joys of summertime in the Nation's capitol. Being a big Nationals fan, Derek has been bugging me about one baseball book in particular. National Pastime is an account of the Nationals debut season by Washington Post baseball writer Bruce Svrluga (an excerpt is available). The season was exciting and worthy of a book not only because the Nationals were unexpectedly contenders last summer, but also because the team became a phenomenon in a city that had gone without baseball for decades. It's the sort of baseball story that baseball fans love (Even so, I'm still an O's fan.)

Every once in a while, though, there's a baseball book that draws interest beyond diehard fans. A couple of years ago it was Michael Lewis' book Moneyball that turned baseball on its head. This year it's the book Game of Shadows by San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, which presents, it seems to me, incontrovertible evidence that Barry Bonds' monster performance of the last few years was, in fact, steroid-fueled as so many had suspected. Ever since Sports Illustrated ran an excerpt of the book a few weeks back, this has been the number one story in baseball. It seems likely to stay the number one story for a while, too. ESPN The Magazine recently ran an excerpt of another Bonds book, Love Me, Hate Me by Jeff Pearlman. That book will be out in May.

Perhaps as important as baseball (and Bonds' steroid troubles), though, is fantasy baseball. I'll be tearing it up this year in a league put together by fellow blogger, Jeff. My team is the Ravenswood Ravens, a reference to both my neighborhood and Edgar Allan Poe. The team's success will rely equally on my managerial prowess and on a breakout season by Wily Mo Pena. Fantasy baseball has clearly become a huge business in recent years and a summer long obsession for many sports fans. In Fantasyland, Wall Street Journal writer Sam Walker does what many of us fantasy baseball fans seem apt to do all summer, and that is chronicle the ups and downs of our fantasy team to anyone stuck listening to us. What sets Walker apart, though, is that he's a sportswriter, a job which affords him real life contact with the players on his fantasy team. I don't have access like that, so when I need fantasy tips I turn to the baseball geeks at Baseball Prospectus. Their annual Prospectus is indispensable, and this year also I managed to get my hands another new book of theirs, Baseball Between the Numbers, in which the BP folks use their formidable mastery of numbers to shatter more myths about the game.

Update: Sam Walker is blogging this week at Powells.com.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:11 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Portraits and illustrations

Two new books from Princeton Architectural Press crossed my desk recently. Jason Bitner is one of the guys behind Found Magazine, where bits of discarded ephemera are turned into art or maybe a decontextualized historical record of the present day. Bitner calls it "a show-and-tell project." When he found over 18,000 studio portraits from the 1950s and 60s in the back of a diner in a small, Midwestern town, they became the star of a new show-and-tell project. La Porte, Indiana is the name of the town where Bitner found the photos and the name of the book he made from them. As Bitner describes it in his introduction to the book, "we rifled through an entire town's population, as if it were a card catalog, a huge visual archive of Midwestern faces." As with looking at any of the FOUND crew's finds, flipping through this book leaves one with odd sensations. We're not used to seeing stuff like this so lovingly presented, so it makes us look a little harder. As I flip through the book, I enjoy the unintentional artistry of the black and white portraits, but more so I wonder who these people are or were. There's more about the book at this Web site.

A Year in Japan by Kate T. Williamson is an illustrated travelogue. Williamson, an illustrator and filmmaker, spent a year in Japan, filling notebooks with her illustrations and observations. This book is like peering into those notebooks. Williamson's curly cursive elaborates on her rich, colorful drawings. Most of the illustrations are of details of every day life: foods and clothing, but they are exotic both in being from in Japan and in the care Williamson lavishes upon them, presenting them in close up on the page. But there are also portraits, collages and abstract compositions.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:10 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Selling used books online

Barnes & Noble is buying used books. They're marketing it as a way to sell your old textbooks, but they're buying other books too. They've set up a simple site that lets you check titles and find out if they'll take them and how much they'll pay. You then send your books to Barnes & Noble and they cover the shipping. As far as I can tell, the prices are fairly comparable to what you might get selling your books to your local used bookstore, maybe even a little better.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:54 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Trending away from hardcovers

There was lots of discussion late last week about Ed Wyatt's NY Times article talking about publishers "offering books by lesser-known authors only as 'paperback originals,' forgoing the higher profits afforded by publishing a book in hardcover for a chance at attracting more buyers and a more sustained shelf life." I'm all for this development as are many other folks. Sarah at GalleyCat commented, as did Miss Snark, who led me to Levi Asher making some very good points at LitKicks. I'm not a big fan of hardcovers, either. Personally, I prefer pocket paperbacks when I can get them.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:21 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Thanks for Three Years from The Millions

I can't believe it's been three years, but it's true. I started The Millions three years ago today (though it didn't become a Blog About Books until a little later.) Want to see what it looked like? Ugly! In the intervening years I've tried to make the blog a little nicer to look at and a little easier to read. I'm still having fun though, and I wouldn't have kept it up for this long (I've never kept anything up this long!), if it weren't for you guys. So thank you. Thank you to my contributors who keep this place from being too monotonous. Thank you to all those folks in the publishing industry who work hard to get good books out there to the people and who are kind enough to occasionally send me books they think I might like. Thank you to writers and aspiring writers for creating things for us to read (and for visiting The Millions sometimes). Thanks to my fellow book bloggers - if it weren't for you guys, this would be a pretty dull hobby. Thanks most of all to the readers of this blog and the readers of books. I've greatly enjoyed our ongoing, virtual conversation.

