The Four Stories reading series – you remember: four authors; one theme; the Enormous Room – starts up again this fall after a run in Osaka, Japan. Didn’t make those myself; the walk to the elephant-doored Cambridge spot was a little more convenient. The second season opens on September 11 with “A Place Apart II: Tales of Exile and Home, Family and Foreigners.” And reading under that theme will be Chris Castellani, Grub Street’s artistic director, author or The Saint of Lost Things and A Kiss from Maddalena, and all around local writing hero; Scott Heim, who wrote Mysterious Skin and the forthcoming We Disappear; Christine Palamidessi Moore, a writing teacher at BU and author of The Virgin Knows; and Lucy McCauley, whose non-fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Salon.com, and the Los Angeles Times. It starts at 7 pm, and it’s free.

The rest of the schedule, in brief, runs as follows:

September 25, 7 pm: “Hitting the Road: Four Stories features Post Road Writers” with Lise Haines, Richard Hoffman, Randi Triant, and Paul Yoon.

October 10, 7 pm: “Driving Solo: Four Stories presents Grub Street authors on loneliness and love unrequited” with Stace Budzko, Jamie Cat Callan, Mike Heppner, and Ellen Litman,

October 30, 7 pm: “Crime and Punishment: Stories from the Big House” (honoring PEN New England’s Freedom To Write Program), with Helen Elaine Lee, T.J. Parsell, and Jean Trounstine.

November 13, 7 pm: “Friends, Family, and Foes: Tales of the Ties that Bind” with Elisabeth Brink, Jessica Berger Gross, Tracy McArdle, and Karen Propp.

And Four Stories will be back in Japan in December and January.

Gloom patrol: Every Visible Thing lures The Crow fans with its jacket art

Girl next door:
Lisa Carey doesn't need black lipstick to write dark

No matter how you cut it, somewhere between ages 12-18, you’re guaranteed to enjoy at least a couple of “Hell years.” Emotional breakdowns are unavoidable, parental conflicts are routine, and the opposite sex is a confusing, terrifying force to be reckoned with. Lisa Carey, a Boston College grad and author of the much-adored Love in the Asylum, is no stranger to the pitfalls of adolescence. Every Visible Thing, her fourth novel, follows the Furey family as siblings Lena and Owen come of age. And they have more than typical teen angst to contend with, since their older brother’s disappearance and the paralyzing grief that his absence has brought push them and their parents down lonely paths of self-destruction. Carey’s lush prose ensures that we’ll have no choice but to watch it all unfold; she reads Thursday, Aug 31 at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St, Brookline | 7 pm | free | 617.739.6002.

ROADTRIP NATION: A Guide to Discovering Your Path In Life landed in our mailbox last week. Usually we're not big fans of motivational, Chicken Soup for the Young Person's Soul fodder--and the subtitle definitely made us gag. However. RTN is something special. It is a self-help text, but it's more about the how and why and here's how you can do it, too, your own way, than it is about getting across some kind of cheesy catch-phrase.

After college, authors Mike Marriner, Nathan Gebhard, and two of their friends planned an atypical cross-country trip. They drove around in a shitty RV they painted day-glo green, interviewing people they felt had successfully defined their own life paths. These ranged from a Maine Lobsterman to a director of Saturday Night Live to Madonna's chief stylist. They scored meetings, captured everything on film, and took it all down in writing. Once they returned home to Cali, Mike and Nathan were still in debt and no more interested in jumping into a career they hated, despite what they call "the noise," ie, self-inflicted and external pressure to do something that pays the bills but doesn't make you happy. And personal happiness isn't quite overrated. Not yet anyway.

So the two of them finagaled a deal here and a connection there so that they could turn their experiences into a book, a documentary, a TV series, and a grassroots movement that's already visited 100 American college campuses. More info about all of that here.

