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 | Comments [0] |  

Oh, we love oddly theme magazine issues. MediaBistro's GalleyCat alerted us to the fact that the literary magazine Barrelhouse is seeking your best roller derby writing for an upcoming issue. Some details to bear in mind:

Barrelhouse wants: "Fiction, essays, poems, whatever you got. Barrelhouse will select one winner who will receive original art created by Cory Oberndorfer, a genuine roller derby artist. Finalists will be published in our Very Special Roller Derby Section, which will be included in our next print issue."

Barrelhouse will give: "The one we like best (aka, "The Winner") will recieve original artwork from Cory Oberndorfer, who creates (among other things) roller derby related art. Cory's piece will take it's inspiration from your work. This essentially means that you will become immortalized in two formats: your roller derby writing will appear in the pages of Barrelhouse, and will also be celebrated in or serve as inspiration for Cory's work. Which will also be the cover of the next issue of Barrelhouse. So essentially we're offering to make you a stone cold Mona Lisa style roller derby literary god or goddess whose roller derby writing will live on for all eternity. Other stuff that we like will appear in the Very Special Roller Derby Section, thus making it's authors a form of lower deities."

Barrelhouse asks: That your submission be spanking-new! "Sorry, no previously published work" will be accepted.

Go here for more submission info and further details. Literary Derby Dames, take note!

1/29/2008 4:09:10 PM by Sharon | Comments [0] |  

Since nobody is reading anything anymore except text-messages and blogs, then we guess it shouldn't matter which books make you smart and which make you dumb, at least according to this guy (link via Blog of a Bookslut). We prefer literature to statistics. After puzzling over this chart for a very long ten minutes, we still don't fully understand it or this list, which is supposed to explain the graph. Back to our lunchtime sandwich companion reading, currently Love in a Time of Cholera. We delight in it. Gabriel Garcia Marquez never fails to satisfy.

1/29/2008 3:12:39 PM by Sharon | Comments [0] |  

The New York Times has an interesting essay in their Sunday Book Review about how Elie Weisel's Night became a best-seller... again.

1/23/2008 2:18:10 PM by Sharon | Comments [0] |  

An interesting little literary roundtable of sorts happened in our corner of the Phoenix HQ today. We were discussing our fondness for a story in The New Yorker's winter fiction issue by Anne Enright, called "Natalie." Nina MacLaughlin (the other half of Word Up) and our colleague Adam Reilly, however, had recently read Enright's 2007 Booker Prize winning The Gathering. Despite both admitting that they sped through the book -- Adam even said he stayed up late nights finishing it -- each came away disappointed, and somewhat unsatisfied.

The reason we liked "Natalie" so very much was because we were entranced by how the narrator discovered things about herself through her bad-to-worse, awkwardly forced relationship with the title character. Often, we think, people like Natalie can bring about certain revelations about the type of individual you are, and the type of individual you can never be. There is an inherent beauty and free-fall in that discovery, and that is what the story meant to us. Plus, the photo (see above) that The New Yorker chose to accompany the piece was utterly perfect. For us, it evokes the same feelings the story does: loss, desolation, exhilaration, fear, lust, the world at your feet with nothing and everything to lose.

We are about to approach The Gathering, then, with all of these thoughts in mind, but we wondered whether Anne Enright was as polarizing to anyone else's little world as it was to ours. Tell us, if you like.

1/10/2008 5:53:52 PM by Sharon | Comments [0] |  

We were broken for a little while, but we're back, and happy to be here!

So here's the thing. We wrote about this book, Gothic + Lolita, a little while ago, but we're still kind of obsessed with it. It sits on our desk and we stare at the pictures when we're supposed to be writing about other things. Phaidon puts out the coolest shit, don't they? Click here for Radar's lengthy and fantastical excerpt.

1/9/2008 5:12:38 PM by Sharon | Comments [0] |