LIES!

The jig is up, Barrino. We've never been all that fond of you, but this stuff isn't helping your rep:

1. The AI winner confessed to Kim Green, who ghost-wrote Barrino's biography, Life is Not a Fairy Tale (Simon & Schuster), that she couldn't read or write (or review Green's chapters in progress for accuracy, etc.) When Green brought the info to the publishers and attempted to get herself credited as a co-writer--in order to avoid a nasty situation in which Barrino would be outed as illiterate--they refused. And Green was paid a mere $45,000 to write the book, which is now a NYT non-fic bestseller and became a Lifetime movie. Barrino wouldn't even comp her free tix to her Atlanta show. Bitch!

2. She talks shit about her dad. A whole lot of good that does. Live and learn, Fantasia. And STOP wearing coordinated camo button-downs + newsboy caps. CHRIST. America may have voted, but who the fug is dressing you, Ryan Seacrest??!

We're out.

We’ve never catered to the publishing industry’s mentality that short-story collections are the poor man’s novel. In fact, we often prefer them to bulky bestselling hardcovers, and KELLY LINK’s Magic for Beginners is proof that sometimes a brief glimpse can say more than a 200-page staring contest. Link’s nine tales are a tongue-in-cheek twist on sci-fi genre fiction, and even the New Yorker’s on board with how she skillfully weaves in fantastical snapshots of middle-class America. Zombies and convenience-store clerks both make appearances, and so does Link; she’ll read tomorrow night at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St, Newton | 7:30 pm | free | 617.244.6619.

Mark Z. Danielewski’s debut House of Leaves – with its unsettling text patterns (scrunched letters, upside-down words, sentences that ran diagonal, blank pages, black pages), its unsettling narrator interaction, and, most of all its unsettling – no, terrifying -- image of an ever-expanding blackness -- ranks as one of the most psychically haunting books I’ve read. Sort of a Twin Peaksy horror show, existentionally creepy and unconventional.

Unconventional also describes Only Revolutions, his second novel, just out, which he’ll be rotating – err – reading from tonight. The book starts at both ends. It’s told by two 16 year-old lovers, Hailey and Sam, over the course of a hundred years. Lists of historic events, all suggested by readers of Danielewski’s web site, line the margins of the pages. It’s suggested that you read eight pages one way, flip the book over and around, and read eight pages the other way. I’ve done six rotations, so I’m close to fifty pages into it. And so far, it’s more Leaves of Grass than House of Leaves – exuberant, exultant, with all sorts of language acrobatics. Does the writing warrant the effort? I’m withholding judgment at the moment. But I haven’t stopped rotating yet. And I’m curious to see how Danielewski will handle it tonight, when he reads at 7 pm at the Brookline Booksmith.

Elsewhere:

Danielewski's little sister is Poe, and she made an album to accompany House of Leaves. It's called Haunted.

Yeah, yeah, we know that White Oleander was totally an Oprah’s Book Club read. Can we help loving it? No, we cannot. Not even Oprah can tarnish Janet Fitch's descriptive magic, although this interview with Ms. Winfrey makes us want to hurl. But doesn't Fitch look sort of regal sitting in that high-backed medieval chair?

Anyway, its taken Fitch seven years to give us a follow-up (she scrapped her original second novel, a work of historical fiction, right before publication), but it seems Paint It Black was worth the wait. The novel follows Josie Tyrell — art model, teen runaway, and LA punk-rock groupie — as she falls in love with the wrong boy and gripes with the aftermath. Hear why Ms. Remember Your Spirit Thang got this one right when Fitch reads tomorrow evening at the Boston Public Library, Rabb Lecture Hall, Copley Square, Boston | 6 pm | free | 617.536.5400.

Pink is the new Bitch

Chuck Klosterman:
We want to punch you in the Sasquatch

Oh you! Go do what the Harvard Book Store says:

I. You can throw:

   1. Shiny beads
   2. Dusty post-feminist texts
   3. Prescription-only coke bottle glasses

II. You can go:

1. The Ultimate Indie-Yuppie is in town, and what a nasty piece of work he is:

   a. Chuck Klosterman's latest, Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas, collects his previously printed profiles and trend stories from the past decade as well as more recent opinions on the new shit he deems relevant. But the real surprise to us is that, in the third section, the Chuckster 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. Ask Klosterman why he really quit Spin when he reads tonight.

   b. It's a Harvard Book Store–sponsored event at the Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St, Cambridge | 6 pm | $3 | 617.661.1515.

2. Remember when you read The Women's Room and either threw up and burned it or got really inspired?

   a. We were tried-and-true Sassy fans back in the day, and now we’re utterly devoted Jane subscribers (whether you care or not, now you know), but we can give it up to Bitch for cornering the post-femmy backlash niche. The publication’s founding editors (it’s gone from stapled ’zine to a full-scale mag), Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler, celebrate the anti-Cosmo’s tenth anniversary with Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine, a collection of essays, rants, and raves — some pre-published, others specially commissioned — that probe into pop-culture from a feminist, modern-girl perspective, with pieces ranging from a rundown of sex scenes in lesbian YA novels to a stand-up discussion of female urination.

   b. It’s girl — er, women — power, with a panel discussion titled “Pop Goes the Feminist,” tomorrow night at Harvard Hillel, Beren Hall, 52 Mount Auburn St, Cambridge | free | 800.542.READ.

