The LBC gets another writeup, this time from the AP. Check it out, they lead with the “Oprah angle.” Oh, and since my dad didn’t understand my previous post about the LBC, I should clarify: yes, I am a member.
More Litblog Co-op Pub
The Collected Blurbs of Zadie Smith
A small but satisfyingly eclectic batch of blurbs from the pen of Zadie Smith. Prior to today, I don’t think I’d ever seen the phrase “the mutt’s nuts” printed on the back of a book.On Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi – “This is an excellent comic book, that deserves a place with Joe Sacco and even Art Spiegelman. In her bold black and white panels, Satrapi eloquently reasserts the moral bankruptcy of all political dogma and religious conformity; how it bullies, how it murders, and how it may always be ridiculed by individual rebellions of the spirit and the intellect”On Love, Sex & Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives by Simon Goldhill – “It’s great, and great fun… a sparkling, erudite and amusing remedy for our collective historical amnesia”On Dogwalker by Arthur Bradford – “Arthur Bradford’s stories are quite simply the mutt’s nuts: One of the funniest, smartest, tallest writers working in America today.”On The Pharmacist’s Mate by Amy Fusselman “Ms. Fusselman’s book, brief as it is, affected me deeply. Not only that, the talent displayed therein was somewhat unnerving.”On Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by Z.Z. Packer – “The kind of brilliance for narrative that should make her peers envious and her readers very, very grateful.”See Also: The Collected Blurbs of Jonathan Safran Foer, The Collected Blurbs of David Mitchell
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Gabo Gets Back To Work
In late 2004, I received this question from a reader:I’m wondering when the next volume of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s autobiography is coming out – anyone know?At the time I didn’t have an answer, but I instead managed to stumble upon the news, then ricocheting across the Spanish-speaking world, that he had finished a new novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores. (The Millions was, in fact, the first English-language publication to report the news, and that post gave us our first big shot of readers.)Now, however, we have received word that Marquez may be starting in on volume two of his proposed three volume biography. The first volume covered his childhood, and Marquez has said that the second volume may carry us through to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1982. Reporting on the occasion of Marquez’s 80th birthday, the LA Times said:His longtime friend and collaborator Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza said by telephone last week from Portugal that “Gabo,” as Garcia Marquez is known here, is picking up with his memoirs in Paris in the mid-1950s, where his first bestselling volume, Living to Tell the Tale, left off.It’s welcome news for fans, as Marquez “last year gave friends the disappointing news that he had ‘run out of gas’ and was quitting writing. The author was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1999, and after treatment at UCLA Medical Center, he recently was pronounced free of the disease.”As an aside, it was Marquez’s trips to Los Angeles to be treated that gave me the opportunity to meet him in the very early (and slightly embarrassing) days of this blog. (You’ll have to scroll down. I don’t know what I was thinking – How could I not lead that post with Marquez!)
Davy Rothbart is a blogging maniac
Davy Rothbart has taken the Powell’s blog by storm. He’s putting together the next FOUND magazine book (a sequel to the first one), and he’s taken to posting late at night, occasionally whilst drunk. He’s discussed “found” stuff, Scrabble and writing to inmates as well as a number of other topics.
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Google Blogs Books
The folks at Google have set up a blog dedicated to Google Book Search. Google’s plan to digitize the world’s books has been one of the most interesting and controversial publishing industry stories of the last couple of years. Is anyone surprised that it’s Google using a blog to get its side of the story out and not the publishers? Me neither.
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Books in the News
Some news stories that caught my this morning:People come into the bookstore all the time to make lists of books that they want to read. Then they head over to the library to try to find them. Every once in a while a doleful customer will remark that the book that he or she wants to read has an interminable waiting list. From these folks and from personal experience I know that it can be next to impossible to borrow a bestseller from the library. What I didn’t know is that adding your name to those waiting lists inspires libraries to buy more books. As this article describes, a waiting list of 296 people prompted the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan library system to buy 96 copies of The Da Vinci Code. So, signing up for library waiting lists is a way to give a boost to the book industry, even if you never spend a buck.Amazon’s UK site has launched an interesting venue called the Authors’ Lounge. The Authors’ Lounge features video clips of authors talking about their books. Right now they’ve got John Le Carre talking about his new book Absolute Friends as well as several other folks.
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Exclusive: The First Lines of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot
Jeffrey Eugenides became a household name among many readers thanks to Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides. Eight years after Middlesex, Eugenides has quietly become one of the most admired American novelists working today, and it’s likely that many fans are looking ahead to October, when Eugenides’s next novel, The Marriage Plot, is set to be released.
FSG’s catalog copy describes a campus/coming-of-age/love-triangle novel (some may recall the protagonist Madeleine Hanna from an excerpt that was published in the New Yorker in 2010), but the The Marriage Plot‘s first paragraph sets the stage for what may be a very bookish novel, with some serious literary name dropping and a mention of John Updike’s Couples.
To start with, look at all the books. There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters. There were a whole lot of black-and-white New Directions paperbacks, mostly poetry by people like H.D. or Denise Levertov. There were the Colette novels she read on the sly. There was the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in her English honors thesis on the marriage plot. There was, in short, this mid-sized but still portable library representing pretty much everything Madeleine had read in college, a collection of texts, seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test, a sophisticated one you couldn’t trick by anticipating the implications of its questions and finally got so lost in that your only recourse was to answer the simple truth. And then you waited for the result, hoping for “Artistic,” or “Passionate,” thinking you could live with “Sensitive,” secretly fearing “Narcissistic” and “Domestic,” but finally being presented with an outcome that cut both ways and made you feel different depending on the day, the hour, or the guy you happened to be dating: “Incurably Romantic.”
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