All those thank yous. One of the nice things about having a blog is that you can publicly pretend you've just won an Oscar any time you feel like it.

Finally, I just want to harken back to my so-called manifesto from way back when, when I laid out why I think it's important for us to discuss what we read. It's still my goal for the blog today: "Given that you and I will only be able to read a finite number of books in our lifetimes, then we should try, as much as possible, to devote ourselves to reading only the ones that are worth reading, while bearing in mind that for every vapid, uninspiring book we read, we are bumping from our lifetime reading list a book that might give us a profound sort of joy."

Keep reading good books!

- C. Max Magee @ 6:18 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Attention Writers

Dan Wickett is putting together the first (that I know of) blog-hosted short story contest. Dan will collect the entries and pass on the finalists to guest judge Charles D'Ambrosio. The winner will be published on Dan's blog and in the Spring 2007 issue of Frostproof Review. What are you waiting for? Send something in.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:47 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Drifting Away by Andrew Saikali

Okay, here's the thing: I'm not usually this inattentive. As a matter of fact, I've often prided myself on being a focused, interested listener. So it was with astonishment that I found myself lost in a memory of my own, not five minutes after author Clare Morrall began to read. Don't blame her. She's a fine reader, and indeed, from the part of the reading that I paid attention to, a fine writer as well. But it's scarcely my fault either.

She was introducing us to the principal characters of Natural Flights of the Human Mind whose lives would intersect along the Devon coast when suddenly, in the narrative, she drew our attention to a dinghy in the water. And then she mentioned the dinghy again. That's all it took - and I was gone. I was suddenly ten years old, on holiday with my mother and father in Virginia Beach. My mother and I had taken our inflatable dinghy out for the afternoon and we were a fair distance away from the shore when we realized that the current was getting stronger and no amount of frantic paddling would right the course. Small and rather lopsided, I wasn't the most accomplished oarsman. Then, adrift for what seemed like ages, we saw my father walking all the way out to our wayward craft, his head never once submerging, and then pulling it back to the shore, shaking his head while his human cargo was alternately sheepish and dumbfounded.

So this is what played out in my head while Ms. Morrall progressed with her own dinghy-related narrative. If I were reading her story, I would simply have flipped back the requisite number of pages and resumed her tale beginning from where my attention was diverted. But I couldn't very well interrupt her public reading and ask her to repeat.

I was jolted back into her world, or at least to the no-man's land of the auditorium, but I was hopelessly lost. I looked around and saw dozens of people, their eyes glued to the stage and their emotions being maneuvered this way and that - a chuckle, a gasp. I could've been one of them. I can chuckle and gasp with the best of them, but I simply couldn't re-connect with her tale. It had passed me by. My own memory-narrative, however, was right there, within reach, and I had been paying full attention to that, so once again, while the reading progressed in that strange world around me, I resumed my own narrative - thinking about how each summer from when we immigrated to Canada when I was two, up until my mid-teens, we'd pack up the car and begin exploring our new continent, first tentatively throughout Ontario and then gradually, over several summers, Quebec, the Maritime provinces, and then down along the eastern seaboard from Maine to the Carolinas and points inland. Over several years we claimed dozens of cities and towns as our own.

Even the most conscientious listener (and again, by that I mean me) must have an assortment of trigger words which will stop him dead in his tracks and spirit him away to some memory - a narrative itself, and one no less rich than one committed to the printed page. Tough competition for any author giving a reading. The worst thing would be for Ms. Morrall to take my negligence personally. Short of not using the word "dinghy" there's nothing she could really have done to prevent this. The trigger was just too strong; and the memory powerful enough to trample on even the best public reader. It's surprising, really, that with all the memories floating around in my head, each with its own set of trigger words, that I'm not spirited away more often.

The funny thing is that with other art forms, this "spiriting away" would be acceptable, even encouraged. It's high praise when a painting or a piece of music transports you somewhere else. But the printed word, especially when recited, is a fickle mistress. It tempts you with it's suggestive powers, but then as soon as you succumb to the temptation, as soon as you're transported somewhere else, it leaves you behind, lost and adrift.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:12 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Some links

• Incredible interview with the New Yorker's Jon Lee Anderson. He tells about the time he was arrested in Guinea and accused of being a spy. Happens to journalists all the time, you say? No, this was when he was thirteen. If he ever writes a memoir, publishers will be lining up. (via Jenny)
• I thoroughly enjoyed Ed's account of a near-drink with William T. Vollmann.
• Golden Rule Jones has a lovely new home. Be sure to update your bookmarks and feed readers.
• Interesting article about a promotional push by The Economist in Baltimore. A few years ago, I started hearing people talk about The Economist all the time. I wasn't sure if the magazine was getting more popular or if I was just traveling in different circles. This quote clears it up: "Of The Economist's worldwide circulation of just less than 1.1 million, Rossi said, North America accounts for a bit more than half, at 569,336, a figure that has increased 47.3 percent since 2001." Wow, that's a big jump. They deserve it. It's a great magazine. If I had more time, I'd read every issue all the way through.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:35 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Books as objects: Books by the Foot