III. Report back to us via email or comments. We're too busy watching Degrassi: TNG to participate in anything bookish. OMG thanks.

Fenway Recordings, Brookline Booksmith, Houghton Mifflin, and the Phoenix are teaming up to present the Phoenix Author Series, which kicks off next Saturday, September 30, at Great Scott in Allston at 7:30 pm. Southie native Michael Patrick MacDonald, author of All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, and the forthcoming Easter Rising: An Irish American Coming Up from Under, will be the first featured writer. He’ll read and sign before Read Yellow, Jake Brennan, Foreign Island, and Plan DJs take the stage as part of the NEMO Music Festival.

All Souls documented MacDonald’s childhood wrapped up in the criminal class of 1970’s Southie. Of a family of ten siblings, all raised by “Ma” alone, one of his brothers jumped off a building, a sister was pushed off a building and suffered brain damage, another brother was killed in a bank robbery, and one was hanged in a jail cell. MacDonald confronts race and poverty and violence within his family and the neighborhood.

In Easter Rising, he turns the lens towards himself and answers the question “how did you escape it all?” Turns out punk had a lot to do with it.

MacDonald, who lives in Brooklyn now, founded the South Boston Vigil Group, and helped launch Hands without Guns, a gun buyback program, in Boston.

Relax, Tim Gunn, it's just fashion!

Holler! Pardon the semi-sporadic postings up in here. Now that it's fall and Boston is a city again, there's ohsomuch more to do. Of late, we've been buried underneath an imposing stack of press releases that doesn't ever seem to get smaller -- though it does include some delicious upcoming author appearances that we'll obvs let you know about asap. 

Anyway, despite being crazybusy, there's always time for books -- even if we're forced downgrade our storytime to the commercials breaks of MTV's "TWO A DAYS" (utterly fascinating; we're learning so much about football and team spirit and the love of the game) or on the glorious, extremely efficient B line. Sometimes it's a little hard to concentrate on fiction while screaming students nearly claw our hair out in their misguided attempts to get a seat next to that hottie from Boston College with the popped collar who is wearing a flip-flops and socks ensemble (NO AND NO). But we'll manage! And we digress. We almost forgot this wasn't a fashion forum.

Oh wait, yes it is (sort of)!

Hear us out. Tim Gunn is...well, he's the closest thing to a diety that we know of at the moment, and before long, he will share a place on the coffee table in loving proximity to The Fug Awards. Fresh from our Publisher's Lunch Weekly deal round-up is this shining designer nugget:

Lifestyle
Fashion guru on the series Project Runway and the chair of fashion design at Parson's The New School for Design Tim Gunn's first book, TIM GUNN: A Guide to Style, written with Parsons' Kate Moloney, to Tamar Brazis and Susan Van Metre at Abrams Image, for publication in spring 2007.

Can we get a HELL YEAH?!

Also, if any of you six readers would care to share some insights with us in our handily provided comments section, Nina and I would be very pleased and grateful. Especially if you've attended any of the Readings & Signings we try to keep you informed about, or if you applied to that job with Pagan Kennedy, or if you just want to tell us to shut up and stop talking about Laguna Beach. Anything. Really. Please?

Make it work, guys. Carry on! We'll see YOU at Red Lobster, Tim-bo.

Washington Post reporter John Pomfret was one of the first American exchange students to attend Nanjiing University in 1981, and he returned to China eight years later as a journalist, which led him to witness first-hand the blood shed at Tiananmen Square eight years later. His Chinese Lessons: A Journey Between Past and Present is a readable account of modern Chinese history. Fluent in Chinese himself, and having immersed himself in the lives of five former classmates, Pomfret’s descriptions of post-Mao China are aided in part by the personal conversations and diary entries he inserts into the text, but the book’s main draw are the clear-eyed discoveries he makes about both the country and its people. He’ll read tomorrow at the Harvard University Fairbanks Center, 1737 Cambridge St, Cambridge | 12:30 pm | free | 617.495.4570.

"Without speculation there is no good and original observation."

When Rhodes Scholar David Quammen realized he couldn’t cut it as a fiction writer (he did his graduate work on William Faulkner), he got into biology. And by “got into,” we mean he wrote a 702-page prize-winning book called The Song of the Dodo about remote-island biology. It was followed by the 400-plus page Monster of God, a detailed look at the plight of man-eating predators. Now he brings his former subject’s prey into his focus with The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution. Picking up on Darwin’s life post-Beagle voyage, this witty, accessibly written biography is a mere 192 pages. Quammen will read tomorrow at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, 26 Oxford St, Cambridge | 6 pm | free | 617. 495.3045.

Iron Man: Where are the chapter outlines at?