The PBS documentary premieres on Oct 1 at 11 pm on WGBH-44 (check your listings here), and RTN will be in Boston Sept 25-30 to screen the doc and explain how students can plan their own RTN adventure. Dates and places:

Sept 26: Northeastern University
Sept 27: Boston College
Sept 28: Emerson College

The whole movement is something of a multi-media onslaught, though the book itself, which is mainly comprised of the profiles and interviews, has some real gems. We really liked the profile of Ben Younger, screenwriter and director of the film Boiler Room. He started out as a rising star political campaign manager who intended to go to law school) Younger decided he wanted to work on films, so he quit his job to become a grip. He had no experience:

   "I had quit on a Friday and was supposed to start the film on a Monday, but the film--the only job I had lined up--got canceled. The head grip knew I had quit my job and felt so bad that he brought me on a music video shoot in South Harlem. He, of course, assumed I actually knew something about being a grip, but I really knew nothing. Being on the set was like walking into an operating room and someone hands you a scalpel and says, 'Here, finish the appendectomy.' I barely got through the day, but I loved it. He didn't hire me again, although he became a friend.
   From there I bullshitted my way onto a feature film called Walking and Talking, with Anne Heche and Catherine Keener. That's another thing. I don't want to say go out and lie, but if you have to say whether you're qualified to do something, just say yes. My motto is say yes to everything..."

And cause we're fugging obsessed with Ira Glass, producer and host of This American Life:

"My parents only told me that it was okay not to go to medical school when I was in my  mid-thirties. By then, I already had a national radio show. Throughout my entire twenties, my parents thought every choice I was making was horrible. My dad would try to listen to All Things Considered and just hated it."

We're psyched for the PBS series, a 12-part half-hour show based on the idea of the original docu. With any luck it'll be a sort of traveling version of American High. Read more excerpts from the book here and here. Also, NPR's Day to Day has a cool interview with up about the Road Trippers here.

Young Catherine Earnshaw: The Kristen Cavalleri of
Yorkshire Moors: The Real Victorian England

Emily Brontë has a powerful heart of darkness

Via Blog of a Bookslut:

Jaemie Gallie of the Yorkshire Post reports that Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë's classic Victorian love story, is being adapted into a comic. Yorkshire-based poet and playwright Adam Strickson wrote the book. It's illustrated by Siku, one of the UK's leading graphic artists, who has worked for Marvel comics and 2000AD. The comic will be released next month as part of the Radical Brontës Festival.

"'I think the book is great,' said Mr Strickson. 'The visualisations are wonderful and I think Heathcliffe and Cathy are a bit sexier and sleeker than intended in the book but that is the style with this sort of thing."

Hmmm. Lascivious Heathcliff and Cathy cartoons? Er, we're not usually purists, but something about that feels...wrong. Oh, and yes, we cried at the end of the book, mmkuh?  Judge us if you must, but just LOOK:

"You teach me how cruel you've been -- cruel and false. Why do you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry, and wring out my kisses and tears; they’ll blight you -- they'll damn you. You loved me -- then what right had  you to leave me? What right -- answer me -- for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery, and degradation and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart -- you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine."

God. It's so good. Dialogue like that shouldn't be squeezed into a tiny cartoon talking bubble. 

RELATED:
File under WTF!!!: MTV's movie-musical version of Wuthering Heights, starring Erika Christensen and Mike Vogel, with an Aimee Osbourne cameo?! NO to the infinity. High School Musical has our forever approval, but not this. Never this.

The venerable Ploughshares just released its 100^th issue, and did so almost entirely sans fanfare. The 35 year-old literary magazine opted against a best-of retrospective or a compilation of essays by past guest editors. Instead, it’s business as usual for the Emerson-based, Plough-and-Stars-founded journal. Ron Carlson is the issue’s guest editor, and the volume includes fiction by western-tough Pam Houston (whose short story collection Cowboys Are My Weakness is an old fave), Ann Hood, Gish Jen, Alan Cheuse, and Tim Schell, among others. On the Ploughshares website, active links on the current issue’s table of contents page are changed daily.

