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Thursday, May 22, 2008
From the inbox: Brookline Booksmith is pleased to announce that broadcasting legend Barbara Walters will be appearing at your favorite local independent bookstore on Thursday, May 22nd at 7pm.
She will be signing copies of her best-selling book Audition from 7-9pm.
If you would like to attend the signing, copies of Audition must be purchased through the Brookline Booksmith.Your Booksmith receipt for the purchase of the book is your ticket to the signing line.
This is a book signing only. Barbara will be only signing copies of her new book. In the interest of time, no photos or personalizations will be allowed. For any further questions, please all the Booksmith at 617-566-6660. If you are unable to make the signing, but would still like a signed copy, place an order with us today for no extra charge by calling the store at 617-566-6660.
GO TEAM BARBARA! Her memoirs are so much dishier than the whole Al divorce and nip-tuck surgery. We mean, really.
5/22/2008 11:17:00 AM by Sharon | |
Monday, May 19, 2008
Can we just say that we're 100 pages into Anna Karenina, and now we're FINALLY fully able to vet Janet Malcolm's joke about Gossip Girl's Nate Archibald,
who she describes as "a kind of Vronsky manqué, with a grande-dame
mother, like
Vronsky's, and a Navy-captain father who is 'a master sailor and
extremely handsome, but a little lacking in the hugs department."
Here's a passage from Mr. Tolstoy himself, which we just read on the
train this morning and totally knocked our head sideways it was so
delicious.
"There was nothing either exceptional or strange in a man's
calling at half-past nine on a friend to inquire details of a proposed
dinner-party and not coming in, but it seemed strange to all of them.
Above all, it seemed strange and not right to Anna."
Now that is how you foreshadow a scandal the likes of which one expects and is aware of but the hints, the subtle hints! Josh Schwartz, kindly take note. We are looking forward to tonight very much.
5/19/2008 1:14:00 PM by Sharon | |
Monday, May 12, 2008
5/12/2008 11:59:21 AM by Sharon | |
Monday, May 05, 2008
Over at Omnivoracious, hosted by Amazon.com. Only one post is up so far and it's annoyingly music-centric. Why all the flashing lights and filler for your readings, James Frey? Why can't you just get up there and, um, READ? We have grown grumpy and tired of you, sir. We don't care what you think of Ozzfest, we would rather hear some things about your forthcoming book and your deal with HarperCollins and maybe, erhm, advice for writers who fucked up and are still trucking along and biding their time and doing their thing, maybe? Please show us what you're actually made of or go away. James Frey will read from his new novel Bright Shiny Morning on May 28th at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Tickets are $5 and they're not sold out yet. Head to the Brookline Booksmith for more info.
5/5/2008 11:36:39 AM by Sharon | |
Monday, April 28, 2008
We know that the point of this New York Times Sunday Styles piece on N+1 editor and author Keith Gessen wasn't supposed to be about the fact that he is obsessed with checking his Amazon.com ranking. Though it's nice to know that even good-looking, 33-year-old Harvard graduates who live in Prospect Heights, helm their own literary magazine, and have a book out that's earned its fair share of praise and attention also have moments of paralyzing insecurity. Gessen told reporter David Itzkoff that more people who viewed the page for his first novel, All The Sad Young Literary Men, bought Sloane Crosley's best-selling essay collection I Was Told There'd Be Cake than they did his book. Oops! After exposing Gessen in a way that will likely have a good portion of New York's literary circles snickering, Itzkoff veered off and got Gessen to talk about themes and issues in publishing that we've been pissed off about for awhile now. We applaud the fact that Gessen is trying to taking risks with his magazine. At first we didn't think his novel sounded very risky at all. The very mention of it bored us. Then we read this: The book is also a further unpacking of Mr. Gessen’s personal philosophy on the proper function of the novel: to hold up an honest mirror to society, no matter how frivolous and unserious that society may be. Young people in big cities like New York, Mr. Gessen said: “are willing to acknowledge that they’re a class only ironically. So they’ll have their ironic kickball games. Their ironic magazines.”
And that struck home. Immediately, we remembered how risky we thought Diane Vadino's Smart Girls
Like Me was (incidentally, she was part of the whole McSweeney's crew). Vadino was inspired by her own situation, and the lifestyles of young, middle-class urban youth as she lived it. We believe it really is important to hold up an "honest mirror," and when elder critics get up on the soapbox screaming about how terrible it is to write about such non-serious subjects, we want to laugh. So while we admit we were bored with the idea of All The Sad Young Literary Men, we have given ourselves a proverbial slap on the wrist for skipping to the same ridiculous conclusion. The piece continues: “They’re willing to have the privileges of their class,” Mr. Gessen added, “to go to a good college, and be subsidized in their New York lives by their parents, but maybe not willing to be written about.”
The result, Mr. Gessen said, is that the everyday lives of young urban adults are no longer considered appropriate subjects for ambitious novels.
