Those oft-quoted Amazon sales rankings don’t really tell you much. They just give a snapshot of how a book is selling at a particular moment. TitleZ can track how a book’s ranking moves over time. There’s some debate about how much those rankings really tell you, but this is a fun toy nonetheless. (via)
Tracking Amazon Rankings
From the Book Pages, Briefly
A nice rememberance of Hunter S. Thompson by his friend Paul Theroux in The Guardian.William T. Vollmann’s substantial look at Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare by Phillip Short in the NY Times.Deborah Solomon sits down for a long chat with Jonathan Safran Foer which reveals this: “he received a $500,000 advance for his first novel and a $1 million advance for his second, meaning that he is probably the highest-earning literary novelist under 30.”
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Schlosser Scoop
Today I heard from a reliable source some very interesting info about Eric Schlosser. Yes, the same Schlosser who I derided two days ago for phoning in the follow up to his huge best seller Fast Food Nation. First of all, it turns out that Schlosser is currently hard at work on another Fast Food Nation style expose. This time he’s tearing the lid off of America’s prisons. It seems like there is wealth of material here, and there must be plenty of improprieties and outrages that the American public needs to know about. I don’t forsee such a book being quite as successful as Fast Food Nation. Everyone has eaten more than their share of fast food, but not everyone has spent a lot of time in prison. Still, I’m sure it will prove to be a very good read. There is another tidbit of info on Schlosser, as well. Apparently he and the director Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Waking Life) have collaborated on a treatment for a film version of Fast Food Nation I suppose that the book does contain a number of compelling characters, and each of these characters has an interesting enough, if not completely fleshed out, story. But, it would definitely take a director as imaginative as Linklater to really pull it off.More MeloyMaile Meloy’s new book, Liars and Saints came out today. She has been widely lauded for her short stories, so it will be interesting to see how well her first novel is recieved.
Small Presses and Nobel Prize Glory
It’s becoming a tradition of sorts, the Nobel jury gives the Prize to an author virtually unknown in the United States, and newspaper columnists grumble while small and university presses bask in a moment of publishing glory.
Nobody outside a few square miles in New York cares that this year’s Pulitzer or Booker winner was put out by Random House or HarperCollins, but even to the casual observer of the literary scene, there’s something refreshing (and, for some, aggravating) about seeing yet another Nobel winner with only the faintest, most haphazard publishing footprint. The Nobel Prize, probably half the time, shines a huge spotlight some pretty obscure books.
For small and university presses, the Prize is a rare moment of popular notice. Daniel E. Pritchard who works for David R. Godine, Publisher in Boston wrote as much a year ago reacting to J.M.G. Le Clézio’s Nobel win, “Nobel Prizes are usually the playground for big boys. They were noticeably absent from this one, leaving all the fame and street-cred for small independents.” Godine published Le Clézio’s The Prospector.
The University of Nebraska Press also published Le Clézio, with two books in print when the Nobel was announced last year: The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts and Onitsha. According to the press’ publicity manager Cara Pesek, Nebraska sold just “a handful” of copies of both titles in 2007, but “since the prize was announced last year, those two titles have accounted for more than $100,000 in incremental sales.”
With Herta Müller’s win, Nebraska has now struck Nobel gold two years in a row. Pesek said that the day after the Nobel was announced, the press had 3,000 backorders for Müller’s book Nadirs.
The director of University of Nebraska Press, Donna Shear, tempered the excitement somewhat, saying that the Nobel turns a book into “a steady backlist seller” as it finds its way onto University reading lists. But she added that a side-effect of the Nobel jury’s idiosyncrasies is that the Prize becomes “a validation of the efforts of University presses.”
The Euro-centric Nobel also injects some commercial viability into the typically limited world of literature in translation. After winning the Nobel in 2002, Hungarian writer Imre Kertész went from university presses to Knopf and Vintage. Meanwhile, plans are already underway to bring Müller to a wider audience. Shear said Nebraska put in a bid for Müller’s latest, Atemschaukel, recently shortlisted for the German Book Prize, but it’s expected that the book will land with one of the big publishing houses.