Marisha Pessl: Hot & High-Rollin'

Book critics and the lit bloggers are all a-buzz over the huge cash advance Marisha Pessl was paid for her debut, Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Despite what most agree is a disappointing, rocky start, the novel blooms into an addictive, Nobokov-esqe (and god knows Word Up will sink its teeth into anything Nabokovian--seriously, anything) thriller about a boarding school with a sinister past. Comparisons to Donna Tartt’s excellent The Secret History (another fave) are well-justified, and the Jonathan Safran Foer references (Nina hearts JSF, but we've grown bored of his wunder-kid status--bring on the fresh meat!) make sense, too. Pessl employs a series of (some might say gimmicky) narrative tricks to spellbound readers, and she’s the latest doe-eyed literary marvel to watch. Go see her tomorrow night at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Ave, Brookline | 7 pm | free | 617.566.6660.

Now that our BFF Ash is wasting away, we feel a new girl-crush on Marisha coming on...

ELSEWHERE:
* NYTBR: "Whoever coined the phrase 'everybody loves a winner' probably wasn’t one. When the news came out that a distractingly pretty actress, playwright and Barnard College graduate named Marisha Pessl, only 27, had sold her first book (which she also illustrated)...for a substantial sum, the pick-a-little, talk-a-little publishing blog brigade went into conniptions."
* Salon: "Special Topics, for all its overeager freshman infelicities, is a real novel, one of substance and breadth, with an arresting story and that rarest of delights, a great ending."
* The Globe: "Part mystery, part suspense, and part psychological drama, this is, at its heart, a book about relationships--both real and imagined--and the desperate need to belong."

Chuck Klosterman: The Ultimate Indie-Yuppie

Ugh, Chuck Klosterman. You're a good writer, you're super-successful, you started out as a nerdy nobody, and you're more obsessed with the minutae of pop-culture ephemera than anyone on earth. We admire all of that. So why do we find you so fucking annoying? It's a dilemma, truly. 

We hear that the author of New York Times bestseller Sex, Drugs, and Coco Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, will speak about his new release, Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Danerous Ideas, at the Barnes & Noble at Boston University on Monday, September 25th, at 1 p.m. Following the program he will sign copies of his books.

Is he really "the new Hunter S. Thompson?" People says so, but they also put Britters on the cover every other week. Could he be "the reigning Kasparov of pop culture wits-matching?" Apparantly, according to The San Francisco Chronicle. "One of America's top cultural critics!" shrieks the mavens at Entertainment Weekly. Word Up doesn't have much of a taste for his books, but his sharp commentary in the NYTM and Esquire are usually to our liking. We had fun reading this piece about DJ Dangermouse, and this one about SoaP.

So here's the surprise factor: Chuck Klosterman IV comrpises a selection of Mr. Pop-Culture Ironic Anti-Hero Man's profiles and trend stories of the past decade in its first part. Part II is his opinions on new shit. Blah blah. In Part III, the Chuckster actually tries his hand at FICTION WRITING. Remember, that deals with actual emotions and character psychology, not just the finer points of the history of The Real World! (Which, to be frank, totally has it's own merit.) If we don't wind up enjoying his short stories, though, we hope the raving Klostie fans out there won't tell us to go die. *Hides* 

We're scared. And also ridiculously intrigued. Anyone spot Chuck in a fiction writing workshop lately?

Hey hi, did you miss us? The internerd at Phoenix HQ was all crazy and unreliable through the end of last week. Thank Christ the www is just a series of tubes. Rest easy, everything's fixed now. Here's an interesting bit from the inbox:

Via Publisher's Marketplace:

Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal looked at books that come with soundtracks--sometimes formally packaged with the book, sometimes informally posted on the web. "The idea is that as they read, people can listen to music that matches the mood of the books. In some cases, the songs are mentioned in the books themselves; in others, the lyrics mirror themes or plot points."

James Patterson spent $100,000 commissioning a CD for one of his Maximum Ride titles, and 100,000 cds were sent to radio stations and given away as promos.

One bellwether site: "One byproduct of the book soundtrack trend has been the transformation of a grassroots music blog into a coveted marketing slot for authors like Mr. Ellis and Mr. Klosterman. The blog, called Largehearted Boy, features a running series called 'Book Notes.' About once a week, an author of a recent book posts a list of songs that inspired the work or that readers might want to listen to as they turn the pages."

