Yesterday, on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show, Salman Rushdie discussed the choices he made as guest-editor of Best American Short Stories 2008. A comparison with our recent post on the year’s New Yorker fiction reveals that several of his picks date to 2007. Still, Rushdie’s taste is excellent, and it’s always fun to hear him talk off-the-cuff.
Salman Rushdie Runs Down 2008’s Best American Short Stories
Dissing Doctorow
The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani shows her extreme distaste for E. L. Doctorow’s new collection, Sweet Land Stories, as well as movies based on Doctorow’s books. (LINK) “Several of E. L. Doctorow’s novels – Ragtime, Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel and Billy Bathgate – have been turned into plodding, overproduced movies. Here, in his latest collection of short fiction, “Sweet Land Stories,” he seems to be trying to turn old movie ideas into stories with equally little success at recycling,” Kakutani says. I personally enjoyed both of the stories from this collection that originally appeared in the New Yorker, “A House on the Plains” and “Jolene: A Life,” so I will probably get some more opinions on this one before I declare it a dud.A New LunchI noticed that Kevin over at LA Observed occasionally reports on publishing industry deals listed in something called “Publisher’s Lunch.” Intrigued, I used my book industry credentials to sign up for these weekly newsletters, and so now, from time to time, I will pass along to you publishing industry news that may be of interest to you. For example, Dave Eggers’ new collection of stories, entitled Visitants, will be published by McSweeney’s (of course) this fall, and J. Robert Lennon’s next book will be called Happyland and will be put out by Norton.
●
●
Harry Potter Mania Flickers On
J.K. Rowling’s slow, inexorable slide out of retirement continues. As we noted a couple of months ago, “For someone who’s not writing any more books about Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling sure is doing a lot of dabbling.”Earlier this year, we wrote about one of Rowling’s post-retirement dabblings, the production of seven handmade copies of Beedle the Bard, a book of “wizarding fairy tales” referred to in the Harry Potter series. Amazon spent $4 million on a copy, and then used it to market a writing contest. Part of the prize, incidentally, was the opportunity “to spend a weekend with the rare and delightful book of fairy tales (security guards included, of course).”Now that prize doesn’t look quite so exclusive, as Bloomsbury and Scholastic have made an edition the book available for the masses for just $7.59 and arriving in early December, just in time for the holidays. Amazon is going one further, offering up to 100,000 pricier facsimile “collector’s editions,” with “a reproduction of J.K. Rowling’s handwritten introduction, metalwork and clasp, and replica gemstones,” as well as various other accouterments.All net proceeds go to a charity co-founded by Rowling.
●
●
Oscar Wao Author Helps Inaugurate New Online Series
Pulitzer winner Junot Díaz talks with his fellow “Year in Reading” contributor Meghan O’Rourke in the debut episode of the online video series Open Book, co-sponsored by Slate and my alma mater. I’m thrilled that the producers elected to keep the same zany voice-over guy who reads Slate’s audio podcasts. Future interviews, we’re told, will include John Ashbery, Charles Simic, and Jonathan Safran Foer.
●
●
Cholodenko
Cholodenko, Cholodenko…. Cholodenko. It really rolls off the tongue. I saw a movie directed by Ms. Cholodenko this evening. She didn’t direct it this evening, I saw it this evening, at the Vista in Los Feliz. I had enjoyed her previous movie, High Art. In Laurel Canyon she continues her riffs on sexual predators, sexual innocents, and the curiosity of all those folks thrown together at once. It was light and entertaining, but also pretty invigorating. Frances McDormand plays a “seen it all” record producer. Her life is fun and free of the usual drudgery, and those around her don’t know whether to fear or envy the life she leads while surrounded by rapscallion British rocker types. Like High Art, Laurel Canyon is a coming of age story, but without so much psychological trauma and none of the admonishments about the scary drugs.
●
●
Four for Three
Not to be a shill for Amazon, but for those who like to save money on books, you can get a fourth book free after buying three books under ten dollars. They’ve got lots of paperback classics that fit the bill.