When I worked at the bookstore in Los Angeles,we would occasionally get customers who would by books based not on their subject matter or on who wrote them, but by the color of their spines. Somebody would come in looking for light covered spines. Another would peak behind dusk jackets looking for books that conveyed a "vintage look." More often than not these shoppers were Hollywood set designers, trying to fill the bookshelves that would provide the backdrop for the action in a movie or television show. Ever wonder why movies cost tens of millions of dollars to make? It's because these guys were paying full price for these books and not picking them up cheap at a Goodwill store. But other people shopped like this to fill their homes because full bookcases look nicer than wallpaper. One celebrity would routinely buy multiple copies of dozens of books, so that his bookshelves would be equally full in each of his multiple homes.

According to a Knight-Ridder article, this book decor trend is filtering down to the masses:

Perhaps the ultimate signal that books are decor came when a recent Pottery Barn catalog showed an entire bookcase with the books turned backward, annoying mismatched spines facing inward, all in an attempt to achieve a neutral, uniform look.

Luckily the article is mostly skeptical of this trend, but it goes on to mention Book Decor, "a California company that sells foreign books by the foot for the express purpose of looking at them rather than reading them. Danish books cost $100 a foot, German are $150 a foot and French are $200."

In a way they're right. Books look great on the walls, elegant and inviting. A well-stocked library makes an impressive statement about one's taste, but of course, lest we forget, each of the books is filled with stories. Walking into such a room, one can almost see all the words and characters peaking out from behind the book covers and floating through the ether. It strikes me as insane that anyone would fill shelves with books that they would never be able to read. After all, books are multitaskers of home decor. They look great, but you can read them and share them with friends, too. Try to do that with wallpaper.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:44 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Transforming bus robot art

Sometimes I think Mrs. Millions prefers to ignore my blogging obsession - I do get the occasional eye roll - but then she goes and surprises me. Ain't she the greatest? So, yesterday, thanks to our car being in the shop, Mrs. Millions was stuck with a long bus ride from near downtown to our neighborhood on the north side. I was going about my business when this text message arrived on my cell phone: "Sighting. The ultimate book on how to draw robots."

Hilarious. But now, of course, it must go on the blog. Mrs. Millions tells me you couldn't miss the guy because how often do you see an Ignatius J. Reilly type reading a robot art book on public transit. Well, probably more often than you'd guess. Of course being obsessive about these things, I had to quiz Mrs. Millions so we could determine exactly what the book was. Turns out it's called You Can Draw Transforming Robots (You Can!). Those are the best kind of robots. I'm mostly working from home these days, which doesn't afford me much opportunity to engage in my favorite Chicago hobby, public transit bookspotting, luckily, Mrs. Millions is picking up my slack. As usual.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:39 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Wordy questions

Did you ever wonder: "What is the longest English word?" "Are there any English words containing the same letter three times in a row?" "Are there any words that rhyme with orange?" "How many words are there in the English language?" "What is the longest one-syllable English word?" The answers to these questions and more can be found at the Oxford Dictionary FAQ.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:28 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question: The 44th in a Series (The mainstream novels of Philip K. Dick)

Don writes in with this question:

Philip K. Dick wrote seven mainstream novels. I think they are pretty terrific, but except for sci-fi fans, no one pays much attention to them. Can you or your readers explain why these novels have received so little recognition among readers of "literary fiction"?

Long before Dick became a science fiction icon, before he began writing the sci-fi novels he's most famous for, Dick aspired to write "serious," mainstream fiction. He spent much of the early part of his career, in the 1950s, writing these novels and was devastated by the rejections he received. In his biography of Dick, Divine Invasions, Lawrence Sutin writes of Dick's early career, "from 1951 through 1958, [he wrote] eighty-odd stories and thirteen novels-six SF, seven mainstream. The six SF novels were all promptly published, but the seven mainstream novels languished. It was an anguish to him. And out of that anguish, his best work would come."

From what I can tell, in total Dick actually wrote at least eight and as many as ten or more (though some people classify different books differently) mainstream novels, some of which are still unpublished or were destroyed by Dick. Here's a list of the eight I found: Confessions Of A Crap Artist, Gather Yourselves Together, Humpty Dumpty In Oakland, In Milton Lumky Territory, Mary And The Giant, Puttering About In A Small Land, The Broken Bubble, and The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike. Most of these were eventually published after his death, and many are out of print. Certainly, none of them even approach the popularity of most of his sci-fi novels.

The obvious answer as to why Dick's mainstream novels are underappreciated is that he was long ago pigeonholed as a sci-fi writer, and the blockbuster movies based on his books have only exacerbated this phenomenon. It's not news to anyone who pays attention to books that "genre" fiction - be it sci-fi, mystery or romance - is "ghettoized" in bookstores and in book review sections and that crossover success is rare. But, at the same time, as any real book-lover knows - readers who ignore the best of what genre fiction has to offer are doing themselves a great disservice.

