Faced with a stark choice – where to buy books in New York congressional district 8 – I have decided to endorse my new employer, the Housing Works Used Bookstore & Cafe. As any American who’s attended a reading or browsed the shelves at HWUBC’s SoHo location knows, the store is a home away from home for bibliophiles. Better still, all of the store’s profits go to Housing Works, a nonprofit that supports homeless New Yorkers living with HIV. Recently, Housing Works has entered the online book business. So this election season, if you want a candidate who will protect your pocketbook while working for social change, look no further than the Housing Works page at half.com. I’m Garth Risk Hallberg, and I approved this message.
“This Election Season…”
R.I.P. & O.M.F.U.G.
“A lot of the book business is timing,” editor Buzz Poole remarked Monday night. If that’s true, the launch party for CBGB: Decades of Graffiti represented some kind of weird cosmic collision. On one side of a wall, in CB’s 313 Gallery, ex-Voidoid (and novelist) Richard Hell, who penned the introduction, held court for friends and book-buyers and for the camera crew that’s been following him around for a week. On the other side, in the original CBGB, legendary hardcore act Bad Brains was warming up for a blistering reunion set.Through what Hell calls the “stunning and stunningly effective inertia” of club owner Hilly Kristal, CBGB has lately become a kind of meta-club: both itself and a tribute to itself. This week, Mark Batty Publisher releases a handsome document of the CBGB’s densely inked walls; next week, rumor has it, those walls get dismantled and shipped to Vegas, where Kristal plans to reopen the dump. Punk is dead. Long live punk.
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HarperCollins BlogHer Follow Up
Following up on my recent post about HarperCollins teaming with the BlogHer women’s blog network, I received from clarifications from HarperCollins on the nature of the arrangement. As I noted, HarperCollins is sponsoring “virtual book tours,” making review copies of several books available for bloggers in the network to read and review “and participate in book title discussions on their own blogs and on BlogHer.org.”I had also noted that BlogHer runs an ad network, and said that “it doesn’t appear as though HarperCollins will be buying ads through the network, but if that does happen, then this initiative will have crossed a line.” It turns out that I missed the point. The whole thing is an above board ad campaign from HarperCollins with no real editorial involvement in what BlogHer members write or don’t write about the books.HarperCollins wrote me today to say that the arrangement is purely a branded sponsorship. HarperCollins is getting to promote and advertise its books, but it’s up to the bloggers decide if they want to discuss the books. BlogHer’s editors, meanwhile, have no involvement in the tour in any way, nor do they endorse the selected titles. It was also pointed out to me that the virtual book tour will never appear on the BlogHer home page, which is reserved for editorial content, but it will be promoted in an ad. HarperCollins also stressed to me that BlogHer is very sensitive about its editorial integrity, and both sides see this feature as a branded sponsorship, rather than a stamp of editorial approval from BlogHer on HarperCollins books.And, now that this has all been cleared up, I think it’s a pretty creative way for a publisher to build a presence in the world of blogs. I’m curious to see how successful it turns out to be.
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TV book club goes farther afield
As TV book clubs fall by the wayside in terms of the public’s interest, the “Today Show” club appears willing to make some more off-beat, interesting selections. The most recent pick, chosen for the club by Walter Mosley, is Graceland by the Nigerian Chris Abani. The book, about a Nigerian Elvis impersonator trying to survive in the urban desolation of Lagos, has been out nearly a year – it was well-reviewed but not a big seller – yet it will get a second life thanks to this selection. Here’s an excerpt.
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In the Trees
Remember a little more than a month ago when I implied that spring had arrived in Chicago despite the insistence of the natives that I was being laughably optimistic? Well, the natives were right, and I was wrong. Since then we’ve had our fair share of plunging overnight temperatures and frigid rainy mornings. But now I’m hoping I can safely say that spring is really here, and our first brutal Chicago winter is behind us. Since leaving Los Angeles, where weather is stubbornly perfect 95 percent of the time, I have enjoyed the seasons despite the difficulty getting acclimated to bad weather. In LA it’s green all the time, but here watching the leaves appear on the trees has been an enjoyable novelty. And yesterday, which may have been the best day of the year thus far, I decided to dust off my tree books, unused since I left the east coast for California five years ago. I was curious to see what kinds of trees line our street, and what’s living in our back yard. (I was partly inspired to do this by the Talk of the Town piece in this week’s New Yorker about the guy who’s running New York City’s “tree census.”) So, using my National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Trees and Trees of North America, I discovered that we’ve got a Northern Catalpa and an American Elm in the front and some kind of Maple in the back yard. If the thunderstorms stop today, I might go back out and see what else is growing around here.
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Iowa Dispatch (Part 4)
The auditions are over, according to my friends in Iowa, now that Ben Marcus – aka the “Dark Horse” – has made his visit to campus to try out for the Director job. During the workshop students noted his nervousness, which they saw as a good sign, that perhaps he’s more invested in getting this job than the other three candidates. Marcus handed out passages from published stories that complimented the stories being workshopped. Marcus also went above and beyond with his feedback on the stories, giving each one a three page, single-spaced typed response. At the reading, Marcus’ short story “Father Costume” got mixed reactions. Many were confused, but some allowed that it was beautifully written. Marcus’ craft talk appeared to get the best reception of all the craft talks. Instead of talking about literary theory, Marcus talked about how he runs a workshop and what kinds of seminars he teaches at Columbia. He talked about trying to be the ideal reader for each text in workshop, and about how he meets with students after their stories are up to help them figure out what of the numerous and diverging criticisms he/she should take to heart. When he opened the talk to questions, he was honest about the kinds of stuff he reads (from Carver to Munro to Barthelme) and the way he chooses applications. He said that often his favorite applicants at Columbia end up coming to Iowa, which proves that both programs can recognize good writing. He even passed out course descriptions of some of his seminars at Columbia, including one about how writers use language to produce emotion in the reader. Rumor mill: Marcus gets thumbs up from the poets and most of the students, but the fiction faculty isn’t so keen.So, that’s it. Hopefully, we’ll get another report when the final decision is made.Previously: Richard Bausch, Lan Samantha Chang, Jim Shepard
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