That last bit is what drives this whole notion forward. It's so easy for people to write off a good book simply because its subject matter isn't considered "appropriate" for "ambitious" novels. Isn't that what makes writing one of them, and making it good, such a huge coup, and such a worthy challenge?
4/28/2008 1:13:57 PM by Sharon | |
Friday, April 18, 2008
 The best Times lede we've seen in a long time kicks off Charles McGrath's review of Joshua Kendall's The Man Who Made Lists, which chronicles the life and times of the creator of Roget's Thesaurus. It goes like this: Sylvia Plath loved her thesaurus so much that she called herself “Roget’s strumpet.”
Really, that is just perfection. Why didn't we know this? Why, also, didn't we know that the Thesaurus was once called, ahem,
Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged
So as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary
Composition. Because that is almost as good.
4/18/2008 1:04:20 PM by Sharon | |
Monday, April 14, 2008
Sometimes, alt-weekly dreams really do come true! Remember back in November, when we were obsessing over Sloane Crosley, Vintage/Anchor book publicist extraordinaire, who had a much-hyped, uber-blurbed book of personal essays coming out this spring? I Was Told There'd Be Cake has arrived. And, as Galleycat reports, it actually hit #19 on the New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list on April 20. A few weeks ago, when we spoke with Crosley during her lunch break one afternoon, we were surprised to learn that she really was pleasant, charming, funny, smart, and nice, and, in her spare (?!) time, builds cool dioramas. Basically, we kinda sorta maybe totally want her life -- who doesn't wish a book of essays about their own comic disappointments would be the sort of thing a lot of people would actually want to read? -- and wish we had her poise, but we can't have it all, can we? No, we cannot. Check out our "Backtalk" interview with Crosley in this week's fishwrap, if you want more, and take note -- she'll be reading from and signing copies of I Was Told There'd Be Cake Tuesday evening at the Brookline Booksmith.
4/14/2008 11:43:19 AM by Sharon | |
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Okay!! Our editor sent us this link to Polyvore a couple of weeks ago, and we were all, oh, cool, it's like Cher's computer in Clueless. And then we promptly forgot about it. But the delightful T.Y. at the Lit Connection was inspired, and she created two book-themed character collages which we're totally envious of. The first is inspired by the prom scene in Stephanie Meyer's Twilight, the second, which is our favorite, is inspired by The Witch from Blackbird Pond! Go look at them, NOW! She also made one for a young Ernest Hemmingway and Sixteen Candles! And here is our collage, which we made in tribute to Jane Austen's first novel, Sense & Sensibility, which we are reading right now. We spoiled the plot for ourselves by watching the Masterpiece Theatre program last weekend. The 2-part series made us weep, and the book just breaks our heart over and over and over again! Elinor and Marianne! Painting and pianofortes! Tea in a country cottage! Suffering and emotional breakdowns! Hurrah! We are totally asking for it! We can't remember the last time we read a happy book. Without further ado:
4/10/2008 11:08:48 AM by Sharon | |
Monday, April 07, 2008
Yup. Liz Phair reviewed Dean Wareham's Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance in this Sunday's NYTBR. Among other things, we have learned that her mother named her Elizabeth Clark Phair because she thought it would make a good New Yorker byline. But more importantly, and most exciting, is the fact that Liz is finishing up her first book -- " fiction, not memoir." She probably would have started a blog, too, but haven't you heard?! People CAN DIE OF BLOGGING and it is FRONT-PAGE NEWS! ZOMG! We'd better go get ourselves some pills and rest and relaxation and time away from this Internet sweat-shop! Jeff Bercovici's rant is the funniest we've read so far.
4/7/2008 11:52:01 AM by Sharon | |
Monday, March 31, 2008
Did you read Rachel Donadio's NYBR back-page essay about literary dealbreakers yet? Or her subsquent Paper Cuts blog post, in which she asked Times readers to state their own literary dealbreakers? So, what are the most common literary dealbreakers? People who don't read at all, people who love Ayn Rand, people who dote on Harry Potter, people who worship The Da Vinci Code, people who are too pretentious, and people who aren't pretentious enough. This is one of the best Paper Cuts comment so far (the prose is a bit rough, the ideas are good): People who reject others for reading a particular book have either:
1) read the book themselves to merit their rejection of its
content, in which case they are hyppocrites [sic] for dumping other readers
of the same book
2) demonstrated dishonesty and sterotype [sic] by dumping someone based
on a book they have never read themselves and of which they cannot,
with integrity, state what they object about it.