With regards to Dick, specifically, though, I'd like to return to the quote above. Sutin writes that Dick's failures pushed him to write his best work - his famous sci-fi novels. Now I've never read Dick's mainstream fiction, but I'd wager that despite the quality of that work, Dick's well-known, award-winning science fiction represents the pinnacle of his body of work. Many of history's greatest writers have impressive bodies of work, but they become known for what is considered their best work and - often unfairly - the lesser work is underappreciated. Herman Melville wrote a lot of great stuff, but Moby Dick gets all the attention. This phenomenon is likely doubly true for Dick because his underappreciated work is in a different genre from his best and best-known work, so casual fans don't even know that these mainstrem novels exist. I didn't.

Thanks for the question, Don! I'm no expert on sci fi, so, readers, please share your thoughts in the comments.

- C. Max Magee @ 5:40 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

The Secret Life of Dan Brown

We think we know people so well, but then real honest to God information comes out about them in a court proceding (or a Smoking Gun investigation) and we find out how wierd they really are. This is doubly true for celebrities, though, it turns out, not always literary ones. Case in point, Dan Brown, who I never thought of as much of a public figure and who always seemed to me to be nothing more than the bland face behind the Da Vinci Code juggernaut, has his quirks, but not very exciting ones it seems. We're discovering this as a result of the plagiarism trial currently under way in England where he's been accused of lifting the premise for his book from Holy Blood, Holy Grail. On to the quirkiness: according to a story in the Guardian, "his witness statement reveals his working method, beginning at 4am, seven days a week, with an antique hour glass on his desk to remind him to take hourly exercise breaks." "push-ups, sit-ups and some quick stretches. I find this helps keep the blood - and ideas - flowing," adds a story in the Independent. Well, if that's all it takes... Also noted at the trial: Blythe, his wife, does the lion's share of his research; he moved on to writing after a failed career as a singer-songwriter in Los Angeles; his parents hid his Christmas gifts and he had to decifer a treasure map to find them.

(via the Publishers Lunch newsletter. The free one. It's all I can afford.)

One more thing. I haven't been following this trial very closely, but I do know one thing: Holy Blood, Holy Grail has been an incredibly huge seller ever since Da Vinci Code came out. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:51 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Google in the bookselling biz

Remember the fear that Google would start a print on demand business and put all the publishers out of business? Well, Google appears to be getting into the bookselling business, but there's no printing involved, nor are they cutting out publishers. Google's new service will allow publishers to set their own price for online access to books. Readers won't be able to save copies of the books on their computers nor will they be able to copy text from the books, and the books will only be viewable within the browser window. This looks like a great opportunity for publishers to provide online access to their books without having to set up their own systems. (via)

Update: Some good comments on this at Booksquare.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:34 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Public Service Announcement

Miss Snark is the blogging pseudonym of a New York agent who has made herself available to all the aspiring writers out there who are befuddled and bewildered by the publishing process. When particularly perplexed, these writers turn to Miss Snark with their questions - despite the better than fair chance of being called a nitwit by Her Snarkiness. Aided only by her faithful poodle Killer Yapp (KY), Miss Snark has come to the rescue of hundreds of writers in the months she's been online answering questions on protocol, procedure and not looking like a fool when trying to turn your manuscript into a published masterpiece. Her advice is refreshingly frank and entirely devoid of BS, and she has a loyal following. Why does she devote so much time to such a thankless endeavor? I can only assume she's trying to make the world a better place (but then again she may be banking on the many pails full of gin she's now owed by the many writers she has helped.)

I had been under the assumption that all aspiring writers were avid readers of Miss Snark, but it has recently come to my attention that this is not the case. So, if you hope to have your book published one day, and you aren't yet reading Miss Snark, I suggest you start now. And this is doubly true if you are agentless and looking. These conditions are not, however, prerequisites. I have no plans to write a book anytime soon, and I can't help but read Miss Snark, if only for the fearful laughs she elicits.

- C. Max Magee @ 12:20 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Weekend Links

• When I was a kid, I read the whole Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder and never thought about it being "for girls." At Slate, Emily Bazelon writes about why it's wrong that "the conventional educational wisdom holds that boys don't like to read about girls."
• The New York Public Library's 25 Books to Remember from 2005 (via Conversational Reading)
• It's Perfectly Normal, a sex education book by Robie H. Harris tops the American Library Association's list of 10 Most Challenged Books of 2005. Also on the list: The Catcher in the Rye and the Captain Underpants series.
• The Ten Worst Autobiographies as listed by The Independent. Not sure where else you'd find Hillary Clinton, James Frey and Hitler on the same list. (via Books Inq.)
• A New Orleans resident auctions off a bunch of "first-edition books, handwritten manuscripts and letters by Beat Generation writers" to raise money for Jon and Gypsy Lou Webb who published some of Charles Bukowski's earlest works and were left homeless by Hurricane Katrina.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:06 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Books as Objects: Golden Books in China

I happened across an odd little story today. Apparently, books made of gold are a fad among the super-rich in China. There is also concern that the books, which cost upwards of $1,000 are becoming a "means of bribery," according to a story from Xinhua, as they are given as gifts to public officials. None of the English-language stories had photos of the books so I did some searching to find out what they look like. You can see pics here and here.