We'd link you directly to the WSJ article, but the squares over there don't like giving away any of their content for free. No matter--we heart the idea of book soundtracks and wish more novels (aside from James Patterson fodder) came with a compilation CD. It reminds us of the mixtape Charlie made in one of our fave YA books of all time, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky. Written in letter-form, Perks is sort of an update on The Catcher in the Rye, though Charlie is nowhere near as entitled as Holden. Charlie is intelligent, shy, introspective, and an old-soul-type whose correspondence to an anonymous stranger takes on the intimate qualities of a journal. It's beautiful and sad and one of the best modern coming-of-age stories this half of Word Up has ever read, so there!

People either love it or hate it (there are over a thousand reviews posted on its Amazon.com page), though usually they love it. Each time we reference this book in conversation, someone owns up to copying Charlie's mix. We have yet to attempt it, though it'd probably create the perfect atomosphere for a reread. 

Here's the tracklist:

Asleep by the Smiths
Vapour Trail by Ride
Scarborough Fair by Simon & Garfunkel
A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum
Time of No Reply by Nick Drake
Dear Prudence by the Beatles
Gypsy by Suzanne Vega
Nights in White Satin by the Moody Blues
Daydream by Smashing Pumpkins
Dusk by Genisis
MLK by U2
Blackbird by the Beatles
Lanslide by Fleetwood Mac
Asleep by the Smiths

Sountrack to your favorite book? Commentary welcome.

A criminal lawyer who moonlights as a beer scribe? We feel as if we could trust Andy Crouch to impart real knowledge on subjects like the Constitution and hops. Two themes, in fact, that segue flawlessly into The Good Beer Guide to New England. Here, nearly 100 pubs, bars, and breweries are wittily profiled and rated with the kind of diligence found in the most conscientious of booze hounds. You’ll feel so much more refined if you’re stumbling home after a few pints of Lindemans Pêche Lambic instead of that 30-rack of Natty Ice. Let Attourney Crouch explain how to appreciate a good cold one tomorrow night at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St, Newton | 7:30 pm | free | 617.244.6619.

ELSEWHERE:
* Andy's drunken home on the interweb: The Beer Scribe
* Andy's super official day job: The Law Offices of Andrew S. Crouch

"When people start writing there is this idea that you have to get everything right first time, every sentence has to be perfect, every paragraph has to be perfect, every chapter has to be perfect, but what you're doing is not any kind of public show, until you're ready for it. There is a kind of mysticism to writing. Every kind of book I've written has been written in a different way. There has not been any set time for writing, any set way, I haven't re-invented the process every time but I almost have. I enjoy the freedom of the blank page. You have to respect the mysticism of writing; you're always going to learn things that will work subconsciously and stuff that won't. You can't tear yourself apart with it either. If you become too self-conscious about it, it shows up in the work, so you've got to enjoy it as well."

A few weeks ago we gave you the heads up that Irvine Welsh would be rolling into town to promote his latest, The Bedroom Secrets of Master Chefs. Your obligatory reminder, since he's a literary supastar, and also, we'd hate for you to miss it just so you can sit home and wait for the hella anti-climactic Real World finale. He'll be at the Coolidge Corner Theatre tomorrow night at 6 pm and tix are only 2 bucks. Reserve them over the phone (617.566.6660) or buy them at the Brookline Booksmith. If you wind up going, please let us know how many f-bombs or c-words Welshy drops. And we'll let you know if Svetlana gets smacked in the face.*

*Editor's note: OMFG how could we have messed that up?! Real World is on tonight. Tomorrow night is the friggin awesome to the max premiere ep of Laguna Beach: Season 3. Welshy or Cali dramarama x 1000?!! Sigh.

Sick of the endless Snakes on a Plane hype? Us neither! Which is why you really ought to spend your morning learning everything possible about Snakes on a Book.

"They say you cannot judge a book by its cover, but what if your summer read is bound in snakeskin?

Most people would not relish opening a book wrapped in cobra or python skin, especially with the summer’s big movie Snakes On A Plane expected to remind us that snakes are one of the animal kingdom’s least popular critters."