— Posted by Student
Most of the blog commenters and people quoted in the piece are guilty of both of these points. Donadio is very wise for not coming out and stating her own dealbreakers. She's absolved. Lucky her. For as long as we can remember worrying about whether were cool, "worthwhile", popular, whatever -- we knew that we would often be judged as such (or not) based on the things we liked. What we read. The music we listened to. The art we admired. Our tastes, the things we enjoy -- now, especially -- define who we are. You don't need to get to know a person in order to peg them based on their Facebook profile, to decide that the last book they posted on their iRead application was way, way below your standards of snobbery, or that they're "A Fan" of a band you outgrew five years before hipster became a New York magazine cover story. It seems that these days, few people can afford to be genuine -- if they want to adequately compete. It's sad. If we're honest about what we truly love, and what we truly value -- whether it's a short story by Chekov or a poem by Jewel -- compatability tends to follow suit. And then, if you want to go ahead and judge people for being happy enough to have found each other based on their alleged crappy-ass taste in blogs, well -- that's your perogative, we say! And we say it with a smile. Instead of inviting you to comment on your literary dealbreakers (snore), if you would like to, please post either the last five books/magazines/comics/whatevs you read (no cheating, even if one of those books was really embarrassing) or a book that you adore that you get a lot of flack about from other people. You don't have to defend it, although you can, if you want to. What's more important is the fact that you like it, regardless of whether anyone else does. If it made you think or feel something, good or bad or in between, we want to know about it.
3/31/2008 12:40:57 PM by Sharon | |
Thursday, March 27, 2008
 Keith Gessen: Author, broad-shouldered man. The Observer is really doing some excellent shoe-leather reporting on sub-cultures these days. Last week's awkward musing on Urbane Tomboys flummoxed us (aren't these girls just hipsters who wear boy clothes, and what does this have to do with feminism?) but Doree Shafrir's story on Nerds of Steel this week is a little bit more our thing. Hipsters or Ripsters? Buff, and Proud? Oh, yes, of course, of course. The publishing industry's collective boner for hottie authors doesn't seem to be going anywhere. So it makes sense that examples of current "nerdy beefcake poster boys" include a lot of literary lads: Conan O'Brien, Keith Gessen ( N+1 editor and author of everyone's favorite new galley, All The Sad Young Literary Men), and up-and-coming buff dork Benjamin Nugent. Nugent penned a book called American Nerd: The Story of My People, which will come out in May. We. Must. Read. This. Shafrir's piece was a fun romp, but we're a bit disappointed that there wasn't some kind of sidebar thing on female buff nerds. She glosses over it by noting that "female nerds can be 'buff,' but that makes for a sexy librarian/Tina Fey kind of paradigm." Radar has some ideas for the new tribes the Observer should hunt down, but we think their next feature should focus on a group we're going to go ahead and call Book Tramps. More specifically: Slutty Ass Bitch Whores Who Read. We are very interested in this phenomenon, given the number of prostitutes with double-lives out there.
3/27/2008 12:14:15 PM by Sharon | |
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
 Zadie Smith: "Put it in a drawer."One of PopSerious's correspondents was at a lecture at Columbia University yesterday, where writer Zadie Smith ( White Teeth) gave a lecture on "Feeling Fraudelent." Below, some wise words by the author. We love this kind of thing. So far, the best advice about writing we ever got was "Sometimes you just have to puke over the side and keep rowing." This is close competition: On the subject of finishing a novel (or for those writers out there squeamish about the N-word, “a piece”), Smith said you should “step away from the vehicle.” Put it in a drawer. Do not publish it–-do not even read it–-until you absolutely have to. The most important reader of your work is not yourself who has written it, or an editor who has seen ten drafts of it already, but a complete stranger, and if you can keep the thing in a drawer long enough chances are that you’ll become that stranger yourself.
3/26/2008 1:54:51 PM by Sharon | |
Friday, March 21, 2008
 Memed Out Have you read Stuff White People Like? It's a very funny blog. We hope it will be a very, very, very funny book. Actually, it will probably have to be the funniest book in the entire fucking world to sell enough copies to justify the alleged $350,000 Random House advance, as reported by the Observer's Leon Neyfakh. (Random House's publicity department won't confirm the actual amount, but they say that $350,000 is an incorrect figure.) Neyfakh also points out that I Can Has Cheezburger, another cute web phenomenon that started on the 4chan message boards, along with anti-Scientology supergroup Anonymous., is similarly basking in the literary glory of viral meme fame. On the political front, Barack Obama Is My New Bicycle also scored a recent contract. Both Cheez and Bicycle will be published by Gotham Books. Bloggers who get memoir deals? So over! Quirky meme-creators who get coffee table, gifty humor-pop-culture deals? So now! So very now! Coming soon to your local Urban Outfitters.
3/21/2008 1:20:38 PM by Sharon | |
Thursday, March 20, 2008
We love the Interweb! (Except when it tries to break our blog.) But you know what we don't love? E-books. E-books are gross. It's like, we and nearly everyone else we know with day jobs spend hours upon hours staring at a screen and reading the Internet all day long. Everyone reads a different Internet. We like to read about literary gossip (um, duh), regular gossip, music, criticism, musical criticism, literary criticism, clothes, media, and more assorted esoteric shit. But you know what we don't like to read on screens? BOOKS. Excerpts are fine. Reviews are fine. Author interviews, again, fine. NOT books. Not our beloved Pride & Prejudice.Reading a Pride & Prejudice e-book is like watching the Kiera Knightly/Colin Firth superfilm, which was NOT SUPER. It's fake! It's bad and wrong! Um, we prefer the BBC version. Obviously! That, friends, THAT, could never be as good -- nothing could ever be, really, let's be honest -- as the book, but it's close! Oh, it is close! We know e-books must make things a million times easier for people like, say, editors. They can load up all their manuscripts into the thing and just carry that around, instead of a thousand pound canvas bag (we've seen it happen). And we know e-books also have other, added, educational, environmental, and otherwise extremely practical purposes. We just don't care to think of them. Because. Well. We hate them! We never want to read a book that way! Especially not anything by Jane Austen. No, no, no. We reject these technological developments. We prefer to read novels in an "antiquated" manner. Fuck e-books. We're just saying.