- C. Max Magee @ 12:13 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Brigid Hughes' new gig

It seems like there's a new magazine debuting every week. After Brigid Hughes was ousted at the Paris Review, she started her own litmag called A Public Space, the debut issue of which has just arrived. Contained within: work by Charles D'Ambrosio, Kelly Link, Haruki Murakami, Marilynne Robinson, Rick Moody, and others. Here's the full TOC.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:15 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Bonds Bombshell

Wow. Sports Illustrated has just published an excerpt of Game of Shadows by SF Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams that lays out what can only be described as incontrovertible evidence that Barry Bonds has been a rampant steroid user for the last several years. This is going to rock the baseball world, and I hope it really does shake things up - I'd love to see the game get back to the way it was before wierdly beefy guys started launching home runs night after night. This is big book news too. I got a breathless "news alert" from a publicist pointing to the impact the SI excerpt is having on the book's sales. As of this writing, yesterday's Amazon rank for the book was 119,745 and now it's up to 75, and climbing I'd assume. So here's to a clean, non-chemically enhanced baseball season. Can we make it happen this year, please?

- C. Max Magee @ 6:25 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Covering the Catalogs: Soft Skull Spring/Summer 2006

The latest catalog to cross my desk is from the Soft Skull Press, the daring Brooklyn-based publishing house that always manages to deliver books from well outside the mainstream. Their books strike a balance between rage and art, and I like looking through their catalog because I know there will almost nothing familiar in it; I will be introduced to new writers and artists.

Coming in May is Delia Falconer's The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, a historical novel about Custer's Last Stand as told by Captain Frederick Benteen who managed to survive the massacre. Benteen's account is told from a distance of twenty years, and the catalog calls the book "an exploration of our dawning age of celebrity (the lionization of Custer, carefully tended to by Custer himself while alive), and what it is to be a soldier (in this era of Iraq memoirs.)"

Soft Skull, which often publishes books in translation, is putting out three books originally published in French this time around. One of these, a graphic novel called Siberia by Nikolai Maslov, sounds particularly intense. In the mold of Marjane Satrapi, this is a memoir, and it tells of the brutality of Maslov's life in the Soviet Union. According to Soft Skull, it's the first ever Russian graphic novel published in the U.S. The book is already out

Also originally published in France are SuperHip JoliPunk by Camille de Toledo and Electric Flesh by Claro. SuperHip JoliPunk is a "manifesto, examining present day counterculture from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present. He asks what it is, exactly, his generation is protesting against." Harry Houdini is at the center of Electric Flesh, but its protagonist is Howard Hourdinary, who claims to be the bastard grandson of the great magician.

Publishers, if you'd like to send me your catalog, please email me.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:48 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Tourney Time

It's that time of year again - the time of year when various orginizations and institutions take the cue from the NCAA basketball tournament to create their own contest in which various products are placed into brackets so that, via head to head competition, the best of the best can be determined. Usually this sort of thing is reserved for beer commercials, and it's hard for anyone to pay that much attention to it, but, as they proved last year, The Morning News has taken the March Madness ripoff to a new level with its Tournament of Books. It was good fun for basketball fans and book fans alike last year and it promises to be good fun this time around to. To play along, meet the judges and download your bracket (pdf). Anyone want to start a pool?

- C. Max Magee @ 8:17 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Voting on Britain's best living writer

The new British quarterly, The Book, is kicking things off with a poll to determine, by popular vote, "the Greatest Living British Writer." As Gordon Kerr writes in his essay introducing the poll, "Now, there's a question! It's such a big one, in fact, that it requires capitals at the beginning of each word!" Indeed. If you've got an opinion on the matter, cast your vote. I couldn't decide - how does one pick in polls like this? - so I selected John Le Carre, who seems to be sufficiently influential and popular while at the same time a little bit outside of the literary box. Thoughts?

- C. Max Magee @ 1:53 PM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post

 

Laurie visits the Book Bus

CSPAN's Book TV is an odd entity. It seems like it's just used to fill the time, although there are occasionally interesting guests. Though CSPAN has never struck me as particularly publicity-hungry, the nonetheless have the Book Bus, "a mobile television production studio that travels the country promoting Book TV's unique non-fiction book programming." Recently, the Book Bus came through Laurie's town, and she sent in her report:

CSPAN's "Book Bus" stopped by the Athens, GA public library for a couple hours on a very wet Wednesday afternoon in February. The two twenty-something female staffers, Ann and MaryAnn, gave tours and explained their traveling broadcast facility. It has a small kitchen and bathroom in the back, but the bulk of the bus is set up with broadcast equipment and a mini-studio for taping interviews. They were just finishing interviewing a local author when we arrived (I think, but am not certain, it was Mary Padgelek talking about her book In the Hand of the Holy Spirit: The Visionary Art of J.B. Murray, a biography of a self-taught Georgia artist). We toured the bus and I asked so many questions you could say they got interviewed for a change, though most of the answers were disappointing. What follows is my best recollection of the conversation:

Q: We know BookTV is dedicated to nonfiction, but why so much on politics, American history and American biographies? Why not more on world history, world figures, nature, technology, explorers, science....?