Oh, but there's more. Who wouldn't want a copy of William S. Burrough's The Wild Boys bound in Niger goat and snakeskin and signed by the author himself? It only costs $17,500! Chump change, friends. Or perhaps we might interest you in A Romance of Destiny by the estimable Oliver Wendell Holmes. That sounds like classic freshman core cirriculum reading -- and you can be the envy of all the pretentious English majors in class when you rifle through your delightful edition, wrapped in the skin of a fucking PYTHON by a "master bookbinder" called Hazel Dreis. $2,100: so worth it!!!

ELSEWHERE:

As if you don't know how to find SOAP on the Interwebber?! Lolz, guys.

This isn’t about books or authors or the practice of writing. Thanks goes to Adam Reilly for passing along this piece in the L.A. Times. In it, Claire Hoffman spends some time with Joe Francis, the guy behind the “Girls Gone Wild” empire. Without question one of the most sickening and powerful pieces of journalism I’ve read in a long, long time. Damning isn’t the word.

Read it here: Baby, Give Me A Kiss by Claire Hoffman. And read the whole thing.

In April, 2005, a contest was announced. People ages 20 to 29 were invited to submit non-fiction essays on any subject to Matt (used to love C&C Music Factory!) and Jillian (went to three NKOTB shows!), two twentysomething editorial assistants at Random House. The blue-ribbon essay would earn the author a quick $20,000, and it, along the running-up essays would be included in an anthology published by Random House.

The resulting collection, Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers will be released later this month. The press release, which came to Word Up with an advanced copy of the book, references Skeletor, slap bracelets, and POGS, as well as the musical predilections of the two editors. This is what we consumed! This is who we are! But it goes without saying that we’re self-aware enough to know we amount to more than our iPod playlists and our choice in sneakers!!!

It didn’t bode well, and it didn’t get me particularly amped up to see what my contemporaries are up to. Irony, of course, isn’t dead. But for those of us born between ’77 and ’86, irony bred with cynicism and the offspring was snark. And from the Twentysomething release, I figured that’s what the collection would be. An anthology of blog posts, from ours, a generation of snark.

Fortunately, the essays aren’t all in-jokes and snide appraisals. In fact, for the most part, the work is earnest, honest, and well-written. Jennifer Glaser writes about her sex life with her dying boyfriend in “Sex and the Sickbed.” in “Live Nude Girl,” Kathleen Rooney (the one author representing Massachusetts in the anthology), tells about her career as a nude artists’ model. The piece begins: “I am twenty-five years old, five foot eight, 110 pounds, with huge dark eyes and long dark hair, and I look totally fucking amazing naked.” In “Rock My Network,” Theodora Stites falls back on the you-are-who’s-in-your-network idea, documenting her electronic social climbing through MySpace, Friendster, Second Life, and Dodgeball. “I honestly don’t know why anyone wants to socialize in person anymore,” she writes. “It’s so difficult to concentrate on talking to just one person at a time.” It feels shallow in comparison to the rest.

The first-place winner hasn’t been announced, but if we had to bet, we’d go with Kyle Minor’s outstanding, engrossing essay called “You Shall Go out with Joy and Be Led Forth with Peace” which deals with brutality, hopelessness, and the non-existence of miracles. It’s the opening chapter of a memoir he’s working on, and Minor also edits a lit journal called The Frost Proof Review, and placed second in the 2004 Atlantic Monthly student fiction contest. We’ll let you know if he takes first place in this contest when we find out. The collection is worth getting for his essay alone, but taken as a whole, it’s a propitious look at writers coming of age right now, and it's a pleasant surprise.

Screwed over by passion, saved by alcohol: Newtonville has another cathartic double billing of deliciously dysfunctional fiction for the sulkies and sensies. First up is Jami Attenberg and her debut novel, Instant Love, which is about a group of young woman whose love lives are more unpredictable than Paris Hilton’s. J. R. Moehringer follows with The Tender Bar, a memoir about his fatherless upbringing in Manhasset, New York, a place rich in both pubs and abandonment metaphors. Find yourself a lonely stranger and sob in synch tomorrow night for a Books & Brews event at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St, Newton | 7:30 pm | free | 617.244.6619.