We expect our book prizes to confirm that a book or author’s commercial success and positive reviews are well-deserved. Sometimes the Nobel plays this role – a validator of critical opinion – but, for the American audience, it often does something different. And this is where the grumbling comes in. We don’t like to be told that an author we’ve never heard of is one of the greatest ever. But in cases like Müller and Kertész and Le Clézio, the Nobel serves as a reminder that in certain corners of the publishing industry, there are presses shepherding the work of these writers into print and keeping it available until such time as the rest of us are able to take notice.
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Random Roundup of Recent Books
Sorry about the infrequency of updates. I saw the Walkmen play two nights this weekend. The new songs are great. The new album will be called Bows and Arrows and it’ll be out some time next February.If you’ve read much of this blog, you’ve probably noticed that I am a fan of food writing (Jeffrey Steingarten, Calvin Trillin, and Jonathan Gold are my favorites), and all too often I find myself allured by a brand new restaurant that I can’t possibly afford. Food writing, more than any other type of journalism, tends to dwell upon the personality of the writer, and so as I devote untold hours to living vicariously, I get to know my food writers pretty well. For quite awhile now I have enjoyed weekly imaginary meals with LA Weekly food writer Michelle Huneven. She’s eloquent and friendly and thorough; not as adventurous as her predecessor Jonathan Gold, but sometimes a peaceful and upscale imaginary lunch is exactly what I’m in the mood for. So, naturally, the other day when I saw that she had a new novel out, I was intrigued. It’s called Jamesland, and it was put out by Knopf (a good sign). Then I noticed that the LA Weekly published an excerpt, which I promptly read. It was surprisingly good, compelling enough to make me want to read the book. You can find the excerpt here.You may have heard of “the original club kid,” James St. James. He arrived in New York City towards the end of the Warhol heyday, and with his cadre of maniacs, built a new “scene” from the ground up. It was Studio 54 for the next generation: drugs, sex and a taste for the macabre and bizarre. Fast forward a few years: a murder has shattered the fantasy they created for themselves, and James is spiraling into drug addiction. At this point he decided to write a book: it is half memoir, half true crime account of the “clubland murder.” It came out a few years ago under the title, Disco Bloodbath. Then this year it was made into a (profoundly forgettable) movie called Party Monster. Though the movie is bad, the book is not, and now it has finally been released as a paperback (and retitled Party Monster: A Fabulous But True Tale of Murder in Clubland). It’s hard to find a book more fun than this one.A new issue of my favorite magazine came out. The latest installment of Colors is devoted to slums. In classic Colors fashion, their eye is unblinking, yet they do not dwell upon misery or pass judgment, instead they focus on how these hand made cities are an example of human ingenuity and a will to survive and live a life of dignity. Where there is beauty and humor to be found in these places, Colors finds it. These people are everyone, the magazine seems to say.
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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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Hey Rock and Roll Fans
Realistic Records, the record label that Derek and I run out of the crawl space beneath his apartment, has a new cd out! It’s the cd version (featuring 3 new songs) of the Recoys record that we put out last summer. So, if you are into the Walkmen and are digging their new album, Bows & Arrows, check out the Recoys, Ham and Pete of the Walkmen’s old band.
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AbeBooks Turns 100 Million
AbeBooks, home of what is likely the most extensive commercial book database on earth, announced today that its online inventory now “exceeds 100 million” books. That’s books for sale right now, folks, not the number of books it has ever sold. The 100 millionth book added was A Checklist of the Vertebrate Animals of Kansas by George D. Potts and Thomas T. Collins. CEO Hannes Blum bought the milestone book. While Amazon and others get lots of press here and elsewhere, AbeBooks is really a remarkable site as it allows one to search through the inventories of “over 13,500 independent booksellers.” Sure it’s not as musty as your neighborhood used book shop, but think of all the treasures to be discovered.In commemoration of the 100 millionth book, the Guardian’s Comment is Free site prints an appreciation of AbeBooks, which “turned a cottage business into an international industry, and created millions of grateful readers.” From the Frankfurt Book Fair, meanwhile, comes news that AbeBooks continues to evolve. The site is using 40%-owned book cataloging site LibraryThing to develop a sophisticated recommendation engine. Unlike Amazon’s recommendation engine, which picks books based on what you buy, LibraryThing makes recommendations based on what you own.
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