Huge congratulations to Marissa, the fearless web-genius and fabulous writer who designed and built the FWR website. In the just-released Best American Short Stories 2009 (ed. Alice Sebold), her story “Trespassing,” published last year by Tin House, has made the “Distinguished Stories of 2009” list.
Spring is wet in Maine. The rivers swell and roadways succumb. Driveways turn to mud pits and basements flood. We take it all in stride, because living here is worth such minor irritations.
But this past spring, the rain seemed ceaseless. The normally bearable soggy months stretched into June and stole the beginning of summer from us. So, expecting Mainers to sit inside a bookstore on the first clear, balmy evening in early July seemed like too much to ask. Even the author Ron Currie, Jr., a Maine native himself, seemed hesitant to go inside Portland’s Longfellow Books for a reading and signing of his new novel Everything Matters! (Viking, 2009).
Seven Stories Press has just released Nader’s novel, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, in which Yoko Ono, Warren Buffet, Ted Turner, Bill-Cosby, Paul Newman, and other influential figures meet, Justice-League style, to defeat bad guys Lancelot Lobo, Brover Dortquist, and corporate CEOs. In an author’s note, Nader himself writes: This book is not a novel. Nor is it nonfiction. In the literary world, it might be described as “a practical utopia.” I call it a fictional vision that could become a new reality. Some known and not-well-known people appear in fictional roles. I invite your imaginative engagement. If that […]
First came blog-based books like Julie and Julia. Then came books based on Internet memes like LOLcats. Recently we’ve seen a spate of Twitter-based books, ranging from Matt Stewart’s novel The French Revolution to TwitterWit to Justin Halpern’s Shit My Dad Says. How far will the trend go? Now, even your Facebook status can land you a book deal–at least in the world of The Onion. Via.
Henry: Lourdes brings small plates of exquisitely arranged antipasti: transparent prosciutto with pale yellow melon, mussels that are mild and smoky, slender strips of carrot and beet that taste of fennel and olive oil. We eat Nell’s beautiful rare tuna, braised with a sauce of tomatoes, apples and basil. We eat small salads full of radicchio and orange peppers and we eat little brown olives that remind me of a meal I ate with my mother in a hotel in Athens when I was very young. We drink Sauvignon Blanc, toasting each other repeatedly. (“To olives!” “To baby-sitters!” “To Nell!”). Nell emerges from the kitchen carrying a small flat white cake that blazes with candles. Clare, Nell, and Lourdes sing “Happy Birthday” to me. I made a wish and blow out all the candles in one breath. “That means you’ll get your wish,” says Nell, but mine is not a wish that can be granted.
Worried that ebooks will be the death of paper books? Sales of Dan Brown’s latest, The Lost Symbol, don’t back that up. At first, it looked like more people bought the book for Kindle than in hardcover. But, reports the L.A.Times: By the time the week was out, with more than 2 million copies sold in the U.S., Britain and Canada — breaking the publisher’s previous one-week record set by Bill Clinton with “My Life” — hardcover sales had easily eclipsed sales of the ebook. Of the 2 million copies sold, only 100,000, or 5%, were electronic versions. Which means, […]
Okay, so “vook” may not enter the common parlance–but the combination of video plus books may be here to stay. Faced with little official promotion, writer Kelly Corrigan whipped up a trailer for her memoir The Middle Place, using her home computer and iMovie, and posted a video of herself reading one of her essays on YouTube. A recent profile of Corrigan in the Washington Post describes the results: A year later, the book has sold about 80,000 copies in hardcover and another 260,000 in paperback, according to Nielsen BookScan data. It sat on the New York Times bestseller list […]
Simon & Schuster’s Atria imprint is teaming up with a multimedia partner to produce “vooks,” a book-video hybrid in which video segments are interspersed with printed text. Today’s release includes two how-to books and two novels (a romance and a thriller). The New York Times ArtsBeat blog reports: The initial “vooks” are “The 90-Second Fitness Solution” by Pete Cerqua, a diet and exercise book aimed at women; “Return to Beauty: Old World Wisdom and Recipes for Great Skin” by Narine Nikogosian, a guide for using fruits, vegetables and other kitchen staples to make skincare products; “Promises,” a romantic novella by […]
If you’re one of those anachronistic thirty-somethings who still quaintly reads books—let alone, a nineteenth- and twentieth-century form like the novel—then you may know the rare and exquisite pleasure of stumbling across one that seems to be written by, for, and about your contemporaries. I had that experience recently with Josh Mohr’s debut novel. Some Things That Meant the World to Me (Two Dollar Radio, June 2009) is the unsettling story of a thirty-year-old San Francisco man named Rhonda, who suffers from depersonalization disorder after a childhood of abandonment and abuse. In between cue-stick beatings, Rorschach tattoos, and botched batches of home-brew wine, he discovers a portal to his past in the dumpster behind a local taquería.
Mitchell Muncy isn’t the only one misinterpreting Banned Books Week. These puppets, also confused at first about the week’s purpose, gather to “do their part” by banning whatever they can get their paws on — from The Grapes of Wrath (they don’t like wrath) to the phone book (it’s too long). Happily, a muppet-librarian sets them straight.