3/20/2008 10:18:54 AM by Sharon | |
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
 © Rachel McPhersonYou know how sometimes, someone says something that makes your face hot and your hands ball into fists of fury and your face go into perma-scowl only to realize you have let them get away with it? We do! Oh, we do, we do, WE DO! We have been there again and again, only to lie awake at night thinking of The Brilliant Things We Ought To Have Said. It can be difficult, and sometimes impossible, to snark back. We are rather shy, and these things don't always come easily to us. Our personalities are “confrontationally-challenged,” shall we say, which seems to be a quirk shared by many biliophiles! We’re likely the sort alpha-individuals refer to, smirkingly, as a "meak-voiced door-mat.” Yes, someone said this to us once. It was awful! Our insides were quaking, and yet we were unable to properly defend ourselves! But it doesn’t have to be that way. Help has arrived, friends, and we are delighted to share the news. In this week's fishwrap, we wrote about Lady Arabella Snark's (a/k/a A.C Kemp -- writer, slang expert, and MIT lecturer) The Perfect Insult for Every Occasion. Basically, the book is our NEW BIBLE, and that's not something we admit to lightly. Particularly when our Jewish mom is maybe reading this. Kemp is extremely funny and clever, and we wished we could tell you more about her book in our little write-up. Fortunately, the Interweb has no space constraints. The Perfect Insult functions as an anti-ettiquite guide, ready to teach you about properly wounding, unconventional put-downs geared toward everyone from passive-agressive fucktards to your douchey co-worker. Also: mean boys, cruel family members, and snobs! There are quizzes and enlightening MENSA-level vocabulary lessons woven through the text. What’s an orchidectimy, you ask? “It sounds like a flower,” Kemp told us. “Or something that would be really nice. Except it’s removing your testes.” The Perfect Insult is written from the perspective of Lady Snark, a character Kemp created for fun. What a card! What a kick! We heart Miss Snark. And you will, too, if you make the time to see her in her full glory -- engraved flask, elbow-length satin gloves, superior smile and all -- tomorrow at the BU Barnes & Noble (660 Beacon St) at 7 pm. Go! But first, read our interview outtakes with Kemp, in which she discusses her insult collection, the book's upcoming YouTube tie-in, and fake socialites. How did you come to write the book?It was kind of an organic thing, I guess. I had taught this slang class to international students and I wanted to write a book for international students on slang. I went to a bunch of publishers and none of them were interested in it. Around the same time I started Slang City, and it was really astonishing to me that most of the people who came to this web site were not international students but native speakers. Then I thought, oh, well I’ll do a book that’s connected to that. I decided on insults. But then, somehow, between the time that I came up with the idea and finishing writing the book it turned into something else. Part of it was that I had written in it in this sort of arch, ironic tone and when my agent took me on he said, Well, why don’t you try assigning an actual character to that voice? And I thought, "Oh, a socialite would be good!" I didn’t know anything about socialites so I read a bunch of books about them. And was that when it morphed into an anti-ettiquite guide?
Once I started writing it in that voice, it kind of changed the
direction. Originally it was just going to be a book about insults and
different categories of insults. When I decided to do it that way, it
became more of an anti-ettiquite kind of book. I ended up putting other
things in, like, you know, information about exotic poisons. Did you have a running collection of insults to cull from?A lot of the stuff in the book I had to spend a great deal of time thinking about. The book has a lot of obscure words -- those, I just sort of collected. I hadn’t originally intended to include so many arcane words. But at some point in the early stages of the book I was reading The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl. It’s about Edgar Allen Poe and it’s one of those historically based books -- he wrote The Dante Club. So, he had all this vocabulary in there that was sort of the 19th century stuff that nobody uses anymore. And so I started just writing these things down on the backs of envelopes. Every time I would find something funny in a newspaper article or book, I would just write it on the back of an envelope until I had a very large collection of envelopes! Then I just started putting them into the book. Sometimes I would look for something that I had found somewhere else and though, that’s an unusual word. And then I’d go onto the online Oxford English Dictionary and I would find something else by mistake when I was looking for that. Which section of the book is most dear to Miss Snark?Well, I think the quiz in which you have to differentiate between grammar terms and sexual perversion and rocks and people from the Bible. That was one of my favorite parts. But the other part that I really liked is the letter on refusing invitations. Last week a bunch of my friends got together and one of my coworkers from MIT shot a video acting that out. I’m going through all of the shots but I’m hoping that in the next couple of weeks we’ll be putting that on YouTube. I was a little nervous to do it and have my friends do it, who were not professional actors, but they were amazing. Are you planning on dressing up as your nom de plume for author events?Yes, absolutely. This afternoon one of the tasks on my list is to order an engraved gin flask! She’s one of these people -- and this was something, when I was reading these various socalite books, there were these various real-life characters who had been from this poor background and married someone who was better than them, divorced them, married someone who was better than that, and kept moving themselves up the ladder. Actually, I don’t know if you noticed this but the dedication in the book is to this woman named Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrborn. She was one of the characters that I found, but it was like a one line mention in a book about New York socialites. I looked it up and she was this woman who was a dressmaker, but she called herself a Baroness. She took a couple of her friends and moved to the Galapogos Islands and called herself the Empress of the Galapogos Islands. She would do things like steal her neighbor’s mail, and then charge them for it! When you look at the current socalites -- Paris Hilton? It’s like, that’s not what a socalite is supposed to be!