A: We do some of that. We're primarily focused on what is of interest to our audience.

Q: In that case, when you get to Atlanta in April, will you be interviewing Neal Boortz and Congressman John Linder, authors of The Fairtax Book which came out in 2005 and made the New York Times bestseller list?

A: We hadn't planned to, but that's a good idea.

Q: Atlanta seems to have trouble attracting good authors for visits. Most of them seem to stick to the Northeast and West Coast. Do you think BookTV could come to Atlanta more often and maybe raise publishers' awareness of our existence?

A: We come as often as we can. We recently covered an author talk for the Center for the Book at the Decatur public library, and have covered events at the Jimmy Carter Library.

Q: You visit a lot of book festivals. Some great nonfiction has also been written in graphic format yet you've never been to a comics convention. Why not go to one and interview some of the nonfiction authors/illustrators there?

A: We do nonfiction.

Q: But some good nonfiction has been done in graphic format -- most recently In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegleman, La Perdida by Jessica Abel, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Epileptic by David B. and Pyongyang by Guy Delisle, among others. There are even a couple annual conventions near Washington, D.C., your headquarters, that would be easy for you to get to and cover.

A: It would be up to the comic book convention organizers then, to contact us about coming.

(One of the staff gives out her business card as a contact point. I have no connection to these conventions but may forward the info to the organizers.)

Q: Why are you staying in Atlanta for 12 days in early April?

A: We're attending a cable producers' convention, but that's not open to the public. We'll basically be reporting to the industry that provides our production budget.

Q: Earlier this year you stopped in Katrina-ravaged Mobile, Alabama. What was it like there? How did people with no homes or public facilities respond to a "Book Bus?"

A: Another crew handled that, so we can't say, but some interviews were taped that may be broadcast.

They in turn asked if I would think up something to ask political theorist Francis Fukuyama for an upcoming 3-hour interview to air on March 5th, and then filmed me asking the question. Who on earth wants to listen to a political theorist for 3-hours?!! Is that their big audience -- cable tv producers closely following political trends? Marjane Satrapi could easily fill one of those Fukuyama hours with the story of her life in Iran before and after the revolution and be a lot more interesting. (Postscript: we taped the show and saw that they aired my question, but I look awful. A friend called and said, "You look better in real life." Thanks.) They rewarded us with free BookTV t-shirts, which come squeeze-packed in the shape of a 2" x 1.5" x 6.25" bus, round wheels and all. My husband opened his and it was less interesting than the way it was packaged. My package is now displayed on a shelf at work, t-shirt still squeezed inside.

The BookTV Bus folks wanted to try local food and planned to have dinner at Athens vegetarian institution The Grit. Maybe they got another interview out of it. Too bad Weaver D's only serves lunch; that's truly Deep South soul food - and Weaver's definitely worth an interview by the BookTV bus folk.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:45 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

More Google Book hysteria

In today's Guardian Nigel Newton, chief executive of Bloomsbury Publishing, rants about the danger presented by Google's ongoing endeavor to digitize the world's books. I'm sorry, but I just cannot understand the vehemence of the opposition to Google's plan. Newton tries to catch our attention by invoking the spirit of Charles Dickens, which he claims is being denigrated by the small ads that Google places near the text of the books it scans, but really, for Newton and other publishers who oppose Google, this is about protecting their bottom line and it has nothing to do with the best interests of authors, Dickens or otherwise.

He begins by decrying Google's "inappropriate" advertising. It's very true that advertising can and does get out of hand in our modern world, but Newton is taking a particularly Draconian line to prove his point. Advertisements run in all of the world's most prestigious magazines and newspapers, and we don't call this "predation." In fact it's particularly amusing to me that Newton selects Dickens to focus on because many of Dickens' novels first appeared in installments in magazines like Harper's, which contained - surprise - advertisements for things like pianos and carpets and shirts. Scroll through the images of old issues of Harper's on this page and you'll catch glimpses of them on the margins, not all that different from the way Google does it.

But it's not long before Newton gets to the real issue, money:

At one level all this is quite funny. At another, it is shocking. The worst thing is that the actual money paid to authors and publishers for these silly ads is negligible. So is the number of book purchases arising directly from these links (certainly they were when Google's representative came to see me last autumn). Authors are being ripped off however you look at it. They need to say something about it, loudly.

This betrays how little Newton knows about what Google is doing. Google takes a cut of the revenues generated by those "silly ads" and the rest goes to the copyright holder. If the copyright holder's take for a particular book is "negligible," so is Google's. Beyond the money, this is also about Old Media's desire for control versus New Media's push for openness. Newton can't see the potential monetary benefit of making his books more accessible to the public. If it were up to him, we'd have to drop a coin in before flipping through a book at a bookstore. Newton's real motives become clear when he reveals that he's not really against digitizing books and making money off of them, he's just against someone else doing it:

Publishers also have the responsibility to make sure that when it comes to hosting electronic content in future, it is their own websites that host the downloads and the scans of text and audio. There is no reason to hand this content to third-party websites.