●
●
Covering the Catalogs: Plume
The weather is nice, and we’ve got all the windows open in the apartment. We ran some errands earlier today – although the task of going to Whole Foods to buy cheese and olives deserves a term with better connotations than “errand.” Now I’m flipping through a stack of catalogs from Penguin while I listen to baseball on the radio. This is why I look forward to weekends.I think I’ll start with the Plume, Portfolio, Overlook, etc. catalog. These imprints do both paperback editions of books that have already come out in hardcover, and paperback originals, which are initially published as a paperback without a prior hardcover release.There’s a nifty little collection coming out in August as a paperback original. The Subway Chronicles “offers a kaleidoscope of perspectives on this most public of spaces,” New York’s legendary subway system. Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, Francine Prose and Calvin Trillin are among 27 contributors whose essays look at New York’s subterranean city from every angle. The anthology’s editor, Jacquelin Cangro, runs thesubwaychronicles.com.I’ve heard sections of Dan Savage’s book The Commitment read on This American Life. Savage writes in the David Sedaris, David Rackoff, public radio funny man vein. Like those two Davids, Savage is gay and his sharp comic timing and casual mastery of the memoir style transcend any label. In The Commitment, Savage recasts the gay marriage “debate” as his own family drama, injecting some much-needed humor and personality into a controversy that is so often portrayed as faceless. The hardcover is already out and the Plume paperback comes out in October.Under the Portfolio imprint is the paperback of John Battelle’s book The Search. The book tells the story of how a goofy little search engine called Google grew into a $120 billion company that enjoys global ubiquity and is seemingly able to reinvent any industry it touches (publishing for example). Aside from my general fascination with Google, I’m also interested in this book because I read and enjoy Battelle’s blog. As the creator of FM Publishing and the “band manager” of Boing Boing, Battelle is someone to watch in the world of new media. The paperback edition comes out in September.Extras: Andy Riley’s morbidly hilarious The Book of Bunny Suicides and The Return of the Bunny Suicides are being collected in a box set called A Box of Bunny Suicides due in September. Haven’t seen the bunny suicides? Go here and click excerpt. Also, Plume is putting out great-looking new editions of Fences, The Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson. (The snazzy new covers aren’t showing up at Amazon yet, but I’m assuming they’ll switch out the old ones soon.)
●
●
Welcome to the Working Week: Megan Hustad Analyzes Our On-the-Job Foibles
The concept of self-improvement through reading has always struck me as hopelessly vexed. I was surprised and delighted, then, to discover in Megan Hustad’s How to Be Useful an erudite, pragmatic, funny, and endearingly humble “Beginner’s Guide to Not Hating Work.” It was the kind of book I wish someone had given me when I was fresh out of college.Back then, in the giddy afterglow of the Clinton years, my enormous sense of entitlement hid behind a contorted ideological posture. Sure, I would benefit financially from global capitalism, but I would maintain my purity by doing a really mediocre job. (Take that, Milton Friedman!) What’s refreshing about How to Be Useful is that it presents an ethical, rather than a moral, argument for working hard. Hustad doesn’t attempt to say that you should work for The Man; rather, she argues that if you have to, you might as well do it well.Surprisingly, the secret to success, according to Hustad’s meta-analysis of a century of business advice, is making yourself indiscriminately useful to those around you. At some point, she argues, people will want to return the favor. And in the meantime, while you may not have addressed global economic inequality, you will have made the world around you a little more pleasant for your coworkers and for yourself.This week, we’ve invited Ms. Hustad to give us some “Usefulness Training” based on our own first-job hijinks. Every day, one of our contributors will post an anecdote about his or her misguided work ethic. Hustad will rate us on a scale of 1 to 5, with one being Mildly Useless, and 5 being Irremediably Useless. She’ll also try to tease out the misguided assumptions we held upon entering the workforce, and to explain how we might have conducted ourselves more helpfully. These links will become active as the posts are published:Welcome to the Working Week 1: MaxWelcome to the Working Week 2: EmreWelcome to the Working Week 3: GarthWelcome to the Working Week 4: AndrewFinally, we invite our readers to contribute their own first-job stories (ideally 100 words or less) in the comments box. At the end of the week, perhaps we’ll ask Ms. Hustad to respond to one of them.
Amazon reviewer shenanigans
Amazon reviews are kind of silly. One has to wade through lots of cranks to get to a useful review, and even then it’s hard to put that much faith in a few sentences penned by a complete stranger (although I have been known to pen Amazon reviews, on occasion). Still, they undoubtedly do have an effect on sales and on peoples’ perceptions of particular books, so when instances of unfair play come to light it can piss people off – like when it was revealed that authors were pseudonymously reviewing their own books (scroll down). With these same concerns in mind, I reprint this email that I received from an eagle-eyed Millions reader today.If you go to this page and scroll down to reviewer #235 (who calls him/herself “nyy”) you should notice that this reviewer has not reviewed any books. Zero. I emailed Amazon about it, and just got a canned reply about how their reviewers are rated. What do you think — a typo or a hack or something else?I have no clue, and I’m sure Amazon would explain it away as a glitch, but it does make me wonder if the customer review system is completely on the level.Update: The original New York Times article about authors reviewing their own books at Amazon.
●
●