3/12/2008 5:01:16 PM by Sharon | |
Monday, March 10, 2008
Daniel Mendelsohn ( The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million) wrote what we thought was a depressing but super-smart Op-Ed piece in the Sunday Times. He makes excellent points about the fake-memoir trend, but even more important, he explains what it means to the opressed classes of individuals whose identities are being stolen in the process. Much has already been written about how race and oppressed minorities play into these book scandals (most recently, Jews and African-Americans). Mendelsohn brings that in, and makes a key connection to our culture's reality-worship. The observations he makes about our obsession with the fantasy, and the satisfaction of experiencing a "redemeptive" situation -- regardless of its validity -- are particularly chilling. An excerpt from the last part of the essay (read the whole thing if you have the time, though!): In an era obsessed with “identity,” it’s useful to remember that identity is precisely that quality in a person, or group, that cannot be appropriated by others; in a world in which theme-park-like simulacra of other places and experiences are increasingly available to anyone with the price of a ticket, the line dividing the authentic from the ersatz needs to be stressed, rather than blurred. As, indeed, Ms. De Wael has so clearly blurred it, for reasons that she has suggested were pitiably psychological. “The story is mine,” she announced. “It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving.”...
“My reality” raises even more far-reaching and dire questions about the state of our culture, one in which the very concept of “reality” seems to be in danger. Think of “reality” entertainments, which so unnervingly parallel the faux-memoirists’ appropriation of others’ authentic emotional experience: in them, real people are forced to endure painful or humiliating or extreme situations, their real emotional reactions becoming the source of the viewers’ idle gratification. Think of the Internet: an unimaginably powerful tool for education but also a Wild West of random self-expression in which anyone can say anything about anything (or anyone) and have it “published,” and which has already made problematic the line between truth and falsehood, expert and amateur opinion, authentic and inauthentic identities, reality and fantasy.
That pervasive blurriness, the casualness about reality that results when you can turn off entire worlds simply by unsubscribing, changing a screen name, or closing your laptop, is what ups the cultural ante just now. It’s not that frauds haven’t been perpetrated before; what’s worrisome is that, maybe for the first time, the question people are raising isn’t whether the amazing story is true, but whether it matters if it’s true. Perhaps the most dismaying response to the James Frey scandal was the feeling on the part of many readers that, true or false, his book had given them the feel-good, “redemptive” experience they’d hoped for when they bought his novel — er, memoir.
3/10/2008 11:04:13 AM by Sharon | |
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
 RECALLED.. Her True Life story, Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival, was a fraud. She is not part Native American. She was not an abused foster child living on the streets of L.A., or a member of the gang the Bloods. She grew up with her biological parents in Sherman Oaks, CA, and went to a private Episcopal high school. While she did work with inner city kids, she interviewed a lot of them in L.A. coffee shops and pawned composites of their stories off as her own. Margaret Jones isn't even her real name. It's Margaret "Peggy" Seltzer. So anyway, the main things that seem to be erupting from what has been deemd the Worst Week Ever in Publishing are: 1. Memoirs sell better than fiction (just like reality TV gets networks better advertising and bigger ratings). This, apparently, is something writers have caught on to. So they turn "novels" into "memoirs." Even if they aren't exactly true. 2. Publishers don't do deeper fact-checking because it could ruin the author-editor relationship. 3. Love and Consequences wouldn't have gotten the reception it did in
the first place if it wasn't for the Charles McGrath connection. 4. Er, James Frey is still publishing a new book. Frowny faces all around. We think it would be nice if fiction wasn't so hard to sell anymore, if every woman writing about their coming-of-age experiences wasn't immediately categorized as chick-lit and designed a book cover featuring pink sparkly heels and a Cosmo, if publicists could somehow, magically, control positive hype before it resulted in hundreds of bloggers hating on talented writers, if writers could be championed without having to be Diablo Cody for it to happen, and if classic books we love weren't repackaged with stupid cartoons that look nothing like real characters just to appeal to new audiences, because it really undermines the intelligence of buyers! These are just a few of our complaints. Margaret, we are sure, will be feeling the heat for quite some time.