ELSEWHERE:
* Check out overwhelmingly positive reviews of The Tender Bar on Metacritic
* Jamie Attenberg's super cool blog: whatever-whenever.net

The author of YA fave Bad Girls, Alex McAuley, has a new fluff book out this month: Summer Love. MTV film execs are dying to cast Avril Lavigne and Kristen Cavalleri opposite each other on the film adaptation of the novel. McAuley's sums up the title on her website:

"It's Laguna Beach meets Cape Fear when a rich girl from California confronts murder and isolation on North Carolina's stormy Outer Banks."

The buzz from an MTV mole:

"It is not a done deal, but there is some serious buzz building over here about it. The MTV execs seem really invested in making Avril a movie star, and feel that Kristin owes them (our guess around here is that Avril is way more into this project than Kristin)."

Of course Av's more into it. She's an old married lady now, remember? Kristen still has to live down her heinous UPN show "Get This Party Started."

Um, can we pre-order tickets to Summer Love this far in advance?

From the author of Mystic River comes a collection of tales no cheerier than his intense portrait of crime drama in working-class Dorchester. Whether Dennis Lehane's characters are buckling under the strain of class resentment, cheating on their spouses, or choosing money over reconciliation, Coronado: Stories (five shorts and a two-act play) is yet another brutal glimpse into lives perpetually wrecked by violence and always touched by tragedy. Bring your frowny face and lust for noir when Lehane recites their sob stories tomorrow night at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St, Newton | 8 pm | free | 617.244.6619.

ELSEWHERE:
* Just call him Professor Lehane - The Globe's gossips report Dennis has joined the faculty of the low-res MFA program at Pine Manor College in Chesnut Hill. Perhaps he'll bring Bennifer 2.0 by as guest speakers. Enroll now.

How'd we miss this? On Wednesday The Guardian UK ran Lionel Shriver's infuriating diatribe on "vapid" computer-generated book covers. While we're not familiar with the author's work, we've decided to pre-judge and say that we pretty much hate her already. Especially for lines such as these:

Oh BULLY for you. What the fug kind of a girl's name is Lionel, anyway?

As luck would have it, there's a heated argument going on in the comments section of this article. One made us very happy:

"The thing that makes a book designers life a living hell is authors thinking they can do our job for us. Most times you will find that the author and publisher have in fact not briefed the designer properly. They will not have passed on the message that the author feels strongly about having an 'illustrated' cover."

Preach!

When we worked in publishing, the in-house designers at our company slaved nights, weekends, and many over-time hours to please authors who, upon suddenly growing massive, canyon-sized egos due to the fact that they were about to become "published," thought it appropriate to dictate to a professional how a marketable book should look. Sometimes, like old lady Shriver here, they'd even draw their own covers and submit them for approval. NO. No, no, no.

MEMORANDUM: To any author (seasoned, newbie, or otherwise) about to enter the marketing/publicity process: Kindly trash your romantic notions about delicate, Henri Rousseau-inspired watercolor paintings as dust jackets--along with your dreams of having Oprah shout in your ear about your overpowering narrative skill on Book Club Day. People don't want to buy novels with covers that closely resemble the ugly-ass free art calendar their grandmother gave them for Christmas. We don't, at any rate. Happy Friday!

Love and other indoor sports,
Word Up

"Ashima never thinks of her husband's name when she thinks of her husband, even though she knows perfectly well what it is. She has adopted his surname but refuses, for propriety's sake, to utter his first. It's not the type of thing Bengali wives do. Like a kiss or caress in a Hindi movie, a husband's name is something intimate and therefore unspoken, cleverly patched over."

It's our general feeling that movies based on books never quite measure up. That's probably because we're book nerds. Not film nerds. Even so, there's something about this trailer for Jhumpa Lahiri's best-selling tour de force The Namesake that gave us a little chill down our spine when we watched it -- and that's saying a lot, considering it's a thousand degrees and counting outside. We feverishly enjoyed The Namesake (if you're first-generation in your family, as this half of WU is, this book is an absolute must-read). And we're zealots when it comes to each and every tale in Interpreter of Maladies. There's a reason why a short-story collection won a Pulitzer Prize: it's honestly THAT good. You guys probably already knew that. Lahiri got her MFA at BU, and many of the pieces in Maladies take place right here in our fine city. Live it, love it.