We love it when this sort of thing is regulated to a mere blip in Publisher's Lunch. Way to bury the lead, guys:

"Ghostface Killah may be out $50,000 after he apparently got spooked by a deadline for his memoir. A Manhattan judge has ordered the Wu-Tang Clan member to return his advance when he repeatedly failed to give HarperCollins a manuscript, due in January 2002, The News' Jose Martinez reports. The rapper, who stood to make $200,000 upon delivery, wasn't available for comment."

Pay the thug up, homie. Though I doubt your publicity team over at HarperCollins is at all perturbed by the delay. This is one pitch we're glad we don't have to make.

Below, an opportunity to work with local author Pagan Kennedy in helping promote her latest book -- a piece of non-fiction about the first person to get a male-to-female sex change. I interviewed Pagan about her most recent novel, Confessions of a Memory Eater, and can easily say that this would be an extremely cool gig.

Author Seeks Assitant

Want to learn to how to make a living as an author and journalist?  Want to improve your writing under the mentorship of an experienced author? Don't want to be paid a lot?  Right now I need help promoting my ninth book, which is a biography related to the sciences and gender issues.  The book will be released by a major publisher in March. You will be in charge of the internet promotion of the book; you may also end up helping me research articles for magazines. 

You will need a laptop equipped with an airport card so you can work at my house for about 10 hours a week. This is an internship rather than a job, but I can pay a small monthly stipend.  I will also help you to move your own career forward by giving you amazingly useful tips about how to pitch your ideas to magazines, how to shape your concepts into publishable stories, and/or how to edit your novel so that it captures the fancy of editors. 

Please send your resume and other relevant documents and doohickeys to paganken@gmail.com

Four out of fourteen of the stories in All Aunt Hagar’s Children have already been published in The New Yorker; and no wonder given that Edward P. Jones won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for his first novel, The Known World. That one was set in antebellum Virginia; this collection of short fiction takes place in modern Washington, DC, where his characters struggle to adapt from the routines of the rural south to city life. Jones captures the African-American experience with a wide angle lens -- he writes about the young, the old, male, and female with the same effortless sophistication of tone that leaves no room for overblown sentiment. Hear the highly praised author read from his work tomorrow the Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard St, Brookline | 6 pm | $2 | 617.566.6660.

Grub Street announced its fall schedule recently -- classes start beginning October 10 -- and the classic wisdom from college about picking classes based on the professor as opposed to the subject applies here, too. We'll gush about Grub every chance we get, and it's fair to say that any course or seminar will have a top-notch teacher. But some stand-outs this season include Jami Brandli (screenwriting), Daphne Kalotay (master fiction), and Mike Heppner (fiction I). You'll also find weekend seminars on story construction, creative non-fiction, and breaking into magazines. Register here, or call Grub Street at 617.695.0075. 

Nora Ephron: Rocking the '80s 'do

Q: Can they be friends? A: NO.

We have no idea how many times we’ve seen . . . When Harry Met Sally. Seven? Fifty? Does it matter? Woody Allen may have perfected the romantic comedy, but Nora Ephron revamped the genre into chick-flick status — and there are a million single girls who love her for it. Screenwriter, director, and novelist, Ephron is a triple threat when it comes to conveying the highs and lows of getting older and falling in love. Her new essay collection, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman, is a wry, analysis-free retrospective on her own life, embodying the idea that it’s okay to have hope while acting as if everything were utterly hopeless. She’ll read tomorrow at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard St, Brookline | 6 pm | $2 | 617.566.6660.

UNRELATED (To Literature); HIGHLY RELEVANT TO LIFE:
* SuriWatch 2006: WAY too much hair for a 4 month old. TomKitten, where'd you buy that baby?!

Read This Now

In Jennifer Egan's first novel, Look at Me, it was difficult to identify with 35-year-old Charlotte Swenson, a bitchy, beautiful Manhattan model who’d been disfigured in a car accident, and whose unnerving sense of entitlement was outdone only by her unmendable emotional fractures. That didn’t stop it from being short-listed for the 2001 National Book Award: Egan has a knack for keeping your rapt attention even with the most unlikable of narrators. Danny, the main character of The Keep, is another New York hipster with a bit of an ax to grind. We meet him just as he arrives at a mediæval castle in Eastern Europe, broke and friendless, on the invitation of his psychologically damaged yet supposedly "recovered" cousin. Heavy paranoia and gothic imagery are the obvious hooks, but Egan’s irresistibly modern prose and effortless POV cuts are what will leave you begging for more when she reads tomorrow at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St, Brookline | 7 pm | free | 617.566.6660.

BTdubs, we just finished reading The Keep last night. And we're gonna have to go ahead and call it one of our fave new books this year. It's the ultimate recipe for a delicious read: love, mystery, death, hipsters, prisoners in creative writing classes, and European castles. Do not walk, but run, to the bookstore.

ELSEWHERE:
There's a long list of fantastic reviews over at Jennifer Egan dot com
Enjoy your stay at The Keep hotel