3/5/2008 12:10:30 PM by Sharon | |
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
 Sloane Crosley: The new Dorothy Parker, some say -- or just our new Imaginary FriendKelefa Sanneh, our favorite New York Times pop music critic, is going to be a staff writer at The New Yorker! Now he and the S.F.J. can totally duke it out over the Lil' Mama and Britney coverage. Loving it! Also moving to 4 Times Square is New York magazine writer Ariel Levy, of whose work we are also big fans. Margaret B. Jones's (not her real name!) Love and Consequences, a memoir about coming-of-age as a penniless, abused foster child in the L.A. gang the Bloods was -- wait for it -- a big, fat lie. Girl got Michiko Kakutani creaming over her writing last week, and she's a stone-faced bullshit artist. Oh, the many ways in which she could have handled this differently. Peggy, did you ever think about writing a non-fiction book based on your friends' accounts, instead of, we don't know, passing them off as your own?! Remember when we freaked out over that Sloane Crosley profile in the NY Observer? The Most Popular Publicist in the World is back, and her new book is about to come out. The hype machine is nearly short-circuiting itself over her tome? You don't say! We're still really, really excited to read it, though. This is the first personal essay Sloane published, in the Village Voice, and it's very funny and good, so we guess the blurbers are all right. We like her. We can't help it. Please let her survive this ugly process of the build-up and the backlash.
3/4/2008 11:02:07 AM by Sharon | |
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
The Interweb is exploding with book deals today. Er, maybe not -- perhaps it is just in our own strange little brain/world. People reports: Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen can now add author to their growing list of professions.
The 21-year-old twins will pen a new book together called Influence that features artists and fashion designers who have inspired the savvy fashionistas over the past decade, Penguin books announced Wednesday.
Perhaps the book will actually be affordable, unlike their redonkulously unjustifiably over-priced fashion lines The Row and Elizabeth and James. Hmph.
2/27/2008 1:54:04 PM by Sharon | |
It's deal day for Publisher's Lunch Weekly. Fresh out of the inbox: General/Other Marisha Pessl's NIGHT FILM, a psychological thriller about obsession, family loyalty and ambition set in raw contemporary Manhattan, moving to Kate Medina at Random House, by her new agent Amanda Urban at ICM.
Uh, so was that a nice deal? A very nice deal? A good deal? A significant deal? OR A MAJOR DEAL (a/k/a here's a check for half a million dollars, you win the author lotto again!) Inquiring minds are inquiring, and obviously, we wish we knew. While Word Up has been slightly divided and somewhat confused by the way Pessl and her publisher have handled her author publicity, we personally are enormous fans of her work. Special Topics in Calamity Physics was our favorite novel of 2006, after all. Speaking of, you know who should totally play Blue in the movie version? AMBER TAMBLYN. We only just had this revelation of sorts.
2/27/2008 11:52:11 AM by Sharon | |
Monday, February 25, 2008
The intimidating publisher of serious and lovely books, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, is moving to a new HQ. Editors and publicists have been toiling away without hot water in the ladies' bathroom sinks! Rebecca Mead explains in her "Talk of the Town" this week.“You had to put your own hot-water tank in, and that was not something that was in the F.S.G. budget,” Isenberg, who is a senior vice-president and director of operations at the company, explained the other day. “The money went into the books, not into painting the walls.” Elaine Kramer, the company’s longest-serving employee, who was hired in the accounts department in 1952, said that, while the employees were happy about the prospect of improved amenities—there will be a pantry, so for the first time coffee will be made in-house, rather than brought in—many of the writers, over the years, had been attached to the house’s primitive living conditions. “Isaac Singer—he liked it that way,” Kramer said.It's almost too perfect -- not to mention hilarious -- that the writers were the only ones who adored the "primitive conditions" that existed.
2/25/2008 1:19:35 PM by Sharon | |
Friday, February 22, 2008
David Sedaris: we are fans, we must admit. Not of all of his work, but much of it. We missed the fact that the title of his latest book, set for a June publication date, keeps on changing. Leon Neyfakh at the Observer didn't, and asked Sedaris to please explain. We can't help but sort of adore the fact that Sedaris loves the titles his boyfriend suggests and then, ultimately, rejects them. He should write an essay about that, we think. When You Are Engulfed in Flames sounds apropo to us. It provides magical cover art possibilities, at the very least.
2/22/2008 10:44:06 AM by Sharon | |
Monday, February 11, 2008
We realized long ago that we were not alone in the fact that we loved to hate Modern Love, a New York Times Sunday Style column equal to a 1,700-word cringe-fest. In this week's New York Observer, Doree Shafrir expertly dissects the column and its uncanny ability to breed book deals. “I read the Styles section religiously, but my eyes glaze over the Modern Love column,” said an editor at Random House. “I assume it’s going to be a woman getting over her divorce. But maybe that’s it, it’s like Sex and the City, it’s a stimulus-and-response thing. It speaks to people. It just pushes the right buttons. And somehow that’s validating, to know that other people are suffering, getting divorced, sleep with their colleagues. They’re unabashedly confessional and really voyeuristic. That’s pleasurable for people to read sometimes.”