What I would say to Newton is go for it, no one is stopping you, and while you are fretting over your books being stolen, Google is digitizing the world's knowledge so that future generations will have easy access to it - well, unless it was published by Bloomsbury, apparently. The point of Newton's diatribe, which is "an edited version of a speech given on Thursday to the Guardian Review's World Book Day forum," is that we should boycott Google to get them back for their trespasses. Good luck with that.

Before I close this, I want to clarify one thing. Newton implies that what Google is doing is bad for authors and not just publishers. I don't think that's true at all. Google's effort - in the absence of a viable effort by publishers - can introduce readers to books and allow authors explore new ways of getting their books to readers and new ways of making money from their writing. The Internet has shaken the foundations of the music, film and news businesses and changed them all - for the better, I think - and there's no reason why the publishing industry should be exempt from this.

See also: The publishers' big blunder, Richard Nash of Soft Skull on Google Print, HarperCollins starts its own little island

Update: Just spotted Hissy Cat's post which goes even further in picking apart Nigel Newton's ridiculous speech. It's worth reading.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:15 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Weekend Links

• The Oscar Blog: Ed has recruited Scott, YPTR, Elizabeth Crane, Jeff, Gwenda, Mark and several others to "live blog" the Oscars on Sunday. I'm convinced that no good can come of this... but you can bet I'll be reading along.
• I'll read what ever Malcolm Gladwell writes, but his 2-part conversation with ESPN.com columnist Bill Simmons on sports (and many other topics) is particularly entertaining.
• I'm a huge fan of the Comics Curmudgeon blog, which hilariously skewers the newspaper funnies. Now Josh has hit the big time. He'll be skewering political cartoons for Wonkette.
• The winners of the 2005 Book Critics Cirle Award will be announced tonight. Here are the finalists.
• Brokeback Mountain (video link) in Bun-O-Vision.

- C. Max Magee @ 5:12 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Corey Vilhauer Book of the Month Club: March 2006

With my personal sport of choice - professional basketball - surging towards the playoffs, I felt a need to read about sports. I needed to read about jocks and sweat and champions and the like.

Instead, I read about gambling. And politics.

Oh, and a little bit of about sports.

(First, though, an aside. I read three books this month - not very many, I know, but it was a shorter month. One of them was To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.

Yes, it was better than Hey Rube. But with To Kill a Mockingbird being selected as South Dakota's "The Big Read" selection for this year, I figured it would be getting as much press as it could handle ["No, he's not being ironic. Corey is from South Dakota" -- Max]. So I'm going with number two.

Back to the review.)

Really, Hey Rube, a collection of Hunter S. Thompson's ESPN.com columns, isn't about sports at all. It's about gambling, mostly, with a little counter-culture political rants thrown in to balance things out. There's a fair bit about his friends, all of which involves gambling and politics. Still, every once in a while Thompson brings it back to sports.

The primary focus of Thompson's rants usually leans towards the NFL - widely though of as "the gamblers' league" - and with rightful cause. Here you'll delve into the mind of a degenerate gambler; one who understands the subtle difference between getting 10 points against the Colts compared to a measly 9. You'll begin to understand the strengths and weaknesses of a man that loves his friends, but loves even more to take their money.

Above all, though, you'll see the fine line between politics and sports. While both seem incredibly different, you'll find they're not - at their cores, both subjects are nearly identical. Both deal with competing forces that, often times, exhibit nearly opposite styles. Both find themselves hotly debated at all times of the day, regardless of a person's knowledge or competency in the subject. The only real difference is that political leaders are chosen, while in sports the leaders are determined after a long and brutal physical battle.

In fact, politics would be a lot more interesting if they adopted the "physical battle" concept.

Hey Rube is not for the faint of heart. It's vitriolic. It's spit out with a forked tongue. It's full of anti-administration propaganda and cursing. Never before has anyone felt so pained while talking about his favorite sport. Thompson rages that "watching the Baltimore Ravens play football is like watching scum freeze on the eyeballs of a jackass," a line that is as true a sports criticism as "steroids ruined baseball" or "the NFL Pro Bowl is no longer relevant."

The odd thing is how attractive he makes everything sound, while at the same time seemingly hating every minute of it. Thompson's obsession with gambling, football, and his own twisted thoughts sounds unnatural. It is. Still, Hey Rube left me longing to join him. It couldn't have been that horrible to hang out and watch football with Thompson, except for the fact that you might get shot.

Or even worse - you might be convinced to run a marathon with Sean Penn.

Listen, we all miss Hunter. It's still incredibly chic to mention his name and blabber on incessantly about how he was a literary genius and how he'll never be replaced.

In all actuality, this is not Thompson's best book. It's fractured, and it's not in his usual wheelhouse. But it is very good. And if you like sports more than politics, as I do, you'll find more pleasure in Hey Rube than you might find in any of his campaign memoirs.

And as far as his genius is concerned, well, it's true. He was a genius. He filled a specific niche that not everyone respected - and that's fine. Some like him, some revere him, and others can't stand him. That's all part of his shtick. Regardless of your feelings, you have to admit he made an impact.