Maud Newton tipped us off to this Tube'd version of the trailer. It's visually arresting, no doubt (and holler, Kumar looks damn good when he's not at White Castle) but the insane emotional weight of Lahiri's words is what makes this thing. She's a wizard at understated dialogue. Perhaps The Namesake will actually match the beauty of the novel, perhaps not. We just hope that even more people pay due attention to Lahiri. She's still quite a young writer and has many surprises in store, we think.

ELSEWHERE:
* Listen to "This Blessed House," one of the best stories in Interpreter of Maladies, read on NPR's This American Life
* Read the first story from the collection: "A Temporary Matter", via The New York Times
* Listen to an interview with Lahiri on WHYY's Fresh Air, in which she discusses The Namesake
* Read a lovely excerpt from The Namesake

This half of Word Up is a little bit consumed with the whole Harry Potter...everything. And we're having serious withdrawal issues this summer since there's no 19438328289 lb. new book to carry around and sink our teeth into. Really, we EAT Harry Potter books. They taste like crumpets. With jam. Jolly good!

One of our fellow HP-lovin' BFFs tipped us off to this CNN article: At a fundraiser on Tuesday, authors John Irving and Stephen King begged J.K. Rowling not to kill off Harry Potter in the next and final installment of the series. For anyone out there who hasn't yet discovered the series, read that far, or lives in a desolate region where media is not available, we won't completely spoil the big surprise of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, in which a beloved, major character was offed. However, we will say -- because it's so obvious -- that rumors have been swirling that Harry's next up on the chopping block. Fans are growing anxious and depressed. Rowling, of course, has made it all into some big "life lesson." Are you gonna be laughing about poor Harry on your way to the bank, biatch? Cause we'll be sobbing. Hysterically. For weeks.

"'When fans accuse me of sadism, which doesn't happen that often, I feel I'm toughening them up to go on and read John and Stephen's books,' she said. 'I think they've got to be toughened up somehow. It's a cruel literary world out there.'"

That's not at all comforting, J.K. And don't condescend. We know it's harsh, we just don't LIKE it. All we want is to see Harry marry Ginny and Hermione marry Ron so they can all get knocked up and spawn The Next Generation of Howgarts (Harry Potter: TNGH). Oh, and make it a double wedding. But classy. With The Weird Sisters -- played in the Goblet of Fire film by Johnny Greenwood and Phil Stelway of Radiohead; Jarvis Cocker and Steve Mackey of Pulp; and electronic artist Jason Buckle -- presiding as house band. Visions of the happy couples rocking out to "Do the Hippogriff," all grown up and triumphant and NOT DEAD...OMG please let it happen. Make it work, J.K. Or you'll be responsible for putting thousands of children on MAOI inhibitors next summer. And that's really gonna piss off Cruise.

RELATED:
Daniel Radcliffe Bares All

The United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) monitors both the number and type of books published per country per year. In 2005, the US shelved 172,000 new books. We only came in second to the UK, which printed a total of 206,000.

With numbers like that it's no surprise to anyone -- especially struggling writers -- that landing a book deal, or even just scoring an agent, has gotten harder than debuting a number one pop single without ever having released a record. It helps if you're as cute as Lily Allen. But most unpublished fiction writers we know (ourselves included) are perpetually exhaustinated, malnourished, and pasty. We avoid contact with fresh air and sunshine and other humans in favor of the warm glow MS Word v. 6.0 emits on our laptop. Just livin life, ya'll.

Since we're always staring at a computer screen, we were thrilled to learn via handy press release that the relationship of writers to publishers is being TRANSFORMED by a little thang called electronic mail. The release, courtesy Publishersandagents.net:

"At one time, a new book author had to go through an agent to sell a book to a major publisher. But now with e-mails and a compelling query, writers with a good story have been able to break through and achieve major deals...It's an approach that has been changing the relationship between writers and publishers, connecting them directly or helping writers find agents to close the deal with already interested publishers."