Despite our unabashed obsession with crappy reality television, we don't find Modern Love very delicious or relatable. But perhaps we're deadened to it after having our buttons pushed by Gilmore Girls reruns and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Perhaps someone with access to BookScan could tell us how all the Love titles are doing now?
2/11/2008 12:34:37 PM by Sharon | |
Monday, February 04, 2008
James Frey is serious about his come-back, so much so that he's jazzing up his forthcoming novel, Bright Shiny Morning, with jacket art by his friend Richard Prince. He's also thinking of going Ira Glass on us, with a book tour that the New York Post's Page Six likens to something that sounds more like a concert tour: "We're talking about having
bands, other authors reading their work. We may try to include some
pyrotechnics," he said with a laugh."
Elsewhere, New York Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner David Car Johnston is pissed about how the Sunday Book Review handled his tome, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves At Government Expense (And Stick You With The Bill). Complaints as noted by Editor & Publisher's Joe Strupp are here, the review in question itself, by Jonathan Chait, is here. Recession arriving in T-minus now? Magazines, in trouble? Why, you don't say. Of course, it's fashion week, when even retail miracles seem possible. Unfortunately, the publishing industry doesn't have an equivalent. Unless you count BEA?
2/4/2008 2:41:03 PM by Sharon | |
Friday, February 01, 2008
Okay, we feel badly for calling out Jezebel about the whole bitter thing -- it's not all the time! it's just about certain stuff! and we understand how they feel because excessive shallowness is annoying! -- but anyway, we are kissing their collective bums over this Friday Fine Lines feature that they've been running for the past while. We've been meaning to tell you about it but neglected to because we have a lot of trouble concentrating on Fridays. So each week, Lizzie Skurnick reviews and discusses the YA books beloved to most girls in their youth. It's the-next-to-most-delicious-thing other than actually sitting down and rereading them. Today's feature is about the brilliant Katherine Patterson's Jacob Have I Loved, which we totally forgot after our recent revived obsession with Judy Blume yet is absolutely one of our favorite, favorite, FAVORITE YA's of all time. How amazing is that cover. We can't even talk about it. LOUISE WAS TOTALLY THE PRETTIER SISTER. We really want to stop off at the BPL, hustle up to the kid's section, borrow it, take it home, and cry about it all weekend. Our heart breaks.
2/1/2008 5:11:37 PM by Sharon | |
This Thursday Styles piece about beauty bloggers and swag is basically just repackages a million-year old story about beauty editors (or fashion editors, or whatever kind of editor) and the swag that they're inundated with on a regular basis. What's funny is the subsequent debate that flared up on Jezebel. Word Up loves the Jezzies but man, they've been bitter lately. We guess yelling at people for jumping on the Juno backlash wagon is okay, but enjoying the idea of playing with make-up as we approach a recession is not? For what it's worth, the impending recession is exactly the sort of thing that makes a lot of girls want to buy themselves cheap lipgloss and chai lattes to help them feel better about life. Delicious books to read while drinking the chai lattes are also in order, which brings us back to the freeloading. We were just imagining how odd and awkward it would be if the publishing industry worked more like the beauty industry does. So, say Elizabeth Gilbert pens another find-yourself-travel-memoir that is set in Hawaii, just for example's sake. And her publicist sends out a few select emails that go something like this: Dear Book Editor, we would like to fly you to Honolulu and give you spa treatments to help you remember your spirit and vibe with Liz's latest message! OMG please come! It's our treat! Yay! Then write about it! And give Liz another hot-30something-blonde spread in the pages of your magazine! Instead of, you know, sending out a galley, and advance praise blurbs and then following up with a comped review copy of the book. Which can also work wonders. Especially if Oprah gets involved. We're quite sure the alternative scheme would never happen. But considering how shallow the publishing industry can be sometimes, we suppose it suffers silently in its own way. Even if the latest chick-lit or lad-lit from whatever major house doesn't come with a free jar of La Mer.
2/1/2008 4:42:37 PM by Sharon | |
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Uh oh. Thirteen people in Turkey were arrested for plotting to kill Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk ( My Name is Red).
What a surprise! Oprah's latest Book Club pick is Eckhart Tolle's self-help tome A New Earth. Congratulations, Eckhart -- please enjoy being the spiritual teacher for this entire nation. Just...ew. From Publisher's Lunch Weekly: Bestselling authors Rory
Freedman and Kim Barnouin's SKINNY BITCH JOURNAL, for publication in early 2009,
and a book adapting the Skinny Bitch message for guys, for publication in fall
2009, again to Jennifer Kasius at Running Press, by Talia Cohen of Laura Dail
Literary Agency (world).