Even if it was only by pointing out the importance of never betting against Duke basketball.

-Corey Vilhauer
Black Marks on Wood Pulp
February 2006 CVBoMC
January 2006 CVBoMC

- C. Max Magee @ 10:09 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Adding voices to the unfolding story of New Orleans

Chin Music Press has put together a nice-looking blog to chronicle the long, lingering aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans:

After Katrina and its horrible aftermath, Chin Music Press felt compelled to shine its wobbly flashlight on New Orleans. This effort resulted in our second book, Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans? Along the way, we met a community of passionate, eloquent writers who care deeply about what happens to the Big Easy. This blog became a natural extension of the book. It's our way of adding voices to the unfolding story of New Orleans.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:56 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question: The 43rd in a Series (Finding Historical Fiction)

Katie writes in with this question:

When I was in Rome I read I, Claudius [by Robert Graves] and loved it. Now I'm looking for other historical fiction, of any period or nationality, that does a comparable job of bringing a time and place to life and maintaining some literary credibility. Any suggestions?

According to Wikipedia, not the definitive source in this realm but a decent enough place to start, a work of historical fiction can be defined as one in which "the story is set among historical events, or more generally, in which the time of the action predates the lifetime of the author." This is a bit broad for my taste, but I think it's a good place to start. Going by this definition, a lot of books that we think of first as fiction could also qualify as historical fiction. Some of my favorite books by contemporary authors fall into this category. T.C. Boyle's Water Music is about a Scottish explorer in Africa in the late 18th century, and Edward P. Jones' book The Known World is about black slave owners in Virginia in the 1840s. Another example of a book like these is Charles Frazier's Civil War novel, Cold Mountain.

But these books aren't really historical fiction in the same way that I, Claudius is historical fiction. Traditionally, in historical fiction, the history is like another character in the novel, and the action is more likely to be ripped from the history books, as it were, placing the reader in a novelized version of true historical events. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell about Atlanta during the Civil War is a famous example. Another is James Clavell's Shogun about the 16th century exploration of Asia. Of the few historical novels I've read, my favorite would have to be Leon Uris' Trinity, a powerful epic about the Irish struggle for independence at the turn of the 20th century.

There is also historical fiction that hews closely to a particular niche, like the Aubrey/Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian and C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower series, both of which take place during the time when tall-masted ships ruled the high seas. The there's Jean M. Auel's Earth's Children series, which is prehistoric, historical fiction. I know, crazy.

I'm sure there are plenty of folks out there who have historical fiction to recommend, so please share in the comments, and thanks, Katie, for your question.

Update: Jenny exposes my unfamiliarity with historical fiction by suggesting many, many fantastic-sounding books in the comments. Check it out, and leave some more suggestions if you've get them.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:26 PM ~ comments: 9 ~ Links to this post

 

Covering the Catalogs: Grove Atlantic Spring/Summer 2006

I get a fair amount of catalogs from publishers these days, and since they're always chock full of new and interesting books that I'm guessing people will want to know about, I'm thinking about instituting a semi-regular feature called Covering the Catalogs wherein I pick out a handful of items that I deem interesting from the most recent catalog to cross my desk. And since I received the newest Grove Press/Atlantic Monthly Press/Black Cat/Canongate catalog yesterday, this one'll be the first.

Recently, Maud was expressing her discomfort with the impending media coverage of the upcoming Samuel Beckett centenary: "I await commemorative events like this centenary with excitement that tends to mutate, as the press coverage appears, into dread, then lamentation, and finally, resigned disgust." The "news" that arises from the anniversary of the birth of a dead writer isn't always scintillating, but, on the upside, such occasions give publishers - wanting to cash in on said press coverage - an opportunity to reissue and repackage the work of the great writer. As such, Grove is putting out two different items to mark Beckett's centenary. The first is a bilingual edition of Waiting for Godot. The play was originally written in French by Beckett, and he translated it into English himself. This edition provides both texts, side-by-side. Grove is also putting out a four volume set of Beckett's collected works with introductions by well-known writers. The first volume of novels is introduced by Colm Toibin and the second volume of novels is introduced by Salman Rushdie. The volume of collected dramatic works is introduced by Edward Albee, and the volume of collected poems, short fiction and criticism is introduced by J.M. Coetzee.

Coming in April from the author of Black Hawk Down, Mark Bowden is Guests of the Ayatollah. Bowden is well-known for his immersive coverage of armed conflict, and in this book he is setting out to provide an account of, as the book's subtitle calls it, "the first battle in America's war with militant Islam," the Iran hostage crisis.

Coming in July from Atlantic Monthly Press is Tom Drury's first new novel in six years, The Driftless Area. Drury was among the "Best of Young American Novelists" named by Granta, and his stories regularly appear in the New Yorker, including "Path Lights" from last fall in which a bottle falls from the sky.

I plan on continuing to cherry pick items that interest me from other catalogs as I receive them, so stay tuned. If you are a publisher and would like to send me your catalog, please email me.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:45 AM ~ comments: 7 ~ Links to this post