A Russian publisher has stooped to a new low: it added “fake quotes from fake newspapers on the cover of a … novel released this summer.” That’s not all, either. Apparently the publishers are trying to bill the book as a “Swedish” crime novel even though it was actually written by a Russian under a pseudonym.
Who Can You Trust Anymore?
Tuesday New Releases – Dan Brown Edition
Booksellers across the country have loaded up dollies with towers of boxes and carted them to the front of the store. Amazon has broken into its super-secret, double-locked, chain-link fence. Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol is here. Understandably, other publishers have ceded this Tuesday almost entirely to the Dan Brown hype machine, but those looking for something (very) different can today find Joyce Carol Oates doing the zombie thing (not really) and the latest from Tao Lin.
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“Murakami, who is nothing if not ambitious, has created a kind of alternative world, a mirror of ours, reversed.”
Though coverage of Haruki Murakami‘s 1Q84 has been ubiquitous this month (appearing on this site as well), it is always worthwhile to read the inimitable New York Review of Books‘ take on such things.
Ready Made
Oddly, America’s only exposure to the French political artist collective Tiqqun has come through onetime Fox News darling Glenn Beck. The Los Angeles Review of Books is here to right that wrong.
Combining a Murder Mystery and Immigrant Family Story with Jane Pek
Jane Pek discusses her debut novel, The Verifiers, which follows an amateur sleuth who investigates the potential suitors of lovelorn New Yorkers.
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Moby-Dick In Pictures
Today is Herman Melville‘s birthday. This October, Tin House will be releasing Matt Kish‘s Moby-Dick In Pictures. Kish began illustrating Melville’s masterpiece in 2009 by “creating images based on text selected from every page of the 552-page Signet Classics paperback edition.” You can preview some of the work on the book’s designated Twitter account.
Sink Your Teeth Into These Reads
Carolyn Kellogg rounded up a great list of “Terrible Beach Reads,” and it serves as a nice companion to Rachel Meier’s list of “Burnt-out Summer Reads.” However, if you’re looking for a few more titles that’ll keep you out of the water, allow me to suggest my all-time favorite shark-centric books: Susan Casey’s The Devil’s Teeth, Michael Capuzzo’s Close to Shore, and Doug Stanton’s In Harm’s Way.
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During the period in which Portugal was under Salazar’s dictatorship, which of course included censorship of books and press, portuguese author Dinis Machado wrote three noir crime novels under the pseudonym Dennis McShade (notice how he played with his own name), pretending to be an american author. The books claimed to have been translated by Dinis Machado himself, who was called by the censor agents regarding this american. He was able to convince them that the books were harmless, and they were published. The set is in America, but you can identify some metaphors regarding the dictatorship in Portugal.
This kind of pretending games can be fun. Though this story is not related to the one you are talking about, I thought it would show you how this pretending games can be subversive. And by the way, the three novels by Dennis McShade are incredibly good. He was, of course, a reader of Chandler and Hammett.
Well, I have to wonder if the fake quotes from the fake reader are any more authentic than the hyperbolic blurbs from ostensibly “real” readers….