1/31/2008 11:24:03 AM by Sharon | |
Friday, November 30, 2007
Image via the NY Observer
Oh, GOD. Oh god oh god oh god. I have so many conflicting thoughts and emotions swirling over Leon Nefakh's latest 3-page New York Observer profile. It's about Sloane Crosley, a 29-year-old Vintage book publicist who had a collection of personal essays published this past April. First of all, she really does seem geniune and loveable. And yes, I would like to be her friend. But there are secrets beneath the surface:
“She’s a pretty damn genuine person,” said Curbed’s Lockhart Steele, who was a longtime managing editor of Gawker. “[Sloane is unique in this way] especially among media people. You deal with so much bullshit from people and so much bullshit from publicists trying to tell you this is great or this is the next great American novelist.” Ms. Crosley, by comparison, cuts to the chase with editors and writers, and conscientiously tailors her pitches to suit their tastes. In other words, where publicists of all kinds—for movies, books, socialites and dentists—have created a giant wall of noise, Ms. Crosley manages to be heard above the racket, recommending her writers and titles to others with a gentle caress instead of a swift kick.
The first thing I did when I read this was forward it around to some book publicist girls I know, and this is what one of them wrote back: "I felt awful and small and like my hair wasn’t shiny enough." It's true. NOBODY's hair is naturally that shiny! Sloane, what product do you use? Please share. And look up there at her skinny jeans and boots! It makes my heart weep.
But more importantly...
How? In what way? Does she gently caress? Instead of kick? The editors and newspaper people? Who hate being harrassed by publicists? And how? Is she so confident? And How Is It Possible To Not Be Nervous when you're hanging out with Candace Bushnell, and, um, Paula Froelich? As a former book publicist who was kept awake at night wondering whether the hundreds upon hundreds of book editors I called and emailed routinely about my authors would ever get back to me, I am officially obsessed with her life and am desperate to know more. She's like... the Cory Kennedy of literary publicity! Maybe? What do her pitch letters look like? Do they contain magical spells? Is there anyone out there who can forward me one? Tell me everything and more.
11/30/2007 2:44:34 PM by Sharon | |
Monday, November 05, 2007
I just finished Diane Vadino's amazing debut, Smart Girls Like Me, last week. In preparation for the review I've been assigned to write, I Googled around and found her also-amazing and mouth-wateringly delicious fashion-and-shopping blog, Bunnyshop. (Bookmark. This. Now.) For a few days, I've been thinking about all the things I adore about Smart Girls while trying to figure out a way to discuss and justify the fact that it's packaged in a baby-pink cover with a picture of a rack of designer clothing. Because, you know.
What I couldn't understand was why I was forcing myself to care. A good book is a good book is a good book, even if the jacket art suggests something that will probably result in many incorrect snap-judgements. Because while Smart Girls is being marketed toward girls who love In Her Shoes and The Devil Wears Prada, it isn't anything like either of those novels. It's kind of like the fake-Chanel necklace I was staring at on the Forever 21 website today. I'm going to buy it, and I'm going to love it, and wearing it is going to make me exceedingly happy. Still, there will always be someone out there with the real Chanel necklace who thinks I'm a varnished fool. Oh well?
Earlier today, I was catching up on GalleyCat when I found this posting, "Don't Let the Pink Cover Faze You." It establishes just why Smart Girls is neither chick-lit nor "trick-lit," Seth Godin's lit-term-of-the-month.
Trick-lit, according to Godin: "A chick-lit novel that pretends to be something else, hoping to rope people in with an interesting premise. 30 pages later, you discover that you were deceived, that it's just another piece of genre trash." Godin's definition kind of makes my skin crawl. Like, God forbid someone recommends a novel is of a lighter fare than James Joyce! You've been completely HAD! Alert The Paris Review! Have David Remnick revoke this person's library card IMMEDIATELY. Tell NANOWRIMO! They shouldn't be allowed to participate anymore. I could keep going, but I won't.
I'm glad that GalleyCat brought this up, and I think I can write my review now. Perhaps more people will read Smart Girls and realize how lovely and good it is, and that sometimes the best writing can be a story about friendship and New York City and BOYS that someone has always wanted to tell, and is actually very, very astutely observed and witty. I love Diane Vadino so much more now, which is to say, a lot a lot a lot, and mostly that extra dose of lovin' is due to one of the things she said to Ron GalleyCat:
"I don't want to be too serenity prayer about it, but there are things I can control, and things I can't," Vadino said as we sat down to lunch in Brooklyn Heights, shortly after she had returned to New York City from an extended stay in London. "I just don't care anymore. I hate to be reductive about it, but I can choose to be obsessive or I can choose to just let it go."
Yes. Exactly. I'm buying my necklace. And I hope Diane Vadino comes to Boston on her book tour, because I would like to give her a really big, dorky high-five and maybe ask her if she wants to go boot shopping.
11/5/2007 4:52:25 PM by Sharon | |
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
We wish.
Here's the thing, as we are fond of saying when we want to rant about something. We found this week's "Questions For..." very amusing in light of recent now-simmering accusations that Solomon uses certain less-than | |