That was a convulted way of saying that P&A.net is one of many companies that sends out mass email pitch queries to agents and publishers for a subscription fee. They also offer special tools and tricks to beefing up your query letter and getting your manuscript read and reviewed, rather than tossed in to the slush pile or trashed as spam. Well, we used to work in publishing, and the other assistant in our office would sometimes forward us horrible pitch letters that we would giggle over during our five second lunch break. So it's true that a smart query can make a difference in getting treated like a professional -- even if your actual manuscript is terrible. There are horrible books being published every day. We know. We read them in airports and buy them at the supermarket for kitch value.

If you head over to P&A.net's extremely meta website that looks like something out of AOL's Hometown Member pages circa 1997 (who needs spell-checker when you've got 15 pt Tahoma fonts?), you can read testimonials from over 150 clients who claim to have either found a publisher or gained an agent from this service.

NANOWRIMO is four months away, and like we do every year, we torture ourselves into thinking we're actually going to give it a shot come November 1st. Realistically speaking we'll probably just wind up trying to send out a short story or two so that we can collect the rejection letters in a shoebox to show our grandchildren when we want to prove we were once exciting and creative in our youth. Bottom line, though, is we want to be published. We're also poor as hell and can't afford P&A's subscription-only magic. Plus, we like masochistic, large projects that consume vast quantities of our time. So we've decided to compile a list of free resources that'll have you on your merry way to proofing galleys at the local coffee shop. Those trustafarians scribbling in their painstakingly decorated journal-notebooks are so gonna wish they were you. Oh, and leave a comment if you think we're missing something important, because there's a shitton out there and we're still new at this, too. 

1. Poets & Writer's Magazine: Links to 429 literary magazines where you can send poems and short stories, as well as 156 small presses that are likelier to entertain unsolicited pitches from unknown or unpublished authors.
2. The Council of Literary Magazines and Small Presses (CLMP).
3. New Pages' handy Guide to Literary Magazines. Read as many as you can, and send your work to those that share the aesthetic of your voice, your subject, and your style. They're all looking for something different, which means you should tailor your submissions to the magazines that want exactly what you've already done.
4. Better yet, New Pages' Guide to Online Literary Magazines. Start here and work your way up to print -- online lit mags are well-respected and just as widely read (if not more so -- free content?!) as print mags. And many of them submit to Best Of collections -- which means, if an online mag prints your work, you're in the running.
5. Grub Street: More links to literary and press guides, as well as info on New England writer's residences, local mags calling for submissions, and upcoming contests. The fall class schedule at Grub St. should be up in a few weeks here.
6. Good god, we heart Ploughshares, Emerson College's esteemed literary journal. They're tough to crack, but if you're a local, you've got to send here. They might even get back to you with a personalized rejection letter (seriously, that's cool). Or, they could accept your work, which would give you enormous bragging rights forever and ever and ever.
7. And holy shit we're totally obsessed with Zoetrope: All-Story, too. Reach for your dreams!
8. Keeping up with Publisher's Weekly, the industry's trade magazine standard for news and pre-pub reviews, is a great way to find out more about current literary trends in case you're sitting on something you can tailor to the demands. It's not necessarily worth the subscription fee, but the Web Exclusives still allows you to access most reviews, as well as the PWJobZone. Working in the industry can only help you learn the ins and outs of how to get published.
9. So You Wanna: Publish a Book, Publish a Short Story, Publish a Poem: Obvious yet simple. Step-by-step instructions to doing each of these things.
10. Subscribe to Publisher's Lunch (run by Publisher's Marketplace), a daily e-mail newsletter that publishes deal news, trends, job opportunities, and industry coups: PublishersLunch-subscribe@topica.com
11. Atlantic Monthly's comprehensive list of Boston publishers and media is a good resource for local publishers to pitch to, not to mention internship opportunities if you're still in school.
12. Neil Gaiman runs a much beloved author blog, and he has some wise suggestions and a bevy of links on this post, which answered a reader's query last January.
13. MediaBistro: Excellent, heavily updated content on everything that has anything to do with publishing -- media, books, the works. And you don't need to be an AvantGuild member to learn.
14. Don't count on Craig's List: $850 for a short story? Is this f'reals?
15. Start a blog, get a book deal. We'll be waiting for that phone call.